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This collaboration from Amsterdam’s Jonny Nash and Suzanne Kraft is a work of profound tranquility. In the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life. | This collaboration from Amsterdam’s Jonny Nash and Suzanne Kraft is a work of profound tranquility. In the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life. | Jonny Nash / Suzanne Kraft: Passive Aggressive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23232-passive-aggressive/ | Passive Aggressive | It’s no secret that albums are getting longer, but Jonny Nash prefers concision. He has said that his favorite format is the mini-LP: 30 or 40 minutes long, one piece of vinyl, not too many twists and turns. The format is particularly conducive to home listening; it’s the right length, he finds, not just to set a mood, but to immerse the listener in the artist’s “sonic world.” He likes the format as a musician, too: as a vehicle to explore a specific idea or a temporary obsession.
So far, his Melody As Truth label has been geared along exactly those lines. Modest in sound and scope, yet unusually committed to its cozy parameters, the Amsterdam label has, in its three-year run, dedicated itself exclusively to quiet, contemplative ambient experiments by Nash and his friend Suzanne Kraft (aka Diego Herrera, a former Los Angeleno now also based in Amsterdam). Each release so far has offered a snapshot of a process or a mood. Nash’s 2014 EP Phantom Actors was a set of limpid new age studies for synth and piano that could have been mistaken for a lost Mark Isham demo. The following year, his Exit Strategies modeled itself upon the liquid guitars of the Durutti Column and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. Kraft’s 2015 album Talk From Home, meanwhile, tackled airy synth-and-guitar miniatures, while last year’s masterful What You Get for Being Young used similar sounds, just fewer of them, and ended up being as evocative, and elusive, as the scent of a crisp autumn morning.
Following a split 7” and a split cassette, Passive Aggressive is the duo’s first collaborative album, but it’s not immediately obvious that it’s the work of four hands instead of two. If anything, it is quieter and more spacious than anything either musician has done on his own. It sounds as though, instead of encouraging each other to add more ideas to the mix, the two musicians focused their energies on subtracting everything extraneous. The results appear as effortless as Japanese calligraphy: a constellation of gestures in which no motion is wasted, and so seemingly natural that the creator’s hand disappears behind the work.
The pair recorded the album in a week of sessions last summer; instead of their usual array of hardware synthesizers, they opted for software-based tools. They have described their desired aesthetic as “future-ECM,” a reference to Manfred Eicher’s iconic jazz and contemporary-music label, in which empty space and suggestive textures are often as important as melody or rhythm. There’s certainly something to that characterization, though the music’s restraint has even more in common with the hushed margins of Editions EG’s catalog, not to mention the Italian minimalist Gigi Masin, who plays with Nash in the trio Gaussian Curve. The more melodic songs, like the bookending “Photo With Grey Sky, White Clouds” and “Time, Being,” suggest Talk Talk muting most of the channels on their mixing desk.
The palette is limited to slowly unfurling synth pads, a liquid trickle of piano, and, most intriguingly, a stubby sound that uncannily resembles an upright bass, except slightly too perfect to be the product of mere wood and catgut. In “Time, Being,” Nash contributes some of his characteristic clean-toned guitar; in “Small Town,” a backmasked filament reminiscent of Robert Fripp flares up. They like to dribble soft staccato attacks over watery backdrops, and they prefer melodies that slip ambiguously between major and minor keys, opting for seconds and fifths over thirds. It all conjures ambiguous, open-ended moods that accommodate a listener’s own emotional state rather than enforcing one of its own.
To call Passive Aggressive placid would be an understatement. It is an album of profound tranquility, and in its modest ambitions it can seem almost slight at first—not just ambient music, but Ambien music. Still, heard on good speakers in the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life. Taken together, this entrancing 40-minute listen amounts to a core sample of a mood you can’t quite put your finger on, which only keeps you drilling ever so gently deeper. | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Melody As Truth | May 17, 2017 | 7.6 | 27d1f90a-9fba-4c1b-8518-f94ee1a205ba | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The debut EP from cryptic London artist Naaahhh offers five tracks of murky electronic ambience, though it contains unmistakable traces of UK rave culture. | The debut EP from cryptic London artist Naaahhh offers five tracks of murky electronic ambience, though it contains unmistakable traces of UK rave culture. | Naaahhh: Themes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22804-themes/ | Themes | Kiran Sande, the shadowy figure pulling the strings behind London electronic outpost Blackest Ever Black, is one of those label bosses who can make a record sound essential through sheer turn of phrase. The debut release by Naaahhh comes with next to zero biographical information—just the promise that he, she, or they hail from “under London,” plus a found photo of a hippy raver, cross-legged and grinning on an Afghan rug, with a half-rolled joint laid out in front of her. Luckily, Sande’s liner-notes make up for some of the gaps in the narrative, promising “sidereal downers for all hardcore ravers” and “paranoid street music meets the cosmic disturbances of musique concrète, the MDMA spine-freeze of isolationism and England’s hidden reverse.” With a billing like that, it’s hard to resist.
It’s not that Naaahhh’s music struggles to live up to the accompanying prose, exactly. But Themes has you squinting into its depths in search of the promised ingredients, like a fortune-teller sifting through tea leaves. Here we have five tracks of murky ambience, devoid of anything you might recognize as a beat, but rhythmic nonetheless—an ooze of sound with dark, rippling tides mottling its surface. Casting around for antecedents, you might compare “Empty Rituals” to the more haunted and abstract works of Coil or Nurse With Wound, veteran British industrial units for whom sound was a carrier for occult or spiritual currents; or “Neck Devour” to the blasted, Gristle-y dub of Wolf Eyes circa Dead Hills.
True to Sande’s description, though, there are unmistakable traces of UK rave culture buried in Themes’ fabric. The throbbing, faintly seasick synth washes of “Blooz” imagine some ancient jungle or hardcore 12” with the beats and bass peeled away, leaving just floating, faintly toxic atmosphere. “My Theme” and “Theme 2,” meanwhile, could be club music as viewed from the “Stranger Things” alternate dimension of Upside Down. Muffled rhythms pulse interminably, gooey bass notes affect a dismal plod, and high quavering melody lines ghost around in the higher registers—a grotesque parody of rave’s ecstatic euphoria.
Over and out in 28 minutes, Themes draws to a close before your first impressions have quite had time to coalesce. This is neither uncommon nor necessarily unwelcome for a label that deals in the cryptic. But there is the sense that this is a project still finding its form. Whether Naaahhh follows on the heels of former Blackest Ever Black groups like Dalhous and Raime in blossoming into something dimly beautiful, or Themes remains a one-off emission from the dark side, remains to be seen. | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Blackest Ever Black | January 21, 2017 | 6.2 | 27d6da4d-557c-4581-8c7c-15d47874ee90 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The score for this surprise Netflix hit about a religious community in rural Oregon revels in emotional indecision, asking you to choose the truth for yourself. | The score for this surprise Netflix hit about a religious community in rural Oregon revels in emotional indecision, asking you to choose the truth for yourself. | Brocker Way: Wild Wild Country (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brocker-way-wild-wild-country-original-score/ | Wild Wild Country (Original Score) | Near-unanimous gushing for the recent Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country” offered insight into our social curiosity for bitterly territorial showdowns. In the six-part series, a controversial Rajneeshpuram community flees India to make a new home on a massive ranch in rural Oregon in the 1980s, creating a clash of cultures on multiple levels. The local outcry and federal scrutiny that followed prompted lingering questions about how a supposed land of the free has historically treated those with an unexpected interpretation of that freedom. An unhurried series, “Wild Wild Country” is more interested in obsessively circling around truth than the cold violence of going for the neck of it.
In a documentary where dozens of unreliable narrators and lots of tricky secrets lurk in plain sight, there is a particular onus on nonverbal clues to point toward the truth. With a neo-Romantic impulse that revels in high drama, Brocker Way’s string-centric score for “Wild Wild Country” does this sort of indirect reporting. Way is the eldest brother of the documentary’s co-directors, Chapman and Maclain, a relationship that ostensibly afforded him a much closer perspective on the documentary’s production than most composers would get. Whereas film composers often receive a completed edit just before beginning work, Way composed as his brothers filmed. The 15 pieces gathered on Western Vinyl’s official score stem from hours of Way’s often-tense compositions for an electronically augmented 12-piece orchestra, conducted by fellow film composer Ali Helnwein.
Brocker’s score offers just half of the documentary’s music. With sensitive guidance from music supervisor and Secretly Canadian co-founder Chris Swanson, “Wild Wild Country” uses “downtempo Americana” by the likes of Bill Callahan and Damien Jurado to shape the Oregon landscape’s texture. Way’s work, meanwhile, maps the story’s more uneasy side. His strings often sound mired in feeling; during “An Adventure of My Life,” you get the sense they’re pushing through a blockade. There is a spirit of yearning and distrust here, as when the rhythms of “High Desert” jerk with jolting paranoia, urging you to look over your shoulder.
In the series, the score tends to supply a counter-narrative to what you see. In an early scene, when bemused Oregonians gawk at the Rajneeshpuram for wearing crimson and rolling out a red carpet on the sidewalk for their leader, the music plays neither into reverence nor ridicule. It instead introduces a creeping distance and prowling depth, pushing us not to gape at a foreign presence or believe a mystical promise but to consider how these ideas intersect. “The Guillotine” references Rajneesh leader Ma Anand Sheela’s provocation, “With every crown comes the guillotine.” But the piece doesn’t analyze the idea. It begins with disturbing plunks of woodblock and pizzicato strings, as though a stone has been dropped into a liquid that somehow silences the splash. Piano and violin wind around one another in loops. We are lodged inside a perplexing new system of unknown laws, the music asking us to ponder the mechanisms.
On its own, Way’s score gains power in this emotional triangulation. “Wild Wild Country” left questions unanswered, so the score feels like a souvenir of that uncertainty and the wariness it fostered. Removed from their concomitant plot points, these pieces convey “Wild Wild Country”’s narrative weight. If you need to sell someone on show’s the brutal tensions, you could play the searching, threatening “Be Grateful for This Beautiful Home” for them, rather than the trailer. Way’s orchestration puts you in the magnetic field of the seductive and suspicious. Likewise, even if you have no clue about the character who inspired “The New Man,” eerie electronics and a clicking rhythm suggest someone whose personality puts you on constant edge. A stressed, bending string pulls you in and pushes you away. This is a height of the outsider’s interest in cults—to see the attraction and be frightened at its sight. | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | October 2, 2018 | 7.1 | 27de4f82-3409-48d2-a83c-d06b1a3ce6dd | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
The Indiana band supplies a sunny Midwestern take on nostalgic, shoegazey dream-pop. | The Indiana band supplies a sunny Midwestern take on nostalgic, shoegazey dream-pop. | Wishy: Paradise EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wishy-paradise-ep/ | Paradise EP | Wishy is the millionth band manifesting nostalgic misrememberings of the dreamier side of ’90s indie rock. Singer-songwriters and guitarists Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter went to the same Indiana high school but reconnected later, when Pitchkites moved back to Indianapolis, bonding over the Sundays and My Bloody Valentine. After releasing a self-titled EP as Mana earlier this year, the band—rounded out by drummer Connor Host, bassist Mitch Collins, and third guitarist and vocalist Dimitri Morris—changed its name to Wishy, signed to Winspear, and gained a sunkissed sheen thanks to L.A. producer Ben Lumsdaine.
The Paradise EP is Wishy’s proper introduction, and the words one might use to describe it—“My Bloody Valentine Unplugged” or “The Cardigans getting more into The La’s”—may seem like simple, hyperbolic praise for music you’ve heard before. Still, Paradise captures a uniquely Midwest approach to shoegaze, in which one’s vision is directed not down toward one’s shoes but up and out, at quiet skies and isolated fields surrounding small towns and cities where you might go hours without seeing someone outside their car. Wishy don’t need to hide away their feelings under noise: Though Pitchkites and Krauter split songwriting duties, both emphasize the kind of dreamy topline melodies that invite you to hum along. One of Paradise’s best moments comes on the opening title track, when Krauter and Pitchkites switch off lead vocals while the other joins in near-perfect harmony. As the song builds up, Krauter’s guitar riffs kick in and become Wishy’s newest and most gleeful singer, like a child running free of its parents.
The rest of the EP showcases what makes each songwriter distinct. Pitchkites wrote “Donut,” a sledgehammer of sound in which her riffs and vocals match the pent-up frustration of the lyrics. She sees all the possibilities of the open road, but her crappy car can only get her nowhere in spurts. When she moans the final chorus lyric, “I’m speeding down HOV and huffing on gasoline,” the guitars and drums are too busy dancing around her wrecked daydream to notice. “Spinning” takes a slower, mellower route to getting lost, sounding a little like The Radio Dept. with a dancey drumbeat seemingly lifted from Krauter’s old band, Hoops.
If Pitchkites is the songwriter more likely to dive in and do snow angels in the dirt, Krauter is too busy watching the sunrises that add shades of pink and blue to the morning sky. In “Blank Time,” every few seconds bring some intricate new instrumentation or melody into the mix. It’s a busy song that shows off Krauter’s guitar playing and sounds like one of his solo songs—specifically “Patience,” from 2020, leaving the impression that Wishy could have instead written something fresher to take advantage of Pitchkites’ harmonies. “Too True” is more successful: The full band feels in sync as Krauter laments a past relationship and what gets lost when we move on for the right reasons. Or something like that—on a great gazepop track, lyrical meaning is secondary.
Up till now, Pitchkites’ and Krauter’s solo releases have relied on drum machines and songwriting that can be recorded and performed within a bedroom. Their dreamlike songwriting styles gel well together, but Wishy are now working on a larger canvas, directing their newfound chemistry and focus toward playing for crowds instead of bedroom walls. Compared to the sometimes mumbly Mana EP, Paradise is also the sound of letting your real-life drummer cook. This elevates Paradise from a solid collection of songs to a promising first statement that executes a familiar sound with excellence. | 2023-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Winspear | December 18, 2023 | 7.3 | 27ded49e-bf0d-4c32-a755-e0bf571d13d2 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
After years of label drama and leaked tracks that hinted at something great, the OutKast MC exceeds high expectations on his proper solo debut. | After years of label drama and leaked tracks that hinted at something great, the OutKast MC exceeds high expectations on his proper solo debut. | Big Boi: Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14424-sir-lucious-left-foot-the-son-of-chico-dusty/ | Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty | Every great rap group has one MC who is-- possibly unfairly-- perceived to be slightly lesser than the other. DMC. Parrish Smith. Malice. Pimp C, at least up until he died. Big Boi's been on that list ever since André Benjamin started rocking pith helmets and neckerchiefs. Big Boi's not underrated, exactly; everyone who knows rap knows he's a great rapper. It's more that he's taken for granted. Virtually every OutKast review of the past decade and a half has posited Big Boi as the earthy, street-level anchor to André's spaced-out visionary, the guy responsible for securing the group's cred when André was trying to invent new colors. Expect Sir Lucious Left Foot to change those conversations. We haven't heard a major-label rap album this inventive, bizarre, joyous, and masterful in a long time, and it's almost impossible to imagine André putting out a solo album this strong anytime soon.
At this point, Big Boi has every right to indulge in the bitter-old-man invective that's tempted so many other rappers of his generation. Even though he's half of one of the most successful groups ever, Big Boi has had to go through years of release-date delays and label drama (some of the topical lyrics here sound like they were written years ago), until he finally left longtime home Jive just so he could release a damn solo album already. Label machinations kept André's voice from even appearing on Sir Lucious Left Foot-- heartbreaking when you think about André's jaw-dropping display on the early advance single "Royal Flush". But instead of letting these setbacks infect his music, Big Boi's made an album that explodes with ideas at every turn, that glides and twitches and mutates with delirious urgency.
Musically, the album drips with 1980s synth-funk signifiers. The keyboards glimmer as they roam, and talkboxes mutter and blurt. But these tracks aren't the stoned miasmas that someone like Dâm-Funk cranks out. Instead, they're itchy and fleet-footed. New melodic elements flit in and out of tracks just as you start to notice them, and there's a lot going on at any given moment. Consider, for example, album closer "Back Up Plan". The track, from old comrades Organized Noize, finds room for cheerleader chants, disembodied grunts, a weird little synth whistle, processed funk guitar, orchestra hits, frantic scratching, a lowdown wobbling bassline, and probably some other stuff that I'm missing-- and this is one of the most laid-back songs on the entire album.
Every once in a while, we'll get a nod toward some current trend, but these aren't market capitulations; they're more opportunities to play with what the kids are doing now. "Follow Us", for example, has a generic rock-dude chorus from Vonnegutt, and virtually any other rapper would've built a hackneyed half-rock song out of a chorus like that, but producer Salaam Remi instead piles bubbly synthetic melodies all over each other. And the robo-voices on "Shutterbugg" aren't airy Auto-Tune; they're more of a deep rumble that you can feel in your gut. "Tangerine" somehow simultaneously sounds like strip-club ass-shake material and Funkadelic covering Morricone. Looking at the production credits, it's surprising to see names like Scott Storch and Lil Jon-- hitmakers who don't really make hits anymore, and who haven't been all that interesting in a while. So Big Boi, then, is someone who encourages his collaborators' furthest-out ideas, and who knows what to do with those ideas when he gets them.
As a rapper, Big Boi is something else. He just does so many things with his voice and cadence, letting his words fall over the snares one moment and fighting upstream against the beat the next. He never falls into any particular pattern of delivery, instead using his flow to knock beats back and forth with relish. Sixteen years after the first OutKast album, he's still coming up with dizzy combinations of words: "My recitals are vital and maybe needed for survival," "The slickness that get your chick hit quick," "Stay sharp as broken glass, get busted on a smash/ When your ass cross paths with this half of the 'Kast." Even if he were saying nothing, the tumble of his words is a thing to behold.
But then, he's never saying nothing. Sir Lucious Left Foot is an album blissfully free of both old-man hectoring and drug-rap nihilism. A few times Big Boi brings up the idea that it's really not too smart to rap about selling crack all the time, but he doesn't dwell on it, and he confines most of his skepticism to awesomely worded asides ("Snow? That's for toboggans.") He's hard enough to tell you to get the South's dick up out your motherfucking mouth and draw blood with the command, but he's also clever enough to slide away from threats just as quickly. He spends a large chunk of the album talking about sex, sounding like a fired-up 11-year-old goofing off in the back of some sort of prodigy-level English class.
There's a lot more to like about Sir Lucious Left Foot. Some of the skits are actually pretty funny. The guests-- who range from masterful fast-rap newcomer Yelawolf to a stirringly gritty Jamie Foxx-- all turn in top-shelf performances. Old Dungeon Family associates Big Rube and Khujo Goodie make feel-good cameos that actually contribute to their songs. But the real story is the rap veteran who's done everything he could possibly do in the genre but who still finds new ways to have fun with it. Last year's best rap album came from Raekwon, another wily old vet who hit a serious late-career stride. But Raekwon did it by inhabiting his older styles, making a record that could've conceivably come out in 1996. On Sir Lucious Left Foot, Big Boi does something even more difficult: He gives us a great album that sounds nothing like any of the great albums he's already given us. From where I'm sitting, that's an even greater achievement. | 2010-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | July 6, 2010 | 9.2 | 27e4b88d-f9b3-4d4c-ad20-206a6533fef6 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The sisters Quin here craft a record reminiscent of 1980s power-pop, rounded with bubbly keyboard squeals and songs about relationships. Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) serves as co-producer. | The sisters Quin here craft a record reminiscent of 1980s power-pop, rounded with bubbly keyboard squeals and songs about relationships. Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) serves as co-producer. | Tegan and Sara: The Con | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10476-the-con/ | The Con | Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock, a comparison only fair because of the company they kept. Now the 26-year-olds have much more in common with 1980s power-pop, rounded with bubbly keyboard squeals, and they do this sound better than either Avril Lavigne or, say, Liz Phair. Some weird choices, however-- vocally, instrumentally, and otherwise-- mar their latest album, The Con. Yet the record's most interesting bits-- a keen sense of melody-- disappear too quickly and can't carry the album over its production bumps. The edgiest thing about the sisters Quin continues to be their haircuts.
The duo's 2004 album So Jealous had great moments, too. "Walking with a Ghost", a song later covered by the White Stripes, was perhaps its finest, if only because it showed how Tegan and Sara can add depth to heartache through keen observation. Such examples are everywhere on The Con: "When I jerk away from holding hands with you/ I know these habits hurt important parts of you," they sing on "Back in Your Head", a song that boasts the album's best keyboard lines. Lyrically, there are as many turds as gems though, and they usually appear within five words of the word "heart." "I want to draw you a floorplan of my head and heart/ I want to give directions, helpful hints, what you’ll be looking for," Sara pleads on "Floorplan". Maybe they should have called it "No Exit". It sounds like a rush of emotion, but flows awkwardly. There's an earnestness they'd do well to drop-- if they know love's a sham, and know the sham's a sham, then sing about that already-- but they don't. I can only imagine that co-producer Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) contributed to the problem.
Tegan's songs are conventional, so they rely on embellishment-- like the Phil Collins-esque drums on "Are You Ten Years Ago"-- to make them more interesting. Her lyrical indugences can also be difficult to swallow. "Hop a Plane" does better for Tegan, because the line she repeats here is catchy enough to stay pleasurable over each iteration. Sara, who has the more strident voice of the two, writes their more complex songs. "Knife Going In"'s instruments drift out of tune, which gives it a seasick, disconnected quality. "Relief Next to Me" thumps like wet newspaper though, her weak similes never building up to a satisfying payoff: a big chorus, a cute melody. "Relief" gets one thing right though: When Sara sings about things "in the dark", you get the feeling that, for much of their young, female audience anyway, they can serve as a beacon. | 2007-07-27T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-27T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vapor / Sire | July 27, 2007 | 6.6 | 27f424b1-7566-4d81-9f48-5a3d2ace892c | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
Frisbee collects recordings the Chilean/German producer made for its label between 1998 and 2001. | Frisbee collects recordings the Chilean/German producer made for its label between 1998 and 2001. | Ricardo Villalobos: Salvador | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9105-salvador/ | Salvador | Another month, another Ricardo Villalobos review. Some of you are already grinding your teeth as you jump on the nearest forum to bitch that Pitchfork's getting as shamelessly obsessed with Villalobos as we are (were?) with Kompakt, to the exclusion of all of Detroit's True Greats, or the UK's Unheralded Heroes of Hardcore, or perhaps simply those bedroom producers toiling away on limited-run CDRs that will surely show us all how it's truly done. That's ok. We're used to it, and none of that makes talking about Villalobos any less interesting, or indeed necessary. You'd be wise to soak up everything you can get your hands on by the prolific and mildly infamous Chilean/German producer and DJ, because for more than a decade he's been subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) redefining what dance music, minimal house, and techno can do and be. Part of the reason there's so much crap "minimal" out there is because Villalobos has been making such absolutely original releases for so long. People want to cop that shit, because it's one of the few newly blazed trails in electronic music. Despite the minimal backlash, there's still plenty of room to swing a machete through the leftover underbrush. But in the meantime, chasing Villalobos' prints through the fetid swamp is more than enough to occupy our time.
All of which makes Salvador a particularly interesting Villalobos release, since it compiles recordings that date back five to eight years, when they originally appeared on Frankfurt's Frisbee Tracks label. This isn't the Villalobos of 2006, veering off into electro-acoustic free techno across a slew of 20-minute-plus drum tracks burned to CD-R and intended for his own DJ sets only. (He played me a few of them in Berlin and at MUTEK, and while they're more floor-oriented than the mind-melting Achso, they're hardly less freaky; indeed, in may ways, they're the rawest snapshot of Villalobos' creative progress yet, as they sound mostly improvised and unedited, full of toggling downbeats, seasick modulations, and unresolved rhythmic collisions. Each one feels like coming up and coming down all at once, which given Ricardo's recreational proclivities might make sense. According to Villalobos, he's including at least one of his private-edition drum tracks in his upcoming Fabric mix, so fear not: You'll hear 'em eventually.) No, this is Villalobos finding his way out of the classic minimal techno of a decade ago, and forging towards the voice that has increasingly become unmistakably his own.
When I asked him why he chose to release Salvador, he explained that Frisbee owns the copyright on all his tracks for the label, released between 1998 and 2001. "There was no possibility of me saying no," he said. "I asked them to send me the finished tracklisting, and in the end I found it to be a kind of snapshot of what I had done, of where I come from. That music was much more obvious, much easier to understand." His music today, he went on, reveals itself more slowly, over time. "But when I was younger, I received a stimulus, an input, and I directly routed it to the track itself. And that stimulus was nightlife, the party."
Salvador is Villalobos' most straightforward release in many years. ("Que Belle Epoque 2006" has been remastered, but the other tracks are in their original versions.) But this hardly makes it less engaging. "Que Belle Epoque" is a 13-minute churn built on bizarrely syncopated synthetic congas and a hypnotic ostinato synth. As it evolves, a heart-rending vocal melody comes up like the sun over the Atacama Desert, with little flute riffs following like vapor trails. In many ways, the track isn't at all different from Villalobos' current DJ tools; it's meant to be mixed, above all, creating a trance state in which off-beat handclaps continually yank you deeper into the vortex.
The CD's seven remaining tracks proceed in a similar manner; "Tempura" is a clattering, percussive workout that really would only come to life in the context of a DJ set (though it still makes for pretty gripping listening at home). The spacious "Suesse Cheques" finds him holding back on the boom-tick til over halfway through its seven-minute length, instead exploring pure drum sound and room tone. "Unflug" and "Lugom-IX" hear him attempting to graft Detroit synthesizers to his characteristic, Latin polyrhythms; where they sound crude, the minimal house groover "Lazer@Present" absolutely triumphs, a miracle of shoomping two-note chords, ever-morphing drum patterns, and a kick that drops out and sneaks back in when you least expect it.
For good measure, the CD also contains Villalobos' mix of Señor Coconut's "Electrolatino" (originally released on the Frisbee sister imprint Multicolor), and it's something else entirely. Well, yes and no: The synthesizers do something you've never quite heard in a Villalobos track, bleeding like Rorschach spots all over the low end, while a metronomic cowbell nags like a guilty conscience. In between those two poles, though, Villalobos' nimble patterns go soaring once again, exploring every angle of flight and pocket of air, where all that is solid melts into rhythm, and all that is rhythm melts into infinity. | 2006-06-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-06-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Frisbee Tracks | June 15, 2006 | 7.5 | 27f9a517-30bb-4fa8-889a-50cfcda60fd3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into bedroom producer Jerrilynn Patton's mind. It was a record for the individual, more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Her new EP, Free Fall, comes off like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is, and it creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. | Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into bedroom producer Jerrilynn Patton's mind. It was a record for the individual, more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Her new EP, Free Fall, comes off like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is, and it creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. | Jlin: Free Fall EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21302-free-fall-ep/ | Free Fall EP | Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer's mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her.
On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting*. Free Fall* feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on a single EP; it's not that they don't have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.
Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. "Eu4ria", like the aptly named "Guantanamo" from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer "Abnormal Restriction", as definitive a statement about Patton's musical identity as you'll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway's turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, "Abnormal Restriction" added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. "Eu4ria" is lighter; Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King's Carrie. "They're all gonna laugh at you," Carrie's mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here, the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.
"I Am the Queen" and "BuZilla" are two biting pieces of footwork that don't let up and shouldn't. It's not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. "BuZilla" reuses the phrase "live and let die." The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It's an aggressive and focused answer to her "genre." Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton's present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement. | 2015-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | December 2, 2015 | 7.6 | 27fab663-7afd-4af8-8b6c-bddf8d130871 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
The consistent indie rock journeyman makes one of the best records of his career with production assistance from Richard Swift. | The consistent indie rock journeyman makes one of the best records of his career with production assistance from Richard Swift. | Damien Jurado: Saint Bartlett | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14258-saint-bartlett/ | Saint Bartlett | It's hard to find an entrance point into Damien Jurado's discography. You could start from the beginning, 1997's Waters Ave. S., but that record is filled with the sort of angsty, electric Pac NW indie-rock that is largely uncharacteristic of his catalogue as a whole. You could start with his first folk-leaning LP, 1999's Rehearsals for Departure, which has one of the best and most tender songs he's written, "Eyes For Windows", or 2002's comparatively upbeat I Break Chairs, but there's not much to make either stand out from the pack. If nothing else, Jurado has been oddly cursed by his own consistency.
Produced by the increasingly ubiquitous Richard Swift, Saint Bartlett, Jurado's ninth record is, finally, a striking departure. So much so that only the sound of his voice keeps you from thinking this could be the work of someone else. The change is noticeable right off the bat, announced by the lushly stringed baroque pop of "Cloudy Shoes", and it continues throughout, with meditations on 1950s girl-group balladry, thorny Neil Young-esque guitar rock, and cavernous chamber-pop.
Swift deserves a fair amount of credit for the reinvention that's on display here, and his ear for instrumentation does wonders for these songs. The woodblock percussion that backs "Arkansas" gives the tune a slight ramshackle bent, while Swift applies the perfect amount of guitar fuzz to turn "Wallingford" into a gentle stomper. Most impressively, the application of subtle space in "Kalama" lends a new gravitas to Jurado's voice, effectively making him bigger than his own sound.
Despite Swift's major contributions, Saint Bartlett is still very much a Damien Jurado album. His best work has always been marked with heartache and desolation, and it's a testament to his strengths that even on Saint Bartlett's most upbeat songs, he manages to convey feelings of loneliness and loss. It helps here that he's still working within his lyrical wheelhouse. The mood on Saint Bartlett ranges from bitter to desperate and back again. Mostly, though, Jurado claims ownership of Saint Bartlett's achievements simply by turning in his strongest songwriting to date. Even the straightforward folk cuts here have more potentcy, especially on haunting "Beacon Hill".
The songs on Saint Bartlett would be considered an achievement for any artist-- but the fact that they come 13 years into a career makes the album even more of a triumph. Maybe the record's accessibility and lushness could lead to a bigger audience for Jurado, but in any case, it's a welcome surprise from a journeyman so dependable he risked being forgotten. | 2010-05-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-05-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | May 26, 2010 | 7.9 | 2801d36a-998e-42e3-b29c-defffa6da6cc | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Phil Cook, Megafaun member and orbiter of Justin Vernon's universe, turns in a passionate solo album forged out of love for Southern blues and raggedy Blue Ridge folk. He's preaching and, like any good missionary, his fervor is infectious. | Phil Cook, Megafaun member and orbiter of Justin Vernon's universe, turns in a passionate solo album forged out of love for Southern blues and raggedy Blue Ridge folk. He's preaching and, like any good missionary, his fervor is infectious. | Phil Cook: Southland Mission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20964-southland-mission/ | Southland Mission | Phil Cook’s second solo album opens with an expression of the truest contentment. But first, "Ain’t It Sweet" spends a full minute stretching out: A steady guitar chug beckons a Wurlitzer’s gap-tooth whistle; low fiddle dips around skittish piano notes, before everything whips to a gentle crest. Only then do Cook, his brother and Megafaun bandmate Brad, and Justin Vernon blast the title, exalting like sunflowers at dawn—or a rural bar band toasting a lock-in. The sweetness is Cook’s comfort in knowing that, ultimately, he and his wife will lie together in the ground. He’s not singing about heaven, but turns the gothic foreboding of death-do-us-part into radiant, secular gospel: "Well we’re wide awake then we’re dead and gone/ But we find a way just to carry on."
That’s the stuff, right there—not that carrying on is as simple as just saying so; Cook spends much of Southland Mission attempting to find the way, just as the path to this he record was its own calling. "It had to come out of me," he has said. "I didn’t realize it had to come out of me, but it had to." A decade ago, Cook moved his family from Wisconsin—where he was a member of Bon Iver’s orbit—to North Carolina, lured by the music of the Delta, Bayou, and Appalachia. He played gorgeous, doleful folk rock in Megafaun, complemented the cohorts of Matthew E. White and Hiss Golden Messenger, acted as bandleader for the Blind Boys of Alabama, and produced for Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray. In 2011 he released Hungry Mother Blues, a low-key solo instrumental record that chased Ry Cooder and John Fahey. Southland Mission is a more full-bodied commitment. Whether simple banjo fare, outlaw stompers, or reeling strut, each one of Cook’s modes is an easy and infectious exertion. And like any good missionary, Cook’s fervor is infectious.
Although Southland Mission is studiously steeped in tradition, it wears it lightly. Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the warmth of the Durham, N.C. community behind the record (the likes of Matt McCaughan, Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath) beams through as its own kind of congregation, though there’s occasionally a homespun gospel duo here, too, in the golden tones of Sophie Blak and Jeanne Jolly. They’re crucial to the record’s two-part centerpiece: chastising Cook for procrastinating on "Sitting on a Fence Too Long" before coming to "Lowly Road", a bluesy spiritual reckoning, which ends with a call-and-response as the duo welcome him home. Like Hiss Golden Messenger’s Lateness of Dancers, Southland Mission handles doubt with the possibility of redemption, reinforced by the record’s persistent, joyous uplift.
Cook navigates the extremes of the squeezed middle class on Southland Mission, staring down what it looks like to fight or flee. "1922" is a cover of a Charlie Parr song about the Piedmont musician’s parents’ Depression-era experiences, where "ain’t it sweet" becomes "ain’t that the way it is." Fed up of giving all his money to the government, a boy leaves his dead end job, gets beat up in a new town, and, dead broke, has no choice but to go back home: "Times are hard here and I can’t roam/ But I ain’t got nothing more." Every verse ends with Cook addressing some "boys," like it’s a tale of bar stool bravado, though choice is never treated as an act of heroism on Southland Mission. "Nothing sacred, nothing saved/ Get your ass on the morning train or get the hell out the way," he sings on "Great Tide", an empathetic epic that swings between tender moments and brisk, reeling jubilation.
Ultimately, choosing to stay and stoke life’s intimacies wins out over fleeing. "Anybody Else", a duet with Frazey Ford, sees Cook resisting easy reassurances in favor of a deep and nourishing love. "Gone" is a parable about how you might as well give it all you’ve got when you can’t take anything with you. To have is not necessarily to hold, and when possession is transient, belonging is all you have. Southland Mission lights up tradition with rare and overt joy and palpable gratitude. It’s an open invitation from a man who’s found home. Say yes. | 2015-09-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Thirty Tigers / Middle West | September 11, 2015 | 7.8 | 2807719e-33ea-4cf8-8ec0-4f4b3b6391a0 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Pianist R. Andrew Lee has rocketed to prominence in modern and contemporary classical music thanks to his curator's attention to pieces in need of greater hearing. His latest release, a 25-minute recording of Jay Batzner's composition "as if to each other…", shows off Lee's skill at playing electro-acoustic work. | Pianist R. Andrew Lee has rocketed to prominence in modern and contemporary classical music thanks to his curator's attention to pieces in need of greater hearing. His latest release, a 25-minute recording of Jay Batzner's composition "as if to each other…", shows off Lee's skill at playing electro-acoustic work. | R. Andrew Lee: as if to each other... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20814-as-if-to-each-other/ | as if to each other... | In recent years, pianist R. Andrew Lee has rocketed to prominence in the world of modern and contemporary classical music, thanks to his sterling technique as well as his curator's attention to pieces in need of greater hearing. In 2013, Lee brought us the first professional recording of Dennis Johnson's long-lost, 1959 work November—a five-hour-plus minimalist breakthrough that inspired La Monte Young (and by extension, composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Lee has also recorded post-minimalist touchstones by the likes of composer and early Village Voice critic Tom Johnson, and Wandelweiser-collective member Eva-Maria Houben.
Long-duration pieces that employ repetition (and sometimes outright silence) have given a sense of unity to Lee's discography, thus far. And while his latest release, a 25-minute recording of Jay Batzner's composition "as if to each other…", doesn't exactly shatter that brand, it does show off Lee's skill at playing electro-acoustic works. After progressing through five gorgeous minutes of attractive (and contemplative-feeling) arpeggiated chords—in which top notes are constantly changing, and roving around the piano's upper reaches—Batzner's composition introduces a wisp of prepared electronics.
Here's where plenty of well-meaning contemporary classical pieces torpedo themselves (often by sounding cheap or hidebound enough to be confused with rejected haunted-house soundtracks). Batzner's tones clear the initial sniff-test, simply by being well-judged. But his compositional instincts are also strong: up until the entrance of the electronics, slower-moving notes in the piano's lower registers have been alternating with more active, higher-pitched chords. The electronic field enters the picture right after Lee simultaneously strikes both extremes of the keyboard for the first time. Along with the resonant echo of the collision, the electronics create an icy, austere beauty.
The piece's middle section luxuriates in the immersive blurring of acoustics and electronics. By the sixteenth minute, we hear overlapping, tinny samples of Lee's playing, which creates a feedback loop, as everything builds into a peak and slowly dies away.
It can be difficult for a musician not to become subservient to the media requirements of a piece like this one, but Lee's playing is never just a helpmate; his interpretive choices sound explicably human throughout. Likewise, this release—the first professional, solo-composer recording of Batzner's work—reflects Lee's ongoing, admirable desire to champion works that haven't yet had the chance to reach icon status. | 2015-07-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Irritable Hedgehog | July 29, 2015 | 7.4 | 28081b5c-d5cc-4a2c-b4e3-9645a5425764 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Vinyl reissues of six albums from the late Jack Rose further solidify his place as a brilliant steel string guitar innovator. | Vinyl reissues of six albums from the late Jack Rose further solidify his place as a brilliant steel string guitar innovator. | Jack Rose: Red Horse, White Mule / Opium Musick / Raag Manifestos / Jack Rose / I Do Play Rock and Roll / Dr. Ragtime and His Pals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22362-red-horse-white-mule-opium-musick-raag-manifestos-jack-rose-i-do-play-rock-and-roll-dr-ragtime-and-his-pals/ | Red Horse, White Mule / Opium Musick / Raag Manifestos / Jack Rose / I Do Play Rock and Roll / Dr. Ragtime and His Pals | The fiery, pastoral steel-string guitar music of Jack Rose first entered the national consciousness in the mid 2000s, as part of a return-to-roots movement sometimes called “New Weird America.” If you were to ask Rose, however, he’d have likely told you there wasn’t much “new” about what he was doing. Rose’s inspiration came largely from pre-war American music: country blues, ragtime, and jazz. But his work never took on the tone of an archivist or academic: his guitar playing always sounded alive and in the moment. In his self-penned liner notes for his sophomore album, Opium Musick, Rose poked fun at himself. Writing under an acronymic pen name and paying homage to the tradition of steel-string albums with satirically self-important liner notes (see John Fahey and Leo Kottke), Rose invented an origin story in which an aged sensae urged him “not to let the ragtime die and to bring it into the 21st century.” Even early in his career, Rose was self-aware in his self-mythologizing, illustrating both a strong sense of humor and a defiant sense of purpose.
“A lot of people, when they view old-time music, they view it as gentle or nostalgic, which I don’t get at all,” Rose said around the release of Golden Apples of the Sun, a scene-establishing compilation for the “New Weird”/freak-folk moment, on which he was included among acts like Antony and the Johnsons, Joanna Newsom, and Vashti Bunyan. “It was totally bizarre sounding to me, and messed up,” he added. Throughout his too-short career and across his nine excellent solo albums, the Virginia-born, Philadelphia-based guitarist made a living out of bizarre sounding, messed-up, old-time music. Six of his albums have been reissued on vinyl by the VHF and Three Lobed labels, and they are each eye-opening testaments to his gift. Collecting his earliest recordings as a solo guitarist through some of his final collaborations before his tragic death in 2009 at the age of 39, these records illustrate Rose’s artistic mastery and his influence on the future of the genre.
On his 2002 debut, Red Horse, White Mule, the self-taught Rose already harbored an acute awareness of the possibilities of his instrument. In the opening “Red Horse,” he plays with a sprawling musicality and insistent rhythm, thumbing a steady picking pattern that picks up in intensity and speed as the track goes on. By the next song, a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” he’s using his slide to create an eerie buzz, calling back to his heavy, droning work with the improv group Pelt in the ’90s and forecasting the wilder compositions to come. Red Horse is a distinctive, if nascent, work—the sound an artist falling in love with his instrument and attempting to put all he knows on tape. Even just one album in, Rose had already created a signature sound and style, and there was a ghostly presence lurking throughout.
John Fahey’s solo guitar compositions cast a heavy shadow on anyone approaching the steel string guitar in a solo context. But, of all the guitar soli artists to emerge over the last two decades, Jack Rose is the one who followed most closely in Fahey’s footsteps. Like Fahey, Rose’s thoroughly researched and lived-in Americana hinted at a deep understanding of the nation’s history. Even his more psychedelic moments unfolded with a penchant for stark realism. His music was beautiful and familiar, without ever feeling predictable or cliched. The sonic similarities between the two guitarists can be effectively boiled down to a melodic sensibility that Glenn Jones called, in the excellent live DVD The Things That We Used to Do, a “resolutely anti-sentimental approach” (Rose puts it more bluntly: he doesn’t play any “pussy chords”). Rose’s music was a distinct turn away from the acoustic guitar’s more romantic qualities. It makes sense that he was ideologically opposed to the New Age-leaning acts like William Ackerman on the Windham Hill label and the more melodic recordings of Kottke.
As he developed as a guitarist, Rose would carve out his own niche. If Red Horse illustrated the myriad possibilities of his instrument, then its follow-up, Opium Musick, was a more intricate portrait of the artist behind the music. In the time between Red Horse and Opium Musick, Rose’s obsession with ragtime intensified, lending him a brighter and more dynamic picking style. The album also marks the moment when Rose’s interest in Indian sitar music and ragas blossomed, particularly with on the opening “Yaman Blues,” which features tanpura played by Pelt’s Mike Gangloff. “Linden Avenue Stomp” is another collaborative track, this time with Glenn Jones. Aside from becoming one of many new folk standards in Rose’s catalog, it is also the most Fahey-influenced track on the album, not to mention, one named for the house where Fahey cut most of his records (The title, however, marks another apocryphal moment in folk music: the street was actually called Linhurst Ave, but the duo thought “Linden” sounded more poetic).
Raag Manifestos from 2004 was an even more ambitious collection than its predecessor, a diverse and comprehensive record that transcends its odds-and-ends structure. Originally released as a tour-only CD-R, compiling material from various singles and compilations, Manifestos is a sprawling work that feels like a summary of Rose’s discography to that point. Across its seven tracks, Rose plays both steel and 12-string guitar with a newfound confidence, from the intense, lo-fi rumblings of “Hart Crane’s Old Boyfriends” and “Black Pearls From the River” (a composition also recorded by Pelt) to the quiet, bucolic fingerpicking in “Road.” Manifestos was a breakthrough for Rose, but it was also the jumping-off point that led to his greatest work.
The following year saw the release of Kensington Blues, an album that remains Rose’s most essential release and the one that defines his career to this day (although it is not included in either of these reissues). Rose himself referred to Kensington as a “really hard record to live up to,” while also speaking of the pleasure he took in hearing other guitarists cover its songs, hinting at the communal drive that fueled Rose’s later recordings. Jack Rose, the 2006 follow-up to Kensington Blues, marks another attempt on his part to make a deeper connection. Its songs are shorter and more melodic. Tracks like “St. Louis Blues” and “Miss May’s Place” are sprightly and sweet, even catchy, and the album’s most sprawling composition, the stunning “Spirits in the House,” is less meandering than Rose’s previous epics. “When I’m working on my solo material I obsess over every little detail,” Rose told an interview in 2009, “It basically takes over my life.” “Spirits in the House” is a composition that displays Rose’s obsessive tendencies; it is his single most gorgeous recording, and a marker of how far he had come since his debut.
The latter two releases in the reissue series—the live album I Do Play Rock and Roll and the collaborative Dr. Ragtime and His Pals, both released in 2008—each reveal completely different sides of Rose. Rock and Roll is one of his true masterpieces, but it could not have come from more humble beginnings. Culled from Rose’s archive of live recordings, after he agreed (while hungover) to release a new record, Rock and Roll actually offers Rose’s most adventurous compositions and highlights the wide potential he had left to explore. “Calais to Dover,” which appeared in a slightly condensed version on Kensington Blues, opens the album with a stately precision. Meanwhile, the closing “Sundogs” presents Rose as something of a provocateur—grinding his slide against the fretboard to create an incessant, noisy drone. The nearly half-hour track is an unabridged recording of a performance in Kutztown, Penn., that reportedly left his audience speechless. With the brief but gorgeous “Cathedral et Chartres” sandwiched between the two tracks, Rock and Roll could run at the risk of sounding tossed-off, but it makes for a visceral listen. For many fans, it is the quintessential Rose album: gorgeous, inspired, and deeply confrontational.
Comparatively, Dr. Ragtime and His Pals is simply a good time. Make no mistake, even though Jack Rose’s records can be cerebral and intimate, they are by no means insular affairs: there is palpable joy in his looser numbers, and a gripping physicality to his heavier work. Throughout Rose's records, you hear him huff and hum behind his guitar, further blurring the line between studio and live recordings. Even so, with its euphoric reimagining of Rose’s key tracks, Dr. Ragtime is the most human record he ever released. It finds Rose surrounded by an army of collaborators, from long-time friend and influence Glenn Jones to up-and-coming banjo player Nathan Bowles (who carries Rose’s torch to this day, particularly on the excellent Whole & Cloven). Regarding the following year’s similarly collaborative Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers LP, Rose gushed that he was finally “playing the music [he] loved as a kid,” and you hear that excitement throughout this record.
While his album with the Black Twig Pickers further developed Rose’s skill as a collaborator and his final release, 2010’s Luck in the Valley, took Rock and Roll’s intimate compositions to even headier territory, his 2008 releases serve as a fitting summation of Rose’s career. They represent an artist deeply committed to his craft and embedded within a community that still bears his mark today, making his influence more visible than ever. In conversation with Glenn Jones in 2008, Rose spoke fondly of his friend’s music, complementing Jones’ strength as a storyteller and his scope as a composer. He speaks particularly highly of one song from Jones’ debut album, though he couldn't remember its name (the song, as it turns out, was named for Rose). Ever averse to sentimentality, Jack Rose made records that showcased Americana as something to be explored and the blues as something to be lived, creating a vital body of work that will likely be rediscovered and fallen in love with the more time passes. | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | null | October 4, 2016 | 7.4 | 2808ad87-268c-41d5-80a7-f1b6d647b771 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
With terse existential inquiries and sun-faded samples, the full-length collaboration between the London rapper and the Brooklyn producer sounds at home on two continents. | With terse existential inquiries and sun-faded samples, the full-length collaboration between the London rapper and the Brooklyn producer sounds at home on two continents. | Jadasea / Laron: The Corner: Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jadasea-laron-the-corner-vol-1/ | The Corner: Vol. 1 | New York City and London share history, slang, and connections as cultural and African diasporic hubs, and for decades, hip-hop has strengthened the bond. Early stars like Slick Rick and the late MF DOOM were born in greater London but launched careers in New York (and underwent heinous immigration struggles). Today, rap’s ongoing cultural exchange can be seen in the relationships between stars like A$AP Rocky and Skepta, and in the proliferation of New York drill music influenced by London’s scene, which drew its own influence from Chicago. And, as in New York, London’s busy underground rap landscape is preoccupied with a warm and insular sound that stretches pensive raps around warped, sample-based beats. It’s within this framework that London rapper Jadasea and Brooklyn producer Laron find common ground.
Jadasea has been crafting prickly and contemplative raps since at least 2013, but he’s made his greatest impression as an affiliate of New York-via-London rapper MIKE; their 2020 single “Regrets” was a showcase for Jada’s bruised but grateful presence. Meanwhile, Laron cut his teeth producing airy beats with booming low end for artists like XXXTentacion and Rich the Kid, becoming an in-house producer for Brooklyn rapper Jay Critch. Similar to adventurous New York-area beatmakers like Tony Seltzer, Laron has a taste for grainy, sun-bleached samples that straddle hip-hop’s past and future. A few years ago, he sent Jadasea a pack of beats “out the blue.” Eventually, they made The Corner: Vol. 1, Jadasea’s second release on MIKE’s label 10k and a solid, if overlong, collection of heady inquiries into self-enlightenment.
On paper, Jadasea brings little that’s new to the tried-and-true world of understated pain rap. But his voice—or at least the way it’s layered—sets him apart. Many artists in this lane, particularly MIKE circa 2017, pride themselves on muddy, unmixed vocals that become another texture in a sea of sound, a reason to lean in close and absorb every word. Jada achieves a similar effect with a relatively clean vocal mix and a mid-range tone like Slowthai on melatonin. His voice projects confidence, even if his terse, melancholic writing style is not far removed from peers like Tony Bontana or John Glacier. Jada’s raps on the MIKE-featuring “Peace Out” land with force and conviction, thudding their way into the pockets of Laron’s soulful organ samples: “I stayed with it, never ever left my place/Just sayin’, man they tryna test my faith.”
He keeps up this delicate dance for 26 tracks. On “Grimey Blimey” and “Heaven High,” he’s absorbing life lessons from dangerous nights out and fostering future friendships across the world. “Holding On” is a mini-biography that chronicles how his come-up has kept him inspired. Jadasea’s writing isn’t especially detail-oriented, but shifts in his voice fill in the blanks: Take his punchy delivery of bars about perseverance on “Scurry” or the reserved, sage-like way he speaks his mind on “Getting By.” His ability to bring you to emotional states of being, as opposed to physical places, is one of his strengths. But assured delivery can’t always carry an album this long, and stretches of The Corner: Vol. 1 blur together. Though it never becomes unpleasant, Jadasea’s range as a performer isn’t yet as vast as his thoughts.
Laron’s beats, however, get a lot of mileage out of their faded samples. Shades of turn-of-the-century hip-hop production blend seamlessly with more modern touches that keep Jada on his toes. Synths, handclaps, and bolts of guitar set off chipmunked vocal snippets on “Tony Yayo” and “The Ropes”; the sour jazz of “Cheers” recalls Standing on the Corner if they dug around in a pack of Pi’erre Bourne drum kits. There are exquisitely straightforward quiet storm flips (“Murky”), triumphant horns laid across skittering 808s (“Main Contender”), and bare-bones breakbeats (“Oh Dear”). Laron plays every card with ease, bringing just the right tweak or flourish to keep Jada’s words flowing like silk. And though his presence is not yet charismatic enough to hold attention for the length of an episode of Top Boy, Jadasea has the skill to cut through Laron’s deft samplework. Their transcontinental linkup isn’t just proof they’re an engaging duo: It’s another example of London and New York’s natural bond. | 2023-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10k | February 22, 2023 | 7.1 | 2812683e-9adf-4a5c-9fe8-fa8702c1a275 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Encased in swirls of dream-pop production, Katherine Paul’s second album represents a softer, more subtle sort of resistance. | Encased in swirls of dream-pop production, Katherine Paul’s second album represents a softer, more subtle sort of resistance. | Black Belt Eagle Scout: At the Party With My Brown Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-belt-eagle-scout-at-the-party-with-my-brown-friends/ | At the Party With My Brown Friends | The backdrop of Black Belt Eagle Scout’s video for “Run It to Ya” is, crucially, a prom, and not a protest. Katherine Paul picks flowers, strums her guitar, and croons, her voice blurred and dreamy, while swaying against a wall of balloons. The visual is unmistakably queer, and unmistakably indigenous, but it represents a softer, more subtle sort of resistance. Rather than curl into a closed fist, her hand takes the hand of another pretty girl and leads her out to the dance floor.
Paul is among the many indigenous artists to garner hard-won and long-overdue recognition from white outlets and tastemakers in recent years. Indigenous artists have taken home Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize four times in the past five years, and the Indigenous Music Countdown, founded by David McLeod in 1998 as a small-scale weekly broadcast, now airs worldwide on satellite radio. Upon signing to Saddle Creek, Paul was eager to use her new platform in service of her community: “Getting signed to a record label and getting a publicist and booking agent—those are privileges that I could take advantage of to try and do good indigenous work.” The work of her debut, Mother of My Children, written during the resistance at Standing Rock, was to steel her loved ones for struggle. At the Party With My Brown Friends, by contrast, concerns itself not with work, but with play and rest.
This is not to say that Paul has made an apolitical record. She is mindful, on opening track “At the Party,” of white audiences, the sort who might marvel at the mere existence of an indigenous woman holding an electric guitar. “How is it real, how is it real,” she sings, “when you don’t even notice it?” Later, on “I Said I Wouldn’t Write This Song,” she takes note of “eyes, staring right at you,” crying “tears filled with joy/And hindrance, too.” Paul is aware of the complex, and often contradictory, priorities that present themselves to her as an artist: to make herself visible, but resist tokenization; to educate the public, but weather the fragility and hostility of their responses.
Still, her first priority is to give indigenous listeners a space to love and care for themselves without white spectatorship. From the hazy, low-lit prom of “Run It to Ya,” to the sweet morning-after of “Half Colored Hair,” Paul floats through a small, safe world of her own creation. Her songs are encased in soft, vague swirls of dream-pop production—the influence, in particular, of Japanese Breakfast, is deeply felt—and she gives no thought to anyone outside this serene bubble, devoting herself instead to everything she sees and feels within it. There is a grey day at the beach, in the Pacific Northwest, with a close friend. There is a bed, and a girl, and sheets “gleaming from the two of us.” There are dreams, too many to count, which recur from song to song, until the listener loses track of what is and isn’t true in Paul’s portrait of her own reality.
Especially touching is the record’s gorgeous closer, “You’re Me and I’m You,” sung from Paul to her mother, like a lullaby in reverse. “I am the one, the one she loves,” she sings, “No matter what my heart becomes.” Paul is free, so long as she sings, to draw no lines around who she is and what she loves. She is the daughter of her mother. She is the girlfriend of her girlfriend. She is the heiress of Geneviève Castrée and Courtney Love and Carrie Brownstein, a worthy ascendant in a long tradition of Pacific Northwest rock which, for too long, has excluded indigenous women. She makes no apologies, feels no inadequacy. Over the course of the album, this near-hour spent in the presence of the people she loves, she is reminded that she is equal to any challenge which may befall her. “You like flowers?” she sings, to a brown-eyed girl, on “Run It to Ya.” “I pick flowers.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 9, 2019 | 8 | 28145133-da3f-4474-9806-750a6cebb98c | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Absorbing influences from the natural world and working with collaborators like Lido Pimienta, the Colombian group pushes its habitual electro-tropicalia sound into new terrain. | Absorbing influences from the natural world and working with collaborators like Lido Pimienta, the Colombian group pushes its habitual electro-tropicalia sound into new terrain. | Bomba Estéreo: Deja | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bomba-estereo-deja/ | Deja | When Bomba Estéreo began recording their sixth album in January 2020, Colombians were in the midst of violent protests sparked by strikes against political corruption and dissatisfaction with President Iván Duque Márquez’s government. The anger from students and indigenous activists alike had been simmering for a while: “What matters to us, more than the virus or anything else, is the future of Colombia,” Maria Alejandra Vega, a university student in Bogotá, told a reporter. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, in a small beach town, Bomba Estéreo were also working to reshape their future. Flying in a tight-knit group of collaborators, including Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta, Bomba Estéreo sought refuge in the natural world and created Deja, a concept album foregrounding the environment as a means by which we can heal ourselves politically, socially, and spiritually.
The resulting work is the band’s most earnest to date. When Deja invites us to the dancefloor, Bomba Estéreo ask that we proceed with a conscience. In 2020, Bomba Estereo’s founder Simón Mejía starred in Sonic Forest, a documentary in defense of coastal Colombia’s Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations. Mejía also released a solo album, Mirla, under the moniker Monte, which inserted nature recordings within instrumental tracks. As Bomba Estéreo absorbed themselves in the land around them, Deja took shape, pushing the group’s habitual electro-tropicalia into different terrain. Drawing influences from marimba, Colombian folk, champeta, and Afrobeats, their sound isn’t necessarily new, but it’s bigger than ever. The most obvious example is “Conexión Total,” a collaboration with Nigerian star Yemi Alade. As Liliana Saumet and Alade riff back and forth about the joys of being fully present, they are carried by Efraín Cuadrado’s gaita (also known as a kuisi), which adds a dazzlingly bright sound to the synths and club-ready rhythm.
Although environmentalism has long played a role in Bomba Estéreo’s music, they’ve never sounded more spiritually attuned, even if it isn’t always effective. Album opener “Agua” begins with a call for the four elements: “Agua/Tierra/Aire/Fuego,” Saumet sings, in a fashion reminiscent of bullerengue, an Afro-Colombian oral tradition. The refrain fits the album’s division into sections dedicated to water, earth, air, and fire, but it still comes off a little hokey. Similarly, the title track relies on ecotherapy-inspired positive affirmations in the attempt to make grand statements about human disconnection, but the uninspiring EDM melody does nothing to lift the lyrics off the ground.
The second half of Deja is more convincingly aligned with their vision. “Tamborero” is a rhapsodic celebration of Colombia’s percussive prowess. On “Tierra,” Saumet sings elegiacally of the earth’s imminent demise; the marimba melody is so sweet, you almost forget how devastating it all is. And on album closer “Mamo Manuel Nieves (Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria),” they pass the mic to an indigenous shaman of the Kogi community. Saumet and Mejía had just finished an old ritual known as a pagamento, or “payment” to the land, when they invited Nieves into the studio to record a message for the world. The largely spoken-word track is a fresh and timely addition to an album of global bangers; it sits in a space similar to Mejía’s solo work, drawing upon samples of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta’s ferocious winds and birds. For a band that consistently invokes tropical indigenous aesthetics, it’s important to see them centering local collaborators’ voices.
Activism and collective healing are at the heart of Deja, and even if Bomba Estéreo’s fusion of lithe beats and weighty themes doesn’t always work, Saumet is a compelling presence throughout. As she opens “Ahora,” surrounded by the sounds of the rainforest, she offers a mantra for anyone struggling: “I am here. I am sitting in the right place, at the right moment, at the right time. Let your heart open.” It’s a simple meditation on seeking balance, and the song that follows, a lilting fusion of synths and guitar set to a cumbia rhythm, drives the point home: They’ve found answers in the world around them.
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. | 2021-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Sony Music Latin | September 18, 2021 | 7 | 2817e976-b8ed-4150-93c0-6c81f5e2c01c | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
The latest collaboration from Luca Mortellaro and Seth Horvitz is a vision of techno as a luminous fog, conjuring vivid imagery with the most stone-faced drones. | The latest collaboration from Luca Mortellaro and Seth Horvitz is a vision of techno as a luminous fog, conjuring vivid imagery with the most stone-faced drones. | Lotus Eater: Plasma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lotus-eater-plasma/ | Plasma | Luca Mortellaro and Seth Horvitz share roots in techno, but both artists long ago pushed into more esoteric realms. Since founding the Berlin label Stroboscopic Artefacts in 2009, Mortellaro—aka Lucy—has specialized in a shadowy, mystical style evoking ancient rituals and crumbling ruins. Their last solo album, 2016’s Self Mythology, offered a vision of techno as archaeological dig, tracing sooty rhythms outlined beneath centuries of rubble. Horvitz’ Rrose project, on the other hand, oscillates between high tech and the higher plane: Its piercing frequencies and sharp pivots resemble the balletic movements of lasers, while the slippery glissandi and cascading levels of rhythmic detail suggest the dazzling geometry ascribed to DMT trips and near-death experiences.
Lucy and Rrose first collaborated in 2016 with The Lotus Eaters EP, and they formalized their partnership as Lotus Eater with 2018’s Desatura. Perhaps it’s the contrast between their approaches—earth vs. air, fire vs. water—that makes their union sound so eerily dematerialized. Despite its ambient overtones, their debut album maintained at least a notional link to dance music in its rounded kick drums and pinging arpeggios. But on Plasma, there are no hard surfaces, no angles or edges, no impacts at all: It’s still techno, but the beats and even most of the bass have evaporated. What’s left is only a luminous fog, the ghost of a pulse strobing at its gaseous core.
Plasma descends from Porter Ricks’ Biokinetics and Plastikman’s Consumed, landmarks of ’90s minimalist techno that privileged grain over groove, yet its microtonal dimension shares more in common with avant-garde composers like La Monte Young or Folke Rabe. Where club techno favors immediate payoffs, one juicy serotonin burst at a time, Lucy and Rrose are playing the long game here: Very little actually happens in any of these pieces, and what does, happens very slowly. There are no melodies, no hooks, no mile markers; to listen to these pieces is to be swept along in their inexorable flow.
The palette consists largely of buzzing tungsten and bowed metal accented by the occasional leaky faucet. Still, for all the outward paucity of their materials, Lotus Eater conjure some remarkably vivid imagery with the most stone-faced drones. In a single track, a cluster of humming frequencies might morph from a fistful of loam—black, sparkling, tactile, alive—into a blast of dry ice, an alarm clock raging, a jet engine at full roar. Try as you might, you’re never quite sure how you’ve gotten from one point to the next; Lotus Eater’s patient fades and filter sweeps imbue these transmogrifications with something like a feeling of inevitability, no matter how bewildering their evolution may appear.
While there are no conventional drums, a hint of techno lingers, like a grave rubbing, in the music’s muted throb, which dully and dutifully trudges in time with dance music’s steadfast four-to-the-floor cadence. This submerged rhythm is the organizing principle around which their teeming worlds of microscopic detail snap together, like metal filings around a magnet. But the duo’s psychedelic intensity is most perceptible in a pair of tracks on the album’s back half, “Intracluster” and “The End of Words,” where even the faintest trace of rhythm is snuffed out. Both are constructed from innumerable layers of vibration that buzz and rattle out of sync with each other, stacked like layers of a pyramid—from bassy throb and midrange crackle all the way up to a rapid-fire shimmer that scrapes the upper edge of the audible threshold. In the absence of musical events, you begin to imagine riff-like shapes materializing in the slightest repeated flicker of tone, like mirages bubbling up from the sizzling tarmac. In this, Lotus Eater prove themselves master illusionists: They use electricity to play tricks on your mind, and the results are both thrilling and a little scary. | 2022-12-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Stroboscopic Artefacts | December 9, 2022 | 7.4 | 281c0a48-dedd-4d8f-a5bb-ddd50ddf9ec0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Cherry and the Swedish free jazz ensemble achieve a rare feat with the product of a four-day jam; a covers record that's both deeply personal for both parties, and possessed of a fleeting magic. | Cherry and the Swedish free jazz ensemble achieve a rare feat with the product of a four-day jam; a covers record that's both deeply personal for both parties, and possessed of a fleeting magic. | The Thing / Neneh Cherry: The Cherry Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16756-the-cherry-thing/ | The Cherry Thing | When she released her 1989 debut album, the club-friendly, socially conscious, and magnetically charismatic Raw Like Sushi, there were early indicators that Neneh Cherry was embarking upon a career of coloring outside the lines. Two decades later, it feels much less important to mention that the album-- which featured the immortally cool, often-imitated, never-duplicated hit single "Buffalo Stance"-- earned her a Brit Award for Best International Solo Artist than it does to tell you that she had the award melted down and made into jewelry, some of which she gave to her fellow nominees. "I gave Jazzie B a piece," she explained later, "Because Soul II Soul kicked ass that year."
Then again, there were even earlier indicators. Cherry was raised by her stepfather, free jazz pioneer Don Cherry, and her upbringing was as unconventional, well-connected and precociously musical as you'd imagine. From an early age, she and her siblings accompanied Cherry on the tour bus, hanging out with Ornette Coleman and any other jazz legends who happened to be around (age four: "[Miles Davis] lifted me up on his lap... and I sat on his snakeskin suit"). At 14, she toured as a backup singer for tribal punk firebrands the Slits; two years later, she formed a punk group of her own, Rip Rig + Panic. Cherry's subsequent solo output was, predictably, unpredictable: three records that blended hip-hop, trip-hop, be-bop with spirited, genre-agnostic abandon. Her disinterest in more conventional pop success relegated her to one-hit-wonder status in the U.S., but, as the more adventurous fans who followed her through the 90s know, it freed her up to graze more interesting territory.
And Cherry's collaborators on her first full-length in 16 years are wild horses in their own right. The freewheeling, punk-influenced Scandanavian jazz trio the Thing (named for a Don Cherry song) are to avant-garde jazz what Nico Muhly basically is to classical music: preternaturally talented upstarts with respect on their highbrow home turf but also plenty of indie cred by association. The Thing have jammed with Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke, and they've got some exhilaratingly knotty PJ Harvey, White Stripes, and Lightning Bolt covers in their repertoire.
So, somehow, The Cherry Thing, the album that the free-spirited pop star and the impish free jazz ensemble made together, is not the indulgent, impenetrable mess that you might expect; just the opposite, actually. It's a remarkably well-defined, cohesive, and above all things inviting listen, and at eight tracks it feels neither slight nor needlessly sprawling. Consisting almost entirely of covers and concocted from an unpretentious, no-frills sonic palette, The Cherry Thing is an exercise of the freedom you can invent within certain limits. Can you create new sensations from well-worn material? Is anything so sacred that you can't melt it down into jewelry?
Naturally, the covers included on the album are as genre-agnostic as the artists who chose them. There's a Stooges classic, an Ornette Coleman track, a song from Madvillainy, and, sparking with raw, electric energy (every track was recorded in a single take), each one is a live wire. Cherry's loose but rhythmically agile vocals wrestle with Mats Gustaffson's wild saxophone riffs; they occasionally convene to share the melody (as on one of two originals, Gustaffson's "Sudden Moment"). More often, they dance around each other in spasms of controlled chaos. Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ingebright Haker-Flaten on the double bass keep things grounded. There's something especially earthy-sounding about their rhythm section and Haker-Flaten's playing in particular, as though he were plucking not strings but vines strung up between trees. As all of these dynamic moving parts try their best to step in time, their terrific, lurching take on the Stooges' "Dirt" has the deliberate, menacing stomp of a 10-foot swamp monster learning how to walk.
Veering from low, jazzy trills to sharp spoken word, Cherry's vocals are phenomenally expressive: On the cover of Madvillain's "Accordian", she sounds like Billie Holiday at a poetry slam. The original "Accordian" fades out shy of two minutes, and Doom's surreal imagery, clock-tick beat and here-and-then-it's-gone duration give it the hazy magic of a naptime dream. The Cherry Thing's "Accordian"-- utterly transformed-- is three times as long, as though that clock's been chucked out of the room. Cherry tiptoes on, off, and around the beat, reveling in every line. "Keep your glory, gold, and glitter," she wrenches first into a chorus, then into a mantra.
Cherry is recording a solo album that's slated for release later in the year, and although she and the Thing are playing a few shows together this summer, it's likely The Cherry Thing will be a one-off: a solid souvenir of what sounds like a pretty fun four-day jam. Still, more than just a forgettable pit stop in two wildly careening careers, The Cherry Thing captures some kind of fleeting magic. It's also something of a paradox: a deeply personal covers album. The ghost of the players' shared past, Don Cherry (who died of cancer in 1995), wrote one of the most inspired songs on the album, "Golden Heart". For the Thing and Neneh both, it's a tribute to the man who got them started on the wild, uncharted career arcs they're still inventing as they go. As the track subsides, she's crooning his words back to him: "You live with me in the golden heart." | 2012-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Smalltown Supersound | June 20, 2012 | 8 | 281c323d-9605-466c-856c-7020f08a8d48 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
RLYR features Pelican guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw, Locrian percussionist Steve Hess, and Russian Circles bassist Colin DeKuiper. Their debut is forty minutes of uncommonly optimistic post-rock. | RLYR features Pelican guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw, Locrian percussionist Steve Hess, and Russian Circles bassist Colin DeKuiper. Their debut is forty minutes of uncommonly optimistic post-rock. | RLYR: Delayer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21979-delayer/ | Delayer | RLYR began by accident. In 2013, Pelican guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Locrian percussionist Steve Hess, both mainstays within the fertile fringes of Chicago’s rock scene, received an invitation to travel two hours north to Milwaukee and debut as an improvisational duo. Despite their geographic and stylistic proximity, Hess and de Brauw had never played together before, so they practiced, soon discovering the festival’s ask had been a fortuitous one—their approaches clicked, and they wanted to continue. Traces of songs emerged from the informal rehearsals, so they decided to build from an exploratory duo to a power trio, recruiting former Russian Circles bassist and busy band member at large, Colin DeKuiper. Less than three years later, Delayer—the band’s radiant four-song, forty-minute start—funnels the distortion and power of its members’ pedigrees into post-rock that is positively cheery. At its best, Delayer offers a smile and demands, quite loudly, that you share it.
Each piece of RLYR, pronounced “Relayer,” boasts a high-volume past. Pelican, for instance, is the very emblem of instrumental post-metal, long led by de Brauw’s burly, refined riffs. Russian Circles belong in that same conversation. And since Hess enlisted in Locrian a half-decade ago, that trio has become one of extreme metal’s most fascinating bands, taking the kinds of textural and thematic chances that push them to and against the genre’s often-obdurate edges.
These extremes of heaviness and dynamics remain intact on Delayer. The guitar and bass that slash between Hess’ big-bottom beats throughout “Reconductor” carry the weight of doom metal; a mid-song escalation even delivers an instrumental acknowledgement of the recent thrash revival. “Delayer,” a four-minute span of rhythm-less bedlam, recalls a more primitive take on the sophisticated din of Locrian, in which tendrils of synthesizer and guitar, manipulated drums and mangled vocals spin into complex musical webs. And you could write a stoner metal opus from one small sample of the 23-minute “Descent of the Night Bison,” where DeKuiper and de Brauw fight beneath a tough shell of amplifier crackle. As the song pivots toward climax, Hess flirts with a blast beat.
But that’s just Delayer’s surly surface, the necessary vestiges of musicians who have made their reputations in or at least around metal. By and large, these songs glow from the core, built with an underlying, unabashed sense of optimism. Something about the repetition of “Slipstream Summer,” for instance, suggests the blues; the riff and rhythm constantly wrap around themselves, stuck in a cycle from which they can’t slip free. Late in the song, though, de Brauw punches through a veil of low, murky roar, the high notes of his guitar becoming the sunlight suddenly breaking through storm clouds. And the churning “Reconductor” soundtracks some heroic feat, a victory obtained against all odds. You may find yourself cheering along.
Delayer, or four songs by a rock ’n’ metal power trio, isn’t a monumental achievement, nor does it aim to be. These forty minutes simply feel good, their ecstatic embrace of electricity and pounded drums occasionally conjuring some action movie’s apogee. But the real coup is a more subtle one. This sort of dude-driven post-rock and post-metal is so often the domain of the dour, with moods as low as the tunings. Like Collections of Colonies of Bees’ most masterful moments almost a decade ago, though, Delayer suggests a victory not over abject depression but over relative contentment. It’s more liftoff than life raft, a reflection of good times rather than a reckoning of the bad ones. This is uncommonly optimistic post-rock, then, deliberately using the strength of the style’s sound to summon something more than temporary fury. | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Magic Bullet | June 22, 2016 | 7 | 281db677-e6da-4364-9fa7-7a6fec414ed6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On his third album—the first part of a projected trilogy—the singer-songwriter retains all his theatrical intensity while shifting his focus to songs about love, a subject he once spurned. | On his third album—the first part of a projected trilogy—the singer-songwriter retains all his theatrical intensity while shifting his focus to songs about love, a subject he once spurned. | Benjamin Clementine: And I Have Been | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benjamin-clementine-and-i-have-been/ | And I Have Been | For the better part of a decade, Benjamin Clementine has been a hostage to his own narrative: the North London boy who taught himself piano by listening to classical radio; the wayward teen who fled to Paris, slept rough, and busked as a means of survival. If you skim through interviews from 2014—before Clementine secured the Mercury Prize for his debut album, At Least for Now—you can see that the musician has long been wary of his own bio. On his third full-length, And I Have Been, Clementine comes to terms with his identity and all of the experiences that shaped it over time. These songs were written at home in the mountains of Ojai, California, but they still sound like they’re curling through Parisian corridors; Clementine is finally at peace with the lingering past. Still impossible to pigeonhole, his hybrid of classical, chamber pop, baroque, and jazz is as thrilling as ever, while the newly stripped-back arrangements heighten the intimacy of a songwriter seeing himself clearly.
Clementine has referred to And I Have Been as his “light” album. It is the first of three parts, which will, he says, get progressively darker—the third chapter may be his final record. It’s hard to envision Clementine writing anything frothy, and his latest work is only “light” compared with the high melodrama of At Least for Now and 2017’s I Tell a Fly. And I Have Been retains Clementine’s theatrical intensity; his voice stretches from robust, oaky lows to highs that crackle like an electrical storm. But in a surprising turn, he succumbs to a musical inevitability: maneuvering his gale-force instrument to sing about love. Clementine once spurned the subject, noting that his songs had more to say than, “Baby, I want to have you.” But his recent role as a husband and father has made the trope inescapable. He married singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey in 2018, and the couple have two young children together. These experiences may have pushed Clementine to write his very first pop songs.
“Auxiliary” is a snapshot of pandemic parenthood, starring Clementine as the unlikely optimist. “I see our world is up in flames,” he sings, sprightly piano and acoustic guitar cresting underneath. But the forecast has a silver lining: “We will survive/Takes you and I/To make our child smile.” On the vamping, neo-blues “Lovelustreman,” Clementine allows himself to enjoy the cliches he once snubbed: “Everything I do is all for you/Believe, you’re my number one.” For an artist who looks to William Blake for inspiration more than Lennon and McCartney, a man who makes up words and penned an entire dictionary with personalized definitions, “Auxiliary” and “Lovelustreman” can feel less lyrically exciting than prior work. But they seem to be an indication that Clementine is loosening up, and occasionally indulging instinct over intellect.
Though Clementine exalts domesticity, being a father at times stirred up his own childhood trauma. He found himself confronted with his history, and for the first time, he embraced it. On the dark waltz “Genesis,” which Clementine has said is about the “constant denial” of his roots, he accepts being “trapped in free”—unsettling shorthand for the past staining the present. In his dry, velvety tenor, he condemns and celebrates this lineage; it exists “no matter where we go,” and ebbs like “settling tides.” It may recede for a while, but the return is unavoidable. In the parallel “Gypsy, BC,” the narrator speaks to a nomad repeating an endless cycle. “Try to go wherever you wanna go/But you’re not free,” Clementine sings, as geyser strings settle over piano. In the song’s final third, he seals his own fate: “Just in case you forget/Gypsy’s been always you.” It’s Clementine’s way of welcoming his shadow, knowing that it is blotted behind every step.
Despite Clementine’s insistence that this is his “light” album, on And I Have Been he grapples with nothing less than life’s cyclical nature. On “Delighted,” he lobs a ball upward and then watches gravity snatch it back down. “We lean, we learn, we earn, we turn, we burn/Then start again” he observes. Violin and a multi-tracked soprano surge in the background. The strings nearly clot the song with their filigree, but they are tempered by Clementine’s earthy, rust-worn voice. At times these cycles are indicated in a song title. “Atonement” points to an inglorious deed; “Residue” suggests the untidy object that came before. The latter is home to one of Clementine’s best lines: “Gluttony ain’t good/Sadness is food… Sadness is wine.” Both metaphors convey the delicious indulgence of depression. But it’s the minimal piano ballad “Copening” that presents Clementine humbly “howling home,” an image that renders the pain and pleasure of shuffling back to where you came from. Upon returning, Clementine entertains the phantoms of his past. They drink to the future. | 2022-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Preserve Artists | December 2, 2022 | 7.5 | 28211193-3e6d-424f-8872-64c68ddfb020 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album from Mase, an icon of the shiny suit era who turned the Bad Boy throne into a recliner. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album from Mase, an icon of the shiny suit era who turned the Bad Boy throne into a recliner. | Mase: Harlem World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mase-harlem-world/ | Harlem World | Mase floats skyward wearing golden goggles and a shiny suit that looks like a tricked-out air traffic control vest. His rise through an ultramodern wind tunnel feels remarkably symbolic as Kelly Price lip-syncs Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” on a monitor behind him. He’s wearing the same diamond-studded Jesus piece the Notorious B.I.G. had on when he was murdered. As he swaggers through the futuristic Hype Williams-directed music video for 1997’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” histories are being rewritten in real-time; the nature of rap as an epic retail commodity is growing. It is a eulogy and a coronation all at once. It is Bad Boy rising from the ashes.
This was how Sean “Puffy” Combs, marketing extraordinaire, formally introduced a rebranded Mason Betha to the world. Despite guest starring on a No. 1 single months prior, this was Mase’s coming out party, the official induction of Bad Boy’s next star. For several years, Betha had been a foot soldier on the insular Harlem rap scene snarling about returning fire in shootouts, infrared beams, and slug-filled foes coughing up blood. Now he was nearly nonchalant, rapping about Dolce tube socks and putting his name on blimps. The transformation into a flashy ladykiller was Puff’s idea. “I was Murda, P. Diddy made me pretty,” Mase joked on a song called “Lookin’ at Me.”
The transformation worked brilliantly and made Mase and Puff arguably more popular than any rappers before them, but it also raised questions about the value of style over substance among a classicist rap community that had just lost two icons to gun violence, the first Tupac Shakur, the other in their own camp. Puff, the man who’d brought hip-hop Biggie Smalls, one of its greatest ever rappers, was suddenly being pegged as an arbiter of bad taste, with Mase his steward in flamboyant emptiness. Initially seen as a sycophant riding Puff’s coattails, and then as an unworthy successor to Biggie, Mase was nearly defiant in his self-belief: “You don’t like me? Bet against me,” he rapped casually on “Niggaz Wanna Act.” That effortless confidence and poise defines his debut album, Harlem World, one of the best rap albums to be almost shamelessly commercial. It was the peak of the shiny suit era, sparking the short-lived jiggy rap phenomenon of the late ’90s.
Mason Bethea was a New Yorker born in the South. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to do everything on his own time, why he talked slower than the big city rappers he grew up with. The youngest of six children, he was delivered almost two months early in Jacksonville, Florida, and he and his mother fled an abusive father, showing up unannounced to live with an uncle in Harlem. Unscheduled arrivals became a hallmark of his life. “I guess from the very beginning I was coming onto the scene before people were ready to see me,” he says in his 2001 pseudo memoir, Revelations: There’s a Light After the Lime. After leading the basketball team to the PSAL Finals his senior year at Manhattan Center High School, Betha and teammate Cameron Giles had dreams of going to the NBA, but when Betha was forced to repeat his senior year—which meant a year without playing ball—the friends picked up rap as a hobby. From the beginning, they were opposites. Cam was the fire; Mase was preternaturally chill.
As amateur rappers in Harlem going by Killa Cam and Murda Mase, the two immersed themselves in the corner scene, rapping around town at gambling spots and after games at Rucker Park. They joined a rap crew called Children of the Corn, founded in 1993 by a far more serious Harlem rapper named Big L. They were managed by an assertive Manhattan Center student named Damon Dash, but he was really courting L, who was known around town as the best rapper in the borough. (Some years later, Dame’s Roc-A-Fella Records would chase Big L again until his death in 1999.) The crew was primarily rapping about being young and menacing with Mase playing the coolest head. Cam was all action (“I’m a cat with nine lives but every day I risk em.”) Big L was the first in the group to catch a break when his Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous single “M.V.P.” started gaining traction in New York. But a few months later, the Notorious B.I.G. released a “One More Chance” remix with the same DeBarge sample and all but killed L’s momentum. As Big L’s major career sputtered, Murda Mase kept rapping on 139th and Lenox, in front of a 24-hour chicken spot. It was a connection to Biggie that would soon give him his chance to become Harlem’s biggest star.
Betha’s twin sister introduced him to Cudda Love, Biggie’s road manager, in 1996. After hearing a Murda Mase tape, Cudda went up to SUNY Purchase, where Betha was going to school, to inquire about his level of commitment to rap. “‘I already know you’re nice,’” Mase remembers him saying, “‘I just need to know if you want to make money?’” The relationship started paying dividends almost immediately. After only a few weeks, Cudda took Betha to audition for Biggie on a freezing New York City sidewalk out front of the Apollo theater. Biggie was impressed and wanted to put Murda Mase in the newly debuted Brooklyn group Junior M.A.F.I.A., but Cudda had other ideas: he sold his Acura to buy a pair of plane tickets to Atlanta for the colossal annual rap convention, Jack the Rapper’s Family Affair. Mase was so broke at the time that he was sharing a one-bedroom apartment and splitting White Castle burgers, but Cudda, knowing the man needed to look the part, let Mase borrow a silk Versace shirt with flamboyant colors, and Mase spent his last dime on Versace pants and shoes to complete the look. “Somebody’s going to notice me,” he remembers thinking.
The convention afterparty was at the Hard Rock, and when he failed to woo producer Jermaine Dupri outside the venue, Cudda finagled an opportunity for Betha to try and impress Puff on the dancefloor. “You rap like that all the time? That slow?” Mase remembers Puff asking him, intrigued. “I liked his style,” Combs told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “His personality stood out. The sound of his voice. He sounded like me.” When Mase got back to New York, he was Bad Boy. Only a few weeks later, he was reunited with Biggie, this time as teammates, on the “Only You” remix. There was a dollar sign in his name now. Puff showed him the money (allegedly $250,000, $50k upfront, outbidding Heavy D at Uptown Records, Tommy Boy Records, and his old friend Dame Dash at Roc-A-Fella) and he planned to make good on his investment. “I’m the newest member of the Bad Boy team/And I’ma bring this nigga Puff mad more cream,” Mase pledged on “Take What’s Yours.” “With hooks galore, leave the city shook for sure/And I’ma take ‘em back where Biggie took ‘em before.”
Mase quickly made good on his promise. Puff was anxious to put his talents to use across the Bad Boy roster, and basically every record they cut together from 1996 to the summer of ‘97 hit. In the wake of Biggie’s death in March of 1997, Mase was suddenly thrust into a new role as replacement headliner. He was constantly fielding questions about inheriting the Bad Boy throne. His response was to turn that throne into a recliner. The album was wholly self-aware; chock full of jams and conscious of it. Mase wanted to take his insular Harlem world global, and he did, rolling out a red carpet from Lenox Ave. into suburban households across the country.
Harlem World is larger than life. Mase had a buttery touch when in his groove, as if having an out-of-body experience watching himself churn out hits. “Why do what most do? Do what you ’posed to/Make hot jams y’all, sell bicoastal/If you want a hit you can let me coach you/Money back on anything that got my vocals,” he rapped on rhetorical opener “Do You Wanna Get $?” And while it’s safe to say Puff Daddy wasn’t a good rapper and was, in fact, simply just an executive masquerading as a showman, no such claim could be made about Mase. His flows were as silky, or as plush, or as golden as the material world furnishing his songs. He made the realm of luxury feel quaint.
Part of the credit is owed to Puff, his ace in-house production team the Hitmen, and other rising beatmakers like the Neptunes, Dame Grease, and Jermaine Dupri who, to paraphrase Combs on the uber-jiggy “Feel So Good,” flipped hits from the ’80s and made ’em sound so crazy. They spun Isaac Hayes, Teena Marie, New Edition, Curtis Mayfield, and Michael Jackson into satiny soundbeds Mase would sprawl out in. Talk of Puff during the late ’90s often found a way back to Berry Gordy shaping the sound of Motown; the Bad Boy exec had a similar genius for putting everyone in a position to succeed. No Way Out remains his crowning achievement as a producer, but across Harlem World he makes Mase look like rap Hugh Hefner.
Mase was underrated in his ability to make extravagant things seem quotidian. He had TVs in the headrests of his red Lex years before Xzibit was kitting out cars on “Pimp My Ride.” He preferred his money in yen because the Japanese didn’t tax him, and if you had something to ask him you could send him a fax. Rappers had been rich before but they’d rarely been thriftless. Mase was Scrooge McDuck diving into a vault of coins and finding his wealth exhausting. “It’s like y’all be talkin’ funny/I don’t understand the language of people with short money,” he rapped on “Feel So Good” over a Kool & the Gang sample that sounded like strolling the Las Vegas Strip at night. To listen to his music was to be vicariously untouchable.
But Harlem World was wrongly depicted as lyrically limited and uninvolved, as well as far removed from the street rap deemed of and for the culture, emblematic of a transitional period when rap’s reach had, to the disdain of some hardcore fans, become a “Seinfeld” joke. It was too above ground, too kitsch, too expensive. The album was often ostentatious, to be sure, largely materialistic and definitely profit-oriented, but certainly not without its hood charms and never unaware of where it came from. Mase’s raps weren’t dense or heavy with double-entendre, but there was plenty of subtly tricky rapping worked into his flexible cadences. And for all the talk of excess, Mase pulled grit and grind rappers like DMX, 8Ball, and MJG into his orbit, made space for the shriek raps of Busta Rhymes, and matched the finesse of early mafioso JAY-Z. He was just as likely to shit talk as he was to flex. Everything circled back to the ubiquity he’d achieved as a Bad Boy poster child, but it still all began with Murda in Harlem.
Almost overnight, Mase set up shop on the Billboard charts as if it was a label requirement. From Biggie’s death through the summer of 1998, all Mase did was make hit records: After handing Puff No. 1 and No. 2 smash hits, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and “Been Around the World,” respectively, and then bringing things to a head with his zeitgeist-shifting appearance on “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” Harlem World produced three Top 10 singles of its own. The album, which hit stores in October, was double platinum by December. He collected four plaques from the RIAA and was nominated for the same Grammy twice. The only rappers who had bigger years than he did were … Biggie and Puff.
The short-lived Jiggy Rap Era—which included Jay-Z’s In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, peaked with Will Smith’s Big Willie Style, and concluded with the rise of DMX in 1998—has been primarily remembered with contempt, along with the Ringtone Rap that would take hold a decade later. But Harlem World remains the sleekest rap album about becoming super famous. It set precedents for decades of posh rap consumerism. It is flagrantly commodified, proud of it, but not lesser for it.
Somewhere along the line, Mase grew weary of the fame, which was reflected in his music. He lost his love for rap and retired live on Hot 97 weeks before the release of his 1999 sophomore album Double Up. He became a pastor. He briefly returned to give rap another go in 2004 but was never the same. The magic was gone. As Kanye put it on “Devil in a New Dress”: “Don’t leave while you’re hot, that’s how Mase screwed up.”
But Mase’s legacy lives on in every rags-to-mega-riches story that’s become standard in rap; in the flows co-opted by everyone from Drake to Pusha T; in wannabe rap moguls naming their imprint after $200,000 luxury cars; in Jesus pieces as a rite of passage. So much of what rap has become can be traced back to those shiny suits blinged out in that wind tunnel. As Mase floats, an entire genre hangs in the balance. | 2019-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Boy | July 21, 2019 | 8.1 | 2825682b-67e9-4566-b04d-db0cc8fd21bf | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Tears for Fears’ second album is the one sound of pop-rock in the ’80s. Its personal psychology, meticulous compositions, and world-sized choruses evoked the loss of control in an overwhelming era. | Tears for Fears’ second album is the one sound of pop-rock in the ’80s. Its personal psychology, meticulous compositions, and world-sized choruses evoked the loss of control in an overwhelming era. | Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tears-for-fears-songs-from-the-big-chair/ | Songs From the Big Chair | Welcome to your life. From the moment you enter the world, you’re traumatized, first by your very birth, then by every subsequent moment of your existence, each of which will have a profound and significant effect on your behavior; in childhood, when you experience emotional distress, that pain remains, buried underneath time and memory.
In 1970, the psychologist Arthur Janov published The Primal Scream, in which he detailed his theory that the neuroses and baggage that adults carry with them are caused by repressed traumatic events from childhood. The same year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono underwent therapy sessions with Janov for about five months. Lennon channeled his experiences into his solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He created one album out of his encounters with Janov; Tears for Fears based their entire career off of Janov’s work.
Even the band’s name is derived from The Primal Scream, on a theory of children’s nightmares. “Basically, if they are allowed to be themselves in their waking hours and are allowed to let their natural crying out, then they won’t dream up monsters at night to be scared of because they can’t face the reality of being scared of their parents,” bassist and co-singer Curt Smith told Will Hall, the author of Tears for Fears . . . Tales From the Big Chair. “Since emotional stress is the central issue here, the solution... is to encourage an emotional response so intense that the years of hidden anger and hurt are allowed to surface from the depths of the unconscious.”
On their second LP, 1985’s Songs From the Big Chair, Tears for Fears took a cue from Lennon and applied what they’d learned from Janov toward studies of single subjects: money, power, love, war, faith. But where Lennon went small, Tears for Fears went huge. They took the goth and synth-pop foundation they constructed on their debut, 1983’s The Hurting, and piled on saxophone, Fairlights, guitar solos, samplers, and live drums on top of drum machines. They wrote cresting choruses, arena-ready anthems, elegant ballads, and multi-section songs that have more in common with prog-rock than most of new wave. And they improbably created not just one of the biggest albums of the 1980s, but an album that manages to exude the 1980s in the same way that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours conveys the lonely narcissism and hedonism of the ’70s, or Love’s Forever Changes captures both the bliss and the ominousness of the Summer of Love.
When Smith and Tears for Fears co-singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Roland Orzabal went to record Songs From the Big Chair, the two possessed the kind of ambition necessary to produce an era-defining album. More than anything, Tears for Fears felt like they had something to prove to both critics and to themselves.
The Hurting went to number one on the UK album charts, sold a million copies, and yielded three top-five singles—“Mad World,” “Pale Shelter,” and “Change”—but the UK music press approached it with near hostility. In his review of the album for NME, Gavin Martin writes, “Sure, they may be popular—so was the Reverend Jim Jones when he took 5,000 followers to Guyana to commit mass suicide.” Orzabal told The Quietus, in an interview, “We weren’t particularly liked by some of the music journals. If you were on the front cover of Smash Hits, you were doomed.”
Part of the problem was that Tears for Fears came off as being too sincere—The Hurting was so explicit about its debt to Janov and The Primal Scream, and so lacking in subtlety, that the album cover depicted a child holding his head in his hands. But that sincerity belies the cosmetic gloss of the music. With its gleaming synthesizers, tight drum-machine programming, and minor-key melodies, The Hurting is a hallmark of early-80s dark wave and goth. That beauty came with a price: “It ended up taking a lot of time and costing a lot of money because we were fussy,” Smith told Hall. “The problem with it taking so long was that when we looked back at tracks we’d done months before we’d think, ‘Ooh, I don’t like that.’”
For Songs From the Big Chair, the band regrouped at their keyboardist Ian Stanley’s home studio in Somerset and rehired Chris Hughes, who also produced The Hurting. After a few false starts, Orzabal formed a brain trust of himself, Hughes, and Stanley, with Dave Bascombe providing engineering assistance and Smith signing off on ideas and making suggestions. They took inspiration from the music they were listening to, cerebral art-rock by Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, and Peter Gabriel. Smith confessed that his favorite album at the time was the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops. He could tell the Blue Nile had total artistic control—the music sounded calculated, finessed, meticulous.
In the documentary Scenes From the Big Chair, Orzabal revealed that the method Tears for Fears adopted was “fitting songs into interesting sounds.” To create the sounds, the squad in Somerset set up a formidable assembly of equipment: “a LinnDrum II box, a Drumulator drum box, a Roland Super Jupiter synthesizer, a Fairlight synthesizer, a DX7 keyboard, a rack of guitars, a Steinberger Bass, a Fender Stratocaster and a Gretsch maple drum kit,” according to Hughes. The main foursome would go in the studio from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week. They started by experimenting with individual fragments and then building them out. They took their time and loosened up their approach. Most importantly, they enjoyed themselves.
No track on Songs From the Big Chair exemplifies this free-roaming, tessellating approach more than its opener, the No. 1 single “Shout.” As Hughes told RBMA, “[Roland] set up a little drum box and a little synthesizer with a bass tone. He pressed the button on the drum box, and he programmed this little beat and it had these little chimey bells and a clapping drum beat. He pressed one of the keys and started singing, ‘Shout. Shout. Let it all out.’”
The template was an opportunity for Hughes, Orzabal, and Stanley to indulge. The structure of “Shout” is minimal, just one or two vocal melodies played over a steady drumbeat for around six-and-a-half minutes. But the thrust of the song is repetition, because as the hook grows and grows, the band keeps adding patches and instruments that compound the potency of the songwriting: a Fairlight-programmed ghostly synth-flute line, chippy guitar licks, and then a perfectly timed breakdown at 2:40, with a warped keyboard patch followed by a huge rush of Hammond organ and then a return to that earlier synth-flute, in a sequence that sounds like a brass band bursting through, then all of it blanketed by heavy-feedback guitars and backup vocals, a knifelike guitar solo running on top, and Orzabal and Smith still singing: “Shout. Shout. Let it all out/These are the things I can do without.”
“Shout” sounds tough. The drumbeat has an industrial, boxy shape and texture that resembles a march, with Orzabal and Smith’s joint vocals delivered almost as a chant. The song is just as explicit about primal therapy as virtually any other Tears for Fears track that predates it. But it’s less egregious, even though the execution is more direct. From the outset, Tears for Fears sound like they have a real purpose. The end of the verse is a declaration: I’m talking to you.
Tears for Fears named Songs From the Big Chair after the 1976 TV movie Sybil, in which Sally Field plays the title character, a woman with multiple personality disorder who could only prevent herself from using her different guises as defense mechanisms when she was sitting in her analyst’s chair. But the title also smartly references the music—because the songs all pertain to different sides of Tears for Fears’ personality—and that the band are delivering the album from an assured psychological state.
Tears for Fears could harness their self-confidence for a variety of tones and subjects, something that’s evident on “Head Over Heels,” another one of Songs From the Big Chair’s major singles. Whereas “Shout” is brooding and martial, “Head Over Heels” is dreamy and skeptical, with its glimpses of the joys of relationship chitchat (“I wanted to be with you alone /And talk about the weather”) and its swooning chorus, clouded in the band’s heavy, misty production. The music contradicts the narrative, in which the protagonist sabotages courtship because of his own self-hatred (“I made a fire, I’m watching it burn/I thought of your future”) and doubts that he can ever truly be in love (“I’m lost in admiration, could I need you this much?”). At this point, Tears for Fears could address their own insecurities without appearing wimpy or self-absorbed.
Songs From the Big Chair’s two ballads, “I Believe” and “Listen,” also manage to avoid preciousness or campiness, impressive because they’re the two parts of the album that most expose Tears for Fears’ love of progressive art-rock. “I Believe,” a gentle track that sounds like it was recorded in a piano bar, greatly resembles Robert Wyatt’s quirky, curling songwriting. The band is forthright about Wyatt’s influence, as corroborated by their engrossing, bare-bones cover of the singer-songwriter’s “Sea Song,” the B-side to “I Believe.” On the symphonic, largely instrumental “Listen,” pockets of blobby keyboard and electric guitar course through the song, with a world-music chorus at the end that sounds like a mash-up of Gabriel’s Security and Jon Hassell and Eno’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
The first two verses of “Listen” also address the then-ongoing Cold War, and Songs From the Big Chair finds Tears for Fears engaging with politics more than ever before. On their first single, the propulsive “Mothers Talk,” the band juxtapose themes of motherhood with protests against nuclear war (“But when the weather starts to burn /Then you’ll know that you’re in trouble”), a canny insinuation that unresolved maternal issues lead to violence. On the simmering, nocturnal “The Working Hour,” Orzabal takes on the music business; its chorus, “This is the working hour/We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes,” straight-up calls out how record companies turn fun and creativity into manual labor and profit from it in the process.
Tears for Fears synthesize all of the threads on Songs From the Big Chair—intricacy, romance, psychology, and politics—on the album’s centerpiece, the everlasting “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Hughes says that he, Orzabal, and Stanley put the song together in a week, astonishing because the track has so many components: the twinkling synth at the beginning joined by a spider-like guitar, the snappy instrumental lead-up to the opening verse, the shuffling drum beat, the chorus, the galvanizing bridge, a moody instrumental passage, a guitar solo, a new melody for a verse afterwards, another guitar solo. And the genius of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is how it escalates, how each part increasingly amplifies the passion of the music.
More than any other Tears for Fears track, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” most successfully transposes Janov’s psychological texts into a pop song with global resonance. Though “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is obviously a meditation on power, you could project virtually every major issue of the 1980s onto the lyrics: the environment (“Turn your back on mother nature”), the fleeting nature of financial success (“Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure/Nothing ever lasts forever”), authoritarian rule (“Even while we sleep/We will find you”), and the Cold War (“Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down”).
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is a song with a near-universal appeal, and likewise Songs From the Big Chair seemed to resonate with everyone—jocks, goths, pre-teens, adults. “At our gigs, you’ll get young girls at the front, the Joy Division fans at the back and even some hippies putting in an appearance,” Smith told Hall. “Our fan mail is certainly very varied, containing letters from everyone from twelve-year-old girls to mothers with five-year-old daughters.”
It took four years for Tears for Fears to follow up Songs From the Big Chair, and what came out of it was The Seeds of Love, an overambitious, elaborate, refined, and somewhat underrated album. Orzabal supposedly alienated everyone—Smith, Hughes, and Stanley—during its production, mostly due to his perfectionism. For a while, it seemed Tears for Fears had faded away, a relic of an era too gauche to respect anymore. The only place you might find them was on “Dennis Miller Live,” which used “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as its opening theme.
Then, Tears for Fears turned up in an unlikely place: Donnie Darko, a film that subverts ’80s teen movies. “Head Over Heels” is memorably included during a slow-motion montage, but Tears for Fears were mostly rediscovered by younger audiences thanks to Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World.” By peeling away all the circuitry and flash of the original, replacing the gizmos with mostly non-electronic instruments, and slowing the tempo, Andrews and Jules exposed “Mad World” as the post-9/11 emo ballad it was perhaps destined to be. As the 2000s progressed, you’d hear Tears for Fears incrementally more often. In 2008 Kanye West sampled the chorus of The Hurting’s “Memories Fade” on “Coldest Winter,” from 808s & Heartbreak, coincidentally about an artist trying to deal with the death of his mother.
Today you’ll hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” all over the place—it’s a staple of classic-rock radio, pharmacies, bars, and parties. But at its core the song is still dealing with Janov; with how, ultimately, what human beings want is control, and the inability to control your own life is misdirected into a desire to overpower other people. It’s a constant with Songs From the Big Chair: interior drama is construed as being about collective suffering. Personal chaos is universal. Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back. | 2017-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mercury | August 20, 2017 | 8.9 | 2831d107-dec4-4460-85aa-05e3e8151793 | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | |
Toned down but no less penitent, nostalgic but ready to stake a claim to a new future, the duo’s long-awaited full-length is one of the most indulgently sinister rap records of the year. | Toned down but no less penitent, nostalgic but ready to stake a claim to a new future, the duo’s long-awaited full-length is one of the most indulgently sinister rap records of the year. | Roc Marciano / The Alchemist: The Elephant Man’s Bones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roc-marciano-the-alchemist-the-elephant-mans-bones/ | The Elephant Man’s Bones | Rumor has it that, in 1987, Michael Jackson made a bid to buy the skeleton of Englishman Joseph Merrick. Merrick, known as the Elephant Man due to his severe physical deformities, spent his life as an object of ridicule and medical fascination before passing away in 1890 at age 27. A tragic figure with a kind heart, he would become the subject of multiple books, stage plays, and movies across the next century, most famously director David Lynch’s 1980 biopic The Elephant Man. Jackson was reportedly moved by the film, finding solace in a scene where Merrick—portrayed by actor John Hurt—is chased by an angry mob through Liverpool Street station and cries out to his attackers: “I am not an elephant. I am not an animal. I am a human being! I…am…a…man!” Over time, Jackson became fascinated by Merrick’s life. He arranged to view his skeleton at Royal London Hospital, where he allegedly offered $500,000, and later $1 million, to purchase it for his collection. Jackson and his estate have denied this story, but the legend lingers.
Roc Marciano and The Alchemist share a fascination with the idea of putting a premium on what they deem to be high art. Both are rapper-producers, Marci from Long Island and Alchemist from Beverly Hills, and both were co-signed by hip-hop royalty early in their careers. Their paths weren’t exactly the same, though. Marci built his status from the ground up after his time in Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and the group the U.N. came to a close, while Alchemist became a marquee name producing for everyone from 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar to Boldy James and Armand Hammer. They turned their influence and underground grind into flourishing independent businesses catering directly to a clientele seeking nose-bone-shattering rap music. The Elephant Man’s Bones, the duo’s long-awaited full-length, mixes the grime they’re known for with sounds that flutter instead of seething: Imagine your favorite mob-affiliated uncle drunk at a family gathering, spinning funny, disgusting, and melancholy yarns to GoodFellas-style lounge jazz. Toned down but no less penitent, nostalgic but ready to stake a claim to a new future, it’s one of the most indulgently sinister rap records of the year.
By now Marci’s pimp-meets-capo persona is so well-established that he can afford to spend his time burrowing deeper to see how much gold he can unearth. He’s a specialist in the sense of Pusha T or Kool G Rap—his deadpan commitment to bending his schtick around different sounds is half the fun. “Me and my Uzi, we lookin’ like a couple spoonin’,” he says on opening track “Rubber Hand Grip,” the comedy and intimacy of the image never overshadowing the danger of being shot by a man who claims he “made God in my likeness.”
His reference pool brings a stark clarity to his mythmaking, giving bits of humor and pathos more depth. On “Quantum Leap,” he claims to own a Bentley that comes with his own personal version of rapper and actor Fonzworth Bentley. Names and brands slip through Marci’s stories unexpectedly, like the Champion clothing he mentions wearing back in the day on “Trillion Cut,” or two bars from the title track that nod to Billie Holiday and the sitcom Good Times to flesh out his come-up: “God bless the child y’all, I finally got it together/From good times hanging in the chow line like Florida Evans.” Elephant Man’s Bones is bursting with quotables, but more impressive is how Marci’s stories weave in seamlessly with the icons he namedrops. He writes about his triumphs and struggles like all of history was waiting for him to appear.
With few exceptions, Marci’s solo albums are known for being entirely self-produced, flooded with gossamer sampled loops and anchored by drums that range from tinny to nonexistent. Alchemist handles every song here, approaching each with an ominous elegance. Aside from the 8-bit synth blasts of “Daddy Kane,” most of Elephant Man’s Bones is dominated by keys—pianos, organs, harpsichord—and drums, teasing out a lounge-jazz vibe he rarely indulges.
Previous one-off Marci and Alchemist collaborations were busier and more boisterous. Both 2016’s “All for It” and 2018’s “In Case You Forgot,” team-ups that appeared through Alchemist’s Craft Singles series, leaned into standard, bludgeoning boom-bap drum programming. Elephant Man’s Bones is more like a shadowy extension of the sunlit warble of “Harry O.,” from 2019’s Yacht Rock 2—relaxed and confident, with a Ruger in the champagne bucket just in case. “Rubber Hand Grip” turns the psychedelia of Alchemist’s work on Armand Hammer’s Haram inside out, its chimes and drums throbbing like an irregular heartbeat. “Quantum Leap” and “Liquid Coke” are two of the prettiest and most stripped-back beats he’s ever created. The crisp vocal loops on songs like “JJ Flash” and the title track float past tiptoeing drums to hover alongside Marci’s voice. Alchemist’s beats are relaxed and full-bodied, creating a calming atmosphere that Marci stuffs with allusions to Call of Duty and gangsters catching bullets with their teeth. For the duo to finally meet in the middle for a full-length project after all these years—and for that project to be as warm, gutter, and satisfying as The Elephant Man’s Bones—is remarkable. When two rap veterans show out with this much style and skill, it’s easy for them to name their price. | 2022-08-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ALC / Pimpire International | August 29, 2022 | 8.2 | 283271cc-a859-4a1e-868c-4718e009a991 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Radiohead’s favorite cellist steps out of their shadow on an album composed largely of beat-oriented electronic music influenced by—but not excessively reverent toward—the work of Aphex Twin. | Radiohead’s favorite cellist steps out of their shadow on an album composed largely of beat-oriented electronic music influenced by—but not excessively reverent toward—the work of Aphex Twin. | Oliver Coates: Shelley’s on Zenn-La | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-coates-shelleys-on-zenn-la/ | Shelley’s on Zenn-La | A cello makes a pretty good hiding place. It’s got a wide body and a dusky tone that doesn’t stick out when paired with other instruments. And until now, that’s kind of what British cellist Oliver Coates has been doing: hiding in plain sight, obscured by the shadows of more famous names. He played on Jonny Greenwood’s scores for The Master and Phantom Thread, and made crucial contributions to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. (“That’s it—that is the sound of the record,” Coates has recalled Thom Yorke saying after hearing him lay down parts for the album.) He also contributed to the strings scraping ghoulishly across Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score.
Coates’ growing catalog of solo and collaborative work includes a CD-R with Leo Abrahams from 2012. His solo debut, 2013’s Towards the Blessed Islands, gathered covers of Iannis Xenakis, Squarepusher, and Roy Harper—a surprising list, reimagined in often surprising ways. His best-known album is probably his and Levi’s Remain Calm, from 2016—a questing study for cello and electronics that went to the heart of his interests in sound and structure. But an easily overlooked 12" from 2014 captured his style in a very different way. On “Another Fantasy,” Coates rebuilt a loopy, sample-heavy house track from producer Bryce Hackford from the ground up, using only his cello. Hackford’s original sounded like “Around the World”-era Daft Punk heard through the wrong end of a Detroit storm drain, but Coates’ strings felt raw and resinous, emitting cricket-legged shrieks and bassy rattles. It couldn’t have been simpler, but its collision of club aesthetics and classical tradition contained multitudes.
Like his 2016 album Upstepping, Shelley’s on Zenn-La focuses largely on beat-oriented electronic music, featuring an unlikely—and at times unstable—mixture of cello, synthesizers, drum machine, and effects. Much of the record was made in Renoise, a fairly unglamorous software sequencer. As it did on his “Another Fantasy” rework, the cello serves as the secret glue holding Shelley’s together, even when you can’t necessarily recognize it. In some places, it takes the form of a buzzing drone; elsewhere, it’s a pizzicato funk line or a keening synth pad or even a scratchy hi-hat noise. Very rarely does Coates’ instrument sound like itself.
“Cello Renoise” is one exception: The bowed figures, bold fifths and fourths, saw steadily against stumbling, rickety drum-machine programming—an unusual configuration that sounds a little like something Arthur Russell might have done had he lived to see the heyday of IDM.
If any influence looms large over Shelley’s, however, it’s that of Aphex Twin. His style of drum programming is all over Coates’ album, in which scratchy, lo-fi machine sounds thud and twitch and tangle themselves up in knots, seemingly loath to follow a straight line for more than a beat or two. You can also catch echoes of Aphex Twin in the album’s slippery approach to pitch; temperamental synths slide in and out of tune, sounding drunken and giddy.
But unlike a lot of music made in Aphex Twin’s wake, Shelley’s never sounds overly reverent. On the contrary, it is playful and exploratory—the rare example of “experimental” music where pleasure seems to be at least as crucial as process. The interplay between contrasting textures—scrappy drum samples, brass-synth squelch, ethereal wordless vocals—is a source of constant fascination. Track lengths range from 95 seconds to nearly nine minutes, and in every case, the duration feels natural, a factor of Coates discovering exactly what he wants to say and then moving on. “Lime” is a sparkling miniature for sour-tuned chords (apparently cello, although it’s treated to resemble an analog synth) and crusty TR-707 that could pass for a very lo-fi cassette dub of an early Boards of Canada demo. Both “Charlev” and “Perfect Apple With Silver Mark,” on the other hand, wend their way across shifting landscapes of shuddering drums and sneakily melodic synth/cello progressions, with expositions, breakdowns, codas, and climaxes rolling endlessly by like the views from the window of an alpine train.
Unlike a lot of beat-based music, the focus here isn’t primarily on the precision of Coates’ patterns; Shelley’s is more about the way they scatter and change shape, like clouds drifting overhead. In the entrancing “Norrin Radd Dreaming” (featuring a musician named Malibu, who had a song on last year’s outstanding Mono No Aware compilation), that means synths and voices that come in waves, sloshing to and fro, building to an ecstatic peak that you never quite see coming. However Coates made this stuff—he’s described employing effects chains he designed for live performance, in which his cello is run through a dizzying array of “delays, phasers, bit crushers, pitch shifters, reverbs”—it seems clear that happy accident played an important role. There’s a kind of alchemy at work here, and you can sense Coates’ delight when what comes out of the black box doesn’t sound anything like the signal that he fed into it.
That said, the album’s most affecting song, “Prairie”—almost unspeakably beautiful, the kind of thing you might request to have played at your funeral or on your deathbed—strips away everything but delay and reverb, marking a return to the cello-ness of the cello. If the rest of the album is about seeing how thoroughly Coates’ instrument can be transmogrified into other sounds, this one is about finding comfort in its wood and metal, its graceful lines, its embrace of the room’s acoustics. You can hide behind a cello, and you can hide the cello inside other sounds. But here, Coates finds a way of being present that no other instrument can imitate. | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | September 10, 2018 | 7.7 | 2837fdf9-6069-470a-b41a-78468380c0fd | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Harlem rapper Smoke DZA keeps it real on Not For Sale, doubling down on classic hip-hop as he’s got an allergy to trends. That’s mostly a good thing. | Harlem rapper Smoke DZA keeps it real on Not For Sale, doubling down on classic hip-hop as he’s got an allergy to trends. That’s mostly a good thing. | Smoke DZA: Not for Sale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smoke-dza-not-for-sale/ | Not for Sale | Harlem rapper Smoke DZA’s Not for Sale is a memorandum for culture vultures, those outsiders who, in his mind, are trying to pollute rap, and those industry insiders trying to sap its swagger for their own personal gain. DZA is a classicist, and he derides those in the game selling out, all while listing off the things money can’t buy them—the love, smoothness, the culture, the cool. If 2016’s Don’t Smoke Rock with Bronx legend and rap super-producer Pete Rock was DZA’s taking a stand in deed, aligning himself with a cultural icon, then this is him writing new bylaws. These are DZA’s 12 rap commandments, in which he extols the mid-grade hustler.
DZA’s rap philosophy is to always err on the side of caution. This can make him a bit of a conservative music-maker, but it also makes him relatively dependable. He presents a lifestyle of subtle comfort and his verses are capo proverbs rapped through kush clouds. He presents himself as rap’s Most Interesting Man, saying things like, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown; imagine how my wrist feel.” He isn’t that interesting, and his writing can underservice his workmanlike flow, but his raps are always appealingly aspirational. He’s the hood everyman turned Super Fly. “Smoking on Cheeba, sipping on Chevas/I’m in the old school, center of Portland like Arvydas/Them niggas tryna style, I’m like beat it/It’s Bob Marley on my chain, not Jesus,” he raps on “The High.” He has largely remained consistent, if not stagnant, since 2010’s George Kush Da Button, occupying the same realm of scotches, cigars, indica blends, and Raf Simons Adidas.
Not for Sale stays true to DZA’s formula but opens the aperture just a bit wider. He doesn’t have the most distinct perspective, so he compensates by building his persona. On “The Love,” his better half is presented as a reflection of himself; her taste enhancing his, which is, in a clever way, another proposed demonstration of his discerning nature. “Connoisseur, mature, Dior type of fly/Comador cigars, Macallan with no ice/No gettin’ sauce, endorse a ratchet TV night/Laugh, experience life, we too young to be angry and hype/We ain’t perfect but our future is bright/And even imperfection is perfection in sight,” he raps.
Despite his confidence, DZA isn’t exactly introducing novel sounds or ideas on Not for Sale, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be fun to hear him navigate New York City with fresh eyes. Half the charm of this record is simply how comfortable DZA seems, even as he fights off rap profiteers and extortionists. He’s never been (and won’t ever be) a rapper par excellence, and that’s kind of the point: He’s settled into his own underdog niche. DZA positions himself as a dark horse, the unassuming alternative to outright primacy, and his nonchalance makes it that much more endearing.
DZA’s constant commitment to cool is upholstered by his ear for luxurious beats. “The High” samples Erykah Badu “Didn’t Cha Know,” in a flip that sounds eerily like J. Cole’s “Too Deep for the Intro,” but the bass is far more warped, and his flows tumble directly into the knock of the drum as a disembodied Badu wails from within. “The Mood” invokes Scarface’s “Guess Who’s Back,” repurposing the same intro from the Originals’ shimmering “Sunrise,” as DZA and Joey Bada$$ take turns repping their boroughs. From the decompressed doo-wop of “The Legacy” to the Boi-1da-lite of “The Game” and “The Antidote,” scanning boom bap and trap drums, Smoke DZA always manages to find his sweet spot.
In a rap age of larger-than-life excess, where even the most basic rappers are Leo DiCaprio playing Jordan Belfort, an image that lends itself to surreality, Smoke DZA’s boasts are accessible, manageable even. He doesn’t want things to look too easy because they weren’t—he likes to show his work—or too exaggerated because it can cheapen that labor. There aren’t any Teslas racing through these raps; he’s got an unlimited line of credit at… Ikea. In this vein, “The Hustle” is a DZA manifesto of sorts, where he reaffirms his dedication to the cash grab that is capitalism and chastises those unwilling to work for theirs. Money is his primary motivator, but he’s nearly as driven to defend rap from those who would misuse it. | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Babygrande | April 26, 2018 | 7.3 | 283fca7a-f7a2-4c33-b4e7-4546e46de64b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Claire Cronin’s latest record connects her lifelong love of horror movies to her simple, creaky songs. | Claire Cronin’s latest record connects her lifelong love of horror movies to her simple, creaky songs. | Claire Cronin: Big Dread Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-cronin-big-dread-moon/ | Big Dread Moon | In 2017, the singer-songwriter Claire Cronin published an essay called “Blue Light on the Screen: Notes on Horror.” Writing about her lifelong attraction to ghost stories and slasher flicks, the Athens, Georgia-based artist explored the comforts of the genre—being able to predict what will happen next, who the killer might be, when to expect a resolution. In one section, she lists her favorite movie taglines, disembodied from their titles so that they read like poetry (“They’re here,” “They won’t stay dead,” “Before you die, you see:”). In another, she makes you feel genuinely sad for all the franchises that ended prematurely and ambiguously: death without resurrection. “Perhaps more than any other genre,” she writes, “horror demonstrates the pleasure of repetition.”
It’s a quality that horror shares with folk music, and Cronin’s fascination with one has aided her mastery in the other. Big Dread Moon, her latest album, is full of scenes you’ll recognize from any number of Halloween classics. There are werewolves and ghosts, guns and knives, fangs and blood, ominous weather and dolls in gowns. Cronin has a cracked, cawing delivery like Will Oldham or Scout Niblett—artists who could turn from conversational to spectral with the quietest gesture. Her music is alluringly sparse; most of the arrangements feature only her guitar and Ezra Buchla’s viola, with occasional synth and percussion for texture.
Like her nonfiction writing, Cronin’s lyrics are kaleidoscopic. She writes from the center of the action, wandering through the dark; we’re likely to see the danger lurking before she does. In “What the Night Is Thinking,” she sings in the third-person to justify this instinct: “We want wild winds,” she sings. “We want bones bleached and scattering.” She often does the job herself, writing songs that swirl like tornadoes through quiet streets. “Tourniquet” is a blues song bled dry; “Like a Shield” surges like a ’90s alternative rock hit stripped to its bleakest form. Stretches of silence in horror films generally forecast just how violent things are about to get. Cronin’s songwriting is heavy with pre-traumatic calm.
The simplicity of her music grounds its intensity. Many singers could take a line like “Coffins long for the touch of death” and have it sound vaguely creepy, but Cronin has a gift for confiding it like something she has experienced first-hand. This balance between tenderness and terror, the supernatural and the quotidian, is crucial to her work. Movie screens appear in multiple songs, while “Call Out” finds her surprised by the way blood looks in real-life—brighter than she expected. The album’s peak is “Wolfman,” a slow, menacing ballad sung with the devotion of a love song. Her words are vague enough to sound like a nightmare but specific enough so that you can see the lamplight, hear the rain on the streets. It’s the kind of whispered story that’s usually laughed off early in a film, only to become frighteningly real by the end. When she sings, you believe every word. | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | June 21, 2019 | 7.5 | 2842ee53-53db-4ba3-b9a4-d401359998e1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Commemorating 20 years of his Prurient alias, Dominick Fernow’s sprawling, three-hour foray into “doom electronics” feels like a swing of the pendulum back to the noise project’s Rust Belt roots. | Commemorating 20 years of his Prurient alias, Dominick Fernow’s sprawling, three-hour foray into “doom electronics” feels like a swing of the pendulum back to the noise project’s Rust Belt roots. | Prurient: Rainbow Mirror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prurient-rainbow-mirror/ | Rainbow Mirror | Dominick Fernow is not here to make things easy for you. In recent years, the noise trailblazer and Hospital Productions founder has drifted toward respectability, with his military-themed techno project Vatican Shadow taking him out of grimy basements and installing him in superclub DJ booths around the world. Fernow was once characterized as a noise bro, but his work is seldom satisfying in a beer-chugging, rock ’n’ roll way, and often can be deliberately taxing—either actively painful (see the sustained feedback screech of Prurient’s 2008 album Arrowhead) or flirting with monotony, as the negative and depressive energies that course through the project are converted into sound.
Rainbow Mirror is not designed to be easily digestible. Released in honor of the Prurient project’s 20th anniversary, this collection clocks in at over three hours in length, spreading out to four CDs or—phew—seven slabs of vinyl. It’s consciously forged in testament to the project’s seldom-documented early days in rural Milwaukee, a period which is memorialized at length in the liner notes, alongside a piece of original fiction written by Fernow and Scott Bryan Wilson. Way back when, Prurient was a trio, and for Rainbow Mirror, it is again. Recording live, Fernow is accompanied by a pair of Hospital Productions regulars, Matt Folden of Dual Action and Jim Mroz of Lussuria, and the resultant sounds have been mixed after the fact by dark-techno magnate Shifted. The music is in a style Fernow calls “doom electronics,” which forsakes Prurient’s familiar blend of feedback pyrotechnics, surging synths, and shrieked vocals in favor of long, sluggish canvases of sound that grind like rusty machinery, or ooze and seep like hot tar; think a 21st-century update of the Eraserhead score, or the exquisite, entropic improvisations of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report, and you’re on the right track.
It’s hard not to be impressed by Rainbow Mirror’s sheer scale. Put it on, go downstairs, bake a cake, mow the lawn, come back, and it’s still going, a swirling void of sound that simmers with morbid unease. The three-man lineup ensures that for all this music’s live, improvisatory provenance, these tracks crackle with textural detail. “Walking on Dehydrated Coral” is a miasma of watery blips and foul synth drool. “Chaos -
Sex” intersperses moments of rumbling ambience with passages that sound like a band saw cutting metal, while the foggy drones and muted percussion of “Path Is Short” might be industrial music for a post-industrial age, where automated processes are pushed to the edge of collapse. Occasionally, moments of unexpected prettiness emerge from the wreckage—see, for instance, the naïve, three-note synth melody that surfaces from the droning turbulence of “Falling in the Water,” though here it is left to revolve ceaselessly until its beauty withers on the vine.
Fernow started the decade with a spree of glossy, rhythmic records like 2011’s Bermuda Drain and 2013’s Through the Window that reflected a burgeoning fascination with dance music, refracting noise and power electronics through techno techniques. Rainbow Mirror feels like a swing of the pendulum back to a more freeform, primitive spirit, away from the urban centers of New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin and back toward the Rust Belt that spawned him. For all its imposing scale, though, it lacks some of the dramatic finesse of classic Prurient. Fernow’s poetic lyrics, spoken or shrieked, have been a key hallmark of the project, and without them, these abstracted noisescapes lack the narrative character of his best work. But Prurient also remains defined by its sense of constant evolution, and by burrowing back to its earliest beginnings, Rainbow Mirror feels like a new arc in the Prurient story. Where next remains to be seen. | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hospital Productions | November 30, 2017 | 6.2 | 284ff864-df31-41e5-99d0-dd02c869e3fc | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The fourth full-length from Lana Del Rey is sincere and sublime, pushing her fascination with pop culture iconography even further while adding a newly personal touch. | The fourth full-length from Lana Del Rey is sincere and sublime, pushing her fascination with pop culture iconography even further while adding a newly personal touch. | Lana Del Rey: Lust for Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lana-del-rey-lust-for-life/ | Lust for Life | We were instantly entranced when Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” surfaced six summers ago—candid but aloof, artfully homemade, haunted in tone with a video that felt like a message in a bottle washed ashore for reasons yet unknown. Del Rey didn’t give easy answers, but we still asked all the wrong questions in return, demanding clearer demarcation between the woman born Elizabeth Grant, the character known as Del Rey, and the millennial-outreach focus groups we presumed to have masterminded the whole thing. It’s a drag to rehash the Born to Die discourse now—a conversation so tediously narrow over a body of work that would prove, over the next five years, to be thrillingly rich.
Since the drastically superior Paradise Edition reissue of Born to Die, Del Rey has neither swayed nor settled. Instead, doubling down on her palette of inky blues and blacks, the singer-songwriter has delivered a trio of dark, dense, radio-agnostic albums that stand wholly apart from any of her pop music peers. If there’s anything about Del Rey that’s obvious by now, it’s that she means it—all of it. Every word, every sigh, every violin swell, the Whitman quotes and JFK fantasies and soft ice cream.
Still, even for the converted, it’s almost too easy to trip into the endless black holes of Del Rey’s universe, where Hollywood sits at the very center in glamorous ruin. Her songs overflow with the iconography of America at its most mythic: purple mountains’ majesty, rockets’ red gleaming, Monroe, Manson. Her layers on layers of symbolism can be disorienting, as I imagine Del Rey intends them to be, encouraging endless cross-references and deep-dive readings of her work that seek to apply some grand cinematic theory to it all—and perhaps there is. But her fourth full-length, Lust for Life, suggests that at its best and truest, Del Rey’s music is sublimely simple: one voice, one story, one meaning. For years, it seemed Del Rey’s artistry lay in her ability to offer herself as a concept pursued to its logical end. Lust for Life presents her as something more interesting: a great American storyteller.
Two things immediately set Lust for Life apart from the rest of Del Rey’s catalog. First, that smile, beaming from the belladonna of sadness, posed in front of the same truck from the Born to Die artwork. Even stranger: the tracklist is packed with features for the first time since we’ve known her. This would be Del Rey’s “happy album,” fans predicted—or worse, an obligatory pivot into wokeness. As it turns out, Lust for Life isn’t outright happy or overtly political (and thank god for that), though Del Rey is re-examining her relationship with Americana. “I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing ’Born to Die,’” she said recently, of her current tour visuals. “I’d rather have static.” Beyond a symbolic “Pardon Our Dust” sign for a nation in turmoil, it’s an apt representation of the moment Lust for Life captures—a record of transition, documenting not so much the result of a profound change in worldview as the process of change itself.
Perhaps the most significant departure here is evident from Lust for Life’s first song, “Love”—a warm, grainy, ’50s-rock anthem (and by far the album’s best single) in which Del Rey shifts focus from her own internal struggle to address her audience directly. “Look at you kids, you know you’re the coolest,” she sings reassuringly, relinquishing her role as the protagonist. The effect is that of a slow pan, the frame creeping outward from Del Rey and stretching gently towards the horizon. That impulse towards a communal understanding of her universe appears most obviously in songs like “God Bless America - And All the Beautiful Women in It” and “When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” two pared-down folk ballads with souped-up low ends (the former includes instrumentation by Metro Boomin, with errant gunfire punctuating the chorus).
These are titles that may have once implied a campy wink but now appear entirely sincere—songs for figuring out exactly where the fuck we are now. And more than any specific predecessor within the folk canon, they remind me—as does much of Lust for Life—of the paintings of Edward Hopper, a realist who captured a new American landscape, as figurative as it was physical. Hopper painted isolated, voyeuristic scenes of the anxiety and ennui of an increasingly urbanized nation set against the totems of Americana (diners, motels, highway gas stations). His work buzzed with the tension between tradition and progress, the cold power of the new against the sublimity of the natural world. Like Hopper, Del Rey’s realism functions doubly as impressionism—literal representation as a means to capture the feeling of life in America.
There are moments on Lust for Life that, while less successful on a pure songwriting level than some of Del Rey’s more focused work, are fascinating distillations of what a Lana Del Rey song means. On “Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind,” a song built to withstand the expected eye-rolls, Del Rey soaks in a Father John Misty festival performance, taking stock of the sea of flower crowns in the crowd as she draws lines from the moment out towards the past and future. It’s the most meta song in her catalog—a sweet and self-aware acknowledgment of the entire Lana Del Rey thing—and that’s before the chorus breaks into an impossibly graceful nod to “Stairway to Heaven.” And if the first verse of Sean Lennon duet “Tomorrow Never Came”—with its references to Bob Dylan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elton John—felt like an oversaturation of her symbol-heavy lexicon, Del Rey reinvents “doing the most” anew on the bridge: “Isn’t life crazy, I said, now that I’m singing with Sean?” It is at once hilarious and flooring, and I can picture no other artist but Del Rey being able to pull it off.
But the best parts of Lust for Life are simpler—songs that succeed not to the extent to which they concentrate the Lana Del Rey mythos, that present her songwriting as poetry that can stand on its own. There is “Cherry,” a cavernous torch song that reminds you Del Rey’s always been more Cat Power than pop star, rumbling with paranoid sub bass and waterlogged echoes of trap drums—the least obvious and most effective allusion to Del Rey’s connection with the way rap production sounds now (though Playboi Carti serving as the long-lost Shangri-La back-up ad-libber on “Summer Bummer” is an inspired touch). Her lyricism has reached a new level of sophistication, switching from devastatingly plainspoken (”Real love is like feeling no fear/When you’re standing in the face of danger/’Cause you just want it so much”) to the more abstract and sensual. There are visions of black beaches, burning roses, summer wine, and peaches, inexplicably ruined; it all feels like a Vanitas for contemporary America—a still life of soft decay. And on “13 Beaches,” a Hollywood film score that stutters and thuds into narcotic rap drums and ’90s alternative angst, Del Rey merges her symbolism and literalism into something like zen poetry: “It took 13 beaches/To find one empty/But finally it’s mine.” It’s at once a document of lived experience (escaping the paparazzi across a string of beaches last summer) and a meditation on the sublime—the symbol of the thing embedded in the thing itself.
And though Lust for Life’s lengthy midsection could benefit from further editing, Del Rey saves the album’s two most stunning and thematically essential songs for last. “Change,” recorded the night before the album was due, consists of nothing more than Del Rey and a piano, contrary to her penchant for wall-of-sound epics. “There’s something in the wind, I can feel it blowing in,” she sings in a pointedly small voice, leaving rhyme schemes behind. “It’s coming in softly, on the wings of a bomb.” It’s a record sung from inside the curl of a cresting wave—the feeling of something happening, around you and inside you before you’ve figured out exactly what it means. And on “Get Free,” Del Rey delivers, at last, the album’s mission statement: “Finally, I’m crossing the threshold/From the ordinary world/To the reveal of my heart.” It is not so much a revelation as a promise that one is coming, and when she sings plainly, “This is my commitment,” the album cover’s uncharacteristic smile reveals itself not as a declaration of happiness, but a reminder that it’s still worth believing in. | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | July 25, 2017 | 7.7 | 28526c03-5e99-4f91-a7a1-6c3dc1ea646b | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Emily Haines leads her band into their seventh album with their own sound, immune to trends and the zeitgeist, full of big, broad rock anthems. | Emily Haines leads her band into their seventh album with their own sound, immune to trends and the zeitgeist, full of big, broad rock anthems. | Metric: Art of Doubt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metric-art-of-doubt/ | Art of Doubt | Metric is a juggernaut, as Canadian an institution as Tim Hortons or stories about raccoons. They’re their own distributor—all their albums since Fantasies have come out on their own label, Metric Music International—and their own sound, immune to trends or the zeitgeist. Their latest album may be called Art of Doubt, but the only thing in doubt from album to album is proportions: synthetic to acoustic, crunch to shimmer, angst to release. Opener “Dark Saturday” says it outright: “I change by staying the same.”
The point of that lyric, of course, is that staying the same can be good, and Metric, in particular, thrive on a kind of comfort-food familiarity. They’re the kind of band where a single song can be a litmus test for the whole discography and aesthetic: if you like this, you’ll probably like everything they release at some gut level. On Synthetica, it was the searing “Youth Without Youth.” Here, it’s “Love You Back,” with Emily Haines’ vocals, precise and crystalline, pressed against Jimmy Shaw’s guitar and its high-gloss tone. (Change can be found elsewhere; like the other members of Broken Social Scene, Haines experiments in her side projects, like her band the Soft Skeletons’ excellent Choir of the Mind.)
Unlike 2015’s Pagans in Vegas, where the band went fully synthpop at a time when seemingly 75% of the music world population was doing the same, Art of Doubt is decidedly rock: guitar and bass loud in the mix, first riffs in the first seconds. The “Reptilia” lope of “Risk,” the “Every Breath You Take” chug of “Holding Out”—all are familiar, all work. Some credit here goes to new producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen: Not only is he a longtime fan of the group, but his résumé is like the best possible version of Metric’s peers on both sides of the genre straddle. Vital rock acts like Wolf Alice and Paramore, towering synth acts like M83 and the late School of Seven Bells—they, and Metric, have one thing in common: an affinity for albums that sound enormous.
Metric do succumb to one trend, namely the streaming-era impulse to make albums about 18 minutes longer than they need to be. And like many long-running institutions, Metric occasionally feel called to address The Problems of Today. While their past albums have plenty of quasi-political lyrical tweaks, the world is quite a different thing in 2018 than 2015—or 2003, the year their debut Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? came out, a year to which Shaw compared the current political landscape. There are so many bands with so many grievances, so any prospective new protest song needs more protest than, to quote the implied subject of them all, “There’s something going on, and it’s bad.” But on “Die Happy” she simply asks, “So what is this society?” “Holding Out” mentions “scroll[ing] through pictures” but it is no more novel.
Even if those moments land flat, Art of Doubt serves up it’s best songs around it. “Seven Rules,” from the Choir of the Mind sessions and heard last year as “Come On, Angel,” has a gentle, Nina Persson-like lope (and what I swear is a Kate Bush reference). “Now or Never Now” is big and knows it, luxuriates in it, spooling out six minutes of anthem. And the title track is the best thing Metric’s done since Synthetica and specifically Haines’ best vocal performances: It goes from seething to shouting to a clipped, defiant staccato to sighing high register “We gotta take it upon ourselves the next time the kick drum starts,” she sings. It’s an old sentiment about music, but for a couple minutes, it’s possible to believe. | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | MMI / Crystal Math Music | September 27, 2018 | 6.6 | 28535946-6da8-4132-8fc4-5bab5081c053 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Water From Your Eyes vocalist’s new solo EP is a collection of charming, heartfelt bedroom pop songs that deserve to be more fully realized. | The Water From Your Eyes vocalist’s new solo EP is a collection of charming, heartfelt bedroom pop songs that deserve to be more fully realized. | Thanks for Coming: What Is My Capacity to Love? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thanks-for-coming-what-is-my-capacity-to-love-ep/ | What Is My Capacity to Love? EP | Rachel Brown keeps their foot on the gas pedal. In addition to making experimental art-rock as one half of Water From Your Eyes, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter has uploaded over 80 solo releases to Bandcamp as Thanks for Coming, even releasing this year’s self-deprecatingly titled highlight compilation You Haven’t Missed Much to help newcomers navigate their sprawling catalog. For them, churning out tracks keeps their creative muscles active and frees them from overthinking. But their latest EP, What Is My Capacity to Love?, shows how speed can be a disservice too, with candid self-reflections on romance that can feel undercooked.
Brown’s Water From Your Eyes bandmate Nate Amos mastered every song on the EP, but What Is My Capacity to Love? is a far cry from the cacophony of their band. The lone similarity is a discordant guitar line running through “Melted,” which could be one of the rubbery riffs on Everyone’s Crushed. Instead, Brown prefers barren, lo-fi bedroom pop where errors only add to the music’s charm. On “Try Again,” they tumble off beat while rushing through the central refrain, as if to mirror being mentally distracted by crush. “Depends” is thrust forward by emotional, almost lackadaisical strumming that recalls the tender twee of the Softies; Brown confesses to the dangers of loving someone too hard, the spare instrumentation magnifying their vulnerable delivery.
Brown’s mesmerizing, almost detached singing anchors the music of both Water From Your Eyes and Thanks for Coming. It can be deceptively dynamic, and on What Is My Capacity to Love?, they try on different vocal styles: fluttering falsettos, glossy whispers, irritated talk-speak. While it’s thrilling to hear Brown play around with their delivery, sometimes their words feel cheap. As they reminisce on a past relationship in the EP opener, they lean on eyeroll-worthy punchlines: “I wish I’d captured you like a photograph/I wish I had/But still life is still life.” Their petulant enunciations on “Postcard”—“I broke my heart then I blamed him, framed him for the crime”—further underscore the juvenile writing.
What Is My Capacity to Love? is like a heartfelt mixtape that slipped through the metal divider of your high school locker. Maybe it’s because of the voice note that closes the album, which is spoken directly into the microphone like some last-ditch confessional: “I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you—but you will,” Brown says at the end of “Spotless Mind,” resignation weighing down their voice. “You know you will think of things, and I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me. Okay? Okay.” The pent-up feelings emanating from that final passage are intense—and it’s this intensity that helps elevate “Spotless Mind” from more humdrum bedroom pop. If only What Is My Capacity to Love? could maintain that heart-piercing tension throughout. The homespun quality of Thanks for Coming songs draws them close to the chest, but the music deserves a more striking, realized form too. | 2023-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Danger Collective | October 3, 2023 | 6 | 285e95c7-f444-4a6a-9854-224e94eb68a8 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
After a year flooding the internet, this Michigan rapper collects 15 of his colorful and brutal raps, which split the difference between deadpan and dead serious. | After a year flooding the internet, this Michigan rapper collects 15 of his colorful and brutal raps, which split the difference between deadpan and dead serious. | Rio Da Yung OG: City on My Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rio-da-yung-og-city-on-my-back/ | City on My Back | Rio Da Yung OG raps like a teacher who has gathered all their students on the rug for storytime. It just so happens that the Flint, Michigan-based 25-year-old’s tales all concern drug dealing, drug addiction, and paranoia. He raps over anxious, piano-driven production similar to Detroit hip-hop, chronicling his past with reflective anecdotes that may or may not be lies: the time when his uncle took away his football as a kid and told him to sell drugs instead; when he ran into the guy who stole his bike back in elementary school, so he shot him in the leg; when his uncle was sentenced to life in jail, but received clemency from Barack Obama.
Last year, Rio Da Yung OG’s hectic punchline-based rap found the ears of longtime Detroit staple Peezy. Before Peezy left to serve a jail sentence, he took Rio under his wing. Rio switched his focus from running around the streets of Flint to music, but he had legal troubles of his own, and soon, drug charges landed him on house arrest. The isolation turned into a blessing, allowing him to flood the internet with his chaotic and line-crossing take on the Detroit sound for the second half of 2019.
His bedroom recordings were so colorful and brutal that the only reasonable response was to laugh at the absurdity: “Meet the plug, take everything while his son watching/Swear to God I ain’t stick that nigga up my gun robbed him,” he raps on “Legendary,” his biggest song to date. Filming his music videos on the same front lawn and rooms throughout his home, he became one of the premier street rappers in the Midwest in months.
Rio keeps this momentum with City on My Back, 15 songs of straight shit-talking over funky beats that could have been made in any year since 2008. The appeal of Rio is simply in listening to him talk. Every line is detailed, as if pulled from a script: “Don’t say shit when I cook dope, I think the kitchen wired,” he says on the 50 Cent-sampling “Window Shopper.” He gives us a peek into his daily life on “Listen To Me”: “It’s nine in the morning I just woke up/Before I make an egg sandwich, I cook dope up.” His raps can go from dark comedy to bleak in one line: “Scared to close my eyes, I might die, I drunk a lot of syrup,” he says on “2020 Freestyle.”
Even Rio’s missteps are never flatout failures. “City on My Back” is one of Rio’s first attempts at a hook, and it’s weak for sure, but his verse more than makes up for it: “Just a sold zip, he say it smell fresh that’s cause it really soap/Yeah, I’m a dirty person,” he cracks. Here are the instructions to “Dance Moves,” Rio’s attempt at crafting a viral dance challenge: “Look man, get on the ground, hump the floor, act like you fucking a bitch.”
But Rio doesn’t need hooks or dance challenges. Listening to him rap on City on My Back is like being engrossed in an audiobook on a long drive. Whether he’s playing a dice game in Louis Vuitton, pouring a girl a cup of E&J and telling her that it’s Henneessy, or selling a customer fake pills, few can tell a story better than Rio. | 2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | #Boyz Entertainment LLC | March 28, 2020 | 7.6 | 28677aab-7491-4adf-b2ba-3b96ac7cae16 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Classic rock-loving blues-rock duo follow the warm Rubber Factory-- and make its Nonesuch bow-- with this more austere collection. | Classic rock-loving blues-rock duo follow the warm Rubber Factory-- and make its Nonesuch bow-- with this more austere collection. | The Black Keys: Magic Potion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9398-magic-potion/ | Magic Potion | The Black Keys were never meant to be classy. For one, they're from Akron, a city that's not quite East Coast or Midwestern and has vaguely smelled like burning tires every time I've driven through it. For another, they're playing blues-rock in 2006-- no irony, no kind of pretense to authority or being some new band of purists, just a blues-rock band. But even if their so-called "raw" panache had been recycled a few times over, they had the kind of songs ("10 a.m. Automatic" chief among them) that demanded the car windows be cranked down and the volume knob twisted firmly to the right for anyone weaned on classic rock radio.
Now signed to elegant major-label imprint Nonesuch, their set up remains the same: one guitar and a set of drums. Singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach plays these unadorned riffs like the guitar was a harp, like their blues pillaging was a stately and noble pursuit, and these familiar riffs should be admired in and of themselves like museum pieces. I didn't expect to hear a 13-piece orchestra on Magic Potion, but nor did I expect to hear such a dry, austere record after the warmth of Rubber Factory. They whip up everything they can between just the two of them, Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney, but what they work up this time isn't a sweat-- it's restraint. On Magic Potion, the pleasures are coyer and the variations much more subtle from riff to riff, song to song. In other words, it's not the record I want to hear from the Black Keys.
There are few attempts to push the two-man band into newer territory, but those that do aren't necessarily welcome. "Strange Desire" is a worked-up staccato paean, leaning on cymbal tapping and heavy reverb like a "No Pigeons"-style aggrandizing retort to the Kills' "The Good Ones", but squelches any of its novelty by rhyming "fire" with "desire." At the end of each verse. There are three verses. "You're the One" fares better, a slow honey drip of gorgeousness with some much-needed vocal doubling to further sweeten the deal, but it's not half as palatable as, say, "The Lengths" from Rubber Factory.
There's very little spark to early sequenced numbers "Your Touch" or the "Heartbreaker" retread "Just a Little Heat", but the latter half of the album does slow down and start to smolder. The title track makes the most of its space as Carney pounds in all the right places, showing restraint without losing the track's pulse. "The Flame" is a molten slow jam, as is "Goodbye Babylon", a stop-start stutter that stretches its quiet tension over a tricky chorus riff that would be awkward in the hands of any other band. But as Magic Potion shows, it's difficult to sustain an entire album of that almost-but-not-quite letting loose (and being a two-instrument band obviously doesn't help).
I'm not willing to rehash the argument over whether they have the right to play their sparse, occasionally unpredictable take on blues-- one of the most tired arguments there is-- because I couldn't care less whether they jacked their swagger from Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, or even White Stripes. They used to be a good time. They used to have songs. Magic Potion is a record where overwhelming competence meets measured restraint, but for me, sacrilege trumps sincerity, and I'd rather hear tuneful blasphemy than a tasteful snoozer of an album. Shit, give me Blueshammer any day. | 2006-09-11T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-11T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | September 11, 2006 | 6 | 28693c11-b99b-469b-be50-35bf78df97d5 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The Melbourne quintet’s second album strolls through familiar territory with good guitar work and good songwriting that never quite peaks where it used to. | The Melbourne quintet’s second album strolls through familiar territory with good guitar work and good songwriting that never quite peaks where it used to. | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Sideways to New Italy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rolling-blackouts-coastal-fever-sideways-to-new-italy/ | Sideways to New Italy | Rolling Blackout Coastal Fever is a combo whose three-guitar attack is hot—steadily but not dangerously so—super-intense, and super-catchy. After a pair of 2017 EPs and their 2018 debut Hope Downs, the Australian quintet has steadily lost interest in tracks with characters and situations: the bric-a-brac of sharp lyric writing that goes down well with the band’s relentless forward, backward, and sideways motion. Sideways to New Italy does little to change this suspicion. These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast.
Devoted not to narrative so much as six-string calisthenics, RBCF are a treat when they play from within one of the aural dust clouds they’ve stirred. On “Cameo,” Fran Keaney lays out a romantic scenario of uncommon banality (“Your voice had an old melody/Like sweet river water,” egads) whose drama gets goosed by Tom Russo and Joe White’s cross-talking electric licks. Or at the three-minute mark in “Cars in Space” when Keaney, Russo, and White pick away at discrete parts: ripple effects that rattle its foundations for the sake of testing them. And on “Sunglasses at the Wedding,” Keaney moves his fingers as if each acoustic strum births a new color trail.
RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration. White settles for phonetic placeholders on “She’s There” and lets the tug of Joe Russo’s excellent bass work and an impressive series of sparkling licks carry him through “The Only One.” If the Acme facelessness of those titles gives you pause, consider: Hope Downs alone sported “An Air-Conditioned Man” and “Cappuccino City”; 2017’s “The French Press” isn’t even about the best way to prepare coffee—it’s one of the sharpest songs about sibling tensions in recent memory. But here’s the thing: RBCF are the guys you would’ve called to write that song.
If great bands create the terms under which listeners will accept them—in effect teach listeners how to listen to them—then good bands fold their hands on their desks as listeners review their antecedents. With the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” as ur-text, RBCF careen into the Feelies’ chordal cul-de-sacs, emulate the scrappiness of the Clean, and even soak in the bubbly freshness of forgotten early-’90s college radio favorites like the Ocean Blue. Until Sideways to New Italy, their marvelous racket distracted from their derivativeness; now, only this good band’s racket will do.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 8, 2020 | 6.6 | 28798fd7-13e2-4de2-80f5-d88396d4dbc9 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The French outfit Alcest has been slowly turning away from the corrosive, ambient metal of their early work—a sound that’s influenced many, most notably Deafheaven—toward an unbroken dreamscape of cushiony shoegaze. Their fourth album, Shelter, produced by Birgir Jón Birgisson and featuring vocals from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, marks that clean break. | The French outfit Alcest has been slowly turning away from the corrosive, ambient metal of their early work—a sound that’s influenced many, most notably Deafheaven—toward an unbroken dreamscape of cushiony shoegaze. Their fourth album, Shelter, produced by Birgir Jón Birgisson and featuring vocals from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, marks that clean break. | Alcest: Shelter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18901-alcest-shelter/ | Shelter | Like Opeth’s Heritage or Darkthrone’s The Cult is Alive, Alcest’s Shelter is the sound of a band that has undergone a decisive yet inevitable metamorphosis. In all these cases, extreme metal was the chrysalis or catalyst; what emerged wasn’t the same as what came before. Opeth shed death metal for bucolic prog; Darkthrone bent black metal toward d-beat crust. Neither came as a total surprise, and neither does Shelter. Alcest have been slowly turning away from the corrosive, ambient metal of their early work—a sound that’s influenced many, most notably Deafheaven—toward an unbroken dreamscape of cushiony shoegaze. Shelter marks that clean break. The French outfit’s fourth full-length is a statement of soft-spoken apostasy that’s unflinching in its resolve. And somewhat less than stellar in its execution.
The friction between ethereality and aggression is what made Alcest’s prior albums, and in particular 2010’s Écailles de Lune, so gripping. Quiet, chiming guitars meshed with thunderous riffs, and liquid-nitrogen synths bled into a bath of warm, soft vocals. Neige, the driving force behind Alcest, has allowed that friction to dissipate. What’s left feels wrung-out. Shelter’s eight songs are among the prettiest Neige has ever composed, with the happy-sad chords and bell-like hook of “Opale” bearing an unmistakable to resemblance to Chapterhouse’s “Breather”. But even Chapterhouse, among the wispiest of shoegaze groups, put more propulsion and surprise into their songs. Throughout Shelter that delicacy never lets up. Some tracks, like “La Nuit Marche Avec Moi” and “Voix Sereines”, muster enough determination to step on a distortion pedal. Beyond that, every element—from Neige’s whispery melodies to the shimmering sameness of the guitar—sticks unswervingly to the path of least resistance.
Shelter leaves no room for the questioning of its shoegaze credentials. Slowdive’s Neil Halstead is brought aboard to sing the lead vocals on “Away”, yet the shoegaze founding father sounds more deflated than dreamy as he moans through the song’s vaguely chamber-folk arrangement. Something is supposed to be evoked here: bemused melancholy, maybe, or wistful longing, or pensive detachment. Whatever it is, it never coheres or connects. At least it’s a break in the fog, even if it only offers a slightly bluer hue of featureless prettiness. The album was recorded in Iceland at Sigur Rós’ studio, Sundlaugin, with Sigur Rós producer Birgir Jón Birgisson, but it doesn’t sound appreciably different than Alcest’s previous output—let alone allow for much internal variation.
The 10-minute closer “Délivrance” nearly reaches escape velocity, a listless spiral of gossamer pop with brief bursts of distorted lucidity. It too collapses under its own lack of weight. Neige has stated in the past that Alcest is a project devoted to realizing in song his visions of otherworldly fantasy and wonder. In chasing that devotion, the songs themselves have been cast adrift. Still capable of great feats of mood and beauty, Alcest have transformed themselves, although not always in the best way. They’ve gone from being a remarkably innovative, influential, and singular force in a subgenre they helped create to being just another shoegaze act. That doesn’t make Shelter a bad album. As an aural analgesic, it goes down smooth and numbs what it needs to. But instead of tearing open the passageway between this world and whatever lies beyond, it shrinks that portal to the size of a keyhole. | 2014-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Prophecy | January 21, 2014 | 6.6 | 287f3b96-766d-4526-9730-9008f2895201 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. On his Domino debut, he gets darker and weirder than ever. | Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. On his Domino debut, he gets darker and weirder than ever. | Alex G: Beach Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21138-beach-music/ | Beach Music | Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. Under the moniker of Alex G, he has made seven full lengths, most of which he put out himself. Beach Music is his Domino debut and, as he is poised to reach an even larger audience, he lets his weirder and darker instincts run rampant.
Giannascoli opens the curtains on Beach Music with a restless experiment that sounds like a cruddy bootleg of Aphex Twin trying to make beats for Scratch Acid. Distant yelling, electronic beats and lo-fi guitars all meet in a track that's less than a minute and sets the ground rules that this will not be Alex G's big, accessible breakthrough. He segues into "Bug", a traditional indie rock recipe of acoustic strums and stereo-panned electric guitars sprinkled with harmonics. The song is moody and intriguing, and just when you think it might be a good playlist candidate for a road trip with your parents, he warps his voice into Chipmunk territory on the line "bug in the crosshair".
Alex G has often used pitch-shifting, but he deploys it more than ever on Beach Music. "Brite Boy" sends his voice up a few notches to play a girl whose affection the title character will spurn and whose help he will reject, while "Station" brings his voice down so he can embody a homeless man breaking into a liquor store. And "Salt" features both high and low voices, like tribes of ogres and elves uniting in song.
These moments bring to mind the similar voice trickery of Ween, who formed just about 50 miles north of Havertown, Pennsylvania, where Giannascoli grew up. The difference between the two lies in their motivation: Ween used the trick for comic effect, but Alex G doesn’t seem like he’s goofing around. Ween wrote in the liner notes for The Pod that they were huffing Scotchgard while recording—though they've since said they were bluffing—but Alex G makes no narcotic admissions whatsoever. Regardless if the composition process involved new chemicals or not, it's clear that a lot of nefarious characters are lurking in these songs. Giannascoli's style has been compared to Elliott Smith in the past, and that's often been true of his presentation, but on Beach Music, it's as if the characters from Smith's darker songs have wandered over to Giannascoli's world, and they're a lot worse for wear.
Most of the songs have one-word titles and the lyrics are both vague and evocative. These traits come together best in the haunting and sweet "Mud". For this track, Giannascoli reaches beyond the pitch-shifter and gets an actual additional human being, Emily Yacina, to harmonize with him. When the pair repetitively whisper-sing, "I know something you don't know," your mind leaps to the worst conclusions of what this "something" could be, as nauseous keys creep into the arrangement and overtake the sounds of fingers skating up and down the frets of an acoustic guitar.
Some of the songs also feature the slightly atonal jangle that Pavement eventually claimed as their sound when they became a full band. What is remarkable about Beach Music is that some of these arrangements beg for you to dismiss them, the way you might have the very first time you heard Pavement, but what at first feels sloppy and clogged is actually intricate upon closer inspection. Complicated arrangements and gorgeous melodies reveal themselves to you as rewards for your patience. Over time, even the alien voices begin to sound natural, even inviting. | 2015-10-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 8, 2015 | 7.2 | 28857612-6dfb-4165-b199-bb9c0248ec3f | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Two years after her debut EP, MNDR's Amanda Warner returns with a Marina Abramović-referencing electro-pop LP she's called an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system." | Two years after her debut EP, MNDR's Amanda Warner returns with a Marina Abramović-referencing electro-pop LP she's called an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system." | MNDR: Feed Me Diamonds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16945-feed-me-diamonds/ | Feed Me Diamonds | It's neither Amanda Warner's fault nor entirely ignorable that she's surrounded by so many peers. Warner, who's performed for years with producer Peter Wade under the moniker MNDR, makes buzzy synthpop amid a deafening buzz of likeminded bands, and from any point in her career, it's a short step to two or three rough analogues or influences. After a couple of years jobbing behind the scenes for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and others, Warner's break came in 2010 when she lent a careening hook and Francophone snappiness to "Bang Bang Bang" by Mark Ronson, an act arguably better known for his antecedents (the vague, remembered 1960s), protégées, and followers than his actual music. This proves apt. The EP that caught Ronson's notice, E.P.E., strutted and shouted and revived all the 80s synthpop fit to get print. It commanded both attention and an inevitable clutter of comparisons: La Roux, Santigold, Goldfrapp.
The namedrops were predictable, but not entirely unwarranted. Warner's said she turned down various unnamed honchos with Katy Perry designs, though she didn't mind tossing tracks about with Patrik Berger, who co-wrote Robyn's "Dancing on My Own", and in the past few years she's built up a small battalion of collaborators eager to emulate that track. E.P.E. and its follow-ups are primarily Warner and Wade's work, but it's hard not to hear their influences. "I go my own way…/ This is my anthem," Warner sang on lead single "I Go Away" over meticulously rippling percussion and sumptuous synths; her way, by all indications, was stylish and fully formed, but perhaps a little too timely.
Two years later, Warner's debut LP arrives in much the same manner. She bursts off the cover of Feed Me Diamonds amid neon and chrome shrapnel; it's arresting, but it's pastiche. The music inside is much the same: 12 mostly solid electro-pop tracks that are immediate, immaculate, and suited equally to outlets populist-- "U.B.C.L." appeared in Jersey Shore in a prior rewrite-- and outré. The album's custom-built, in other words, to the synthpop template of the past few years. Some tracks veer house, others electroclash, others toward an 80s slow dance. Strewn through the mix are percussion stutters and pinball noises, and dubstep touches you could actually call tasteful. "Burning Hearts" begins with hoover synths, guitar bluster, and slivered vocal samples, like the Sleigh Bells/Purity Ring hybrid that legions undoubtedly asked for; it's even got spider imagery that could have crawled off the latter's debut. "Waiting" rides either a "Tainted Love" groove or whatever's left of it after three decades of further tainting. Albums like these have a few things in common. They're generally likeable. They almost always sound fantastic. At their worst, they substitute sheen for swagger and noise for punch; at their best, they have all four.
At her best, MNDR does. Single "#1 in Heaven", inspired by kidnapped then corrupted robber-heiress Patty Hearst, gleams like a bumper sticker; it turns her post-arrest taunts into a killer hook ("Tell them I'm smiling/ Send my greetings") and her bank stickup into instructions for the dance floor ("put your hands above your head…."). Warner's similarly occupied on loopy club anthem "U.B.C.L.", a rework of EPE's leadoff track, skewed only as much as its title. It's half as clever as it thinks it is, but probably twice as functional. "Sparrow Voices" is bracing, Warner and a sequencer trying to outfeint one another, though it's probably advisable to ignore anything it's trying to say about the cracks in China's economy.
That's the sort of topicality MNDR ascribes to almost every track. She's called the album an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system," an admirable goal for a different occasion. It's not that dance-pop can't be subverted, but Hearst repurposed as a dancing queen is roughly par here. "Fall in Love With the Enemy" doesn't get much deeper than saying it isn't a choice. "Blue Jean Youth" is a list of nostalgia checkpoints that aims for iconic but lands somewhere around clip art. These are missteps, though, and few. "Faster Horses", named for an apocryphal Henry Ford quote ("if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses") is noisy and addled-- the vague vocal patois on "the front ro-ow... you don't kno-ow” has too many similarities to mention-- but as a commentary on the genre's demand for ever-catchier material, it works.
Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady. At first "Stay" sounds too chilly, too insistent on delivering pat soundbites like "I'm not going to fade away," but the way the chorus trails off and the catch in Warner's voice when she sings "aching" betrays the act. The title track, meanwhile, is all catches. It's got its footnotes-- the reference this time is a quote by performance artist Marina Abramović about how her father was killed after being fed fine-pureed diamonds-- but you don't need to consult them to hear the masochism in Warner's voice as she meanders from the first crafted couplet ("lie with me, lie to me") on through reduction and dismantlement metaphors. MNDR always had style; here, at least, the substance has caught up. | 2012-09-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ultra | September 6, 2012 | 7.1 | 2890fbe6-446a-4de2-a0f1-36a6c229dacc | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The imaginative IDM producer behind 2006's awesome Body Riddle adds his own voice to the mix and increases the clatter, to mixed results. | The imaginative IDM producer behind 2006's awesome Body Riddle adds his own voice to the mix and increases the clatter, to mixed results. | Clark: Totems Flare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13268-totems-flare/ | Totems Flare | Think about the basic properties of beat-oriented electronic music. It emphasizes dynamic action, feelings of speed, impressions of light-- extremes and intricacies of sensation. It tweaks your senses with creative deformations of time and space, with strictly engineered frameworks lurking beneath sleek or gaudy facades. And as Simon Reynolds credibly argued in Energy Flash/Generation Ecstasy, it strives to create experiences instead of describing them. Doesn't it sound a lot like the state fair, and make it seem crazy that tinny speakers still blast mostly rock, rap, and country hits across the rides? Imagine Lindstrøm's slopes and plunges on your roller coaster; the Field's nested spins on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
In an obscure corner of the midway, Chris Clark mans the funhouse. He lays out certain conditions-- dark twisty passageways, treacherous stairs, and moving platforms-- but doesn't suggest that you experience them in any particular way. His songs are divided into bizarre chambers of clashing design. He's the rare case where a heavy-handedly metaphorical approach like this seems defensible. In interviews, Clark holds forth at length on process and ideas while neatly sidestepping taxonomical points. He has his go-to tricks: His specialty is the cataclysmic anthem, cobbled together from homemade break beats, glitchy jags of Euro- and acid-house, pockets of concussive noise, honeycombed synth lines, and contoured masses of distortion, all piled up in lunging heaps of coarse texture. He really doesn't seem to make any type of music, which means that there's no background proposition or guideline, and metaphor might be the only way to talk about it. As in the funhouse, you have to make your own way through.
We enter an unspoken contract with the funhouse: To be tripped, mocked, and have our skirts looked up in a spirit of good-natured mischief. It's the same with Clark, and at his best, he honors it. His greatest record, 2006's exquisitely convulsed Body Riddle, was full of spaces as deeply habitable as they were impossible. It was an alchemist's album-- violent where it naturally should have been tranquil (and vice-versa); corporeal where it should have been cerebral (ditto). The acid squelches of "Herzog" were weirdly serene and grounding, their ambient atmosphere charged with live-wire menace. It was, unquestionably, his most humane album. But the same body Clark celebrated in 2006 was trampled under the war-tank treads of last year's Turning Dragon, a fascinating but dyspeptic album that it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting to listen to very often.
As on Turning Dragon, Clark's tricks are all in place on Totems Flare, but the abstracts that made Body Riddle great are spottily present. It lacks a certain tenderness or reticence, and there's no implication of a compact with the listener, an assurance that this inhospitable space is ultimately for their pleasure. Put it this way: You would probably decline to ride a roller coaster designed by the Clark of this album, not trusting that its promise of danger wouldn't be taken to its logical conclusion, the car separating from the tracks. Totems Flare regains a measure of hospitality from its predecessor, but it brings only one new idea to the table-- Clark's singing, which is only partially effective. It works pretty well when he pitches his deep, roughshod voice toward dilapidated grandeur: "Growls Garden" imagines Matthew Dear's Asa Breed as interpreted by Thomas Brinkmann. But his cyber-Teutonic turn on "Rainbow Voodoo" is a bit silly.
Clark's voice works best when he uses it like just another sound source; say, as a stuttering, FX-laden pulse in "Look Into the Heart Now". Your attention is drawn to details like this because the compositions often feel under-imagined as songs. The aforementioned tracks make the first half of the album feel jumbled and cluttered. The fizzy syncopation of opener "Outside Plume" is enticing, but its lumbering synths and beat-dropping tangents thwart its momentum. Things do start coming together after the utilitarian vamp "Luxman Furs": "Totem Crackerjack" uses gusts of noise to enhance, not derail, its cadence, and has a confidently measured stride that carries it intelligibly from breakneck drums to delicate arpeggios. The home stretch has a satisfying continuity-- the revved-up but beatific "Future Daniel" runs into the rewinding ambiance of "Primary Balloon Landing"; the dark drive of "Talis" and "Suns of Temper" dissolves into the gentle guitar whorls of closer "Absence". That's how funhouses are supposed to work-- we know the chaos is an illusion, designed for our enjoyment by an orderly hand. Otherwise, they're just confusing and enervating. | 2009-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 20, 2009 | 5.9 | 28934aa7-0499-4c98-be3e-29e7f59c0e98 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Veteran rapper breaks from Mannie Fresh and grows up quickly, displaying a flexible flow and more layered lyrics. | Veteran rapper breaks from Mannie Fresh and grows up quickly, displaying a flexible flow and more layered lyrics. | Lil Wayne: Tha Carter II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4997-tha-carter-ii/ | Tha Carter II | Something great happened last week on The Tonight Show, poor Leno notwithstanding. Camera on musical guest Lil' Wayne, bassist behind him on pasty octaves, some keyboard "funk" preset, really thin till the guitars flange in. This is Alan-born Robin Thicke's "Oh Shooter" they're playing, straight-up, and Thicke, on stage beside Wayne, begins his stick'd-up anthem, his breath caught as it would be near chrome. Tune in then and you'd think Thicke was the star and Weezy just his cough-n-pepper hypeman. "I brought my homeboy with me," says standing Wayne of singing Thicke. He's kidding, right? Technically this is Wayne's song called "Shooter", but the entire "song", down to the track length, is Thicke's original.
What a tense performance so far; music played, but you could probably hear a pin drop. This young New Orleans rapper bouncing around on stage with Real Musicians but not much else, good for a laugh or a breakdance or whatever Other-approved televised woop-de-doo-- "cute" and "rap's not so bad after all" but also "rapping is easy," "rap=only good as the sample it swiped". Wayne was holding us at bay, all our presuppositions about his career, his music, his age and color, his responsibility qua artist post-Katrina. If Thicke's the crybaby here, Wayne's the stick-up kid.
"They want me with my hands up," sings Thicke, doing that stupid "raise the roof" thing. Wayne breaks: "I'm trying to tell you what I am, baby-- listen." And after almost two minutes of no talking he bursts the song open: "So many doubt cos I come from the South, but when I open my mouth the best come out. It's my turn and I'm starting right here today." And so on-- 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.
Granted, Leno won't make "Shooter" Wayne's "song" (it will be though), and we definitely can't call Tha Carter II his coming-of-age album or something equally corny-- people blew that line on the one before. Fact is, Wayne's still young, and he loves that he can get away with shit-- literally. Firmly keeping a foot in the sandbox, Wayne dabbles scatological throughout ("Dear Mr. Toilet/ I'm the shit"), sometimes even elaborately so ("You niggas small bubbles, I burp you/ I'll spit you out and have your girls slurp you"). Total energy thing, his verses still lack polish and a good edit (e.g. so many goddamn shark jokes), and his skits and "personality raps" (cf. "Grown Man") spell him out too bluntly, too vainly. And yet, there's "Shooter", or "Receipt", or "Get Over": "Standin' on stage in front of thousands/ Don't amount to me not having my father." Lines like this fall outta nowhere, jaw-droppers aplenty-- but "don't forget the baby".
People who met Wayne on "Go DJ" and thought him a lunchroom hack emcee-- who knows what's happened since then, but damn has he learned how to write. His squeak is now a croak, his laugh a little more burly, his flow remarkably flexible. Sometimes he's deliberate like syrup cats ("But this is Southern, face it/ If we too simple then yall don't get the basics") but when he needs to be, he's nimble as that Other Carter: "I ain't talking too fast you just listening too slow." Remy and weed, fast things and women, the corner-- these are Wayne's wax since B.G.'ing with B.G., putting piff on the campus before he ever enrolled in college.
What's different, and crucial: no Mannie Fresh electro-dixie beats. Free from Fresh, Wayne is less a novelty-- less Pinocchio on Pleasure Island (cf. 500 Degreez), less that dorm-room poster of the baby giving the middle finger. In fact, no-name nawlins producers run the boards, their crackly soul sampling and that implied return-to-rap roots a perfect complement to Weezy's raspy, sometimes even Miles Davisian voice. On "Receipt", which lifts the Isleys' "Lay-Away", Wayne's nursery rhyme delivery grants pick-ups like "my daughter want another/ Sister or brother/ And you looking like a mother" that rare smooth-crude game, something a young Curtis Jackson wanted out of "Best Friend" but didn't quite get.
"I'm a self-made millionaire, fuck the public," he says on "Money On My Mind." To an extent, he's right. This is Wayne's show, the album's only guests being Kurupt and Birdman and some r&b; b-girls. Not to say he's ungrateful; it's just that establishing his autonomy, his don't give a fuck, is infinitely more important. Lead track "Tha Mobb" really lays the audience/methodology/goals stuff on thick: For five minutes, no chorus, sad piano, he does it for "the gangstas and the bitches, the hustlers and the hos." Crossover? "Whatever." Mainstream? "No!" He refuses to be a Big artist, precisely so he can be a big Artist.
Shirking responsibility then? Katrina happened after most these tracks were cut, so let's not be assholes. He worked in a few rhymes after the fact, very simple stuff like "gotta get the hood back after Katrina" on "Feel Me". But the line that follows is more telling: "Weezy F. Baby, the 'F' is for 'FEMA'." FEMA, that lark, and so goes his point: For relief, he's not responsible. While Wayne hasn't made Tha Carter II a "Katrina album" in the obvious respect (cf. that horrendous "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" song rock critics like because they "get" it), he's given New Orleans something much greater-- someone, one of their own, to believe in. "If I talk it I walk it like Herschel," he says on "Mo Fire", his syllables out his mouth like smoke rings-- he means sex, other things too. | 2006-01-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-01-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Cash Money | January 12, 2006 | 8.1 | 28967dc2-a0cc-4263-b4c9-e72d64cbb7e7 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Veteran shapeshifters' 10th album is focused and concise, bearing the pop-golden touch of producers Paul Epworth and Bjorn Yttling. | Veteran shapeshifters' 10th album is focused and concise, bearing the pop-golden touch of producers Paul Epworth and Bjorn Yttling. | Primal Scream: Beautiful Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12024-beautiful-future/ | Beautiful Future | At the turn of 90s, Primal Scream were one of the first groups to transform themselves from a conventional rock band into a production team. Breaking down traditional instrumental roles, the band became studio silly putty, collaborating with any number of producers. It's a concept that's since been embraced by the likes of Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, but where those groups have taken a studious, science-lab approach to their experimentalism, Primal Scream still project a venerable image of rock'n'roll hedonism. They unapologetically celebrate (and occasionally decry) their chemical consumption in song, mouth off in the press about crap bands and evil politicians, and load up their videos with Kate Moss cameos. Taken as a whole, Primal Scream's scattershot, trend-spotting discography doesn't so much represent a search for new sounds as a search for the best drugs: ecstasy (1991's epochal acid-house address Screamadelica), weed (1997's dubtronic odyssey Vanishing Point), speed (2000's explosive XTRMNTR), coke (2002's totally wired Evil Heat), and whatever horrific substance deludes them into releasing a Rolling Stones knockoff every 12 years (1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up, 2006's Riot City Blues).
Beautiful Future is an especially rich title coming from a band with such a sloppy past, but its concise, laser-focussed 10-song tracklist-- bearing the pop-golden touch of producers Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, the Rapture) and Bjorn Yttling (Peter Bjorn and John, Lykke Li)-- suggests Primal Scream's latest high is sobriety. The opening title track features the most joyous, clear-headed melody they've sung since Screamadelica's "Movin' on Up", but in a much different dressing. Here, their Exile-era Stones influence yields to the cheeky glam of Sparks, from the jaunty piano riff, hand claps and ascending chorus, to Bobby Gillespie's wry commentary on middle-class privilege: "Congratulations/ You're living the dream/ In the dead heart of the control machine." The lyric may read like a typically agitated Gillespie spiel, but since assuming the role of techno-punk provocateurs on XTRMNTR-- in retrospect, a prescient anti-Bush/Blair manifesto-- Primal Scream's music has turned less pointedly political; rather than wage a carpet-bomb attack on governmental institutions, Beautiful Future seeks to serve those who live under their rule, seeming more sympathetic to the notion of materialism as escapism.
Military references are either deployed playfully (the "gas chambers" on "Beautiful Future" standing in for a culture choking on over-consumption) or lazily ("Suicide Bomb" being a cheap, ripped-from-the-headlines metaphor for goin' crazy), but even in the latter instance, the self-immolating image is followed by Gillespie declaring, "I see the beauty in everything." So it's fitting that Beautiful Future, musically, is drawn to the allure of cool, shimmering surfaces: "Can't Go Back" retrofits the brutalizing guitar holocaust of XTRMNTR's "Accelerator" as slick, Korg-crazed new wave, while the "Billie Jean" beat and Italo-disco sheen of "Uptown" glosses over its working-class-heroic chorus, positioning the band as unlikely but eager elder statesmen to the nu-romantic electro of Sam Sparro and Calvin Harris.
In a sense, Beautiful Future finds Primal Scream turning into the sort of bright, bouncy 80s pop band they initially stood in opposition to. And yet, the transition is pulled off with such guileless enthusiasm and steely precision that the mid-album drift back to ultraviolet stoner/psych dirge ("Suicide Bomb", "Beautiful Summer") feels like an unnecessary regression better left to the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. But the group also stumbles when they force the fun: The woeful "Zombie Man" repurposes several Screamadelica signifiers, but squanders them all on a stupid, sore-thumb chorus chant ("Hey hey zombie man/ Gonna put you in a can").
Fortunately, the record's weak center stretch is redeemed by a great closing trifecta that again finds Primal Scream putting their far-reaching Rolodex to use: CSS' Lovefoxxx trades cool come-ons with Gillespie on the evil-heated "I Love to Hurt (You Love to Be Hurt)", which sounds like the Plastic Ono Band rager "I Found Out" given an Ed Banger remix; an elegiac, Linda Thompson-assisted cover of the Fleetwood Mac Tusk track "Over and Over" effectively fills Primal Scream's one-soul-ballad-per-album quota; and though Josh Homme doesn't actually sing on the closing "Necro Hex Blues", his presence is made obvious by the song's relentless, motorik-metal pulse, giving the band's long-standing Stooges fetish a 21st-century makeover. Much like Screamadelica's acid-rock/acid-house crossover nearly 20 years ago, Beautiful Future proposes an equally unlikely union between Primal Scream's traditional leather-jacketed indie/Britpop base and today's neon-capped, bottle-serviced club kids. And if this attempted reconciliation produces moments of both elation and frustration, well, the band's erratic track record gives us no real reason to expect otherwise. | 2008-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 28, 2008 | 7 | 28a4672d-206b-4390-a4e0-15b8307c268f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The tenth album from Daniel Lopatin is his most collaborative and accessible solo project to date, yet still full of unexpected chaos and songs that can suddenly dissolve and disarm. | The tenth album from Daniel Lopatin is his most collaborative and accessible solo project to date, yet still full of unexpected chaos and songs that can suddenly dissolve and disarm. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Age Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-age-of/ | Age Of | In children’s movies, the world is always ending. These worlds are smaller than our own, less complex and less fraught, but there is rarely an instance when they’re not in crisis. The kingdom is freezing over, or the human race has been doomed, or God is getting ready to go off to college. When they come out of crisis, the worlds are fundamentally changed—kids’ movies don’t adhere to the trope of the action hero batting away disaster and everything going back to normal. They are one of the few mainstream cultural arenas where vivid eschatologies can play out unburdened by the need to massage the status quo. So it follows that, on his most apocalyptic record, Oneohtrix Point Never would sneak in a song meant to soundtrack a hypothetical Pixar movie.
Age Of, the tenth studio album from the electronic artist Daniel Lopatin, spills over many of the formal and conceptual boundaries set by previous OPN records. After working with Anohni on her debut solo album Hopelessness, Lopatin found himself drawn to the process of collaborating with other artists, a stark contrast to the cerebral solo labor that had driven his work to date. Instead of going it alone again, Lopatin looped in James Blake to co-produce and mix the album. Anohni and noise artist Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) lent vocals to several tracks, while Eli Keszler supplied live drums and multi-instrumentalist Kelsey Lu played keyboards. Strikingly, Lopatin sings lead on four songs, threading his distorted voice through jagged electronics for the first time since 2010’s Returnal.
The inclusion of more pop-friendly artists and the foregrounding of the human voice might suggest that Age Of ranks among OPN’s more accessible pieces. If anything, it’s one of his most challenging. Sound objects drift in and out of focus like space debris from a forgotten explosion; slick, retrofuturistic synthesizers commingle with harsh noise; the record’s most conventional song, “Babylon,” ends abruptly, like someone unplugged it. The songs on Age Of are chaotic. They do not behave the way you expect them to, and their deviations from the energetic scripts of popular music ripple like tremors through the ground.
Like its predecessor, 2015’s Garden of Delete, whose preamble consisted of a fansite for a nonexistent band and a fake interview with an alien, Age Of comes cocooned in esoteric lore. The CD art and promotional material reiterate a kind of alignment chart based on 16th-century French engravings, with each of four “ages” (bondage, ecco, excess, and harvest) illustrated by grotesque humanoid caricatures. The four images laid out in a grid evoke the right/left authoritarian/libertarian memes that proliferate on Twitter to the point of semantic satiation, only Age Of’s chart has no original referent, no known source image to corrupt—it’s pure meme.
Lopatin has said that “Myriad,” the name of his new live ensemble and part of the track title “myriad.industries,” is an acronym that stands for “My Record = Internet Addiction Disorder.” It’s a joke, probably, but Age Of does engage with the emotional exhaustion of the endless scroll. The music is preoccupied with the question of what the mind is looking for when it compulsively returns to the feed: nothing specific, but nothing redundant, either. The internet addict craves a vague novelty beyond what the channel-surfer or dial-turner seeks. The internet addict wants to be implicated in their leisure because there is no leisure anymore. Nor is there any labor. There is only attention and the objects to which it’s drawn.
The way Lopatin funnels attention through Age Of confounds deeply ingrained listening habits. “The Station,” a simmering pop number apparently written for Usher, bombards a sterile, placid guitar riff with frantic cascades of harpsichord and synthesizer. Even the voice, roboticized by effects, wants to break out of its cage; by the song’s end, it’s splintered off into an uncanny screech. “Babylon,” another vocal track buttressed by the bass tone from the “Twin Peaks” theme, overlays Lopatin’s voice with so many different versions of itself (and some backing screams from Prurient) that he starts to sound less like the orchestrator of his own music than a victim of it. “I love it when I see you in a state of disbelief,” he sings, his words corroded by harmonies falling slightly out of sync. He dissolves himself in a song that doesn’t quite sound like a song, singing with a voice that sounds less and less like a voice.
These formal disintegrations flood the record with anxiety. Even its brighter moments, like the tantalizing instrumental “Toys 2” (the one meant for Pixar, and named for Toys, a nightmarish Robin Williams comedy) tend to fall to ruin before long. The synthesizers detune, the percussion trickles away, the singing voices stutter and fade. Age Of could be an exercise in ruining songs, but like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, it is less interested in perpetuating pleasure than it is in examining its mechanics. What makes a song tick, and what kind of desire propels the listener through it? What makes a person want?
It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers. Anohni’s voice breaks to the forefront on “Same,” a jolting track that lets her do what she does best, which is taunt annihilation and withstand it. Her voice is authoritative like nature is, lithe and flexible enough to dodge bullets, powerful without any need to adhere to architectures of power. When she re-enters the fray on “Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen,” she brings with her all the stray voices that have percolated throughout the album, the raspy yowls and the low groans. “Speak to me,” they sing against the jazzy strut of a drum kit, twirling together like trash in a breeze. “Release me.” The moment is beautiful in ways Lopatin’s music has not before dared to be beautiful—it disarms.
In the face of extinction, the human mind seeks narrative. It wants to be the action hero diverting the disaster so that real life can continue unimpeded. Age Of floats the idea that the disaster itself might be real life. In its chaos and its relief from chaos, it stages the panic and helplessness encountered in disaster as stories worth telling on their own. | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | June 2, 2018 | 7.8 | 28a5d21a-4bab-4ffe-a0e1-eb825e106d5f | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On one of the defining albums of her 38-year career, the Everything But the Girl singer embraces her inner disco maven in pursuit of freedom from society’s ordained roles for women. | On one of the defining albums of her 38-year career, the Everything But the Girl singer embraces her inner disco maven in pursuit of freedom from society’s ordained roles for women. | Tracey Thorn: Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracey-thorn-record/ | Record | It’s an odd quirk of British culture that the country’s defining pop rebels often wind up part of the intellectual establishment. Instead of being sent to the glue factory, ex-punks and erstwhile Britpoppers find themselves on the airwaves of BBC 6 Music and the shelves of mainstream bookshops; they write broadsheet newspaper columns and compose serious film scores. This is exactly what Tracey Thorn has been up to in the eight years since the former Marine Girl and Everything But the Girl singer released her third solo album. She’s published two excellent memoirs, guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s “Today Show,” written a New Statesman column, done the music for Carol Morley’s The Falling, released a Christmas album, and reigns as a popular Twitter voice. To Brits, there is nothing surprising about this. In the best possible way, what makes no sense is that Thorn should release one of the defining albums of her 38-year-long career right now.
Your first thought on hearing Record should be: Why has it taken so long for Thorn to embrace the right and true path of disco maven? At 55, Thorn’s voice—the spiritual forebear to the xx’s Romy Madley Croft—has deepened into a brogue that suggests diva grandeur but retains its inherent skepticism, luring you to the dancefloor while raising an eyebrow at your moves. Following the breakout success of Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing,” Everything But the Girl switched jazzy indie pop for jungle and drum ‘n’ bass on their final two albums, to middling effect: The songwriting didn’t change, just the window dressing. On Record, Thorn and co-producer Ewan Pearson build acid basslines and monochrome disco whirl around Thorn’s august voice, giving her center stage to steer the drama and euphoria of what she’s called nine “feminist bangers.”
Thorn’s latter-day solo material has often confronted topics that don’t come up a lot in pop: getting back into dating after divorce, entering menopause as your teenage kids are hitting puberty, the fear of familiar bodies growing boring—some character studies (Thorn remains married to EBTG’s Ben Watt), others not. But she’s never sung about them with so much humor, action, and revelation as she does here. On 2007’s Out of the Woods and 2010’s Love and Its Opposite these were themes rather than stories; worrying signs of diminishment rather than new opportunities. Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.
Record is loosely structured like a fever dream about how expectations surrounding femininity—and what it means to embrace or reject them—shape a life. It starts with Thorn staring down the crossroads of middle age in a song of existential bafflement set, appropriately, to a caper that sounds like early New Order. “Here I go again,” she sighs on “Queen,” sanguine as she contemplates what might have been and wonders which is more real—her, or the fantasy? “I’m on fire/A head full of desire/This is me and someone else entirely,” she marvels, invoking Springsteen for the first time on an album that often borrows his trademark triumphalism to recast a woman’s life as a hero’s journey. (A moment, too, for Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums, playing racing hi-hats so light and dazzling they seem sampled from sea sparkle.)
Thorn looks to her past to figure out how to handle her future: the liberation of being “too tall, all wrong” for boys; the cad who broke her heart but not before teaching her the three chords that gave her a future; anxious first fumblings, contraception, babies, empty nests, and inheritance. Always defiant, she deftly traces these milestones and the changing heart that comes alongside them. “I didn’t want my babies,” she sings on “Babies,” a restrained reproductive anthem with more Boss flair, “until I wanted babies/And when I wanted babies/Nothing else would do but babies/Babies, babies.” The kids grow up and her role changes again. “This won’t make sense to you now,” she sings to her teenage charges on tender dream-pop dirge “Go”: “To wave you out the door/It’s what my love was for/And I know you have to go.” While empathetic, Thorn is also a master of the perfect, barbed couplet that makes you punch the air, cutting her economic storytelling with shots of acid. “Though we kissed and kissed and kissed/You were nothing but a catalyst,” she sings to three-chords boy on “Guitar,” a fizzing new-wave jam that’s wholly befitting of its subject matter.
Almost every song is worthy of that teenage revelation. Wielding a sparse, tarnished palette, Pearson and Thorn build compact and stylish pop songs that build to heart-racing emotional release, though Record’s highlight is its most ambitious song: “Sister,” an eight-and-a-half-minute breakdown built around spindly funk, shattered-glass percussion, austere cowbell, and Thorn’s flinty message of female solidarity. “I am my mother now/I am my sister/And I fight like a girl,” she sings, the effect as seductive as it is menacing. The only track that feels out of place is “Face,” a character study of a woman obsessing over her ex’s Facebook and his new partner that’s brilliantly observed—and crystallized in dubby purgatory—but a bitter outlier to her valiant scheme.
Over the course of Record, Thorn looks squarely at society’s ordained roles for women—mother, lover, caregiver—as a way of figuring out what happens when those expectations have largely been fulfilled. What do freedom and purpose look like? By way of an answer, Thorn ends Record with “Dancefloor,” which flips the fantasy she explored in “Queen” (and sounds deliciously like Stuart Price-era Pet Shop Boys bashing helmets with Daft Punk). When she properly considers it, the idea of running away for a new life is really quite knackering: “Think of what you’d have to pack/If you left and planned on never coming back,” she sings, a line of deadpan despair given weight by her austere tone. “Oh, but where I’d like to be/Is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me,” she sings, the tone shifting from anxiety to release. Real escape, it turns out, is much more prosaic. But as Thorn proves on a glorious record, no less transcendent. | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Merge | March 5, 2018 | 8 | 28aa43f3-1545-4e36-ac02-e2f240e59c15 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
On his proper debut album, the underground Virginia rapper sounds both flashy and laconic, seeming at once like an everyman and cooler than you. | On his proper debut album, the underground Virginia rapper sounds both flashy and laconic, seeming at once like an everyman and cooler than you. | Fly Anakin: Frank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fly-anakin-frank/ | Frank | In 2007, Frank Walton bonded with a fellow weirdo Marcus Law over their similarly out-of-date rap tastes. They were eighth graders at the height of the Soulja Boy Era, but Walton and Law tended to the rap of their 35-year-old uncles and older brothers: Wu-Tang, specifically Ghostface; Mobb Deep, specifically Havoc’s murky production; Boot Camp Clik, specifically their pugnacious mouthpiece, Sean Price. They were raised in Richmond, a city without a major rap history, so they acted like any kids without a local scene to plug into—they began building their own.
In 2022, Walton, aka Fly Anakin, has more company. From New York to Buffalo to his own Richmond, the grim atmosphere and coded slang of Giuliani-era New York are everywhere. His old friend Marcus Law—now Henny L.O.—is the co-founding member of their 11-member collective Mutant Academy, which has helped define Richmond’s own scene, and which places Fly Anakin in the middle of it all, surrounded by like-minded peers. He’s not as soft and introspective as MIKE, not as mysterious as Mach-Hommy. He's not a wild knucklehead like Westside Gunn, nor a hardcore street rapper like Benny the Butcher. He brings a bristling, skeptical attitude to the scene, and he sounds good on just about anything you put him on. Like another hero of his, Curren$y, Anakin does a good job of making his records sound flashy and laconic, seeming at once like an everyman and cooler than you. And if we’re talking fundamentals—syllable counts, breath control, cadences, rhyme patterns, delivery—he’s probably the single best pure rapper in the scene.
Frank is billed as his debut, but the distinction probably matters most to Fly Anakin, and to hear him tell it, it doesn’t even particularly matter that much to him: “I called this one my debut because it cost the most money to make,” he says. He might have given it his government name, but in every way, Frank is a continuation of the music he’s been making without fuss or cease for at least eight years. The production is muffled and murky, and his voice cuts through it, pitiless and Ginsu-clean, for 38 sustained and effortless-sounding minutes.
Despite all the Ghostface love he’s shown in interviews, Fly Anakin’s voice hits the track with a crisp forward motion that reminds me more of the Brooklyn legend (and perennial NY rap also-ran) AZ. Anakin throws his syllables like combinations at a speed bag: When he raps a line like “Now all of the lines is getting crowded,” every word somehow sounds like it starts with the letter “D.” Also like AZ, he sounds so commanding over the beat, the syllables locking in place just so, that you occasionally forget to pay attention to his words.
When you tune into the lyrics, you get little glimpses into his mind, like “Two seats ain’t enough when the gang carrying hurt and work” (“Love Song (Come Back)”) or “Why when niggas die they need a go fund but flexing when they on earth?” (“Class Clown”). More often than not, he offers you opportunities to admire the way he pushes word sounds up against each other: “Maneuver wrong and we gon’ move you off the atlas, pawn,” he raps on “Sean Price.” There’s a workmanlike quality to his writing, which eschews confessions or personal detail—the closest we get to autobiography is when he tells us he “got my alias from a bar fight.”
If Frank represents a culminating moment for Fly Anakin, instead of just another brick in his discography, he finds subtle ways to show us. For one, it’s longer than usual, about as much as legroom as he’s afforded himself. For another, he collaborates with some of the artists who first inspired him to make this kind of music, back in 2007. Madlib, who gave Fly Anakin a big cosign a few years ago, shows up as producer for the fantastic “No Dough,” and Dilated Peoples’ Evidence gets behind the boards for “Sean Price.” Richmond hometown hero Nickelus F, a battle-hardened rapper who influenced (and possibly wrote for) a young Aubrey Drake Graham, delivers a hilarious verse on “Ghost.” There’s a track called “WaxPoetic,” and at one point he even works a reference to Soundbombing into an awkward sex rap: “Something rawkus thumping, bomb the pussy like a sound bite” (“Underdog Theme”). For a rap nerd, the kind of kid who found his community trading and memorizing verses, this is as close as he gets to showing us his heart. | 2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | March 18, 2022 | 7.5 | 28af46a1-bf88-4c7d-8288-119bc256c886 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Combining modular synth, saxophone, and a medieval lute, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall create an album of pastoral disquiet and itchy post-punk edge. | Combining modular synth, saxophone, and a medieval lute, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall create an album of pastoral disquiet and itchy post-punk edge. | The Waeve: The Waeve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-waeve-the-waeve/ | The Waeve | Centuries of obscure folk tradition and a mistrust of isolated rural communities have helped birth a rich vein of pastoral horror in British music and film, from Incredible String Band and The Wicker Man in the late ’60s and early ’70s to Broadcast and the Focus Group in the 2000s. On their eponymous debut, the WAEVE—aka Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and former Pipettes member Rose Elinor Dougall—become the latest act to dip into this disenchanted stream. Far from the urbane chatter of Blur’s greatest hits, The WAEVE reflects the turbulence beneath the soil of Great Britain: an album of pastoral disquiet and itchy post-punk edge.
It’s not the record you might imagine from the pen of a Britpop guitar hero and a onetime ’50s girl-group revivalist. For a start, the WAEVE don’t use much guitar, leaning heavily on saxophone, piano, drums, and synth. Coxon even breaks out the cittern (a medieval lute) on “All Along,” where it bumps up against Dougall’s piano and an ARP 2000 modular synth in what might be the catchiest piece of lute work since “Greensleeves.” When the guitar does arrive, as in the warped blues solo on “Over and Over,” it is used sparingly, to shift compositional gears rather than as the sine qua non of rock melody. The lyrics, too, lean on images of nature and antiquity: the “jagged shore” and “ancient tides” on “Undine,” or “silver moon” and “ecstatic, magic night” on “Kill Me Again.”
Broadcast purists might be annoyed by how much the WAEVE borrow from the much-lamented Birmingham experimentalists, down to Dougall’s delivery of the word “surrender” on “Undine,” which comes straight from the Trish Keenan school of detached seduction. But Dougall has the songwriting talent to pull it off: Her 2017 solo album Stellular joined lovelorn synth-pop with Broadcast-esque dreaminess to enchanting effect. Add the saxophone and Coxon’s naively charming vocals, which share the limelight with Dougall’s Keenan-ian tone, and the WAEVE become a far more intriguing beast: a band with its own distinct musical palette.
The saxophone in particular is key. In rock music the sax is often used to mark an almost orgiastic explosion in emotion—à la Don Weller’s fabulously overblown saxophone solo in David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners”—or played deliberately against type, as a signifier of sleazy grit, as in New York no wave. Coxon wields the instrument as a weapon of dissonance and unease. “Can I Call You,” the album’s excellent opening track, breaks down into a series of droning chords, while a rogue sax calls from the wilderness on “Drowning” like a woodland animal in distress.
In any case, the WAEVE have another trick up their sleeve. The strongest songs on the album come when the band kicks up into a kind of psychedelic post-punk clatter, like Wire in the state of nervy calm before the mushroom tea properly kicks in. “Kill Me Again” combines the post-Pavement lurch of Blur’s “Coffee & TV” or Coxon’s “Freakin’ Out” with a brooding synth pulse and the saxophone’s unhinged melodic commentary; “Someone Up There” is an unlikely cross between Elastica’s sharp melodic wit and Flight of the Conchords’ comic masterpiece of sentient AI revenge, “Robots.”
In his music with the WAEVE, Coxon told Guitar World, he “didn’t want to be Graham Coxon from Blur.” He largely achieves this goal on an album where guitar bends a knee to saxophone and the country is a place of esoteric ritual rather than very big houses. Those looking for Graham from Blur will find it in his laconic vocal turns and occasional guitar explosions, while Dougall’s dreamily dejected melodies will resonate with fans of her solo work. But The WAEVE has its own chemistry, an alchemic mixture of psych, punk, folk, tenderness, and dread, laced with dextrous saxophone tones and a few come-hither drops of terror. | 2023-02-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Transgressive | February 6, 2023 | 7.3 | 28b50cee-41b4-4a1b-b28f-025c01f21056 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
In-demand remixers with an armful of much-loved singles, the hotly-tipped and hotly-contested Crystal Castles don't stay in one place for too long on their debut LP. | In-demand remixers with an armful of much-loved singles, the hotly-tipped and hotly-contested Crystal Castles don't stay in one place for too long on their debut LP. | Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11215-crystal-castles/ | Crystal Castles | Crystal Castles prefer traveling light. While the hotly-tipped and already hotly-contested Toronto duo's basement party set-up doesn't look like it'll fill up the passenger seat on a tour van, they also like to play fast and loose with their associations. They've remixed at a Hot Chip-like pace for everyone from Bloc Party to Uffie to Klaxons, but they're not a part of your nu-rave genre (really, who is?), or blog house for that matter. Their debut LP partly picks from 7" and 12"s that have been available in some format since 2005, and it's every bit as difficult to pin down.
The lead track samples DFA 1979's "Dead Womb" and places those vocals atop a cyclical synth loop while they get disembodied and chopped up-- both function as song-length hooks. But the thing's called "Untrust Us" (natch) and by the next one, they're making good on that claim. "Alice Practice" absolutely sears with megaphoned (emphasis on mega) barking and Ethan Fawn's Atari-laced keyboards going on the fritz and racking up free plays. Ah, so this is what an arcade fire sounds like.
They don't stay in one place for too long, but the body of the album can be distilled to an essence of the glassy, ten-lane stare of Last Exit with Ed Banger's egg-frying EQ. Well, except when it sounds more like "Alice Practice" ("Xxzcuzx Me" and "Knights" are a bit interchangeable in their diminishing returns). Whether it's a thank you or challenge to everyone they've worked with, Crystal Castles opens up endless remix possibilities. Though hardly minimal, there's plenty to easily pick apart and work with-- "Good Time" is a veritable toybox with undulating octaves, an almost Eastern-sounding riff and tweaked nice-guy vocals which combine the Knife and New Order. Even if you can't really make out the words, the call-and-response chant of "Courtship Dating" glows amidst fizzy synths and Triple 6 drum clicks. And "Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)", is a collaboration with the LA noisemongers that builds from now-retro electroclash to a clattering mix of drums.
Just when you think you've gotten your paragraph-long blurb ready for the internet's approval, the last two tracks offer a bait and switch; the mad dash of "Black Panther" is probably what nu-rave was supposed to sound like (the Goth! Team?), and then the record ends on a disquietingly beautiful shoegaze comedown played on an acoustic guitar of all things ("Tell Me What to Swallow"). That they play such hide and seek musically should've come as no surprise anyway; despite the fact that there's literally an Atari game named "Crystal Castles", they named themselves after a She-Ra playset, which is like finding out LeBron James chose to wear uniform number at #23 as a tribute to his favorite Jimmy Eat World song. Then again, it's fitting for a record that draws so much of its power from unpredictability. | 2008-03-17T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-17T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Last Gang | March 17, 2008 | 7.8 | 28b60e2e-200c-4511-8cd9-5a98b5fa28a5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Captured Tracks issues an expanded LP version of songwriter Kate Fagan’s 1981 single, a cheeky rejoinder to consumerist status-seeking that became a DIY hit. | Captured Tracks issues an expanded LP version of songwriter Kate Fagan’s 1981 single, a cheeky rejoinder to consumerist status-seeking that became a DIY hit. | Kate Fagan: I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool (Expanded Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-fagan-i-dont-wanna-be-too-cool-expanded-edition/ | I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool (Expanded Edition) | New York City was in decline when Rupert Murdoch sat down at Kate Fagan’s desk at New York Magazine in the late 1970s and fired her and some 80 colleagues. It was a classic case of stock market downturn; six-figure earners were losing jobs while graffiti writers scrawled on subway cars. The cultural scene was shifting, too. Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Fagan had arrived in New York at the height of punk in the early ’70s. The hottest spot on the Lower East Side was CBGB: a rock venue born out of the post-Nixon cultural crisis and the home of the Ramones, as well as a community invested in the myth of authenticity.
By the time Fagan lost her magazine job, CBGB’s popularity was rivaled by the glamorous velvet-rope culture of uptown’s Studio 54. Both venues were, in a sense, gentrification projects. After years of financial devastation brought on by suburbanization and deindustrialization, city government was hungry to attract a young, professional, tax-paying crowd. Nightlife—whether it presented itself as populist as CBGB, or as cliquish as Studio 54—drew an emerging creative class who flocked to refurbished Manhattan neighborhoods. Studio 54’s culture of disco exclusivity simply mirrored a changing reality. Disillusioned, Fagan departed New York for good.
In 1980, she visited a friend in Chicago and stayed for a few decades. In the unpretentious Midwest music scene, she felt she’d rediscovered CBGB’s inclusive spirit—at least for a moment. Then she noticed people starting to wear shades at the club, to shop for more expensive clothes. Exclusionary “cool” threatened to creep in again. In retaliation, Fagan picked up a bass guitar she hardly knew how to play, tracked a frolicsome five-note riff onto a rudimentary drum machine, and sang about the bitterness she felt toward “cool.” “I don’t wear the hip clothes/I just shop at AMVETS,” she sneered on “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.”
The tiny punk-run label Disturbing, which Fagan helped form, released the single in 1981. After the original run sold out, Fagan self-funded another 1,000 copies, which, along with most of her belongings, were destroyed in a house fire. In the decades since, the single’s original pressing has become a collector’s item. In 2016, Manufactured Records, an affiliate of Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks, reissued the single, which sold out, too. Now, Captured Tracks have released an expanded and remastered LP version of “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool,” featuring the single, its original B-sides, four tracks from a romantic new wave rock opera in which Fagan plays a socialite seduced by the post-industrial nightscape of rock and disco, and a previously unreleased ska track.
The songs are lumped together unsystematically, which feels appropriate for someone with a musical career so far-reaching and slipshod as Fagan’s. In her early years, she covered the breadth of the ’80s—new wave, pulsing disco, arch post-punk, ska—spinning through a Rolodex of musical trends without committing to any one sound. In her later career, she would turn to Tammy Wynette-inspired country. Today, she continues to make music in her new hometown of New Orleans, performing locally and releasing the occasional Christmas album. The songs collected here, though smudged with a distinctly ’80s schmaltz, carry intergenerational DIY appeal: high hooks and low production values.
Fagan’s nervy delivery tinges every song. She frequently whoops and yelps as though she’s falling off a staircase to nowhere. The music itches. The percussion sounds less like a supporting structure and more like a tower collapse. And, aside from that phlegmatic five-note riff on the lead track, the bass buzzes with anxious energy, frantically trying to take up space. The mix is sky-wide and reverberant up until the record’s last song, the previously unreleased “Say It,” which sounds as though it were recorded through cardboard. The bubbling 2 tone is reminiscent of Fagan’s later role as co-founder and lead vocalist of Chicago ska band Heavy Manners, though “Say It” achieves greater emotional range than anything in their catalog. Fagan places a shaken soda can of tension right at its center, allowing the chorus to fizz as she delivers a heart-in-throat performance. It’s her best song since “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.” | 2023-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | March 2, 2023 | 7.1 | 28bbf846-14a6-4074-87bd-b3371f17d00c | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
An outlier in Kate Bush’s catalog, her seventh album from 1993 finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea. | An outlier in Kate Bush’s catalog, her seventh album from 1993 finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea. | Kate Bush: The Red Shoes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-bush-the-red-shoes/ | The Red Shoes | In Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Red Shoes,” a woman slips on some shiny footwear and suddenly can’t stop dancing. It’s all a bit of fun until she’s prancing across graveyards in the middle of the night, panicked enough to force an executioner to chop off her crimson-clad feet in hopes of breaking the spell. British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took that story and made it into a meta masterpiece with their 1948 movie The Red Shoes. It centers around a phantasmagoric ballet that translates Andersen’s tale, but the film also depicts the backstage plight of its principal dancer. “You cannot have it both ways,” a mad genius ballet director tells her. “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer.” In the end, forced to choose between great passions, she puts on those ruby slippers one more time—and jumps in front of a moving train. The Red Shoes, in all its beauty and tragedy, in its impossible decisions concerning art and life, is one of Kate Bush’s favorite films. She named her seventh album after it.
When Bush’s The Red Shoes was released in November 1993, the 35-year-old singer was reeling. Her mother had passed the previous year. Her romantic relationship with close musical collaborator Del Palmer, who had known her since she was a teenager, was ending. And after spending her entire adult life obsessively cultivating her fantasies into reality through sound and image, she was wary of being swept away by her work. “I’m feeling very tired,” she said at the time. “I’m going on a holiday. I’m really looking forward to not pleasing anyone but myself.” This was no idle threat. Her next album would not arrive for another 12 years.
But The Red Shoes has her once again doing everything: singing and dancing, writing and producing. The record was presented alongside a 45-minute short film called The Line, the Cross & the Curve that Bush directed, wrote, and starred in. It’s a little much: The Line is woefully underdeveloped as it stitches together a string of repetitive music videos via a cockamamie plot inspired by Powell’s The Red Shoes but without a trace of that movie’s lush panache. (In 2005, Bush herself called the chintzy visual “a load of bollocks.”)
The album fares better. It doesn’t rank among Bush’s finest—it sounds more prototypically ’80s than some of the records she actually released that decade, marked by big snares and a brittle sound that a recent remaster can’t properly remedy. It’s an outlier, but hardly a disaster. The Red Shoes finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea.
The album’s musical unwieldiness is set against Bush’s relatively diaristic songwriting.The Red Shoes is the most confessional album by an artist not known for, or especially interested in, confession. Bush has always taken advantage of the elusive space between art and reality, conjuring characters, rarely doing interviews, always aware of getting burned by a lingering spotlight. “That’s what all art’s about—a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t, in real life,” she said around the time of The Red Shoes. “It’s all make believe, really.” The album falters when she falls short of this magical realism. When it comes to her songwriting, Kate Bush’s stories are almost always more engrossing than Kate Bush.
The record’s personal themes of loss, perseverance, and memory coalesce on “Moments of Pleasure,” one of Bush’s most affecting ballads. She sings of the small memories of life—laughing at dumb jokes, snowy evenings high above New York City, a piece of wisdom from her mother—as Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen builds these quiet moments into monuments with a heroic string arrangement. Bush ends the song with a series of mini eulogies: for her aunt, her longtime guitarist, her dance partner. “Just being alive, it can really hurt,” she belts at the center of the track, stating the obvious with such conviction that it sounds revelatory.
But sometimes, the obviousness of these songs and sentiments can feel too familiar. Bush stacks up plainspoken laments of heartbreak on “And So Is Love,” backed by a ponderous instrumental that only adds to the staleness; the presence of Eric Clapton—one of a number of big-name guitarists who guest on the album—and his scrunch-faced blues licks does not help. Closer “You’re the One” is a better breakup song, though similarly and uncharacteristically rote. It’s fun to hear the fanciful teller of tales attempt kiss-off lines like “I’m going to stay with my friend/Mmm, yes, he’s very good-looking,” but the song’s near-six-minute runtime, superfluous implementation of the Bulgarian vocal group Trio Bulgarka (who were used to much better effect on her previous album, 1989’s The Sensual World), and unnecessary guitar riffage, this time from Jeff Beck, turn it into a tepid slog.
There’s a grab-bag quality to the album, one that runs contrary to the more conceptual flourishes that show up on some of Bush’s most beloved work, like 1985’s Hounds of Love. This looser, more scattershot method doesn’t totally suit her. She admits as much on the record’s opening track, “Rubberband Girl,” a brash trifle where she longs to be as flexible as a tree, to be able to bounce around and bounce back. And the album’s strangest track, “Big Stripey Lie,” is an angsty, tuneless wreck that sounds like Bush trying—and failing—to take on the industrial and grunge sounds of the early ’90s. The song marked the first time Bush ever played guitar on an album; tellingly, to this day, it’s also the last time she ever played guitar on an album. Elsewhere, there are African rhythms, Celtic stomps, and even some bulbous funk. Before the album’s release, Bush said that The Red Shoes’ more freewheeling approach was meant to coincide with a subsequent live tour, which would have been her first since 1979. The shows never happened.
The penultimate song, “Why Should I Love You?,” took a particularly winding route to completion that speaks to the record’s uncertain process. It was originally conceived by Bush as a winning, slow-motion ballad about the inexplicability of fate and feeling. But then, in hopes of collaboration, she sent tapes of her early version to Prince, who mailed back a drastic revamp that Prince’s own engineer later called “lame disco.” What ended up on The Red Shoes is a disjointed amalgam of the two, a collaboration between two of pop’s most ingenious minds turned into a garish missed opportunity.
Mercifully, Bush’s demo of the song found its way online years later, and the singer also took it upon herself to offer pared-down remakes of several tracks from The Red Shoes on her 2011 project Director’s Cut. These alternate, largely superior takes reveal that the songwriting on much of The Red Shoes is worthy of Bush’s reputation. But, in the early ’90s, as she struggled to balance human comforts with her grand pursuit of art, she cluttered her ideas. In the nearly 26 years since The Red Shoes came out, Bush raised her only child and released two rich and spacious albums of new material. From The Red Shoes’ moment of imbalance, a harmonious new equilibrium was set. | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | EMI | January 19, 2019 | 7 | 28bdae01-69a9-4c00-90fb-3a5f1ff20467 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
The Swedish rapper’s latest is the most fully realized project of his career. Its blurry, blot-out-the-world vibe glitches between reality and nightmare. | The Swedish rapper’s latest is the most fully realized project of his career. Its blurry, blot-out-the-world vibe glitches between reality and nightmare. | Bladee: Cold Visions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bladee-cold-visions/ | Cold Visions | “Not many brain cells left, but I’m ready for—” Bladee begins his new album, before he’s cut off by Vincent Price’s famous laugh from “Thriller.” So fried he can’t finish a sentence, this madman’s at the brink of collapse. Seized by panic attacks, he threatens to “kill kill kill” and calls himself “a stupid bitch” while ambulance sirens wail and screams lacerate the night. Ten years in, the Swedish rapper is the most famous he’s ever been and still crippled by anguish. “The only thing that’s left is paranoia,” he cries.
Trying to explain Bladee’s bizarre thrill to doubters always felt risky: the more you thought about it, the less sure you were about why you liked him. Here was this young Swede soaking in Auto-Tune and cosplaying as a listless, emo Chief Keef; half the time it was impossible to tell what his verses meant. Still, the twinges of ache in his voice, floating over glassy and gloomy beats, felt inexplicably poignant. His slipshod vocals capture the ennui of modern life like nothing else, or so one long essay put it. Over time, he’s made it easier for true believers and rubberneckers alike, stretching his voice to acrobatic wildness and sculpting a galaxy of surreal lore in the lyrics. Bladee’s version of rap is blemished but beautiful, imperfect and half-coherent in a way that makes banal thoughts feel endearingly askew.
Cold Visions is his most realized project to date, an anxious 30-song album that doubles as a chance for him to reflect on his dizzying ascent. It’s enticingly darker than most of what he’s put out in recent years—the sublime optimism of Crest and 333, the summery bounce of Good Luck and The Fool—and more cohesive than Spiderr and Exeter’s freaky experiments. It’s like his life is glitching between dreams and nightmares. He’s at the Gucci store one moment then lying sleepless, begging for help the next; he’s declaring himself the bloodthirsty king then sitting at McDonald’s where all he can muster is calling it the “Sad Meal.” Bladee reaches max mania on “End of the Road Boyz,” which begins with the ear-splitting shrieks of a viral Roblox squeaker that’s like a bouncer for old heads. Flitting between moods, he unleashes a flurry of saintly warbles and baleful mumbles. “Reality surf might break my mind,” he warns. “Take another breath, it’s great, I’m fine.”
Everything bursts alive here, from the surround-sound vocals to the production roster that’s basically the cloud-rage Avengers. Seamless transitions make F1LTHY and Warpstr’s synthetic blazes melt against the icy trembles of Lusi, Woesum, Yung Sherman, and Whitearmor. Bladee’s delivery is constantly morphing, hurling horrorcore grunts and evil ASMR whispers over smooth rap flows and the kind of helium-high singing he honed on Crest and The Fool. Demented ad-libs shadow pristine verses; words deform into mutant growls. “King Nothingg” is a killer coronation: Bass thuds convulse, synths shiver, Bladee jokes about trauma-dumping and murdering people for nothing. The mix shakes with demonic sound effects yet somehow ends in a dreamy cloud rap reverie. It’s a far cry from the limp Auto-Tune droning of his early days.
Amid the chaos, Bladee pauses to take stock of things with striking lucidity given his usual tendency to abstract and arrive at ideas from oblique angles. He dropped his first solo tape, Gluee, just about a decade ago, back when he was known as Yung Lean’s sidekick. Now at 30, he’s experiencing something like a mid-career crisis. “I got so old, I got embarrassed to even be here, you know?” the intro goes. He’s aware of his immense influence on a new generation of internet musicians, but also feels more personally fucked up and worse off than he was as a fresh-faced 18-year-old. The gorgeously glum “Flatline” conveys Bladee’s sadness about letting someone down—possibly himself?—with some of his most expressive vocals ever, fluttering between hushed murmurs and frail cries; as he repeats how he’s suffocating in “dark feelings,” his tone mirrors the dismay by slowly dropping in pitch.
For as agitated as this album can be, it’s also sweetly silly in classic Bladee fashion. “Lows Partlyy” is eerily joyous, its blooming synths juxtaposing wildly with the depressive lyrics lurking beneath. “Burn down the disco, hang the fucking DJ,” Bladee coos at himself, sounding blissed-out. Some lyrics recall the gibberish aphorisms and cutesy riddles of his 2021 Fool era. He talks about “violently drug abusing weed” and accidentally buying 1,000 Smurfs toys while browsing eBay on shrooms. He scorns people for watching YouTube Shorts and says he paints better than Rembrandt. Lines that might feel dead in print electrify the ear through Bladee’s agile vocals, twitching with odd mouth-noises and tone-switches, like how he randomly chirps “I’m back!” as if he’s returning home from work in the twilight haze of “Flexing & Finessing.”
While Cold Visions may not be his swan song, there’s definitely a feeling of a closing chapter. The album is haunted by ghosts from Bladee’s past; nearly every song makes some kind of allusion to a previous release. He namedrops track titles like “Everlasting Flames” and “Redlight Moments.” Previously established lore about the mystical Drain Gang High School gets developed more on the snarling “Don’t Wanna Hang Out.” Old audio logos rematerialize, like the “Blade” tag taken from the 1998 movie Blade and the Sad Boys “profound sadness” effect lifted from Street Fighter IV. Veteran drainers are combing through this album in group chats, building a master doc to catalog every interpolation and reference.
One minute, Bladee’s wondering whether his cultish fans understand him (“Every time I check the comments I’m thinking like, ‘Do they even deserve me?’”). Later, he doubts whether he’s achieved anything that warrants worship: “The vision is clear, but I’m nowhere near.” It sounds like he’s collected his past lives and sonic memorabilia together for himself as much as for the fans. He’s looking at it all, questioning what his musical accomplishments mean. There’s no clear answer; Bladee hasn’t discovered true happiness or reached enlightenment. By the album’s end, he sounds exhausted yet ecstatic, like he’s shedding a great weight. The music swells and shimmers. “I’m like you, I’m living and I’m learning,” he sings, dissolving into the noise. | 2024-04-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Trash Island | April 30, 2024 | 8.3 | 28bf3e1d-aba0-4a4b-84aa-60ad2486fb5a | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
A four-disc set looks back on the brief, fertile period in which the British band twisted conventional rock instrumentation into increasingly arcane shapes. They still inhabit a class of their own. | A four-disc set looks back on the brief, fertile period in which the British band twisted conventional rock instrumentation into increasingly arcane shapes. They still inhabit a class of their own. | Seefeel: Rupt and Flex (1994-96) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seefeel-rupt-and-flex-1994-96/ | Rupt and Flex (1994-96) | In 1994, Seefeel became the first guitar band to sign to Warp Records, at a time when such a distinction actually felt significant. The Sheffield label, founded in 1989, was still synonymous with squirrely bleep techno and high-tech head music from artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, and electronic music was expected to be just that—the product of circuits and silicon. Seefeel, on the other hand, played guitar and bass and drums, and they even had a singer; despite copious pedals and Cubase software, theirs was a full-blooded sound, rosy as a blush. They had gotten their start on Too Pure, where they were labelmates with Stereolab, fuzz rockers Th’ Faith Healers, even the bluesy PJ Harvey; Seefeel’s early EPs and debut album, 1993’s Quique, earned them comparisons to groups like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. Still, protested bassist Daren Seymour, “We’re not really song people. We’re more sound people.” A new box set confirms the truth of that assertion. Rupt and Flex (1994 - 96) looks back on the brief, fertile period in which Seefeel twisted conventional rock instrumentation into increasingly arcane shapes, forging a singular fusion of ambient, techno, and dub that still inhabits a class of its own, 25 years later.
With Quique, terms like “dream pop,” “shoegaze,” and “post-rock” had attached themselves to the band; it was an era of in-betweenness, when established genres were turning porous, and the spirit of slippage suited the group. Seefeel’s 1995 album Succour—their first and, until the band reunited in 2010, only album for Warp—is the sound of old certainties dissolving. After Quique’s wall-of-sound rush, Succour was skeletal and tentative; even in its heaviest moments, it feels like a strong gust could take it apart.
By 1995, any latent rock-band tendencies left on the debut album had evaporated. You could still just about imagine the players staking out their places in the stereo field like points on the compass—drummer Justin Fletcher due south, bassist Daren Seymour and guitarist Mark Clifford pushing laterally east and west, while singer/guitarist Sarah Peacock’s cool, clear soprano drifted as far north as the frequencies could carry. But the magnet had gone haywire; the needle spun amok as poles swapped and roles blurred. Increasingly, they used a computer to chop up sound into bits to be stretched, bent, looped, and layered. In the studio, Fletcher’s live drums were replaced by purely programmed rhythms. “Seefeel’s methodology makes guitars sound like samples, the synth like a choir, and the human voice like a sequencer,” wrote Simon Reynolds, who identified them as part of a movement “using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and power chords.”
Succour opener “Meol” signals the shift that has taken place. The bass and drums, cornerstones of everything Seefeel had done until now, have momentarily fallen silent; this is a strictly liquid landscape, a vaporous guitar etude that twists like ink dissipating in water. It is the sound of pure electricity, exhausted and forlorn, a haunted dial tone singing deathbed lullabies. With “Extract,” clanking steel drums and dread bass return, establishing a dubby post-punk thread that will bind the album together, but the feel of the music remains weightless and disembodied: The song’s main hook is a curlicue of guitar feedback as Peacock’s wordless voice floats above it all, refracted into specks of light thrown by a slowly moving mirror ball.
Not everything on the record is so mellow: The turbulent “Fracture” is a roiled current over jagged rocks; the drums of “Vex” attack elegantly carved drones like a jackhammer in a hall full of marble busts. No matter the tempo or the volume of a given song, however, the mood throughout remains fiercely interior, full of toe-scuffing rhythms and inexpressible woe. The album ends as wearily as it begins, with the two-part finale of “Utreat” and “Tempean.” The first song is just two overtone-laden bass notes pitched so close on the fretboard that they quiver with dissonance. An answering bass tone blasts like an intermittent foghorn, its steady rhythm nevertheless impossible to parse; mechanical handclaps scatter in the background like startled birds. Then, after five long minutes of funereal repetition, “Tempean” provides a two-minute coda, in the form of a single held chord that dissipates into feedback in its final moments: a long held breath, and then nothingness.
The second disc of the box set is composed of Succour outtakes, and if anything, these 12 tracks are even bleaker, as though Seefeel trying to see how severely it could smudge a shape and still be left with the outline of a song. These were not just abstract experiments: To hear Clifford tell it, the band was not happy at the time. Touring was taking its toll; “the whole thing just became a bit of a nightmare sometimes,” he told Perfect Sound Forever in 2003. “In retrospect, when I think about it, it comes through in the music. When I listen to Succour now, whenever I do, I almost can’t see where it came from. It’s strange.” When they embarked upon recording Succour, the band didn’t actively discuss what they wanted to make; they simply plugged in their gear and went in pursuit of something that “reflected whatever state of mind we were in at the time.” The most fascinating finds on this disc are alternate versions that do little more than change the playback speed. “Meol 2” takes Succour’s stately opener and pitches it up to a dulcet shimmer; “Meol 3,” even faster, is a taste of metal on a cold breeze. They do something similar with alternate takes from (Ch-Vox), their third album, on the box set’s third disc, running the tape first faster, then slower, like a feedback-besotted Goldilocks in search of the point at which the drone becomes just right.
(Ch-Vox), released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, was the band’s final album before calling it quits. (Clifford and Peacock eventually resurrected the group in 2010, bringing on new members Shigeru Ishihara, aka DJ Scotch Egg, and former Boredoms drummer E-da.) Rephlex is long gone, and the album has never been made available digitally, which makes its inclusion here, rounded out with half a dozen unreleased tracks, especially welcome. (Ch-Vox) sounds just as revelatory today as it did 25 years ago. It opens with “Utreat (Complete),” a sparser version of Succour’s standout track—an unconventional move, perhaps, but one that reduced the previous album’s already miserly palette even further. And that, across the next five tracks, is just what they do. Peacock’s voice is almost inaudible on this record, but you can feel its presence, or at least feel a presence, woven into the all-encompassing blanket of shadow. Album closer “Net” is about as dynamic as a house settling on an autumn night, but this third disc’s bonus tracks prove that Seefeel had still more nothingness left in them: Tape experiments play out like a tire slowly deflating, and the disc’s concluding track, “Ashime,” is just a loop of tolling bells, like an abandoned church after the apocalypse.
The box set’s fourth disc gathers a pair of Warp EPs, a couple of live tracks, a nice alternate mix of “Starethrough,” and an Autechre remix. EP cuts like “Spangle” and “Fracture” show the band at their most song-like—the former, in particular, casts a glance back on the dream-pop modes of Quique—while the percussive “Tied” is reminiscent of the industrial/techno/dub fusions that Clifford was pursuing in his side project Disjecta around the same time. (A couple of Rupt and Flex’s tracks sound almost like ambient dubstep, a genre that wouldn’t actually be invented for another decade or more.) This fourth disc feels slightly anti-climactic; after the long, gradual disappearing act that plays out across Succour and (Ch-Vox), to be returned to such forceful rhythms is jarring. But that hardly detracts from the abiding lesson of Rupt and Flex, which does the service of rescuing from obscurity two great, underappreciated albums precisely when they feel more relevant than ever. Ambient—as a genre, a practice, a philosophy—has been spun a million ways since then, and it is currently in the midst of what might be its most popular revival ever. But it has rarely been made to feel so expressive as in Seefeel’s hands—at once deeply abstracted and emotionally direct, desolate yet comforting. They were sound people, not song people, through and through, and Rupt and Flex tracks their determination to become one with a frequency.
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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. | 2021-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Warp | May 15, 2021 | 8.5 | 28c1712a-5879-4b35-bd44-7b102dda587e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Jessy Lanza's latest is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto, full of pent-up nervous energy set to release. | Jessy Lanza's latest is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto, full of pent-up nervous energy set to release. | Jessy Lanza: Oh No | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21802-oh-no/ | Oh No | In the last year, in and around Hamilton, Ontario, billboards have been posted around roads warning residents about the danger of the carcinogenic element radon in their homes. The billboard showed a hellish crack in the ground oozing a toxic green light. Jessy Lanza started seeing these advertisements right around the time she moved into her co-producer Jeremy Greenspan’s (of Junior Boys) home to write her sophomore album *Oh No. *She was also convinced right around the same time, that the air quality in their shared home was poisonous. In order to fight the incoming entropy, she surrounded herself with tropical plants to clean the air, and she completed an album that recycled the bad voodoo into something remarkably generative and self-assured.
She told the FADER that in general she’s “always thinking of ways to alleviate waking up every day and feeling a deep sense of dread.” Oh No in its own way is about harnessing anxiety and estrangement—imagining how all of her bundles of pent-up nervous energy could be harnessed into a productive flow. The music here is what happens when you turn that faucet on and let all the power just stream out. *Oh No *is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects. Or as Lindsay Zoladz once wrote, music in this mode is not exactly “sadness” but an expression of a “particular kind of strength—one that allows the contradictions, complexity, and emotional range of a lived experience.”
In the last three years since her debut, Pull My Hair Back, it's obvious by just listening to this album that both her singing and production efforts have matured exponentially. The songs are freewheeling collages of '90s R&B, Chicago footwork, acid house, disco, and wonky minimalist pop, using simple instrumentation to span multiple moods and BPMs. Meanwhile, Lanza’s singing works overtime, lifting boulders and throwing them across city blocks. Her lyrics are blunt and straightforward, but her singing allows her to imbue even the most casual and static of statements with a sense of devastating irony. For example in “Going Somewhere” she treats pandering and all its silent erosion with subtle shifts in phrasing, hiccuping in the middle of lines like “Say you love me” and “Baby I just want to impress you" as if she was almost giggling at the thought.
The exhortations of hurt in Lanza’s songs are not coming from the perspective of someone sulking over their wounds, but a place of triumphant reclamation. The production and her singing on this album reach full symmetry in the album’s centerpiece, “It Means I Love You.” It’s a frenetic blend of footwork surrounding a supine ballad of loss. It tastefully samples a tabla beat from a South African song, and swaddles this percussion in slashing synths. Her voice carries along with the instrumentation in a deathly shadow dance, mimicking its jerky changes in tempo and pitch effortlessly. It all stops just for a moment when she tells the listener, and the beloved, to look into her eyes, because that's when you it means she loves you. In that pocket of seconds, it feels like you’ve been turned into stone. | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | May 18, 2016 | 7.9 | 28c3258d-18a8-44e2-9faa-e999106f3a5c | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Christianity is the unwavering focus of Kanye’s gospel album, a richly produced but largely flawed record about one man’s love of the Lord (and himself). | Christianity is the unwavering focus of Kanye’s gospel album, a richly produced but largely flawed record about one man’s love of the Lord (and himself). | Kanye West: Jesus Is King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-jesus-is-king/ | Jesus Is King | In 1964, in the small, rural community of Longdale, Mississippi, a group of black worshippers at the Mount Zion Methodist Church were ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan. The attackers, some of whom were allegedly dressed in police uniform, broke one man’s jaw, viciously beat others, and ultimately burned the building to the ground. In the midst of the chaos, a woman named Beatrice Cole launched into a spoken prayer of despair: “Father, I stretch my hand to Thee, no other help I know. If Thou withdraw Thyself from me, where shall I go?” Improbably, the Klansmen retreated. Such was the power of the gospel.
“Father I Stretch My Hands To Thee,” an unsmiling Methodist hymn written by Isaac Watts in the early 1700s and turned into a rousing standard by black gospel singers over the next century, has since transcended the church pew. It is ostensibly a favorite of Kanye West, who sampled Pastor T.L. Barrett’s version on 2016’s The Life of Pablo, in a song that opens with a non sequitur about a bleached butthole. Three years and a religious rebirth later, the motif returns on West’s ninth album, Jesus Is King. “Follow God,” whose title is as literal as gospel can get, is organized around a sample of a burning vocal: “Father I stretch, stretch my hands to you,” goes the singer of an obscure 1974 track, Whole Truth’s “Can You Lose By Following God.”
Recorded (and, apparently, re-recorded) in the months after he announced a recommitment to Christianity, the album is West’s first offering in the wake of Sunday Service, the performance series he’s turned into something of a global church brand. As West sells it, figuratively and literally, Jesus Is King is a repudiation of his past sin, an absolution, a blank slate from which to spread the word of a very specific God, one whose blessings rain down on a cul-de-sac in Calabasas and a ranch in Jackson Hole. He’s always presented as religious—“Jesus Walks” imagined the club as a holy temple back in 2004; the Kardashians’ labored, glamorous Easter photos have become something of an annual tradition; Pablo was explicitly an album about faith—and yet the timing is notable.
By most accounts, fewer and fewer Americans identify as Christian, and a steadily growing number describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. The religious, meanwhile, identify as more devout. Consider the power of the evangelical right on the political landscape, into which West has inserted himself in recent years, causing some of the turmoil that presumably sent him seeking refuge in Christ this spring. (In a recent piece for Vibe, the writer Kiana Fitzgerald, who shares with West a bipolar diagnosis, put forth a moving theory connecting spiritual fervor with the experience of mania.)
Though Jesus Is King followed what is now a characteristically chaotic album rollout for West, the result is much more focused than his 2018 album ye. His mythical rap-camp format, popularized with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s Hawaii origin story, unifies the contributions of producers as disparate as Timbaland, Pi’erre Bourne, Boogz, and Evan Mast of Ratatat into 27 minutes of pleasant, if not entirely transgressive, textures. Some of the hallmarks of 20th-century gospel are evident, and warmly applied: the rise and fall of a formidable choir; the velvety growl of a Hammond organ; an undulating piano; rhythms that stretch through history and geography, all the way back to West Africa. It is a markedly more cohesive and enjoyable album than I believed him capable of creating at this juncture.
Jesus Is King nods to a handful of moments from the past 15 years of West’s career. The gospel-soul sample deployed on “God Is” harkens to his early days as an in-house producer at Roc-A-Fella. The maximalism of his leather-skirt phase is all over the expansive soundscape of “Use This Gospel,” whose Kenny G sax solo might be the 2019 equivalent of throwing Elton John onto a hook, just because you can. Elsewhere, the stark, confrontational attitude of 2013’s Yeezus is echoed in the battle drums that propel “Selah.” His raspy pleading on “Water” recalls the era of loosies that produced “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds.” Throughout, Auto-Tuned vocals draw a line from 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak all the way through to the anguish of Pablo.
Though Jesus Is King offers some resolution to the darkness hinted at on Pablo, it lacks the deeply human searching that made that album effective and moving. Life is not black and white, and neither is the experience of communing with any god. The most interesting moment, thematically, comes in the inherent tension between a reunited Clipse—Pusha-T and his older brother No Malice—on “Use This Gospel” for the first time in several years and at different stages of self-reflection. They connect the relatable universality of gospel as delivered on Jesus Is King by Fred Hammond, Ty Dolla $ign, and Ant Clemons, whose singing collectively comes closest to expressing the inspiring, sustaining gentleness of a warmly held faith. Think, for example, of the mountain to be traversed on “Climbing Higher Mountains” or the storm to be crossed on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Whereas much traditional and contemporary gospel invokes struggle, salvation, and transformation, Jesus Is King is largely focused on the ways in which religion has served Kanye himself. “How you got so much favor on your side?/‘Accept him as your lord and savior,’ I replied,” he raps on “On God.”
If West’s mission is, as he told Zane Lowe in an interview last week, to convert people to Christianity, he’ll likely have to search a little deeper. Beyond superficial gestures at biblical references and the capitalist leanings of American prosperity gospel, there is virtually no indication here as to what it means to follow Jesus. That is, other than to perhaps sit back and wait for Him to give you a Forbes cover and a billion-dollar sneaker brand. It’s hard to take West seriously when the obstacles he distresses over are Instagram likes and steep tax rates (the IRS, he complains, wants “half of the pie”). Rather than the grace, justice, and love that characterizes faith at its most transformative, West internalizes the religious entitlement that props up the wealthy and powerful, validating months of jokes about his ambitions as a megachurch pastor.
Revelations in recent weeks—that he admonished his wife for wearing tight clothes, asked collaborators to abstain from premarital sex, and began keeping a Christian scorecard that includes limiting himself to two curse words a day—suggest his interpretation of the gospel has been more dogmatic than faithful. Historically, it has been the vulnerability with which he expresses his own hypocrisies and moral failings that have made West a uniquely compelling artist; unfortunately, there is very little of that complexity on Jesus Is King. (An exception is “Follow God,” where an argument with his father prompts consideration, however shallow, of what it means to be “Christlike.”)
There is not enough depth here to distract from his politics, or to complicate them. It’s an album of slogans, dashed-off and too short, and as he continues to test the edge between spontaneous and half-finished, it gets harder to ignore the facts hovering outside the frame. His call for the abolishment of the 13th Amendment, for example, is in direct opposition to his avowed support of a racist, punitive, incarceration-obsessed president. Yes, the bassline on “Water” is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but a moment like this feels like a consolation, not a highlight. Kanye albums used to stretch our perspectives and imaginations. Now they illuminate the contours of his increasingly shrunken world. | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | October 29, 2019 | 7.2 | 28c42ec7-b67c-4232-bf67-b6630d5c2e3e | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Harnessing the allure of the occult and the power of self-help, the Los Angeles garage rockers break free from their roots and ascend to the realm of spiritual psych-jazz rockestra. | Harnessing the allure of the occult and the power of self-help, the Los Angeles garage rockers break free from their roots and ascend to the realm of spiritual psych-jazz rockestra. | Death Valley Girls: Under the Spell of Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-valley-girls-under-the-spell-of-joy/ | Under the Spell of Joy | Death Valley Girls ringleader Bonnie Bloomgarden has said that her band’s initial bucket-list goal was to meet Iggy Pop. On their first two albums—2016’s Glow in the Dark and 2018’s Darkness Rains—they set the bait, in the form of sassy, saxy garage rock that hit the sweet spot between the Stooges and Shangri-Las. The gambit worked: Not only has Iggy given the group his blessing (calling them “a gift to the world”), he starred in the video for their 2018 single “Disaster (Is What We’re After),” spending its entire four-minute runtime chowing down on a cheeseburger with pure Warholian ambivalence. But now that they’ve fulfilled their dream of meeting Iggy in the physical world, Death Valley Girls are challenging themselves to commune with him in the metaphysical one, by channelling the animalistic abandon and sax-blasted ferocity of the Stooges at their Fun House freakiest. Under the Spell of Joy is not a soundtrack for eating cheeseburgers—it’s music for barfing up the poison in your soul.
Death Valley Girls have always dabbled in the language and iconography of the occult—the title Under the Spell of Joy isn’t much of a thematic stretch for a group whose repertoire already includes “Love Spell”—but this time they dial down the camp to harness its sinister allure and ceremonial grandeur. They’ve also grown their flock of parishioners, adding Delta 72 frontman/Cat Power sideman Gregg Foreman on keyboards, album MVP Gabe Flores on sax, and a small cast of singing children to enhance the commune vibe. And yet, for all its black-mass organ drones, apocalyptic sax squeals, and demonic girl-group chants, Under the Spell of Joy is an album that radiates positivity, a psych-punk self-help manual that suggests finding happiness in a world of shit requires some black-magick intervention.
Recently, Bloomgarden has spent less time name-dropping musical heroes than philosophical ones, like psychedelic oracle Terence McKenna and occult historian Mitch Horowitz, and their liberation philosophies permeate her lyric sheet. She spends most of this record floating—up in clouds, through dreams, into alternate realms—as a means to free herself from the demands of everyday life and realize her true potential. “Highlight what you see, this is the dream,” she shouts atop the hypnotic bass throb and scrambled sax frequencies of “Hypnagogia,” before enshrining her self-affirmations as a daily ritual: “Rise, shine, and repeat!” The winsome Ronettes-via-“Sister Ray” romp “Bliss Out” is even more explicit in its live-for-the-moment directives: “Be here right now, ’cause we’re all gonna die,” Bloomgarden sings, leaving us with the reassurance that “we’re just traveling time/we’re all in the sky/so bliss out.”
But even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle. The title track’s heavy soul-punk stomp transforms its circular mantra—“under the spell of joy/under the spell of love”—into a war cry, while the “10 Day Miracle Challenge” reframes Horowitz’s namesake motivational strategy as a blistering garage-punk attack on complacency and insecurity. Under the Spell of Joy’s most effective advice arrives in the form of its mesmerizing centerpiece “The Universe,” where Death Valley Girls not only offer a design for life, but immediately put it into action. “Live freer than the freedom that you trust/Dream bigger than the things that lift you up,” Bloomgarden preaches, as the band break free from their garage-punk roots and ascend to the realm of spiritual psych-jazz rockestra atop a cloudbed of misty organ drones and saxophone smog. It’s quite the dramatic turn of events for a band whose concept of joy used to involve watching horror movies on TV and going to the disco. But Death Valley Girls are ready to forgo simple pleasures in pursuit of eternal ecstasy.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Suicide Squeeze | October 27, 2020 | 7.7 | 28c77c23-638d-44e8-9358-de68e16150ef | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Frederikke Hoffmeier’s voice is the thread that holds together her apocalyptic mood pieces, a cinematic take on noise that’s driven by dead-eyed focus. | Frederikke Hoffmeier’s voice is the thread that holds together her apocalyptic mood pieces, a cinematic take on noise that’s driven by dead-eyed focus. | Puce Mary: The Drought | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/puce-mary-the-drought/ | The Drought | “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief/And the dry stone no sound of water.... I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” These parched words, written almost 100 years ago by TS Eliot, in The Waste Land, could easily double as an epigraph for Puce Mary’s The Drought. Starting with the title, the record concerns itself with a primordial lack: a rotting, shuddering collapse both personal and global. Though rooted in industrial music and power electronics, The Drought sidesteps those genres’ stereotypical displays of machismo and fetishistic celebrations of strength. Instead it evokes an absence of power, the failure of industry. Puce Mary (aka Frederikke Hoffmeier) soundtracks a life spent vacantly shuttling between insidious digital isolation and alienated bodily contact, set against the background of a looming apocalypse.
The Drought is extremely cinematic. Many of the timbres will be familiar to fans of recent highbrow horror excursions like The Witch and Under the Skin. Pealing strings stretch across grey skies while thudding toms, roaring static, and claustrophobic low end seep into the mix. But there is no easily digestible three-act arc to be found here. Hoffmeier’s previous titles, Persona and The Spiral, are revealing. The Drought moves with a steady foreboding worthy of Bergman, obsessively tracing the same terrain over and over again. If The Spiral suggested a descent, The Drought traces a circle. The film it conjures is a slow-motion 360-degree pan across an ashen landscape.
Opening with a pair of desolate instrumentals, the album really comes alive on the third track. “To Possess Is to Be in Control” pivots on Hoffmeier’s laconic voice intoning a droning micro treatise on desire. It winds up with a vaporous cloud of haunting half melodies and floating whistles (catcalls?), and then she dives right in: “It makes me sick to open my body to you, to give you all I have. If I could possess you, like I possess my own body….” Her last line—“To possess is to be in control”—is answered with staccato bursts of noise, sharp as a knife’s blade. Hoffmeier seems to be tearing her way out of the track, writhing and snarling while simultaneously keeping her cool.
The theme picks up two songs later with the album’s centerpiece. “Red Desert” similarly presents alienation and dread in the midst of code-red atmospherics. Air-raid sirens hover while Hoffmeier sighs, “I find myself feeling like decades have passed. I’m an old woman now, and I have lost my attraction. I’m tortured by a feeling of drowning under you… and I feel desperate.” So far, so literal, but just after the one-minute mark, a mournful organ gently announces itself, sounding like a not-too-distant cousin to Eno’s “The Big Ship.” In an album almost completely devoid of traditional musical gestures, this intrusion gives The Drought a much-needed dose of the holy.
But having arrived at such an affecting moment, Hoffmeier seems reluctant to let it breathe. It’s too bad, because while the non-vocal tracks are uniformly impressive and powerful, they lag slightly behind. “Fragments of a Lily” churns like a gabber track with food poisoning. “Coagulate” shimmers and radiates with the cold light of black metal, and “Slouching Uphill” closes the album on an escalated note, teetering on the brink of violence. But it’s the voice that brings The Drought together, giving the album a sense of movement and purpose beyond a set of well-executed mood pieces. As it is, the record is thematically unified and executed with a steady, unwavering hand, but it also feels like a concept album waiting to happen. Over only a few years, Puce Mary has emerged as one of the most exciting and promising voices in noise music. The Drought’s glacial intensity and dead-eyed focus force you to approach it on its own terms, but one senses that Hoffmeier is just getting started. | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | October 13, 2018 | 7.2 | 28cb3a5f-e595-433a-8722-0bdf1bde314a | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Drawing inspiration from narrative thrust of video-game soundtracks and sound design of trap and trance, the London producer revels in melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss. | Drawing inspiration from narrative thrust of video-game soundtracks and sound design of trap and trance, the London producer revels in melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss. | Dark0: Eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dark0-eternity/ | Eternity | Video-game soundtracks have often drawn upon club music for inspiration: Just think of the drum’n’bass of Soichi Terada’s music for Ape Escape, the hard techno of the PlayStation Ghost in the Shell game, even the straight-up proto-grime in an X-Men game for the Sega Genesis. In the case of London producer Dark0, the inspiration runs in the other direction. His new album Eternity feels as much like the accompaniment to imagined landscapes as the soundtrack to a long night in a warehouse.
Dark0 (Davor Bokhari) is one of the few non-Swedes signed to Stockholm’s Year0001—home to Yung Lean, Drain Gang, and Viagra Boys—but he sounds right at home on the label. Though it is steeped in the sad-boy aesthetic of Yung Lean and his crew, the label has recently expanded into a wide range of electronic subgenres, particularly with last year’s Rift ONE compilation, that overlaps with Dark0’s own work. Since 2013, his releases have blended grime, trap, and club music with crystalline, cinematic sound design. He cites game scores as a touchstone for his music—the producer once recounted an album release party at which attendees played Mortal Kombat X on a projector while moshing and dancing to his music.
Eternity isn’t the soundtrack to a video game, but it feels like one. These are almost story songs, but the tale is told through an EDM structure of builds and drops, rising peaks followed by comedown periods and chilled-out piano lines. Dark0 draws on the melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss of trance music, which gives a sense of warmth to a sound that might otherwise be cold or robotic. Tender and textured feminine voices are buried under layers of filters and effects, like a distant memory trapped in ice. More than clear voices, Dark0 prefers ASMR choruses on tracks like “zeroGen,” or the shrill, nightcore chipmunk tones of the uncanny R&B ballad “Wait for Me.”
Though he often plays with ambient textures, slower tempos, and abstracted sound effects, Dark0’s music celebrates the anthemic and over-the-top properties of mainstream club and rave styles—big beats, intense drops, and grinding trap drums—but in a somewhat warped form. If James Ferraro or Lorenzo Senni made more accessible club bangers, it might sound a little like the trance-trap fusion of “infinite edge.” The opening title track pairs Rustie-like trap bombast and grime wobbles with a distant Auto-Tuned voice, starting off dark and menacing before fading into a contemplative haze. “Shining Star” pitch bends and shifts like a gentle ray of light before a hardstyle beat breaks through.
Clean, shining piano keys undergird most of the album, grounding its ethereal synths with acoustic resonance. The combination of uplifting keyboard work, ambient soundscapes, and unabashed club textures sometimes suggests a modern reboot of pre-waiting room Moby albums like Everything Is Wrong—the intense piano loop of “Promise” recalls that album’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters,” immortalized as the needle-drop that plays over Al Pacino’s worn-out mug at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. The emotions have a heart-on-their-sleeve intensity that’s more in line with pop , but Dark0 brings an almost compositional precision to his mix of downtempo textures and high-intensity club music—the piano-driven "Nova Bridge" is straight out of a JRPG. There’s as much space for peace and solace as there is for kinetic energy and high BPMs, a reflective cut scene for every frenetic battle. Dark0 places special emphasis on the more fragile parts of songs, the quiet intros and outros that force you to turn the headphones up, making you work to realize their complexity. Sometimes his sounds are just a gentle wave crashing in and out of your speakers, like the disintegrated pulses of “Born From Decay.”
Thanks to the seamlessness with which streaming services are integrated into game consoles, it’s now relatively easy to mute in-game music and replace it with a soundtrack of your own curation—sometimes a necessity when you’re going mad hearing the same intense orchestral cue over and over during a boss fight. Dark0’s music wouldn’t exist if he’d turned down the sound of the games he grew up on, but Eternity is also perfect for that purpose; this is an album in search of images, one that begs to be played over snowy mountain peaks and stunning pixelated vistas. Eternity feels like the ideal experience of losing yourself in a video game: euphoric, enrapturing, and maybe a little overwhelming, as the world around you melts away and all that’s left is sensation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | Year0001 | June 8, 2021 | 7 | 28cfd99a-9a3d-4636-b9ec-5171e3f55c16 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Bloc Party frontman attempts a blazing indictment of institutional racism on his latest solo effort, but too often reaches for stock characters and sloganeering. | The Bloc Party frontman attempts a blazing indictment of institutional racism on his latest solo effort, but too often reaches for stock characters and sloganeering. | Kele: 2042 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kele-2042/ | 2042 | My favorite song Kele Okereke has ever written—hell, one of my favorite songs ever written, period—is Bloc Party’s “I Still Remember.” The swooning electric guitars rendered the private, quiet pain of gay adolescent yearning on the scale of a fists-in-the-air epic, tracing every incandescent high and bitter low. The song was a bold move in 2007, when the indie rock scene was even more homogeneous than it is now, and it endures over a decade later, having been embraced by new generations of young queer people.
As with so many other songs in Okereke’s catalogue, “I Still Remember” proves his gift for subtle, powerful songwriting about subjects as personal as they are political. But the clunky conceptual scaffolding of 2042 often obscures this gift from view. Like slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain, 2042 announces itself as a blazing indictment of institutional racism in the United Kingdom. slowthai’s record succeeded largely on the strength of his storytelling, which gave listeners intimate, ground-level glimpses of life under white supremacy. Okereke reaches instead, too often, for stock characters and statistics, painting a vivid picture of racist oppression while neglecting to flesh out the people who live under that oppression.
On “St Kaepernick Wept,” for instance, Okereke relates the story of a man shot to death by police while his children watched, and then concludes with the blunt clunker of a lyric, “He was just another hand-out for welfare/Headed to the prison-industrial complex.” It’s a strange compulsion that recurs throughout the record, Okereke gesturing broadly at sociological concepts while flinching away from smaller human stories. His stated goal, granted, is nothing less than sweeping, structural change—“Let England burn,” he sings, “so we can start again”—but the broad strokes of his lyrical approach often divest his subjects of distinctions.
The stronger moments of 2042 are undercut, too, by jarring sequencing. In the record’s first half, listeners are rushed from earnest hagiography (“St Kaepernick”) to satire (“Guava Rubicon”) to “My Business,” a rap song with all the edge of the antagonist’s big moment in a Disney Channel musical. Past the halfway point, the record is a smoother listen—more sonically cohesive, more given to the kinds of sweet, subtle love songs that Okereke perfected on his last solo outing, Fatherland. “Natural Hair” is particularly lovely, a lilting flirtation between two black boys, as is “Back Burner,” which traces a love story that feels lived-in, tested by conflict and strengthened by years of togetherness: “No, I don’t fuck with The Smiths, but to The Cure I can get down.”
There’s a speed-bump in this back half, though, which is particularly emblematic of the problems that plague this album. After the sleek, sexy slow burn of “Catching Feelings,” Okereke inserts “A Day of National Shame (Interlude),” an excerpt of British Member of Parliament David Lammy’s blistering indictment of the wrongful deportation of legal Caribbean immigrants. He backs Lammy’s speech with an echoing guitar track, calm and spacey and deeply tonally inappropriate. He follows it with “Ocean View,” a featherlight waltz without any real connection to the ideas Lammy advanced. It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring. | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | KOLA | November 21, 2019 | 6.1 | 28cff589-f2bb-49b0-9b67-3af19a283ee6 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
They were a cult band from Wisconsin in the ’80s who hit it big in the ’90s with their self-titled debut of brash, devil-eyed songs that hummed with sex, violence, and perverted religiosity. | They were a cult band from Wisconsin in the ’80s who hit it big in the ’90s with their self-titled debut of brash, devil-eyed songs that hummed with sex, violence, and perverted religiosity. | Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23130-violent-femmes/ | Violent Femmes | Billie Jo Campbell was discovered at age 3 while walking down a street in Los Angeles with her mother. A photographer approached, told the mother that Billie Jo was adorable, and asked if she wouldn’t mind her daughter appearing in a photo shoot at a house in Laurel Canyon. The mother—“a free spirit,” Billie Jo explained—promptly set up an appointment. They later learned that the shoot was for the cover of an album by an obscure acoustic-punk trio from Milwaukee about to release their debut. In the photo, barefoot Billie Jo wears a cute white dress and strains to peer inside a darkened house through a window. She had no idea that this was an apt metaphor for the band’s songs, which capture that precise moment when childhood innocence is corrupted by the obsessions of the adult world—sex, violence, perverted religiosity, and omnipresent death.
Years later, when Billie Jo was a teenager in the ’90s, she realized that the album was pretty momentous. “This was my bragging point,” she recalled in 2007. “I’d be at parties, and if the girls in the dorm knew you were trying to meet cute boys, they’d tell them I am on the cover.”
What’s amazing about this story isn’t just that Billie Jo Campbell was still recognized, well into her college years, as the kid on the cover of the Violent Femmes’ self-titled 1983 LP. It’s that people knew what the cover even looked like. “I think the majority of people found out about our music because somebody had made a tape and played it at a party. I’ve heard that so many times,” said Violent Femmes’ singer-songwriter Gordon Gano in a 2016 interview, still cherubic even in his early 50s. “A few years ago, I had somebody that was a big fan say, ‘What does your album cover look like? I’ve never seen it because it’s always been on a tape that somebody made.’”
Violent Femmes are perhaps the greatest mixtape band of its era—they were to Maxell what Drake now is to Spotify playlists. Long after the Femmes’ initial wave of underground fame came and went in the mid-’80s, choice cuts from their first album kept popping up on countless tapes dispensed throughout teenage suburbia. For those that encountered the Femmes in this manner, the band’s songs were akin to outsider art—found musical data that offered bracingly unfiltered takes on lust and alienation and the yearning to belong, written on an acoustic guitar by a misfit kid who sang in an untrained pubescent whine. Mixtapes gave Violent Femmes renewed life divorced from the context of their own up-and-down career, infusing songs from their first and most successful record with the adolescent angst of each subsequent generation of middle-schoolers in search of a spokesman.
This is the art of the mixtape, finding songs that will expose your innermost self to whoever is receiving the tape. And Violent Femmes songs were catchy and simple enough to work especially well as plainspoken musical messages. If you wanted a killer kick-off for your “I’m an Edgy Outsider and Want to Be Appreciated As Such” mix—one of the most popular mixtape genres—a common choice was “Blister in the Sun,” in which Gano snakes allusions to heroin and premature ejaculation behind Brian Ritchie’s relentlessly busy bass line, like a shoplifter stuffing cigarettes down the front of his jeans. And the perfect closer for that tape would inevitably be “Add It Up,” a relentless rant that argues against involuntary celibacy on the grounds that it can make you homicidal. (“Gone Daddy Gone” also worked in this slot, particularly if the tape had an “all marimbas” theme.)
The other most popular mixtape genre was “I’m Into You and This Is My Way of Showing It,” and Violent Femmes delivered there as well. Gano wrote the most romantic song on Violent Femmes, “Good Feeling,” when he was just 15. An affectingly pure expression of fairy-tale love, “Good Feeling” is a rare moment of unfettered tenderness on an otherwise brash record, revealing the nice young man behind the bravado who was raised by a Baptist minister and a theater actress. Gano actually wrote a collection of gospel songs around the same time as Violent Femmes, but Ritchie, an atheist, refused to record them. He and excitable stand-up drummer Victor DeLorenzo—who was the oldest member by several years—were more comfortable with the nervy “Please Do Not Go,” in which Gano pledges to “patiently pray, pray, pray, pray, pray” for sex rather than salvation.
Gano and Ritchie later admitted that the members of Violent Femmes had virtually nothing in common except for music. But in the beginning, at least, that was enough to bond them together, because nobody else in their hometown of Milwaukee, Wis. took Violent Femmes seriously. The affectations that later endeared them to fans —the ramshackle instrumentation, the spitefully witty lyrics, Gano’s habit of wearing a bathrobe in public—stigmatized the Femmes in the Milwaukee club scene. They were forced to busk in the street with acoustic instruments because nobody would book them.
According to legend, Violent Femmes were “discovered” in 1981 by James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders, who invited them to open for his band during a performance at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theatre after seeing them busk outside the venue. Gano had just graduated from high school, and it was rare of the Femmes to perform indoors on an actual stage.
This story became an oft-repeated talking point in press releases after the Femmes became semi-famous in the American indie underground. But as the band members themselves were quick to point out, Violent Femmes were hardly set up for a professional career after that minor acknowledgment. As always, they were left to fend for themselves, eventually borrowing $10,000 from DeLorenzo’s father to fund recording sessions at a studio in Lake Geneva, about 50 miles southwest of Milwaukee. Producer Mark Van Hecke later described the studio as being “in a state of collapse. You’d go into the studio and there would be this equipment, and the next day you go in there’s a piece missing because it got repossessed.” Van Hecke’s intention was to give Violent Femmes a classic Sun Sessions sound, though this naturalistic approach required lots of takes, as the band tended to move around a lot while playing. For Van Hecke, working with the Femmes was an act of faith—he had previously tried to shop a three-song demo to a few dozen record labels in New York and Los Angeles, and all of them said no. “A lot of people thought I was nuts and this was shit. I knew it wasn’t,” he said later.
Nevertheless, Violent Femmes were oddly confident in themselves. “When we made the first album, we thought it was destined to be considered a masterpiece,” Ritchie claimed in 2015. The first prominent person to agree that Violent Femmes were destined for greatness was New York Times music critic Robert Palmer, whose rave review of two performances opening for Richard Hell at the Bottom Line and CBGB in 1982 was instrumental in getting the Femmes a deal with Slash Records.
Palmer, a blues scholar who had just published the definitive history *Deep Blues *the previous year, compared Gano to his most obvious antecedents, Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. But Palmer also heard a new strain of Americana in Violent Femmes’ revved-up, snotty confessionals, likening songs to “the discursive, rambling structures of folk-era Dylan.” In a subsequent review of Violent Femmes’ second album, 1984’s overtly spiritual Hallowed Ground, Palmer detected “a subterranean mother lode of apocalyptic religion, murder, and madness that has lurked just under the surface of hillbilly music and blues since the 19th century” in the Femmes’ knowingly primitive music. Perhaps Palmer was also thinking of Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” which lifts a verse from Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want To Make Love To You,” or the teenage murder ballad “To The Kill,” in which Gano fantasizes about vengefully hunting down his ex in Chicago, like so many Delta musicians decades earlier.
Flash forward to the ’90s, and Palmer’s conflation of Gano’s songs with the timeless quality of the blues felt truer than ever, even as Violent Femmes also seemed more contemporary than ever. In the ’80s, Violent Femmes were strictly an underground phenomenon; a slow but steady seller, the self-titled debut finally went platinum in February of 1991, though it didn’t actually crack the Billboard 200 chart until later that year. By then, Violent Femmes had achieved a measure of mainstream recognition thanks to the alt-rock explosion. They became a fixture of nostalgic movie soundtracks—Ethan Hawke sang “Add It Up” to needle Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, and Minnie Driver blasted “Blister In The Sun” on the hip underground radio show that John Cusack obsesses over in Grosse Pointe Blank. Violent Femmes even appeared in an episode of “Sabrina The Teenage Witch”—mean girl Libby casts a spell on Gano, making him serenade her with “Please Do Not Go” while Sabrina and her aunts do an awkward skank.
Violent Femmes’ influence was now discernible in the legion of underground rockers who had codified Gano's quirky vocal style into what is now commonly recognized as the "indie guy" voice. In years to come, Gano’s vocals—recently described by author J.K. Rowling as sounding “like a bee in a plastic cup”—would echo in Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Mangum, Colin Meloy, Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and countless less heralded reedy young men.
Violent Femmes remain a band out of time. They are rarely mentioned with the “canon” bands of ’80s American post-punk—lacking the sales and accolades of R.E.M., the Replacements, and the Pixies, the Femmes don’t signify an era so much as a time of life. Violent Femmes is children’s music for teenagers—uber-elementary sing-alongs that have their time and place, and then are set aside as facile once they’re outgrown.
But Violent Femmes deserves better. If the blues survived because of the oral tradition of passing down songs from one singer to another, Violent Femmes endured because the tunes were shared via word of mouth at dorm parties and high school keggers. (Even the girl on the cover learned about Violent Femmes that way.) And don’t discount those precious mixtapes, a primitive form of social media that worked exponentially slower than the internet but were ultimately no less effective at creating a lasting legacy.
For young people growing up in the internet age, Violent Femmes is part of a shared language. In 2013, after a period of estrangement marked by lawsuits and public in-fighting, Violent Femmes were persuaded to reunite for a performance at Coachella. “As soon as we started out the set with ‘Blister in the Sun,’ when that riff hit, it was like a swarm of insects coming towards our stage. They all started running from the other stages,” Ritchie recalled. All these years later, whenever teenagers listen to songs from Violent Femmes, they also hear themselves. | 2017-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slash | May 21, 2017 | 9.1 | 28dfffb8-209f-4af6-bae5-6a60391b0ff7 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The second full-length from this noisy Bristol duo is more accessible than their first but sacrifices none of that record's visceral power. | The second full-length from this noisy Bristol duo is more accessible than their first but sacrifices none of that record's visceral power. | Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13617-tarot-sport/ | Tarot Sport | Like any noise group, Fuck Buttons rely on a certain amount of vulgarity and aggression. While they've always possessed a knack for melody that has, for their genre, provided their music with an accessible edge, listeners unaccustomed to blood-curdling screams and metal-scraping drones have had their work cut out for them when searching for the more delicate moments that helped make last year's Street Horrrsing such a stunning listen.
Tarot Sport represents a subtler, more mature approach to songwriting and a sharpening of their craft. But moreso, it marks a comprehensive stylistic shift for the duo's sound, from experimental noise with a buried pop sensibility to a sort of modernized electronic take on classic post-rock structures. And impressively, they've made these changes without sacrificing any of the genre-straddling adventurousness that made them intriguing in the first place.
Perhaps the best way to think about their transformation is to consider how the new material relates to post-rock groups like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The band has always had an inclination toward sweeping epics (see: "Sweet Love for Planet Earth"), but instead of using scale as a canvas for brutality/delicacy contrasts, here they repurpose the post-rock format as a digital soundscape. Gone are the shrieks and wailing guitar chords that populated Street Horrrsing; instead these songs are built almost wholly with synth and keyboard textures that originate in dance music.
Aiding the shift is producer Andrew Weatherall, who has a long history of infusing rock with dancefloor bounce and drawing the best from his groups. (His helming of Primal Scream's epochal Screamadelica and his remix work with My Bloody Valentine are prime examples.) From the chugging drumbeat of opener "Surf Solar" to the chipped-up electro backdrop of finale "Flight of the Feathered Serpent", the dynamics and textures of techno are the foundation of the record, making a direct link between Tarot and Weatherall's earlier boundary-defying productions.
All of which is prologue to Tarot Sport's actual songs, which by and large are pretty freaking incredible. There's a cinematic, storytelling quality to the music, and the climactic builds of longer pieces such as "The Lisbon Maru"-- with its militaristic drumbeat and huge synth melodies-- conjure the excitement of an oversized movie sequence. "Surf Solar", extended from the clipped-length radio edit that emerged online last month, is anxious and menacing by comparison but hits those notes without the histrionics of Fuck Buttons' previous work-- the band seems just too confident here to rely on screeches to get its point across.
Fuck Buttons also master shorter pieces that shift and redirect the record's momentum. Close in spirit to the tribal romp of "Ribs Out" from Street Horrrsing-- but ultimately more listenable and imaginative-- "Rough Steez" envisions industrial techno as locomotive skronk. And "Phantom Limb" recalls genre-benders like Liquid Liquid and Gang Gang Dance with its cavernous atmosphere and snaky, complex arrangement. When the band returns to widescreen emotiveness for the triumphant closer "Flight of the Feathered Serpent", it feels like a victory lap-- the capper on a record that is a hell of a lot easier to like than even fans of Street Horrrsin**g would have expected. That was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album-- and one of the best of this already fruitful year. | 2009-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ATP | October 23, 2009 | 9 | 28e34bb5-6b56-4d7e-9407-1deadedba913 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg's sophomore album was recorded in Omaha with Bright Eyes' Mike Mogis and features guest spots from Conor Oberst and the Felice Brothers. | The Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg's sophomore album was recorded in Omaha with Bright Eyes' Mike Mogis and features guest spots from Conor Oberst and the Felice Brothers. | First Aid Kit: The Lion's Roar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16205-the-lions-roar/ | The Lion's Roar | First Aid Kit is two sisters, Swedish, last name Söderberg. Klara is younger and shorter, the one with the dark bangs cut right across her heavy eyes, who sings with a crooked underbite that she could probably never set straight without wrecking the lovely specificity of her voice, the slight lisp of it, her languid vowels. Johanna, the older one, about whom everything is long (her limbs, her blondish mane), mostly sings harmony; her voice is darker and heavier and comes from somewhere different from her sister's. Klara seems to coax hers out from just under her tongue, while Johanna, her eyes growing wide and distant whenever she has some bars to herself, often appears to be channeling something far beyond her body, beyond the room, beyond even the sky.
Last year, First Aid Kit went to Omaha make their second album, The Lion's Roar, with Mike Mogis, a producer and also a member of Bright Eyes, perhaps the first band that Klara loved. Their debut, 2010's The Big Black and the Blue, released when the sisters were just 17 and 19, was so striking-- with their otherworldly, interlocking voices and uncanny understanding of imagined adult pains-- that the tracks' demo-grade quality was easily overlooked. This time, though, they have all of Mogis' bells and whistles at their disposal: his way of almost imperceptibly coaxing a song into full bloom, his feel for when to gussy-up and when to strip away, but also, yes, actual bells and whistles, or at least one deeply eerie flute tone that lingers throughout, floating in and out of scenes like a sly specter. And a new clutch of friends appears for the closing track, "King of the World", a song so jumpy and earnest and ecstatically terrified by the unknowable future that Conor Oberst seems to have had no choice but to consummate the clear homage to the best of his mid-2000s output by making an appearance himself, along with the Felice Brothers, whose showing as a wheezy, rattletrap backing band nearly redeems their dismal 2011 album, Celebration Florida.
For the sisters' part, their voices are steadier now, and richer, as if they were told enough times how good they are that they're finally resigned to believing it. (It's a shame, then, that Mogis can get a bit heavy-handed with the reverb-- their nakedly mic'd voices are almost always more stunning.) The choruses are big and chewy, even on the most melancholy tracks-- "Blue" is perhaps one of the more charming songs ever involving the phrase "now you're just a shell of your former youth" and would be even without the twinkly glockenspiel and bumpy little bassline. Thanks to Mogis, The Lion's Roar would sound like a very good album even if it wasn’t one-- but likewise would be stunning even if the band had been left to its own devices.
And yes, that's very likely "Blue" as a Joni Mitchell allusion, though the rambling, scatter-pitched confession of "New Year's Eve" may be more of a direct tribute. First Aid Kit have this guileless way of making their influences clear, as if offering up the source code of their art to the world, not as proof of anything but in a spirit of communion-- perhaps most specifically making the offering to girls just a few years behind them, sitting under the grip of some pair of huge headphones in their childhood bedrooms, hearing the Söderberg sisters' words and voices for the first time, feeling something shift inside them, wondering where this beautiful thing came from, and finding clues there even before they know it.
"Emmylou", maybe the best song on the album, and its second single, does this most deftly and most directly. "I'll be your Emmylou, and I'll be your June/ If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," the chorus blurts over bashful drums and wry pedal steel, the sisters shaking out the one-syllable names with giddy relish. Do you know any other song involving young women trying to romance would-be beaus with sweet sweet voices and Americana trivia? "I'm not asking much of you/ Just sing, little darlin', sing with me," the chorus continues, but if all they really wanna do is croon a few numbers, I'll eat my Nudie suit.
Klara and Johanna say they wrote the song before they'd set foot in America. As if to make up for lost time, last year, when they finally came over to the States, they went to California, out to Joshua Tree. It was the birthday of Gram Parsons, who would have been 65 if he hadn't died there when he was 26. They made the music video for "Emmylou" there, wearing caftans and drifting side by side through the scrubby desert like characters in a psychedelic Aaron Sorkin drama. They burn incense at a cross made of colored stones, an ad hoc tribute to the more official ad hoc tribute kept up for Parsons there at the park; they wave the smoke with their small hands; they throw out their arms and let their sleeves flutter out in the wind.
I wonder what they thought about when they were out there-- if they felt new, if they felt homesick, if they were somehow disappointed, despite everything, to not see Gram himself wandering over the hills. I wonder if they thought about how they will most likely outlive him, how one day they will have been making music longer than he was even alive, how one day they will outgrow their caftans and their crosses, how the most beautiful songs they're ever going to write are still waiting for them out there in the future somewhere. | 2012-01-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-01-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Wichita | January 24, 2012 | 7.6 | 28e34e70-b0e5-4757-9ffe-22d882627d7b | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
Trouble Maker is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets. The Bay Area group examines contemporary political turmoil with a quick, scratchy sound that honors their punk past. | Trouble Maker is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets. The Bay Area group examines contemporary political turmoil with a quick, scratchy sound that honors their punk past. | Rancid: Trouble Maker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rancid-trouble-maker/ | Trouble Maker | Some artists forge their moral compasses through imitation and collaboration; others prefer careful study, or prolonged retreats. And then there’s Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, whose rise to fame entailed 20 years of getting his ass kicked: by addiction, by divorce. But Armstrong has been most notoriously pummeled by the Gilman gutter-punks who fostered his metamorphosis from a street kid, to the ska-core luminaries Operation Ivy, to the leader of Rancid, which rose from the ashes of its predecessor to become of the most successful wrecking crews in the recent memory. Just like Rancid’s Bay Area peers Green Day, Armstrong and company’s mainstream ascent drew ire from their DIY compatriots. “Ever since I started playing punk rock, people have said major labels are shit,” Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1995, a month or so after the band released their LP ...And Out Come the Wolves, “but I have to be shown… I gotta have my ass kicked before I’m gonna really believe any of that.”
Rancid spent the next eight years heeding that warning, rejecting lucrative deals from a slew of big-shot suitors (including Madonna, whose label Maverick Records aggressively courted the band). Then, at the height of Rancid’s appeal in the early 2000s, Armstrong got another ass-kicking when listeners learned that Warner Brothers–gasp!–would be distributing the band’s 2003 album Indestructible. The label’s attempts to obscure their involvement with the LP through the omission of their logo on the album’s packaging and liner notes only amplified Rancid’s perceived betrayal. In time, the poisoned-well narrative overpowered the music itself, even as the band returned to their previously-held, independently-focused distribution approach. Though Rancid’s subsequent work—2009’s Let the Dominoes Fall, 2014’s ...Honor Is All We Know—offered reliable doses of their usual three-chord fury, the thrill had long since vanished. And like it or not, narrative is everything for a punk band.
Armstrong et al can’t turn back the clock and morph into crusty ruffians again. What they can do is honor their past, which brings us to their ninth full-length, Trouble Maker. It’s no coincidence that the LP’s cover art resurrects the stamped-on logo that graced their eponymous 1993 debut: the 17-track effort finds the band examining contemporary political turmoil–blue-collar identity crises, tense demonstrations, the ever-present shadow of the Man– through the prism of their rebellious past, a little more wizened but just as rambunctious as ever. There are no stylistic experiments, no ballads, no bullshit. Instead, Rancid craft a tableau of working-class grit with quick, scratchy strokes: a whirlwind tour of turbulent political rallies and smoke-enshrouded pool halls, factories, and back alleys.
The band’s arrangements remain ephemeral and formulaic as ever. Mumbled verses? Check. Barked choruses? Check. Breakneck solos, courtesy of Lars Erik Frederiksen? Check. But here, Rancid’s first-thought-best-thought palette belies a deeper line of reasoning: a conscious ploy for permanence, timelessness. “Telegraph Avenue” repurposes “Ring of Fire”’s signature chord progression into a heartland-tinged backdrop for Armstrong’s ode to the Bay Area protester, a modern American archetype: “The ones who stand for freedom of speech/Well, this one goes out to you/Well, I can still hear your voice/On Telegraph Avenue.” Lead single “Ghost of a Chance” and the turbocharged “Make It Out Alive” recast the frontman as a street-punk sage. On the former, he peddles the following pep talk with a sugary hit of cynicism: “Well, maybe someday we’ll get a new start/You never grow too old to dream.” So convincing is Armstrong’s barfly-guru approach—all hoarse sing-a-longs, grizzled half-raps, and punchy, prolonged “hey”s and “woah”s—that you almost forget he willingly gave a multinational shampoo company the go-ahead to use his music in that commercial.
About two and a half decades after their inception, Rancid are, for all intents and purposes, a legacy band. It’s a distinction they never asked for, but one they were nonetheless destined to attain, given Operation Ivy’s cult status and the band’s collective ear for tuneful-if-rugged rock hooks. (Let’s not forget that Armstrong co-wrote P!nk’s 2003 hit “Trouble.”) Rancid’s anti-establishment days may be a figment of the past, but the band’s spirit remains inextinguishable; they’ve just had problems harnessing and illustrating it. While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled. This is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets, and for diehards, that’s more than enough. | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | June 16, 2017 | 7.3 | 28e464ab-a6fc-4d8c-a09f-6a6789bf562b | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Two new tapes, one recorded a year ago and one laid down more recently, highlight Chief Keef's move from street-rap hitmaker to something far stranger. | Two new tapes, one recorded a year ago and one laid down more recently, highlight Chief Keef's move from street-rap hitmaker to something far stranger. | Chief Keef / Gucci Mane: Back From the Dead 2/Big Gucci Sosa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20027-chief-keef-gucci-mane-back-from-the-dead-2big-gucci-sosa/ | Back From the Dead 2/Big Gucci Sosa | Listening now to Finally Rich, Chief Keef’s capstone 2012 release and only album with Interscope, it’s striking how easily the hits seemed to come to the then–17-year-old star. Even its unheralded album tracks hit a sweet spot of purposeful insouciance that promised a career in the spotlight. With songs selected and sequenced largely by Young Chop, Finally Rich is a creative success (if only a modest commercial one) because it sells Chief Keef as a hitmaker. In the pre-Internet industry, perhaps that's just what he would be. But today his interests lie elsewhere, and his path since has been a defiant refutation of any direction but his own.
To make a case for Chief Keef’s more recent music is to wander into a catch–22. Though short, defensive explanations ("he’s got good hooks," "it’s just turn-up music") are tempting, they undersell his breadth; any lengthy defense is dismissed out of hand for overthinking music unworthy of the attention. But Chief Keef has not only sustained creatively in the waning spotlight of his initial breakthrough, he’s become one of the more original young voices in hip-hop. Over the course of the past two years, his music has been in a state of continual reinvention. His latest tape, Back From the Dead 2, is a bold step in a dark new direction. Largely self-produced, it again redefines his sound, pushes his rapping to the foreground, and makes his older records—including the recent Big Gucci Sosa, much of which was recorded more than a year ago—seem quaint.
Though reminiscent of his earlier rap style, Big Gucci Sosa is a mediocre record, and shows the futility of pining for Chief Keef’s supposed golden era of 2012. Admittedly, his biggest records from this time had an immediacy that trumped everything else out there. But Big Gucci Sosa lacks the songwriting of peaks like "Love Sosa", parachuting Keef verses into the one-dimensional pulp-gangster formula that’s been Gucci Mane’s collaborative stock in trade since 2011. Not that Keef is the album’s weak link. On standout "Darker" (which has been in circulation for at least a year), Keef completely washes his mentor.
He stands out again on "Paper", the only song on both Big Gucci Sosa and Back From the Dead 2, if only for a callback to Lil Wayne’s infamous "lasagna" lyric (this one’s about spaghetti). Thankfully, it’s the only pro forma trap record on the latter tape. Sixteen of BFTD2’s 20 tracks are produced by Chief Keef himself. For his first steps into rapper-producer territory, he shows promise—though it’s tough to imagine most of these beats working outside the context of a Chief Keef album, as they are primed to frame his vocals. He’s cultivated a consistent sound; each beat is of-a-piece, with brooding synthesized string and chorale patches moving in beefy quarter notes to conjure a grim yet electric atmosphere. Where the production on 2013's Almighty So had the pace and bleary color of city lights sliding up a rain-drenched windshield, Back From the Dead 2 prowls through back alleys, preferring gritty textures and coiled energy.
In jazz improvisation, there’s a saying that if you screw up, make sure to do it loud—a confident mistake isn’t really a mistake at all. In keeping with this notion, Keef’s production has an amateurism-as-aesthetic element not unlike late ‘90s Swizz Beatz records. The seams show—cymbals take a full beat to decay, waveforms distort, and though he conveys a range of moods, he doesn’t yet have the facility for much rhythmic variation. But Keef’s commitment to the beats’ functional effect blurs the line between "mistake" and mastery—whether through misunderstanding, willful mutation, or both, there’s a savviness and sophistication to the album’s sound. Like many aspects of his musical approach, his conviction makes the unconventional connect.
The main sonic shift from his recent work to this tape is rhythmic. Through loosies released to iTunes and YouTube, Keef’s 2014 output varied from the sudden roller coaster effects of the low-pass filter ("Gucci Gang", "Sosa Style") to the intricate, nimble rhythms of 12hunna’s production ("Hundreds", "Make It Count"). On Back From the Dead 2, tracks like "Whole Crowd" and "Wheres Waldo" seem to float forward, while more groove-driven records like "Farm", "Sets", and “Wayne” are relentless, creeping ahead on four-beats-per-bar tip-toes. It’s not monochromatic; "Faneto" has the feel of a '70s Chinatown sequence, "The Moral" sounds like music from Castlevania, and “Blurry” is all searing exultation. But when compared with this summer’s dynamic, uptempo sound, Keef’s beats are deliberate, the grooves often static—creating a stark contrasting canvas for the dynamism of his delivery.
Keef's rapping holds the project together. His earliest records, like "Everydays Halloween" and "John Madden", hit particularly hard because of a central contradiction: his voice was at once an unbothered flatline and a tool of projection. Keef had Gucci Mane’s nonchalant flow, but his voice popped to the front of the speaker without sacrificing that sense of effortlessness. As he’s evolved, Keef’s detached from that behind-the-beat pocket and shifted to a more aggressive style—one freed from the rhythmic grid other artists treat as a requisite constraint, without being untethered from it altogether, a la certain Lil B releases. This unpredictability lends a chaotic tension to the music.
His lyrics are more effective for their blunt economy—he gets more mileage per syllable (as on the cleverly brutal "Faneto": "Talkin’ out his neck, pistol to his throat/ Blow this motherfucker, he gon’ choke"). He’s unafraid to use space, preferring the compositional effect of short burst phrases, rather than long, familiar cadences. (E–40’s new single "Choices (Yup)" is an example of a more traditional rapper working in this style.) Like King Louie, he will lock into a particular pattern for several lines, using extreme slant rhymes ("I just hit a stain, finagle/ I just hit a stain, finito"), as if trying to demolish the distance between words themselves, or to camouflage his thoughts. He’s made rhyming a word with itself into an art form of its own—he likes to complete the circuit early, or to let words stay static while the meaning shifts ("Nigga don’t slip, you lose it, then you lose it").
Over the course of his career, critics have suggested Keef was a diminished version of every rapper from Waka to Lil B to Soulja Boy. These comparisons now seem absurd; grappling to describe something truly new, we look to the past, and inevitably fall short. Today, Chief Keef is in rarefied air for street rap—a creative voice with an original, cohesive aesthetic. True, in the media spotlight, interest in him is at low ebb: for a certain hipper music listener, he’s not weird enough, eclipsed by the gender-bending, manic Lil Wayne disciple Young Thug. For hip-hop heads, Keef is too weird—and so we end up with a straightlaced (if energetic) street rapper named Bobby Shmurda. Yet to the grassroots, among a new generation of stars, he sits at street rap’s aesthetic center, not its margins.
The subtext of this music remains deeply bleak; there are numerous shouts to his murdered cousin, and it’s extremely disconcerting how casually Chicago rappers refer to kush blunts by the names of fallen enemies. Yet at its heart, there’s a playfulness, both explicit ("I can cut my dreads and sell them on Ebay") and artistic—witness the poetic run-on about money midway through "Wheres Waldo". He plays his own narrative close to the vest, letting his story loom below his elliptical rhymes like ice cubes in a glass. Nonetheless, moments of clarity burst through suddenly, crackling with significance: "And I’m still rollin’ dice, no monopoly/ I can’t be controlled, this ain’t no colony." That line comes from "Wayne", which sounds like a hit rap single turned inside-out to reveal its rotten core—Rae Sremmurd’s evil antithesis. Malevolent and psychedelic, Back From the Dead 2 is Chief Keef’s own "Down 2 Tha Last Roach" blown out to album-length proportions. | 2014-11-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-11-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | null | November 24, 2014 | 7.8 | 28e782a6-c71d-41c3-ad59-3902b0ca0dbd | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
Chelsea Wolfe dives headfirst into sludge metal and creates a unique space where sweetness can be heavy and contact is always uncomfortable. | Chelsea Wolfe dives headfirst into sludge metal and creates a unique space where sweetness can be heavy and contact is always uncomfortable. | Chelsea Wolfe: Hiss Spun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chelsea-wolfe-hiss-spun/ | Hiss Spun | On her sixth official full-length album Hiss Spun, singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe attempts to find reconciliation with global-scale suffering by turning to her own personal scars in a heaving wail of guitars. Over her last two albums, 2013’s Pain is Beauty and 2015’s Abyss, Wolfe and her right-hand multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm steadily dialed-up the heaviness, first by transplanting Wolfe’s gothic folk approach onto an electronic/industrial bedrock and then by adding shades of doom. For Hiss Spun, their first outing with Converge guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou at the boards, Wolfe and Chisholm dive headfirst into sludge metal.
Wolfe is, of course, hardly the first musician to express a sense of being overwhelmed, or to employ forceful sounds as a buffer. And with Ballou onboard, Hiss Spun abrades more than her past work. But much like the last BIG|BRAVE album pushed beyond the soft/harsh dichotomy, Chisholm, Ballou, and Wolfe carve out a space where ear-pleasing sweetness can be heavy. They also leave ample room for Wolfe’s voice, which never fights against the crushing weight of the sounds around it. Ditto for Chisholm’s noise collages, presumably the “hiss” of the title and one of the album’s most distinguishing features. (Fittingly, Chisholm re-worked sounds from both the band’s personal space and historical sources like the Enola Gay’s bomb blasts.) It also helps that much of the riffing comes courtesy of Troy Van Leeuwen whose unparalleled finesse has graced Queens of the Stone Age, Failure, and A Perfect Circle.
Wolfe explains in the Hiss Spun press release that she “wanted to write some sort of escapist music, songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free.” Throughout the album, she keeps her lens trained on the body, even as she gradually widens her scope from painful intimate contact to mass tragedies like war and ecological ruin. On “Vex” and “The Culling,” for example, Wolfe uses the phrase “bled out.” Neither song is entirely clear about what or who their protagonists struggle against, but the image of blood subtly connotes something different in each song. On other songs like “Particle Flux,” “Offering,” and “Static Hum,” ravaged landscapes are hard to tell apart from individual trauma.
All throughout, proximity and intimacy—with one’s own thoughts and memories, with people who cause injury, the lingering presence of a lost “twin”—is always uncomfortable. “I’ve spent, in different beds/Many moons/And that’s the way I prefer it,” Wolfe sings over a low simmer of downtempo metal on “16 Psyche.” She continues: “I feel it crawl up my legs/Let me wrap you in these thighs/It gets me out of my head again.” Wolfe is a particularly melodious singer, which doesn’t clash with the music so much as it makes the turmoil that inspired it sneak up on you. In some spots, it never seems to materialize at all.
As much as Wolfe broods, the songs don’t illuminate her pain all that much. The people and travails she sings about dwell in the periphery of the music like flickering shadows. Heavy music has long been the province of people who find catharsis in confronting demons. Wolfe, Chisholm, Ballou, and their guests take a more indirect path. The sound they make is certainly foreboding, but one can also walk away from this album feeling more settled than disturbed. Being grounded, after all, is what Wolfe was going for. That you have to work in order to appreciate what she went through to get there is what makes Hiss Spun so intriguing. | 2017-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | October 3, 2017 | 7.2 | 28e92060-16fa-4315-a791-8fe35516a91c | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
At a time when the remaining bands of their vintage are locked into the album-retrospective tour circuit or releasing pro-forma records, Primal Scream’s 11th full-length sees them keeping pace with 21st-century pop, recruiting guests like Sky Ferreira and Haim. | At a time when the remaining bands of their vintage are locked into the album-retrospective tour circuit or releasing pro-forma records, Primal Scream’s 11th full-length sees them keeping pace with 21st-century pop, recruiting guests like Sky Ferreira and Haim. | Primal Scream: Chaosmosis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21590-chaosmosis/ | Chaosmosis | In their 30-year career, Primal Scream have demonstrated a savvy for keeping themselves current. They joined the anorak convention with their cut "Velocity Girl" on the C86 compilation; helped push acid house into the mainstream with 1991's rave-rock symbiosis Screamadelica; and then pushed rock to new extremes with 2000's punktronica assault XTRMTR. That drive still animates them today: At a time when the remaining bands of their vintage are locked into the album-retrospective tour circuit or releasing pro-forma records, Primal Scream’s 11th full-length, Chaosmosis, sees them keeping pace with 21st-century pop, recruiting new-school divas Sky Ferreira and Haim in an admirable attempt to keep their median audience age on the shy side of 40.
In the Scream discography, Chaosmosis’ closest antecedent is 2008’s Beautiful Future, another modestly scaled, melodically focussed record loaded with then-au courant collaborators (Bjorn Yttling, CSS singer Lovefoxxx, Josh Homme). However Chaosmosis is the band’s most lyrically intimate, earnest and heartfelt record to date, which is something of a new look for a group that usually deals in PLUR platitudes and politicized screeds.
The album’s most affecting songs—like the simmering synth-pop of “(Feeling Like a) Demon Again” and the beautifully aching tropical-soul serenade “I Can Change”—find a dejected Bobby Gillespie surveying the wreckage of a broken relationship, and provide rare glimpses of the sunken eyes that he normally shields behind his wraparound sunglasses. And while the showdown with Ferreira on “Where the Light Gets In” initially suggests a replay of Gillespie’s prior tryst with Kate Moss on “Some Velvet Morning,” its knockout chorus thrusts the song to the ranks of the Scream’s best singles.
The aforementioned tracks make good on Chaosmosis’ promise of a modern-pop makeover. But when the hooks aren’t as sharp (like on the morse-code electro of “Carnival of Fools” or the chillout comp–ready “Autumn in Paradise”), the album’s temperate energy and mid-tempo pacing threaten to render the band indistinguishable from the synth-smeared indie-pop acts filling up the medium-font tier on a Coachella bill. And in lieu of any unifying principle, other songs offer the faintest echoes of past glories. From the house pianos and bongo breaks on down, the opening “Tripping on Your Love” is a shameless Screamadelica simulacrum that asks nothing more of the Haim sisters than to shout out that hokey title ad infinitum. “Golden Rope” is the obligatory ’70s-Stones rehash (complete with a Bobby Keys-style sax solo and “hallelujah!” hosannas), but delivered with a lumbering chug that suggests even the band are getting bored with this mode.
Of course, Primal Scream have always been wandering spirits. But they’ve always sounded fully committed to whichever path they chose, no matter how misguided it may be. Chaosmosis, by contrast, is encumbered by an uncharacteristic restraint and tentativeness. The bracing, sometimes violent collision of rock ‘n’ roll and dance music that’s powered Primal Scream’s best work has been melted down here into mercurial droplets—shiny and radiant, to be sure, but ultimately non-descript. | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | First International / Ignition | March 17, 2016 | 6 | 28edd05b-48a1-423e-8a2d-716b439e5a23 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem's third collaboration this year bears their shared, strong sense of magic and mystery. It's a story told through Jarmusch's feedback-addled guitar parts and the Dutch lutist's forlorn playing. | Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem's third collaboration this year bears their shared, strong sense of magic and mystery. It's a story told through Jarmusch's feedback-addled guitar parts and the Dutch lutist's forlorn playing. | Jozef van Wissem / Jim Jarmusch: The Mystery of Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17480-the-mystery-of-heaven/ | The Mystery of Heaven | Jim Jarmusch's films often give life's bit-part players a central role. There's Eddie from Stranger Than Paradise, played by former Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson, whose weatherworn existence revolved around placing bets at the dog track. Ghost Dog deposited an ice cream salesman played by Isaach De Bankolé as the best friend of the titular character. The musical choices for Jarmusch's films, so often pivotal to the action, reflect his decision to cast Hollywood stars alongside relative unknowns. The Broken Flowers soundtrack featured contributions from Mulatu Astatke, Marvin Gaye, and Sleep. His forthcoming vampire feature, Only Lovers Left Alive, will pull another musician out of the shadows, with Dutch lutist Jozef Van Wissem providing music for the film. The Mystery of Heaven is the pair's third musical collaboration this year, following Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity (on Important) and Apokatastasis (on Van Wissem's own Incunabulum label).
The story of how this duo met, in a chance meeting on a New York City street, where Van Wissem pushed a CD into Jarmusch's hand, feels like it was pulled directly from one of the director's movies. The music they make together retains certain tenets of those films, too. There's a strong sense of magic and mystery, all delivered with a beautiful simplicity. If you strip away the stylistic heft of Jarmusch's films, there are often deceptively basic human emotions underpinning the narrative, albeit ones revealed through the eyes of emotionally damaged individuals. The tracks on The Mystery of Heaven reach down to the same spot, as told through Van Wissem's forlorn lute playing and Jarmusch's feedback-addled guitar parts. Their only diversion is to employ actress (and Only Lovers star) Tilda Swinton to provide a stern spoken word passage over "The More She Burns the More Beautifully She Glows".
Much of this record is a gentle advance on the ideas of Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity, with Jarmusch again taking a back seat to Van Wissem's lead. It's a meditative piece, and one that passes naturally from bristly, repetitive motifs ("Flowing Light of the Godhead") to more subdued material ("The Mystery of Heaven"). Even when they reach peak noise, about two thirds of the way through "Flowing Light", it's more hypnotic than aggressive. This is material with a firmly contemplative edge to it, casting a spell only broken with the occasional fluffed note or lapse into accidental dissonance. There's a definite sense that this was recorded live and with little practice beforehand. The title track feels sloppy and aimless at times, perhaps deliberately so. But this is music that benefits from a certain amount of discipline, such as the feral splendor of "The More She Burns", where the pair sync up perfectly following Swinton's wonderfully haughty vocal.
The fact that Jarmusch worked on this album with an actress and musician involved in his next movie makes this feel like an important step toward that project. There's even a filmic feel to some of the work here, particularly in the two versions of "Etimasia", which echo with a lonely, lovelorn ambiance. It makes sense that Jarmusch would want to break away from music that could superficially resemble "soundtrack" work, and he mostly has achieved that on his various collaborations with Van Wissem. But the versions of "Etimasia" on The Mystery of Heaven shift closer to a place in which he's become more comfortable since his nascent musical efforts in the no wave scene. It's one of stark, pensive thought, populated by characters who don't make connections easily, whose attempts to make sense of the world are largely a solitary pursuit. At its best, this music feeds into a similar sentiment, pushing close to the kind of deep introspection at the heart of Jarmusch's films. | 2012-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | December 7, 2012 | 6.4 | 28ef4261-ad8d-478d-b53a-878c4867ef94 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The inescapable Portland rapper continues to go beyond the usual rage rap expectations, bending his voice without ever making it feel gimmicky. | The inescapable Portland rapper continues to go beyond the usual rage rap expectations, bending his voice without ever making it feel gimmicky. | Yeat: Up 2 Më | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeat-up-2-me/ | Up 2 Më | Yes, it’s happening again. Another generation of rappers who grew up on Chief Keef, Young Thug, and Future, armed with melodies soaked in AutoTune and lyrics that range from incredibly melodramatic to what can simply be put as vibes have become the obsessions of SoundCloud communities. But it’s a bit more knotty this time. The scene has become so sprawling and expansive, populated by subgenres and collectives that almost exist in their own worlds and complicated by the looming presence of deep-pocketed record labels throwing a bag at whoever can get a song to pop on TikTok.
But no matter what corner of the app you’re completely immersed in, Yeat has been inescapable this summer. Behind a mixtape called 4L, singles like “Sorry Bout That” and “Mad Bout That,” and a viral snippet turned breakout single (“Gët Busy”), which got everyone from Lil Yachty to Drake to recite the line “This song was already turnt, but here’s a bell,” the Portland 21-year-old has fast become the face of rage. It’s a style defined by production that sounds like an eruption of pyrotechnics: think Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, which has essentially become the blueprint. Most of it isn’t any good. Usually, it’s so unbelievably hollow like Carti protégé Ken Car$on’s Project X, or just a shameless ploy for streams like Trippie Redd’s Trip at Knight. Why the hell is a sound lazily categorized as “rage rap” so boring?!
Thankfully, Yeat’s Up 2 Më is not. Similar to lead single “Gët Busy,” the best Yeat songs feel like a steady build to one euphoric moment. On “Turban,” it’s the way he screeches “Tonka truck” like he’s being exorcised; “Hëy” starts out relatively unmemorable, and by the midpoint, he sounds like a riled-up pitbull; the rippling bass thuds on “Ya Ya” fuse together with his Travis-like “oohs” and ad-libs. He’s melodic, but not in the way where you want to hear him perform a guitar ballad; instead, it’s the ability to bend and shape his voice without ever making it feel gimmicky.
Unlike so much of the music done in this style over the last six months, Yeat’s inspiration feels like it refreshingly goes beyond Whole Lotta Red. Specifically, the way Future screeds about addiction and temptation over Metro Boomin and Southside beats that sound like the world is caving into a black hole on DS2. It’s not to say that Yeat’s lyrics are particularly well thought out—more often than not, they resemble the time he wails “Yeah, this perky got me snail, you should call me Gary” on “Trëndy way,” but occasionally, real emotions cut through the bullshit. “This could be my last song, ho/It feel like I’m dying on the edge, ho/Yeah, I be taking percs just for my head, ho,” he croons on “Lët ya know.” Later, he bounces between reckless drug talk and slight introspection on “Bak on ëm” over what sounds like a Back From the Dead era Young Chop instrumental.
The rage beats are the real issue on Up 2 Më. There are over 20 (yes, 20) producers credited on this mixtape, yet aside from a few standouts, the production is stuck in the same box. It’s a problem that’s more noticeable on Project X and Trip at Knight because Carson and Trippie don’t elevate the staleness with distinct vocal quirks like Yeat so often does. But it’s clear the subgenre could use a burst of creative energy. Maybe they could look to digicore, another community that has quickly formed on SoundCloud. The way many of those producers lean on distortion, glitching, and pitch changes would be an energizing twist to beats that are too polished and formulaic. But I wouldn’t bet on that. There’s too much money to be made and deals to be signed, and therefore any additional weirdness will take a backseat. Up 2 Më might be as good as it gets.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | TwizzyRich | September 17, 2021 | 6.7 | 28ef66a0-d6f8-41bd-a98b-6281af254eda | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The long-awaited collaboration between Minneapolis-St. Paul hip-hop pioneers Muja Messiah and I Self Devine is mostly an act of collage, with pro-black, anti-police sentiments dominating its most lucid moments. The most striking part of 9th House, though, is how it's equal parts loose and specific to its environment. | The long-awaited collaboration between Minneapolis-St. Paul hip-hop pioneers Muja Messiah and I Self Devine is mostly an act of collage, with pro-black, anti-police sentiments dominating its most lucid moments. The most striking part of 9th House, though, is how it's equal parts loose and specific to its environment. | Muja Messiah / I Self Devine: 9th House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21320-9th-house/ | 9th House | You can scoff at astrology and still be moved by 9th House, the long-awaited collaboration between Minneapolis-St. Paul hip-hop pioneers Muja Messiah and I Self Devine. The record’s title and some of its window dressings gesture at Jupiter’s movements, but the artists find themselves planted firmly in the Twin Cities streets they’ve defined and documented over the past two decades.
For those unfamiliar, Muja made a name for himself in the early 2000s with a string of show-stealing guest verses, before his solo LPs—like last year’s God Kissed It, the Devil Missed It—solidified him as the Cities’ sneering id. (He’s also written verses for several of your favorite yacht-owning rappers.) I Self Devine’s legacy stretches back even further: together with DJ Kool Akiem as the Micranots, he was one of the first genuine Minneapolis stars, to the point where his nod helped solidify Rhymesayers in its infancy.
Rapping together for the first time at length, it’s quickly apparent that Muja and Chaka invert the old duo dynamics. The two MCs still present the point and counter-point on a single theme, but where the variance in many a group setting has come from each rapper’s writing, it’s evident on 9th House mostly in the tone of the vocals. Self is gruff, guttural, and earnest, and Muja’s voice is the audio equivalent of that .gif where Birdman rubs his hands together in front of doves and an explosion.
That’s seen most clearly on "Arrow Dynamics": Muja’s "Diagnosed: ADHD/ For white folks, that’s a disability" and Self’s "Well-dressed niggas get hit, like, ‘Where the product at?’/ White trash pulling dime sacks out their Prada bags" complement each other, while in more similar hands they might combine to be too on-the-nose. The song’s hook, though, converges at the group’s de facto mission statement: "Gun up on my hip, I won’t bust it at my nigs/ But I guarantee I’m shooting at the cops, though." It’s clear, and it’s potent.
And it’s morbidly prescient: On November 15th, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed a 24-year-old black man named Jamar Clark. Multiple eyewitnesses say Clark was handcuffed when the fatal shot was fired; police deny that he had been handcuffed, but have yet to release video of the incident. Protesters reacted swiftly, shutting down the I-94 freeway and, more recently, occupying the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis. It was there that five protesters were shot, apparently by a small group of white supremacists. (No one was critically injured.) The following night, more shots were fired at those assembled. At the time of this writing, hundreds of people remain in the blocks surrounding the precinct, and thousands have marched through downtown Minneapolis demonstrating against Clark’s killing, the absence of video evidence, and the police response to the subsequent shootings.
Muja has even inserted himself into the protests, demanding answers in Mayor Betsy Hodges’ foyer and clarifying that he’s a “concerned citizen” unaffiliated with any political movement. That sounds about right: 9th House is mostly an act of collage, with pro-black, anti-police sentiments dominating its most lucid moments. There’s malt liquor, gold slippers, and promises to "suplex label reps," but when the MCs cut through, they do it with a knife that’s carefully pointed. On "IOFWUCUC" (an acronym for "I Only Fuck With You ‘Cause You Crazy"), Self raps, "Dreaming of peace and violence/ Don’t wanna be a martyr/ Defiance in my blood running as clear as water." For two men who would seemingly expect their closest confidants to read between the lines, some anxieties are made refreshingly clear.
The most striking part of 9th House, perhaps even more than its politics, is how it's equal parts loose and specific to its environment. The former quality is thanks to beats from J.Hard, M¥K, and Orko Eloheim, the latter to the Holiday Inn on Eleventh Street and Rashad McCants. In an unsettling time for Minneapolis-St. Paul, 9th House is the record the Cities have created for themselves. | 2015-11-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 30, 2015 | 7.3 | 28f6a530-2a9a-423c-8d1a-0d2f108c9539 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
While the Oakland rapper still has a knack for melody and easy charm, her album’s larger-than-life narrative is more mechanical and generic than it is fun. | While the Oakland rapper still has a knack for melody and easy charm, her album’s larger-than-life narrative is more mechanical and generic than it is fun. | Kamaiyah: No Explanations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaiyah-no-explanations/ | No Explanations | In February, Kamaiyah released Got It Made, her first independent album after exiting a joint deal with Interscope and YG’s 4HUNNID. The album was a spirited declaration of independence, fueled by Kamaiyah’s lingering frustration with major label over-management and underinvestment. “I don’t need nobody else/I don’t need nobody’s help,” she rapped on “Pressure,” one of the album’s many defiant mission statements. No Explanations, her follow-up after September’s joint tape with Capolow, is cast in the same mold, again championing autonomy and self-reliance—with diminishing returns. Kamaiyah’s songs of freedom have become increasingly humdrum; though she’s in control, she doesn’t sound free.
“I’m a boss … that’s going to be my new narrative,” Kamaiyah said in an interview earlier this year. She meant it. Where Got It Made spun independence as a limitless, open-world quest, No Explanations narrows the vision. Kamayah wants to be a boss so badly it’s all she talks about, leading to songs and verses that feel more actuarial than expressive. “Once I hit the billboards, I’mma be going nuts/Been here four years plus, but still feel like one,” she says on “Scared to Lose.” On the pensive “Bend da Corner,” she mourns her lack of visibility: “Since I been rapping, still ain’t charted high.” She’s not the first independent artist to bemoan the vagaries of success, but her obsession with making it overdetermines her writing. She sounds like a shareholder rather than a creator.
To Kamaiyah’s credit, she believes in the brand. Where her previous music was indebted to the past and awash in nostalgic samples and grooves and homages to her Oakland roots, this record’s main reference points are Kamaiyah herself. “Don’t bring your bullshit to my house,” she warns on the brassy “Big Step” after running down her Oakland bona fides. “I don’t swang Chrevolets/Bentley, now I’m paid/Money green, count change/Different league, got it made,” she sings on “Bape Hoodie,” referencing Got It Made. No Explanations is full of mythmaking in this vein, Kamaiyah declaring herself anointed and untouchable. One song is literally titled “Chosen.”
The production helps sell this turn, trading the twerk-ready bounce and warm melodies of her past music for brash anthems and lush lounge bops. Multiple songs end in blown-out outros and plush suites reminiscent of DJ Quik and DeBarge. Champagne and Chanel get frequent mentions. The new Kamaiyah, we’re told, is larger than life, spending big, bossed up.
This shift might be more engaging if it sounded less mechanical and generic. Kamaiyah’s catalog is filled with celebrations, tapping into the full spectrum of feelings that accompany success: relief, ecstasy, joy. But too often the writing on No Explanations has more inertia than momentum or texture. The way she spins in place on “Art of War” is characteristic of the album as a whole. “I’m just one of a kind and I know it/Trying to knock me off my pivot and it’s showing/I’m a top tier bitch, I’m the coldest/To knock off raw shit, I’m appointed,” she says, her self-affirmations accumulating but not building.
There’s a thin thread of recovery buried beneath all the bluster. The sheer abundance of chest-puffing suggests Kamaiyah is trying to remind herself of her talent despite her years in major label purgatory. On “Go Crazy,” a funky song with a playful Bay Area bounce, Kamaiyah briefly removes her armor. “Swear I been lost my mind since I lost little Nate/Then some years down the line, fucked around and lost James,” she sings, her voice dropping a register as her boasts become wearied sighs. Moments like this add weight to her obsession with moguldom but are frustratingly rare. Though Kamaiyah hasn’t lost her knack for melody or easy charm, on No Explanations, the narrative too often obscures the person.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | GRND.WRK / Empire | December 18, 2020 | 6 | 28f6b3f6-6d7e-4155-8bc8-c285d309df8e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
This eclectic two-disc mix spans multiple decades and includes both the familiar and the underground-- all without being showy or keeping the listener at arm's length. | This eclectic two-disc mix spans multiple decades and includes both the familiar and the underground-- all without being showy or keeping the listener at arm's length. | Optimo: How to Kill the DJ [Part Two] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6106-how-to-kill-the-dj-part-two/ | How to Kill the DJ [Part Two] | It's considered an unassailable virtue to have eclectic taste in music. That's how most everyone likes to think of himself, as the person who likes a bit of everything (the good parts, presumably) and subconsciously understands musical connections that extend beyond the boundaries of genre, scene, or geography. The appeal is demonstrated in the story of early hip-hop, which-- as it's usually told-- is the story of DJs who would throw on whatever rocked the party, be it Aerosmith, Chic, or some uptight German dudes obsessed with robots who happened to be so stiff they were funky. This mythical late 70s/early 80s period can be seen as the DJ's Garden of Eden before the Fall (before serious money became involved, I guess), to which so many yearn to return.
In practice, though, eclecticism in a DJ mix isn't always all its cracked up to be. If you've ever actually played music for a crowd of people gathered to have a good time to your selections, you know most of them aren't at all interested in the wild and crazy shit in your crate. One indulgent misstep and the dancers disappear faster than if someone lit a stinkbomb in the center of the floor. Most people who go out want to dance and feel good to something familiar, so club nights are accordingly designed to let them know what they're in for.
Ultimately, the thing about the eclectic DJ set is that's it's really, really difficult to pull off. Without the parameters of a micro-scene to guide you, the DJ has to know his records backward and forward to understand how pieces cut from different saws might snap together. When it works, though, it's something. On the evidence of their first official mix CD, JD Twitch and JG Wilkes-- who since 1997 have been the resident DJs at the Glasgow club Optimo (Espacio)-- do diversity beautifully.
How to Kill the DJ [Part Two]-- the sequel to Ivan Smagghe's excellent 2003 Tigersushi release-- is actually a two-disc set, with the first given over to a mashed-up approximation of the what the club sounds like in full swing, and the second containing 18 tracks representing what might play as people are filing in. This 75-minute continuous mix is a miracle of licensing, with 42 indexed tracks from 50+ artists, including big names like Love, Suicide, and Gang of Four, and many lesser-knowns familiar primarily to followers of a specific scene (Ricardo Villalobos, Loose Joints, Akufen).
On paper it looks like an ADHD sort of mix, with many selections lasting only for 30 seconds or so, but the Optimo DJs generally keep the transitions smooth and have an uncanny knack for building bridges between disparate sounds. Keep an eye on the CD player and it's often surprising when one track ends and another begins. How to Kill the DJ is a true collage, where the tiniest musical fragment has a job to do. So the seven seconds of Basic Channel's "Phylyps Track 2" solo exists to connect the throbbing techno of Luciano and Quenum's "Orange Mistake" to the industrial synth pop of Crash Course in Science's early 80s track "Flying Turns", which then leads to a brief snippet of the Revolting Cocks' heavy "On Fire" and then the Superpitcher Schaffel mix of the Quarks' gothic/sleaze "I Walk".
With all the uber-hip records flying around How to Kill the DJ never feels analytical or showy. So even when the pre-teens from the Langley Schools Music Project show up to do "Good Vibrations" in the middle of the CD, which would normally seem a guaranteed vibe-killer, the indulgent gesture feels earned. Besides, it's Twitch's set closer before he gives the decks up to Wilkes, and when the latter starts his set off with the insanely danceable D.C. go-go of "The Word" by the Junkyard Band, all is forgiven.
If the first CD is an approximation of a club mix, the second comes across simply as a mix CD, the kind you or I might make for a friend. No themes are overt connections, just 18 tracks of music that hang together. Angelo Badalamenti's gorgeous and unsettling theme for Mullholland Drive opens, other highlights include Arthur Russell's "Another Thought", Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's spooky "Some Velvet Morning", Sun City Girls' "Opium Den", and Os Mutantes' "A Minha Menina". It's a record collector's mix, no question, filled with tracks that have all been labeled "cool" at some point. But as a collection of good songs that sound great together on one CD, it's a convincing argument for the power of good taste. Combine that taste with skilled editing and you've every right to be as eclectic as you want to be. | 2005-01-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-01-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kill the DJ | January 24, 2005 | 9 | 28f6e949-8f6b-4d81-bc70-bb81f165ec72 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
It’s important to note that Run the Jewels 2 is an album—it’s on a real label and you can pay money to own it. And the transition from mixtape-to-album explains every progression El-P and Killer Mike have made in the past year. This is the most viciously realized rap album of 2014. | It’s important to note that Run the Jewels 2 is an album—it’s on a real label and you can pay money to own it. And the transition from mixtape-to-album explains every progression El-P and Killer Mike have made in the past year. This is the most viciously realized rap album of 2014. | Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19968-run-the-jewels-run-the-jewels-2/ | Run the Jewels 2 | Trigger warning: If you or someone you love is a fuckboy, do yourself a favor and steer clear of Run the Jewels 2. You will not like what you hear. Here’s a brief, but nearly complete list of people who are exempt, as handed down by El-P and Killer Mike on RTJ2: Malcolm X, UGK (Pimp C posthumously given the Lifetime Achievement Award), MJG, the Weathermen (both the hip-hop and militant factions), Gangsta Boo, Scarface (that's Brad Jordan, Al Pacino's is noticeably absent here), Zack De La Rocha, Biggie, 2Pac, Nas (ca. 1993 and also 2014, as this is being released on his Mass Appeal imprint). That’s really about it.
Otherwise, when El-P sneers, "You want a whore in a white dress/ I want a wife with a thong" during "Angel Duster", it’s a metaphor that implicates just about everybody in his blast radius—conservative and liberal politicians who hide their bullshit ideals behind "values," religious figures doing the same, beta-male types using performative tolerance as a front for their passive-aggressive misogyny, or just anyone who’s full of shit. For Run the Jewels, these people are what cocaine was to Clipse, sex to Lil Wayne, clothing to Cam’ron—their domain, their muse, a seemingly endless source of inspiration for the most viciously realized rap album of 2014 and most other years.
It’s important to note that RTJ2 is an album—it’s on a real label and you can pay money to own it. And the transition from mixtape-to-album explains every progression El-P and Killer Mike have made in the past year. Think of it as the Hell Hath No Fury to Run the Jewels’ We Got It 4 Cheap—the latter were freewheeling collaborations that introduced commercially exiled veterans to a new audience of microphone fiends and completely reframed their public perception. The sequel feels more like a statement, taking into account crucial constructs like sequencing, judiciously granted guest spots, and pacing. But Run the Jewels exchange Clipse’s unrelenting, and highly specific mean streak for a righteous anger that has a gleeful, conspiratorial edge—Run the Jewels get it and you get them.
This is one of the more readily apparent aspects of Run the Jewels’ development as a functioning group; they were a festival act from the start and RTJ2 is a rare hip-hop record that sounds like it was created with live performance in mind. They’re two guys with dexterous, booming voices over blaring production that’s percussive, abrasive, and dynamic. The first half is uncut aggression for any situation in transit, the first thing you can reach for if you’re getting elbowed on the subway or cut off in traffic driving down I-85. As RTJ2 progresses, it’s still the same detritus that filled El-P’s iron galaxy in the past, only now, the forms are recognizable and warm: dub’s echo and synth bass swiped from Amnesiac commingle on "All My Life", vocal snippets are taken from Police Academy’s Michael Winslow on "Oh My Darling Don’t Cry", and Zack De La Rocha on "Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)" before the real thing comes through to spit some goofy, try-hard "Bombtrack"-style aggro braggadocio that doubles as the best verse of his life. On the whole, RTJ2 is El-P’s most accessible and rangy production to date and he’s hit a stride that recalls Sonic Youth in 1987 or Animal Collective in 2004, the point where a celebrated noise terrorist starts to embrace and challenge their audience rather than simply testing their patience.
Run the Jewels are undeniably a crossover hip-hop act, and cognizant of their unique position—Mike and El's career-changing 2012 albums respectively came courtesy of Cartoon Network and a former blues label that spent years claiming the Black Keys as their most "contemporary" act. Both have been around long enough to recognize they share stages with EDM acts and fans with Future and Young Thug; rather than seeing them as threats, they view them as inspiration and competition, as it’s the commercial vanguard who are fucking with language and syntax as much as Def Jux and Dungeon Family ever were.
And therein is the most important lack of distinction on RTJ2, that between "old school" and "new school," "lyrical" and whatever its opposite is, as if hip-hop isn’t a living, evolving organism. El and Mike deliver both blows to the sternum and elbow-jabs to the ribs; there are hours worth of instantly quotable, clever ignorance, as in El-P’s already much-loved request that haters, "Can all run naked backwards through a field of dicks." Meanwhile, Mike’s verse on "All Due Respect" is a blacked-out, brilliant clinic in rhythm, wordplay and content—"This year, we iller than a nun in a cumshot/ Getting double-penetrated in a dope spot/ By two hard pipe hittin’ niggas/ On the orders of Marcellus to the soundtrack of 2Pac/ I beat you to a pulp, no fiction/ Tarantino flow, new Jules (Jewels) and Vincent."
Throughout RTJ2, the duo appear limitless in their vocal capacity, whether working as a tag team, storytellers, or engaging in battle-rap one-upmanship. "Blockbuster Night, Pt. 1" is all razzle dazzle alliteration, while "Oh My Darling Don’t Cry" compiles a career’s worth of flows, from "We Dem Boyz"-derived "hol’ up"s! to Adidas-scuffing tough talk to the triplet-flipping "Move that Dope" cadence. Any sort of geographical or philosophical or stylistic boundary that stood between the two no longer exists, if it ever did; El is just as likely to spit Dirty South double time raps about strippers as Mike is to wax about obscure historical figures and governmental conspiracies.
RTJ2is darker, bolder, and longer than its predecessor, though still clocking in at a bullshit-free 39 minutes; the difference between this and most sequels is that this one actually has a plot. Both El-P and Killer Mike are pushing 40, career artists spitting grown-ass raps about grown-ass problems. They came of age during a time when "the black CNN" was actually something worth aspiring to and hip-hop isn’t the one that failed to keep up its end of the bargain; I don’t know if they finally found the plane or have moved onto 24-hour coverage of the ebola panic, but these days you might as well be watching Channel Zero. Comedians are now delivering the hardest news anyway, and RTJ2 is more "Last Week Tonight", ditching the ironic distance that typified political humor and going straight for the killshot.
As with Vince Staples’ "Hands Up", "Early" is live reportage of police brutality that wasn’t directly inspired by the death of Michael Brown. Which is what makes it even more frightening. The racial dynamic of Run the Jewels is occasionally played for laughs on RTJ2; here, it's acknowledged in a powerful, unspoken way, as Mike’s role is that of the street preacher, empowered by the support of his people, whereas El plays the wilderness prophet, his madness spurred by the realization his craziest thoughts are coming to pass. Mike is harassed in his home over trivial weed possession and taken away in cuffs while the neighbors record the scene on their cell phones. Meanwhile, El-P walks the streets of New York untouched by the police, but affected by his own powerlessness. He closes his mournful verse with "They’ll watch you walk to the store they’re recording/ But didn’t record a cop when he shot no warning," concluding the cycle of violence with, "Go home, go to sleep, up again early"—the last line echoing "it was everyday America and that’s all" from Sun Kil Moon’s "Pray for Newtown", another anti-gun protest whose headlines were pulled from the past and has its relevance renewed throughout 2014 in regular and increasingly dispiriting intervals.
A similar splitscreen occurs on "Crown"; Mike’s verse is based on a true story, recalling his days of slinging cocaine to a pregnant woman just to make ends meet, praying for God to give him a lane out of this life. Once the kid is born, Mike sighs, "Heard he was normal 'til three and then he stopped talking," racked with guilt until he meets the woman a few years later and she relieves him of his burden—"I’ve been redeemed/ I found in Christ/ Whatever it take, I hope you find it, Mike." Meanwhile, El takes a surprisingly empathetic tone towards an army ensign who himself was just trying to find his own lane, pitying the man for voluntarily surrendering his free will to become a human weapon but understanding the choice in light of the mental torture. Whereas the broad scope of R.A.P. Music and Cancer for Cure made Run the Jewels seem like a one-off lark, the interaction between El and Mike on "Crown" and "Early" makes those records somehow sound incomplete in retrospect.
But these moments of reflection are wisely paced within RTJ2’s otherwise relentless assault. "Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)" is the hardest, most celebratory track about starting a prison riot since "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos"; sulfur burns and wardens are waterboarded, as, "We killin’ em for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom/ And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord’ll sort 'em." The most unconventional social study occurs on "Love Again (Akinyele Back)"; as Yeezus proved, consensual, unorthodox sex is instantly heard as misogyny and the he-said, she-said hook of, "She want that dick in her mouth all day" certainly courts trouble. At least until Gangsta Boo steals the track with a verse of even greater demands and vulgarity, in the same way she made filthy Three 6 Mafia songs like "Tongue Ring" and "Hit It From the Back" sound strangely progressive in their gender politics.
Referring to "Put It in Your Mouth", the most infamous track of "Love Again"’s parenthetical namesake, El-P commented, "i feel lucky to have grown up in a time when filthy/stupid/funny rap songs could be hits like that one." RTJ2 isn’t backwards-looking or a throwback, but any record whose most notable guest appearances come from former members of Three 6 Mafia and Rage Against the Machine is nostalgic to some degree. There’s also the hovering influence of not just N.W.A. and Public Enemy, but also less critically revered innovators like the Geto Boys, Goodie Mob, and 8Ball & MJG, Southern acts whose intelligence and complexity felt natural, wisdom from stoops, liquor stores, and street corners that translated to college dorms without ever presenting themselves as "art" or "conscious" rappers.
As much as El-P and Killer Mike want to distance themselves from being seen as role models, they are; their experience just happens to sound a hell of a lot like the truth. Towards the end of "Lie, Cheat, Steal", Killer Mike digs a shallow grave for deposed Clippers despot Donald Sterling, but not entirely for his horrifying racism; what truly offends Mike is seeing the guy blubbering on TV, giving apologies he doesn’t mean in the slightest, outing himself as another "prisoner of privilege" in a system where even a billionaire isn’t in control of his destiny. And the common thread that ties RTJ2 with some of the other widely-celebrated albums of 2014—Benji, To Be Kind, and Beyoncé—is that each is an example of a seasoned artist using their financial and artistic capital to take control of the means of production and distribution, putting the least amount of distance between themselves and their vision. "Independent as fuck" indeed; sounding like nothing else and answering to nobody but its creators, Run the Jewels 2 is in a class by itself. | 2014-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | October 29, 2014 | 9 | 28f97673-e8df-4d31-97ca-5127d3aaa60a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang's new album, Death Speaks, features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, the National's Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett. As its title makes plain, its five love songs are in the voice of Death. | Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang's new album, Death Speaks, features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, the National's Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett. As its title makes plain, its five love songs are in the voice of Death. | David Lang: Death Speaks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18023-david-lang-death-speaks/ | Death Speaks | In his youth, David Lang's music glowed with heat; in 2007, around his 50th birthday, he began the slow, mournful process of freezing it. A stiffening breeze ran through his music, and his works assumed the spare urgency of a life form forced to reorder its priorities to survive. His Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 masterwork, The Little Match Girl Passion, scored for just four voices and some hand bells, huddled around a handful of close-together pitches like a body trapping heat; the highlight, "Have Mercy My God," wound slowly around just five notes, all within one octave, sending the same questioning note into the air repeatedly. Something profound had spooked Lang into a consideration of primal questions.
On his new album, Death Speaks, Lang stops dancing around the subject and invites the implied muse behind his late-period transformation to center stage. As its title makes plain, the five love songs on Speaks are in the voice of Death; the words put in Death's mouth, meanwhile, are Schubert's. "Something that has always attracted me to the songs of Franz Schubert is how present death is," Lang writes in the liner notes. "It isn't a state of being or a place or a metaphor, but a person, a character in a drama who can tell us in our own language what to expect in the World to Come." The second the music starts playing, though, this framework disappears. When Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, who performs the title role, opens her mouth, you are not thinking about Schubert. You are thinking about death.
Like The Little Match Girl Passion, the instrumental forces are simple: Bryce Dessner of the National on guitar, Nico Muhly on piano, and Owen Pallett on violin and occasional backup vocals. If The Little Match Girl Passion resembled a frozen, minimalist recasting of the English madrigal, Death Speaks sounds like the stem cells of Schubert songs, attempting repeatedly to assemble themselves into form. "you will return" is set for a piano and electric guitar, played in a high register, blending together to fool the ear into hearing one harp. At the song's edges, however, the piano throws in compelling "off" notes, pricking the surface with the sound of modern, anxious thought. "I am your pale companion," Worden sings haltingly, longing palpable in her voice, on "you will return," while the music hesitates its way forward, one tangled figure at a time.
This probing reiteration of a single phrase, one that restates itself in a thousand different ways, is a trademark touch of Lang's. There is a philosophical tenor to this technique, as if the "correct" phrasing of this figure is just one more try away, and the changes, when they happen, ripple across the music more than they announce themselves. "I am walking" consists of a two-note guitar figure, with small throat-clearing interjections from the piano, while Worden and guest vocalist Pallett's vocal lines cross over each other. The final piece on the album, "Depart", a piece for cello and wordless vocals, hangs like smoke, darkening by imperceptible shades. In the pervading unease of Lang's new world, only the smallest tendrils of harmonic motion are allowed to advance the music forward.
This frozen wood is the place from which Lang's music reaches us now, and Worden's voice has maybe been never better used than as its human embodiment. Her rounded, glowing tone remains creamy even as it ascends into its highest register, and she brings an overwhelming sadness to Worden's Death, whose loneliness as she vainly pursues her charges, or even, in "mist is rising", begs them to escape-- "I love you/I love you/I love all of you/Your face/I love your face/Your form/I love your form ... Please don't make me make you follow me"-- is heartbreaking. Her Death is not just human, but humane, burdened by her task and full of compassion for those she visits. She is beautiful, but troubled, and her voice, like these pieces, rings out into a stillness, harmonic and spiritual, that feels both haunted and becalmed. | 2013-05-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Cantaloupe | May 8, 2013 | 8 | 28fbc725-bc9f-4470-93ec-58e5a09e45ee | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Former NYC no wavers draft famed alterna-rock producer Alan Moulder (U2, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins) for their high-gloss, ornamental new record. | Former NYC no wavers draft famed alterna-rock producer Alan Moulder (U2, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins) for their high-gloss, ornamental new record. | Blonde Redhead: 23 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10102-23/ | 23 | The 23rd hexagram of the I Ching is commonly known as "Splitting Apart", the point in a cycle where upheaval and disintegration enters in. The number 23, heralded by many an occultist and rag-tag philosopher is often considered a magical number associated with change, the point in a series where new energy comes in to transform the pre-existing condition and change the trajectory. A pop example of these esoteric notions, sadly, may be beloved New York indie rockers Blonde Redhead's seventh full-length, 23.
Ironically, this career-facelift will most likely be the album that catapults this band to the red carpet-- more record sales, more exposure, higher profile tours. But serious Redhead heads familiar with the band's past forward-thinking oeuvre of magical melancholy will most likely catch a wince-able whiff of disintegration. Somewhere underneath all the high-gloss, ornamental swirlies and lacquered doilies are haphazardly camouflaged well-written songs.
Essentially, 23 consists of simply tunes much in the vein of the international trio's high water mark, 2000's Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, which found the once angularly screeching Sonic Youth/Unwound-worshiping post-no-wavers breathing deep and relaxing. The songs are similar to 2004's almost as good Misery Is a Butterfly, which took said gems of art-pop blueness, but draped them in heavy orchestration and flirted with an almost too-lush production. Consider Butterfly the unsubtle foreshadowing: Allegedly, somewhere during the course of the making of the self-produced 23, Blonde Redhead got lost; unsure if their early mixes were going in the right direction the band brought in famed alterna-rock producer Alan Moulder (U2, Depeche Mode, My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins) for a tune-up.
Whether the Pace twins-- Amedeo (voice-guitars) and Simone (drums)-- and foxy frontwoman Kazu Makino (voice-guitars) were already drifting toward overblown production before Moulder's involvement is unclear, but the producer's paws are everywhere. Take, for example, the title track "23" where seriously My Bloody Valentine–jonesing guitars and hypno whatzits whirl around Kazu's eyes-wide-shut ethereal unintelligible words, sounding like the coolest new shoegaze band on the block, but not the quirky subtle architects of wistfullness we've come to know and love. Another mistep would be "The Dress", where traceable stains of previous BR dance-y hanky panky (such as Lemon's "This Is Not") gets mired in electro keyboard chirps and droning draft-in-the-brain synths. You can't blame a band for trying new things: "Silently" sounds like a beach-walking Blondie track with girl-group harmonies; "Publisher" takes a Police-like drum attack and the trio's trademark minor-chord guitar lines but pads them with odd electronica effluvium; and "Top Ranking" smooshes J-pop cutesiness against Tropicalia breeziness. And then there's "Heroine", with its honey-I-shrunk-Kazu-into-a-Buggles-song samba. Innovative? Sure, but when all the day-glo splatters, candy-coated swooshes, and chocolate waterfalls obscure the individualized songs underneath, what's the point? 23 coulda/shoulda been the album where Blonde Redhead added on that much needed new wing to their mansion of moody cool craftsmanship. But instead, constructed right in front, blocking the entire view of the ornate and majestic building they took over 13 years to build, is a garish warbly and weird Frank Gehry-esque monstrosity. | 2007-04-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-04-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 11, 2007 | 7 | 28fbf56e-4241-42fc-b184-19e0b0642bf4 | D. Shawn Bosler | https://pitchfork.com/staff/d.-shawn bosler/ | null |
After covering Sun Ra on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, the Chicago trio fires up a passel of arcane vintage synths and interprets eight more songs by the cosmic jazz legend. | After covering Sun Ra on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, the Chicago trio fires up a passel of arcane vintage synths and interprets eight more songs by the cosmic jazz legend. | Bitchin Bajas: Switched on Ra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bitchin-bajas-switched-on-ra/ | Switched on Ra | Bitchin Bajas apparently have a new album coming out in 2022. But while Cooper Crain and his trio waited for their vinyl to get pressed—along with everyone else in the music industry not named Adele—they sat down and expanded on a really great idea they had on their last album, Bajas Fresh. Their version of almighty jazz pianist Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play'' was one of their most inspired experiments and, per the Spotify streaming numbers, one of their most popular. Now here’s a full album of Sun Ra interpretations made on 19 vintage keyboards and little else, available only through streaming services and on cassette, and supporting a Chicago organization that connects art instructors to prisoners at Illinois’ Stateville Maximum Security Prison.
It’s not a stretch to see Bajas cover Ra so extensively. Baja Rob Frye comes from a jazz background, and Crain has done sound for Ra’s former band, the Arkestra. Ra, meanwhile, was one of the first jazz musicians to play the electric piano on record, and his fascination with keyboards as both instruments and objects is evident on his wonderful 1969 album Atlantis, where he lovingly designated his Hohner clavinet the “Solar Sound Instrument” and then absolutely went to town on it. The title of Bajas’ album is a reference to Wendy Carlos’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach, one of the major catalysts of synthesizers’ early popularity, and while the sonics here are much more sophisticated than Carlos’, it’s an admirable act of deference for Bajas to shout her out.
In lesser hands, “psychedelic synth-drone band does Ra” could be an invitation to formless wankery or something that coasts on Ra’s cachet as an avant-music ur-freak rather than actually dealing with him as an artist. Instead, Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.
Guest Jayve Montgomery’s use of the EWI-4000, an electronic wind instrument, is likely a tribute to Marshall Allen, the 97-year-old current leader of the Arkestra and a proponent of its cousin the EVI. A more oblique but no less touching tribute comes from Daniel Quinlivan’s vocoder, which approximates the slightly insouciant voice of Ra’s favorite singer, June Tyson. She sounded like she’d been casually traveling the stars for years, fully at ease in the outer reaches of the cosmos; Quinlivan matches this quality with a goofy, almost cute vocal filter that sounds less like a portentous astral ambassador than a robot sidekick along for the ride. It’s a risky choice that works only because of a total understanding of the emotional tenor of Ra’s music.
Ra’s music often has a mottled, earthy quality, even when it’s recounting journeys across the galaxy. His compositions might lose a bit of swing in being locked so firmly into a grid of oscillators and drum machines, but Bajas make up for it with a vivid, consistent, and carefully curated palette. If you’re familiar with the Dutch art movement De Stijl, you might get a sense of what Bajas are going for, favoring bold and unsubtle swaths of color over muddied earth tones or Pollock-like melanges. While the original “Space Is the Place” bustles like an aerial expressway, Bajas introduce it with hissing clouds of organ steam, as if letting the room fill with stage fog to set the scene, before a vocoder enters to imitate the four-note theme that’s chanted incessantly throughout the original.
“Space Is the Place” and “Lanquidity,” both from Ra’s most sonically outré era in the 1970s, are the tracks that most people will recognize, perhaps because they’re the easiest sell to latter-day ears as some of his funkiest, freakiest, most pharaoh-hatted work. “Opus in Springtime” dates from one of his last sessions, in 1990. But the sound and feel of Switched on Ra is most closely aligned with the music Ra was making in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when he was calling his band the Myth Science Arkestra. Records like Angels and Demons at Play and Fate in a Pleasant Mood are full of loping, oblong-seeming music that often seems to crawl into the sunset. Bajas accordingly pace their arrangements at an ooze, and the album builds up a slow but palpable momentum over its 51 minutes.
But what makes Switched on Ra stand so tall as both a tribute and a listening experience in its own right is how it uses these compositions as the framework for something that doesn’t really sound like a whole lot else. Though they’re paying tribute to two old masters of the electric keyboard in a style that’s enjoying a lot of love right now, thanks to the reissues of albums like Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies, Switched on Ra doesn’t exploit nostalgia or vintage-synth fetishism. It’s simply another iteration of what jazz musicians have been doing for decades: treating old songs less like artifacts trapped in amber than confederations of malleable ideas on which to project a brand-new sound and vision.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | December 2, 2021 | 7.9 | 28fe313d-4395-4a13-af44-127f7985daca | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Here he goes again, looking at the stars, seeing how they shine. | Here he goes again, looking at the stars, seeing how they shine. | Coldplay: Music of the Spheres | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coldplay-music-of-the-spheres/ | Music of the Spheres | It’s been more than 20 years since “Yellow” introduced the world to Coldplay at their best: hopelessly romantic but not treacly, full of wonder but grounded in the present. The song’s cymbals crash and its lyrics pine for the stars, but it’s more than just some lovesick drivel. Chris Martin’s falsetto can sound mournful, as if the object of his affection has already moved on, while guitarist Jonny Buckland’s distorted chords are slightly sour, hinting at turmoil in the undertow. The “Yellow” video, which was filmed on the day of drummer Will Champion’s mother’s funeral, is similarly poignant. Martin saunters along a drizzly beach, enticing the sun to rise, putting a choirboy spin on the Verve’s misanthropic clip for “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” In the middle of the video, when he raises a sleeve to his left eye, it’s unclear if he’s wiping away an errant raindrop or a tear.
Since then, Coldplay have often invoked the cosmos—the stars, the moon, the planets in general—as they’ve reached for universal feelings while leapfrogging from theaters to arenas to stadiums all around Earth. They’ve also struggled to maintain the mix of paranoia and positivity that fueled their finest work; their last few records lunged from misery to ecstasy without examining what’s in between. These two trends—cosmophilia and a shift away from emotional nuance—hit a strange zenith with their ninth studio album, Music of the Spheres. There’s a loose sci-fi concept involving a distant solar system, and Martin has said he found inspiration in the Cantina Band from the original Star Wars. But the record is more akin to the franchise’s notorious prequels: overblown, cartoonish, seemingly made for 8-year-olds. Even Jar Jar Binks himself might look askance at Coldplay’s latest CGI abomination of a video, featuring dancing alien ducks among other extraterrestrials possibly kidnapped from an off-brand theme park.
Music of the Spheres is produced by Max Martin, who has essentially defined the parameters of pop music over the last quarter-century. After making his name as the go-to hitmaker of the ’90s teen-pop era, creating career-making classics with the likes of Britney and Backstreet, Max has since teamed up with established superstars like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, helping them attain unfathomable levels of global popularity while maintaining the idiosyncrasies that made fans love them in the first place. For their part, Coldplay have never lacked in world-conquering ambition as they dutifully followed the tide of popular music away from traditional rock sounds across the last decade. So this full-album collaboration makes sense in a numbers-and-figures sort of way, especially following the band’s self-consciously modest 2019 record Everyday Life, their worst-selling LP to date.
The commercial strategy is already working. Spheres’ new single, “My Universe,” featuring K-pop kings BTS, who might be the only humans better at scaling the charts than Max right now, debuted at the very top of the Hot 100, scoring Coldplay their second-ever American No. 1. Their first was 2008’s “Viva La Vida,” a song that tactfully expanded what Coldplay could sound like after the creative dead-end of their third LP, 2005’s X&Y. Back then, Chris described Coldplay’s ethos thusly: “We can’t possibly get any bigger, let’s just get better.” The clamorous immensity of Spheres suggests the band’s philosophy has been inverted: Coldplay can’t top what they’ve already done artistically, but maybe they can score several billion more streams anyway.
For about half of the album’s songs, I would not be surprised if the creative process involved repeatedly smashing a red game show buzzer with the word “BIG” written on it. Along with the record’s hackneyed interstellar theme, Spheres’ enormity sadly chimes with what space exploration has become in real life: another meaningless hurdle for the richest of the rich to hop over, a VIP escape hatch. “Humankind” leans on a series of hollow millennial whoops, in between plasticine Springsteen chords; all gesture, no action. “Higher Power” attempts to repurpose the coked-out ’80s sounds of the Weeknd’s Max-produced “Blinding Lights” for a band that once made a pact to fire any member who got into cocaine. Featuring the din of a chanting crowd, synth-pop filler track “Infinity Sign” seems solely designed to play in the background of a FIFA video game’s menu screen.
But wait, it gets worse! “People of the Pride” is the roughest thing here, a midlife crisis jock jam where Buckland’s supposedly scuzzy guitar riff is filtered through what must be a plugin called “Dank Robot Fart.” In the song, Chris rails against a vague dictator figure who “takes his time” from a “homemade cuckoo clock” that he “makes us march around.” I think we can all agree authoritarian tyrants are bad, but so is this glorified Twitter rant.
Here is the part of the Coldplay review where we need to discuss Chris’ eternally frustrating words. To his credit, the singer has admitted he’s not a great lyricist, and that his songwriting boils down to “just a bunch of feelings.” Which would seem like a good match for the type of instant-pleasure pop Max is known for. But Max is also the progenitor of “melodic math,” a songwriting style where each line requires a certain number of syllables in order to maximize its melodic impact. Squeezing out the most efficient earworms possible sometimes means cleverness or novelty get steamrolled. Combined with Chris’ already-sketchy writing and the album’s ham-fisted instrumentation, this results in songs that don’t pinpoint a feeling but rather helplessly wave their arms in the direction of one.
“Let Somebody Go,” a duet with Selena Gomez, is an adult contemporary ballad seemingly swiped from Bryan Adams’ archives in which the pair aimlessly mope until deciding that “it hurts like so, to let somebody go.” Can’t argue with that. The crux of “Humankind” involves the revelation that humans can be... kind. Thanks to Max’s exacting formulas, a lot of these choruses will likely end up rattling around your head while you’re trying to go to sleep, but they’re so inane that you’re also likely to resent them for being there.
There are a couple of moments when these banalities briefly turn transcendent. “My Universe,” which follows a similar musical template as Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” bounds forward with the headiness of star-crossed infatuation. “You are my universe, and I just want to put you fi-i-irst,” Chris proclaims, adding some uncharacteristic finesse to the last word, like Mick Jagger might. Coupled with synths towering enough to be seen from the moon, an energetic turn from BTS, and an out-of-nowhere blog-house outro, the song breaks out of its market-tested shell and delivers a fleeting jolt of bliss.
The album’s best song, “Biutyful,” is also its most bittersweet. Guided by a simple acoustic guitar figure and an unfussy hip-hop beat, it is the rare Spheres track that is given any space to consider itself. Chris reacts with his most affecting vocal performance on the whole record, nostalgic and enchanting—which is especially impressive since he spends half the song pitched-up to sound like a squeaky alien. “Biutyful” is an ode to unconditional love, perhaps between parent and child, that doesn’t scream at you as much as it lets you linger inside of its dreamy gravity. “When you love me, love me, love me,” Chris sings, “I know I’ll be on top of the world, man.” It doesn’t look like much on paper, but the magic of this band at their most powerful has everything to do with their ability to turn something you’ve heard before—a phrase, a guitar echo—into something you want to hear over and over again.
There are too few of those bright spots, though. Instead, the record is more accurately represented by the video for “Higher Power,” where Chris walks toward the camera in a way that might bring your mind back to the first time you ever saw him. But he’s not on a beach, or even on this planet. He’s on a desolate orb called (checks notes) Kaotica, surrounded by a Blade Runner algorithm of a cityscape and dancing like the last wedding singer alive. There’s not much to see in his eyes except, maybe, desperation.
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. | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | October 14, 2021 | 5.1 | 28fff3d2-0545-4909-b76f-d466648bd7b8 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
The Asheville indie-rock quintet delivers an album’s worth of covers, revealing their influences via songs by Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Roger Miller. | The Asheville indie-rock quintet delivers an album’s worth of covers, revealing their influences via songs by Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Roger Miller. | Wednesday: Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wednesday-mowing-the-leaves-instead-of-piling-em-up/ | Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up | Has there ever been a more troublesome key change than the one that occurs a minute and 40 seconds into Wednesday’s cover of “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)”? In the original version of Gary Stewart’s barroom weeper, the outlaw country legend seemed to be describing a sad, old routine—something that by now had become familiar enough for him to take a little comfort in sharing with the person on the barstool beside him. But in Wednesday’s take, listen for that turnaround after the first chorus, when the whole band starts winding up like some ancient, rusting machinery. You get the sense that tonight, for better or worse, might be their breaking point.
“She’s Actin’ Single” is just one of the songs that the Asheville, North Carolina, indie-rock quintet transforms on its new covers album, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up. The follow-up to 2021’s excellent Twin Plagues, it’s the type of collection that, in a lesser band’s hands, might feel like a stopgap release: a low-stakes way of shaking off the jitters after a breakthrough. Instead, Mowing the Leaves feels crucial to Wednesday’s evolution, running through their influences—classic country, 1990s alt-rock and shoegaze, 2000s alt-country—to illustrate what the band draws on to create its signature blend.
Led by vocalist and guitarist Karly Hartzman, Wednesday have a knack for wrapping fragile, well-crafted songs in cozy blankets of noise. Many of their recordings are showcases for the extraordinary interplay of Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman alongside lap steel player Xandy Chelmis. That key change in “She’s Actin’ Single,” for example, is propelled by whining electric leads, making the instrument sound equally dangerous and dejected—you don’t know whether to offer a helping hand or back away in case they start kicking.
If that’s the balance you look for in rock music, then the selections on Mowing the Leaves will suit you like an expertly crafted mood playlist. When Wednesday plays “I Am the Cosmos,” they make Chris Bell’s signature song feel even more doomed and alone, trading his wide-open mountain vista for a claustrophobic bedroom of warped keys and fuzzed-out guitars. In their version of Drive-By Truckers’ alcoholic’s lament “Women Without Whiskey,” they tear into action at the end of each verse: More than Lenderman’s plainspoken delivery, the moaning guitars bring to life its imagery of exorcizing demons and drinking deep in the grave.
As ambitious as these covers can be, the best moments maintain a feeling of unrehearsed chemistry, the way a familiar song at the end of a live set can break the tension. Classics by Smashing Pumpkins and Medicine are natural fits, but other choices reveal new wrinkles in the band’s sound. Their take on Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock and Teardrops” begins with Hartzman strumming her guitar alongside Chelmis’ tentative lap steel, as if she’s teaching it to her bandmates for the first time. After a swell of feedback, you can hear them individually try to recreate its heartbroken shuffle with the tools they have on hand: an inquisitive bassline over the second verse, a chugging riff to carry the chorus, a musical break of layered solos, chasing each other toward a queasy harmony. “We tried our best to pay our respects,” Hartzman said of the experience, “but at the end of the day you can’t exactly replicate the magic of any of these tracks.” And yet, performances like these manage to feel inspired and original, capturing a magic all their own. | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | March 21, 2022 | 7.4 | 2900061a-e78f-4f23-bc27-5d84cc6bc3e9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The New York producer’s ambitious album is a dark, surreal, jazzy collage about resistance and hope. | The New York producer’s ambitious album is a dark, surreal, jazzy collage about resistance and hope. | Slauson Malone 1: A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slauson-malone-a-quiet-farwell-or-twenty-sixteen-to-twenty-eighteen/ | A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen | The defining words that linger on Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 film and soundtrack Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song are, “They bled my mama, they bled my papa/Won’t bleed me, won’t bleed you.” The line is from “Won’t Bleed Me,” a story of a black man living in a world where the white man has all of the authority (sounds familiar). Van Peebles’ message is one of resistance and hope, a connection he shares with Jasper Marsalis, aka Slauson Malone, who lightly sings that exact quote on “Won’t Bleed Me: The Sequel” and in part molds his ambitious album, A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen, after Peebles’ groundbreaking independent film.
Slauson Malone comes from the genre-neglecting New York collective of Standing on the Corner, whose music is often a response to the social issues negatively impacting the oppression of blackness and its culture. But at the end, they leave you with a sense of hope and optimism, felt deeply in the music of rappers like MIKE and Medhane. In this scene, Slauson Malone is the steady backbone, sprinkling his sample-heavy touches throughout. A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen is Marsalis’ first album since departing Standing on the Corner, for which he creates a surreal sound of memory, and a soulful foundation to send a message of his own.
Like a jazz musician or a restless composer, Marsalis reinterprets the same song four different times here, titled “Smile.” Through this miniseries within his album, he discovers a defining mantra: “Smile at the past when I see it.” It’s a bar spit by a reflective Caleb Giles over a bright piano riff on “Smile 1,” restated with less energy by Los Angeles rapper Maxo on “Smile 2,” before dreary guitars and Quasimoto-style pitch alteration on Marsalis’ vocals feel like a descent into a dark portal on “Smile 3” and “Smile 4.”
At times—with short songs that hover around a minute, abrupt beat switches, and a refusal to hide his influences—Marsalis begins to emerge like a youth-injected Madlib. There are moments where it's easy to get lost because Marsalis is unconcerned if anyone can keep up. It can feel like you’re listening to a YouTube playlist of snippets. But the snippet-like approach isn’t a distraction from Marsalis’ message given we’re in an era where some (me) can go days only listening to leaked clips of Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert.
And, refreshingly, Marsalis’ music is not all message. His arrangements are engaging despite their density, using collaborations to make every song feel like a moment of its own. He spreads a fresh set of meditative voices across the project (See: Medhane, Pink Siifu, and Taphari) and adds extra life through contributions from cellist Nicky Wetherell and violinist Maya Balkaran.
Above all, it’s an album that rewards close, undistracted listening. Marsalis’ music inspires deep-digging into yourself (or Google) because when you’re lost in a song, replaying it, you pick up on new details each time, and realize every sound has a purpose. Whether the sounds are mournful sirens and screams or a saxophone riff on “(Fred Hampton’s Door Into Farewell Sassy) Na” that makes it feel like you’re the only attendee at a cigar-scented jazz club.
The beautiful part about the New York underground where Marsalis emerged is that they’re conscious of their brashness and unbothered if their message doesn’t knock down every door. Marsalis remains unbroken in a world made to demoralize a young black person like himself before they get the chance to reach this type of creative breakthrough. In an archived interview, Melvin Van Peebles said there were two responses to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, “Those who got their game uptight, dig it out of sight, the others run for cover.” With any luck, Marsalis will garner a similar response. | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | Grand Closing | April 25, 2019 | 7.8 | 2904513b-e2e8-421d-9627-736814fb60d2 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Like the best lo-fi music, this debut LP manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener. | Like the best lo-fi music, this debut LP manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener. | Tune-Yards: BiRd-BrAiNs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12851-bird-brains/ | BiRd-BrAiNs | When you talk about lo-fi more or less inspired by folk, the best stuff always carries with it a sense of discovery. Cheap and tinny acoustic music should feel like something you stumbled upon, like maybe you dug it out of an old drawer or rescued it from the freebee bin in the thrift store. And then the force of the music should sparkle through the grit and hiss and distortion and make you think you understand something about the person making it. It's a romantic notion, one not necessarily based in reality. But the best music in this vein manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener.
That's how BiRd-BrAiNs feels. It's the debut album by Merrill Garbus' tUnE-yArDs (she's the lone member of the band) and it was recorded on a digital voice recorder and assembled using shareware mixing software. Garbus' primary instrument is ukulele, the tone of which is thin and trebly and lonesome, the sound you usually get from a barrel-scraping demos collection issued long after someone is dead. To this she adds her own field recordings-- the sound outside her window, a child being asked about blueberries, indistinct creaks and clatter-- along with occasional percussion that seems to consist of whatever nearby could be smacked or shaken. Some songs loop these elements into mini-epics that bring to mind an early, crude version of Juana Molina's one-woman-band aesthetic; others sound like they're being whispered around a late-night campfire burning a few tents over. The "production" is rough, and not always in an appealing way. The sub-demo quality's most annoying attribute is the blocky digital clipping that happens whenever the voice recorder is overloaded, which is often. So if you don't have a tolerance for cut-rate sonics-- and this isn't even the warm analog stuff-- forget about it. But if you do, the best songs on BiRd-BrAiNs can sneak up on you.
The ultimate draw is Garbus' voice, which can be husky and serious or else pitched up to make her sound like a kid humming to herself to pass the time. She's got a respectable amount of power and range, but more importantly, she sings with abandon. Take "Sunlight", a track that made its way around as a pre-release mp3. On it she begins low and sensual, purring the verses like a 1970s folkie about to lay down something heavy as a for-real drum kit bangs out a half-funk loop and an electric guitar scratches along. And then the song pivots and Garbus explodes into the chorus. Each successive "I could be the sunlight in your eyes, couldn't I?" is more desperate than the last, the frantic plea of someone who has never been seen. It's cathartic even as it leaves you hanging, the sort of song that begs for repeat plays.
Only one other song matches "Sunlight", and I'll get to it in a moment, but several others come close. "Lions" is both charming and creepy, halfway between a singsong schoolyard rhyme and a graveyard blues. The wordless vocalizations in the folk-hop "Hatari" could fairly be described as yodeling, but Garbus sells the warble with her fearlessness (here's someone who never bothered to wonder if she might be annoying people, and her boldness gives her an edge.) "There is a natural sound that wild things make when they're bound" is "Hatari"'s closing line, which is a perfect description of Garbus' unhinged mode. In between the best moments are some formless stretches populated with a few decent songs that never quite fulfill their promise. Still, the time spent collecting and assembling (BiRd-BrAiNs was put together over two years) turned up a few things worth holding onto.
Like "Fiya", the second-to-last song, which manages to grab the best elements of everything that came before. We get a simple and pretty melody on the verses, the "seems like it's always been around" kind of tune Devendra Banhart wrote so effortlessly on Rejoicing in the Hands and Niño Rojo. And then there's a subtle build, where additional instruments are folded in and the clutter increases the track's intensity. The structure is a perfect match for "Fiya"'s theme, which is about transforming extreme self-loathing into something else. "What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?", Garbus wonders. She concludes that a relationship's failure only makes sense if she is, in fact, "nothing at all." And then she moves on to singing "You are always on my mind" four times, toying with the canonical phrase (it almost sounds like "were always on my mind") and making it her own before finally letting loose with that "wild thing" sound.
Her amazing wail answers her earlier question: What if your own skin makes your skin crawl? Well, maybe you try and turn those feelings into something. Like, say, write and record a terrifically moving song called "Fiya" in your living room. You'll feel a little better. And then those of us who understand those shitty feelings can sit around and listen to "Fiya", and we'll feel better too. That's what the intimacy of home-recorded music is all about. | 2009-04-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-04-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Marriage | April 3, 2009 | 6.8 | 2906b8a0-35a1-4642-8500-802bb01d0970 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
2xCD set of arena-friendly songs about California, sex, and having sex in California is split between slightly askew mid-tempo pop and regrettable relapses into funk and muso noodling. | 2xCD set of arena-friendly songs about California, sex, and having sex in California is split between slightly askew mid-tempo pop and regrettable relapses into funk and muso noodling. | Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6710-stadium-arcadium/ | Stadium Arcadium | Double albums can be fearless declarations of self-indulgence, an idea dump for a band looking to expand its boundaries, give the secondary members a few chances to songwrite, or share that gestating song cycle about warring clans of magical elves with the world. The Red Hot Chili Peppers don't seem to be likely candidates for any of the above, having spent a two-decade career trafficking in progressively diluted funk songs about California, sex, and having sex in California. Then again, they've given their record the preposterous pseudo-Latin title of Stadium Arcadium (what's next, a music review book called Thesaurus Musicarum?), so maybe the shirtophobic quartet is ready to let their art-rock flag fly.
Probably for the best, that's not the case; through two-plus hours of music, the emphasis here is on the Stadium. Like many of their peers from the heady peak of alternative rock-- your Grohls, Cornells, and Billie Joes-- the Peppers have eased into a comfortable life traveling down the middle of the road. Kiedis, Flea, & co. can even stake a truly rightful claim to the territory now christened Adult Album Alternative, having practically induced labor on the genre with the mega-hit "Under the Bridge" and their subsequent string of ever-so-slightly askew mid-tempo pop. Fitting examples abound on Stadium Arcadium, catchy tunes that will ensure a long tenure for the album at the front of the store. The band's sin, however, is one of self-denial: If the Red Hot Chili Peppers have pretty much mastered a marketable style, why bludgeon us with an unwieldy and inconsistent approach for 1/12th of a day, nagged by an annoying tendency to detour through affirmations of their technical talent and loyalty to funk-rock?
It could've been worse, as the sessions that led to Stadium Arcadium reportedly yielded enough material for a triple album. So the band has shown some ability to self-edit, but not enough to save the record from typical double-album bloat, the islands of good tracks floating amidst the should-a-been B-sides. Conveniently-- or perhaps subconsciously-- the set is still front-loaded, with the first disc containing most of the highlights, like the expertly paced sunset anthem of the title track or the one-peak-after-another rave-up of "Torture Me".
But sprinkled throughout the first disc, and coming to a head in the second, are products of the band's compulsive need to tip the light-bulb hat to their younger selves, most notably half-baked funk tracks "Hump De Bump" and "Warlocks". Whereas poor production values and drug-fueled exuberance once excused their George Clinton worship, 20 years on, in Rick Rubin's sterile environment, the band sounds like they're in jamband training camp, filling in all the empty spaces with blippityblap reminders of Flea's virtuosity and John Frusciante's desire to use every effects pedal ever invented (potentially the primary motivation for making this a double album).
Isolated to the occasional compulsory workout, these excesses could be ignored, but when they slip into the over-long outros of straightforward soon-to-be-singles, the band's lack of perspective is obvious. Rubin, producing his fifth consecutive RHCP release, appears unwilling or unable to push the band into any kind of challenging territory, settling for inserting a great treated-drum breakdown in the middle of "Readymade" that he'll probably mine the next time Jay-Z rings him up. Brief moments where the band takes on a new identity, like the Fleetwood Mac-style finale of "Wet Sand", are fleeting, while other experiments (the spoken-word of "Death of a Martian", the bizarre background vocals of "Animal Bar") simply derail right as soon as they leave the station.
Maybe the Mac are an appropriate guidepost for the Chili Peppers, potential guides for how to sublimate a once-renowned rhythm section into slick California contempo-pop-- hell, they even made a similarly uneven double album! But keeping one foot in the funk of their origins and becoming mired in muso leanings is a ball and chain for the band's current incarnation as radio-pop darlings, a period that has now lasted twice as long as their goofball early days. By trying to incorporate all these personas, Stadium Arcadium can't help but grow as distended as the name suggests, revealing a band too proud to merely play the game they've already solved or use the added space to risk a less worn path. | 2006-05-09T02:00:16.000-04:00 | 2006-05-09T02:00:16.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | May 9, 2006 | 4.7 | 2907d7b1-11c8-4036-a015-e4d3e2f8b031 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
null | Sometime last year, omnipresent vocalist and Ipecac label owner Mike Patton teamed up with one of hard rock's current hottest commodities, the Dillinger Escape Plan (DEP), to record a four-song EP while the band was between singers. But the significance of this pairing goes beyond simple collaboration. It is historical. Here's why:
Love him or leave him, Patton's influence on underground metal and hardcore, particularly through Faith No More, is undeniable. His influence on mainstream rap-rock is similarly undisputed, serving as the template for vocalists like Korn's Jonathan Davis. There's a list of side-projects and guest appearances too long to mention, | The Dillinger Escape Plan / Mike Patton: Irony Is a Dead Scene EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2314-irony-is-a-dead-scene-ep/ | Irony Is a Dead Scene EP | Sometime last year, omnipresent vocalist and Ipecac label owner Mike Patton teamed up with one of hard rock's current hottest commodities, the Dillinger Escape Plan (DEP), to record a four-song EP while the band was between singers. But the significance of this pairing goes beyond simple collaboration. It is historical. Here's why:
Love him or leave him, Patton's influence on underground metal and hardcore, particularly through Faith No More, is undeniable. His influence on mainstream rap-rock is similarly undisputed, serving as the template for vocalists like Korn's Jonathan Davis. There's a list of side-projects and guest appearances too long to mention, boasting an acclaimed cast of cohorts: John Zorn, Dan the Automator, Dave Lombardo (Slayer), Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), and Melt-Banana, among others. And at the foundation of the legend, there's simply the mad genius of Mike Patton, a.k.a. "Hardcore Pavarotti", with his immense vocal range and penchant for perplexing artistic expression. He may be too much to handle sometimes, but it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call the man an icon.
And then there's the Dillinger Escape Plan: With only one release under their belts (the three-song EP Under the Running Board) at the time, this band laid down perhaps the seminal recording for the now flourishing math-metal genre, blending elements of math-rock, metal, and hardcore with a tip of the hat to modern jazz. Highly technical and intelligent, but still tenacious and punishing, 1999's Calculating Infinity set a high-bar for the genre, and garnered loads of praise for the New Jersey upstarts.
In 2001, while searching for a new vocalist to replace the departed Dmitri Minakakis (who took lead vocals on Calculating Infinity), DEP butted heads with Patton to produce this four-track EP. For a meeting of the minds of this caliber, you might assume there had to be some give and take, but here, the two parties complement each other perfectly by blending their two distinguished sounds into one primal force: DEP's cerebral approach interlocks with Patton's more visceral leanings, making for a seamless, happy medium of intense technical proficiency and quirky, creative flourishes. This one is on par with DEP's finest, yet it's more accessible-- and more importantly, it surpasses everything Patton's done since Faith No More's Angel Dust.
Patton himself hasn't changed. The cartoon-baritone hyper-rap on "Hollywood Squares"-- in addition to the Snarf melody-- tells you the eccentric Patton of old hasn't gone anywhere. Similar spastic rap stylings on "Pig Latin" further reinforce the point. And just in case you still aren't convinced, he sports a multi-faceted, all-natural Richard D. James impression on the band's rendition of "Come to Daddy". Yet, unlike most of Patton's other recent projects, including Tomahawk and Fantômas, DEP refuse to reflect the strained caricature of his vocals in their music. There is no "goof" in hardcore punk, and the band hasn't compromised-- these are, after all, the guys who shat on stage during a performance at the August 2002 Reading Festival.
The band's calculated proficiency stands in stark contrast to Patton's right-brained outlandishness; while Patton is busy stammering about "your mother, your father," and God-knows-what else on "Pig Latin," DEP are furnishing him with flawless funk-metal. The multi-faceted ass kicking of "Hollywood Squares" relies on the band's patented, eruptive math-metal passages to break up a modicum of Patton weirdness. And even "Come to Daddy", which may sound like a bad idea in theory, comes off with supreme ferocity: Chris Pennie's drums simply decimate iBooks.
The complete package is neither arcane nor peculiar. Patton and DEP have managed to find a midpoint between two styles that speaks to both sides of the brain. The only unfortunate thing is that we'll likely never again witness the two in action together; last year, Dillinger hired vocalist Greg Puciato who, despite handling his growling duties admirably, doesn't near possess Patton's vocal range or ambition. So it's just as Patton himself once mused: "You want it all but you can't have it." Four songs will have to suffice. | 2002-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Epitaph | December 2, 2002 | 8.4 | 290b95c3-dec2-4a83-8430-02ded5fc47f1 | Brad Haywood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-haywood/ | null |
On Timber Remixed, the likes of Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and Oneohtrix Point Never tackle Bang On a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s driving and rhythmic work for wood planks. | On Timber Remixed, the likes of Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and Oneohtrix Point Never tackle Bang On a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s driving and rhythmic work for wood planks. | Mantra Percussion: Michael Gordon: Timber Remixed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22501-michael-gordon-timber-remixed/ | Michael Gordon: Timber Remixed | Contemporary classical music and remix culture have not always been natural partners. Remix albums dedicated to pieces by Steve Reich or Philip Glass often sound more dutiful than imaginative—despite the fact that the minimalist school of composition has inspired countless approaches to electronic music. It's proved a tough problem to solve, yet the attractive idea of placing beat-oriented classical works in the hands of cutting-edge producers generally ensures that new proposals will be forthcoming.
Timber Remixed is the latest entrant in this field. It carries some familiar drawbacks, but also some ingenious stretches. On this double-album set, the work under electronic re-consideration is a percussion piece by veteran composer Michael Gordon. A co-founder of the influential Bang On A Can collective, Gordon’s approach to polyrhythmic complexity led the minimalist movement into some new territory, starting in the 1980s. His 2009 work Timber requires six percussionists to navigate a wide array of patterns, while each playing only a single simantra—otherwise known as a 2x4. (Their varied lengths can produce different pitches and overtones, a possibility first exploited by composer Iannis Xenakis.)
Still, boards are boards. And the limited instrumental range of a “wood plank ensemble” might suggest a static experience. Unless the composition itself is really something. The consistent feel of discovery that is evident on the 2011 premiere recording of Timber is due to Gordon’s talent for upending expectations. Rich and bizarre tapestries spring up all over the nearly hour-long piece. Pointedly, Gordon’s beat layers don’t build up in a process-oriented way that might help you anticipate what’s coming next. Rhythmically, Timber is a work of jagged surprise—even when this quality is masked by the surface simplicity of the wood-struck tones.
The original release of Timber was performed by the Dutch group Slagwerk Den Haag. Timber Remixed offers two different recordings by the American group Mantra Percussion. On the first disc, a studio recording by Mantra is remixed by twelve different electronic artists. This coterie includes names that are well-known outside the field of new-classical—like Fennesz and Oneohtrix Point Never—as well as underground luminaries like Ikue Mori. The second disc of Timber Remixed presents a complete, live performance of the original piece.
It’s a smart move to append a full performance of Timber to the remixes. In this way, the relative star power of Tim Hecker will guarantee that people actually check out Gordon’s music. Though while it is ably played, the live version here isn’t quite on the level of the first release—which to my ears still sounds like the the best vehicle for the composer’s designs. The live take on Timber Remixed features more sustain, and more bass-heavy pulsation. These qualities serve the composition’s most propulsive passages well. But they also rob Timber of some textural variance. (The original take by Slagwerk Den Haag has a drier sound that makes the piece’s eccentricities stand out better.)
As a result, Timber Remixed is defined more clearly by its remixes. Tim Hecker’s rethink has been billed as a reference to Steve Reich’s “phasing” compositions. And his piece does sound like Gordon as imagined by Reich, circa 1967. But by reaching back to a period of minimalism before Gordon’s ascent, this remix ignores some of what makes the composer’s music distinct. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s leadoff track has a light-touch approach that involves stretching a few drones atop Mantra’s studio playing. It’s an attractive sound, but you’d be just as well served to listen to Gordon’s music straight up.
Composer Sam Pluta’s take, which follows next, shows how much can be gained by discarding the central, wood-tone nature of Timber. After starting out with the collective sound of the simantras, Pluta transmutes and twists the percussion notes into purely electronic washes of sound that still retain Gordon’s melodic patterns. After this feat of filtering out the percussion from a percussion piece and keeping it recognizable, Pluta adds crackling beats back to the mix, for a bit, before closing with harmonics that hit like amplifier feedback.
Other acts with audacious approaches to this assignment include Oneohtrix Point Never and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. The former blends in synthesized choral accompaniment; the latter fosters a madcap flow by isolating samples and pushing them to extremes of timbre and tempo. HPrizm’s remix uses quick dynamic shifts to create an unstable, foreboding environment.
Some of the final entries move so far away from the source material that you’d be hard pressed to identify them as Gordon remixes in a sonic lineup. (That’s the case with Hauschka’s entry, which goes heavy on the prepared-piano.) Driving too far afield from all the elements of Timber can seem as unrewarding a choice as expressing undue fidelity to the piece. Though thanks to the most creative works on the first disc, this crossover project still shows that it's able to do justice to Gordon’s work, while also suggesting some promising avenues for future, cross-genre collaboration. | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | November 16, 2016 | 6.8 | 290edd72-be30-479d-905b-bf6833803c23 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Montreal duo’s scorching second album unites acid techno, future jazz, and hip-hop in service of incisive political punk. | The Montreal duo’s scorching second album unites acid techno, future jazz, and hip-hop in service of incisive political punk. | Pelada: Ahora Más Que Nunca | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pelada-ahora-mas-que-nunca/ | Ahora Más Que Nunca | Pelada’s mantra is “love us or hate us, we don’t give a fuck.” Over the past decade, the Montreal-based duo of vocalist Chris Vargas and producer Tobias Rochman have fused punk aggression and politicized lyrics into a mutant strain of hardware techno. Four years have passed since their debut, and after parting ways with former label PAN, Pelada return with a second album that renders their hardcore punk politics even more incisive. Ahora Más Que Nunca (Now More Than Ever) sets the Colombian vocalist’s Spanish-language protest songs and empowerment anthems to ominous electronic beatscapes, matching them in intensity at every step.
On 2019’s Movimiento Para Cambio (Movement for Change), Pelada’s explorations into cumbia and reggaeton sounded more like a disjointed string of singles than a structured collection. The duo is still dancing between acid techno, future jazz, and hip-hop, but on Ahora Más Que Nunca, the increased consistency of Rochman’s production synthesizes these sounds into a uniquely confrontational and genre-agnostic take on club music. Guest appearances from horrorcore rapper Backxwash and trumpeter Aquiles Navarro of Irreversible Entanglements complicate the classifications even further.
Several core themes emerge from Vargas’ urgent electro-punk sermons. “Agua ≠ Mercancía” (“Water ≠ Merchandise”) calls out the Canadian government for its mismanagement of natural resources. “Latido de Extinción” (“Extinction Beat”) echoes the need to rise up against state and corporate greed, as Vargas shouts, “Estamos en tierra robada!” (“We are on stolen land!”) Album opener “La Gente Se Laventa” (“People Get Up”) calls for revolution “hoy, no mañana” (“today, not tomorrow”) before a beat switch arrives to propel Backxwash’s aggressive rhymes about eating their oppressors. “This dirty little life we live,” they spit, “it’s fight the rich, or go on till we ice these pricks.”
As any activist will tell you, meaningful action is not possible without self-care. After a brief introduction about finding inner strength, “Ya Fue” (“It Was Already”) merges vocoder-laced vocals with Navarro’s wandering, echo-drenched horn, like Miles Davis in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. On “Pilas” (“Batteries”), Vargas sings about overcoming doubts and depression, reminding that “un mal día no te define” (“a bad day does not define you”). Their angrily enunciated lyrics pick up speed as bouncing rubber-ball synths are replaced by orchestral percussion samples, giving gravitas to this pissed-off pep talk.
In the resigned yet resolved spoken-word passages of closer “Punto de no Retorno” (“Point of No Return”), Pelada argue that “la pobreza existe, no porque no podamos alimentar a los pobres, sino porque no podemos satisfacer a los ricos” (“poverty exists, not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich”). Yet perhaps the most persuasive moment is the ACAB anthem “Cerdo” (“Pig”), which concludes with cycling pianos reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. This album’s political slogans may not be Pelada’s alone, but bolstered by their unifying array of thumping beats, the horrors of colonialism become all the more real. | 2023-12-08T08:29:08.704-05:00 | 2023-12-08T08:29:08.704-05:00 | Electronic | New Label | December 8, 2023 | 7.7 | 290fe7bf-6a65-4593-ab95-54a3bf48be7c | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The second album in Mute’s planned series of archival Can shows captures a group figuring things out in real time. After 30 tentative minutes, things turn transcendent. | The second album in Mute’s planned series of archival Can shows captures a group figuring things out in real time. After 30 tentative minutes, things turn transcendent. | Can: Live in Brighton 1975 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/can-live-in-brighton-1975/ | Live in Brighton 1975 | When you’re improvising a piece of music from scratch, you’re bound to spend some time fumbling in the dark. You take a tentative stab at this chord change or that groovy ostinato, you listen to your bandmates conducting their own halting experiments, you wait for the idea that will illuminate a compelling path forward for everyone. For Can, on the evening of November 19, 1975, the light took its time showing up. But once the legendary German avant-rock band found it, they never looked back.
Live in Brighton 1975 is the second in a planned series of Can archival concert recordings, perhaps the next best thing to seeing them live for those of us who were born too late to witness their decade-long run. And if records must suffice, we might as well embrace the positives the medium has to offer. Given Can’s habit of pulling jams from thin air, there are no song titles here, just identifying numbers in German. The first few excursions have their moments, but if you’re digging into Live in Brighton 1975 for the first time, I recommend skipping straight to track vier.
We hear a rowdy audience, itself something of a revelation for a band whose legacy can seem phantasmagoric for a modern American listener—they were envisioning new forms for rock music that were far beyond the visions of their contemporaries, and doing so in relative obscurity, especially outside Europe. (Who are these people who had the good sense to see Can when they had the chance, and did they appreciate what they were getting?) Irmin Schmidt’s painterly electric piano chords suggest a pastoral scene, then Michael Karoli’s guitar feedback and Jaki Liebezeit’s snare drum rain down like napalm and gatling gun fire. Fans will recognize the riff that emerges from the onslaught as “Vernal Equinox,” a highlight from 1975’s Landed, the otherwise middling album that Can were ostensibly promoting at the time. But Can were never a band to merely recreate their records, and their take on “Vernal Equinox” here reaches a delirium that the studio version only hints at. Liebezeit, Can’s greatest individual player, propels his bandmates with a drumbeat that may as well have been pulled off a d’n’b record from 20 years later, envisioning the future as he skitters forward at 160 bpm.
Can remain at full throttle for the rest of the show. “Brighton 75 Fünf” seems loosely based on “Quantum Physics,” off 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma, but again the band takes its own source material as an open-ended suggestion about where the music might go, rather than a set of rules. Where “Quantum Physics” is whispery and diffuse, “Brighton 75 Fünf” is emphatic and visceral, hammering at the edges of its central theme until they’re sharp enough to draw blood. The most thrilling moment comes when they abandon the roadmap entirely. Liebezeit downshifts suddenly into menacing half-time and the band loses its footing for a second, seemingly unsure how to complement this new groove. Eventually, they stop trying to cohere, and the faltering ambiguity comes to seem deliberate. It sounds like a transmission from an alternate timeline where Karlheinz Stockhausen and J Dilla decided to team up for a 7".
The musicians are at their best when they have an anchor, some agreed-upon germ of an idea from which to build their improvisation outward. The set’s highest peak comes at the end with “Brighton 75 Sieben,” a jam clearly derived from 1972’s immortal “Vitamin C.” By ’75, vocalist Damo Suzuki had left Can, and in lieu of his manic hook, the band reorients “Vitamin C” around its instrumental bridge, a minor-key organ line that comes across as nearly incidental on the studio version but emerges as monumental here. Liebezeit’s barrages of percussion in the final section of “Sieben” would be astounding if they were the first things he played that night, and are even more so when you realize he’s been at it like this for an hour and a half.
What about everything else, the 30 minutes of music that come before Can hit their stride with “Brighton 75 Vier”? Other than a brief dip into the reeling melody of “Dizzy Dizzy,” it sounds to me like they’re working from scratch. And while they surely found magic in these unexplored zones on many other nights, it just wasn’t happening here. “Eins” and “Zwei” lean heavily on leads from Karoli, who was a wildly inventive guitarist in his approaches to texture and rhythm, but not at his best when playing more traditional solos. They sound less like the guys who exploded the boundaries of rock music with Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi than they do like a pretty good jam band.
The mere existence of recordings like Live in Brighton 1975 is a gift to Can listeners. Unlike the Grateful Dead—perhaps Can’s closest equals in their vision of the rock stage as a cosmic realm where anything is possible—Can didn’t have bootleg tapers at every single show. The Dead certainly played their fair share of clams, but when you can zoom through their entire history, there’s less pressure for every moment to reach transcendence; even the rough spots become charming in their way. Hopefully, as Mute releases more of these archival Can shows, the effect will be similar. Commitment to spontaneous invention means willingness to accept the occasional failure. And you can always skip to the next track.
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. | 2021-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mute | December 18, 2021 | 7.4 | 2913c8e1-b65f-4d81-a5dd-bd2306350c76 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Originally issued in 1960, this was Davis' studio follow-up to the landmark Kind of Blue and found him striking out in an entirely new direction. | Originally issued in 1960, this was Davis' studio follow-up to the landmark Kind of Blue and found him striking out in an entirely new direction. | Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain: Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13088-sketches-of-spain-legacy-edition/ | Sketches of Spain: Legacy Edition | Is this even jazz? Sketches of Spain was perhaps the first Miles Davis album to inspire this question, though it certainly wouldn't be the last. Originally released in 1960, it was Davis' studio follow-up to the landmark Kind of Blue, and it found him, yet again, striking out in an entirely new direction.
Working with arranger Gil Evans, Davis cooked up a concept album, looking to the structure and texture of Spanish folk and classical music for inspiration. The two old friends and collaborators were on a huge roll creatively during this period. Davis was piling up hall of fame-caliber jazz albums with alarming regularity, while Evans, in addition to working with Davis frequently in the late 1950s, recorded what was perhaps his finest solo album in 1960, Out of the Cool (it vaguely shares a vibe with Sketches, but is in my estimation just a hair better). So to say both were in strong form here would be an understatement. Davis takes what is most striking about his trumpet style-- the controlled soloing in the middle register, with a mastery of subtle shifts in focus-- and amplifies it, creating measured phrases of almost painful intensity. While Evans' distinctive approach to harmony and tonal color-- one of the most enjoyable "Hey, I get it!" moments as you first explore jazz is when you start to recognize his arrangements-- inhabits a form that to the uninitiated can sound mysterious and exotic and sensual. It's hard not to be taken in immediately.
And that's the first thing to note about Sketches of Spain: Where Davis' "Is this jazz?" albums from the late-60s forward were often dense and challenging ("Is this even music?" even came up now and then), Sketches of Spain was always easy to like. So much so that, like its predecessor, it became the kind of record that someone with only two or three albums by jazz artists might have in their collection. That's partly up to its potential contexts being so variable. There's a lot going on in the music that rewards a close listen, but it's also something you can put on and read to (though admittedly, some of the dynamic surges could be a little jolting). It's often quiet and atmospheric, at points coming over as almost ambient. It's the kind of album that dims the light in the room whenever it plays. It's also absolutely gorgeous.
The writers of The Penguin Guide to Jazz felt that the moodiness of Sketches of Spain dominated to the point where it added up to something closer to glorified elevator music. There is some merit to their claim, but the criticism now seems, interestingly, dated. The majority of people encountering a record like Sketches of Spain for the first time probably have no special interest in jazz as an idea, and the notion of pursuing atmospheric records whose primary selling point is an overriding feel and an abiding surface-level prettiness is nothing to be embarrassed about. If we want something more forward with more improvisation and interplay, hey, there are a billion other records out there. But Sketches of Spain does something special.
There's a real charge that comes from the distant, clattering percussion that begins "Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio)", the opening track and centerpiece. It's a piece by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, and if you hear it played with a classical guitar and full orchestra, you realize both how faithful Evans was to it in terms of structure and what he accomplished as far as texture. Using French horn, harp, oboe, and bassoon, as well as more typically jazz brass instruments like trumpet and trombone (Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, the rhythm section of Davis' band, are both on hand, but they're playing charts-- there's no room here for improvisation), Evans creates a shifting tapestry of luscious sound. Sometimes the music just seems to hang in the air, and sometimes it lurches toward an unexpected climax. Davis is the only soloist on the record, and he burrows deeply into the melodies, turning them over with a huge, bulbous tone that's both strong and vulnerable. He sounds especially impassioned on "Saeta", a piece whose scales reflect the influence of North African music on flamenco. It opens with a march and a fanfare, and then Davis blasts an uncanny solo-- slow, choosing between a small handful of notes, but so intent and concentrated that his trumpet almost seems to be splintering. The contrasts between Evans velvety but complex backdrops and Davis' extemporaneous work out front is compelling from start to finish.
The problem with this edition is a familiar one to anyone who has followed the never-ending Miles Davis reissue campaign: There's an extra disc of material here, all of which was issued elsewhere and most of which is of interest primarily to collectors, and that extra disc inflates the suggested retail of the set to $25. That's a lot of scratch when you get down to what you're really paying for if you don't own the set already, and that's the first five tracks from the original record, 41 minutes of music total. Disc One, in addition to the full album, does contain the sessions' one true outtake, "Song of Our Country". It's easy to see why it was left off, since its tone is several shades brighter and the arrangement is more firmly entrenched in jazz proper-- it actually sounds closer to something from Miles Ahead, the 1957 Evans/Davis big band set. But it's still worth owning, even if it was later compiled into one of Davis' many odds-and-ends sets, 1980's Directions.
Eight of the 11 tracks on the second disc consist of alternate takes, including four that cover sections of "Concierto". As good as some of this material is, you'll never reach for this sequence over the master unless you're researching the subtle differences in the solos. A live version of "Concierto" from 1961, the only time Davis performed this material in concert, is the most worthwhile inclusion by far. But by the end of the disc we're hearing "Teo" from the 1961 album Someday My Prince Will Come, and all of a sudden Coltrane is soloing, which makes no sense whatsoever in this painstakingly arranged context. As the notes indicate, "Teo" bears a melodic and thematic resemblance to material on Sketches, and though that's true, its inclusion here is dubious. It seems more a way to pad out a set that needs to be of a certain length to justify the price tag. Better that this edition had included "Song of Our Country" and the live "Concierto" as bonus cuts on a single disc. The liner notes, by composer Gunther Schuller, a "Third Stream" pioneer who mixed jazz and classical, are informative and well done and do add value. The music benefits from his analysis, which is technical but still accessible.
So the score given here reflects a compromise between the vast musical riches of the original album and the questionable packaging of the reissue. I wish I could say that Sketches is an album that turntable owners should just seek out on inexpensive used vinyl-- with a jazz record this popular, there are plenty of copies floating around. But the music is so subtle and detailed, surface noise really can get in the way here. Sketches is a masterpiece that opens up with a close listen, with every detail of the music clearly audible. So do seek it out, but if you do so with this edition, it'll cost you a few bucks. | 2009-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Jazz | Legacy | June 5, 2009 | 8 | 29163979-60e1-4b6f-bb0d-5391dff901f6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the ... | The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the ... | The Black Keys: Thickfreakness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/766-thickfreakness/ | Thickfreakness | The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the way quick-like: The Black Keys and the Stripes will inevitably be indexed on the same page in the great canon of Rock history, but paper similarities aside-- each duo brazenly, turbulently rehashing American blues tradition through a minimalist storm of scraping guitars and bruised skins-- they've got almost nothing in common. The Black Keys may just be a couple of white dudes from Akron, but they seem closer in spirit to something that Muddy Waters himself might've considered "the blues" than to any midwestern bar-band's approximation of it. The only Stripes link of any importance, in fact, is that the Keys' previous album was better, too.
Last year's The Big Come-Up introduced the garage-grime and "white Hendrix" croon of The Sonics to the unholy strut of Junior Kimbrough's legendary guitar lines, fusing them into a spitting, spewing, 40-ton monster. Winners like "Heavy Soul" evoked the primal ballet of Fordzilla crushing unmanned Buicks, and when it wasn't busy flattening rides, still offered a glimpse of the delicate machinery under the hood with soul cuts like "I'll Be Your Man". With Thickfreakness, the once-massive guitar is exponentially weightier, thicker, and juicier, swelling to Earth-shaking proportions, at the unfortunate loss of a little subtlety. But that's just the way it is sometimes; there's no room for luxuries like nuanced variations in tone, or shifting rhythms when you're fleeing from a fire-breathing behemoth.
Still, swallow enough white-hot blues riffs and you get heartburn; it's hard not to miss Come-Up's pace-breaking exercises like "Countdown" or "Them Eyes" after blues explosion #348 (and counting). Even at its most delicate, Dan Auerbach's fretwork still hits like a hollowbody that's been filled with cement, and Patrick Carney's swaying grooves seem suppressed, driven further back in the mix. Once again, the Keys stomp as violently and elementally as before, but they nearly get carried away. Tracks like "If You See Me" and "Hurt Like Mine" attempt to reduce Thickfreakness' wildfire to merely a controlled burn, but even when the Keys try to play it cool on this album, they still run hot. Nothing strays too far from the molten desperation of a more typical offering of "Midnight" or an uber-faithful cover of The Sonics' "Have Love Will Travel".
Ah, but who'm I kidding? Thickfreakness may veer towards oppressively monolithic, but it's also equal parts sincerity and devotion, thunder and lightning, majesty and naked anger. Look upon the power of the title track, mortals, and despair! The central riff splits heaven and earth, and for a few brief minutes, commands all your attention as you fear for your very life; it's an exorcism, a catharsis. And it only gets thicker and freakier from there, lurching into the cautionary force of the too-similar "Hard Row"; like a simplified, but equally relentless version of its predecessor, the simple bluster is momentarily awe-inspiring. When Auerbach howls, "It's a hard row to hoe by yourself," the release is overwhelming.
But sure enough, the intensity of the opening combination proves impossible to maintain for long. Though the stutter-stepping percussion and racing, rise/fall soloing of "Set You Free" nearly succeeds at preserving the pummeling drive beyond all limits of human endurance, it ends up being the most purely entertaining cut on the album simply out of the necessity for respite. The body braces itself for another towering blast after being further skewered by Auerbach's nasty hooks in the opening seconds, and gets (only a little) less than that, but the relaxation is welcome. From that point on, Thickfreakness begins to run together slightly, though as mentioned earlier, not for lack of energy.
The related concerns of a need for a bit more understatement and variety hinder the Black Keys this time around, but remain somewhat insignificant in relation to their even-more-muscular blues attack. On top of that, the ultra-minimal echoes of "Cry Alone" and the R.L. Burnside-as-channeled-thru-MC5 tangle of "Hold Me in Your Arms" partially ameliorates the somewhat pervasive sameness, closing the album with a distinctly different sound than they've yet shown. All told, the shortcomings are relative to what the duo already proved themselves capable of on The Big Come-Up; Thickfreakness isn't quite their debut, but it's still a powerhouse, even exceeding its ancestor in total spectacle. Raw rock grandeur as so frequently conjured up on this album is hard to come by in any capacity; if that means having to overlook a few minor flaws, it's worth it. | 2003-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 22, 2003 | 7.7 | 291649fb-e309-490d-b573-6ee69b867531 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Best known as one half of art-rock duo Ohmme, the Chicago musician turns towards lush, baroque-tinged folk on a solo debut with a reverent approach to self-knowledge and growth. | Best known as one half of art-rock duo Ohmme, the Chicago musician turns towards lush, baroque-tinged folk on a solo debut with a reverent approach to self-knowledge and growth. | Macie Stewart: Mouth Full of Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macie-stewart-mouth-full-of-glass/ | Mouth Full of Glass | Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best tracks of the past five years transcendent. Their string work added a vital spark to the single that SZA named after Drew Barrymore and the title track of indie rock band Whitney’s breakthrough album. Stewart’s own career is a tour of the Chicago scene: Starting with the genre-splicing group Kid These Days, which featured rapper Vic Mensa and a debut album produced by Jeff Tweedy, Stewart (who uses she and they pronouns) honed their skills in bands like the avant-garde jazz group Marker. Later, she became a session player for Top 40 acts like Chance the Rapper and underground stars like Nnamdi. Most visibly, she and Sima Cunningham make up the avant-pop duo Ohmme, who released their third album last year.
A few years ago, Stewart described these vast collaborations as a necessary way to sustain energy. “It takes a cross-pollination of communities to ensure that you stay creative,” she said. But at a certain point, she realized that lending her talents elsewhere had plateaued her own journey toward self-understanding. “I didn’t know who I was or what I sounded like as an individual,” she explains in press materials for her debut solo album, Mouth Full of Glass. Still, collaboration remains central to the work: Stepping away from Ohmme’s combustible art-rock, Stewart recruited several Chicago musicians, including Ben LaMar Gay and Sen Morimoto, to embellish her poetic, baroque-tinged folk. The project’s cinematic quality and refreshing self-awareness makes clear that working with others strengthened the language needed to express herself.
In their lyrics, Stewart zero in on personal flaws as a way to move forward. On the lush, romantic opener “Finally,” gentle, rippling guitar plucks introduce a meditation on opening up amid misgivings. “I’m wrong and I know it/But not willing to show it,” Stewart sings sweetly. Their voice ascends cherubically as they admit that they’re finally ready to tell the truth, first to themself and then to others. Lia Kohl’s cello rushes in like cleansing water alongside their acknowledgements of personal growth.
In Stewart’s telling, confronting oneself is a curious journey, full of vibrant images that ground complex emotions in tangible metaphors. On “Where We Live,” her words become the brick and mortar as she builds a future home, warm with fire, honey, and wine. When she compares herself to the namesake of “Garter Snake,” confessing to feeling “wicked” while accompanied by angelic backing vocals and blooming synths, it feels like a tender embrace of our shadow selves. Stewart doesn’t indulge in self-loathing; instead, a trickle of piano or swell of saxophone make the prospect of change seem beautiful. Near the album’s end, on “Tone Pome,” she extends the motif of change to natural elements. Soft strums accompany images of snow; swirls of cello enter when Stewart begins to sing of spring’s arrival. Although pretty, it’s the weakest track—Glass’ success doesn’t rely on Stewart’s romantic lyricism, but her animated compositions and vocal gymnastics.
The best songs on Mouth Full of Glass feel like they’re alive. Finger-plucked guitars mimic falling rain as Stewart’s melodies wind through the octaves like ivy, and the string arrangements feel as detailed as hand-embroidered tapestries. Most stunning is the quasi-titular third track, “Mouthful of Glass,” which recalls the decadent work of George Martin, specifically “Sea of Time” from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. With few words, Stewart shifts the emphasis to tone, elongating her phrases. Low piano notes fumble in the background, and a pearly sound recalls a leaky faucet. Inspired by a dream and grounded in no concrete narrative, the magic is in the satiny vocals and paisley compositions, a world unto itself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | September 27, 2021 | 7.2 | 291a5433-1b1d-405a-819f-e27f27b3963a | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The idea of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek releasing a Christmas album might seem like an odd one, but there’s no doubt he has a voice suited to the material, that he comes up with solid guitar arrangements, and generally imbues these holiday favorites with a sense of calm and contemplation. | The idea of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek releasing a Christmas album might seem like an odd one, but there’s no doubt he has a voice suited to the material, that he comes up with solid guitar arrangements, and generally imbues these holiday favorites with a sense of calm and contemplation. | Mark Kozelek: Sings Christmas Carols | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19932-mark-kozelek-sings-christmas-carols/ | Sings Christmas Carols | Timing is everything. We’ve known for a while that Mark Kozelek was going to be releasing a Christmas album before the end of the year, but for much of that time Kozelek was riding a wave of goodwill following the release of (the still very good, even if I’ve stopped bringing it up at parties) Benji. Now Sings Christmas Carols finally comes out and it feels like an unwanted present from the obnoxious uncle you try and avoid at family gatherings. What happened in between? Kozelek saw the reaction he got from a typically cranky and offhand comment about War on Drugs’ music bleeding into his own at a festival and somehow thought releasing not one but two songs about it a would be amusing to someone other than himself (plus a t-shirt with another insult). Suffice to say the joke isn’t funny anymore, and Kozelek is looking pretty sad, not to mention that he’s probably alienating new fans he may have acquired since Benji’s release. And now we’re supposed to allow him into our homes and into Mom and Dad’s 5xCD changer, slotting his CD next to Dolly Parton and Nat King Cole and A Charlie Brown Christmas? If nothing else, we can be thankful that Kozelek finished this album some time ago, so he didn’t alter his version of “The Christmas Song” to include the line “Although it’s been said, many times, many ways, War on Drugs can…”
Anyway. If you can listen to Sings Christmas Carols and think, “This too shall pass,” knowing that by Christmas 2015 Kozelek will have become bored of this game and we’ll have moved on to the next internet beef, you may well enjoy this one. There’s no doubt Kozelek has a voice suited to the material, that he comes up with solid guitar arrangements, and generally imbues these songs with a sense of calm and contemplation. This is by and large a traditional Christmas album all the way, something that you could play for your parents and have them say, “Hey, that’s better than the weird one you brought last year.” He layers his voice into a mini choir for the a capella on “O Come All Ye Faithful”, throws a funny spoken word interlude into “Christmas Time Is Here” that pokes fun at his sad-sack persona, and includes an overlooked Christmas-themed song into the mix, the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles”, which really should be a standard. It’s just voice and guitar throughout, but Kozelek’s nylon string work is consistently engaging, even as he falls back on some of his go-to fingerpicking patterns.
But the album’s strengths—the relaxed vibe, easy prettiness, and earthy undercurrent, all appropriate for a bloated eggnog buzz—happen to be qualities Kozelek can conjure at will. He has a weird way with covers; he can make any song sound like a Kozelek song, but that’s a double-edged sword. When he tackles someone else’s music it almost always sounds good, but there is rarely any depth, and the actual content can seem irrelevant. Two previous covers collections, the AC/DC set What’s Next to the Moon and Tiny Cities, featuring Modest Mouse songs, were more about domination than interpretation. Kozelek smothers the songs in his own aesthetic, and the same holds true here. The main differences being, Christmas songs lend themselves well to his particular concerns, and not too many people are thinking about the deeper layers of meaning inside “O Christmas Tree”. Is it going to bump Low’s Christmas out of the rotation? Not likely. But it’s not bad, and it very well may sound better with each passing year. | 2014-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde | November 6, 2014 | 6.8 | 291e30f3-9575-40ac-9d22-82036edeaf37 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Purple Rain was a landmark that solidified Prince’s standing as the preeminent pop genius of his generation; more than three decades on, it still retains all of its power. | Purple Rain was a landmark that solidified Prince’s standing as the preeminent pop genius of his generation; more than three decades on, it still retains all of its power. | Prince / The Revolution: Purple Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21841-purple-rain/ | Purple Rain | Prior to Purple Rain, the backstory Prince had created for himself was that of a sex-obsessed R&B groove superstar, a multi-instrumentalist and prodigious musical upstart who used his considerable powers for the sole purposes of getting the club lit the fuck up. He presented himself as a kind of raunch alien bringing the divine soundtrack to your coke-fueled, crushed velour orgy, the musical equivalent of a fog machine and a black strobe light. He refused interviews and shied away from press profiles. He famously stonewalled music press royalty—even kingmaker Dick Clark on his own show. You were not to know who he was or where he was from. You were not to fully comprehend his race nor his gender. You were not to find pictures of him in Teen Beat buying apples and milk at the grocery store in sweatpants and a baseball cap. He was most decidedly not just like us. He was from some alternate dimension where it was always 2 a.m. on a misty full moon. You were to believe that he was as mysterious as god, something conjured, perhaps from your fantasies, a magical apparition descending from funk heaven, arriving on a cloud of purple smoke and adorned in little more than a guitar, a falsetto made of glitter, and a deeply intractable groove.
But as the wildly creative are wont to do, by 1983 Prince was looking to switch that whole thing up. Despite his acute talent, he was still viewed by the industry at large as little more than an extra-funky urban novelty act, someone in league with the likes of Rick James and Lipps Inc. His most successful song to date, “Little Red Corvette,” had peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, which simply was not good enough for the man who once described the musical training he received at the hands of his father as “almost like the Army.”
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was devastating the country with the spare and stark depictions of a bankrupt American Dream on his darkened opus Nebraska. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet band were doubling down on white-man soul with the basic but wildly popular “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Michael Jackson was re-wiring the industry with an album composed almost entirely of number 1 pop hits that spent 37 weeks lording over the Billboard charts. Prince’s keyboardist, Dr. Fink, recalls that during the 1999 tour, his band leader asked him what makes Seger’s music so popular. “Well, he's playing mainstream pop-rock,” Fink told him. “If you were to write something along these lines, it would cross things over for you even further.” Prince had already been carrying a purple notebook with him on the tour bus in which he had been scribbling the ideas, notes and images that would become his next movement. (Prince didn’t make albums, he made environments) and he was looking for something new.
That “something new” was Purple Rain, a sonic and visual experience that cracks open the shell of his reclusive sex alien persona to tell something of an origin story, one slightly more than loosely based on Prince’s real life. The film, directed by an unknown, produced by first timers and starring a bunch of people who had never acted in a movie before, has become an astronomical and enduring success against overwhelming odds. But it does so because it’s a film about America, about revolution and youth and anger and fucking. About not being like your dad. That is to say, it’s about rock’n’roll. It’s the tale of a kid from an abusive home in a cold, working-class city who has a shitload of talent and a dream. And he has to figure out, through tortuous trial and error, exactly what he needs to destroy in order to achieve it. Purple Rain is rough and vulnerable, common and funny, and at times even cute. It is the exact opposite of everything Prince had been before it. But let’s not kid ourselves. The movie is merely decently shot, competently directed, and not even passably acted. The real reason it works is because of the itinerant magnetism of its lead and of the music he can make.
Prince’s sixth studio offering, 1984’s Music From the Motion Picture Purple Rain, is Springsteen’s Nebraska laced with the violence of James Brown’s deepest grooves and liberally dusted with white dove feathers, dried rose petals, and scented candle wax. The album manages to deftly thread the needle between a dazzling array of genres: disaffected synth pop, tongue-wagging hair metal, dark R&B, and pleading soul. The result is something that isn’t a successful combination of genres as much as an effortless, almost incidental transcendence of the very idea of genre itself. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It doesn’t matter what you like. You like this. It is wrong to say that Purple Rain blazes a new trail. Rather it beams a blinding light signal from a part of the forest that no one will be able to ever find again. You cannot make another album like it. The only way to get to where Purple Rain takes you is to play Purple Rain.
Given that the album is somewhat of an early-career look back for Prince, it gives us new access into his musical and cultural background. His hometown of Minneapolis boasted a black population of 4.3% in the 1970 census and, other than the low range KMOJ, didn’t have an urban formatted station until 2000. If you grew up listening to the radio in the Minneapolis of Prince’s youth, then you grew up listening to rock. Thusly the album’s opening salvo, “Let’s Go Crazy,” thematically picks up where the titular track from 1999 leaves off, namely: “We’re all going to die one way or another, so let’s rock while we’re here,” but musically is a dramatic departure from the slick, smokey grooves of its predecessor. It is set against a hyperactive American backbeat reminiscent of latter-day rockabilly, and features Prince ripping out the kind of ostentatiously speedy Van Halen-esque guitar work that would become the audio version of the generation’s early MTV aesthetic.
From there, the album drops into the closest thing it has to a dud in the Apollonia duet “Take Me With U.” But like another genius pop composer, Stevie Wonder, (to whom Prince is not compared nearly enough), his work brims with so many compelling musical ideas that they can be found hidden in even the weakest of tracks. “Take Me With U” is distinguished by a stellar intro and bridge played only on tom-tom and strings. On “The Beautiful Ones,” Prince the serpentine is at his most coiled, his falsetto vocals syrupy and tightly wound until they explode into a wounded animal scream. “Do you want him/Or do you want me/Cuz I want you!” he howls, bursting out of the song all together. In the movie’s plot, this is about a love triangle, but it feels more like Prince is at the throat of his listeners. “Do you want that bullshit on the radio? Or do you want this brilliance? Make up your goddamn mind!”
“Computer Blue” begins with a cryptic spoken exchange between guitarist Wendy Melvoin and Keyboardist Lisa Coleman that may either be about an impending sex act or an impending cup of tea, (vaguely pornographic ambiguity is an aesthetic calling card of the Revolution, Prince’s adroit, androgynous, and multi-racial backing band). The ensuing song is a club jam about the common ’80s theme of existential technological alienation. It flows smoothly into a melodic instrumental, the unlisted “Father’s Song” that showcases Prince’s talent for crafting a surprisingly emotional narrative out of a chord progression and a guitar solo (foreshadowing, perhaps?) before devolving into feedback, wordless screaming, and the intro to the crowning achievement of the first half.
That achievement is “Darling Nikki,” a track that is both thick and skimpy, dark and taut: a thumping, loping, grinding fuck song about getting dirty with and getting played by the timeless femme fatale. The denouement, a quivering undulating coda, impossibly finds the musical link between burlesque backing bands and thrash metal double bass pedal rumbles, and is topped off by a terse and violent guitar solo. The whole song seems to operate at three different tempos simultaneously, leaving no part of your body or spirit quite able to escape its savage grasp.
The second half of the album begins with the confessional “When Doves Cry,” the album’s first single (and Prince’s first ever Billboard #1) wherein he delivers his most pointedly personal lyrics yet, “Maybe I’m just like my father/Too bold/Maybe you’re just like my mother/She’s never satisfied.” In the hands of a lesser talent this could come off as maudlin public journal reading, but fortunately for all of us, “When Doves Cry” is one of Prince’s most affecting compositions to date, launching with a bristling guitar burst before dropping into a karst LM-1 drum pattern featuring the signature knocks he used to great effect on 1999. The ensuing groove provides a solid bed for a bouquet of rococo keyboard arpeggios and steadily unfolding melodic progressions that expertly capture the helpless confessional pleading of a man trying to figure out who he is and why it hurts so damn much. It is the the mid-show stopper, Prince as Rimbaud in pressed petals and lace, carefully gluing together a ransom note from a prison of his own beauty and emotion.
Having covered the tough stuff, we are free to party, and “I Would Die 4 U” is a celebratory, if lyrically morose, jam distinguished by a vast swaths of new wave synth, deep bounce and an insistent high hat. Following that is the impish and yet entirely earnest “Baby I’m a Star.” This is not Prince the character saying it, it is Prince the 26 year old serving notice that he’s greater than we could have ever imagined (turned out he was right) and that we need either get on board or get left.
Which brings us to the album’s title track, the epic and uncharacteristic arena jam “Purple Rain.” Prince here is part preacher, part guitar god. So deeply embedded in arena rock is this song that Prince reportedly called Jonathan Cain and Neal Schon of Journey to ask their blessing (and to ensure they wouldn’t sue over the song’s proximity to “Faithfully”). “Purple Rain” is a baptism, a washing clean of sins and a chance at redemption, even if the words don’t make any sense, (and to most people they don’t) the vastness of the arrangement, the grandiosity of the soloing, the pleading of the vocals reaches you, makes you cry, makes you feel free.
With Purple Rain, Prince bursts forth from the ghetto created by mainstream radio and launches himself directly onto the Mt. Rushmore of American music. He plays rock better than rock musicians, composes better than jazz guys, and performs better than everyone, all without ever abandoning his roots as a funk man, a party leader, a true MC. The album and film brought him a fame greater and more frightening than even he imagined and he would eventually retreat into the reclusive and obtuse inscrutability for which he ultimately became known. But for the 24 weeks Purple Rain spent atop the charts in 1984, the black kid from the midwest had managed to become the most accurate expression we had of young America’s overabundance of angst, love, horniness, recklessness, idealism, and hope. For those 24 weeks at least, Prince was one of us. | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | April 29, 2016 | 10 | 2923e49b-5e5b-4c86-9ecc-9c5d05ec5035 | Carvell Wallace | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carvell-wallace/ | null |
The ranging album from the Philadelphia songwriter adopts a drifting mind as its emotional compass. There’s no rush to get where he’s going, and he rarely checks to see if you’re still following along. | The ranging album from the Philadelphia songwriter adopts a drifting mind as its emotional compass. There’s no rush to get where he’s going, and he rarely checks to see if you’re still following along. | Kurt Vile: Bottle It In | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kurt-vile-bottle-it-in/ | Bottle It In | Nestled into Side A of Kurt Vile’s seventh solo album, Bottle It In, is “Bassackwards,” 10 minutes of warped, psychedelic folk-rock, like a long sigh in the face of existential dread. Some songwriters seek wisdom in their aimlessness—reflecting on what they could have done better, trying to pinpoint what went wrong. But there’s no moral to Vile’s story; he wallows, unapologetically. To a slow-pulsing chord progression, like Tom Petty’s “Swingin’” played on the moon, the 38-year-old Philadelphia songwriter repeats himself and gets distracted before losing his train of thought completely. As he drifts through space, he sounds confused, resigned, distant. It’s one of his best songs yet.
This track, and its circuitous path toward nothingness, is a key insight into the mind of Kurt Vile. A lot of his lyrics take place in the early hours of the day, those bleary, pre-coffee moments, when nobody else is around, that have always somehow inspired his clearest thoughts. Over the last decade, Vile’s musical evolution from scuzzy, self-recorded doodles to fuller, brighter vistas has resembled a diary composed entirely of late-summer weekend mornings: He seeks comfortability over clarity, with anxiety creeping in but never quite blocking the light. Or as he puts it in “Bassackwards,” “The sun went down, and I couldn’t find another one… for a while.”
Recorded gradually throughout America while Vile was on tour over the last three years, Bottle It In adopts a drifting mind as its emotional compass. The scenery changes, but Vile’s dazed, half-smile remains constant. “One Trick Ponies” is a bouncy highlight about friendship and the joys of repetition, as Vile depicts the span of life as a “song, if the repeats were long.” Communicating in a chewy monotone that’s more for zoning out than singing along, he still writes lyrics that feel like predictive text: “What a world we’ve inherited/From another mother/What a whale of a pickle.” So over Bottle It In’s 80 minutes, he manages to communicate very little, yet the mood is immediately identifiable: slow, smoky, heady. There’s no rush to get where he’s going, and he rarely checks to see if you’re still following along.
While Bottle It In—Vile’s longest, most introspective record—lacks the quiet beauty of 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, the warmth of 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze, or the immediacy of 2015’s b’lieve i’m goin’ down…, its monolithic Kurtness is its own defining quality. In a recent New York Times interview, he jokingly compared the record to Bruce Springsteen’s multi-platinum Born in the U.S.A. Of course, nothing sounds like a “Dancing in the Dark”-style breakthrough, but there is a sense of comprehensiveness, each song zooming into a different, hazy corner of his psyche. The result feels like an extended hang alone with Kurt in a dark basement. Here, he’s less likely to summon the energy for a jam like 2009’s “Freak Train” and more likely to, say, crack a joke about avoiding parking tickets (“Loading Zones”) or gush about being in love while ripping noisy guitar solos for 10-plus minutes (“Skinny Mini”). At a certain point, though, the air can get a little stale.
To keep things fresh, he enlists the help of Cass McCombs, Kim Gordon, and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, though often in barely noticeable ways. Only harpist Mary Lattimore steals the show, ascending the free-floating title track into a menacing, regenerative anti-epic. Yet Bottle It In rotates entirely around Vile. Just as you couldn’t mistake his voice or lyrics for anyone else’s, his silvery, shapeshifting guitar remains a defining sound in modern indie rock. When his compositions feel like thoughts in progress, his guitar speaks to the intensity bubbling just under the surface.
At its best, Bottle It In pairs music with message to create a new tension in Vile’s work. The anti-technology lyrics of “Mutinies” are fairly simple (“I think things were way easier with a regular telephone,” he mutters), but the arrangement is complex and colorful, building to a droning sunshower that envelopes his words. “Cold Was the Wind,” meanwhile, furthers his penchant for rambling about his rambles, but its arrangement is one of his darkest, most unsettling studio concoctions yet. It could pass for a spidery Tom Waits demo or the theme for an HBO miniseries about a sad detective.
And then, of course, there’s “Bassackwards.” It’s the beautiful, banal peak of the record, a warning for the purposeful meandering that follows. The album’s structure—with its more accessible tracks up front and a meditative, somewhat indulgent back-half—can feel like a conversation slipping silently into sighing and nodding. At the end of “Bassackwards,” he mumbles, “Just the way things is these days/Just the way things come out.” It’s the type of thing you say when you’re bored and trying to change the subject but it also serves his momentary thesis statement. Vile has long embraced such in-between moments—he’s just never sounded so lost in one. | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 12, 2018 | 7 | 2929ea9c-e642-4e19-a8f0-9a6f0a9211a3 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn metal band Tombs have shifted their lineup repeatedly while maintaining an eerie consistency—the group hasn’t released a bad record. Their new EP is capable of making you think of Unsane, Darkthrone, and Bauhaus in the same song. | The Brooklyn metal band Tombs have shifted their lineup repeatedly while maintaining an eerie consistency—the group hasn’t released a bad record. Their new EP is capable of making you think of Unsane, Darkthrone, and Bauhaus in the same song. | Tombs: All Empires Fall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21633-all-empires-fall/ | All Empires Fall | Tombs are restless—or at least vocalist and guitarist Mike Hill is. Hill's changed the lineup around him a handful of times since founding the band in 2007, and the sound's shifted just as often. They've had a couple different drummers, a few different guitarists and bassists. They've also moved from an act that brought to mind Helmet collaborating with Immortal to something that can bring to mind Sisters of Mercy stuck in a blackened downpour.
Hill has done all this while maintaining an eerie consistency—the group hasn't released a bad record, and their last two collections, 2011's Path of Totality and 2014's Savage Gold, were among the best the years they came out. The music has always been precise and muscular, tough but elegant, even as they started working more elements into their sound: They are capable of making you think of Unsane, Darkthrone, and Bauhaus in the same song. The band name itself,"Tombs," is flexible—broad, everyday, non-specific—but it's always related to death.
Their new EP, All Empires Fall, features their biggest stylistic shift to date. Much of this is due to the addition of synth/electronics player and co-vocalist Fade Kainer, an avowed Andy Stott fan who used to front the crusty doom group, Batillus, and currently plays in the power-electronics project, Theologian, among other industrial-leaning acts. (The EP also welcomes new drummer Charlie Schmid of Vaura and guitarist Evan Void of Sadgiqacea.)
There's more space here than on past offerings. The songs are still coiled and intense, but Tombs allow themselves room to drift into dark chasms of rough, bleak ambience. You have to think this is partially a result of the flexibility Kainer affords them. He also adds Wax Trax howls alongside Hill's brutal barks. Hill continues to grow as a singer; When not shouting or screaming, he's crooning clean tones that can bring to mind Peter Murphy or Ian Curtis. In the past I've likened Hill to a drill sergeant because of his muscles and shaved head. In person, though, he strikes me as especially calm, even zen. You do get the idea, however, that he's pushing the people around him to make the most disciplined music of their careers—and that they're happily following his lead.
All Empires Fall is brief. There are five songs across 24 minutes, and it feels more like a palate cleanser than a complete offering. But because of its precision, and Sanford Parker's dense production, it's also powerful. Short instrumental "The World is Made of Fire" sounds like a post-metal anthem reminiscent of fellow Brooklynites Sannhet until the entrance of melancholic, gothic-metal synths. It's followed by "Obsidian,” which as its name suggests, offers swarming black metal. On the song, Hill growls"We are the fallen/ Manifest in shadows"; much of the record explores the apocalypse on a personal, individual level.
Like all of what Tombs does, the lyrics and music feel thoughtful— there are no tossed-off details in the maelstrom. The more mid-tempo "Last Days of Sunlight” drips with haunted, clanging atmospherics; Hill chants lyrics that feel personal ("It is hard to forgive me/ 100 tears have fallen") with a dead-eyed intonation. The shredding, bass-heavy, death rock-paced"Deceiver" features dual vocals from Hill and Kainer, along with contributions from Sera Timms of Black Mare and Ides of Gemini. It's kind of like industrial Watain.
But it's the last song,"V”, that has me most excited for what they do next. Opening with a minute and a half of what sounds like a distant wind tunnel lined with ice, the six and a half minute track becomes an anthem that moves between black metal, post-punk, and death rock. Hill and Kainer repeatedly shout"Fall into the great divide/ Fall into the netherworld," while elegant synths and layers of guitars and drums fight it out behind them. It's maybe the catchiest song Tombs have ever written. It reminded me of the dark punk anthems that would sometimes show up on MTV's 120 Minutes when I was a kid, which made me think about how black metal is often just one step away from goth and punk. On these songs, Tombs take those steps and more, and then sprint. | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Relapse | April 4, 2016 | 7.8 | 292aa599-aa32-4b2e-8aaf-1944b16fbf2f | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
At their best, the Philly punk band JANK highlights the connection between emo’s fourth wave and the unconventional, genre-spanning pop of the Dismemberment Plan or the Unicorns. | At their best, the Philly punk band JANK highlights the connection between emo’s fourth wave and the unconventional, genre-spanning pop of the Dismemberment Plan or the Unicorns. | Jank: Awkward Pop Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21915-awkward-pop-songs/ | Awkward Pop Songs | Humor has a tenuous place in music, and actual “jokes” have almost none at all. It's understandable: Most songwriting places a premium on some sort of basic honesty, and asking someone “are you joking?” is usually a way to determine if they are shitting you. Honest, earnest attempts to be funny, meanwhile, usually end up with the opposite result. So this is what *Awkward Pop Songs *knowingly puts itself up against—its cover art and album title immediately establish its prank-punk bonafides and “JANK” itself is probably even sillier than the "Futurama" reference frontperson Matt Diamond used for previous band Panucci’s Pizza. But in the few months since its initial release and its physical reissue, *Awkward Pop Songs *has lived out a lyric from another trio whose superficial goofiness was a Trojan horse for one of the most inventive, original and flat-out *fun *records in its realm: “Saw the cover of the tape, figured it’s pretty wack/later on eventually admitted that it’s pretty crack.”
As was the case with Das Racist, local heroes Ween, and even the Golden State Warriors, JANK’s irreverence feels like an unlocked superpower rather than a defense mechanism or compensatory measure—that they’re having this much fun with their technically astonishing chops makes their subversion of realness seem all the more amazing. Even more improbable is the number of styles in which they can operate: though the title *Awkward Pop Songs *is the least-clever aspect of the LP, it’s an accurate descriptor for an overview of nearly every offshoot of “revival” emo that has coalesced into the new shape of alternative rock.
There’s plenty of the arpeggiated, hammer-and-pull guitar of the dubious, American Football-fathered “twinkle” subgenre, as well as the two-handed tapping that marks its mathier offshoots. JANK can also veer towards hefty, Will Yip-approved emo-gaze and sometimes it all happens within the *same song (“Caitlyn”). Diamond’s voice can elicit the instantaneous thrills of raw-throated, Midwestern emo and caffeinated pop-punk without the requisite adenoidal whine. In fact, the songs that most immediately sound like they're crushing hard on someone *turn into surrealistic stoner talk: “Caitlyn” proposes a playdate of “Katamari Damacy” and late-night TV with an imaginary dog. “Wut I Liek Abt U” cops the irrepressible, house party giddiness of Nothing Feels Good and its whimsical, quotable non-sequiturs—“And you could use a new toothbrush!;” “Tell me your favorite kind of dinosaur?”
At its peaks, Awkward Pop Songs draws a fat highlighter on the connection between emo’s fourth wave and the unconventional, genre-spanning pop of the Dismemberment Plan or the Unicorns, bands whose manic, effusive, anti-cool styles soon were subsumed by more earnest, bombastic forms of indie rock. This aspect of JANK can make *Awkward Pop Songs *sound damn-near necessary in 2016—if peers like Foxing, The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and the Hotelier are stewards of the communally composed, broadly ambitious sound of mid-decade indie rock, they also have its tendency towards somber intensity.
But JANK kid because they love: the most impressive part of *Awkward Pop Songs *is that it’s incredibly funny without sounding like it’s ever making *fun *of anyone specific. Diamond's pop culture reference points are still cartoonish and broad—“Ouran Highschool Toast Club” tweaks the title of a popular parody of *otaku *culture, while “Race Car Bed” nods at an overlooked joke on the otherwise overexposed “Can I Borrow A Feeling?” episode of “The Simpsons.”
But the best laughs are musical in-jokes and some have nothing at all to do with JANK’s style of music. “Race Car Bed” also nominally “features” the presumable #sadboy parody Yung Goth Boi and “Loading Screen” might be a subtext-free goof on the retro-futurist fetishizing of James Ferraro or PC Music. “The Hat Store” strives to be this decade’s “Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell;” “Spilt to Bill” shouts out the similarly untamed Island of Misfit Toys and announces, “if you don’t like Built to Spill, then I don’t fuck with you or anyone you know” while sounding like a There’s Nothing Wrong With Love* *cut played at 78 rpm.
The climactic moment of *Awkward Pop Songs *occurs when the happy hardcore of “J A N K!” crumples into a heap for no discernible reason. And then, the most legit LOL a punk record has given me in ages: a group chant of “THIS IS...A RIPOFF...OF A...TITLE...FIGHT SONG,” knicking the melody of their emo-gaze turning point “Head in the Ceiling Fan.” It doesn’t come off like a joke at the expense of punk rock’s most stoic bands, or really even the countless pop-punk acts who’ve aped it to establish a more “mature” sound. It's more of a simple “if if feel good, do it” moment. Or, an acknowledgment that even if it's only four years old, that's a watershed classic, and thus, public domain. It’s the same kind of open-ended communication and crowd participation that constantly pops up in hip-hop and pop music. Rather than shy away from people claiming their fans are “meme loving Tumblr kids,” JANK say, “we are too.” Is it any wonder that JANK can basically be their own backing band at shows these days? | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Creep | June 2, 2016 | 7.9 | 292b9637-c6d2-42a8-978b-f0524fb52404 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Inspired by the Beatles circa Revolver, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders fuse their habitual folksy garage and fantastical psych into a wily sound fleshed out with Mellotron and tape echo. | Inspired by the Beatles circa Revolver, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders fuse their habitual folksy garage and fantastical psych into a wily sound fleshed out with Mellotron and tape echo. | The Peacers: Blexxed Rec | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-peacers-blexxed-rec/ | Blexxed Rec | Hyde Street Studios has been canceling out the din of its eponymous San Francisco block for six decades now. As Wally Heider Studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it freeze-framed the boundless spirit of the Bay Area—and the counterculture more broadly—in records by Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. A half-century on, in a dank, unassuming space next door, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders the Peacers help to carry the mantle for savvy psychedelia.
Recorded between 2017 and 2020 at Hyde Street, another space across the way, and in Hudson, New York, their third album, Blexxed Rec, mines scrappy pop majesty from a relatively modest setup. Reuniting Donovan with Bo Moore, Shayde Sartin, and Mike Shoun—returning from 2017’s Introducing the Crimsmen—joint action proves key here. Splitting songwriting duties so that each member reveals a hue of their full-spectrum sound, the band earns its loose supergroup stripes. In sound and synergy, the example of the Beatles circa Revolver looms large. It’s a big shadow to fill out, but they wear it well.
Like many of their peers, including Donovan’s previous outfit, Sic Alps, the Peacers have generally sat in the overlap of two compatible worlds: folksy garage and fantastical psych. Here these often thread as one. A shifting, glam-tinged gem, “Dickdog in Paris” is an exercise in changing gears. Flipping full-blown swagger to skeletal Mellotron and tape echo, it neatly captures the band’s wily curveballs. Elsewhere, the acoustic-driven “Stinson Teep” is a peak. “All the living, faceless actors/You can have your Grammy now,” Donovan drawls. It’s languid, kind of out of it—a dosed tale that equally conjures White Fence and G N’ R Lies, if the latter had a Drag City catalog number.
In a recent video, a masked-up Bo Moore and Mike Shoun gave a guided tour of their space on Hyde Street. They geek out over mics, snare drums, and other equipment. But it’s their trusty ¼" 8-track recorder, the Tascam 388, that commands the most reverence. The versatile, affordable machine has gained a cult-like following among artists in the Bay Area and beyond (John Dwyer’s Castle Face have regularly used it to capture shows in the garage and psych community). It isn’t the vintage desk next door, and it’s far from Studio Two at Abbey Road, but with it, the Peacers get dynamic range while retaining that all-important analog touch. This Goldilocks ideal has a point: The band are, in their own thrifty way, gearheads but not precious. Blexxed Rec captures that important distinction. Crowning it all is the way each instrument is fixed in space, neither lost nor squashed in the mix. Dozy to the point of almost veering off the road, the Syd Barrett-like slouch of “Irish Suit” exhausts the full range of their beloved recording console.
As Stephen Malkmus has in recent years, particularly on Sparkle Hard, the band honors past masters without skewing into pastiche. The most obvious hat tip to the Beatles, Moore’s “Colors for You” blends the warm, round tone of Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass with a backward-looped swirl of strings. Penned by Sartin, who stocked the rock shelves at San Francisco’s Amoeba store for a number of years, “Make It Right” plays like a long-lost relic from a Bay Area troubadour of yore. “You know I want to make it right,” Sartin vows over a brittle refrain. It’s the band’s most heartfelt moment this time around—not least because it sits alongside titles like “Dickdog in Paris” and “Ghost of a Motherfucker.”
In various formations, Donovan has long been an ace at wrangling puckish lyrics from the prosaic. Here, Sartin and Moore adopt the tried-and-tested approach as they outright refuse to signpost the times beyond getting by in a vague, Dadaist daze. “Irish Suit” concerns itself with “Catholic leisure” and pink guitars. On “Blackberry Est,” Donovan sings, “You cleared your debt and straightened your top.” A highlight, the lysergic pop of “Dandelion” finds Moore obliquely asking, “Who will tell her now?” Maybe it has something to do with its three-year gestation, but these songs don’t feel typical of the times. In fact, they sidestep worldly strife in ways we should probably be thankful for.
The current status of rock’n’roll—rendered by longtimers like Foo Fighters less an art form or a living culture than a contractual obligation—make the Peacers feel all the more invaluable. There’s no “Eleanor Rigby” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” here, but by absorbing and reimagining the spacious, surrealist lineage from which they have sprung, they offer an album that feels like it’s already stood the test of time.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | March 30, 2021 | 7 | 292cb623-f060-4aef-936c-789abe8843f2 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
Like those on Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, the songs on Gowns' dark, trembly, electronics-laden folk album are about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings. | Like those on Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, the songs on Gowns' dark, trembly, electronics-laden folk album are about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings. | Gowns: Red State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10803-red-state/ | Red State | Almost none of the songs on Gowns' drone-folk album Red State take place outside. The issue here isn't preference of location, but inertia: Moving becomes both physically difficult and psychologically unappealing when you're on a tremendous amount of drugs. On the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, John Darnielle explored the same drag: "When we walk out in the sunlight we tell every we know it hurts our eyes/ When the real reason we don't like it is that it makes us wonder if we're dying."
Red State is, like We Shall All Be Healed, an album about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings. But fully grasping reality isn't the goal of most vision-seekers; when Erika Anderson reads off the roll of toxins in their system on "Fargo", she's not scared or even proud, she's bemused. And when she wheezes a minute later that "The light that poured in through the window was golden" in a crappy basement room in South Dakota, well, that's her way of saying hello to heaven.
Gowns' music is serially unstable: Both Anderson and Ezra Buchla wheeze like they have knife wounds in their stomachs, the band's synth patches fail to spread into full drones, and its clattering percussion (especially on the album's centerpiece, "White Like Heaven") never settles into a groove. But the catastrophe is strategic; it accentuates a feeling of possibility-- for as often Gowns might have a wreck, they might have a revelation. In an era where indie's fetishes have been for composure, discretion, muscle, and nice shoes, Gowns' agenda-- to make a porno about confusion-- is radical.
On the process of making Red State, Anderson wrote, "When you listen you can tell that it could have only been recorded in a shit-ass meat-packing city in the Midwest where people shoot crank mixed with grape Kool-Aid and the grocery checkers don't even know what tofu is and all there is to do is get shit-faced at the bar and ask everyone how their kids are doing." And you can tell. Fragile people make bad decisions. There are places in this country cursed by boredom and bad weather. Of course, Buchla, Anderson, and drummer Corey Fogel see what they want to see (or what the drugs point their characters toward). This makes them good artists and potentially horrible journalists.
Still, for all the romance and theatricality of their visions-- drug freaks are nothing if not indulgent in their compellingly insane hunches-- Gowns' stories end up sounding like grisly reportage. Red State concludes with "Advice" and "Cherylee", the former a sampled television speaker talking about the difficulties of addiction over a slow fade of distortion and piano, the latter morphing from uncertain noise into a ballad about recovery, Anderson moaning, like she's at church, "You've gotta stare into the mirror till you name this disease/ You've gotta write down all the symptoms even though it's obscene." Television and mirrors: two of the scariest things found in almost every American home. | 2007-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2007-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Cardboard | November 5, 2007 | 7.8 | 292cd3b3-7901-49fc-9ea0-b02319b42533 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Girl Band are an Irish punk quartet featuring no girls. This new EP compiles past singles, including 25-second circle-pit blurts along with updates of songs by Beat Happening and Blawan, to introduce the group's nihilistic noise to North American audiences. | Girl Band are an Irish punk quartet featuring no girls. This new EP compiles past singles, including 25-second circle-pit blurts along with updates of songs by Beat Happening and Blawan, to introduce the group's nihilistic noise to North American audiences. | Girl Band: The Early Years EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20394-the-early-years-ep/ | The Early Years EP | The obvious joke with Girl Band is that the Irish quartet features no girls (and not everyone’s laughing), but really, the bigger misdirection lies in calling themselves a band. Sure, their composition conforms to standard punk-rock parameters—yelping singer, fuzzbox-tweaking guitarist and bassist, pugilistic drummer—but even at its most ferocious, their music lacks the emotionally raw, primal catharsis we associate with post-hardcore acts. They come off more like steely lab technicians administering shock treatment for dubious purposes. You don’t so much listen to a Girl Band song as get strapped into it: militaristic drum stomps mimic the beat of your pounding heart; foreboding, unidentifiable noises emerge suddenly from unseen corners seemingly by the push of a button; and, as they pile on the punishment with sadistic glee, your convulsions effectively form a new dance move.
It’s a drill that Girl Band have been gradually perfecting over the past two years, through a string of singles that have showcased their bone-crushing force, but through markedly different demonstrations, be it 25-second circle-pit blurts or updates of songs by everyone from Beat Happening to Blawan. While these tracks have been compiled by Rough Trade on The Early Years to introduce Girl Band to North American audiences, the EP is also a snapshot of a band still figuring out how to harness the nihilistic noise of punk and the architectural precision of dance music without conforming to the conventions of either.
It’s no insult to say that Girl Band’s signature song at this point is a cover—because it's one that perfectly encapsulates both their antagonistic essence and unorthodox methodology. Their grueling distension of Blawan’s "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage"from 2013 not only betrayed a vision that looked far beyond punk for inspiration, but proved to be an ideal vehicle for frontman Dara Kiely to assert his split personality: part arch absurdist, part panic-attacked nervous wreck. The band’s hammering 2014 single "Lawman" further entrenched these sarcastic/spastic extremes, though, after the past year of awful police-related headlines, the satirical non sequitirs ("He starts every sentence with 'I know I’m not a racist, but…'") and the song’s violent meltdown climax have acquired an accidental, uncomfortably topical resonance.
Girl Band’s singular qualities are best appreciated in these longer tracks, which clear adequate space for Kiely's wild mood swings, while affording the band enough time to experiment and find just the right dissonant frequencies to power their apocalyptic finales. The more concentrated songs, naturally, give them less to do: the rumble through Beat Happening’s "I Love You" is ultimately more a reverential nod to Girl Band’s smart-ass indie ancestors than something they try to fully claim as their own, while the group were in such a rush to unleash half-minute no-fi thrasher "The Cha Cha Cha" that they seemingly neglected to master it properly. But "De Bom Bom" marks the point where Girl Band’s primordial aggression and burgeoning ambitions start to coalesce, packing all the textural disorientation and mounting intensity of their extended workouts into a taut, three-and-a-half-minute shot.
Like the Girl Band name itself, the title of The Early Years is a silly joke—for one, the EP doesn’t even include the band’s earliest recordings (that would be 2012’s France 98 mini-album), and the period that it faux-nostalgically canonizes covers a mere 19-month span that ended just last summer. But the mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much longer—like patron saints Liars’ equally feral 2001 debut, The Early Years could one day seem like a mere baby step for a band that has evolved into something even more imposing. | 2015-04-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | April 20, 2015 | 7.2 | 2930b43d-613e-4473-985b-718c7f02d287 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On her fourth album, Elysia Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time. It blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns while conjuring a sense of profound loneliness. | On her fourth album, Elysia Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time. It blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns while conjuring a sense of profound loneliness. | Elysia Crampton: Elysia Crampton | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elysia-crampton-elysia-crampton/ | Elysia Crampton | Throughout her work to date, Amerindian electronic producer Elysia Crampton has maintained a skeptical relationship to linear time. In interviews, she cites the Aymara concept of taypi, “a sort of juncture where the space-times of the here and now and the unknown or de-known co-mingle,” a place “where weeping turns to melodious noise.” Her music resists ingrained ways of hearing; where a listener trained on Western dance music might search for tension and release, for narrative followed by denouement, Crampton offers discombobulated fragments, ragged contradictions, and anticlimax. Her 2017 record, Spots y Escupitajo, positioned radio spots for imaginary FM stations as songs in their own right, not auxiliary experiments accompanying the “real” music. On her fourth, self-titled album, Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time, using music’s sequential nature as a tool for imagining processes that have no beginnings and no ends.
By drawing from the rhythms of Andean genres like khantus and tundique, Crampton investigates the relationship between the individual self and the social structures in which the self is embedded. Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness. Mournful synth chords permeate “Oscollo,” whose glitching textures situate those drum patterns at a remove. They don’t envelop the listener so much as they seem to waft over from a vast and desolate landscape, as though the celebration they suggest were happening far away. On “Pachuyma” and “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora),” the drum beats barely insinuate celebration at all. They gnash their teeth, as if in warning, while air horns and disembodied voices cry out amid the chaos.
While it takes a band of people to create these patterns with physical drums, the technology accessible to electronic musicians makes it possible to render these beats alone. The clipped, airless quality of the synth drum sounds creates friction with the collective settings of ritual and celebration in which such drum patterns might be found. Crampton implies a parade and then reveals herself to be the sole participant.
That’s not to say that Crampton is the sole presence on the album. Different voices speak different words across its six tracks, though the language never coheres or settles into a pattern. These voices could be radio spots interjecting across the airwaves, or discrete fragments of spoken conversation severed from their origin and embedded in the fabric of the music. They have their own internal rhythms, and because the same clips appear in more than one track, they have the effect of uniting the album, of grouping its songs together into the same space.
In the liner notes, Crampton dedicates the record to Ofelia (aka Carlos) Espinoza, the trans femme Aymara revolutionary known for changing the festival costume of the China Supay, a femme devil figure critical to indigenous celebrations like the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia. In citing Espinoza, Crampton connects a cultural history of trans survival to the present moment. This blur of contemporary dance music into historical ritual complicates two colonialist myths: that Native Americans belong to the distant past, not the present, and that trans people belong to the present, not the past. American racism falsely situates indigenous peoples within a vague “history;” likewise, but in reverse, contemporary transphobes make the tenuous claim that gender nonconforming people represent an entirely new phenomenon. Both myths attempt to sequester oppressed people into disconnected units of time, isolating them from their histories and their futures. In her music-making practice, Crampton uproots these ways of thinking, presenting a kind of perpetual motion as an alternative to discrete portions of time. There is no now and there is no then. There is only the way the beat hits the ear. | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Break World | April 30, 2018 | 7.6 | 29317f69-cf21-4317-9901-c772d66221f0 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Page Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, Helmet's eighth studio album and fourth since he re-launched the brand with a revolving cast of side musicians. | Page Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, Helmet's eighth studio album and fourth since he re-launched the brand with a revolving cast of side musicians. | Helmet: Dead to the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22502-dead-to-the-world/ | Dead to the World | It’s hard to calculate just how pervasive Helmet founder Page Hamilton’s influence has been, but at one point during the mid-90’s it seemed as if his footprints were all over the heavy metal and alt-rock landscape. You could make a strong case that there are traces of Hamilton’s style in the music of Tool, the Deftones, and even the likes of Weezer and the Smashing Pumpkins. Helmet’s reach makes sense given that the band's career arc traversed multiple scenes in a short time. Starting out with one foot in New York’s avant-garde sphere following Hamilton’s tenures with Glenn Branca and Band of Susans, Helmet’s earliest releases on the iconic indie label Amphetamine Reptile in ’89-’90 landed them in the middle of a burgeoning underground wave that included other cult acts like Cows, Killdozer, Today Is the Day, and others.
Along the way, Helmet also became associated with the artier side of New York’s hardcore and post-hardcore circles alongside Quicksand and Orange 9mm. Metal audiences—and bands like Sepultura and Pantera —embraced them as well. By 1994, Helmet found themselves in the thick of the alternative rock zeitgeist as their video for “Milktoast,” their contribution to The Crow soundtrack, scored heavy rotation on MTV. And just prior to the band’s breakup in the late ’90s, Helmet toured with Korn and Limp Bizkit.
Hamilton’s hypnotic, earworm-like riffs have a way of instantly getting under your skin and sticking to your brain like gum. So does the grooving but strangely counter-intuitive approach to rhythm that sets the band's sound apart to this day. So it’s easy to see why Helmet's signature style rubbed off so readily on other bands. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Meshuggah or the Dillinger Escape Plan evolving the way they did without Hamilton’s proto math-metal vocabulary to build on.
But in spite of his master’s degree in jazz composition, Hamilton imposed a rigid, primitivistic structural frame on Helmet’s music that he's never completely broken free of. Most of the time, he hasn't really tried. Not unlike Guided By Voices mastermind Bob Pollard, Hamilton has more or less recycled the same formula for Helmet’s entire career, insisting on defining the band by its limits even long after it was creatively expedient to do so—shocking when you consider that, in his time away from Helmet, Hamilton played with Bowie and Joe Henry, nearly joined Wire, and worked on film scores with composer Elliot Goldenthal.
The good news is that Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, the band's eighth studio album and fourth since Hamilton re-launched the Helmet brand with a revolving cast of side musicians. Things start out promisingly enough when, on album opener “Life or Death,” Hamilton manages to find the elusive middle ground between the tinny grain of the band’s early (and recent) non-album singles and the lush, pumped-up-for-airplay tone of the first Helmet 2.0 album, 2004’s Size Matters.
Hamilton also explores melody more fearlessly than ever. On “Bad News,” he nods at Revolver-era Beatles. And the title track might be the most layered and spacious of anything Hamilton's ever released under the Helmet name, with its somber cello occupying a prominent place in the mix. Strings play a key role on the eerie “Expect the World” as well. Meanwhile, “Look Alive,” with its haunting vocal line, is arguably the first time that a Helmet tune has conveyed genuine pathos. And when Hamilton slows down and reprises "Life or Death" at the end of the album, you can make out the harmonic fabric of his chords more clearly than ever before. But the Elvis Costello cover “Green Shirt,” his attempt at spry pop, lands too close to the ill-conceived hard rock bubblegum of Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” to make sense as a Helmet tune.
Going all the way back to 1994’s Betty—Helmet's only other album with genuine variation —Hamilton proved that he was actually capable of introducing melody into the band's vocabulary without dulling its edge. Hamilton may have started out as a barking vocalist, but he developed into a tunesmith at a time when he was still coming up with vital, intricate riffs. Both Betty and 1997’s Aftertaste contain examples of Hamilton ingeniously weaving vocals and riffs together, expanding while also staying true to Helmet’s core sound.
Try, for example, to sing a song like “It's Easy to Get Bored” while playing (or even air-guitaring) the rhythm guitar part without tripping up. In such cases, Hamilton’s experimental instincts and songwriting acumen came together seamlessly. That doesn't happen nearly enough on Dead to the World, where too much of the material stumbles in a confused attempt to marry Hamilton’s increasingly generic pop sensibilities with the savagery of classic-era Helmet. The two elements don’t gel, and both sound forced.
Longtime fans will recognize touches of that old Helmet magic in songs like “Red Scare” and “Die Alone,” with its spiraling riff and 3-on-4 rhythm that's long been one of the band's most recognizable hallmarks. But Hamilton has undeniably lost some of the touch that captivated his audience the first time around. Up ‘til the band's breakup in ’98, Hamilton's elliptical lyrics were marked by an intellectual distance that created a rich space between the words and the music—and, crucially, separated Helmet from the glut of their angst- and rage-driven peers.
Since 2004, Hamilton has written more openly about relationships, which might have added texture to the music if his lyrics weren't so painfully one-sided and mean-spirited. Not to mention that he continues to attack New Age ideals, as he did all the way back on the early non-LP track “Shirley MacLaine.” To still be harping on the same topic almost 30 years later points to an alarming lack of growth and self-awareness. At least back then, the quirks in Hamilton's lyrics gave them character.
Now, when he growls embarrassing lines like “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” at the end of “I <3 My Guru,” Hamilton just comes off like an aging, bitter misanthrope with no substance to offer in place of vacuity that still bothers him so much. (Try moving out of L.A., maybe?) Lyrics aside, the elephant in the room on any latter-day Helmet release is the absence of founding drummer John Stanier. Before Stanier re-invented himself as an agile, polyrhythm-juggling finesse player in Battles, he was basically a one-trick pony whose ultra-tight snare crack became as integral to Helmet's sound as Hamilton's riffs.
Stanier's brute simplicity provided the yin to Hamilton's yang, and the band hasn't really been the same since his departure. It's encouraging to see Hamilton reaching for new modes of expression on Dead to the World. Ultimately, though, after making such an indelible and unique contribution to the language of modern heavy rock, Hamilton continues to show that he's hemmed-in by the style he invented. | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | EarMusic | November 11, 2016 | 6.8 | 29353545-6077-427a-a748-ba5d49815b22 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The array of sound and style on the Norwegian duo’s latest EP is engrossing, the sound of off-kilter future-pop composed with equal amounts of sugar and existential dread. | The array of sound and style on the Norwegian duo’s latest EP is engrossing, the sound of off-kilter future-pop composed with equal amounts of sugar and existential dread. | Smerz: Have fun EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smerz-have-fun-ep/ | Have fun EP | The two women of Smerz are musical omnivores. They’re the kind of listeners who shout out Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna in one breath and call a concert from the experimental musician Yves Tumor “one of the best music experiences [we’ve] had in a while” in another. Beat specialists and vocalists Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt spent their Norwegian youth engaged in traditional musical pursuits—singing in choirs, studying classical violin, and theatre—before falling in love with electronic music through Jessy Lanza, DJ Rashad, and Jamie xx’s remixes of Gil Scott-Heron. The breadth of their experience might explain the feel of their beguiling new EP Have fun, which sounds like something Tove Lo might make if she gave up on making hits and started obsessing over Yeezus and field recordings.
“Oh my my,” the oldest single on Have fun, remains the best way into Smerz’s disorienting world. It’s built around a distorted beat and a synth line that shimmers and melts like a heat mirage, one of the duo’s favorite sounds. Like much of their work, it’s animated by the tension between Motzfeldt’s chilled, affectless voice—not to mention lyrics that sound like a word salad of teen Instagram captions—and arrangements that evoke existential dread and churning industry.
On “Oh my my,” Stoltenberg punctuates every few lines with a sardonic reading of the title phrase, muttering about “basic bitch problems” over a shuddering, vacuum-like effect. You’re left wondering exactly what constitute “basic bitch problems” in the Smerz extended universe: is switching from dairy to almond milk making them feel bloated, or are they being sucked into a cold, blank void? The contrast is profound enough to make you giggle, especially since it’s obvious Smerz are in on the joke.
“Oh my my” is fun enough that Smerz return to its melody and motif on the gauzy, defrosted “Girl 2.” It’s a trick revisited a few times throughout Have fun: after attacking the listener with an array of groaning horrors, Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt ease up and let some air into their arrangements. Of the eight songs on the EP, opener “Worth it” is one of four new tracks, and it’s an intimidating introduction: you’re whacked with a jackhammering rhythm, hissing pistons, and textures like sandpaper and steel wool. Once you’ve been thoroughly desensitized, it breaks open into a shimmering expanse and a new beat that’s better suited to a club than a metallurgical site. “No harm” and “Have fun” opt for a less acidic approach, leaning on degraded trip-hop rhythms and eerie refrains. (When Motzfeldt’s processed chanting is laid over one of those slowly warping synths on the title track, it sounds less like encouragement than the start of a descent into madness.) “Half life” flips the script by ratcheting up the intensity over its runtime, its thudding beat mutating into a fuzzy cacophony. And the duo follows up the blistering footwork of fitness “Fitness” with “Bail on me,” the EP’s most accessible moment by far. It’s a laid-back glide, one intercut with spoken segments and simple, sweet harmony.
I was struck by something Stoltenberg said when asked about Smerz’s musical growing pains last summer. “We started to make stuff we thought sounded nice, rather than trying to make stuff because that’s how we thought it should sound,” she said. “We gained more self-confidence when we ignored the right way to do it.” It reminded me of Lorde’s apocryphal story about writing “Green Light,” though the stakes were obviously a little smaller: when Max Martin described her songwriting as “incorrect,” she reveled in its oddity instead of doubting her convictions. Have fun is full of songs you might call “incorrect”: they’re off-kilter, even at their plainest. But coming into your own as a creative force means learning to trust your instincts, no matter where they take you. By veering off the beaten path, Smerz have stumbled into a vision for pop that’s both approachable and esoteric. | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | March 13, 2018 | 8.1 | 294f36b0-29ac-4875-b474-d75a2934a626 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
On her third album, the French-Malian singer artfully slides between lingo and genres—Afrobeats, zouk, R&B—to create a far-reaching pop experience about life, love, and freedom. | On her third album, the French-Malian singer artfully slides between lingo and genres—Afrobeats, zouk, R&B—to create a far-reaching pop experience about life, love, and freedom. | Aya Nakamura: AYA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aya-nakamura-aya/ | AYA | Since catapulting to the top of the French charts, multi-platinum Malian-born artist Aya Danioko has been given countless labels. In one breath, she is abbreviated as an Afro-pop artist, the next bundled into France’s robust and increasingly populous rap scene, teeming with talent from Paris to Marseille. Her success has frequently been minimized as a novelty act, despite being the most listened-to contemporary French act in the world. Her international smash hit “Djadja”—from her sublime second album, 2018’s Nakamura—placed her on a feminist pedestal she was reluctant to embrace. Her detractors looked at her unflappable demeanor as a tall dark-skinned woman, churning out hit after hit in France’s cis-male dominated music industry, and pegged her as overly cocksure.
The clearest signal in the noise, however, lies in the labels she gives herself, indicating her creative essence long before she became a mainstay on Spotify. Her performing surname, Nakamura, comes from the character Hiro Nakamura of the superhero series Heroes; a warrior who, through sheer force of will, can bend space and time, transporting himself to different worlds. This has been Aya’s superpower since the days of her 2017 debut Journal Intime—playing with the universes of not just Afrobeats, but zouk, R&B, and pop to layer in her penetrating musings on life, love, and freedom.
Aya has a challenging act to follow; it seems nearly unfathomable to eclipse the cultural phenomenon of “Djadja.” The Aulnay-sous-Bois-raised chanteuse rose to the occasion, however, masterfully employing l’argot, or French slang, as she shifts through her various modalities of defiance, softness, and matters of the heart to create a cohesive, intimate experience. Aya is the sound of a young woman and mother who has found the love she deserves and is embracing it unreservedly.
The most explicit Afrobeats flair takes center stage with the tracks “La Machine” and “Doudou” (an kreyòl term for honey/boo). In the former, it is the crisp and commanding lyricism that makes the track so enjoyable, layered over production that harkens back to the spellbinding era early 2010s Wizkid; the latter reunites Aya with Parisian producers Le Side (“Djadja”, “Pookie”) for a sensual and forthright single that seems tailor-made for a Burna Boy remix. The notion of him doing a romantic French verse in response to the enticingly delivered “parle en français, sois clair” would seemingly do wonders for accelerating a bridge to a frequently misunderstood market of the French urban music scene. But as Nakamura has stated repeatedly, anglophone acknowledgment is not her concern. As it stands, the two English features on the album—Stormzy and Ms. Banks—are used sparingly and judiciously, with the latter providing the greater punch on the sweetly delivered “Mon Lossa.”
As in her previous projects, Aya flexes her melodic muscle in other genres. “Fly,” while in need of some refinement in execution around the hook, contains the same spirited airiness of a Dangerous Woman-era Ariana Grande ballad; “Plus jamais” (Never Again), despite Stormzy’s muted presence, is an R&B track at its core, the English version of which would find a perfect home in a Kehlani project. She shares the fear and intensity of falling in love, likening the pleasure of succumbing to it to a religious experience in “Nirvana”; the liberal use of Mashallah in a time when France is being challenged on the world stage for Islamophobic and racially heightened social contexts does not go unnoticed.
Just two tracks later, she partners with Franco-Malagasy rapper Oboy for the erotic “Préféré”—and therein lies the magic of Aya, or La Nakamurance. She will juxtapose her faith with a sexual liaison, dismiss wastemen while fantasizing about the traditional weddings that she had seen growing up in her West African community, and revive and transform a beloved mid-aughts zouk certified hood classic from a Franco-Comorian songwriter (“Sentiments Grandissants”) without hesitation. The efforts may not always land, but she approaches each layer with sincerity—and the successful conjugations are transcendent experiences, greater than their individual parts.
While some members of the French establishment may look askance at her heavy use of argot, she remains dominant, with a cultural penetration that hasn’t emerged from a woman in France since the days of Edith Piaf. Nakamura may be a self-designation, but she is indeed a superhero of sorts; informed by the line of griottes in her maternal Malian heritage, fearlessly genre-bending, shunning the unspoken limitations of genre labels. Like Piaf, Aya “ne regrette rien”—her musical fingerprint is an intimate portrait not just of her life, but the interplay of dominant sounds from the African and West Indian communities in France and how well she can slide between them, both in lingo and melody.
These compositions are what make her music most successful to her longtime fans—a zouk percussion line throbs under refrains that seamlessly flow between R&B and more potent Afropop intonations, as is the case with the deliciously sharp “Tchop” (Whip), and may even inject a classic kompa synth beat for some gouyad (as on the waning moments of “Préféré”). The young woman from 93eme is exposing the world to the France that she knows and hears, in prose and tempo, with every new stream. That is a level of cultural currency that far outweighs a new Times Square billboard—although it would be well served for the rest of the Western musical vanguard to come along for the ride.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Rec.118 / Warner France | December 4, 2020 | 7.6 | 29512353-9b46-454e-82b7-d77421df79e5 | Shamira Ibrahim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shamira-ibrahim/ | |
The second album from Julian Casablancas and his motley New York band is sludgy, psychedelic sesh that occasionally coheres into surprising moments of clarity and radiance. | The second album from Julian Casablancas and his motley New York band is sludgy, psychedelic sesh that occasionally coheres into surprising moments of clarity and radiance. | The Voidz: Virtue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-voidz-virtue/ | Virtue | Fifteen years ago, Julian Casablancas opened the Strokes’ feverishly anticipated second album by declaring, “I wanna be forgotten.” At the time, it seemed like an all-too-knowing response to the band’s sudden fame. But everything Casablancas has done since—from the Strokes’ sporadic and scattered follow-up albums to his increasingly outré solo quests—suggests he wasn’t joking. Casablancas is the natural-born rock star whose essence was defined by his seeming indifference to rock stardom. But his blasé attitude always belied the Strokes’ airtight sense of craftsmanship. His current passion project, as lead singer for the Voidz, is what happens when Casablancas stops just looking like he doesn’t give a fuck and really starts acting like it.
In both look and sound, the Voidz are the Turkish Star Wars version of the Strokes: a proudly low-rent, audacious, bizarro-world transfiguration that’s equally admirable and repellent. And for those Strokes fans who thought the Voidz’s messy 2014 debut, Tyranny (credited to Julian Casablancas+The Voidz), was a one-off blurt that the singer just had to get out of his system, Virtue doubles down on his commitment to obfuscation. For one, Casablancas has taken his name off the marquee, stripping the Voidz of their lead singer’s star billing and whatever expectations may come with it. And while there’s no 11-minute hazing rituals like Tyranny’s progasaurus “Human Sadness” to be found here, Virtue’s hour-long, 15-track run-time still counts as a formidable endurance test, presenting a collage of ’80s ephemera—new wave, electro, hair metal, yacht rock—rendered in the snowy resolution of an overused VHS cassette. But like an old TV that only works when you position the antenna just so, the album’s scrambled signals do occasionally cohere into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.
On their later records, the Strokes sounded hamstrung about how to evolve, and their attempts to draw outside the lines felt forced and unnatural. But Virtue opener “Leave It in My Dreams” plays to Casablancas’ innate strengths while weirding things up in just the right ways: his bleary-eyed melancholy and just-rolled-outta-bed delivery give way to a disarming emotional payoff, as guitarists Amir Yaghmai and Jeramy Gritter spaz out over the song’s breezy strut. “Don’t overthink it,” Casablancas sings en route to the rousing chorus, and Virtue’s best moments emerge when he takes those words to heart. There’s the divine “Lazy Boy,” a gentle jangle-soul reverie upended by a military-drummed chorus, and the neon groove of “All Wordz Are Made Up,” which suggests an alternate ’00s where Casablancas didn’t have to shoulder the weight of saving rock’n’roll and instead disappeared into the Williamsburg electro-party circuit.
Casablancas and co. scatter these sort of pop reprieves across Virtue, wisely deploying them whenever it feels like the album is starting to crumble under the weight of its excesses. This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones: “One of the Ones” boasts an absolutely sublime guitar break, but you have to trudge through its sluggish grind to unearth it; “Wink” centers around a winsome Afro-pop melody, but the band’s incessant tinkering eventually reduces the song to a puddle. Even the album’s most straight-ahead rockers aren’t immune to the Voidz’s fussy impulses: The robo-metal rager “Black Hole” is neutered by its toilet-bowl production, while the anti-Trump screed “We’re Where We Were” feels less like a political punk song than a caricature of one. And this is to say nothing of Virtue’s questionable detours into nu-metal (“Pyramid of Bones”) and Falco-worthy Eurotrash (“QYURRYUS”).
But if there’s a method to all this madness, it’s revealed amid the sultry soft rock of “Permanent High School,” when Casablancas sings, “Just because something’s popular, don’t mean it’s good.” It’s a line that effectively serves as a hyperlink to that already-infamous Vulture interview, where Casablancas sounds off on injustices both real (the corrosive effects of corporations on democracy, the scourge of Fake News) and imagined (the perceived commercial failures of Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie), while castigating Top 40 pop music as a symptom of both. That disillusionment is laid bare on the mid-album acoustic respite “Think Before You Drink,” a melodramatic, Dylan-esque rendition of a ’70s-pop obscurity that reflects his great awokening. But Casablancas’ most potent protest against the powers that be is to simply be the change he wants to see in the world: Virtue imagines the sound of rock music in an upside-down universe where, as he fantasized to Vulture, Ariel Pink does sell more records than Ed Sheeran. And its response to the insidious evils of the internet is to mash-up and mutate oppositional styles in the same way your brain is forced to funnel serious CNN headlines and stupid memes into the same neural data stream. On Virtue, the murkiness is the message—the obtuse agitprop of an anti-star who still wants to be forgotten. | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cult / RCA | April 5, 2018 | 6.9 | 2953994e-4da2-4e9d-aec1-d444bd618640 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The production on Unknown Mortal Orchestra's third album is so central it’s almost another character on the album, corroding and tripping out the instruments. Ruban Nielson's fastidious choices behind the boards are a large part of what makes Multi-Love a joy to listen to. | The production on Unknown Mortal Orchestra's third album is so central it’s almost another character on the album, corroding and tripping out the instruments. Ruban Nielson's fastidious choices behind the boards are a large part of what makes Multi-Love a joy to listen to. | Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20590-unknown-mortal-orchestra-multi-love/ | Multi-Love | Unknown Mortal Orchestra's music is like a game of hide-and-seek, revealing one thing only to bury another. Blink and you’ll miss the guitar in the beginning of Multi-Love’s "The World Is Crowded" because a burst of synths comes in and saturates the track to a pure white hum. If you don’t catch the anxieties and heartbreaks of polyamorous love, it’s because Ruban Nielson has compressed and phased his voice down to a thin analog texture. Falling for UMO is as easy as taking time to look for what Nielson conceals in his songs. It can be a vintage Crumar synth tangled in the mix, or him pondering if someone would listen to his "silly voice" on the last day of their life; a loose hi-hat on the off-beat subtly driving the verse into the chorus, or him thinking his wife’s love for him is her "fatal flaw."
For as tuned-in and specific as it is, Multi-Love is multivalent. Next to some baroque '60s beat music there’s a Zappa homage, propped up against a dance track you could find on a Giorgio Moroder record, followed by some pigeon-toed funk that you should probably do a bunch of drugs to. It’s a wunderkammer inside, cramped with hundreds of tiny gestures, musical and lyrical. Recall, this is a guy who’s obsessed with taking huge pop ideas, like "How Can You Luv Me" off his debut album, and turning them completely inward. That song could be a Bruno Mars No. 1 hit in the hands of a major label producer. But Nielson is a fussy gear-head who loves psychedelia, shredding on his guitar without a pick, and, well, making music to do a bunch of drugs to. All the pop songs are buried deep in the mossy soul of Multi-Love.
Nielson produced, mixed, and engineered the entirety of Multi-Love. Some back-end teams work hard to hide in the shadows and feel that if they do their job well, the listener won’t even notice any production. Nielson is the opposite of that. The production is so central it’s almost another character on the album, corroding and tripping out the instruments, and compressing drum tracks down so they can fit in the palm of your hand. At times it feels like you’re listening to the album with un-popped ears. Once in a while, on simpler songs like the mid-tempo "Stage or Screen" or the obtuse motown-soul of "Ur Life One Night", make this vintage sheen feel like a crutch rather than a purposeful tool.
Nielson's ear for how something should sound is unparalleled, and his fastidious choices behind the boards are a large part of what makes Multi-Love a joy to listen to. It's as if he tried to make Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times in secret, so as not to wake the kids upstairs—private celebrations and private exorcisms. The most outspoken Nielson gets is on "Can’t Keep Checking My Phone", a single worthy of Larry Levan’s crate at Paradise Garage as some one-off flamenco disco track stuck near the end of the set. Underneath the spacey dance party, Nielson lays out a bittersweet song about missing someone you love, while the other person you love is right by your side.
In a recent profile, Nielson said, "Think about the two most serious relationships in your life so far, and then experiencing them simultaneously." Polyamory is an emotionally and spiritually dense topic to approach on an album, and, for someone with a third-eye tattoo, Nielson mostly avoids speaking in hempy clichés. Save for some grand overtures on the title track that actually feel more expository than anything else, his laments about these two women in his life are as finely portioned as the music below it. He ropes his feelings under universal themes on "Extreme Wealth and Casual Cruelty". Who wouldn't want to abandon it all and start over again as "just strangers" without the strictures of money or society? It's a story as old as time, only in Nielson's case, it just happens to be star-triple-cross'd lovers.
This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive. Those are moods he mostly saves that for the closer, "Puzzles". The seven-minute song serves as a tacked-on coda with overdriven '70s hard rock guitar and Nielson stretching the capacity of his vocals to a bluesy peak. It will kill live, as will most of these songs which will bend into longer, louder psych forms in rock clubs. But "Puzzles" feels broad and out of place here, despite its charms. Maybe it's the "Electioneering" outlier of an album with such an evocative mood. I think there's more to be found in the horn part on the endlessly melodic "Necessary Evil", played by Nielson's father. It's soft as Muzak, a simple up-and-down melody with smooth swing rhythm. When Nielson coos the words "necessary evil," the horn line just shifts forward one beat in the measure, making it sound entirely different while actually staying the exact same. It's one small link in a long chain of moments strung together seamlessly and imbued with so much. | 2015-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 26, 2015 | 7.1 | 29574fbd-6ad7-4f2a-9bf3-85efc8dce2a2 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Daniel Lanois is a celebrated producer (Bob Dylan, U2, Brian Eno, Neil Young) who toggles between singer-songwriter fare and blurry, concept-driven soundscapes with his own music. His new album, Flesh & Machine, is an endlessly inventive ambient collection. | Daniel Lanois is a celebrated producer (Bob Dylan, U2, Brian Eno, Neil Young) who toggles between singer-songwriter fare and blurry, concept-driven soundscapes with his own music. His new album, Flesh & Machine, is an endlessly inventive ambient collection. | Daniel Lanois: Flesh and Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20007-daniel-lanois-flesh-and-machine/ | Flesh and Machine | A blast of frantic noise, "The End" is not the closer but the second song on Daniel Lanois’ new album, Flesh & Machine. Scribbles of distressed electric guitar and waves of distortion grate against scratchily arrhythmic drums, creating a sustained explosion of sound uninterrupted by lyrics or melody. It’s all static and tension, with no release until it fades into the more percussive "Sioux Lookout". Listening to "The End", it’s almost impossible not to be reminded of Lanois’ motorcycle crash four years ago, when he lost control of his bike in Los Angeles and ended up in the hospital with multiple broken bones. The song conveys the same sense of slowed time that most of us experience during an accident, a hyperawareness that allows you to take in every small detail. Such associations emphasize the song’s queasy friction: guitar strings against drum heads, bone against asphalt, flesh against machine.
A deft guitarist who gravitates toward the liquid sound of the pedal steel, Lanois plays the studio like it’s just one more instrument, which would be a cliché if he didn’t take the studio on the road with him and produce each show like it’s a new record. More than 30 years after getting his first credits—one of which was a Raffi album, no less—he has become one of the most recognizable names in the control room, collaborating closely with Brian Eno and twiddling knobs for Neil Young’s Le Noise, Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, Willie Nelson’s Teatro, and nearly half of U2’s catalog (although not their most recent catastrophe). But Lanois is less well known as a solo artist, partly because one album per decade isn’t exactly prolific and partly because he has never settled on one particular sound or approach. Instead, he toggles between singer-songwriter fare (like 2003’s Shine) and blurry, concept-driven soundscapes (2005’s Belladonna).
Fortunately, Flesh & Machine is purely instrumental, with no lyrics to structure it too rigidly and no concept to hem Lanois. There’s an intriguing sense of entropy to these songs; rather than pristine, everything sounds weathered and worn. Like a robot detaching its limbs, "Tamboura Jah" actively disassembles itself as you listen, cut-and-pasting its constituent parts into new patterns. The mere act of holding together, though, gives the song its self-propulsion, as the cymbals and guitars reverberate against each other in unexpected ways. Of course Flesh & Machine is going to sound great, with each instrument calibrated either to pull you into Lanois’ sonic world or to shake you up once you get there.
Lanois creates some lovely sounds and moods on Flesh & Machine, but what really sets it apart from his other work is how he sets them against each other. The disembodied vocals on opener "Rocco" are pitched high to sound inhuman, lulling you a bit before the jarring conflagration of "The End". The album starts strong but picks up considerably on the second side, pitting the ethereal piano of "Iceland" with the raking-light nostalgia of "My First Love", which sounds like it’s stuck halfway between an old Floyd Cramer instrumental and the new Twin Peaks reboot. With its descending piano theme and bossa nova underpinning, it’s exactly the kind of song that would be on the jukebox at the Double R.
Flesh & Machine reaches its climax on "Aquatic", with its lurid pedal steel gliding like a shark around a reef. Lanois amplifies and exaggerates that lead instrument, not only lending it a supreme fluidity but also distorting its tone, like a microphone held too close to the mouth or an eye pressed right up to the TV screen. Yet, the effect is somehow delicate rather than noisy. It might seem like faint praise to call Flesh & Machine Lanois’ best and most realized solo album, but it’s also one of the best ambient records of 2014—an endlessly inventive collection of songs built on odd, often lurid sounds and textures, somehow rough and gentle at the same time. | 2014-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | November 18, 2014 | 7.7 | 295a8d62-fc64-430b-bb09-09d1a1eaf3a4 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Safdie brothers’ Adam Sandler vehicle is replete with outsized personalities, but Oneohtrix Point Never’s anxiety-stoking score makes a confident bid for a supporting role in its own right. | The Safdie brothers’ Adam Sandler vehicle is replete with outsized personalities, but Oneohtrix Point Never’s anxiety-stoking score makes a confident bid for a supporting role in its own right. | Daniel Lopatin: Uncut Gems (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-lopatin-uncut-gems-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Uncut Gems (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | The title sequence of the new Safdie brothers film, Uncut Gems, brings the moviegoer along a CGI-assisted journey through light-years of celestial mist before the camera recedes into footage from a probe deep inside Adam Sandler’s ass. Watching the opening credits fade over shots of protagonist Howie Ratner’s colon—pink and ribbed, like an aquatic worm—is bearing witness to an act that is in the macro graceful and in the micro grotesque, a confusing alloy found often in the work of the music of electronic musician, sound designer, and auteur Daniel Lopatin, usually known as Oneohtrix Point Never.
Lopatin has long blended sincerity and absurdity, the ratio of which varies dramatically per project. There was the score he did for the Safdie Brothers’ 2017 film Good Time, a one-night-in-New-York wreckage play upon which Lopatin’s sound design lavishes the serenity of being trapped in a hot elevator. There was 2010’s unimpeachable Eccojams Vol 1, under the nom de plume Chuck Person—an enormously goofy, surprisingly moving chopped-and-screwed tape of customer-support muzak and pop cheese that would predate the vaporwave hurricane by at least two years. Last year’s prolix and lore-ridden Age Of featured a track that served as his “proof of concept” for how he would score an entirely made-up Pixar story.
But there is plenty real about Uncut Gems, a movie filled with big, avian men who are always yelling at one another. This is par for the brothers Safdie, who seem to love making films about antiheroes run amok in Manhattan at maximum volume. Stark and tweaky under overcast skies, Midtown’s diamond district here acts as mayhem’s gate: a world in which sweaty bookies and graying heavies take meetings and hostages in the backs of hired cars, and promises should have been fulfilled yesterday. For our hero Howie, every opportunity is a potentially profitable one, be it a scheme to auction off a rare opal for 10 times its price, or the chance to make quick money off Kevin Garnett’s championship ring on an hours-long loan. Naturally, the peripatetic lifestyle of a gambler is bipolar—all zeniths and nadirs, the former leading directly and inevitably to the latter.
Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there, replete with a choral ensemble classically trained in a cappella Renaissance music and a handful of co-conspirators (the unholy Gatekeeper among them) who beef up each scene with the baroquely doofy polysynth dressings that could only belong under Lopatin’s baton.
The sound design drapes heavily around the necks of everyone in the film. Sometimes, Lopatin’s work is mixed so loudly that I laughed out loud. (Consider a scene in which Howie, trudging a long hallway with two bloody plugs of tissue in his nostrils and a faraway look in his eyes, has an electric sax-ridden fugue blasting like a frat initiation.) At other times, the music offers a kind of counterpoint. Where there is chaos, the score might get unusually soft; where there is sex, the tones scan saccharine; where there is heartbreak, Lopatin’s troupe treats misery like a punchline. (There’s a great scene in which Ratner’s girlfriend, played perfectly by Julia Fox, storms past a long line of club-goers immediately after sort of cheating on Ratner with the Weeknd. Here, the score—and the track in question, titled “Fuck You Howard”—sounds as if a Nordic boating team was asked to contribute vocals to Animal Crossing theme music.)
Soundtracking will always call into question the way that noise can make an image feel more glib, or more concerted; how audio can apply pressure, release a valve, inspire hysteria, dread, or joy within a scene. The idea of anxiety-making via carefully orchestrated synthwork is not new, but the Safdie brothers and Lopatin seem to have gotten the art down to a science. Some of the stabbingly angular ways in which the soundtrack dispenses somatic terror can feel like a savvy interpretation of “anxiety reappraisal,” a fashionable stress-management method that asks one to reframe anxiety-producing events as exciting ones. Thinking calm thoughts during panic only seems to exacerbate things; loud and low-BPM music during a screaming match does not a soothing scene make. This isn’t to say that the score doesn’t summon disquiet through more traditional ways: “Windows”—which smacks obviously of percussionist and contributor Eli Keszler, a man who has seemingly spent his life mimicking the beautiful and complex skitter of rainwater on various roofs—lends a runaway scene on a helicopter the nervy vim necessary to set off the film’s final 20 minutes of cardio.
High or low octane, it’s satisfying to situate Lopatin and the Safdies as part of a greater legacy of director-and-musician duets formed and calcified during the 1970s and 1980s. These films—the plots of which revolved around male antiheroes locked in doomed quests to resolve their poor choices—were scored by either proggy Germans (Goblin, Tangerine Dream), glistering Italians (Sensation’s Fix, Giorgio Moroder), or spectral Greeks (Vangelis), adding new, freaky, new-age dimensions to the portrayal of male misery. “It's so strange that that became the sound of men reflecting on their nature,” Lopatin said in the wake of Good Time. The fact that the Safdie brothers have found kinship in Lopatin, and the fact that this becomes the new sound of men who refuse to look inward, does the rare work of riffing on a tradition and catapulting it into canon.
Midway through the film, woeful Howie is faced with a moment of reckoning disguised as an ultimatum. “You really put me in a bad position,” says a foe, threatening him with a fresher hell than the one he endured the day prior. Lopatin, like Howie, is a man indebted to the absurdity of circumstance. Bad decisions upon good decisions, orientations upon re-orientations—the two work in a fractal pas de deux, hunting for the hardest payoff per scene, per moment, per any opportunity presented. Ashes to ashes, nebula to butthole, what else can one do?
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Warp | December 16, 2019 | 7.4 | 295e65d8-6296-4460-a498-e423e9557385 | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani releases her first solo-- er, "collaborative"-- album Love Angel Music Baby, with assistance from Andre 3000, Dr. Dre, Eve, and the ubiquitous Linda Perry, among others. | No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani releases her first solo-- er, "collaborative"-- album Love Angel Music Baby, with assistance from Andre 3000, Dr. Dre, Eve, and the ubiquitous Linda Perry, among others. | Gwen Stefani: Love Angel Music Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7789-love-angel-music-baby/ | Love Angel Music Baby | Gwen Stefani should stick to making bum flaps. Not quite a skirt, not quite a dish rag, the Stefani bum flap dangles off the guts of our divorced aunts and 12-year-old mall-slut daughters, the ones who steal Livestrong bracelets and dry-hump public schoolkids in Pac Sun dressing rooms. Bum flaps are these people's stars and stripes. Not all of us want to salute this flag, but it exists, and it gives America something else to believe in-- and it's not nearly as expensive as a valium addiction or Kaplan SAT course.
As widely predicted, 35-year old singer/fashionista Stefani has temporarily given up No Doubt to fully embrace a high-pop lifestyle with nary a pierced tongue in-cheek. The metamorphosis began with her Eve and Dr. Dre collaboration on 2001's killer single "Let Me Blow Ya Mind", and is completed here with her solo debut Love Angel Music Baby, a spineless, starfucked advertisement for her high-end clothing line.
Obviously, we can't expect 12 more cuts as personal or urgent as debut single "What You Waiting For", Stefani's slick self-steeling kick in the pitch-corrected plaids, and one of the best electro songs this year-- especially when the pop star openly PRs that she didn't "really see [LAMB] as a 'solo' record in the typical sense... The idea was to be open and let my ego shut up and sit over in the corner and make something great based on a concept." If Stefani wants to sacrifice her identity, that's fine, but hot Christ, she's working with everyone from Andre 3000 to the Neptunes to New Order to Dr. Dre here. So why isn't LAMB bigger, better, faster, more? Is it the scourge of 4 Non Blondes' Linda Perry, who coaxed Stefani into finishing the solo project and all but forced her back into the studio because Perry reportedly only "had a brief window of time available"? What's going on?
In fairness, one of the Andre tracks, "Bubble Pop Electric", isn't half-bad, a brave Prince-goes-Stray Cats doowop shuffle with a great hook and an Andre-as-Johnny Vulture gentleman boyfriend cameo. The track is silly and fun, and probably exactly what Stefani et al., wanted out of LAMB. Which is what makes Andre's second contribution, "Long Way to Go", so perplexing: The maudlin MLK Jr. samples and the duet's pointed appeal to interracial dating ("We've got a long way to go!/ It's beyond Martin Luthur/ Upgrade computer") feel out of place on an otherwise carefree album boasting lines like, "You know you are my treasure chest," and, "We got hydroponic love/ And we smoke it."
And another thing about Stefani's treasure chests-- not to mention, "We climbed all the way from the bottom to the top"; the Eve- and Dre- and Tevye-powered camp-hop "Rich Girl"; "I only want to fly first class desires (you're my limousine)"; "We're luxurious like Egyptian cotton"; "If I was a wealthy girl/ I'd get me four Harajuku girls to inspire me"; the unintentionally offensive orientalist fetishism, "Now we get to lay back"; "Ch-Ching Ch-Ching-- we're loaded and we're not going to blow it"; the soulless Nellee Hooper 90s R&B; vanity affair "Luxurious"; and the rest of LAMB's zombied buy-LAMB-clothing mantras and transparent Hollywood Dream bullshit-- the Joker's free-money parade through Gotham City was a much more entertaining display of wealth, and he had Prince, not just Wendy & Lisa.
Elsewhere on LAMB, the Neptunes shit out a Queen pastiche called "Hollaback Girl", which has about as much club potential as a 13-year old with a milk moustache and his dad's ID. For "The Real Thing", co-producers and co-players New Order unbizarrify, unlove, and untriangulate "Bizarre Love Triangle" just enough that the millions of people who heard about New Order on Karaoke Revolution won't notice the similarities right away. Seriously, anyone remotely involved with "The Real Thing" should find a stray dog and let it bite him.
So, final tally: LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments. For Stefani, fashion has officially come first; to her credit, these songs are the slickest, shiniest, bum-flappiest failures of the year. | 2004-11-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-11-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | November 23, 2004 | 5.1 | 29670cd5-a2ca-4bc5-8d88-ca9b9f47a6ee | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The N.Y. noise-punk quart's debut LP is an unabashedly grim collection, one that conjures the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film delivered with merciless brute force. | The N.Y. noise-punk quart's debut LP is an unabashedly grim collection, one that conjures the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film delivered with merciless brute force. | Pop. 1280: The Horror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16243-pop-1280/ | The Horror | If the hardest thing for a new rock band to do is be original, then the second hardest is to be scary. Most artists deploying horror-movie imagery and shock tactics inevitably succumb to campy theatricality (as seen in everyone from Marilyn Manson to the earliest iteration of the Horrors), or are quick to explain it away as just a ruse (e.g., Odd Future saying they're just joshin' with all that rape-and-murder business), and lest we forget that the most well-worn metaphor used to describe death metal invokes a character from Sesame Street. But the songs that have startled me the most-- Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' "Hard-On for Love", the Jesus Lizard's "Killer McHann"-- are unnerving to me not so much for their overt aggression as their matter-of-fact realism, where the line between singer and subject is blurred, and sound and fury coalesce into a vivid, very real portrait of violent psychosis.
New York foursome Pop. 1280 are not shy about showing their hand-- they take their name from a Jim Thompson crime novel about a killer cop, and they've given their first full-length album the self-explanatory title of The Horror. Pop. 1280 wallow in the same pool of pigfuck sloppy seconds as East Coast contemporaries Pissed Jeans and the Men, but where those bands respectively soften their blows (somewhat) with wry observations about domesticity and knowing classic-rock references, Pop. 1280 offer no such salve. If the ray-gunned synth-punk stylings of the band's debut 2010 EP, The Grid, suggested a certain fondness for cheeky, B-movie thrills, The Horror is a far more traumatic experience, conjuring all the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film, but delivered with merciless, medieval brute force. The first words we hear on the album are "two dogs fucking"; it proves to be The Horror's most romantic lyric.
Band co-founders Chris Bug and Ivan Lip recorded The Horror with a different drummer and keyboardist from The Grid, and the difference is immediately palpable-- rather than provide a clear separation of bass, synths, and Lip's Birthday Party-esque guitar scrapes, the three elements are often compacted into one monolithic, doomy frequency that hangs over the record like a cloud of black smoke. But new drummer Zach Ziemann does a fine job of pushing the proverbial boulder up the mountain. For all its oppressive heaviness, The Horror has energy and verve to spare: "Bodies in the Dunes" sets its apocalyptic death-toll imagery to a heart-racing tribal stomp that doesn't relent for five minutes, while "New Electronix" sounds like a summit between 1990s Touch and Go greats Brainiac and Girls Against Boys. Ironically, when Bug starts shouting out explicit dance-move instructions ("Hips to the right/ And hips to the left!") on "Nature Boy", the song's convulsing groove slows to a sludgy grind, making his directives sound less like an invitation to shimmy than militaristic orders shouted at some poor captive trapped at the bottom of a well.
Bug isn't the most dynamic vocalist-- sounding not unlike Liars' Angus Andrew played at 16 rpm-- but for a band as harsh as this, he need not display a range of emotions so long as he convincingly conveys the right ones: grim and grimmer. And it's The Horror's dirgey digressions that actually best showcase his cold-blooded character, whether shaming a submissive subject into acting like a dog on "Beg Like a Human", or taking no small amount of glee in describing the agonizing process of dying by the noose on "Hang Em' High". In a world this bleak, the best you can hope for is a quick, easy death, and yet even then Pop. 1280 won't let you off that easy-- as Bug cautions us at the outset, "Life after death is a painful life." But he can rest assured that, with an album as unabashedly grim and unforgiving as The Horror, he needn't have to worry about being granted eternal salvation. | 2012-02-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-02-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | February 3, 2012 | 7.5 | 296e5602-181d-4132-a16e-da54ca7b4712 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Irish band’s unrelenting third album, made with an arcade of pedals and processors, surges with electricity. Inside all of its noise is an indignant, surreal mania that gives it a twisted pop soul. | The Irish band’s unrelenting third album, made with an arcade of pedals and processors, surges with electricity. Inside all of its noise is an indignant, surreal mania that gives it a twisted pop soul. | Gilla Band: Most Normal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gilla-band-most-normal/ | Most Normal | There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments on Most Normal, the audacious third album by Ireland’s Gilla Band. Occasionally they come from Dara Kiely’s riled-up lyrics: “I can’t wear hats I just get slagged,” he chants over Adam Faulkner’s drilled snares on “Bin Liner Fashion.” On “Backwash,” he declares “no one looks cool around a wasp” in a matter-of-fact sneer, though the real punchline is the sickly, warp-speed gargle of noise that follows, which gives the feel of swerving down the twistiest slide at the waterpark on a flume of sewage.
But perhaps the funniest moment comes at the start of “Almost Soon.” On an album where Gilla Band became studio rats determined to push every sound to a mutant extreme, here is Most Normal’s lone immediately identifiable guitar. Not only that, guitarist Alan Duggan plays straightforward chiming chords, and in a tone that immediately suggests the ebullient cockiness of Is This It-era Strokes. Though three of Gilla Band cop to being in a teenage Strokes rip-off band, the four-piece (completed by bassist Daniel Fox) could not exist any further from that kind of rock orthodoxy. And sure enough, within 40 seconds, Kiely is howling “I’ll brain you!” and Faulkner’s tidy beat suddenly sounds like he’s whipping static. By the time the song ends, Gilla Band are spinning up clouds of outer-planetary ash.
Most Normal is Gilla Band’s third album in eight years. Despite a slight catalog, they’ve become one of the most influential bands of their generation in the British and Irish Isles—not least at home in Ireland, where the likes of Fontaines D.C. and the Murder Capital followed in their frenzied (and putatively post-punk) wake. “It’s nuts watching it ’cause they’re all like rock stars now,” Duggan said recently. “And we’re still fucking, er, very much not. Which is fine.” It’s also the point. From their breakout song—a distinctly condemned cover of techno producer Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?”—Gilla Band (fka Girl Band) refused to act like a rock band (pretty much the smartest thing any outfit of that ilk can do today). Their distance from mainstream success gave them the space to hone their brutal and exhilarating approach.
After releasing their discomfiting 2015 debut, Holding Hands With Jamie, Gilla Band canceled tours so that Kiely could prioritize a mental health emergency. They spent two years writing the 2019 follow-up The Talkies, happy enough to let people assume the group had disbanded as they toiled in private on a masterpiece of panic and deconstruction. Once the pandemic limited touring, their rehearsal space became a refuge where they could hang out, get drunk, and push extremes, working with zero concern for how they would ever play their third album live. And Most Normal is unmistakably lab work. Instrumental phrases repeat across the record at varying levels of degradation, from full pelt to ghostly apparition. A stridently contemporary record that couldn’t have been made without an arcade of pedals and processors, not to mention a forensic intent, it bears comparison to two charred albums that Low have made with BJ Burton, although it shares as much DNA with Yeezus’ precisely warped abrasion or Earl Sweatshirt’s hallucinatory Some Rap Songs. Crucially, despite Gilla Band persistently writing and reinventing—an easy way to make things stodgy—it also breathes vigorously, making the gap between man and machine imperceptible.
The Talkies started with an unsettling close-mic’d recording of Kiely having an anxiety attack; elsewhere in the album, he moaned and retched, stuck out on a limb from the band. On Most Normal, the music and those uncontrollable psychological realities heave as an awesome whole. Opener “The Gum” sounds like a violent death buffering. After the gnashing conclusion to “Backwash,” in which Kiely’s voice fragments like a shack in a tornado, comes “Gushie,” a dazed instrumental tundra that seems to track the cortisol ebbing away; standout “The Weirds” emanates from a similar haze into a renewed jolt of mania, heralded by heady slashes of guitar and a berzerk beat. Their whacked-out signal-to-noise ratio occasionally blips like a mind faltering and snapping back to; as the album reaches its end, it seemingly starts to asphyxiate. Many songs flow directly from one to the other—the terminal velocity of “Bin Liner Fashion,” with its atmosphere-penetrating scream, snaps into the furious processed howl of “Capgras”—denying their captive audience respite. Not only do Kiely and the band seethe as one, Most Normal exerts a possessive physicality on the listener. “I never killed before and I’ll never kill again,” Kiely rants on “The Weirds”; yet Gilla Band’s obliterating catharsis provides a good surrogate release for wringing necks.
Despite the album’s slippery flow, it is anything but formless. The Talkies was a conceptual album in part. Inspired by the looseness of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, it featured repeat motifs in the key of A; Kiely omitted pronouns, wishing to avoid any connotations brought on by use of “I” or “you,” and one song, “Aibohphobia,” gleefully fired symmetrical sentences at anyone suffering with a fear of palindromes. It created an air of resistance, Gilla Band choosing to backflip rather than walk. But Most Normal is a direct attack that hits like chugging gas from the nozzle. It’s not only thanks to its mauling noise, but the antic and insistent cadence of Kiely’s delivery. “I spent allllll my money on shit clothes, shit clothes,” he declaims in a lumbering sneer at the outset of “Eight Fivers,” a steady metronome amid swathes of interference. (The references to clothes, he has said, relate to his childhood shame at not being able to afford better ones.) The squall often rises to meet this tormented conductor, and his repeated phrases and internal rhymes give the album a twisted pop soul, no matter how nonsensical the words: “It became a muscle/A hustle to be a Jack Russell/Whose head was deaf and once again/Binged the Big Brother box set,” Kiely observes on the zooming “Backwash.” Most Normal teems with these inexplicable earworms, which bury in and leave you idly crooning “who’s in love with the balding earwig?” like it’s some Top 40 kiss-off.
Mostly, Kiely’s lyrics are a spray of indignant surreality. Some of them have the logic of sleep-talk: You can picture rushing to record a dozing friend as they drool “I’m the fastest man in the class/Wearing a big massive face,” as Kiely does on the slurred “Red Polo Neck.” The fish and wasps that festered in the lyrics of Gilla Band’s first two albums wriggle through here, as do an array of destitute characters bewildered by normal life. You could dig to uncover a seam of thoughts about aging—the point where Kiely “stopped being cute”; how he “got slow too fast”—although the album’s non-specific, all-encompassing state of turmoil feels like the more pressing concern.
It comes to a head on closer “Post Ryan.” To a queasy drone and an unsparing beat lifted from A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran (So Far Away),” Kiely abandons his parade of wasps and weirdos to spill his guts about being in a perpetual state of recovery from mental ill-health: “Took it all for granted/Gonna end up homeless/I hid behind the surreal/I‘m a bit too much,” he chants. He self-flagellates—on a song where the distortion pares back, he’s “just the same prick”—and reveals his powerlessness in the face of doctors using unintelligible “big words,” not to mention the tides of depression that fix him back in bed. “Oh no, not again,” Kiely wails, sarcasm his only defense. He concludes with another of his spiraling cadences: “Basically, I get inevitable depression when I do nothing,” he repeats, then the music stops dead. For a brief moment, Gilla Band reveal the necessity of their invention; otherwise, they leave us to simply behold its power. | 2022-10-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 11, 2022 | 8.4 | 2973da0f-ac40-4392-bb01-420d9291af78 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ |
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