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Each track of the new Pharmakon LP can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body. Even when her visceral noise achieves moments of transcendence, it still strikes you in the gut. | Each track of the new Pharmakon LP can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body. Even when her visceral noise achieves moments of transcendence, it still strikes you in the gut. | Pharmakon: Contact | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22974-contact/ | Contact | Through a decade of performing and recording as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet has made music that heaves, throbs, and decays. Harnessing the drilling power of electronics and the elasticity of her screams, she’s concocted visceral noise in New York since she was a teenager—first on small-run tapes and CD-Rs, then on more widely-available albums for her hometown label Sacred Bones. As her profile has grown, her sound has remained physical, the aural equivalent of organs pumping life into a body while nature takes a toll on its flesh. The physicality of each Pharmakon album emerges in Chardiet’s choices of cover art. Her 2013 LP Abandon showed maggots swarming on her lap, suggesting a theme of bodily decomposition. For 2014’s Bestial Burden—influenced by an illness that required emergency surgery—she placed animal organs on her chest and torso, as if her own innards had broken through her skin.
On the cover of the third Pharmakon full-length, Contact, Chardiet is no longer alone. A mesh of greasy fingers cover her face, her hair tangled in between them like a spiderweb catching flies. Perhaps Contact, then, is about reaching out and connecting with others. Alongside the heavier, more claustrophobic Bestial Burden, this new collection sounds spacious. Chardiet has opened her psychic soundscapes to give the outside world more room to enter. And that’s a well-timed goal, given how current political strife has pushed people to work together rather than turn inward.
In press materials, Chardiet says Contact is about “when our mind uses the body in order to transcend or escape it.” (Or, as she recently expanded, it’s “about stepping outside your experiences as a human and looking at humanity in an objective way.”) The ultimate objective, she writes, is “Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!” Achieving that isn’t easy. The music on Contact is stressful and tense, rife with conflicts that aren’t always resolved. At one point, Chardiet even seems ready to admit defeat, singing that “Despite all our scrambling rejections/We cannot transcend all of our instincts/Just animals, lost in a confused dream.” But she never gives up. Each track can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body, and Chardiet compellingly mines that primal contest for drama and catharsis. The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.
Contact benefits from Chardiet’s agile voice, which feels more prominent than ever. Her howls and screeches are central to four of the album’s six tracks, naturally humanizing the music while standing strong inside the electronic clatter. On “Nakedness of Need,” ominous noise is shifted by her blasting shrieks, while during “Transmission” her screams bounce around the din like wolves surrounding prey. That song’s lyric comprises just five lines, framing communication as paramount: “I had a conversation/It lasted nearly an hour/Held no words/And carried the weight/Of the state of things so held.”
Chardiet’s sounds are in a constant tug of war on Contact, and that clash seems to be the point. Just as there’s often more to learn from a journey than its destination, for Pharmakon the battle outweighs the result. Perhaps that’s why Contact’s closer, “No Natural Order,” actually resembles a battlefield. Crashes and pounds rattle while Chardiet peals out angry breaths, undaunted by the sonic assault. In the end, her chants could pass for political slogans—“No divine law, escape!/No positive law, revolt!/No natural law pertains:/Only empathy, untamed”—and it sounds like a victory. | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | March 30, 2017 | 7.9 | 2af17de8-56c9-495e-8518-b7d5a3bda9d5 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Margo Price is a country singer signed to Jack White's Third Man Records. On her highly buzzed debut, she emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes. | Margo Price is a country singer signed to Jack White's Third Man Records. On her highly buzzed debut, she emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes. | Margo Price: Midwest Farmer's Daughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21745-midwest-farmers-daughter/ | Midwest Farmer's Daughter | Margo Price has been gigging hard in Nashville for nearly a decade, earning a reputation as a fierce live act but getting barely any attention from labels or radio programmers. In the last few months, however, her fortunes took an abrupt turn: She signed to Jack White's Third Man Records, debuted on "Colbert," and released a string of hard-drinkin', hard-livin' singles. Even before she releases her debut, Midwest Farmer's Daughter, she has found herself at the center of some of the most intense buzz in country music, which means she has undergone a great deal of scrutiny. Most of it has concentrated on her backstory, which sounds like every country song rolled into one: Dad lost the farm, Nashville screwed her over, she shacked up with a married man, did a brief stint in jail, lost a child. To record this album, she hocked her wedding ring and car to pay for sessions at Memphis' legendary Sun Studios.
She owns up to all of it on her debut's epic six-minute opener "Hands of Time," which tells her own story better than any critic, press release, publicist, TV host, or awards presenter ever could. It's a remarkable cold open, an incredible introduction to an artist who is both a newcomer and a veteran, but what makes it so powerful is the contrast between all the bad shit she's endured and her modest goals for recovery: "All I wanna do is make a little cash." Rather than conquer the world or see her name up in lights, Price just wants get the farm back for her dad and buy her mom a nice bottle of wine.
On Midwest Farmer's Daughter—whose title is clearly meant to echo Loretta Lynn's famous origin story—Price emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes that split the difference between so many ampersands: country & western, rock & roll, rhythm & blues. It's an ambitious piece of music-making and storytelling, featuring a road-hardened backing band called the Price Tags and a singer whose flinty voice conveys both a guarded vulnerability and a reckless scrappiness. She fiddles while Nashville burns on "This Town Gets Around," three minutes of inside baseball that details all the unscrupulous managers and sexist promoters who populate the industry like fleas on a hound. "I guess it's me who gets the joke," she sings. "Maybe I'd be smarter if I played dumb."
On most of Daughter, however, Price is tough in conventional ways, on songs that fit a bit more squarely with country traditions. She threatens a bar patron on the honky-tonk fight song "About to Find Out," drowns the devil on her shoulder with whisky and tequila on "Since You Put Me Down," welcomes a wayward lover on "How the Mighty Have Fallen." They're sturdy tunes, strong examples of the country songwriting, but they don't hit with the same force as the more obviously personal songs here. Daughter is best when it's specifically first-person, when Price bends country to fit her own story rather than bend herself to fit the form. You root hard for Price to win these battles, even as you may find yourself wishing Midwest Farmer's Daughter could transcend the hype. | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Third Man | March 24, 2016 | 7 | 2af38ed4-1294-4d67-8ddc-bc10230d0c1d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
After a seven year pause, Elizabeth Powell’s new album as Land of Talk still sounds like a direct line to her consciousness, full of unpredictable songwriting twists and poetically opaque lyrics. | After a seven year pause, Elizabeth Powell’s new album as Land of Talk still sounds like a direct line to her consciousness, full of unpredictable songwriting twists and poetically opaque lyrics. | Land of Talk: Life After Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23242-life-after-youth/ | Life After Youth | There was a moment shortly after Montreal’s Land of Talk released their last album, 2010’s Cloak and Cipher, when the band’s longevity seemed quietly clear. As the Canadian indie pop boom hit its zenith and receded, something about Land of Talk sounded timeless. Never as bombastic as Arcade Fire or as saccharine as Stars, Land of Talk were more straightforward. Even with Cipher pulling guests from the who’s who of Montreal indie, and Justin Vernon producer credits on 2008’s Some Are Lakes, Land of Talk always managed to sound like a direct line to Elizabeth Powell’s consciousness, like the best-kept-secret of your local basement scene. Seven years later, Powell is back with Life After Youth—a solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.
Music, or at least a music career, is often said to be a young person’s game—an economy that relies heavily on a college demographic, touring schedules that take their toll on the mind and body, and a lack of economic stability. This all accumulated for Powell. And after a devastating computer crash destroyed the bulk of her post-Cipher material, her father suffered a stroke, leading Powell to put music on pause and prioritize being his caretaker. Life After Youth, then, could also be called Music After the Grind—Powell coming back to music as a healing and sustaining practice, for both herself and her father. “This Time” has Powell announcing her return: “I don’t want to waste it this time/And see fate as the end of me.”
In true Land of Talk form, that’s about as overt as Powell gets. Snapshots of longing manifest throughout the album: “Yes you were on my mind/Done a lot of distance/I can’t leave you behind,” Powell sings on “Yes You Were;” “The wind undoes me/Pulls me past/The way you hold me/Brings me back,” goes the tender “Inner Lover.” Otherwise, the lyrics stay poetically opaque, generating meaning in how phrases sit together, like how the emotional crux of “Inner Lover” rests in the refrain “You light it slowly/Your light is lonely.”
One of Powell’s biggest songwriting strengths has been its unpredictability. As soon as you think you know where a song is going, it turns and drops you into fresh emotional territory; the fragments part and leave you on a plaintive, gutting line. (This approach is currently best practiced by Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan.) Life After Youth uses some conventional song structures, but it contains choice breakaways. “World Made” interjects stops and starts into an otherwise steadily chugging tempo; “Yes You Were” hits the gas pedal with a visceral restlessness. “Spiritual Intimidation” starts mellow, accelerates on an early bridge and drives right off, catching air in a freefall of whirling synths.
For the most part, though, Life After Youth feels like Land of Talk’s most muted release, built from synth parts and programmed loops rather than guitar. Drums are sparse, even on the louder rock songs, and the production never lets the raw parts land quite right. There’s a brashness that’s missing, replaced with the tenderness that comes with gingerly stepping back into something wounded. Late-2000s Canadian indie pop was never one to throw the brick (except maybe for Metric), but Land of Talk always had something of an uprising within it, smuggling in jabs at the music industry and gender.
Youth is instead concerned with an inwardness, peppered with reassurances that could be directed to Powell’s longing fans, the people in her care, or Powell herself. On the gentle closer “Macabre,” she launches into a singsong verse: “If it wasn’t for this life I would leave it/But oh I’d miss the sky and the sea.” As the old cliches would have it, we’re always the oldest we’ve ever been—but there is in fact life after youth, so long as you make a little space for healing. | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | May 18, 2017 | 7 | 2af59dd5-a52c-4617-9a3c-e094587b1f5e | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | null |
The legendary singer and songwriter has her already diverse, malleable career remixed by artists such as Coldcut, Francois K, and DJ Logic. | The legendary singer and songwriter has her already diverse, malleable career remixed by artists such as Coldcut, Francois K, and DJ Logic. | Nina Simone: Remixed and Reimagined | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9749-remixed-and-reimagined/ | Remixed and Reimagined | The irony of remix collections like this one is that, while they're ostensibly supposed to bring the artist "up to date" and keep their music alive by merging classic records with new techniques and technologies, the artist so honored always winds up sounding older and deader. Though Nina Simone passed just a few years ago, through much of this set she sounds like her contributions were peeled off of an old 78; absent her usual arrangements, she becomes just another dusty Ghost of Music Past trapped inside some earringed bald guy's machine.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If records were ever agreed to be holy and beyond the reach of those who like to tinker, those days are long gone. Everything is a work in progress, to be continually repackaged, recontextualized, remastered, and yes, remixed-- legally and otherwise-- again and again. And Nina Simone, who fought hard and bitter fights for control of her art, is gone now, and her vote doesn't count. So you may as well meet a remix set like this in the middle.
The worst tracks here fail because they sound like they're trying to frame Simone as fashionably "cool." When singing, Simone could be pretentious, goofy, sentimental, melodramatic, angry, and compassionate; she almost never looked on at the world from an icy remove. Despite her often-tragic life, she wasn't Chet Baker. Her husky voice and sometimes behind-the-beat phrasing obviously serve as downtempo touchstones, but when given a trip-hop backing on Daniel Y's "I Can't See Nobody" or Coldcut's neo-big beat "Save Me", she's reduced to a cardboard cut-out, propped up in front as a one-dimensional caricature. And while she was to my ears perhaps the sexiest vocalist that ever lived, immersed in DJ Wally's mix on "My Man's Gone Now", she comes over as "sexy" in the manner of an airbrushed babe from a Skyy Vodka ad.
I do, however, have to give it up for Tony Humphries' "Got U Turned on Dub" remix of "Turn Me On". Enlivened by a snippet of sampled scat vocal and a bubblicious house beat, he alone finds the overflowing life that propelled Simone's best recordings. It's almost eight minutes long but has enough joy and generosity to go another five, easy. And while I'm not crazy about the reverb Francois K. puts on Simone's voice on his mix of "Here Comes the Sun"-- a stylization that homogenizes the most distinctive of instruments-- the delicate arrangement and beat he stretches behind her have a certain charm. Behind those two, there are another two or three OK tracks, and the remainder of the record is pretty dire. Sad to say, it could have been worse. | 2007-01-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2007-01-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Legacy / RCA | January 12, 2007 | 3.5 | 2afbbcc8-ad61-4c75-bda6-72b7bd73dd36 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Australian hitmaker’s 10th studio album is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far. | The Australian hitmaker’s 10th studio album is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far. | Sia: Reasonable Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sia-reasonable-woman/ | Reasonable Woman | Sia’s voice is a titanic instrument that swerves between sorrow and euphoria in the same octave-spanning measure. Since her 2014 breakthrough, 1000 Forms of Fear, the Australian star’s career has spanned big-ticket electropop collaborations with the likes of Diplo, Zayn, Flo Rida, and Sean Paul, as well as her own passion projects. Over the past decade, her sound fully morphed from the quietly crushing indie pop of early records to produce glossy mainstream hits, including both giddy highs and some forgettable lows. Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.
Reasonable Woman follows 2021’s Music, the soundtrack to the singer’s misguided directorial debut of the same name. Both a critical and commercial flop, Music might suggest that Sia has something to prove. Yet few songs on Reasonable Woman summon the concentrated adrenaline and idiosyncratic lyrics that animate her best music. (Even the tepid title makes it feel as though she’s managing expectations upfront.) The chorus that’s meant to juice up motivational opener “Little Wing” weds Sia’s grandiose vocals to basic lyrics: “My little wing/I know you can’t stop crying/But tears dry up when you’re flying,” she sings in a soaring upper register, sounding as though she’s still scoring a forgettable film. On the more memorable ballad “I Had a Heart,” co-written with Rosalía, she reaches deeper, and her unvarnished performance revels in the weathered grain of her voice. Dealing out forgiveness after a breakup, she relinquishes some of the album’s pomp and gradually finds a more moving, if still treacly, sweet spot.
More often, pomp seems to be the point. Reasonable Woman is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far. The wobbly dubstep drop on the anonymous single “Incredible,” featuring Sia’s LSD partner Labrinth, sounds teleported from 2014. The stomping, rafters-aiming “Gimme Love” grates as it makes the titular request 12 times in a chorus. Chaka Khan’s verses on the souped-up, Greg Kurstin-produced “Immortal Queen” are so incomprehensible they’re almost camp, combining references to The Matrix, “cavemen bringing the cave queen carvings,” and Queens Victoria and Sheba. It makes no more sense in context, ping-ponging between uninspired synth arpeggios, than it does on paper. And on the truly dire Paris Hilton duet “Fame Won’t Love You,” Sia delivers achingly sincere lyrics about the trials of celebrity beside one of Y2K’s most flavorless personalities. The guitar-tinged synth-pop feels airless. There’s no forward motion, no tension—both key to the rapturous feelings evoked by Sia’s most energetic, soaring songs.
She finds a more worthy match in Kylie Minogue on the breathy, strutting “Dance Alone,” an electropop highlight that shares DNA with Minogue’s recent Tension and readily invites comparison to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” still the gold standard for this particular flavor of bittersweet bliss. It’s an issue that plagues Reasonable Woman: The germ of a better idea often appears within reach. That’s true of songs like the pleasure-seeking “One Night,” where bizarre, Timbaland-esque rhythmic strings propose a more interesting angle on swaggering dance-R&B. It happens again on the closing ballad “Rock and Balloon,” with the simple, metronomic synth that winds through the background and finally dissipates into an acoustic guitar melody. Those wrinkles of strangeness—whether in production, vocals, or instrumentation—are traces of a stronger album that the incoherent Reasonable Woman quickly abandons for the next drop. | 2024-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 6, 2024 | 5.5 | 2afbea6c-1837-45a1-9875-574a14731aca | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The former Odd Future rapper’s latest solo EP shows his strengths but ultimately loses steam due to his basic bars and formless lyrics. | The former Odd Future rapper’s latest solo EP shows his strengths but ultimately loses steam due to his basic bars and formless lyrics. | Hodgy: Entitled | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hodgy-entitled/ | Entitled | At the beginning of his career, Hodgy was an able foil. Odd Future was a collective full of rap hellions intent on pushing boundaries as often as they pushed clothing covered in cats, but even within that hectic framework, Hodgy’s voice was always recognizable. The higher register of his voice stuck out next to the deeper rasps of Tyler, The Creator and Domo Genesis, giving each verse a sense of urgency, even if his bars weren’t particularly impressive. Much of the thrill of verses like his Tumblr-referencing breakthrough on “Sandwitches” or the first lines of “Loaded”—a standout from he and producer Left Brain’s duo MellowHype—came from the slickness of his words, how they’d contrast with the richer timbres of his collaborators or the spacey beats of the production.
But as he moved on to solo work, his abilities began to wane. After a number of mixtapes, he released his 2016 “debut” Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide, which featured bursts of strong rapping and singing tied to indistinct writing. For all the gusto of his marathon-like flow on “Final Hour” or his ballooning voice on “Resurrection,” it felt like anyone could’ve written most of these songs. This remains the problem on his latest EP Entitled, which shows he’s still a decent performer without telling us why we should care. It is a tighter and more focused experience than Fireplace, but only by virtue of it being five songs long instead of 13.
That lack of focus is ironic considering the track titles spell out a declarative sentence: “Every day, people change into someone we never knew again.” Whether this is some sort of meta-commentary or just a whoa, dude weedism, the thinness of his lyrics don’t do his singing or rapping any favors. While Hodgy switches between both modes with technical flair, bars like “Every day I’m on my grind like a skateboarder/I’m a g, I’m on my rind like a shaved orange” from opener “Everyday” are dead on arrival. Rappers have built entire aesthetics around selling punchlines— Roc Marciano and Pi’erre Bourne are pros at this—but theirs are attached to stories, a distinct worldview that doubles as a glimpse at their personality. Try as he might, empty lines like “Complex like the magazine” from “People Change” don’t have the same mileage.
As a comic rapper, Hodgy’s bars are stale and basic. On top of being unfunny, his lyrics lack detail, a sense of place or geography, or a definite personality to bolster him when he starts telling stories. He comes close a few times with stray nods to Anita Baker songs (“Into Someone”) and the energetic verse that closes out “People Change.” But these fleeting moments quickly dissolve. The love songs lack longing and chemistry, leaning on tired metaphors like “hanging like ornaments” and shallow talk of experiences that never dives into what those experiences might mean. At their most serious, they sound like unfinished campfire sing-alongs.
Which is a shame because Entitled also features what are effectively two MellowHype reunion tracks. Left Brain’s beats on “People Change” and “We Never Knew” mix the haze of early 2010s cloud rap with whizzing drums and synths that expand and swirl like quasars, and Hodgy navigates them effortlessly. It’s almost enough to make you want a new MellowHype project, if only Hodgy would flesh out his writing. Entitled feels like an attempted course correction after a slow few years, but the project doesn’t fail because it’s offensive or poorly arranged. Simply, Hodgy sounds like a bored hype-man with nothing to say. | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Poortrait / Repost | May 24, 2022 | 5.3 | 2afe8f71-5fa9-447a-982d-bfb2adce6e1e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Now on his own label, the internet rap originator explores all his favorite styles—warbling rap, theatrical rock and pop—and the results are consistently joyous. | Now on his own label, the internet rap originator explores all his favorite styles—warbling rap, theatrical rock and pop—and the results are consistently joyous. | iLoveMakonnen: My Parade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ilovemakonnen-my-parade/ | My Parade | Year after year, successive generations of internet rap further confirm that iLoveMakonnen is an originator. Hyperpop and digicore artists get praised for mashing together rap with other genres on a whim; Makonnen was making songs that sounded like Gucci Mane and MGMT in 2011. Mario Judah goes viral for crooning over rap beats like an opera singer; Makonnen did that in 2014. “Panini” by Lil Nas X—everything by Lil Nas X, to be honest—feels indebted to Makonnen’s bubbly melodies and vocal approach.
Makonnen’s version of internet rap was unlike anyone before him. His early Drink More Water tapes, largely self-produced, were strange and muddy and gripped by a deep curiosity, full of sketches of rap, electro-pop, and indie rock. On paper, they looked like the work of a hitmaker, which is why the industry took interest in him. But after “Tuesday,” and after signing with Drake’s OVO Sound in 2014, Makonnen largely receded from the spotlight—partly because his music was always too weird for radio, partly because labels never cared to invest in him. It didn’t help that most of his star rap collaborators distanced themselves after he came out as a gay man in 2017. (It’s telling that just a couple years later, the Black online teen who hit No. 1 with “Old Town Road” was more embraced by fans and the industry for coming out.)
Maybe Makonnen just needed to escape from all that noise. He did in real life, moving to Portland, Oregon in 2016, and now he’s done so artistically. After a near-decade with Warner, he’s gone and started his own label and released his first independent album, My Parade. It’s a natural continuation and refinement of the styles he’s grown fond of over the years, with a little less rapping and a little more singing. Makonnen rarely compromises his vision, sequencing warbling rap songs alongside the indie rock and folk experiments he’s toyed with for a decade. These are some of his most fleshed-out ideas, and the results are consistently joyous. The single “Whoopsy” lurches around synthetic flutes and 808s and Makonnen yelps the title, sounding like a siren, before passing it off to a rapper named Payday who demolishes her verse.
On “Whoopsy” and elsewhere, Makonnen demonstrates his knack for rolling words around and making them sound three-dimensional. His elastic, buoyant voice transforms relatively mundane phrases into mantras. He could just tell you he’s sexy, but he’d rather squeal “I’m2sexyI’m2sexyI’m2HOT!”, the syllables floating overhead like loosed balloons.
Makonnen tends to throw everything at the wall, which usually leads to a few duds. But on My Parade, he moves briskly through styles. He’s a bit more reserved, which makes the record smoother than some of his mixtape work, but it also leads to greyer stretches, or staid rap cuts like “So Saucy” and “Whip It Harder” where he isn’t doing much. He thankfully follows those up with the yawning “Bad Bitch With a Stutter,” a glacial club record made warmer by its ridiculous, self-evident premise.
The thing is, “Bad Bitch With a Stutter” is also a song about longing, and longing is Makonnen’s wellspring—no one is better at injecting funny, meandering songs with heart and humanity. On his indie rock and folk numbers, Makonnen writes in big, theatrical flourishes. “You could be ‘cross the ocean, somewhere in the blue/ I'll be all alone searching for you,” he warbles on the gorgeous “If It’s Cool,” which saunters at the pace of a Tame Impala song. These are ideas he might’ve tried on past tapes, but here they’re full-bodied, aided by stronger beats and cleaner mixes.
The range of production allows Makonnen to express himself better and open up more, like on the grungy title track, where he acknowledges all the hardship that’s come his way over the years: the deaths of some of his closest friends, the hearts he’s shattered, the living hell that is working for someone who doesn’t care about you. It’s sad but also defiant, a moment of agency: “Why should I keep waiting around if it's just gon’ be raining now?” My Parade takes that line to heart and grins wide in response. The DNA and doll head are still there, but Makonnen’s older, surer of himself, freer than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Timeless Magic / Cor Tan | April 24, 2021 | 7 | 2aff2580-775f-451a-b0dc-77545ffc3b40 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
The musical output of Michelle Branch and Patrick Carney’s embattled partnership suffers from muddled songwriting and meandering arrangements. | The musical output of Michelle Branch and Patrick Carney’s embattled partnership suffers from muddled songwriting and meandering arrangements. | Michelle Branch: The Trouble With Fever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michelle-branch-the-trouble-with-fever/ | The Trouble With Fever | The enduring image of Michelle Branch is that of a young woman holding a guitar, fixing you with an open stare, and daring you to look back. In TRL days, she was photographed in empty lofts and alongside desert blacktops, dressed like an all-American rocker with nods to her Southwestern roots. This image projected a frankness rare among teenage pop stars, even if it didn’t quite capture the appeal of her early work. For all their hooks, bridges, and I’m-sinking-slowly-so-hurry-hold-mes, 2001’s The Spirit Room and 2003’s Hotel Paper are entrancing guitar-pop records, bolstered by Branch’s second-person immediacy and producer John Shanks’ sleek execution. (The striking pre-chorus of “Everywhere,” where the verse structure veers off-key into the stop-start hook, is Shanks’ signature—seen elsewhere on “Come Clean,” “Have a Nice Day,” and “Pieces of Me.”)
Branch’s stardom was as brief as it was sudden. Hotel Paper landed a week before her 20th birthday; Warner sat on the follow-up, cycled Branch through the Nashville machine, and eventually dropped her. Shanks returned for 2010’s Everything Comes and Goes EP, and co-wrote a track on Branch’s 2017 comeback Hopeless Romantic. In the interim, she found a new songwriting partner. After meeting Patrick Carney at a party thrown by his then-wife in 2015, Branch and the Black Keys drummer agreed to work on a batch of unproduced songs. A year later they were a couple, and after marrying in 2019, they returned to the studio for Branch’s fourth full-length. Weeks before The Trouble With Fever’s scheduled release, the bottom fell out: Branch was arrested on a since-dismissed domestic assault charge and filed for divorce before agreeing to attempt reconciliation.
Meanwhile Branch is promoting the musical output of their embattled partnership, a long-simmering album co-written and co-produced by Carney. Fever is such a comprehensive blunder, it’s hard not to search for cracks in the couple’s working relationship. Lead single “I’m a Man,” a would-be anthem from the Carrie Underwood school of revenge feminism, lampoons its male narrator with sardonic framing: “I’m a man/And I’m ready to go/And I can’t get it up/And I can’t let it show.”
No points for subtlety, but fair enough. That’s until Branch abandons the bit, shifting to a woman’s perspective for the second verse: “I’m so tired of being told by everybody/That I can’t make decisions ’bout my own damn body.” The hook is unmelodic, the guitars sound like kazoos, and the violin breakdown is bafflingly out-of-place. Here is a sendup of male impotence, composed and recorded with the husband Branch nearly sent packing. You couldn’t write this stuff! Unfortunately, neither can they—as a protest song it’s jumbled, with none of Hotel Paper’s snarling bite.
Listening to Fever’s lurching arrangements, the question must be asked: Has Patrick Carney ever heard a Michelle Branch song? Even if country-pop isn’t his comfort zone, Branch is a compelling vocalist capable of wary plaintiveness and blistering rancor, effecting a humane intimacy even when her lyrics trend unspecific. She can do bluesy twang and canyon-rock jangle, but the slinky Europop of “Zut Alors!” would’ve been a stretch even for Madonna. The verses (“I get the feeling that we’re on them drugs/And what will happen when it’s not enough?”) are as inane as the swirling disco strings; it’s like Dua Lipa on downers. The unabashed come-ons of “Beating on the Outside” are the album’s lyrical nadir, beginning with the opening bars’ entreaty: “I wanna get you off/I wanna see your face.”
The album isn’t bold enough to commit in any one direction, offsetting whispery synth-pop with saccharine country ballads. Still, the most glaring structural defects are overarching. The dressed-up guitars range from staticky to syrupy; the arrangements meander into melodramatic bridges. The synthetic percussion and modest chord progressions make for a chamber-pop ponderousness. (Has a world-renowned drummer ever been so enamored by chintzy drum machines?) In lieu of hooks, Branch sings wordless, ooh-ooh-ooh harmonies, like vocal reference tracks left intact.
Some of these songs might have been salvaged if not for their bewildering instrumentation. It’s hard to tell where the guitars end and the keys begin in the sludgy wall of sound on “I’m Sorry.” With abrasive synths and spaced-out percussion, “You Got Me Where You Want Me” feels at once too busy and too sparse. The keeper is “Closest Thing to Heaven,” a midtempo ballad with cozy, plainspoken lyrics. The quiet intro spotlights Branch’s burnished voice, picking up momentum en route to the first chorus, but a succession of extraneous instrumental breaks distracts from the easy melody. A more sure-handed producer would have honed in on the chords and the epistolary quality of Branch’s verses. There’s a really nice song here, buried in over-produced schmaltz.
If history remembered Branch as a layover between Liz Phair and Avril Lavigne—or worse, a peer of Hilary Duff and Ashlee Simpson—it wouldn’t do justice to her broader catalog. Hopeless Romantic glimpsed a future in genre work with a distinctive set of woozy, ’70s-inspired rock tunes; with any luck, Fever will be the aberration. When a creative-slash-romantic partnership goes south, you might get Rumours, proof of art’s capacity to transcend animosity. More likely, you’ll get a mishmash like The Trouble with Fever: jaded lovers grappling for space. | 2022-09-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Audio Eagle / Nonesuch / Warner | September 20, 2022 | 5.1 | 2b044821-a06d-4874-9ba5-c79b188617a7 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The Cure's 1989 album, released during what was arguably the band's peak period, receives a lavish reissue with some terrific bonus material | The Cure's 1989 album, released during what was arguably the band's peak period, receives a lavish reissue with some terrific bonus material | The Cure: Disintegration [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14288-disintegration-deluxe-edition/ | Disintegration [Deluxe Edition] | The late 1980s and early 90s were the Cure’s heyday—from an American perspective. It’s not just that they were making great music; they’d been making great music for roughly a decade already. But these were the years during which they coalesced into this whole iconic thing, the Cure—a sound, a look, and a sensibility that a few kids in every other high school could build whole identities around. Or at least whole wardrobes, decoration schemes, and notebook scribbles. One of my first big memories of listening to Disintegration involves wandering around the Colorado State Fair, from the agriculture show to the gang fights by the midway. This is a kind of reach I doubt Robert Smith ever imagined.
And yet there they were. You could say—again, from an American perspective—that it started with two things. There was Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, a 1987 double album that scatters in a lot of different directions. This is something the band always did well: listening to their “many moods” pop records is like exploring a new city, where every storefront and side street offers something unique. The same went for Standing on a Beach / Staring at the Sea, a collection of singles stretching from 1978 to 1985, that was critical to introducing this band to North Americans.
But mostly there was Disintegration: the record where Robert Smith approached turning 30, got engaged and then married, got annoyed with the way his band was working, and went off by himself to write something deep and serious. Disintegration does not “scatter.” It’s a single, grand, dense, continual, epic trip into core stuff the Cure did well. They’d always been good at this kind of album, too. If Kiss Me is a crowded, teeming city to explore, listening to Disintegration is more like standing in the middle of some vast, empty space—the kind of ocean or plain where you can see the horizon in all directions. You can sense that focus straight from the first minute, during which some wind chimes knock around in an empty void, and then the band bursts out with one of the most overwhelmingly grand openings I’ve ever heard on a pop record—a slow-motion, radiant synth figure of such scale that Sofia Coppola has plausibly used it to soundtrack the coronation of Louis XVI.
It’s no wonder this was meaningful to a lot of teenagers: The sheer emotional grandeur of tracks like that opener, “Plainsong,” make a great match for the feeling that everything in your life is all-consumingly important, whether it’s your all-consuming sadness, joy, longing, or whatever. And yet Disintegration is not a very teenagey album. It’s not an emo whine, and it’s not a big miserablist mope, either; one of its most popular tracks, “Lovesong,” was written by Smith as a wedding present for his wife. “I will always love you,” it keeps promising—not the way you sing that in a giddy love song, but like it’s a grave, solemn, bloody commitment. It was a top 10 hit in the U.S.
This is the thing: The album has a reputation as some huge, dark, crushingly depressive experience. It’s not entirely unearned. If you want to be crushingly depressed with Disintegration, or frustrated, or self-loathing, it’ll embrace you right back. But it’ll embrace other things, too. A whole lot of this album’s appeal is that it’s comforting, practically womblike—big, warm, slow, full of beauty and melody and even joy. The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics, not sulkers. It’s muscular (like on the title track), wistful (“Pictures of You”), ghostly (“Closedown”), seething (“Fascination Street”), and yeah, morose, but what’s striking is how each of those qualities can reach really, really far into your gut. It’s not a record for the dead-inside: Get far enough into this album, and I will almost guarantee you will feel some shit.
It’s monolithic, and most of the songs work the same way. A lot of them are mostly “intro”: The steady pulse of bass and guitar underneath, while glacially huge synth lines and liquid guitar melodies sparkle through the foreground. After a while, Smith’s voice comes in, echoing calmly, surveying the ocean around him. On Kiss Me he yowled and croaked and had fun with it, but he spends the length of this album turning in tense, restrained performances, calm and steely and grave. The parts where he actually lets loose and starts raving are explosive. The title track, for instance, plunges further and further into a frustrated wail before climaxing on one phrase: “Both of us knew/How the end always is.” (You can take that climax as harrowing or cathartic or just plain fun.) Songs like this aren’t organized around parts and movements, just steady repetition and emotional build. So at some point you realize that the intros aren’t really “intros,” not just a period of waiting for things to start: sinking into the sound of this album—a sound whose every element feels huge and magnificent—is the whole point.
And that, to be honest, is the one drawback of this reissue. If I’m remembering correctly, the first pressings of Disintegration actually said, in the liner notes, “this album was mixed to be played loud, so turn it up.” It was intentionally created with headroom to spare, and designed to be full of space—every instrument surrounded by air, every echo trail clear and audible, an album that was above all comfortable to listen to. Like most remasters these days, this one has to pump up the volume toward modern levels, which means smushing things together and making parts fight for space. I’m not so cranky that this usually bothers me, but this is one album where it might really eat away at the point—those horizons you used to be able to see in all directions have been moved miles closer.
On the plus side, there’s the rest of the package. Previous reissues in this series have included home demos that felt more like curiosities than anything useful. But the ones here are enlightening; it's marvelous to hear them and consider how Smith’s instrumental sketches came together into anything as complete as this record. (You can also chuckle at the cheery-sounding ones that obviously got axed along the way.) With this package, in fact, you can go from home demos to studio ones, from studio demos to the album, and then from the album to the third disc—1989 live recordings of each track, in order. And where are these “crushingly depressive” ghouls playing them? At Wembley Arena, in front of more than 10,000 people. | 2010-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | June 10, 2010 | 10 | 2b10831f-9e12-4c22-b02b-4868fb7a517f | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The songwriter’s self-produced second LP is an introduction to the psyche beneath the quirky bowl cut. But its self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism reveal little. | The songwriter’s self-produced second LP is an introduction to the psyche beneath the quirky bowl cut. But its self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism reveal little. | Gus Dapperton: Orca | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gus-dapperton-orca/ | Orca | Gus Dapperton: e-boy archetype, Porches lookalike, bedroom pop artist, post-Tumblr aesthete, TikTok native. He is a mood board, Gen Z culture personified. Over the past few years, the Brooklyn-based 23-year-old and his class of fellow online alterna-pop artists with colorful hair have developed an aesthetic: light, hazy synth tunes that blur into fans’ lives and Spotify algorithms. His smooth, sunny pop songs address modern anxieties in ways that feel direct and relatable, simple to the point of monotony. Dapperton’s two EPs and 2019 debut full-length garnered a young cult following that grew with his feature on BENEE’s “Supalonely,” a 2020 TikTok hit that climbed the Billboard charts. But musical identity was secondary to Dapperton’s rise, which seemed to hinge on easy listening and a trendy persona. Dapperton looks like Brooklyn to people who’ve never been to Brooklyn. He looks like a rock star to fashion insiders. He looks cool to teenagers. And he sounds like anybody. Orca, his self-produced second LP, is an introduction to the psyche beneath the quirky bowl cut. Unfortunately, it fails to answer some key questions—namely, who is Gus Dapperton and what is he trying to be?
A newfound honesty and ease runs through Orca’s reflections on depression. You can hear him becoming more comfortable with his voice, stretching it beyond a nasally croon. Still, his personality remains hidden, and it’s hard to discern what he’s going for. “Bluebird”’s swaggering bassline feels goofy and forced against Dapperton’s bratty drone: “I’m young and I’m never getting old/That’s my human right.” “My Say So” lands somewhere between Top 40 hit, schoolyard chant, and fictional Disney Channel band as Dapperton and Australian singer Chela bop along to xylophone scales: “My say so still says the same/So I say so in different ways.”
His most successful lines either appeal to a quick-pulsed adolescent nihilism, or are made to sound significant by attention-grabbing production choices. “I’m too atheist to pray for my life,” Dapperton moans on “First Aid,” arguably the best track on Orca. A phrase as inane as “I love it when you cuss” ignites when it’s pummeled by drums on “Grim.” But the album’s emptier arrangements expose contrived poetics. “Though books of Dawkins seem to think that we are through,” he pronounces on “Swan Song,” apparently having just finished The God Delusion. Dapperton tries on words like “apostacize” and metaphors about broken cameras, speaking as “the product of a crowded youth...strictly cavalier inside.” The flowery language doesn’t fit his mild pop flavor, and the shots at intellectual depth hardly register.
Bedroom pop lends itself to a solitary environment, while anthemic radio pop usually requires more people in the room. Dapperton writes, records, and produces all of his own music; aside from some mixing, mastering, and guest vocalists’ harmonizing, Orca is a one-man production. And as he attempts to polish and sharpen the genre, his source material gets lost in translation. Dapperton sacrifices grainy intimacy in favor of a more accessible singer-songwriter style, settling closer to the adult contemporary umbrella that stretches over artists like Ed Sheeran and Khalid. Flashes of gauzy Mac DeMarco guitars and emo cadences read like not-so-subtle reminders of unearned indie street cred. It’s all very calculated, but it doesn’t quite add up.
Dapperton’s potential shines when he pushes himself, when it sounds like he’s making music for self-expression and fun, expanding his vocal range and messing around with reverb. He loses it inside of self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism. Certain beats just work better in a seconds-long TikTok dance routine than on headphones. Like many young artists today, Dapperton is under pressure to strike the mood of the moment and achieve virality—to sustain a feedback loop of recommended content. Pop music worked this way long before social media, but as musicians and audiences bend to the will of the feed, the overemphasis on aesthetics feels increasingly pervasive.
According to a recent interview, Dapperton’s most treasured albums include the Smiths compilation Hatful of Hollow, Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. This collection makes sense on the surface: three classics of sad-boy rock that look great on a gallery wall. But beyond their covers, each is an example of artists experimenting with sound and vulnerability early in their discography. Maybe, if Dapperton spent more time absorbing and workshopping the ideas that turned his inspirations into phenomenons, he would unlock what sets him apart.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | September 21, 2020 | 5.3 | 2b144ca2-2a91-46d6-9aa6-5d75a03a7474 | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
On an interconnected suite of pieces for pipe organ, brass ensemble, and chamber choir, the composer balances minimalist intensity with sacred music’s depth of feeling. | On an interconnected suite of pieces for pipe organ, brass ensemble, and chamber choir, the composer balances minimalist intensity with sacred music’s depth of feeling. | Kali Malone: All Life Long | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kali-malone-all-life-long/ | All Life Long | A held chord on a pipe organ can signal a looming arrival—of a Boris Karloff character or, in a brighter register, the bride-to-be. Such a stately chord encapsulates anticipation. It makes its listener cognizant of waiting, because the instrument can sustain such a chord forever. That is how pipe organs function, and it is one reason they are perfect for churchly representations of heavenly—that is, eternal—choruses.
By contrast, if you hear a sustained note on a piano or saxophone, let alone sung by a singer, you know it has a finite lifespan: until the instrument—or lungs—give way. The limitless sustain of an organ is an innate superpower. Since you sense the organ’s stamina is inexhaustible, you know the player has complete discretion as to when whatever happens next will … actually … occur.
When that musician is Kali Malone, be prepared to wait—and, following momentary activity, to wait again. Malone is a poet of attenuation. The compositions on All Life Long proceed at the considered pace of a chess-by-mail match. Each step is a marker of choices made. As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment. To listen closely is to find compositions within, as waveforms meld, tones circle, and patterns shift with a dynamism initially belied by the seeming stasis.
You’ve heard of forest bathing? Welcome to cathedral bathing, to the dark romance of the steady descents amid “Fastened Maze,” and to the methodical harmonic brick-laying of “Prisoned on Watery Shore.” Malone’s organ works can feel as if she is spelunking through cavernous frequencies, seeking to understand just how far the darkness extends. She maps territory fastidiously, and then serves up her field work in composition form. At the most extreme, she might finish a song—in this case, the title track—by holding its closing chord for more than a full minute. (One foresees the inevitable scandale when a Spotify bot accidentally eradicates such a track as part of its war on white noise.) Even when Malone’s compositions adopt a more human timescale, as on “Moving Forward,” the impact is heady.
Stephen O’Malley, of doom-metal band Sunn O))), accompanies Malone on the album, which is released by his record label Ideologic Organ. The pairing makes perfect sense: The two share penchants for dense harmonies, exotic tunings, and ceremonial grandeur. It is a sign of Malone’s decade-long maturation as an artist that, at 30, she has come to make practical use of the drones that she once let unfurl on their own. The wooly sawtooth waves that filled out last year’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy brought to mind the raga-inspired tonalities of La Monte Young. Here they are raw material for more traditional, if still funereal, compositions. Malone’s latest work challenges today’s drone musicians to retain the delectable, psychedelic whir of drones while using them in the service of something melodically engaging.
All Life Long is not all pipe organs. The album rotates through organ, choir, and brass ensemble. The works for voice suggest the 16th-century polyphony of Palestrina. “Passage Through the Spheres” opens with one singer panned all the way to the right; shortly after another singer enters from the left. The voices alternately reflect, presage, and complete each other’s lines. The exaggerated stereo separation signals Malone’s camaraderie with Janet Cardiff’s landmark sound-art installation featuring the music of Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, 40 Part Motet, which uses individual, freestanding speakers for each of its titular vocal lines, allowing the listener to walk among what is, in effect, a choir of ghosts.
While Malone has employed horns in the past, as on 2018’s Cast of Mind and 2022’s Living Torch, that was in service of drones—chamber instruments as synthesizer modules, in a manner of speaking. On All Life Long, she is truly writing for brass ensemble, yielding a regal quality: less goth, more Sun King (minus the filigree of the Baroque era). In particular, elegant horns on tracks like “Retrograde Cannon” and “Formation Flight” echo the dignified arrangements of David Byrne’s The Knee Plays, music the Talking Heads cofounder composed for Robert Wilson’s opera the CIVIL warS. In Malone’s and Byrne’s pieces alike, you can hear modern sensibilities merging with antiquated techniques.
Malone does inquisitive listeners a favor by repeating two works in different forms. The title piece, first played on organ, appears toward the end of All Life Long in a voice setting that seems quicker, less ethereal. The second version also reveals the source of the album’s title, a mournful poem, “The Crying Water,” by 20th-century Welsh literary figure Arthur Symons. “No Sun to Burn” is performed first by brass, with enthralling high points, and then later on organ, more delicate and tenuous.
Malone is among a cadre of 21st-century musicians breathing new life into organs. Others include Olivia Block, Robert Curgenven, Sarah Davachi, Lawrence English, FUJI|||||||||||TA, and Claire M Singer. They do so coincident with the ongoing deconsecration of many churches. Malone has acknowledged this tension in pieces like “Sacer Profanare,” from 2019’s The Sacrificial Code. It’s a risky endeavor; were her music not so moving, it might invite accusations of purloined gravitas. The addition of vocal polyphony on All Life Long intensifies Malone’s engagement with such liturgical themes, and she nudges the matter further with her text selection for “Passage Through the Spheres.” Sung in Italian, it could be mistaken for a Vatican homily, but it is quite the contrary. The source is an essay by philosopher Giorgio Agamben that quotes Trebatius Testa, a 1st-century BC Roman jurist, on the topic of perceived irreligiosity: “In the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men.” The deeply felt lesson of All Life Long is that secular deployment of such resources can itself be a fount of beauty, reflection, and perhaps even revelation. | 2024-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ideologic Organ | March 2, 2024 | 8.3 | 2b15d9da-c18c-4e1d-a50a-9b5c8bc454ae | Marc Weidenbaum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-weidenbaum / | |
Ty Segall is on a tear. Slaughterhouse may be his heaviest and loudest album, but its extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and Nuggets-schooled economy. | Ty Segall is on a tear. Slaughterhouse may be his heaviest and loudest album, but its extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and Nuggets-schooled economy. | Ty Segall Band: Slaughterhouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16744-slaughterhouse/ | Slaughterhouse | Nearly 40 years on from their initial, unceremonious flameout, the Stooges have been thoroughly absorbed and accepted into the pop-cultural mainstream in ways that would've seemed nigh unimaginable in the early 1970s. Beyond blazing the trail for punk and the subgenres that arose in its wake, their songs have been covered by stadium-rock giants, featured in videogames, successfully mashed-up with Salt N Pepa, soundtracked Kristen Stewart/Dakota Fanning make-out scenes in big-screen biopics, and used to sell Chryslers. But it's no coincidence that all of these middlebrow appropriations draw from the band's 1969 self-titled debut and 1973's Raw Power-- by Stooges standards, the albums you're most likely to reach for when entertaining house guests.
The band's infamous 1970 sophomore release, Fun House, has remained largely undisturbed by the music supervisors of the world, because, as even casual Stooges fans know, you just don't fuck with Fun House. It isn't simply a collection of classic proto-punk songs, it's a very real, physical, suffocating space. It's an album in which you get locked and trapped, and from which you reemerge a different person. Over the course of its 36 minutes, Iggy Pop's temperament is gradually debased from the cocksure swagger of opener "Down on the Street" to the screaming, strait-jacketed psychosis of the closing "L.A. Blues". It's an album that even one of the most absurdly over-the-top box sets in rock history couldn't decode or demystify.
But if Fun House is like that creepy dilapidated domicile at the end of the street, the Ty Segall Band are the neighborhood punks who break into it late at night just for kicks, spray paint the walls, and leave behind a small mountain of empty beer cans. Now, the Ty Segall Band are not the Stooges; their full-throttle, pedal-squashing thrust makes no allowances for the Stooges' underrated sense of groove and funk, and Segall is way more of a sucker for pop melody than Iggy ever was. But Slaughterhouse sees them redrafting the Fun House floor plan for their own devious devices: there's that evocative title, for one, and the fact that both albums end with extended, free-form noise meltdowns (in Segall's case, the self-explanatory "Fuzz War"). But most of all, they've vividly captured Fun House's unapologetic griminess, blast-furnace heat, and panic attack-inducing lack of oxygen.
Slaughterhouse is also the closest thing to a concept album we've heard from Segall, whose reputation has been built upon on a ceaseless stream of releases born of a hyperactive whimsy. And where the Lennon-like turns on 2011's Drag City debut, Goodbye Bread, suggested Segall was following a similar pop-leaning path to garage-reared peers like Smith Westerns, Black Lips, and the late Jay Reatard, it was answered earlier this year by a wiggy, scatterbrained collaboration with psych-folkie White Fence. But on Slaughterhouse, Segall's impulsiveness yields to a holistic aesthetic. Segall has described it as "evil space rock" in interviews, but Slaughterhouse feels more subterranean and animalistic than that descriptor suggests. This is an album that opens with a scorching double-shot of Motor City-burning rave-ups ("Death" and "I Bought My Eyes") and a title track that recalls Nirvana with a serious case of Tourette's, and then just gets faster, heavier, and nastier as it progresses; even the withering mid-album sludgefeast "Wave Goodbye" eventually intensifies into a fiercely militaristic, machine-gunned finale. (Only a crazed, abruptly terminated cover of the Bo Diddley/Captain Beefheart standard "Diddy Wah Diddy"-- which ends with Segall screaming "fuck this fucking song!" before admitting with a laugh, "I don't know what we're doing!"-- breaks the album's sinister spell.)
Remarkably, Slaughterhouse's extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and Nuggets-schooled economy. It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously: the hopped-up harmonies of "Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart" sound like Hamburg-era Beatles on a particularly potent amphetamines binge, and even the sewer-soaked cover of the Fred Neil-via-The Fabs oldie "That's the Bag I'm In" can't obscure it's righteous chorus. But Slaughterhouse's surprising bounty of crust-covered pop hooks doesn't so much temper the album's ferocious attack as adrenalize the Ty Segall Band's performances to lightning-fast, bloodletting extremes. Which makes the aforementioned "Fuzz War" the only logical way to bring the album's careening momentum to a halt. Comprising 10 minutes of ominous feedback drones and hailstorm drum rattles, the colossal closer proves to be less guitar-carnage climax than scorched-earth aftermath, an opportunity to tally up the body count and mop up the entrails. But while "Fuzz War" may be an uncharacteristic moment of excess on another otherwise lean and mean album, it reinforces the idea of Slaughterhouse as a real place to get lost in-- and the only way out is through the killing floor. | 2012-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | June 25, 2012 | 8.7 | 2b16bd9f-f134-4cb2-91ed-0412e4e686d7 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The gifted Chicago singer-songwriter and self-identified outsider artist makes his full-length debut with an often impressive collection of home-recorded material from the last several years. | The gifted Chicago singer-songwriter and self-identified outsider artist makes his full-length debut with an often impressive collection of home-recorded material from the last several years. | Willis Earl Beal: Acousmatic Sorcery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16454-acousmatic-sorcery/ | Acousmatic Sorcery | It's hard to stand out in the world of independent music. "College Grad Moves to Fashionable Urban Enclave and Starts a Garage Rock Band" isn't the most compelling headline, regardless of whether the music is any good. How do you get people to pay attention? One common method in the last couple of years has been to swaddle your music in the gauze of "mystery": no bio, no photos, a cryptic name that puts the artist one step ahead of the engineers writing Google's search algorithms. Another is to actually live an unusual life before you first sit down with a publicist to write a press release. This is the path of Chicago's Willis Earl Beal.
Before news came earlier this year that he'd signed to a subsidiary of indie giant XL, very few people outside of Chicago had heard of Beal. A profile in the Chicago Reader from July of last year told the story of a 27-year-old African-American man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, had been in the Army, lived with his grandmother, bummed around Albuquerque, and sometimes left CD-Rs of his music in random places. He was a visual artist who had drawn the attention of Found Magazine. He printed his phone number on flyers and invited people to call him and he would sing them a song. He busked a capella on El platforms. After the news came that he'd signed to XL, we discovered that he had auditioned the reality television show "The X Factor". Add it all up and the urge to ask, "What's the deal with this guy?" is overwhelming.
Beal's debut album, Acousmatic Sorcery, which consists of of home-recorded songs stretching back over the last few years, doesn't answer this question. But it does suggest that the answer, when it finally comes, may well be fascinating. The first thing working in Beal's favor is his astonishing voice. One moment it's a soft and modest whisper, the kind of instrument that makes you want to lean in a little bit to make everything out. On songs like "Sambo Joe From the Rainbow", "Monotony", and "Evening's Kiss", all of which are sung quietly with just a steady strum of a guitar string or two, Beal is firmly in the mode of the late-night home-recording folkie. All seem like songs he might have recorded at 3 a.m. after being asleep for an hour two, trying to get them down before a short burst of dream inspiration faded. They are haunting and beautiful, and his barely-tuned guitar strumming, as well as the hermetic and occasionally surreal lyrics, brings to mind Jandek, an artist he admires.
But this is only one of his modes. "Take Me Away" finds Beal singing in a full-throated howl on a song that touches on blues by-way-of-field-holler. Accompanying his moans and growl is some kind of cheap, distorted hand-made percussion. Here Beal's love of Tom Waits is readily apparent-- if Waits stuck a version of "Take Me Away" on the back half of Mule Variations no one would have batted an eye. And then on "Ghost Robot", Beal does a (awkward, ultimately) version of rap that actually feels closer to Lost Poets-style proto-rap than anything hip-hop proper has produced in the last 30 years.
"Ghost Robot" aside, Beal brings something to the table no matter what kind of music he's making, and the highlights of Sorcery are impressive. But there's also a nagging sense that the songwriting and vision hasn't quite caught up with the talent. His lyrics have too many clunkers, his songs don't seem quite developed. In a different world, this would be Beal's third or fourth release, the one that comes after a couple of strong albums, serving to show his fans that he was doing something interesting early and on his own. This is not to say that the four-track lo-fi approach can't lead to great and important music-- see the recent issue of Weed Forestin', the first solo release by Lou Barlow's Sentridoh. Sometimes crude technology suits the music perfectly. But Beal's music seems to want something more. Songwriting aside, in his case, the limitations feel like just that-- something that prevents the work from being fully realized.
In that respect and a few others (the impressive vocal range, songs filled with introspection an ear for junkyard percussion) Beal has something in common with tUnE-yArDs circa BiRd-BrAiNs, even if his songs don't stand up to where Merrill Garbus' were then. So while Acousmatic Sorcery is interesting and occasionally even great on its own, it ultimately feels very much like a hyper-creative and gifted artist trying to figure out what he's doing. He's woodshedding, and it's often rewarding to listen in. But even during the best moments, you can't help thinking ahead to what might come next. | 2012-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | XL / Hot Charity | April 2, 2012 | 7.2 | 2b18b023-5ccb-49bf-813d-eee24fcc8980 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Released on Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek's Caldo Verde label, the debut LP from Owen Ashworth's post-Casiotone for the Painfully Alone project is the most wistful work he's committed to tape. | Released on Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek's Caldo Verde label, the debut LP from Owen Ashworth's post-Casiotone for the Painfully Alone project is the most wistful work he's committed to tape. | Advance Base: A Shut-In's Prayer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16656-a-shut-ins-prayer/ | A Shut-In's Prayer | Owen Ashworth is familiar with nostalgia. His work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an often lo-fi, not-always-Casiotone-based indie pop project that officially came to an end in 2010, encompassed a range of emotions that often tasted more "bitter" than "sweet." Regret, longing, desire, scorn, and jealousy frequently featured on the menu, but what made those feelings resonate was the presence of memory in his songwriting, the idea that even the most painful experiences are worth remembering. That's why his earliest material was so diaristic, as well as why he once chose to write a song reminiscing on when bridge tolls amounted to no more than "one single crisp clean dollar bill." 2009's final Casiotone album, the anti-procreation treatise Vs. Children, is perhaps his most cynical work to date, but the concluding song "White Jetta" punctuated ruminations on sick mothers and unstable bloodlines with a mantra about staying young forever: "To stay the same/ To never change."
Three years removed, and Owen Ashworth's shell has cracked. A Shut-In's Prayer is the proper debut from his new project, Advance Base, and it's easily the most wistful work he's committed to tape. Couched in the most immediate and affecting melodies of his career, many of the stories told on A Shut-In's Prayer look back at the past mainly to remember its contents. Ashworth's flair for narrative detail is in top form, achieving a level so microscopic that, at one point, he zooms in while ruminating on familial ennui to describe a scene in a horror movie that several characters are watching together. Sometimes, as on the album highlight "Riot Grrrls", these trips down memory lane end with resolution-- or, at least, as much resolution that you could get from two college-age outcasts "Wondering if we ran/ Who'd miss us." Elsewhere, memories take on the form of child runaways and faded filial relationships, as Ashworth is left with disconnected threads between the past and present and not much more.
As a songwriter and, by proxy, as a human being, Ashworth's certainly grown since he started plinking out tape-hiss anti-anthems back in 1998. You can hear his musical progression in the pretty, at-times lush instrumentation on display here, a logical progression from the baroque figures of Vs. Children with added intimacy. He's made leaps and bounds as a singer, too: For all its warm mid-fi glow and quaint arrangements, A Shut-In's Prayer retains its affecting strength thanks to Ashworth's vocal performances. It still feels like a stretch to call him a "singer" by most mainstream standards, but the occasional sullen sneer of his earlier work has been smoothed out.
He's found a nice pocket of resonance in his low-pitched voice, and his higher register is pleasant and sing-songy. Ashworth uses the latter disarmingly on "More Trouble", the album's most easygoing and upbeat tune that, upon closer inspection, is about the grim inevitability of waiting for bad news from a doctor. There are a few songs on A Shut-In's Prayer that deal with such weighty subject matter-- "New Gospel"'s advice to a substance-addled depressive, the troubled sibling relationship detailed in "My Sister's Birthday"-- but the album otherwise largely carries the type of fuzzy sadness that you'd get from looking at old pictures of past (and, possibly, better) times. That such an openly nostalgic album is seeing release on Caldo Verde is a humorous coincidence, given that its founder, Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek, recently waxed nostalgic on "Sunshine in Chicago", a gorgeous cut from SKM's forthcoming album Among the Leaves. If 2012 is the year that downer-music veteran loner types finally start to express some sort of happiness, out of their fondness of the past or otherwise, then so be it.
A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music. The trapped-in-suburbia haze of Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers carries Casiotone's torch of homespun intimacy; Mike Hadreas takes the project's raconteurish flair to new, bruising depths as Perfume Genius; and South Carolina songwriter Mat Cothran's Coma Cinema project possesses the cynicism of Ashworth's youth. As those young artists continue to grow, so does Owen Ashworth, and this new chapter of his 15-year run carries such promise that fixating on the past almost seems pointless, since the future potentially holds so much more in store. | 2012-05-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde / Orindal | May 24, 2012 | 7.4 | 2b230b87-21ac-4fae-b00f-88f9bfeec27c | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The idiosyncratic electro-pop singer-songwriter (and Eurovision contestant) turns his pen to the mundane magic of household chores, but it too often looks like he missed a spot. | The idiosyncratic electro-pop singer-songwriter (and Eurovision contestant) turns his pen to the mundane magic of household chores, but it too often looks like he missed a spot. | Sébastien Tellier: Domesticated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sebastien-tellier-domesticated/ | Domesticated | A vast amount of music is consumed at home, often lightening the domestic chores that map out our days. It’s a surprise, then, that so few musicians draw direct inspiration from the day-to-day grind of domesticity. Gnomic French musician Sébastien Tellier says that his sixth album, Domesticated, was inspired by dirty dishes in the sink, soiled laundry on the floor, and the two children responsible for so much of that mess; reflecting that mundane magic, its eight songs drift by on a light glaze of electro disco.
This kind of mischievous concept suits Tellier, a singer who mixes the exotic with the humdrum and the sublime with the ridiculous. You can imagine him pushing the vacuum cleaner around his chic Paris apartment to the disco boogie of “Venezia,” while the Valium melancholy on a song like “Stuck in a Summer Love” raises the mournful spirit of Chris de Burgh’s ’80s standard “The Lady in Red.” Both songs seem tailor-made for washing up tearfully to daytime radio.
On the whole, though, Tellier doesn’t seem to land the theme. “A Ballet,” for example, plays on the French word for “broom" (“balai”), a borderline pun that few listeners outside of France will understand, while the very repetitive lyrics to “Domestic Tasks” barely expand on the promise of the title. It’s not that this record is ill suited to domesticity, exactly, but if someone claimed that Domesticated was actually about round-the-world yachting or Olympic diving you could easily believe them.
Luckily, Tellier has a production concept too. His aim on Domesticated was to assemble a new wave of producers—including Jam City and France’s Corentin Kerdraon, aka NIT—to create a futuristic pop sound, leaving him free to concentrate on his supposed melodic strengths. The result is a devilishly lush instrumental vibe, whose wipe-clean aesthetic brings to mind ’80s pop refracted through the robotic luster of Jam City’s Classical Curves. “A Ballet” comes replete with soaring sax break and aching Art of Noise chords, while the electro-synth shuffle of “Hazy Feelings” seems to crave the sweetly anachronistic release of a slap bass, without ever giving in to temptation.
These production choices—while not as futuristic as Tellier might like to believe—do at least fit with Domesticated’s homely theme, gleaming like the well-polished kitchen surfaces of a Patrick Bateman fantasy. But Tellier’s unassuming voice, so touching in its modesty on his 2003 classic “La Ritournelle,” suffers from the slaver of vocoder-esque effects. It sounds at times like Tellier is singing with a mouthful of porridge from the back of a wardrobe, the lyrics indiscernible to all but his closest associates, which leaves the melodies with a heavy emotional weight to convey.
This shouldn’t be a problem: you don’t represent France in the Eurovision Song Contest (as Tellier did in 2008) without being able to pen a golden refrain. But the album’s odd moments of melodic sparkle—the winsome desire lines of “Won” or the doleful swoon of “Oui”—are never quite enough, symptomatic of a record that comes tantalizingly close to satisfying without quite scaling the heights. Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy. | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Record Makers | May 29, 2020 | 6 | 2b239b5d-eb2f-4ded-97b2-ebec45738b64 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Canadian composer turns from electroacoustic minimalism to contemplative, deeply focused compositions for piano, organ, voice, and strings. | The Canadian composer turns from electroacoustic minimalism to contemplative, deeply focused compositions for piano, organ, voice, and strings. | Sarah Davachi: Pale Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-pale-bloom/ | Pale Bloom | Each of Sarah Davachi’s releases develops a distinct sense of place. Though her last few records have comprised subtle electroacoustic renderings of instrumental textures, Davachi has also intermittently played with compositional restraints, and Pale Bloom picks up that idea, beginning from the austere confines of the piano solo. The organ tones that undergirded much of her recent work suggested a secular version of the church nave. Here, the walls close in and we’re transported somewhere deceptively plain, to what might be an afternoon recital in someone’s home.
Piano was Davachi’s first instrument, and on “Perfumes I–III,” the three-part suite that makes up Pale Bloom’s A-side, it plays an elemental, if ultimately complex, role. Before eventually returning to the sustained tones that characterize so much of her work, the album first wanders through the field of classical composition. The melody on “Perfumes I” is minor, elegant, affecting but grayscale. More dramatic than the piano notes themselves is the cold silence that punctuates them, lasting for seconds at a time. Midway through, a drone (the piano processed backwards?) begins to pulse its way to the forefront. It intensifies the sound—the piano takes on a slight dynamic insistence as it begins a heartrending ascent into a higher register—and also makes strange our sense of environment. It is as if a window in the room had let in an unsettling breeze from an advancing storm.
“Perfumes II” begins with another subdued piano performance, winding its way to a yearning cluster of notes. This piece also hinges on the introduction of a new element at its midway point: a vocal performance by Fausto Dayap Daos, whose layered tenor phrases are swirled into a haunting chorus. Some iterations of his voice remain distant, but the piano stays close, our solid ground. On the suite’s concluding entry, space is at last filled all the way in with a series of sustained tones from an organ, which the piano accents in deliberately applied chords. In place of the movement of the two preceding pieces, here she explores a developing relationship between the two sets of tones; it invites sinking in, an unexpected encounter with the sublime.
I’ve been turning to Davachi’s work when craving a kind of blossoming pathos; recent compositions like “Third Hour” and “Buhrstone” ache their way to vivid peaks. In a productive rebuke of that habit of listening, there’s a focused severity here—again, the recital quality, a sense of solemnity—that forecloses any dramatic displays of emotion. That doesn’t mean that the stark lines of Pale Bloom don’t resonate with feeling, but it is, perhaps, a feeling distilled, feeling so concentrated we have to work a little harder to make sense of it as listeners.
The album’s B-side, “If It Pleased Me to Appear to You Wrapped in This Drapery,” matches “Perfumes I–III” in the way it builds up from musical elements at their most reduced. Single-note threads of viola and violin perform a call-and-response dance and eventually intersect in crystalline layers. When they’re joined by the warmth of pipe organ in a lower register, the unadorned fullness of the sound is nearly overwhelming. The physical tension that makes these affecting notes possible resonates in the body, and when the entire thing turns discordant in the piece’s final minutes, we’re folded into its thread-by-thread dissolution. Even at their most rigorous, these compositions manage to hold the listener close—a bare but rewarding intimacy. | 2019-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | W.25TH | June 8, 2019 | 7.5 | 2b278145-d0c6-46fb-9659-e161f044c892 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
The producer and luxury furniture seller gathers the biggest names in rap once again for a market-researched album that’s as repetitive as his catchphrases. | The producer and luxury furniture seller gathers the biggest names in rap once again for a market-researched album that’s as repetitive as his catchphrases. | DJ Khaled: Khaled Khaled | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-khaled-khaled-khaled/ | Khaled Khaled | This past winter, DJ Khaled started an OnlyFans account with Fat Joe, continuing his recent campaign of total media saturation. Between his Snapchats, his advice book, the luxury furniture line (We the Best Home), the podcast, and his reinvention as a self-help guru, Khaled has spent the last decade in pursuit of constant virality, too in on the joke for it to be funny anymore. Following his motivational triumph routine in 2021 feels like discovering you still have the T-Pain app or Lil B’s Basedmojis on your phone—you remember why everyone found them amusing, but you’re a little embarrassed that you once did, too.
Buying into DJ Khaled’s shtick has never been a prerequisite for enjoying his music, though. He’s always taken a backseat to the collaborations he curates; and lately, he’s been less of a presence on his albums than ever—he doesn’t even shout or ad-lib much anymore, and that was his one thing. There’s a growing disconnect between Khaled the gregarious living meme and Khaled the auto-pilot behind star-studded rap albums with all the individuality of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation. Khaled Khaled is his 12th record, and we’re so used to them by now that you can forget what a radical exercise they are: rap albums where the A&R rep is the star, unapologetic unit shifters that don’t even disguise their disinterest in artistry, cohesion, or substance.
Khaled’s albums weren’t always this cynical. His earliest records lovingly hyped his native Florida rap scene and other kindred pockets of the south. But over the years, he lost any sense of scene stewardship, and his purview expanded to include anything that sells—out went Trick Daddy and in came Justin Bieber, who joins 21 Savage on one of Khaled Khaled’s lowlights, “Let It Go,” recycling the summery, Bud Light Lime-A-Rita vibes of 2017’s “I’m The One.” Consider it one of Khaled’s unwritten keys: If it worked before, then repeat. It’s not for nothing that he’s made “Another one...” one of his guiding mantras.
Khaled’s aversion to risk is unrivaled: He gathers the biggest names in rap, then has them make the same music they’d record on their own anyway. Sometimes staying out of the way works—the album’s first two singles were just Drake solo tracks with Khaled’s name on them. But the returns are never more than the sum of the talent involved. Put Lil Durk and Lil Baby (in the first of his three features on the record) over a brass-knuckled Tay Keith beat on “Every Chance I Get,” and you get an undeniable banger. Weigh down H.E.R. with messy Migos and Meek Mill verses, and you’re cutting your losses.
Even Khaled Khaled’s boldest pairings don’t land, which speaks to how difficult it is to get excited about anything on a DJ Khaled tracklist at this point. A collab from former enemies Nas and Jay-Z was once a major event, but there’s no indication of their long history on the drowsy “Sorry Not Sorry.” Nobody’s trying to one-up anybody here; instead, the two weary icons rap about their recent investments like distant colleagues making labored small talk at a happy hour destined to end after one drink. Elsewhere, the record takes Khaled’s recent habit of obvious samples to obnoxious new extremes. The shrill guitars of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” slash and claw a the Post Malone, Megan Thee Stallion, and DaBaby feature “I Did It” like the worst idea The Hood Internet ever had.
It’s the closer “Where You Come From,” with dancehall titans Buju Banton, Capleton, and Bounty Killer, that most stands out, and not only because it’s the album’s lone reggae track. It’s the one song that feels like it exists not out of Khaled’s unquenchable thirst for streams, but because he genuinely likes it—the album’s hardest track by a distance, it drips with fanboy enthusiasm. Khaled Khaled begs for a few more outliers like this, moments where Khaled tosses his market research out of the window and trusts his passions. As a public figure, DJ Khaled gives us so much of himself. On his records, he gives us so little.
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. | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | We the Best / Epic | May 18, 2021 | 4.8 | 2b27cd6c-5c4d-4d99-81b7-0888b76d3833 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The self-produced debut from the Chicago-based band recalls the downcast, hazy vibe of Alex G and Soccer Mommy. | The self-produced debut from the Chicago-based band recalls the downcast, hazy vibe of Alex G and Soccer Mommy. | Slow Pulp: Moveys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slow-pulp-moveys/ | Moveys | Moveys, the self-produced debut LP from the Wisconsin-bred, Chicago-based band Slow Pulp, is a soundtrack for aimless afternoon walks and light existential crises, as the temperature drops and our hours spent outdoors shorten. It arrives into an uncertain autumn, half a year through a pandemic with no end in sight, on the precipice of an unknowable winter. Both cathartic and restrained, the album feels like a prelude to seasonal depression, fueled by internal battles and external tensions.
There’s strength to be derived from Emily Massey’s cool moan as it pierces the warm acoustics, a magnetic resilience that comes through with each word: “If I could treat myself better/I know I’m still getting better.” She sings about the exhausting task of being alive—the load is particularly heavy on the topic of relationships, tracing the longing, the pursuit, the letdown, and the recovery. She’s “holding out for the downside” on “Idaho” and seeing through that self-fulfilled prophecy on the punk-tinged “At It Again.”
Slow Pulp worked on Moveys while on tour with Alex G last year, and his influence is evident. The album is marked by down-tuned guitars and lyrics that don’t paint a picture as much as they set a mood. “Track” is led by a spiraling riff that recalls some of Alex G’s more recent, polished material mixed with cadences reminiscent of Soccer Mommy. “Falling Apart” internalizes the familiar feeling of failure: “Why don’t you go back/To falling apart/You were so good at that...Feeling like a deadbeat / Everything is incomplete.” Violins spin defeat into something vaguely comforting.
For the most part, Moveys is a well-structured album. The tracklist reflects the monotony and fatigue of depression, with alternating textures that keep things engaging, a grungy crooner alongside a triumphant piano interlude. But the final bonus track calls these choices into question. The titular "Movey" is a goofy dance tune—complete with vinyl scratching, bass grooving, and someone yelling “Scram!”—an abrupt follow-up to a song that laments, “I’m a loner with no plans.” While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire. There’s hope on the other side.
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 | Winspear | October 27, 2020 | 6.8 | 2b335152-96b7-459f-9d67-26d8aa438863 | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
Carta is the third album and major label debut from Especia, a five-piece frequently billed as "Japanese vaporwave idols." Although it doesn’t reach the heights of earlier works, it’s a solid snapshot of what Especia has done so well in recent times: real-deal city pop blessed with big hooks and copious saxophone solos. | Carta is the third album and major label debut from Especia, a five-piece frequently billed as "Japanese vaporwave idols." Although it doesn’t reach the heights of earlier works, it’s a solid snapshot of what Especia has done so well in recent times: real-deal city pop blessed with big hooks and copious saxophone solos. | Especia: Carta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21621-carta/ | Carta | Faced with rapidly declining sales, Japanese music labels went niche over the last five years. They catered to very specific demographics rather than listeners at large via "idol pop" groups devoted to subcultures. The best case scenario was a group like Babymetal going viral and reaching a more general audience, but catering to steampunk aficionados or fans of um, "chubbiness" proved just as efficient. Yet no pop group’s identity has been stranger than Especia’s, a five-piece frequently billed as "Japanese vaporwave idols." They’ve embraced the stylings of an Internet subgenre infatuated with pitched-down vocals and old technology, while their primary producer has openly mentioned how influential acts such as Espirit空想 and Saint Pepsi (now Skylar Spence) have been to their sound. The commitment goes deep—they’ve recorded entire live shows onto VHS tape.
Yet Especia is more complicated than simple microgenre imitation. Look beneath the Grecian busts and Windows 95 logos, and you’ll find many vaporwave artists using slowed-down Japanese songs from the 1980s as source material, particularly from a glitzy genre called city pop, indebted to American AOR and funk, that reflected Japan's then-decadent lifestyle. Especia’s actual music leans closer to real-deal city pop, blessed with big hooks and copious saxophone solos, than anything by James Ferraro or Oneohtrix Point Never.
Carta, the group’s third album and first for a major label, continues their brand of vaporwave-inspired dabbling—look closely at the straight-out-of-Myst cover art and you’ll see what looks suspiciously like the Enron logo—but offers a mostly straight-ahead set of mellow pop. It’s the outfit’s final release as a quintet, as three members are set to "graduate" shortly after its release, and even though it doesn’t reach the heights of earlier works, it’s a solid snapshot of what Especia has done so well in recent times to stand out on a purely sonic level.
The bulk of Carta leans toward easygoing music punched up by brass sections and bubbly synthesizer, the sort of songs that sound best as the evening is just settling in. The trio Hi-Fi City (featuring Especia’s main producer Schtein&Longer, PellyColo, and saxophonist Yoshiro Nakagawa) handle most of the songwriting and production, bringing a deep knowledge of style that helps Especia’s music rise above simple recycling. "Over Time" and "Sunshower" sway at the pace of Brand New Heavies, while the squiggly bass and saxophone blurts of "Mistake" nail the urban drama of city pop wonderfully. These are solid recreations of retro sounds not hiding their influences—"Rittenhouse Square"'s title reveals the Philadelphia soul approximation before the first horn stab—that at their worst still sound smooth and pleasant.
But Carta works in a smattering of other sounds to keep things moving. Hip-hop plays a prominent role, the members of Especia breaking into rap at various points that channels the same time period the rest of the album does. Less charming—and, positioned as the album opener, a horrible introduction—is "Clover," an arena-sized rock ballad assembled by a trio of older Japanese rockers. It would be cheesy in any decade, but made worse by how unnatural it forces Especia to sing, their voices better suited for mellow than soaring. Also mixed in is one direct embrace of vaporwave sound on "Saudade," produced by Brazilian artist VHS Logos and featuring narcotized recordings of the group’s members playing a game. It’s a nice breather.
Most of Carta registers as simply "solid, if a bit thin." Yet the album—and the current version of Especia—ends on a high, courtesy of the collection’s two big pop moments, the tropical-scented shuffler "Boogie Aroma" and the high-stepping "Aviator," the latter in particularly delivering the album’s most charged-up hook. These instances highlight what have made Especia stand out in Japan even more than the vaporwave wallpaper—catchy earworms every bit as good as the silly videos. | 2016-03-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic / Global | Victor | March 1, 2016 | 6.5 | 2b46b2a7-d702-42fe-9d9e-05c923d70850 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
Yachty is our master of joy. His debut album is well-polished and full of pop-rap confections, but his polarizing style hardly captures the nuance suggested by the album’s cover and title. | Yachty is our master of joy. His debut album is well-polished and full of pop-rap confections, but his polarizing style hardly captures the nuance suggested by the album’s cover and title. | Lil Yachty: Teenage Emotions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23246-teenage-emotions/ | Teenage Emotions | The most polarizing figure in hip-hop today never asked to become a provocateur or rap reformist, but he was happy to oblige. When confectioner Lil Yachty and his team of teenaged separatists broke rank, more influenced by Kid Cudi and Chief Keef and pop-rockers Coldplay than the cliche rap Mt. Rushmore types, they challenged long-established ideas about what rap should sound like.
Yachty’s refusal to engage with rap’s legacy renewed a culture clash that’s been waged between warring factions for decades now. But his enthusiastic, sometimes silly delivery and his all-around cheerfulness have endeared him to a new generation of rap fans. Feel-good tunes quickly made him both a leader of the current rap youth movement and the one most likely to cross over to pop audiences. Platforms of positivity and inclusivity seem a fitting countermeasure in a climate where the most popular rap group in the country will denounce a colleague for being gay. A selling point has always been the whimsy, Yachty’s flippant disregard for convention, focusing on playful melodies that sound like jingles for Nicktoons. He is most comfortable when gleeful and thrives on fun, but can struggle to sustain ideas. Lil Yachty’s debut album Teenage Emotions, released after a breakout mixtape and an Apple Exclusive, is his most complete work yet, but it doesn’t contain the nuance its cover and title suggest.
Teenage Emotions feels hollow next to the real, complicated emotions of teens; his stories here are usually rendered without depth or dimension, more like sketches of impulses. But in his element, Yachty’s rare feel for earworms and his unorthodox cadences let him cut corners, unleashing a series of non-sequiturs with such levity that it’s like frolicking in a bouncy castle. He is our master of joy. Songs like “All Around Me” and “FYI (Know Now)” fill bubblegum productions with his animated flows. “Harley” leaps and bounds through repetitions. The intro, “Like a Star,” beams with exuberance before drifting into a more delicate tune, one that is genuinely pleasant, and it’s the first of many signs that Yachty is figuring things out.
Yachty has polished the edges of his Auto-Tuned warbles since the Lil Boat mixtape, which were often grating in their attempts to find a pitch. And he’s growing more proficient in songcraft, constructing tunes that don’t suddenly sputter and stall out. Early records sounded like they were carelessly-assembled and that cheekiness was almost half of the appeal. But Teenage Emotions is refined and moves with more purpose. Over a woozy WondaGurl production, Yachty pushes in and out of falsetto on “Lady in Yellow,” turning a repeating stanza into a refrain but occasionally changing the lyrics. Opposite singer Grace, who he originally teamed up with for DJ Cassidy’s “Honor,” he seems poised for a crossover on “Running With a Ghost” and his Diplo collaboration, “Forever Young,” is a satisfying pop rap delight. These moments showcase Yachty’s charms. Where he gets into trouble is when he seeks the approval of rap pundits.
At some point, the finger-wagging purists got into Yachty’s head because being the scapegoat for ruining an entire genre can have that effect on a person. But he dramatically overcorrected, spending far too much energy trying to pass himself off as an acceptable rapper’s rapper, or as someone agreeable to classicist sensibilities. Several songs on Teenage Emotions try to fit into a model Yachty was never built for, and he ends up with lines like, “She blow that dick like a cello.” Listening to him tense up during tough talk on “DN Freestyle” and “X Men” is painful. These moments are off message and off brand. What results is an album that’s half fun, half struggle—loosening one minute then tightening up the next, but always dilly dallying.
Despite some indecision on to whom he's speaking, Yachty does challenge himself to take on new roles on Teenage Emotions, and in certain instances he’s bewitching. On “Made of Glass,” a soothing synthpop ballad, he sings of unrequited love, unseen by the girl of his dreams. As he moves in unison with the sample on “No More,” which is distorted and disorienting, he laments being pursued by gold diggers. It’s one of the few times he engages thoughtfully with his celebrity. On “Priorities,” he assesses the decisions he’s made, finding a nice singsong balance. Though far too long and sometimes aimless, Teenage Emotions is the mind of a child star blown-up and on exhibition at the epicenter of modern rap. It’s there to be gawked at and appreciated, and then maybe enjoyed. | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Capitol / Quality Control | May 26, 2017 | 6.8 | 2b51d22f-297e-4f11-98e8-4f0cd02964d1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Without the self-assurance of her debut, the New York songwriter’s second full-length is an album in search of an identity. | Without the self-assurance of her debut, the New York songwriter’s second full-length is an album in search of an identity. | Margaret Glaspy: Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margaret-glaspy-devotion/ | Devotion | Margaret Glaspy’s 2016 debut Emotions & Math was effective and confident blues-rock, grounded in the strains of folk, and elevated by a bombastic Shawn Everett mix. Two years later, her Born Yesterday EP adopted a stripped-back live sound, allowing her songs to come together regardless of arrangement. After a brief hiatus, she reconvened with producer Tyler Chester and traded guitars for Ableton, becoming the latest folk musician to embrace electronics. But reinventions do not guarantee a satisfying record. Without the self-assurance of her debut, Glaspy’s follow-up, Devotion, is an album in search of an identity. Part lighthearted synth-pop, part mild-mannered MOR pop, it’s too slight to endanger a promising career but too bland to be an interesting misfire.
With Devotion, Glaspy trades swagger for sincerity, risking corniness for the sake of honest expression. It should feel liberating—and writing it likely did—but on record it’s either unimaginative or baffling. With the exception of “You Amaze Me,” buried towards the end of the record, Glaspy strays away from the favorable Elliott Smith comparisons of her debut. As Devotion attempts to push in new directions, misguided stylistic choices turn into distractions. When Glaspy opens “Killing What Keeps Us Alive” with a garbled vocoder, it only recalls the sound Imogen Heap perfected 15 years ago.
Nothing else is equally jarring, but the stylistic missteps continue throughout. “What’s the Point” leads with a dubstep synth before delving into an aimless imitation of John Congleton’s crunchy, flanged productions. Ballads like “Young Love” and “Without Him” are closer to Sara Bareilles territory, without the benefit of Bareilles’ extroversion and big choruses. Title track “Devotion” veers so far into adult-contemporary R&B that it begins to resemble Maroon 5’s “Sunday Morning.” When Glaspy and Chester do land on a memorable, sinuous groove with “You’ve Got My Number,” the song stumbles over ungainly lyrics like, “And if I had to choose just a few words to summarize you/‘Gorgeous’ and ‘true’ wouldn’t surprise you.”
The simplistic couplets and labored aphorisms are the record’s biggest disappointment. Glaspy’s penchant for stringing together idioms turns whole verses into mush: “They say two halves make a whole/But I am half empty and you are half full,” she proclaims on “Without Him.” On the lone rocker “So Wrong It’s Right,” a series of dog puns abruptly turns maudlin: “Tonight I’m off the leash, running wild and free/And you just so happen to be right next to me.” Glaspy’s wordplay sometimes leaned on “fish in the sea”-style clichés in the past, but here the folksy turns of phrase become overwhelming. The preciousness muddles her ideas, like the non-dichotomy posed by “Stay With Me”: “When it all shakes down/Who’s the clown and who’s the savior?”
Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math. Even “You Amaze Me,” a lovely intimate acoustic number, feels like a lesser “Somebody to Anybody,” a lovely intimate acoustic number from the last album. Otherwise, little on this record works with Glaspy’s strengths as a songwriter—or, due to the change in instrumentation, as a musician. There are still glimpses of her usual frank, heartfelt songwriting on Devotion, but they’re not worth seeking out in a package this dull.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | March 31, 2020 | 5.3 | 2b584c1d-f392-45ae-8f7c-d7b17233c65f | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The Montreal songwriter shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice as she reflects on the ache of grief and the passage of time. | The Montreal songwriter shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice as she reflects on the ache of grief and the passage of time. | Helena Deland: Goodnight Summerland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helena-deland-goodnight-summerland/ | Goodnight Summerland | Helena Deland’s stirring new record Goodnight Summerland opens wordlessly, with a measured, melancholy piano sketch played by Lysandre Ménard. On the next song, Deland admits: “Saying something isn’t easy.” The introduction is a small moment of grace—a recognition that, sometimes, we need space to collect our thoughts before we can find the right words—and a fitting welcome to a stirring, reflective set of songs from the Montreal-based musician.
Deland’s previous work has been similarly marked by contemplation, though she’s worked across a variety of sounds. Her debut album, Someone New, paired straightforward singer-songwriter inclinations with dense electronic textures. It followed a series of EPs that included swaggering indie rock, yearning folk, and bubbly synth-pop. Recently, she’s collaborated with the rapper JPEGMAFIA and the experimental musician Claire Rousay, and made a collaborative electronic record as Hildegard with producer and multi-instrumentalist Ouri. But Goodnight Summerland displays a fresh focus and intention. Here, Deland shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice and newfound observations about the ache of grief and the passage of time.
Deland made Goodnight Summerland in the shadow of loss: Her mother, Maria, died in the summer of 2021. Deland wrote some of these songs before her mother’s death and recorded demos in her parents’ home in the weeks immediately following. Grief trails her across the album, starting from her first lines, which tell of “cream-colored ashes” and saying goodbye. Later, the stunning “Who I Sound Like” captures Deland in the shadowy space between desolation and acceptance, where she addresses her mother directly: “I just want to talk to you,” she repeats.
Throughout the record, Deland is accompanied mainly by her own acoustic guitar and some gentle percussion, with the occasional touch of piano and woodwinds. She made the record with producer Sam Evian, who plays various instruments on the record, and a small band. The subtlety of the production serves to highlight the record’s lodestar: Deland’s high, sweet voice. It can shift effortlessly between modes: conversational, placid, aching, curious, joyful; it’s rarely ever forceful but carries the emotional weight of introspection. The clarity of Deland’s voice is striking, given how often her lyrics highlight the slipperiness of language itself. “Maria, I might never know what I’d tell you,” she sings on “Saying Something.” On “Drawbridge,” she asks: “When we said ‘later’/What did you mean?” On “Night Soft as Silk,” she urges, “Tell me everything you think,” before admitting, “words can be so mild.”
Where words fail, Deland turns to the majesty of the landscapes around her. Across the record, she marvels at the natural world: its immense scale, the way it makes our individual human experiences seem small by comparison. On one track, she gazes at a pastoral scene—the terrain is “bright green, vibrant gray and everything pulsating”; its timelessness (“four hundred million years opened wide”) astounds her. Then she brings it back to human scale: “Rocks you keep in your car door,” she sings, “Have traveled through far more than your life.” Even the intensity of our pain is dwarfed by the span of geologic time.
Across the record, Deland grapples with the realization that time will pass—whether or not we ask it to, whether or not we’re paying attention. The point is underscored by Goodnight Summerland’s unhurried pace: Its patient piano intro; its midpoint, “Roadflower,” where Deland luxuriates through the vowels of a line like, “You’ve been so good/To me.” The record does have its more propulsive moments: “Night Soft as Silk” matches woozy guitars with stormy percussion; on “Spring Bug,” Deland’s band grooves underneath her breezy, swooping vocal melody. By the album’s closer, “Strawberry Moon,” Deland has found a kind of resting place. “Love, come to me,” she sings calmly over strummed guitars, acknowledging the potential of the moment before her: No amount of time “has ever been wasted/If it brought us here.” | 2023-10-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Chivi Chivi | October 16, 2023 | 7.4 | 2b5bb880-35a5-4868-aa05-c864b56e1f77 | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
The Long Island rapper's quotable second album features production work from the Alchemist and Q-Tip and improves on his 2010 debut in every conceivable way. | The Long Island rapper's quotable second album features production work from the Alchemist and Q-Tip and improves on his 2010 debut in every conceivable way. | Roc Marciano: Reloaded | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17301-reloaded/ | Reloaded | On the first single from Reloaded, Roc Marciano threatens to "push your afro back to 76... those were some good years, baby." He was born in 1978. It's not the first time the Long Island rapper has ignored the calendar year. After spending the 2000s in the major label hinterlands as a forgotten member of Flipmode Squad, he went Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on that entire decade with the release of 2010's Marcberg. On that album, he's firmly lodged in a style of hip-hop that never escaped the mid-90s, equally informed by the pimp posture of the 70s and the crack epidemic of the 80s. He remains in that zone today, but two years later, surrounded by rugged New York rap from artists like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Heems, El-P, and the Pro Era crew (not to mention Nas' overtly nostalgic Life is Good), he sounds like less of an anachronism. Fortunately, he's taken this new enviornment as a challenge, and Reloaded improves on Marcberg in every conceivable way.
In setting and sound, Reloaded is most certainly a "New York" album. The beats are steeped in classic blaxploitation funk and understated menace, but the occasional glimpse of light and organic groove offers more entry points than the unrelentingly grim Marcberg. And where Marcberg simply filled a void, Reloaded can create demand among rap fans who look beyond the five boroughs. Roc's voice is more confident and distinctive and, more importantly, he's stepped up his lyrics. They've become something wholly his own as opposed to a clear stylistic descendent of anyone else. He's at a point that we see every few years where a rapper manages to accumulate the escape velocity to transcend the strictures of regionalism and become something that can be embraced by anyone who simply loves the possibilities that hip-hop lyricism allows for. It's "gangsta rap" in form alone, still presented as songs with hooks and structure, but the main pursuit is making the English language bend to their will: see Prodigy in 2000, DipSet in 2003, Clipse in 2005, Wayne in 2007, Gucci Mane in 2009, or Rick Ross in 2010. Or, it's "lyrical" hip-hop for people who don't necessarily think that term has to be the tool of the "good guys."
Roc Marciano pulls pretty much one trick over and over again throughout Reloaded, but it's an awesome one-- managing to stack one multisyllabic rhyme after another in a way that still makes narrative sense, without ever devolving into empty Scribble Jam showmanship. As a result, Reloaded is 100% quotable. Marciano's first few bars on "Tek to a Mack" basically sums it up: "I'm back for the crown, baby/ In the Avi' that's brown like gravy/ Style's wavy, lazy eye Tracy McGrady/ Deliver like an 80-pound baby." "Pistolier" is another astounding example of Marciano's limitless facility with gun talk: "diamond choker, we bonded at the Ponderosa/ Islamic culture put the copper in the toaster/ Pot smoker drive the Rover with the silent motor/ Mama I'm vulgar my persona got the fly aroma." Even better is how Roc is realizing the inherent comedy in all of this absurd wordplay. Closer "The Man" is something closer to straight punchline stand-up, as Roc comes up with the best NBA namedrops in recent memory over DOOM-style soul cheese ("sniff the Chris Mullin off the envelope," "the 4-4's chrome with the long nose, call it Ginobili"). Did you enjoy any of those? Great, because the whole album is pretty much that all the time, thrilling and incredibly nerdy, like watching the best Street Fighter II player in town rule the local arcade.
Based on the above, Reloaded should be something of a minor classic. But if you still consider hip-hop to be a triangulation of beats, rhymes, and life, it's the last of the three that ultimately limits its ceiling. Quite simply, nothing happens on Reloaded. At all. That's something of an overstatement, obviously: Most of the time, Roc and his associates will plot on your demise and execute it with ease, at which point they will have their way with your woman and celebrate over top-shelf liquor. Then they'll probably buy more guns. That's the plot of nearly every single track on Reloaded. Yet none of this seems to be happening in the present tense and it's easy to imagine Roc rapping the entirety of Reloaded from a podium, like it's simply a 55-minute lecture on wordplay. There's an almost wholesale dearth of storytelling and aside from the still rather vague encomium of "Thug's Prayer, Pt. 2", not a single personal detail.
But Reloaded's narrow brand of lyrical genius is so captivating on a second-by-second basis that these criticisms feel misplaced or even irrelevant. Though his appeal runs deep, Roc Marciano is a specialist and the flipside of the consensus praise granted to universal, emotive, and ambitious hip hop records like Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that specialists tend to get underrated or overlooked. A rapper doesn't have to be everything to everyone, especially if their strengths lie in making antisocial, verbally virtuosic beatdown hip-hop-- after all, look what happened to Mobb Deep when they started making love songs. And if you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded. | 2012-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Decon | November 21, 2012 | 8.1 | 2b618ebf-c34b-4b07-9e37-5bbd42662cda | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The L.A. singer and rapper’s intimate EP confronts trauma and healing in smooth, unflinching songs. | The L.A. singer and rapper’s intimate EP confronts trauma and healing in smooth, unflinching songs. | Kari Faux: Cry 4 Help EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kari-faux-cry-4-help-ep/ | Cry 4 Help EP | Kari Faux wasn’t always this introspective. The Arkansas native’s popularity grew immensely back in 2014 when she released the girl-bossy single “No Small Talk”; the song even made its way to the soundtrack for Issa Rae’s hit television series “Insecure” after being remixed by Childish Gambino. But a year after the release of her PRIMARY EP, the rapper and singer takes a more intimate approach. For Kari, CRY 4 HELP is about confronting trauma and healing, rather than an outlet for upbeat, braggadocious anthems.
The EP’s lead single, “Leave Me Alone,” explores Kari’s lust for isolation coupled with a disdain for people who simply want to waste her time. Over production that draws inspiration from 1970’s soul, she shows us a new side of herself. While “No Small Talk” was a bold declaration of confidence filled with cell-phone chirps and 808s, Kari now uses live drums and hazy synths working together to carry her alto croons. “Thinking ‘Damn man, where are my friends?’ I guess that love is just for pretend,” she resounds. Though she yearns to be alone, the need for simple human companionship is equally as present.
Kari remains just as unguarded on “Medicated,” a woozy song built on a slow, heavy drumbeat. The song’s hook spells out her intense highs and emotional lows—“Here we go again/She’s rollercoasterin,” she sings. Her voice lags behind the beat, giving a playful wink to the opening line, “I don’t wanna be medicated.” She quickly follows up in the second verse with the idea that drinking away the pain may be much more her speed, though it doesn’t help with sustaining the life she’s trying to lead.
On “Latch Key,” the EP’s closing song, Kari cuts to the chase. No longer crooning, she reverts to vivid storytelling in a monotonous yet resentful voice—separating this record from the other songful numbers. “All the while, I’m poppin’ thyroid pills to balance out my levels/Preparin’ for motherhood, Lord knew I wasn’t ready/About two weeks later, the baby had miscarried.” As Kari unpacks her load of emotional turmoil, she gives listeners a chilling look into her trauma and delivers it with unflinching attention to detail.
With each song peeling back another layer of her pain, Kari strongly suggests that the internal wounds you don’t deal with are the ones that will continue to haunt you. But therein lies this dark, moody EP’s silver lining. CRY 4 HELP is not only a wake-up call to go ahead and face the hurtful things in your life that you may believe you can’t, but also a reflection of Kari’s extensive growth as an artist and as a woman who has experienced life’s many challenges. | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Change Minds | March 16, 2019 | 7.4 | 2b6427e7-1ccf-4383-a9fc-bf6992a60801 | Khalia Russell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/khalia-russell/ | |
On his debut solo album under a new alias, Spirit of the Beehive’s Zack Schwartz runs with his band’s genre-agnostic ethos, applying his hyperactive style to chillwave, rap beats, punk, and more. | On his debut solo album under a new alias, Spirit of the Beehive’s Zack Schwartz runs with his band’s genre-agnostic ethos, applying his hyperactive style to chillwave, rap beats, punk, and more. | draag me: i am gambling with my life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/draag-me-i-am-gambling-with-my-life/ | i am gambling with my life | As leader and guitarist of Spirit of the Beehive, Zack Schwartz constructs densely layered indie rock that teeters between throbbing distortion and uneasy calm. Listening to their last record, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks, can feel like free-falling down the rabbit hole, post-punk guitars shredding through tape loops. On i am gambling with my life, his first album under the name draag me, Schwartz doubles down on that genre-agnostic ethos, applying his chaotic DIY production style to chillwave, rap beats, club music, punk, and seemingly whatever else he wants.
i am gambling with my life is functionally a solo album; Schwartz handled nearly every aspect of its creation—writing, recording, mixing, and mastering—on his own. Culled from dozens of drafts, the album was completed after he returned home from Spirit of the Beehive’s fall tour last year. The most noticeable fingerprint is a palpable sense of anxiety, one that permeates every groggy chord and Auto-Tuned performance with malaise. (There are appearances by other artists, such as Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger and fellow Philadelphians Body Meat and Pedazo De Carne Con Ojo, but their voices are, for the most part, subsumed within the greater draag me universe.)
Like Toro y Moi, another musical polyglot who has thrown himself into various styles over the course of his career, Schwartz is knowledgeable enough to know when to subvert different subgenre tropes and when to indulge in them, sometimes over the span of a single track. “there is a party where i’m going” starts out like a scuzzy ballad in the vein of Yung Lean affiliate Bladee before it gradually disintegrates, leaving only eerie synth drones in its wake. Songs like “the curve” and “form” flirt with house music and vaporwave while retaining similarly strung-out atmospheres.
There’s a surprising amount of detail. Save for some scattered exceptions (like the closing “i want to go first,” which unfortunately devolves into ’80s pastiche), the album comes across as the handiwork of a deep listener, not the demo of a dilettante. Textures dance around the stereo field while guitars glitch and warble in unexpected ways. Such production tricks might be tougher to implement in a band setting, but devoid of any such constraints, Schwartz is free to flex his chameleonic prowess across these 19 bite-sized songs.
Still, Schwartz’s voice can get lost in the haze, his words ghostly and indecipherable. But when the lyrics peek through, they reveal an insightful writer who’s writhing in self-reflection, observing his own internal battles and the way his inner conflicts are projected onto the world around him. He can be a gifted storyteller, too. On “lie,” probably the closest Schwartz comes to the sound of his primary band, he quietly ruminates on his role in a toxic relationship. “Paid for damages/You crashed our car into,” he mutters. “Both our lives are wrecked/I still lie for you.”
While his artistic identity can be murky, Schwartz’s studio ability is undeniable. In an alternate universe, he could easily have been a reliable behind-the-scenes Los Angeles hitmaker turning out catchy bedroom pop and niche genre revivals. Instead, he’s a beloved figure in the Philadelphia indie scene, and as his solo debut makes clear, he’s got even more to give the world than Spirit of the Beehive has let on. | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | February 12, 2020 | 7.1 | 2b66ae4c-741f-4923-b18c-b0f5d00b153f | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Madonna's 12th studio album, featuring collaborations with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, is the product of both a merger and a divorce. | Madonna's 12th studio album, featuring collaborations with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, is the product of both a merger and a divorce. | Madonna: MDNA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16426-mdna/ | MDNA | Madonna's 12th studio album is the product of both a merger and a divorce, but as much as the singer attempts to milk the latter event for pathos over the course of its 16 tracks, the tone is mostly set by corporate dealmaking. MDNA is the star's first record as part of a $120 million deal with concert promotion juggernaut Live Nation and a separate three-album pact with Interscope, and like a lot of new records by artists of her stature, it's essentially a mechanism to promote a world tour that will inevitably drastically out-earn the profits from her new music. These sort of records don't need to be cynical or uninspired on an artistic level, but this one feels particularly hollow, the dead-eyed result of obligations, deadlines, and hedged bets.
Madonna has made her share of bad music in the past, but for the most part, her failures have come from taking artistic chances that didn't pay off, as on her experiments with hip-hop on American Life and Hard Candy. Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes. The worst of these numbers were produced by French DJ Martin Solveig, whose anonymous, unimaginative arrangements for "Turn Up the Radio", "Give Me All Your Luvin'", "I Don't Give A", and "B-Day Song" are paired with excessively bland lyrics. The latter track, a collaboration with M.I.A., is horrifically regressive, the sound of two of pop's great feminist provocateurs joining forces for what amounts to a tacky children's song about birthday parties spiced up with a couple of tired double entendres. (Sorry ladies, Rihanna beat you to that frosting-licking line.)
Madonna's tracks with house duo the Benassi Bros. and William Orbit, the principal architect of her 1998 album Ray of Light, are much better, if not up to par with previous career highlights. "I'm Addicted", a dynamic electro throbber by the Benassis, is the big keeper here, and their work on "Girl Gone Wild" yields a reasonably strong single that rises to the challenge of competing with Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry on pop radio. The Orbit collaborations mainly call back to their work together on Ray, the record that essentially established the aesthetics of the singer's past decade of music. "I'm a Sinner" is a serviceable rewrite of their Ray-era soundtrack hit "Beautiful Stranger", and "Falling Free" plays to her strengths as a singer of ballads, though it lacks the generous hooks of, say, "Take a Bow" or "Live to Tell".
The most interesting of the Orbit productions is "Gang Bang", a campy revenge fantasy that essentially uses her filmmaker ex-husband Guy Ritchie's sub-Tarantino aesthetic as a weapon against him. The title suggests porn, but it's really a nod to mobsters, particularly as her over-the-top, Ana Matronic-esque monologue turns especially violent and bloody. It's the album's boldest, most experimental track, and it's marred only by a just-off vocal performance that renders her very familiar voice a bit anonymous, and a half-hearted attempt at a dubstep bass drop. (Next time just hire Skrillex, okay?)
Madonna reckons with her divorce from Ritchie elsewhere on the record, but her attempts to address lingering bitterness and affection for her ex are so remote that the songs have all the soul of a carefully edited press release. "Love Spent", an Orbit production with brittle electro-acoustic accompaniment, at least approaches the topic from an interesting angle, focusing on the tension and power dynamic of a relationship in which one half of the couple drastically out-earns the other. The song picks up steam as it goes along, but it ultimately comes out like a tepid, ponderous rework of her 2005 smash "Hung Up". "I Don't Give A" starts off strong with her spitting out the lines, "Wake up, ex-wife/ This is your life," in a robotic rap, but she is upstaged by guest Nicki Minaj, who turns in an entertaining performance that is nevertheless below the standards of her usual features.
It's almost impossible to approach MDNA without some degree of cynicism, but it's equally difficult to imagine anyone being more cynical about this music than Madonna herself. Unlike previous late-period records in which she had the luxury to indulge in creative tangents and not get too hung up on scoring several hits, MDNA is a record that comes with major commercial expectations. The "this has to work" factor is high, and it's hard to shake the impression that she has some measure of contempt for the contemporary pop audience. We all know that Madonna is an extremely intelligent woman-- even if she's never been known for penning great lyrics, it's easier to take the mesmerizingly dumb lyrics of tracks like "Superstar" and "B-Day Song" as spiteful trolling rather than vapid pandering. It doesn't really matter whether or not this drivel is insulting to Madonna's audience-- the most loyal fans seem to embrace being submissive to her domineering persona-- but it is disheartening when one of the most influential pop artists of the 20th century is tossing out the world's umpteen-millionth "Mickey" retread as a lead single. She's the one who deserves better. | 2012-03-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Live Nation | March 26, 2012 | 4.5 | 2b6a9021-dc31-46e4-84f6-9905cecb96ad | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
On her second album, the Virginia songwriter doesn’t merely reckon with loss; she tells a story about the way people carry each other through time. | On her second album, the Virginia songwriter doesn’t merely reckon with loss; she tells a story about the way people carry each other through time. | Lucy Dacus: Historian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-dacus-historian/ | Historian | Lucy Dacus has a warm, sonorous voice, the kind of voice that rings out like a bugle over dialed-up amps, the kind of voice that can lull you into feeling safe even when she’s singing about heartbreak, abjection, and death. Her second album, Historian, builds on the foundation set by her first, the lyrically clever and musically robust No Burden, which caught ears at Matador shortly after its release in 2016. As Historian adds new elements to Dacus’ music—strings, horns, vocal effects, and spoken word samples appear here alongside guitars, drums, and bass—it also finds the Virginia songwriter plumbing new thematic depths and broadening her stage. The album begins with a breakup and climaxes with the death of a loved one, two separate events that Dacus integrates into the same story. She doesn’t merely reckon with loss or paint a portrait of grief; Historian digs deeper than that. It’s an album about the way people carry each other through time.
It’s tempting to compare Dacus to fellow Matador signee Julien Baker. The two artists are friends, they’re both exceptionally strong lyricists, and they both moved from a tentative but impressive debut record to a full-fledged follow-up. They complement each other, but their work sits on different planes. Baker’s songs look inward, framing the self as a portal to God and the broader world. Dacus’ songs tend to survey the world first, then try to situate the self within it, to make connections between the environment and the inner experience of being alive.
A rich cast of characters flits through Historian. There’s the bad lover (and soon-to-be-ex) who’s the recipient of the deliciously barbed line “you don’t deserve what you don’t respect” on “Night Shift.” There’s the friend who casts aside the life they’ve always known in order to find meaning on “Nonbeliever.” There’s Dacus’ grandmother, whose death the songwriter illustrates on the resplendent “Pillar of Truth,” the album’s emotional core. “I am weak looking at you/A pillar of truth turning to dust,” Dacus repeats throughout the song. At times, she seems to switch places with her grandmother, describing the death with first-person pronouns as if she were the one at the end of her life, looking up at her family from her deathbed. Then she snaps back to herself, and all the life she still has left.
Dacus often sings with a wry edge to her voice, as if she both does and doesn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. The bolstered instrumentation on Historian doesn’t iron out that nuance into blank sincerity; when the music swells, the irony and fear and the slight tint of humor on Dacus’ voice swell too. The density of affect in the music means that it can take some time to unravel and expose itself fully. Historian’s big band moments grab you first. Then, over time, you hear quavers of uncertainty on lines like “I am at peace with my death/I can go back to bed.”
That gradual unfolding is one of Historian’s many delights. It’s not an easy album to wear out. It lasts, and it should, given that so many of its lyrics pick at time, and the way time condenses around deep emotional attachments to other people. The album grapples with hope, too, something Dacus believes “is the most powerful force that humans can interact with.” But she doesn’t conceive of hope as a kind of optimism or a sunny disposition. She sees it as a relationship to time, a way of negotiating with the future, a vessel for moving forward. | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 6, 2018 | 8.1 | 2b74ba6c-4c5c-4636-ad13-3cd6264cf0a2 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Though it includes some of the band’s least memorable songs, their latest live album makes a strong case for Coldplay as one of the 21st century’s most enduring arena acts. | Though it includes some of the band’s least memorable songs, their latest live album makes a strong case for Coldplay as one of the 21st century’s most enduring arena acts. | Coldplay: Live in Buenos Aires | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coldplay-live-in-buenos-aires/ | Live in Buenos Aires | The difference between Coldplay’s hits and misses is so elusive that Coldplay themselves have never quite figured it out. The most uncanny scene in their new documentary A Head Full of Dreams—which, for the record, includes footage of Chris Martin coaching Beyoncé on recording vocals—comes from the writing sessions for 2005’s X&Y. Martin is penning a tender new ballad about how it feels when someone you love is grief-stricken and inconsolable. His working lyrics read as follows:
Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you can not replace
Tears stream down your face
And I-I-I-I-I-I will try to fix you
“Is that shit?” he asks shyly. His bandmates are unimpressed.
Cut to a performance at Buenos Aires’ 53,000-seat Estadio Ciudad de La Plata in November 2017. It’s the final night of the third-highest-grossing tour of all time, and the audience tells a different story. Herein lies the magic of Coldplay. The same way that no one wishes on their deathbed that they spent more time at work, nobody screaming in an audience of thousands wishes the lyricist workshopped the hits a little longer. And so, Live in Buenos Aires might feature some of Coldplay’s least memorable recent work, including more than half of 2015’s A Head Full of Dreams plus their jingle-in-search-of-a-product Chainsmokers collaboration “Something Just Like This,” but the 24-track album makes a strong case for the legacy of one of the 21st century’s most enduring live acts.
This trio of new releases—the documentary, the live album, and a concert film from São Paulo—coincide with the band’s 20th anniversary. Unlike the arena trailblazers they’ve always idolized, Coldplay have spent these two decades more or less following a linear path. Their few experiments have gone down smoothly as either commercial triumphs (2008’s Brian Eno-produced Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends) or at least coherent narrative moves (2014’s Ghost Stories, released after Martin’s separation from Gwyneth Paltrow). Even when they seem to take a left turn, it feels somewhat superficial: a software update, a new seasonal flavor at Starbucks. But it’s also this brand consistency that allows their retrospective releases to feel uniquely unified, victory montages as opposed to sprawling artistic surveys.
While their recent studio work reflects a somewhat depressing glut of ideas, the stage is where Coldplay reap the benefits of their headliner status. Like U2, they make sure each tour is its own dazzling, light-up spectacular, and it’s generally fantastic every time. They’ve released four live albums in the past 15 years, and there’s a good reason for it. Somehow, Live in Buenos Aires marks their first complete concert released officially. This means you get to hear all of Martin’s between-song banter, said almost entirely in Spanish. There’s also a sweet throwaway song written for that night, “Amor Argentina,” and a spirited cover of Argentine rock band Soda Stereo’s “De Música Ligera.”
Otherwise, Coldplay aren’t the type of band who like peppering their sets with surprises or deep cuts. Instead, they construct setlists like karaoke nights; the goal is to keep up the momentum and make sure everyone’s having a good time. This occasionally means stapling an EDM drop to the end of a song, as they do in “Paradise.” Mostly, it means constantly asking for auxiliary whooping just to keep spirits high, as they do before launching into “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face” and throughout pretty much every other song.
The crowd responds with an omnipresent roar that makes each track seem like the centerpiece. The opening “A Head Full of Dreams” plays here like a rousing call to action, despite sounding more like the theme song for a Coldplay-centric game show on ABC. If songs like this get the crowd going, then the big singles are veritable explosions. Hearing a massive audience scream through “The Scientist” still brings chills, no matter how many live versions you’ve heard. It’s Coldplay’s most patient and unguarded ballad, highlighting the strange intimacy they’ve maintained as they’ve ascended to larger stages through all of rock’s expansions and retreats.
At their best, Coldplay are both the cozy rom-com you watch on your laptop before bed and the big budget IMAX focus-tested to get your heart racing. In concert, even their weaker songs speak to this power. It’s a testament to both their dedication and the Cirque du Soleil-levels of professionalism involved with their live show. On Live in Buenos Aires, their quietest moments feel like massive group hugs and the anthems come off as celebrations. Still, a sense of humanity is missing. They sound like a band on top of the world, but they’ve also never seemed further away. | 2018-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Parlophone | December 13, 2018 | 6.1 | 2b78c10d-2afa-4a93-a2cd-10aebef7ed2d | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
With ceaseless, snarling brutality, the Texas post-hardcore trio’s second album finds a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. | With ceaseless, snarling brutality, the Texas post-hardcore trio’s second album finds a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. | Portrayal of Guilt: We Are Always Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portrayal-of-guilt-we-are-always-alone/ | We Are Always Alone | Remember the cautious optimism of February 2020? Texas trio Portrayal of Guilt buried it under a flood of flesh-melting sludge called “The End of Man Will Bring Peace to This Earth.” Nine months later, they commemorated New Year’s Eve with a filmed live performance titled “2020 Will Burn in Hell Forever.” Their second LP arrives at a queasy time, when most resolutions are already abandoned and—months into a pandemic—arbitrary points on the calendar feel more arbitrary than ever. But it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full, half empty, or just something to smash against a wall: On We Are Always Alone, Portrayal of Guilt find a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. After all, what you consider to be “mood music” depends on whether you’re seeking counterprogramming or a chance to lean into the negative energy outside.
Portrayal of Guilt’s first album, 2018’s Let Pain Be Your Guide, was rooted in classic screamo and distinguished by crowd-pleasing jet-roar vocals and post-rock expanse. It earned them an opening slot on a Deafheaven/Touché Amoré co-headlining tour and suggested a similarly ambitious trajectory towards critical and commercial acclaim. They happened to be very good at this style of populist, blackened hardcore; the possibility of hearing something as anthemic as “Daymare” rendered with higher production values is still tantalizing. But in hindsight, Let Pain Be Your Guide now seems a bit conventional, even tentative compared to the new record’s ceaseless brutality. “Birth, awakening/A life spent suffering”—the first words of We Are Always Alone are virtually unintelligible through Matt King’s Gollum shriek, and so is just about every other lyric. Context makes the meaning clear enough: A life spent suffering is indeed nasty and brutish, but at least it’s short.
Similar to celebrated second LPs by Nuvolascura and Infant Island, We Are Always Alone manages to broaden an already excellent band’s scope without aspiring to accessibility. “The Second Coming” and “Anesthetized” undergo jarring spasms of blast beats, tempo shifts, and metalcore breakdowns, only to collapse under a sulfurous vapor cloud; the lyrics of “My Immolation” leave nothing to metaphor, nor does its coda, where the guitars pitch-shift to burnt husks. As “They Want Us All to Suffer” leads into the equally self-explanatory “Garden of Despair,” Alex Stanfield’s bass is distended to the maximum extent an instrument can be while still being identifiable as itself. Last year’s “The End of Man Will Bring Peace to This Earth” (a split single with Atlanta’s Slow Fire Pistol) reached towards the kind of populist post-hardcore and metal synonymous with the yoked-up sonics of Will Yip, who mastered We Are Always Alone; producer Phillip Odom has frequently worked alongside Yip, and it shows on an album that sounds like it’s constantly mid-deadlift. “Masochistic Oath” delivers its hook by stopping midway to impersonate a collapsing bridge: steel girders howling, cables snapping, windshields splintering.
Throughout the album’s 27 minutes, there are few, wisely employed moments of brightness—the citric guitar figures that begin “Anesthetized” and “It’s Already Over,” the clean vocals that occasionally glimmer low in the mix, an acknowledgement of the existence of something other than unrelenting darkness. But each is immediately followed by a quick cut to black: “I follow the light/There’s nothing at the end.” You can take King at his word: Every track on We Are Always Alone ends up someplace uglier and more forbidding than it started.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Closed Casket Activities | February 2, 2021 | 7.8 | 2b7fac97-6985-40a5-b96d-0e1dbbc26249 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Finnish electronic whiz best-known as Luomo revists his dubby ambient guise. | The Finnish electronic whiz best-known as Luomo revists his dubby ambient guise. | Vladislav Delay: Whistleblower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10209-whistleblower/ | Whistleblower | Is there anybody doing as much with dub these days as Sasu Ripatti? The tricks and tenets of the form have been so integrated into different realms of music production that they're simply part of the weather. Disembodied echoes, horizontal smears, transfigurations of details into plot-points and vice versa-- all such things are base elements that owe to the days when reggae producers started wondering what might be hiding between the wires in their mixing desks.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of dub in electronic music, but it's also easy to take for granted. Part of that owes to how literally dub gets invoked by those most closely associated with it: When the likes of Pole or Rhythm & Sound show their devotion to the dub methodology they hold dear, it tends to come out sounding more or less like re-versioned reggae. Drums fan out over bulbous bass-lines, tempos skew slow, melodies grow lazy and warm, and so on.
Sasu Ripatti is less literal. Under his working guises as Luomo, Uusitalo, and Vladislav Delay, the Finnish producer has allied with dub as both a method and a mindset. It starts with the interrelation of his three personae, which itself functions as a sort of dub gesture. But it's most evident in the way he trips and rubs each and every element of his sound as it transpires, whether under the schedule of house (cf. Luomo), techno (Uusitalo), or dub that wanders out of line.
The last one is what plays on Whistleblower, the eighth album credited to Vladislav Delay. The sounds are the same as they've always been: miasmic synth tones, rubbery kick-drums that stutter and tap, weird whirligigs given to tumbling around what could well be a big washing machine filled with an irradiated syrup of significant thickness. They're basically the same sounds that Ripatti mines as Luomo and Uusitalo, minus any veritable rites of rhythm.
As Luomo has grown evermore sensuous and inviting, the common knock against the work of Delay is that it's all a big tease. (Who could resist the desire to hear Luomo when he's so close at hand?) But while the tease does in fact taunt in tracks that rarely build beyond a lumbering yawn, the Luomo aura helps as much as it hurts, mostly by making Delay's dubby hesitations and ambient lack of pacing resonante all the more for the decisions they imply. When a series of pounding sounds wanders into a 12-minute track like “Wanted To (Kill)", what initially scans as arbitrary carpentry noise falls into a hypnotic pulse, in part because you're listening for it. Likewise the barely-suggested sound of a voice cut up in "Stop Talking"-- the mere chance that it might turn into a lush chorus in the fashion of Luomo makes it sneak into an ear all the deeper.
That's not to say that Whistleblower isn't worthwhile on its own terms. Few producers have as varied a store of sounds to draw on as Ripatti. And he never just plugs them in, which proves all the more evident when he's at his slowest and most patient. It's a wonder to hear how he tweaks and customizes every little fidget in "I Saw a Polysexual," just as it's stirring to hear when he pulls back to haunt in "Lumi." You could fashion a Venn diagram to make sense of the effects as they relate to Luomo and Uusitalo, or you could just draw a circle and stay inside. | 2007-05-16T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2007-05-16T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Huume | May 16, 2007 | 7.1 | 2b832ffe-5962-4af8-b732-6c7a72da9bc5 | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
This rare 1976 live recording shows the experimental folk musician in uncharacteristically lucid form, tying together unlikely influences into fluid, unusual compositions. | This rare 1976 live recording shows the experimental folk musician in uncharacteristically lucid form, tying together unlikely influences into fluid, unusual compositions. | Sandy Bull & the Rhythm Ace: Live 1976 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16473-live-1976/ | Live 1976 | After playing one song in his live set, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Sandy Bull pauses to demonstrate the presets on his new-fangled drum machine. He bought the Rhythm Ace from Japan, and he goofs on the programmed marches, jazz waltzes, western lopes, bossa novas, and boleros that this "drummer" can provide. "Now I'd like to introduce the rest of the band here," he announces to the crowd at the Berkeley Community Theater, opening up for Leo Kottke on May 2, 1976. "We got Sandy Bull on rhythm guitar (he whistles and impersonates the crowd's roars), we got Sandy Bull on bass, and Mr. Rhythm Ace playing the kick-ass drum part." The crowd laughs, as no doubt the only sight is of Mr. Bull on his lonesome up on stage, with guitar, oud, four-track machine, and the Rhythm Ace as accoutrement.
That his humor remains intact is evident, and as this rare concert document (rescued by Steve Krakow and released on his Galactic Zoo Disk label, an imprint of Drag City) can attest, Bull was physically intact in the 1970s as well. Much like the Kottke crowd on that night, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sandy Bull had already expired from a drug misadventure earlier in that decade. Although I already knew that Sandy Bull had passed away in the early 2000s, I mistakenly assumed that this live document would have shown Bull deep down in a hole. Aside from the unfocused and muddled 1972 studio album, Demolition Derby, not a note of his had been recorded in that decade as he grappled with serious drug issues that irredeemably waylaid his promising career.
A contemporary of steel-string virtuosos like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Kottke, Bull's recorded work in the 1960s outstripped those of his peers for their singular vision and sense of adventure. Take "Blend", the side-long tour de force from his 1963 debut, Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo. While his aforementioned peers navel-gazed and wove solo acoustic guitar music well into the 70s (though Fahey did take a few whimsical detours), Bull enlisted jazz drummer Billy Higgins for his first recording date. By that point in 1963, the crossover between folk and jazz was non-existent, the worlds of white and black barely engaged in dialogue. At that time, Higgins worked primarily with the likes of Donald Byrd and Ornette Coleman, so it says something of Bull's adroit skills on acoustic guitar that he not only enlisted but matched Higgins' powerful and free rhythms note for note. For 10 minutes or so, Bull casts a spell on his steel-string, but when Higgins' toms thunder in, these two master musicians flash a level of telepathy that still astounds. Elsewhere, he fused banjo and "Carmina Burana" and juxtaposed Bach with Bo Diddley, Indian raga with the reverb of Roebuck "Pops" Staples. His subsequent records were diminishing returns as his drug use increased (and while it remains a bit of a mess, I have a soft spot for the writhing snakepit of sound that is his 1968 album, E Pluribus Unum) before he dropped out altogether.
Unlike another posthumous live album of Bull's recorded in 1969 (opening for Fahey), Live 1976 finds Bull in full command of his live setup, tape, and drum machines buoying his flights. His eight-minute oud improvisation is mesmeric, and on "Driftin'", he teases salsa rhythms out of an homage to doo-wop group the Drifters, all while garlanding steel guitar figures atop it. His vocal turn on "Love is Forever" proves that for all of this instrumental prowess, none of the steel-stringers should have ever been let near a microphone.
And after an anecdote that somehow ties together rehab, snake farms, and masturbation, Bull snarls "Swamp Music! Watch that gator!" launching into a funky 9-minute improvisation that stomps through wetlands situated right near Sly Stone's "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa". More laconic and distended cosmic slop follows on the closing "New York City", and as his set ends, Bull need not impersonate a roaring crowd; they're more than happy to oblige. | 2012-04-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-04-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Galactic Zoo Disk | April 11, 2012 | 7.6 | 2b8c6771-97f3-4f46-8ee1-3f0c1b954e9e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Composed during an extended flow state, the UK avant-techno producer’s hypnotic new album balances murky, lo-fi dread with moments of shimmering beauty. | Composed during an extended flow state, the UK avant-techno producer’s hypnotic new album balances murky, lo-fi dread with moments of shimmering beauty. | Actress: Statik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/actress-statik/ | Statik | An apprehensive energy charges the atmosphere just before a thunderstorm erupts. The light seems wrong, shadows washed out by the flat, sickly greenish hue of the sky. You can feel the air thinning as the barometric pressure drops, preparing for the coming gusts of wind and spiky torrents of rain or hail. Those moments seem to last forever, stretching time taut until the storm finally arrives, offering a respite from the tension.
That nervous, clenched-jaw feeling saturates the beguiling Statik, Darren Cunningham’s latest album as Actress. It’s a soft and unsettling record, quietly off-gassing its paranoid aura like a decaying piece of fruit in a well-appointed kitchen. Even the album’s most beautiful passages—and there are many—move with an anxious slink, as if Cunningham had composed these tracks while hunched over, eyes darting, his shoulders brushing his ears. The majority of Statik came from an unbroken period of productivity Cunningham describes as an “extensive flow state,” and that deep focus gives it a cohesion that some of his previous records lacked. Each song seems to grow out of the preceding one, like a coral reef blossoming into a strange and singular world.
Cunningham conceals most of his sounds beneath a blanket of hiss, smudging everything into a blurry haze. He’ll often use sidechain compression to carve out kick drums, giving them the effect of railroad signals strobing on a foggy night. There’s a pervasive dreamlike atmosphere, as if each instrument is being played in a different space, all traveling significant distances to arrive in your headphones. The initial ambient moments of “System Verse” glimmer like light pollution on the horizon, wispy synth pads floating around a murky bass rhythm. As the song fades in, it feels as though it’s slowly—almost menacingly—approaching, coalescing into a muted but propulsive 140 BPM techno track. It can be difficult to compute exactly what’s happening at any given time on Statik, even if the elements are generally familiar.
A disorienting amount of tension yields very little resolution. The squirming synthesizer sequences in “Ray” overlap but never seem to touch each other, their circular standoff egged on by the insistent click of 16th-note hi-hats. “Cafe del Mars” features a delirious cascade of arpeggios accented by a string synth, building anticipation for a chord change that never comes. When Cunningham does offer a break from the pressure, he tends to bury it deep in the mix. The gentle flanged guitar melody on “Dolphin Spray” softens the song’s staccato edge, but you have to strain to make it out. Any moments of serenity are fleeting, at constant risk of being overshadowed by the looming dread.
“Rainlines” is the least nebulous track on Statik, and perhaps its easiest entry point. On the first listen, it plays like a slightly loopy, potentially improvised jam, chugging pleasantly in place. But lean closer and you’ll discover how jittery and unstable it is. The percussion moves around the kick drum like modal jazz, clav and open hi-hat occasionally switching places in the pattern, creating the illusion of a shifting rhythmic center. The loop gains and sheds harmonic intervals, tricking us into thinking the song’s key is constantly modulating. Near the end, the kick, hi-hat, and clap lock into place, forming a smooth house groove—only to collapse seconds later. It’d be maddening if it didn’t sound so good.
That’s the surreal magic of Statik: pallid terror deceptively wrapped in an inviting soft-focus glow. If it’s not Cunningham’s best work, it may be his most quintessential, a true distillation of his ability to simultaneously attract and repulse. This is music born of the era where meditation guidance is paywalled and basic necessities are locked behind plexiglass; where resource-consuming AI recommends a daily diet of rocks; where successive photos on social media might show the brutal aftermath of a bombing and a bottomless mimosa brunch. Statik is the soundtrack to a seemingly endless moment of dread-filled anticipation—something is coming, and we have no choice but to wait until it gets here. | 2024-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | June 11, 2024 | 7.9 | 2b97f893-03ae-4d16-9ea4-7f3eeb57155e | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
Berlin-based UK producer Paul Rose eschews dubstep on his third Scuba LP, using prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop to create something stylishly retro. | Berlin-based UK producer Paul Rose eschews dubstep on his third Scuba LP, using prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop to create something stylishly retro. | Scuba: Personality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16341-personality/ | Personality | At some point in the past year or so, appropriating the signifiers of big, dumb, and derided dance music became the thing to do. Overdriven riffs, snare rolls, embarrassingly huge climaxes, and even lusher comedowns: Trance, prog, and electro are seeping through the pores of underground dance music. Berlin-based UK expat Paul Rose has been leading the charge with this sort of stuff, stirring controversy with his overtly trancey "Adrenalin" and crafting a hypnotic sugar rush with "Loss". Long split between the worlds of 4/4 and bass music, I proposed that last year's DJ-Kicks mix spelled the end of the divide between his bass-oriented Scuba alias and the techno-driven SCB, and his third Scuba album, Personality, meshes well enough with this idea.
A Mutual Antipathy had Scuba excavating dubstep structures, and Triangulation showed him sending out feelers in all sorts of directions, but Personality is essentially a techno album. It's a day-glo, plasticine sort of techno, and it's loaded with way more vocals, hooks, and tuneful melodies than the past output from a producer whose all-encompassing dourness seemed to encroach on even the prettiest moments of his catalog (see Triangulation's heartbreaking "Before"). I've always thought that Triangulation's album cover-- an empty and bare concrete walkway-- was the best visual encapsulation possible for an artist whose music sounded completely devoid of humanity, all computer click, industrial clank, manipulated ciphers, and hollow drums. But look at Personality's cover art: There's a real piece of a human on there.
Don't let the arm and the sun fool you: opener "Ignition Key", even with its wafting breezes of ecstatic "ooohs," is every bit as cold and steely as the rest of his output. It's just reflecting more light, underpinned with the same rubbery bass sounds that defined last year's "Adrenalin" 12". It's followed by the heaving Shed-esque techno of "Underbelly", which uses Triangulation's array of manufacturing sounds: Maybe this new Scuba isn't so unfamiliar after all?
Then we hit "The Hope". If you thought "Adrenalin" was divisive, well, "The Hope" feels like internet trolling. With a lumbering somersault of a beat that combusts into obnoxious blasts of distorted synth, "The Hope" is a transparent Big Beat homage, a mid-1990s Chemical Brothers leftover right down to the cheesy and slightly uncomfortable vocal ("Got the camera/ Got the zinc/ Teenage girls/ Stop to think"). It feels defiant and irreverent coming from Scuba, but it works because it's so much fun-- "big room" in pretty much every way you can imagine. If you aren't swept up in the serotonin rushes, you're gonna be battered and bruised by its bulldozing path anyway.
From then on, Personality sticks to a fairly consistent template: metallic drums, detached synths, and cheeky vocal samples, all largely sounding deliriously cheery and upbeat. The only thing more surprising than the "never seen ya break it down like this!" chipmunk squeak on "Ne1butu" is the way the track explodes into a rollicking piano riff. "July" deals in the "Miami Vice" synth pop of Hyetal, "Tulips" is sickly sweet garage full of feminine pressure-- only weighed down with Scuba's usual leaden low-end-- and even the fairly tepid drum'n'bass exercise "Cognitive Dissonance" features a dog bark as one its rhythmic devices. Almost every track features some kind of luxurious, decadent breakdown; songs dissolving into gorgeous vapor trails and glowstick reveries halfway through before coming back up for air-- the same device that made "Adrenalin" such a monster and one that doesn't show any signs of diminishing returns.
That's not to say the album is all skittles and sunbursts: "Action" is high-octane twitch techno that coasts on snowballing momentum until it sounds like its going to explode from its own energy, and "Gekko" sounds a bit like he got lost in his own personal vision of Involver, all writhing basslines and indefatigably chugging chords. Scuba saves the most explosive for the closer: "If U Want" takes all of the album's hysteria teases and genre flirtations and bundles them into one convenient package, a four-to-the-floor stormer that recalls the most maximalist extremes of 1990s techno into a sleek, powerful vehicle. Brushed by swirls of synth that hint at climax, triumphantly euphoric chords, and a bassline that sounds like a malfunctioning engine, it's unapologetically enormous, leaving anything close to subtlety in the dust trails behind it.
It's a fitting end to Personality: Perhaps the most go-for-the-jugular thing Scuba's produced, "If U Want" still fits into his overarching discography like the rest of the album. Even at its most novel-- and there are a lot of firsts here for Scuba-- you can still hear the same grumbly, bearded guy behind the beats. Where he once used dubstep as the foundation for his distinctive productions, this time he's taking prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop, and packaging it up in something stylishly retro, all coated in a futuristic 2012 sheen. It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done. Thankfully, his Midas touch extends to this stuff as well. | 2012-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | March 2, 2012 | 8.1 | 2b9f4be5-b69b-4b89-a472-8b9ac0131922 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Traditionalists no more, the Swedish band spend their fourth album exploring the divide between metal’s underground and mainstream. | Traditionalists no more, the Swedish band spend their fourth album exploring the divide between metal’s underground and mainstream. | Tribulation: Down Below | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tribulation-down-below/ | Down Below | Three years ago, Tribulation needed listeners to know it could still sound hard. In the space of just three albums, the corpsepaint-cloaked Swedes had moved from a debut of dead-ahead death metal to an imaginative flirtation with the genre’s more progressive fringes, and, finally, to 2015’s The Children of the Night, a proudly theatrical record that cut the band’s devilish menace with playful psychedelics and arena-sized hooks. That album remains one of the decade’s decisive metal triumphs, its occult anthems every bit as ominous as accessible. But for a band that gave its earliest songs names such as “Seduced by the Smell of Rotten Flesh” and “When the Sky is Black with Devils,” The Children of the Night betrayed a certain softening, with keyboard-gilded choruses meant to lift lighters high. So they closed the LP with “Music from the Other,” a relentless seven-minute tirade about a descent into hell. The vocals were more raw, the guitars more claustrophobic—a reminder of Tribulation’s bygone aggression, and a reaffirmation of its serrated edge.
Down Below, the quartet’s delightful fourth album, makes no such concessions. Save for a bonus track (“Come, Become, to Be”), it ends with “Here Be Dragons,” a spiraling, piano-and-strings-backed sprawl that boasts one of the band’s most emphatic choruses. “Here be dragons/Here be death/Here be the somber that have felt the Devil’s breath,” exclaims Johannes Andersson, delivering each word of what could pass for a particularly dramatic Harry Potter passage with the patient enunciation of someone who fully expects those lyrics to be shouted back his way. The song ends with an extended, extravagant duet for xylophone and guitars. “Here Be Dragons” is a closing statement from a band newly comfortable with what it has become—former traditionalists who have nurtured rare crossover potential. Tribulation are now ready for stages as big as their massive songs.
From end to end, Down Below relishes exploring the divide between metal’s underground and more mainstream access points, or finding multiple routes between what’s below and what’s above. Long lost is the Tribulation that simply added a blackened veneer to death metal and, later, dressed that mix with black eyeliner and gothic keyboards. This record is something of a catch-all, a gyre of genres suited for much more diverse palettes. Tribulation goes there immediately, with opener and first single “The Lament.” Linking scabrous verses of mid-tempo thrash with well-tempered choruses where the band slows down and opens wide, “The Lament” blooms like the big gray flowers of some mystical plant. Tribulation even slides comfortably into a piano-and-bass interlude, a late-song respite that lets the newly initiated catch their breath before the finale.
“Cries from the Underworld,” meanwhile, leavens harsh, driving verses about hellish allure with guitars that, at times, sparkle like those of the Go-Betweens and racing drums that suggest the heyday of Interpol or the Editors. In this way, Down Below recalls Nachtmystium’s short-lived but similarly post-punk turn toward a wider audience. The economical playing of new drummer Oscar Leander has added a lean sense of momentum, which is essential to this progression. The song turns, too, on a repetitive synthesizer pulse, a sort of safety beacon that lingers in the mix for more than a minute. And Andersson stays largely out of the way during “The World,” almost whispering verses that largely decorate the song’s post-metal instrumental majesty. The heroic riffs, the lumbering-and-racing rhythms, the widescreen atmospherics: It’s a metal song for folks with reservations about most metal singing, a gateway that prompts memories of Isis or Mono, not Celtic Frost.
This all may sound cold and calculated, as though Tribulation were cynically casting a wide net for a bigger fanbase. The increasingly cartoonish lyrics and presentation (like the video for “The Lament,” which suggests Twilight for an art-house crowd) do little to mitigate that feeling. Still, Down Below is incredibly athletic and fun, with every guitar solo, lyrical twist and musical turnaround delivered in boldface italics. Notice the way Tribulation slices between the verses of the explosive “Subterranea” or squeezes so much action between every line of “Nightbound”: This is a band that absolutely revels in the possibilities suggested by its obsidian thrills, no matter the potential changes in the audience’s size and scope. Down Below is about death and hell, sure, but it’s proudly, defiantly not meant for an underground anymore. | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Century Media | January 25, 2018 | 8 | 2ba18633-6bca-4dc4-b4b8-8cda0d30ff17 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Jana Hunter teams up with a new band that provides her with unhinged, dreamy rock more often in the service of atmosphere than her voice. | Jana Hunter teams up with a new band that provides her with unhinged, dreamy rock more often in the service of atmosphere than her voice. | Lower Dens: Twin-Hand Movement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14339-twin-hand-movement/ | Twin-Hand Movement | Texas-born Jana Hunter, the talented freak-folk guitarist and singer, was the first artist to release an album on Devendra Banhart and Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic's label Gnomonsong. In all she's put out two full-length albums, one EP, and a split with Banhart, alongside contributions to other bands, including Phosphorescent and CocoRosie. Her last release was in 2007, and fans wondered where Hunter had gone until she recently started turning up at venues with a new band. The new group, a foursome based in Baltimore, immerses her elastic alto tone in a colorful mix of electric guitar, bass, and drums, yielding unhinged, dreamy rock with just the right mix of flourish and understatement. This is very much Hunter's band; anyone familiar with her work will hear the parallels between the two acts. The biggest difference between Twin-Hand Movement and Hunter's solo albums is the instrumentation: This album is more about her guitar than her voice, which is absent from a few of the songs. Both projects let their guitars go off and wander, but the lilting country twang seems to have been left behind.
Instead, Lower Dens experiment with a broad range of tones, all in the service of atmosphere. They also frequently stick to lower registers and slower tempos, which at times comes off as too introspective, especially on the instrumental tracks. The same could be said of the xx's debut-- when Lower Dens are at their most spare ("Rosie" and "Plastic & Powder"), the two bands sound similar-- but in place of the xx's foggy sexual tension, Hunter and company share a wider array of emotion. When Hunter's voice appears-- often deep into tracks-- it can sound spent, alluring, hopeful, and exasperated, and the guitars are just as versatile: screeching, whining, twinkling-- they're the show-offs in the band. That said, there is a placid, warm quality to nearly every track, no matter what the guitars are up to. (For this, credit is due to producer Chris Coady, who also mixed Beach House's Teen Dream; Coady turns busy bunches of layers into an elegant bouquet.)
Hunter's deep, smooth voice-- comparable to PJ Harvey's, especially on grittier tracks like "Completely Golden"-- is woven in with the least trebly of the instruments, whispery yet tensile. When it's time for the guitars to show off with elaborate arpeggios, gurgling shreds, and distant, glittery calls-and-responses, she stands back from the mic entirely, or at least gives the instruments, including her own, a long intro. Even when her lyrics are a key component of a song, she can sound (like Beach House's Victoria Legrand) a little lost in the mix, as if the force of the instruments were threatening to blow her away. The rare tracks where she's loudest are just as strong as the others: there's the slight "Truss Me", whose title is a good indication of how slow and loose the song is, and "Two Cocks", a joyous, robust potential single.
Lower Dens appreciate the grimy atmospherics of new wave as much as the dizzy elements of shoegaze, which can make Twin-Hand Movement confusing on first listen. But when variety sounds this good, it's hard to fault a band for sharing so many ideas in one place. The album is primarily about atmosphere: about translating feeling into music, rather than the music serving as a companion to lyrics. When Hunter ruminates about "just a-standing in your pretty presence" on "I Get Nervous", the instruments, playing a long, cozy intro of noodling and heartbeat percussion, are that "pretty presence"-- or the closest thing to it. | 2010-07-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-07-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Gnomonsong | July 22, 2010 | 8.1 | 2ba1e0d1-bad8-49a0-8e73-edd1998be844 | Pitchfork | null |
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Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, former One Direction member Zayn's debut Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular. | Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, former One Direction member Zayn's debut Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular. | Zayn: Mind of Mine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21764-mind-of-mine/ | Mind of Mine | Last Friday, in order to celebrate the release of his first solo album, Mind of Mine, Zayn performed the bonus track "LIKE I WOULD" on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon." He was assisted by the Roots and surrounded by fluorescent tubes, but he looked alone and slightly lost, his eyes gazing blankly ahead. Since he left One Direction a year ago, there’s an awkwardness and inflexibility visible in his performances, as if he’s just learning how to occupy a stage on his own. When he sings the chorus, "He-eeee / won’t touch you like I do," he starts to loosen up, giving a few rhythmic shrugs and meaningful gazes at the middle distance, but as a solo star he moves through space unsteadily.
In One Direction, Zayn contributed a distinct, introspective personality, the pleasing and elastic geometry of his hair, a capable falsetto, and an emotional reserve which contrasted tastefully with the adolescent exuberance of his bandmates. On his own, uninterrupted by four other voices, his vocal can sound shapeless, with his vowels collapsing into mumbled piles of feeling. His highly anticipated solo album is state-of-the-art amorphous R&B, Frank Ocean and Miguel-indebted stuff that swerves in and out of focus like headlights through a fog. But his voice doesn't stand out in it, and on fussy, textured songs like "tRuTh" and "BoRdErSz," he's just an additional cloud in a misty atmosphere.
In sparer, more reduced arrangements you can hear him strain; "fOoL fOr YoU" is a Beatles pastiche, just piano and drums and Zayn, and his voice sounds pinched and exposed. He sounds lovely on "sHe" and "dRuNk," incidentally the most assured songs on the record. There’s a dexterity to "sHe" that seems vacuumed out of the rest of the album, his vocal moving nimbly among blurred pulses of guitar and inverted piano clusters. When he unleashes his falsetto, it pierces the track, a crystal tower rising through the surface of the earth. It’s the only instant on Mind of Mine that seems to hint at his actual capacity for pop artistry. There’s also something gorgeous and spectral to his voice on the intermission, "fLoWeR," which is sung entirely in Urdu; he snaps with ease into the perpendicular arrangement of notes.
As a document of his metamorphosis, from goofy teen idol to humorless R&B singer, Mind of Mine is mostly unsuccessful. It’s not as secure or as nimble as Justin Timberlake’s Justified, and it lacks the three sublime and thermochromic singles of Justin Bieber’s Purpose. The album is so certain of what kind of adulthood it wants to convey that it often ends up expressing an amplified parody of it. The lyrics are hyper-focused on types of haze (drunk or drugged) and heterosexual sex; blustery lead single "PILLOWTALK" seems reverse-engineered from Zayn singing the word "fucking," a glossy wrought-iron context for an elementary school transgression. In the closing track "TiO" he sings "You get off on me / it's like cheating," which is likely intended to sound provocative and sexy but comes off, like the majority of sexual encounters on the record, as dour and joyless. (A clutch of Zayn-era One Direction tracks have a more whimsical and dynamic vision of sex, particularly "No Control," in which they seem super-psyched to have done it with someone cool.)
The bonus tracks expand the dimensions of the album. "BLUE" would seem Zayn’s attempt at a Coldplay-esque ballad if it approached any sort of resolution or climax; instead it just hovers nervously at half-altitude. These uncertain moments are the most compelling ones, perhaps because they feel truest to Zayn's tentative solo presence. Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated*.* Great solo pop careers are usually born when the performer figures out what space they want to claim and leave enough room for the listener to join them, but Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular. | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | March 29, 2016 | 5.9 | 2ba35d8d-3bcf-4b61-8abc-e14a8c4090cb | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
The 23-year-old songwriter’s debut renders tales of young love and its quandaries with diaristic lyrics and anguished singing. She’s at her best when she’s plainspoken and immediate. | The 23-year-old songwriter’s debut renders tales of young love and its quandaries with diaristic lyrics and anguished singing. She’s at her best when she’s plainspoken and immediate. | Jensen McRae: Who Hurt You? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jensen-mcrae-who-hurt-you-ep/ | Who Hurt You? EP | Los Angeles folk singer Jensen McRae never asks the title question of her debut EP, but its anxious premise haunts her songs. Shadowy forces populate her tales of young love and its quandaries, rotting budding romance from the inside, sniping at it from unseen perches. If McRae were a pulpier writer, this looming paranoia might be the centerpiece of her music, her narrators determined to unmask and confront the elusive “who.” Instead, McRae leaves the saboteurs unidentified, dwelling on the effects of their misdeeds with diaristic lyrics and anguished singing. Though her overreliance on allegory can give Who Hurt You? a detached air, her performances are often gripping.
McRae has a resonant, malleable voice that can shrivel into a wounded yelp or harden into a defiant war cry, poles that suit the melodramatic and confessional modes she favors. Who Hurt You?, produced in full by Rahki (Kendrick Lamar, Jorja Smith, EarthGang), showcases this range with spare compositions that render McRae in focus. Across the brief record’s six songs, she sounds clear and confident even when she’s channeling confusion or ambivalence.
“Immune,” a track about a troubled couple that visits a COVID-19 mass vaccination site and buckles under the weight of these unprecedented times, is charmingly maudlin. “What will we say to each other/When the needle goes in?/What will we be to each other/If the world doesn’t end?” McRae belts with dewy-eyed fear. The song began as a winking Twitter homage to Phoebe Bridgers, one of McRae’s influences, but the completed version goes full schmaltz.
“Wolves” is more hushed, turning brushes with predatory men into a mournful fable. The song makes deft use of negative space, lapsing into silence between McRae’s downcast lyrics as a lone guitar melody flickers in the background. “Thank God women learned to whisper/But I crave a microphone,” she laments in a splintered murmur, sounding both relieved and ashamed. The concepts on other songs are thinner. “Loving you is in my bones,” she sings on “Adam’s Ribs,” a ballad so awash in biblical allusions it could be a Veggie Tales script. “Dead Girl Walking,” a song that uses bodily pain as a metaphor for emotional distance, is just as flat.
McRae is at her best when she’s plainspoken, committed to being immediate rather than bookish. “White Boy,” a song about being erased, is artfully one-sided. McRae describes a white companion ignoring her with disarming precision. “White girl arrives/I turn invisible/I don’t like/Who I am to you,” she sings in a near sob, shrinking into herself. The song is less a confrontation and more an epiphany, McRae’s character stumbling into lucidity. As McRae finds her footing as a songwriter, that ability to burrow into the core of an idea or scene will be key to expanding the casts of her tiny dramas and giving those ambient shadows depth.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Human Re Sources | July 2, 2021 | 6.8 | 2ba43a38-c7f9-4804-8cda-731a42cedc0e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/60dca3dfa1d9c5d8c35a6e65/1:1/w_1500,h_1500,c_limit/Jensen%20McRae:%20Who%20Hurt%20You |
The singer-songwriter’s latest—a loose reworking of Billie Holiday’s 1958 album Lady in Satin—is made with affection, curiosity, and care. | The singer-songwriter’s latest—a loose reworking of Billie Holiday’s 1958 album Lady in Satin—is made with affection, curiosity, and care. | M. Ward: Think of Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-ward-think-of-spring/ | Think of Spring | M. Ward, who sings in a hushed rasp that rarely registers above a murmur, may not be the first vocalist to leap to mind when thinking of modern equivalents to Billie Holiday. An Americana minimalist with a penchant for arty atmosphere, Ward appears to exist on an entirely different plane from Holiday, a singer who always seemed like she was mining the depths of her soul. It’s not just a difference of genre or era: there’s a chasm separating the two artists in terms of aesthetics.
Art doesn’t tend to follow a straight line, though. M. Ward fell in love with the music of Billie Holiday when he was leaving adolescence and gravitating toward 1958’s Lady in Satin, the last album she released in her lifetime. Ward was drawn to how he mistook Holiday’s voice “for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar—some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings.” This characterization of Holiday is especially true on Lady in Satin, a record that captures a singer navigating through the damage of her voice due to drug and alcohol abuse. The evident wear on Holiday’s instrument rankled some listeners, as did the overripe arrangements of Ray Ellis, a producer who was known for his work with such pop trifles as the Four Lads. The cognitive dissonance was by design. Holiday realized her bruised voice would benefit from supple string support and this contrast is part of what gives Lady in Satin its power. Like the Frank Sinatra Capitol records of the 1950s that inspired it, Lady in Satin tells an autobiographical story through its interpretations of tunes from the Great American Songbook.
The same could be said of Think of Spring, M. Ward’s tribute to Holiday that essentially amounts to an album-length cover of Lady in Satin. The songs don’t run in the same sequence but apart from "The End of a Love Affair"—an Edward Redding song that was swapped for "All the Way," a Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn song written for Sinatra in 1957—they’re all here, all performed with an easy warmth that conveys a deep, abiding love of the source material. This intimacy is heightened by Ward’s decision to record the album on an old Tascam Portastudio he acquired when he was a teenager. Deep into the GarageBand era, working with such outdated analog technology as a four-track cassette recorder seems nearly as retro as the Great American Songbook itself, so the combination of vintage tech and classic tunes creates a bit of a dreamy shimmer, a quality that suits Ward’s quiet rearrangements of familiar tunes.
Ward’s gentle and floating reworks of Lady in Satin’s songs are grounded in his experimentations with alternate guitar tunings, an instrumental technique that results in unusual chord voicings and suspended notes. The particulars of the tunings aren’t as interesting as their feeling; the chord progressions and light riffs seem to hang in space, providing a soft bed for Ward’s husky whisper. It’s a folkie refraction of Holiday’s original album: She needed an orchestra to provide comfortable support for her weathered voice, while he only needs his own guitar to carry his grizzled purr.
Instrumentation and fidelity certainly are elements that distinguish Think of Spring from its inspiration, as is the record’s ultimate emotional impact. At the time he recorded the album in 2019, M. Ward had outlived Billie Holiday by a few years, yet he sounds younger on Think of Spring than she did on Lady in Satin, where she sounded as if she was wrestling with the collected weight of her entire life. The stakes aren’t nearly as high on Think of Spring. It’s an album made with affection, curiosity and care, a record with a specific, sometimes bewitching vibe. Its mellow sway is alluring but it also can drift ever so slightly into the realm of mood music, perhaps an inevitable result for a gently restless musician who seems to favor feel over feeling.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | December 11, 2020 | 7 | 2baa9274-a74e-4ec8-a90b-c43faf01c810 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
With lush instrumentation and some welcome guest appearances, the follow-up to the UK singer’s breakout debut highlights her sumptuous voice and attention to detail. | With lush instrumentation and some welcome guest appearances, the follow-up to the UK singer’s breakout debut highlights her sumptuous voice and attention to detail. | Ella Mai: Heart on My Sleeve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ella-mai-heart-on-my-sleeve/ | Heart on My Sleeve | The distinct pleasure of Ella Mai’s 2018 breakout “Boo’d Up” lay in its breezy simplicity. The UK singer’s smash hit, which peaked at No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100, aspired toward the effortless sound of ’90s R&B, but Mai’s honeyed delivery brought something fresh and endlessly replayable to the formula. The ubiquitous track all but guaranteed a double-platinum certification for Mai’s self-titled debut, a record that drifted from breathy ballads to ascendant vocal runs, occasionally to boring ends. Yet her rich, textured voice and commitment to the throwback sound placed her high among a new generation of artists mining R&B’s history and giving it a modern spin.
On her second album, Heart on My Sleeve, Mai asserts herself as a resilient force, especially when she sings about falling head over heels in love. Executive produced by frequent collaborator Mustard, the record fleshes out her lovestruck sound with more tactile elements—acoustic guitars and strings are foregrounded more often than beats. Mai also thankfully forgoes the mood-killing spoken-word outros, replacing them with the occasional guest appearances: Mary J. Blige offers backing vocals and words of encouragement in her luxuriant New York accent on the vulnerable “Sink or Swim,” while gospel legend Kirk Franklin and his choir show up for a full-blown sermon on “Fallen Angel.” By leaning into lush, percussive instrumentation and rounding up collaborators who complement her sound, Mai has crafted a solid follow-up that centers her strengths as a singer and songwriter.
The best songs are closely in tune with Mai’s emotions. On the highlight “How,” she goes toe-to-toe with Compton rapper Roddy Ricch over a lilting vocal sample, adopting a springy flow as she picks herself up after a betrayal: “How could you switch it up on me in my darkest hour?” she demands. “Fallen Angel” takes a two-part approach, beginning with funky handclaps and hi-hats. “Maybe this is compensation for unmet expectations,” she considers in her fluttering mezzo-soprano before the song crests in its Kirk-assisted gospel outro. With her ear for melody and rich backing harmonies, Mai balances the tonal shifts with ease.
Mai falters when she slips into staid songs that come across as filler. On the straightforward, 808-laced ballad “DFMU,” the production flattens her precise vocal delivery; later, “Feels Like” is hampered by a half-committed lyrical conceit (as a hook, “feels like ooh” can only go so far). The stumbles keep Heart on My Sleeve from being truly exceptional, but Mai’s sumptuous voice and attention to detail make it a beguiling delight. | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 10 Summers / Interscope | May 16, 2022 | 7.3 | 2bab18d2-d679-4b60-8dd3-d941e26e27e9 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo), Liars' dark, largely electronic and sample-based latest album is a return to their adventurous, experimental roots. It's also the group's most human and fragile album to date. | Co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo), Liars' dark, largely electronic and sample-based latest album is a return to their adventurous, experimental roots. It's also the group's most human and fragile album to date. | Liars: WIXIW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16681-wixiw/ | WIXIW | Even at their highest points of visibility, Liars have spent the last decade creating obfuscation. Their 2001 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, was a raging fire of herky-jerky Solid Gold antagonism that ended a locked groove which, on CD, ran longer than all of the record's songs combined. The lead single from 2006's Drum's Not Dead, "It Fit When I Was a Kid", featured the unconflicted cover image of the trio's faces superimposed onto gay pornography. Liars have shifted around geographically over the years as well, from New York to New Jersey to Berlin, but since settling down in Los Angeles in 2009, they've made some of their most unsettling and misanthropic work thus far.
The band's latest curveball arrives early on their latest album, WIXIW. Its opening track, "The Exact Colour of Doubt", features Tangerine Dream-like synths giving way to soft pitter-patter percussion and a guitar line that shimmers with just the right amount of reverb. It's lovely, ethereal, and not remotely indicative of what follows.
WIXIW is a return to Liars' more adventurous, experimental roots, a dark and abstract detour from the more straightforward one-two punch of 2007's self-titled effort and 2010's Sisterworld. While the latter showcased comparatively traditional instrumentation, WIXIW is largely electronic and sample-based, with frontman Angus Andrew's vocals featuring as one of very few recognizably organic presences on the record. The trait this album shares most with its predecessor is an abundance of creeping tension, but there's little catharsis to be found here, just a steady level of overcast unease.
Liars have always excelled at creating self-contained atmospheres and the overall vibe on WIXIW is pure dread and uncertainty, no doubt a by-product of the album's genesis. Andrew mentioned in our interview that the creative process was "more difficult" than in the past, a result of he and band member Aaron Hemphill's increasingly collaborative songwriting. The strengthened partnership between the two is apparent, to the point where Andrew appears to address Hemphill directly on the cosmic rumination "His and Mine Sensations": "Tell me it's a lie, Aaron/ Tell me it's a lie."
While making the album, Andrew also began a serious romantic relationship while a relationship of Hemphill's ended. WIXIW finds itself emotionally and lyrically somewhere in the middle, mixing bitter sentiments and pleas for protection and safety with the same embrace of duality that marked Drum's Not Dead. The new album's title is pronounced "wish you," and the harrowing upward climb of its title track and centerpiece reflects the type of yearning that the pronunciation suggests: "I wish you were here with me/ I can't no longer take it all/ Wish you would not come back to me."
WIXIW is a very human and fragile album-- moreso than any other Liars record-- and it's initially easy to overlook these traits because the sound is so cold, electronic, and distant. It's so clearly the result of a rock band attempting to create electronic music that comparisons to Radiohead circa Kid A and Amnesiac are somewhat unavoidable. (Andrew's decidedly Thom Yorke-ish vocal takes on "His and Mine Sensations" and "III Valley Prodigies" add some weight to that, too.) But where Radiohead drew from the then-contemporary glitch of Warp-stamped IDM, Liars look further back on WIXIW, evoking an earlier period of electronic music.
That nod to the distant past is represented in the choice to bring in Mute founder and producer Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) as a co-producer along with the band themselves, as well as in Liars' own rudimentary, back-to-basics sampling techniques, where they recorded dripping wet rags and deflated balloons, among other things. (You can find videos documenting these sampling techniques at the band's website.) As a result, even WIXIW's most inhuman moments retain a force of brute, blunt physicality. Take Liars' drums away and leave them with nothing but machines, and they still project an incantatory, campfire-seance vibe.
Appreciating WIXIW's taken risks and the subsequent riches that follow is a lot easier of a task than deciding where it ranks on the best-to-least-best scale of Liars' records. I'm fairly certain it's not their best, but even as I type this, each spin brings out new details and textures that color the listening experience in a different way. What we end up with is another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path. Fascinating turns of change have always been Liars' sole consistency, and in that respect, I hope they stay the same forever. | 2012-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | June 4, 2012 | 7.8 | 2bab6c86-8876-4540-ad95-71219fd6e301 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The possibility that Lil Wayne's new album could be overshadowed by his recent health scare is confirmed by this rote, crass reassembly of what once made him great. Weezy called II "my bum-ass album" on his release from hospital: turns out he wasn't just being self-deprecating. | The possibility that Lil Wayne's new album could be overshadowed by his recent health scare is confirmed by this rote, crass reassembly of what once made him great. Weezy called II "my bum-ass album" on his release from hospital: turns out he wasn't just being self-deprecating. | Lil Wayne: I Am Not a Human Being II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17802-lil-wayne-i-am-not-a-human-being-ii/ | I Am Not a Human Being II | The title is sadly accurate. Lil Wayne is a full-blown cottage industry now, a one-man corporation that provides succor and service to careers ranging from Nicki Minaj and Drake’s to Gudda Gudda and Lil Chuckee’s. With this many shareholders come obligations, so despite the increasingly obvious and pressing personal needs of Dwayne Carter the man, Lil Wayne Inc. steamrolls forward, impervious to setbacks. When Carter landed in the ICU for six frightening days this month, after seizures that many assumed were related to his ongoing, years-documented problems with codeine addiction, his handlers smoothed things over with the panicked dissembling of hangers-on propping up an ailing dictator. After his release, Wayne gave a thumbs up to TMZ cameras to allay fears, announcing he was “better than good.” He did look good, but he also, tellingly, shrugged and offered this: “My bum-ass album is coming out... March 26? It's 26?...You’re gonna get that shit or you won’t. If not, it’s whatever.”
This spirit of indifference hangs heavy on I Am Not A Human Being II. In his review of 2011’s Tha Carter IV, Ryan Dombal observed that "after an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money,” and two years later, the prognosis has only grown more grim: No song on IIis meaningfully distinguishable from the next. Everything pumps out in an undifferentiated slurry of interchangeable dick jokes, drug references, and lame puns. Tha Carter IV moved nearly a million copies in a single week, and this staggering success may have sealed Wayne’s artistic fate.
All of the quirks and peculiarities that once made Wayne great have hardened, six or seven years later, into nearly unbearable tics. All of his lyrics have devolved into barely rearranged little puzzles of themselves, with countless versions of his "She ride/ Take this dick like ___” formulation, none of them funny or creative: On “IANAHB”, a woman takes it like “advice,” while others ride it like both "go-karts" and "the Kentucky Derby" on "Curtains”. His tweaking of gangsta-rap’s language has never been more perfunctory. He sounds terminally bored, and even the better rap songs on here-- the hits, like the Mike Will Made It-produced, Future-and-Drake-featuring “Bitches Love Me” or the rubbery, Bay Area-influenced clap of “Rich As Fuck”-- work around him, not with him.
The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap. On “Romance”, he sings in his croaky, limber way about his profane version of love while Cool & Dre’s synthesizers smear like bionic fireflies: “She kissed my ankle when I twist my ankle/ She even did anal when she don't do anal.” On the big, clomping pop rock of "Back To You”, his voice is a shpritz of Lil Wayne on the surface of a towering club-pop production, the kind that mashes together the respective sugar highs of Euro club-pop, hair-metal, and synth pop into a glutinous ball (If you’re wondering whose sampled voice that is crooning at the bottom of all that mess, by the way, it’s Jamie Lidell’s.) This might not be the most promising future to ponder for Wayne’s music, but they’re the moments he sounds happiest: as a cog in a much bigger machine than himself, set free from being the all-consuming center for the first time. | 2013-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment | March 29, 2013 | 3.9 | 2bac142c-51d1-4378-b205-138c2516b2b6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Naomi Punk's proper debut, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the Olympia, Wash., trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half. | Naomi Punk's proper debut, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the Olympia, Wash., trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half. | Naomi Punk: The Feeling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17248-the-feeling/ | The Feeling | Olympia/Seattle's Naomi Punk are at least partly inspired by their grunge forbearers. The genre's basic elements are well-represented: The sludgy erosion over the guitars, the drums blasting with machine-grade heaviness. Since the old formula goes "one part metal, two parts punk, and one part psychedelic weird shit," it's not a stretch by any means to consider Naomi Punk a grunge band. And while they're clearly a part of a long lineage of bands taking their influence from the Seattle rock scene of the early 1990s, Naomi Punk's songs are not cheaply manufactured recreations of Soundgarden or even TAD.
The Feeling, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half. Naomi Punk's approach to grunge is one of deconstruction and rebuilding in different places with fewer parts. Most of the album's songs change tempos at the drop of flannel, breaking into a dense wall of meticulously controlled chaos. Guitars are not delivered with a steady stream of chords; they come in blasts along with the crash cymbal, often at irregular points in the song. There's almost a need to keep up with them rhythmically over the first few listens, because the phrasing of the chords and beats zig zag through a motley course, unintentionally using empty space as every bit the weapon their guitars and drums are.
Despite the grunge signifiers, Naomi Punk seem to be working under a template like slowcore, art-punk, or no wave played at half-speed. They've given themselves a narrow palette to work with in this sense, but The Feeling's funeral-march tempos and unrelenting heaviness don't detract from what makes the album compelling. Aside from three quasi-classical guitar interludes, the record comes packed top-to-bottom with total bruisers, and for most of its 35 minutes, the music is hitting you with pummeling force, every bit as visceral as your favorite punk album from this year. Most of the songs come with a cathartic breakdown of some sort, whether it's the rollicking finish of "Trashworld" or the chorus of "Burned Body".
Not only does The Feeling connect on a purely visceral level, it's got plenty of emotional resolve. For a band whose poppiest song's titled "Burned Body" and for all of the lyrics about charred flesh and self-immolation, Naomi Punk are good at injecting a bit of hope and optimism into their music. "I am the sun/ I am the shooting star" goes the opening lyric of "The Spell".
The title track takes that optimism and shoots it into anthemic territory. Playing out like the battle scene climax of your favorite war movie, "The Feeling" starts out scaling back to hold the tension, but rolls into explosion after explosion. The chorus, the sedate tease of the middle eight, and then the climax-- "And now I know that I can find a way"-- triumphantly rise above the din. Monolithic and seemingly impenetrable at first, The Feeling has a number of these moments, subtler details that offer plenty of rewards for whoever can stand being pummeled for almost 40 minutes. | 2012-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | October 18, 2012 | 7.6 | 2bad0447-8a4d-40d3-adcb-291fa86f38eb | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Produced by BADBADNOTGOOD, the second album from the Hiroshima-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter explores heartbreak and familial history with a subtle and dynamic approach. | Produced by BADBADNOTGOOD, the second album from the Hiroshima-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter explores heartbreak and familial history with a subtle and dynamic approach. | Jonah Yano: *Portrait of a Dog * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonah-yano-portrait-of-a-dog/ | Portrait of a Dog | In 2022, upon noticing that his grandparents were beginning to forget his name, Jonah Yano traveled to their home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, hoping to archive any and all memories of them. Tirelessly recording footage and conversations, and digitizing thousands of photos and documents with the help of his brother, Yano channeled his emotional energy into the gut-wrenching highlight of his new album, Portrait of a Dog. At the center of “Song About the Family House”—marked with somber acoustic guitar and his wistful, cracking vocals, trailing away after every line like a faded memory—is a rush to immortalize his family’s history, knowing that even if the people he loves are gone, the details of late nights and home-cooked meals won’t be lost.
This connection to the past brings a new level of focus to Yano’s work. His debut album, 2020’s Souvenir, blended drum’n’bass, rock, and ambient with acoustic instrumentation, adopting the sounds of his numerous collaborators to create an expansive landscape. In his lyrics, Yono reflected on his parents’ separation and the experience of being an expatriate after moving from Hiroshima to Vancouver at a young age. Refining the sprawling sound of Souvenir, Portrait of a Dog is produced entirely by the Toronto group BADBADNOTGOOD, encasing Yano’s melancholy lyrics and tranquil guitar playing in a more casual environment and giving the album a meditative, inviting tone.
Portrait of a Dog meanders naturally as Yano follows the band’s jazzy arrangements and bends around instrumentalists like cellist Eliza Niemi. The sections that accompany Yano’s vocals are purposeful and restrained, harkening back to the effective, straight-laced compositions from BBNG’s 2016 album IV. On “Call the Number,” Yano croons along to a mixture of subdued piano and sweeping cello. But once the vocals stop and the band takes over, the improvisation and solos run wild, transforming the coffeehouse lullaby into a frenetic live set in a smoky basement club. Pianist Felix Fox-Pappas dazzles at the end of “Always” and Leland Whitty closes “Haven’t Haven’t” with a rousing tenor saxophone solo.
Each of the 12 songs was written in the aftermath of Yano’s trip to his grandparents, while he was also going through a breakup. Yano credits songwriters like Adrianne Lenker and Feist as inspiration, and he follows in their lineage of cryptic, diaristic intimacy. Heartbreak seeps into the material, but instead of recounting the pain in precise details, he deals in pithy allusions, leaving clues about his feelings. At times, his sparse approach can lighten the emotional weight of the material, like his whispered lines about “the cold middle of the night” in “The Speed of Sound!” The crux of the song depends on everything but the actual words: His voice lilts with every syllable, making the imagery feel crushing and poignant.
Yano can conjure equally affecting moments even when he isn’t speaking to us directly. A recording of his grandfather’s voice opens “So Sweet,” inaccurately describing their familial relationship: “Get your music out and say, ‘This is for my uncle,’” he instructs, before being quickly corrected by Yano’s grandmother. It’s a sobering moment, but it speaks to Yano’s undaunted pursuit to preserve the past, in all its imperfection and beauty. | 2023-02-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | February 3, 2023 | 7.3 | 2badabb8-9799-4c1b-ac60-582edfd4163d | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
At first listen, Loom plays like an appropriately wistful dream pop cousin to Young Marble Giants or the Marine Girls, or perhaps something resembling Camera Obscura’s awkward stepsister. But underneath all the jingle-jangling guitars and twee musical meanderings, Fear of Men are quietly seething. | At first listen, Loom plays like an appropriately wistful dream pop cousin to Young Marble Giants or the Marine Girls, or perhaps something resembling Camera Obscura’s awkward stepsister. But underneath all the jingle-jangling guitars and twee musical meanderings, Fear of Men are quietly seething. | Fear of Men: Loom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19276-fear-of-men-loom/ | Loom | Almost every song on Loom, Fear of Men’s full-length debut, includes a reference to water. The narrator in these songs risks being consumed, overwhelmed, sunk like a stone, or washed away completely. The drowned romanticism of the band’s lyrics (“I tried my best to destroy you but the waves/ Keep overflowing me/ Washing me out ‘till I’m empty”) is reflected in their music as well—a kind of delicate, twilight indie pop swirl that belies the heady darkness that seems to always be simmering just underneath. At first listen, Loom plays like an appropriately wistful dream pop cousin to Young Marble Giants or the Marine Girls (or something resembling Camera Obscura’s awkward stepsister). But underneath all the jingle-jangling guitars and twee musical meanderings, Fear of Men are quietly seething—a prim librarian who just happens to carry a warm switchblade in her book bag.
Fear of Men is essentially the work of two mindful British art students: Jessica Weiss (guitarist and vocalist) and Daniel Falvey (guitarist). Taking their name from a rare anxiety disorder (“androphobia” is an abnormal and persistent fear of men), the band set about making songs that took on mortality, mental illness, and loneliness and set them against a melodic backdrop of Smiths-like guitars. The fruits of the band’s early efforts were collected into an aptly named 2013 collection called Early Fragments, a release that showcased the band’s ability to marry the beautiful with the slyly profane. It’s a concept the band pushes even further on Loom. When Weiss sings “Lie alone until the dark takes it all/ Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” it’s a fitting descriptor of the band’s aesthetic: Personal melancholy and romantic dread loom large, while an ever-present ocean of ambiguously deep feelings threatens to wash everything away.
Musically, Loom is a nice step forward. “Green Sea” and “Seer”—both of which appeared previously on Fragments—sound bigger and bolder here, each benefiting from more assured production. The record’s best songs—“Inside” and “Descent” among them—balance the record’s darkest lyrical sentiments against it’s brightest melodies, which generally proves to be Fear of Men’s neatest trick. Though the band’s committed DIY aesthetic is admirable—they employ a strict hands-on approach to everything, from the production of the music to the album art to the band’s videos—the music might be better served by the help of an outside producer. This is far and away a more sanguine listening experience than anything the band has recorded before, but even with the addition of a full-time drummer (Michael Miles) and a live bassist (Becky Wilkie), the rhythm section can’t deliver the kind of punch the material demands. And the album’s shimmery sameness (and turgid melancholy) eventually starts to feel a bit rote.
When the band does cut loose, as they do on the sublime “America”, the albums’s best track, you get a sense where they might go next. The song veers from gentle strummer and escapist fantasy to something resembling heaviness, with diaphanous guitar lines momentarily giving way to a bit of roiling feedback and what sounds like a tiny little amp being mercilessly overdriven. It’s a rare moment of abandon. Fear of Men are likely never going to shred riotously, blow up their gear, or even raise their voices to anything resembling a scream—they simply aren’t that kind of band—but here’s hoping that all that well-considered vitriol in Weiss’ lyrics might eventually bleed over into their music. | 2014-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Kanine | April 22, 2014 | 6.8 | 2bae1a6c-33b7-46d9-8538-e34ce8344219 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist crafts a unique modern jazz record with both mind-boggling technique and in-the-moment expression. | Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist crafts a unique modern jazz record with both mind-boggling technique and in-the-moment expression. | Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15166-new-history-of-warfare-vol-2-judges/ | New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges | Once in a while, I can convince myself that it's impossible to say anything truly new in music. There has been so much music made and documented in the last 50 years, my thinking goes, that the best we can hope for is an artful re-combination of elements of the past (which seems like more than enough, most of the time). But then I'll come across a new record that sounds like nothing else I've heard: I can't quite place it, but its appeal feels so organic and easy to understand, I don't really feel a need to place it, either. Such is the case with the second solo album from Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges.
A few things about this record make it highly unusual. First, Stetson generally records his pieces solo, live, and in a single take. Some of these tracks have so much sound, so many cross-crossing and overlapping elements, it simply doesn't seem possible that one musician is making them in real time. "Judges" has clattering percussion, a menacing bassline, and a growling lead element that sounds like an anguished voice processed in a strange way. Well, the percussion turns out to be a close-mic'd recording of the instruments' keys being manipulated, the low-end comes from the fact that Stetson plays the enormous bass saxophone and has a good sense of how to underpin a tune with a deep pulse, and the lead voice is indeed his voice-- Stetson vocalizing through the horn as he blows. That all of these things come together at once in a piece that is compelling and highly musical is nothing short of miraculous. The key to Stetson's approach is that he uses an array of microphones placed in strategic places-- on the horn, on his neck, on the other side of the room-- and then mixes everything down into a churning cauldron of sound (engineer Efrim Menuck from Godspeed/A Silver Mt Zion and producer Shahzad Ismaily had their work cut out for them, and they succeed brilliantly; Ben Frost is equally great on the mix). Stetson has also mastered the technique of circular breathing-- playing continuously with his mouth while breathing through his nose-- so that the sound can unspool unencumbered by his body's need for respiration.
The record does bring certain reference points to mind. When Stetson really gets the circular breathing going and unleashes a torrent of notes the climb up and down the scale, fans of free improv might think of solo material by players like Peter Brotzmann and Evan Parker, whose mind-boggling technique is put at the service of in-the-moment expression. But Warfare Vol. 2 doesn't sound much like improv or even jazz, despite our associations of the genre term with the solo horn. These pieces sound composed and carefully ordered, often closer to the precision of classical minimalism than the expressionism of fire jazz. And compared to someone like saxophonist/composer/bandleader Anthony Braxton, with whom Stetson has worked (if you are a virtuoso on bass sax, you're going to wind up working with Braxton, who greatly expanded the context for unusual reeds in jazz), Warfare feels less cerebral, almost like a "pop" version of some of those heady compositions.
So there's no prior experience needed here. You can dive in and immerse yourself in the swirl of musical color that is "From No Part of Me Could I Summon a Voice", in which Stetson's blast of notes, many per second, are recorded as though from across a vast stone space, each one vanishing into the air in a cloud of natural reverberation. Or marvel at the way Stetson makes a track like "Red Horse (Judges II)" sound almost as if it had a breakbeat, the slap of the keys on the instrument so pronounced in the mix you focus on the rhythm first and the texture of the air coming through the horn later.
Reinforcing the music's connection to both minimalism and pop, several tracks here feature the vocals of Laurie Anderson, whose approach is a natural fit with this material. "A Dream of Water" features her clear and hypnotic voice articulating memorable imagery ("There were those who lived in the crawlspace/ There were people lighting candles") over a grinding and relentless arpeggiated figure from Stetson. "All the Colors Bleached to White (ILAIJ II)" begins with Anderson's vocal and a swelling chorus of voices and then shifts gears to a hard, noir-ish stomp whose deep tones can easily shake an entire room. Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond joins the proceedings on a powerful and affecting cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes", a mutant, arted-up blues that reminds me of the overlooked album of Ekkehard Ehlers, A Life Without Fear, the way it abstracts a folk idiom and boils it down to a central emotional idea.
Like the rest of the record (and Vol. 1 is also excellent, if not quite as varied or powerful), "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes" feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists. And though New Warfare Vol. 2 is easy to enjoy on a purely musical level, as sound, without bothering about the underlying ideas or any notions of how it's made, it's also a gratifying reminder that horizons of musical expression are so much more vast than prevailing trends would indicate. | 2011-03-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-03-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Constellation | March 3, 2011 | 8.2 | 2bb0e8fa-2bf0-4423-92b9-4c5c10e05091 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The film actor’s musical debut is full of shadowy theatrics and cryptic gibberish. Rarely do you encounter music this bombastic and unreasonable. | The film actor’s musical debut is full of shadowy theatrics and cryptic gibberish. Rarely do you encounter music this bombastic and unreasonable. | Caleb Landry Jones: The Mother Stone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caleb-landry-jones-the-mother-stone/ | The Mother Stone | No one plays a better creep than Caleb Landry Jones. Watch him sniff out Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, wild and impatient, like a dog that’s just spotted a rabbit. Look at his sunken, lying eyes in Twin Peaks: The Return. Jones exemplifies the all-American boy gone sour, and most of the time, it’s unclear whether he’s pretending. “You know when you push so hard and you pop blood vessels and go unconscious a little bit?” he says of his acting. “Sometimes it’s like that, when you wake up and you don’t know where you are.” During interviews he erupts into strange, delirious laughter. You can’t watch a single YouTube clip of him without fans commenting, “Joker vibes.”
The 30-year-old Texan began writing and recording music at 16, the same age he made his film debut in the Coen Brothers’ neo-Western No Country for Old Men. Over the years, he accumulated more than 700 songs. His thriving acting career pulled him away from music, until a few years ago, when he landed a meeting with filmmaker-musician Jim Jarmusch. In lieu of an introduction, Jones wrote him a piano instrumental. But they met at a diner, where there was no way for Jones to play his new piece. Instead, he slipped Jarmusch two collections of songs he’d written in his parents’ barn several years earlier, and Jarmusch connected him to Sacred Bones founder Caleb Bratten. Soon, Jones got to work on his debut album, The Mother Stone, incorporating his piano composition into the album’s title track.
There’s a distinctly theatrical bent to The Mother Stone, which is framed as a “parade led by multiple unreliable narrators” who spew their monologues and then vacate the stage. In the video for “Flag Day/The Mother Stone,” stout, crimson-lipped aristocrats lounge in slo-mo, their faces plastered in Warholian neon, mouths agape like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Sluggish carnival music intensifies the unease. Then, midway through the expansive, seven-and-a-half minute opus, a cymbal crash halts the sinister fanfare. Psychedelic guitar replaces the garish horns. Abstruse sentences escape Jones’ lips like vapor: “It takes a daffodil … to shake the jelly from the stone.”
Spectral harmonies, waltzing strings, what sounds like a dog howling at the moon—all rear their heads in the opening suite. There’s something admirable about how willfully The Mother Stone defies easy listening; rarely do you encounter music this bombastic and unreasonable. (Jones cites the Beatles’ White Album as a major inspiration.) “The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke” flips alien lasers into bluegrass fiddle. Strange voices materialize as if from a dream: a grubby croak in “Katya,” a gruff deadpan in “All I Am in You/The Big Worm.” In “You’re So Wonderfull,” Jones jauntily sings “you’re so won-der-ful” and foams at the mouth. The full tracklist is 15 items long, with several spilling past six minutes.
But once you burrow deeper, the shadowy theatrics and cryptic gibberish become monotonous; these are not different characters, but the same man rambling on and on. Most of the songs—overwhelmingly sung in a nasally British whine—have the wilted grandeur of a drunk’s last hurrah. The lyrics conjure a hazy aura of doom and gloom, but they don’t amount to compelling character sketches. An ounce of clarity would go a long way towards balancing nutty remarks like, “The solitude I’ve reached has got one foot,” or, “Shakin’ like the main-frame, not warning, like they’re milking/All the sharp tanked slinkies, milling.” (According to Jones, the album’s themes include “abuse, loss, hope, the good tickle, the bad tickle, the runaway train, the perfectly timed flying bus.”) An unreliable narrator should be intelligibly so, if only for a moment. Or else why keep listening?
In its dream-like exhibitionism, anachronism, and novelty, The Mother Stone is a little like Sleep No More, the immersive, Kubrikian staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which masked audience members follow silent actors around a dimly lit 1930s hotel, piecing together a deconstructed story at their own pace. Some people will indulge in the spectacle, valuing the sensory thrill over narrative coherence. Others will emerge from the multi-hour ordeal exhausted, wondering what the hell to make of the chocolate sauce and sporadic nudity. Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return. | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | May 5, 2020 | 6.4 | 2bb3e059-735f-4eae-bab4-9db59d0a48b8 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Shabaka Hutchings leads his brass band on a propulsive mind- and body-moving record, advocating through music that change comes from speaking directly about collective oppression. | Shabaka Hutchings leads his brass band on a propulsive mind- and body-moving record, advocating through music that change comes from speaking directly about collective oppression. | Sons of Kemet: Black to the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sons-of-kemet-black-to-the-future/ | Black to the Future | For the past few years, the London-born saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings has led three different groups, exploring a distinctive sound with each. The soul prog of the Comet Is Coming gazes ahead; the spiritual jazz of Shabaka and the Ancestors seems to take its cues from the past. Between these bands lies the turbulent, soca-inflected jazz of the Sons of Kemet, which is tied to the present moment. Their latest, Black to the Future, is a propulsive record advocating that change comes from speaking directly about collective oppression. Collective is the key word here, and Hutchings attempts to unite the different strands of the African diaspora, working with vocalists and rappers from both the UK and U.S. Black to the Future is highly accessible, politically engaged jazz that’s more focused on communication than individual experimentation.
When the fusion works, the music seems like it’s about to combust. Though Sons of Kemet is only made up of four players—two horns (Hutchings and Theon Cross) and two percussionists (Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner)—the noise they make rivals a big band. On “Pick Up Your Burning Cross,” Hutchings’ saxophone races alongside his clarinet, each instrument trying to take the lead. Cross’ tuba brings a grounding current of bass, stirring up turbulent storm clouds on the horizon. The Chicago-based pianist Angel Bat Dawid sings with force, and the experimental rapper Moor Mother peppers the track with her bracing, cryptic asides (“I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place lost the race”). It feels like a whole community singing at once, as does the jovial standout “Hustle.” As Cross and Hutchings blare a united theme, UK rapper Kojey Radical speaks of the indomitability of the spirit. When Lianne La Havas joins Radical on the chorus (“Born from the mud with the hustle inside me”), a call-and-response emerges between the vocalists and the instrumentalists. It’s a small moment reflecting a wider theme: The first step to collective liberation is communal dialogue.
This thrust supplies this music with fire, but it can also lead to forced moments. The fierce attack of horns and emotive spoken-word on opener “Field Negus” portend a forceful lament on the Black experience. And to some extent, it delivers. The sense of menace generated by long held notes of the tuba and calculated rattle of the drums expands as poet Joshua Idehen explores how white supremacy closes off the pathways of a Black imagination: “Lightened up my skin/Bitten down my tongue/I begged you for an inch/Lemme have some liquor and a flatscreen.” The horns swell, mirroring the narrator’s expanding consciousness. As impassioned as this performance is, it’s jarring to hear Idehen synthesize past and current oppression in present social media terms. There’s not really a point in giving Candace Owens more airtime, even if you’re criticizing her. And screaming “hashtag burn it all” reduces what could be a bracing warning into self-parody. Yet even with these qualms, it’s hard to deny the power of Idehen’s palpable exasperation, which makes itself heard through his tortured breaths and targeted intonations. It’s hard to think of a crowd hearing this at a protest and not responding in kind.
Because its purpose is to move minds and bodies, Black to the Future features little visionary improvisation. In the late ’60s, groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago processed moments of strife through challenging experiments; Sons of Kemet prefer to make danceable, approachable expressions of joy. After the didactic burst of the first half, the second half of the album mainly features pulsating instrumentals. Hutchings can go the limit when he improvises, but he tones it down here. Solos are few and far between, and he rarely veers from the melody at hand. Still, there are pockets of wildness to be found in songs like “Let the Circle be Unbroken” and “Envision Yourself Levitating.” Close to the end of the former, his playing reaches a high-pitched snarl, and the latter ends with the type of performance that makes you wonder how anyone can fit such a staggering series of notes in such a small space. It’s a show-stopping moment, but Hutchings isn’t so focused on drawing attention to himself: While his entire community marches forward, Sons of Kemet provide the soundtrack.
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. | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | May 21, 2021 | 7.4 | 2bb5e1c2-d10b-4be9-a56f-82b5e9201ce3 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
On their first album in seven years, Broken Social Scene distill their sound to a vital essence. The band is focused and renewed, invigorated by the missionary spirit of their best work. | On their first album in seven years, Broken Social Scene distill their sound to a vital essence. The band is focused and renewed, invigorated by the missionary spirit of their best work. | Broken Social Scene: Hug of Thunder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broken-social-scene-hug-of-thunder/ | Hug of Thunder | “The cynics fucking hate me. I know that much. They’re not fans.” I’m willing to bet Broken Social Scene ringleader Kevin Drew takes that personally. From the start, Broken Social Scene have made recklessly celebratory music that left their countercultural beliefs buried like dog whistles: “They all need to be the cause/They all want to fuck the cause,” he sang, rather cynically, 15 years ago on the canonical You Forgot It in People, long before virtue signaling and slacktivism became part of the lexicon. But after the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015 inspired a swift return to action following a five-year hiatus, they’re not hiding shit this time around.
Frustrated by people touting concepts of “radical community” and “self-care,” yet spending most of their day treating people like shit online? Hug of Thunder is too. Feel like a washed outcast when confronted by the sterility of festival music and the humiliating sound degradation of digital streaming? Hug of Thunder is too. Tired of nihilism being presented as the only option for rational thinkers? Hug of Thunder is too. While there’s an undeniable power in commiseration, Hug of Thunder is invigorated by the missionary spirit of the band’s best work. Drew and company try to make converts of lapsed idealists and people that remind him of his former self.
2017 has found many of the past decade’s most beloved indie rock acts returning after long layoffs, and as with many of their lead singles, ”Halfway Home” was greeted not with a loud embrace of crackling buzz, but a shrug, disappointed by the lack of novelty rather than marveling at just how Broken Social Scene distilled their essence into four minutes. Which, yes, it sounds just like Broken Social Scene at the times when they’re going to lift you out of whatever hole you’re chosen to wallow in, even if it takes all 30 hands on deck.
The subsequent previews of Hug of Thunder also gave us “googly-eyed dream-pop,” “passed-out drunk and caffeine-wired studio wizards,” and also “the band with Feist in it.” Broken Social Scene are defined by a kind of utopian collectivism, and the lead-up to Hug of Thunder confirms that their excessive generosity can make them a seriously inefficient singles band. But in the same way that the members of Broken Social Scene renounce their star power to present a unified front, the individual songs of Hug of Thunder are best understood as reciprocal parts of a whole.
After the sunrise incantation of “Sol Luna,” “Halfway Home” gets Hug of Thunder to a height where the breathless plunge of the chorus from “Protest Song” can feel like a skydive without a parachute. On its own, “Skyline” forgoes any hook for mesmeric repetition, getting Hug of Thunder to a cruising altitude where “Stay Happy” can serve as a realistic mantra. “Vanity Pail Kids” has the kind of arrangement that would proudly bleed into an undifferentiated splotch on previous albums, but here, the jazz-handed chorus opens the possibility of Broken Social Scene as an up-with-people Earth, Wind & Fire indie-soul revue. Immediately afterward, the subterranean rumbles of the title track are a peek at what Feist’s Pleasure might’ve been with fleshier arrangements. Affecting as it is on its own, it also serves as a necessary segue between the “Vanity Pail Kids” and the muted soul-baring of the second half.
More so than Forgiveness Rock Record, Hug of Thunder presents Broken Social Scene as a rock band making rock songs, a coherent montage rather than a patched-together highlight reel. Any sort of industry leveling-up is probably out of the question at this point for Broken Social Scene and the possibility that they’re going for “hits” is entirely theoretical. They’ve never had a problem sounding big, but the inevitable point on each record where Drew and former producer David Newfeld couldn’t keep their friends in check has always been a subject of “bug or feature?” discussion. If not restraint, it’s possible that working with big-time producer Joe Chiccarelli (whose C.V. includes Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage and Jason Mraz and everything in between) actually provided boundaries. This is especially important as Hug of Thunder starts to loosen its grip in the second half; this is how Broken Social Scene albums usually play out, yet they forgo their typical Side B drift for some of the band's most personable and emotionally urgent songwriting to date. It’s also where the stakes of the album are set, confronting haters head-on: love songs appealing to the disillusioned, grounding exercises for those with their head in the clouds, finding common ground between “Cause=Time” and “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl.”
As if their short time on this earth is running out, the band spends the last 15 minutes of Hug of Thunder getting their point across as clearly as possible on “Please Take Me With You” and “Gonna Get Better,” songs that add “plainspoken” and “compassionate” to their many modes. “Future’s not what it used to be, we still gotta go there,” newest member Ariel Engle sings before punning on the title: “Things are gonna get better because they can’t get any worse.” It’s the band’s most audacious dare to cynics—of course it can get worse, they’ll say. It’s probably gotten worse in the time it’s taken you to read this far. But on the ensuing “Mouthguards of the Apocalypse,” Drew speaks to them like a wounded healer. He’s been there and he’d rather kill his friends than see them roll their eyes at a song like “Gonna Get Better.” “I’m trying for the living and I’m staying so I can leave,” he sings on the record’s final words, underlining the message of communal uplift this band has been transmitting for almost two decades: If you forgot it in people, don’t ever let it happen again. | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts / City Slang | July 10, 2017 | 8.4 | 2bbb3896-0c62-4ff5-8fc5-c25d33728268 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Though the music is often engaging and exciting, Low in High School is Morrissey’s second consecutive release that feels regrettably tethered to his increasingly alienating public persona. | Though the music is often engaging and exciting, Low in High School is Morrissey’s second consecutive release that feels regrettably tethered to his increasingly alienating public persona. | Morrissey: Low in High School | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morrissey-low-in-high-school/ | Low in High School | “I make this claim, now let me explain,” Morrissey sings after he first utters the title of “Jacky’s Only Happy When She’s Up on the Stage,” a standout track on his bizarre and ambitious new album Low in High School. Ironically, this is one of his recent statements that needs the least defending. Some zealous fans have suggested the song—which tells the story of a woman devoting herself to the theater after a bout of heartbreak—is an allegory for Britain leaving the E.U. (particularly after a live performance where he chanted “Brexit!” repeatedly at the end). But it plays more like a thinly veiled confession from Morrissey himself. “Jacky cracks when she isn’t on stage,” he admits in its final verse, as the audience flees the room.
Morrissey has courted controversy and dared his fans to abandon him throughout his entire career, but Low in High School marks his second consecutive release that feels regrettably tethered to his increasingly alienating public persona. 2014’s muddled, exhausting World Peace Is None of Your Business was a career-low that’s now nearly impossible to hear. Shortly after its release, the album was removed from record distributors and streaming services due to a clash with his label: a move that feels as bluntly symbolic as, well, the conceit of a Morrissey song. If later solo highlights like 2004’s You Are the Quarry felt like catching up with an old friend, Morrissey’s music is now more like scrolling through their Twitter feed and remembering why you stopped hanging out in the first place.
Since we first met him fronting the Smiths in the ’80s lamenting how pop music said nothing to him about his life, Morrissey has been adamant about imbuing his records with deeper political ambitions. But Low in High School returns him to his most utilitarian purpose: a spokesperson for youthful melancholy. This theme surfaces both in the album title and its cover art—Morrissey’s first in over two decades not to feature his own visage. The first single, “Spent the Day in Bed,” even plays like the 58-year-old’s spin on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a magical day spent shirking one’s obligations, delivered with a prescriptive, winking omniscience. “I’m not my type,” he sings in its funniest line, “But I love my bed.” Fortunately, that song, with its squelchy production and barely-there verses, feels like a pit-stop on the record more than a statement of purpose. For better or worse, Morrissey shows up to work.
Like World Peace, Low in High School pairs him and his band with producer Joe Chiccarelli, who delights in exploring new sounds. While that impulse mostly served to gloss up underwritten material on World Peace, the adventurous atmosphere is more welcome this time. A dramatic army of horns elevates the swaggering opener “My Love, I’d Do Anything for You” to resemble superhero theme music, and the woozy keys in “I Wish You Lonely” make its glittery disco more infectious. The pomp and circumstance also inspires Morrissey to stretch his voice into long-abandoned territory, occasionally slipping into a breathy croon or the playful falsetto of his younger years. A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century.
Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. “Give me an order and I’ll blow up your daughter,” he slurs angrily in the anti-troops polemic “I Bury the Living.” In a catalog filled with questionable manifestos disguised as anthems, this is his most unwieldy, tackling war, class, and suicide over seven interminable, mean-spirited minutes. Other epics about police brutality in Venezuela and Morrissey’s own sympathy for the people of Israel (“I can’t answer for what armies do/They are not you”) are more straightforward though they’re far from effective, let alone enjoyable. His lyrics expose the same insensitivity as his abhorrent comments blaming victims of sexual assault. He portrays the people of Venezuela as helpless and God-fearing, while opponents of Israel are merely jealous barbarians. As he ages, Morrissey’s worldview gets smaller and smaller, and his political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.
In a recent interview, Morrissey pinpointed Low in High School’s driving concern: “Can young people ever be carefree again?” The album’s most agreeable moments are when he posits romance—as opposed to bitter provocation—as the answer. In the breezy, stomp-clap swing of “All the Young People Must Fall in Love,” he vaguely takes aim at Trump and delivers the titular command as a beacon of hope for his devoted legion of loners. In a song called “When You Open Your Legs,” he sings proudly about getting kicked out of a club at 4 a.m. for public displays of affection, bellowing, “Everything I know deserts me now.” The sentiment is echoed in the stark piano ballad “In Your Lap,” which counters observations of apocalyptic chaos with dreams of oral sex. These are not his most delicate works of fantasy, but at least he’s practicing what he preaches. We all walk home alone, he’s reminded us time and time again, and if nothing else, Morrissey’s faith in love remains devout. | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | BMG | November 21, 2017 | 5.7 | 2bbcad0e-d07b-4f93-982b-26e084a8b3d6 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Expanded reissues of the hip-hop legends' first four albums. | Expanded reissues of the hip-hop legends' first four albums. | Run-D.M.C.: Run-DMC / King of Rock / Raising Hell / Tougher Than Leather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11816-run-dmc-king-of-rock-raising-hell-tougher-than-leather/ | Run-DMC / King of Rock / Raising Hell / Tougher Than Leather | Here are some things about Run-DMC that you might already know: They were the first rap group to go gold, platinum, and multi-platinum, to perform on American Bandstand, to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, to land in rotation on MTV, to endorse a sneaker, and to tour the country. Here's what that impressive list of accomplishments tells you about the group's music: just about nothing.
It's hard to hear Run-DMC's music as music in 2005. For 20 years, their singles have been dorm-room staples like Hendrix and Marley; they danced with Steven Tyler on a hundred VH-1 video countdowns, their fedora-clad images have fossilized into pop consciousness. The group hasn't been relevant to rap in nearly 20 years; most of the music played on urban stations' old-school mixes comes from years after the group's peak. More importantly, the group spent the twilight of its career making embarrassing career move after embarrassing career move: performing at the VMAs with Kid Rock, endorsing Virgin Cola, releasing the god-awful 2001 failed-comeback album Crown Royal (featuring collaborations with douchebags like Fred Durst and the guy from Third Eye Blind), and performing at every college in the country again and again and again even though DMC's voice was clearly gone and Run had to help him with all his lines.
Now that the group's first four albums are being reissued, it makes sense to ask whether they're worth buying, especially since multiple hits collections have already compiled their essential singles. The simple answer is no. Every one of these studio albums has filler, especially now that they've been loaded down with bonus tracks, and the excellent compilation Together Forever is still available at finer used record stores nationwide. But Run-DMC remains probably the most important group in rap history, and its albums deserve careful scrutiny, as historical documents and sometimes as more.
The group's self-titled debut album, released in 1984, remains its most powerful and immediate studio record, the LP that forever tore rap away from disco and made it its own thing. Famously, the album's production removed all the glossy live-band funk popular on the rap records of the day and replaced it with a harsh, spacey stripped-down electronic boom. Album opener "Hard Times" is a good case in point: Producer Larry Smith lays down a spooky, chilly electro beat, nothing but a few drum-machine ticks and claps, some heavy breathing, a couple of synth stabs. Run and DMC toss lines back and forth in a tag-team style that never really caught on, yelling rather than flowing, building up to the end of the verse where they're both yelling in tandem. Lyrically, it's nothing special; their street reportage is just another take on their first single "It's Like That", which is itself a vanilla version of Melle Mel's rap on "The Message".
But musically, it's spare and hard and densely compelling, and it probably sounded terrifying in 1984. The rest of the album sounds pretty much like this, hard empty beats with yelled old-school catchphrase-slinging rapping, and it's a strong and forceful time capsule from an era when rap's hardness came from its sound rather than its lyrics or its' practitioners' biographies. The only real misstep is "Rock Box", a track that buries a decent banger under layers of unbearable hair-metal guitar wheedling. The amazing early live track "Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse)", included on the reissue, proves that Run-DMC were actually better rappers onstage than they were in the studio, but then that track is already on Together Forever, as are five of the original album's nine tracks. So Run-DMC is pretty great, but you probably don't need to own it.
King of Rock takes "Rock Box" as its starting-off point, adding a whole lot of heavy rock guitars to the group's musical palette. The new approach endeared the group to suburban America, but it meant that they'd never again capture the dystopian heaviness of their debut. Fortunately, they improve on the precedent of "Rock Box", finding more effective ways to throw rock into the mix. The title track rests on a huge, stomping AC/DC riff, and the two rappers sound pretty amazing yelling over it. "Can You Rock It Like This", with its 80s synth and glossy oriental plinks, could be a Duran Duran song until the rapping starts. This is effective stuff, but it lacks the sonic oneness of the debut and thus carries an exponentially lesser impact. The rapping hasn't gotten much better; they say it's "never ever old school" before biting Melle Mel again on the token social-message track. Today, their lyrics sound archaic to the point ridiculousness ("You're a funny-looking slop eating shish kabob/ You're the reason that my eyes are on the doorknob," "Why don't you find a short pier and take a long walk?"). "Roots, Rap, Reggae" is a truly shitty and forced collaboration with Yellowman, and it captures absolutely none of what makes rap or dancehall great. The album offers little more than the still-thrilling rapping-over-guitars charge of the title track, but again: greatest hits.
Raising Hell is generally considered to be the group's all-time classic, and it certainly has its share of classic moments. Rick Rubin had by this point taken over production from Larry Smith, and he kept the group's thunderous stomp while adding a host of sly sampled musical touches: unbelievably funky bells on "Peter Piper", a great cartoonish piano line on "You Be Illin'", a dirty Southern-rock guitar riff on the title track. Run and DMC had also stepped their rap game up; "It's Tricky" is basically as good as the two of them ever got, spitting quick-tongue witticisms and yelling booming threats with equal abandon. The album, however, has a ton of filler: the goofy human-beatbox jam "Hit It Run", the ridiculously tossed-off dis "Dumb Girl", the utterly blatant Slick Rick bite "Perfection". And "Walk This Way". "Walk This Way" totally fucking sucks, a weak and half-baked novelty-rap jam which got them (and Aerosmith) all over MTV but which sounds no better for having anticipated the commercial possibilities of rap-rock.
That record was the group's commercial apex (it went triple platinum), but the band took too much time off after its release, spending a couple of years making a shitty movie and losing a court battle against its record label. During those couple of years, the landscape of rap changed completely; 1988 was the genre's quote-unquote Golden Age, and Run-DMC looked like relics next to young, more skilled rappers like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane and hungrier crews like Public Enemy and NWA. Tougher Than Leather found the group playing catch-up, enlisting a new producer in Davy D and rapping on the Marley Marl-ish breakbeats popular at the time rather than the booming drum machines that they'd always used.
On tracks like "They Call Us Run-DMC" and "Radio Station", they sound confused and out-of-touch, kicking old-school applause lines over anemic drum breaks. They also revert to formula a few too many times, coming with tracks that essentially amount to sequels of previous hits: adding weird parental angst to the honking goofball punchlines of "You Be Illin'" on "Papa Crazy", awkwardly attempting to shoehorn breakbeats onto a "King of Rock"-style banger on "Soul to Rock and Roll", biting Slick Rick again on "Ragtime". But parts of Tougher Than Leather are just great, especially "Beats to the Rhyme", which found Run and DMC quick-tongue rapping in tandem over an amazing state-of-the-art busy breakbeat with awesome sonar pings like Timbaland would use 10 years later. Tougher Than Leather is a failure, but it's a noble one. The reissue includes "Christmas in Hollis", maybe the first time they would allow themselves to become cartoon characters, kicking it with Santa, DMC chilling and cooling just like a snowman in a line that seems touchingly naïve in the Jeezy era.
And that's it. Nobody is going to be reissuing the group's 1990 album Back From Hell anytime soon, and the group became an old-school signifier, someone for rappers to quote or reference but never hire for features or anything. The group was essentially irrelevant only five years after releasing its first single-- to put that in perspective, Bow Wow has been popular for a longer time. The group was hugely important in changing rap and making it an industry force, but you can't really say they had much influence on the way it sounds today. They removed the flash and gloss of the disco-rap of the Sugar Hill label, and they influenced a young LL Cool J, who influenced Boogie Down Productions and Eric B & Rakim, who influenced the Juice Crew and Public Enemy and NWA, and on and on and on, as rap would undergo sea change after sea change. By the late 90s, much of the music was flashier and glossier than it ever had been in the Sugar Hill era, and any changes that Run-DMC made were changed themselves to the point of being unrecognizable. And so what we have now are four historical documents, each with at least a handful of thrilling moments. And most of those thrilling moments are on Together Forever or other singles compilations, so unless you're a historian or a rich person, save your money. | 2005-09-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-09-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | September 22, 2005 | 8.1 | 2bc131e8-9e72-4b9b-9819-5bf3707e0ce1 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Much more than a Caribbean summer playlist, Bad Bunny’s latest album is a melodic discourse that questions the powers that be and a call to action that encourages diasporic joy, perreo, and rest. | Much more than a Caribbean summer playlist, Bad Bunny’s latest album is a melodic discourse that questions the powers that be and a call to action that encourages diasporic joy, perreo, and rest. | Bad Bunny: Un Verano Sin Ti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-un-verano-sin-ti/ | Un Verano Sin Ti | Bad Bunny moves with intention. Quickly after releasing Un Verano Sin Ti, he made stops that reflect two major themes of the album. The first was a cute, intimate celebration at the last Puerto Rican social club remaining in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: the Caribbean Social Club (also known as “Toñita’s” after one of its owners, Maria Antonia Cay). As one of the most regarded Latinx-owned bars to survive the area’s gentrification while also preserving Boricua history, its existence symbolizes resistance. The day after, he appeared in the Bronx to record a music video for one of the album’s highlights, the upbeat hip-hop dembow fusion “Tití Me Preguntó.” Sporting a T-shirt honoring bachata legend Anthony Santos—whose “No Te Puedo Olvidar” is sampled at the beginning of the track—he was seen turning up with Dominican youth, taking part in the street revelery known simply as teteo. This release-week schedule reflects two of Un Verano Sin Ti’s animating forces: Benito’s bori pride and appreciation of Dominican culture.
Recorded in his native island of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Un Verano Sin Ti is a cohesively packaged voyage through the various sounds synonymous with the Caribbean region—reggaetón, reggae, bomba, Dominican dembow, Dominican mambo, and bachata, among others. The album’s 23 tracks are conceptualized through an A side and B side scheme that separates high-energy party and fun sonidos from tranquility and conscious thinking. Its enticing musical patchwork further lures listeners into El Conejo’s universe of experimental arrangements, sharp and nostalgic synths, and unexpected genre fusions. It’s a loving ode to Caribbean culture that embraces marginalized scenes within Latin America, from the ostracization of Black-rooted genres like bachata, dembow, and mambo to the criminalization of reggaeton.
Since his early Latin-trap beginnings (which he nods to here on “Dos Mil 16”), Bad Bunny’s adventurous tastes have catapulted him to become one of the most prolific global tastemakers. That versatility, paired with impeccable delivery, wordplay, and lyricism, has permitted him to exist creatively in a way no one else in Latin music, specifically within El Movimiento—to push the boundaries of gender conformity and fashion, for example, while simultaneously branching out to wrestling and acting. His range is represented throughout his discography, which spans pop-punk-meets-trap tracks like “Tenemos Que Hablar” (from 2019’s X 100PRE), “Hablamos Mañana” (2020’s YHLQMDLG), and “Yo Visto Así” (El Último Tour Del Mundo, his second album of 2020 and the first all Spanish-language album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200). As he’s gone on to become Spotify’s most-streamed artist two years in a row, Bad Bunny has set records never before seen in the industry. Yet, despite all the accolades and fame, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio can still be found in a narrow, Puerto Rican-owned bar in Brooklyn.
In this tiny, symbolic bar in New York City, he celebrated another muse for the project: the vacations he spent on the west coast of Puerto Rico as a kid. The album’s gratifying transitions illustrate a summer in el caribe—what it feels like to be on those beaches, the colloquial phrases and dialects of the Spanish-language Caribbean. The sound of seagulls in the track-to-track transition between “Agosto” and “Callaita” perfectly evokes the texture and atmosphere of the beach. With dazzling eclecticism, Bad Bunny touches on nu-disco, psychedelia, electro-pop, and house on reggaetón-based songs like “Party” with Rauw Alejandro, “Tarot” featuring Jhay Cortez, and one of its most political tracks, “El Apagón.” The second half brings a wealth of unexpected collaborations: On “Ojitos Lindos” and “Otro Atardecer,” respectively, Colombian cumbia-electro group Bomba Estéreo and indie-pop band the Marías adapt seamlessly into the project’s world.
The B-side also serves as a melodic discourse on Puerto Rican livelihood. Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla joins for “Andrea,” an indie-pop song that touches on femicide and gender violence. “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) is a middle finger to those privatizing the island’s electrical grid and beaches, furthering the displacement and gentrification of communities in Puerto Rico, the world’s oldest colony. “Que se vayan ellos/Lo que me pertenece a mí/Se lo quedan ellos” (Let them go/What belongs to me/They’ll keep it for themselves), sings Bad Bunny’s girlfriend, Gabriela Berlingeri, in the outro. “Esta es mi tierra” (This is my land). The song’s beginning rhythm is the pulse of bomba, a genre birthed by enslaved Africans to preserve tradition that today symbolizes resistance and liberation.
The truth is: perreo, whining the waist, and shaking ass are all forms of protest and expression, and activated equally throughout the album. While the B-side feels designed for whining down and deep thinking, the A-side sets the tone for teteos, cookouts, and beach parties, keeping reggaetón culture at the forefront with appearances from native legends like Tony Dize on “La Corriente” and Plan B’s Chencho Corleone on “Me Porto Bonito.” A major part of the production influences belong to the Dominican Republic, though actual Dominican artists are conspicuously absent. “Después de la Playa,” which opens with synths that transition to a Dominican mambo a little over a minute in, is one of the only songs to credit a Dominican artist by name: Against a foundation of guira, tambora, and piano, you hear, “I’m here with el Apechao”—a reference to Dahian el Apechao, an instrumentalist, singer, and composer with an impressive history of collaboration with mambo and reggaetón artists alike. The lack of visible representation for more Black Dominican artists on an album so indebted to their influence feels like a missed opportunity.
What it means to properly appreciate culture runs deep, especially when you’re a global phenomenon with omnivorous tastes and a vast audience, and Bad Bunny has space to continue learning. Since the mid-2010s, he’s introduced and defined trends for El Movimiento in both music and fashion. Every album rollout brings a fresh aesthetic: From intricate hair designs and brightly colored short-shorts to skirts and punk leathers to the beach-ready boonie hats of Un Verano Sin Ti, he’s constantly evolving. As he did with ’80s synths, romantiqueo (pop reggaetón centered on heartache and love), and emo lyricism, this album sets the blueprint for what’s next and the message is clear: The Caribbean deserves its flowers and will continue to claim space. Bad Bunny’s diasporic summer playlist is the sound of a world preparing for positive healing and joy. | 2022-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | May 14, 2022 | 8.4 | 2bc499b7-45cf-45d9-b7ea-60bee7f3c769 | Jennifer Mota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jennifer-mota/ | |
The rising Afrobeats artist refines her style on a glossy, tightly woven EP. | The rising Afrobeats artist refines her style on a glossy, tightly woven EP. | Gyakie: My Diary EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gyakie-my-diary-ep/ | My Diary EP | Although Jackline Acheampong only recently started making music, she has long been a student of the craft. The 22-year-old Ghanain Afro-fusion artist, who records under the name Gyakie, was 8 when she began accompanying her father, the legendary highlife singer Nana Acheampong, to his studio. In August 2020, during her second year of college, she released her debut EP, Seed, a freewheeling project she wrote and recorded during lockdown. While its wide-ranging genre experimentation didn’t always coalesce, her talents alchemized on “Forever,” a sticky-sweet single whose simple yet vulnerable lyrics announced Gyakie as one of Ghana’s fast-rising Afrobeats talents.
My Diary, Gyakie’s second EP, is a glossier and more tightly woven improvement on its predecessor. Even though the six-song set feels like a direct thematic extension—most of her lyrics still concern love and desire—the production is stronger and her writing is significantly more self-possessed. If Seed attempted to encompass a multitude of sounds without landing on a specific identity, then these songs allow Gyakie to streamline her thought process—sometimes to a fault. As her lyrics dance between feelings of longing and fear, she occasionally finds herself in creative stasis.
The EP opens strong with the Altra Nova-produced “Audience,” a partly sultry, partly somber jazz number. Right away, you can hear the adventurous spirit from her past work, but the motives are now more concrete. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Gyakie, we’re about to have a good time,” she begins, reassuring herself and her listeners before igniting the party with the freestyle-esque riffs of “na, na, na, na” that make up the chorus. The Davido-assisted “Flames” and the clever, bittersweet Afropop track “Something” are also highlights that showcase her growth as an artist.
If Seed allowed Gyakie to exhibit a sense of freedom as an emerging act, My Diary is occasionally too careful in its approach, creating a sense of self-imposed restriction. While it’s refreshing to hear Gyakie move beyond the winning formula that made “Forever” a hit, she is still trying to find a sound that is uniquely hers. Closing song “Waka Waka,” a reggae fusion track, illustrates the ambiguity, beginning with high energy but struggling to maintain its flow. Beneath the tension in her lyrics—trusting in someone else and guarding her own heart—there is a sense that, had she allowed herself the chance to freefall a bit, she might have returned with a more daring project. At its best, My Diary feels like the precursor to a grander, more confident reinvention to come. | 2022-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Flip the Music / Sony Music West Africa / Epic | August 11, 2022 | 6.5 | 2bc75831-d7c2-461f-94cf-12d02232c4ca | Nelson C.J. | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nelson-c.j./ | |
Initially out last year on a small vinyl-only edition, this collection of skewed country-soul greatness deserves to be heard by more ears. | Initially out last year on a small vinyl-only edition, this collection of skewed country-soul greatness deserves to be heard by more ears. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Poor Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16546-poor-moon/ | Poor Moon | Last year, the tiny North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors issued Poor Moon-- 13 tracks of skewed, country-soul greatness from Hiss Golden Messenger-- in a vinyl edition of 500, each hand-numbered at the lower right corner of the cover. Poor Moon represents just the second release for Paradise of Bachelors and its first collection of new songs; the year before, the imprint debuted with Said I Had a Vision, a collection of mostly ignored and lost would-be soul hits by a small-town Southern producer and tunesmith named David Lee.
Last week, the California-via-New York label Tompkins Square reissued Poor Moon on CD, giving an album that had quickly sold out in its original form a chance to benefit from wider distribution. Tompkins Square is one of the few extant imprints that could give Poor Moon a proper and permanent presence, or one with an aesthetic that fit not only Paradise of Bachelors but also Hiss Golden Messenger. For the last decade, after all, Tompkins Square has dug deep into both the past and present to deliver soulful music in all its numerous guises, whether that's meant box sets of astonishing gospel performances or the one-man-string-band exhortations of Frank Fairfield. Poor Moon thrives on an absolute Pan-American musical alchemy, where classic country and bar-band rock, pristine bluegrass and subversive funk whittle their own way into the same perfect grooves. This is new music that uses the past like a catapult-- into songs that understand their pedigrees without kowtowing to them. Tompkins Square is a readymade home.
Hiss Golden Messenger is, at its core, Durham, N.C., songwriter M.C. Taylor and New York multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch; in the late 1990s, Hirsch and Taylor anchored San Francisco's the Court & Spark, an intriguing act that attempted to till the soil between indie rock and alt-country scenes long before listeners seemed so Fleet Foxes-ready. Poor Moon is the fourth Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it feels in a sense like a debut, or at least some grand curtain finally being pulled back. By far the band's most developed effort, Poor Moon was recorded with a cast of 16 guitarists, string players, horn players, drummers, pickers, and singers and revisits several tunes from past Hiss Golden Messenger albums-- in effect, funneling the band's widespread oeuvre into this one discrete moment.
It works: Poor Moon is a fantastic, on-repeat record that recalls the aesthetic risks and rewards of the best stuff produced by Laurel Canyon's singer-songwriters and, decades later, the stylistically daring musicians associated with New Weird America. Hiss Golden Messenger pairs an instant accessibility with careful complexity; the hook of opener "Blue Country Mystic", for example, is inescapable, but the song's sudden twists and sprints and minute musical details provide a framework of constant unpredictability. There's a beautiful bluegrass trot in the middle and a string-lined country-soul template at the end, but those are exceptions. Instead, Poor Moon largely depends upon the band's ability to hide the seams of its polyglot proclivities. Traces of funk and dub ripple warmly beneath the banjo of "Drummer Down" and the keyboard flourishes of "Jesus Shot Me in the Head", while "Super Blue (Two Days Clean)" washes psychedelic warmth gently over an incisive bar-rock clip. The sidewinding acoustic guitars of the instrumental "Dreamwood" rise from a haze of nocturnal field recordings, suggesting Sir Richard Bishop sitting in with the sounds of a surrounding swamp. These innovative melds put Hiss Golden Messenger in the company of contemporaries like Megafaun, Doug Paisley, and Lambchop, all acts who have lifted from the past with steady visions for the future.
Poor Moon is something of a religious album, but Taylor judiciously applies the same nothing-sacred mentality to his faith that his band delivers to its variegated music. Tying a tight knot between self-definition, self-discovery, and the possibility of self-obliteration, "Jesus Shot Me in the Head" slowly reveals itself to not only be a meditation on giving into God but arguably giving up on life, too. "Daylight" questions the need for good-versus-evil, light-versus dark binaries, suggesting that essential truths get lost at the border between black and white. The same tension ribbons through "Super Blue", the first-person tale of a junkie whose forced sobriety starts to kill him-- at least until he kills it with shots and lines and spontaneous trips down south. "There's a big black horse on a nice straight course/ My bets are fixed/ All right," Taylor sings, his unequivocal sneer embracing and exploring every aspect of addiction all at once.
Taylor uses this album almost like a journal, teasing out various scenarios and debating the proper balance between keeping faith and giving up on it. Musically, for instance, "Under All the Land" might be the album's most easygoing tune, cutting an unlikely path between reggae swagger and country sway. But as Taylor works through his religious indecision, that backdrop makes it clear that he's working again through an age-old debate about service versus selfishness, or about the meaning of freedom in the face of commitment. "It's hard to tell which are kings and which are men," he half-moans, revealing some level of discomfort with both classes. That same blue-collar directness shows up again on "A Working Man Can't Make No Way", an exasperated acoustic rollick surrounded by sighing steel guitar. Here, Taylor puts the woes of the Bible-reading, all-toiling commoner in the harsh daylight of reality. No matter how much the narrator works, heaven inevitably takes his parents; earning a simple wage strips any leisure time he could have ever had, rewarding his allegiance with no earthly sanctuary. Ever so gently, our man rebels: "My bosses can just go to hell," Taylor sings, easing the imprecation skyward. "Tell 'em all I don't give a damn."
It's difficult not to revel in the fortuitous timing of Poor Moon, an album that treats hard times like the only through-line of existence but keeps pressing ahead. At a moment when the international economy seems on the brink of unfathomable faults, when people's rights are being questioned on the basis of religion, and when battles of lesser evils are the only ones seemingly left to be won, Poor Moon offers a steadying sort of balm. Never pedantic or didactic, never extreme or aggressive, Poor Moon is a warm hand on a cold shoulder, a vintage piece of soul music for new times in need. | 2012-04-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-04-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square / Paradise of Bachelors | April 26, 2012 | 7.8 | 2bcba26d-57cd-418a-be2e-0ae3ece2a90e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Mogwai's latest full-length is technically a soundtrack, featuring reworked material from their musical contributions to a BBC 4 documentary on the atomic age. | Mogwai's latest full-length is technically a soundtrack, featuring reworked material from their musical contributions to a BBC 4 documentary on the atomic age. | Mogwai: Atomic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21748-atomic/ | Atomic | Mogwai's latest full-length is technically a soundtrack: It comprises reworked material from their musical contributions to last year’s BBC 4 documentary Storyville - Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise, a chronological history of nuclear disaster (and innovation) from Hiroshima onward. However, unlike the previous works the Scottish post-rock innovators have scored (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, The Fountain, and "Les Revenants") the source material doesn’t have a clear-cut narrative*.* With no outside narration or interviews to provide context to the film's archival cortège (save a series of statistics at the conclusion), director Mark Cousins takes a bold risk and assumes the audience's familiarity with everything mentioned in "We Didn't Start the Fire." It's more an obtuse high-art music video than it is a traditional documentary. Atomic, on the other hand, is anything but esoteric. Despite its minimalistic approach, the album poignantly illustrates the binary oppositions that cropped up in Hiroshima’s wake: life and death, hope and fear, war and peace, atomic and organic.
Mogwai have always thrived on textural contrast: the fission of twangy strings against somber snare hits, the disintegration of brittle synthesizers beneath a tide of feedback, a violin crying out in silence. In keeping with the film’s themes, several tracks on Atomic sound corrupted. Beneath the uplifting fanfare of opening track "Ether," for instance, one can hear a faint, dull drone, as though the band recorded the track on nuked recording equipment. The unsettling murmur continues throughout the entire record, and even in moments of rare purity—such as the tender duet of guitars and violin on "Are You A Dancer?"—the mechanical roar is never far behind.
The majority of the album distances itself from rock and sticks to a doom-ridden breed of new-wave. "SCRAM" sees the group sequencing a stream of staggered synth lines into hypnotic orbit, like a Cold War Calder mobile, while "Weak Force" resembles a piano ballad performed by a forlorn android. The record’s final track, "Fat Man," is the most methodical and magnificent by far. The band take a lone, unassuming piano riff and bombard it with sharp guitar tones, the corruption further catalyzed with steadily-increasing doses of the aforementioned aural radioactivity; there’s a cinematic swell, and then... silence.
Considering the conditions of Atomic's conception, the album’s departure from the band’s preceding full-length, 2014’s Rave Tapes, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, fans expecting a Stuart Braithwaite shred-fest may find the LP a disappointment. But like all good concept albums (and soundtracks), Atomic’s sole allegiance is to its subject. And when you’re dealing with the pinnacle of human innovation and the symbol of death, that subject deserves to take center stage. | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rock Action / Temporary Residence Ltd. | April 8, 2016 | 7.1 | 2bd12ea6-cd79-4b03-8738-a3834ca21ea0 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
On Steven Ellison’s sixth album, his sweeping jazz-funk feels limitless. It sounds more like a sketchbook with FlyLo crafting each minute with great care and technical dexterity. | On Steven Ellison’s sixth album, his sweeping jazz-funk feels limitless. It sounds more like a sketchbook with FlyLo crafting each minute with great care and technical dexterity. | Flying Lotus: Flamagra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flying-lotus-flamagra/ | Flamagra | You’re Dead! was such a momentous piece of work, and such an inflection point in Flying Lotus’ career, that his earlier albums can now sound conventional by comparison. They were original and daring, but remained planted in soil tilled by pioneers like Dilla and Madlib. You’re Dead! offered a different vision: ecstatic, shapeshifting, deeply collaborative, and with a remarkable ability to mask its making. Where most beat music foregrounds surfaces and processes—the fingerprints on the pads of the MPC, the dust in the grooves of the wax—the 2014 album flowed like magical liquid with no discernable source. Where beat music is grounded, You’re Dead! was pure vapor, a lungful of atoms returned swirling into the universe.
You’re Dead! was an album about mortality, one colored by the passing of friends, peers, and family members; it reflected the increasingly cosmic scope of Steven Ellison’s work as Flying Lotus, in which spiritual jazz could exist side by side with sick jokes, the sublime with the ridiculous, fanciful, and ribald. This time, on his sixth album, there is no explicit theme; the through line holding Flamagra together seems to be the creative process itself. Ellison spent the past five years working on the album; 10 tracks swelled to more than two dozen. For a while, it was envisioned as a collection of just beats, no jazz. The jazz eventually wormed its way back in, thanks to longtime collaborators like keyboardists Brandon Coleman, Dennis Hamm, and Taylor Graves; multi-instrumentalist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson; and, especially, bassist Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat, a key member of the Brainfeeder brain trust and a co-writer of the majority of these songs. The album’s guiding metaphor was a flame on a hill. “Then I went to this party and heard David Lynch saying the words that he wound up saying on the record,” Ellison says. “And I was like, ‘That’s it, we’re just going to go in that direction.’”
For all the clarity that the image of a flame on a hill might suggest, there is a lot of murk and confusion. There’s a lot of everything; fortunately, that goes both ways. There are bouts of thick, gloopy overload but also instances of crystalline focus; there are serpentine jazz-funk rave-ups and moments of profound stillness. In keeping with a lot of beat music, many of these tracks are relatively short. The abundance of minute-and-a-half miniatures means that, for all the viscous density of the stacked keyboards, and all the nervous momentum of Thundercat’s agile fretwork, there’s plenty of room to breathe. On a sensory level the music sounds incredible, crafted with a technical dexterity that only accentuates its vast dimension.
Sweeping, prismatic jazz-funk predominates, but there is no shortage of surprises. The 89-second “Andromeda,” a co-write with Thundercat, sounds like Flying Lotus’ take on Radiohead’s version of post-rock. “Say Something,” even shorter, might be Tom Waits soundtracking a Wes Anderson film. “Pygmy,” a late-album highlight, drizzles Thundercat’s high-necked bass melody over rainforest samples and a beat that swishes like a rushing river; it’s as moving as it is simple.
The album feels, above all, like a sketchbook—synths from “Takashi,” a funk-lite tune built from Jackson Pollack-like layers of spattered keys, turn up 11 tracks later on “Debbie Is Depressed,” and their recurrence is more than simple déjà vu; it’s a peek into Ellison’s hard drive, a glimpse at the way ideas from a given session are carried into new contexts. Some of the record’s most sketch-like pieces are its most rewarding: Consider “Pilgrim Side Eye,” a cartoonishly swaggering funk miniature that flips, in its final seconds, into gorgeous, sighing chords, soft as baby’s breath. The song, an instrumental, is over in 91 seconds; jazz great Herbie Hancock is in there somewhere, scampering around within the antic changes, but the horizon is egoless. All virtuosity is channeled back into the spirit of group interplay.
Tierra Whack pulls off the most striking star turn, on “Yellow Baby,” the album’s sparsest track—just a spindly, ramshackle beat, all errant claps and snares, underpinning the Philadelphia rapper’s wild gyrations. Ellison builds the barest of scaffolding for her to dangle from, and she makes the most of this rickety playground, sounding giddy as she lags dangerously behind the beat. Flying Lotus is known as a maximalist, but here he shows how much he can do with simple materials, especially when paired with the right partner.
Even in two- and three-minute doses, 67 minutes of this stuff is a lot. A handful of tracks could probably have been set aside for a separate EP or a deluxe edition of the album. And for all the bold-print clout of the assembled guests—Solange, George Clinton, Toro y Moi, Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano—one wishes for more standout songs on par with You’re Dead!’s “Never Catch Me,” featuring Kendrick Lamar. Ellison comes closest on “More,” featuring Anderson .Paak at his raspy, declamatory best. The hook is an expression of existential yearning boiled down to its essence: “There’s gotta be more to life than myself… Gotta be somethin’ more that I can’t tell.”
It’s here that the album comes closest to the big-picture soul-searching of You’re Dead! But even when he sets his sights on closer targets, it’s clear that Flying Lotus is a rare talent with enviable range, more next-level bandleader than mere beatmaker. No wonder that David Lynch gets a surrealistic spoken-word solo at the dead center of the album: The shock-headed director’s self-contained universes are an obvious influence on Ellison’s own art. True, Flamagra may not comprise nearly as elaborate a world as those that Lynch conjures, and it doesn’t push Ellison’s art forward in the same way that You’re Dead! did. But the afterlife is a hard act to follow, and in the light of that flame on the hill, Flamagra makes for an engaging way station. | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 24, 2019 | 7.8 | 2bd1d0b8-eedb-441c-87b5-7568a2cf387f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The first official release from Seattle-based Fleet Foxes may be largely influenced by vintage folk and rock LPs, but this pastoral psych-pop band does something special with these elements. Fusing classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and epic, reverb-drenched harmonies, the group's brilliantly rustic songs never go quite where you expect them to, instead taking more scenic routes to arrive at perfect, natural conclusions. | The first official release from Seattle-based Fleet Foxes may be largely influenced by vintage folk and rock LPs, but this pastoral psych-pop band does something special with these elements. Fusing classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and epic, reverb-drenched harmonies, the group's brilliantly rustic songs never go quite where you expect them to, instead taking more scenic routes to arrive at perfect, natural conclusions. | Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11206-sun-giant-ep/ | Sun Giant EP | The opening track on Fleet Foxes' debut EP is the perfect introduction to this Seattle band, whose carefully fashioned songs reward more active listening than your typical indie-roots outfit. "Sun Giant" begins with their soft harmonies reverberating in what sounds like a cathedral space. With no accompaniment, their sustained a cappella notes fade slowly, adding gravity to this hymn of contentment: "What a life I lead in the summer/ What a life I lead in the spring." The only other instrument is Skyler Skjelset's mandolin, which enters late in the song playing a delicate theme as singer Robin Pecknold hums quietly.
The Sun Giant EP-- sold on tour and digitally through Sub Pop, with a proper release forthcoming-- contains familiar sounds, but Fleet Foxes make something new and special with them, following their own musical whims as closely as they follow tradition. (Maybe more closely.) These five songs-- modest but never spare, atmospheric but never as an end in itself-- change shape constantly, taking in elements of classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and soundtrack flourishes. Already mistaken for Southern rock (there's not enough boogie in Nicholas Peterson's drums for that), Fleet Foxes will bear repeated comparisons, both praising and disparaging, to groups like My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses, but those connections are based on superficial similarities like geography or the heavy use of reverb. In fact, Fleet Foxes' touchstones are much more diverse than that-- and not necessarily so contemporary. Until recently, their MySpace page listed Judee Sill, Crosby Stills & Nash, and Fairport Convention as influences, although now it reads "not much of a rock band." That's not especially true. You could also make a case that Fleet Foxes' demonstrative harmonies recall Fleetwood Mac; that their rearrangement and recombination of traditional styles hints at the Band or, more recently, Grizzly Bear; that their short, evocative instrumental phrasing bears similarities to Pinetop Seven.
Such comparisons accompany the arrival of most young bands, but Fleet Foxes' songs inhabit a very specific, very rural space that's as much a product of how these songs are assembled as it is of how they sound. Like a novelist writing intricately winding sentences, the band craft hummable melodies that never quite go where you expect, but sound neither manipulated nor directed. After the quiet title track comes "Drops in the River", which builds gradually as the band patiently add instruments-- strange ambient clattering in the background and simple floor toms in place of a drum kit, accentuated with tambourine and a snaky electric guitar. Halfway through the song, Fleet Foxes reach a dramatic peak, and their next move is surprising: The music ebbs momentarily, as if to build anew through a second verse, but then picks up at that same dramatic level. Like the rest of the EP, "Drops in the River" possesses an intriguingly blunt concision, as though Fleet Foxes have no time for the luxury of long, slow crescendos or meandering jams. They focus their arrangements finely, emphasizing Pecknold's rustically impressionistic lyrics as much as their organic and inventive sound.
"English House" and "Mykonos", the longest and most obviously "rock" songs, comprise the EP's rising action and reveal more of Fleet Foxes' range. The former is a graceful downward rush of guitars and percussion, with a falsetto chorus trimming the music like Christmas lights in the rafters. "Mykonos" doesn't travel as far as its title suggests, but thrives on the tension between Pecknold's wordless vocal intro and the band's intricate harmonies. Of course, it careens off in new directions. "Brother, you don't need to turn me away," Pecknold pleads, bringing the song to a dramatic standstill. Then the band just runs away with the song again.
The Sun Giant EP ends with Pecknold alone once more, singing "Innocent Son" with only a few brusque strums as accompaniment. With only the sparsest elements, he turns the song into a sort of rough county-road soul, his voice unceremoniously fading out on the final words. This song, and the others here, reinforce the impression that Sun Giant is more than a tour souvenir or a promotional teaser for a proper release. It's a sovereign work: a statement EP, supremely crafted and confident. | 2008-02-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | February 29, 2008 | 8.7 | 2bd4c108-49d5-4194-aac9-e1d3b2265d5f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Commissioned as the soundtrack to a line of prefab homes, this 1986 ambient masterpiece doubles as a frame for the smallest, most quotidian sounds. It’s a testament to the act of listening itself. | Commissioned as the soundtrack to a line of prefab homes, this 1986 ambient masterpiece doubles as a frame for the smallest, most quotidian sounds. It’s a testament to the act of listening itself. | Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiroshi-yoshimura-surround/ | Surround | Hiroshi Yoshimura was sitting with his eyes closed. Beneath him, a mat. Beside him, several stones. In his hands he held a soprano saxophone. It was September 1977, and he and the musician Akio Suzuki were staging a performance titled HOT BREATH. For the next 12 hours, their time would belong to the act of listening. The 36-year-old composer wanted his music to be “as close to air itself” as possible, and it’s easy to imagine that on that Saturday, he captured something at the level of particles. Above his head hung a paper structure dubbed the “cloud mobile.” It twirled as a result of his movements and his playing, and maybe the opening of a nearby door. If he longed to be part of something grander, something interconnected, Yoshimura got there one modest gesture at a time.
Yoshimura, who died in 2003, believed that any given artwork—like individual human existence itself—represented a single thread of a much larger tapestry. He joined the Taj Mahal Travellers in 1974, and under the leadership of Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi, the free-improvisation group held concerts in the city and in nature, often accompanied by footage of the ocean. Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports would arrive at the tail end of the decade, bringing with it something new: kankyō ongaku, or “environmental music,” a style of site-specific sound art. Yoshimura’s first foray into the genre came with 1982’s Music for Nine Post Cards, created to be played back at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. The spirit of the piece recalls something he once said of a Harold Budd performance: “full of kindness and refinement, allowing us to open up our hearts without limits.” Yoshimura’s compositions were similarly self-effacing and similarly transformative, meant to affect the way we interact with the world.
Yoshimura would spend his career writing songs for public spaces, and the fullest realization of that was his 1986 LP Surround, commissioned by Misawa Homes Institute of Research and Development as a set of soundscapes for the company’s prefabricated houses. The task was daunting: He had to make people’s homes—the most intimate, comfortable place in anyone’s life—even more hospitable. The album’s most arresting quality points to his solution: It encourages an appreciation for everyday beauty. Yoshimura was keenly receptive to the sublimity of the world around him; he’d once spent an entire day looking heavenward, playing his piano to the steady drifting of clouds. Such dedicated practices may have informed the natural rhythms at the heart of Surround, where patient metallophone and guitar-like melodies swim in reflecting pools of limpid electronic tone. The synths on “Something blue” are as charming as they are inviting, every phrase like a cresting wave to float upon. It sounds like Eno’s “1/1” if the latter were twice as fast and suffused with childlike whimsy. It’s this playfulness that sets Yoshimura’s music apart. The music of forebears like Erik Satie, who he loved since high school, could often be construed as forlorn; Surround’s brand of introspection is eminently hopeful.
Comparing Surround to the work of Yoshimura’s contemporaries helps clarify the uniqueness of the Japanese composer’s vision. In the 1980s, Steve Roach and Michael Stearns constructed interplanetary fantasies, Budd & Eno’s The Pearl turned new-age reverberations into mythical dreams, and Ambient 4: On Land was dark and moody, filled with atmospheric intrigue. Yoshimura’s work is far more down to earth, unconcerned with imagining new locales. In “Green shower,” a woodwind-like melody trickles down like rain, landing in a pool of rippling synths. When a higher-pitched tone arrives, it does so with the warmth of a sun breaking the horizon. Conjuring entire landscapes out of a few meager layers of sound, Yoshimura seems to encourage listeners to focus their senses and notice how much music already surrounds us.
For decades, Yoshimura wrote down his thoughts about music in notebooks. Perhaps most insightful was when he mused, “My music is not mine, but the sounds which are not mine are also my music.” As John Cage had with 4’33”, Yoshimura found that anything could be compositional material, that he was a mere participant in the universe’s collective symphony. This is especially apparent on his albums incorporating field recordings, like 1986’s GREEN or 1993’s Wet Land, but similar ideas also animate Surround. On “Water planet,” glistening synths intermittently appear, one note at a time—sometimes offering a semblance of melody, but mostly just sparkling amid diaphanous drones. The song resembles an important precursor to environmental music: suikinkutsu, a Japanese garden ornament where water droplets echo inside jars.
Music this tender feels like a generous embrace. That is the prevailing impression of Surround’s 11-minute centerpiece, “Time forest.” Its synths oscillate without pause, tremolo pulses in constant motion. Halfway through, deep synthesizer chimes offer a welcome sense of stability amid the soft tumult. “Serenity might be the supreme music I am aiming at,” Yoshimura once said. He wasn’t endorsing escapism; he detested rock’n’roll for pursuing just that. His music instead prized hyper-awareness of one’s surroundings. Even his peers making kankyō ongaku couldn’t quite reach this careful balance. At times, their works could be too dramatic, or leave one drifting aimlessly. With Surround, each new development is vital, and its quietude is a site for active engagement.
In the original liner notes for the album, Yoshimura requested that it be played at a low enough volume to allow space for conversation. He wanted its contents to be on the same level as, say, the patter of footsteps. Turn the title track up to 11 and you can hear the emotional pull of its synth pads. Bring it down several notches and all that remains is a low hum ringed by a faint glimmer—it feels, quite beautifully, like walking through mist. In a way, Yoshimura’s work is the antithesis to musique concrète: If those composers exerted dominion over nature, reconfiguring sounds through tape-spliced collages, then Yoshimura was merely surrendering to it.
Yoshimura made his way through the world via sound, once declaring, “I look with my ears.” He gives us a chance to experience that on “Time after time,” the magnum opus of his entire oeuvre. There’s a startling clarity to each mallet strike, and when hearing it alongside the ambient noise of one’s living quarters, everything—the rustling of dog tags, the clanging of silverware—seems imbued with an extra glint. His music can be understood as an alternate version of Pauline Oliveros’ deep-listening practices, except without the long-form drones and extended retreats. To become extraordinarily attentive, he simply gives you the sparest of sounds. At his concerts, Yoshimura had performers wear paper bunny ears to signal that people should listen closely. On Surround, he asks us to be like a rabbit grazing in the evening stillness, perfectly attuned to our surroundings. | 2023-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Temporal Drift | October 14, 2023 | 9 | 2bdee843-a6ea-44ab-9c40-c149067b290b | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
DJ Khaled is a savvy curator; too often, that’s all he is. His latest collection of star-studded rap party bangers offers the rare opportunity to isolate what, exactly, he adds to a track. | DJ Khaled is a savvy curator; too often, that’s all he is. His latest collection of star-studded rap party bangers offers the rare opportunity to isolate what, exactly, he adds to a track. | DJ Khaled: God Did | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-khaled-god-did/ | God Did | On stage at the VMAs this year, clad in an ash-gray suit with slime-green sneakers, DJ Khaled couldn’t stop screaming. He and Offset were there to present the contenders for the Best Collaboration award. Khaled is arguably the person best qualified for this gig, given that he’s built a musical empire by recruiting big names to hop on his beats. But instead of offering any insight into the logic behind his vast catalog of all-star team-ups, every few seconds, he squinted at the crowd and bellowed the title of his new album: “GOD DID!” The moment went viral, as DJ Khaled appearances tend to do; being a meme has often eclipsed his music. At least this time he wasn’t also getting slimed.
This is what we’ve come to expect from DJ Khaled: excess, repetition, excessive repetition. He makes catchphrases first, songs second, and in the 15 years since he started releasing music, his signature mantras and affirmations—another one, major key, we the best—have stuck harder than most of his actual songs. His past three albums, in particular, were stuffed with paint-by-numbers hip-hop, full of juddering bass and air horns. Khaled operates more like a party planner than a producer: He knows who to invite, and what’s required to set the mood, all while recognizing that his own appearance will never be the main attraction. Frequently, the only way to identify a DJ Khaled track is hearing him shouting his own name. He stays in the background for most of God Did’s 18 tracks—but once in a while, he finally tiptoes out of his usual templates. It’s not enough to salvage a bogged-down album, but coming from him, even a little experimentation is surprising.
Rather than kicking off the record with a grandiose inspirational message, as he’s often done in the past, Khaled saves it for the outro and introduces God Did with less than a minute of Drake at his pettiest. “They act like we friends/Whole time is pretend,” Drake sings over delicate music-box synths, with no corkboard affirmations in sight. It’s an elegant diversion from Khaled’s standard, thump-focused fare, which makes it all the more overwhelming when the title track barrels in. “God Did” is an eight-and-a-half-minute exercise in bombast: screeching tires, spiraling electric guitar, the back-to-back steamroll of Rick Ross handing off to Lil Wayne handing off to four straight minutes of Jay-Z. Jay’s sprawling verse should be its own track—even the joy of hearing him brag about monogrammed pockets and “pushin’ Fenty like fentanyl” wears out eventually—but “God Did” is ambitious, the first time since Khaled’s early records that he’s reached for actual grandness, instead of empty proclamations of it.
Khaled is a savvy curator; too often, that’s all he is. God Did offers the rare opportunity to isolate what, exactly, DJ Khaled adds to a track. He stitches a snippet from the Lox vs. Dipset Verzuz battle into an interlude with Jadakiss, and the shouts of the crowd invigorate a stretch of sterile, focus-tested songs. Khaled’s craft is clearest in his remix of Kanye West’s “Use This Gospel.” He updates the 2019 track with an Eminem verse that slots easily over chiming bells and rolling drums, raps sputtering into hyperspeed. It spins out into a bass drop, turning a pensive song from Jesus Is King into a banger to wake up a party, or at least something to blast at the gym.
All-purpose intensity is the appeal of Khaled’s albums, which have the subtlety of shotgunning a Red Bull. Many of the tracks on God Did can’t sustain the energy, though. Two out of three Migos phone it in on “Party,” opening with energetic ad-libs that peter out conspicuously. Gunna and Roddy Ricch wilt on “Fam Good, We Good,” sounding bored by the time they reach the chorus. Even Lil Baby can’t resuscitate “Big Time” from a plodding beat and the absurdity of Future’s very first line: “Rainbow Audemars ’cause my bitch bisexual.” “Staying Alive” unfolds like a caricature of a Khaled song, ticking off the requisite expensive sample as Drake interpolates the Bee Gees through Auto-Tune.
Some of the album’s most appealing melodies and hooks seem more incidental than intentional, the logical outcome of combining stars and beats, then backing away. Restraint can pay off—the late Juice WRLD shines on a track that’s just him, and 21 Savage could rap over an iPhone alarm—but you’re left wondering what could happen if Khaled took a more active role. Putting Latto and City Girls on the same track is a winning idea, but on “Bills Paid,” their verses are cordoned off from each other. SZA gets confined to the chorus on “Beautiful,” when she could’ve added zest to Future’s croaky raps about eating shrooms and burning sage. What would a DJ Khaled album sound like if he were more director than set decorator, if he harnessed the power of collaboration to push artists beyond their comfort zones? In a few moments, God Did hints at the possibilities. But when it comes down to offering new wisdom or proudly repeating the tried-and-true, we already know where DJ Khaled stands. | 2022-09-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | We the Best / Epic | September 7, 2022 | 4 | 2be12231-e6fd-434b-bc43-85217802b1cc | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The new reissue of Tom Petty’s benchmark 1994 solo album has a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes it feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. | The new reissue of Tom Petty’s benchmark 1994 solo album has a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes it feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. | Tom Petty: Wildflowers & All the Rest (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-wildflowers-and-all-the-rest-deluxe-edition/ | Wildflowers & All the Rest (Deluxe Edition) | Imagine the scene: It’s 1994 and Tom Petty is presenting his new solo album Wildflowers to the suits at Warner Bros. He’s been working on this music for two years with a new collaborator, producer Rick Rubin, and he is excited. He presses play. The first thing you hear is the title track, which sounds like a folk standard. Next, you hear “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” with its booming drums and wrecking ball of a chorus; it sounds like a hit single. Then you hear 23 more songs.
It’s amazing, the label says, but it’s too long.
Somehow, the artist sitting across the table—43 years old; a friend and collaborator of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Johnny Cash; an artist who has spent his decades-long career demanding control over everything with his name on it, right down to the price of his albums—agrees. Wildflowers is released that fall; 15 tracks, 63 minutes. It goes triple platinum and many considered it his masterpiece.
The further that Tom Petty got from Wildflowers, the more admiration he felt for it, and the less he understood it. In later conversations with Rubin, he admitted to feeling slightly intimidated: not sure he could ever top it, uncertain where it came from. In the last years of Petty’s life, he spoke optimistically about revisiting the material for a box set and maybe a tour. It was the next thing on his list.
Three years after his death, we have Wildflowers & All the Rest, the immersive collection Petty had in mind, curated by his family and bandmates. It includes, along with the album itself, finally back on vinyl, All the Rest: a 10-song set of outtakes, forming a solid studio album that Petty considered releasing under the name Wildflowers 2. Then there’s Home Recordings, which compiles Petty’s intimate solo demos from the era. Next is Live Wildflowers, a thrilling collection that shows how audiences around the world received this material on stage over the span of two decades. And finally, there’s Alternative Versions (Finding Wallflowers), where you hear Petty and his bandmates experiment with the songs in the studio: a set of performances notable for their minor variations in lyrics and arrangement (and, in one instance, because Ringo Starr is playing drums).
It is a lot to take in. Of course, even before this collection, Wildflowers was overwhelming by design. There are classic albums that feel carved in stone, where every note seems purposeful in communicating a point: your Born to Run’s or Blue’s or Petty’s own Damn the Torpedoes. And then there are albums like this, where the messiness is the point: you come to hear an artist indulge in whatever spirit strikes them in the studio that day. It’s the type of album where one song might be a hopeless acoustic ballad inspired by John Fahey, but the song directly before it might involve goofy non sequiturs about sex while someone rips a guitar solo.
It’s a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes this box set feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. Like the album itself, these recordings are fascinating, fun, and sometimes unsettlingly intimate. “Don’t Fade on Me,” the aforementioned Fahey-inspired ballad, is presented in an early solo rendition where you learn that Petty’s lyrics about a failing romantic relationship actually started as a desperate intervention from a guitarist to a bassist. (It is particularly unnerving considering Howie Epstein, the bassist in Petty’s own band, the Heartbreakers, was struggling with heroin addiction that would take his life less than 10 years later.)
More than any of Petty’s albums, Wildflowers is driven with autobiographical intensity. It’s telling that even in the earliest forms of these songs, he accompanied himself with harmony vocals and 12-string guitar and piano, as if he wanted to make sure even these versions would sound good blasting from a car radio. And yet, the music is filled with details about addiction and divorce (Petty and his first wife Jane separated a year after the album’s release). An outtake called “Harry Green” is a hushed acoustic song about a high school outcast who befriended Petty back in Florida and died by suicide. He is one of many ghosts who haunts this music, even if the song itself may have felt too confessional to include.
The other outtakes are less revealing but often remarkable: “Leave Virginia Alone” has a chorus so romantic and sugar-sweet that Petty ended up lending the song to Rod Stewart. “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” is present only on the Home Recordings set, and it’s a fine addition to Petty’s legacy of gorgeous, stoned lullabies. In the liner notes, bandmate Benmont Tench notes that this release marks his first time hearing the song; he confirms this by noting that, had he heard it earlier, he would have demanded they record it.
Because each component of the set feels like its own carefully constructed album, it avoids the historical aura of something like Dylan’s Cutting Edge set—where entire studio sessions were presented with incomplete takes and banter. Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part. On the live set, two outtakes find definitive versions: the riotous “Drivin’ Down to Georgia,” where the Heartbreakers explode in the way they only could with an audience cheering them on. And then there’s “Girl on LSD,” a goofy B-side that Petty can barely get through without cracking himself up. “I’m sorry about that,” he deadpans as the audience roars. “I don’t know what happened to me there.”
This lightness sustains the set. Take the Home Recordings version of “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” a moodier take on a road trip classic, complete with several discarded lines. “Most things that I worry ’bout/Never happen anyway,“ he sings in a whisper, drawling the syllables through its now-familiar, seesawing melody. Listening to all the bonus discs, it’s a lyric you will hear him try to work into multiple songs. It becomes a kind of mantra, a way to check his anxiety and turn it into something lighter, something you can sing along with. For those of us who have always listened to Tom Petty for this reason, there is comfort in knowing you can turn to Wildflowers. And now, you can live in it.
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. | 2020-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | October 17, 2020 | 9.3 | 2be20c69-d7ee-4472-bf50-e27193058b74 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On his second album, the Boston rapper embraces his strengths, grows into his voice as a writer and draws lessons from his come-up. | On his second album, the Boston rapper embraces his strengths, grows into his voice as a writer and draws lessons from his come-up. | Cousin Stizz: Trying to Find My Next Thrill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cousin-stizz-trying-to-find-my-next-thrill/ | Trying To Find My Next Thrill | Boston rapper Cousin Stizz has spent his career fighting to break into the mainstream. Since signing a major-label deal, he’s worked with big-name producers including Vinylz and WondaGurl, secured guest verses from established rappers like Offset and G-Eazy, and courted the zeitgeist with a variety of on-trend styles: flute-rap, Migos-style repetition, codeine rap. But despite these efforts, Stizz has yet to score a hit after four years in the public eye. The rapper retreats to his comfort zone on Trying to Find My Next Thrill, doubling down on the slow, hypnotic trap on which he made his name. This retrenchment turns out to be a smart move: The end result is Stizz’s most consistent release since his haunting debut, Suffolk County.
Cousin Stizz has always had excellent taste in beats, and for Trying to Find My Next Thrill, he’s tapped fellow Massachusetts native Lil Rich—with whom he’s worked since the start—to executive produce. The pair have sourced a head-turning set of instrumentals: Lil Rich’s beat on “Perfect” sounds like heavy machinery echoing through a wet basement; Take A Daytrip turns in a fizzy club banger on “STP”; and on “Anonymous,” ascendant celebrity producer Kenny Beats punctuates a kaleidoscope of chirpy tones with pillowy drum hits. Stizz anchors everything with his deliberate, subtly melodic flows.
If Trying to Find My Next Thrill has fewer obvious standouts than One Night Only, that’s only because it’s stronger throughout. “Toast 2 That” is a dazzling trap anthem, built atop a twinkling, minor-key instrumental laced with melodica. Stizz’s motivational speeches are well-documented but here, he opens with an outright pep talk (“All my niggas in the jail, man, we always think about you, bruh/Keep your head up high, for real, for real”) before Freddie Gibbs drops a show-stopping guest verse, modulating his speed as he approaches the beat from all sides. On “Off With Ya Head!” Stizz stabilizes a wobbly beat with his unshakable delivery. But here, he allows himself to break character, yelping, “You ain’t stick to the script, now it’s off with ya head!” with the theatrical flair of a deranged monarch. “Perfect” feels a bit rote, but Stizz allows the subject of his desire a response, in the form of a playfully assured verse from City Girls’ Yung Miami (“Top of the Ritz getting ate like a steak,” “Yes, I’m a fool for the carats/Spirit animal is a rabbit”).
In hindsight, One Night Only was an album shaped by growing pains: not only was it full of stylistic experiments, it also found Stizz reveling in his newfound wealth and status in the most generic terms. With Trying to Find My Next Thrill, he’s figured out that it’s not the lifestyle that he leads but rather, the distance between where he came from and where he now sits that makes for his best writing. On “Meds,” he confides that his weed habit is a coping mechanism for PTSD, and on “Soso,” he reminds himself not to get too comfortable. “The Message” finds Stizz in full storytelling mode, narrating the mistakes of his youth with the hindsight of a man who made it out, while on “Traumatized,” he asks a detractor, “How could I stop now? I'm selling hope.” At its best, Trying to Find My Next Thrill reveals Cousin Stizz to be a reflective and self-aware writer, an everyman behind the jewelry and designer clothes. | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | August 29, 2019 | 7.1 | 2be39cda-5014-4010-b40f-9b7b8d6206ca | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
On their second album since reforming in 2010, the UK’s once-notorious indie rockers settle into the congenial sound of a pretty good band. | On their second album since reforming in 2010, the UK’s once-notorious indie rockers settle into the congenial sound of a pretty good band. | The Libertines: All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-libertines-all-quiet-on-the-eastern-esplanade/ | All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade | In Carol Reed’s classic film The Third Man, Orson Welles’ slippery anti-hero Harry Lime justifies his descent into criminality by comparing the cultural output of Renaissance Italy during the turbulent rule of the Borgia family with that of Switzerland. The Swiss, he concludes, “had brotherly love and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” It is a reference that the Libertines, with their love of fading Albion, would surely appreciate, though perhaps not when directed at All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, their second album since reforming in 2010.
During the Libertines’ first run, from 1997 to 2004, the band thrived on a perilous creative chaos, driven by the love/hate relationship between founding members and principal songwriters Carl Barât and Peter Doherty, plus London bus-loads of hard drugs. Unhealthy though it undoubtedly was —Doherty, famously, was jailed for burgling Barât’s flat and the pair needed bodyguards to keep themselves apart during the recording of their second album—this tension produced a thrilling, white-knuckle-scrape of a debut and a follow-up that intermittently sparked on its way to the top of the UK charts. In keeping with this tempestuous history, the band’s third album, 2015’s surprisingly vital Anthems for Doomed Youth, was “born of complexity,” according to Barât. This leaves All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade as the first Libertines’ LP to spring untroubled onto wax.
For anyone who grew up on the Libertines, it’s hard not to root for them. And yet initial signs here are far from promising. “Run Run Run”—the lead single that, ironically, is about trying to escape the past—uses the well-worn line “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” within the first 30 seconds. Its meat-and-potatoes indie rock doesn’t get much more inspired from there: The line between a good Libertines song and a bad one remains perilously thin. “Night of the Hunter” goes a step further, filching not just its title (from Charles Laughton’s 1955 noir masterpiece) but also its central motif, in this case from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a borrowing better left unheard. On “Oh Shit,” the Libertines rip off themselves with a spiraling guitar riff that’s a near copy of their 2003 single “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun.”
What are the Libertines without their central tension? Not that different, perhaps, to the Britpop bands they followed into the charts or the legions of wannabes they inspired in the early 2000s, which is to say very much in the classic British rock lineage of the Kinks, the Jam, and the Smiths, albeit without the wistful beauty, artful fury, and naive experimentation of all three. There are moments on this album that speak to a band that once embraced its idiosyncrasies. “Baron’s Claw” has a touch of hot jazz in its sprawling trumpet lines, while “Be Young”’s excursion into reggae is interesting, if not entirely rewarding, helped by the fact that Gary Powell is one of indie rock’s smartest drummers.
These points of interest are outweighed by a run of well-crafted but derivative indie-pop tunes where melodic smarts meet copybook songwriting. “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” borrows the title of a well-regarded 1992 biography of Nico and sets it to a swooning, downbeat melody, while “Man With the Melody” could be latter-period Blur with its twinkling strings, acoustic guitars, and craftily descending, Albarn-esque melody. It’s a perfect illustration of All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade’s central conundrum: The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.
This album is no Renaissance masterpiece, then. But it’s not quite Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock either. Stripped of their fraternal bad blood, the Libertines are just a band—and a decent one at that. But, as All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade chugs to its chummy finale, you do almost wish that someone would start burgling someone, if only to see what happens. | 2024-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Casablanca / Republic | April 8, 2024 | 6.3 | 2be99859-2eda-4072-85c0-2bc82e8d2e4d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Austin band returns with its longest and loosest record, characterized by a new sense of lightness. | The Austin band returns with its longest and loosest record, characterized by a new sense of lightness. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: XI: Bleed Here Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-dead-xi-bleed-here-now/ | XI: Bleed Here Now | Not all tales from the pandemic are tragedies. As Conrad Keely tells it, he rather enjoyed the unhurried pace of lockdown and the long days he spent blissfully reading, cooking, and hiking to nowhere in particular, all a welcome respite from the grind and indignities of playing in an aging band with slumping album sales. “Put simply, it was a dream come true,” he says of the downtime he hadn’t realized he’d needed.
Keely tried to bring some of that same sense of leisure to the sessions for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s 11th album, XI: Bleed Here Now, reasoning that if the band was going to keep carrying on, it shouldn’t feel so much like work. A new six-piece lineup, anchored as ever by Keely and Jason Reece, decamped to an old barn outside of Austin to record, not only to save money but to spare themselves the pressure of tight deadlines. Between takes they’d grill or play soccer and frisbee (or sometimes both at once, via a game they invented called frizball). They spent their evenings luxuriating in wine and conversation.
That relaxed attitude might seem at odds with the fundamental try-hard nature of this band, but it doesn’t curb the group’s signature scope. Bleed Here Now is looser than any recent Trail of Dead album, even though at 75 minutes it’s the band’s longest album to date. It sprawls as much as you’d expect, yet its best moments have a lightness, almost nonchalance to them. True to the album’s punny title, Trail of Dead are still bleeding for their art. But they’re also trying to be in the moment.
Where past records strived for huge statements, Bleed Here Now settles for satisfying standalone tracks. That’s especially true of the album’s exhilarating first half, which plays out as a parade of spirited genre dalliances. In a five-song stretch, they smash cut from the psychedelic jangle of “Field Song” to the Foo-Fighters-by-way-of-Meadowlands anthemic alternative of “Penny Candle” and the Black Sabbath-y vamping of “No Confidence,” then place a roaring hardcore throwback called “Kill Everyone” after a string interlude fit for a Game of Thrones sequence.
While some of the grander swings of the album’s second half inevitably succumb to bloat—it’s as if Keely can’t resist soundtracking the Final Fantasy fan fiction in his head—the record is at its best when it goes small. Bleed Here Now’s sweetest song is its most intimate: “Growing Divide,” a tender, finger-picked plea for climate action in the face of partisan stalemates. “Don’t let the sight of a growing divide make you give up on humanity,” Keely harmonizes with Spoon’s Britt Daniel, their voices enveloping each other for maximum warmth over the sounds of the cresting ocean.
It’s a testament to how approachable, how pleasantly hummable, so many of these songs are that they overshadow the album’s gimmick: It was mixed in quadrophonic sound, a four-channel surround mix considered state-of-the-art in the ’70s but that hasn’t been used much since. You can imagine how rich that might sound, with all that drum separation and all those strings and synthesizers waltzing back and forth between speakers, Zaireeka-style. But you’ll probably have to leave it to your imagination, since nobody outside of the most dedicated Steve Hoffman forum users will have the setup to hear it the way it was intended. It’s endearing, really, the way this band goes the extra mile, even when it hardly matters, but the best thing about Bleed Here Now is how it rarely feels like work, despite all the work that clearly went into it. In their own overachieving way, Trail of Dead have made a hangout record. | 2022-07-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dine Alone | July 21, 2022 | 7.5 | 2bea6daf-a323-48d1-8ffa-c3c39b76d94d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The L.I.E.S. label head makes a rare appearance on his own imprint, clearing away the lo-fi cobwebs and digging into tough, percussive dancefloor cuts. | The L.I.E.S. label head makes a rare appearance on his own imprint, clearing away the lo-fi cobwebs and digging into tough, percussive dancefloor cuts. | Ron Morelli: Heart Stopper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ron-morelli-heart-stopper/ | Heart Stopper | Thirteen years ago, DJ and producer Ron Morelli began releasing records by friends and neighbors like Delroy Edwards and Traxx, quickly establishing a very New York take on Detroit techno and Chicago house. Their residue was both greasier and grittier than neighbors like disco gentrifiers DFA; he called his label Long Island Electrical Systems, like a Kraftwerk on the Atlantic. Since then, a variety of renaissances in New York dance music have brought L.I.E.S.’ brand of rough-and-tumble rhythm-making in and out of fashion, but its vision has remained steadfast, even as Morelli himself ditched Brooklyn for Paris a decade ago. L.I.E.S. hasn’t released much of Morelli’s own music over the years, but number 200 is all his own, and it’s a treat. Heart Stopper shakes off the usual L.I.E.S foggy grayscale and turns on some flickering neon. It’s a bouncy beast.
“House Music Revenge” announces Morelli’s shift: A kind of fanfare reverses endlessly backwards; a sample of what sounds like someone saying “woo-hoo” stacks on top of itself, the way an infectious exclamation moves through a crowd; and a nice little package of kicks and clacks invokes a friendly night of dancing. “Rule Is to Survive” is also propulsively reversed, with dry snares and cymbals straining against a tide of thick mid-range gurgles and moans and whispers. The drums win on “Tricks of the Trade (Dub),” a tom-tom workout that succumbs to the pleasure of a well-engineered kick drum and a handclap with a bit of echo. Sometimes the simplest beats are the sharpest, and this one cuts deep. “Gun Smoke” is also tough, although less spaghetti-western aria and more laser-beam residue; its forceful patterns of snare drum and sequencer keep rearranging themselves, occasionally shuddering into fractal takes on four-on-the-floor. But the blustering “Subway Shootout” wins the day, spraying percussion around with wild precision, as if Morelli was playing Duck Hunt with the drum machines.
Vocals are welcome. With its cowbell baubles and call-and-response stabs, “Another Old Beat Track” butches up a Bobby O-style beat by pitching it way down, like the Pet Shop Boys’ “Love Comes Quickly” but not quick at all, and intoxicated but maybe not exactly in, like, love. The singer of “Tangle Trap of Love” feels something. Maybe everything. “All our emotions are caught up,” he moans, his voice in pain and delight. The metallic percussion almost swings, but the steely bassline keeps things caged up, even as the keyboards swan around in echoes of the deadly serious, preposterous glamor of the Liquid Sky clubs. House ghosts anchor the deep and creepy “Time Stands Still,” but they also haunt it: Slips of melody poke through the fog like fingers pulling upon a curtain, show their face as piano-house riffs, then disappear as suddenly as they came. A voice chants distortedly about reality and escape and someone strikes first a prefab tabla sound, then a shivery maybe-marimba, gesturing at a transcendence that never comes.
Or maybe that’s the old style. Morelli closes with “Natural Deaths,” a mid-tempo sparkler closer to the sweeter side of bittersweet than most anything he’s previously released. Droplets of goth guitar threaten to storm, but settle into a cozy pitter-patter gently softening the drum machines. “Ron’s Torture” is similarly comfortable in its sad-sack skin, dressed up in long cloaks of melancholy synths. But the title track is the ultimate treat, a stiff cocktail of filtered congas and chimes on the rocks. There’s a bit of “Big Fun,” a bit of “Testone”; there’s a sense of the radio mixes beaming west from Chicago’s WBMX radio station in the 1980s meeting the rave pirate broadcasts beaming west from the UK and settling into the petroleum used to make Morelli’s records in New York City. This is no nostalgia trip, though. It’s the longtime L.I.E.S. vibe: not looking back, but looking over its shoulders, relentlessly moving on. | 2023-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | L.I.E.S. | April 28, 2023 | 7.6 | 2bf1c73d-fe48-4a63-8b61-2f0e5ec90e19 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The Soft Pink Truth is the project of Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, and Why Pay More? is a typically conceptual project based on samples culled from YouTube. Half abstract collage, half dance album, and altogether weird, it's a fitting tribute to the website a decade after its rise to popularity. | The Soft Pink Truth is the project of Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, and Why Pay More? is a typically conceptual project based on samples culled from YouTube. Half abstract collage, half dance album, and altogether weird, it's a fitting tribute to the website a decade after its rise to popularity. | The Soft Pink Truth: Why Pay More? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21348-why-pay-more/ | Why Pay More? | Drew Daniel of the Soft Pink Truth remembers the first thing he ever watched on YouTube. For most people with Internet access, recalling one's initiation into the era of video streaming is like remembering the first picture they ever saw, or the first song they heard—it's damn near impossible. Daniel, on the other hand, remembers the moment he clicked the play button, saw an Iraqi sandstorm, and set off down the path into one of the biggest repositories of human experience ever constructed. At the end of 2015, he put that self-awareness to the test by dropping Why Pay More?, a musical case study of YouTube and the ways it amuses, alarms, alienates, and unites the modern mind. Half abstract collage, half dance album, and altogether weird, it's a fitting tribute to the website a decade after its rise to popularity.
Rather than look to globally recognized memes to illustrate YouTube's power and ubiquity, Daniel calls on the mostly forgotten fragments floating out there in the algorithmic abyss, waiting to be stumbled upon by accident or odd search (in other words, no Crazy Frog here). His samples come from the clips on the nth page for the search result "party," the 10 videos viewed a collective 10 times, the zeroes and ones that never mattered—until now. Sonic traits most listeners would consider detrimental—poor sound quality, background noise—form the basis of the record's texture. Within the tightly wound confines of "Acappella," for example, an amateur soul performance that sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom finds new life as an echoey sample in a house track. Various explosions, screeching tires, and sarcastic anti-drug monologues find their way into the ragtag mix as well, colliding and collapsing until the junk gets vulcanized into a speedy machine.
Queerness is intrinsic to the Soft Pink Truth: 2014's Why Do the Heathen Rage? sought to expose and deconstruct the homophobic attitudes lurking beneath the surface of black metal fandom, and Daniel's introduction to the project, 2003's Do You Party, drew upon the sounds and experiences of his time as a go-go dancer at Bay Area gay bars earlier in his life. As a musical case study of YouTube—one of the century's near-universal mediums—Why Pay More? requires a broader lens to illustrate the amorphous, anonymous nature of the website. But there are many tracks on the record—"I Love Your Ass," " Fire Island of the Mind," the title track—that bring the queer-as-fuck energy of Daniel's earlier material. "Are You Looking?" assembles results for the terms "Looking" and "Step" into a brittle-sounding dancefloor turn, solidified by a sample from Madonna's "Vogue," a song inspired by (and arguably pilfered from) gay culture; aside from that, the former keyword links a classic term for soliciting gay sex to the act of trolling YouTube, suggesting that something each of us does is queer—that by extension, we all are. It's a sneaky statement that functions simultaneously as a compelling thesis as well as a clap-back to homophobic trolls.
Then there's the title track, which was conceived as a contest/concert at Dan Deacon's Whartscape festival where guests had to guess the track's BPM. Daniel doesn't make that task easy, burying the beat beneath harsh, tinny game show music, warped house synths, and, most unsettlingly of all, a voice-altered clip of what appears to be a demonic android ordering off the Taco Bell value menu. Isolated from its traditional performative context, "Why Pay More?" scans more overwhelming than engaging, putting it in step with the blaring, boorish "Awesome" (hope you like bagpipes) and the cartoonish "Party Pills." Nevertheless, such compositions realize the album's mission of sensory overload—that inevitable, mind-numbing state that we all acquiesced to (however subconsciously) when we clicked on that play button for the first time. | 2016-01-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 5, 2016 | 7 | 2bfb725f-fc76-4c8b-9bae-d6e37323855c | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
null | Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut *Arular*, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, *Arular*\-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical | M.I.A.: Kala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10564-kala/ | Kala | Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kinds of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough. Issues that feel more important than ever as our traditional notions of genre and geography melt away, namely: How we square our desire for freshness and fun with the ugly politics of cultural tourism, or whether we bother at all; how the internet works like a hall of mirrors on identity and meaning; whether there's really any such thing as an empty visceral gesture.
If Arular provided a platform to discuss those things, Kala certainly invites us to continue the conversation. For all the scrutiny and cynicism aimed at her in the past 18 months, M.I.A. hasn't dialed herself down in the slightest. If anything, Kala finds her puffing out her chest and asserting herself more strenuously than ever, half-baked agit-prop and all. When she boasts on the stomping, Bollywood-sampling opener "Bamboo Banga" that she's "coming back with power/ Power," you get the sense that by "power" she means "courage of conviction." Regardless of how you square with her politics, her willingness to continue the muckracking is admirable, if not dimension-adding. Don't forget, she's rubbing elbows with the likes of Interscope and Timbaland now; for all the choices she might have made and the audiences she might have aimed at, the fresh-sounding, adventurous, and not-exactly-accessible Kala is the kind of record that obviously demanded a defined personal vision. Taken in concert with her understandable blasting of Pitchfork for perpetuating the male-led ingenue myth a few weeks ago, this campaign's single biggest revelation is turning out to be M.I.A. herself.
In contrast to her comparatively sparkly and streamlined debut, Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious. While it still sounds, for lack of a better word, as digital as its predecessor, the primarily Switch-produced album paradoxically reaches further than the produced-by-committee Arular in terms of its overall palette of sounds. From the disco bassline and gloopy Eurovision strings of the swimmy Bollywood cover "Jimmy" to the hairy didgeridoos and pitched-up elementary school raps (courtesy of Aboriginal schoolboy crew Wilcannia Mob) of "Mango Pickle Down River" to the bubbling synths of the gloriously woozy "20 Dollar", this represents a significant expansion of M.I.A.'s already big tent of sounds. It also signifies her expansion as a performer. Where Arular saw her make the best of her fairly limited vocal abilities, Kala finds her reaching further outward, either by singing sweetly, as she does capably on "Jimmy", by peppering her chatter with sudden, free-floating melodies ("20 Dollar"), or by simply putting even more emphasis on the elastic qualities of her usual sing-songy delivery, as she does on the pinched-nose baile funk of "World Town" and the celebratory first single "Boyz"-- a triumph of her rhythmic patter if there ever was one.
On paper, M.I.A.'s politics still register as conflicted as ever. She's as enamoured with her own empty sloganeering as she is disapproving of the western world's, and as likely to remind us that AK47s cost $20 apiece in Africa ("20 Dollar") as she is to adorn the chorus of her summer songs with cash register ch-chings and gunfire clatter ("Paper Planes"). An easy hybrid of island patois and Westernized slang, most of her lyrics register as being primarily in service of their rhythms, anyway; as with Arular, the things M.I.A. insinuates are often more rewarding than those she actually says. For example, bits and pieces of standard whitebread indie rock tunes turn up like whack-a-moles all throughout Kala. "Bamboo Banga" pinches a verse from Jonathan Richman's 1976 middle American driving anthem "Roadrunner" only to flip the metaphor from cars to desert animals; "20 Dollar" knowingly pilfers the bassline to New Order's "Blue Monday" before throwing in a lyrical nod to Pixies; even the island-tinged nursery rhyme of "Paper Planes" borrows from the Clash's "Straight to Hell". Whether we're meant to infer anything larger (perhaps about colonization and cultural re-appropriation) from these little morsels is, of course, entirely up to us. But at the very least, it tells us that M.I.A.'s intuition always leads her to interesting places.
And make no mistake, she's in here. While there was a time when you might have been able to argue that Arular wasn't the product of a singular vision, this album makes it increasingly difficult, if not outright impossible, to say that about her output anymore. Even more interesting than how an artist acquires a listenership is what they do once they have it. With Kala, M.I.A.'s made it abundantly obvious where her interests lie, and it's not in toppling 130k. Who dares call her an opportunist now? | 2007-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | XL / Interscope | August 21, 2007 | 8.9 | 2c00d271-a32f-4658-a173-c649b9b6cebf | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Childbirth is a group consisting of Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time). Women's Rights plays like an album created to deflect hopelessness with crude humor, and Childbirth are indiscriminate in their choice of topics, as long as they're ripe for comedy. | Childbirth is a group consisting of Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time). Women's Rights plays like an album created to deflect hopelessness with crude humor, and Childbirth are indiscriminate in their choice of topics, as long as they're ripe for comedy. | Childbirth: Women’s Rights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21019-womens-rights/ | Women’s Rights | Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time) open their album screaming "Childbirth!" and "Women's rights!". Peck pounds her drum kit while Shapiro draws out each phrase, McKenna joining in on the latter. It's a puzzling forty seconds, and at first the track feels either unnecessary or like a joke. But if it is a joke, it feels both vital and too close to home when you consider that 241 representatives of the GOP recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood. It's just as well the punk trio keeps shouting on repeat as if the subject had no meaning.
Ultimately Women's Rights plays like an album created to deflect hopelessness with crude humor, and Childbirth are indiscriminate in their choice of topics, as long as they're ripe for comedy. They'll tackle anything from online dating to Seattle's influx of tech culture, brought to you by Amazon (All band members reside in the PNW). Shapiro opens "Tech Bro" with a cheerful guitar riff only to begrudgingly admit, "I'll let you explain feminism to me/ Tech bro, tech bro/ If I can use your HDTV," proving that you can be disgusted by gentrification, but intrigued with its trappings at the same time. During "Siri, Open Tinder", McKenna's backing vocals are reduced to the simple instructions "Swipe left!" or "Swipe right!" only to exclaim, "Which one are you?!" upon encountering a group photo. All over the album, repeated lyrics are interrupted with one liners to highlight peak ridiculousness.
However, it's not just dudes under attack here. Tracks like "Let's Be Bad" and "Breast Coast (Hangin' Out)" – where lyrics like "Hanging out/ Doing stuff/ With my boyfriend" and "I love him cause he's hot", read like a dig against Bethany Cosentino – are perfect for all the times when perfectly curated Pinterest boards, UGG boots, and pictures of pumpkin spice lattes on Instagram make you want to scream. In order to level the playing field, we're gifted the single "Nasty Grrls" – a laundry list of disgusting habits that "nice young ladies" shouldn't indulge in, like wiping away boogers and never washing bras, amongst others transgressions of hygiene. (Hate to break it to you, but we do dip everything in ranch.)
Then, of course, there's the matter of the band's namesake. They're quick to point out that once you've reached spawning age, women's conversations are downgraded to a competitive arena. Take "More Fertile Than You" where Shapiro outright brags, "I've got eggs by the dozen and you got none". But by far, the highlight of the whole album is the hilarious and dark "Baby Bump". The line, "I'm that horrifying person from your past/ I'm a party creep/ Why are we still friends?" delivered by a snide friend to an expectant mom, rings painfully true. Those of us who choose to abstain from motherhood often feel we become nothing more than grubby, little deviants who snort coke off a key in your bathroom. When will we settle down?
With all of these cultural touch points, it's clear that Childbirth are not concerned with maintaining relevance over the next ten years. Women's Rights is an album created entirely for the moment, which keeps the spirit lighthearted even when they're dealing with heavy-handed subject matter. You know exactly what they're referencing, and they're quick to make you laugh. The problem is, it's easy to feel clobbered by the album's bluntness and their variety of topics don't differ much from the first record. Shapiro and McKenna's back-and-forth calls get tedious and the feeling become less "Well, that's funny!" and more "Okay, we get it". But there's a point somewhere in there, too. Women are subjected to such a barrage of expectations and judgements that it's fucking exhausting even when it's funny, and sometimes you have to mock everything because you feel powerless to change it. It makes you so angry that you have to keep repeating yourself. | 2015-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Suicide Squeeze | October 2, 2015 | 6.8 | 2c050a68-0092-4236-a38f-6a4148bb171f | Lindsay Hood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-hood/ | null |
The pop star’s compilation features Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, and Stormzy in a sometimes nice but hopelessly transparent attempt at a hip-hop crossover. | The pop star’s compilation features Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, and Stormzy in a sometimes nice but hopelessly transparent attempt at a hip-hop crossover. | Ed Sheeran: No.6 Collaborations Project | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-sheeran-no6-collaborations-project/ | No.6 Collaborations Project | The rumors are confirmed: Ed Sheeran finally married his longtime girlfriend, Cherry Seaborn. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God—really, an hour of small talk recorded at the studio of Sheeran’s countryside home in Suffolk and released alongside the album in lieu of any major press—Sheeran fills us in with blissful references to their life together. He’s ditched the good-natured, drunken shenanigans that once led to a scar on his cheek from the sword of an actual British royal in favor of nesting with the person he calls “his lady.” Please congratulate Ed Sheeran on his graduation to matrimony, to becoming an absolute wife guy.
Therein lies the conceptual premise of the bulk of the guest-laden No. 6 Collaborations Project. There’s “I Don’t Care,” an early single featuring Justin Bieber and maybe the best effort on No.6, a vector of the dancehall-lite rhythms sounds Sheeran debuted on 2017’s “Shape of You.” Bieber, a fellow newlywed, shares in Sheeran’s swelling melodies and loving truisms: “I don't care when I'm with my baby, yeah/All the bad things disappear.” Then there’s “Cross Me,” featuring Chance the Rapper and a hook fashioned out of a sample of PnB Rock’s 2017 XXL Freshman cypher, a well-meaning if slightly paternalistic ode to their respective partners.
But the change in Sheeran’s marital status has not inspired a shift away from the chip on his shoulder: I’m not a cool guy, I’m a regular guy, is the subtext of his career thus far. No.6 opens with a heavy-handed, Khalid-assisted reminder that he is not one of the “beautiful people,” a catchy calculation appropriate for the sad-pop dominating the charts. “Antisocial,” featuring Travis Scott and his signature skittering drums, begins with a bizarre instruction: “All you cool people, you better leave now.”
In an album defined mostly by banality, “South of the Border,” featuring Camila Cabello and Cardi B, is an actual bizarre moment. It’s a Latin-pop fantasy—Sheeran sings of someone’s “caramel thighs” and “curly hair”—punctuated by Cardi’s suggestion that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” Huh? Maybe unintentionally, the raceplay points directly to the elephant in the room: Though he built his fame on confessional, earnest acoustic guitar songs, Ed Sheeran loves black music, and he wants you to know it.
Unfortunately, on No.6, that appreciation largely manifests as the belief that he is a competent rapper. On one song, “Take Me Back to London” featuring Stormzy, his flow bears a suspicious resemblance to “Bitch Better Have My Money”–era Rihanna. (Sheeran has settled plagiarism lawsuits on at least three occasions and will go to trial on a fourth this September.) There, and elsewhere, his raps are cringey and simplistic, with all of the subtlety of a plot-driven song written by Lin Manuel Miranda: “It's that time/Big Mike and Teddy are on grime/I wanna try new things, they just want me to sing/Because nobody thinks I write rhymes.”
Being a fan of rap doesn’t mean you can rap. I would never delude myself into thinking I could run a kitchen just because I’ve spent years watching “Chopped.” Alongside 50 Cent and Eminem, both way past their prime as rappers, Sheeran sounds even more out of his depth on “Remember the Name”: “Yeah, I was born a misfit, grew up 10 miles from the town of Ipswich/Wanted to make it big, I wished it to existence/I never was a sick kid, always dismissed quick/‘Stick to singing, stop rappin’,’ like it's Christmas.” Those unnamed haters were right and No.6 confirms that Sheeran is better off sticking within his skillset. “Feels,” which ingeniously unites Young Thug and J Hus, and “Put It All on Me,” which offers Ella Mai a warm piano to shine over, are legitimately irresistible.
In a 2014 Vibe cover story, in which a reporter witnessed him freestyle over beats including YG’s “My Nigga,” Sheeran was described as having a “hip-hop soul.” A couple years later, Stormzy, with whom Sheeran has something of a friendship, took it further. “Even with his rapping he can execute it well,” he told GQ. It didn’t quite come out of nowhere. In the early days, he’d experimented with what a collaborator describes as “singing rap.” And in 2011, after independently releasing a handful of EPs in the style of alt-folk-rock singer-songwriter forbearers like Jason Mraz, he convinced grime greats like Wiley and Jme to participate in his No.5 Collaborations Project album, after which No.6 is modeled. Over the years, he’s performed multiple Nina Simone covers, recorded a song in the Ghanaian language of Twi, and told Billboard that Justin Timberlake, unparalleled in the cultural phenomenon of “blue-eyed soul,” was “pretty close to a direct inspiration.”
Nearly eight years, 150 million albums sold, and dozens of arena-headlining tour dates after No.5, he’s employed a similar ethos but with the expanded budget and superstar access of his status as one of the world’s best-selling artists. Like the original compilation project, much of No 6. is as bad in theory as it is in practice. Pop music has drawn from black cultural expression since the dawn of its existence, becoming increasingly absorbent in recent years. As hip-hop and diasporic genres like Afropop, dancehall, and dembow have framed the dominant modalities of contemporary radio, inspiration and appropriation have become business moves as much as artistic choices. But few releases have been as baldly transparent and destined for ubiquity as No.6, which has all the conspicuous mining of a Drake album, but very little of the finesse or cultural fluency. | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | July 16, 2019 | 5.3 | 2c0a7456-b181-4dcc-bb6b-5aa38be5afa3 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
MF Doom is an ever-evolving oddity. Since starting his career spouting bouncy, Brand Nubian-esque black\n\ power verses with his ... | MF Doom is an ever-evolving oddity. Since starting his career spouting bouncy, Brand Nubian-esque black\n\ power verses with his ... | Viktor Vaughn: Vaudeville Villain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8514-vaudeville-villain/ | Vaudeville Villain | MF Doom is an ever-evolving oddity. Since starting his career spouting bouncy, Brand Nubian-esque black power verses with his late brother Subroc and rapper Onyx in the collective KMD, Daniel Dumile has gained weight, smoked hallucinogens, drank libations, and developed a new style to match his rapidly deteriorating voice. Now, in a new arena of arrhythmia and soft beats, MF Doom staggers into a telephone booth somewhere underground and falls out as Viktor Vaughn.
A joint project between Doom and Sound-Ink, Vaudeville Villain's storyline follows the everyday life of super-villain/beat scientist/drug dealer/stick-up kid Vik Vaughn. Not surprisingly, it plays out much like any other Metal Face project: Doom's sick flow is tied to a fractured cadence, a slurry, guttural delivery, obscure pop culture references ("Unfrozen caveman, look over the contracts") and beautifully simple idioms and metaphors. Although best known for his more whimsical material, this album has Doom frequently coming off like Wu without the pretension, branching out into more evolved song structures (choruses!) and unusually focused topical and narrative tracks.
The pieces here run a larger gamut of topics than the shit-talking he mastered on Operation: Doomsday. Situations faced by our favorite masked rhymer this side of '93 Ghostface include the courtship of an underage girl ("Let Me Watch" with Apani B. Fly Emcee), a drug deal gone horribly awry ("Lactose and Lecithin"), an argument with a Chinese restaurant owner ("Raedawn") and the hilarious gunning down of a lame open mic night. While most underground emcees are content to rhyme about their intelligence, the evils of commercialism, and the general populace's lack of cognizance, Vik finds the perfect balance between complex songs and simple delivery, never hitting you with guilt trips or preaching to the choir.
There's no exaggeration made when you hear someone referring to Metal Face as one of the best writers in rap: "Modern Day Mugging" has Doom turning a tired theme like, well, robbing people from a ghetto cliché into a comedic spectacle, delivering a how-to for all aspiring thugs and thugettes: He only carries a .45 with "no bullets, no clip" that has "black electrical tape over the hole in the handle" but still manages to cause a fellow citizen to "run his chain like an errand." After detailing clever break-in methods, he plays the fall guy, getting shot by one of his elderly victims and claiming that he "woulda let her have it if he had the ammo."
In another example of Dumile's pen prowess, he teams up with former Anti-Pop Consortium rhymesayer M. Saayid for a cartoonish recollection of their education ("Never Dead"). Doom claims, "If I don't study, I'ma cheat off Peter Parker," and then teams up with schoolmate Saayid to run and gun on a search for Doom's stolen Donkey Kong game. Throughout the course of the song, they buy fireworks and indulge in Guyanese strippers in Chinatown, and Doom finds a guru who teaches him "that the roach is never dead," hypothetically cultivating the future super scientist on which this album is based. Songwriting doesn't often come this lush, detail-minded or captivating in hip-hop these days, but it's no surprise that the best songs in the genre are coming from an 80s transplant that claims to be "a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd."
As expected on an album from one of the current greats, the soundscapes on Vaudeville Villain fail to keep pace with the classic lines being dropped left and right. This is Doom's first album consisting entirely of guest productions, and it quickly becomes apparent that he sounds better over his own work. Relatively unknown producers King Honey, Max Bill, and Heat Sensor offer a cohesive sound, but fail to really hit on a mood that suits Doom's drunken master assault. But there are moments where it all comes together brilliantly: Heat Sensor's "Raedawn" is an electronic burner that writhes and lurches like a malfunctioning robot, stuttering out from of a pit of molten drums and sinister bells. King Honey's "Let Me Watch" is a pier-walking rock-skip across the ocean, equipped with a lumbering, Prince Paul-ish jazz loop and bassline. Rjd2 also drops by with the album's showstopper: "Saliva" delivers a triumphant string section, jubilant vocal sample, and bombastic horns across a subtle breakbeat backdrop.
Despite its admittedly slight flaws, Vaudeville Villain goes head-to-head with Doom's other 2003 project, King Geedorah's Take Me to Your Leader, for what stands as the hip-hop album of the year thus far. Unless his collaboration with Madlib (MadVillain) or his official MF Doom LP on Rhymesayers prove to be flawless ventures, this album will come out not just among the year's greatest, but also among the best in his catalog. | 2003-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sound Ink | September 15, 2003 | 9.1 | 2c0ada81-7b81-49d4-b4d2-bd5580ca5511 | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | null |
Along with Nevermind, released a half year later, R.E.M.’s Out of Time was the early-’90s major-label ideal: A blockbuster that multiplied the band’s following without losing existing fans. | Along with Nevermind, released a half year later, R.E.M.’s Out of Time was the early-’90s major-label ideal: A blockbuster that multiplied the band’s following without losing existing fans. | R.E.M.: Out of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22669-out-of-time/ | Out of Time | It was probably overstated, but a few years ago the podcast 99% Invisible made a provocative argument for R.E.M.’s Out of Time as the most politically significant album in American history—not for its content, but for its packaging. The band, the story goes, was wary of releasing the CD in a longbox, the superfluous cardboard packaging that compact discs came in during the format’s early years, so an idealistic Warner Brothers executive pitched them on the idea of putting that wasted packaging to use. The back of the box would include a Rock the Vote petition lobbying senators to support a bill enabling citizens to register to vote at DMVs or through the mail. Those petitions flowed into Congress by the thousands, and the bill eventually passed, leading to a historic influx of new young voters.
The podcast’s numbers are a little fuzzy, so it may be a stretch to directly credit R.E.M. for the bill’s passage. But if nothing else, the story speaks to the band’s stature at the time. In 1991, R.E.M. weren’t just huge; they were important, and the Rock the Vote petition certainly wouldn’t have had the same impact if it hadn’t been packaged around such an enormously popular record. Out of Time gave the band their biggest hit single, netted them three Grammys, and eventually sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, numbers that insured the band the capital to do more or less whatever they wanted for the rest of their career. Along with Nevermind, released a half year later, it was the ideal every major label aspired to during their great independent-artist grab of the early ’90s: a blockbuster that multiplied the band’s following without ticking off existing fans.
Out of Time is a weird entry in R.E.M.’s discography, although in fairness the same can be said of almost every album R.E.M. released during that stretch. Numb from a year on the road, the band largely cast aside the usual electric guitars to fiddle with other instruments, most prominently the mandolin, which Peter Buck claimed he was still teaching himself when he stumbled upon the riff for “Losing My Religion.” Twenty-five years later, that single remains the most perfect pop song R.E.M. ever crafted, but it was hardly a fluke. The longing harpsichord on the album’s other great ballad, “Half a World Away,” is almost as enchanting, while the Beach Boys-bright “Near Wild Heaven” is almost overwhelming in its beauty and generosity. The whole record is flush with violins and cellos, revealing a range and sophistication that none of its predecessors had ever even hinted at.
Of course, Out of Time is sometimes remembered as much for its stylistic overreach as much as it is for all that elegance. It’s the album with “Country Feedback,” the rawest expression of sheer remorse the band ever captured on tape, but also the album with “Shiny Happy People,” a song that to this day many R.E.M. diehards would just as soon will out of existence. On one side it’s got bassist Mike Mills’ most sublime lead vocal turn on string-swept “Texarkana”; on the other it’s got KRS-One on “Radio Song” wailing like the Big Bopper over a wacky organ lick. Somehow, making one of the fiercest rappers of his era sound like such a colossal clown remains the album’s most perplexing legacy.
A quarter century removed from its release, though, those missteps are easy to write off as endearing period trappings. If anything, the album now sounds more like the masterpiece it felt just short of at the time, a work nearly on par with its more universally regarded, nocturnal sequel Automatic for the People. Warner Brothers’ anniversary reissue gives the album the usual deluxe treatment, with a second disc of demos mostly of interest for the glimpse they provide into the band’s process. “Losing My Religion,” for instance, is presented as both a somewhat uncertain instrumental and as a lean, string-less rock song. You can also hear Michael Stipe not quite hit the high notes on an early version of “Near Wild Heaven.”
Much more worthwhile is a third disc included on pricier versions of the reissue: a live, Unplugged-esque performance for a West Virginia public radio broadcast. Since the band had opted against a big tour behind Out of Time, they sound refreshed and just a little under-rehearsed. Stipe’s reverential, beat-poetry recitation of KRS-One’s “Radio Song” verse aside, the band goes out of their way not to take themselves too seriously. Mills leads a demure rendition of the Troggs’ flower-power standard “Love Is All Around,” then Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock join in to bring some honky-tonk rowdiness to a giddy cover of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas.” R.E.M. were one of the biggest bands in the world, but even coming off of their most high-minded record to date—and performing on a day that West Virginia’s governor had christened “R.E.M. Day,” at that—they still sounded like the same gang of old friends who drunkenly recorded a jingle for their favorite barbeque spot for an early B-side. The weight of their newfound importance would eventually take a toll on the group. It hadn’t yet. | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Concord Bicycle | December 2, 2016 | 8.4 | 2c0b7710-dd22-481d-aef7-a37e4dfcd94e | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Sophomore release on Goner records builds confidently on the experimental, 1960s-inspired lo-fi rock of last year's self-titled debut. | Sophomore release on Goner records builds confidently on the experimental, 1960s-inspired lo-fi rock of last year's self-titled debut. | Ty Segall: Ty Segall / Lemons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13262-ty-segall-lemons/ | Ty Segall / Lemons | Ty Segall's self-titled debut was released last year on Castle Face Records, the label run by Jon Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees. His follow-up, Lemons, is out just a few months later on Memphis-based Goner Records, run by the Oblivians' Eric Friedl. Pretend his next one is out on Siltbreeze and it's not hard to triangulate Segall's sound. His short, sharp songs peal out of the garage without raising the doors, sending 1960s rock riffs crashing through splintered, smart-ass lo-fi buzz. After spending time in San Francisco's the Traditional Fools, Segall went way solo, playing early shows all by himself: Alone on stage, he strummed a beat-up guitar, howled his lyrics, and worked a kickdrum with a tambourine duct-taped to it. He has recently started playing with a band, but still believes that all a song really needs is whatever one person can strike, strum, sing, or shake.
This no-fuss, no-frills DIY philosophy defines both of his albums, but especially the rough-and-tumble Ty Segall. It actually sounds like the product of one man, all the instruments he could carry, and an hour's worth of studio time. It kicks off with the guitar and tambourine strut of "Go Home", with Segall's vocals drenched in harsh reverb that doesn't conceal but enhances the song's concise melodies. He's enamored with 60s pop rhythms, so you could conceivably do the Shag or the Mashed Potato to "The Drag" or "So Alone". But his is a limited, limiting set-up, and at times his run-throughs sound obligatory. He apes Jon Spencer aping Elvis Presley on "Pretty Baby (You're So Ugly)", saving the song only with a breakneck distortion chorus. Ultimately, Ty Segall sounds like a test run, a document of an artist discovering what all he can do by himself, which makes moments like the whistled outro on "Watching You", so reminiscent of Sergio Leone, all the more endearing.
Musically and chronologically, Ty Segall and Lemons make a good pair, not only because together they add up to about 50 minutes, but because the latter builds confidently on the experiments of the former. Segall coaxes a greater range of sounds from his set-up, touching on a bit of psychedelic country on "Rusted Dust", frenzied gutter-punk fury on "Johnny", and hallucinatory desert rock on the Captain Beefheart cover "Drop Out Boogie". "In Your Car" stomps with the brat-menace of Black Lips, and the instrumental "Untitled #2" builds its surf rock from the ground up, establishing a fast rhythm section of rimshots and acoustic strums before introducing the barreling lead guitar and wiping out spectacularly at the end. Buffed to a relative shine, these songs are leaner, more frenetic, and simply more imaginative.
With this one-two punch, Segall enters a lo-fi field crowded with artists mining similar influences for inspiration and making similarly compact noise. What distinguishes him from his peers, however, is his ability to instill his songs with a palpable creative zeal, as if the final recordings were less important than the process of performing them. All of his noble goals of prolificacy and spontaneity would be meaningless if his energy and excitement didn't cut through the noise loud and clear. | 2009-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 17, 2009 | 6.7 | 2c0dc3b3-9d1e-414c-a1fe-415163641015 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Earlier this month, the Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, then just 19, released his third mixtape, another collection of murky, tonally somber music. The lovingly crafted X is unrepentantly bleak, and stylistically provocative, combining Earl Sweatshirt's insistent misanthropy with a kind of rap game senioritis. | Earlier this month, the Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, then just 19, released his third mixtape, another collection of murky, tonally somber music. The lovingly crafted X is unrepentantly bleak, and stylistically provocative, combining Earl Sweatshirt's insistent misanthropy with a kind of rap game senioritis. | Lucki: X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20750-x/ | X | It's easy to be reductive when discussing, or processing, Lucki Eck$' music. Earlier this month, the Chicago rapper, then just 19, released his third mixtape, X, which scans like a pretty unsurprising extension of the aesthetic of his previous two mixtapes. Eck$' is murky, tonally somber music: the kind that is borderline overwrought, sometimes irksome in its refusal to get up from under its own weight, even for a minute. Affect-wise, there are resonances with the recent work of Earl Sweatshirt (Eck$ acknowledges the debt, being "high as fuck off of that Earl Sweatshirt and Max B" on "Mac N Cheese"). The Odd Future alumnus' April album has been widely acclaimed, but has also spawned its share of categorical dismissals: usually, by listeners with limited patience for self-serious grand tours of the dark recesses of the post-adolescent mind ("I do like shit, and I do go outside," essentially). Eck$' tape is even more unrepentantly bleak, and stylistically provocative, combining Earl's insistent misanthropy with a kind of rap game senioritis; greasy, caution-to-the-wind flows and half-baked reflections are the order of the day.
Appreciating Eck$' songwriting prowess and overall discipline—and crediting that he is something other than a one-trick pony, wielding tape-echo-heavy ambience as his primary weapon—requires closer listening. The rapper has altered his sound and focal points significantly over the course of his three releases; just compare the croaked axioms and eerie washes of X to his comparatively chipper 2013 debut, Alternative Trap. Though that tape sags under an excess of small-time pusherman shop talk and viscous reverb clouds, Eck$' delivery is usually liltingly melodic; in hindsight, the influence of the then-rising Chance the Rapper is unmistakable (the title is a play on Acid Rap: statement-of-purpose as mixtape title and invented Soundcloud genre tag). Eck$' breakthrough track from the project, "Count on Me", is driven by quaint pizzicato strings straight off of an Andrew Bird record. 2014's Body High, in turn, found Lucki smearing the colors on his sonic palette, shunting the lithe, nursery-rhyme hooks off to the side to accommodate more longform lyrical throughlines and rap over Björk—it's a drastically more difficult record.
But somehow, it feels easier to lock in with the spare, dead-eyed X than either of these other two tapes; certainly, it's Eck$' most lovingly crafted release to date. The production operates in the same general realm as the previous material. The key chordal material is manifested in waves of impressionistic, mostly unidentifiable sound. Samples, when they crop up, are treated heavily, mimicking the crackly sound of aged 78s; otherwise, they are slowed down and phased in the mode of a vintage DJ Screw mix. But generally, on X, the drum sounds and patterns are crisp, moving closer than Eck$ has yet come to trap that is not "alternative" at all. They swing rather than plod, topped by careening cymbal purrs (the beat for the Chance-featuring "Stevie Wonder" is partially the work of Young Chop, the veritable Charlie Parker of Chicago drill production).
Eck$' rapping bends to this newfound clarity. He's clearly storyboarding his ideas, or at least considering his next step more carefully on the spot. Song structures shift smoothly with new gestures in the production, or don't, when there's still life in just one sticky idea to squeeze out: Highlights "Lowlife" and the "Still Tippin'" sampling "Still Steal" build up momentum around deadly simple, plaintive refrains and narrow locked grooves. Elsewhere, Eck$ builds toward denser, more symphonic moments—see the sinister synth bass that builds under the tabla-driven "Mac N Cheese" (toward the line "Got nightmares starring you") or the lush "None Other", with its thinly sliced soul sample and tap dancing 808s.
His verses, narratively, also seem to unfold with the expressive contours in the music. Tales of wasted hours, bad relationships, and ill-advised benders build toward unexpected admissions: "I contradict often, I get it from my family/ So you can't blame me, baby, it's in my blood/ So if I'm disrespectful, just know that it's all love," he half-snickers on "Still Steal". Self-doubt and, at worst, self-loathing is the constant subtext, lurking behind every self-mythologizing moment, allowing Eck$ to push beyond the "posted up on that corner like I been waiting on a ride or something" braggadocio and caricaturish anti-heroism of his preceding tapes.
If nothing else—right down to Eck$ assuming some of the production duties—the key to X's success is its palpable, overarching poise and control. Hearing attitude-for-its-own-sake and sloppiness as the locus means buying into the central illusion, confusing content for form. Sure, this is, for all intents and purposes, bleary Tumblr-ripe rap which coalesces loosely, begging for the use of "drug-addled" as both a general descriptor and an excuse for its surface eccentricities. However, there's a lot more to this music than slacker posturing; step in closer, and you'll discover the care in Eck$' design, and one of the year's strongest vanguard hip-hop albums. | 2015-06-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-06-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 30, 2015 | 7.5 | 2c1079d6-e6be-403d-b962-0e9de400f266 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Inspired by the rugged yet serene beauty of Ireland’s west coast, the singer-songwriter’s tranquil psych-folk explores communion with nature, family, and ourselves. | Inspired by the rugged yet serene beauty of Ireland’s west coast, the singer-songwriter’s tranquil psych-folk explores communion with nature, family, and ourselves. | Aoife Nessa Frances: Protector | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aoife-nessa-frances-protector/ | Protector | Throughout “Day Out of Time,” the closing song on Irish singer-songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances’ second album, brush strokes on a snare drum call to mind the hiss of surf lapping in a cove. It’s slight, almost imperceptible, but it epitomizes the healing backdrop to Protector. Written and recorded during an extended stay on Ireland’s windswept west coast, the follow-up to Land of No Junction reaps lucidity from family bonding and fleeing the city in search of peace. With it, Frances’ psych-folk soliloquies arrive like postcards from a friend who’s just beginning to open up.
In early 2020, shortly after the release of her debut, Frances started to write songs with the defined delicacy of birdsong at dawn. Trading Dublin for her father’s home in rural Clare, she spent the summer reconnecting with family and embracing solitude, too. “I got up every day before sunrise and took my guitar to a place where nobody could hear me,” she said in press materials, on the daily routine that proved a wellspring for new material. Teaming up with co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Jenkinson and drummer Brendan Doherty, Frances soon sought fresh inspiration and even more seclusion. Relocating to a cabin in the village of Annascaul, Kerry, the trio crafted a record that feels like an emergence from the duskier corners of her debut.
While the heart-stopping landscape of Clare provided the spark, Protector finds its muted mystical power in everyday activity. “I took a boat to Mayo/Swam out off the island/And waited for the sun to set and bathe my answers,” she opens “This Still Life,” one of several songs whose gentle flow evokes early morning swims on Inch Beach. Above a weave of Crumb-like organ and warbly guitar arpeggios, Frances’ diaristic account hones in on what she has called the “tension between wanting to float away and wanting to assert yourself.” “Soft Lines” marries an Arcadian anecdote in the present with the kind of low-key transcendent imagery that characterized Land of No Junction. “Making my way to the shoreline/Red hue, kiss the divine/As I count the hours out of here,” she muses, shining warm light on the psychic pain of wanting to be in two places at once.
Like its predecessor, Protector channels the energy of a different time—and west coast—entirely. From the foothills of the Slieve Mish Mountains, “Only Child” carries a heavy Laurel Canyon glow, its two chords every bar as spacious as a Jessica Pratt record or David Crosby circa If I Could Only Remember My Name. “Emptiness Follows,” a lush peak featuring harp, strings, and Villagers’ Conor O’Brien on trumpet and flugelhorn, captures Protector’s defining sense of lived-in comfort. The decision to put Frances’ vocals right up front in the mix—inspired by Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson—ensures that even when she doesn’t show a full hand lyrically, her words always sound within reach.
On paper, Frances’ year-and-a-half journey could read as pure escapism. On record, it sounds like someone running toward—not away—from life. “I left the city/Out of this town/Went for the back road this time around,” she offers on highlight “Chariot,” each syllable evoking the rich emphasis of Victoria Legrand in the early days of Beach House. Guided by soft-focus mellotron and a shuffling bossa nova beat, Frances’ closing words (“I know everything has an end/So I see all my family and friends”) reveals the “back road” to be a path to, rather than an escape hatch from, a mindful platonic love. It may not always be plain sailing, but by sourcing the time and space for serenity, Protector makes a pitch for authenticity that leaves room for ambiguity. | 2022-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Partisan | November 10, 2022 | 7.5 | 2c1169e5-b4ec-4e61-80e8-c3cc2b63aa66 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
After an overdose nearly ended her life, Demi Lovato sings powerfully and directly about her past and who she wants to become. | After an overdose nearly ended her life, Demi Lovato sings powerfully and directly about her past and who she wants to become. | Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/demi-lovato-dancing-with-the-devilthe-art-of-starting-over/ | Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over | This review contains mentions of rape and sexual assault.
At the 2008 American Music Awards, Demi Lovato—then Disney’s leading lady for her star turn in Camp Rock—smiled as a red-carpet reporter asked about the inspiration behind her pop-punk solo music. “Believe it or not, being 16, I’ve been through a lot,” she answered with a dignified giggle. “Come on, how much heartbreak can you have at 16?” the man insisted. “Oh, a lot,” Lovato immediately retorted.
Over the next few years, as she dutifully performed the role of a chaste pop star—albeit one fascinated by metal music—Lovato struggled under the immense pressure of the media and music industries (child stars, we so often forget, are workers). Behind the scenes, Lovato struggled with an eating disorder, self-harm, and substance use. She recently revealed that she was raped at the age of 15; though she reported the assault to adults, the perpetrator continued to work alongside her. After entering a treatment facility for the first time at 18, Lovato was transparent about her struggles with addiction and recovery.
In the summer of 2018, after six years of sobriety, Lovato relapsed. On July 24, she overdosed on opioids, causing three strokes, a heart attack, multiple organ failure, pneumonia, permanent brain damage, and lasting vision problems. As she explains in the recent documentary Dancing With the Devil, the drug dealer who supplied Lovato that night sexually assaulted her and left her for dead. It is a miracle that she survived.
Arriving alongside the documentary and a blitz of confessional interviews, Lovato’s seventh album, Dancing with the Devil…The Art of Starting Over takes control of the narrative. Across 19 songs, the 28-year-old leans into her personal struggles; the pop star who once professed a desire to “be free of all demons” has seemingly accepted the reality that she must live alongside them. On the power ballad “Anyone,” Lovato tries to find solace in her art but comes up short. “A hundred million stories/And a hundred million songs/I feel stupid when I sing/Nobody’s listening to me,” she belts. Written before her relapse, it’s a cry for help from a place of loneliness and desperation. The slinky “Dancing with the Devil” outlines the precipitous slope that led to overdose: “A little red wine” became “a little white line,” and then “a little glass pipe.” “ICU (Madison’s Lullabye)” relives the moment when Lovato woke up in the hospital, legally blind and unable to recognize her little sister.
After this somber three-song prologue, Dancing with the Devil expands to reveal the person Lovato is—or aims to be—today; there is a lot of shed skin, rewritten endings, and references to reaching heaven. While Lovato’s previous record, 2017’s Tell Me You Love Me, dabbled in pool-party R&B and electropop, here she explores an array of influences from “The Art of Starting Over”’s soft rock to a haunting cover of Gary Jules’ haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” “Lonely People” aims for a stadium singalong with a chorus that name-drops Romeo and Juliet, undercutting the positive vibes with the starkest of closing thoughts—“Truth is we all die alone/So you better love yourself before you go.”
At nearly an hour long, the album attempts to cover a vast amount of ground, airing out years of trauma and reconfiguring Lovato’s public identity. She offers a state of the union about her recovery—she’s “California Sober”—and her sexuality. On “The Kind of Lover I Am,” a sequel of sorts to her 2015 bi-curious anthem “Cool for the Summer,” Lovato fully embraces her queerness and her overflowing heart. “I don’t care if you’ve got a dick/I don’t care if you got a WAP/I just wanna love/You know what I’m saying,” she says at the outro. “Like, I just wanna fucking share my life with someone at some point.”
Lovato is certainly not the first pop star to speak out about the music industry’s perpetuation of sexual and emotional abuse; much like Kesha, her gut-wrenching disclosures refuse to be pushed under the rug for fear of bad publicity or isolating a fanbase. But even when Lovato strikes an upbeat or optimistic tone, it’s difficult to look beyond the tragedy at the album’s core. The synthy “Melon Cake” takes its name from the birthday dessert Lovato’s team served her in the years preceding her overdose: a cylinder of ripe watermelon frosted in fat-free whipped cream and topped with sprinkles and candles. Even as Lovato confidently declares that melon cakes are a thing of the past, the image is so depressing it’s difficult to focus on anything else, especially on what is intended to be a fun song. But isn’t that what so many of us do to survive? We attempt to reframe our traumas as lessons learned; we use humor as a defense mechanism; we move on because dwelling in guilt or shame furthers the destructive spiral.
One of the rare moments when Dancing With the Devil moves beyond a 1:1 recreation of Lovato’s life is “Met Him Last Night,” a slinky duet with Ariana Grande. Both artists have lived through horrific tragedy and responded with elegance and empathy, writing songs about their experiences both for themselves and anyone who might see their own trauma reflected back. But “Met Him Last Night” does not aim for catharsis, at least not explicitly. Instead, the two blasély trill about lost innocence and deception in the shadow of “him,” apparently Satan. It’s the closest thing to escapism on an album wholly focused on hard reality.
On the other end of the spectrum is the music video for “Dancing With the Devil,” which recreates the night of Lovato’s overdose and the subsequent battle for her life in the ICU in startling detail. There’s the machine that cleaned her blood through a vein in her neck, the duffle bag presumably full of drugs, and the sponge bath that softly traces over the “survivor” tattoo on her neck. Even though Lovato co-directed the video, stating that sharing her lived experiences is part of her healing process, the visual feels almost unnecessarily voyeuristic: an artist recreating their worst moment with the assumption that it speaks for itself.
Dancing With the Devil asks you to trust that what Demi Lovato went through is enough. The music will undoubtedly reach listeners who struggle with their own burdens and look to Lovato as a role model, just as they have since she was that teenager on the red carpet, forced to justify the depths of her lived experience. This taking-off-the-makeup moment brings us closer to her than ever before: the four-part documentary rollout, the multiple album editions, the no-holds-barred press tour. But the diaristic nature of the music, and the blunt force with which it is delivered, showcases Demi Lovato the person and sidelines Demi Lovato the artist. It is an unenviable position: to have a story so harrowing that the emotional catharsis we feel in real life overshadows what she wanted to create on the album.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | April 7, 2021 | 6.5 | 2c13b63d-7a7e-42fd-a6a3-beab1905a2f5 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
A new box set of the legendary post-punk label’s first two years gathers chestnuts from Joy Division and the Durutti Column alongside rarities, oddities, dead ends, and some stunning graphic design. | A new box set of the legendary post-punk label’s first two years gathers chestnuts from Joy Division and the Durutti Column alongside rarities, oddities, dead ends, and some stunning graphic design. | Various Artists: Use Hearing Protection: Factory Records 1978-79 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-use-hearing-protection-factory-records-1978-79/ | Use Hearing Protection | “I don’t want to rock the boat, I wanna fucking sink it.”
This unofficial motto of Factory Records appeared in an early catalog for the label, typewritten just below their address on Palatine Road in Manchester and just to the right of designer Peter Saville’s now-iconic logo: an image of a man plugging his ears with his index fingers, rendered in blurry triplicate to give the impression that he’s vibrating.
It was a prescient statement for Factory, considering the poor business decisions that its owners made throughout the label’s 14-year run, moves that ended up torpedoing the whole business in 1992. But in 1979, when the maxim was printed atop a list of the first 10 “releases” (not all of them recordings) that the imprint’s founders Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton, and Martin Hannett had given a catalog number to, it was the perfect youthful rallying cry: the kind of slogan you’d find carved into the runout groove of a 45 packaged in a hand-folded, hand-stapled sleeve, released by one of the dozens of tiny DIY labels that cropped up in the wake of UK punk.
The four men who started Factory were inspired by the explosion of young, hungry artists in their home country, particularly the Sex Pistols, whose snarling 1976 performance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall famously lit a fire in the bellies of a number of future legends in attendance. But while the music Factory presented to the world early on was often raw and unformed, the label gave it all a far more professional sheen through Saville’s stunning, minimalist design work. Even if the art offered little indication of what the music might sound like, whether at the concerts they booked in 1978-79 at the Russell Club or on the first batch of records they released, the stark show posters and cover art still have an undeniable allure. (Just ask anyone who has repurposed the sleeve art of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures for a t-shirt design in recent years.)
The new box set Use Hearing Protection: Factory Records 1978-79 has a similarly unconventional appeal. Its hulking size and spare, bright yellow design, featuring the same ear-plugging logo from their catalog, give no indication of what’s inside, but practically beg shoppers to handle it. What does lie within are recreations of the first 10 numbered items in the Factory catalog, including their first four vinyl releases, a DVD of a Joy Division-soundtracked film titled No City Fun (aka The Factory Flick), and various ephemera: concert posters, stationery, and, of all things, artist Linder Sterling’s rough sketches for a wooden abacus to track a woman’s menstrual cycle. Along with a book featuring photos from the era and an oral history of each item within, this beautifully designed package neatly reflects the way Factory combined the slapdash, try-anything approach of the times with careful curation and thoughtfully designed aesthetic.
The Factory nights that Wilson et al booked at the Russell Club were proof of this. Saville’s poster announcing the first batch of shows was instantly eye catching; its precise industrial design looking more like a warning poster found near a building site. The concerts being promoted were the opposite, promising odd pairings like the itchy dub-inspired sounds of the Durutti Column with the winking pub rock of Jilted John (aka comedian Graham Fellows) or Pete Shelley’s loose experimental project the Tiller Boys with the tightly wound attack of Joy Division.
This approach extended to A Factory Sample, the double 7" that was the first Factory Records release. Three sides of the records were taken up by artists who were Russell Club regulars. Joy Division offered up two tracks (“Digital” and “Glass”) that proved to be the transition between the agitation of their Warsaw days and the more ruminative sound of their debut full-length. Though signed to Rough Trade, early industrial trio Cabaret Voltaire lent a pair of tunes to Factory (the atmospheric “Baader Meinhof” and the Joe Meek-meets-Scientist blurt “Sex in Secret”) that codified their unsettling methodology. The Durutti Column’s tracks, meanwhile, are the only studio document of the project’s early lineup, which generated a blur of sprechgesang vocals, wobbly rhythms, and processed guitar.
Rounding it out was a true outlier: comedian John Dowie. His goofball pub rock odes to “Acne” and “Hitler’s Liver” feel entirely out of place next to such artful music and inside Saville’s austere silver sleeves. As author Mick Middles put it in his book Factory: The Story of the Record Label, it turned the record from “a base from which a new label would evolve” into “a simple hotch-potch.” Not that it felt so at the time of A Factory Sample’s release in January 1979. The initial run of 1,000 copies sold out quickly, necessitating a quick repressing of 4,000, and apparently four months’ worth of assembling each copy by hand. Those were all snapped up as well.
The folks at the label didn’t allow themselves any time to bask in the glow of this early success, as they were already pushing two other singles into the world—the debut 7"s from A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)—and facilitating the sessions that would yield Unknown Pleasures (from which the makers of No City Fun would pluck three songs to soundtrack their Super 8 footage of Manchester street life). All would be on the shelves by mid-1979.
The level of activity that Factory Records kept up in its earliest years set a template for the label up until its demise in the early 1990s. Wilson and his cohort barreled forward blindly, making snap decisions that would wind up biting them in the end. The label was forced to file for bankruptcy after their failed attempts to sell off their most lucrative assets—the catalogs of Joy Division and New Order—to another label. The problem was that, per a rough contract they signed early on, the bands owned the rights to their music.
What Factory had going for it, especially in those early days, was a sharp ear for talent. A Certain Ratio, a band managed by Wilson, were months away from finding the funk/soul sound that turned them into a vital influence for LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture, but their first recorded material was an intoxicating blast of massive bass attack and granulating guitar rhythms. OMD, on the other hand, stood well outside the moody, postmodern sounds of everything else Factory had put a number to that point. In fact, according to the notes accompanying this set, Wilson hated the music and only agreed to release it at the urging of his wife, Lindsay Reade, to help push them to a major label. OMD’s sole Factory single does find sonic connection to the rest of the label’s output via Martin Hannett’s production, which bathed the Kraftwerk tribute “Electricity” and the tart, Human League-like flipside “Almost” in gooey layers of reverb and delay.
And, of course, there was Joy Division, the label’s then-crown jewel signing. With Hannett at the helm, they set a new template for post-punk with Unknown Pleasures. The producer recorded their taut, rhythm-heavy compositions over the course of two weekends and then spent another weekend mixing the tracks and turning them into atmospheric harbingers of mental and emotional decay. Where Joy Division’s live performances had been sweaty, blunt-edged affairs, Hannett made the music feel like getting slowly squeezed between two rubber mats.
Like that album, nearly all the musical material found within Use Hearing Protection has been reissued in some form or other in the 40 years since its initial release. Their repressing may seem unnecessary to some, but the work that curator James Nice and designer Howard Wakefield put into the details of this set render it exceptionally appealing. The sleeves of Unknown Pleasures and OMD’s single are in their original textured form, and the Factory posters are big and suitable for framing. Some rarities are also included, including a double-CD set featuring an interview with Joy Division, Wilson, and Gretton, and a 12" white-label single of a proposed release by the Tiller Boys. Neither are necessarily essential listening (the interview is upended by the clatter of crockery and the sounds of the men eating), but they’re nice to have in physical form.
Factory Records and its various keepers sprinted ahead for the next 12 years, landing a few huge hits (“Blue Monday,” Pills ’n’ Thrills ’n’ Bellyaches) and many more middling releases as they went. (For a more complete picture, check out the other commemorative boxed set being released next month, Factory Records: Communications 1978-1992.) But for the brief window captured for posterity in Use Hearing Protection, the energy and promise of what Wilson and his friends felt in those vibrant days of the late ’70s radiates from every inch of this set. | 2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Factory | October 19, 2019 | 7.7 | 2c13d0dd-5330-4d1f-b97b-8495a4995258 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
After debuting with her hit single "Whip My Hair," Willow Smith (daugher of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith) left her music career. Five years later, she emerges with a precocious, fitfully interesting new record that shows growing pains in between bursts of inspiration. | After debuting with her hit single "Whip My Hair," Willow Smith (daugher of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith) left her music career. Five years later, she emerges with a precocious, fitfully interesting new record that shows growing pains in between bursts of inspiration. | Willow: Ardipithecus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21370-ardipithecus/ | Ardipithecus | It's been five years since Willow Smith released "Whip My Hair," her undeniably catchy, exuberant debut single. It was light. It was fun. It was a good song. At nine years old, she was the youngest-ever signee to Roc Nation: perhaps not an astonishing fact given who her parents are, but hitting the limelight before middle school can be tough on the psyche no matter how silver your spoon is. Therefore, it was a pleasantly surprising decision when, a few years later, Willow decided to bail on starring in a remake of Annie, canned all follow-ups to her burgeoning music career, and focused on growing up with whatever artistic integrity the world would allow her. Although still in the public eye, giving increasingly mature and existential interviews, and sporadically releasing music online, Willow has now released what amounts to her first official album, Ardipithecus (which is "a genus of an extinct hominine that lived during Late Miocene and Early Pliocene in Afar Depression, Ethiopia," according to Wikipedia, FYI), and the fact that it is such a pointed departure from her earlier musical forays is a surprise to no one.
Nepotism and talent aren't mutually exclusive, but behind all the psychic awakenings and blossoming chakras, something about Ardipithecus remains unbaked. The potential is there, definitely—Willow's complete subversion of R&B/pop tropes (shaved head, age-appropriate sexuality, asymmetrical fashion) is a breath of fresh air, and comes off as totally natural, not the posturing of someone pretending to be cooler than they are. Her vocals are untrained, but not gratingly so, coming off as throaty and confident even when she misses notes. The current alternative R&B landscape is filled with artists who may not be the most powerful vocalists (Frank Ocean, FKA twigs) but more than compensate with lyrical style and production skills. It's clear that this is what Willow aspires to; however, by focusing so heavily on her mystical lyrics and desire to express her worldview, the overall production value takes a backseat. Can the spiritual musings of a high school student, albeit one with above-average life experience, sustain themselves for an entire record? And furthermore, is Willow's persona enough to detract from her somewhat forgivable artistic shortcomings? Even after multiple listens to Ardipithecus, frankly, those questions persist.
Ardipithecus' problems are even down to its track sequencing—by the time the album picks up at "Stars," an uptempo, synth-lead collaboration with frequent musical partner JABS, you're already twelve songs in, many of which aren't complex or structured enough to hold much of your attention. "Why Don't You Cry," the record's lead single, is also its closer, a puzzling decision which, again, seems much too little too late after a full listen. It's a shame, because many of the ideas within Ardipithecus are solid, just shoddily executed. Willow is able to flow from tribal chanting (the fast-paced and shuddering "Natives of the Windy Forest," an early highlight) to more traditional R&B leanings ("IDK," a song that proves that when her lyrics about mortality and spirituality are slightly subdued, the effect can actually be arresting), which is no small feat. But at the same time, Willow has written and produced the whole album pretty much by herself, and it shows. When she sings, on opener "Organization & Classification," "I'm just a teenager/ But I feel angrier than a swarm of hornets," it's a painfully unnecessary statement, because literally no other type of person would follow it up with a song that's unironically called "dRuGz," which includes the line "I'm the heroin inside the syringe/ And I'm not going in/ I'm just the girl."
But if you were Willow Smith, would you care? Her crown as Most Woke Millennial is secure, and her mission of completely abandoning her pop past has definitely been accomplished. In the same way that the leap between ages 10 and 15 is gigantic, so is the leap between 15 and 20, and in another five years, if not sooner, it's absolutely plausible that Willow could deliver the polished, brilliant record she is clearly capable of. It's just that, in between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains. | 2016-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Roc Nation | January 7, 2016 | 5.8 | 2c158158-b530-4186-9b37-88d88d116ae2 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
In the tradition of Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive, this Carpark duo-- singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally-- crafts lovesick, narcotized rock with lots of depth and sweep. | In the tradition of Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive, this Carpark duo-- singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally-- crafts lovesick, narcotized rock with lots of depth and sweep. | Beach House: Beach House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9502-beach-house/ | Beach House | Summer songs have simple blueprints, syndicated by open windows in June; winter's about bells, strings, and digital sounds, anything with a sharp edge; spring's pretty simple if you start with a seed. Autumn, though, that's a tougher proposition. Those records are few and far between, and worth all the more for it. Beach House aren't called that for the same reason the Beach Boys are, but rather to evoke the desolation of the season after. I'm no synaesthetic but this stuff pretty much screams amber, orange, translucence, and late-October trembles, and I'll be glad to have it in my life over the next couple of months.
Baltimore's Beach House are singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally. Because they come from such a well-defined tradition-- the boy-girl duo making lovesick, narcotized rock with lots of depth and sweep-- it's pretty much impossible to listen to this, their debut, without making certain connections. Bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage. While a lot of their sounds and shapes are the same, Beach House's recipe of fairground waltzes, ghosted lullabies, and woodland hymnals feels more intimate than those of their forerunners. The Hope Sandovals and Jason Pierces of the world mostly wanted to make their songs bigger than their heartaches, to rub out messiness with beauty; Beach House play their songs for a much smaller room, and aren't afraid to stare down a mistake if it comes bounding back in echoes.
At no point during Beach House's 35 minutes does it ever sound like the work of more than two people. Mostly, those people even sound human. Flubbed notes, missed cues, and empty spaces mottle these songs; the instruments speak with imperfection and the music hums impassively along. Our first sign that the sand is cold comes quickly; opener "Saltwater" shivers to life with a sputtering drum machine, some decaying organs, and, eventually, Legrand's baleful vocals. She sings clearly, without affect, and produces notes that trail off with uncommon power, not unlike Nico, to whom she's often compared.
Slide guitars and thick swathes of organs make up most of the instrumentation, the latter bolstering the simple percussions and chintzy bossa nova rhythms with their own pulses and slow oscillations. While this is one of those records that hangs together like a fog, certain moments still peek out. The musty "Auburn and Ivory" marries a creeping harpsichord with Legrand's upper-register coo; "Master of None" temporarily breaks the album's strangely ritualistic spell with Legrand's most soulful vocal; closer "Heart and Lungs" fades out on a bed of gorgeous harmonies. And the best thing here is so good it's scary: with its languid slide guitar, wheezing organ and churning chorus, "Apple Orchard" already feels like a classic, and almost-- but just almost-- worth losing the warmth. | 2006-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Carpark | October 11, 2006 | 8.1 | 2c18488b-5c06-407e-a019-ecfd22685a5c | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Singer-guitarist Alicia Bognanno sounds tensed and ready to strike on the Nashville-based grunge torchbearers’ second album (and first for Sub Pop). | Singer-guitarist Alicia Bognanno sounds tensed and ready to strike on the Nashville-based grunge torchbearers’ second album (and first for Sub Pop). | Bully: Losing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bully-losing/ | Losing | For all its earth tones, all its ripped jeans and flannel and grit, the Nineties grunge scene flew close to the surreal in its lyrics. Courtney Love divided herself into inanimate objects like a Hans Bellmer photo on Hole’s “Doll Parts”; Mary Timony became a sickly plant on Helium’s “Pat’s Trick”; and Kurt Cobain went from building trees and planting houses to crawling back up into the womb by the umbilicus on Nirvana’s “Breed” and “Heart-Shaped Box,” respectively. It was a freaky time for rock—at least on the page.
Today, the Nashville band Bully reenacts the canonical grunge sound faithfully, which makes sense: lead singer and guitarist Alicia Bognanno, who does double duty as her own band’s producer and recording engineer, learned her chops during an internship at the studio run by Steve Albini, the guy behind the boards for Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me sessions. But Bully avoid performing strictly as a period piece thanks to Bognanno’s lyrics, which sidestep grunge’s fantastical poetics in favor of more personal accounts. “I think when I first started writing it was abstract, and maybe that was an excuse for me not to hone in on what message I was really trying to convey through a song,” Bognanno recently told Hero Magazine. “I’ve got to sing the lyrics every night for the next two years, so they should matter to me.” Instead of recreating the Rorschach blot scream-a-thons of the ’90s, then, Bully choose to inflate that decade’s raw timbre with words that feel intimate and necessary.
The band’s second album, Losing, is grimier and less sugar-slick than their 2015 debut, Feels Like, where songs like “Trying” and “Milkman” offered hooks so punchy they bordered on pop-punk. Here, by contrast, Bognanno seems frozen in the moment where she’s poised to jump but hasn’t left the ground yet, tensed and ready to strike as she sings out the snags in her interpersonal malaise. More second-person pronouns pepper her lyrics than ever, whether she’s figuring out how to traverse a toxic relationship or nursing one hell of a crush. Her sandpaper scream is still the most immediately arresting element of Bully’s music; when, on “Running," she seethes, “You say I’m running/But I don’t care/I’ll admit it/I get anxious too/Just like you,” it lands less like a confession and more like an uppercut.
Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her. She oscillates between a clean head voice and that gutting scream just as bright lead guitar lines poke through the power-chord murk every so often, whether as a placeholder between verses on “Running” or as a way of painting atmosphere, Weezer-style, on “Guess There.” On “Not the Way,” Bognanno even initiates a kind of call-and-response with Bully’s guitars, her scream echoed by a low, grinding chord. She’s the kind of vocalist who doesn’t just float above the rest of the band, but gets down in the dirt to tangle with their sounds. They’re not just backing her up; they’re egging her on to her most cathartic moments.
That catharsis comes full-throttle on “Seeing It,” the heaviest track Bully has recorded so far. The lyrics dart around the singer and someone else, and a secret that’s hanging between them. “I laid down in my bed/Replayed it all in my head/I closed my eyes and I erased your face from my mind,” Bognanno sings. “I didn’t want to/I should put this on you/I didn’t want to.” She drags out that last “to” like a rusty chain while she breaks into the song’s main riff on her guitar, and then, when she asks, “Is it true?/I quit seeing it in you,” the “you” erupts like a firework. Her words stay deliberately vague, but there’s a later couplet that strikes a nerve: “Such a blurry place to be/Stuck in your own body.” These words recontextualize the lines that have come before and the rage with which they’re sung, making “Seeing It” sound less like a breakup song and more like a retelling of embodied trauma, or at least an indirect way of screaming at someone who’s hurt you.
If “Seeing It” touches on some heavy shit long left unspoken—enduring creeps as a woman in the music industry, or really just in the world—then Losing’s closer, “Hate and Control,” finishes the thought with extra barbs. “What is it about me that makes you so uncomfortable?/Can we just exist without your hate and control?” Bognanno asks, and then later answers her own question: “You don’t like it when I’m angry/Tough shit, learn to deal.” It’s a salve for anyone who’s been trying to get free, and particularly anyone who’s gotten yelled at for it. Bognanno puts her anger on full display, inviting everyone who’s felt the same to join in and scream along. | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 24, 2017 | 7.2 | 2c1a3011-e3a7-420c-a591-c9c991e05e86 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The second album from the Spanish singer is a remarkable feat, seamlessly linking flamenco’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. | The second album from the Spanish singer is a remarkable feat, seamlessly linking flamenco’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. | Rosalía: El Mal Querer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosalia-el-mal-querer/ | El Mal Querer | Global bass, the internet-centric underground scene that began flourishing around the world in the late 2000s, emerged when young producers took their countries’ folk traditions and updated them for a millennial dancefloor. They used new technology to connect previously collapsed musical boundaries: Cumbia became digitized (Colombia, Mexico), salsa got remixed (Puerto Rico, New York), pow wow drums went electric (Canada), and some producers even transmogrified Andean pan flutes into intellectual bangers. Global bass became a precursor to the increasingly boundless way pop music works now, even as it became flattened into limp and canned versions of what some people dreadfully termed “trop-house,” not to mention the overall poisonous creep of EDM into its bloodstream.
The concept, though, is still intriguing: As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big studio-quantized mishmash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures? And alternately, is it preferable to take a rigid approach to that hyperlocality—or at least a defensive stance towards cultural specificity—if it stifles the kind of musical creativity that fosters a genre’s evolution.
One approach—a very successful one—lies in El Mal Querer, the relentlessly gorgeous album from Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Spanish singer with one foot steeped in her Catalan history and the other hypebae-sneakered foot sidling into the future. Rooted in flamenco—the Arabic-influenced Andalusian music which she has studied since a young age—El Mal Querer is a dramatic, romantic document that seamlessly links that tradition’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. Flamenco music carries the sound of Spanish history within it—you can practically hear the migration patterns—and Rosalía uses it to tell the story of a doomed relationship across 11 songs, each one serving as a new chapter. It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.
Thrillingly, Rosalía has figured out a way to situate her classical training alongside Justin Timberlake and Arthur Russell samples, glossy synths and hip-hop swing. With co-production from the Spanish producer El Guincho, El Mal Querer’s already delivered two hits—first, the slinky, hypnotic “Malamente,” where Rosalía’s honeyed voice works in counter-rhythm to flamenco-influenced syncopated handclaps. (Her stardom was definitely aided by the song’s video, in which she executes slick choreography while wearing a fluffy fake-fur jacket and tracksuit as a kind of Spanish answer to Rihanna.)
“Malamente” and its follow-up—the yearning jealousy bop “Pienso en Tu Mirá”—might imply a more radio-friendly album, but Rosalía is true to her hybrid ethic, and keeps it folkier as she maneuvers through the album’s heartbreak narrative. Even the astonishing “De Aquí No Sales,” which replaces the handclaps with samples of revved-up motorcycle engines as a downbeat, is more in the vocal tradition she was raised in. It alludes to the pared-down instrumentation of classic flamenco—a guitar, a clap, a stomp—but the emotion is sampled and patched directly into her voice. She has a lot to say, and does so with the drama and intensity flamenco requires: On that song, she declaims powerfully about domestic abuse and the justifications abusers use, while the bad-romance arc comes to a climax. “Mucho más a mí me duele, de lo que a ti te está doliendo,” she sings: This hurts me more than it hurts you.
A studious sense of tradition pervades Rosalía’s approach on El Mal Querer. The narrative of the album is based on The Romance of Flamenca, a manuscript from the 13th century about a woman whose lover keeps her locked up in a tower—“el mal querer” can be translated to something like “the bad desire.” Perhaps this is a defiant rejoinder to those who might be resistant to a new take on a timeworn style. In “Reniego,” based on a classic flamenco melody, the production is pared down, and her soprano bursts like fireworks, electric and elastic, the agony and pull of destructive romance coursing through it. The melismas sound easy for her, as if to prove she can do it, before going down more experimental roads again, playing around with pop ballad-style synths, vocoder, and a cheeky allusion to reggaeton’s dembow pulse by way of flamenco handclaps. It’s an adventurous foray and deceptively pretty: None of this, from the way her voice sprints across her angular harmonies to the complex rhythm patterns that weave through them, is easy. With Rosalía’s sense of grace, though, it sounds like it could be. | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | November 8, 2018 | 8.8 | 2c1c4eb6-3518-42b5-8fb6-287c355bf2bf | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
This long-awaited and revamped mixtape is Keef’s most accessible and incidentally romantic project in years, a bop-filled R&B gem that shows the Chicago rapper evolving in every direction naturally. | This long-awaited and revamped mixtape is Keef’s most accessible and incidentally romantic project in years, a bop-filled R&B gem that shows the Chicago rapper evolving in every direction naturally. | Chief Keef: Thot Breaker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chief-keef-thot-breaker/ | Thot Breaker | Chief Keef’s 2015 roast “Thot Breaker” was all about having sex with some other guy’s girlfriend, about her role as a disposable means to emasculate said boyfriend, and about the vicious sport of it all. “I think I’m the youngest flexer on earth,” he proclaimed proudly, a remorseless victor.
The Thot Breaker mixtape was originally teased more than a year earlier as a playboy manifesto made in the song’s image, but like many long-awaited Keef projects—Mansion Musick, UFOverload 2, and Crashing Computers among them—songs slowly leaked out and official versions never came. When previews of rumored Thot Breaker tracks began surfacing elsewhere in 2014, it seemed like the wait for the tape was nearly over. The mixtape was eventually given a Valentine’s Day 2015 release date, with songs like “Fucked Your Ho” and “Thots Gone Crazy,” but it failed to materialize.
More than two years later, with that version of Thot Breaker now an afterthought for all but the most diehard Keef fans, the Chicago prodigy has returned to the title in surprising fashion with renewed vision and purpose. According to Keef producer CBMix, with whom he worked closely on the project, these are all new songs divorced from the original concept and context. In a bit of irony, the new and improved Thot Breaker is Chief Keef’s most romantic work; once merely a means to label himself the ultimate womanizer, he instead takes a 42-minute R&B sojourn, forging a project his contemporaries would make if only they could. The songs are carefully composed and finely layered. Inside them, he’s somehow evasive and affectionate in equal measure. It becomes the ultimate serenade for side chicks, a collection of half-ballads forsaking monogamy and reveling in the delight and confusion of short-term companionship. Never has an out-of-character moment felt more evolutionary, or more natural.
It’s telling that the new Thot Breaker cover art features a Barbie-esque figure stabbing the anthropomorphic heart from the original artwork (which seemed to represent Chief Keef, the eponymous Thot Breaker in question) between the eyes. Where early Thot Breaker cuts were apathetic and standoffish with Keef as the aggressor, these are almost genteel in comparison. “You thought that you had Turbo in your palms/You got trust issues, girl, you are not alone,” he sings on the intro. Before he was talking at women in songs, here he’s talking to them, if not to charm or comfort them, then to explain himself. So untangles this knot of feelings, assertive and doting in some instances, removed and apprehensive in others, but always engaging, and usually in conversation. It has been years since Keef was this charming, and this accessible.
Calling these “love songs” might be a bit of a stretch—after all, he does sing, “She wants me to be her man/I can’t, baby, I’ll break you” on “Grab a Star,” holding firm to his original position—but there is certainly an intimacy and a tenderness to many of them. The women he propositions are more often subjects than props, and there’s an elegance to the way he sings to each one that feels personal and loving. Don’t misunderstand: there are still plenty of angry boyfriends (and husbands) on the revamped Thot Breaker, and he’s mostly noncommittal even in the most intimate situations, but this is way more Mr. Steal Your Girl than “O.P.P.”; there’s some wooing involved.
A certain juvenile innocence is captured on Thot Breaker that escapes even the best and lightest Lil Yachty songs, and it’s, frankly, enchanting, especially coming from a drill architect. No one saw this coming. The art for his dancehall jam “Can You Be My Friend” was a hand-scribbled elementary school-style note with boxes to be checked, and the lyrics follow suit. On one of the more upbeat cuts, “Whoa,” he runs into an old flame, taking a brief stroll down memory lane, before attempting to win her over again with basic conversation starters. “Baby, I’m gon’ treat you better/I can be the sun in your rainy weather/Let’s just get together,” he pleads. “Slow Dance” moves with the clumsy wobble of a first dance at a junior prom, but his vocal runs are endearing nonetheless. “You My Number One” is easily the sweetest song he’s ever written.
When he strays from the cutesier songs, he takes dramatic turns, reimagining sad boy R&B on tracks like “Couple of Coats” and “Drank Head” and revitalizing bop with “Going Home.” Every song is an oddball assemblage of parts (particularly “You & Me,” with its wobbly synths, disembodied vocal plugins, skittish hi-hats, and snaps), but each one functions on multiple levels, and no song feels out of place. His last mixtape, Two Zero One Seven, was scatterbrained, a low stakes sampler for Keef’s wildest and weirdest musical inclinations, but the ambitious Thot Breaker shows what Keef is capable of when focused: There is no sound he can’t hone and master, no challenge too risky. Like Future’s HNDRXX before it, the mixtape dares to mix matters of the heart and pleasures of the flesh, a feat of rap balladry. Who says tough guys can’t be sensitive? | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RBC / Glo Gang | June 15, 2017 | 8 | 2c26fcbc-01bd-4ec7-8c01-f6e1f3e06287 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno recapture the dizzy exuberance that drew audiences to their early singles—but trade the weed for ice cream—on their first foray into kids’ music. | Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno recapture the dizzy exuberance that drew audiences to their early singles—but trade the weed for ice cream—on their first foray into kids’ music. | Best Coast: Best Kids | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/best-coast-best-kids/ | Best Kids | A debate recently broke out online over whether parents should bring their children to see live music, but it’s the kids who are really in charge. Much as teenagers with money and leisure time gave rise to a new youth culture in the 1950s and ’60s, streaming and smartphones mean that kids as young as toddlers can now influence the charts without spending a single cent. The rugrat-driven musical dystopia envisioned in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad was upon us the moment a couple of wise guys from Norway thought to ask, “What does the fox say?”
In another sign of the tot-pocalypse, I recently heard a big-time producer brag that his new song would be on the lips of two-year-olds everywhere. To achieve that, though, he’d be best off securing a spot on the endless series of Kidz Bop compilations that have forced dippy hits by Lukas Graham and Magic! into otherwise musically upstanding homes. As a weary parent of a 6-year-old, with a baby on the way, I’ve found solace in the rare music my kid loves as much as I do—a list that has dwindled down to A Charlie Brown Christmas and 2015’s brilliant This Record Belongs To compilation. Sometimes, post-Lego Batman, it’s enough to settle for a millionth stream of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”
Best Coast gamely make their first foray into this fraught but potentially rewarding terrain with the Amazon exclusive Best Kids. The album works partly because Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno recognize that what they’ve always done well—simple lyrics and catchy melodies, delivered from a strong emotional perspective and with a punkish beach-party energy—can be translated into children’s music with only a slight shift in themes. Unlike the indie-pop class a few years before Best Coast broke out, Cosentino’s songs of weed and heartbreak wouldn’t usually be mistaken for kids’ stuff. But this smart set of originals and covers applies the band’s peppy, sun-soaked directness to more innocent subject matter. Best Kids fills a vacant space on the Venn diagram of taste between parents predisposed to like Best Coast and their finicky, Captain Underpants-replaying offspring.
After the moody disaffection of 2015’s California Nights, it’s a delight to hear Best Kids’ originals move back toward the dizzy exuberance that endeared audiences to early songs like “When I’m With You.” A standout is the appropriately sugary “Ice Cream Mountain,” which boasts a title image fit to be drooled over equally by children and amiable stoners with cats named Snack, plus an unexpected smattering of cheap synth chirps to go with its familiar surf-wax Americana. Best Coast seem to revel in this record’s lower stakes on “Cats & Dogs,” a goofy (also, woof-y and meow-y) romp that gently reminds kids that “anyone can love anyone that they want.” The clarity of vision that made 2012’s The Only Place so perfect for travel commercials serves warmer and cuddlier ends here.
That approach carries over just as cleanly on the covers. Standbys like “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and “Rock-a-Bye Baby” get some extra music-box touches to their arrangements, but they’re still rendered as uptempo fuzz-rockers. The sound isn’t far from the spirit of Best Coast’s debut album, 2010’s Crazy for You, whose producer, Lewis Pesacov, returns for Best Kids. “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” most famously performed by “You Don’t Own Me” singer Lesley Gore, isn’t traditionally a kids’ song, but Best Coast’s version deftly splits the difference between “Ice Cream Mountain” and the girl-group yearning that powers the duo’s best songs.
Best Kids’ finale, a sanitized remake of “When I’m With You,” sums up both the project’s ample charm and its modest shortcomings. A spirited choir of girls who performed the song onstage with Best Coast during the all-female-identifying Girlschool L.A. festival takes the lead after the first verse, helping transform this love-it-or-hate-it indie chestnut into a road-trip-worthy family sing-along. But the lyrical switch from “sleeping alone,” in the original, to “watching TV alone” and “playing alone” is a bit awkward. As the inclusion of surf-splashed Kermit cover “Rainbow Connection”—one of the best kids’ songs ever—highlights, the truth is that kids can enjoy music that pairs deeper feelings with simple-seeming exteriors. But Best Coast can address that if they ever get to Best Kids 2. The next time the band comes through town, at least, there shouldn’t be any bickering over whether it’s OK to lug the kiddos. | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Amazon | June 27, 2018 | 7 | 2c27794a-a869-48c8-9984-95c22a07f602 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
This five-record retrospective box reminds us that while Lush might not have lunged for the jugular like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain, they were a first-rate shoegaze band. | This five-record retrospective box reminds us that while Lush might not have lunged for the jugular like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain, they were a first-rate shoegaze band. | Lush: Origami | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21816-origami/ | Origami | If you're hearing Lush for the first time via this five-record retrospective box, bear in mind: the feathery jangle of leadoff track "Sweetness and Light" is going to sound somewhat anemic measured against the sensory-bathing production favored by Lush's modern-day successors like Beach House, Painted Zeros, and Dum Dum Girls. The same goes if you're arriving at this set straight from the brand new EP Blind Spot, Lush's first recorded output after a 20-year absence. Conversely, back in 1989-90, when Lush's debut EP Scar first made a splash, it was tempting to dismiss the English quartet's music as a Cocteau Twins knockoff—but only if you focused on skin-deep similarities rather than the character underneath the sound.
The first record in this set is Gala, a re-packaging of Scar and two other EPs released together in 1990 to function as the band's introduction to new audiences. Sequenced in backwards chronological order, Gala allowed the uninitiated to stumble onto the demo-like crudeness of Scar after being won-over by the radiant shimmer of songs like "Sweetness and Light" and "De-Luxe." Those songs came across as something of a revelation if you were unfamiliar with Lush's influences and were listening through the lens of alternative rock's transition to a hard-driving, heavy guitar-based format. With six songs produced by Cocteau Twins co-founder Robin Guthrie, Gala still has the naive air of a band fumbling for its voice in the shadow of its heroes. Nevertheless, on the first seven songs, the band throws down the gauntlet and asserts all of the traits that have established its sound as timeless.
The second record of the set is Lush's first proper full-length, 1992's Spooky. Here, it becomes quite clear that this band possessed the substance to match its style. As part of the wave of British acts that were first slapped with the shoegaze tag—Ride, Slowdive, and Pale Saints among them—Lush's music was naturally defined by its seemingly endless ripples of delay, reverb, flange, and chorus. But the almost-supernatural power of frontwoman/guitarist Miki Berenyi and lead guitarist/vocalist Emma Anderson's vocal harmonies and intertwining guitar work set Lush apart from the shoegaze pack on a number of levels.
After a brief intro, Spooky launches straight into the stratosphere with "Nothing Natural," a pinnacle moment not only for Lush but for shoegaze/alternative across the board. Although Guthrie brings his soft-focus production once again, no amount of sonic soft-pedaling can contain the band's assuredness as it aspires to—and mostly reaches—a beauty so sublime that it pumps you up as much as it takes your breath away. Sure, Lush made melancholy, ethereal music, but such was the band's range during this period that none of the songs on Spooky conform strictly to one mood.
By turns dour, impatient, hopeful, and resigned, the album never runs out of shades. Uptempo numbers like "Laura" and "Superblast!" counterbalance the more reflective moments, which hit hardest on album closer "Monochrome," a song with a swaying underwater groove. In the chorus, Berenyi sings, "And sometimes I think if I stand by the phone it may ring/ And sometimes I worry and fear what tomorrow may bring," her voice drenched in reverb so she sounds less like a human than an apparition. It is one of several moments on Spooky where Lush's music verges on mind-altering.
As the band's sole songwriters, Anderson and Berenyi each took unorthodox approaches to melody, chord structure, pacing, lyrics, and even guitar strumming. With Lush, they wove their idiosyncrasies together into a sound whose rough edge belies its delicate outer lacing. The pair was especially fond of inserting odd notes into chords that draped even their most delicate songs in a haze of dissonance. And if you refer to bootleg recordings from the band's heyday, it's evident that Lush packed a punch in concert that none of these records quite capture. Most unfortunately, you can listen to this whole reissue set and never get a sense of the assertive, even forceful playing of late drummer Chris Acland, whose suicide in October of '96 stopped Lush's career in its tracks just as Anderson was contemplating quitting and collective morale had begun wane.
Had Acland not ended his own life, it seems like an implosion was imminent anyway—which is strange considering that Lush's third and final full-length, 1996's Lovelife, triggered a spike in commercial success in the UK. By Lovelife, however, Berenyi and Anderson had abandoned what originally made their music appealing in favor of a more streamlined sound hewing towards Britpop. While a tune like Anderson's "500 (Shake Baby Shake)" distills the familiar harmonies into a tight, sugary-sweet package, which only makes the song's underlying sarcasm and faux-vapidity all the more biting, a multi-faceted muse like Anderson's wasn't best served by going down the same path as Pulp and Blur. Frankly, she and Berenyi were more capable than that.
At a crucial midpoint between the beginning and the end, 1994's Split documents the band reaching beyond the shoegaze mold but not yet pandering to pop appeal. By all accounts a difficult process that involved repeated attempts at a final mix, Split benefits from the turmoil. By that point, Anderson and Berenyi's romantic outlooks had darkened considerably, and at times—the languid, seven-and-a-half minute "Desire Lines," a plea to a person who needs help on "Undertow"—Split simulates the sensation of being emotionally lost, adrift on a sea of uncertainty and woe. On those songs, the pair's guitars are like waves lapping against the side of a boat going nowhere.
The final disc, a collection of Lovelife-era B-sides originally released (in two versions) in Canada and Japan as Topolino, largely follows in the direction of Lovelife and then veers off course with delightfully varied results. It's a breath of fresh air, for example, when Lush delve into their signature guitar glitter on "I Have the Moon." Meanwhile, on "Plums and Oranges" (one of a slew of digital bonus tracks, all of which also appear on the recent 5-cd box set Chorus), the band seamlessly transplants its classic sound onto an electronic framework—a tantalizing hint of what might have been had Lush had more time to experiment. Likewise, "Matador" and "I'd Like to Walk Around in Your Mind" see the band venturing into a pastoral English folk arena one wishes Berenyi and Anderson would have explored more.
It's frustrating, because the stripped-down simplicity of "Carmen"—a chipper rock ditty that sounds like it was rescued by the spirit of Juliana Hatfield on its way to becoming a Britpop single—proves that Lush could have sailed right past the trends of the day. In truth, Topolino serves as a postscript, rather than the meat, of a remarkable career, but its charming odds and ends reveal myriad new angles on the band. Even the instrumental cocktail jazz of "Cul De Sac" stumbles its way into grace somehow, and the album's haphazard running order caps the listening experience off on a surprisingly carefree note.
Of course, Origami establishes Lush's place in the lineage of guitar rock well before you get to the Topolino record. Anchored by Anderson and Berenyi's songwriting acumen, Lush's music didn't lunge at the jugular quite like the work of more audacious sonic innovators like My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain. But, in a strange way, time has proven to be on Lush's side. Two-plus decades later, bands have gotten rather adept at reproducing the sound and attitude that this box documents so vividly. Nevertheless, Lush's body of work reminds us that all the guitar pedals in the world amount to little more than window dressing if you don't have the heart and soul to harness them. With Origami, it's perhaps more clear than ever that Lush possessed both in spades.
Correction: Due to a publishing error, this review was published with incorrect scores; they have been changed. | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 3, 2016 | 8.5 | 2c286562-94eb-4742-918b-400930de8b86 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Midwestern band’s fourth album cleans up their “punked-up country gunk,” giving more space to Ryan Davis’ incisive, deceptively offhand lyrics. | The Midwestern band’s fourth album cleans up their “punked-up country gunk,” giving more space to Ryan Davis’ incisive, deceptively offhand lyrics. | State Champion: Send Flowers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/state-champion-send-flowers/ | Send Flowers | “How many fantasies never make it past the pillow covers?” Ryan Davis sings on “My Over, My Under,” the opener of Send Flowers, the fourth album by State Champion. They’re hard to Google and nearly as hard to categorize; “cowpunk” and “alt-country” don’t quite do them justice. James Jackson Toth, of their friends’ band Wooden Wand, came closest: “punked-up country gunk.” Solid in their sonic integrity, on this outing State Champion remove a little more of the gunk to give space to Davis’ rangy ruminations, delivered mostly in spoken word that gives way to an occasional wail.
The band formed 10 years ago in Chicago when the core members—singer/songwriter/guitarist Davis, drummer Sal Cassato, bassist Mikie Poland, and violinist Sabrina Rush—were in art school. Now they’re spread out over several towns and states. They recorded their third album, 2015’s Fantasy Error, in the fields and the farmhouse of Paul Oldham’s Kentucky studio; ambient sounds of crickets bled into the mix. Davis is based in Louisville, where he runs the label Sophomore Lounge (the label’s releases also include records by Spider Bags and Wooden Wand) and has hosted the terrific festival Cropped Out almost every fall since 2010, skipping a few years when State Champion have been on tour—the main time the band members see each other these days. They continue to book their own gigs, playing house shows and DIY spaces; they remain committed to a name that yields a hilariously wide range of Internet results—choices pointed toward a life in music that isn't defined by others’ expectations. They’re old-soul enough not to be bothered with careerism, nimble enough to embrace the situations they encounter and make themselves at home.
The songs on Send Flowers suggest being on the road—a band of wandering troubadours picking up fine guest players along the way. Angel Olsen guested on their second record and Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin joined in on Fantasy Error; this outing brings Edith Frost on vocals and Christopher May on pedal steel. Star-chart the album and you’d likely peg its origin to some after-midnight hour, gas-station coffee mugs filling the cup holders of a van, when the only two or three people still awake let fly strange, salient thoughts: riffs on lives hidden beyond the lights of the highway.
Silver Jews are among State Champion’s obvious kin, and Send Flowers’ packaging duly comes bearing a blurb from David Berman: “If Bob Dylan was funny, if Tom Waits was relevant, Ryan might not be peerless at what he does best, which is writing large gregarious circles around his pitiful colleagues in the field.” Humor equips the dreamiest of these songs with necessary gravity. Before a recent State Champion show I’d been re-reading the poet James Tate’s The Ghost Soldiers, and the feeling of those poems, which swerve between absurd and realistic encounters told by wry, profound narrators, shares an affinity with Davis’ plainspoken lyrics, which are more deliberate than they appear. His lines flow in a deceptively offhand lilt, though the structures are more ornate than they seem. On “Death Preferences,” keyboard and strings create a slow, swooning drift, a melodic mask for words that sneak up on you in staccato percussive pauses; Frost and Davis harmonize over May’s lonesome, yearning pedal steel and multiple tempo switches in “When I Come Through,” a brash ballad of a wanderer’s promise to return (“Unplug the stars from the sky when I come through”). Most songs hover around six or seven minutes long: the shortest, the lovely, heartbroken lament “If You Don’t Show Me,” explodes in an excellent twang-and-fuzz guitar solo at its finish. With just seven tracks, the album leaves you wanting more.
But that’s the nature of the road, too. Travel the country enough and you become a witness to tiny changes imperceptible to people who live in those places. Davis’ narrator articulates the shifts palpably in the album’s closer, “Stonehenge Band Blues,” about a fictitious blues group who plays to “Southern Ohio’s scaredy boys and hobby-kit glue girls of now”: “What happened to all the country boys/The honky tonks are filled with boneheads/The art museums are full of noise.” The lament comes underscored by the reassurance of being played by an actual band that remains true to the idiosyncratic sound it has forged. “What happens at Stonehenge stays at Stonehenge,” goes the refrain. It might be an acknowledgement of the things in life that will go unexplained for the ages to come. Send Flowers is a tribute to those mysteries—to the small, vital impressions, and the music left in their wake. | 2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sophomore Lounge / Feeding Tube | December 11, 2018 | 8 | 2c296930-3af4-40dd-8289-510d63323610 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
The Brazilian guitarist and L.A. saxophonist’s collaboration is charming and intimate. The pair coils themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration. | The Brazilian guitarist and L.A. saxophonist’s collaboration is charming and intimate. The pair coils themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration. | Fabiano do Nascimento / Sam Gendel: The Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fabiano-do-nascimento-sam-gendel-the-room/ | The Room | Like Billy Corgan with a Big Muff or Jimi Hendrix with a Crybaby, L.A. saxophonist Sam Gendel long ago figured out how to turn a commercial piece of hardware into something personal and immediate. In his case, it’s a battery of reverb, synth emulators, and effects pedals that, when he’s at his most dialed-in, can make his horn sound like both Rahsaan Roland Kirk on “The Inflated Tear” and Tom Morello on “Killing in the Name.” It’s a discombobulating sound that’s become ubiquitous in the L.A. jazz and experimental scenes over the past decade. Listen to a handful of songs he’s been on and you’ll know it instantly: Like backmasked speech, it feels both inside-out and strangely familiar.
It’s simply strange, then, to hear a Sam Gendel record in which the saxophone sounds familiar. There are no effects on The Room, his new duo album with seven-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento. There’s no percussion, either—save for a bit of breath-scatting Gendel puffs through his horn in the lovely “Astral Flowers”—or any of the bleary production effects that can make Gendel’s records sound like they were recorded by the light of an old desktop monitor. Nascimento’s recent albums—2023’s Das Nuvens and Mundo Solo—is dotted with drum machines and bushy synths, but he’s long taken his cues from the crisp and tidy jazz of ECM and the close-mic’d sambas of João Gilberto. This can make his music feel a touch formal at times, almost uncannily precise, but just as it does on 2017’s Tempo dos Mestres, that production style gives The Room a clarity that allows the listener to focus on how deftly both musicians move across the album. Like a World Cup telecast, even the slowest moments of these performances deserve to be seen in the highest possible definition.
Nascimento and Gendel’s rapport was obvious on the five Tempo dos Mestres songs they recorded together, and they bonded further over a shared love of Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and the 1964 Stan Getz and João Gilberto smash Getz/Gilberto. While that album also brought together an American saxophonist and a Brazilian guitarist, it’s Gendel whose playing more closely recalls that of Gilberto. In a reedy tone that sounds nearly as much like a flute as it does a sax, he flies close to the ground, sometimes barely blowing above a whisper; when the end of “Foi Boto” calls for greater intensity, he gets it by playing quieter. Gendel can write a gorgeous, aching melody—that’s him at the tender core of Sam Wilkes’ “Run,” for one—but hearing him play it straight across an entire album is a very welcome reminder of the depth and delicacy that’s sometimes obscured by his effects.
Gendel’s sax tends to take center stage on these songs, but the intricacy of Nascimento’s writing and the sturdy confidence with which the guitarist plays makes listening to The Room feel a bit like seeing a solo performance at the Palais Garnier; losing yourself in the architecture is half the point. Like Baden Powell, Nascimento can turn the blank spots and heavy shadows of minimalism into florid, nearly Baroque curlicues with little more than a shift of emphasis. On “Kewere,” he pins a couple of bends to the end of his lines and fills in negative space with ringing harmonics in a way that recalls John Abercrombie, while the plucking and tapping of “Astral Flowers” could have been taken from a Meredith Monk score. For Nascimento to show this much range without being showy is a testament to how well The Room coheres.
In keeping with their tendencies as soloists, both players coil themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration. It makes the music feel compact and concentrated, ripe with potential energy they both expend with great patience and never without the other nearby. At times, one will round a corner in their playing and start doubling the other’s line; at others, they work like partnered abstract painters, intuiting where to place their brush without having to look at the other’s work. In the gorgeous “Poeira,” they gather the melody up, then follow their own courses, their lines drifting apart and back together as they slowly descend like two feathers dropped from the same height. The sense of connection between Gendel and Nascimento is obvious, but it’s at moments like this, when they fall away from one another and still feel inseparable, that give The Room its intimate charm. | 2024-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Real World | February 7, 2024 | 7.7 | 2c2bc36b-dd16-4fb1-b098-54c186c5d603 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Known for its restless ambition and DIY spirit, the post-punk group evolves with unnerving ambience, spoken-word recitations, and industrial noise. | Known for its restless ambition and DIY spirit, the post-punk group evolves with unnerving ambience, spoken-word recitations, and industrial noise. | Deliluh: Fault Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deliluh-fault-lines/ | Fault Lines | Prior to the pandemic, Deliluh were a post-punky quartet based in downtown Toronto; today, they exist as a transient avant-ambient duo flashing their Eurail passes between Berlin and Marseille. That dramatic shift aligns them with a grand tradition of iconoclastic North American artists—from Iggy Pop to Liars to the Brian Jonestown Massacre—who’ve headed to the old continent to chase new musical horizons, but in Deliluh’s case, they’re breaking free of both their established sound and their essential identity. Through the late 2010s, Deliluh were more than just familiar faces in Toronto’s DIY underground; they were, in many ways, its ideological center, constantly seeking performance spaces that lay outside the traditional bar circuit. They were the kind of band that hosted shows in their living room, transformed a local veterans hall into a freak-scene clubhouse, and even got the city’s permission to stage an event in the famously abandoned Lower Bay subway station. In Colin Medley and Maria Todorov-Topouzov’s short documentary on the group, guitarist/synth player Julius Pedersen summed up Deliluh’s thrill-seeking philosophy like so: “It became this [game of] like, ‘how can we beat the last one?’”
Sometime in 2019, however, that question became less about unlocking hidden spaces in their community and more about harnessing the band’s own surging ambitions. On their first two records, 2017’s Day Catcher and 2019’s Beneath the Floors, Deliluh staked out the sweet spot between post-punk grime and post-rock grace, and they continued to stretch the aesthetic parameters of the four-piece rock band on “Amulet,” a stalking seven-minute epic that they first recorded in 2019 in Pedersen’s native Copenhagen on the eve of a European tour. “Amulet” reappears as the centerpiece of Deliluh’s third album, Fault Lines. But since its initial conception, bassist Erik Jude and drummer/violinist Erika Wharton-Shukster stepped away from the group and returned to Toronto while Pedersen and lead vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Kyle Knapp laid down roots in Europe, where they could take advantage of a more concentrated touring network. As such, the “Amulet” we hear on Fault Lines reflects both the downsized lineup and the extra tinkering-time afforded by subsequent pandemic lockdowns. The two versions share the same sinister synth pulse and Knapp’s spoken-word narrative about an unrepentant jewel thief preying on the wealthy. But what once resembled the string-spiked, jump-scare soundtrack to a creepy cat-and-mouse thriller is now more conducive to an apocalyptic sci-fi horror flick, as the duo layer techno hi-hats and eerie frost-covered drones into a cyclonic swirl that’s equally glorious and grotesque.
Both recordings of “Amulet” were released together last year as a single to commemorate the previous incarnation of Deliluh and introduce the new one. On Fault Lines, that skin-shedding process kicks into high gear. But while tracks like “Credence (Ash in the Winds of Reason)” and “Syndicate II” fit snugly into the band’s previous guitar-driven repertoire (not to mention this current era of peak post-punk), Deliluh are the rare band that can summon the menacing propulsion and imagistic density of the Fall without resorting to Mark E. Smith pantomime-uh. In lieu of hectored invectives, Knapp uses his unnervingly calm voice to worm his way into the tormented psyches of his protagonists, like when he catalogs the abuses of the church on “Credence” through the eyes of a possibly complicit priest nervously awaiting judgment day.
But where “Credence” and “Syndicate II” yield the kinds of incremental sonic evolutions (spine-tingling piano embellishments on the former, a theatrical gang-vocal breakdown on the latter) that would’ve counted as major breakthroughs in the band’s pre-2020 iteration, on Fault Lines, these songs function more as last-gasp purges that free up Deliluh to abandon rock music altogether. The album begins with “Memorial,” a serene yet restless ambient piece over which Knapp delivers a solemn funeral prayer (“When the light of the land has perished/Deliver me out to sea”) that could also double as last rites for the band Deliluh once were. It’s immediately answered by the calamitous “Body and Soul,” where Knapp and Pedersen showcase their new methods of bringing the noise, through a beatless industrial hellscape of incessant alarm-bell clamor, anvil-crushing chords, and squealing saxophone that sounds like a wounded animal begging to be put out of its misery.
By the time we reach the closing “Mirror of Hope,” Deliluh have become an apparition of their former selves. Reciting a poem about a train conductor lost in her own thoughts, possibly at the precise moment of an impending crash, Knapp intones: “She is not gliding toward her destination/This is her destiny, this is her chariot, this is her kingdom.” And for the next six minutes, Deliluh lay claim to a promised land of their own through an exquisite free-floating synthphony streaked with windswept woodwinds and tear-jerking strings. Back when they were still holding shows in their living room, Knapp and Pedersen christened their ad-hoc venue Somewhere Else, to denote a safe space liberated from the business demands, programming limitations, and hot-headed bouncers of a typical bar operation. Several years and 4,000 miles removed from those DIY halcyon days, that name still functions as a mission statement—geographically, musically, and spiritually. | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tin Angel | June 13, 2022 | 7.5 | 2c2e1b0c-8002-402d-91fa-a2c41c685106 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
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 ambitious and masterful 1995 album from the legendary country singer, one that came at a pivotal moment in her restless life. | 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 ambitious and masterful 1995 album from the legendary country singer, one that came at a pivotal moment in her restless life. | Emmylou Harris: Wrecking Ball | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emmylou-harris-wrecking-ball/ | Wrecking Ball | By the time she was 48 years old, Emmylou Harris had lived a life or two. She’d issued 16 solo records, toured the world a few times over, and fronted a swinging country-rock ensemble called the Hot Band. She’d been a leading presence in a wave of counterculture-adjacent singer-songwriters who had spawned multiple generations of creative disciples, with Gillian Welch, the Chicks, Sheryl Crow, Conor Oberst, and Margo Price among those in her direct lineage. She’d raised two daughters and gone through three divorces; she’d experienced the death of a parent and the shocking loss of her mentor and creative soulmate. Everybody who worked with her seemed to love her, and it showed in the extensive roster of credits she’d earned as a collaborator across her multi-decade career.
But for all her high esteem, Harris was in need of a new challenge—and so, here came Wrecking Ball. Released in late September of 1995, Wrecking Ball is a staggering work that defied expectations for what a middle-aged woman should be doing with her time. The record drew Harris away from the gaudier side of Nashville and the cynical side of adulthood, pulling inspiration from the life Harris had lived with contributions from a handful of those she’d met along the way. To some listeners, it was a betrayal by their reedy Queen of the Silver Dollar, who’d once happily offered heaps of twangy, mild-mannered songs; for others, it was a refreshing start to a new chapter, proof that a woman’s artistry had no expiration date. For Harris, Wrecking Ball became a place to be a version of herself that she’d never put to tape before.
With her light, flexible voice, Harris is one of the definitive team players of American music—she’s everywhere, if you know where to look. Hear her with Bob Dylan and Neil Young, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt; with Mark Knopfler, George Jones, Willie Nelson, or even in the low harmony of the riverbed siren song on screen in O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s her, joining the Band for “Evangeline” in The Last Waltz, and bouncing with Bonnie Raitt and Little Feat on The Midnight Special. Outside of her many guest appearances, Harris kept up a steady career of her own, issuing sublime folk-leaning records in the ’70s and chasing them with more squarely country material over the next decade. But, by the mid-1990s, Harris was starting to hit dead ends with country radio, a platform that has a particularly ferocious hold over the genre’s metrics for success.
Harris’ 1993 album, Cowgirl’s Prayer, kept pace with trends with a couple of rock-tinged numbers and crystal-clear production, but it had no Top 40 singles, and peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard charts. Though she wasn’t in a full-on flop mode, Harris sensed that she needed to recalibrate. “It was obvious after all [the label’s] effort that country radio was not interested in me—I was too old, or whatever,” Harris once said.
Her label, Elektra, encouraged her to consider working with a producer who could reroute her for her next album. “They basically came back to me and said, ‘We’re going to back you no matter what you do. Do you have any ideas?’” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 2014. Rather than enlisting a Nashville sharpshooter, Harris turned to Daniel Lanois, a Canadian technician who had moved from producing Raffi records onto some of the biggest rock albums of the 1980s, including blockbusters by U2, Peter Gabriel, and Bob Dylan.
At his Kingsway Studios in New Orleans’ French Quarter, Lanois impressed and flabbergasted artists with an unconventional setup that involved unfixed gear in a weird old house, and a recording engineer named Trina Shoemaker who took no bullshit behind the board. Whatever Lanois was doing, his production work often earned a charge of being atmospheric, as though he were capable of summoning pressure systems through his manipulation of knobs and faders. Pushing reverb and swirling backdrops, he created vast soundscapes where artists and listeners could both lose themselves.
More than his impressive production credits on U2’s The Joshua Tree or Peter Gabriel’s So, it was Lanois’ 1989 solo album Acadie, with its combination of relaxed French-Canadian folk music and moody electronic ambiance, that intrigued Harris. She approached the recording process with an inherent sense of trust in her producer, and in turn, Lanois seemed to sense the careful guiding hand that Harris’ work needed: not more of the same genre material that had become restrictive, nor a pivot into the world of stadium-filling stardom. He could create an auditory depth of field that reflected Harris’ own eclecticism, matching her wide-ranging narrative appetite with subtle arrangements that freed her from the narrow constraints of country music.
Harris’ voice is rich and smoky across Wrecking Ball, wrapped in Lanois’ loose and spacious arrangements. She smolders in her natural register, keeping light without pressing herself into awkward highs. A sparkle of guitar and tumble of drums opens the album in the Lanois-penned “Where Will I Be.” As Harris floats over her lines, wondering about her cosmic fate, the song hints at the gospel hymns that had worked their way into the folk and country canons through the Carter Family and Bill Monroe. Lanois brought on U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. to back Harris, and the tasteful touches he brings to Wrecking Ball frame Harris’ voice without overshadowing her presence.
If the album gives a whole snapshot of Harris making a statement for herself, the individual tracks tell their own little stories about Harris and the prevailing emotional forces in her life. Old friends appear throughout, occasionally doubling up. Steve Earle, who wrote “Goodbye,” pops up on “Every Grain of Sand” and “Sweet Old World.” Sisters Anna and Kate McGarrigle, longtime Harris favorites, harmonize on closing number “Waltz Across Texas Tonight,” which Harris co-wrote with frequent collaborator Rodney Crowell. Harris picked up “Sweet Old World” from Lucinda Williams, who showed up to play guitar on the Wrecking Ball recording.
After Harris had joined singer-songwriter Julie Miller to duet on Miller’s “All My Tears” in 1993, she re-cut the song herself for Wrecking Ball. Lanois’ touch is apparent in the muted synthetic churn that carries the song, which Harris foils with airy vocalizations at its close. In “Goin’ Back to Harlan,” written by Anna McGarrigle, Harris rubs elbows with familiar characters, recalling her own position as a sort of folkloric totem. The tune summons folksong figures that populated Harris’ teenage days listening to Pete Seeger and Joan Baez albums: Fair Ellen, cuckoo birds, Barbara Allen, the bells of Rhymney. Harris lightly lifts her voice in the chorus, as if she knows that the relief of returning to a familiar place is worth whatever devils await her there. Any claims that Harris had strayed from her roots of honoring traditional artistry, which she’d done with so many ballads in her previous work, dissolve in McGarrigle’s homage.
Though Harris was an established light among the singer-songwriter set by the time she made Wrecking Ball, she’d nonetheless maintained her voracious appetite for songs by new artists, borrowing “Orphan Girl” from a Nashville up-and-comer in her late twenties named Gillian Welch. Harris’ father, whose career in the Marine Corps informed her itinerant childhood, had died in 1993, and that particular grief peeks through the dulcimer and tambourine that give the song a woodsy, shambolic feel. (The following year, Welch would offer her clear, unembellished take as the opener of her debut album Revival.)
On the title track, Harris found a coded statement of purpose from Neil Young, who harmonized with her on the recording in addition to adding backing vocals and harmonica to “Sweet Old World.” Like Dylan, Young had also had a rough go of the Reagan years, and like Dylan, had a turnaround in 1989. Bookended with acoustic and electric versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Freedom liberated Young from his overstuffed era. Young’s “Wrecking Ball” sounds like something the bartender turns on with the lights, and a look that says it’s time to move along. But Harris transformed the song into a transcendental invocation, opening it with a gauzy haze of guitar that feels like a lifting mist. “My life’s an open book/You read it on the radio,” the song begins, with Harris sounding like a mystical presence as she promises to wear something pretty in white.
Like Young, Harris had lived her own version of strangers absorbing her life’s story through the airwaves, though hers involved a particularly unwieldy presence: the specter of Gram Parsons, a figurehead of “cosmic American music” who died in September of 1973 as the embodiment of burning out rather than fading away. Parsons sometimes wore a bedazzled suit designed by famed rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn, who bedecked him with embroidered icons of his favorite vices and vexations: cannabis, naked women, a Fender Telecaster, ascendant flames, assorted pills, a couple of crosses, poppies as shorthand for morphine and heroin. For better and for worse, Harris’ life wouldn’t have been the same without that rowdy Roman candle of a man, who wisely recruited her to sing with him after a tip from his Byrds bandmate Chris Hillman. She joined him on his debut solo album, 1973’s GP, and on the road in his Fallen Angels band. Parsons had cheated death more than once by the time he’d encountered Harris, but their time together was short.
Parsons died at 26, topping off years of substance misuse with a final flush of tequila and morphine. Harris was left behind, and though Parsons had not quite been a reliable presence, he was still her main tether to the music that illuminated her life. She later credited Linda Ronstadt with being the first person who sought to comfort her at the time, which ultimately sealed their lifelong friendship. Harris and Parsons had become such an inimitable pair that their separation became a defining event in Harris’ life.
Harris fulfilled Parsons’ wish for fleshing out duets that recalled the iconic power of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. The pair seemed unstoppable, their voices matched for one another. Gossip abounded about their preternatural closeness as singing partners—purportedly sparking discontent from Gretchen Parsons, Gram’s wife, who had plenty of other grievances with her badly behaved spouse—but the official record is that they kept it professional and platonic. “We were not romantically involved...but I do believe that if he had lived beyond the ripe old age of almost 27 that, possibly, we would have become involved," Harris conceded in 2000. Parsons may have been the irreverent flamethrower, but Harris was a leveling force, meeting his outrageous affection for overindulgence with a beatifically even keel. He wouldn’t have been the same without her, either.
Though Harris found her passion for music through the folk revival of the early 1960s, she admitted that she’d perceived country music of the same era to be rougher and less refined, more politically conservative than her taste. She credited Parsons with helping her see the beautiful, raw heart of country music, which he’d accomplished through the boundary-busting country-rock records he’d made with the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. Harris seemed to turn her newfound X-ray vision into a superpower over the subsequent years, divining new sentiments from songs by Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, the Louvin Brothers, Shel Silverstein, and scores more.
She exercises that gaze as she draws out the emotional undercurrents of the songs on Wrecking Ball, especially in the flexing tension of “Deeper Well.” Harris channels both the eerie rounds of pre-war Appalachian ballads and flashes of modernity for a reverberating cut that conveys an unquenchable thirst laced with a little sense of sin. The song resurrects a line from “Where Will I Be” about “addiction stayed on tight like a glove.” Here, the image bears the weight of a looming threat. Though the simile is credited to Lanois, it’s difficult not to hear a sort of resonance in the secondhand impact that addiction had on Harris’ life. A flare of electric guitar scorches the space between verses, a flame licking upward in suggestion of even darker depths.
Grief and loss appear in “Goodbye” and “Sweet Old World,” both of which feel hitched to a more general sense of parting sadness. The softly restless “Goodbye” stands out on its own merit with its regretful refrain, but Harris was, in some sense, doing a favor to the down-and-out Steve Earle. He’d written that song and the rest of 1995’s Train a Comin’ while completing a court-ordered rehab program, and the LP was the first he’d made after kicking heroin (Harris sang on two songs from the album). Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World,” meanwhile, was another heartfelt addition that Williams had recorded as the title track to her fourth LP in 1992. Working together in the studio, Lanois encouraged Harris to allow Williams to lead the song at a slower pace. With that direction, the song became an even softer tune than Williams’ barroom-friendly original—which was already a feat by Williams, considering that the song is about a suicide. As Harris enumerates some of the lovely things about life on Earth, it almost sounds like a lullaby.
Wrecking Ball hits a high that unfurls as a psychedelic storm in Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love,” where Lanois’ atmospheric qualifier finally roars forward. His electric guitar solos are bolts of lightning branching outward against the backdrop of percussion and distorted electric guitar gnarls. As she drifts over lines about troubles evaporating, Harris sounds as though she’s basking in the ambient warmth of loving relationships that can only reveal itself with time—the kinds of long-view perspectives that Hendrix, Parsons, and several of their peers never got to see.
Upon its release, Wrecking Ball found more favor among critics and careful listeners than the CD-purchasing public. It was never even on the country charts, and dropped from the Billboard 200 after less than two months, having peaked at No. 94. It never moved a million copies. Narrowly making the Grammy eligibility window, Wrecking Ball did earn Harris a Best Contemporary Folk Album trophy for her trouble, adding to her half-dozen-strong collection. But the industry metrics were beside the point.
Harris, being a woman in the music industry and the world at large, was well aware of the way that numbers could be used against her to assign value: her age, her body measurements, the sizes of checks she earned, how many men she’d loved, the number of records she’d sold. But because of the circumstances of her gender, the warmth of her lasting friendships, and the thoroughly proven quality of her work, Harris also knew that those numbers ultimately amount to nothing. What sits at the heart of Wrecking Ball is the accomplished thrill of running up that hill, no matter who’s watching.
Wrecking Ball wasn’t a betrayal or a denial of any other version of Emmylou Harris, neither a reinvention nor a revision of her history. Harris didn’t set out to change her story or set a new standard for the next century’s singer-songwriters. She was breaking through to something else entirely: herself. | 2022-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Elektra | April 17, 2022 | 8.8 | 2c2f7a49-b2f8-49c4-8c1e-15cc1aeabe8d | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Armed with a bag full of vintage mixtapes that he discovered in the trunk of a used car, the Toronto producer and U.S. Girls affiliate whips up a lo-fi tribute to ’80s house, techno, and electro. | Armed with a bag full of vintage mixtapes that he discovered in the trunk of a used car, the Toronto producer and U.S. Girls affiliate whips up a lo-fi tribute to ’80s house, techno, and electro. | Tony Price: Mark VI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-price-mark-vi/ | Mark VI | In 2020, the Toronto-based U.S. Girls affiliate Tony Price bought a used car and found a bunch of old cassettes from the owner, a former radio DJ and archivist, in the trunk. They turned out to contain hours of house and techno mix shows from the late 1980s—sounds that Price pilfered to create his sixth album, Mark VI, which he named in honor of the car in question. A filter-heavy instrumental dance record made almost entirely from synths, drum machines, and samples, it’s a loving pastiche of the era in question whose hissy loops and gurgling basslines are sometimes all but indistinguishable from the original.
Price’s firm command over his materials shows exciting growth. He’s only attempted dance music once before: the 2019 album 86’d, which was sometimes so slapdash it was hard to groove along to the beats despite their clear intent to rock your body. Outside that LP, his dance-music CV has been minimal. His co-production credits lie mostly with non-electronic artists—Young Guv, Michael Rault, U.S. Girls—while under his birth name, Anthony Nemet, he fronted the garage rock band Actual Water. His last album, 2020’s Interview / Discount, was a two-song free-jazz affair; 2018’s experimental Celica Absolu collaged together distorted beats with blues guitar, industrial noise, and dub sirens. Despite the new album’s relatively sleek machine beats, the throughline between his previous projects and Mark VI turns out to be his abiding interest in gritty, lo-fi textures. The difference this time is that he’s using them to make music you can actually dance to.
The album sounds best when Price combines fast-paced, 808-dashed percussion with alarm-like synths. The electronics on “Aerosol” recall the Ghostbusters theme; they open a portal to the ’80s and inject adrenaline into Price’s hand-clapped shuffle. Mark VI’s title track fuses bleating synths and 808s into a body-rocking acid suite with a beat so engrossing that the transition directly into “Prime” is completely seamless. There, harsh synths evoking Galaga alien ships duke it out with phaser-drenched blasts and an accelerating barrage of drum machines. On centerpiece “Valentino,” funk and house smash into an invigorating blend while glitchy electronic chirps raise the already high stakes of the rapid kicks and synthetic slap bass. It’s all pretty advanced, given the haze that lingered over even the most frenetic moments of 86’d. There, he sounded like he was still figuring it out. Here, when he goes high-BPM, he clearly knows what he’s doing.
On the A-side of Mark VI, the tempos are faster, and Price sounds most comfortable in this uptempo zone. The album’s somewhat syrupier, more dialed-back B-side, which eventually decomposes into ambient jazz, isn’t as enticing. “Phreak” boasts the same elements as the A-side’s best moments—serrated synths, a percussive undercurrent—but its slower pace feels comparatively static, like Price left the grooviest parts on the mixing-room floor.
Mark VI’s A-side opens with “Night Time Mind,” a collage of vintage radio ads and broadcast chatter, and side B closes with that track’s presumable companion, “House of Information.” Amid its slowly groaning saxes and purgatory-like, formless synth bubbles—it’s the only track that fully recalls Interview / Discount—an ad for New York’s most expensive escort service stands out. On “Night Time Mind,” the roulette of ad fragments hints at the freewheeling musical approach and fun times ahead; on “House of Information,” they fully pull Mark VI away from electronics and act as a surreal sort of comedown. They almost take on the role of the MC who introduces and closes out Boiler Room sets. But if their lysergic moods indicate avant-garde intentions, the bulk of Mark VI suggests a much simpler purpose to Price’s archaeological experiment in vintage audio: to have a good time. | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Telephone Explosion | March 14, 2022 | 6.8 | 2c32cfe9-d35e-4206-88e2-8b4b211f8ca6 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Zomby returns with a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings. Here he abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions. | Zomby returns with a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings. Here he abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions. | Zomby: Let's Jam 1 EP / Let's Jam 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21148-lets-jam-1-ep-lets-jam-2-ep/ | Let's Jam 1 EP / Let's Jam 2 EP | In the two-plus years since 2013's With Love, Zomby has experimented with a new mode: silence. Or, at least, relative silence, as the irascible producer has been dormant after keeping a near constant release schedule since debuting in 2007. It's been for the best, really, as London's grime underground, including upstarts like Visionist and Logos, took the genre to new, exciting places just as Zomby's twinkling arpeggios started to feel too familiar. Now Zomby returns, first with a one-off single this summer with grime godfather Wiley and now with Let's Jam!!, a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings.
Anyone hoping for fireworks upon Zomby's return is likely to be disappointed, as Let's Jam!! is slight both by XL's standards and the strictures of dance music 12"s. Zomby has referred to at least one of the tracks here ("Acid Surf") as a "DJ tool"—a simple, repetitive piece meant to aid DJ mixing—and much of Let's Jam 1 proceeds in this manner, offering up slight variations on simple riffs. DJ tools are a common, simple convention, but they usually aren't packaged with promotional airhorns (nor do they tend to come out on XL Recordings, or at least not since the early '90s), so it's fair to assume that Zomby sees these as somewhat more substantial than that term implies.
Locating that substance proves difficult. On Let's Jam 1 Zomby (finally!) abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions—of the early history of XL, coincidentally or not—adding little to the equation. Opener "Surf I" is essentially a harmless electro sendup, featuring a low voice grunting the track's title while short melodic lines phase in and out. The problem is that, even for a low-stakes genre exercise, "Surf I" is badly lacking in dynamism, deploying that same curt vocal sample on the first downbeat of every other measure of the track while a short bassline repeats. It is noticeably repetitive in a realm in which repetition is basically the entire point.
No, if you're looking for the type of subtle shifts and melodic changeups that are part and parcel to the very concept of dance music you'll have to wait for "Surf II", a similar concept but with just enough rhythmic interplay and moving pieces to register as improvement. If for some reason you should want to bridge these Zomby offers aforementioned tool "Acid Surf", which sounds like a parody of Zomby doing an acid track: a zippy 303 bassline, a sample of someone sternly declaring "acid", and lots of airhorn. "Slime", a coarse interpretation of the hoover bass sound, is a far better fit for Zomby's eerie sense of melody.
There's less to say about Let's Jam 2, which returns Zomby to his default style—sparkling synths, fizzy square wave bass, pools of reverb—with diminishing returns. The best of the four tracks, "Bloom", wouldn't sound out of place on Local Action or Keysound Recordings or any of the other London labels releasing lush, forward-thinking bass explorations, but nor would it stand out. (More troublingly, you could say the same about its placement on Zomby's past two albums.) Grime has gotten vaster and braver in Zomby's absence; long reverb tails and gunshot percussion don't quite cut it anymore.
Let's Jam!! does unload some of With Love's portentous conceptualism. It's nice to see Zomby return to the short, understated format under which he's released some of his most potent material; With Love suggested that his gilded, buzzy sound is difficult to scale. No points just for showing up, though, and Let's Jam!! finds Zomby far too conservative working through two distinct periods of UK dance history. | 2015-10-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | October 15, 2015 | 4.9 | 2c330a87-c8e7-4fc2-9676-a5b7e1ead2bf | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The young Swedish house producer DJ Seinfeld applies an opaque dose of irreverence atop every surface of his project. He makes effective club tracks, but his acts of appropriation are dubious. | The young Swedish house producer DJ Seinfeld applies an opaque dose of irreverence atop every surface of his project. He makes effective club tracks, but his acts of appropriation are dubious. | DJ Seinfeld: Sunrise EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22937-sunrise-ep/ | Sunrise EP | Veteran L.A. beat producer Daedelus recently remarked on Twitter, “Young producers. Someday your alias won’t sound ridiculous. Keep going.” A comforting gesture, but I don’t think Daedelus had DJ Seinfeld’s name in mind. Since last year, the young Swedish house producer—who also goes by Rimbaudian, referencing the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud—has been caught in the crossfire of an ongoing debate on the topic of authenticity in house music.
Along with such producers as DJ Boring and Ross From Friends, DJ Seinfeld has helped usher in a new era of house music that prioritizes pleasure over precision; feeling over substance. With that—love it or hate it—“lo-fi” dominated the scene in 2016. Satisfaction is their M.O., and the internet is their oyster. In only a few months, DJ Boring’s “Winona” and Ross From Friends’ “Talk to Me You’ll Understand” both garnered over a million hits on YouTube—astonishing achievements for unknown bedroom producers. DJ Seinfeld’s own track “U” has accrued over 300,000 plays on the same platform since October.
The music DJ Seinfeld makes isn’t all that divisive on its own. His debut Season 1 EP, released last year, presented a freewheeling collection of five jacking beats dipping between vaporwave funk, scorched-earth acid, and tribal house. It’s emotive party music with a youthful, no-fucks-given approach. Aside from the cover art’s portrayal of Jerry and George in a decidedly Macintosh Plus aesthetic and a track entitled “Jerry,” DJ Seinfeld’s namesake is nowhere to be found in the tunes themselves.
The “Seinfeld” graphics have vanished for the three-track Sunrise EP, replaced with appropriative imagery of another kind—a cheeky smiley face recalling the ubiquitous symbol of acid house and a dog happily sniffing its own ass, like an ouroboros (the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail). The acid house reference is undeniable, and on “Chat Shit Get Luved,” DJ Seinfeld draws up a gnarly 303 bassline from subterranean depths as the claps reverberate through a cavernous space. It’s an effective club track, but it reaches top velocity fairly quickly, and stays there for five minutes of clenched-fist tension. It forgoes the archetypal EDM “build” and offers little variation other than a few predictably satisfying bass drops.
DJ Seinfeld evokes the cyclical nature of the ouroboros on “Beginning of an End,” where he transports us to a shimmering synthscape with a 4/4 pulse less ferocious than the rest of the EP. Meanwhile, a voice recites the 1932 poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Mary Elizabeth Frye. As Frye’s voice is swallowed up by DJ Seinfeld’s gently lapping waves, her words—“Do not stand at my grave and cry/I am not there; I did not die”—emphasize morbid introspection.
The highlight here is “Flyin’ Thru Sunrise,” a stomping slice of nouveau-deep-house. Again, DJ Seinfeld doesn’t hide anything, as he recasts a snippet from the matriarch of the deep house vocal, Sade Adu. The sample comes from her 1992 Love Deluxe slow-burner “Pearls.” Her words aren’t “Flyin’ thru sunrise,” as the title suggests, but rather “dying to survive.” It’s effective inasmuch as it plays up the moody ecstasy of Moodymann or Larry Heard, but “Flyin’ Thru Sunrise”’s blatant emotion is also its greatest weakness. Sade’s “Pearls” is an elegy to a woman in Somalia barely scraping by; it’s a heartbreaking track about struggle and survival, literally “dying to survive.” For DJ Seinfeld, it’s fodder for a bleary-eyed banger.
Reinterpretation and re-contextualization are cornerstones of house music, and DJ Seinfeld hasn't really done anything wrong here. But the blatant acts of appropriation in his choice of name, visual aesthetic, and samples make one wonder what exactly Seinfeld is getting at. While electronic music can offer the allure of anonymity or an alter-ego, DJ Seinfeld lacquers an opaque, kitschy dose of irreverence on top every surface of his project. He’s not hiding from view—he wants your attention. | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Endotherm | March 6, 2017 | 6.9 | 2c3f08d9-28c7-4cd5-9f44-8a40005d5750 | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | null |
This LP/DVD set is culled from a pair of SBTRKT's typically sensory-overload live shows recorded at the London venue Shepherds Bush Empire last October. It's not quite bootleg cameraphone quality, but from the outset it's clear something's up. | This LP/DVD set is culled from a pair of SBTRKT's typically sensory-overload live shows recorded at the London venue Shepherds Bush Empire last October. It's not quite bootleg cameraphone quality, but from the outset it's clear something's up. | SBTRKT: Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17585-live/ | Live | SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut was a welcome breakthrough. In a year when bass music was getting further acquainted with the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, SBTRKT found a way to streamline producer Aaron Jerome's clean, rhythmically intricate yet suitably catchy style into a sound that felt distinctly aboveground. And while guest spots from singers like Jessie Ware and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano took SBTRKT's compatibility with R&B and indie pop to its logical conclusion, it was the yearning, gentle murmuring of regular collaborator Sampha that proved to be the most characteristic and distinct voice on the record.
In the following year, SBTRKT took his show on the road, and a real sense of showmanship-- elaborate masks, quick shifts from programmed to live percussion, Sampha's presence as a singer and multi-instrumentalist-- made those concerts a sensory-overload experience. That energy's visually borne out in the two videos that come with the LP/DVD version of Live, an album culled from a pair of shows recorded at London venue Shepherds Bush Empire last October. But unfortunately those video excerpts are the closest this set comes to doing justice to what seems like it could've been an exciting series of shows. Because if there's one thing that threatens to ruin the atmosphere of a really tight performance like this, it's a foggy recording, mixing, or mastering job that fails to capture the dynamic pop of SBTRKT's drums, whether programmed or behind the kit.
It's not quite bootleg cameraphone-recording quality, but from the outset of "Surely" it's clear something's up-- what should be crisp, resonant snares sound like cardboard, kicks feel mushy, and hi-hats have the weak timbre of rattling chain link fences. It's a shame, because this version takes what was a fairly forgettable bonus 7" from the LP version of SBTRKT and ups its tempo, using it as a good base to rhythmically improvise some glitchy freeform beats and turning an afterthought into an anthem. Sampha's voice suffers, too-- its strength is in his subtlety, and while he sounds powerful over minimal accompaniment, a lot of nuance is lost when he sings over heavy instrumentation. What should be the most emotional moments on "Never Never" and "Trials of the Past" give the unfair illusion that he's short of breath and trying to catch up.
Everything else about Live seems almost secondary to the cruddy sound quality, but it'd be a shame to detract from what SBTRKT was going for here. The addition of London's Heritage Orchestra on tracks like "Trials of the Past" and "Go Bang" isn't your typical class-up-the-joint schmaltz move; the strings really do wring out some additional emotional highs. The version of "Wildfire" is deliriously inspired, as SBTRKT takes Nagano's voice and chops it up into a stammering percussive riff, extending one of his signature singles into a high-energy sprawl. And one previously unheard track, the surprisingly techno-indebted "Migration" (a segue out of SBTRKT highlight "Hold On"), definitely gives followup-hungry fans something more to look forward to for the next release. This concert album's heart is in the right place. It's too bad that the mics weren't. | 2013-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | XL / Young Turks | January 18, 2013 | 5.5 | 2c435ca2-e99b-405e-80a7-74c2dfef6490 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. On A**nareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open. | The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. On A**nareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open. | Horrendous: Anareta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21134-anareta/ | Anareta | The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. But their sound opened up drastically for Ecdysis, the album's glimpses of outside influences earning the band increased attention. On A**nareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open. It's as if, bona fides well established, the band set out to form a link between the past they once embraced and a future they imagine.
This shift is as clear during opener "The Nihilist", where seething whispers curl around a complex math-metal figure, as it is during closer "The Solipsist", where a kaleidoscopic melody spins like a spotlight inside a thrash metal bulwark. There are references to antecedents throughout*:* "Stillborn Gods" invokes Slayer, while moments of "Ozymandias" sound like a Big Four mixtape. The legacy of Swedish death metal looms large, too. But these are the foundations from which Horrendous now sprawl—with bright solos that whip in the wind, with rubber-band basslines that run counterclockwise to the leads, with whiplash rhythms that suggest a short-circuiting carnival ride.
Through all of these twists and churns, the band never seems to be showing off its dexterity, or attempting transitions for their own sake. Horrendous have become masters of pacing and dynamics, instinctively knowing when to let the album and audience breathe. "Polaris" progresses from doom metal to black metal to death metal and back to doom seamlessly, as though a DJ had spent hours perfecting the cuts between it all. On the first five minutes of "Acolytes", they plow through a grindcore sprint and settle into a dense and demanding death-metal section, with a squealing little riff tucked carefully into a rhythm section that refuses to sit still. These additions lend the momentum of mystery to these songs, which surprise every time you hear them.
One of the most glorious moments on the album, and in metal this year, arrives as a revelation at the end of "Acolytes". Unexpectedly, the guitar stalls, locking into one glowing note as the drums retreat into a low-tempo tap. Then, a new arching riff radiates outward, as though the guitar has suddenly emerged from a mountain's shadow and into the midday sun. The drums double and triple their pace, while Herring musters one final, fade-away scream, like a hero taking his leave of a scene. It's a beautiful passage, as redemptive as anything on Deafheaven's Sunbather and as cathartic as the closing moments of a symphony.
Though they sound quite different, Anareta has a lot in common with my other favorite metal album of the year, Tribulation's The Children of the Night. On their earliest albums, both bands wrestled with the past, rendering death metal anew as competent revivalists. But in 2015, they have both stretched those traditions, filling accepted frameworks with unlikely elements. The influences are still recognizable, but the results are no longer obvious. This quest even comes written into Anareta's wonderfully narrative lyrics, where the aim for mortal meaning serves as the cri de cœur. "Forging a new reality/ Embrace the burning dawn in me," goes the end of "Acolytes". Indeed, metal can value faithful, enthusiastic recreations more than heretical ingenuity, and vice versa. But like Tribulation, Horrendous show the value of compromise within a record that creates its own middle ground—and stands right there for eight tracks, stunning. | 2015-11-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Dark Descent | November 24, 2015 | 8.2 | 2c4c84b5-35c8-4580-b0a1-c073fe6ab65a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The masked UK duo crafts electronic pop that draws on hip-hop, R&B, chillwave, and psych-funk, but their immersive soundscapes leave little impression. | The masked UK duo crafts electronic pop that draws on hip-hop, R&B, chillwave, and psych-funk, but their immersive soundscapes leave little impression. | Jadu Heart: Melt Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jadu-heart-melt-away/ | Melt Away | From spiritual jazz legend Sun Ra to self-styled rap villain MF DOOM to the chrome-helmeted robots of Daft Punk, musicians seeking to cultivate mystery and intrigue have donned masks. Jadu Heart—the London duo of Alex Headford and Diva Jeffery—place themselves in this lineage, and they’re rarely seen without their masks, which resemble a more whimsical Donnie Darko bunny.
The costuming is part of an elaborate backstory, equal parts “Legend of Zelda,” Indiana Jones, and the fever dream of a J Dilla disciple. As Jadu Heart tell it, their alter-egos Dina and Faro were cursed after they unwittingly touched a magic MPC in an abandoned temple. Their early EPs recalled the otherworldly beat music of Brainfeeder producer Teebs, incorporating aqueous warbles and clicks into glittering electronic pop. On their debut album Melt Away, the duo attempt to meet their self-mythology with immersive soundscapes that leave little impression.
In the tradition of Gorillaz or Jai Paul, Jadu Heart’s borderless electronica eagerly welcomes hip-hop, R&B, chillwave, and psych-funk into the fold. Ukulele twangs, handclaps, and found-sound samples turn “The Cure” into a Maggie Rogers-esque blend of folk and dance, except with African drumming and a hip-hop breakdown. Producer Mura Masa (the duo’s label head) joins for the jazzy “U Never Call Me,” where elements like kalimba and a clave drum pattern point towards Afro-Cuban inspiration. Then there’s “Heroin Song,” which sounds like Oasis gone shoegaze. But just because Jadu Heart pull from multiple genres doesn’t mean their tracks are innovative. Most of their choices serve to create a wash of sound that all blends together.
Jadu Heart have an ear for an intricate melody, but their vague lyrics never get a chance to be memorable. On “Forgotten Ghosts,” a disaffected Headford emotes sadness in melodramatic metaphors like, “We’ll go and feel the rain/Falling like an angel in the sea.” “Harry Brompton’s Ice Tea” refers to a brand of fruity beverage, though the song might also double as a metaphor for a psychedelic trip. “I’m drifting now, down through the river that’s made/Can you feel it,” the two sing over a smooth funk beat. But there are no clear narratives, no concrete imagery, no sense of the universe they’re attempting to reveal.
After nearly an hour of reverbed guitar and synth, Melt Away ends with a breath of fresh air: a faithful cover of Vashti Bunyan’s 1970 song “Diamond Day,” sparingly accentuated by the flutter of violin strings and the childlike lilt of a recorder. But Jadu Heart’s remake betrays their weaknesses. As Headford and Jeffery reproduce Bunyan’s elegant quatrains, their own songs appear amateurish by comparison. Granted, there are a lot more instruments and production effects in a Jadu Heart song. But Bunyan found a timeless magic in the mundane that no amount of cosmic sound-design conjuring can match.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | VLF | August 13, 2019 | 5.8 | 2c56035c-9c6f-4d4f-982c-5d3eb3b86ecb | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
A pair of new EPs splits the German producer’s work down the middle: ISS005 is reserved strictly for big, bruising club tracks, while ISS006 trades the drums for pure, beatless ambient. | A pair of new EPs splits the German producer’s work down the middle: ISS005 is reserved strictly for big, bruising club tracks, while ISS006 trades the drums for pure, beatless ambient. | Skee Mask: ISS005 / ISS006 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-iss005-iss006/ | ISS005 / ISS006 | Skee Mask’s music thrives on the friction between opposing impulses. The German producer fuels storming club rhythms with jungle breaks, distorted kicks, and whip-cracking electro syncopations, then swathes them in wispy atmospheric tones, soft as baby’s breath. The end product is a dramatic pairing of force and aura, like an earthmover haloed in dust clouds and rays of sunlight, or an iceberg cleaving in slow motion, throwing off huge plumes of frozen debris.
The balance of those two impulses may shift from track to track—Skee Mask’s EPs lean harder on muscular club cuts, while his albums allow him to stretch out and explore more ethereal zones—but rarely does the needle tip all the way to one extreme or the other; the dichotomy remains fundamental to almost everything he does. With a pair of new EPs, however, Skee Mask (aka Munich’s Bryan Müller) splits his work down the middle. ISS005 is reserved strictly for big, bruising club tracks, while ISS006 trades the drums for pure, beatless ambient. (ISS is short for “Ilian Skee Series,” Müller’s own imprint under his hometown’s Ilian Tape label; as is frequently the case with his EPs, the titles are the same as the catalog numbers.) The drily functionalist tags make the contents appear to be mere DJ tools; the outsized sounds inside protest mightily at such a condescending description. Spinning off club tackle and sofa stuffing into two separate divisions might seem like an unremarkable strategy, but in Skee Mask’s case, it’s productive: Taken together, the two EPs suggest an artist uninterested in lingering in his comfort zone.
ISS005’s five tracks showcase rugged club rhythms that go for the jugular. Like “RZZ” on last October’s ISS004, the opening “IT Danza” casts a glance back at decade-old dubstep: Insistent congas tumble forward at 140 BPM, while dub sirens and murky deejay chat suggest a fever dream of dancehall reggae. Just over hallway through, Müller lets rip a sample of jazz saxophone that he flips into careening runs reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”—if, say, the Russian composer had been plagued by murder hornets. The next two tracks take up ISS004’s grime investigations, collectively marking a new frontier in sheer ugliness for the German producer. “Meal” thrashes like a poisoned beast, with garbled bass throbbing unsteadily beneath shrieking cuica and the occasional spray of bullets. Even more disorienting, “Reefer Madness” is just drums and snarling bass, but the beat feels inside out. The pulse doesn’t land on the downbeat, leaving you perpetually off balance; it’s like standing on the windy edge of a precipice. The EP finishes off with an attention-deficit drum tool and some razor-sharp electro. The nuts-and-bolts cuts are still a hoot: all killer, no filigree.
In the past, Müller’s softer instincts often tended toward sentimentality, but there’s nothing pretty about the six ambient tracks that constitute ISS006. “Dolby” opens the EP with chugging dub-delay feedback, before a bright tone rises like a rocket through smog, illuminating a vast expanse of featureless ground below: faint synth pads, rumbling bass, the ghost of a chord change. It sounds like William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops run through a battered rave soundsystem on a ruined planet—an elegy that has outlasted its mourners. “Frogsplash (Reshape),” on the other hand, marks the record’s emotional apex: Faint chords with an almost guitar-like feel cycle back and forth, like the memory of a love song turning to dust at the bottom of a dry well.
The next three tracks turn more indistinct. Their movements are slow and unpredictable, with muted synths or string-like textures that twist aimlessly. The blissfully numb “Henk (Version Whatever)” is particularly lovely; its deep, subdued drones would make the perfect accompaniment to a documentary on the ocean’s cold, dark abyssal zone, where dead organic matter falls like ghostly snow and the bioluminescent lures of anglerfish bob in the blackness. But if this stretch is abstract to the point of emotionlessness, “Mbass123 Excerpt” is deeply expressive, with forlorn synths tracing sad, graceful curlicues against an inky backdrop. It amounts to a powerful highlight of the whole diptych. Skee Mask has always expertly sequenced his albums, using pacing and contrasts not just to set a mood but to tell stories, tales full of twists and turns, climaxes and denouements. With ISS005 and ISS006, he arrives at a fork in the road, and the plot thickens.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | July 1, 2020 | 7.8 | 2c561aa2-ed82-46e1-8b64-902ebff54c79 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Cornwallian drum'n'bass producer Luke Vibert has been deploying many of the same tricks for years, under his Plug alias among others: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and vocal snippets from old records or VHS movies. His latest, Bizarster, is fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on. | The Cornwallian drum'n'bass producer Luke Vibert has been deploying many of the same tricks for years, under his Plug alias among others: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and vocal snippets from old records or VHS movies. His latest, Bizarster, is fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on. | Luke Vibert: Bizarster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21196-bizarster/ | Bizarster | Thanks in part to a Trent Reznor co-sign, American electronica listeners were introduced to the peculiar talents of producer Luke Vibert in 1997 by Drum 'n' Bass for Papa. Released under his Plug alias, it wasn't his first album, but Vibert's caffeinated take on the still-underground dance form was given Interscope distribution. This meant that many stateside listeners were introduced to drum'n'bass via Vibert's goofy and furious rollercoaster tracks set to offbeat samples, like John Goodman's howling admonishment from Barton Fink: "I'LL. SHOW. YOU. THE. LIFE. OF. THE. MIND."
Since then, Vibert has spun off aliases to match his productions, each one slotted to fit a particular genre. Wagon Christ signified the trippiest trip-hop, Amen Andrews made dizzying jungle, Kerrier District did filter disco. Albums under Vibert's proper name spread even further: Big Soup spanned breakbeat and downtempo, YosepH dipped into acid, while a compilation, Nuggets, found Vibert digging deep into library music.
The lone constant throughout has been Vibert's corny humor, which comes up often on Bizarster, his first album for his peer Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label in six years. "Knockout" flashes the tricky, skittering footwork of Paradinas and Aphex Twin, with left-field harp runs, analog synth bloops, and the requisite cheeky vocal sample (this one from Mike Tyson's Nintendo game "Punch Out!!"). "L Tronic" uses the neon nightcrawler squiggle from Stone's "Girl I Like the Way That You Move", some more 8-bit bubbles, and an old hip-hop freestyle atop it.
It's a formula that Vibert has done to death no matter the moniker: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and/or arcade game FX as the next layer, all topped off by vocal snippets from old records or old VHS movies. There's a soul sample, a railing preacher, and a howl to go with the crisp hi-hats and handclaps of "Officer's Club", a boast about "[makin'] like the ghetto [to] blast ya" sped up so as to move from menacing to cartoonish. Vocal lolz reach peak Vibert on "I Can Phil It", built from—as the punny title soon bears out—Phil Collins asking "can you feel it?" soon joined by the MC shout from the live version of Mr. Fingers' "Can You Feel It?", and all manner of "feels", piled up on a track that ultimately doesn't feel like much.
In 2012, Vibert unearthed more of his Plug material, releasing it as Back on Time. Much like Bizarster, it's fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on, even though those jokey samples no longer land quite right. Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind. | 2015-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | October 23, 2015 | 6.4 | 2c5684b5-7837-4d14-92b6-9635a8ab5e34 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Japanese rock artist Shintaro Sakamoto's latest album finds him immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo, assembling the resulting sounds into a whole that suggests the heady late 1990s as much as they do the go-go '60s. | Japanese rock artist Shintaro Sakamoto's latest album finds him immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo, assembling the resulting sounds into a whole that suggests the heady late 1990s as much as they do the go-go '60s. | Shintaro Sakamoto: Let's Dance Raw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19714-shintaro-sakamoto-lets-dance-raw/ | Let's Dance Raw | There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence. Yet as Julian Cope explains in his study of Japanese psychedelia Japrocksampler, the Japanese heads who built upon and translated the post-Nuggets era into their own language, laying the groundwork for Sakamoto himself, most often eschewed drugs completely, opting for other avenues through which to get to the same dizzying musical highs.
As a solo artist, Sakamoto is so unconcerned with authenticity to a musical tradition that on record, he quite nearly disappears completely. On the 2012 LP How to Live With a Phantom, he mastered an ersatz lounge-pop that skewed as much portmortem as postmodern. The lightest, oft-cheesiest products of Western '50s and '60s pop—from the Free Design to French yé-yé and Martin Denny’s “exotica” soundscapes—have long appealed to Japanese record nerds for whom “soul” is often a very foreign concept, and Sakamoto is no exception. On his second solo album Let’s Dance Raw, he doubles down on his love for such sounds, assembling them into a whole that suggests as much the heady late '90s as the go-go '60s.
A slight shift from Phantom’s chippy disco guitar licks and smoky organs, Raw finds Sakamoto immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo—an instrument which, he suggests on “You Can Be a Robot, Too”, can be plucked and looped in a way that sounds like thousands of tiny gears operating in perfect concert. If there's any recognizable Western spirit animals for Raw (other than “Sleep Walk”), it's Beck—the heavy-lidded proto-serious iteration, that is, from 1998’s Mutations—and indie-pop gadabout and arranger-for-hire Sean O’Hagan with the High Llamas, whose '90s LPs Santa Barbara and Hawaii absorbed the Americana ambitions of Van Dyke Parks and ironed out the quirks, creating a heavily-stamped, pristine musical passport. Like Beck’s “Tropicalia”, Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.
What makes Sakamoto unique, though, is not simply his knack for turning the exotic West into a glimmering watercolor, or his capacity to craft a simple groove redolent of Steely Dan’s gaudy disco swan song Gaucho—though “Like an Obligation” more than qualifies—but doing so with the kind of fashionable indifference mastered by predecessors like Beck, Grace Jones, and the dazed, obsessive Yokohama teenagers wandering through Memphis in Mystery Train. Yes, Sakamoto digs into countercultural sociology on “Obligation” and “Birth of the Super Cult”, two blunted treatises against the staid social structures that still dog much of Japanese society. But before we call him a prophet, let’s keep in mind his alternative: sliding “a small chip between your eyebrows” and becoming a robot. Sakamoto has an odd way of working, sure, but it's also liberating: when you disregard authenticity as your compass, it’s amazing how far you can travel. | 2014-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Other Music / Zelone | September 15, 2014 | 7.1 | 2c57503d-d965-4644-a785-c2e6300d8741 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Flying the banner of punk, Titus Andronicus' third album sounds like something knocked out immediately by five guys in a room and captured on tape without the need for narration, a brass section, or multiple tempo changes. | Flying the banner of punk, Titus Andronicus' third album sounds like something knocked out immediately by five guys in a room and captured on tape without the need for narration, a brass section, or multiple tempo changes. | Titus Andronicus: Local Business | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17258-local-business/ | Local Business | Patrick Stickles announced Titus Andronicus' upcoming North American tour by proclaiming "PUNK IS BACK." I suppose it's only fair to point out this is a guy whose last record ended with a 15-minute epic based on a Civil War naval battle. (It also had a bagpipe solo.) But while "The Battle of Hampton Roads" and many other Titus Andronicus songs lack the structural qualities of punk rock proper, they more than compensate with a spirit of all-in commitment. This was music made without any sort of Plan B.
It's understandable that Stickles would be flying the banner of punk for Local Business since Titus Andronicus couldn't possibly top The Monitor by going bigger. But while Local Business is no less ambitious than its predecessors, it's ambitious in a way that's more meaningful for the band as a working unit. This is the first time the lineup touring the record is the same one that made it, and you get the feeling their intent was to make a one-take road dog album. At that they've succeeded. But Local Business also marks the first time the band seems like it's holding something back-- like there is a Plan B.
At the outset, you get an idea of how it might've been drawn up. The first three songs on Local Business are by far the strongest and perhaps coincidentally the most familiar-- a medley of opening duo "Ecce Homo" and "Still Life With Hot Deuce on Silver Platter" has been a staple of their live sets for some time, while "Upon Viewing Oregon's Landscape With the Flood of Detritus" was premiered as part of an anticipatory mixtape. Together, they align with the mission of Local Business by sounding more plug-in-and-play than even the rawest parts of The Airing of Grievances, something that could be knocked out immediately by five guys in a room and captured on tape without the need for narration, a brass section, or multiple tempo changes.
These opening tracks still bear many of the characteristics of classic Titus Andronicus songs, with rhythms to beat out on your steering wheel, triumphant classic rock guitars, and Stickles showing off his underrated sense of tunefulness. Once he grabs a hold of a melody, he crams it with in-jokes and self-reference: "Feeling like we live on a Diarrhea Planet" is a classic Stickles-ism if you don't know he's namedropping his friend's band. In a rare event, Stickles actually repeats lines, and you can easily hear those key phrases being echoed by a room full of true believers. That sense of populism is crucial as the band juggles nihilism, existentialism, and misanthropy.
The opening section is a promising glimpse of a more aerodynamic and blue-collar Titus Andronicus, but by "My Eating Disorder", their new attitude has begun to clash with old habits. As is his style, Stickles has been candid about his struggles with Selective Eating Disorder, and as a confessional, "My Eating Disorder" is admirable, enlightening, and incredibly brave. But as a piece of music, it doesn't pack nearly enough ideas to support its grand framework.
"My Eating Disorder" isn't really part of a narrative arc, but as the literal and figurative center of Local Business, it opens a fissure and everything else crumbles around it. The one-minute instrumental "Food Fight!" and the one-line rant of "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)" are the type of songs that carried weight in the context of Titus' prior concepts, but here they add nothing. "(I Am the) Electric Man" was a lark when it was released online following Stickles' bizarre electrocution accident, and outfitted with glitzy showtune vocals, it's a welcome respite in between the autopilot angst of "In a Small Body" and "Tried to Quit Smoking"'s agonizing blooze crawl.
Most important, for a record whose title and purpose is to celebrate punk, DIY, and local scenes, there's little sense of their previous fun or community uplift. During "In a Big City", Stickles screams "Now I'm a drop in deluge of hipsters," connecting with a sentiment on "Still Life": "It's just me, lonely me/ and the other relevant dudes/ arrogant enough to believe this is developing news." These are representative of Local Business' pervasive attitude, rife with the sort of sarcasm, gossip, and double meaning that dominates discourse in indie rock and its Twitter parallel universe.
Cynicism is both healthy and necessary in this realm, and Stickles' bullshit detector is off the charts throughout much of Local Business. But as he wonders about his complicity or how this kind of social schematic has benefited him, the album becomes stifling rather than illuminating. Even he's not sure how much he has to add to the conversation, as so much of Local Business struggles with coming up with something new to say: "Don't tell me that I was born free/ that joke's been old since high school," "By now I think we've established/ that everything is inherently worthless," "Yes, it's 'us against them' again." As such, a record meant to solidify Titus Andronicus after the past six years of personnel churn ultimately sounds transitional. This could possibly work in favor of Local Business in the long run, and after two stone-cold knockouts in The Airing of Grievances and The Monitor, it's not unexpected for them to stumble a bit. But are they on the right track? The battle lines of "us against them" aren't as clearly drawn this time, and for once, Titus Andronicus sound unsure of where they stand. | 2012-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | October 24, 2012 | 7 | 2c5a0abe-e1cf-46e3-b210-a323cf07246e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The charismatic rapper's second album captures absolutely none of his real-life persona. It is among the most insipid, vacuous statements in recent pop history. | The charismatic rapper's second album captures absolutely none of his real-life persona. It is among the most insipid, vacuous statements in recent pop history. | Jack Harlow: Come Home the Kids Miss You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-harlow-come-home-the-kids-miss-you/ | Come Home the Kids Miss You | Jack Harlow is a charming, tall, and increasingly chiseled 24-year-old man who sports a mop of curly hair, impossibly tamed and complemented by a youthful beard, sharp blue eyes, a coy smile, and a honking diamond earring in each lobe. Like any good heartthrob, he loves antics—he’s eager to flirt with women he’s just met and say, I love you, or simply act like a goober in public. His second album, Come Home the Kids Miss You, reveals that the showmanship is merely a distraction from some insipid, vacuous music. Harlow’s charisma does not translate onto the record, and, instead, we’re left with a one-trick pony without a discernible trick, a competent rapper who does not flow intricately or write impressively, a pop star who struggles to carry a song on his own.
Harlow’s origin story is repeated often: At age 12, he decided he wanted to be a rapper and got to work, practicing, recording, and selling CDs at school. By 19, he made “Dark Knight,” the song that launched a major-label bidding war for his talents and, ultimately, landed him a deal with the once-promising Atlantic imprint Generation Now. Just about two years later, he made his first good song and true hit, “Whats Poppin”; then, after releasing his debut studio album, the Harlow hype machine went into hyperdrive with “Industry Baby,” the Lil Nas X single where Harlow dutifully performed the role of the straight man in the proudly gay music video. Next to Lil Nas X, Harlow delivered one of the best verses of his career, too, his down-the-middle approach an appropriate complement to his co-star’s more fluid delivery.
Stripped of an appropriate foil, however, Harlow’s swagger is muted. Despite an air of pomp, lead single “Nail Tech” is limp, largely due to its chintzy beat and Harlow’s reluctant vocals. He is too casual on the song, as if he’s afraid to veer away from his tried and true flow for something more expressive. In the music video, for example, he stands tall in a tank top holding three dogs, like he’s DMX, and he raps, “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” He winks, sneers, and mockingly snaps his hand as he mouths, “hound,” but any implied aggression or magnetism is lost on the recorded track.
Harlow’s ability to rap well somehow acts as a hindrance to his ability to make good songs. He does not have a definable trait or tick that could be parodied, preferring to keep things tidy and also make terrible allusions. (The worst might be “Can’t lie, I’m on Angus Cloud nine” because “You know I like to dictate things, Kim Jong” is so obviously stupid that it must be a joke.) His straightforward approach is similar to those of fellow Southerners Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby, the sort of bars-first-but-also-make-it-pop throwback rappers who maybe would not have stood out in the commercial landscape of the 2000s, but are anomalies in the day and age of vibes. Unlike them, however, Harlow does not make bright songs on Come Home the Kids Miss You. The album, for the most part, consists of a monochromatic palette of generic “smooth” beats, one just bleeding into the next. Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.
These songs have topics, for sure—women, his upbringing, how he drinks pineapple juice to make his semen taste good—but Harlow does not craft vivid scenes, proffer compelling thoughts, or wring out emotion, sounding like someone forced into an introductory therapy session, for instance, when he raps, “Terrified to see my parents pass,” on “Parent Trap.” The most intriguing thing here is the desperate commodification of his own music and ideas, seen on the suite of “First Class” and “Dua Lipa.” The former, which egregiously samples Fergie’s mid-2000s hit “Glamorous,” is massively popular, having been a TikTok hit before debuting atop the Billboard Hot 100. Harlow’s hook is basically Fergie’s, making it less of a chorus and more of a signal of cultural awareness, a nod to an era that his generation has fetishized. The nod is what matters.
With “Dua Lipa,” previewed just days before the album’s release, Harlow simply incorporates the global star’s name into a refrain. The song’s got nothing to do with Dua Lipa; again, it’s the sort of knowing wink that makes for good tabloid fodder but not necessarily good music. Were it not called “Dua Lipa,” there would be nothing of note about the song, which has a flat beat and equally flat bars. Harlow has gone for the celebrity song title in the past with “Tyler Herro,” but with that single he at least parlayed the conceit into an acknowledgment of his position as a white figure in a predominantly Black space. “Dua Lipa” is just being vaguely horny on main, as he might say. With little substance or musical intrigue, “First Class” and “Dua Lipa” are anodyne pieces of content designed to make somebody say, “Did you hear that Jack Harlow song that samples Fergie, or the one called ‘Dua Lipa’?” There’s no better answer than a dead-eyed “Yeah.” He did the same thing with a short album trailer starring Danielle Fishel, better known as Topanga from Boy Meets World. Was there much of a point? Not really, but people took notice, so that’s cool.
Still, in some ways, Come Home the Kids Miss You is the perfect album for someone like Jack Harlow. There are ways that Harlow could position it as a real album, able to point to specific points of growth on tracks like “Side Piece” and “Lil Secret,” which are meant to be adult and sexy, or the closing “State Fair,” which finds him reflecting about how he’s famous but still the same guy. And there’s his song with Drake, “Churchill Downs,” which is more or less a copy of an up-late Drake confessional and has Harlow spitting the album’s defining defensive line: “I’m hip-hop, do you fully understand?”
A big mistake, however, was actually getting Drake on the song, as the veteran artist sounds like he has something worth saying. Meanwhile Harlow, despite the growing fame and unending fascination, is still finding his footing. He is funny online and in interviews and knows how to grab people’s attention. Without much to grasp with his music, it’s easiest just to stare. | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Generation Now / Atlantic | May 10, 2022 | 2.9 | 2c5a7170-21ae-45fa-aa34-51096bceca25 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
As the relentlessly positive artist ascends to pop culture ubiquity, her hook-filled and saccharine music feels increasingly boxed in by the Lizzo brand. | As the relentlessly positive artist ascends to pop culture ubiquity, her hook-filled and saccharine music feels increasingly boxed in by the Lizzo brand. | Lizzo: Special | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lizzo-special/ | Special | Not long ago, Lizzo distilled her songwriting process into just three short sentences. On an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the singer and rapper coached the former late-night host through recording a song at her Los Angeles home studio. In what felt like an obvious set-up, Letterman grumbled a few self-deprecating bars at the mic— “I’m ugly, I sweat, I’m old”—before Lizzo interjected. “To make it a Lizzo song, you gotta be positive,” she said. “You can’t say, ‘I’m ugly.’ If you do say, ‘I’m ugly,’ you gotta say, ‘I’m ugly, but I like it.’”
That simple formula may be part of why Lizzo was able to write, in her estimate, “175 to 200” songs for Special, the follow-up to her Grammy-winning major label debut Cuz I Love You. The other half of the equation is undoubtedly her tireless work ethic: Since releasing Cuz I Love You in 2019, she’s launched a size-inclusive shapewear line, invested in the at-home fitness startup Hydrow, and signed a TV production deal with Amazon, which premiered her first project, the reality dance competition Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, earlier this year. All the while, she’s been active on every social platform imaginable, correcting people on her own TikTok dance challenges and posting weekly glam shoots to Instagram. Her mission to promote empowerment and positivity, to ensure that her fans never feel alone, has manifested itself in making sure they never go a day without forgetting she exists.
The 12 tracks that made it onto Special certainly support that idea. Like Lizzo’s breakout hit “Truth Hurts” before it, lead single “About Damn Time” has achieved a cultural ubiquity that few artists could hope to reach. Perhaps the Max Martin-produced “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” with its groove indebted to Hall & Oates and ecstatic call-and-response chorus, is heading towards the same milestone. That touch of familiarity is key to the album: On the Mark Ronson collaboration “Break Up Twice,” Lizzo interpolates Lauryn Hill over a soulful horn section in order to get real with a back-and-forth lover. Combining voice-cracking vulnerability with some meme du jour pull-quotes (“Who gon’ put up with your Gemini shit like I do?”) is the Lizzo specialty, and hearing her in her element is a great reminder of why so many have turned to her music for catharsis, joy, and understanding.
That appeal becomes more difficult to parse out whenever Special is watered down by clunky writing and, more often than not, the kind of saccharine pop production designed chiefly for playlist adds. A good chunk of the album reads like a checklist of streaming-friendly social events such as birthday parties (“Birthday Girl”), bachelorette parties (“Grrrls”), and Pride afterparties (the very vibey “Everybody’s Gay”). In its effort to reach the masses, Special has the unfortunate fault of both trying too hard to hit the zeitgeist—like the nonsensical Tesla metaphor on opener “The Sign”—and striving for pure blahtitude. The latter is most apparent on the album’s title track, where the gap between Lizzo’s detailed verses about her pre-fame life in Houston and the all-caps “LOVE YOURSELF” chorus couldn’t be wider.
In fact, when it comes to happiness, some of the most satisfying songs on Special—the ones that come closest to finding inner peace—are also the most subdued. As made clear by the title, “Naked” is a sultry stripped-down track where Lizzo urges a paramour to “come make this body feel sacred” with no hint of shame or remorse. On album closer “Coldplay,” over a chiptuned sample of Chris Martin, she wistfully recalls the early days of a love affair, where simply hanging out and shooting the shit with another person can realign your entire view of yourself, for better or worse. “Do you say this shit to other people?/I don't think that I could,” she coos, over and over. It’s the most genuine, and the most blissful, that she’s ever sounded.
Somewhere in the wake of Daft Punk’s retro-futuristic Random Access Memories and Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” a kind of buoyant, disco-influenced pop sound began to take over the charts. Out of all its practitioners—Dua Lipa, BTS, Doja Cat—Lizzo is perhaps the one who best captures the rapturous, sequined appeal of the genre, both in her ability to craft life-affirming hooks and in her overall self-image. Look no further than her Rolling Stone cover spread, or to her former mentor Prince, whose Minneapolis funk is draped all over Lizzo’s music. The only component that she’s missing, really, is that unique Studio 54 blend of sleaze and transcendence that artists like Jessie Ware and the Weeknd have been able to better replicate. (The provocative single “Rumors,” where Lizzo traded saucy zingers with Cardi B, is sadly nowhere to be found on Special.)
But that’s not really what she’s about. At a time when the relationship between artist and fan is in flux with each social media platform update, Lizzo has made it a point to listen and learn, for the most part. She switched out ableist lyrics in her song when asked to do so; she regularly hosts Instagram Lives, where she cracks jokes and tells candid stories. On “Birthday Girl,” she devotes the entire bridge to the voices of other women, sharing their birthdays and astrological signs. To her most devoted fans, and even to some casual listeners, these gestures towards inclusivity can mean the world. The music is just icing on the cake. | 2022-07-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Nice Life / Atlantic | July 21, 2022 | 6.4 | 2c5bd0bb-3d4f-48b5-97d0-202083820b79 | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
On their debut EP, the production duo of Lunice Fermin Pierre II (Lunice) and Ross Birchard (Hudson Mohawke) put together 16 minutes of the most brazen, positively huge beats this year. | On their debut EP, the production duo of Lunice Fermin Pierre II (Lunice) and Ross Birchard (Hudson Mohawke) put together 16 minutes of the most brazen, positively huge beats this year. | TNGHT: TNGHT EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16854-tnght-ep/ | TNGHT EP | Lunice and Hudson Mowhawke of TNGHT emerged this year with a glass-shattering SXSW set and a few brash, colorful bangers on Rustie's scene-defining BBC Essential Mix. While their contemporaries experiment with footwork loops, yacht rock, and 1970s prog, TNGHT zero in on rap's fixation on the loud and chaotic. Hip-hop production has always had time for bass and bombast but a growing number of producers-- notably Lex Luger, the often copied but rarely equalled soundbomber behind Waka's influential Flockaveli-- have an almost nihilistic embrace of sonic overkill.
TNGHT may not come from the American rap scene (Lunice is in Montreal, while HudMo's Ross Birchard is based in Glasgow), but their connection to it is clear. Lunice and Birchard have great ears for what's what and who's making it: their engaging and well-curated hour-long mix for Diplo's BBC show ranged from the mush-mouthed grit of Florida's Spaceghostpurrp to Chicago's recent wave of teenage antagonism (Chief Keef, Sasha Go Hard) without showing any signs of dilettantism.
Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds. Birchard recently copped to Pitchfork that inspiration usually hits him when he's on the couch, but this is no DIY laptop affair: HudMo and Lunice took to a high-end London studio to bang out these five cuts, and the results sound properly expensive.
Ironically, they arrived at this point by process of subtraction. Where something like Gunplay's "Jump Out" crams well over a hundred SFX triggers into its short runtime, creating the kind of sonic swarm that threatens to swallow itself, TNGHT's take on post-Luger smash-and-bash drama is clean and precise. The simplicity is deceptive next to the record's volume, and its minimalist approach, rounding off every seismic charge with a futuristic crispness that recalls Timbaland's game-changing creative peak.
Another revelation dropped in that TNGHT interview is that there are yet-to-be-named MCs locked to spit over every single track on this EP some time in the future. It's a promising development, considering that their remix of Waka's recent single "Rooster in My Rari", which pulls off the four-leaf-clover achievement of actually making a Flocka single louder-- proves that Lunice and HudMo's wordless bombs retain their effectiveness with rappers on them.
On their own, though, a keen sense of structure lifts TNGHT's productions above purely functional beat-tape grooves. The breadth of carnage on the EP's centerpiece, "Higher Ground", starts with looped handclaps and vocal samples and quickly ascends to martial-law status as a synthesized tuba pops in and out to steamroll buildings just for laughs. And "Goooo"'s tight tonal coils sound like hot knives slashing through metal by its high-anxiety conclusion.
"[They] rarely work out," Birchard told us last month, regarding teaming up with others in the production world. "I've done loads of collaborations and I'm never totally happy with the outcome because it feels like you're compromising something of yourself in it." What's most impressive about TNGHT's sound, then, is how effortlessly cohesive and them it sounds. Those whose ears have been close to the ground over the past three years know that both HudMo and Lunice's solo work shares more than a LuckyMe affiliation-- specifically, heavy-thudded bass rhythms, splashes of synth color, and a fun-first approach to melodic phrasing indebted to dance and R&B alike. Separately, they compliment each other, but together, they finish each other's sentences with exclamation points in bold, underlined, 72-point type. Since the EP's completion, HudMo and Lunice have been at work on individual solo albums, but their partnership has already yielded results so impressive and of-the-moment that it's likely we haven't heard the last of it. | 2012-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp/Luckyme | July 25, 2012 | 8.5 | 2c5e78eb-78c3-491f-9213-af93930303e1 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Toronto singer-songwriter channels cosmic country on her debut album. Recorded live in the studio, it’s a promising showcase of both her nimble voice and her band’s dynamic playing. | The Toronto singer-songwriter channels cosmic country on her debut album. Recorded live in the studio, it’s a promising showcase of both her nimble voice and her band’s dynamic playing. | Julianna Riolino: All Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julianna-riolino-all-blue/ | All Blue | Julianna Riolino’s All Blue feels wonderfully out of time: The Toronto alt-country musician’s solo debut sounds like Dolly Parton hanging out in Laurel Canyon in 1972—or perhaps 2032. Like Parton, Riolino layers and harmonizes her voice—the most fine-tuned instrument on All Blue—until it sounds as big as your feelings for a long-lost love. Both are performers who play the sentimentalist smiling through the sadness, the most fitting form of melancholy for country music. But Riolino’s flavor of country is more cosmic; like fellow troubadours Tobacco City and Daniel Romano—Riolino was a member of his band the Outfit—she also invokes a starry-eyed ’60s folk sensibility without appearing overtly nostalgic. You’ve heard these sounds before, but their familiarity is a strength, even when All Blue plays it a little safe.
Riolino made the wise decision to record most of All Blue live. Producer Aaron Goldstein, a gifted pedal-steel player who has been associated with Cowboy Junkies and Ducks Ltd., understands that these 11 songs are best heard while swaying in place; the playing is as compelling as the songwriting. This is a testament to the performance of Riolino and her bandmates, especially Thomas Hammerton on keyboards and Anthony Ronaldi doing a few light Exile on Main St.-era Bobby Keys impressions on baritone saxophone. All Blue is at its best when it leans into this more rockin’ flavor of honky tonk, as on “Lone Ranger” (“Lend me your kisses, and dismiss me when you fear,” she sings like a dare), or in the T. Rex stomp and wails on “Why Do I Miss You.” At the other end of the spectrum, Riolino adopts an Aimee Mann-like delivery on “Hark!,” singing about a celestial dream as if it was just some passing sign on the highway.
When the album lags, it’s usually from an aggressive case of sameness or overreliance on an unchanging midtempo gait. This can plague even the best of the alt-country elite (see Wilco’s Cruel Country from this year). By the end of “Long Feeling,” the fatigue of one verse too many feels just grating enough to elicit a sigh. But the song that immediately follows, “You,” is the album’s highlight, by far the most fun and realized Riolino performance on the record. It’s straight-up power pop in which she sneaks surprising lines (“Everyone is fine until they are drowning in someone”) into wordless ’60s girl-group choruses. The drummer is finally awake, and the entrance of the 12-string recalls the twinkling 12-strings that elevate Phoebe Bridgers’ “Motion Sickness,” except Riolino and her bandmates are driving way past the speed limit.
“You” is the one great moment on a promising debut album with many good ones. And though there may only be a handful of truly memorable songs, the atmosphere of Riolino’s carefully crafted cosmic country lingers in the mind. | 2022-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | You’ve Changed | October 24, 2022 | 7 | 2c62f518-e8a6-4157-a5ba-f2bb61571950 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
An improvisatory companion to 2022’s Inside Problems, Andrew Bird’s newest instrumental album channels the warmth of its Ojai, California setting. | An improvisatory companion to 2022’s Inside Problems, Andrew Bird’s newest instrumental album channels the warmth of its Ojai, California setting. | Andrew Bird: Outside Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-bird-outside-problems/ | Outside Problems | Violinist and singer-songwriter Andrew Bird delved into his interior psyche with uncharacteristic candor on 2022’s Inside Problems, balancing introspection with a subdued yet lively combo of collaborators. Though it arrives a year later, his new album Outside Problems is essentially the rough draft of its predecessor: exploratory recordings where he’s improvising textures and imagining melodies. A close listen reveals refrains and motifs—or as one track has it, “Mo Teef”—that were built out on various songs on Inside Problems. Detecting the echoes requires concentration, though, not to mention intimate familiarity with the previous record. There are no lyrics, no singing apart from some incidental vocalizing, just Bird’s violin and guitar supported by Alan Hampton’s bass.
Despite its spare instrumentation, Outside Problems never feels skeletal or small. As he telegraphs in the title, Bird is looking beyond himself, literally stepping outside to record the bulk of the music in the mountains and orange groves of Ojai, a small California town located east of Santa Barbara, not too far from his home in Los Angeles. The open vistas are like an uncredited third musician, sanding off rough edges and lending warmth to the string instruments as they pluck and strum. Inviting nature into the recording sends the unmistakable message that Bird is ready to re-emerge into the world.
In a sense Outside Problems can seem as if Bird is closing a chapter, tying a bow on his pandemic experience. Simultaneously a footnote and its own beast, Outside Problems picks up a thread left hanging from Echolocations, a multi-part site-specific series where Bird recorded music inspired by a distinct environment at the point of inspiration. He completed two out of a planned five installments—the inaugural Echolocations: Canyon and 2017’s Echolocations: River—before putting the concept on the back burner, timing that roughly coincided with the onset of the pandemic and the introspective turn of Inside Problems. As on the Echolocations albums, the physical space of Outdoor Problems is palpable within the recording but Bird’s improvisations aren’t intended to be ambient and atmospheric: They hit the heart, not the head.
Album opener “Mancey” aims directly at the gut with its slithery blues. As Bird’s lead violin dances around Hampton’s swinging 12-bar groove, he sounds joyful and alive, a spirit that flows throughout the record. The circular refrain of “Festivus” recasts a maypole jig as a secular celebration of grievances, gaining momentum from Bird’s slightly distorted violin. A similarly understated humor drives the spritely “Mormon House Party,” where the joke lies in how the percolating rhythm still sounds polite and friendly. The high spirits aren’t limited to numbers with upbeat tempos. There’s a sense of freedom to the lithe melodies and extended improvisations on “Epilogue,” where Bird’s lovely, lyrical playing has a sense of ascendent grace; it’s music that feels untethered to the weight of the world.
“Tik Tok” concludes the album on a contemplative note that doesn’t quite jibe with the track’s knowing nod toward the social media app. Yet this dissonance suits the album: Lacking the considered construction of Inside Problems, Outside Problems is definitionally a footnote, a collection of sketches and explorations that will fascinate listeners who have followed Bird for years. That audience will recognize that Outside Problems is in its own way as emotionally unguarded as its predecessor: Andrew Bird freeing himself from confines of his own design. | 2023-07-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | July 27, 2023 | 6.9 | 2c67203e-ebdd-4cf5-a6a1-f5f0aa33dc73 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ |
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