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The 71-year-old guitarist has long been known as a peerless interpreter of American musical forms, but on these 13 diaristic originals, he reveals more of himself than ever before. | The 71-year-old guitarist has long been known as a peerless interpreter of American musical forms, but on these 13 diaristic originals, he reveals more of himself than ever before. | Bill Frisell: Four | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-frisell-four/ | Four | Avant-garde jazz isn’t known for its gentleness, but Bill Frisell’s compositions are a fine-spun exception. Once a member of raucous early-’90s outfit Naked City, Frisell has spent decades at the crossroads of Americana and jazz, where he flirts with virtuosic, nostalgic pastiche yet never commits to any particular bit. The 71-year-old guitarist has delved into country, dabbled in surf, reworked classic movie scores, and even released an entire album of luxuriously orchestrated John Lennon covers. His fans admire the quiet sweep of his thoughtful arrangements and twangy, often vibrato-assisted tone, yet he’s accumulated his share of skeptics who paint him as a traditionalist. Many of his releases verge on beautiful formal exercises—they rarely touch on personal blues or divulge his beliefs about the country that spawned his source material.
Yet the Trump years and the pandemic marked a change. Frisell’s last couple of bandleader records revealed more of Bill, their conceptual underpinnings less prescriptive, more open to personal conviction—and as always, his collaborators were well suited to the task at hand. Americana, from 2020, was a panoramic joint effort with co-composers Grégoire Maret and Romain Collin, both immigrants who wove their complex outlooks on the titular genre into the record’s tapestry. Released later that year, Valentine expanded on its predecessor, drawing out the wounded innards of Burt Bacharch’s too-often trivialized “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” before Frisell bared his own politics on a treatment of “We Shall Overcome.” His latest, Four, harnesses a similar attitude: Having learned lessons from America’s musical history, Frisell spins them into a sense of doleful resilience in the face of the present.
He sketched out nine of the record’s 13 tracks, all of which are originals, during quarantine. (A few of the other songs appeared in more subdued form on his 1999 masterstroke Good Dog, Happy Man, another on 1988’s pathfinding Lookout for Hope.) Accompanying Frisell is a brand new, nimble combo: Gerald Clayton on piano, Gregory Tardy on sax and clarinet, and Johnathan Blake on drums. Without a bassist, the group prances through airy melodies like acrobats on a wire. Yet sorrow always follows playfulness on Four, which dips and soars like the emotions of a single day. The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.
The record is smattered with requiems for dead friends, dulcet pieces reliant on subtly shifting ostinatos. Opener “Dear Old Friend (For Alan Woodard)” starts with a duet between clarinet and piano that builds into the album’s stirring version of an overture. “Claude Utley,” about the Seattle artist, who died in 2021, transposes a piano refrain into a call-and-response—Tardy’s clarinet practically weeps, before Clayton and Frisell offer a two-chord riposte. Staggered melodies give “Waltz for Hal Willner,” about the famous producer and Frisell collaborator, who died of COVID in 2020, the swirling effect of sacred choral music. Yet the album’s middle mulls too long over moody straight-ahead and cool jazz, and on the dolorous “Wise Woman,” the band leans overmuch on repetition.
Still, such slow moments pay off. At the start of the LP’s fourth, final side, the musicians spring to attention with a lighthearted rendition of “Good Dog, Happy Man,” a callback to the record’s bright-eyed opening figure. Taken together, the two compositions act like beacons of hope illuminating Four’s rueful center. This sequencing strikes at the rhythms of real life, its surprising peaks and unavoidable valleys arriving in quick succession.
Over the course of Four, Frisell and co. build up a sense of forbearance, a painstakingly formed emotional callus. Bluesy closer “Dog on a Roof” numbers among his late-career finest. Starting with several minutes of guitar harmonics, ghostly piano, sax runs, and cymbal scraping, the players settle into a down-and-dirty groove more rugged and propulsive than anything that preceded it. Before the song ends, it dissipates into unnerving, whimpering free jazz, but the promise of that thrilling central section endures, spotlighting their long-sought middle road between grief and joy. | 2023-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | January 4, 2023 | 7.4 | 2c6945e4-fe18-451c-a75e-c00d3023c2c1 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
With her own strain of batida music, the Portuguese-born, Bordeaux-bred producer Nídia offers a debut album of mind-bending complexity. | With her own strain of batida music, the Portuguese-born, Bordeaux-bred producer Nídia offers a debut album of mind-bending complexity. | Nídia: Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nidia-nidia-e-ma-nidia-e-fudida/ | Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida | Batida is, at its heart, a music of exchange. Born out of Angolan styles like semba, kizomba, and kuduro, and encompassing a growing constellation of contemporary variants (tarraxo, tarraxinha, fodencia) along with global sounds like house and Afrobeats, it’s a little like a game of telephone. Rhythms bounce between Portugal, Angola, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cape Verde, and other points in the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, changing shape all the way; they ricochet back and forth across Lisbon’s suburbs, with crews on opposite sides of the Tagus river coming up with different takes on the ever-mutating form.
Nídia represents a widening of its global footprint. She grew up in Vale da Amoreira, a working-class Lisbon suburb, but she moved to Bordeaux, France, in 2011, when she was 14 years old. In Vale da Amoreira, she had danced to batida with a group of friends who dubbed themselves Kaninas Squad. In France, armed with FL Studio and some YouTube tutorials, she set up her own bedroom studio, Estúdio da Mana (“Sister’s Studio”), and set about developing her own take on the sound. For a time, she went under the alias Nídia Minaj, a tribute to one of her idols. But she loses the borrowed surname on Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida, her debut album. The record is both a contribution to the style and a fierce declaration of independence.
Its title translates loosely as “Nídia is bad, Nídia is dope.” (That’s “bad,” of course, in the “not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good” sense of the term.) The opening track is all swagger: Insistent horn fanfare, rattling percussion, the defiant cry of “Mulher Profissional!” (“Professional woman!”)—as defiant as a fighter’s ring-walk anthem, it’s a triumphant way for the 20-year-old musician to declare that she is all business. What follows this brassy intro is a succession of short, devastatingly kinetic tracks. Most of them are well under three minutes long, full of brittle percussion samples, mind-bendingly complex syncopations, and rapid-fire synth bursts, as though someone had tossed a brick of firecrackers onto a Korg factory assembly line. To listeners familiar with DJ Marfox, Nigga Fox, Firmeza, and other Príncipe musicians, Nídia’s music won’t sound completely alien. But much of the album is imbued with a tough, almost confrontational tone, a not-to-be-fucked-with vibe that is hers alone.
Her rhythms are unusually intricate. “Biotheke” rides a complicated drum groove that feels perpetually on the verge of collapse as it traces its tornado-like path through a mess of metal and wood. In “É da Banda,” the clattering drum sounds seem almost random at first; it’s only when the kick asserts its gravitational pull that all the elements fall into place. Stripped of everything but snapping drums and a high-pitched, hiccupping refrain, it makes for a dazzling display of her rhythmic skills. What’s most striking about her music, though, is her use of dissonance. A handful of sharp, key-clashing sounds lent 2015’s Danger EP an extra hint of menace, but here they definitively become her signature. The eerie, haunted-carousel melody of “Biotheke” sets into stark relief the tune’s clanging percussion and deadweight bass riffs. “Mulher Profissional” is a riot of tinny frequencies and stabbing motions; “Arme” bristles with needling tones, vocal shots pitched a half-tone apart, and a piercing melody that sounds like a tape being fast-forwarded.
The slow, grinding “Puro Tarraxo” is a good example of the mind-bending complexity of her approach. Over an almost dembow like groove, the sounds pile up: high-pitched, staccato vocal samples; video-game bleeps; a harsh, buzzing sound that splits the stereo field wide open. In between these hard, bright tones, a weird, modal melody dances in circles, all but invisible amid a collection of elements so shrill they could set your teeth on edge. It sometimes seems like the main organizing principle of her music is the lattice of crisscrossing lasers found in Hollywood bank vaults: Getting inside is tricky business, indeed.
But there’s also a softer side to her music. In one of the album’s finest tracks, “Underground,” her fondness for dissonance yields fluttering, guitar-like chords jumbled up with jagged synths, a balance of soft tone clusters and sharp angles as tactile as a fistful of dandelion tufts and broken glass. And on “I Miss My Ghetto,” brooding piano chords apply the brakes to runaway drums and breakneck syncopations—the rare moment of introspection from a young artist who clearly seems more interested in moving forward than looking back. It’s also a suggestion that, no matter how far batida travels, it’s not likely to forget its roots. | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | July 11, 2017 | 7.8 | 2c6b999b-bf5c-404a-bd24-9d135b7c09af | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Recorded along the Amazon River, the four-song EP features just Avey Tare and Geologist in a return to the hazy, patiently paced, and largely improvised records of their early days. | Recorded along the Amazon River, the four-song EP features just Avey Tare and Geologist in a return to the hazy, patiently paced, and largely improvised records of their early days. | Animal Collective: Meeting of the Waters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23149-meeting-of-the-waters-ep/ | Meeting of the Waters EP | Animal Collective are an institution founded on instability, exemplified by fluid membership, soluble song structures, and abrupt album-to-album aesthetic breaks. But throughout their metamorphic history, their best music has always immersed you in the time and place in which it was created. Campfire Songs from 2003 is the most obvious example (even though, technically, it was an album of porch songs). But ambience also plays a crucial “fifth Beatle” role on Sung Tongs (whose hermetic home-recordings are enhanced by field recordings collected at Avey Tare’s local deli) and even Strawberry Jam (whose dry, chiseled sonics reflect its arid Arizona recording locale). If anything has changed for Animal Collective, it’s that their more manic recent records sound less like the product of their source environment and more like they’re adapting to the band’s current one—the large concert halls and festival stages they now call home.
On the one hand, Meeting of the Waters represents another tangential detour on Animal Collective’s career path. It’s their first record to feature only Avey Tare and Geologist, and the absence of AC perennial Panda Bear may explain why it was initially issued as a Record Store Day exclusive before quietly appearing on streaming services last week. But this four-song mini-album also represents a full-circle move for the group, a return to making the sort of hazy, patiently paced, and largely improvised records where the background setting plays a starring role.
In essence, Meeting of the Waters takes Campfire Songs’ off-the-cuff, on-the-spot ethos and exports it to a Brazilian rainforest: Avey and Geologist recorded it along the Amazon River as part of a Viceland documentary series, Earth Works, that explores the environmental degradation in the region. More than just provide Geologist with a hissing, humming backdrop off which he can bounce his dubbed-out sonics, the secluded tropical setting encourages Avey to embrace an unadorned, plainspoken delivery that contrasts sharply with his usual spastic, pitch-shifting hollers. As such, Meeting of the Waters doesn’t yield any of the ecstatic highs we’ve come to expect from an Animal Collective record; rather, Avey calmly dispenses his words as if he’s taking great care not to upset the natural order of his surroundings. On the record’s miasmic 13-minute opener, “Blue Noses,” he’s practically singing in 16 rpm, as he extols the virtues of sunlight, fresh air, and wild magnolias atop slow-motion acoustic strums that threaten to dissolve into the song’s aqueous ether. The state of zen reverie is interrupted only by the frequent pitter-patter of footsteps.
But if “Blue Noses” is precisely sort of blissed-out psych-folk meditation you’d expect a couple of Deadheads to come up with after they’re dropped in the jungle without any plan or pressures, other songs bear the more introspective effects of isolating yourself in a remote place far from home. “Man of Oil”—the only track here you could imagine the current iteration of Animal Collective fleshing out into a more robust pop song—threads its acoustic melody with vocal snippets of a woman speaking in an indeterminate language, like the indecipherable conversation happening in a dream you can’t quite recall in the morning. But more than just a random detail, her enigmatic voice brings a hazy melancholy to intimate lines like “I find it so hard to tell you/ I’m afraid to forget the smell of you.”
In moments like these, Meeting of the Waters makes for a nice complement to part-time AC participant Deakin’s 2016 release Sleep Cycle, another record that fused field-recording scenery with sobering self-reflection. And that pensive quality is most pronounced on “Selection of a Place (Rio Negro Version),” a lo-fi love song that treats a romantic embrace as a security-blanket against a world that overburdens us with work, stress, and smartphone addiction. (“I’m right beside you,” Avey sings, “not thinking about … little letters on my phone.”) Avey and Geologist may have gone down to the Amazon to help spread awareness of rainforest depletion, but the songs on Meeting of the Waters assert that humanity’s fate is equally dependent on our own psychic preservation. The album’s primitive presentation serves to remind us just how fragile our existence truly is: As Avey’s last strums cede to an encroaching thundercloud of white noise, we’re subjected to the unsettling sound of paradise lost. | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | May 11, 2017 | 7.3 | 2c6b9f3d-daca-4b4d-8271-23f44cb96f29 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This version of Sgt Pepper’s treats the Beatles' originals like colorful clothes worn by today’s most electrifying jazz musicians, who give these old chestnuts a new body and vitality. | This version of Sgt Pepper’s treats the Beatles' originals like colorful clothes worn by today’s most electrifying jazz musicians, who give these old chestnuts a new body and vitality. | Various Artists: A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-a-day-in-the-life-impressions-of-pepper/ | A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper | Your heroes have covered the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band since they first heard it. Just days after its release in the spring of 1967, Jimi Hendrix shocked a London crowd with the album’s opening theme with half of the Fab Four in attendance. Joe Cocker turned its affable second track, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” into soul-baring treacle a year later, while Elton John shouted out its lysergic third beauty, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” in the mid-1970s with John Lennon’s help. And so it goes down the tracklist and across generations and genres. At this point, it’s daunting to name an idea more passé than covering these songs, as omnipresent as oxygen or as eternal as Paul McCartney’s avuncular charm.
It’s a good thing, then, that A Day in the Life: Impressions of Pepper is not actually a Beatles cover album. Sure, its 13 tracks sync with the sequence of Sgt. Pepper’s, and you can hear traces of that totemic record in every piece here. But A Day in the Life is instead a full-length interpretation of Sgt. Pepper’s, rendered by some of the most captivating young musicians in the modern jazz orbit. Rather than offering obvious renditions of these standards, the likes of Makaya McCraven, Mary Halvorson, Shabaka Hutchings, and Sullivan Fortner reimagine them in the grandest jazz tradition—as fodder and grist, inspiration for making something else entirely. From sweeping solo piano vamps to cinematic takes bordering on post-rock, these versions treat the originals like colorful clothes worn by today’s most electrifying jazz musicians, who give these old chestnuts a new body and vitality.
Halvorson exemplifies the idea early “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She often plays the guitar in rhythmic and melodic tangles, so that a simply stated theme begins to fold onto itself until it shapes a dense thicket. As she mimics Ringo Starr’s voice with her inimitable tone, the phrases split and tumble until she seems to lose the line. Each time it happens, though, drummer Tomas Fujiwara rushes in to reaffirm the shape. Likewise, harpist Brandee Younger passes on the obvious, harp-laced “She’s Leaving Home” for a complex, intimate arrangement of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Using the original only as a suggestive framework, Younger turns her harp into the lace between darting flutes and skittering drums. Her take ferries mystery.
Surrounded by a lissome mix of vibraphone, electric guitar, and keyboard, McCraven powers through “Lucy” like he’s trying to find the peak for one of his fabled jam sessions, his kit an escape vehicle for his band’s collective transcendence. For his dazzling spin through “When I’m Sixty Four,” Fortner harnesses the same mix of erudition and élan heard on his tremendous work with Cécile McLorin Salvant. Recognizing that tabla and sitar are dated signifiers for rock bands hoping to convey a worldly sense of exotica, New York’s Onyx Collective reimagines the hovering drone of “Within You Without You” as a patchwork of astral synthesizers and distorted bass. Saxophonist Isaiah Barr toys with George Harrison’s vocal line, slowing it down and examining its contours in search of more than novelty. It is hypnotic, beautiful, and—you wish—infinite.
The interpretive nature of A Day in the Life eclipses mere musical form, too, with some of the best pieces here working as emotional transformations—a risky but thrilling proposition for pieces so deeply lodged in our culture. After half a century, “Getting Better” has grown bathetic from the cheery ubiquity of television commercials and grocery-aisle soundtracks, the equivalent of a Lifetime movie playing on a loop in another room. So the savvy London trio Wildflower furrows its brow at McCartney’s wide-eyed grin, the muscle-bound rhythm section and Idris Rahman’s exasperated saxophone tone asking when, exactly, it all gets better. They turn the song inside out, looking for an answer that has yet to appear. And every time the melody of “Fixing a Hole” begins to flicker too brightly, pianist Cameron Graves stomps out the flame either with a pounding left hand that lands like heavy boots on concrete or discursive right-hand fantasies that spin like a ceiling fan. He wordlessly emphasizes the lyrics’ torment—the hell of other people, “the silly people [that] run around”—that is largely cloaked by the mirth of a harpsichord and Ringo’s swing.
It’s tempting to uphold A Day in the Life as some sort of yearbook or capstone achievement for this tremendously creative moment in jazz, a genre that’s been pronounced dead and then resurrected so many times it could be a major world religion. And in a sense, sure, it is: As with McCraven’s own Universal Beings, A Day in the Life does put many of the people that have made this loose movement so exciting in one breathless sequence. You could even imagine them all pasted onto the cover—Felix Pastorius in the place of Albert Einstein, Ravi Coltrane lording over it all like Edgar Allen Poe. Instead, this album is a wonderful expression of possibility. They take ownership of these standards—not as grails deserving fealty, but instead as another piece of the musical vernacular, motifs absorbed and repurposed inside an idiom they’ve helped invigorate. | 2018-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Verve | December 28, 2018 | 7.8 | 2c6ef343-7055-462c-835a-8bee4fc4455c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
After two EPs, Low's Alan Sparhawk and his fellow Choir members finally release their debut LP. Mark Kozelek produces but he no longer is a featured player. | After two EPs, Low's Alan Sparhawk and his fellow Choir members finally release their debut LP. Mark Kozelek produces but he no longer is a featured player. | Retribution Gospel Choir: Retribution Gospel Choir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11317-retribution-gospel-choir/ | Retribution Gospel Choir | Who knew it would be such a pleasure to hear Alan Sparhawk-- master of minimalist pop-- rock out with his cock out? Sure, the last two Low albums had downright loud moments, and there's that bluesy side project the Black Eyed Snakes that Sparhawk had a few years back. But on the Retribution Gospel Choir album, the dude channels his inner Crazy Horse with dark dirge-y anthems. He even curses and stuff!
It's taken Retribution a few years to make a full-length; the group's been around since 2005 and have released two tour EPs. Eric Pollard plays drums and new guy (in this band as well as Low) Matt Livingston plays bass, while Sparhawk plays guitar and sings, and he wrote the songs, too. Three aspects of the group's live shows and EPs are missing on their debut. First and foremost, there's singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek, who did produce the record, and it's on his label. But Kozelek was once a member of the band, and his guitar playing is missed (as are a few songs they played with him, notably the great "Hatchet").
Not missed so much are the group's penchant for cool covers (though two songs-- "Breaker" and "Take Your Time"-- could be called self-covers, as they have already appeared on the last Low record). Sure their live take on "Sandinista" is great, but the covers felt like concert or B-side material, so it's good that they realized that. Finally, the group's experimental and dubby aspects are relegated to subtle sound effect elements. That's made the album more cohesive but less diverse than their music is live.
Sparhawk knows how to wring emotional depth out of the most tired lyrical clichés, and he's clearly dissected rock dynamics to the point that when he does them "straight" it's either boring (as on "They Knew You Well") or something to behold ("Easy Prey", "Somebody's Someone"). Songs like "Holes in Our Heads" and "Take Your Time" are dynamic in a loud/louder/soft/loudest way that works well in service of decent songs and melodies. (By now, Mogwai and Sigur Rós devotees have copied those tricks to death-- contemporary math rock is so simple it may as well be called subtraction rock.)
Entire swaths of the Retribution Gospel Choir album are reminiscent of the slash-and-burn imitation classic rock found on the Bush League All Stars' 1995 Pop Narcotic album Old Numbers (albeit with odder tunings). At the time, that fine album sank like a stone in the indie music scene; RGC arrives after a decade's worth of stoner metal has convinced kids it's OK to enjoy back-to-basics riff-heavy rock'n'roll-- even without the irony that was so heavily drizzled atop 80s and 90s revisionings of 70s conventions. To address the album on 70s turf, Retribution Gospel Choir may not be as great as a Neil Young with Crazy Horse album, but it's better than any of the albums Crazy Horse made on their own. | 2008-03-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-03-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde | March 24, 2008 | 7.5 | 2c78db15-8b69-408b-add9-930f80d37e53 | Mike McGonigal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-mcgonigal/ | null |
The 20th LP from OCS—better known as Thee Oh Sees—is a softer and slower strand of psychedelia than the San Francisco garage-rock institution has come to be known for. | The 20th LP from OCS—better known as Thee Oh Sees—is a softer and slower strand of psychedelia than the San Francisco garage-rock institution has come to be known for. | OCS: Memory of a Cut Off Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ocs-memory-of-a-cut-off-head/ | Memory of a Cut Off Head | When OCS originated in 1997, it was the music of a goblin. That’s what John Dwyer recently likened his younger self to on Marc Maron’s “WTF?” podcast, explaining how all the recreational drugs he took alongside his singing-saw-playing friend Patrick Mullins—with the curious goal of creating “the quietest songs we could”—would render him constantly breathing through his mouth. Yes, the writhing, bug-eyed garage-rock band known most frequently as Thee Oh Sees was for many early years a whispering freak-folk expedition. Plenty of other things have since changed for Dwyer. His track record at that time told a story of several diverse endeavors rather than the one of an exhaustingly prolific primary project, for which he’s now known. And, as the 43-year-old will tell you today, he’s dialed back his drugs.
For the project’s 20th LP in 20 years (and the 100th album for Dwyer’s own Castle Face Records), he returns to both its original name stylization and restrained aura for the first time in over a decade. Memory of a Cut Off Head essentially leaves the amps at home. Instead, it reverses hard into baroque, acoustic, and otherwise more delicate songs of a softer, slower psychedelic vein. The intensity, much like the spelling, is reduced by 70%.
If Memory is another new page for OCS, it is the special-thanks page. Coming amid a fast-as-ever recording clip—that’s four Dwyer LPs in 16 months, a merciless pace even for him—Memory honors the project’s history. It acknowledges strains of folk music that are less obviously fundamental to shaping the wilder iterations of Thee Oh Sees, and it honors some of the people who helped shape their store. There are horn arrangements by his friend and pupil Mikal Cronin. Memory also marks the returns of Mullins on singing saw and singer/keyboardist Brigid Dawson, the closest complementing presence Dwyer has ever had in the band. The album is as much hers as it is his, and she takes the reins on its superior second half.
Dwyer’s own songs run into a predictable problem. His signature restlessness tends to enhance the Oh Sees’ concussion-inducing material; for the past 10+ years, it’s sometimes seemed like the faster Thee Oh Sees produce, the harder they hit. The approach doesn’t work such wonders here. Memory’s concept demands patience, which is not exactly Dwyer’s natural element for writing. While Memory gives him the opportunity to drop his guitar and pick up the electric bagpipes and flute, its songs either come up short of compelling, or he stops them short. In the moments when he and Dawson harmonize together again, like on “On and On Corridor” or the opening title track, textures and voices come close to clicking into place. But the only songs that sound natural from this eerily hushed world are by Dawson alone, like her ghostly “The Fool” and its lonely woodwind backdrop.
Such an abrupt, massive tonal swing between efforts is not an unfamiliar move for Dwyer. One of the reasons he conceived OCS as an ultra-quiet project in the first place was because his prior band, Coachwhips, devoured noise. But as he recounted in the “WTF?” interview, “It incorporated over time more and more members, and the music changed, and now we’re at this rock’n’roll show.” All of those past and present members are now the spine of a 20-year-old San Francisco institution. On Memory of a Cut Off Head, Dawson once again proves to be its best friend. | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Castle Face | November 27, 2017 | 6.5 | 2c7c2730-c5ee-4aa8-a25e-d3291603a526 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
A decade after minimal wave seemed to reach its peak, the Massachusetts duo proves the style’s continued vitality. | A decade after minimal wave seemed to reach its peak, the Massachusetts duo proves the style’s continued vitality. | Boy Harsher: Careful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boy-harsher-careful/ | Careful | A few weeks ago, at a bar in Brooklyn known for its metal and goth affiliations, a DJ in the back room was running through a playlist thick with synths. The old standbys—Bauhaus, Joy Division, Soft Cell, Siouxsie and the Banshees—made their appearances, as did a younger generation of artists like New York’s Xeno & Oaklander, Montreal duo Essaie Pas, and the Northampton, Massachusetts, group Boy Harsher. Among the more recent crop, one song stood out: Boy Harsher’s “Motion.” It was, like other songs played that night, dark and driving, powered by stark, acrid synthesis and barreling drums. But something about it felt unusually immediate.
Producer Augustus Muller’s synth chords moved with angry purpose while his jagged little basslines gave the song its groove, and Jae Matthews’ husky, smudged-out vocals conveyed a ghostly feeling of longing. There are a few jolting moments like this on the band’s new record, Careful—like “Come Closer,” where the synth bounces like a pinball caught between two flashing bumpers while the drum machine thumps with reckless abandon. Or there’s the bracing “Tears,” where spiraling keyboard and percussion build and build into a menacing cyclone of dark pop. It’s easy to imagine these tracks playing well to the goth clubs of the world, but it’s chiseled and streamlined in a way that suggests it might also slip into the cracks of a techno set. That in-betweenness is what makes Boy Harsher’s work, and that of their peers, so interesting.
In the late 2000s, when the DJ Veronica Vasicka popularized the term “minimal wave” to describe the barbed-wire sound of decades-old DIY electronic music, minimal electronic music was in fashion. You could hear it throughout New York nightlife at club series like Wierd, and it seemed, as Louis Pattison notes, that this old-new aesthetic was at its peak. But as bands like Boy Harsher or Essaie Pas have made clear, the reign of minimal synth continues unabated into the second decade of the 21st century, and the style’s variety and versatility continue to grow.
While the palette of sounds Boy Harsher plays with on Careful can seem limited—brisk drum machine loops, oscillating synths, and Matthews’ haunting incantations—the group finds ways to make each song sound distinct. From the morose slow burn of “LA” to the frenzied bounce of “The Look You Gave (Jerry),” the duo shows how far it can stretch a unified sound. Apart from some less-successful forays into soundtrack-like textures and atmospheric ambience, like the John Carpenter-lite of “Crush,” the record is mostly geared towards movement and heat and sweat. That Boy Harsher will soon play Berghain, Berlin’s temple of techno, speaks to the music’s contemporary vitality. Scrappy and spirited, minimal synth music lives on. | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nude Club | February 4, 2019 | 7.2 | 2c7c6bd9-4545-4904-86ca-a0ef03f2f361 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
Jaime Fennelly assembles a full-band and a grand vision for his sixth album as Mind Over Mirrors, a complex and beautiful synth-and-drone time warp. | Jaime Fennelly assembles a full-band and a grand vision for his sixth album as Mind Over Mirrors, a complex and beautiful synth-and-drone time warp. | Mind Over Mirrors: Bellowing Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mind-over-mirrors-bellowing-sun/ | Bellowing Sun | Mind Over Mirrors did not always sound so bold. At the start of the decade, the name was simply a solo shield for Jaime Fennelly, a nomadic experimental musician who had begun to big deeper into a world of ascendant drone with synthesizers and Indian harmonium. For years, he had played in Peeesseye, a tempestuous and unclassifiable guitar-and-drum Brooklyn trio, and collaborated on several immersive pieces with celebrated choreographer Miguel Gutierrez.
But Mind Over Mirrors represented a sort of musical and geographic escape, allowing Fennelly to immerse himself in arching strands of tone as he fled the city to write. He penned the great 2017 album, Undying Color, during an extended furlough in Wisconsin’s gorgeous Driftless region, where he improvised and edited under the impressive influence of nature before recruiting an ad hoc band to help fulfill his vision. All of those elements—the retreat, the environment, the rendezvous, the drone, and the unclassifiable nature of it all—culminate at last in the brilliant Bellowing Sun, Mind Over Mirrors’ transfixing sixth album, its first as a commanding full band, and its debut large-scale multimedia art production. For Mind Over Mirrors, it is an arrival.
Three years ago, Fennelly first referenced an audacious project that would involve a full band, an album, and a live stage show. As he has often done, Fennelly decamped to a rural location and began writing, inspired by the setting and the work of essential American naturalist Henry Beston. Sketches in hand, he re-assembled a top-tier cast of Midwestern collaborators who had, in recent years, sometimes acted as his ensemble: Califone violinist Jim Becker, Freakwater singer Janet Beveridge Bean, and Death Blues and Volcano Choir drummer Jon Mueller. Together, they built what is essentially a sci-fi symphony—a seventy-three-minute suite of twelve seamless pieces, often interconnected by recurring motifs and cast from elements as far-flung as bluegrass and harsh noise. Commissioned in part by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bellowing Sun is not only an album but also a mobile art installation. The quartet performs beneath a gigantic rotating zoetrope, an internally illuminated cylinder that spins overhead, casting a series of images and colors around a room. The space becomes an invitation to get lost in this magnificent sound.
Bellowing Sun warps space, time, scope, and scale. While the record officially clocks in at 73 minutes, it somehow feels shorter and longer, as if expanding or contracting as it plays. Restless swirls of melodies and drum patterns maintain a sense of motion so that 10-minute track times seem to pass with the briskness of a pop hit. For instance, “Zeitgebers,” in which the entire band spends nearly six minutes rising into one miraculous chord change before letting it smear into silence, feels like it lasts for only an instant. The quartet pulls the tension so tight that all you remember is its sudden release. On the other hand, some of these moments feel like they have lasted and will last forever, suspending you in permanent states of being. During “Lanterns on the Beach,” Bean repeatedly intones “Light” against sparkling rays of guitar noise and nested keyboard melodies that bounce endlessly among a few notes; it is a hymn for that time just after the sun has set, when the world glows orange and pink and seems as if it may always be that way. Mueller’s solo gong-and-tom exploration, “Acrophasing,” holds you permanently at the lip of an abyss and dares you to flinch, to slip forever from this side of safety.
What’s more is Mind Over Mirrors’ ability to move from the macrocosm to the microcosm and back, from music that truly occupies the astral shorthand kosmische to sounds that seem to score activity on the cellular level. With serial synthesizer lines that phase in and out of one another, “Feeding on the Flats” recalls middle-school science class, with the dropper of pond water placed beneath a rudimentary microscope. But it flows directly into “Matchstick Grip,” which soon aims for the heavens. Bean sings of the sun. Mueller and Fennelly lock synthesizer to bass, the melody and meter synchronized in dizzying propulsion. In the distance, Becker adds extended fiddle tones, like the solar wind rushing by as the band gathers speed. “Halfway to the Zenith” seems as vast as the widest horizon, its wordless vocals and neon arpeggios rising together toward the sky.
Again, it empties instantly into “Oculate Beings,” a fiddle-and-drum hoedown that pairs the Southern gusto of Othar Turner and the Teutonic strength of Faust and actually manages to intensify both; grounded and gritty, it is a return to earth. Bellowing Sun thrives on these oscilations—between electronics and acoustics, between the stars and the soil, between infinity and this instant. From the fulcrum, it unfurls as a stream of constant surprise and intrigue.
Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present. Its power forces the issue. And its interdisciplinary approach to genre and form push firmly against our propensity for silos, finding unexpected connections in unlikely places. This is ecstatic hillbilly krautrock raga drone—with celestial vocals and a drummer who loves to rattle the room—built to be played in a modern art museum beneath a spinning phosphorescent orb. Despite all that, or maybe because of it, this is one of the decade’s true experimental wonders. | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Paradise of Bachelors | April 11, 2018 | 8 | 2c8386de-88b8-46d3-87a1-e6f95d9aa059 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On her latest collection of wise, lucid songwriting, the Nashville artist brings a sense of depth and directness to her songs. | On her latest collection of wise, lucid songwriting, the Nashville artist brings a sense of depth and directness to her songs. | Caroline Spence: True North | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-spence-true-north/ | True North | The spirit of Mary Oliver haunts True North, the fourth album by Nashville singer-songwriter Caroline Spence. Its opening track is named after the late poet, who Spence invokes at its stirring climax: “I’ve been playing at the church of Mary Oliver/Yeah, I’m trying to know myself and love all of her.” Later, on “There’s Always Room,” she quotes Oliver’s “The Summer Day”—“I know I get one wild and precious life,” she sings, resolving to persevere through grief and pain. During her lifetime, Oliver’s poetry was sometimes underappreciated for its plainspoken accessibility and inspirational nature, but since her death in 2019, more critics have come to acknowledge its elemental power. It’s a natural companion to Spence’s work, which is warm, inviting, and unfailingly human.
Spence’s initial breakthrough came in 2013, when her song “Mint Condition” took the grand prize in American Songwriter’s annual lyric contest. (She’d eventually record it as the title track to her Rounder Records debut, with guest vocals from Emmylou Harris.) Even then, at 23, Spence’s lyrics possessed a casual wisdom that could feel like getting drinks with a well-read, Zenned-out friend. On True North, she sings about embracing the present (“The Gift”), surrendering to love (“Scale These Walls”), and taking big risks (“Icarus”) with a sageness that shows the influence of her literary heroes—Oliver, Walt Whitman, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. She sounds like someone you can trust.
Some of that credibility comes from her voice. Spence is a sturdy, unflappable singer. Her gentle, Virginia-bred drawl never strains for a note, but she’s careful to leave slivers of vulnerability around its edges. Her vocal lines are thoughtfully considered and frequently catchy, but they’re seldom flashy. In moments where many of her contemporaries in the country music world might emphasize a key line by belting it out, Spence tends to draw back, leaving room for the listener to find themselves in the lyric. “The Next Good Time” is an ode to perseverance passed down to Spence by her late grandmother, and she forwards its message to her listeners with her signature understated grace: “When trouble finds you, you can just do what I do/Grit your teeth, get through it/And wait for the next good time.”
It’s one of several instances on the album where her delivery verges on a kind of folksy sprechgesang, reinforcing the song’s relaxed, familial sentiment. The sympathetic dynamic between Spence’s words and her singing gives True North much of its power. A lovely mix by producer Jordan Lehning cedes center stage to Spence’s vocals—the layered arrangements reveal themselves on repeated listens, but Lehning knows it’s Spence’s show, and he stands aside accordingly.
The ballad “I Know You Know Me” is the best track on the record, and the most emblematic of Spence’s sensibility as a songwriter. It’s a strikingly direct song about the supernatural symbiosis between lovers, with a simple arrangement that cuts to the bone. Its directness masks a profound depth, as Spence spins canny metaphors of moons and tides, storms and candles. She duetted with the National’s Matt Berninger on an earlier version of the song, but in this rendition, she stands alone.
The fact that Berninger could step in and out so seamlessly is indicative of the way Spence moves freely about the border between country music and indie rock. (The recent back-to-basics collaborations between Berninger’s National bandmate Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift make for a handy parallel.) Untethered to the lineage of either genre, these songs are ultimately vessels for Spence’s frank, lucid insights, with meaning buried in each syllable. “Poetry, to be understood, must be clear,” Mary Oliver said in a 2012 interview with NPR. Like few working songwriters, Spence has internalized that message. | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rounder | May 3, 2022 | 7.4 | 2c84545f-5749-471d-ad2b-f067411207d1 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Carsten Jost, co-founder of Hamburg's Dial Records, returns with his first proper LP in over a decade. The result is hypnotic, torn between cool remove and encroaching dread. | Carsten Jost, co-founder of Hamburg's Dial Records, returns with his first proper LP in over a decade. The result is hypnotic, torn between cool remove and encroaching dread. | Carsten Jost: Perishable Tactics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22854-perishable-tactics/ | Perishable Tactics | Carsten Jost is a co-founder of Hamburg’s Dial Records, a label responsible for minimalist classics from Lawrence, Efdemin, and Pantha du Prince, among others. Jost (aka David Lieske) released his debut album, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, way back in 2001, when Dial’s favored strain of moody, minimalist house was still relatively novel; the deep house revival wouldn’t happen for another decade. Since then, he’s put out very little else, even as the style he helped establish has become ubiquitous in underground dance music, from the Smallville label’s twinkly-eyed tone poems to the muted chords and buffed textures of the so-called “lo-fi house” phenomenon.
Since 2007—with three new Carsten Jost tracks that year, it was an uncharacteristically prolific period—his output has slowed to a trickle: one song on Dial’s 2010 compilation; a split single with Lawrence in 2011; another compilation cut in 2015. Lieske put out a full-length with his duo Misanthrope CA last year, but that album’s dissonant, doom-laden ambient is a long way from his ruminative and rhythmic sweet spot. Finally, however, the wind seems to have blown him back into the studio. The resulting album goes to the heart of the Dial aesthetic: wistful, hypnotic, and torn between ecstatic abandon, cool remove, and encroaching dread.
The bookending “Intro” and “Outro” are stylistic outliers. Closer in spirit to Misanthrope CA, they combine ethereal orchestral samples with drifting synthesizers and distant scrapes and drones, suggesting Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project if Voigt had been brought up on a steady diet of Ligeti and doom metal. The album’s nine remaining tracks proceed almost like a set of variations upon a theme. His grooves invariably emphasize the thud and hiss of classic Roland machines, and his crisp claps and flashing hi-hats cut through the swirling murk like searchlights. He likes his chords plaintive and his reverb trails long.
A few cuts are more melodic; the bittersweet “Atlantis II” features a bassline vaguely reminiscent of Ricardo Villalobos’ “Dexter,” and its layered string pads are unabashedly sentimental. “Love,” originally released on a split 12” in 2007, carves out a clean-lined counterpoint between Rhodes keys and a rich, tonal conga pattern. Mostly, though, he applies his layers of synthesizers like watercolors, and the blurred edges of his melodies seep outward like the outline of a stain.
Like much dance music, Perishable Tactics seldom gestures beyond its immediate environs; it’s a music of immersion, of immediacy, and also of deep isolation. Whereas most dance music is social, Lieske spins his fibers into a soft, hermetic cocoon. But the occasional crack in the façade affords a glimpse of ideas not often found in conjunction with house music, beginning with the militaristic theme that runs through titles such as “Army Green” and “Dawn Patrol,” as well as the ominous cover photo of a shirtless figure crouching beneath a Mylar space blanket, clutching some kind of heavy weaponry. The theme becomes explicit on “Platoon RLX,” in which a brief snippet of dialogue echoes in an incessant loop over mournful strings and a restless drum groove. “How’d you get the nickname?” asks a voice; “The killer?” whispers another in reply.
The clip comes from The World of Charlie Company, a 1970 documentary that the CBS News reporter John Laurence made while embedded with an American rifle company in Vietnam. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Bob Dylan lyric that’s quoted in the title of his debut album has a deeper historical significance: That line, from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” inspired the name of the Weather Underground, colloquially known as the Weathermen, the ’60s radicals who took up arms against the U.S. government. With these echoes of the civil unrest and military disasters of last century, Lieske adds even more sinister overtones to his already unsettling atmospheres. As it happens, the Weathermen have recently been back in the news: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s shadowy right-hand man, cryptically shouted out the leftist revolutionaries in a 2010 speech. If Carsten Jost is a kind of dance-music Cassandra, complicating club music with some serious end-of-the-world vibes, Lieske couldn’t have picked a more appropriate time to bring him back. | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dial | February 8, 2017 | 7 | 2c850d9c-f8d1-4fd1-8863-d63440c6e7fc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This Seattle neo-soul duo lent forcible female vocals to Shabazz Palaces' 2011 LP Black Up. Following a handful of self-released mixtapes, awE naturalE marks their proper debut. | This Seattle neo-soul duo lent forcible female vocals to Shabazz Palaces' 2011 LP Black Up. Following a handful of self-released mixtapes, awE naturalE marks their proper debut. | THEESatisfaction: awE naturalE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16444-awe-naturale/ | awE naturalE | Amid all the dense and amorphous elements found on Shabazz Palaces 2011 album Black Up, there was one you felt like you could reach out and touch. On a handful of tracks, a pair of forcible female vocalists cut through the seductive murk, anchoring the songs and lodging their voices in your brain. "Play it then, let my soul unwind," one sang on "Swerve... the reeping of all that is worthwhile (Noir not withstanding)". At the very end of the track, the other rapped with patient conviction: "So still it morphed, this shit is way too advanced." The voices were those of Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons, respectively, the duo behind Seattle neo-soul/avant-rap duo THEESatisfaction.
Following a handful of self-released Bandcamp mixtapes, awE naturalE marks THEESatisfaction's proper debut, and their post-Black Up introduction to the world through Sub Pop. The album stands on its own as a fresh take on dense neo-soul, jazz, and rap fusion, but it also functions as a component of a larger piece. It's solid proof that they weren't merely vocalists auditioned for a part by Palaceer Lazaro, but part of a symbiotic relationship that must have much deeper roots. As Irons and Harris-White's were on Black Up, Lazaro's fingerprints are all over this record, including guest verses over the minimal-jazz of "God" and the alien-like, wobble-warped "Enchantruss". On a more understated level, unconventional song structures-- there are few hooks or choruses or neatly measured verses here-- subtly reveal themselves the way they did on Black Up. Perhaps it's the result of a close artistic partnership, or a reflection of the contemporary music scene in Seattle, but the music of Lazaro and THEESatisfaction sounds as though it's working toward the same goal, even when released as separate entities.
What is that common goal? Like Lazaro has done in the last couple of years, THEESatisfaction find a way to draw from the early-1990s backpack era and break new (and sometimes strange) ground while staying on the right side of the line between groovy and granola. Songs meander through psychedelic loops built around jazz or funk instrumentation, starting punchily in one place and ending abruptly somewhere altogether different. Most clock in well under three minutes. That sort of free-flowing structural approach lends itself well to Irons and Harris-White's stream-of-consciousness lyrical mode, a smooth rapping/singing tag-team effort.
The content here is cryptic but almost always obliquely political, brushing on the experiences that come along with being black lesbians in America. "My melanin is relevant/ It's something to be had," they chant on "Deeper". "I said, 'Ow! I am the bitch on the side,'" the two sing together on "Bitch", narrating an inner monologue of friendship and romantic struggle. At a time when politically conscious rap is viewed with skepticism, that sort of territory becomes tricky to navigate, but Irons and Harris-White pull it off. They come over as ultra-positive Queens of the Stoned Age who prioritize uninhibited genre exploration and good vibe-seeking above all.
At some point in 2009, the duo uploaded a goofy video they'd filmed of themselves talking at the webcam, grinning and telling their fans what a good month they'd had. The music in the background was Digable Planets' "Black Ego", which points explicitly to the tradition they're helping to carry on along with Lazaro. awE naturalE, like Black Up, is a pleasantly surprising resurrection of the Pacific Northwest-via-Brooklyn hippie-hop that we never might have anticipated a few years ago. Much of the music from that era doesn't hold up, but THEESatisfaction have an ear for what was worth saving, and the mantra on uptempo album highlight "QueenS"-- "Whatever you do, don't funk with my groove"-- still has legs. | 2012-03-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-03-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 29, 2012 | 7.5 | 2c9da203-ea5a-448b-924f-2c61a25ab292 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Sleigh Bells' fourth record is a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism. | Sleigh Bells' fourth record is a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism. | Sleigh Bells: Jessica Rabbit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22571-jessica-rabbit/ | Jessica Rabbit | Having watched the shelf life for buzz bands grow ever shorter during the late ’00s, Sleigh Bells seemed to understand the need to make the most of their moment. In the wake of their breakthrough debut Treats they worked fast, firing off a couple more LPs within a year of each other, as if trying to refuse the world the chance to forget about them. Though it suffered the inevitable diminishing returns expected from a band that got everything right the first time around, 2012’s Reign of Terror nearly matched the blunt force of their debut, while distinguishing itself just enough with its arena-rock lean. But by their third effort 2013’s Bitter Rivals, the sugar rush had become a headache. The album was genuinely obnoxious in a way its predecessors had only pretended to be, and almost as troubling for a band whose power stemmed from their laser focus—their resolve to drive a single idea, brick on the gas pedal, head first through any obstacle in its path—it was strangely noncommittal.
For their fourth album, Sleigh Bells did something inherently risky for a band so of-the-moment: They took their time, piecing together Jessica Rabbit in stops and starts over three years, and it sounds like it. Recorded in part with Mike Elizondo, the seasoned Los Angeles producer best known for glossing up records for Eminem and his Shady/Aftermath cohorts, it’s a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism. Anybody holding out hope for another great, singular inspiration to strike the band again the way it did on their distortion-addled debut probably won’t find it even worth a cursory stream. What the album lacks in vision, though, it attempts to compensate for through sheer exertion. If nothing else, the duo has never seemed to be trying harder than they are here, so although Jessica Rabbit is even more scattershot than Bitter Rivals was, it at least has a sense of showmanship that album didn’t.
The album also smartly runs with the one thing that Bitter Rivals did right: giving more control to singer Alexis Krauss. Krauss had always been the face of Sleigh Bells, their head cheerleader and fun ambassador. Her past as a member of a teen-pop band was central to the group’s mythos, their link to the very music they were subverting. But as integral as she was to the band’s image, Treats didn’t give her all that much to do. Derek Miller’s compressed guitars were so loud, so blown out, that often all Krauss could do was play against them, injecting her airy voice here and there, and even then mostly to make the guitars feel that much heavier in comparison.
On subsequent efforts, Krauss has dialed up the ferocity to the point where she’s no longer juxtaposed against the fray—she is the fray. And as she takes on increased songwriting responsibilities on Jessica Rabbit, she’s also seized the chance to show off her full vocal range. On “Rule Number One,” her voice climbs from a Kesha sneer to a robust Xtina wail as she belts “POP ROCKS AND COKE MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE!” over Miller’s hair-metal riffage. Somehow, she’s even louder than the guitars.
While Krauss relishes the opportunity to play the pop star she never got an actual chance to be, Miller succumbs to a reduced role. His spliced guitars propel “Crucible,” an admirably spirited mashup of circa-’87 Whitney Houston and Licensed to Ill-era Beastie Boys, but it’s hard to even guess what hand he might have had on the Elizondo co-production “I Can Only Stare,” a guitar-free, high-drama pop number closer to something you’d find on a Leona Lewis record than anything on Treats. Similarly, the brooding, EDM-tinged “Unlimited Dark Paths,” as with far too many Elizondo productions, sounds like it was somehow conceived with Skylar Grey in mind.
Even when Jessica Rabbit treads into generic territory, Krauss manages to leave a personal stamp on the material. “I was dreaming of a dead end street that we used to run down,” she sings on “Lightning Turns Sawdust Gold,” over a slinky, lighter-waving groove more than a little inspired by Santigold’s “Disparate Youth.” Elsewhere she calls out a partner who wastes a Friday night getting high and watching The Lion King, the kind of specific, seemingly autobiographic detail that rarely made its way into the first couple Sleigh Bells records. She takes ownership of these songs in a way she never did before.
So Jessica Rabbit is Krauss’s show, and she’s a show worth watching. The problem is it’s just not very catchy. On their first two albums, Sleigh Bells always had a granite hook to balance out the volume. But too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop. | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Torn Clean | November 8, 2016 | 5.9 | 2caa403a-806b-4334-b8fd-321ffa5c9177 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1971 live double LP from the Allman Brothers Band, a snapshot of a pure and joyous moment in rock’n’roll. | 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 1971 live double LP from the Allman Brothers Band, a snapshot of a pure and joyous moment in rock’n’roll. | The Allman Brothers Band: At Fillmore East | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-allman-brothers-band-live-at-fillmore-east/ | At Fillmore East | The Allman Brothers Band didn’t give a good goddamn about a photograph. It was early spring in 1971 in Macon, the comfortable little mid-Georgia city they’d recently adopted as their hometown because that’s where their upstart Southern label, Capricorn, lived. The sextet—two guitars, two drummers, bass, organ—had been a band for only two years. They’d passed most of that time on tour, playing 300 shows in 1970 and barely surviving on an unsteady diet of booze and blow, heroin and pot.
But after a spate of mid-Atlantic shows in April, they were home for just three days before another sprint through the even deeper South, including Alabama and Mississippi. There were kids, wives, and girlfriends to visit, a rare respite for a band that had suddenly exploded in popularity. And then, there was this stupid photo. Three weeks earlier, they’d played three (and recorded two) nights of marathon concerts at Manhattan’s Fillmore East, intending to compile the performances into an album that at last bottled the ecstasy and improvisation of their electrified blues-rock. The pictures they had taken in New York were a bust, so Jim Marshall—already a high-profile music photographer, having snapped Cash at Folsom and Coltrane and Miles in repose—had followed them home to Macon.
They should have been flattered, hosting this icon in their sleepy city. But they were tired, and much like the Grateful Dead, their pals and cross-country rivals as the best live band in the country, they never cared much for promotion, anyway. What’s more, Marshall was bossy. “A real son of a bitch,” drummer Butch Trucks remembered decades later, “who was lucky he didn’t get his ass kicked.” They scowled for Marshall’s first shots, a gaggle of roughnecks with matching mushroom tattoos, flexing their Southern roughness for the camera.
Just then, Duane Allman—the band’s founder, fixer, linchpin, and unparalleled guitar dynamo—spotted his local cocaine connection and sprinted down the alley. He returned to his spot, clutching an 8 ball in his hand and brandishing a Cheshire grin. The rest of the band howled, so Marshall took his picture and got his album cover, everyone locked in a laugh. He caught the band in their most natural setting: reveling in the joy and possibility of the present, the exact same way they sound on what is arguably rock music’s quintessential live album, At Fillmore East.
The Allman Brothers never intended to make their first live album, per se; they simply wanted to make their third overall album, and they recognized they were better onstage than in a controlled studio environment. Their self-titled 1969 debut, recorded five months after their first show, felt chastened, its straitlaced production and relatively short songs drawing the reins fast on a spirited young racehorse. Their second album, Idlewild South, worked to showcase a softer and more commercially viable side. Sure, it sounded good, but it also sounded dated upon arrival, a folk-rock reverie from a band that was best when it was wide-awake, very high, and very loud. “We get kind of frustrated doing the records,” Duane admitted at the start of the ’70s, noting that the stage was where they found their “natural fire.”
On the West Coast, the Grateful Dead had come of age—and shown their first flashes of greatness—by playing free shows in area parks, a tradition that early inchoate versions of the Allman Brothers pursued in their native Florida. (The Dead first met The Allman Brothers in an Atlanta park in 1969, the start of their enduring partnership.) And after three deeply uncomfortable studio albums, the Dead had also figured out they needed to record themselves live if they ever wanted wider audiences to understand how they actually sounded.
Early in 1969, the Dead opened a new frontier in rock production when their crew lugged a mammoth prototype of an Ampex 16-track tape machine up the stairs of San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom. The technology afforded them the sort of control over recordings that would yield their first live albums and the early best-sellers of their career. The Allman Brothers again followed the Dead’s lead.
But the Allmans wanted to up the ante, too. The Dead’s live debut had been a patchwork from several shows in different rooms; they were not above adding studio overdubs, either, as they would soon do on 1971’s actually pretty decent Skull Fuck. For the Allmans, though, the ability to fix anything neared heresy—live, they reckoned, ought to mean live. They wanted no part of the running music-industry joke, guitarist Dickey Betts later said, that the only live part of most “live” albums was the cheering. They wanted to play in one room for several days, record themselves and the crowd, and create a snapshot of an actual moment that was both compelling and real. The Allman Brothers wanted to revel in—and preserve—the present.
And they knew exactly where they had to do it: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, at 105 Second Avenue in the East Village. In San Francisco, the ambitious and inventive Graham had gone from managing a mime troupe to establishing a new paradigm for live music. At Fillmore West, he had ignored genre striation, pairing the Dead with Miles Davis and the Who with blues harpist James Cotton.
He recognized the same crossover zeal in five white hippies and a dauntless Black R&B percussionist from the South, who were setting new fire to old blues. Graham and his staff loved the Allmans the moment they opened for Blood, Sweat, & Tears in New York in 1969. Within weeks, they became a staple of both Fillmore East and Fillmore West, long before the rest of the music industry could figure out what to do with the band.
Their sets at Fillmore East offer a roadmap of their rapid progress. Opening for the Dead there in February 1970, they sounded fast and anxious, intimidated by the auspicious setting. But the Dead dosed the Allmans (and everyone else around) with Owsley Stanley’s acid, and something in the Southerners shifted. As Graham later put it, “the Allman Brothers were never the same again.” They were suddenly more aggressive, more open. By the Summer of 1971, when the band played their spectacular last-ever set at Fillmore East, Graham, not given to empty flattery, introduced them as “the finest contemporary music… the best of them all.”
The band shared that admiration, not only for Graham—“the fairest person,” Gregg Allman called him—but also for his New York room, a former Yiddish theater that became a hub for exploratory rock as soon as it opened in 1968. The productions were professional, the lights sharp, the crew familial and attentive, the sound crisp. “The acoustics were nearly perfect in there,” Gregg told Rolling Stone 45 years later. “I don’t think we even discussed another venue.”
They booked three nights, the first a mere warmup for the real “sessions”—four sets total, split over Friday and Saturday. Just as the Dead would do a year later in Europe, the Allmans parked a rented cargo truck equipped with a 16-channel machine in the rear, cables carrying the signal from the stage. The legendary Tom Dowd, a tech whiz who had recorded Idlewild South and Duane’s (superior) parts on Clapton’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, helmed the equipment.
Dowd had the band’s trust. He threw a fit, for instance, when an unrehearsed horn section appeared during the first night; by night two, they were gone. After each set, they’d grab booze and food and head to Atlantic Records to listen back and decide what to play next. There were no overdubs—only the moment, minus a few snips.
More than half a century later, the seven-track sequence that Dowd and the band culled from the 28 songs they recorded that weekend still feels like a revelation. Rock’n’roll has mutated into infinite shapes in the decades since, of course, but these pieces—sitting at thresholds of blues-rock and prog-rock, of pure soul and flashy technicality—still sound breathless, riveting, and wildly imaginative.
At Fillmore East is a condensed representation of an actual show, following much the same energetic arc as an early Allman Brothers set. (Remember, this is a band that had debuted less than two years earlier.) After Graham introduces them, they spring into “Statesboro Blues,” the Blind Willie McTell standard that inspired Duane to play slide guitar after he saw Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis perform it in Los Angeles. Compact and charged, the song still gives the band space to showcase its dual guitar masters—Duane, whose slide leads sparkle with such melody that his younger brother’s singing feels like an afterthought, and Dickey Betts, whose comparatively understated playing restores the song’s sense of gravity.
“Done Somebody Wrong,” meanwhile, throbs like a crowded juke joint. The beautifully brooding “Stormy Monday” is a showcase for Gregg’s deepening techniques as a soul singer, his voice wafting above the band like a cigarette’s plume of smoke. This opening triptych is the Allman Brothers’ reference check, an offering of fundamental blues bona fides while nodding to the Black predecessors that made their music possible.
For a spell, “You Don’t Love Me,” an R&B hit for Willie Cobbs a decade earlier, feels that way, too, the band and harmonica pal Thom “The Ace” Doucette passing around the melody like a tightly wrapped joint. After everyone else falls away, Duane fiddles with the theme alone, trying to make a new shape from a familiar source. The band rejoins and follows his lead. Butch Trucks goes one way on his drums, while Jai “Jaimoe” Johanson goes another, as if Elvin Jones were trying to catch Charlie Watts at the other side of a maze. There are snippets of “Sitting on Top of the World,” a stunning bit of “Joy to the World,” and the prevailing sense that this band could do practically anything.
And then, well, it does: The second half of At Fillmore East is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been, especially at this relatively early but especially fertile point in its history. Anchored by Gregg’s stuttering organ and Berry Oakley’s lyrical bass, “Hot ’Lanta” feels like a game of instrumental hide-and-seek, each player seeing just what they can do with the theme before disappearing back into the safety of the band.
Written by Betts after an alleged tryst in the very Macon graveyard where half the band is now buried, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” offers a keen testimonial to how much attention these Southern blues dudes were paying to emerging sounds and scenes far beyond rock. The textural interplay resembles Miles Davis’ then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.
The rhythm section ferries a righteous bit of funk, but the two-drummer setup allows Johanson and Trucks to work around the groove with a bebop sense of subtlety and softness. (Before joining the Allman Brothers, Johanson was on the cusp of moving to New York to play jazz, or “starve to death … playing what I love.”) Tilt your head one way, and “Elizabeth Reed” is a strutting, sexual rock instrumental; tilt it the other way, and it’s a deep improvisational hang, populated by players forever in search of some unimagined rhythmic intricacy.
No song makes it clearer that the Allman Brothers had never recorded a proper-for-them album than the finale, “Whipping Post.” Sure, they’d cut it as the farewell for their debut LP, when it was a dumb and fun five-minute rock song about being put out and misused by a woman you love—same old blues, different tune. Fifty years later, that version can still sit squarely between the Doors and Led Zeppelin in an afternoon FM rock block of songs by jilted androgenic bros.
But this 23-minute version is gloriously affirming, a diorama about being hurt badly and somehow persevering to work toward personal redemption. They first play the song straight through, Gregg screaming out his struggles at an elevated tempo that suggests he’s simply looking forward to hearing what comes next. The guitars soon take over, crisscrossing over the pounding rhythm section in a series of urgent solos, each a wrestling match with despair.
Duane and Betts quarrel until they collapse, the band going nearly silent while the guitarists sulk in a sort of cosmic instrumental grumble. But they pick each other up, rushing back headlong back into the song. When Gregg returns to the chorus after the long instrumental break, he sounds not like the victim but instead the victor, his struggles beaten back by the help of this ad hoc brotherhood. It is absolutely transcendent, based in the blues but rising above them.
The Allman Brothers finished playing the version of “Whipping Post” heard on At Fillmore East sometime around 5 a.m. It was the final set of their final night, and it had been delayed by a bomb threat that forced everyone from the building for hours. They rolled straight into “Mountain Jam” for 35 minutes, then responded to relentless calls for an encore with one more song.
“That’s all for tonight, thank you,” Duane said when it was over, despite the crowd’s cries for more. “Hey, it’s six o’clock, y’all. Look here: We recorded all this. It’s going to be our third album. You’re all on it.” (You can hear this proclamation on the 2014 edition, which includes every set.) Through his good-natured fatigue, you get some sense of what everyone in the room, crowd included, had accomplished—they’d made not only the Allman Brothers’ lone masterpiece, but they’d created and captured a crowning achievement of live rock’n’roll.
That moment and its glory would not last. Disenchanted with the music industry and financially saddled by sizable venues on separate coasts, Graham would close both Fillmore East and West by early July, 1971. Days later, the Allman Brothers released At Fillmore East, which would sell 500,000 copies in just three months, something their first two records did only when they were later repackaged as a pair. They beat their mentors and predecessors, the Dead, to that benchmark by three weeks—At Fillmore East, after all, was better than the overdub-laced Skull Fuck, preserving a moment of sheer power and finesse with perfect clarity.
But on October 29, four days after At Fillmore East was certified Gold, Duane Allman—home in Macon for another brief break from tour, leaving a birthday party sober—clipped a truck hauling a crane with his motorcycle, which landed on top of him. He died that evening from internal bleeding. He was 24. In the six months since taping At Fillmore East, the Allman Brothers had grown both sharper and more expansive, with Duane even talking about building a “big band.” It’s bittersweet, even shocking, to imagine just how far and hard he might have pushed their sound.
Under Gregg’s sudden leadership, the Allman Brothers Band returned to the stage less than a month after they played Duane’s funeral, convinced that’s what their visionary would have demanded. The extra material they’d recorded at Fillmore East became the backbone of their next album—the fabled resurrection of 1972’s half-live Eat a Peach. A few hiatuses excepted, they stayed on stage (even after the brilliant Oakley also died on a motorcycle a year later) until retiring in 2014.
The Allman Brothers Band were occasionally great during those subsequent 40 years, rotating some of Duane’s best electric disciples (including an extended family member, Derek Trucks) into the lineup. Still, they were forever after an aging band chasing the kind of joyous moment and youthful magic that At Fillmore East epitomizes. You can always find good spare parts, you know? It’s harder to find the guy who makes everyone grin in an uncomfortable situation by running down the street to score.
For all the perpetually obvious reasons, speaking about Southern pride feels fraught. Sure, many of our problems are not endemic to this place, but they are often brandished with particular relish or malice here, whether by Confederate flag or voting-rights restrictions. “Duane Allman was in the vanguard of the New South,” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau once said. I think that applies to the whole band, which Duane liked to call his “enlightened rogues,” a pointed rejoinder to the stereotype of ignorant rebels. They weren’t perfect in this regard, of course—there are stars-and-bars (including a shirt designed for them by the extended family of the Dead) and questionable images in their closet, too. But by and large, the Allman Brothers provided an early model for young Southerners attempting to overcome their bigotry, bullshit, and fear to do something great, together. They still do.
When Duane returned to Florida with Johanson in 1969 to start the band in earnest, for instance, the pair moved into Trucks’ home. The white drummer was so scared of his new Black houseguest he assumed he was there to rob or kill him—at least until they started talking, at which point they became instant friends. By year’s end, they were one of rock’s great drumming tandems; by March 1971, they could swing, shuffle, and push harder than most anyone else in rock’n’roll.
What’s more, the Allman Brothers tacitly recognized the exploitative history of authorship here—from hush puppies on down to banjo music, whites have continually co-opted the work of their Black contemporaries. The Allmans accepted that they were borrowing from Black predecessors, from the songs themselves to Gregg’s soul mimesis, and they aggressively admitted it. They take so much care to acknowledge authorship during At Fillmore East that Duane corrects himself when he calls “Stormy Monday” a Bobby Bland tune. “Actually, it’s a T-Bone Walker song,” he says.
A white Southerner name-checking two Black musicians from stage doesn’t sound like a lot, but Bob Dylan still struggles to do half as much 50 years later. At least in that instant, the Allman Brothers were doing what they felt they could. And that ability—to make now better, however best you can—is the true animating spirit of At Fillmore East, from its beaming cover to its implicit politics. It is a tragedy that these seven songs captured one of the final moments the actual Allman Brothers Band would revel in together. But good god damn, at least we still get to relive it. | 2022-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capricorn | April 10, 2022 | 9.2 | 2caeba81-a72f-4eab-8763-c3a5408837d8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
This limited six-disc set of the 1967 classic includes remasters, alternate versions and mixes, practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording, and a remaster of Nico's Chelsea Girl, on which the Velvets performed. | This limited six-disc set of the 1967 classic includes remasters, alternate versions and mixes, practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording, and a remaster of Nico's Chelsea Girl, on which the Velvets performed. | The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17129-the-velvet-underground-nico/ | The Velvet Underground & Nico | Forty-five years after its release, everything that was supposed to have made The Velvet Underground & Nico special has been nearly eradicated by its own legend. The most dangerous record of 1967 has been absorbed into the establishment rock canon; the paradoxical fame it earned from its hilariously terrible sales figures in its early years has been negated by reissue after deluxe-edition reissue; and its transgressive kinky-druggy menace has been smothered by the embrace of millions of overly precious Wes Anderson acolytes. Is a limited-edition "super deluxe" six-disc box set really going to help restore any of the ineffable outsider cool that it's lost over the years? Actually, yeah, it is.
The new super deluxe edition of TVU&N consists of a new stereo remaster of the album, a new mono remaster (both taken from the original tapes), a disc of alternate versions and mixes of the songs, a disc of practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording from around the time the album was recorded (spread across two discs), and a remaster of Nico's solo debut, Chelsea Girl, which the Velvets performed on. So aside from the 45 minutes of Chelsea Girl, you've got five hours of essentially the same 11 songs presented over and over in various levels of audio fidelity. On paper it may seem indulgent, but listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in.
First there's the album proper. The remastering process was handled by Bill Levenson, who's been working on Velvets material since the mid-80s rarities collections VU and Another VU, and who oversaw the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set that collected all of the group's studio recordings. Levenson knows the material well enough to keep from making it sound too clean. The amp hiss, tape saturation, and overall grit that made TVU&N leap out from the scores of mannered psychedelic rock albums released around the same time is still firmly in place; it's just that the grit sounds better.
The stereo mix breathes in a way that the album never has before. As incredible as it sounds, though, the mono version on the second disc provides the set's first moment of serious revelation: It doesn't breathe at all. In fact, with every throbbing bassline and squalling viola set dead center, the mix is suffocating. The transformative effect it has on the songs is unreal. Lou-fronted rockers like "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" leap out from the speakers with an aggression that other versions lack. "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Venus in Furs", and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are oppressively noisy, but pleasurably so. It's a sensual sensory overload that underlines just how successful the group was at the music-as-S&M game it was playing with listeners.
Disc four is even rawer, and removes the last bit of remaining studio refinement to expose the Velvets' primal proto-punk heart. The first half is a reproduction of the one-of-a-kind acetate discovered by a record collector in a New York City street sale in 2002-- and sold on eBay a few years later for over $25,000-- that contained the first version of the album that the band delivered to Columbia Records (and which the label rejected). Some of the tracks would end up on the version of album that Verve issued after taming them down during another round of mixing; others were re-recorded entirely. Compared to the familiar finished version the material sounds unhinged. Moe Tucker's rudimentary drumming on an alternate version of "Heroin" is primitive to the extreme, while the original mix of "Femme Fatale" place a bizarre falsetto backing vocal from one of the male members high enough in the mix to put a listener on edge. And since the audio's taken straight from a beat-up acetate the whole fantastic mess is covered in crackles and hiss.
The rest of disc four is pulled from a taped rehearsal at the Factory a few months before the Scepter sessions, previously available in bootleg form. Parts of it are more interesting than listenable, like the band dicking around while Lou Reed patiently attempts to explain the lyrics to "Venus in Furs" to Nico. Other parts are jaw-dropping, like a version of "Run, Run, Run" that quickly turns itself inside out and transforms into a frenetic, semi-improvised Bo Diddley impression that's denser and heavier than almost anything else in the Velvets' catalog and can demand repeat plays back to back.
What makes moments like this, and the set in general, so compelling is that you get a picture of the group as a living, breathing band, separate from the performances that would be frozen in time and started on a long march to iconhood a little over a year later. For a minute-- or sometimes for 12-- you get a sense of what they really were, which is just another garage outfit hopped up on pills and playing rock'n'roll music so hard that it starts flinging off parts. The difference is that their garage was the Factory, and that they were willing to ride it far closer to fully falling apart than anyone else.
That's the image that sustains the final two discs, which together comprise a bootlegged live set from Columbus, Ohio's Valleydale Ballroom in November, 1966, four months or so before TVU&N was released. While someone-- maybe a devoted fan of the Factory scene-- yells out Nico's name when she introduces "All Tomorrow's Parties", you get the very clear idea that very few people in the crowd know who the Velvet Underground are, or like what they're playing. You can hear maybe two or three members of the audience clap after the opener "Melody Laughter", a 28-minute jam that's mostly noisy drone with a brief pop coda at the end. After a feedback-filled scorched-earth rendition of "Black Angel's Death Song", Lou Reed snarls at the audience, "If it's too loud for you, you move back."
A few months later, right after the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group would convene to record parts of Nico's Chelsea Girl, which is a fine baroque folk-pop album, but nothing approaching that first record. The three other LPs the group recorded before Reed left the band almost four years after that show were great in their own rights, but paled in comparison to TVU&N. Listening to the live recording and hearing the silences between the songs, though, it's easy to imagine a roomful of people being pummeled by this strange, intimidating noise, and seeking safety in the back of the room, completely unaware that the band they're being assaulted by was at that moment (and for not much longer), the best in the world. | 2012-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 20, 2012 | 9 | 2cb194ec-97ad-47a8-9789-9f78d66488bf | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner teams with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford, and Miles Kane, of 1960s-tinged English rockers the Little Flames and the Rascals, to create a remarkably vivid 1960s symphonic-pop pastiche. | The Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner teams with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford, and Miles Kane, of 1960s-tinged English rockers the Little Flames and the Rascals, to create a remarkably vivid 1960s symphonic-pop pastiche. | The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11433-the-age-of-the-understatement/ | The Age of the Understatement | Alex Turner has spent most of his short career trying to prove he's not whatever people say he is. Or else, trying to prove he can live up to it. At the height of Arctic Monkeys mania in late 2005, the Sheffield, England quartet followed their first UK No. 1-- post-punk dervish "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor"-- with one of Turner's most vivid character sketches to date, red-light vignette "When the Sun Goes Down". Which also went to No. 1. More importantly, it hinted that all the hype, most of it from the excitable British press (Terris? Gay Dad? Razorlight?...Coldplay?), wasn't all hype. The next single's B-sides included a cover of 1965 r&b oldie "Baby, I'm Yours". When it came time to pick a lead single for fine 2007 sophomore effort Favourite Worst Nightmare, the Arctics went with the one that didn't have a chorus.
In between singing, playing guitar, and writing songs for one of the UK's biggest bands, Turner listened to some records. Old ones: Favourite Worst Nightmare finale "505" sampled Ennio Morricone, and in an interview at the time with The Onion's A/V Club, Turner touted everything from doo-wop and girl groups to late-1960s David Bowie rarity "In the Heat of the Morning". In retrospect, that's where Turner's latest project, the Last Shadow Puppets, begins. The other half of the duo, Miles Kane, played guitar on "505". The Bowie song, which the Last Shadow Puppets have since covered as a B-side, could easily have been their aesthetic template.
Kane, formerly of 1960s-tinged English rockers the Little Flames and now with a new group dubbed the Rascals, is actually Turner's least well-known collaborator on the Last Shadow Puppets' full-length debut. Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, who has arranged strings for the Arcade Fire, does so here with the 22-piece London Metropolitan Orchestra. Simian Mobile Disco half James Ford, who produced Favourite Worst Nightmare and the Klaxons' debut album, produces again and serves double-duty on drums. Together, they've helped create Turner's most impressive album-length statement yet, one that strives, musically and lyrically, for the epic grandeur of an era before GarageBand or MySpace, and avoids lapsing into pretentiousness by dint of its own headlong enthusiasm. As Turner's granddad might say, "You've overdoon it." Again.
Ford may be better known for his work in unfortunately nicknamed subgenres like blog house and nu-rave, but on The Age of the Understatement, he oversees a remarkably vivid 1960s symphonic-pop pastiche. The title track and first single opens the record at a gallop, stretching the baroque-pop of early Scott Walker-- the Jacques Brel-translating, Ingmar Bergman-feting crooner, not the avant-gardist from Tilt and The Drift-- to the dramatic mariachi brass of Love's Forever Changes, or one of Morricone's Sergio Leone scores. Or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's "The Legend of Xanadu". "About as subtle as an earthquake, I know," Turner concedes on "My Mistakes Were Made for You", which settles into a regal symphonic-funk groove befitting David Axelrod (the producer for Cannonball Adderley and the Electric Prunes, not the adviser to Barack Obama). Pallett's contributions range from the jittery waltz fanfares of "Calm Like You" and whip-cracking horse race of "Separate and Ever Deadly" to the downy romance of "The Meeting Place", which could've fit on an album by the Arctics' fellow Sheffield son Richard Hawley.
So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound. The video for "The Age of the Understatement" is set in Russia, and compared to the Arctics' insider-ish dispatches about Life Among the Chavs or Life As the Biggest New Band Since Oasis, these songs are Tolstoy in their bird's-eye omniscience. "Burglary and fireworks, the skies they were alight," Turner sings on "Calm Like You", describing a once-exciting city and the bitter romance that took place there. Brisk, timpani-rumbling "Standing Next to Me" is just conventional love-triangle stuff, but it finds Turner moving from his anthropologically detailed Arctics brushstrokes to bold, cinematic gestures: "You want to have her/ Two years have gone now/ But I can't relate." And on stinging recrimination "Black Plant": "He's got papercuts from the love letters you never gave him."
Turner wisely decides not to compete in the crooner sweepstakes, letting his voice retain its usual charming grittiness. Kane, from near Liverpool, sings in a voice that blends in as naturally as if they were brothers. So if you hear only the caustic vocals and lavish arrangements of faster-paced tracks like "Only the Truth", the Last Shadow Puppets are exactly what you'd expect Arctics-with-strings to sound like. This single-mindedness hampers songs like "The Chamber" or "I Don't Like You Any More", which work fine on their own but offer little to distinguish themselves when following The Age of the Understatement's stirring first half. As on both Arctics albums, though, Turner keeps a tender surprise up his sleeve. The first minute of finale "The Time Has Come Again" strips away all but neatly picked acoustic guitar and a 22-year-old's panging nostalgia for a few years earlier. "Don't go too soon/ She went too soon," Turner and Kane harmonize, as strings rise up to meet them, whatever people say they are, and everything else. | 2008-04-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 22, 2008 | 7.7 | 2cb27ac9-115a-4524-bd3e-50ddf0807d04 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Numero Group’s deluxe 5xLP box set looks back on a cult band that forged an unconventional blend of math rock and post-hardcore in the early 2000s. | Numero Group’s deluxe 5xLP box set looks back on a cult band that forged an unconventional blend of math rock and post-hardcore in the early 2000s. | 90 Day Men: We Blame Chicago | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/90-day-men-we-blame-chicago/ | We Blame Chicago | Career retrospectives tend to coincide with a period in which their subjects have become newly influential or relevant, or a moment when shifting tastes have made them ripe for rediscovery. That’s not the case with 90 Day Men, the Chicago art rockers whose three albums drew from turn-of-the-century underground rock’s most obscure corners, and sound even more arcane two decades later. Nothing in the air suggests the time is right for a 90 Day Men reappraisal; you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary band that cites them as an inspiration. Perhaps the best argument for Numero Group releasing a career box set now is that there might never be a right time.
Numero’s 5xLP set We Blame Chicago compiles all the group’s studio albums, along with singles, EPs, and unreleased material, chronicling 90 Day Men’s evolution from a math-rock band straining for originality into a jazzier, more cryptic outfit that eventually found it. For all its promise, their 2000 debut album (Is (It) Is) Critical Band couldn’t quite crack the puzzle of finding coherent common ground between math rock, modernist post-hardcore, and jagged post-punk. The band’s most avant hallmarks were there from the beginning—long, digressive songs; whiplash turns; almost free-form instrumental interplay—but the presentation was off. An air of artifice hangs over the record, especially the performances of singer Brian Case, who sang mostly in either a hectoring torrent of exclamations (“This is from one primadonna to another!”) or in droll spoken monologues.
Even by the standards of music that never cared much about likability, he could be a gratingly confrontational frontman, either so overbearing he was barely tolerable or so checked out he was barely there. It didn’t help, either, that the album’s central pairing of sardonic post-punk a la Gang of Four and the Fall and stern, serious Louisville-style math rock clashed on a conceptual level. Even on a song that grappled with the dichotomies of seeking and knowing, faith and uncertainty, “Exploration vs. Solution, Baby,” the glibness is right there in the title, like a shrug emoji saying, “Take this seriously, or don’t.” You’d imagine Slint’s Spiderland would lose something, too, if that album broke its unflinching intensity every couple of minutes to tell you it was just pulling your leg.
To 90 Day Men’s credit, they course-corrected quickly. By their 2002 follow-up, To Everybody, their first album written entirely after their relocation from St. Louis to Chicago, they’d landed on a far richer, much more singular muse. The instrumental “We Blame Chicago” nods to the influence of their new home city on their sound, with the kind of mosaic of post-rock, jazz, and dub most commonly found on a Tortoise record. Meanwhile, keyboardist Andy Lansangan, a late addition to the group, had stepped up as a creative engine, and his stately pianos emerged as a go-to lead instrument for the group. With those pianos easing some of the demands on their frontman to command attention, Case relaxed into himself, and his vocals grew more assured, more subdued, more vulnerable.
Other circumstances conspired to lend a crucial element of fragility to their sound. The group recorded in the days immediately after 9/11, when rescue crews were still scouring the wreckage for survivors, and horror and confusion remained thick in the air. In the extensive oral history that accompanies the box set, producer John Congelton recalls, “That strange nihilism everyone was feeling at the time made us like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s make a strange record.’” Congleton’s twitchy fingerprints are all over the album, most prominently in the crude, percussive tape manipulations of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” the mesh of pianos and electronics that most exemplifies the album’s mournful, haunted air. It’s fascinating how a band with no apparent debt to Radiohead independently arrived at so many of the same moods and ideas as Amnesiac.
The group’s final album, 2004’s Panda Park, was even more of a showcase for Congleton’s adventurous production—outside of Congleton’s own records with the Paper Chase, none of his other work from the era showcases his use of the studio quite as fearlessly. Some of the confidence and grace of To Everybody carries over, especially in the wintery ivories and beautiful despair of single “Too Late or Too Dead,” but to the extent the record isn’t as successful as its predecessor, it’s because it tries to do so much more. It’s a brief record, just 35 minutes, but with its vast busyness it feels longer. Closer “Night Birds” throws down eight and a half disorienting minutes of prog and skronk, never settling on a throughline to make its many moving parts cohere.
The box set’s rare material underscores just how far this band had to climb to find its voice. A bonus cassette of the group’s earliest recordings plays like the kind of demo Dischord must have received in the mail all the time, a spirited but very raw stab at the arty post-hardcore that proliferated on the label in the late ’90s. By a 2001 John Peel session, they’d switched from an inherited language to one they seemed to be inventing on the fly, opening up their songs to breathe and highlighting the intricate dialogue between their instruments over any driving component. It’s a glimpse at what an exceptional live band they must have been at their peak. By a few years later, they were burned out. The warm reception to Panda Park opened up bigger touring opportunities, but the pressures of trying to make ends meet on the road took a toll. In the oral history, Case recalls thinking, “The only way we can live is if we’re in this fucking van all the time?”
Revisiting 90 Day Men’s records with the benefit of hindsight, you can hear long-shot opportunities for them to grow their audience, if they’d wanted to compromise a bit. They could have easily leaned more into dance punk, for instance, and owned some of the Rapture/Liars market. With a little restraint and polish they could have positioned themselves as a better Cold War Kids. They also would have made an absolutely killer jam band. But in truth they never had the instincts of a group that was destined for big things. 90 Day Men were one of those bittersweet cases where their most fulfilling path was always the one with the lowest ceiling.\ | 2024-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Numero Group | February 1, 2024 | 7.4 | 2cb2e4de-c030-4fff-9340-ae3e54acefc8 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Kelela’s debut album is technically stunning and emotionally realized. It lives in a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers. | Kelela’s debut album is technically stunning and emotionally realized. It lives in a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers. | Kelela: Take Me Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelela-take-me-apart/ | Take Me Apart | Kelela is an intellectual in search of the body high. During the bountiful era of her early 30s, she has become exceptionally aware of the way club tracks work best when tuned to the head and the heart. Her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, remains a hallmark of the genre, a moment when the next-level producers of Night Slugs and Fade to Mind found a unified center within Kelela’s sinewy vocals. On 2015’s Hallucinogen EP, she further proved herself as an extraordinary ear and songwriter, guiding her producer-collaborators to push further into uncharted, futuristic territory. And on Take Me Apart, her first studio album, she takes the cerebral, corporeal world she’s built into the domain where it can historically live best: a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers.
Take Me Apart is a document of the emotional mechanics of a break-up and the freeing nature of new love. Kelela luxuriates in this radical openness between the two. On the title track, a sex jam produced by Al Shux and Jam City that hovers in the silky realm between drum ’n’ bass and rhythm & quad. Kelela demands a partner explore her entirely before getting all mushy about it—“Don’t say you’re in love, baby,” she coos, “until you learn to take me apart.” She advocates the exploration of her bod in the context of practicality—the need to unite the purely physical with one’s own damn brain.
The song is as much a statement about her music as it is about lusty night sweats, a theme that underpins Take Me Apart with an earned confidence. Her voice is clearer than ever, and she’s mastered its lower reaches and its breathy, Janet-invoking croons; on “Blue Light,” another song in which she asserts her desire to put it down with a new lover, she explores her vocal range with awesome muscularity. “I’m on my way right now, promise I won’t be long,” she sings, “Baby, keep the blue light on.” A pulsing, grime-adjacent synth by Dubbel Dutch acts as her pep squad, and the whole affair ends up feeling appropriately backlit, a bit illicit, and totally determined. You wanna dance and fuck to it.
Like Björk did in her early solo days, Take Me Apart provides a template for how to innovate pop, incorporating a melange of influences—writing collaborators include the xx’s Romy Madley Croft, Brazilian Girls’ Sabina Sciubba, and Nguzunguzu’s Asma Maroof—while remaining divorced from the endless industry zeitgeist of big-name algorithm producers. What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing. “Frontline,” which premiered on an episode of “Insecure” and seamlessly blended into the show’s estimation of break-ups in millennial Los Angeles, is a cinematic document in and of itself. As she avails herself of a shitty relationship (“Cry and talk about it baby but it ain’t no use/I ain’t gonna sit here with your blues”), a joint crackles, keys jingle, a car alarm beeps off, an engine revs. It’s completely transportive, and the most visual example of an album that seeks to create a world of her own.
Of course, there are pop-history touchstones—a strategically placed “ay” on “Waitin” invokes the glory days of crunk & b; songs like “Enough” and “Onanon,” both Arca joints, are like if Windy & Carl were fully psyched on modern DIY raves. But as Kelela canvasses the vagaries of her relationships, spreading her wings high atop the peaks of her soprano voice, she builds this outbound world to reflect the richness of her prodigious interior. Within this space, she flourishes as a songwriter, precise without hemming herself in.
Because of this, on an album full of jeep-jouncing bangers, it’s perhaps the most minimal tracks that land the hardest. On “Bluff,” her breezy vibrato chills on a slow piano melody, and she sings as though she’s telling a secret. “There you go, holding onto something. I’m gonna prove you wrong. Here we go, jumping in the deep end. I’m gonna prove you wrong.” It’s just over a minute long, but it’s evidence her heart is true: the song reverberates with tenderness, a prevailing theme for an album that documents falling in and out of love. She might be singing about different partners, but it’s the value and dignity she gives to her feelings that provides the true backdrop on Take Me Apart. In the process of setting out to solidify her own sound, Kelela has finally fallen for herself. | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warp | October 6, 2017 | 8.6 | 2cbba1d2-1365-4bbd-859f-e39714c6d4c9 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
This 32-track collection combines remastered rarities and unreleased oddities. More than a collectors’ compendium, though, it offers a welcome collage of a restless, empathic spirit. | This 32-track collection combines remastered rarities and unreleased oddities. More than a collectors’ compendium, though, it offers a welcome collage of a restless, empathic spirit. | Joe Strummer: Joe Strummer 001 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-strummer-joe-strummer-001/ | Joe Strummer 001 | Timing never was Joe Strummer’s strong suit. Not more than a year after the Clash cracked the stateside Top 10 in 1982, with “Rock the Casbah” peaking at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, Strummer fired his partner, Mick Jones. Instead of pulling the plug on the “The Only Band That Matters,” he kicked around for a few years, sticking with the Clash long enough to alienate even his hardcore fans with 1985’s incoherent Cut the Crap. Strummer released a solo album in 1989, when neither UK nor U.S. audiences were much interested in his earthy passion. When punk did have a commercial resurgence in the mid-1990s, his attempt to reunite the Clash fell apart. He couldn’t round up another proper gang until he formed the Mescaleros near decade’s end. Just as they began to hit their stride, Strummer died of a heart attack on December 22, 2002. He was only 50.
Released nearly 16 years after his death, Joe Strummer 001—a 32-track compilation of remastered rarities and previously unreleased material—continues this streak of bad timing, appearing at a moment when the Clash’s memory mostly surfaces for Greatest Albums Of All Time lists. Yet Strummer’s absence from mainstream discourse works in favor of Joe Strummer 001. It arrives to almost no expectations, save for those diehards who scrambled to collect these scraps over the years and long harbored hopes that Strummer’s recordings for obscure indie films such as Sara Driver’s 1993 When Pigs Fly would be released.
Joe Strummer 001 meets those collectors’ needs, but it’s much more than some utilitarian compendium. Eschewing chronology for collage, Joe Strummer 001 paints a vivid and complex portrait of Strummer as he existed outside of the Clash. Each CD opens with a version of “Letsgetabitarockin,” a nifty little Chuck Berry lift he wrote for his first band, the pub rockers the 101’ers. It’s an appropriate opening salvo. No matter how far Strummer roamed in life and music—singing Bob Marley with Johnny Cash, dabbling in African rhythms, and interpolating New Orleans R&B during extended sojourns in Spain and California—he was always rooted in rock’n’roll.
While Strummer started his professional career singing retro rock, he was consumed by understanding other cultures, which Joe Strummer 001 makes clear. Shuffling between elastic reggae, Irish folk, cinematic country, boombox hip-hop, and pseudo-jazz, the compilation showcases a singer/songwriter restless for new experiences, a hunger abetted by the Clash's collapse. Without a band, he was free to join directors Alex Cox and Jim Jarmusch on exotic film sets, contributing a few songs and even popping up on screen.
In Redemption Song: The Ballad Of Joe Strummer, biographer Chris Salewicz argues Strummer suffered from depression during this period. Still, this music is vibrant and never listless, gaining life from its ragged edges and brittle recordings. The cheapness suggests vitality, as if Strummer just needed to get these thoughts down as quickly as possible. For that reason, chunks of this material can seem tentative, even incomplete. Certain songs are revisited, and melodies are reappropriated. That circularity feels integral to Strummer’s creativity. He always worked his way back to the basics, writing rocking rave-ups and diving into spiritual dub when other ideas fell short.
A compilation with such rough edges typically remains the province of the converted, but Joe Strummer 001 explains the rocker’s sensibility in a way that is instructive and even inspiring for neophytes. The Clash were omnivorous and passionate, but their familiarity can sometimes mute their sense of adventure and emotion. That’s not the case here. Strummer embraced other cultures, formed the short-lived Latino Rockabilly War for 1988’s Permanent Record soundtrack, recorded with the Pogues under the Astro-Physicians disguise, and reunited with old bandmate Mick Jones to make hip-hop that didn’t sound like the Clash. His insatiable curiosity and endless empathy give this rough-hewn music a powerful core. Strummer’s career was a testament for open borders and open hearts. While such compassion may have fallen out of fashion, Strummer’s messy, impassioned music now sounds even more urgent and necessary. | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ignition | September 29, 2018 | 8 | 2cbd03f9-9a03-491e-920b-2e2cf6197aab | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
With a collection of gentle duets inspired by great-to-iffy movies, the veteran songwriter and protégé uncover mythic resonances and ugly truths. | With a collection of gentle duets inspired by great-to-iffy movies, the veteran songwriter and protégé uncover mythic resonances and ugly truths. | Sufjan Stevens / Angelo De Augustine: A Beginner’s Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sufjan-stevens-angelo-de-augustine-a-beginners-mind/ | A Beginner’s Mind | There’s a minor subgenre of pop concept albums inspired by movies—not soundtrack albums, but records that explicitly take vivid cinematic imagery as lyrical inspiration. On one side is, say, JAY-Z’s American Gangster, sparked by Jay’s obsession with a single movie. On the other end is something more self-consciously abstract, like the U2 and Brian Eno collaboration Original Soundtracks 1, a compilation of themes to imaginary movies created by jamming in the studio over film clips.
A Beginner’s Mind, the new collaboration from Sufjan Stevens and songwriter Angelo De Augustine, takes a substantively different approach: There’s no unifying concept beyond the pair’s omnivorous channel-surfing, and they don’t attempt an overtly cinematic musical style. Instead, they view film almost through the lens of the original Surrealists, who would go to the theater not to watch a complete film, but to catch bits and pieces of multiple movies, absorbing an out-of-context stream of images rather than a coherent plot.
Several songs draw from certified Criterion classics like Wings of Desire (“Reach Out”) and All About Eve (“Lady Macbeth in Chains”), but Sufjan notes in an interview that the duo were specifically drawn to titles that are in some way “problematic,” whether maligned sequels like Bring It On Again (“Fictional California”), discarded genre movies like Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (“The Pillar of Souls”) or films that have become a magnet for criticism like The Silence of the Lambs (“Cimmerian Shade”). Not every title cited finds its way into the lyrics directly; some serve more as guiding stars. Like the bromantic surfers Johnny Utah and Bodhi in Point Break, the film that sparked the title track, Sufjan and Angelo are riders on the storm, circling each other in search of a unified wave.
Thanks to their gently intertwined voices, most name-drops or direct references, like the shout-out to stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen on “Olympus,” don’t feel forced. The chorus of “It’s Your Own Body and Mind” nods to Spike Lee’s debut She’s Gotta Have It, but could just as easily be a generic turn of phrase. The lyrical imagery is often more mythic than narrative or visual, in line with Sufjan’s well-documented religious and spiritual concerns. “The Pillar of Souls” casts the gory quest of Clive Barker’s Cenobites to find pleasure within the desecration of flesh as a rapturous, twinkling hymn.
Moments of gentle guitar plucking and arcing falsetto give the impression of classic Sufjan, and the loosely conceptual nature of the record is a thread running throughout his discography. But left-field experimentation is as inherent to his work as careful lyricism, and an album inspired by film offers a showcase for Sufjan and Angelo’s talents for sound design as much as songwriting. The soft strums and twinkling percussion of “Lady Macbeth in Chains” give way to a drum machine breakdown, while “Back to Oz” is built on a defined backbeat and psychedelic guitar solo, lending it a more hook-oriented jangle-pop sensibility than the piano-driven solace found in other moments of the album. As much as there is a sense of stillness and a meditative hush, there's also a grand sweep—Sufjan and Angelo form a choir of two, their eerily similar voices turning harmony into a kind of natural reverb. It’s often difficult to tell which vocalist is which, complicating the vantage point of an album so invested in perspective and individual identity.
A Beginner’s Mind strays furthest into “problematic” territory with “Cimmerian Shade,” a prayer delivered from the perspective of Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs. But even more than a fictional character with a deeply complicated relationship to trans audiences, what stands out most is the song’s use of the word “autogynephilia,” a debunked but still damaging pseudoscientific theory, propagated by anti-trans bigots, which essentially dismisses transness as a sexual fetish instead of a valid identity. As a trans woman, it’s almost impossible for me to approach the character of Buffalo Bill or a concept like autogynephilia in a vacuum—when I came out as trans on Twitter, one of the few outwardly hateful comments I received was from a stranger who responded to my very vulnerable post with a mocking photo of Buffalo Bill. For me and many other trans people, Buffalo Bill is not a character so much as a specter that haunts us, a symbol of both direct harassment and structural oppression.
Sufjan has long been fascinated with serial killers, and A Beginner’s Mind makes the unseemly, misunderstood antagonists of horror movies into something of a motif: the tormented souls of Hellraiser III on “The Pillars of Soul,” the zombies of George Romero on “You Give Death a Bad Name.” It can be empowering to reclaim cinematic villains, especially when so many are historically queer-coded, but Buffalo Bill isn’t just any old horror-movie monster—they signify real and material forms of hate. That A Beginner’s Mind casts a character representative of so much trauma in a lineup of many different stories reveals the overlapping realities inhabited by trans and cis populations. For cis people, Silence of the Lambs is just another movie, and “autogynephilia” just another fake Greek word in an outdated psychiatric encyclopedia; for trans people, they’re cultural weapons.
Though the end result walks a tricky line, a song like “Cimmerian Shade” at the very least seems to come from a place of good intentions. Like Bodhisattva, the dreamboat Zen poet warrior played by Patrick Swayze in Point Break, Sufjan and Angelo find unorthodox influence in Buddhist teachings, interpreting spiritual principles in their own way. The Zen concept of the “beginner’s mind” is that dewy newness found in a green and enthusiastic pupil, a person who’s open to everything because they know nothing. It’s a concept that’s particularly resonant on a collaborative album between a younger songwriter and a prolific veteran. Through reinterpretation and re-examination, Sufjan and Angelo strive not just to understand others, but to better understand themselves. As Sufjan sings on the John Carpenter-indebted “(This Is) The Thing,” “This is the thing about people/You never really know what’s inside/Somewhere in the soul there’s a secret.” Music allows for the possibility of stepping outside your own sense of self to better understand another’s identity. When they sing in harmony, converging together to the point where one becomes almost indistinguishable from the other, Sufjan and Angelo become a duet of pure voice without the hindrance of material flesh or form.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Asthmatic Kitty | September 30, 2021 | 6.7 | 2cbf6b2e-e7ba-4c70-9dcb-54c1d6cb621d | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The debut LP from this South London band is absurd, playful, and more than a little unsettling, sounding at times like a less romantic Libertines. | The debut LP from this South London band is absurd, playful, and more than a little unsettling, sounding at times like a less romantic Libertines. | Goat Girl : Goat Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goat-girl-goat-girl/ | Goat Girl | June 24, 2016—the day Britain voted to leave the European Union—was a dreadful one. And yet something hopeful happened that day: Four teens who called themselves Goat Girl inked a deal with Rough Trade. Two years later, following a round of premature hype as one of the UK’s most promising bands, they’ve released their debut LP. Goat Girl, whose members are now in their early 20s, are navigating post-adolescence in a time of queasy division between the young and old. Brexit’s impact remains a cataclysmically uncertain mess; London, which once boasted a thriving indie subculture, has lost much of its creative edge to greed and gentrification. In this crazy, aimless time, they’ve built something distinctly new and surreal.
While Goat Girl are part of the same scene that has produced post-punk quintet Shame and wonky rock group Sorry, they’re quite different from their London peers. At 19 tracks in length, their debut appears daunting but proves to be light and accessible, with plenty of offbeat wit and many an unexpected twist down gothic country roads. It’s an absurd and playful experience, like reading a book of André Breton poems while drunk on cheap cider. The song titles—“Viper Fish,” “Moonlit Monkey,” “The Man With No Heart or Brain”—are unsettling in a goofy way, as are their stage names (singer Clottie Cream, guitarist LED, bassist Naima Jelly, and drummer Rosy Bones). Goat Girl seem keen on making sure they’re not taken too seriously.
That doesn’t mean their songs don’t deal with sincere subjects. On “Burn the Stake,” they make their feelings about Britain’s ruling party very clear: “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the Tories on the top/Put the DUP in the middle and we’ll burn the fucking lot,” Clottie hollers with a sense of sad ennui. Unrelenting in their attack, Goat Girl follow that song with “Creep,” a tune about a gold-chain-wearing menace on public transport who tries to film girls on his phone. “I wanna smash your head in/Right in,” Clottie repeats. It’s a dark humor befitting of a society that often seems to have lost the plot.
There’s a fantastical, post-Libertines quality to the fiddles heard on “Creep” and the jaunty western twang of “Cracker Drool.” Unlike Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, however, Goat Girl aren’t interested in glorifying anything. Clottie’s droll storytelling has an intentionally off-putting effect; nobody’s going to move to London on the strength of this album. There’s an exhaustion in her voice, not to mention two separate songs titled “I Don’t Care.” She sounds as blasé as Lou Reed on a comedown, pissed-off but without the energy to shout. Even house parties seem dull (“You walk inside a dirty room...”), and the boys she fantasizes over only appeal because they make her feel comparatively normal (“You’re so strange, and it makes me feel sane”). “I’m disgusting,” she offers on “Country Sleaze.” “I’m a shame to this so-called human race.”
For all the ugly, there’s a lot of pretty here, too. The gorgeous melodies on “Lay Down” (which has a dreamy whiff of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”) lure you into the band’s humdrum universe in plain sight of the warnings. Clottie sounds most dissociated on “Throw Me a Bone,” a morose, sparse folk song. “If you take me home, then you’ll end up alone,” she deadpans with a nevertheless inviting curl of the finger. Goat Girl don’t exactly welcome you in, but they’ve left the door ajar if you feel daring. | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | April 9, 2018 | 7.5 | 2cc542c7-2b0a-40c0-bfe0-0a0a3c13f7c0 | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | |
Felix Walworth’s second album of indie-pop under the name Told Slant addresses questions of trauma, confusion, and loss with frankness and intimacy. | Felix Walworth’s second album of indie-pop under the name Told Slant addresses questions of trauma, confusion, and loss with frankness and intimacy. | Told Slant: Going By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21969-going-by/ | Going By | Like other peers in the Double Double Whammy scene (Frankie Cosmos et al), Felix Walworth’s music revolves around transmuting daily ephemera into loftier symbolism. “Floating by you on ice skates/Vodka mixed in pink lemonade/So much love without high stakes,” the Epoch collective member sings on “Wappinger’s Creek,” off their second album as Told Slant. As that title suggests, the songs meander through all the rural and suburban settings central to folksy emo fare. Drinking 40s in the parking lot, sinking “Cannon Balls” into mountaintop swimming holes, and searching out “turtles by the fallen trees”—they’re the isolated, intimate spaces in which small town kids write memories of touch and togetherness.
The album begins plainly with “I Don’t,” a track title indicative of Walworth's penchant for somber declaratives. Those declaratives tend to either turn anthemic in climatic, shout-along mantras—“Tsunami’s” collective plea for comfort sang with their Epoch pals, “isn’t this silly and aren’t you beautiful”—or quietly eloquent. The album’s final moments represent the former transforming into the latter, as the “Tsunami” chorus reappears before their lone voice exasperatedly asks, “so why are we treating each other like animals?” (Walworth, who is non-binary, uses gender-neutral pronouns). That slippage from comfort to desolation and companionship to solitude is the space Told Slant’s music inhabits.
Walworth’s 2012 debut Still Water rarely strayed from the same C/G chords, and was propelled by sparse banjo plucks and morose guitar riffs that echoed one another song-to-song. Here, Walworth retains the simplicity—maybe getting a bit more adventurous with the chord progressions—but deploys it more intentionally toward constructing a cohesive album. The line of “oh oh oh’s” on “I Don’t” foreshadows the choral melody of “Tsunami,” the latter mentions “a can in my hand” following “Tall Cans Hold Hands,” the end of “Delicate” repeats the climax line of “Low Hymnal” (you “can battering ram this life”), and so on.
It’s the same small phrasebook of melodies, guitar parts, and lyrics erupting over and over into different configurations to create a complexly interconnected whole, but the album’s insularity also sounds cabin fever-esque—fitting, considering the city-born Walworth recorded it in self-professed Bon Iver fashion, sequestered to woodsy seclusion. The songs might be tender in their soft-hearted melancholy, but that strict adherence to spare parameters offers them a punk spirit. It’s a testament to Walworth’s compelling songcraft that despite all the repetition, the album doesn’t sound repetitive, but one wonders how many albums further that project can last.
The sparsity makes room to highlight Walworth’s distinctive trembling warble, which teeters precariously, constantly on the edge of breakdown—a performance of radical vulnerability that serves as the lynchpin of the music’s unique poignancy. “Tsunami” begins with a gravelly mumble of “I want to be a good sky on bad day” before choking a register higher into “and today was a bad day.” The weary lyrics bare an “old soul” demeanor—on their debut, Still Water, they sing about feeling “twice their age”— but the vocal fry and cracks through which they’re delivered are socially coded as gendered markers of adolescence.
Walworth’s voice revels in its own messy excess, repurposing vocal transgressions into fundamental elements of their singing style. It’s a critical model for queer listeners like myself: hearing a non-binary voice celebrate its own liminality helped me learn to honor my own trans feminine body. That conscious claiming of the queer body’s deviance (“still my body will be an illegible one,” Walworth chokes out on Low Hymnal) allows their voice to so powerfully transmit the extensive trauma that queer bodies magnetize.
In particular, this album focuses on the trauma of loss. Love signifies more than just companionship for Walworth. “High Dirge” explores how relationships fundamentally tether them to reality: “I need you around the ground needs a figure just to be something at all.” So the breakups they chronicle represent more than just the loss of a friend, but the more total psychological catastrophe of depersonalization. This album’s predecessor explored immobilization—when “today feels a lot like yesterday” and “it feels like we are in still water.” Going By moves forwards past the stagnancy and suffocation of stillness to the downward spiral of decay: losing lovers, losing yourself, losing your hold on reality, losing the will to live. But in that dissolution of identity, there’s a spark of liberation. The existential angst of *being *or what am I?—see Still Water’s “I Am Not” and “I’m Real”— transitions to a question of action—what am I going to do?—to which Walworth answers, “I Don’t.” It might not be salvation, but Going By offers a path out of the murk. | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | June 29, 2016 | 7.4 | 2cc7216c-2c34-4f48-b7ed-2da45f6b8910 | Ro Samarth | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ro-samarth/ | null |
Matty Healy taps Jack Antonoff to help produce a concise, meaningful, pop-focused album about love. It’s cliche, it’s obvious, it’s slyly profound—it’s the 1975. | Matty Healy taps Jack Antonoff to help produce a concise, meaningful, pop-focused album about love. It’s cliche, it’s obvious, it’s slyly profound—it’s the 1975. | The 1975: Being Funny in a Foreign Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-1975-being-funny-in-a-foreign-language/ | Being Funny in a Foreign Language | Beneath the 1975’s brilliant sheen lies a sense of doom. Look around you—can’t you sense it, too? Millions of us scrolling through social media with glazed eyes and fragile psyches, unable to find connection beyond the confines of our bedrooms, snorting Adderall and watching porn just to register a pulse. You know, we live in society. On past records, frontman Matty Healy explored these maladies with a comic, clumsy edge, stuffing his lyrics with Donald Trump tweets, writing songs about FaceTime sex, and opening an 80-minute album with a speech from climate activist Greta Thunberg. The 1975 aspire toward sincerity and radicality, to make music that’s actually meaningful. Then they look in the mirror and chafe at their own reflection.
Unlike 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form, both of which attempted to capture the hyperactivity of thumbing through tabs, the 1975’s latest album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, tames the group’s taste for excess and plays up their fundamentals: goopy ’80s guitars, pumping drums, schmaltzy saxophones, and infuriatingly good hooks. With production help from Jack Antonoff, at 44 minutes, it’s the band’s shortest and most focused album yet, one that perpetuates a simple message: Love will save us. It’s cliche, it’s obvious, it’s slyly profound—it’s the 1975.
And if any contemporary pop star is prepared for the eye rolls and scorn that an album-wide cliché as trite as love will save us inspire, it’s Matty Healy. Call him what you will—a satirist, a postmodernist, a tacky romantic, an “ironically woke… post-coke, average skinny bloke calling his ego imagination,” per “Part of the Band”—but he’s speaking from the heart. “One could criticize me for loads of things, but you can’t criticize me for being insincere,” he recently told The New York Times. “Annoying, whatever. But I’m not insincere.” Being Funny is as sincere as the 1975 have ever sounded, and also as hopeful. Without the thematic discursions and stylistic detours of past records, Healy’s glamorous love songs finally take center stage, their message as convincing as ever: Maybe love, cliches and all, is the answer.
Earnestness offset with humor, sociocultural critiques bookended by dick jokes—the 1975’s raison d’être is on full display on the album’s eponymous opener, an epic orchestral number whose doubled pianos and billowy vocals pay homage to LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” Healy sings of surviving in the digital age, of wading through targeted advertisements and pharmaceutical addictions and political identities, rattling off a string of lines like “I’m feeling apathetic after scrolling through hell/I think I’ve got a boner, but I can’t really tell,” and, “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well and mining all the bits of you you think you can sell.” By positioning our cultural ills as urgent, life-threatening predicaments, Healy offers a useful framework for interpreting the rollicking pop-rock fervor to come. Here’s a way forward, he seems to be saying, winking at us, one that feels good; one that sustains.
Being Funny presents this fervor with renewed force, replacing the band’s computerized production with natural studio instrumentation. (Their ground rule when making the record was to “play it and record it. Real instruments.”) The songs pop when they erupt with energy, when the band’s joy and zeal are palpable. Take “Happiness,” a glistening, limber, and exceptional proof-of-concept. It was originally conceived during a jam session where the band performed their parts with “locked eyes,” per Healy, who gives an astounding vocal performance. “In case you didn’t notice/I would go blind just to see you,” he sings, boiling with desperation. The towering dance groove on “Oh Caroline”—the one that blends Bruce Hornsby and Carly Rae Jepsen—could likely be a hit at any point in the past 40 years. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s magnificent in its breadth—it makes you believe, however reservedly, that you, too, can “find [yourself] in the moonlight.”
Even when their songs reek of camp, Healy has enough moxie to elevate a potentially horrible idea into an eloquent exclamation point. How many bands could pull off “I’m in Love With You,” a song designed for wedding dancefloors and roadside make-outs? It’s silly, sure, but it’s also a pristine, precise celebration of commitment and in-person infatuation amid pop music’s “Texts Go Green” era. “Looking for Somebody (To Love)” boasts the physicality of a Bruce Springsteen song, its colorful guitars, pulsing synths, and massive drums slashing like lightning around Healy’s hound dog voice. At first the song seems like just another rumbling good time, but then Healy’s writing deepens: “Maybe we’re lacking in desire/Maybe it’s just all fucked/But the boy with ‘the plan’ and the gun in his hand was looking for somebody to love.” Throughout the record, the 1975 repeatedly suggest that human connection can lift us out of loneliness, reestablish our place in the world, and separate us from our screens. According to Healy, the stakes for doing so have never been higher.
In Being Funny’s quieter moments, the group treads somewhat new territory. Antonoff lends his soft hand to guitar-centric folk rock songs, like “Wintering,” whose chorus feels like the theme song for a bad ’90s sitcom, or “When We Are Together,” which boasts all the inoffensive flourishes native to an Antonoff-assisted track. But the standout ballads come when Healy channels his R&B chops. The stunning “Human Too” features a falsetto reminiscent of Justin Vernon, while the pop standard “All I Need to Hear” sounds like a song every American Idol contestant would’ve clamored to perform in 2007. It’s simple but inimitable, general but specific—in a word, it’s honest, an elusive quality that separates the 1975 from their mainstream rock contemporaries.
In the music video for “All I Need to Hear,” Healy walks around a wooded area in a trench coat, staring into the sky, then a pond; he’s quick to point out a swan that enters his periphery. Speaking into his phone, he monologues about capital A-Art, identity, the facade of reality—the usual Matty Healy talking points. We don’t hear what questions he’s being asked, just snippets of his answers. “It sounds like a pretentious thing to say, but there’s a lot of figuring stuff out on this record: musically, philosophically, emotionally,” he says as the camera catches him paddling a canoe. As always, the 1975 are his vessel to seek and not to know; to risk cringiness for the sake of sincerity; to crack a joke at the wrong time; to grab someone by the shoulders and say that you love them. This is what they live for. | 2022-10-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | October 14, 2022 | 8 | 2cc7f94c-cf06-4118-b3b0-bf09a63b1647 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The new age composer’s late-blooming renaissance continues with a compilation attempting to span the sounds and moods of a long, eclectic career. | The new age composer’s late-blooming renaissance continues with a compilation attempting to span the sounds and moods of a long, eclectic career. | Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beverly-glenn-copeland-transmissions-the-music-of-beverly-glenn-copeland/ | Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland | For almost the entirety of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s life, the music was there but listeners were not. Then, one day in 2016, an intervention wholesome enough to feel scripted arrived: one spam-bound email from a record collector inquiring about back stock. Now audiences come to gather in the company of an artist who has spent three-quarters of a century revolving around the sun with one soul and two selves. The openly queer Black artist once shunned by peers and forced to flee sexual reprogramming has arrived at a moment where everybody wants to be his friend.
A palm-reader’s premonition in the 1970s that Glenn-Copeland would attain success in winter years was fulfilled when two reissues of his masterwork Keyboard Fantasies turned a trickle of interest into a surge. Look to pick up a copy online and you’ll be met with recommendations for Midori Takada and William Onyeabor––other brilliant musicians of the 1980s who became hot commodities on the market after decades of quiescence. If you were to walk into a listening bar either side of the globe in the last few years, chances are you’d catch the dinky, DX7-rendered electric piano on Keyboard Fantasies’ “Sunset Village” gliding out of a set of ludicrously expensive speakers. Hidden from view for so long, Glenn-Copeland was reborn as the North Star of new age.
That’s where the tale might have ended, were it not for the artist’s keenness to be actively involved, rather than just regarded as a dusty curio. A lifetime of withheld yeses poured forth from Glenn-Copeland: to lectures, to podcasts, even a segment on Canadian television where he flew to Tokyo and thanked his benefactor in person. Having appeared in concert just once between 1980 and 2018––a period in which Beverly transitioned, moved to the water’s edge in New Brunswick and found long-sought stability with his current wife, Elizabeth––he embarked on tour, delivering lieder-indebted torch songs and age-old spirituals that stretched well beyond Keyboard Fantasies’ synth miniatures, in performances as stately and dignified as the stained-glass murals that adorn his record sleeves and stage production.
Following a crowd-sourced documentary in 2019 which took his story wider still, Transmissions is the first formal attempt to gather works from across Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s career in one place. The physical copy spans just nine tracks and 47 minutes (although the digital edition extends past the hour mark), which appears slight for an artist who could easily command double the runtime. Given the wide variety of styles and moods across the compilation, as well as the potential for emotional overload, a gentle introduction might be an act of mercy. At numerous points, it can seem as if you’ve flipped over to a different record entirely.
The white-knuckle, fluent jamming of the Toronto jazz ensemble who feature on “Erzili”––which closed out 1971’s Beverly Glenn-Copeland––feels impossibly separate from the plangent synthesizer tones and steady tug of double-bass on the newest solo song here, 2018’s “River Dreams.” Three tracks from 2004’s little-known Primal Prayer make it the most represented of all Glenn-Copeland’s albums, another twist. Recorded under the alias Phynix, it captured Glenn-Copeland as he rebounded from a health scare with gaiety in abundance. The jaunty, cruise-ready instrumentals that lead them off only really make sense when Glenn-Copeland swoops down on deck and begins to warble. Transmissions opens with one of these: “La Vita” surges forth in Italian with operatic flair, a sharp rejoinder if you came expecting to be soothed, before melting into what most listeners would recognize as the conventional A1 of Glenn-Copeland’s oeuvre, Keyboard Fantasies’ “Ever New.”
Across Glenn-Copeland’s songbook are pearls of wisdom about grace, forgiveness and spiritual ablution; given what we know of the artist’s history, it’s easy to find yourself shrinking in your seat. Two haunting numbers from 1970’s Beverly Copeland reflect the climate he grew up in: “Sometimes,” Beverly beckons on “Durocher,” “I get to thinking what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of loving when hatred is so strong?” Solace lies in “Don’t Despair”: “Tomorrow may bring roses...tomorrow may bring love.” Glenn-Copeland’s voice anchors it all, a rich contralto capable of zooming up octaves and hushing a crowd from fifty paces. This is most evident in a rendition of “Deep River,” captured during Utrecht arts festival Le Guess Who?, where Glenn-Copeland performed in 2018 at the invitation of Devendra Banhart and Moor Mother. In between that enrapturing flutter, he breaks into a speaking voice somewhere between compère and camp leader, inviting the assembled throng to chant with him and his band, Indigo Rising. The audience, hesitant to encroach at first, slowly creeps into the recording before finding full voice at the climax. The effect is riveting.
While the sequencing on Transmissions does fortify a greater understanding about Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s gift, the comp essentially ties a bow atop an established feel-good story. The same themes recur with every review, interview, and radio special: joy, acceptance, redemption, magic. What does it say about us that we’re all lusting after hope? It’s inevitable, perhaps: the coalescence around his music is a welcome unifier in an ugly age. From his belated emergence on the world stage in the wake of Keyboard Fantasies, through feature-length films and right up until this compilation’s release, people have jostled non-stop to place their hand upon this beacon of light. Glenn-Copeland has obliged each one. | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Transgressive | October 1, 2020 | 8 | 2cca49b4-e32c-4b52-8719-d21a17eb3086 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
On their last album, Foxygen sounded like a band trying to survive. On their latest, they reach for the sky, making an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity. | On their last album, Foxygen sounded like a band trying to survive. On their latest, they reach for the sky, making an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity. | Foxygen: Hang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22755-hang/ | Hang | “What are we good for if we can’t make it?” Sam France wondered on the last Foxygen album, …And Star Power. It was a pertinent question, since for a while there it didn’t seem like his band would make it. At the height of their dysfunction, Foxygen seemed to break up every week; they quickly became as known for their onstage meltdowns as their eccentric classic-rock pastiches. Music came so effortlessly to the group, but the mechanics of simply being a band seemed beyond them. When the duo launched what they called their Farewell Tour in 2015, it wasn’t so much a fake-out or an in-joke as an acknowledgement of the possible: For a band like this, any tour could be a farewell tour. So what would their legacy be if one of those breakups had stuck? As well received as their breakthrough record We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic was at the time, would anybody remember it a decade later if that had been the end? All the goodwill in the world doesn’t buy a band much if they no longer exist.
Fascinatingly overstuffed and unscripted, …And Star Power in hindsight feels like a placeholder, the work of a band trying to survive long enough to make another one. For their extravagant follow-up, though, Foxygen set out to demonstrate just how much they’re capable of when they’re playing the long game. Recorded with a 40-some-piece orchestra and dubiously billed as the group’s “first proper studio album,” Hang is the kind of investment of time, money, and patience a band can only make if they intend to stick around for a while, an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity in real time. Though France still sings in a kind of spin-the-wheel Jagger/Bowie/Reed impression, he and Jonathan Rado have dropped their usual grab-bag approach in favor of a more disciplined homage to the theatrical rock records of the late ’70s, particularly the Broadway-adoring budget busters of Billy Joel, Elton John, and Meat Loaf. There’s a commitment to concept here rarely found outside of Destroyer albums.
Conducted and arranged by Trey Pollard with assists from indie-rock’s go-to maximalist Matthew E. White, the assembled big band isn’t just for show. It’s at the center of every track, from the sumptuous, Philly soul strings of the IMAX-sized opener “Follow The Leader” to the frolicsome brass of the Sunset Boulevard tribute “Avalon,” which culminates in a swinging hot jazz breakdown right out of The Muppet Show. The drummer takes an actual tap dance solo.
Hang hits peak artifice at its halfway point with “America,” a song as wide in scope as its title. Feeding off the faux-importance of its arrangement, France belts out a succession of clichés about dreams, patriotism, and heroism, and dusts off an old-fashioned critique of entertainment industry superficiality (“You only play yourself when you’re in Hollywood!”) Somehow the track isn’t even the album’s most elaborate parody of bygone songwriting conventions. That distinction goes to the mock magnum opus “Rise Up,” which opens with a command to “pull yourself up from the fires of hell” and “follow your own heart,” and concludes with the time-tested revelation that the thing “you’ve been searching all your life”—you probably know where this is going—“was with you all the time.”
The danger with any record this high concept is that it’ll be easier to admire than to enjoy, and Foxygen haven’t completely avoided that trap. Between its mammoth arrangements and France’s singing-in-the-shower gusto, Hang is sometimes just too much. Even though it’s barely a half hour long, it demands such constant attention that it can be hard to make it through the whole thing in a single sitting. And to the extent that the record is a joke, the sheer scale of the project makes Foxygen over-commit to it. By the album’s final stretch, when France sings about flamingos in two consecutive songs, the band seems to be itching for a change of pace, one of those sudden stylistic leaps that used to come one after another on their previous records.
Not coincidentally, then, the album’s most refreshing song is the one that most breaks form. With “On Lankershim,” the band takes a breezy detour into the well-groomed A.M. country of the ’70s—for three easygoing, slightly out of place minutes they become the Eagles, at least until France adopts Jonathan Richman’s Hippie Johnny-despising drawl to sing about an actress friend of his (“You know, she says she can get me paaaaaaaarts.”) With Hang, Foxygen have proven their capacity for lavish spectacle, but they’re still at their best when they give themselves the freedom to roam. | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 16, 2017 | 7 | 2ccb43c7-48eb-4ff3-8944-94ee852d6e97 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
A third Libertines album once seemed about as likely as a fifth Smiths LP. Like recovery, Anthems for Doomed Youth takes things one step at a time. It's an absorbing listen front to back, rich with mood and gorgeous melodies. | A third Libertines album once seemed about as likely as a fifth Smiths LP. Like recovery, Anthems for Doomed Youth takes things one step at a time. It's an absorbing listen front to back, rich with mood and gorgeous melodies. | The Libertines: Anthems for Doomed Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20881-anthems-for-doomed-youth/ | Anthems for Doomed Youth | Over a decade after their heyday, the Libertines are still the only post-Britpop British indie band with an enduring mythology. That mythology began before the band even existed, written into being in Pete Doherty's journal. Like a lovelorn teenager, he scrawled "Doherty/Barât" across countless pages, in which he also laid out his and Carl Barât's poetic ambition: "To gain a measure of immortality in the plastic bubble of popular culture. A tricky task—unless one happens to be equipped with the belief, the talent, and the fervour."
Such was the price of admission into the world of the Libertines. You didn’t need a military jacket and crude tattoo stick'n'poked in a Camden bedsit, just the belief that belief itself was enough to transcend unfavorable circumstances, whether class or humdrum surrounds. They called this state of mind Albion, framed as a fantasy of a kinder England rooted in kitchen sink drama and Galton and Simpson comedies. But Doherty knew it couldn't last. "Look at the Sex Pistols," he said in 2002, before the Libertines had even released debut Up the Bracket. "They split up and there’s bitterness and sourness." He told Barât that they would meet the same fate, and they did. Their Albion became oblivion.
Considering the interim decade of hubris (Barât's truly awful solo records) and reckless devastation (the crimes resulting from Doherty's enduring addictions, now supposedly kicked), it's a huge surprise that the Libertines' unlikely third album doesn't reprise old glories. On Anthems for Doomed Youth, the immortal Albion dream is dead, their erstwhile fantasy mocked and incinerated like an effigy on bonfire night.
Anthems is littered with fragments of various past demos, but one old song appears wholesale. "You're My Waterloo" dates from 1999, a smoky piano ballad about the blossoming all-but-physical romance between Doherty and Barât. As lovely as it is, the intervening 16 years make tragic lines like "I'm so glad we know just what to do and everyone's going to be happy" just sound mawkish. Sharper is "Fame and Fortune", a shanty about Camden good old days that would be self-aggrandizing if it wasn't so self-mocking. "Dubloons down for a double bluff/ Dip your quill or your bleeding heart and sign there and there and there," Barât sings, sending up the naivete of bohemians doing business.
For fans, it's always galling to see a band dismiss the parts of their past that they fell in love with. But Anthems isn't bitter or dismissive. Opener "Barbarians" is a gimlet-eyed spaghetti western rallying optimism for the broken. Lifting the guitar from Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me", the title track starts out as a grand proclamation about the futile spoils of war and revolution, espoused with Barât's typical camp flair. But then he shreds the glorious fantasy, revealing an ignominious reality with a comic turn of phrase: "In the pub that night, racking out the lines of shite/ Putting to right all of the world's great wrongs." When righteous belief is its own life force, an array of beer mats is as good a map to conquer as any.
There's no romance in the songs where the duo confront their demons (Barât has also struggled with addiction and depression), but they're still full of fight. On "Belly of the Beast", Doherty sounds as if he's trying to slap himself out of the fug with every syllable of "It was a smacked-up, cracked-up, bone shark smacked -down day." Single "Gunga Din" has a reggae lilt, and Doherty's portrait of the cycle of veins, drinks, panic, and suffering is flinty, in stark contrast with the chorus' sloppy, rueful rush about having weak moral fiber. On "Heart of the Matter", the guitars echo "Don't Look Back Into the Sun", but whereas that classic praised a chancer's luck, here the pair express sad surprise that they're still going, having made it this far on a "crooked little smile."
It's a reminder of the beguiling poetry of the Libertines, the world of Biggles and Bilo, ships and maidens, which they indulge on "Fury of Chonburi", a tale of conflicted, enduring devotion among "pig men" (their mutual pet name). It's one of the only ragers here, alongside "Glasgow Coma Scale Blues", tumbling pub rock with a brash theme tune quality. Anthems is an absorbing listen front to back, but lacks the iconoclasm of Up the Bracket and 2004's self-titled record. Still, it's rich with mood and gorgeous melodies, and a pervasive doomy streak. The record's two love songs that don't concern Pete'n'Carl are both PSAs about the danger of believing in eternity: "Iceman" showcases their Kinks-y knack for storytelling in an acoustic yarn about a figure best avoided; "Dead for Love" is affecting noir cabaret that warns that death is the only true forever.
Given how easy it is to hate what the Libertines became, it's strange how endearing they remain, how magnetic Barât and Doherty's deep, despairing love. And how successful: The music that the two frontmen made apart was often disappointing—Barât’s knees-up theatrics ("je regrette, je regrette that I haven’t had you yet") more than Doherty’s occasionally lovely work alone and with Babyshambles. Yet their enduring facility together—as much as their third record swears off such cosmic promise—is almost, just almost, enough to make you believe in soulmates. | 2015-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Harvest / Virgin EMI | September 7, 2015 | 7.7 | 2ccc4eaf-c225-4c95-9fe1-e7cd897374d1 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
After the relative disappointment of Paper Tigers, Vladislav Delay's fourth Luomo album rewires the project, forging new emotional and sonic territory, marshalling enormous amounts of studio wizardry and compositional effort to map out a new (effortless-sounding) textural and sensual approach to house and pop music. | After the relative disappointment of Paper Tigers, Vladislav Delay's fourth Luomo album rewires the project, forging new emotional and sonic territory, marshalling enormous amounts of studio wizardry and compositional effort to map out a new (effortless-sounding) textural and sensual approach to house and pop music. | Luomo: Convivial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12390-convivial/ | Convivial | After 2006's disappointing Paper Tigers, I had wondered if Finland's Sasu Ripatti might quietly abandon Luomo, his moniker for a seductive, dub-laced brand of vocal house that resulted in two of this decade's most gorgeous albums, Vocalcity and The Present Lover. After all, Ripatti had a strong 2007 with excellent releases as Uusitalo (propulsive tech-house) and Vladislav Delay (swirling fractal dub). By comparison, it appeared that Ripatti had exhausted the possibilities inherent to the Luomo project, and that every new release was doomed to intensify a sense of diminishing returns.
In retrospect, Paper Tigers sounds better than I remember: a stately, hypnotic collection featuring some of Ripatti's most refined house productions. But it exists almost entirely within the shadow of the first two Luomo albums, inviting the warmth of recognition rather than the flushes and chills of surprised fascination. Ripatti's work as Vladislav Delay hardly shocks these days either, but there's a sense with Luomo that the stakes are higher. Standing still is anathema to the Luomo aesthetic, the value of which resides not merely in the bewitching, spangly depths of Ripatti's arrangements, but also in the vague sense that, at his best, he forges new emotional as well as sonic territory, marshalling enormous amounts of studio wizardry and compositional effort to map out a new (effortless-sounding) textural and sensual approach to house music.
So it's with a sense of relief bordering on exhilaration that I come to the fourth Luomo album to discover a substantial rewiring of this particular aesthetic. While retaining the voluptuous shimmer characteristic of all Ripatti's work as Luomo, this album distances itself from the stutters and glitches he previously used to imply conflict and self-contradiction (puncturing house's habitual self-assurance). Instead, Convivial parades an immaculately structured, insectile busyness: clean and clearly etched, each sound placed with infinite care and burnished to a hyperreal sheen. If Vocalcity was murky and enveloping and The Present Lover gaseous and giddy, then Convivial is more like the rush of pure oxygen, offering a sound that is so sharp and so vivid it sears as much as it energizes.
It's also Ripatti's most unabashed foray into "pop" territory. Where previously the producer mostly oscillated between simple refrains and rigorously fractured vocal cut-ups (occasionally leaving his anonymous divas to wander in a confusing hall of mirrors), Convivial ushers in an array of guest vocalists whose contributions resemble (to a greater or lesser extent) "proper songs," filled with the coherent emotional arcs of complete verses and choruses.
"Love You All", a brooding gothic electro-ballad somewhere between the first Junior Boys album and Depeche Mode's Violator, forms a far outpost into this unfamiliar territory, its stuttering groove, morose strings, and eerie arpeggios creating a dense, almost claustrophobic topographic framework for Sascha Ring (Apparat)'s languid-but-tense verses and overblown falsetto choruses. It's a world away from the open-ended, near-formless echo-chambers of Vocalcity, or even the expansive curving surfaces of The Present Lover; compared to those albums, its exacting subordination of sonics to songfulness seems almost totalitarian.
But it's precisely this sense of discipline that makes "Love You All" (together with Convivial's other highlights) so marvelous: The pressure that these full-blown song structures exert upon Ripatti's sonic largess creates an unbearable sense of momentum that makes the best tracks here almost explosive with a joyful sense of possibility. You can almost hear the delight with which Ripatti puzzles out how to imbue the transitions from verses to choruses on "Love You All" with the kind of anthemic surge that pop masters take for granted. And it is from within this process of symbiotic adaptation-- the careful entwining of the producer's trembling sounds along the snaking contours of songcraft-- that the hoped-for sense of emotional breakthrough emerges.
The (relatively) weaker moments on Convivial are those which could most easily be mistaken for a reiteration the sound of the previous Luomo albums: On the understated chug of "If I Can't", (Scissor Sister) Jake Shears' bittersweet multi-tracked sighs mirror a little too closely the conflicted, stuttering divas of old, a resemblance Ripatti underlines by providing some of his most archetypal bruised, woozy synth chords. But even here, there's a sense of economy and structure that lifts the song above its immediate forbears, with every synth quiver and scraping dub echo carefully sustaining the ambiguous development of Shears' performance.
But while it's pleasing to see Ripatti further hone his familiar sound, I can't help but prefer the alchemy of the new: The best moments on Convivial transpose that unmistakable air of aching longing onto a broader, less predictable sonic palette. "Gets Along Fine" might ride a familiar wistful bass riff, but the core of its appeal resides in the astonishing combination of bleeping synthesizer and pseudo-African percussion in its chorus, which makes it simultaneously the most aggressive and purely joyous Luomo production to date, the muscular assault of its universalist affection like an embrace so fierce it crushes. The marvel, and perhaps the necessity of the Luomo project, is bound up in the shock of physical intimacy; pleasurable, overwhelming, and at times a little scary. "Am I really feeling this?" "Is it you who is making me feel this way?" Yes, and yes. | 2008-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Huume | November 5, 2008 | 8.5 | 2cd05fc7-eede-4487-9ee7-fa01b43d4ab8 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
These reissues of Zeppelin’s first three albums are remastered and are packaged with bonus discs that include previously unreleased live material and studio cuts. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since. | These reissues of Zeppelin’s first three albums are remastered and are packaged with bonus discs that include previously unreleased live material and studio cuts. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since. | Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin II / Led Zeppelin III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19418-led-zeppelin-led-zeppelin-ii-led-zeppelin-iii/ | Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin II / Led Zeppelin III | As time moves on and “The 60s” and “The 70s” become not so much historical periods as media creations, it's harder to take for granted what the significant cultural touchstones of those eras actually mean to current-day society. Some of the artists that were once universally appreciated are slipping from memory, while others are having difficulty translating to new generations. The furor greeting each new Beatles enterprise shows their music and image are indeed proving timeless, and they remain relevant for teenagers and septuagenarians alike—but other giants from the late 1960s and early 70s aren’t having it so easy. The Who’s stock has plummeted in the last decade, and it’s getting tougher to find anyone under 35 who cares about a note of their music made after 1971. The Rolling Stones have been at it so long that it’s difficult for younger people to believe that they were once actually good. Pink Floyd still reach some alienated kids, but their most devoted fans are among the graybeard audiophile set. And then there's Led Zeppelin.
Zeppelin occupies a unique place among this group of bands, in part because their position was hard to pin down while they were active. They were unimaginably popular from 1969 to 1980, but critical respect was elusive. Their suspect reputation has been somewhat overstated (in the U.S., Rolling Stone panned them early on but eventually came around, while Creem and Circus took them seriously all along) but Led Zeppelin never quite registered with the intelligentsia. They made the heaviest hard rock records ever recorded, but their lyrics tended toward loopy mysticism when they weren’t either stealing ideas outright or wallowing in a kind of hedonism where misogyny was a given.
In 2014, Led Zeppelin is typically viewed through one of three lenses: those among the 50-plus set who were actually there hear their music with a nostalgic ear, remembering the days of their youth. There are those who grew up with the assumption that Led Zeppelin were important—let's say 30 to 50 years old—hear them filtered through a second wave of nostalgia, from movie titles like Dazed and Confused and the memory of classic rock radio. To these people (including me), Zeppelin defined an otherworldly image of '70s rock deities, conquering the world on the strength of volume, arena shows, and the baddest riffs the world had ever heard. And then there’s the younger set for whom Zep might seem a little comical, a faintly embarrassing relic from another era even as a certain amount of the music remains undeniable. In one sense, this latter group have more in common with the skeptical critics of the first wave, possessing expectations of "what music should be" that don’t necessarily apply for a band that sounds like this.
These reissues of Zeppelin’s first three albums are an attempt to reach all of these people, using every tool at the band and label’s disposal. The primary reason these sets are being presented and received as a Big Deal is that they are the first reissues of the digital era (and here I’m using the term to include CDs, which means we’re going back more than 30 years) to include bonus material. The reissues are remastered and are packaged with bonus discs that include previously unreleased live material and studio cuts. The PR push surrounding a big reissue in 2014 inevitably involves sharing things that can spread on social media and hence reach younger kids, while other elements—unheard versions, improved sound—ostensibly entice older fans to re-buy the records.
Jimmy Page, always Led Zeppelin’s sonic architect, heard the blues differently. He heard it as sound first, rather than a form or tradition or product of personalities—maybe that’s why he felt so cavalier about "borrowing" from blues records without attribution, since you can't copyright a sound—and he understood the trance-inducing element of blues repetition better than anyone: blues as a consciousness-expanding ritual. All of this is clear from the very beginning, as Led Zeppelin is one of music's most assured and fully realized debuts; individually, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were great players, but the whole of their sound somehow exceeded the sum of its parts. But even above the instrumental virtuosity, Led Zeppelin is a triumph of production, each part clear and forceful but adding up to something even more powerful.
Just about everything Zep would do at one point is presented here somewhere—trance-rock (“Dazed and Confused”), gorgeous acoustic folk (“Black Mountain Side”), catchy guitar pop (“Good Times Bad Times”), updates on straight blues (“I Can’t Quit You Baby”). They’d do most of these things better later, but this is where they appeared first. Zep sounded so brilliant right out of the gate because Page was already a veteran of the music scene when they started; working as a session guitarist and later with the Yardbirds, he took in the scene and saw what was missing. As much as Zeppelin understood music, at this point words were more or less just sounds.
Led Zeppelin also set the tone for a decade of dippy lyrics. If Zep was never accepted as hip in some circles, it’s partly because of the knuckle-dragging worldview of songs like “Dazed and Confused”. It’s hard not to laugh or cringe in 2014 when hearing a line like “Every day I work so hard, bringin' home my hard-earned pay/ Try and love you baby but you push me away,” but it’s equally difficult not to acknowledge that Robert Plant delivers them with a certain histrionic power. And then a bar later, John Bonham’s slow fills and Page’s terrifying guitar screech come in, and the true meaning of the music is found.
It’s truly impossible to oversell how brilliantly these records are produced; “rock” as an idea is really a ’70s idea, and Led Zeppelin established what that would mean and what it would sound like, which was as much a matter of arrangement as it was knowing where to set the microphones, how high to mix the bass. You can hear that on the bonus disc to the first album, which was recorded live in Paris in 1969 and aired on radio. The recording fidelity, for a release by such a major band, is remarkably poor—which goes to show how well the vaults have already been cleared out—but there’s no doubting just how much this band could rip in their first year. Of particular note is the attack of Plant’s singing, as he comes over like the unhinged 22-year-old he was. The earliest live recordings by bands are so exciting in large part because the vocalist hasn’t yet learned how to pace himself; Plant sings these songs like Zeppelin might last a year and this is his one chance to get it right. By the late ’70s, purely as a matter of survival, he’d learn how to coast on stage.
There is no arguing with a riff. It’s a conversation-ender, something resistant to analysis that strips away the intellectual to situate the music in a purely physical space. Of the 100 greatest guitar riffs in the history of rock music, Jimmy Page might have written 20, and a good number of those can be found on Led Zeppelin’s second album from 1969. If you or someone close to you has ever been within 10 feet of a radio tuned to a classic rock station, you’ve heard them all, many times—maybe too many. For every young person who discovers “Whole Lotta Love” and “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”, there’s an older person who gets sick of them from overplay and doesn’t need to ever hear them again. Part of the challenge and excitement of revisiting a record upon reissue is trying to hear the music again with fresh ears, seeing if you can tap into that feeling of discovery that came from hearing it the first time. When I’m able to mentally put myself into this place— the kid who got his driver’s license a month ago, driving around listening to II on tape—the reissue sounds as thrilling as ever.
Every track on this record is musically brilliant, and in the span of just a few months it’s amazing how much Page had enriched the band’s sound. Chiming acoustic guitars provide the contrast to the crunch in a whole new way on “Ramble On” and “Thank You”, offering yet another template for mixing folk with proto-metal. “Whole Lotta Love” might have gotten the band sued by Willie Dixon, but there was no sonic precedent for it in rock music—it’s a sound that would have been unimaginable without the rise of drug culture. If you are not a drummer, it’s hard to imagine listening to “Moby Dick” very often, but better evidence of John Bonham’s genius is found elsewhere on the record. Zep’s rhythmic underpinning, especially the locked-in tandem of Jones and Bonham, was always their secret weapon, the thing that divided them from contemporaries like Black Sabbath. They could swing, they loved James Brown and Motown, and they took pride in the fact that people would dance at their shows. The bonus disc is a mildly interesting amalgam of alternate mixes and rough takes—the kind of stuff anyone but the most dedicated obsessives will listen to only once—and there’s little advance here lyrically from the debut, but II is still close to perfect.
III is, indirectly, Led Zeppelin’s own version of Pink Floyd's Meddle—the folky, pretty early record that was never too popular and hence a favorite of indie types skeptical of such a massive mainstream band. That it opens with “Immigrant Song”, one of their top few rockers, only makes the later acoustic loveliness that much more affecting. The strings laid atop the acoustic guitar on “Friends” foreshadow “Kashmir”; “Tangerine” has an amazing tension between the minor-key verses and the open, joyous chorus, as good an example of any of Zep as a pop band. The melancholy ache of “That’s the Way” is Zep with their guard down—it goes down as easy as a great Cat Stevens song—and then by the end of the record things start to get a little weird, with the heavy acoustic hoedown of “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” and the acid-fried chug of the blues standard “Shake ’em on Down”, a nod to the hypnotic one-chord version by Mississippi Fred McDowell. III has easily the best bonus material too, including a fantastic unreleased version of the old blues song “Keys to the Highway”. Depending on your age, you might remember III as “the one with the Viking kittens song” or “the one with that pretty song that played during an interlude of Almost Famous”; for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to be inundated with songs and riffs that became clichés, it might be the best place to start.
For some, the interest in these sets is the remastering, an alleged improvement in sound, which makes sense for a band so song-oriented. I’ve always thought that Zeppelin, like Neil Young, were best heard from nice-sounding pressings from the ’70s that were utterly ubiquitous in used LP bins in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then, you could collect the entire Zeppelin catalog for something like $30, where the inferior sounding early CD masters would run you more like $150.
These days the gap between different versions seems to be closing. I attended a listening session for these reissues in New York, hosted by Jimmy Page, and at one point he was asked which version sounded best, vinyl or CD. Page responded with saying the best version was the original analog tape, but “unfortunately I can’t invite you all ’round to listen to it.” Suffice to say that these remasters sound very good, a bit louder but not overly so, but we’re likely reaching a point of diminishing returns. That said, I’m very glad these new remasters and the attendant publicity push exist, to get us all listening to and talking about Led Zeppelin again, where they stand and what they might mean. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since. | 2014-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 12, 2014 | 9.2 | 2cde9905-9579-4e9d-b160-fa8455e251a3 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On Lushlife's latest full-length, the Philly rapper and producer's curatorial instincts have kicked into overdrive. Unfortunately, despite an impressive roster of guests, Ritualize fails to add up to much. | On Lushlife's latest full-length, the Philly rapper and producer's curatorial instincts have kicked into overdrive. Unfortunately, despite an impressive roster of guests, Ritualize fails to add up to much. | Lushlife: Ritualize | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21566-ritualize/ | Ritualize | Lushlife is a true Philadelphia hybrid, an artist who has spent his career bridging the gap between the city’s hip-hop and indie rock scenes. First as a mash-up artist and more recently, as a rapper and producer, he’s worked to convene dissimilar sounds and musicians in service of his vision. On his latest full-length, Ritualize, his curatorial instincts have kicked into overdrive. "We on that lush Primavera sound," Lushlife quips on the title track. And indeed, the credits for the album read like the lineup for an eclectic music festival, ranging from singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler to little-known Philly rapper Yikes the Zero.
This time around, Lushlife has even outsourced some of the production, abandoning the warm boom-bap of his earlier, self-produced work in favor of collaborations with Philly electro trio CSLSX. The end result is a soaring, cinematic sound rooted in live instruments that’s more M83 than Mobb Deep. There’s an impressive range on display here, from the orchestral prog of "Burt Reynolds (Desert Visions)" to the William Basinski tribute "Integration Loop." Many of the album's guests add to the richness of the production as well. RJD2 gets a co-production credit on the heady, multi-part "Toynbee Suite," I Break Horses contribute swells of psychedelic guitar and spectral backing vocals to "The Waking World," and Ariel Pink stops by for some unabashed Vangelis worship, helping evoke the neon glow of Blade Runner’s slick, wet streets on"Hong Kong (Lady of Love)."
While all this music provides ample grist for the mill, Lushlife rarely manages to wrest the listener’s attention away from the backdrop. He essentially has one flow—a breathless, nasal, Ghostface-esque cadence—but lacks Tony Starks’ charisma or storytelling ability. Lyrically, his bars are peppered with signifiers of taste: he’s shouting out Roky Erickson, Mary Timony, and Isabella Rossellini, sipping on barleywine and La Fin du Monde. Thanks to his straight-faced delivery, however, all these references feel humorless, like Das Racist without the irony. He attempts to squirm into a few interesting perspectives—for example, Mark David Chapman’s on "The Waking World"—but largely trawls the surface, delivering punchlines like, "He hold the heat standing outside of the Dakota watching/ While Holden Caulfield just telling him when to let the glock spit." At one point he refers to his style as "Bottle Rocket rap," which certainly doesn't help the perception that this is hip-hop music for the Wes Anderson set.
These deficiencies come into sharper focus when Lushlife is forced to share space with more seasoned rappers. Philly lifer Freeway sounds revitalized on "Strawberry Mansion," following serious health issues last year; while his performance isn’t quite "Cannon"-level here, hearing him rap over a sunny, synth-driven instrumental is a thrill unto itself. By his own high standards, Killer Mike’s verse on "This Ecstatic Cult" sounds phoned in but even so, he manages to run circles around Lushlife without lifting a finger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best verse on Ritualize comes from the hungriest emcee of the bunch: North Carolina rapper Deniro Farrar. Farrar's deliberate, grime-influenced flow sounds genuinely menacing set against "Incantation"’s spare backdrop of echoing snare hits and palm-muted guitar (Lushlife and CSLSX wisely let the otherwise busy beat drop out before Farrar gets on the mic).
While there is no shortage of interesting ideas or capable musicians on Ritualize, in the absence of a compelling vision, it doesn’t add up to much. As Lushlife surely knows, the thrill of a good mash-up comes from the tension of two disparate ideas rubbing up against each other and there are far too few of those moments to be found here. Ultimately, Ritualize feels like a party with plenty of interesting guests but little conversation—it’s hard not to blame the host. | 2016-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Western Vinyl | February 17, 2016 | 5.8 | 2ce1243f-ddf2-460e-91b1-beba14f314fc | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Sean Carey's new album is the first he recorded in Bon Iver bandmate Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Fall Creek, Wis. The warmth, reverb, and dusty textures here form something much larger than S. Carey has ever done before, but his real talent lies in making these songs seem tiny set against the world around him. | Sean Carey's new album is the first he recorded in Bon Iver bandmate Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Fall Creek, Wis. The warmth, reverb, and dusty textures here form something much larger than S. Carey has ever done before, but his real talent lies in making these songs seem tiny set against the world around him. | S. Carey: Range of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19143-s-carey-range-of-light/ | Range of Light | S. Carey recently posted a series of pictures to his Instagram that correspond to each of the songs on his new album, Range of Light, but even without the visual aid you can practically see these images while listening*.* Each song possesses a filtered approximation of natural beauty, and the outdoor environment is a renewable resource for Carey’s songwriting: summer lakes in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, nights in Marfa, Tex., and the deserts of Arizona and California.
Range of Light is the first album Carey's recorded in Bon Iver bandmate Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Fall Creek, Wis.; he cobbled together his 2010 debut All We Grow while on tour with Bon Iver and built 2012's electro-folk Hoyas EP on mostly just a laptop. The warmth, reverb, and dusty textures here form something much larger than S. Carey has ever done before, but his real talent lies in making these songs seem tiny set against the world around him.
Even though Carey’s canvas is large, Range of Light is all detail—including his voice, which remains whisper-quiet and occasionally climbs to a hushed tenor akin to Sufjan Stevens. His voice is more up front than before, which gives these songs more shape as he interacts with the ceaselessly beautiful soundscapes, breaking up the serenity with songcraft. The syncopated “Crown the Pines” uses Justin Vernon’s falsetto as another background texture, but the busyness of the whole thing serves as a perfect jolt for the record.
A trained percussionist in both jazz and classical music, Carey’s arrangements add a sense of rustic whimsy to Range of Light—there's tapping on glass bottles, spoons on thighs, and what sounds like someone walking over gravel. Carey achieves his greatest successes when working in a more transportative mode, though: the stately “Alpenglow” builds to the end like a thawing post-rock opus, and closing track “Neverending Fountain” provides a cathartic ending. It's easy for these songs to stir the listener, and even easier for them to to whisk the listener away to a secluded piece of earth.
Paradoxically, Range of Light can sound a little too on-the-nose about embodying the majesty of nature and its meditative properties; there are greyscale cuts that possess cautious wonder and tumble-dry jazz tones, like Talk Talk left out in the cold for too long. Carey's destinations and recollections can retreat to a sleepy, melancholy safe zone. Regardless, Range Of Light is the first album that defines Carey apart from his bandmates and contemporaries, as his developed, earnest, Midwestern glow bursts through the album's cracks. | 2014-04-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-04-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 3, 2014 | 7.3 | 2ce74676-3278-4e8f-bd9b-0dba1e169400 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Young NYC band continues to grow on its dynamic second EP, which recalls everything from Stereolab to Björk to Cocteau Twins. | Young NYC band continues to grow on its dynamic second EP, which recalls everything from Stereolab to Björk to Cocteau Twins. | Twin Sister: Color Your Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14073-color-your-life/ | Color Your Life | Twin Sister are a Brooklyn-by-way-of-Long Island quintet that do so much so well. Their songs have a remarkable sense of atmosphere and romanticism. They nod at their heroes-- maybe Stereolab and Björk, maybe Cocteau Twins or 1980s pop-- without overtly stealing. They seem to know they are capable of great things; perhaps ostentatiously, they released a trailer for Color Your Life, just their second EP (following November 2008's brief but occasionally stunning Vampires With Dreaming Kids). The EP features six songs, one of which is the instrumental "Galaxy Plateau", a stormy, harmonium-lead bit of futzing that is completely inessential. Even then, it's handled with such grace, it never feels presumptuous. Almost earned.
Twin Sister's singer, the mousily enchanting Andrea Estella, has the sort of breathy, committed voice that untangles knots. It sits all over the mix on Color Your Life, a significant, if not monumental leap forward for the band. Sometimes Estella is high up, as on "Milk & Honey", a wrenching ballad about what so many of their songs are about: the promise of love and the confusing moments at the beginning and end of every relationship. It's a gorgeous song that quakes and quivers before abruptly ending. The respite is brief before they sharply enter the best thing they have done to date. "All Around and Away We Go" is a magical thing, driving and relaxed at once. Pitchfork's Ryan Schreiber recently compared the song to Andrea True Connection's disco chestnut "More, More, More", and despite the seeming incongruity, that's right on. Twin Sister thrive when things are hushed, as on Vampires' arresting "I Want a House" but they seem unhappy with those simple moves. "All Around" takes them to a new and better place.
The rest of Color Your Life weaves in and out with little urgency. "Lady Daydream" is similarly lush, and full of heartfelt declarations-- "If you can't find the sea, I will take you there," Estella sings on the chorus. Seven-minute opener "The Other Side of Your Face" seems to be the unfinished cousin of "All Around and Away We Go"-- it never quite leaves the launching pad. Closer "Phenomenons" is polished and, strangely, almost radio-ready if it had an actual chorus. But that's not who this band is, either. In full, this is a mood record from a band that is still perfecting how to be not-too quiet. Power and volume often come easily to young bands. If things are reversed for Twin Sister, then they probably don't have very much to worry about. | 2010-03-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-03-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Infinite Best | March 30, 2010 | 7.5 | 2cf02f96-f9b2-4197-ac38-10210f19b145 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Just weeks after releasing a new album and accompanying 7", the Portuguese batida producer completes the triptych with a dynamic and defiant four-track EP of tough, percussive club cuts. | Just weeks after releasing a new album and accompanying 7", the Portuguese batida producer completes the triptych with a dynamic and defiant four-track EP of tough, percussive club cuts. | Nídia: S/T EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nidia-st-ep/ | S/T EP | Few words and little fanfare accompanied the release of S/T, Nídia’s latest EP on Lisbon dance label Príncipe. It made a surprise landing in early June, while across the U.S., collective rage about police brutality and state-sanctioned racism was boiling over and spilling into the streets. “We have to be more friendly and humane,” wrote the Portuguese producer, who grew up in outer Lisbon’s Vale de Amoreira housing projects, in a statement announcing S/T. “COVID taught us that we are nobody without each other,” she added. “Since I stopped judging and hating human beings my life has become as colourful as the LGBTQ flag and as firm as Martin Luther King’s fist.” While the creation of the tracks predates the current protests, the EP contains some of Nídia’s most urgent and invigorating beat work—a reminder that the batida rhythms she crafts are themselves a form of dissent.
“Calm music is for couples,” Nídia told The New York Times in 2018, shortly after moving back to Vale do Amoreira from Bordeaux, where she spent her adolescence. “When something comes out of the ghetto, it can’t come softly. It has to have strength.” That strength is evident across Nídia’s catalog, but particularly on S/T, which packs four relentless entries into a lean 16 minutes. S/T marks the third installment of a triptych, following Nídia’s Badjuda Sukulbembe 7" and her latest LP, Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes, both of which arrived earlier this year. Those records are considerably more lax and spacious than S/T. The meditative Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes lopes and ripples, while Badjuda Sukulbembe is as thick and agitated as a kettle of simmering molasses. S/T detonates any previous calm, however. Nídia has said that her community’s music should be “like an explosion in your face,” and S/T is evidence of the young producer’s pyrotechnic touch.
The record is propelled by sharp synthesizer, insistent percussion, and the occasional squawking command. Opener “CHEF” tosses laser-beam bleats over snare patches like peppery spices—the more seasoning, the better. “Jam” dials up that intensity, looping a frantic, soccer-stadium synth melody over skittering breakbeats. Perhaps the song’s title stems from its resemblance to an over-caffeinated jock jam—one better blasted in the club than at a sports arena. While “CHEF” and “Jam” are optimally explosive, “Hard” and “Nunun” are the most dynamic cuts on S/T, maintaining velocity as they change shape. The latter pusles with organic, wooden percussion. It clatters and thumps as Nídia extrudes beams of glowing, ambient tone to glide between the polyrhythms.
If strength is Nídia’s impetus for making music, it is fully realized on “Hard,” a militant dancefloor decree. Her longtime calling card, “Studio da Mana” (“Sister’s Studio,” the name she gave to her home recording setup) chirps out early in the mix, followed by dueling horn phrases and girding beats. Here, the percussion is tinny and rapid—like horses galloping on streets paved with sheet metal. Nídia’s rhythmic stride is in full force: equal parts battle march and ecstatic gyration. Listening to Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes and Badjuda Sukulbembe now, it seems like they weren’t so much relaxed as they were bracing for disruption. S/T offers that catharsis—a work of urgency that makes dancing itself feel like a form of civil disobedience. | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | June 16, 2020 | 7.7 | 2cf4d8dd-6072-49e0-a29e-36eaa828227c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Portland songwriter captures a mood of ordinary enchantment on her spacious and stirring new record. | The Portland songwriter captures a mood of ordinary enchantment on her spacious and stirring new record. | Laura Veirs: Found Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-veirs-found-light/ | Found Light | Laura Veirs writes bookish, patient music that draws you in slowly and steadily, the images developing at the tantalizing pace of unshaken Polaroids. After 20 years, 11 albums, and numerous collaborations with Americana giants (Bill Frisell, Béla Fleck, Neko Case, k.d. lang, Sufjan Stevens), the quality of her latest record is less surprising than its immediacy. Found Light opener “Autumn Song” is instantly mesmerizing. Veirs’s vocal line, doubled by This Is the Kit’s Kate Stables, draws infinity signs inside a circle of pensive nylon strings, which then evaporate into harp-like layers as subdued basses and trombones fill in below, spreading the landscape under the sky. As “night stitches day,” “day stitches night,” and “thought stitches thought,” Veirs spins a lyrical cocoon around the precise mood of ordinary enchantment, dreamlike yet wide-awake, that can steal over a rainy Sunday spent measuring out your life with coffee spoons.
Some things haven’t changed: Veirs, who lives in Portland, synthesizes a magpie reading list (this time, the credits acknowledge Lynda Barry, John Keats, and Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani) into compact, allusive songs, her voice a strong, calm river where Pacific Northwest indie and contemporary Americana sail side by side. But everything else has changed. On her last record, My Echo, Veirs dealt with the end of her marriage to Tucker Martine, who produced it, as well as most of her other albums. Found Light is her first time co-producing and arranging her songs, and her first time recording her guitar and vocals together rather than in isolation, which perhaps accounts for the record’s intimate, holistic feeling. The impact of the life change cannot be overstated, but the impact of the process change should not be overlooked. In both cases, it seems, Veirs has more space to breathe, and she inhales it deeply.
The sound of Found Light is bright yet mysterious, part crystal and part smoke. Spindle-wound like British folk but frayed like Scandinavian jazz, the accompaniment adds veins of light and webs of shadow to Veirs’s hard, shining words. Like “Autumn Song,” “Ring Song” draws incisive details on revolving cycles of time and light. Throughout the record, Veirs tends the weedy patch between the archetypal and the specific until it blooms with exquisite turns like “I pawned my wedding ring at the Silver Lining/I felt sad; I also felt a weight go flying,” a feeling so real the melody sails away with it. The song is enriched but unladen by the spun gold of Shahzad Ismaily’s drums, bass, piano, and synthesizer. As the record’s co-producer, his gentle, open-ended sensibility is perceptible yet sympathetic.
These two rapt, billowy songs—along with others, like “Naked Hymn,” a sensuous ensemble piece with Charlotte Greve’s alto sax and Sam Amidon’s fiddle and banjo—are Found Light’s consistent but not exclusive highlights. There are also the times when the record eases toward the minimal electronics implicit in sparkling arrangements like these. Tawny analog synths eventually light up the snapping groove of “Signal” like a synaptic switchboard, while “Eucalyptus,” powered by a galloping electronic rhythm, seems like it might go full “Tom’s Diner” until it becomes a cathartic electro-acoustic rave instead. And there’s the invigorating crunch of “Seaside Haiku,” a rain-lashed rock song with a sublime ellipsis trembling in its center.
The occasional bluebird-embroidered country-folk tune pleasantly drifts by, but most often, Found Light is riveting, and even its plainer moments are essential to its narrative arc. Much of its power is derived from Veirs’s writing, a smoothly scrolling prosody of passing seasons, phasing moons, and streaming clouds; of slowing sundials and gleaming mirrors and dreamlike Aegean shores. It’s a world in which each thing burns with a particular scent, or a taste, or, most often, a color: blue flames, yellow coats, green kites, black flags, white roses, orange patterns on a wall. On the edge of this vibrant new world, Veirs names everything she feels and sees, with breakthrough frankness and the occasional whip-sting of vengeance, and it’s thrilling to share in that freedom with her. | 2022-07-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Raven Marching Band | July 13, 2022 | 7.6 | 2cf56542-1b12-4948-a222-37804a1d0836 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
When your band is best known for sharing an apartment with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there's clearly a lot ... | When your band is best known for sharing an apartment with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there's clearly a lot ... | Metric: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5547-old-world-underground-where-are-you-now/ | Old World Underground, Where Are You Now | When your band is best known for sharing an apartment with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there's clearly a lot of room for the development of a slightly more personal hype. Such is the case with Metric. Reportedly starting their band based on a mutual distaste for white Toronto funk bands, Metric melds together the usual suspects (The Cure, XTC, The Velvet Underground, New Order) for a new wave-tinged exploration of off-kilter indie rock.
You may remember frontwoman Emily Haines from her work with Broken Social Scene and Stars. Here, she seldom attempts the kind of mesmerizing, super-hushed whispers of BSS's "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl", instead showing off a nicely breathy sing/talk and a clear affinity for vocal fluctuations and cadence changes. The subject matter is even more varied than her vocal range: spanning topics as diverse as a friend's altered clothing aesthetic ("On a Slow Night"), to the importance of social status ("The List"), to the inquiry of whether it's "wrong to want more than a folk song" ("Wet Blanket"), Haines has an array of lyrical targets on display and she, more or less, handles the shooting range.
One of the most stunning successes on Old World Underground, "Succexy" takes issue with the political agenda of the U.S. government from a more creative stance than the indie world's typical anti-Bush rhetoric and generalizations. Instead of placing the blame purely on the government, Haines claims, "All we do is talk, sit, switch screens/ As the homeland plans enemies." Slipping between power chords and her own serpentine synth lines, Haines juxtaposes sex and war without sounding lost in her own thoughts.
Metric aren't overly adept from a technical standpoint, and their melodies sometimes feel a bit too simplistic, but, in attempting a mix between accessible dance-punk and new wave, they do deliver where it counts: their rhythm section is incredibly tight, and drummer Joules Scott-Key's delightfully funky meter is particularly notable. Still, the band rarely attempts anything out of the ordinary, and their lack of innovative arrangements often translates to a tendency for existing ideas to overstay their welcome.
With Emily Haines' previous work as a frame of reference, you'd be right to assume that Metric does maintain an aura of talent, with the band serving as a hard melodic edge to her serene, plaintive vocal. Though still searching for their place in the ever-evolving world of indie rock, Metric, in their current incarnation, promise great things sooner rather than later. | 2003-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Last Gang / Enjoy | September 24, 2003 | 7.3 | 2cf88d9d-511b-4c42-93c0-67f1ae216c6f | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | null |
Though they made their name on last year's raucous stomper Gallowsbird's Bark, nothing on that album hinted at ... | Though they made their name on last year's raucous stomper Gallowsbird's Bark, nothing on that album hinted at ... | The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3272-blueberry-boat/ | Blueberry Boat | The Fiery Furnaces' debut, Gallowsbird’s Bark, pegged them as a whimsical but rootsy New York band, one compared numbingly often to The White Stripes. Most of the clean garage revival was as predictable as a Guy Lombardo tribute, but the Furnaces stood apart, both for their The Band-meets-Syd Barrett nuggets and their lyrics, which read like a ransom note made from ripped-up atlases. Frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger sang "I went to" as often as James Brown goes "unh," and her brother Matt coupled raucous guitar leads with a piano that rollicked like a fall down the stairs.
Yet nothing on Gallowsbird's Bark hints at the ambition of The Fiery Furnaces' second album, the 76-minute Blueberry Boat. The 10-minute opener, "Quay Cur", sets the stage: After a two-minute overture with loud, blatting organs that pump like they're driven by bellows, Eleanor is introduced in the character of a child who lost her protective locket, "and now I'll never never, never feel like I'm safe again," she says. The adventure starts: They cut to the next section, where the guitars come in on a deluge of nautical imagery-- and then the frenzy gives way to an acoustic interlude that finds Eleanor singing gently in... Inuit?
The Furnaces pull off other mini-operas on "Blueberry Boat"-- on which Eleanor faces off against a gang of pirates-- and "Chris Michaels", whose different parts run together so quickly that its story is almost mashed to gibberish. Matt Friedberger, who-- unlike on the band's first album-- wrote all of the material, emerges as a pop auteur. Matt has acknowledged the influence of The Who's rock suites, "A Quick One, While He's Away" and "Rael", but instead of taking a single theme and expanding it into one lengthy song, Matt is more likely to concatenate half-dozen seemingly separate ideas in a way that makes every piece-- even a straightforward track such as "Straight Street"-- feel epic.
So much stuff is jammed into Blueberry Boat that you'd think Freidberger put some of it in for kicks. The Noah's Ark of retro guitars and garish prog keyboards initially seems random, and on the evidence of the Furnaces' live shows, these versions aren't even definitive: Their sets rework, split and remake their repertoire into one breathless block of music, one on which a song might show up for only one verse or come back three or four times. But this isn't arbitrary: Matt and Eleanor are just reworking and sequencing the songs for different contexts. The process resembles the way a DJ sets up a mix, and-- like in a club setting-- the final product should be judged not simply on which pieces they use, but on how well those segments work as a whole and how the band controls the energy in the room.
Blueberry Boat's 13 tracks form a perfect flow, sticking short tunes between the mini-operas, building up through "Chris Michaels" to the brief respite of the "Paw Paw Tree" before exploding into "I Lost My Dog", the album's dizziest travelogue. As scrambled as Matt's palette may sound, a close listen reveals how perfectly he evokes each song's content: The sighing tones near the start of "Blueberry Boat" sound like waves lapping the bow of their vessel, "Mason City"'s beat chugs softly, like a train gliding into a station, and on "I Lost My Dog" Matt captures the frenzy of running all over town by switching instrumentation with every verse.
The lyrics keep pace, repeating the encyclopedic references and buckshot wordplay of the last album, but extending the narratives. Matt pulls us in and out of the fantasy-- as on "Spaniolated", where Eleanor starts as a grown-up slacker, only to find herself abducted before regressing back into childhood and given pills "to keep from growing taller." Gallowsbird's Bark told similarly meticulous stories about Eleanor's real-life wanderings through London or New Jersey, but this time the songs grow into elaborate fictions, and the stakes are higher, with battles and abductions belying the cheerful arrangements.
The Furnaces sound tighter here than on their debut, but they still retain a sense of carelessness and spontaneity-- listen to the rambunctious piano interlude on "Blueberry Boat" or the distracted spit off his guitar solos. Matt sings more on this record, with a delivery similar to Peter Gabriel in his Genesis days, and Eleanor's melodic, speak-singy vocals show a wider range and more force. Eleanor pushes her crystal-clear enunciation with a more aggressive delivery, especially when she slips into character, such as when she stands up to a mob of pirates and swears, "You ain't never getting the cargo of my blueberry boat."
John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta devastatingly parodied The Strokes approach to their second album, joking that they would use their money and clout to make a two-album monster with eight-minute jams, tuba solos and a Gregg Allman guest spot. Whether that sounds like a dream or a nightmare, the joke was on us: The Strokes' second album sounded mostly like their first. But The Fiery Furnaces have made the kind of rock behemoth Darnielle described, a record for the overgrown part of our brain that craves engrossing complexity. The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination. And like all the best children's stories, it takes off once the kids break the rules-- when they're dragged away from safety but have enough curiosity and faith in themselves to enjoy the adventure. We're just lucky to trail behind and pick up their breadcrumbs. | 2004-07-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-07-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | July 13, 2004 | 9.6 | 2cf90f73-94f8-4cce-91c9-21f4b0055609 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Birdman’s presence is largely intrusive on the pair’s joint project. It’s YoungBoy’s versatility that keeps the album afloat. | Birdman’s presence is largely intrusive on the pair’s joint project. It’s YoungBoy’s versatility that keeps the album afloat. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again / Birdman: From the Bayou | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-birdman-from-the-bayou/ | From the Bayou | Only one of the three music videos for Birdman and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s joint mixtape From the Bayou features Birdman. And in that video, Birdman and YoungBoy never occupy the same room, a detail that captures the spirit of their collaboration. Over 13 tracks, they appear together five times, their ideas rarely intersecting, their performances disparate. For most of its runtime, the tape centers YoungBoy, who croons, yelps, and wails with his usual intensity and anguish, sharing glimpses of his life under house arrest after another jail bid. But YoungBoy’s caterwauling only barely conceals the emptiness of the project. Although Birdman postures as a mentor and fellow artist inspired by his young partner’s talent and drive, he is foremost an investor, and YoungBoy stock is hot.
YoungBoy and Birdman first teased From the Bayou in March 2018, when YoungBoy’s career was taking off on the strength of mixtapes and notoriety. Artistically, the collaboration made little sense. Birdman has one mode—stuntin’—and YoungBoy is a restless shapeshifter. But YoungBoy was buzzing at the time, and both artists had ties to Antoine “Fee” Banks, who manages YoungBoy and previously worked with Young Money. There was, at least, a veneer of brand synergy and shared history to the team-up. In the three-plus years since announcing the collab, however, YoungBoy has become a cultural and commercial juggernaut, his legal troubles, prolific output, and intimate writing swelling into a self-sustaining ecosystem. Though he has also released joint tapes with Rich the Kid and Moneybagg Yo, his music and his enterprise are decisively solitary.
This context makes Birdman’s presence conspicuously disruptive, an intrusion that the tape’s structure seems to acknowledge. After the fourth song, he vanishes, appearing again only on the final track. Previous pairings “We Poppin’” and “Ride” showed Birdman and YoungBoy don’t have much in common besides a shared love of toasting to success, so it’s a relief when Birdman bows out early. But his absence highlights the laziness of the project as a whole. Besides the uninspired reference to their home state in the title, YoungBoy and Birdman don’t even try to bridge their worlds. Plenty of modern collaborations come together through emails, file-sharing, and DMs, but From the Bayou feels computed. This wacky, unused artwork is their most interesting shared moment.
Taken as a YoungBoy solo project, From the Bayou works fine. YoungBoy continues to use music as a confession booth where he unspools his doubts and fears, and channels his rage and defiance. His writing is often lucid and particular, his verses filled with the names of streets and people he holds dear. On introspective songs like “The Bigger End” and “Achievements,” he clings to these memories like a raft, the familiarity of his past briefly nullifying the uncertainty of his future. “Alligator Walk” is all threats, his voice swinging from whines to growls as he glides over a bouncy NoLimitShawn beat. His emotions gush out on “Heart & Soul,” a song filled with teary self-assessments and urgent goal-setting. “I been wanna do right since I touched down/I been watchin’ the way I influence now/I ain’t post not a picture, I moved on/I’m responsible to all these children now,” he raps, claiming his mantle as king of YouTube and the platform’s teen hordes.
YoungBoy’s versatility ultimately keeps From the Bayou afloat, but even his best performances feel meager compared to his past releases. Putting aside this strange Birdman detour, YoungBoy’s music grows more standardized with every release. He continues to opt for functional beats that lean hard on weepy pianos and bluesy guitar loops. He rarely broaches new sounds, flows, or song structures. His free-associative dispatches about healing and pain speak his thoughts but do not probe them. His music steers clear of surprises and risks. He’s consistent, as his fans like to say. So is Birdman.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Cash Money | December 16, 2021 | 6.5 | 2cffe962-3885-4e50-a577-1c1a9d1eed17 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
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 Aimee Mann’s third album, a world-weary showcase of independent spirit and expertly tuned songwriting. | 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 Aimee Mann’s third album, a world-weary showcase of independent spirit and expertly tuned songwriting. | Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aimee-mann-bachelor-no-2-or-the-last-remains-of-the-dodo/ | Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo | “Unpopular pop.” That’s the phrase Jon Brion used in 1999 to describe the music scene at Largo, the 120-seat venue in West Hollywood where he ran a weekly residency for more than a decade. Every Friday night, seated at a secondhand piano (that at some point acquired a decorative Viking helmet) and walled in by arcane analog instruments, the star producer, composer, and musical polymath put on a show. Among frequent guests were some of Brion’s most distinguished collaborators: Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, and Aimee Mann. On any given night, John Paul Jones, Jackson Browne, or even Kanye West could appear on the tiny, rug-covered stage.
Owned by Mark Flanagan, a towering Irishman with discerning taste in music, Largo became a haven for the eclectic, sophisticated pop sound Brion championed, played by performers who’d long ago outgrown open-mic nights. Flanagan also filled out bills with pillars of LA’s stand-up scene: Zach Galifianakis, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman. Music-loving filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Michel Gondry were in the mix, too. Largo became an ersatz salon and fostered some of the greatest collaborations of its time.
This is the environment that nurtured Mann’s brilliant 2000 album Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo. The traditional narrative around Mann’s career frames her as an aberration. Over the course of four decades, she has been a pop flavor of the week who reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter; a folk-rock traditionalist who refused to posture her way into a self-consciously edgy alternative idiom; a woman whose persona isn’t seductive or enraged so much as pensive and, at times, embittered; an artist in a youth-obsessed industry who started doing her best work sometime in her late 30s. All of this made her an outlier in the music industry at large. But at Largo, Mann was among her people.
The gimmick-free nature of her music and public image perturbed sexist, unimaginative major-label executives in the ’90s, when the industry was still printing money and every act was expected to break out with the same velocity as Nirvana. At the beginning of that decade, Mann’s band ’Til Tuesday—a new wave act that had peaked with the breathy 1985 hit “Voices Carry”—broke up, and she launched a solo career. Her power-pop debut, 1993’s Whatever, and somewhat more muted 1995 follow-up I’m With Stupid proved she was a witty, self-possessed songwriter, even as sales in the low six figures disappointed the suits.
By the time she made her third album, Bachelor No. 2, Mann was known for clashing with the industry. In 1999, The New York Times Magazine sent reporter Jonathan van Meter to observe her struggle to get her label to release the record over their protests that it lacked a single. “A single is a record company’s job: to pick out a song that they think is good and make sure people hear it,” Mann complained. “It’s also incidentally, their job to come up with a way of selling records if, say, I don’t have a single at all.”
She wrote the deceptively winsome piano ballad “Nothing Is Good Enough” about this exhausting back-and-forth. “It doesn’t really help that you can never say what you’re looking for/But you’ll know it when you hear it,” she sings. The lightness of her vocal lends a hint of irony to her scornful lyrics, which offended her A&R rep. He assured the Times that not only had he given her specific feedback on choruses that “weren’t working,” he’d also made her a tape of better ones. Mann eventually told van Meter that she’d heard Interscope head Jimmy Iovine had listened to Bachelor No. 2 and demanded, “Aimee doesn’t expect us to put this record out as it is, does she?”
At various points during the recording process, Mann attempted to churn out the hit that would liberate her other songs from the vaults at Interscope. But she still ended up with a release steeped in the aesthetics and values of Largo, a place so hospitable to her sound that Flanagan once jokingly called it “Aimee Mann’s clubhouse.” Out of step though it might have been with a testosterone-damaged late-’90s rock marketplace dominated by Mann’s Interscope labelmates Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson (not to mention a pop sphere populated by and targeted entirely toward teens), the intricately crafted Bachelor No. 2 was a gift to the crowd Brion called “song sluts,” who lined up outside the club every Friday.
More than any album Mann had made up to that point, it’s a showcase for the detail she builds into her music before the recording process even begins. “I kind of like it to sound like a complete song before I get to the studio,” she explained to Performing Songwriter magazine in 2005. “I work hard to make sure both the melody and the words are strong before thinking about recording or production.”
The approach suits her unpretentious attitude toward music-making, which she treats as a craft as much as an art. Throughout her career, Mann has shown little patience for the idea that there’s something mysterious and alchemical behind creativity. “People are a little too in love with this idea of the crazy genius,” she said on the podcast Beyond and Back. “That it’s effortless, that it’s flowing, that you’re born with it. Because songwriting is a skill.”
Yet Mann’s songwriting, particularly on Bachelor No. 2, has its share of magical elements. She has the ability to sublimate a simple folk melody into something weightless and soaring. Her slinky “Calling It Quits,” an initially spare, glum resolution to resign from the rat race, gets an infusion of energy and wonder at the moment she invokes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”; Mann is as wary of the priceless gemstone as Fitzgerald was, but a few regal trumpet blasts (provided by none other than Flanagan) and the crash of cymbals capture its sparkling allure.
Throughout the album, a handful of producers, including Brion and Mann herself, add dimension to her finely wrought melodies and words. Each recording feels like a faithful translation of her rousing performances, with sing-along refrains and strummy intros intact. As a result, despite its scattered genesis over several stints in the studio, Bachelor No. 2 has the organic flow of a late-night set in a small, hushed room. There’s a piano-bar feel to the instrument’s low, steady ramble on “Driving Sideways.” Keyboards clink like a pair of wine glasses on “Satellite,” underlining Mann’s gentle, devastating diagnosis of a confidant’s loss of perspective: “Baby, it’s clear/From here/You’re losing your atmosphere.” Though they’re by no means minimalistic, these arrangements establish a sense of intimacy that’s hard to find on full-band rock records that aren’t deliberately, performatively lo-fi.
The archetypal bar—not the club or the stadium but maybe Largo on a slow night—makes an ideal imagined backdrop for 13 songs bound together by the kind of world-weary wisdom pop culture associates with such settings. Sometimes Mann is the regular slumped over a tumbler of whiskey, wryly enumerating her many disappointments. Other times, she plays the bartender—listening closely, dispensing no-nonsense advice, offering a gruff sort of comfort. Bottled-up energy builds to explosive choruses in “Ghost World,” smashing the veneer of detachment that surrounds Daniel Clowes’ comic-book heroine Enid Coleslaw, a seen-it-all barfly in the body of a teen girl.
As early as “Voices Carry,” Mann had an ear for sudden, surprising hooks. That talent manifests enchantingly on “Red Vines,” a rumination on the meteoric rise of her younger friend Paul Thomas Anderson that starts out placid but lifts off on Mann’s intensifying vocal before the first verse is through, then crescendos straight into a chorus that lingers on dilated vowels. The dark side of “Red Vines” is the way it frames Mann, still under 40 but a decade past her own bright-young-thing years, as both a cheerleader of Anderson’s success and the only one who foresees his inevitable fall from grace. (That she was wrong in using her experience to predict a downfall that never arrived probably says less about their respective outputs than it does about pop music’s youth bias and the misogyny that pervades all corners of the entertainment industry.) She’s constantly anticipating the misfortunes of others. She knows when they’re bound for disappointment, when they’re deluding themselves, when they’ve lost the plot entirely and need to be cut off for the night.
The best song on the album, and the one that most thoroughly embodies its wary, bruised point of view, is “Deathly.” Warmed up by whispered backing vocals from Brion and Juliana Hatfield, it’s a preemptive rejection from someone who’s been hurt too many times to risk heartbreak again. “Don’t pick on me/When one act of kindness could be deathly,” Mann pleads, her emphatic down-strums and simple rhyme scheme inviting a cathartic sing-along. She repeats the brief but evocative title so many times, it finally morphs into a word that’s even more devastating by virtue of its finality: “definitely.” Because she chooses her maximalist moments carefully on Bachelor No. 2, the song’s stratospheric, almost overblown minute-long instrumental outro lends an epic scale to what amounts to Mann’s refusal to keep experiencing emotions.
It was “Deathly” that inspired Anderson to complete the circle of inspiration, making Mann’s music the centerpiece of his 1999 film Magnolia. It makes up the bulk of the soundtrack, alongside a score from Brion (whose history with Anderson dated back to the director’s 1996 debut Hard Eight, on which he collaborated with Mann’s husband, composer Michael Penn). Unfolding over a night punctuated by violent L.A. rain—and culminating in a biblical cloudburst of bullfrogs—Magnolia follows an intersecting cast of lonely, angry, wounded and regretful characters.
In one scene, an abuse survivor and addict named Claudia (Melora Walters) abruptly ends what looked to be a promising first date with a kind, embattled police officer (John C. Reilly) by speaking the opening salvo of “Deathly”: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” (“I heard that line and wrote backwards,” Anderson recalled in an introduction to the shooting script. “This ‘original’ screenplay could, for all intents and purposes, be called an adaption of Aimee Mann songs.”) The film hinges on this ugly but understandable impulse, to hurt anyone you could potentially care about before they gain the power to hurt you.
Of the nine songs Mann contributed to Magnolia’s soundtrack, including an apt cover of “One” recycled from a Harry Nilsson tribute album, four also appear on Bachelor No. 2: “Driving Sideways,” the muted woman-to-woman warning “You Do” and an instrumental version of “Nothing Is Good Enough,” along with “Deathly.” Magnolia drew more attention to non-album tracks “Wise Up,” which the cast sings in one surreal sequence, and the emotional steamroller “Save Me,” which earned an Academy Award nomination. (Mann got to perform it at the Oscars, but it lost to Phil Collins’ saccharine “You’ll Be in My Heart,” from Tarzan.) Written for Bachelor No. 2 before being appropriated as a Magnolia single, it’s the flip-side of “Deathly.” Mann’s narrator—“a girl in need of a tourniquet”—begs, or maybe dares, an object of affection to pluck her “from the ranks of the freaks/Who suspect they could never love anyone.”
Mann has said that Bachelor No. 2 could’ve come out as early as 1998, but a combination of label gridlock and the marketing cycle around Magnolia, whose soundtrack hit stores just before the film’s December 1999 theatrical debut, delayed its release until the following May. In the meantime, on tour, an impatient Mann sold homemade EPs of her new music, in what she has characterized as a “real DIY fuck-you-record-company-I’m-selling-it-myself” gesture. And after the no-confidence vote from Iovine, she bought back her masters from Interscope, founded the label SuperEgo, and put out Bachelor No. 2 on her own. That courageous move presaged a future where artists with dedicated fan bases wouldn’t need corporate middlemen to access them.
With a boost in name recognition from Magnolia and the Oscars, sales of the album soared past 200,000—easily outperforming I’m With Stupid. (This was an especially decisive victory for Mann: In 1999, then-Sony VP Gail Marowitz had told the Times that “if Aimee sold 70,000 records independently, she would be making more money than if she sold 300,000 on a major label.”) It was in collaborating with Anderson on a movie that eventually played in more than 1,000 theaters that Mann finally found a wider audience primed to appreciate her pithy, disenchanted songs.
Largo’s is the rare story of a small, independently owned music venue that has a happy ending. Flanagan and friends left the original venue for a larger one, Largo at the Coronet, in 2008. Eleven years later, Brion maintains a monthly Friday-night residency, and in December, Mann and Ted Leo are scheduled to play three nights of Christmas shows. “For a while there,” Mann once said, “I was actually going to call the record Underdog Day.” Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo probably makes a grander, more elegant name for a contemporary classic. But the alternate title certainly would have fit. | 2019-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Superego | November 17, 2019 | 9 | 2d00af2a-b939-4e9a-b6a3-6dd7adab9b72 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
Christians Catch Hell, a collection of 18 tracks from Henry Stone and Timmy Thomas' late 1970s Gospel Roots label, transcends record collector arcana by providing a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes here are joy, empathy, and compassion. | Christians Catch Hell, a collection of 18 tracks from Henry Stone and Timmy Thomas' late 1970s Gospel Roots label, transcends record collector arcana by providing a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes here are joy, empathy, and compassion. | Various Artists: Christians Catch Hell: Gospel Roots 1976-79 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21296-christians-catch-hell-gospel-roots-1976-79/ | Christians Catch Hell: Gospel Roots 1976-79 | Producer and label owner Henry Stone, who passed away last August at the age of 93, was the kind of mythic record label executive who turns up midway through music biopics, or as the "other guy" in countless photos of famous artists. He regularly shared cognac at his house with James Brown; he recorded a young Ray Charles; he singlehandedly put Miami on the map with his early '70s label TK Records; and made a star of a worker in his warehouse named Harry Wayne Casey, whose KC & the Sunshine band scored disco hits like "That's The Way (I Like It)" and "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" for TK. Just as impressive as his business smarts was his restlessness: though TK was Stone's primary concern, he also oversaw a fleet of smaller independent labels, each of which had a different stylistic focus, but were all loosely linked to R&B.
One of those labels was Gospel Roots, which Stone founded in 1976 with Timmy Thomas, who had himself scored a hit four years prior with "Why Can't We Live Together", a song that has had a particularly big 2015. Like all of Stone's ventures, Gospel Roots quickly amassed a sprawling discography, releasing 50 LPs in just three years. Part of this was owed to the label's canny structure—rather than shelling out for recording and production, Stone snapped up pre-existing gospel masters from regional artists and simply pressed and distributed them through Gospel Roots. According to the extensive notes included with Christians Catch Hell, Thomas rarely met—or even spoke to—the artists whose work he was commissioned to promote. The label expired just three years after it was founded, without scoring a single notable hit.
That backstory makes Christians Catch Hell—a collection of 18 tracks from the Gospel Roots label—seem like yet another in a long line of barrel-scraping reissues of "lost classics," but the music it contains transcends record collector arcana, providing instead a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes on Christians are joy, empathy and compassion; in nearly all of them, salvation and Divine love are contrasted with societal ills. On the loose, New Orleans-style R&B of the Fantastic Family Aires' "Tell Me", vocalist Rachion Conigan asks repeatedly, "What is this world coming to?" describing fractured families and global catastrophes as the band vamps balefully behind him. Later, in "The Color of God", they attack racism, describing God as being "a natural color," existing above toxic, man-made prejudice. Like "Tell Me", the music that accompanies it is a slow walk, full of teardrop guitar licks and heartbeat bass lines.
By contrast, Pastor T.L. Barrett's swooping "After the Rain" comes on like Talking Book-era Stevie Wonder, with big, clanging piano ringing out behind Barrett's fervent reassurances of God's enduring love. And "On Jesus' Program", by the Original Sunset Travelers, is a kind of twilight doo-wop number that edges its way forward slowly, with an unidentified lead vocalist spilling his honeyed tenor over deep-set, creeping music. There are fragments of hundreds of styles on Christians: the wacka-wacka disco guitar on "For the Children", the twinkling cocktail lounge funk on the sweeping "Said It Long Time Ago", and late-night Quiet Storm vocals on the praise number "Spirit Free", which gracefully blurs the line between spiritual and romantic love. Christians subtly connects all of these genres, indicating passages from one to the other while also gesturing toward their common source in gospel music. More than being a simple celebration of obscure artists, Christians is instead a kind of roadmap, tracing the byways that lead from one style to another.
At times, it could do with a bit more heat. With few of the tracks operating above mid-tempo, it begins to sag slightly as it goes on. Fortunately, it snaps back into focus with the late arrival of the title track, a smoky, agonized blues number powered by the impassioned vocals of Rev. Edna Isaac and the Greene Sisters. In the liners, Isaac describes crying while writing the lyrics, and every ounce of that pain turns up in her delivery. Unlike the rest of the record, which presents religion as a rescue, "Christians Catch Hell" focuses on the difficulty of having faith, and the oppression from friends and spiritual forces that accompanies belief. "People who are non-Christians/ Throw stumbling blocks in your way," she cautions, "Satan chooses his disciples/ Puts his seal on them to do his ways/…But I'd rather be a Christian/ And stay with the Lord every day." Like all of the songs on Christians, it didn't turn its singer into a star on par with, say KC & the Sunshine Band. But the conviction of the performance and the clarity of the lyrics suggests that perhaps earthly acclaim was beside the point. | 2015-12-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Honest Jon’s | December 11, 2015 | 7.3 | 2d0bf64a-041b-4118-8d32-79d1bd43a72d | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
The new 18-year-old New York rapper carves a unique path of searing lyricism through back-alley soul-sampling beats. He examines his youth with an ancient coolness and preternatural technique. | The new 18-year-old New York rapper carves a unique path of searing lyricism through back-alley soul-sampling beats. He examines his youth with an ancient coolness and preternatural technique. | MIKE: May God Bless Your Hustle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-may-god-bless-your-hustle/ | May God Bless Your Hustle | The rapper MIKE, a self-described “bulky black body” from the Bronx, is a prodigious wordsmith with a booming voice and a silver tongue. In the span of a single track, he may contemplate life and death, responsibility and ambition, the state of the world and the state of his wallet. He pushes and pulls his words with a preternatural sense of rhythm. His new album, May God Bless Your Hustle, is a collection of observations, thoughts, and confessions about simply existing and trying to exist simply at the age of 18. With back-alley, soul-sampling beats and with lyrics so solid they could gather moss, MIKE arrives with a unique and fresh voice that provides a shock to the whole rap system. Rare is there someone so young who is as in control as he is vulnerable.
Hustle arrives after years of refinement. His earliest project, Belgium Butter, dates back to 2014, when he was still too wordy and out of synch. Importantly, the tape revealed his backward-leaning ear and a taste for jagged production in the vein of MF DOOM and J Dilla. Since then, the beats—provided largely by members of his sLUms crew—have gotten sparser and better, as have his bars. MIKE is a deliberate lyricist, using juxtaposition to render the ordinary remarkable. On “Pigeonfeet,” he raps, “Watch his jaw get broken like a vase when it’s dropped,” and on “Hunger,” he comes up with, “I’m off the wall like a wet sticker.” It’s as if MIKE exists in a world where the line, “Making sure my man wallet’s straight like a collar when you iron that,” from Earl Sweatshirt’s “Grief,” is canon. Like Earl, MIKE’s flow is gluey and extraordinary. But even when MIKE discards the rhyme or varies his speed, there’s a consistent rhythm that conveys the song forward, exemplified on “10k,” where he spends the bulk with the same rhyme before shifting into a new scheme and rare double-time bars. There is no languishing in the beat and every transition is without seams or effort.
Beyond his phrasing skills, MIKE makes his words stick. For every passage of double-time flow, there’s a moment of clarity. On “Hunger” alone, his lyrics pop with color, like the brilliant opener—“Hunger make you eat your words instead”—and a moment of repose after a scattered day: “I reach home and hit the mattress quick.” His technical proficiency both highlights and obscures his various pains and transgressions. In a recent interview, he talked about how he and his mother have been separated for years due to government paperwork. On the opening “Somebody Please,” he spends just one line acknowledging the situation, later scattering references throughout Hustle. His steady delivery masks the difficulty, suggesting that there’s a well of emotions that isn’t communicated or that he may not be ready to divulge everything on a record. That absence is strong, like a portrait where the subject is moved by something the viewer cannot see. Hustle’s instrumentals only heighten the melancholy, as the splintered samples evoke more nameless ghosts. Sixpress and MIKE, who handle the majority of the production, add minimal flourishes, allowing the lifted melodies and MIKE’s voice to carry the songs. The techniques recall the ancient cool of RZA in his prime.
Depression is a constant theme throughout Hustle that MIKE treats with maturity. He sees it as a lingering condition, not a singular obstacle. “Depression isn’t just a phase/It’s hard to dub the L when it’s all up in your face,” he states plainly on “Pigeonfeet.” He later admits, “I fucking hate my guts/Don’t got the guts to do shit,” but uses that as motivation to work harder at his craft—an ethos he sets from the start, opening the album with the declaration, “Bust my ass!”
Much is made of the new generation of rappers, who may or may not be ruining hip-hop, depending who you ask. Lil Yachty, a year MIKE’s senior, is as much a style icon and motivator as he is a rapper. Even newer entrants—namely those of the SoundCloud generation, led by the odious XXXTentacion—are reckless on the mic and in concert, better at stirring emotion than honing a craft. MIKE, who appears to be unconcerned with image or popularity, bucks the narrative. He paints in fine strokes, the quiet kid working it out on the page compared to extroverted melodrama of Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Llif3.” His brilliance is in the details and the patience he displays as an MC who is as technical as he is stylish. In a world of noise, MIKE’s quietude is magnetic. | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | June 30, 2017 | 8.3 | 2d0c2d54-26d3-4568-b486-e143b24c90a6 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Although the spotlight has shifted from Balearic pop in recent times, London duo the Idjut Boys are unlikely to care, having been trekking that breezy coast for nearly two decades. Astonishingly, this is their debut album, a warm, comforting collection with a wriggling focus. | Although the spotlight has shifted from Balearic pop in recent times, London duo the Idjut Boys are unlikely to care, having been trekking that breezy coast for nearly two decades. Astonishingly, this is their debut album, a warm, comforting collection with a wriggling focus. | Idjut Boys: Cellar Door | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16924-cellar-door/ | Cellar Door | The recent resurgence in Balearic pop music is a contender for the most innocuous trend redux of 2012. Forthcoming efforts from mainstays like Mungolian Jetset, Woolfy vs. Projections, and Windsurf exhibit an enthusiasm for the sound even though the spotlight has turned elsewhere. Newcomers Poolside prove that outsiders haven't lost interest, even if their debut album mostly just remind us of the halcyon days of 2007-08 when both Air France and Studio were going concerns. The Idjut Boys were content to let that last wave of attention pass them by, popping up mostly on remixes and some EPs, but they're the OGs of this very particular game, clocking 12"s as far back as 1993.
The duo-- Londoners Daniel Tyler and Conrad McDonnell-- would rightly bristle at being lumped in with any kind of movement, because when you've been making music for 18 or 19 years, you're likely to have made enough of it differently, even if just to you, that such label tags will seem extra silly. They've crafted a career of dance music that has steadfastly avoided the prevailing dance paradigms-- house, techno-- of their day. For the last half-decade or so they've hovered around the Smalltown Supersound galaxy in an uncle-shaped saucer, steering artists like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and Mungolian via remixes and collaborations. They specialize in lightweight bodyrock, not explicitly beachy but breezy enough to serve as a proxy.
Cellar Door is, shockingly, their first artist album, a 38-minute tart that wisely avoids the temptation to sum or define their career. (Though might I humbly request a collection of 12"s/remixes, friends?) Instead, it's a idly stitched collection of funk, disco, and pop so unassuming that its lack of coherence feels like a virtue. Eight-song records feel like they should have a center, something to talk and build around, but Cellar Door's keeps shifting, like light moving on the floor as the day progresses. The first single, "One for Kenny", is the album's most danceable track, candy disco that moves at the same pace as a comforting lava lamp. Halfway through it eases (there are no sharp movements on Cellar Door) into a gorgeous, jazzy piano line. It feels like someone draped a warm blanket over the track.
Two long vocal ballads-- "Shine" and the "The Way I Like It", both featuring Sally Rodgers-- are well-formed and tender. The latter, in particular, details an appreciative lust, thankful and tense until its beautiful, windswept second half. "Going Down" and "Love Hunter" employ ringing acoustic guitars, harmonic complexity coloring standard rhythms. "Le Wasuk"'s proggy, diffuse raggae is the only true misstep, and the Idjut Boys redeem themselves with sunset-beautiful "Jazz Axe", two minutes of honeyed electric guitar to close the album.
Churls will indict Cellar Door for a lack of coherence, but the Idjut Boys have built a career on a lack of coherence. Dance versions of these tracks are reportedly forthcoming, and they'll probably be great. Cellar Door, though, is a frozen moment, a triumph and an oddity. Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints. | 2012-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | July 27, 2012 | 7.3 | 2d0f20f8-bce8-4ddb-93e5-493c261de441 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Sea and Cake vocalist returns with his second album of solo electronic music in five years, and it has many things in common with the last one. Once again, the predominant theme is the emotional possibilities of the modular synthesizer. | The Sea and Cake vocalist returns with his second album of solo electronic music in five years, and it has many things in common with the last one. Once again, the predominant theme is the emotional possibilities of the modular synthesizer. | Sam Prekop: The Republic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20034-the-republic/ | The Republic | Sam Prekop’s work is nothing if not subtle. His first band, Shrimp Boat, could be all over the place, but after settling in with the Sea and Cake in 1994, his distinguished careers in music, painting, and photography have been unified in theme and overall aesthetic. He’s never been worried about repeating himself. The Sea and Cake made a few outstanding albums and a few more good ones; as a singer and guitarist, Prekop made two fine full-lengths that were different from his work in the Sea and Cake, but not markedly so. And now he’s returned with his second album of solo electronic music in five years, and it has many things in common with the last one.
Once again, the predominant theme is the emotional possibilities of the modular synthesis. Unlike, say, Oneohtrix Point Never, Prekop’s electronic music never feels like commentary, and unlike Arp the influences are more open-ended. Many of these tracks sound like they could have been made in 1975 or 1985. Simple, clean tones bubble along, tracing melodies that evoke a wide-eyed kind of retrofuturism, redolent of an era when we hoped that technology could save humanity from itself. But even that marker seems slippery. The first nine all bear the title "The Republic" and were assembled as part of an art installation, but titles (later ones include "Ghost" and "Invisible") are meaningless. This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.
Importantly, as with Old Punch Card, it asks such questions but doesn’t offer any particular answers. The Republic would make a lousy film soundtrack because the music is defined by its ambiguity. Some might hear mystery in this music, some might hear something chill and late-night ambient, some might hear a bright and sunny affirmation, but Prekop’s relationship to sound can’t be summed up so neatly. As with his song lyrics, his electronic music is built for in-between spaces that are experienced very differently depending on the listener’s perspective.
Only in a few places does The Republic move outside its strict analog synth palette. "The Republic 9" incorporates what sound like samples of a harp, and "Weather Vane" briefly features a thudding 4/4 kick, but even that surprising turn is quickly subsumed back into the album’s more open-ended drift. Extremes of any kind have no place here. Even the tag "music" doesn’t always seem accurate. Passages from the installation make you wonder if you’re listening to an extremely quiet drone or just the sound of something being plugged in. The analog equipment hisses and crackles but these artifacts are no less important than the tunes. If the album has a broader idea to hang itself on, that's it—after listening, you start to notice what your room sounds like. | 2015-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | March 4, 2015 | 7.4 | 2d199a3d-0736-4d64-99fc-8ee92cdcd8e9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The British singer’s crisply rendered, competently hooky second album promises a more personal self-portrait, but she ends up disappearing into vague songwriting and anodyne dance-pop production. | The British singer’s crisply rendered, competently hooky second album promises a more personal self-portrait, but she ends up disappearing into vague songwriting and anodyne dance-pop production. | Anne-Marie: Therapy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anne-marie-therapy/ | Therapy | Anne-Marie was getting bored of her own music. The British pop singer told the BBC that she dreaded playing her biggest song, “Rockabye,” on tour, having soured on the slinky, trop-house collaboration with Clean Bandit and Sean Paul. It was the track that anchored her first album, 2018’s Speak Your Mind, which was filled with bland, thrashing electro-pop numbers and known best for the Ed Sheeran co–written “2002,” which zigzags between interpolating early 2000s chart-toppers over earnest, chugging guitar. Right after she released the record, she started to work on the next one—an angrier album, she’s said, built on vitriol towards an ex. But then a father came up to her after a show and said that his daughter looked up to the singer. “I couldn't deal with this little girl listening to all this angry music I'd been making," she told Music Week. “My role and who I want to be is someone who lifts people up and makes people feel good.” She scrapped the album and wrote an entirely new one titled Therapy, determined to uplift.
The resulting project is dimmed down and diluted. Anne-Marie builds her songs around vague suggestions of ideas—heartbreak and resilience, self-knowledge and easy love—crooned over slithering club beats and awash in schmaltzy synths. The album’s sleekest songs retread her previous hits. Little Mix joins, and often drowns out, Anne-Marie on “Kiss My (Uh Oh),” a fluffy, flimsy interpolation of the 2003 track “Never Leave You (Uh Ooh, Uh Ooh)” that doesn’t add much to the original. Sheeran shows up again as a co-writer, this time with Max Martin, for the well-intentioned but grating “Beautiful,” a cliche-clogged ode to rejecting beauty standards that ends with a chorus of chirping children’s voices. None of these songs stray beyond palatable. They are crisply produced and welded to competent hooks, and you can picture yourself blithing nodding along to most of them in a club or car or mall. But the only glimpses we get of Anne-Marie herself come in stock images: chewed nails and crappy credit, Sunday mornings in white t-shirts, singing along to Drake on summer nights. Even on a song called “Who I Am,” we learn patchy, surface details—“I like crying too much,” she hums, before launching into a diatribe about “fake friends.”
The album’s throng of features swarm to fill in this vacuum. Former One Direction member Niall Horan rasps about remembering a lover on “Our Song,” with the melodrama of a movie trailer. The British rapper MoStack overpowers the beats on “Way Too Long,” barreling over the melody with a flailing rap that rhymes Adele with the singer Mabel. A number of DJs show up, pumping skittering drum patterns and fluorescent drops into their respective tracks; one of the rare distinctive production choices comes from the UK dance outfit Rudimental, Anne-Marie’s frequent collaborator. They hurl snaps and cymbals and frenetic bleats of trumpet onto a track called “Unloveable,” dragging and distorting Anne-Marie’s vocals into a drone—“Could anybody love meeeee?” she pleads over the churning beats, wringing any last drop of vulnerability into the overpowering bass.
There’s a trace of what could have been a gripping album buried in all this glitz. The title track fumbles at a mature, moving message—that relationships can end without blame or fault, that therapy can be more critical than intimacy. Strip away the shellacked synths and whooshing bass, and “Better Not Together” becomes a tender meditation: “Neither of us wanna be alone,” she wails, “We're losing grip but we can't let go.” Lines like this dissolve into the soundscape, blending into the glut of electro-pop artists—Zara Larsson, Ava Max, Ellie Goulding, Bebe Rexha—that Anne-Marie imitates. Two albums in, it’s not clear what distinguishes Anne-Marie’s music. If even she’s bored of her own songs, you have to wonder, where does that leave us?
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. | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | August 9, 2021 | 5.4 | 2d19e71f-233c-4cf5-a981-076c19d310f8 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The Scottish quintet’s 10th album, and first in six years, is full of quiet revelations. The hushed production and contented lyrics make for their warmest and subtlest effort to date. | The Scottish quintet’s 10th album, and first in six years, is full of quiet revelations. The hushed production and contented lyrics make for their warmest and subtlest effort to date. | Teenage Fanclub: Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22287-here/ | Here | When Teenage Fanclub broke in 1991 with their third album Bandwagonesque, they were a band deeply of their time. The Scottish quintet was at once noisy enough to stand among trendsetters like Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, and melodic enough to fit seamlessly on post-“Alex Chilton,” Chilton-indebted college radio. The band’s zeitgeist-capturing breakthrough actually posed a threat to Nirvana come list-making season. In the wake of their banner year, however, Teenage Fanclub carved a quieter path, with each album feeling slightly less bold and more introverted. That’s not to say they retreated. As Teenage Fanclub’s heavier, gutsier proclivities subsided, they focused on becoming an even more sustainable machine, tightening up their songwriting and honing in their trademark three-part harmonies between vocalists Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley.
As the years have passed and the band's output has slowed, Teenage Fanclub’s music has evolved like a long and stable love affair, propelled by intimacy, comfort, and shared admiration. In “I’m in Love,” the opening track on Here, Teenage Fanclub’s first album in six years, Blake actually makes the comparison himself. “I like your trajectory,” he sings, “I’m in love with you, love.” The lyric could be addressing a person or just the feeling itself: a tribute to an emotion. Sunny and deceptively complex, “I’m in Love” serves as a fitting introduction to Here, the band’s subtlest, warmest release to date and also one of their strongest.
With their hushed production and contented lyrics, the 12 tracks on Here play like a series of quiet revelations, the kind of thoughts you have in moments of clarity, surrounded by people you love. The album’s best songs communicate that state of bliss with immediately gratifying melodies and effortless wisdom. The Love-penned “Thin Air” embraces the mystery of life with an energetic, Bad Reputation-era Thin Lizzy buzz. Equally euphoric is “The Darkest Part of the Night,” a sweet, autumnal exercise in classic pop songwriting, bobbing from hook to hook like the horses on a merry-go-round.
Even if Here, the band’s 10th album, finds Teenage Fanclub comfortable with their identity and largely uninterested in testing its boundaries, they still find some room for experimentation. McGinley’s contributions, particularly “Steady State,” and Love's quietly triumphant “I Have Nothing More to Say,” are the most serpentine, psychedelic tracks the band have ever recorded. And on “The First Sight,” the album’s dizzying highlight, they spin the well-trodden ’90s loud-quiet-loud dynamic into the aural equivalent of leaving a dim apartment and feeling the sun on your face. The song reaches pure ecstasy by the time it concludes with one of the album’s many fuzzy, impeccable guitar solos.
The greatest moments on Here come when Teenage Fanclub use their music to uplift, as in the cascading horns in “The First Sight” or the glimmering strings in “The Darkest Part of the Night.” They’re slightly less successful when they try to convey these feelings with their words. The deeply literal choruses of “Hold On” and “Live in the Moment” land with a healthy dose of cheese, an aspect of pop music that Teenage Fanclub have always gracefully skirted around. But, to paraphrase Norm Macdonald, it’s not sentimental if you really mean it. And judging by how many tracks on Here make reference to the simple joy of being alive, Teenage Fanclub sound like a band grateful for the time they have and entirely present within it. | 2016-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 6, 2016 | 7.8 | 2d231d29-67e0-4096-a264-b41ed4fb2809 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
After the all-R&B, mostly-WTF? direction of Ghostdini, Ghostface returns to hardcore rap with this all-star-boosted record. | After the all-R&B, mostly-WTF? direction of Ghostdini, Ghostface returns to hardcore rap with this all-star-boosted record. | Ghostface Killah: Apollo Kids | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14942-apollo-kids/ | Apollo Kids | Anyone surprised by the all-R&B, mostly-WTF? direction of Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City should be studying Ghostface's art: ever since signing to Def Jam and temporarily dropping the "Killah," it's been like watching the aftermath of Weezer's Pinkerton flop over and over again. Though we got some undeniably great music in the process, it felt somewhat ancillary to "Tush", "Back Like That", the "Back Like That" remix, bummed out interviews, and hiring Diddy's production team for Big Doe Rehab-- all pretty clear actions of someone who takes his poor commercial fortunes very personally and isn't trying to be anyone's idea of a cult act. Of course, none of it worked in the slightest, so even if it was a giant fuck-you to his hardcore contingent, Ghostdini was at least understandable as the culmination of years worth of frustration from someone who felt like he ran out of crossover options. Or, as Ghostface said in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, "I'm hanging this shit up if this shit don't work."
On its face, Apollo Kids is a weirdly deflated concession from both parties: Twelve spartanly named tracks, barely over 40 minutes of music, a ton of guests hailing from Ghost's inner circle, a rehashed album title, and a near total lack of promotion: If Ghostface didn't have a Twitter account, there's a good chance we wouldn't be aware of this thing's existence. But isn't that what we were all clamoring for after the desperate shilling of Ghostdini? At the outset, it would sure seem so. Apollo Kids plays out something like a lower-stakes version of The Pretty Toney Album, no RZA but plenty of that record's time-honored breakbeats, blaxploitatied guitars, and swallowed-whole soul samples.
It's the kind of stuff that his harried intensity always sounds viscerally powerful over, even if the rhymes aren't prime material. He doesn't throw his darts sideways anymore, but without sort of bullshit clutter, he's still an incredibly ostentatious lyricist, just one that's easier to parse. The record's opening trio is evidence enough of that: on "Purified Thoughts", Killah Priest and GZA add their typical ballast-heavy musings on metaphysics and crack sales to Ghost's boasting of feeding children in Benin and "Africans chantin' me on like Coachella." When matched up with a more comparable style, Busta Rhymes helps turn "Superstar" into an Olympic-level track meet of fast-rap, while Ghost and Cappadonna appropriately spaz out for "Black Tequila". And while "Handcuffin' Them Hoes [ft. Jim Jones]" is possibly the least promising run of words ever to grace a Ghostface tracklist, there's still an illicit glee in how lines like, "And I ain't even gotta be dipped/ I pull out my pocket two sloppy joe mitts this thick!" counter the problem that some of his most locked-in performances as of late come at the expense of tactful gender relations.
While the music and the personnel are all comfort food for Ghostface, Apollo Kids still leaves something of a strange aftertaste. The basically arbitrary sequencing never allows too much momentum to build, and the lack of any sort of organizational principle makes it come off seeming more slapped-together by Def Jam interns than an Event release befitting Ghost's rep. But the larger issue is that Apollo Kids feels like a record that's good because it never dares to be great. Even on Ghostface's more uneven LPs, there are always reasons to think of Ghostface as a victim of his own prolificacy rather than someone who can no longer make a legit claim as one of the greatest rappers ever-- "Alex (Stolen Script)", "Maxine", "White Linen Affair", to name a few. That "2getha Baby" and "How You Like Me Baby" didn't spark much buzz in advance shouldn't be a surprise, as they feature the kind of clock-punching rhymes ("She look like she get it from her mama/ That's right Michelle I'm Obama") that Ghostface is supposed to be an alternative to. Those are two of the three songs on Apollo Kids that are solo joints (the other being "Starkology", which is so minimal it's barely there), and the most troubling aspect is that Apollo Kids makes a strong claim as Ghost's best LP since Fishscale, and he's hardly on it.
You'll never have to question whether foot soldiers like Shawn Wiggs, Trife Da God, and Sheek Louch are going to try and bring whatever constitutes their A-games, but Ghostface should never get outshined by the likes of Joell Ortiz when it comes to criminology. "In Tha Park" also is somewhat underwhelming for a song that features two of the best voices in hip-hop on the same track for the first time; yet whereas Black Thought's invocation of fights at the Spectrum and out-of-town ice skaters feels steeped in personal history, Ghost's hip-hop origin story comes off like he's told it dozens of times.
It's hard not to feel conflicted about Apollo Kids. Unlike Ghostface records that presumably get unfairly judged by the standards of his best work, it's tempting to overrate it due a general relief that he didn't try to make Ghostdini again. And even if the initial buzz of simply getting a new LP wears off pretty quickly here, it's not to the point where "no Ghostface" is better than "new Ghostface." But as with the aforementioned Weezer, Ghostface's weakest output is coming at a point when he's releasing more than ever, and differentiating correlation and causation just gets harder and harder: I realize the days of spiced-out Calvin Coolers are long gone, but it's also been enough time since the relatively earthbound Fishscale that I'm not certain the remedy is just slowing the fuck down. | 2011-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | January 3, 2011 | 7.3 | 2d23f8df-04e4-4acb-9ad0-c2ee3ab65309 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Across 25 torturous minutes, the Toronto rapper doesn’t make a single lasting impression as a performer, storyteller, or craftsman. He’ll do well on OVO. | Across 25 torturous minutes, the Toronto rapper doesn’t make a single lasting impression as a performer, storyteller, or craftsman. He’ll do well on OVO. | Baka Not Nice: 4Milli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baka-not-nice-4milli/ | 4Milli | Like all OVO Sound signees, Baka Not Nice’s role within Drake’s fiefdom is defined by how Drake sees him. Since his introduction on “From Time” from Nothing Was the Same, Baka has been styled as the label’s resident goon, a no-nonsense bruiser who puts loyalty and integrity above all. In Drake’s eyes, Baka represents Toronto’s unsung underbelly, a land of accents, culture, and danger. Before Drake could go global, he had to establish his pull over a global city, and Baka, his former bodyguard, was his man on the ground.
As a rapper, Baka embraces the role Drake has laid out for him to a fault. On 4Milli, he raps with a joyful gracelessness, forgoing wit or emotion and opting for menace. He lives to pull cards and check posers, to hurl insults and to flex. His sole interests are intimidation and keeping it real; rapping comes second. This emphasis on power and reputation sets Baka apart from the Drake-lite crooners that fill OVO’s roster (dvsn, Majid Jordan, PARTYNEXTDOOR, etc.), and he clearly enjoys all the chest-puffing—but his goon raps are largely bland and unmemorable. Baka Not Nice actually does live up to his name: His music is literally without style or flourish.
Rap has a rich history of straight shooters, but Baka’s straight talk is so unimaginative it’s taxing. When he uses humor to color his insults, he’s so unsubtle he sounds like a parody of a bully. “I’mma catch you niggas when I choose to/Sliding down your block just to shoot you/Like doot-do, do-do-doot-do,” he sings on “Money in the Bank.” On “Cream of the Crop” he growls into the mic while detailing a hook-up...because he’s sooo beasty in bed. When he tells stories, he somehow omits characters, setting, and plot. His vignette of a drug deal on “Dope Game” is so sparse and lifeless, it’s nearly a koan: “Told him to meet me in person/He met me in person, he froze.”
This limited skill set is most constrained when Baka alludes to his time in prison. His rap sheet includes armed robbery and assault and he was once detained and held in custody for 10 months for assault and human trafficking (the charges were later dropped). These bids and the circumstances around them are frequently evoked across 4Milli, yet they never have context or weight. On “Live Up to My Name,” for instance, Baka says that he began a sentence on the day Men in Black was released (July 2, 1997) and left when “Timberlake was bringing sexy back” (~July 18, 2006). It’s a jarring and clever way to render how much of a time-warp incarceration can be, but Baka goes no further. The before, the after, and the jail time itself dissolve into the generic boast that follows: “Facts, nigga, facts.”
Baka ends 4Milli by accosting hangers-on that weren’t with him before his come-up. “Where the fuck were you when the judge gave me 13 years, nine months? Where the fuck were you, when my pops was in the courtroom, in shock? Where were you when I was down below? Yo, I got convicted of something I ain’t even fucking do, my nigga,” he rants on the outro of “Gimme That Work.” These questions are rhetorical, but 4Milli is so placeless, impersonal, and disjointed that even hypothetically, it’d be hard to muster either answers or concern. Across 25 torturous minutes, Baka doesn’t make a single lasting impression as a performer, storyteller, or craftsman. He’ll do well on OVO. | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Warner Bros. | August 8, 2018 | 4.7 | 2d25ec64-a688-4db2-8233-813d2a4d99b2 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
To shed the stigma of “Friday,” Rebecca Black reinvents herself as a desperate hyperpop star. | To shed the stigma of “Friday,” Rebecca Black reinvents herself as a desperate hyperpop star. | Rebecca Black: Let Her Burn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rebecca-black-let-her-burn/ | Let Her Burn | Can a debut album be a comeback? I wish I could say that Let Her Burn is a scintillating and surprisingly poignant send-up of Rebecca Black’s image and history as a self-created subject of internet scorn, but sadly it is one of the most joyless and interminably dull pop records of the past few years—and confirmation that “Friday” is still the most interesting piece of music she’s ever made.
You can understand why Black felt the spotlight calling her back at this particular moment. We’re in the midst of an era when even the most commercially unsuccessful singer can rebrand as an alternative pop star and find a home on any number of gym playlists. Black is playing the game well: She relaunched her career in 2021 with an amusing, if somewhat thin, hyperpop remix of “Friday” produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and featuring Big Freedia, Dorian Electra, and the brotronica duo 3OH!3. A press release is stamped with identitarian bona fides (“queer-celebrated,” Mexican-American, “iconic queer creator,” and so on) and her new look is very much in vogue, leaning on Julia Fox-ish bodysuits, exaggerated makeup and jewelry, and Cronenberg-lite music videos. Watching the video for “Crumbs,” a breathier, less exciting retread of Tove Lo’s “Disco Tits,” you can practically hear the two-word brainstorm: It’s camp!
Sadly it is not. Let Her Burn is a desperate, bald-faced attempt to pull together whichever cultural signifiers seem likely to resonate with online fanbases. The entire album operates like this: “Destroy Me” is a cursory nod to emo-meets-d’n’b, à la Willow; “Doe Eyed” plays like Ariana Grande’s “just like magic” redone in the style of Charli XCX’s “claws”; multiple tracks deploy the kind of scraping, metallic synths that SOPHIE popularized and which Sam Smith and Kim Petras are busy running into the ground. All of this is paired with extraordinarily earnest but totally anonymous breakup lyrics—“I can’t erase you,” “My misery, it loves your company,” “There’s nothing you could do to make me love you less.”
In a sense, the triteness makes Let Her Burn an interesting cultural document. It’s proof that, in less than four years, hyperpop has gone from being a fun, hotly contested new microgenre to being a hacky shortcut into the zeitgeist. That’s the danger of building a scene with a deeply ironic sense of humor: It becomes nearly impossible to decide whether something is all part of the joke or simply capitalizing on an easily replicable sound. At some point, you have to ask yourself why you wouldn’t slap on a Rebecca Black album just for fun.
But Let Her Burn is so, so dry. Largely produced and written with MØ collaborator Stint and Micah Jasper, who worked on Slayyyter’s Troubled Paradise, Let Her Burn is bereft of the subversive and chaotic DIY energy that made hyperpop a destabilizing force. Black mostly sings in a breathy, affected deadpan that suggests heavy, anonymizing digital pitch-correction. It skirts the edges of being robotic and mostly ends up uncanny.
In 2011, Black fell victim to one of the earliest, and most intensely brain-numbing, cycles of internet discourse. First, of course, there was “Friday,” which was intensely mocked; then, there was the consideration that, perhaps, it was unfair to mock her; then, much later, came Black’s stint as an anti-bullying advocate. All the while, there were additional singles and TV appearances and splashy video cameos where you couldn’t tell if she was in on, or the butt of, the joke. She is a case study for the way that the internet exploits the young, innocent, and unself-aware. One could argue that, by releasing Let Her Burn—which carries the same clean, calculated “darkness” of classic I’m bad now 2000s pop records like Miley Cyrus’ Can’t Be Tamed—Black is reclaiming her image, seeking to exist in public on her own terms. Compared to, say, the TLC reality show hamster wheel or the Cameo ecosystem, hyperpop seems like a slightly less exploitative way for a D-list celeb to get another shot in the public eye. But far from an entryway into fertile new creative territory, Let Her Burn comes across as a means to a rebrand. It’s undeniable that Black has been through a lot, which makes it all the more bizarre that Let Her Burn, intellectually, musically, and spiritually, contains so little.
There are flashes of a slightly more interesting album. On “Destroy Me,” Black airs insecurities—“Don’t wanna be a loser/I wonder if I dye my hair/Will they think that I’m cooler?”—with an unadorned frankness that makes you wonder, a little, about who she is beyond a singer who had a minor YouTube hit with “Friday” and then, a little while later, a minor Billboard hit with follow-up “Saturday.” “Sick to My Stomach,” one of a couple of more traditional, ’80s-inflected songs on the album, will satiate anyone holding out for The Loneliest Time Side B, as will “Look at You”—although “Everybody’s got that somebody that fucks you up” is the kind of clunker not even Carly Rae Jepsen would touch.
Black, at least, seems to have a shred of self-awareness about the whole thing. On Let Her Burn’s final track, “Performer,” she sings about struggling to open up: “Every time I try to be more vulnerable/It’s like I hit a wall/Can’t go any further.” It is ostensibly not meant to be taken literally, but after an album on which she struggles to convincingly muster the anarchic spark of hyperpop or the wounded pathos of a classic breakup record, it might as well be true. | 2023-02-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | February 13, 2023 | 4.4 | 2d2bada5-2497-4e45-af1c-aff3c0aac5d3 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The British punk band Johnny Foreigner’s songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. | The British punk band Johnny Foreigner’s songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. | Johnny Foreigner: Mono No Aware | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22140-mono-no-aware/ | Mono No Aware | The anime series FLCL, like a lot of anime before it, depicts a young boy fighting robots. What distinguishes the series is that the robots emanate from an abyss in the boy’s brain. When they emerge, they resemble cubist knots of trash, mechanical blocks congealed into a kind of sinister animated matter.
When I listen to the music of British punk band Johnny Foreigner, I’m reminded of those robots, in both design and velocity. Johnny Foreigner songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. The opening seconds of their 2014 record You Can Do Better, in which snare rolls are processed and multiplied until they resemble explosions in a hollow cylinder, sound like distant cousins of Blink-182’s “Feeling This.” They’ve covered American Football’s “Never Meant,” but their version transfers the expansive atmosphere of the original into their own, narrower gravity, the distinct guitar phrases shivering in anxious proximity to each other.
Mono No Aware, their fifth album, which coincides with their ten-year anniversary as a band, is their most elastic and adventurous record since 2011’s Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, in which unstable punk songs degenerated into piano ballads which then degenerated further into sound collages and spoken word. Mono No Aware isn’t as varied, but its structures have a tendency to digress, evaporate, and recombine, as if one is driving through a radically shrunken landscape. It radiates a feeling of seasickness, the guitars and drums lurching from extreme gravity into total freefall. These transitions aren’t completely seamless; you can hear the stitching. When “If You Can’t Be Honest, Be Awesome” lifts off into the remote and aerial region of an American Football song, you can feel the dissonance and tension of the transition.
Johnny Foreigner songs tend to be about geography, and how it combines with memory to produce something like three-dimensional feelings. Mono No Aware is specifically devoted to coastlines and to oceans. “I have walked into every ocean going,” guitarist Alexei Berrow sings in “Undevastator,” “holding hope out for future us/Hoping holding out was enough.” Later, on “The Worst of Us,” bassist Kelly Parker sings, “The streets shrink and the skyline blocks the sun/Whole weeks where I never see daylight/I’ve been dreaming of the ocean.” There’s a severe clarity to Johnny Foreigner lyrics, as if written under the sort of bitterness and honesty only accessed after approximately three drinks. “When your entourage froze/I’d never seen you so exposed/And I’ve seen you with no clothes,” Berrow sings in “The X and the O.” Even their meanest lyrics are haunted by ghosts, though, which often manifest in a form of delayed melancholy—a kind of hangover. A lyric in “Our Lifestyles Incandescent”—“We end up under the covers/but couldn’t be further from each other”—is capable of folding the entire Johnny Foreigner universe into itself.
Their songs also talk to each other—“Undevastator” is a sequel to You Can Do Better’s “Devastator,” and the lyric “I guess New Street couldn’t take it/But I can” in “Cliffjumper” ties back to a song on Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, forming a series of arterial connections that resemble lines the way memories rhythmically link to each other in the brain. Memories are themselves temporal hangovers; as one accesses them, one also accesses what could’ve been, drawing reality through the distortions of regret and nostalgia. The best Johnny Foreigner songs, several of which are included on Mono No Aware, depict this process holistically; you hear someone sifting through their failures and their fantasies, their past and present mistakes swarming into each other. | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Alcopop! / Lame-O | July 21, 2016 | 7.9 | 2d2f490b-9d6f-4fe9-9409-c3e6422fe886 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
A strikingly intimate and affecting debut full-length from Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas. | A strikingly intimate and affecting debut full-length from Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas. | Perfume Genius: Learning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14457-learning/ | Learning | The promotional materials for Perfume Genius' Learning show the project's sole member, 26-year-old Seattle resident Mike Hadreas, shirtless and with a black eye. It's as evocative an image as the Strokes wearing leather jackets and Velvet Underground t-shirts or Animal Collective wearing tribal masks. The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble. The production value is lo-fi, although not in a staticky, antagonistic way. Instead, the crude recording adds intimacy, to the point where you can hear Hadreas' feet on the pedals of the piano that plays a central role in many of his songs. This music sounds personal.
On paper, Perfume Genius would seem to cater to a small niche, but Hadreas has an innate gift for melody that ups the accessibility considerably. Many of these understated songs turn out to be surprisingly persistent earworms, with tunes that are refreshingly uncluttered. The song structures of cuts like "Learning", "Mr. Peterson", and "Write to Your Brother" mostly sticking to short melodic sequences that slowly work their way into your headspace. This simplicity puts greater focus on Hadreas' lyrics, and they deserve the attention. He's tackling emotionally fraught topics here-- the struggle to gain acceptance from loved ones, suicide, molestation, substance abuse, and questionable relationships with figures of authority, to name a few. "Write to Your Brother" addresses a person named Mary to act upon the titular command, reminding her to tell him, "Mom treats you like a lover/ That you have to hide all the mouthwash from her." "Mr. Peterson", the album's most heartbreakingly direct cut, concerns a teenager's sexual relationship with a teacher, ending with a grisly death.
Hadreas has a knack for detail that recalls Sufjan Stevens' more intimate and non-big-tent moments, and he knows how to tell a story. One comes away [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| from "When" remembering "the line of the trees/ Above the end of the street," as a mother steps into her yard "holding her daughter." It's the small things that stand out: the Joy Division mixtape in "Mr. Peterson", the pressed flower concealed within a letter in "Write to Your Brother", the paycheck held by the about-to-vanish titular subject in "Perry". These songs touch on a range of emotions, but the fine details make them hit harder.
For all its fragile moments and depictions of emotional instability, Learning is an unbelievably warm-sounding record. That warmth especially emanates during the album's more textural moments, like the pulsing synth dirge "No Problem" or the impressionistic ambient smears of "Gay Angels". On the latter cut, Hadreas comes closest to achieving transcendence, as near-wordless cries tangle and moan around drones and low-mixed rumbles of thunder. However upward he hits, though, Hadreas remains down to earth, whispering harshly at the track's end, "It's okay/ It's okay." In another artist's hands, this might come off as melodramatic playacting. Hadreas turns it into one of the album's most affecting songs, as this talented new artist uses those two words to evoke Learning's ultimate mindset: Today is terrible, but tomorrow can bring anything. | 2010-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-07-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | July 16, 2010 | 8.2 | 2d327808-6e21-409f-aa69-4a4c5bac16f2 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The New York rapper’s promising debut showcases a 21-year-old who’s still finding his own lane between sensitivity and swagger. | The New York rapper’s promising debut showcases a 21-year-old who’s still finding his own lane between sensitivity and swagger. | A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: The Bigger Artist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-boogie-wit-da-hoodie-the-bigger-artist/ | The Bigger Artist | Last year, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie performed three sold out shows at Madison Square Garden without a debut album. He wasn’t the headliner, but when Drake asks you to perform an opening set in your hometown, you do it. His debut mixtape, 2016’s Artist, catapulted the 21-year-old from a Bronx striver with “My Shit” to a XXL Freshman with two platinum tracks. His sound mixes melody and grit; transforming his most vulnerable moments into catchy sing-a-longs. Channeling his Uptown charisma and tapping into the du jour sound he adopted during a brief stint in Florida, the result is galvanizing New York’s rap scene. On his debut album The Bigger Artist, he alternates between his rap persona, Boogie, and who he is underneath the fame, the man born Artist Dubose.
He shows contrition on opener “No Promises,” paying respect to a fan who was killed at his concert in Louisville: “Savannah just wanted to see me perform and got hit over stupid shit/I woke up and saw the shit right on my phone, they don’t know who the shooter is.” He peppers guilt through the beginning of the track as he reflects on his life choices and its affect on the people around him. “I treated them bad, I wouldn’t be mad if I was to get treated the same way/So treat me the same way,” he raps. This initial volley of introspection clears the lane for Dubose to explore his fraught relationships on The Bigger Artist, while freeing him to tap into the swagger cemented in Boogie’s music.
One thing about Boogie is that he loves the piano to an extreme degree. It floats over more than half of The Bigger Artist’s 15 tracks, carving out a sound that has become his signature. Fingers run across the keys at the beginning of “Money Sprung,” a flute-infused love song to big bills. It gives his songs a sense of melodrama that falls somewhere between pure gothic sadness and a Pure Moods compilation. But his voice feels at home over piano loops, bouncing around as it does on “Say A’,” a cryptically cheerful song about how fame has altered his encounters with police. Although his affinity for the keyboard is clear, Boogie’s prized instrument is his voice, flipping and distorting melodies. Here, he not only tests the dexterity of his original flow, but reinvents ones from yesteryear.
A large part of his claim to fame was his ability to dig into his soured relationships with women, like the Drake effect, but without the ribbed turtleneck. Buried in this album are cadences of jaded love songs, most notably Lauryn Hill’s “Ex Factor” and Maroon 5’s “This Love.” But, it’s when producers Myster Whyte and Tracksterz interpolate Robin Thicke’s “Teach U a Lesson” that you see how well Boogie can reinvent the wheel. Grabbing Trey Songz for background vocals, “Bad Girl” is his interpretation of a love song, raucous and raunchy, and totally his own.
The Bigger Artist is a peek at Boogie’s potential, but there are moments that feel like déjà vu, both for Boogie and for the state of rap itself. The production on “Undefeated” sounds almost identical to Drake’s “Energy,” and closer “Beast Mode,” screams like a faulty tribute to Future—cramming as many “Freak Hoe” and “Diamond Dancing” references as can fit into four minutes. When his sound doesn’t outright mimic Drake or Future, Boogie sounds slightly ahead of the curve, testing the bounds of melody at every turn. | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 5, 2017 | 7 | 2d38daef-fb88-47cd-81ee-e05388d346ee | Kristin Corry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kristin-corry/ | |
null | null | Neil Young: On the Beach / American Stars 'n' Bars / Hawks & Doves / Re-ac-tor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11868-on-the-beach-american-stars-n-bars-hawks-doves-re-ac-tor/ | On the Beach / American Stars 'n' Bars / Hawks & Doves / Re-ac-tor | There are few musical artists who need the old canonization speech less than Neil Young. With his reputation preserved amongst us youngsters as the Godfather of Grunge (apparently based on little more than a predilection towards flannel), he's already known by all as the hip great-uncle amidst the Woodstock era's senile grandparents. Still, attention must be paid to the most impressive feat of Young's career: an all-but-perfect streak of very good-to-excellent albums that spanned an incredible, and unparalleled, eleven years. To put it another way, from 1969-1979, Neil Young was rock's Joe Dimaggio.
Which makes it especially cruel that, for years afterward, Neil's eccentric skepticism about the auditory worth of the compact disc format kept many of those albums out-of-print. So it's somewhat ironic that now, in the dying days of the digital disc, Reprise Records has finally convinced their stubborn client to allow for patching up most of these holes, rescuing four albums from obscurity and bootleggers. Fancy remastering, fancy packaging: who cares? I can finally retire four crackly vinyls to wall-decoration duty.
The most criminal omission by a long shot was On the Beach, the 1974 disc that represented Young's last ramp-up before his masterpiece, Tonight's the Night. Recorded with help from The Band's crack rhythm section and colorful multi-instrumentalist hick Rusty Kershaw, On the Beach is one of the few from Young's catalog that doesn't land easily on either his country or hard-rock piles. Three song titles with the word "blues" give you an idea of the mood, but hardly prepare you for the bleak anger of "Revolution Blues" or "For the Turnstiles", post-apocalyptic visions as eerie as any of 28 Days Later's scenic pans. The real engine of the album's brilliance, though, is the trio of slow, long, lonely hotel room folk songs that closes out the album, peaking with Neil's "Desolation Row", "Ambulance Blues." To hear them is to know that Jason Molina goes to bed each night caressing a copy of this record.
The stark tone of On the Beach was only carried over to one track from 1977's American Stars 'n' Bars, the creepily lo-fi "Will to Love". What fills the remainder of the album is a sort of buffet-style Neil Young, offering up choice leftovers from various failed projects of the era. The peak, of course, is "Like a Hurricane", perhaps one of the finest examples of Neil's willfully untechnical guit-hartic playing style, a chord progression that induces string-popping frenzy in his live shows to this day. But also making appearances are Skynyrd Neil, slashing country-rock lines through "Bite the Bullet" and Farm Aid favorite "Homegrown", and Sensitive Poet Neil, revisiting Harvest seasoning with "Hey Babe" and "Star of Bethlehem".
Unfortunately, reclaiming that Harvest mood is what chokes the majority of Hawks & Doves, notable for being the dashed-off post-Rust Never Sleeps album that breaks his streak of excellence, and not much more. Other than faux-traditionals "The Old Homestead" and "Captain Kennedy", this 1980 release captures an uncharacteristically tentative Neil, clearly unsure of whether to develop quirky singalongs like "Lost in Space" or plastic soul like "Staying Power" (an early harbinger of his recent unbecoming Motown romanticism). Young can't even seem to stay on task thematically here, sequencing the patronizing "Union Man" before "Comin' Apart at Every Nail"'s fanfare for the working man. Consider that the title track is brimful of pro-American nationalism from the Canadian-born songwriter, and you've got a good idea of just how confusing an effort Hawks & Doves can be.
But confusion was to be the name of the game for Young in the 1980s, a period celebrated for his principled resistance to record company pigeon-holing, but very, very rarely actually listened to. The fourth reissue in this batch, Re-ac-tor, doesn't quite fall into the gimmick trap that so much of his second full decade's work did, but the effort is still held back by an unhealthy fascination with using guitars as sound effect generators: machine guns in "Shots", backfiring cars in "Motor City", train engines in "Southern Pacific". Quality of songwriting and fierce playing by Crazy Horse manage to redeem the album, however: "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze" and "Shots" rank as two of his most underrated barnstormers.
To own all four reissues, then, is to witness a couple snapshots of the man mid-streak, and a couple from the immediate aftermath, as he began to slouch towards genre experimentation and respectably above-mediocre twilight. However, all but the most devout Neilologists should forgo the latter two; it'd leave enough money to track down a bootleg copy of Time Fades Away, now the only neglected step-child of Young's peak period (and despite what you may have heard from Neil himself, one of his best). Although we'd love to see that record in print, too, us superior folk would no longer have anything to lord over the peons. Sorry, Col. Molina, your secret recipe is out. | 2003-09-30T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-09-30T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 30, 2003 | 9.5 | 2d3a4c9a-6a15-4a0d-a394-9f238971fedc | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The Austin native Jess Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence. Her debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive. | The Austin native Jess Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence. Her debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive. | Jess Williamson: Native State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18942-jess-williamson-native-state/ | Native State | “Maybe I am just the devil’s girl,” Austin native Jess Williamson sang in one of her early songs, each word croaked like something drifted up from the underworld. Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence—a guitar creaks like an old staircase; the occasional pedal steel lick blows by like a sudden, inexplicable draft. Her songs are loosely structured and rarely have what you’d call verses and choruses; she prefers instead to let them unfurl into strange and twisted shapes. Sometimes she sounds like Angel Olsen or Joanna Newsom, but more often she sounds like a coyote—lonesome and half-rabid, howling into the sparse landscapes of her songs and then pausing, as if she’s waiting for an echo.
Williamson’s debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive. She wrote it shortly after leaving New York City for her hometown of Austin (she describes that change as a “period of turning inward and spending a good deal of time alone”), and, fittingly, these songs luxuriate in slow rhythms, compositional elbow room, and moments of quiet introspection. The stirring, macabre opener “Blood Song” begins as though it’s being sung by a sleepwalker (“Who can say what’s really real when there’s a veil between what you kinda see and what you kinda feel”), but it gathers force and vividness as the song moves on. Like Williamson’s most powerful songs, “Blood Song” gives you the impression that you are watching someone weaving on a loom in reverse: as time goes on patterns unravel, solid ground disappears, and by the end the the very bones of the thing lay exposed.
There’s never a shortage of the kind of music Williamson makes. Every generation has its own crop of banjo-wielding mystics singing about astrology, medicine wheels, and long-haired ladies, and—blame so-called hipster culture’s antique shop fetishism, or maybe just the commercial viability of Marcus Mumford—that lane feels particularly crowded right now. But that makes it that much more impressive that Native State stands out among this ever-refreshing crowd. Williamson is particularly good at braiding together nostalgia for the past with a gimlet-eyed (and often bitingly self-aware) view of the present moment. (There’s humor here, occasionally, so subtle and cutting that you might miss it: “I thought I saw something real in Barcelona, in Brooklyn/ But I’ve learned the power now of manic delusions.”) She paints scenes of “moon-bathing ladies” and measures time by Saturn’s orbit, but then chases these lines with expressions of such plainspoken clarity that they almost knock you off your feet: “Here I am at 25 and I can’t sign a lease,” she admits in the last song. “Mostly I’ve survived off people being nice to me.”
Native State is often quite dark, so the last two songs—aside from “Blood Song”, perhaps the best she’s released yet—pop up like the first shocks of green in springtime. “You Can Have Heaven on Earth” is a warm, banjo-driven ode to nature (“Try as we must to touch what surrounds us/ All of us thinking what we can’t photograph, we can sing”), but all of the themes of the album really come together in the short, sprightly closer “Seventh Song”. It’s a song about finding a balance between solitude and codependence, between barrelling forward and standing still. Native State is a document of a restless spirit, a wanderer continually searching for the landscape that will best match the thoughts—and the songs—that rattle inside her. But she never romanticizes her wanderlust: She realizes that the very drive that moves her forward could easily result in a lifetime of dissatisfaction. The wisdom of “Seventh Song”, then, is how to find peace in stillness—even if it’s only temporary. You can almost hear the hum of the highway beckoning in the background, but in the album’s final line, she’s found the thrill of its opposite: “Do you know how holy it is/ Just to sit quietly with someone?” | 2014-01-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-01-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Brutal Honest | January 30, 2014 | 7.4 | 2d3c212b-2762-4179-9c49-f60f994341b4 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Finally full of purpose, rapper Jonwayne navigates his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? | Finally full of purpose, rapper Jonwayne navigates his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? | Jonwayne: Rap Album Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22914-rap-album-two/ | Rap Album Two | In 2014, Los Angeles rapper/producer Jonwayne had a crisis of faith. His suddenly-realized rap dreams were the impetus for his own implosion. A battle with alcoholism waged in part because of a crippling fear of flying, and the harshness of his lifestyle threatened to ruin him. He canceled his shows, parted ways with his label Stones Throw, and retreated from the rap scene. The next year, he released an EP called Jonwayne is Retired. “When I’m grieving I stay up writing these masterpieces,” he rapped. His second full-length rap album seems to prove that assertion. It’s an introspective journal that uses self-critique as a lens through which to examine the fragility of rap celebrity on any scale. It considers what it means to be a rapper and it considers the cost. Rap Album Two deconstructs Jonwayne to build him back up.
Jonwayne has always been a master craftsman and talented technician, but in the past, his raps didn’t really have any function. It was rapping for the sake of it. He had plenty of knotty, syllable-twisting wordplay pivoting on slant rhymes and internal schemes, but much of the content was filler. His full-length debut as a lyricist, Rap Album One, was bogged down by his inability to get out of his own head, rattling off series after series of pointless puzzlers and long-winded (albeit fun) workarounds for rap cliches aiming to show how clever he was. Instilled with purpose, Rap Album Two weighs every sentence carefully. He isn’t interested in constructing complex lyrical miracle word exhibitions. He's too busy wondering if rap is even worth it.
Much of Rap Album Two is about rap as both an instrument of destruction and a vehicle for redemption. It finds Jonwayne navigating his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? His writing, which was once so heady, is now sobering. He’s rapping more deliberately, and the bars all mean more, carrying bigger burdens but bringing bigger rewards. There’s literally a song called “These Words Are Everything.” Songs like the existentialist daydream “Human Condition” and the punching “City Lights” explore the consequences of addiction, especially when pursuing a rap career (“There's a price to it youngin’/You most likely don’t invite the kind of vices we brung in/Be it poison of the body or the kind you can’t see ‘cause it's creeping up behind”). The album uses a beatpack with snappy, slow-rolling drums, minor piano chords, soul hymnals, and sunless tones to depict an ongoing recalibration, as Jonwayne finds his way back to rap.
On “LIVE from the Fuck You,” one of the album’s keenest moments, a stranger approaches the rapper in public asking for an impromptu concert for a girl he’s with (“She says she knows who you are, I think she's a big fan”) before tagging on a dismissal: “She says you rap and I’m not really seeing it, dog.” Jonwayne finally indulges his request for on-the-spot raps with a verse dismantling the “fan” and his actions: “So here’s a little story bout the way I make it hurt/The way I make you learn how not to approach a man who’s suffering for his work like a monkey in the circus.” The observations aren’t exactly revelatory but they are cleverly articulated, and the sharpness with which they’re delivered makes them potent. The most telling moment on Rap Album Two is “The Single,” a chest-beating song he botches several times before scrapping. The title of the song and his inability to complete it best exemplify the album’s primary lesson: the pursuit of stardom can be punishing, both on mind and body.
Rap Album Two is easily the most fulfilling project Jonwayne has ever made loaded with the most thoughtful writing of his career. It isn’t just the gravity of subjects, it’s the carefulness with which he’s willing to examine them. Every candid, incredibly personal line contains some form of catharsis. Alcoholism drove him into isolation and loneliness only led to further self-sabotage. But this record is a triumph over that. These raps don’t just exist for posterity; they, too, are a part of the healing process. As Jonwayne rethinks his “order of operations,” he becomes closer to whole. | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The Order Label / Authors | February 27, 2017 | 7.6 | 2d3e6cd3-2913-4b3c-a993-429ed19a0cc0 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The long-delayed album captures Wayne how we want to remember him: openhearted, word-drunk, and exhilarated by the possibilities of his own voice. | The long-delayed album captures Wayne how we want to remember him: openhearted, word-drunk, and exhilarated by the possibilities of his own voice. | Lil Wayne: Tha Carter V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-wayne-tha-carter-v/ | Tha Carter V | We can only imagine what Tha Carter V might have sounded like in 2014 when Lil Wayne first announced it was finished. We’ll never know how many Trinidad James features that shelved draft of the album might have included, or what kind of play on “Blurred Lines” Wayne might have made, or which words he might have rhymed with Gotye. That album probably wouldn’t have been very good, and it almost certainly wouldn’t have been as rewarding or revealing as the belated final product that a humbled Wayne presented on his 36th birthday, after the four most trying years of his career.
Lil Wayne was already mired in a brutal slump when the bottom fell out. Overexposed and uninspired, he’d become so resigned to his dwindling relevance after years of repeating the same jokes that he’d even stopped calling himself the greatest rapper alive. Then, for reasons that still aren’t completely clear, his mentor and father figure, Birdman, turned on him, refusing to release the album and all but holding his career hostage amid bitter contractual disputes. The two reconciled this year, but the hurt and betrayal are harrowingly documented on 2015’s Sorry 4 the Wait II, the most impassioned of Wayne’s otherwise lifeless 2010s mixtapes.
Despite the toll those wilderness years took on him, it may have been for the best that Tha Carter V was delayed so long. It’s hard to imagine the rapper who’d released the dreadful I Am Not a Human Being II just a few months prior could have crafted an album this tactful and heartfelt. There’s a degree of quality control on Carter V that nobody could have expected from a 2018 Lil Wayne record, let alone a nearly 90-minute one.
Wayne is no longer the lunatic trailblazer of his ’00s mixtape run, a rapper who in a just a couple bars could summon a purplish reality where fish flew through the skies and pigeons swam in the ocean. It’s hard for that kind of Christopher Robin imagination to survive this deep into adulthood. But more than any release since 2009’s No Ceilings, Carter V captures Wayne how we want to remember him: openhearted, word-drunk, and exhilarated by the possibilities of his own voice. He dials back his most obnoxious tics: the overbearing Auto-Tune; the incessant dick jokes; that awful, forced cackle that grated exponentially more with every tired crack. And even his lamer quips pay off in unexpected, sometimes emotional ways. “Blunt big, big as Mama June off the diet plan/Smokin’ science lab/I should have a tattoo that say, ‘I’m not like my dad,’” he raps over a nervy Zaytoven beat on “Problems.”
Some of these tracks date back years, while others were reportedly finished just weeks ago. That could be a recipe for whiplash, but most of this material is woven together so seamlessly that its provenance is never a distraction. Nicki Minaj gives the most radiant R&B performance of her career on “Dark Side of the Moon,” and Kendrick Lamar brings Nicolas Cage–levels of insanity to his “Stan”-inspired spotlight turn on “Mona Lisa,” breaking out a dozen different voices as he dramatizes the breakdown of jealous boyfriend driven to the edge by his partner’s obsession with Weezy. Neither Wayne nor Kendrick let the song’s high concept get in the way of unbridled, ferocious rapping. On the more of-the-moment end of the spectrum, there’s “Don’t Cry,” an XXXTentacion feature that kicks off the album on a misleading, miserablist note, and “Let It Fly,” an undistinguished foray into Travis Scott’s boutique trap.
But unlike 2011’s relentlessly trend-chasing Tha Carter IV, on Carter V, Wayne finally gives himself permission to fall behind the times. The record is never more electric than when Wayne engages with his past, victoriously returning to lanes he’s conquered instead of fixating on all the newer ones he’ll never own. He reunites with Mannie Fresh on the riotously fun throwback “Start This Shit Off Right,” accompanied by Young Money’s resident lovable goofball Mack Maine and a heavenly hook from the queen of radio’s yesteryear, Ashanti. Swizz Beatz gets in on the nostalgia, too, adrenalizing his club jam “Uproar” with a hyped-up flip of G. Dep’s “Special Delivery.”
For as much as it’s been retooled over the last four years, one thing has remained the same since Tha Carter V was first announced: Its cover, a photo of a young Wayne with his mother, Jacida. She looms protectively over the entire album, tearfully narrating its opening track and filling in Wayne’s biography in interludes. She’s not the only woman in his life who plays a prominent role. His eldest daughter, Reginae, capably sells a bittersweet hook on “Famous,” and his ex-fiancée, Nivea graces, his redemption tale “Dope New Gospel.”
Their presence foreshadows the uncommonly personal tone of the album’s final stretch, especially the closer, “Let It All Work Out.” It shines new light on one of the tentpoles of Lil Wayne’s backstory: the self-inflicted gunshot wound he survived at age 12, which he’d always maintained was an accident. Now, he confirms, it wasn’t. “Too much was on my conscience to be smart about it/Too torn apart about it, I aim where my heart was pounding,” he raps. It’s a powerful reveal, one he in effect waited years to share until he had found the right happy ending to frame it around, and it closes the record on a breath-stopping note. The most surprising takeaway from Tha Carter V, it turns out, isn’t that Wayne still has music this vital in him. It’s that after all these years, there’s still more to learn about him. | 2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment / Republic | October 1, 2018 | 7.4 | 2d463e30-a5c0-4760-82ee-21cecb98dd2a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Capping off his breakout year, the D.C. rapper offers a deft album of soft synths and languid trap that further carves out his identity. | Capping off his breakout year, the D.C. rapper offers a deft album of soft synths and languid trap that further carves out his identity. | Shy Glizzy: Quiet Storm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shy-glizzy-quiet-storm/ | Quiet Storm | All the way through 2017, Shy Glizzy’s voice has been at the center of an unexpected Washington, D.C. rap hit. GoldLink’s “Crew” snowballed into a smash as the months warmed, and it’s Glizzy’s verse that cuts the song in half, interrupting an otherwise sinewy and droning R&B jam with a jumpy giddiness. The eager opening of his verse—“Hey! Nice to meet/I’m Young Jefe, who you be?”—is the type you brace for all along, the obvious “this is my favorite part” of one of the year’s happiest surprises. Of course, it wasn’t an introduction so much as a mainstream moment of arrival. Glizzy has been at or near the center of D.C. hip-hop since at least 2014, and “Crew” felt more like lending a hand than climbing a social ladder. But where GoldLink burrowed into D.C. music tradition for a statement album that blipped his city back into the mainstream hip-hop consciousness, Glizzy channels the pervasive sounds of Atlanta trap for his own contemporary D.C. soundtrack.
Glizzy’s latest mixtape, Quiet Storm, is an ambitious 18 songs, but he’s successfully designed it to glide by. Almost every beat is in a softly-synthed, languid trap style, and Glizzy is rarely as jumpy as he appears on “Crew.” Instead, he hosts the project as the center of attention, a pop artist with a full arsenal of graceful melody to match the tone. Go-to Atlanta producers like TM88, Goose, and Yung Lan dot the landscape with tracks that sound smooth but not slick, and often take shape out of minor key atmospherics. Glizzy uses the same sounds to channel opulent romance (“Blow a Bag”) and morbid existentialism (“Take Me Away”), sometimes on the same song. “Get Away” is a versatile escapist anthem: crime chase and sentimental runaway at once.
Glizzy has also rekindled his surefire working relationship with the Atlanta producer Zaytoven, whose keyboard twinkles on “One Day” might echo some of his previous productions (see Future’s “Peacoat”), but remain vital enough to appear on both this album and the producer’s own recent solo outing. For all the Atlanta stars Zaytoven’s beats have canvassed, Glizzy might treat them the best. He slips into the first verse with droning couplets and jumps out of the second to yelp out his bona fides. For the chorus, he churns hope into a mantra, promising and reminding himself of the purpose of his grind: “All my niggas gon’ ball one day.”
Besides the smartly streamlined curation of beats, Quiet Storm also folds in carefully doled out features: Trey Songz carries a swaggering hook on “Dope Boy Magic” and Dave East punches into “Get It Again” with a relentless string of brags. As the de facto leader and concentrated star power of the D.C. crew Glizzy Gang, Shy shares space with 3 Glizzy and 30 Glizzy on “Haters Anthem” for a track that greets envy with biting inspirationalism. But there’s a sour side here too. In September, 30 Glizzy was shot and killed in Baltimore, and his brief appearance on the Quiet Storm tracklist prefaces a heartfelt tribute at the end of the album. That closer, “Take Me Away,” is dangerously morose, edging into depressive suicidal thoughts as Glizzy caps off each chorus line with an open invitation for death. Glizzy sounds both like an open-wound and depressed shut-in here. “It’s a war started outside, don’t wanna talk about it,” he yelps. For all the giddiness Glizzy carries onto many of his songs, he’s never been more endearing than this, wallowing in justifiable street survivalism. More than ever, he sounds like the open heart of his city. | 2017-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | December 21, 2017 | 7.1 | 2d4d4972-800e-4da0-8aef-a344c37f47f1 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Prolific Bay Area band offers its latest album of jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody. | Prolific Bay Area band offers its latest album of jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody. | The Fresh & Onlys: Grey-Eyed Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13507-grey-eyed-girls/ | Grey-Eyed Girls | The Fresh & Onlys formed just last year in San Francisco, but they already boast more music to their name than most bands manage in twice that time. Over the course of a flurry of 7"s, a limited-edition cassette, and two full-length albums-- last spring's self-titled and now Grey-Eyed Girls-- you can hear the sound of a young band busily honing in on what they're good at. In case you weren't tipped off by their almost distractingly evocative band name (should we be thinking of the Only Ones, or the Young Fresh Fellows?), the Fresh & Onlys traffic in jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody. Their recordings are lovingly caked with crud, and their jams sometimes veer perilously close to derailing completely*,* which might seem to lump them in with other San Francisco psych revivalists like Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps. But the Fresh & Onlys are set apart by an endearingly fussy devotion to songcraft and an understated and unfakeable weirdness. Their self-titled record was fairly straightforward but satisfying garage rock; Grey-Eyed Girls is stranger and more interesting, toning down the swagger and finding a sweet spot somewhere in between uptempo brashness and the quirky vulnerability of Beat Happening.
If the Fresh & Onlys come off as more winsome than your average Nuggets fetishists, part of that might have something to do with their diffident rhythm section, which ensures that they wobble more often than they rock. "What's His Shadow Still Doing Here" is a classic piece of Buddy Holly yearning that drags and nearly trips over its own feet, gaining in poignancy and charm whatever it loses in a steady backbeat. "No Second Guessing", meanwhile, comes off like a handmade valentine straight from Calvin Johnson: "Be strong, be wise/ Don't ever question your place in my life," Tim Cohen warbles in his unsteady baritone. "Dude's Got a Tender Heart", for its part, is a bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold tale that echoes the Crystals' "He's a Rebel" over a tin-can approximation of girl-group pop: "You wouldn't know if you looked at him/ But dude's got a tender heart."
There are a handful of killer straight-ahead rave-ups as well: The spectacularly catchy "I'm Gonna Be Your Elevator" bops along on its "I'm gonna lift you up/ I'm gonna bring you down" chorus chant, while "D.Y." supplies the Yardbirds-style barn-burner. But the most intriguing numbers branch out into more wigged-out territory, like the B-movie paranoia of "Invisible Forces" or "Clowns (Took My Baby Away)", the title of which requires no further elucidation. These little weirdo touches help distinguish the Fresh & Onlys from their San Francisco brethren*,* and throughout Grey-Eyed Girls, their possibly unhealthy familiarity with garage-rock arcana is balanced out by a keen songwriter's eye, and their obsession with the past is elevated by genuine affection and love. | 2009-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | October 23, 2009 | 7.5 | 2d4fcd85-7e46-4a31-8b7a-d03e82365290 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
null | Boris' affinity for every variety of psychedelia has been unending, so it's no surprise they finally went and named a record *Smile*. They do so after a run of releases that's included hard noise freakouts (*Sun Baked Snow Cave*, with Merzbow), drug-caked and deadpan Motörhead take-offs (*Pink*), tepid five-blunt solos [*Altar*, with SunnO)))], and psych-sessions with Ghost's Michio Kurihara (*Rainbow*). Most of these recordings came in at least two versions-- Japanese, American, vinyl, CD, smoke signal, etc.-- and, in the case of *Dronevil Final*, a one stereophonic, two-soundsystem-requiring CD set. If you claim to like everything Boris have done in | Boris: Smile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11464-smile/ | Smile | Boris' affinity for every variety of psychedelia has been unending, so it's no surprise they finally went and named a record Smile. They do so after a run of releases that's included hard noise freakouts (Sun Baked Snow Cave, with Merzbow), drug-caked and deadpan Motörhead take-offs (Pink), tepid five-blunt solos [Altar, with SunnO)))], and psych-sessions with Ghost's Michio Kurihara (Rainbow). Most of these recordings came in at least two versions-- Japanese, American, vinyl, CD, smoke signal, etc.-- and, in the case of Dronevil Final, a one stereophonic, two-soundsystem-requiring CD set. If you claim to like everything Boris have done in their decade-plus run, let alone in the past three years, your tolerance for directionless, shapeless, and unending jam sessions is higher than mine.
My guess is the band probably doesn't lose much sleep over the quality or consistency of what they put out, but it was still dispiriting to hear Boris's Atsuo run down Pink in recent interviews. He now refers to the band's "cool rock" phase as boring, which is what I'd call the instrumental noise'n'drone suites the band drops on a maddeningly regular basis. No matter: the scuffed-up, scuzzed-out Pink will be their monument, whether they like it or not. Discovering what you're best at would be a thrill to most bands, but to Boris, it apparently felt like a burden, and so Smile is their exquisite-corpse sequel, a near-automatic exercise in drawing inspiration from anybody but themselves. For the Japanese version, the trio went so far as to leave the record behind with engineer and veteran of the Stars You Ishihara, who mixed and mastered it while the band was out of town.
Among those Smile nods toward: The U.S. version opens with a cover of a song by Kenji Sawada, of Pyg/Julie-renown; "Buzz-In" is named for the Melvins; another track, apparently, cops lyrics from Japanese band Anthem. A friend by the name of Aso wrote the excellently titled "You Were Holding An Umbrella", while Sunn0)))'s Stephen O'Malley plays on the record's final song. Kurihara guests throughout. The Japanese version could credibly have Ishihara's name on the cover, since his demented, scooped-out mixes bear little similarity to what Boris will call Smile in the U.S. There are, as expected, sublime moments on both, but it also seems as if these songs were simply the first eight that the prolific band wrote between one tour and the next.
A band named after a Melvins track wouldn't title a song "Buzz-In" lightly, and Boris' tribute begins with a squealing baby, who sings a little bit before the guitars ramp up. After that, the band charges in at its usual half-stoned, half-time boogie. That swagger-- playing from behind the beat-- is likely what's on Atsuo's mind when he talks about "cool rock," which "Buzz-In" most assuredly is; why anyone would avoid howling over guitars as finely distorted and oil-slicked as these is anyone's guess. "Laser Beam", a whisky-throated, spread-legs titan, dips so low in scuzz and feedback it could be a broken practice-session rehearsal, before a typically Boris pivot: The sound of a computer turning off or on, followed by the emphatically blank return of Takeshi's deadpan vocals. Veering into satire (welcome, for a band who appear to have no sense of humor beyond the name of their label/design firm, Fangs Anal Satan) is "Statement", on which the band breaks out both a cowbell and the "woo-woo" from "Sympathy for the Devil". "My Neighbor Satan" is one of those Boris warblers-- like Akuma no Uta's "Nothingness Song", say-- that sounds like it was written, mid voice-crack, by a 16-year-old boy. The untitled finale is an O'Malley collaboration, plus another shot at breaking out the wail, here mitigated by the droning weight of O'Malley's Stonehenge backline.
Those in the market for something truly unfathomable should seek out Smile's Japanese version. Beyond an entertainingly hollowed out "Statement", Ishihara leaves most of the other instrument sounds untreated-- all the better to scrape off your skin. This swarm-of-hornets sound suits a band that consistently hesitates just at it appears ready to turn loose. I also prefer Isihara's version of "No Ones Grieve", a The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked 2 outtake, which here dispenses with the ceremonial marching of the U.S. version for an undifferentiated, Comets on Fire feedback spray.
It takes a few listens just to sort out which song is which relative to the U.S. version. "My Neighbor Satan"-- subdued, crooning-- becomes, on the Japanese version, thick, layered: a Justin Broderick outtake, drenched in JAMC fuzz. The O'Malley duet, which ends both versions, is a noisier, more guitar-hero affair via Ishihara, whose instinct is to consistently pull out both extremes (melody, solo-y chaos) in the band's sound. It's a creative way of bluffing some unity from the record.
Boris are clearly proud to have made a record as schizophrenic as Smile, and I have no doubt their method helped them see all sorts of colors while making it. But the band may consider their fellow countrymen, Acid Mothers Temple, whose propensity to make ideally psychedelic but for all purposes identical records has, over time, sucked the surprise out of their ostensibly free-form vortex. It's no crime to make the same record twice when the alternative is making a different one, over and over and over again. | 2008-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Diwphalanx | May 2, 2008 | 6.4 | 2d556752-44bf-4401-a3de-85378ea13e6a | Pitchfork | null |
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On her newly reissued and expanded 2016 mixtape, Destiny Frasqueri—aka Princess Nokia—raps with granular detail about mysticism, childhood, and her native New York City. | On her newly reissued and expanded 2016 mixtape, Destiny Frasqueri—aka Princess Nokia—raps with granular detail about mysticism, childhood, and her native New York City. | Princess Nokia: 1992 Deluxe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/princess-nokia-1992-deluxe/ | 1992 Deluxe | Destiny Frasqueri, better known as the Afro-Nuyorican rapper Princess Nokia, has spent the past five years searching for her sound. In 2016, she released a nine-track mixtape called 1992, named for her birth year and the era when her native New York City held a gritty dominance over hip-hop. She has always been a rapper with her shoe on the throat of her doubters, but 1992 was decidedly tougher than 2014’s club music-laden Metallic Butterfly and the mélange of disco, funk, hip-hop, and Corinne Bailey Rae-style pop that makes up her 2015 project Honeysuckle, which she released as Destiny. For those who have been following Frasqueri since her 2012 track “Bitch, I’m Posh”—released under the moniker Wavy Spice—then perhaps 1992 is a shock. It’s a large leap from the posing-primed, vogue ball-inspired “Posh” to her recent rugged sound. But for the 25-year-old rapper, the tape was a realization and release of a lot that has been bubbling inside of her. On a broadcast of her internet radio show Smart Girl Club, she declared, “1992 freed my soul.”
Now with a reissue via Rough Trade that includes eight new tracks, the emotions of her autobiographical lyrics are even more palpable than before. She is open about her experiences in foster care, her coping mechanisms for feeling frightened and misunderstood, and the creative manifestations of abuse on new addition “Goth Kid”: “You make me sick, and all I was was just a kid/You picked a flaw in all I did and go and make me feel like shit... You have no clue to how I lived, in foster care, abused as kids… I was sleeping in the cemetery/Kind of cute, a little scary.” There is joy in skater brat anthem “Bart Simpson” and a wealth of pride for her gender-defiant style and “little titties and fat belly” on “Tomboy.” Describing that song’s video, Frasqueri says, “[It’s] me as Destiny in New York growing up in the city, being a skater, being a comic book head, being a rapper, and being a really androgynous kid.”
The sound of New York is occasionally absent on 1992—in moments, her Migos-like repetitive hooks and regionless hashtag punchlines move it somewhere a bit less rooted—but Frasqueri’s loved for the city never wanes. She sounds especially comfortable on the pulsating “Brujas,” which explores the Taíno and Yoruban mysticism brujería (or witchcraft) that she raps about her “Grandmas” practicing. On “Saggy Denim,” she and fellow NYC upstart Wiki head back in time to 1995 where one leg of Princess Nokia’s jeans are rolled up above her calf like LL Cool J used to do; she is jamming to Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and getting high to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. She excels in these daydreams, but “ABCs of New York” is where she sounds most at home. The lyrical details are granular—she relishes eating bodega food on her mom’s couch and warns of the NYPD’s warrant squads. It is less NYC 101 and more like a native New York vernacular that harkens back to the work of artists such as Big L. Princess Nokia’s voice catches in the back of her throat and her delivery is reminiscent of Fort Greene rapper Paula Perry’s mini-hit “Extra, Extra” produced by DJ Premier.
These similarities square Princess Nokia’s first strictly-rap project right into New York’s remarkable hip-hop lineage, but they also highlight 1992’s primary deficiency: the tinny, crackerjack production throughout. How would Frasqueri sound over classic New York beats by producers like Primo, the Alchemist, or RZA? The most exciting rap coming out of the city at the current moment is by women like Cardi B and Young M.A. If Frasqueri can find more experienced collaborators, she has the ability to transcend DIY tapes and festivals for sturdier money-makers (if that’s even something she wants). Princess Nokia’s done anime cosplay and has taken inspiration from Civil Rights-era funk, and although she’s said 1992 is her most authentic self, she has a lot of time and space to really find her sound. | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rough Trade | September 12, 2017 | 6.2 | 2d579ed1-3621-4842-902a-a293767f6e2c | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Brian Eno has done everything from producing huge pop stars to creating tiny art installations to touring with rock bands to inventing ambient music. Another Green World remains his definitive album. | Brian Eno has done everything from producing huge pop stars to creating tiny art installations to touring with rock bands to inventing ambient music. Another Green World remains his definitive album. | Brian Eno: Another Green World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22061-another-green-world/ | Another Green World | In July 1975, Brian Eno found himself a few days and several thousand dollars into a studio booking with nearly nothing to show for it.
It wasn’t that he had too few ideas, but too many. His first two solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), had reimagined glam rock as sound sculpture and established Eno not just as a practitioner of pop, but a theoretician of it: Someone whose music doubled as a blueprint for how music could be made. In interviews he came off as part drag courtesan and part professor emeritus, scissoring his legs in feathers and sequins while dishing about the thrills of aleatoric composition, shaping ideas few people had heard before into forms anyone could understand.
Jets and Tiger Mountain bookended a year—November 1973 to November 1974—during which Eno released three other, collaborative albums. By the end of 1975, he’d release at least two more, including something called Discreet Music, which pioneered the textured drift of what Eno later called “ambient.”
At the time he conceived of Discreet Music, just a few months before he found himself panicked on the studio floor, Eno was lying in a London hospital after being hit by a taxi. The story—a modern creation myth—goes that his girlfriend brought him an album of 18th-century harp music, which Eno was too weak to adjust the volume on, exposing him to a blurry, impressionistic convergence of music and light rainfall outside. What if, he thought, you could make music to be heard but not actively listened to? (Or, as Eno later formulated the challenge, music “as ignorable as it is interesting.”) [1]
Days earlier, he had been lying in the back of an ambulance, holding his head together with his own bloody hands. Most people who can’t turn their brains off consider it an affliction. Eno accepted it as a gift.
Eno, it should be said, had planned on going into the studio without a plan. As an art-school student, he’d fallen in love with Fluxus, a network of sculptors, musicians, performers, and thinkers who privileged the process of making work over the product. In 1968, he won a small school award for his performance of a George Brecht piece called “Drip Event,” whose score, in full, was “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into them.”
Eno, then 20, added instructions for the instruments to be ground down and cast into blocks of acrylic resin, which should be given to young children. “Now,” he stipulated, “the music begins.” Liberated by the idea that there are no right ways, only different ones, Eno performed the piece two more times, each one unrecognizable to the last. Recording, by extension, wasn’t the endpoint of composition but part of composition itself, the studio less a place of stenography than discovery.
But record companies don’t buy and sell processes, they buy and sell records. If Fluxus and other performance artists defied the reduction of art to an object, Eno’s ambition was to make records—concrete, immutable, physical records—that reflected process. Discreet Music’s 30-minute centerpiece, a loop of slow, feathery synthesizer tones, fades in at the beginning of the record and out at the end, as though to signal to the listener that whatever Discreet Music is—the physical record, the abstract composition—we’ve only witnessed part of it.
“I think I started about 35 pieces and some of ’em were real clutching at straws,” Eno told the NME in 1976, remembering the panic of his studio session. “But it’s interesting: Sometimes that kind of desperation gives rise to things that would never happen any other way.”
Unsure of what else to do, Eno started giving himself instructions. Swing the microphone from the ceiling was one. Hire a trombone was another. A year earlier, he and the artist Peter Schmidt developed a set of creative constraints that codified in a deck of cards they called “Oblique Strategies.” Part Fluxus exercise, part I Ching, part high-concept Tarot, the cards presented what Eno and Schmidt called “worthwhile dilemmas,” scenarios artists might pose to themselves while trying to squeeze through a difficult moment.
In the spirit of the endeavor, I have just drawn three cards at random. The first says “Look at a very small object, look at its center.” The next, “Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation.” The third “Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar.” If freedom is darkness, “Oblique Strategies” were a guide rail: You might not know where you were going but at least you could start to move.
The real challenge of the Strategies is having the faith to surrender to them. Throughout his 40-year career, which has included producing such marquee enterprises as U2, Talking Heads, and Coldplay, Eno has remained a voluntary amateur, someone who seems most engaged when he isn’t sure what will happen next. More than humor, more than work ethic, more than his ability to see and conceptualize in ways nobody had quite seen and conceptualized before, Eno’s greatest gift was his ability not only to find peace in uncertainty, but progress.
Not all Eno’s collaborators shared his sense of play. As told to Geeta Dayal in her book on the album, the bassist Percy Jones remembers him handing out sheets of paper on which musicians were asked to write numbers, which corresponded to a specific note, which Eno wanted them to play on beat with a metronome. Phil Collins—yes, “In the Air Tonight” Phil Collins, then the drummer of Genesis—got about 20 beats in before stopping to throw beer cans at a bicycle across the room. Eno often came home from the studio and cried, later calling the process “almost unmitigated hell.”
A couple of months later, they had a placid, reflective and unrepentantly beautiful album called Another Green World. Though usually lumped in with Eno’s other early “vocal” albums—Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), and 1977’s Before and After Science—only five of its 14 songs actually have singing. While Eno could’ve separated the vocal tracks from the instrumental ones, as David Bowie did a couple of years later on the Eno-assisted Low, he instead dispersed them at even intervals, lily pads of song between deeper seas. The effect is like slipping into and out of sleep while friends talk in the next room.
As a child, Eno had designed houses, blueprints, sketches for fantastical and improbable places, filled with labyrinths and secret passageways. Trees grew through the middle of rooms, streams ran indoors. *Another Green World *captures those rooms in sound. Instead of linear, narrative structures that move from A to B to C to convey development, songs like “The Big Ship” start on A and linger, accumulating countermelodies, magnifying themes, staying the same and yet revealing new sides with every turn. The effect is like seeing a two-dimensional image rise off the page and then slowly fall again.
In the absence of vocals, Eno’s approach, which he once called “vertical music,” becomes a metaphor for intimacy: With every second that the tracks unfold, you feel like you’re getting closer to the heart of something. That you never arrive doesn’t matter. The joy is in the passage. I’ve often felt like the most famous “Oblique Strategy,” “repetition is a form of change,” is as applicable to my best friendships or my marriage as it is to the creative process: When you see her face every day, the challenge becomes to notice something new.
Removing vocals—or at least diminishing their primacy—was Eno’s way of chipping at how we identify the “human” in music. Pop is a diaristic form: A voice telling you their story, seeking identification. In Another Green World, voices ricochet around the mix like people in a busy market (“Sky Saw”) or stumble in the margins, drunk and out of tune (“Golden Hours”). At certain points I get the strange sense that Eno is distracted by something happening at the window, just out of frame. He isn’t commanding the sound around him, he’s inhabiting it. He could just as well leave and everything would be the same.
Among Eno’s fascinations at the time was dub reggae, which was entering an enlightenment phase. “You get an album like, say, King Tubby Meets the Upsetter, where on the back of the album you get a picture of the consoles instead of the ‘stars’,” he said in a 1975 interview. The image—instead of the band, pictures of their equipment—articulated Eno’s developing attitude that musicians are only as important as the way they’re organized and processed. (One of Eno’s other big bang moments had been with “Come Out,” by the composer Steve Reich, a hypnotic piece in which two nearly identical tape loops of a human voice slowly fall out of phase with each other then slide back together—music whose effect depended entirely on the technology used to make it.)
The most remarkable thing about Another Green World, then, is how a stoic Englishman who showed no interest in the conventional expression of emotion managed to make something that feels so intensely personal.
Eno grew up in a small, parochial town in postwar England, the son of a third-generation mailman and a Catholic woman from Belgium. Aside from occasional streaks of melancholy, young life was steady and unremarkable. “My great debt to my parents is that they showed little interest in what I was doing,” he told People in 1982. His first love was doo-wop, the lunar reverberation of echo and percussive babble of backup singers, the uncanny mix of carnal yearning and pure naiveté, of lust without sex. (Talking to the writer Lester Bangs in 1979, he called it “music from nowhere.”)
The impact lingered. The daffy, nonsensical love poetry of “I’ll Come Running,” the sha-la-las of its backup singers. “Everything Merges With the Night,” which opens with the plaintive address to a girl named “Rosalie,” the talk of waiting all summer, all evening. You can see Eno on the corner outside her house under a halo of weird orange streetlight, picking up a pebble to toss at her window. Even some of Another Green World’s instrumental tracks, particularly “Becalmed” and “In Dark Trees,” have the eerie aura of something like Elvis’ “Blue Moon,” at once grounded and hovering three feet overhead.
Another Green World is not a happy record, nor is it sad. There are no demonstrations of personal triumph or failure, pain or elation, tension or release, desire or disappointment. The album’s most dazzling passage, the guitarist Robert Fripp’s solo on “St. Elmo’s Fire,” was made under Eno’s direction to replicate the display of a Wimshurst machine, a generator that creates lightning-like sparks that jump between two metal spheres. Set in the context of the song, a long walk between Eno and his companion “Brown Eyes,” the solo—electricity across the sky—becomes a point of shared beauty, something neither of them expected to see but that overtakes them both. This is the nature of Another Green World’s romance: Not what one person does or says for another, but the bond created between two people bearing witness to something bigger than both of them: Not love but wonder.
As someone who has frequently found themselves in states of deep peace only to have someone ask me if anything was wrong, Another Green World’s apparent neutrality has always been a lifeline to me. Of course, I don’t hear it as neutral—I hear it as ecstatically calm, an album that by some mysterious grace managed to climb just a few rungs higher on the tower and get a more sympathetic look at what it all means. Though self-consciously not a hippie, Eno seemed to understand that the real promise of psychedelic drugs wasn’t to push one’s thoughts into a new beyond but to restore them to a place they hadn’t been since childhood: Drifting but absorbed, naïve but curious, moving laterally, freely, safely. In doo-wop parlance, this was his slow dance with the universe.
“I read a science fiction story a long time ago where these people are exploring space and they finally find this habitable planet,” he said to the NME, reflecting on the album’s title. “And it turns out to be identical to Earth in every detail. And I thought that was the supreme irony: that they’d originally left to find something better and arrived in the end—which was actually the same place. Which is how I feel about myself. I’m always trying to project myself at a tangent and always seem eventually to arrive back at the same place.” In other words, here.
[1] “Most of the quotes and anecdotes in this piece came from either David Sheppard’s On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World, or interviews documented on Eno’s fansite.” | 2016-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island | September 18, 2016 | 10 | 2d5f2c9a-579a-4451-ae71-f60cc48f6ca0 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On their debut album, the Irish duo Bicep—founders of the blog-turned-party and label Feel My Bicep—offer a lean and consciously paced survey of UK dance sounds with hints of psychedelia. | On their debut album, the Irish duo Bicep—founders of the blog-turned-party and label Feel My Bicep—offer a lean and consciously paced survey of UK dance sounds with hints of psychedelia. | Bicep: Bicep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bicep-bicep/ | Bicep | The Irish DJ duo of Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, aka Bicep, have always had their hands directly on the pulse of the party. Since rising nearly a decade ago with their infamous Feel My Bicep blog-turned-party and record label, they’ve trotted the globe with their own ecstatic sound. Spanning styles like house, techno, disco, and jungle, Bicep are unbeholden to specific rhythms, scenes, or eras. Instead, their M.O. boils down to big moments in clubs. On their own tracks, they favor a boomy low-end balanced with a keen sense of melody, resulting in a range of dancefloor bombs—from notorious edits of forgotten 1990s classics to futuristic, crystalline anthems.
Bicep are most easily bracketed under the house umbrella, but many of their tracks don’t adhere to the style’s typical 4/4 pulse. Instead, Bicep favor uptempo jungle breaks, bumping 808 electro and hip-hop beats, and grinding disco rhythms. Their eponymous debut album is a varied document drawing on the rich history and variety of UK dance music, updated with sleek, modern sounds, vibrant psychedelic textures, and impeccable production.
At every turn, the melodies on Bicep display a grandiose shimmer. Opener “Orca” floats on a sun-dappled pool; its fluttering chords feel weightless as the even kick drum meets a crunchy breakbeat, providing a propulsive churn. A barely-there voice fractures and spreads across the sonic field, giving “Orca” a sense of psychedelia that sets the tone for the rest of an album that bounces and flutters like a summery wind. The dewey synths on “Ayaya” hang in the air and cascade over one another, while the syncopated rhythms on “Ayr” glide like ice. Even with such an immediate sound, Bicep strive for awe-inspiring cinematics in their design, with subtle flourishes that wow as they draw a smile across your face.
The punchy highlight “Rain” recalls recent Four Tet singles, sneaking in a gorgeous Indian vocal beneath a sharp garage house beat, but Bicep enhance the formula with reverberant effects and a meticulously detailed mix. “Glue” offers a satisfying bit of smoked-out jungle, slowed to a more modest house tempo, but across its short four-and-a-half minutes, the track doesn’t transport listeners as convincingly as some of the jungle epics that inspire it. On “Vale,” Bicep veer into a more commercial lane, with washed out vocals and fuzzy bass connecting for a moody anthem in the vein of Disclosure. (It sounds like a deeper and more restrained update to their “You & Me” remix from 2013.)
Bicep’s expansive production and compact song-lengths often lack the transportive and hypnotic potential that the best dance music offers. But it succeeds as a lean and consciously paced album. The strength of Bicep, as DJs, is their intuitive ability to structure songs into digestible morsels—with steady builds, bridges, and breakdowns—and it reflects in their arrangements here. This debut offers a crystal-clear view into the grooves that have captivated Ferguson and McBriar as their DJ careers have launched them into the upper echelon of dance music: shimmering, dramatic melodies, barreling breaks, and booming kicks that ensure their tunes are as hard-hitting as they are fun. | 2017-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | August 30, 2017 | 7.4 | 2d610fad-f20e-436e-9831-98ddebe43807 | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | null |
The second EP from London producer Murlo is competent but bland. It feels like a document from dance music’s recent past, proof enough that the post-club sound is becoming stale. | The second EP from London producer Murlo is competent but bland. It feels like a document from dance music’s recent past, proof enough that the post-club sound is becoming stale. | Murlo: Club Coil EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23292-club-coil-ep/ | Club Coil EP | There is something decidedly untimely about Murlo’s Club Coil. There’s its dystopian, digitally rendered urban landscape of an album cover; its collection of sleek, “post-club” tunes; its obligatory features from a smoky vocalist. These are all elements of dance music that might’ve been rather au courant, if not forward looking, five years ago. The second EP from the London producer/DJ Murlo (aka Chris Pell) sounds and feels like a document from an era of dance music that’s come to a close.
Pell was one of a crop of DJs that emerged earlier in the decade when slippery, amorphous electronic music was coming into prominence. What made the music of Pell and DJs in his peer group (Kingdom, L-Vis 1990) arresting at the time was how it offered a peek into a future of pop that was cybertronic, gaudy, ambitious, and in-your-face. In some respects, that sound did successfully seep into pop music: Kingdom’s collaborations with mainstream artists like SZA and Syd show that this style of music has been influential. But there are limits to what one can do with a toolbox of frigid synths, dark atmospheres, and disconcerting drums. Club Coil is proof enough that the post-club sound is becoming stale, in need of a dose of inspiration.
On Club Coil, Murlo reveals how shallow the standard formula for this particular kind of dance music is. He works at the intersection of many genres—making a fusion restaurant’s equivalent of dance music—by sprinkling bits of grime, dancehall, soca, and UK funky into his productions. In practice, this often equals shuffling synths and booming bass and plenty of snapping kickdrums. His songs are all neat and tightly organized—but they’re exceedingly bland, or at the very least inoffensive. Take, for example, the opening track “Coil.” On its surface the song is extremely competent: it bears a legible arc, its synth and bass sounds are crisp and well designed, and it has little moments of fright and simulated emotion that come from burping horns and thick drum rolls. But you’d be hard pressed to say any one part of the song was affecting—it’s too safe to elicit any feeling other than mild head nodding.
And this feeling of middle-of-the-road production is especially evident in the vocal collaborations with Gemma Dunleavy. Like Murlo, Dunleavy’s style lacks its own identity. Rather, both Murlo’s production and Dunleavy’s singing can feel like an assemblage of recognizable parts borrowed from other artists. Even if done well, it doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting listening experience.
For example, “I Need”—the strongest of their two collaborations—contains a mix of chiptune sounds, precise percussion, and interesting vocal effects, offering a sense that the song is glossy and thoughtful. But Dunleavy’s singing, while pleasing, is hardly moving; it never goes beyond or below expectation. “I Need” is a highlight of the EP, but it unfortunately illustrates what makes Club Coil such an inessential record. Murlo and Dunleavy are contended to play it safe—her vocals are just brassy enough to make for a diluted impression of singers like Dawn Richard or Kelela, while his production is just clean enough to be a passable approximation of Kingdom’s frigid dance songs or AlunaGeorge’s pop house. While it is maybe too much to expect any one artist to reinvent the wheel they’ve been given, Club Coil sounds so much like a plethora of other things that it comes over like the album equivalent of paint-by-numbers. | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mixpak | June 12, 2017 | 5.9 | 2d666e6e-013e-4dc7-9cf0-6313e219a09c | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
This live document of a sweaty performance from drone-rock outfit Moon Duo in Ravenna features the first time the band's played as a trio, with John Jeffrey furiously hammering on the same beat for upwards of 10 minutes at a time. You can feel all that sweat and humidity dripping off this recording, which corrodes the skillfully sculpted fuzz and laser-like rhythmic precision of their studio albums with enough grease and grime to constitute a fire hazard. | This live document of a sweaty performance from drone-rock outfit Moon Duo in Ravenna features the first time the band's played as a trio, with John Jeffrey furiously hammering on the same beat for upwards of 10 minutes at a time. You can feel all that sweat and humidity dripping off this recording, which corrodes the skillfully sculpted fuzz and laser-like rhythmic precision of their studio albums with enough grease and grime to constitute a fire hazard. | Moon Duo: Live in Ravenna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19654-moon-duo-live-in-ravenna/ | Live in Ravenna | Like their mothership act Wooden Shjips, drone-rock outfit Moon Duo—aka Shijps builder Ripley Johnson and musical/romantic partner Sanae Yamada—are not ones for dramatic dynamic variation. They instantly set a psychedelic scene and then spend the next several minutes retracing it, until all the lines blur into a sound that’s constantly morphing and hypnotically static at the same time. However, for this new, limited-edition live album, the duo effect a change that, if not radically reorienting their core aesthetic, at least turns their very band name into one big typo.
While Johnson and Yamada’s job descriptions respectively bill them as singer/guitarist and keyboardist, Moon Duo’s recordings to date have deployed drum machines to bolster their motorik momentum. However, their summer 2013 trek through Europe marked the first time they lugged a proper kit on tour and enlisted a full-time stickman, John Jeffrey, who, following a recommendation from the band’s manager, was hired without so much as a single audition. Of course, it helps that Moon Duo aren’t the sort of band to trouble budding percussionists with complex arrangements or tricky cues to remember. But the show documented here presented Jeffrey with a trial by fire all the same—by having him furiously hammer on the same beat for upwards of 10 minutes at a time in the thick of what was apparently a brutal heat wave. (And even though the Ravenna show was performed at an outdoor beachside stage as opposed to a claustrophobic club, the stifling temperature still prompts Johnson to make a mid-set plea for towels.)
You can feel all that sweat and humidity dripping off this recording, which corrodes the skillfully sculpted fuzz and laser-like rhythmic precision of their studio albums with enough grease and grime to constitute a fire hazard. And with Jeffrey’s imposing kick-drum thump and chain-whipped, tambourine-rattled backbeats added to mix, Moon Duo feel come off less like the blissed-out soundtrack for melting into your rec-room shag carpet than a gang of toughs ready to start a rumble on an overcrowded dancefloor. The big-boom effect also illuminates how Moon Duo savvily update the influence of their canonical psych-punk forbears: the beefier versions of “Mazes”, “I Been Gone”, and “Goners” refashion the Spacemen 3 as the ultimate go-go party band; “Free Action” reroutes Suicide’s “Rocket USA” into a foot-stomped heartland hoedown.
Aside from that last track—which gets distended to double the length of the version heard on 2012’s Circles—Live in Ravenna surprisingly doesn’t stretch Moon Duo’s hypno-rock rave-ups too far beyond their original parameters, nor does it yield any significant rethinks of the material. So, on top of capturing the band at an intriguing new phase of their evolution, Live in Ravenna effectively functions as a handy, compact compilation of Moon Duo’s three albums to date (if underscoring their uniform vibe). For more casual trippers, this could be all the Moon Duo you need—but don’t sleep on the digital-only bonus track, “Set It On Fire”, which caps off this hot August night with an incendiary collision of Fun House fuzz and “Tomorrow Never Knows” drum rolls that makes you hope an official rebranding into Moon Trio isn’t too far off. | 2014-09-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | September 3, 2014 | 7.4 | 2d71747d-96ab-4580-86a6-563ede49b3a8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On their latest collaboration, the Detroit rapper and the Beverly Hills producer turn out one of the year’s most immersive rap albums. | On their latest collaboration, the Detroit rapper and the Beverly Hills producer turn out one of the year’s most immersive rap albums. | Boldy James: The Price of Tea in China | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-the-price-of-tea-in-china/ | The Price of Tea in China | The chronically overlooked Detroit rapper Boldy James has been making excellent street rap for a decade. His 2011 mixtape, Trappers Alley: Pros and Cons, sprawls across 28 tracks and improbably holds attention with quick cuts in mood and tempo. Boldy fits into a broad idea of his city’s grimy rap lineage, but owes little to the stylistic trends that have emerged from there in the 2010s—you will find in him little of Doughboyz Cashout’s manic dread or Danny Brown’s eccentricity. While the 2015 Trapper’s Alley sequel and his 2017 mixtape House of Blues dabbled in faster, more maximalist production, he works best when he works methodically, finding crevices in a skeletal frame.
Boldy writes without show, in short vignettes or standalone thoughts. Ninety seconds into The Price of Tea in China, his excellent new album with the producer Alchemist, he recalls his grandmother “cussin’ me out/‘Quit running in and out the house/What’s all the fuss about? It’s either cut me in or cut it out.’” His verses build tension slowly and resist the urge toward melodrama or moralizing; his voice is deep enough to project menace or instill calm without ever seeming to strain or slide out of pocket. Having worked twice before with Alchemist, this is familiar ground—or as familiar as Alchemist’s beats can ever be, as they molt from lush to serrated. Boldy responds by delivering what is one of the best, most immersive rap albums of the year so far.
As underground rap producers go, the Beverly Hills-bred Alchemist is this century’s great album-length auteur. He reinvigorated the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy’s career with 2007’s minor masterpiece Return of the Mac. He was responsible for Curren$y’s 2011 Covert Coup, one of the prolific New Orleans rapper’s most celebrated releases. Boldy and Alchemist teamed up in 2013 for the well-received My 1st Chemistry Set, and again last year for the brief Boldface EP. Even as the economic (dis)incentives for sampling keep mutating, Alchemist crate-digs aggressively, turning out fascinatingly textured, sample-based records at a daunting rate.
On China his beats vary from the vaguely wistful (“Pinto”) to the skull-rattling (“Giant Slide”); some songs sound like slow creeps through mud (“Mustard”) and others recall the rhythmic creaking of a hotel bed frame (“Run-Ins”). Crucially, they make space for Boldy, who raps here with a disarming poise whether he’s quipping that a rival crew’s members “look like a boy band” or dispensing quasi-military wisdom like “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” His voice at times recalls the Gary native Freddie Gibbs, who appears here on “S.N.O.R.T.” But where Gibbs likes to lapse into quick, technical passages of double-time (he does so here), Boldy centers himself at a midtempo, giving his verses a complexity that emerges only on repeat listens.
For a lesser writer or vocalist, that might be a recipe for dry songs, but China is mesmerizing in its minimalism. His near-metronomic control also means that, when Boldy for once turns to a more ostentatious style—the extraordinary Vince Staples duet “Surf & Turf,” where he raps entirely in a cascading, tightly wound meter—it doubles as a reminder of the careful construction elsewhere.
Boldy’s verses are webs of evocative detail: jail tats that linger from teenage years, insomniac drives down to Kentucky, gloved hands clutching guns, dealers huddled outside in Nike tech fabrics, a son who thinks his road-tripping dad doesn’t love him, Pyrexes full of dope that looks like oatmeal, stolen pills to salve a grandmother’s throat cancer, cars set to cruise control to eliminate variables, half-kilos of coke stuffed under mattresses like grain in a silo. These fragmented scenes are littered with enough Detroit street names that you become sure you could find the Citgo or Kroger in question. In fact, the bulk of China is so richly specific that Boldy earns the latitude to yada-yada an entire murder, to chilling effect. On “Giant Slide,” he wraps up a man’s story like this: “Now he out in Memphis, Tenn., future looking bleak/It took a week, but when they caught up to him, he got put to sleep.”
The Price of Tea in China is not a creative breakthrough marked by a new production palette or a leap in writing style. It’s the result of two superb technicians slowly whittling away the excess material from what was already a singular sound. It opens with an isolated piano and no drums and ends with what sounds like a villain’s theme from a B-movie mafia thriller; its great trick is to be so expertly crafted that you scarcely notice the jaw-clenching stakes until it’s already too late. | 2020-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ALC | February 24, 2020 | 8 | 2d72f180-bd52-418c-9d3d-d7ce4efd0b85 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
With his fifth album since 2007, dance producer Matt Cutler has released his most complete statement: Each track on Galaxy Garden is a maximalist marvel in minimalist disguise. | With his fifth album since 2007, dance producer Matt Cutler has released his most complete statement: Each track on Galaxy Garden is a maximalist marvel in minimalist disguise. | Lone: Galaxy Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16578-galaxy-garden/ | Galaxy Garden | Matt "Lone" Cutler is the best neo-rave producer out there. Give or take Rustie, he may be the best dance producer to make a name in the last five years, period. And Galaxy Garden, the fifth Lone album since 2007, is a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.
Each track on Galaxy Garden is a four- or five-minute maximalist marvel in minimalist disguise. Always direct and propulsive, as if racing forward without the time to stop and admire their own brilliant detail work, Lone tracks still manage to juggle three or six or 10 layers of rhythm with disarming skill. One beat alone may be constructed from footwork-like kick barrages, clattering retro drum machines, wild hand percussion loops, and chimes and bells that accent the already intricate groove science.
Even at his "simplest," like the clank-clonk of "Cthulhu", which echoes the spare programming of late drum and bass, Cutler swirls all sorts of glittering rhythm baubles around the main beat. Because why risk boredom when you can go all-out? Like the best young dance producers of the moment, happily embracing abundance after years of miserly dance minimalism, Cutler's attitude seems to be that more is always better, provided it doesn't fuck up the groove.
And then there's the magic Cutler works on top of those grooves, a spell of simple heart-tugging melodies, show-off instrumental virtuosity, and pure sound effect pyrotechnics. As if constructing such head-wrecking beats was no big deal, he then attempts to throw in everything else he can, whether it's warm Detroit synth washes, plangent guitar licks, prog-like keyboard runs, hardcore synth stabs that trigger both nostalgia and an adrenalin rush, or all of them at once. "The Animal Pattern" is anchored by a silly bouncing ball of a keyboard pattern, guaranteed to produce grins. It's a good enough hook to carry someone else's whole track, but that doesn't stop Cutler from including spasms of acid house, delicate Kraftwerk-like runs, and whooshes like cartoon spacecraft taking off.
What's amazing is that, despite their density, Lone tracks never splutter out into headache-inducing clutter. I'm guessing that's because Cutler has fixed on certain operating principles of old-school rave as much as the sound itself. He understands the way the best rave producers managed to combine so many paradoxical ideas about form and intent into single tracks.
So, sure, Cutler can expertly echo certain precise moments from rave's past, intentionally or not, like the way "As a Child" recalls both the tape-warp wooziness of Bodysnatch's "Secret Summer Fantasy" and the idyllic guitar loop of DJ Die's "Autumn". But those are two reference points you're hardly required to know in order to enjoy the track, maybe two reference points Cutler didn't even have in mind. Because forget historical fidelity for a minute: What really links Galaxy Garden to that early-1990s golden age is the way it manages to be both manic and chill, overstuffed with ideas and viscerally direct, relentlessly uplifting and never drippy about it.
Most millennial neo-ravers were barely eating solid food when acts like Orbital were cutting their first ecstatic singles. As Simon Reynolds noted in his "Maximal Nation" essay, they'd come of age with the starkness of dance-punk, the gloom of early dubstep, the grimness of "serious" European techno. So maybe this youthful revolt-- rediscovering the neon surfaces, speedy beats, and throw-in-as-many-hooks-as-you-can pop thrills of late-1980s and early-90s dance music-- wasn't so surprising. Kids gotta go against the dominant culture, after all. And after a decade spent exploring thousand shades of darkness, this overturning of values was wonderful, like waking up one day to sunshine after a week of shitty weather.
But once you got over the surprise, that this music had not been stricken from dance history after all, it was hard not to hear something dry and academic and forced in a lot of the new stuff. There was a certain irony there, given that early rave was all about vitality and immediacy, as if this wave of rave reverence had drained the sound of some essence. There was also the nagging question of whether these neo-rave records offered anything new, any 21st-century twists to make them stand out from the records they paid tribute to.
Cutler is in his late 20s, not really a kid anymore, and so he probably has vague memories of this music playing itself out in real time. But anyone can easily download the whole of rave history now, become a scholar without having been there at all. Part of what makes Galaxy Garden unique, in a scene that's quickly become glutted, is its simultaneous sensitivity to particular old-school sonics and an interest in everything that's come after.
Mostly this now-ness surfaces in the rhythms. There are groove ideas here that never would have occurred to a producer in 1991, either because the technology wasn't quite there yet or beats had yet to be twisted in those particular ways. Which is a little funny, because for his first few doggedly downtempo albums, melody was Lone's strong suit, not rhythm. And yet, after a few years making excellent if not particularly noteworthy homages to Boards of Canada, something in Cutler's music opened up once he rediscovered that early rave and techno really moved him. This is not the way things usually go with retro-minded artists, who are often so obsessed with mimicking each period detail of their heroes' work that the results wind up sounding pinched and inhibited. By focusing on the music he loved, however old it was, and keeping tabs on the present, Cutler could become more himself.
I'm usually wary of making the kind sweeping pronouncements about an artist's value found in that first paragraph, but in Lone's case, uncomplicated enthusiasm seems like the appropriate response. Lone's music is obviously complex, especially once you get past the overwhelming brightness of its outer layers and the rush of the tempo. But like the music made by his rave and techno heroes, Galaxy Garden is celebratory stuff. Mostly it seems to be celebrating the simple luck of being alive, of getting to make music designed to bring people together rather than bum them out. | 2012-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | May 9, 2012 | 8.2 | 2d749b77-3b73-4cb7-8ba5-f914883ffe97 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
You might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house from the house legend Moodymann. But his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results. | You might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house from the house legend Moodymann. But his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results. | Moodymann: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21580-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Despite a dance music career now stretching into its third decade, it’s rare for the man born Kenny Dixon, Jr. to grant an interview. But in 2010, Moodymann sat down for a now-legendary talk with the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the bon mots he drops across its two hours are legion—"My bitches and my hoes is my MPCs, my SP-1200, my bass, my keyboards"; "Detroit is a dying city; well, I’m going to die with that motherfucker"; "Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas"—whoever watched the video came away with only one image: The entourage of African-American women who walk in with him and twist his unruly afro into braids onstage and then pass Hennessy around to the audience.
This strategy of misdirection has cemented Dixon’s legacy in house music while also keeping his mystery intact. I’ve seen him DJ with a black veil over his face or else a hoodie pulled tight, keeping attention off of him. A set of disco and house can easily veer into White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana before swerving back. The cover of 2014’s self-titled album portrayed him as a house slipper-wearing, Solo cup-swigging layabout while the music within slyly touched on heartbreak and urban decay. With his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, one might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house, but Dixon confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.
Whether he alights on underground hip-hop (Dopehead), vocodered soul (Talc), quiet storm psychedelia, or skittering, looping grooves (Jitwam), Moody moves at a flâneur’s pace, easeful yet determinedly at his own leisure and meter. Beats might never accelerate beyond headnod speeds, but Moodymann continually changes up the drums: crisp snares drop into swinging hi-hat patterns, Brazilian congas into Rich Medina’s kickdrums back into smoky downtempo, with fellow Detroit producer Andrés’ contribution adding a Latin flare to the mix. The first half posits an alternate history of 21st century soul and R&B: Passing over well-known acts, he finds jewels in the shadows, like the Pied Pipers’ remix of "Can’t Hold Back" and Julien Dyne’s "Stained Glass Fresh Frozen," and places them alongside tracks by Flying Lotus and Jai Paul.
It’s 16 tracks in before the BPMs enter disco territory, with Rodney Hunter’s "Uptown Tricks" remix of the Fort Knox Five. But not even two minutes later, that momentum veers into the solemn solo guitar of José González, who sings "we’ll remain after everything’s been washed away." From there, Moodymann picks it back up, from the quickening future jazz of "Tag Team Triangle" to the deep house of Joeski, and where other producers might lose or confuse a crowd with such temperamental switches, Moodymann holds us calmly in the palm of his hand. Who else would suss out a Kings of Tomorrow track from 2013 (stuck on a CDR promo no less), some 20 years after their '90s heyday, to push the mix to its ecstatic peak? But that’s exactly what he does on "Fall for You."
He again deviates from trajectory for a dramatic, beatless reading of Anne Clark’s "Our Darkness." For Detroiters who grew up on legendary radio jockey the Electrifying Mojo, this proto-techno spoken word track is a classic, the type of brooding synth-pop track (what you’d now deem darkwave) that in the early '80s music blurred the color lines on the dancefloor. Dropping a live, piano-only version here, Moody harkens back to his Detroit roots, and Clark’s lines about "[an] idealistic assurance that…we'd keep our heads above the blackened water/ But there's no room for ideals in this mechanical place" are particularly resonant. Clark’s song rails against detachment as a means for surviving in the modern era, of keeping ideals intact in the face of insurmountable odds. It might sound like an outlier in the mix, but it doubles as Dixon Jr.’s own outlook. "I am not the hottest motherfucking DJ in the world," is how Moody put it during his RBMA lecture. "I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world, but what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables." | 2016-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | !K7 | February 17, 2016 | 8.4 | 2d782991-e3e7-4000-aae2-eeb39c8bb4f9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Off That Loud is billed as DJ Spinn's first EP for Hyperdub, but the footwork producer and Teklife co-founder with the late DJ Rashad has been recording for decades, with or without his name on the title. On his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, Spinn finally takes center stage. | Off That Loud is billed as DJ Spinn's first EP for Hyperdub, but the footwork producer and Teklife co-founder with the late DJ Rashad has been recording for decades, with or without his name on the title. On his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, Spinn finally takes center stage. | DJ Spinn: Off That Loud EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21018-off-that-loud-ep/ | Off That Loud EP | Off That Loud is billed as as the first EP for Hyperdub from DJ Spinn, but this designation obscures the footwork producer's long history in the Chicago underground electronic scene. Spinn, born Morris Harper, has been pressing energetic, beguiling footwork onto record for decades, even if only a fraction of those releases have featured his name on the title. Back in the '90s, he dropped tracks on cassette with longtime collaborator and Teklife co-founder, the late DJ Rashad. He squeezed through the closing doors of vaunted ghetto house label Dance Mania before it shuttered in the early '00s, releasing a raw, crackling track in 1998 called "Mutha Fuc*a" that Dance Mania misattributed to DJ Thadz. He also had a hand in eight of the 14 songs on Rashad's masterpiece, 2013's Double Cup, and this year alone appeared on a slew of Teklife and Rashad-related releases.
Spinn's lack of marquee status often seems due to his eagerness to work with others, but he finally takes center stage on Off That Loud. It's his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, and the EP comes during a particularly rich year for footwork. Massive opener "Throw It Back" delivers megaton drops between scorching acid synths and sprightly, rapid-fire kicks. Footwork remains a niche concern—Planet Mu honcho Mike Paradinas recently told Dummy Magazine footwork albums sell so poorly he can only afford to drop two a year—but "Throw It Back" could chameleon its way onto a playlist of arena-sized EDM songs as easily as it could provide a soundtrack for dancers facing off at Battlegroundz on Chicago's South Side.
Spinn handles two of the EP's four tracks on his own—"The Future Is Now", with its cross-stitching rhythms, is the hardest of the four, and the title track marries rich Rhodes organ with sputtering vocal samples and twitching patterns of percussion. But the best of the bunch is a tune Spinn made with Rashad, the previously released "Dubby", which showcases the pair's penchant for experimentation while keeping footwork grounded in its idiosyncratic pulse. Spinn and Rashad marry jungle breaks to footwork's syncopated drum and bass, and then pass the mic to Danny Brown, who raps: "I don't know 'bout where you from but this is how my hood work." Brown's squawk has colored downtrodden tales about growing up in Detroit, but he sounds utterly at home on "Dubby". As Spinn adeptly blends foreign sounds into a distinctly Chicago genre, Off That Loud shows his ability to help footwork thrive outside its birthplace. Spinn earned his veteran bona fides years ago, but Off That Loud feels like a new beginning. | 2015-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 13, 2015 | 7.3 | 2d78d0d9-6ad1-44ea-abd5-47b9f5f9ce54 | Leor Galil | https://pitchfork.com/staff/leor-galil/ | null |
Chances are, the first time you heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, it sounded damned unique. No, the fat beats and ... | Chances are, the first time you heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, it sounded damned unique. No, the fat beats and ... | DJ Shadow: The Private Press | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2373-the-private-press/ | The Private Press | Chances are, the first time you heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, it sounded damned unique. No, the fat beats and the goofy samples and the wickedy-wicky weren't anything new, even back in those halcyon days of '96, but the idea of fat beats and goofy samples and wickedy-wicky on an album bereft of some sucka MC's verbal gymnastics-- that, friends, was gold. Instrumental hip-hop, of course, was no more radical an idea back then than it is now; but for many of us young wannabes and poseurs, Endtroducing was the first time we'd ever heard anything quite like it.
And even if the concept wasn't just out of the box, the freaky melange of John Carpenter soundtracks and visceral, pounding punk beats in a hip-hop environment most certainly was. So, DJ Shadow may not have invented instrumental hip-hop, but he did sound a revolution with it. And now, six years, two mix records with Cut Chemist and a handful of UNKLE remixes later, here we all sit at our little terminals wondering if Mr. Josh Davis is capable of doing it all over again.
But The Private Press is being dropped into a market vastly different than the one that gave birth to its predecessor. Ninja Tune, Mo'Wax and other like-minded labels have spent the last half-decade slowly and laboriously digging a grave in which to bury the beats-and-samples formula. Which might explain why-- despite its fair share of fat beats, goofy samples and wickedy-wicky-- The Private Press will not go down in history as the record that brought electronic music out of its state of imminent peril.
After an irritating introductory segment in which some woman who's probably dead now recites a written letter to a friend (the record is littered with these skit-like clips, and though some are mildly entertaining, they tend to detract from the real deal), the album opens up for real with "Fixed Income," a fine-enough instrumental hip-hop retread that leaves little impression after it's clicked over to "Walkie Talkie," where things lighten up a bit. Built from a harsh drumbeat and a few alternating samples-- a man bellowing "I'm a bad muthafuckin' DJ," a woman proclaiming, "This is why I walk and talk this way," and the now-ubiquitous cry of "SUCKA!"-- the groove on "Walkie Talkie" is seriously tight (even 'dope,' if you so dare), despite its too-quirky, scratched-upon boasting.
Up until now, The Private Press has resided in the comfortable niche chiseled out by Endtroducing, albeit with a less darkly atmospheric bent. But the record's also got its fair share of tracks that sound nothing like Shadow's previous endeavors; alongside the familiar sounding cuts, new directions abound: on "Six Days," a soulful R&B; crooner tears off close to a week's worth of page-a-days, lamenting with each that, "Tommorow never comes until it's too late." This 007-esque sentiment is set to hand drums and organ washes that wouldn't sound out of place on a pitched-down Can record. "Right Thing/GDMFSOB" infuses the standard Shadow routine with a hint of electro, replacing some of the trademark live-sounding drumming with cheesy machines, and looping a nicely staggered vocal to fit the beat.
"Monosylabik" heads a bit further down this path, matching a vocal sample and drenched-in-delay drums with buzzing synths and bumping bass. "Mashin' on the Motorway" is a short but sweet tip of the hat to road rage, "Grand Theft Auto III," and those reckless driving songs rebelliously churned out in the 1950s. Angry drivers serenade Lateef the Truth Speaker (of the Quannum Projects duo Latyrx) with horn honks and swears as he ponders the slow-moving fiends surrounding him ("I tell 'em move over/ This road ain't big enough for ya/ I'm flying like Knight Rider/ They tryin' to keep up with they Grandma beside em'/ 'Sides, maybe his steel-belted radials are expired/ Maybe they tired/ Maybe their odometer needs to be rewired"), the whole thing escalating until it crashes and detonates like a hundred-car pile-up.
Next up is "Blood on the Motorway," a comparatively slow, meditative reaction. Spoken word ruminations about death fall over simple piano chords, chimes and bad 80s synths, the relative corniness of which I could tolerate were it not for the hair-metal balladeering that comes with it. At one point, the vocalist repeats the phrase "let the laughter..." three times before he manages to get to what he wants us to allow the laughter to do. Personally, the melodramatic delivery of such underwhelming lines as, "Your eyes will not close/ Your tongue barely speaks/ But I can still feel you," over an electro-synth arpeggio isn't exactly my cup of tea. Still, I appreciate Shadow's attempt to take a different approach, even if I don't care for the execution. Besides, the song does eventually resolve itself with a hot instrumental charge headed by a tight-as-can-be breakbeat, so I suppose nothing's lost... er, except any unhealthily harbored expectations of perfection.
Shadow closes the album with a song called "You Can't Go Home Again." The title fits: though he makes a point of referencing styles and techniques from his breakthrough debut, he's clearly most interested in forward-thinking sounds. Like watching live improvisation, the results aren't always perfect, but you feel part of the process; the relative success of the whole takes a back seat to the art of trying.
It's better this way, anyhow. It would, after all, be a sad thing if Shadow took a sad shot at Xeroxing his debut. But what would be sadder is if people dismissed this album just because it doesn't live up to the strength of its groundshattering predecessor. The Private Press is more solid an album than anyone dared expect from an older, wiser DJ Shadow, and though it won't be televising another revolution, I'd be lying if I said its celebratory pleasure centers didn't communicate directly with my own. | 2002-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | MCA | June 5, 2002 | 7 | 2d7c5938-2b51-44d8-a106-dab784bd6257 | David M. Pecoraro | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-m. pecoraro/ | null |
Finally, after an endless parade of spotty and/or unofficial compilations, legendary post-punk band The Fall are given their proper due with this two-disc, career-spanning retrospective, which at last offers a convenient summary of their best material-- from their 1977 roots to the present day. | Finally, after an endless parade of spotty and/or unofficial compilations, legendary post-punk band The Fall are given their proper due with this two-disc, career-spanning retrospective, which at last offers a convenient summary of their best material-- from their 1977 roots to the present day. | The Fall: 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2976-50000-fall-fans-cant-be-wrong/ | 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong | The Fall have seen so many compilations and reissues of their work during the course of their 26-year career that they named their latest full-length The Real Fall LP for clarification. Given the reputation of these numerous shoddy anthologies, however, and the fact that, with the exception of the excellent 2002 Rough Trade release, Totally Wired, there has never been any truly "definitive" Fall retrospective, the best a potential convert could hope for was to pick whichever disc bore the prettiest packaging.
While other Fall comps pride themselves on monochromatic slabs of cover design more appropriate for Rothko retrospectives than tumultuous punk albums, 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong instantly has one thing going for it: Its artwork is absolutely hilarious, keenly referencing Elvis Presley's billion-selling 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong. With its image of countless self-replicating Elvises hailing down in dashing suits, that original cover was a perfect embodiment of pop music's narcissism and weirdness-- incidentally also the two subjects of nearly every song Mark E. Smith ever laid to tape.
As the first legitimate career-spanning compilation, 50,000 Fall Fans begins at the band's inception in 1977. Smith was a mere 20 years old, weaned on garage rock, kraut-rock, and a one-year stint as a dock worker. Like all young adults, he named his band after a Camus novel, quickly releasing a series of singles before 1979's full-length debut, Live at the Witch Trials. Represented by "Repetition", the pre-Witch Trials band consists of simple angular guitars, teen-pop rhythms, and drunken charm without any of the complexity or chaos that would later become integral to their work.
Around 1980's Grotesque, The Fall began to seriously investigate other genres, channeling spiraling rodeos ("How I Wrote Elastic Man"), steely noise-pop ("Totally Wired"), and rhythmic shrapnel ("New Face in Hell"). 50,000 Fall Fans spends its leisurely time in this nascent stage, but the brunt of the album is understandably spent exploring The Fall's near-perfect run of albums in the mid-80s, from 1982's Hex Enduction Hour to 1986's Bend Sinister. A staggering 13 tracks from this era find their place on this two-disc set, forging a truly brilliant sequence. Ranging from the blustering, seismic noise of "The Classical" to the schizophrenic death-rattle of "The Man Whose Head Expanded", the album provides a convincing case that The Fall were the most uncompromisingly progressive and reliable band of the 1980s, whether they assumed the guise of punk heavyweights or sweet electro-divas (with the assistance of Smith's wife, Brix).
With this sort of lead-in, even the most questionable song of the band's notorious early-90s phase seems challenging and substantive. Considering that this anthology's second disc includes the band's stab at Europop/ska-rap ("Why Are People Grudgeful?"), this is truly a feat. As a general rule, this disc pulls one song from every album released from 1990 to the present, distilling each allegedly mediocre release to one stunning single. If anything, however, these selections compel listeners to return to the band's 90s output with their tranquilized synths ("Masquerade") and brash genre-blenders (the Cocteau Twins-vs.-AC/DC dynamics of "The Chiselers").
Of course, with a career that's spanned four decades, 50,000 Fall Fans inevitably winds up omitting some of the most crucial songs in their canon, including "Oh! Brother!", "Slang King", "Bombast", and "Oleano". Still, the songs represented are consistently fascinating and invigorating, many standing as among the finest of the last quarter-century, chaotically navigating punk through ever more adventurous territory, from Countrypolitan to house music.
As a result of this willed diversity and comprehensiveness, 50,000 Fall Fans has finally stepped up to assume its rightful position as the most successful and essential Fall compilation in existence-- a convenient summary for fearful neophytes reluctant to dip their toe into the black hole of the band's discography, as well as die-hard fans seeking a distillation of choice cuts from the group's more wayward 90s efforts. Smith is never less than inspiring on any of these 39 tracks, flaunting his confrontational sneer and leering sarcasm over some of the most erratic, riled riffs in punk. In his oft-ignored later period, Smith sounds even more unhinged, furious and battered, cloaking criticisms of governmental policies in lunatic poetics that the most pretentious high-school fanzine dadaists would cower before. Smith quite literally sounds as if his mouth has been pierced full of gaping holes leaking bile and cancer.
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental difference between Smith and Elvis. Elvis was pure sexual dynamite, basking in his own libidinal juices; in sharp contrast, Smith is the ugliest, grimiest beast of Lucifer to ever drag his expanding head from a pub's water closet. Elvis may have drooled sex, but it was artificial, manipulative, cheap. The Fall, like all truly great sex, climaxes in rage, regret and release-- the three criteria for all utterly essential rock music. 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong chronicles more than two decades of those climaxes, perhaps to one day be held in similar regard to the album its artwork parodies. | 2004-07-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-07-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | July 8, 2004 | 9.3 | 2d813178-983b-44fe-9a26-bae68c559a0d | Alex Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-lindhart/ | null |
Of Montreal's darkest and most experimental record to date, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer gorily chronicles frontman Kevin Barnes' recent relationship woes, all while rebuilding the band as a mechanical synth-pop/glam hybrid. | Of Montreal's darkest and most experimental record to date, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer gorily chronicles frontman Kevin Barnes' recent relationship woes, all while rebuilding the band as a mechanical synth-pop/glam hybrid. | Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9796-hissing-fauna-are-you-the-destroyer/ | Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? | The breakup album is a familiar pop music trope-- countless artists have harnessed the emotional fallout of a relationship to fuel their songwriting efforts. The less imaginative practitioners wind up churning out acoustic self-pity or overdriven spite and angst, while the most effective have draped heartbreak in a clever disguise (like the high-gloss domestic dispute of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), or rendered personal pain as the most important event in human history (like the symphonic catharsis of ABC's The Lexicon of Love).
Despite a soft spot for concept albums, Of Montreal would seem an unlikely participant in this arena, having spent much of their career eschewing confessional introspection for escapist fantasy. Even amidst the notebook-doodle psychedelia society of Elephant 6, Kevin Barnes and his compatriots stood apart for their day-glo Nickelodeon world, full of bizarre characters with alliterative names and toy-box, sugar-high arrangements. While there's always been a dark streak running through Of Montreal's cartoon universe-- and Barnes' chipmunk-shrill voice sometimes tips disturbingly from childlike to desperate-- few would look to the Athens, Geo., band to accurately depict love's gory aftermath.
Yet in the past year, storm clouds have intruded upon the band's rainbow domain as Barnes went through a separation (he and his wife have since reconciled); concurrently, the band's sound has been slowly molting off the giddy pop of its early days, using its past couple of albums to test the waters of a more sinister combination of synth-pop and glam without abandoning its steakhouse jingle-worthy melodies. These two plot threads intertwine at Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, an astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.
The emotional accuracy of the record lies in Of Montreal's unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to settle for "woe is me" moping. Barnes resists the urge to cry into an acoustic guitar, instead portraying the full-spectrum manic mood-swings of the brokenhearted: desperately seeking distraction in drugs or religion, imagining himself as a cynical-minded lothario, and even considering violence. When Barnes does directly give in to his despair, it produces the monolithic 12-minute centerpiece of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", a gutwrenching soundtrack provided by an unrelenting bassline and a synth solo that sounds like an angry flying saucer.
The rest of Hissing Fauna is an endless supply of off-kilter but instantly appealing melodies intact over the band's newly robotic sound. The focus throughout is on mechanized rhythms and synthesizer swirls, though the tempos are no less hyperactive, and the attention span of the arrangements is only a shade longer. Occasionally, the bright synthesizers appear to mock Barnes' shadowy feelings, like the roller-skate organ riff that flits about the pleading drug-use of "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse", or the Christmas carol exterior of depression saga "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger".
Of Montreal's full embrace of this new sound works best in the record's second half, as after the soul-purge of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", Barnes tries to slut away the pain through a series of sex jams no less memorable for being completely unconvincing. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" finds the singer sauntering through the club brushing off sexual advances from both women and men and boasting of "soul power," while "Faberge Falls for Shuggie" struts over a bassline funkier than I ever could have imagined the group capable of producing. Throughout, Barnes multi-tracks several lascivious voices, making bizarre double entendres out of parachutes and interiors. It's not the direction many of their fans might've imagined they'd take, but it's that very attribute that makes it so ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable. | 2007-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 24, 2007 | 8.7 | 2d8227ab-5490-4655-8b6a-de20558915eb | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Neil Young's first collection of new material with Crazy Horse since 2003's Greendale features enough life and fuck-you attitude to remind a listener that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" wasn't necessarily about dying young, so long as you avoided phoning it in. | Neil Young's first collection of new material with Crazy Horse since 2003's Greendale features enough life and fuck-you attitude to remind a listener that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" wasn't necessarily about dying young, so long as you avoided phoning it in. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17213-psychedelic-pill/ | Psychedelic Pill | The signature Crazy Horse move is The Huddle. No matter how big the stage, Neil Young, Billy Talbot, and Frank "Poncho" Sampedro will inevitably find themselves tightly packed in front of Ralph Molina's drums, bobbing and flailing in such close proximity that it's a miracle they never crack guitar necks. It's an aggressively insular move for a band playing to thousands, an unambiguous signal that the feedback storm they are conjuring is often more about them than us.
That self indulgence is the beating heart of each time Young deigns to bring the Horse back out of the barn, even as the decision excites his fanbase like no other. To the point, the latest Crazy Horse reunion was announced with the leak of an instrumental jam on the chords to "Fuckin' Up" and "Cortez the Killer” that ran over 37 minutes. Then there was the first official leg of the comeback: Americana, where Young fed old-as-dirt traditionals such as "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" into the Crazy Horse engine, followed by an arena tour that filled nearly half the setlist with unreleased material.
But Psychedelic Pill might be the most accurate studio portrayal of The Huddle yet. Three songs gallop past the 15-minute mark, and the opener "Driftin' Back" approaches a half hour, quickly weeding out the faint of heart. They are the three longest songs ever released by Young (if you don't count Arc) and they feel like it. "Driftin' Back", in particular, is nearly trance-inducing as it locks onto the same chord progression, interrupted only occasionally by mini-rants about hip-hop haircuts and mp3 sound quality.
Yet other than these marathon challenges, playing with Crazy Horse is playing it safe for Young: You know exactly what you're going to get, and there are none of the pleasant surprises of 2010's excellent loop-dabbling Le Noise. One song, "She's Always Dancing", even sounds like the band just took an instrumental rehearsal of "Like a Hurricane" and added a new vocal track over the top-- which is good enough to make it the second best jam on the record. "Ramada Inn" is paint-by-numbers Crazy Horse, indistinguishable from any of their late-period outings beyond its refusal to end.
It will also surprise no Neil Young fan that most of the songs here are about aging, continuing a roughly 50-year streak of obsessing over getting old. So much of Psychedelic Pill is Young looking back, from the long-married couple of "Ramada Inn" to the classic rock name-dropping of "Twisted Road". He even reminisces his way back to the cradle, with "Born in Ontario", a brief country-rocker that's a welcome breath-catcher, even though it bears a giant hole in the shape of deceased longtime collaborator and auxiliary Horseman Ben Keith's slide guitar.
But Neil's particular flavor of nostalgia has always been a little on the sour side. When he references the Woodstock Generation, he tends to do it with a scowl, angry about the failure of the hippie dream even as he still clings to its promise. Psychedelic Pill suggests a softening of that harsh stance, particularly on the saccharine "Twisted Road" with its irony-free shout-outs to Dylan and the Dead and the distracting "trippy" effects that ruin the title track.
Thankfully, the album's final epic, "Walk Like a Giant", scrawls a jagged line through that cuddly history with a single chord change, coming immediately after an immensely dopey verse about how Neil and his friends were gonna save the world. In fact, "Walk Like a Giant", is easily the best studio Crazy Horse performance since Ragged Glory. Once again, the formula is unchanged-- it even swipes pretty heavily from the "Hey Hey My My" riff-- but between the verses the Horse is whipped until it foams at the mouth. Everything great about Neil Young, electric guitarist, is on full display, his singular tone veering from feral growls and feedback to blistering fury while the other three egg him on with subtle, perennially underrated counterpoint.
Despite the patience required to get there, the track underlines the greatest trick of Neil Young's long career: that his most self-indulgent mode can also be his most crowd-pleasing. At this point, the "these old guys still know how to rock!" angle for Crazy Horse is itself old enough to collect Social Security. But there's enough life and fuck-you attitude left in Psychedelic Pill to remind a listener that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" wasn't necessarily about dying young, so long as you avoided phoning it in. If circling the wagons is what it takes to keep Neil Young's fire raging, then just be happy he lets us pay to watch. | 2012-10-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 30, 2012 | 7 | 2d90653e-e119-4520-a1a9-fe82fa6566f6 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On her second solo album in nine months, the experimental poet and musician grapples with Black musical histories and “the work of memory.” | On her second solo album in nine months, the experimental poet and musician grapples with Black musical histories and “the work of memory.” | Moor Mother: Jazz Codes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moor-mother-jazz-codes/ | Jazz Codes | On Jazz Codes, the prolific artist Camae Ayewa’s second album as Moor Mother in the last nine months, the poet and musician lays the idea of genre out on the operating table and dissects it. With a career spent in close proximity to what could nominally be described as jazz, rap, and experimental music, Ayewa takes this opportunity to let in more legibly jazzy textures, like Keir Neuringer’s alto saxophone, so that she can peer at them with an analytical eye, exploring Black musical forms and their histories through bold recontextualizations of her own design.
Jazz Codes cycles through idiomatic sounds, often delivered by collaborators, each a reference that points to another reference, and on and on. Jason Moran lays down rollicking piano on “ODE TO MARY,” a tribute to the early jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams that ends with an archival recording of Williams talking about Dizzy Gillespie. On “UMZANSI”—credited to Black Quantum Futurism, Ayewa’s duo with Philadelphia’s Rasheedah Phillips—syncopated drum machines nod to Philly club and Chicago footwork. On “RAP JASM,” Ayewa slips out of spoken word to try on a rap flow and riff on OutKast: “Forever ever, motherfucker, you know the song.” Even as she references the past and the present, she worries on “DUST TOGETHER” about things disappearing when she falls asleep. She’s scribbling, contending not only with the erasure of marginalization but the inescapable fallibility of memory.
On “BLUES AWAY,” she begins, “Now how am I s’posed to play the blues when I’m feeling this good?” But what follows is a weeping complaint backed by New Jersey rap weirdo Fatboi Sharif. “You took the blues away from me,” they bawl together. So the blues is gone, and in its absence, “my heart won’t sing,” “the band can’t play,” and “the drummer can’t swing.” This is a theme on Jazz Codes: Black genres—jazz, blues, rap—have been adulterated, either destroyed or diminished. In this case, though, Ayewa is using a familiar narrative to stress that acrobatic leaps of Black musicianship from one innovation to another are a necessity as each successive form gets altered; she’s concerned with the things you must leave behind when you’re constantly made a refugee.
Jazz Codes is also a record about the anxiety of the artwork’s relationship to other works, a real artist-as-critic kind of deal. That line of inquiry becomes clear when she contemplates Mary Lou Williams’ piano sound, or tries to remake the woundedness at the core of the blues, or constructs an assemblage of hip-hop signifiers, or traces diasporic lines from “Mississippi to East Texas” to Congo to Barbados in a spoken-word passage over Aquiles Navarro’s echoing trumpet that she calls a “MEDITATION RAG.”
Her fascination with genre is something she shares in common with music critics: All those neologisms, all that anxiety about the end of monoculture, can most charitably be interpreted as trying to do what Ayewa, on “DUST TOGETHER,” calls “the work of memory.” Genre has, yes, a cursed history, and, yes, is a famously sloppy approximation of musical history, but it starts from an enthusiasm, an impulse to document not only songs, but the prisms of subjectivity they inspire as ways of remembering how music exists in the world.
And that’s where the nerdiness that undergirds Jazz Codes—like the nods to “abstract rap,” audible in the dusty, nostalgic sound of “RAP JASM”—comes in especially handy. On Jazz Codes, when Ayewa settles into a familiar hip-hop flow (which suits her well, by the way), her shift in tone connects contemporary styles with much longer arcs. The howls on “BLUES AWAY” are familiar Moor Mother textures: haunted voices at their limits. So effective is Ayewa’s conditioning of the listener to expect disaster that even when she sounds relaxed, rapping with abstract-rap stalwart AKAI SOLO, I’m still on edge, waiting for some gory scene. It’s a deeply anxious album, not least because of all these histories that Ayewa juggles.
The histories Ayewa’s drawing aren’t tidy ones, and they can’t be: Jazz Codes advocates for active remembrance as the remedy to the erasure it mourns. In the final song, “THOMAS STANLEY JAZZCODES OUTRO,” artist and academic Thomas Stanley meditates on the etymology of the word “jazz.” Over Irreversible Entanglements’ murky, percussive swirl, he tells us that the word was originally a term for sex, and though “its illegitimate origins [have been] lost in the murky brothels where it was conceived and birthed,” he calls for a return to that libidinal impulse. He urges us to free the music from its aesthetic trappings and see it as an attitude—a dirty one, one that’s embodied not only in Jazz Code’s song titles (“RAP JASM”, “NOISE JISM”) but also its repeated attempts to make memory an action, a gesture, a thrust. That’s right, I think: You have to have the grit to handle some vulgarity to even begin the job of really remembering. In Jazz Codes’ promiscuity, Moor Mother plots an escape from the oppressive confines of institutional memory. | 2022-07-08T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-08T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti- | July 8, 2022 | 7.7 | 2d929395-d1a0-463d-9044-30182d2e26ea | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
Fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, Warren Defever’s collection of childhood recordings is wispy, mercurial, and improbably good. | Fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, Warren Defever’s collection of childhood recordings is wispy, mercurial, and improbably good. | His Name Is Alive: All the Mirrors In the House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/his-name-is-alive-all-the-mirrors-in-the-house-home-recordings-1979-1986/ | All the Mirrors In the House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986) | In the 29 years that he has helmed the idiosyncratic project His Name Is Alive, Warren Defever has made many different kinds of music, few of them obvious kin to one another: lo-fi bedroom pop, ramshackle ambient, straight-up R&B, spiritual jazz, stoner metal, even a psychedelic rock opera. Recently, Defever came across a box of cassettes—many without covers or cases, the labels scrawled in ballpoint or Sharpie—that lay at the root of all of it: his own adolescent (and preteen) home recordings, from the years predating HNIA. Some went as far back as 1979, when the Livonia, Michigan, native was just 10 years old. He paid fellow Michigander Shelley Salant, of Saturday Looks Good to Me and Tyvek, to make digital transfers of their contents, and he asked her to flag anything that sounded “new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars.” All the Mirrors in the House is the fruit of that harvest: a slim, beguiling album of reverberant ambient made with piano, guitar, and rudimentary electronics—reverb pedal, boombox, 4-track recorder—all as smudged a kindergartener’s chalk drawing. Made without apparent prejudice, and fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, it is an astonishing document of lo-fi alchemy.
On the surface, the sound of all 15 pieces is remarkably simple: They foreground graceful, slow-moving notes wrapped in reverb—though perhaps “foreground” is the wrong word for music that is mostly background. The space of a typical track is a dusky smear; the shape of a melody might suggest itself like the body of a whale slicing its way through cold water before disappearing into the darkness. The opening “Piano Rev” sounds exactly like its title suggests: sustained tones swishing gently in reverse. “Lliadin” is a soft wash of notes, wispy and kelp-like, on what might be a Casio’s string preset. “Something About Hope” multitracks fingerpicked acoustic guitar in wistful counterpoint; “Equally Divided” turns John Cale’s stabbing piano attack aqueous and unsteady. Rarely does a single track seem to use more than one ingredient; taking in the whole album is a little like looking at a backlit bar of homebrewed infusions, each glowing a slightly different shade, but all belonging to the same basic category.
But beneath that outward simplicity lies a deeper layer of mystery, and as the album progresses, its composition becomes even murkier and more mercurial. Judging from the title, “Tape Slow” might be an experiment in playback speeds, but going by the sound of the thing, it might also be something far stranger, perhaps a chorus of Amazonian tree frogs on a muggy night. “Echo Lake” is stirred by faint splashing sounds, like oars in the water; the closing “F Choir” could be a chorus of whirly tubes. The album is sequenced to flow as one seamless suite, a technique that draws extra musicality out of what might otherwise feel sketch-like.
There’s little trace of these songs’ making in their final forms; even Defever professes to remember little about how they were recorded. “By age 10, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother’s LP collection played at the wrong speeds,” Defever recalls in the liner notes; he mentions using boomboxes to simulate multi-tracking, and an early-1980s guitar sampler with one second of memory. But these details are just teasing hints, which is as it should be: Part of the album’s charm is its flat-out improbability. As Mike McGonigal writes in a thoroughly entertaining essay accompanying the album: “Holy shit, whatever you think, this music is far better than it has any reason being.”
It boggles the mind to imagine a suburban teenager in the early ’80s making music like this, even if he did have the legendary Canadian radio show Brave New Waves to help guide his nascent taste for outer-limits sounds. Ambient music was hardly a household concept back then; Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which helped popularize the idea, had been out for only a year before Defever began experimenting with tape.
But for listeners familiar with His Name Is Alive’s catalog, what might be most intriguing is how much All the Mirrors in the House is in keeping with the rest of Defever’s discography. You can hear the same diffuse sounds running through the foggy melancholy of Livonia, his debut album; jump forward to 2017’s Black Wings, a workbook of ideas and alternate takes from the 2016 rock record Patterns of Light, and you’ll find exactly the same sorts of drones that form All the Mirrors in the House. “There’s such a unifying element to all of it that’s been there since the beginning,” Defever said of his work in an interview in late 2000, before the release of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth. Some details might change, he said, “but ultimately it’s the same feelings, the same perspectives, the same emotions every time in every song.” All the Mirrors in the House bears that out: It captures the essence of an idea that has bounced through his music ever since in a never-ending chain of reflections. | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Disciples | June 27, 2019 | 7.6 | 2d9c0486-5246-4260-a27e-85c864329eba | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Compilation LP is a remastered suite of the fiery Philly punk five-piece’s three EPs to date. The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy with hooks in every corner. | Compilation LP is a remastered suite of the fiery Philly punk five-piece’s three EPs to date. The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy with hooks in every corner. | Sheer Mag: Compilation LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22760-compilation-lp/ | Compilation LP | Sheer Mag’s signature tune is “Fan the Flames,” an anarchic jamboree with mandatory party hats. Guitar licks flirt, rhythms tease, and, amidst the stirrings of Tina Halladay’s furious yowl, champagne flutes tremble on their shelves. Only then does the song show its hand: a roaring screed on housing inequality and unjust rent inflation, with a cast of gentrifying yuppies, heartless investors, and a landlord negligent of human rights and fire-hazards. It concludes in a furnace of horror: “When our neighbors burned/The realtors shook hands/With their backs turned.” As Halladay fumes, acrobatic riffs twirl optimistically. A final chorus rallies troops: “You’ve got to stand up and break the chains/Make a plan and demand what the damage pays.”
On Compilation LP, a remastered suite of their three EPs to date, the Philly gang apply their fury to a thematic swath: by turns personal and political, romantic and righteous. Like any throwback band setting the world to rights with whiskey on its breath, the band requires a magnetic personality for anchorage, of which it has five. Halladay, while rooted in punk, is a born rock star with a soul singer’s defiance: In a soaring note, her wail can crest, tremble suggestively, and suddenly snap, as if to say, “Boy, you couldn’t handle the rest.” Less merciful is lead guitarist Kyle Seely, a prolific and preternatural hook-writer: “Point Breeze” opens with a wild, red-herring riff that quickly flips inside-out; you want to rewind it, like a magic trick, and locate the sleight of hand. Seely composes the songs with his key-jumping bassist and brother, Hart; drummer Ian Dykstra lays hot coals under their feet, his jittery beats primed for a structural collapse. Matt Palmer, the agile rhythm guitarist, often doubles as the band’s firebrand lyricist.
As befits a band that rallies its disenchanted listeners to organize, the result is an all-pistons-firing unit: The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy; there are abundant pre-choruses, mid-song transitions plugged with errant licks, a hook for every available nook. The awesome catchiness of opener “What You Want,” from their 2015 debut EP, hinges on a cheeky three-note bassline that bobbles innocently, as if lost between verses. Halladay sings of romantic submission—“I can be anything that you want me to be/Lock me up, yeah, you got the key”—but you’d need a Geiger Counter to detect vulnerability in her whiplash vocals. Even when the lyrics turn inward, Halladay’s throaty exhortations advance a subtext of personal liberation.
Hard rock’s value as an emancipatory symbol has, of course, diminished since its 1970s heyday. But Sheer Mag’s audacity, in reclaiming an era of working-class music that nobody takes seriously anymore, is central to their appeal. Plenty of throwback rock groups, taking after Weezer, would sooner invert cock-rock chauvinism with self-deprecation or slacker charm. But throughout Compilation LP, Sheer Mag play by the riff-rock rules—power chords empower, solos blaze, and choruses rally. They identify in Thin Lizzy’s swagger an underdog spirit that can be repurposed without irony. Matched to the group’s us-vs.-them narratives, hard-rock brawn becomes a crudely effective vehicle for political urgency.
More than most groups who sing of “fightin’ tooth and nail just to take what’s mine,” Sheer Mag are attuned to the forces underpinning their characters’ malaise. On “Hard Lovin’,” they conjure links between class oppression and domestic violence; “Can’t Stop Fighting” confronts the horror of Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city where countless women’s murders have gone unpunished. On the latter, helpless to redeem a faraway injustice, the narrator’s viewpoint pivots to confront the broad spectre of misogynistic violence. Having asserted that “We’re striking back, baby,” Halladay glares at the camera: “You say you don’t understand?/I can see the blood/It’s on your hands.” It’s the album’s most direct, and darkest, line—piercing, outraged, with matter-of-fact finality. But Halladay exudes triumph, because her rage has found its object; she signs off with a yowled “Oh yeah!,” the glorious sound of renounced apathy. | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wilsuns RC | January 17, 2017 | 8.3 | 2d9df2cd-ec12-427f-80b5-a2480014b297 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
On his poignant new solo album, the former Walkmen member fondly remembers his old friend and collaborator Stewart Lupton, who died in 2018. | On his poignant new solo album, the former Walkmen member fondly remembers his old friend and collaborator Stewart Lupton, who died in 2018. | Walter Martin: The World at Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/walter-martin-the-world-at-night/ | The World at Night | When Jonathan Fire*Eater lead vocalist Stewart Lupton passed away in 2018, the Walkmen bassist and keyboard player Walter Martin grieved his dear friend with a note memorializing his work. “Whatever the hell that thing is that happens when you see the best art or hear the best music or read the best lines—that other-worldly beauty and that feeling that you are in the presence of something that is magical and real,” he wrote, “Stew’s poems had that.” Martin and Lupton met in middle school at age 11 and the two quickly bonded, writing music together for the band that would become Fire*Eater and staying in touch long after it disbanded. So it was obvious the inspiration for The World at Night, Martin’s fifth solo album, should come from Lupton, by way of a handmade collage still hanging above Martin’s writing desk.
The World at Night examines the symbiotic relationship between sorrow and hope. For every song grappling with loss, there are two marveling at life’s uncertainty. On the title track, Martin gazes at a starry sky: “Gee, is that you whispering to me?/Well I know I shouldn’t believe what I can’t see/But oh my, with each flicker in the sky/A ghost goes ghosting by.” It’s followed by the heartfelt “Little Summer Fly,” about delighting in each day’s fleeting pleasures, and “To the Moon,” an escapist ballad about following foolish dreams. No matter the circumstances, Martin refuses to hide the sparkle in his eye. Instead of dragging listeners through secondhand grief, he invites them to sit beside him at a New York City dive, raise their cocktail glasses in a toast to irrepressibility, and take to the dance floor to celebrate dodging life’s unrelenting punches.
Here, Martin’s optimism flourishes in the best arrangements of his career. Flutes, clarinets, upright bass, baritone sax—his childlike orchestrations in “October” and “First Thing I Remember” somehow avoid crossing into gratingly twee, perhaps because he does write music for children: Cheerios commercial soundtracks, family-friendly solo albums like We’re All Young Together and My Kinda Music, the theme to the Golden Globe-winning animated film Missing Link. And yet that side gig might be to blame for the moments in The World at Night where Martin sounds like he’s singing to his kids instead of his peers. This oversimplification appears in flashes, but it’s hard to miss: listing presents a toddler might want in “That’s All I Need,” or conversing with a bird in “Hey Joe.”
In interviews, Martin jokes that he can’t sing, but his raspy voice makes for a charmingly suave and despondent narrator in “The Soldier,” the real story of Martin’s grandfather-in-law shipping off to World War II. It’s a gutting listen, the kind that looks backwards with unflinching clarity. That might be The World at Night’s biggest strength. Martin isn’t naive; he’s just a romantic. At its best, The World at Night evokes the strangest part of mourning: when your eyes fill with tears but they catch the light, making everything look brighter anyway.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ile Flottante | February 5, 2020 | 6.8 | 2da2c5ad-fcdf-4288-a184-2cfbf85239e2 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Conceptualized around listening to a retro-pop radio station in purgatory, Abel Tesfaye’s fifth album is the most thoughtful, melodic, and revealing project of his career. | Conceptualized around listening to a retro-pop radio station in purgatory, Abel Tesfaye’s fifth album is the most thoughtful, melodic, and revealing project of his career. | The Weeknd: Dawn FM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weeknd-dawn-fm/ | Dawn FM | We might have noticed that there was something universally, perversely relatable about the Weeknd’s music when songs from his 2015 album appeared on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack and were nominated for a Kids’ Choice Award. To think that Abel Tesfaye—who rose to fame somewhat anonymously with sweaty mixtures about Alizé for breakfast and pills that burned his brain—would one day go on to play the Super Bowl would have felt bizarre to even his fans. But after a long album rollout for 2020’s After Hours wherein the singer had his face made up with bruises, blood, and bandages, there he was on the most-watched telecast of 2021—92 million people tuning in—looking like a quarter-billion bucks. A decade after his initial rise to fame, he had ascended to true Starboy status, glistening in a red sequin suit, performing hit after hit from his catalog, pop’s antihero taking his rightful place on the throne.
After Hours was a dancefloor record released when every dancefloor was under lockdown, an attempt to bridge the gap between a despondent persona and Billboard-charting retro-funk, flirting with both impulses without committing to either. On Dawn FM, released with essentially no fanfare, the Weeknd has gone all-in on a biblical fantasia, melding frisson and fear into euphoric disco and ’80s R&B with life and death stakes. And for the first time in all his dead-eyed chronicles of debauchery, he sounds a little scared about it.
Dawn FM is a concept album, sort of. In interviews, Tesfaye has said that the album plays like listening to a kind of adult contemporary radio station as you sit in a traffic jam in the tunnel, only the tunnel is purgatory and the light at the end of the tunnel is death. For the most part, Tesfaye earns this framework—he doesn’t toss out half–baked theories on the meaning of life as much as he prods at the looming dread and terror inherent to it. He filled his early-career songs with metaphorical self-destruction; on “Gasoline,” he sings about setting himself on fire: “It’s 5 a.m./I’m nihilist/I know there’s nothing after this,” he drones in a disarming British accent, bluntly summarizing his entire discography. His previous itch was for drugged-out oblivion, but Dawn FM is all about annihilation. Interspersed with his real-life neighbor Jim Carrey playing a blissed-out radio DJ and parody commercials for the afterlife, Dawn FM takes the Weeknd on a literal death drive.
This architecture gives a smart cover for the Weeknd to experiment beyond the confines of his previous work. Past songs charted the course of a single tortured party or a frantic, frenetic night; here, he opts for more grandeur. He executive produced the album alongside pop powerhouse Max Martin and experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and the two function like a devil and angel perched on his shoulders—Martin’s glittering effects, Lopatin’s abstractions and absurdity—alongside production from Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and longtime collaborator Oscar Holter.
The result is a singular sound, with entropy built into the catchy dance tracks. You can hear it in the panoramic bleats on “How Do I Make You Love Me,” the buzz and haze of “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” the electronic squiggles on “Don’t Break My Heart,” before the Weeknd deadpans a line like, “I almost died in the discothèque.” Even the songs that sound the most like classic Weeknd fare—the blasé throb of “Best Friends,” the rap-adjacent cadence that starts “Here We Go….Again”—are flecked with screeching strings and squirming synths. The sound is decadent because it’s so discordant; each song is sumptuously saturated with instrumental quirks. Dawn FM is a cavernous album, and the surprises on its tracks can feel like hidden crystalline chambers. A sample from a 1983 Japanese city pop song slips into a shimmery ballad; a Beach Boys member coos background vocals while Tyler, the Creator howls, “You gon’ sign this prenup,” four times in a row.
The album works best when the Weeknd spirals out. The five-minute version of “Take My Breath” stretches out into a shimmering struggle—you can hear him fight for air, his gasps reverberating over the striding beat. He negotiates boundaries with a lover on “Sacrifice,” alternating between devotion and defiance; “When you cry and say you miss me, I lie and tell you that I’ll never leave,” he hisses, but he admits the extent to which he’s already compromised. He cycles through paranoia and jealousy, only making promises when he feels threatened. “The only thing I understand is zero-sum of tenderness,” he hums early in the album, and for much of the record he flails between articulating that cynicism towards romance and defeating it, like on the treacly “Starry Eyes.” It’s a ballad primed for catharsis, but it builds toward a limp conclusion: “Let me be there for your heart,” he wails, a syrupy pledge that seems to come out of nowhere and oversimplifies the toll it takes on him.
Still, this is the Weeknd’s most ambitious project in sound and scope, and the most effective record he’s put out in years. Part of the thrill comes from hearing him take himself a little less seriously, like the wink in his voice as he sings station identification bumpers in requisite jazzy harmony. There’s also all the little grace notes throughout: Quincy Jones detailing how childhood trauma ravaged his adult relationships; Tesfaye reciting a stanza from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” murmuring that “Beauty is the terror we endure.” This, too, could be a thesis statement for the Weeknd’s work—the horror built into compulsion, the fear that anything worth having will corrode. But it’s the pursuit of beauty that enchants this album, the search for the sublime, the will to turn a grid-locked crawl towards death into something incandescent. “You gotta be heaven to see heaven,” Jim Carrey muses on the album’s final track, a winding spoken-word poem that unfolds like a prayer. It’s a lovely thought, an instruction and a plea—to abandon regret, to hollow out shame, to cobble bliss out of the chaos, for as long as we’re able.
CORRECTION: The Weeknd narrates the passage from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” on “Every Angel Is Terrifying”; director Josh Safdie voices the Arthur Fleminger character.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | XO / Republic | January 10, 2022 | 8 | 2daba419-ca23-4d32-9bed-a131bafed544 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Former Suede mates Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler reunite for the first time in a decade. | Former Suede mates Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler reunite for the first time in a decade. | The Tears: Here Come the Tears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8295-here-come-the-tears/ | Here Come the Tears | For two albums, Brett Anderson and Bernard seemed as if they could grow to become the Morrissey & Marr of the 90s-- Suede's self-titled debut and its follow-up, Dog Man Star, are among the best records of Britpop, and even the B-sides they wrote together were pretty consistently amazing songs. The fraying and ultimate disintegration of their creative relationship pushed Dog Man Star to its final gloriously turgid, expansive state, with each musician trying to muscle his best ideas to the front. That album isn't just a collection of a band's recently written songs, it's a sweeping picture of despair and interpersonal meltdown. Post-Butler, Suede distanced themselves from that sound, opting instead to become a sort of gutter party band. The catharsis seemed to sap Butler as well-- his solo records are only a song or two removed from totally mediocre, and aside from "Yes" I'd rather not think about his collaboration with David McAlmont.
Ten years later, Suede are dead, Butler's way under the radar and here come the Tears, the official reunion of Anderson & Butler. It's a reunion that's been about as low-key as a reunion between these two could possibly be, given that Suede were once so huge that Virgin Megastores across Britain changed their name to Head Music for a day to mark the release of the band's fourth album. Listening to the results, it seems as though they genuinely enjoy working together again-- when Anderson refers to "you and me" on "Two Creatures" and talks about running away to warmer weather in Africa, it almost sounds like he's talking to Butler and not some anonymous girlfriend as the guitarist's distinctively dissonant leads snake alongside his vocal.
That amity is perhaps a part of the reason Here Come the Tears doesn't quite measure up to the duo's past together-- the seething tension and bitchy moodiness of their original partnership undeniably made the music better and more intense. The other reason things aren't quite as transcendent this time is the more mundane matter of Brett Anderson-- he's selling his voice to tobacconists on an installment plan and can't do melodrama like he used to. Plus, years of frequently lazy lyric writing with Suede Mk II haven't entirely cleared up. That said, there also are no songs that simply list the ways in which various unrelated people are decadent and none that string together references to gasoline, diesel, alcohol, polythene, and trash in a random sequence.
Removed from the context of their past work (ha!), Here Come the Tears is a good album, one with the respective drum and bass work of Mako Sakamoto and Nathan Fisher grounding sweeping ballads like "Apollo 13" and driving the speedier songs solidly so that Butler's guitar is free to roam, jousting with the vocal melodies. Butler is still an impressive guitarist-- his solo on "Lovers" is a particular highlight. Other hallmarks of the classic Dog Man Star-era sound that surface here include the wandering, Leslie'd pianos and smearing, slightly antagonistic string arrangements, which are held back for just the right moments.
So color me pleasantly surprised-- I really expected very little from an Anderson/Butler reunion, but they've ably demonstrated that my old-guard Suede fan anxiety was unfounded with catchy, dramatic songs like "Imperfections" and "Lovers". There's nothing as great as "New Generation", "She's Not Dead", or "The 2 of Us" but there doesn't have to be, either, because the Tears have enough natural dynamism of their own to stand alone. | 2005-06-19T02:00:25.000-04:00 | 2005-06-19T02:00:25.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Independiente | June 19, 2005 | 7 | 2db3e355-d5d8-43ea-9d4a-a0e56e5004b3 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Cold Devil is the most compelling album of the Los Angeles emcee’s career. His avant deadpan and impressionistic relationship to the beat is hard to classify, but it’s icy and unforgettable. | Cold Devil is the most compelling album of the Los Angeles emcee’s career. His avant deadpan and impressionistic relationship to the beat is hard to classify, but it’s icy and unforgettable. | Drakeo the Ruler: Cold Devil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drakeo-the-ruler-cold-devil/ | Cold Devil | The second song on Cold Devil, Drakeo the Ruler’s excellent new album, is called “Flu Flamming,” its title a nod to the L.A. rapper’s vast and inscrutable vocabulary of code, slang, and shorthand. It opens with a nine-second riff without drums, where the syllables of each line are chopped finely or pushed to (and past) the end of a measure. It doesn’t sound as if it’s part of any conventional or recognizable flow. But at the 10-second mark, the drums kick in, and Drakeo plunges immediately into a pocket: “All mud in my kidneys, my plug is a Gypsy/This a fully automatic, I let my kids hold the semis.” From there, with only minor adjustments to that song’s opening run, he’s mud-walking in Christian Louboutins, coolly breaking wrists, holding heat like Luke Skywalker playing laser tag, all the while playing cat and mouse with the beat.
Despite a low national profile, rap fans around Los Angeles have been eagerly awaiting the return of Drakeo’s avant deadpan. The South Central native, who spent 2015 and ‘16 garnering a reputation as one of the city’s most magnetic—and immediately influential—new artists, was incarcerated for much of 2017, following a January raid on a home that yielded weapons he maintains weren’t his. (The raid took place one day after his son was born, and until Drakeo was freed, he was only able to meet his child through bulletproof glass during visitation hours.) Cold Devil is not only a continuation of the momentum Drakeo’s been building for more than two years now, but a step forward in form, a distillation of what makes him such a compelling stylist.
Drakeo’s adventurousness as a vocalist can at first recall West Coast legends like E-40 or Suga Free, but where those two would slip in and out of the drums to dazzle—they’re virtuosos—Drakeo will often use his voice percussively, as if creating a new rhythm track, separate from the percussion. See “Hood Trophy,” where he raps alternately against and with the drums, slowing to a laconic creep, then pushing the pace at will. Even with more familiar approaches, he transcends: on “Fool’s Gold,” Drakeo darts around in what sounds like a dream-state, his voice cutting through the din.
As a writer, Drakeo works in short, impressionistic bursts. He can be wildly funny or rattle off bone-chilling threats without breaking character. Cold Devil’s centerpiece is “Neiman & Marcus Don’t Know You,” where Drakeo’s wearing “princess cuts on my wrist like an emo bitch,” and where the most scathing insult in L.A. county is that the clerks at Neiman Marcus don’t even recognize you. Some rappers are great for their ability to mimic an inner monologue in their writing; Drakeo is able to evoke powerful emotions with the same energy and cadence that you’d use to talk to yourself, under your breath.
On previous works, like last December’s So Cold I Do ‘Em or 2016’s I Am Mr. Mosely 2, he positioned himself as a counterpoint to rap’s mainstream forces, applying his more difficult—and often more rewarding—style to industry beats. Cold Devil feels more like an important piece of an L.A. rap scene that’s become one of the country’s most vibrant. The album’s B-side sports back-to-back collaborations with 03 Greedo, the experimental rapper whose own Odyssean records have made him a cult hero in the city. (That working relationship, where Greedo’s vocals run hot to Drakeo’s icy cool, seems as if it could yield some truly stunning music.) There are also contributions from the likes of Drakeo’s brother, Ralfy the Plug, and two from Ohgeesy, from the rapidly breaking group Shoreline Mafia.
That Drakeo’s flow has already been co-opted by other rappers around L.A. is a testament to its appeal, but it’s difficult to imagine someone accurately replicating his style. His mixture of the city’s street rap traditions and its most colorful fringe elements makes for a strange, irresistible alchemy, the kind that can’t be easily decoded. | 2018-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stinc Team | January 5, 2018 | 7.9 | 2db5b9a1-3686-4f1a-9895-703551da3fe0 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Grouper follows her outstanding 2008 LP with another mix of submerged instruments and field recordings, on a split with a new Roy Montgomery track. | Grouper follows her outstanding 2008 LP with another mix of submerged instruments and field recordings, on a split with a new Roy Montgomery track. | Roy Montgomery / Grouper: Roy Montgomery/Grouper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13837-roy-montgomerygrouper/ | Roy Montgomery/Grouper | In 1996 the label Drunken Fish released the monumental 3xLP compilation Harmony of the Spheres. Featuring performances by Charalambides, Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond, and Loren Mazzacane Connors, this lavishly packaged set proved to be a landmark, bringing several different underground streams into confluence. Inspired by ancient Pythagorean principles, each of the artists on Harmony of the Spheres strived to transform the base materials of folk, country blues, ambient, and psych-rock into vehicles for innovative, wholly unique personal expression.
It's never easy to conclusively measure an album's influence-- particularly a boutique collection with a limited initial pressing. But at the very least, it can be said that Harmony of the Spheres has since proven to be uncommonly prescient, as the music contained on its six sides anticipated the direction of many subsequent branches of avant-rock, shadowy folk, and glo-fi. And the album's echoes are certainly in easy evidence on this split album by Portland's Grouper (aka singer-songwriter Liz Harris) and the prolific New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery, himself a Harmony of the Spheres alum.
In fact, the echoes are literal on Montgomery's side, as he here presents a lovely live version of his majestic piece "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", which first appeared on Harmony of the Spheres. But Grouper's songs seem to be direct spiritual descendents as well. Constructed using elemental strands of voice, submerged instruments, and field recordings, Harris' work here is never less than captivating, and a decade and a half later it seems in its own way a perfect distillation of Harmony of the Sphere's music and guiding principles.
On the original version of "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", Montgomery took melodic cues from Bull's album E Pluribus Unum, gradually layering his gently strummed chords with multi-tracked effects and overtones to build dense and formidable sheets of sound. For this solo recording, the piece has been necessarily stripped-down, and the loss of the overdubbed layers of dissonance and texture do somewhat diminish its overall effect. Still, Montgomery is a skillful player with a distinctive, immediately recognizable sound, and in the crowded field of solo guitarists, that can sometimes be half the battle. Though it is not quite as transcendent as the original version, it can be a hypnotic pleasure to hear Montgomery cycle through this track's revolving, raga-like melodic ideas.
Grouper's half of the split is even more rewarding, and the music Harris presents here is among her most focused and spellbinding to date. Though divided into four tracks, her side seems composed to be heard as one continuous whole, as her vocals and source recordings bleed from one track into the next. As with such peers as Charalambides' Christina Carter or Fursaxa's Tara Burke, there is a timeless quality to Harris' vocals on "Hollow Press" or "Hold the Way". Her simple melodies and scales can occasionally recall the medieval vocal music of Hildegard Von Bingen, which, combined with her obscured or non-existent lyrics, can give her work a delicate liturgical character.
Her primary backing instrument of choice here seems to be a processed Rhodes or Wurlitzer keyboard, and its warm, distorted texture blends invisibly into grainy tape effects to give the whole performance a welcome degree of hazy dissonance. It is especially lovely to hear the way these songs seem to emerge out of the static and then return again to darkness, as though they are being broadcast from an orbiting satellite that is only briefly in range of Earth, with Grouper's music already moving on to seek harmonies on another heavenly plane. | 2010-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Root Strata | January 19, 2010 | 7.8 | 2db853eb-0dbe-4393-ad61-02fa83cab1ac | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The first reissue of the 2001 film’s soundtrack proves the last legacy of three Archie comics characters. | The first reissue of the 2001 film’s soundtrack proves the last legacy of three Archie comics characters. | Various Artists: Josie and the Pussycats—Music from the Motion Picture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-josie-and-the-pussycatsmusic-from-the-motion-picture/ | Josie and the Pussycats—Music from the Motion Picture | Back in the Spring of 2001, a boom of lucrative live-action remakes of cartoons, comics, and picture books led to the radical reinterpretation of a beloved fictional band: Archie comics’ Josie and the Pussycats. In the original comics and television show, the Pussycats performed bubblegum pop as pure as their leopard-print bodysuits were skintight. But for the band’s big-screen debut, Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, the writing/directing team behind the 1998 teen hit Can’t Hardly Wait, wanted to parody the synthetic nature of contemporary pop music and comment on the commodification of individuality.
Conveniently, there was no lack of material for them to pull from. The unfathomable success of the Spice Girls had spurred a cottage-industry of pop stars that revolutionized the market: as of August 2001, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, *NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys had sold a combined 76 million CDs, more than a quarter of the U.S. population at the time. On the other end of the spectrum, pop-punk bands were neck and neck with Destiny’s Child on the Billboard Top 40 and nu-metal was crawling out of the shadows to invade MTV. Riot grrrl was taking its final breaths, bands like Hole, L7, and, the Breeders were all in various states of hiatuses, and recent touchstones for female power-pop like the Donnas largely existed in the margins.
Josie and the Pussycats aimed at an audience somewhere in the middle of all this, to the teen who watched TRL but could appreciate the film’s references to Hole. Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook), Melody (Tara Reid), and Valerie (Rosario Dawson) are three passionate outcasts who live in a funky clubhouse and play gigs to indifferent audiences. After signing a sudden and suspicious record deal, Josie and the Pussycats are whisked away to New York City to be oblivious harbingers of subliminal capitalist messages. (A very prescient take on sponcon!) But because Josie and the Pussycats is a Classic Teen Movie, friendship saves the day, character triumphs over the hive mind, and everyone rocks out at the gig.
Since the Pussycats were intended to be weirdos with great taste, Kaplan and Elfont decided to make Josie and the Pussycats “an all-woman Blink-182—a power-pop band with a bit of a punk feel.” The pair found an executive producer in an unexpected fan: renowned R&B mastermind Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. From there, they built a gigantic songwriting team of the era’s alternative stars including Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), Adam Duritz (Counting Crows), Anna Waronker (that dog.), Kay Hanley and Michael Eisenstein (Letters to Cleo) and many others. Originally recruited to provide the Pussycats’ backing vocals, Hanley soon found herself voicing Josie after the original singer was canned. Hanley’s own band Letters to Cleo had disbanded in 2000 and the producers thought her spunky sneer was perfect for Josie.
But what makes Hanley’s work on the Josie soundtrack so exhilarating is that she is vocalizing her own awakening. In the reissue’s liner notes, Hanley recounts her anxieties about performing the soundtrack’s only ballad, “You Don’t See Me.” “I just thought I was in a band and I wrote the songs and yelled really loud and hit the notes,” she says. But a chat with Babyface sparked a punk rock epiphany much like the principal character’s in Chorus Line: “God, I’m a dancer! A dancer dances!” “It was the first time in my life that I made the connection between my role in Letters to Cleo and being a singer.”
But aside from “You Don’t See Me,” the 10 other Josie and the Pussycats songs here are classic pop-punk girl power anthems with heart-on-sleeve hooks to amplify the heightened emotions of adolescence. The “whatever, dude” eyeroll of Hanley’s voice paired with one-liners like, “The only time I’d look at you is on a rock and roll poster” pack a sweet punch that bounces in your head like Pop Rocks. Even the boilerplate earworms that satisfy various plot points like asking a guy to quit playing mind games (“Pretend to Be Nice”), ignoring the haters (“You’re a Star”), and sexual independence (“Come On”) are impossibly catchy. The soundtracks’ two covers, “Real Wild Child” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” are the only real misses; even the revamped “Josie and the Pussycats” theme with its absurd “Long tails and ears for hats/Guitars and Marshall stacks” rhyme comes off better than this pair of rock’n’roll knockoffs.
Josie and the Pussycats’ best moments are when Hanley celebrates her own self-worth. The soundtrack’s revved-up opener and montage-ready single “3 Small Words” is an ode to self-love that recalls Letters to Cleo’s biggest hit “Here and Now” in Hanley’s rapid-fire delivery of peppy word associations like, “I’m a punk rock prom queen/Brown paper magazine.” Later, on the revelatory “Spin Around,” Hanley is dizzy and drunk off the merry-go-round that is coming into consciousness. (“I’ve been staring at the sun some time/And it gets dark inside but I don’t mind” is Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for Josie fans.) And then there’s “Shapeshifter,” a call-out of a hypocritical faker that doubles as a statement against male privilege, a song as necessary in 2017 as it was in 2001.
It would be criminal not to mention the two bonus tracks by DuJour, the fictional boy band of tacky horndogs featuring Seth Green and Donald Faison. “DuJour Around the World” and “Backdoor Lover” perfectly lampoon the nasally falsettos and the “girl I love you so much my voice is weak” warbles of *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. They also whip the tissue-thin veil off those band’s sugarcoated sexuality and sing a song so obviously about anal sex that it’s a wonder that Jack Valenti wasn’t sent to an early grave.
For all this, Josie and the Pussycats bombed at the box office. It was largely reviled by critics who took the film’s tongue-in-cheek satirization of consumer culture at face value. “Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they’re as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough,” wrote Roger Ebert, who clearly missed many points. Others jeered at the actress’ musicianship, which they saw as amateur. Despite this critical disdain, Josie and the Pussycats reached its ideal audience—young women—who helped push the soundtrack to No. 16 on the Billboard Soundtrack charts.
Josie and the Pussycats, both the film and the soundtrack, continue to influence people who do not identify with the aggressively male music world. Even before this reissue, female-identifying musicians have discussed how revolutionary it was for them to see women in a mainstream platform. In 2016, Brooklyn’s Charly Bliss performed a Josie cover set. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13 said in a recent New York Times feature on women in rock music that she directly credits Josie and the Pussycats as inspiration (she has also covered “Pretend to Be Nice”). Now on the CW show “Riverdale,” Josie and the Pussycats are performed by three black women. In that same New York Times feature, as well as a more recent one that wonders if women should make their own pop music canon, the point seems to be missed. There has never been a moment where women haven’t existed in the pop or rock world. Underappreciated and forced to work twice as hard, yes. But absent, never. Perhaps it seems simple but just making space for non-male voices can be a radical means of shifting perception. Josie and the Pussycats did that in the mainstream and its impact still reverberates today. | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mondo | October 6, 2017 | 7.5 | 2dc0efcc-37c1-472a-9d56-ed0ab4704232 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Tapping Detroit techno, IDM, and boom-bap hip-hop, Lone’s horizontally inclined DJ-Kicks mix uses expert selection and programming to highlight his own distinctive musical sensibility. | Tapping Detroit techno, IDM, and boom-bap hip-hop, Lone’s horizontally inclined DJ-Kicks mix uses expert selection and programming to highlight his own distinctive musical sensibility. | Lone: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lone-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | The DJ mix typically fulfills a number of roles in the modern musical jigsaw: It can serve as a showcase for the DJ’s mixing talents, a compendium of the latest tunes, or simply the soundtrack to a good hard dance. Lone’s entry into the venerated DJ-Kicks series, his first commercial mix CD, doesn’t really do any of these. What it does do, though, is far more interesting, guiding us into the singular sonic universe of Nottingham-born producer Matt Cutler, an artist who has forged his own distinctive musical milieu where techno, rave, boom-bap hip-hop, house, and ambient are drawn together by vibrant melodies and sun-washed atmospherics.
Cutler’s description of his DJ-Kicks album as “a weird midnight radio show” makes a lot of sense. This is a place where a strong authorial voice and expert programming join seemingly disparate musical strands, and each song is a second cousin to the next—familiar but distinct. As such, track selection and organization are far more important than mixing skills, which favor functional blends that neither jar nor radically reinterpret the songs in question.
Luckily, Lone’s track selection and programming are both excellent. Rather than show off the latest promos or the flashiest corners of his record collection, Cutler’s selection is primed for feel, with every track—be it old (the gorgeous proto-IDM of Balil’s “Choke and Fly”), new (Ross From Friends’ 2017 cut “The Outsiders”), obscure (Casino Versus Japan’s sprawling “Go Hawaii”), or chart-topping (Radiohead’s “Worrywort”)—employed for its particular ambience. Naturally, the two artists that have most influenced Lone, Boards of Canada and Madlib, also turn up in the shape of “Orange Romeda” and Lootpack's “Hityawitdat,” respectively.
Out of this comes a mix that stays true to its dreamy, melodic feel as it shifts genres and jumps between musical eras. Ross From Friends’ lo-fi house is followed by Drexciya’s electro classic “Bubble Metropolis,” a song that—at 24 years old—is almost prehistoric in dance music terms, while Lone’s woozy new “Brooklyn Banks” fades snugly into Camu Tao’s 2001 indie hip-hop banger “Hold the Floor.” And unlikely comparisons emerge as the mix unfurls. The twinkling deep house of Protect-U’s “Double Rainbow” shares a certain horizontal melodicism with Boards of Canada’s “Orange Romeda,” while the loose breakbeats that underpin Gnork’s housey “U” bring to mind the shuffling drums of “Hold the Floor,” some five tracks before. It’s only toward the end of the album—a slightly awkward run from Drexciya to Balil and finally Radiohead—that the mix loses its coherence, becoming more a collection of great songs than a work of artistry in itself.
Lone’s focus is generally trained on the overall flow, rather than individual songs, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t surfaced some gems. John Beltran’s “Placid Angels” is such a lovely piece of feathery Detroit techno, it beggars belief that it isn’t better known, while “Spotted,” by Heralds of Change (the duo of Mike Slott and Hudson Mohawke), sounds like a lost classic of abstract hip-hop, striding the borderline between Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus, and the imperious pomp of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” Among four new Lone tracks, the standout “Brooklyn Banks” marries a spring-heeled Lone Catalysts-style beat to detuned piano, and “Saturday Night” sounds like Larry Heard if he were a stoner from middle England.
Lone’s DJ-Kicks probably won’t get your party started—not in a great hurry, anyway. But it fits snugly into an illustrious line of DJ-Kicks albums that favor the mind over the feet and the bean bag over the dancefloor. In the long term, maybe that’s for the best: Depth, clever musical transitions and enveloping ambience give Lone’s DJ-Kicks an enduring appeal beyond the vagaries of electronic-music fashion and the transient demands of the club. | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | September 30, 2017 | 7.6 | 2dc516d1-e13d-4ae3-ad60-77a1c506e555 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The new entry in Springsteen’s Live Archives series is the most unusual offering so far: two acoustic shows from 1990 that find him alone onstage for the first time since his commercial breakthrough. | The new entry in Springsteen’s Live Archives series is the most unusual offering so far: two acoustic shows from 1990 that find him alone onstage for the first time since his commercial breakthrough. | Bruce Springsteen: The Christic Shows, November 16 & 17, 1990 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22055-the-christic-shows-november-16-17-1990/ | The Christic Shows, November 16 & 17, 1990 | Bruce Springsteen’s most cinematic, far-reaching songs begin with specifics—“Born down in a dead man’s town,” or “I come from down in the valley,” or “Here in Northeast Ohio, back in 1803”—before zooming out to illustrate how their characters and locales encapsulate bigger things: their class, their country, their generation. His ability to bring grand themes down to earth allows his greatest songs to light-up arenas while also feeling deeply personal, and it explains how he achieved a massive audience that still reveres him like a cult artist.
Springsteen’s personal writing hit a peak on 1987’s Tunnel of Love, the lonely, autumnal follow-up to the massive Born in the U.S.A. Think of it as an ’80s precursor to Lemonade: an artist responding to a groundbreaking pop-culture phenomenon with something deeply intimate and coyly autobiographical. Unlike the Vietnam vets and working-class heroes who dominated Born in the U.S.A., the protagonist throughout most of the songs on Tunnel of Love was an unhappy man entering middle age and confronting his failing marriage and his life choices. Following the tour after the album, Springsteen divorced his actress wife, moved to L.A., and fired the E Street Band, his loyal crew of lifelong friends and collaborators. Tunnel of Love was also followed by a five-year hiatus from releasing music or touring—the longest break yet in a career heretofore defined by his incessant work ethic.
The Christic Shows, the latest and arguably greatest release yet in Springsteen’s ongoing Live Archive series, was recorded in the middle of this hiatus. A long-standing fan favorite in bootleg form, the set compiles Springsteen’s one-off acoustic sets in support of the public interest law firm the Christic Institute, performed in the fall of 1990 at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. It remains an essential if uncharacteristic portrait of Springsteen as a live performer, capturing his first solo shows since his rise to fame, following two decades spent building his reputation as a tireless showman and charismatic bandleader
Alone on stage and unburdened by rockstar trappings (or “all the macho posturing that I have to do,” as he calls it) Springsteen sounds equally thrilled and uncomfortable. Throughout these sets, his songs are reframed as private, neurotic musings, so that even the audience’s presence begins to feel intrusive. “If you’re moved to clap along, please don’t,” he states at the beginning of the second set. “I’d appreciate as much quiet during the songs as possible.”
Accordingly, the overriding mood throughout The Christic Shows is almost oppressively introspective. Night one’s rendition of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” embodies neither the cathartic chug that propelled the 1978 studio rendition nor the frantic pulse of later solo versions. It’s a tentative performance, placed near the beginning of the set like Springsteen’s attempt to pump himself up. Conversely, the languid, dreamlike sprawl of 1982’s “Mansion on the Hill” is replaced here with a propulsive, nervous energy: perhaps the result of a narrator now faced with living in (and paying the mortgage for) his own mansion on a hill.
As on his finest albums, the sequencing is impeccable, highlighting and building upon particular themes across his discography: adjusting your beliefs in the face of disappointment, finding fulfillment within society, growin’ up. The setlist isn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser, favoring quieter album cuts over sing-along favorites, but Springsteen still slips in a few treats for the super-fans. The crowd roars when he mentions how “The big man joined the band” in “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” a moment that feels as close as these shows come to pandering, given that Springsteen was currently doing everything in his power to distance himself from his mythical E Street origin story.
More subtle is the closing line of 1973’s seldom-performed “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” (“All aboard, Nebraska’s our next stop”), fading right into the murder ballad title track from Nebraska—a darkly humorous juxtaposition, given the songs’ jarring shift in tones. It’s the kind of playful pairing that Springsteen’s album-oriented E Street tours rarely made room for. Here, he seems delighted to pull from obscure corners of his discography and watch different characters interact, subversively toying with his canon in the process. It’s telling that he performs over half of Nebraska, but not “Dancing in the Dark,” “Badlands,” or “Born to Run.”
With most of the hits out of the picture, Springsteen has space to work through some new material, playing spirited renditions of songs that wouldn’t make the cut for his next album (“Red Headed Woman,” “When the Lights Go Out,”) and one that shouldn’t have (“57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”). Other new songs, like “Soul Driver” and “Real World,” later found on 1992's often-derided Human Touch, are high points, offered here in their stripped-back, definitive versions. The latter performance is a reminder that in 1990, Springsteen was just coming into a new version of his voice—a sad, country croon, somewhere between the vocal-chord-shredding grit of Born in the U.S.A. and the rootsy twang seemingly bestowed upon him by the cowboy hat from the Ghost of Tom Joad era. Hearing these performances—especially with this crystal-clear remaster that brings the crisp, percussive shimmer of Springsteen’s guitar into focus—you can imagine the fans in attendance were confident that another studio masterpiece was on its way.
This was not the case. When Human Touch was released in spring of ’92 (along with its far-better sister album, Lucky Town), it was Springsteen’s worst-received release by a long shot. Unlike his defining works, Human Touch had little personality, trading in Bruce’s everyman for a decidedly generic “any man.” Like Weezer’s Green Album or the second season of “True Detective,” Human Touch found Springsteen hiding behind genre tropes and clichés, retreating in fear of having revealed too much. Most heartbreaking was what happened to songs like “Real World” and “Soul Driver,” as they were rendered unrecognizable by superfluous bells and whistles (technically a pan flute, but the less said about that the better). You almost wish someone would have convinced Springsteen to pull another Nebraska and just release these live performances instead and let the full-band studio versions exist only in our imaginations.
Maybe that’s what his enthusiastic audience was trying to express at these shows, as they repeatedly ignore Springsteen’s requests for silence and shout toward the stage. In one deeply revealing moment, within the first few songs, a fan yells “We love you!” as Bruce tunes his guitar. He sighs in response, calm and deliberate, as if he had been rehearsing for this moment, “But you don’t really know me.” It’s slightly shocking to hear Springsteen take an antagonistic turn toward his fans, but he had a point. Indeed, the 41-year-old, mulleted Californian in these recordings is a very different person than the scruffy romantic who summed up his mission statement in 1975, “I want to know if love is wild... I want to know if love is real.” Opening both shows with Tunnel of Love’s heartbroken centerpiece, “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen sings like a man with more adult concerns on his plate. He wants to know if love can last. He wants to know himself.
Accordingly, the following decade would find Springsteen eventually reuniting with the E Street Band and returning to New Jersey, where he and his second wife, bandmate Patti Scialfa, would raise a family. After spending his career searching for a happy ending—a way out, a promised land, a beautiful reward—he finally got one, and it dropped him back right where he started. Still, in its awkwardness and beauty, The Christic Shows is a fascinating portrait of the artist in a period of transition, raising questions that, in hindsight, he knew the answers to all along. | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 28, 2016 | 8.5 | 2dc5cd76-5bf7-4663-985e-a14a4d8650da | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
When he was 44 years old, Tom Petty released his second and greatest solo album. It is a crucial entry to his catalog, one whose songwriting is elegantly spare, personal, and intuitive. | When he was 44 years old, Tom Petty released his second and greatest solo album. It is a crucial entry to his catalog, one whose songwriting is elegantly spare, personal, and intuitive. | Tom Petty: Wildflowers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-wildflowers/ | Wildflowers | In the opening verse of “To Find a Friend,” Tom Petty lays out the narrative for his long, messy, exquisite solo album Wildflowers:
In the middle of his life
He left his wife
And ran off to be bad
Boy, it was sad
Petty was 44 when he released his second solo album in the autumn of 1994. He was headed toward a rough divorce from Jane Benyo, his wife of over two decades, with whom he had two daughters. According to Warren Zanes’ biography Petty, he was also on the verge of a pretty serious heroin addiction. At the same time, music was flowing from him like never before: song after song, constant waves of inspiration, words writing themselves. For two years, he practically lived in the studio. Legend has it, the hour-plus album was originally slated to be twice as long with an additional disc of material attached. The release of that music—an archival project that was allegedly one of Petty’s final endeavors—is uncertain. For now, at least, we have Wildflowers.
Wildflowers is not Tom Petty’s tightest album, nor his easiest to listen to. There’s hopelessness and anger; disappointment and regret. Its disparate modes—blues, country, folk, power-pop, torch songs—are connected by the roads, both literal and figurative, that led him to where he found himself: lonely, middle-aged, digging through his consciousness as one would ransack a room to find a small, lost object. “You were so cool back in high school,” he sings smoothly in the last song before switching to his frank, Southern speaking voice: “What happened?” He asks the question and deflates with no hint of poetry or romance, let alone an answer.
Unlike most of his classic rock forebearers, Petty never quite had a “lost era.” He never floundered like Dylan in the ’80s or Springsteen in the ’90s. Instead, he attacked and retreated more consistently. That’s partially why Wildflowers—which followed his commercially successful but creatively scatterbrained record with the Heartbreakers, Into the Great Wide Open—doesn’t receive the widespread accolades of similar later-career masterpieces like Time Out of Mind. Yet, Wildflowers is just as crucial to his discography. It’s impossible to understand the span of Petty’s work without considering these songs: the haunted singalongs that sat next to each other with the stacked, collage-logic flow of a killer concert setlist.
In tone and structure, Wildflowers recalls Neil Young’s 1970 album After the Gold Rush. Petty’s lyrics are simple and intuitive (“In the middle of his life/He left his wife”), spoken as plainly as possible. Yet every word comes alive, speaking multitudes. “Don’t be afraid anymore,” he sings in one song, “It’s only a broken heart.” Young once sang something similar, employing the second-person to place himself as the distanced narrator, the wiser voice offering sage advice. But did anyone buy it? You don’t write songs like these when you’re standing back trying to see the big picture: You write them when you’re in the middle of it, unraveling, talking to yourself, looking for a friend.
Wildflowers was recorded with Rick Rubin, one of Petty’s defining producer partnerships along with Jimmy Iovine and ELO’s Jeff Lynne. But while Lynne spoke to the pop romantic in Petty—the one who envisioned the immortal opening chord of “Free Fallin’” as an army of acoustic guitarists in tie-dye t-shirts playing simultaneously on a cliffside at dusk—Rubin spoke to the nihilist. There’s an unexpected aural twist in nearly every song on Wildflowers: the devastating, string-accompanied outro of “It’s Good to Be King” that makes for the most gorgeous 60 seconds on any Tom Petty record; the seemingly improvised spoken asides during the guitar solos in “Honey Bee”; the warm synths laid over “Time to Move On” that make it sound like he’s singing from underwater. And while it would be reductive to say that Rubin simply lent Petty a loose, stripped-back approach, Petty’s music had never sounded more nakedly reflective of his mental state.
Discussing the making of the album in a recent interview, Rubin recalled Petty playing him a tape of demos, interrupting to pick up his guitar and write an entirely new song on the spot, inspired by hearing his own words played back at him. The album, decades later, still reflects that persistent intensity. In his lyrics, Petty sometimes suggests a sense of spiritual enlightenment (“We gotta get to a higher place”), but it comes out anxious and impatient (“We gotta leave by night”), as if the answer was just on the tip of his tongue, in the next song, the next word. “I’m afraid of that album,” Petty admitted to Rubin. Sometimes he sounds out of control, driven by something deep within him. His daughter Adria once said that, upon hearing the record, she instantly knew that her parents’ marriage was over. It’s all there in Petty’s voice, desperate to be understood and echoed by those who heard their own sad story in it. | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 10, 2017 | 8.8 | 2dc5e04d-b22d-4893-8934-f764c907a51f | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The band’s sixth album pivots back to a more melodic, sincere, and effortful style, attempting once again to find a genuine connection. | The band’s sixth album pivots back to a more melodic, sincere, and effortful style, attempting once again to find a genuine connection. | Arcade Fire: WE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arcade-fire-we/ | WE | During Arcade Fire’s appearance at Coachella last month, Win Butler got a little emotional. He was introducing “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid),” a tender single from the band’s new album, WE. Unlike 2017’s Everything Now, its lyrics made no effort to meet our present moment of desensitized irony and online overstimulation. And unlike 2013’s Reflektor, no shiny synths or disco beats contrasted with the heartland quiver of his voice. Instead, the bandleader, who’d turned 42 the previous day, stood with an acoustic guitar and sang earnest bits of advice to a young person, asking the audience to accompany him with a childlike, wordless refrain. Soon, the sentiment proved too much. He hid his face behind his hands, and his bandmates stopped to let him collect himself.
From the beginning, Arcade Fire were built for moments when raw feeling overtakes us. They recorded their debut album, 2004’s Funeral, in their early 20s, a time when our perspective on death and aging, our parents and our hometown, becomes more fragile and complex, when the divide between childhood and messier, serious adulthood feels dramatic and irreversible. Some of the band’s coping mechanisms now seem like youthful affectations—the period costumes, the whimsical on-stage antics—while others proved enduring. The core of the band remains the duo of Butler and Régine Chassagne, who co-write the songs and share lead vocals in addition to being married parents of a 9-year-old son, and their best songs still seem designed to be sung as loud as possible, eyes closed, from the heart of a massive crowd.
These principles define WE, an album that reclaims the band’s trademarks after a decade spent fighting against them. Butler and Chassagne wrote the whole record on guitar and piano at their home in New Orleans, ensuring the bones were established before presenting it to their bandmates. The same way that vivid flashes from childhood haunted their earliest songwriting, the couple now let their history as collaborators flicker through the music: They’ve claimed that pieces of the multi-part lead single “The Lightning” date back to Funeral, while aspects of the also multi-part “End of the Empire” first materialized when they were in college.
Part of the band’s charm always came from the buzzing, lived-in atmosphere of their records. They sounded too big for every room they played in: voices clipping in microphones, instruments crowding the stage. Co-produced by Nigel Godrich, these songs open up a larger space. There has never been so much silence on an Arcade Fire record, offering a sense of dynamics that makes slow-build anthems like “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” and quiet turns like the title track feel equally momentous. Godrich draws attention to the negative space on the outer edges of the songs, adding a newly vulnerable counterpoint to the sonic peaks. At times, they sound jarringly intimate, even humble.
And yet, this is still Arcade Fire, and you are unlikely to hear a more ambitious major label rock album in 2022. The lyrics touch on spiritual deliverance and the actual apocalypse; the credits list strings, horns, harp, congas, djembe, fiddle, and Peter Gabriel; influences include Dark Side of the Moon and Martin Luther King Jr. The entire record is structured as a journey from introspective angst (the first side is labeled “I”) to communal transcendence (the second is “We”) as if trying to put the pandemic to bed single-handedly. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a record try so desperately to move me, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. After all this time, Arcade Fire seem to have learned their imperfections are easier to gloss over when the music sweeps you up and away with it.
The band’s last three albums channeled their grand scope into sprawling tracklists, but on WE, they attempt to pack it into every song, not content until each one feels like it could become the peak of their live set. Clearly recognizing this approach would become exhausting stretched across a long-form project, they wisely structure the album in movements, ensuring no two of its seven songs occupy the same color palette or mood. If you prefer the band in jittery neons, the Chassagne-led “Unconditional II (Race and Religion)” will be the ecstatic highlight; if you miss the baroque, indie-film drama of their early days, “The Lightning” will be a refreshing hit of adrenaline; if you want a strummy singalong for your next road trip, kick off the playlist with “End of the Empire” and watch the landscape blur.
All of this is to say, WE badly strives to be another classic Arcade Fire album, something that can appeal to all factions of their fanbase and reignite the spark, nearly two decades into their career. Occasionally, the attempt is almost enough to make it feel like one. But like any presentation this effortful, there are times when you want only to avert eye contact and make it stop. The belabored coda to “End of the Empire,” which touches on Dante’s Inferno to sell a long, cheeky metaphor about “unsubscribing,” must have felt like an epiphany in the recording studio: an “Are we allowed to do that?” sense of glee, fulfilling a latent wish for Butler—who has come off as stern and humorless in so much of his songwriting—to join the Lonely Island. But this brand of satirical theater is a lot less funny when the guy singing seems to have tears in his eyes, pleading for approval.
At the end of the grand, pulsing opener “Age of Anxiety I,” Butler plays a little trick, layering his voice with two warring premonitions: “It’s all about you,” goes one. “It’s not about you,” snipes the other. It’s a fleeting refrain meant to conjure a sense of paranoid self-interrogation, although with the music that follows, it ends up sounding somewhat indecisive: a songwriter tossing his subject matter in the air and hoping it lands. The “I”/”We” structure is a handy tool to sort the new material, but it also becomes a crutch for a band that has so triumphantly merged the two perspectives. As a result, the tone is uncharacteristically distant: Does he want to comfort us, critique us, or rock our souls? Why is he still so mad at the internet? Or, to return to that lyric in “Age of Anxiety I,” what is it all about?
In a sense, every Arcade Fire song is about the same thing, and any of their records could share a title with this one. They are singing about us, with a rare ability to transform and unite. When you listen to The Suburbs, they are driving through your hometown. When we listen to Funeral, we are feral kids in the snow, our uncut hair long and symbolic as it blows in the post-apocalyptic wind. On Neon Bible, I am vaguely wary of the government. These records were able to reach the same climax as their live shows, when the band wanders into the audience, making each fan feel like an auxiliary member.
All of those albums invited similar criticism to this one—clunky lyrics, emotional overreach—but WE is the first time the band seems to wrestle with those concerns in the actual music. During the first verse of “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” Chassagne responds to each of Butler’s lyrics with a muted “yeah.” It’s not the type of call-and-response an audience can participate in but rather a quiet insistence: “Not bad—what else you got?” Beneath the album’s social critique and sci-fi scenery, WE zeroes in on a more personal battle. Set to music that aims to play like a compact highlights reel, multiple lyrics address being “midway through life,” and nearly every song returns to crises of confidence and identity. These are fitting quandaries for a band who has reached a vast divide between how they see themselves—arch, self-aware—and how they’re seen by others—earnest, full of wonder—which could explain their recurring difficulty in presenting their art to the world, why they’ve made such a habit of apologizing for album rollouts.
Arcade Fire struggle to have it both ways. They want to lower the stakes for themselves, but they also want to write the album that summarizes the past two years of pandemic life, drawing on a 1924 dystopian novel, a 1958 epic poem about America, and every David Bowie song that’s longer than five minutes. They want to remind you they’re the same empathetic songwriters who made you cry to your iPod in your childhood bedroom, but they also want to be the first indie band to work “New phone, who’s this?” into a lyric. They want to play to their strengths, but they only occasionally remember what they are.
To their credit, they mostly remember in the second half of the record, where the songs become more modest and refined, the writing more confident and precise. This is when Butler and Chassagne look into each other’s eyes, and maybe to the world, and beg, “Don’t quit on me/I won’t quit on you.” Just after that is “Lookout Kid,” and even if it’s the closest this band has come to matching the treacly sentiment of its more cartoonish imitators, the lyrics present the clearest effort to transcend the band’s ongoing creative rut. With its fatherly wisdom and jaunty, springtime bounce, you can see why the whole thing moved Butler to tears as he looked to his audience: his muse, the sea of faces he’s watched from this same vantage point as they’ve multiplied and moved on, so close and so far away. “There are things that you can do that no one else on Earth could ever do,” he promises them. He knows it’s a two-way street and he’s fighting like hell to live up to his end. | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 5, 2022 | 7 | 2dd5bfea-ebbc-4db9-a87c-25ec45be8c97 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
From start to finish, this is Mac Miller's most refined and well put-together project. He sounds like someone’s troubled little brother made good: from the album’s opening horns, you can sense that this is a victory lap of sorts, a homecoming. | From start to finish, this is Mac Miller's most refined and well put-together project. He sounds like someone’s troubled little brother made good: from the album’s opening horns, you can sense that this is a victory lap of sorts, a homecoming. | Mac Miller: GO:OD AM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21038-mac-miller-good-am/ | GO:OD AM | Who is Mac Miller? On Blue Slide Park, he was a childish "frat rapper" who made dumb jokes about smoking weed and referred to the vagina as a "cooter." On the claustrophobic Watching Movies With the Sound Off, he was rapping in a pitched-down voice alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ab-Soul about friends lost, drugs consumed, depression, and the trappings of success. And on the transparent, relaxed GO:OD AM, he sounds like someone’s troubled little brother made good: from the album’s opening horns, you can sense that this is a victory lap for Mac, a homecoming.
From start to finish, this is his most refined and well put-together project. Getting through the 16 tracks on Blue Slide Park was like an endurance test, and even the deeper and much-improved Watching Movies started to sound interchangeable before it ended. The beats on GO:OD AM have a New York, boom-bap feel, with lots of jazz samples and harder drums, and it’s both more varied and more upbeat, from the trap-sounding beats of "When in Rome" or the Chief Keef-featuring "Cut the Check" to love songs like "ROS" or the Miguel collaboration "The Weekend". Miller said he recorded 400 songs for Watching, and sometimes you couldn’t help but wonder about the selection process ("Objects in the Mirror"?) but on GO:OD AM, he’s learned to self-edit.
Lyrically, Mac offers a music industry "Scared Straight". "I’ve seen some motherfucking shit," he warns on "Two Matches". The interlude before "God Speed" includes a voicemail from his brother, checking in on him at a low point in his life, and later on in the song, he admits: "White lines be numbing them dark times/ Them pills that I’m popping, I need to man up/ Admit it’s a problem, I need a wake up/ Before one morning, I don’t wake up." It’s funny to hear a 23-year-old who just kicked his habit and could be considered a kid himself refer regretfully to "all the kids doing drugs" on "In the Bag", but Mac has enough of his sense of humor intact to keep the album from playing like a D.A.R.E. campaign on wax.
On "God Speed", the album’s standout track, he pays tribute to the close friends in his Most Dope Family, especially his right hand man Q, and it’s genuinely touching. "Everybody saying I need rehab/ So I’m speeding with a blindfold on/ It won’t be long before they watching me crash/ And they don’t wanna see that," he raps, thanking the people that got him through the toughest time of his life. He’s never preachy, though: He sounds refreshed and rejuvenated, like someone who has been going for daily walks, eating veggies and drinking fruit smoothies every day.
Many songs here reference his status as a white rapper, signaling his awareness of the rap game’s perception of him: "I’m a white rapper/ They always call me shady," he says on "Brand Name", just a few minutes into the album. "I know niggas think you white and you not about to go in with these bars," chimes in Domo Genesis on "In the Bag". There’s a kind of authenticity to him that has been there since the beginning, if you look for it: He doesn’t rap about breaking the law, because he’s not about that life. He’s a corny white rapper (meant as a compliment) who loves his family, friends, and hometown. We might not learn a lot of specifics about him, but there’s a lot of honesty in his music if you look for it. | 2015-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | October 8, 2015 | 7.3 | 2dd96b51-d1cf-4187-82e0-7a491ff440e8 | Tayler Montague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tayler- montague/ | null |
The elusive UK group’s third album in just over a year—to be made available online for only 99 days—renders Black trauma in the eerie, sing-song cadences of children’s rhymes. | The elusive UK group’s third album in just over a year—to be made available online for only 99 days—renders Black trauma in the eerie, sing-song cadences of children’s rhymes. | SAULT: NINE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sault-nine/ | NINE | The nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down” is secretly about the spirits of the dead. The centuries-old children’s tune doubles as a macabre tale of children being walled inside the London Bridge, or buried under its foundation, to ensure that the structure never crumbles. At least that’s the theory advanced by Alice Bertha Gomme, a noted British folklorist and scholar of children’s games. Like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, whose bloody tales were sanitized for bedtime retelling, many nursery rhymes have equally disturbing origins. On NINE, the elusive British group SAULT channel childhood rhymes—not just their repetitive, earwormy melodies but also their ominous undertones—into songs with a deceptively simple air that are laden with grief.
NINE is SAULT’s third album in just a little over a year, and it builds on the penchant for mystery that they established with their first two albums, 5 and 7, both released in 2019 under a cloak of anonymity. The album will be available—whether as a stream, download, or CD/LP—for just 99 days. Where their first albums were rooted in neo-soul and funk, 2020’s Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) borrowed liberally from Afrobeat and the blues. With NINE, they add new layers—of mystery but also flippant humor—to their sound.
We laugh when things are funny but recently, particularly over the past year and a half, I began buckling over when things were neither humorous nor joyous. Laughter made more sense than sadness. It required more physical exertion, and helped me move when I wanted to hide in a crawl space. It’s that energy of laughing because everything is terrible that beats through the brief opener, “Haha,” an a cappella chant that resembles a playground rhyme set to syncopated handclaps. “How about/Ha ha ha ha/How about/Ha ha ha ha,” runs the refrain, leaving little inkling of its origin story. Are we laughing at a joke or a person? And “how about” what exactly? That man, that dog, them Yankees? The meaning is as cryptic as the band, but they do offer a hint: “How about the love.” Looking around the globe today, that four-letter word is as urgent as it is furtive, and while SAULT are private, the grief they sing of has been projected onto the world stage, stoking a sadness that could make you want to disappear. It’s the type of misery that elicits a desperate ha ha ha ha. How about the love, right?
UK rapper Little Simz is luminescent on “You From London,” sitting in the pocket where bold ambition meets calm disregard for convention. “Ain’t no thinkin’ twice when you’re living life the rebel way, huh/We don’t know L.A./You ain’t knowin’ Shoreditch Overground, ’bout to run away,” she spits over a beat that evokes Corinne Bailey Rae summer aesthetics with a take-no-shit mindset. Simz projects a sunny disposition amid trying external factors: “I know killers in the streets, but I ain’t really involved/We don't wanna cause any grief/But we get triggered when hearin’ the sound of police.” The somber “Alcohol” reflects on the battle to conquer destructive vices and fight against the impermanent bliss of chemical comfort, bringing to mind Kendrick Lamar’s bleak “A.D.H.D.”: “Oh alcohol/Look what I’ve done,” Cleo Sol sings mournfully; “Oh alcohol/It was only supposed to be one.”
“London Gangs” is set to a retro bass-and-drum loop that sounds like it’s playing through faulty speakers. The mood is anxious and hectic, with the energy of commuters moving from one subway to another during the morning rush hour. Clarity comes on “Fear” and “Bitter Streets,” with the latter’s swelling strings and foot-tapping percussion cushioning a meditation on despondency and resignation. Sol movingly channels what happens when the choices from our youth trap us in situations we can’t escape without violence or wrenching loss: “Your energy/Takes away the best of me/I remember when we were young/You made friends with a gun,” she sings, her tone deceptively chipper. In moments like this it’s clear how much NINE is concerned with the ways that relationships and loyalties are formed, group labels are distributed (“RIP postcodes/Revenge is all you know”), and those affected weather the storms.
Heavy weather hangs over NINE—“I can’t really fool with all that rain out there,” chirps an excited American on “You From London”—but on the closing “Light’s in Your Hands,” temperature takes on a more metaphorical aspect, as the measure of frigid, unwelcoming circumstances. During a break in the gospel-inflected song, the sample of a man’s voice breaks in over piano and wordless background harmonies. “When you think about it, I never really had a childhood—I was constantly on edge, constantly on edge,” he muses. “Looking back, I can identify it as anxiety. Because I'd walk into school, not knowing what the temperature is—it’s like, there might have been a falling out in the hood, and now this, you know what I’m saying?” The song’s specifics are hyper-local, but zoom out of London, and these narrators and their lives weave themselves into the fabrics of Black stories across the globe. In SAULT’s music, trauma takes on the repetitive cadence of a children’s rhyme, and to know it is to laugh through 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. | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Forever Living Originals | July 1, 2021 | 7.8 | 2ddabdad-7701-4a5f-9cfa-0abb6b2f9769 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
On its adventurous new album, the Gothenburg quintet expands on its pitch-perfect blend of post-punk, jangle pop, and shoegaze. | On its adventurous new album, the Gothenburg quintet expands on its pitch-perfect blend of post-punk, jangle pop, and shoegaze. | Makthaverskan: För Allting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makthaverskan-for-allting/ | För Allting | Since Makthaverskan formed in 2008, their keen-edged brand of dream punk has remained uncannily consistent. Across their last three full-length releases—held together as a kind of conceptual trilogy—the Gothenburg quintet has curated a mostly unchanging, pitch-perfect blend of post-punk, jangle pop, and shoegaze. Their latest album, För Allting, keeps the same essential framework but expands on it, encompassing a full-bodied reflection on regret and stagnation.
In contrast to the languid, meditative moments from 2017’s III, the songs on För Allting return to the youthful bite of the band’s early music with newfound urgency and attention to detail. Although every song is still steeped in classically dreamy textures, the band substantially varies its musical palette. The synths on “Caress,” a new element in their repertoire, suggest an intimate fondness for Power, Corruption, and Lies; the storm-tossed “Lova” takes on a serrated, gothic tone; closer “Maktologen” explodes in a Close Lobsters-like expression of pure C-86 joy. Both “Tomorrow” and “Ten Days” deviate from the indie pop formula with tremendously cathartic breakdowns—the latter brings a post-punk revival edge in its beautifully bitter outro, like something out of a classic Western film. Even the ambient transition tracks “(-)” and “(--)” form a lush, thoughtful susurrus in and of themselves.
Romantic tracks like “These Walls” and “All I’ve Ever Wanted to Say” bring the band closer to a shoegaze sound. Frontwoman Maja Milner has a voice seemingly built for dream pop—thin but strong, hitting a violent edge as easily as the flick of a butterfly knife. Her vocals narrow with accusation as she laments “but you used to be mine” on “Lova” and denounces “all of this world’s sorrow” on the sweetly misanthropic “Tomorrow.” Her sonorous lyrics are never complex but they’re never sophomoric, either; her euphoria and grief sound arresting and empathetic through the speakers.
Milner’s lyrics remain visceral, but there’s a gentler tilt to her writing now. While the lyrics of II were characterized with incisive fuck you’s, För Allting is more subtle, carrying the taut restlessness of a waiting room. Milner’s tone is urgent and existential. The lead single “This Time” is suffused with a sharp, wistful regret, one only brought about with age: “This time it’s too late/This time it won’t matter,” she admits. “This time I said things I shouldn’t have said.”
At this stage in Makthaverskan’s career, it could be easy for them to hit a ceiling: It’s common for contemporary dream pop bands to grow complacent with their sound and begin repeating themselves. But more than a decade after their debut, Makthaverskan still find a way to retain their ‘80s influences and joyful pop formula while reshaping their identity and evolving. On För Allting, there’s more room to breathe and more time to bask in their endless disquiet.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | November 17, 2021 | 7.6 | 2ddacb3e-ff0d-440b-a9dd-52e6df3fb05c | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The latest collection from synth-pop retrofuturist and punk intellectual John Maus contains grander, darker songs than his previous albums. It’s a thrill to encounter his singular voice. | The latest collection from synth-pop retrofuturist and punk intellectual John Maus contains grander, darker songs than his previous albums. It’s a thrill to encounter his singular voice. | John Maus: Screen Memories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-maus-screen-memories/ | Screen Memories | It has been six years since John Maus released new material, but the synth-pop retrofuturist and punk intellectual hasn’t just been twiddling his thumbs at home in the open plains of rural Minnesota. Deciding that he should take his responsibilities as a professional musician seriously, Maus spent two years building his own modular synthesizer, inspired by pioneers like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Never one to take an easy route, Maus was convinced that the effort of creating electronic music from scratch could only lend his work a greater significance. Alas, despite his efforts, “it didn’t really make that much of a difference sonically,” he sighed in a recent interview, “which was a huge disappointment to me.”
Screen Memories—which will be followed early next year by another album of new material, Addendum—does indeed sound pretty similar, sonically, to 2011’s We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, the album that launched the former Ariel Pink collaborator into the upper echelons of indie rock fame. His strange combination of sounds and moods—combining 1980s goth-pop with baroque keyboards, horror movie soundtracks, and that perilously deep baritone—continues to be fertile soil for his songwriting, but there’s a tension in the air on these grander, darker songs.
Though the addition of the modular synthesizer hasn’t radically altered Maus’ sound, there’s a sense of greater craftsmanship in the small details. “The Combine” provides the gravest possible opening, pulling a brass symphony and a synthetic choir into a gothic crescendo as Maus warns us of impending annihilation by blind machinery: “I see the combine coming/It’s going to dust us all to nothing.” The apocalyptic mood continues throughout, but the darkness is balanced with a kind of playful absurdity—the sense of nihilistic abandon that comes from finding yourself at a party at the end of the world. He references the battlefield and the electric chair as easily as he name-checks cartoon demon Skeletor and the Super Bowl, as on the sleazy funk of “Touchdown”: “Forward drive across the line!”
Maus spent two of his six years away studying political philosophy; his PhD thesis considers the “molecular technologies of power” among other things. But despite being outwardly political in interviews (he describes himself as “left of left of left of left”), he’s wise enough, and punk enough, to understand that the stilted vocabulary of theory can’t easily be harvested for lyrics. The overall sound of the song is always prioritized, and he funnels his hyper-intelligence into bizarre phrases that lodge firmly in your brain, sometimes creating an unerasable mental image. “Teenage witch! Teenage witch!” he chants on the song of the same name, either as celebration or accusation, “Want to start a fire, witch? For that icy titty?!” At other times, he seems to have followed one of his esoteric lines of questioning to a ridiculous conclusion: “Your pets are gonna die!” he gloats over and over on the taut, new wave-ish “Pets,” before taking a huge conceptual leap backwards to consider our shared mortality on a cosmic scale: “Let this be the time of the end, standing between time and its end.”
Despite the references to imminent doom, Maus’ pessimism never stands in the way of a perky melody. “The People Are Missing” borrows a line from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to gesture at political end-times over frantic synth-pop keys (“The camp, the ghetto, the ghetto, the camp,” he intones grimly), but the phrases themselves are immediate and thrilling, big ideas chewed into poppy fragments to consider at your leisure. The furred-up guitar riffage of “Find Out” is the closest thing to a Strokes homage you’ll want to hear this year, while “Decide Decide” seems to channel the gutter romance of Suicide through heavily echoed vocals and glittering organs as Maus contemplates the future: “It’s a dream to dream,” he coos.
After such a powerful opening, the album tails off slightly on the final stretch, ending in a haze with “Bombs Away,” a song penned by Ariel Pink and another former collaborator, Holy Shit’s Matt Fishbeck. Still, with many songs barely brushing three minutes and the whole thing coming in under 40, there’s no lack of momentum; Screen Memories is over in a flash, and begs to be played again from the beginning. Given the album’s lengthy gestation, you can understand why Maus might be disappointed with how much he still sounds just like himself. For the rest of us, though, it’s a thrill to encounter his self-assured and singular voice. While the actual apocalypse shows no signs of slowing down, Screen Memories strikes a chord in a way that most blatantly political albums never quite manage. As society crumbles, John Maus’ commitment to being John Maus is inspiring, tapping an unexpected synchronicity with our doomed world. | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ribbon Music | October 28, 2017 | 8 | 2dde7887-c6c4-4e4c-81cd-ed1cb5af115c | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
After her 1986 album Control and its assertion of her identity as an artist, Janet Jackson was thinking big. Rhythm Nation 1814 is a thrilling mix of social messaging and dancefloor pleasure. | After her 1986 album Control and its assertion of her identity as an artist, Janet Jackson was thinking big. Rhythm Nation 1814 is a thrilling mix of social messaging and dancefloor pleasure. | Janet Jackson: Rhythm Nation 1814 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22253-rhythm-nation-1814/ | Rhythm Nation 1814 | The United States in 1989 was awash in conservatism, discord, and dissent—George H.W. Bush assumed the U.S. presidency after two terms of Reagan, gun violence was on the rise, the crack epidemic was in full swing. But with the imminent shift in decades, so too opened up possibilities. Grassroots organizing for Earth Day 1990 was underway, a worldwide effort for environmental awareness that seemed to singlehandedly make recycling an imperative status quo. Members of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP protested St. Patrick’s Cathedral and crashed the New York Stock Exchange to protest regressive views and HIV drug profiteering. KRS-One created the “Stop the Violence” movement, leading to a broad coalition of rappers to cut a song, “Self Destruction,” that would benefit the National Urban League. Hope sprung anew for a fresh era, and it was all manifesting in pools of revitalized activism across the country.
In other words, it was “time to give a damn, let’s work together,” as 23-year-old Janet Jackson sang on “Rhythm Nation,” the title track of her fourth proper album, a passionate entreaty delivered with the choreography of a boxer’s pose and an iconic military kick. Rhythm Nation 1814 was the pop album that defined this moment on the brink, one that reflected Jackson’s exposure to the rise of 24-hour news, which influenced the album in the form of channel-surfing interludes and the urgency of a new political awakening. In response to what she saw as a world crumbling around her, Jackson explicitly laid out her own vision of a global anti-racist utopia, while actually creating such a space within an album that had no genre or topical boundaries. It was brawny and righteous; heard alongside her independence-asserting 1986 release Control, Rhythm Nation 1814 represented the full-spectrum actualizing of her womanhood, juxtaposing emotional, physical, and political power with the first visuals of Jackson as a dyed-in-the-wool sex symbol.
Rhythm Nation 1814 became the rare album to combine multi-platinum-selling pop music and explicit social messages without crossing the line into preachiness. The ironclad songwriting of the still-going power trio of Jackson, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis had a lot to do with that—at this point, they were infusing their synth funk with looser, layered rhythms and exploring the distance between funk and metal. Her vocals were often considered breathy and lilting, but on this album, Jackson established her lion’s roar, even at her uppermost pitch. The title track incorporated the muscled riff from “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” connecting Sly Stone’s own sociopolitical message to hers. But its syncopated kicks and Jackson’s self-assured mission were resolutely contemporary, the result of a time when tape splicing and sampling were considered the zenith of pop experimentation.
In that sense, Rhythm not only dovetailed with a political era in hip-hop, a genre with a heavy stylistic influence on the album—Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Salt-n-Pepa’s Blacks’ Magic bookended Rhythm Nation’s release, as did Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—but it set a precedent for conceptual pop albums far beyond it. For one, the absurdly derided “militancy” of Beyoncé’s powerful Black Panther-alluding Superbowl performance, as well as Lemonade as both a visual epic and political statement, have clear and undeniable precedents in 1814’s militaristic, optimistic critique. (MTV aired Rhythm Nation 1814 FILM, the visual album Jackson termed a “telemusical,” in an hour-long special, a trendsetting antecedent to Lemonade and a postscript to her brother Michael’s Thriller epic. Young viewers rushed to wear metal-plated ballcaps and dangle their house keys from a single ear.) With it, Jackson demanded multiplicity in both image and genre, in a time when black women pop singers of her oeuvre weren’t often given it. Then, as now, she knew she would not be afforded that multidimensionality on good faith—she had to make it for herself.
Rhythm Nation opens with an industrial-sounding “Interlude: Pledge,” in which she, as our righteous leader, lays out her mission for social justice in a new utopia, “a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together through our beliefs.” Behind her, disciples say words in a manner of poetry, a chorus; just after she finishes saying that she and her crew are “pushing toward a world rid of colorlines,” a man’s voice whispers the word “dance,” and that juxtaposition epitomized her approach.
Jackson’s a multimedia artist to be sure—her music was not complete without the dance was not complete without the visuals—but her particular mix of politics with dancefloor acumen and box-step swing was miraculous. The bridge for “The Knowledge,” in which Jackson and her constituents call and respond the words “Prejudice/No!/Ignorance/ No!/Bigotry/No!/Illiteracy/No!,” is the stuff of a political rally, theoretically incongruous in a pop song. And yet overlaid on a creeping New Jack Swing bassline, its stridency transformed into physicality, the cadences inspiring the idea that, shit, maybe dancing really does have the power to liberate us. In the video, she smashed glass, did a half-snake, and posed with her index finger pointing at her brain on the downbeat.
Shortening the distance between funk, industrial experiments—you can link Pretty Hate Machine’s synth clangor from that same year to Rhythm Nation’s easily enough—and New Jack Swing, Jackson was making a statement about the multitudes of her pop artistry, as well as her broader multitudes as a black woman. Where Control was about liberating herself from the expectations of her family and specifically her father, Rhythm Nation was in direct response to her label’s exhortations that she make a “Control II,” as Jimmy Jam described it, which clearly was too small a box to hold her artistic impulses. She was in full flourish, and also staking out further claim as a sex symbol, as lead single “Miss You Much,” slinky-sad “Come Back to Me,” and the image-altering “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” solidified. The former was the pop love song of the year and a smash hit with a chair-dancing video that’s still being imitated. (Ciara and Tinashe, at the least, would be forever altered.)
“Love Will Never Do” was inextricable from Jackson’s bustier gallivanting with half-clad muscle men, actor/models Djimon Hounsou and Antonio Sabáto Jr, on the beach. “I was so used to being a tomboy, covered from head to toe,” she said in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “I wanted to do something different for the last video from Rhythm Nation… with the top half, I never wore something so tiny in my life. And I didn’t have on a bra.” The video, shot in high-contrast and glimmering black and white, was specifically calibrated to fashion spread specifications—courtesy of director Herb Ritts, a frequent photographer of supermodels—and moreover to match Jackson, then 23, with her emergence as a femme fatale.
This would thrust her career into an adult sensuality—by 1993, at 27, she would be posing topless on the cover of Rolling Stone. But Rhythm Nation’s arc was also explicitly historical. After much speculation about what the “1814” in the title stood for, Jackson later confirmed that it referred to the year Francis Scott Key wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner,” firmly asserting this was her new national anthem. In the “Alright” video, a song that worked alongside “Escapade” as an explicit reprieve from the social ills she addressed on the album—the permission to get loose after all that stress, a pop structure that still proves useful today—Jackson wore a zoot suit and cast ’40s and ’50s icons Cyd Charisse and Cab Calloway, the former a dance legend of the silver screen, the latter a music director who spent much of his early career as the gifted entertainment for wealthy whites in Harlem’s segregated Cotton Club. “Alright” was a pop art homage to those old timey musicals, and an implicit vision of what the world could be like, should her utopia be instated. The melody was forward-looking and comforting, a love song and with more swing and the synth horns that signified a kind of aspiration among an orchestra of agreeance. She sang:
Friends come and friends may go
My friends you’re real I know
True self you have shown
You’re alright with me
That some dismissive critics then thought the politics were separable from the love songs was an incorrect reading. Jackson’s further assertion of self was as personal-as-political as the era demanded, reflecting in part her relationship and eventual marriage to René Elizondo, done in secret to keep both the press and her former dadager at bay. She was fully growing into herself as a human, exploring her internal territory and reconciling it with the world outside, while pushing herself musically more than ever. “Black Cat,” which she wrote entirely herself, was the fully manifested example of this internal and external congealing. She threw down a slinky, sexy snarl over a rock guitar shred that was also wildly jiggy, making an unlikely dive-bar banger that spoke to both gang members and the wronged women who loved them. Another nod to history—topically, the bad boy lament could be traced back to Big Mama Thornton, the black blueswoman who invented rock’n’roll—Jackson was proving to the world she was as versatile as any other chart-topper of the day, and no move she made was without substance. Perhaps by presenting her self-made utopia, she also envisioned that the real-life dystopian one would recognize her not for what it wanted her to be, but for who she was. | 2016-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | A&M | October 9, 2016 | 9 | 2de0ad03-3539-40cc-975b-2af05c133c31 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
Alynda Segarra’s fantastic new album revives the folky textures of previous records to grapple with American myths and tragedies. It’s part folk-punk memoir, part spiritual invocation. | Alynda Segarra’s fantastic new album revives the folky textures of previous records to grapple with American myths and tragedies. It’s part folk-punk memoir, part spiritual invocation. | Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hurray-for-the-riff-raff-the-past-is-still-alive/ | The Past Is Still Alive | In Juan Gómez Bárcena’s 2023 novel Not Even the Dead, a former conquistador accepts a mysterious quest from the colonial government of Mexico. He must leave his wife and home, but it’s going to be worth it—the job pays gold, and it should only take two weeks. Off he goes, riding horseback into numerous trials and tribulations, all the while reassuring himself: Two weeks. Two more weeks will do the trick. Two weeks is the least of his problems because he’s not only riding, he’s time traveling—advancing by decades and then centuries, tripping and stumbling into future worlds where the legends and prejudices of the past continually take on new shapes. Eventually he’s reincarnated as a migrant worker, hitching a ride on a train.
“Time can take you for a ride,” Alynda Segarra sings near the top of their ninth album, The Past Is Still Alive. Rather than horses, Segarra mostly writes about trains, because they used to hop a few themself and because of the way the train, the first rhythm of rural industrialization, runs beneath the American blues and folk music that inform their career as Hurray for the Riff Raff. That’s the shaky-steady forward momentum driving The Past Is Still Alive: part folk-punk memoir, part harm-reduction PSA, part spiritual invocation and/or world-historical séance. The location is: Out there somewhere and the time is: Don’t you know all time is connected?
The Past Is Still Alive represents a turn back toward more traditionally Americana textures after 2022’s Life on Earth, a kind of electronic rewilding project that followed the slicker, self-consciously conceptual The Navigator. The sound is dusky, naturalistic, one-third electric and two-thirds acoustic; we see softness and joy in the human experience and, lurking in the background, violence, fentanyl, and barrels of crude. Producer Brad Cook plays bass here, along with a core studio lineup including brother Phil Cook (piano, organ, Wurltizer, dobro) and drummer Yan Westerlund—what one might call the alternate-reality Megafaun, featuring two original member-brothers and the third member’s brother (behold, the ever-reaching influence of DeYarmond Edison).
Elements from Segarra’s biography appear in flashes throughout their discography but rarely as explicitly as in The Past Is Still Alive, a vivid time travelogue that reflects on Segarra’s youthful misadventures as a “dirty kid” or punk traveler with humility, nostalgia, and transhistorical perspective. In the retelling, shoplifting and dumpster diving for food represent both self-sufficiency and secret shame. And when you have no place to go, a train will take you somewhere. It’s certainly not the lifestyle for everyone: “Here’s a silver spoon, you can eat your heart out as a prize,” Segarra taunts, or cautions, on highlight “Hawkmoon,” a rollicking coming-of-age story honoring a trans mentor, Miss Jonathan, who’s assaulted and never seen again.
It seems Segarra has been thinking about the vast psychic geographies and American histories where trains (and queer punks) go that ordinary civilians usually don’t, probably singing the last three verses of “This Land Is Your Land” and not just the first half, namechecking poet Eileen Myles alongside a legendary writer of freight-train graffiti, and leading off the album with a pair of death-defying gestures: “Alibi,” summoning a friend back from the brink of addiction, and “Buffalo,” about the extinction of the Great Plains’ original movement economy. “Two weeks just to catch the buffalo,” they chant, and I picture the animals receding further toward the horizon, further still, until the day these unnamed hunters must accept that they won’t be found again. And then—the herd “one day magically appeared.” Time travel.
Segarra sounds best delivering a prophetic-sounding folk song, maybe because it’s how I first encountered their work on older cuts like “End of the Line” or “Look Out Mama.” The Past Is Still Alive’s fantastical yet sharply observed writing and revival of a more traditional sound feels like a homecoming. The album was recorded in the weeks immediately following the death of Segarra’s father, Jose Enrico Segarra, or “Quico,” who leaves behind its closing voicemails. “It’s all in the past but the past is still alive,” Segarra snarls on “Vetiver,” the title phrase showing up in a place that isn’t the title track because it’s just that kind of album: unbounded. They’re in wild form on that song, a deliciously slurry traveler’s ballad about transience and relationships also featuring a Bob Dylan banger of a pregnant phrase, “You know nothing is free/But it could certainly be.” And they continue to grow into their own poetic voice, one that climbs a little stair-stepping melody and turns on its heel with a well-timed profanity or an emphatic reminder to test your drugs. “I’d never heard a song mention Narcan,” Segarra said at a recent listening event, so they wrote one that promotes the emergency overdose reversal by name.
At last they speak to the future on “Ogallala,” the name of a Nebraska town (itself named for a tribe of the Lakota People) where the album’s apocalyptic subtext finally erupts to the surface. So effective is The Past Is Still Alive at defying time—reversing, revisiting, slipping through—that in the end I wish it were true. Brad Cook’s rich, earthy touches are all over the upcoming Waxahatchee album and Jess Williamson’s most recent, among numerous prominent credits in recent years. And Segarra’s most morose monologue does sound quite like Conor Oberst when he’s singing backup on the very Bright Eyes-y “The World Is Dangerous.” Aesthetically, in these moments, The Past Is Still Alive feels notably of the present as a contemporary indie-rock record, rather than the way I’d ideally prefer to obtain it, which is handed over by a mysterious stranger at the back of a nameless little ghost town saloon. I don’t expect that’ll happen soon, but imagine a Hurray for the Riff Raff album that’s woolier and weirder, like their take on ’70s Van Morrison, or out-of-time completely like (if you’ll forgive me for one more train joke) their very own Blood on the Tracks? I don’t believe Segarra has totally cracked that on record yet, and it’s a gift to hear them on their way. All the while I was alone, the past was close behind. If this is the end of history, then right now is the most past there’ll ever be. Hold on baby, we’re living in it. | 2024-02-27T05:52:40.105-05:00 | 2024-02-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | February 27, 2024 | 8.3 | 2deb925b-ee7f-4034-a5cc-2cfb10875137 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Chicago-based trio Bitchin Bajas once again pay homage to the zone-out music of the 1960s and '70s, perfectly reconstructing the psychedelic easy-listening of the era. But this time they are carving out an even more distinct path. | Chicago-based trio Bitchin Bajas once again pay homage to the zone-out music of the 1960s and '70s, perfectly reconstructing the psychedelic easy-listening of the era. But this time they are carving out an even more distinct path. | Bitchin Bajas: Transporteur EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20476-transporteur-ep/ | Transporteur EP | On last year’s self-titled double LP, the Chicago-based trio Bitchin Bajas—which began as an offshoot of psych-rock ensemble Cave—paid expert homage to the zone-out music of the 1960s and '70s, perfectly reconstructing the psychedelic easy-listening of the era. The group—Cooper Crain, Roberty Frye, and Dan Quinlivan—got all of the ingredients right. The record’s eight compositions were perfectly dialed in, both in terms of influences (Terry Riley, Laraaji, Popol Vuh) and the vintage gear and methods required to channel them (tape machines, loops, electric organs). It was like taking a stroll through a museum exhibit, a blissed-out reminder that, at this point, ambient music has a deep and well-established history.
Bitchin Bajas appeal is that they so expertly recreate a style of music designed for simple pleasure. This might make the trio sound like some sort of New Age cover band, but that’s not exactly the case. They don't create knock-offs or copies. Instead, they apply the same compositional methods and get results that are unique, but familiar. If you've spent some time with Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, Fripp and Eno’s Evening Star, or the Kuckkuck label catalog, Bitchin Bajas will register as more of a good thing. But on the group's latest EP, Transporteur, the trio has stepped back from their influences a little. The music is still meditative and trance inducing, but it’s harder to draw a direct line to an existing work or style.
Even though it’s labeled as an EP, at 34 minutes Transporteur is a sizeable chunk of music—four pieces that almost all stretch out to around nine minutes. The tracks are still based on repetitive looping phrases, but the instrumental palate has shifted, moving away from sounds that were wedded to yesterday's mystical moment (mainly, the electric organ) and relying more heavily on sequenced analog synthesizers.
The first two tracks, "Rias Baixas" and "Planete T", hew more closely to the Bitchin Bajas' established formula. A droney loop is introduced, then augmented with lush keyboard figures. It's great and thoroughly drifty stuff, if reminiscent of pastoral German synth noodlers like Cluster.
The EP's second half moves into more distinctive territory. On "No Tabac", a percussive synthesizer sequence is paired up with flute doodles, which slowly evolve and accumulate urgency. Closer "Marimba" is particularly unusual. The process is basically the same—a burbling synthesizer loop evolves with the accumulation of additional instrumentation. Only here, the focus is on rhythm and percussion, rather than ethereal tones and pads, with seemingly random bongo-like sounds, hand claps, shakers, and additional percussive elements. At times, the music recalls Congolese electric thumb piano ensemble Konono N°1, albeit with a more overtly psychedelic bent. It’s excellent modern ambient music, exercising restraint, never crashing into a crescendo, and sustaining interest while remaining rooted in repetition.
In addition to a great record collection and a well curated studio, Bitchin Bajas have also internalized the concepts that made vintage ambient music engaging. Particularly, how tape loop-based or repetitive compositions can distort your perception of time, that they can supply a sense of stillness in motion, where seven minutes can slip by almost entirely unnoticed. | 2015-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hands in the Dark | May 1, 2015 | 7.7 | 2df40607-ec3a-48c5-b1b5-a441cca16520 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
On their groundbreaking new album, the Philadelphia hardcore group mixes actionable rhetoric, absurdist humor, and breathtaking vulnerability like no band before them. | On their groundbreaking new album, the Philadelphia hardcore group mixes actionable rhetoric, absurdist humor, and breathtaking vulnerability like no band before them. | Soul Glo: Diaspora Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soul-glo-diaspora-problems/ | Diaspora Problems | Soul Glo’s rise to hardcore heroism would be greater cause for celebration if it weren’t such a damning indictment of American society. Since forming in 2014, the Philly quartet has garnered modest acclaim for airing their righteous grievances against being both tokenized and ostracized as a Black punk band, all while sparing no detail on hypocrisy within their own community, our broken health care system, generational trauma, and the false promises of higher education and upward mobility. By the time Americans en masse were starting to admit that things were as fucked up as Soul Glo had been saying, they’d put out their first widely distributed release, Songs to Yeet at the Sun, in November 2020. The message hadn’t changed, but more people were actually willing to listen. Nearly two years later, none of Soul Glo’s calls for political action have been answered in a meaningful way. “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip/But still liberals are more dangerous,” Pierce Jordan snarls midway through Soul Glo’s staggering new album, Diaspora Problems, a ticking time bomb hurled by a band tired of waiting on solutions and taking power into its own hands.
Though Soul Glo mix radical, actionable rhetoric, absurdist humor, and breathtaking vulnerability like almost no band before them, Diaspora Problems is above all a flex. “We got big plans coming up in this motherfucker,” Jordan announced on lead single “Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!) ((By the Future)),” a celebration of their well-earned success and a grim recognition of how quickly it can all disappear for Black artists, whether in the churn of industry machinery or at the hands of the state. Soul Glo’s previous releases often adhered to standard hardcore specs, clocking in between 10 and 20 minutes, complete statements that nonetheless felt like they never captured the full scope of their artistry; 2016’s Untitled was the exception in exceeding a half hour, but it needed 20 songs to get there.
Accordingly, Diaspora Problems is a big album, conceived like a major label debut: horn sections, instantly recognizable and hopefully cleared samples, a half-dozen guest rappers and vocalists, and Will Yip on mixing and mastering. It begins with a bong rip approximating the rhythm of the 20th Century Fox intro. Technically, it’s more accessible than Soul Glo’s past releases, but it dares listeners to think deeply about whether the repeated hooks are theirs to shout back, whether directed at the band’s peers (“Who gon’ beat my ass! Who the fuck gon’ beat my ass?”) or those who might try to claim allyship (“I’m so bored by the left, protests, and reluctance to militarize”).
Aside from a 30-second non-sequitur of twinkle guitar that precedes the blunt force of “(Five Years and) My Family,” there are no breathers or interludes, none of the things that typically stretch a hardcore album to the capacity of a vinyl record. “Can I live?” are the first of Jordan’s many, many words on Diaspora Problems—nearly 5,500 in the lyrics sheet by my count, delivered as rapid-fire Migos triplets, scorched screamo howls, deadpan spoken word, and a very believable Johnny Rotten impression. To some extent, he can be taken literally here, as in, who will survive in America, in the face of everything that is actively trying to kill him as a financially insecure Black man. Even beyond the threat of institutional force, Jordan has spent the entirety of Soul Glo’s existence exploring the feedback loop of poverty, debilitating depression, and the impossibility of obtaining proper treatment. These pathologies dovetail in “John J,” an astute sociopolitical treatise that begins with Jordan’s memory of putting a gun in his mouth just to see what it would feel like, and then fast-forwards to a searing image of 2020’s protests: “I’m on 15th seeing 20 police run toward me to protect a bank.”
But as “Jump!!” makes bracingly clear, being an artist on the verge of a breakthrough might be the biggest threat to Soul Glo’s survival. “If I get popped before it’s clear I’m hot/Of course there’ll be someone to fill in,” Jordan frantically spits, soon elaborating on Jadakiss’ immortal line from 20 years prior—“You know dead rappers get better promotion.” Jordan claims to be “living on Juice WRLD Pop Smoke time,” evoking two Black artists who died before turning 21 and became cottage industries, a ghoulish scenario for labels generating seemingly endless posthumous content without having to consider the human being attached. The chorus links them to Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, victims of violent killings whose legacies likewise threaten to be relegated to social media symbolism and murals in gentrified city centers. The urgency in Soul Glo’s delivery ensures that Diaspora Problems never descends into nihilism.
Then again, Jordan’s question of “Can I live?” could just as easily be heard as an homage to the classic Jay-Z cut, an arch rebuttal levied at anyone who tries to find fault with Black people exploiting capitalism’s many loopholes. “They want to persecute me because I get money responsibly, ethically?” a voice announces at the beginning of the subwoofer-busting “Driponomics.” Jordan rattles off luxury streetwear brands in the chorus, honoring those who use Off-White or Supreme gear as the means or the rewards of their work: “Reselling, upselling, I’m telling you/Labor to get comfortable is only for the gullible.” Or, as the man once said, can’t knock the hustle.
All of this is nearly impossible to absorb just by listening to Diaspora Problems; it’s no slight to say that even those predisposed to the most aggressive forms of hardcore and avant garde hip-hop will need to build up the stamina to take in the whole thing in one sitting. It’s a testament to the band’s ambitions and execution peaking in lockstep that Diaspora Problems can be appreciated as both a fully visceral experience and a cerebral one. “Thumbsucker” follows a timeline of prescribed security blankets, from Wellbutrin to a cherished stuffed animal—Jordan’s family takes away his beloved Cookie to toughen him up, only to return it after he graduates college. “I was having hands put on me paired with wild mental abuse,” he reveals on “(Five Years and) My Family,” counteracting societal tendencies towards secrecy and repression, only to end with a bittersweet punchline: “You could’ve saved your money/All that you spent on therapy/You’d still have if you just came to me.” If Jordan simply read the lyrics from “Thumbsucker” or “(Five Years and) My Family,” he might be celebrated as one of our most affecting and vital poets or essayists. As is, they sound like Fishbone played at double speed, or the soundtrack to someone deadlifting a cop car and throwing it through a Wells Fargo. Or maybe they’re just the future of hardcore we need more than we’ve earned. | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph / Secret Voice | March 30, 2022 | 8.5 | 2e09417e-135b-4fa4-bef2-549c7d606d99 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi's latest EP unearths new, ambient-influenced grooves with a vintage Moog. | Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi's latest EP unearths new, ambient-influenced grooves with a vintage Moog. | Qasim Naqvi: Chronology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22693-chronology/ | Chronology | Dawn of Midi’s 2013 album Dysnomia merged genres with ease. Members of modern jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic scenes all celebrated the trio’s memorable grooves and motifs. The exuberance of experimental dance music was easy to identify in this acoustic group’s sound. But another quality of that debut recording was its sense of control, particularly when dealing with ambient aesthetics.
Since 2013, the group’s drummer, Qasim Naqvi, has continued to work in the contemporary classical sphere. On the NNA Tapes imprint, he released a set of chamber music (performed by a student ensemble). On his latest EP, he plays and composes on a vintage Moog synthesizer—an instrument similar to the one used by Wendy Carlos on the landmark 1968 LP Switched-on Bach.
Taken individually, the six pieces on Chronology dispense small-scale hits of gorgeousness. In tandem, the tracks cohere to form a compelling suite of pieces that can subtly undermine expectations for ambient-influenced composition. Since this early Moog model was a monophonic synthesizer, capable of producing just a single melodic line at any given time, Naqvi had to multitrack his chords and harmonic designs. But this is done so subtly, the tracks all retain the feel of an intimate performance; it’s as though everything was triggered in one ruminative take.
On the opener, “Kindly Static,” Naqvi loops a single Moog tone. He turns this into an affecting minimalist composition by switching up playback speeds. Each droning note creates a new equilibrium, while the often slow pitch-bends in between carry a more reluctant, vulnerable feel. On the title track—the longest piece, which serves as the album’s emotional climax—Naqvi layers the sonic information in performances that employ different oscillators. Sometimes this results in a mellow, church-organ feel; at other points, harsher combinations provide a dramatic edge. It’s a slow-moving piece, but rich with activity.
Though it isn’t beat-focused, Chronology also has a connection with trends in electronic music that informed Dysnomia. On “Aftertouched,” another piece that uses multichannel playback trickery, Naqvi creates unpredictable rhythmic patterns from consistent harmonies. Because this particular Moog instrument was (in the composer’s words) “kind of janky,” there are stretches where you can hear signal noise in the mix, or else tones that seem less stable than others. But there’s nothing haphazard about the finished product. In “Head Within a Head,” the use of deep, floor-rattling blips works well alongside the instrument’s eccentricities. And the tone clusters that drive “Mt. Erased” have a chattering, jittery air. It’s the contrast between these pieces and the more tranquil compositions that gives Chronology its range—and its sense of purpose. | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | December 16, 2016 | 7.5 | 2e1283bc-2d94-428f-ae97-c765b467e4dc | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The two Chicago rappers form an alliance possibly out of convenience or shared circumstances, but their opposing styles meld into a project that can work surprisingly well. | The two Chicago rappers form an alliance possibly out of convenience or shared circumstances, but their opposing styles meld into a project that can work surprisingly well. | SD / Brian Fresco: Muddbruddas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sd-brian-fresco-muddbruddas/ | Muddbruddas | For every national superstar born out of a regional rap scene, there are always dozens more MCs from that same community who fail to cross over. Brian Fresco & SD are not untalented, not entirely unsuccessful, but neither rapper has made it as far as some of their comrades from Chicago. Fresco came up earlier in the decade with the collective SaveMoney alongside members like Chance the Rapper & Vic Mensa, but he was soon eclipsed by their Kanye collaborations and Grammy nominations. SD was once counted among the most promising new stars of the city’s drill scene, a member of Chief Keef and Fredo Santana’s Glory Boyz Entertainment, but he maintained his independence and never really broke through because of it.
Now, two rappers who never really got their due have come together to form a new tag-team partnership: the Muddbruddas. It might be an alliance of convenience or shared circumstances, but it’s one that works surprisingly well. Brian Fresco and SD’s mutually shared lack of commercial success, at least relative to their peers, isn’t out of any lack of skill or style on their part. In some alternate timeline, Brian Fresco has an exclusive deal with Apple and SD is a critical darling and cult favorite on the level of Keef.
Fresco’s first impression of a mixtape, 2013’s Mafioso, dropped two weeks after Chance’s Acid Rap and included three separate features from The Rapper. On his debut, Fresco specialized in the same kind of soulful, slightly wonky sound that Chance cut his teeth on before becoming the rap game’s biggest wife guy. Like the rest of the SaveMoney collective’s releases, Fresco’s early work is relatively out of step with the rap movement his city was receiving the most acclaim for at that time; Mafioso is much more quiet storm than Chicago drill. So it’s fascinating to see him pair with an artist who embodies drill like few others; SD’s mid-decade releases are hallmarks of the subgenre. On mixtapes like Life of a Savage 3 and Truly Blessed, SD demonstrated that moshpit-ready ragers came as easily to him as melodic pop numbers—glittery ballads like “Big Things” and “Gossip” are still some of my favorite drill recordings.
Muddbruddas isn’t really drill, but it’s not acid rap either. Fresco brings the soul, SD the pop mentality, and the result is lowkey party rap, laidback and effortless. The synths are bright and bouncy, and the bass is plentiful. On the one hand, Muddbruddas goes for a blatantly commercial sound, drafting many of the biggest producers in rap today—808 Mafia on “Duckin,” Pi’erre Bourne on “Aretha,” CashmoneyAP on “Teef Gold”—but on the other, it’s a hard sell as a commercial prospect, with not a feature to speak of, just 30 minutes of 808s and bars.
The pair primarily operate as vocal foils to one another. On tracks like “Harley,” Fresco leans into his loose, sing-song flow that’s not too dissimilar from Chance, but SD’s presence pushes him into different flows, like “On It,” where he sounds much more frantic and leaned-forward in his voice, or “Pimp C,” on which he briefly shouts out and imitates the late Texas legend. SD’s flow has a grittier quality, not just in the gruffness of his voice but the pain it radiates—there’s a sadness to his voice that pushes against the overall jubilance of Muddbuddras, like on the more mournful “Bet On It.” When SD and Fresco meld their divergent sensibilities, the result approaches the sublime—“Bankroll” opens with SD spitting over a Clams Casino-type vocal loop courtesy of producer Mondamade da Beat, before an utterly triumphant horn hits and Brian Fresco takes charge for the chorus.
Fresco & SD have patterned themselves in the image of classic rap duos—the cover art pays homage to Clipse, and “Pimp C” is obviously something of a tribute to UGK. Though the result may not be as groundbreaking as either of those groups, by coming together as part of a tacit alliance, both members of Muddbruddas have proved their viability as artists outside their brief moment in the sun during rap’s blog years. Their project is a valuable reminder that every rap scene is so much more than its most successful stars.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | HIPvision | August 3, 2020 | 6.9 | 2e1ac45b-63b7-4050-97cf-193171b3af2e | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Ethiopian keyboard maestro’s first new album in two decades radically updates a style that already sounded like the future. | The Ethiopian keyboard maestro’s first new album in two decades radically updates a style that already sounded like the future. | Hailu Mergia: Lala Belu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hailu-mergia-lala-belu/ | Lala Belu | Before setting foot in America, Hailu Mergia and the Walias Band had already spent a decade leading revolutionary Ethiopia’s nightclub scene. With raucous sets blending funk, traditional music, and prototypical Ethio-jazz, they played to upper-crust crowds in white tuxes and bowties, at hotels that swerved the country’s strict curfew with all-night lock-ins. But local acclaim left the Walias Band hungry, and in 1981, they plotted a U.S. tour to launch their courtship of discerning westerners. The shows promised much, but the audiences, discerning little, let them drift by; after a few more years’ touring, the group’s members were exhausted, their work unrecognized. Some went home, while others resigned themselves to quiet lives on American soil.
Among them was Mergia, a keyboardist whose charisma, creative smarts, and fitful ambition had, by 1985, been made to fit in a silver taxicab, shuttling travellers to and from the airport in Washington, D.C. Anonymity suited him. When business was slow, he’d walk to his trunk, pull out a Yamaha keyboard, and slide into the backseat, where he’d skitter up and down Ethiopian scales over looping beat patterns.
It wasn’t until 2013 that Hailu Mergia reissues began popping up in U.S. record stores. The first, Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye, was originally recorded in Washington in 1985, after the Walias Band’s dissolution. The work of a one-man band, this mirage of electric piano, mournful synth, pirouetting accordion, and repetitive drum machine felt accordingly dislocated and solitary, with unchanging tempos that felt like no tempo, a kind of astronomical drift. Its release sparked a wider rediscovery: Two livelier reissues from Mergia’s Ethiopia years followed via Awesome Tapes From Africa, along with the kind of international tour he’d been picturing when the Walias Band touched down three decades earlier.
Mergia never stopped writing, and with Lala Belu—his first new full-length in two decades—he’s finally produced an album to stand alongside those golden-era landmarks. While he’s become a remarkably versatile songwriter, the new release contains echoes of the old, full of peculiar details that contrast the sparkly veneer of the jazz trio he’s now fronting. Back in the Walias heyday, Mergia and his electric organ would embed in the eight-piece’s tapestry, then teleport center-stage, the instrument’s abrasive grain violating the organic groove. Much of Lala Belu’s magic comes from that playful impulse. Within opener “Tizita” are three moments of textural ingenuity: first the lead accordion’s entry, with an uproarious lament that jars against sunny double-bass and a seafaring waltz rhythm; then a disarmingly rich piano, which tap-dances into the song’s peppier 4/4 suite; and a third, moments later, when a squelching analog synth blurts over the top of it all, like a shy person tumbling into the conversation at a party.
Despite his considerable history, Mergia’s dexterity here is unexpected. Seventy-one and flourishing, the keyboard maestro has radically updated an oeuvre that already sounded like the future, and in doing so, he makes it sound contemporary. This music is pretty and polished, while revivifying the formal contours of Lala Belu’s three traditional songs. Besides “Tizita,” there’s “Anchihoye Lene,” which makes mischief from accordion and organ solos dancing around a slyly flattened fifth note, and “Gum Gum,” the least eventful song here, whose masterful blend of weightless organ and gently roiling undercurrents is nonetheless captivating.
When this antic energy withdraws into reflection, it’s even more breathtaking. Mergia’s own “Yefikir Engurguro,” a solo-piano ballad, closes the record with drifting ennui and a sad gaze. It’s a deft complement to the title track, an endlessly replayable jaunt with cheery “ba-ba-ba” vocals and a misbehaving fifth bar whose puzzling rhythm demands rewinds. If these thoroughly opposed original compositions show a single philosophy, it’s one that mingles hope and resignation. Lala Belu rings out with the resilience of a onetime dreamer who’s absorbed disappointment and settled for something close to optimism. | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Awesome Tapes From Africa | February 24, 2018 | 8 | 2e1e9b93-a16e-4582-b895-2f0d68638e07 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
The Norwegian artist brings her heady, personal text into the world of dance music to create an affecting, transcendental album that lives on the boundary of pop and the avant-garde. | The Norwegian artist brings her heady, personal text into the world of dance music to create an affecting, transcendental album that lives on the boundary of pop and the avant-garde. | Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenny-hval-the-practice-of-love/ | The Practice of Love | In a statement accompanying the announcement of her seventh record, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval admitted some trepidation about the overarching subject. “Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonized, big artists,” she wrote. “I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things.” Since emerging as a solo artist over a decade ago, some of these “other things” have included vampires, menstruation, gender identity, and capitalism. With those fascinations in mind, the Norwegian avant-garde artist manages to take the exhausted topic of love and transform it into something that feels both erudite and primal, a work that encourages both contemplation and movement.
Inspired in part by Valie Export’s 1985 drama of the same name, The Practice of Love looks beyond traditional definitions of love; Hval seldom mentions romance, even of the conceptual sort. Instead, across eight tracks, love is an amorphous entity. It’s finding rituals of intimacy beyond the norm. It’s celebrating otherness. It’s two friends questioning their choice to not have children over Skype. The practice of love, Hval seemingly says, is creation, survival, and community sustained and defined on one’s terms.
Written and produced by Hval after she completed an upcoming novel about the coming-of-age of a lonely Norwegian teenage girl in the 1990s, the record moves away from the experimental art-pop of her earlier work and embraces the hypnotic spirit of ’90s trance music, a world Hval says she never experienced firsthand. This new alchemy of four-on-the-floor rhythms with heady theory makes Hval’s music more accessible and affecting than ever before.
The Practice of Love eases into its grand ambitions by opening with the origin of all life: Earth. “Lions” invites a subject to search for sanctity in the trees, the grass, the clouds. “Study this and ask yourself: Where is God?” a distant, measured voice implores over rhythmic bursts of white noise. Then, as the voice’s focus shrinks towards the ants, mushrooms, and flowers of the forest, the song’s structure expands. A shuffling synth nestles against the percussion and as Hval’s voice enters the scene, “Lions” accelerates until it bursts into dancefloor euphoria.
The feeling continues on the stellar “Ashes to Ashes,” as it manifests the cerebral songwriting process as a physical act. Atop a dreamy, buoyant arrangement, Hval sings of beats burrowing into the ground and playing an instrument that is “just a shape in the earth,” of sinking her hands into the soil and tasting the detritus of memories. Despite this carnality, Hval’s voice is light, airy, and calming. “She was certain the lyrics went about burying someone’s ashes/And then having a cigarette.” Songwriting mimics a life cycle: As you exorcise the past, you move closer to your demise.
“Ashes to Ashes” and the skittering, saxophone-tinged “High Alice” are the only songs on The Practice of Love that feature Hval on her own. As on previous records, a group of guest vocalists (here, artists Vivian Wang, Félicia Atkinson, and Laura Jean Englert) provide a collage of perspectives, their voices often blending into one organism. Hval, Wang, and Englert converge on the title track, which is composed of two overlapping dialogues, one of Wang reciting the narration of a film by Hval’s frequent co-producer Lasse Marhaug, the other a conversation between Englert and Hval about existence. “I have to accept that I’m part of this human ecosystem but I’m not the princess and I’m not the main character,” Englert remarks. Many artists explore ego death, but few have made it into such a personal and physical sensation, something that reverberates through the body long after the song cuts out.
“Flesh in dissent” or the rejection of heteronormative obligation is further explored on “Accident,” a song flush with wonder. As Hval attempts to rectify the transition from being “the closest her mother came to magic” to being “no longer a mystery of life,” she envisions women simulating the various rituals of pregnancy. One woman discovers stretch mark cream in an Airbnb bathroom. When she spreads the product on her stomach, she feels no shame. “So many years. So little fruit,” she blasély murmurs later while picking at a container of dried figs. “Accident” reaches a powerful conclusion as the narrator rediscovers her magic through art: She’s “Born to write/Born to burn.” The way Hval reconciles with destiny makes you want to seek out your own.
If “Accident” is Hval at her most corporeal, “Six Red Cannas” floats off into the metaphysical. Over a thumping beat that could soundtrack a grimy techno show, she chops up a fictional memory into a meditation that encompasses female genius, songwriting philosophy, and the passage of time. While driving through the New Mexican desert on a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keefe’s home studio, Hval somewhat unwittingly connects herself to a lineage of innovators. “I think I was trying to write to Georgia O’Keeffe/Like Joni Mitchell writes to Amelia Earhart when she is driving in the desert,” she observes, letting her falsetto spiral atop a wobbling synth. “As if a song can communicate with the spirits or awaken the dead/I mean—isn’t that what it’s for?” Nodding to Mitchell’s own desert observations on Hejira’s “Amelia,” Hval looks upward and notices six of O’Keeffe’s signature fiery red flowers streaking across the sky. As the song dissolves, the thought arises: Who else could make a banger out of conjuring Georgia O’Keeffe?
The Practice of Love concludes with its most understated track. “Ordinary” is a gauzy, spoken-word wisp about finding comfort in the familiar. “Can I only write these things, not all the other things?” a stoic voice asks. As bells, horns, and drums gradually creep in and build, the song subtly swells into an opulent trance track. But right as it reaches its peak, “Ordinary” begins to wash away until only its outlines remain. Its payoff is intimate, a fitting comedown after a record that pushes Hval towards her most emotionally vulnerable. She’s an outsider claiming a piece of the mainstream for herself without sacrificing what makes her music so special.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | September 17, 2019 | 8.6 | 2e23e737-f3f4-4729-b1cb-5c04f5150340 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
In 1959, Thelonious Monk recorded selections from his songbook for the soundtrack to French director Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The lost tapes were never released until now. | In 1959, Thelonious Monk recorded selections from his songbook for the soundtrack to French director Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The lost tapes were never released until now. | Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23116-thelonious-monk-thelonious-monk-les-liaisons-dangereuses-1960/ | Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 | There have been many exceptional eras in jazz history—we’re in one now, in fact—but no one year reverberated like 1959. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, John Coltrane made Giant Steps, Charles Mingus released Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman barnstormed into New York and unleashed The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Thelonious Monk, as Rushmore-worthy as those others, put out no less than three albums, all in a variety of settings: the large ensemble At Town Hall; 5 by Monk by 5 with his quintet; and the solo Thelonious Alone in San Francisco. If these were not as monumental as the aforementioned—or as brilliant as his own Brilliant Corners from 1957—then they showcased his vast breadth as a truly original pianist, bandleader, and above all, as a writer. His many virtues are underscored again with the unveiling of yet another recording he made that year: the soundtrack for Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, itself an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel. Improbably lost to the world, the recordings were never released on their own until now, on the centennial of Monk’s birth. If 1959 was a summit in jazz, it may also have marked, on balance, Monk’s annus mirabilis.
Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960—a limited-edition double-LP and 2xCD set—was produced by Zev Feldman, François Le Xuan, and Frederic Thomas for the independent Sam Records and Saga labels with full permission from Monk’s estate. It’s bolstered by notes from scholars including Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, as well as photographs from the session, which took place down the block from Carnegie Hall at Nola Penthouse Studio on 111 West 57th Street. (Monk being Monk, he wore a conical hat during the date.)
Jazz had such pan-cultural appeal in the late 1950s that Duke Ellington had a cameo in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, for which he also did the music; Mingus scored John Cassavetes’ directorial debut, Shadows; and Miles did the memorable soundtrack for Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud. Even Vadim, whose personal life was more interesting than his life’s work—his two autobiographies were titled Memoirs of the Devil and Bardot, Deneuve, and Fonda: My Life With the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World—used the Modern Jazz Quartet to compose the music for another of his erotic dramas, No Sun in Venice, two years earlier.
Despite some personal and professional issues he was dealing with, Monk was in top form on this mid-summer day—spry, full of wit, his ideas delightfully unpredictable as ever. The photos show that his wife Nellie—his rock—was there as was his patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. His band was made up of Sam Jones on bass, Art Taylor on drums, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who would go on to be his loyal soldier for years to come, and another tenor, Barney Wilen, which is how these tapes were discovered. The producers found them while combing Wilen’s archives in search of unreleased material the Frenchman might have left behind.
By the time Monk agreed to record, there was no time to write original music so he dipped into his own songbook: two versions each of “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Light Blue,” and “Rhythm-a-Ning” (the first of which sounds as nimble and alive as any he’d done). Monk did no less than four versions of “Pannonica,” plus “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are,” “Six in One,” and the hymn “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” What might have been monotonous in other hands provided ample opportunity for Monk, who wrote music with acres of room for his improvisational pivots.
Indeed, the music works better as an album than a soundtrack, though it’s clear Vadim had real affection for jazz. “Crepuscule With Nellie” plays over the opening credits, followed immediately by “Well, You Needn’t,” and soon after “Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are.” There’s even a scene with jazz musicians Kenny Clarke, Kenny Dorham, Paul Rovère, Barney Wilen, and Duke Jordan, who also composed music for the film (though it’s not included in this set). But the soundtrack often intrudes and overwhelms some sections of the movie, whether during a party scene or at a ski resort or in a bedroom.
On Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, Monk is a heavyweight engaging with a middleweight, and middlebrow, in Vadim, whose career was more defined by his romantic conquests than his artistic content. But that’s not on Monk. And his work here, in the middle of 1959, is as thought-provoking as anything he recorded in that prodigious year. | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Sam Records / Saga | April 18, 2017 | 8.7 | 2e248537-55a3-4e41-9b81-0c22c52aa5f5 | Michael J. Agovino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/ | null |
A decade after their last album, Grandaddy pick up where they left off, for better and for worse. | A decade after their last album, Grandaddy pick up where they left off, for better and for worse. | Grandaddy: Last Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22950-last-place/ | Last Place | Some Grandaddy songs are about technology. Nearly all of them are about junk: Alcoholic robots and broken household appliances outlive their usefulness and are left to rust. But the same basic fate awaits lost kittens, lonely spacemen, forlorn miners, and hollowed-out cities of rural California, eulogized by a band whose fuzz pedals, analog synths, and withered harmonies always sound like they’re about to give out. And much like Jed the Humanoid, Grandaddy themselves fizzled and popped, and then they just stopped with 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, essentially a Jason Lytle solo album. Given their dedication to documenting entropy, a “triumphant comeback” isn’t the sort of thing one expects from this band. But as Last Place makes clear, the creeping sense that we’ll all just end up in a pile of our emotional and physical baggage never goes out of style.
Lytle had kept busy since disassembling Grandaddy a decade ago: After moving to Montana to escape the relative bustle of the Central Valley, he released two solo LPs, produced Band of Horses, hooked up with Monsters of Blog Rock supergroup BNQT, and found a sensible benefactor in new label head Danger Mouse. But Grandaddy are still a state-of-the-art 2000 band, the sum of slack-motherfucker indie rock, the mid-fi experimentalism of Sparklehorse, and just enough of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips’ late-’90s prog sweep. Most crucially, The Sophtware Slump countered the pre-millennial tension of trip-hop, Timbaland, and Radiohead with Y2k’s definitive ¯\(ツ)/¯ album, speaking to people who came of age during the tech boom and felt like the 21st century could only promise shinier distractions from the same old pervasive suburban boredom.
If Last Place doesn’t exactly sound happy about that fate coming to pass, at least Lytle’s learning to deal. “Way We Won’t” begins the record with him accepting loss as some schmo living atop a box store, enjoying the “tropical smells and back-to-school sales,” the best most people can hope for in adulthood. This unusually zippy pop song is immediately followed by “Brush With the Wild,” also patterned after the closest thing Grandaddy had to a crossover hit (“Now It’s On”), making for the most vigorous eight-minute stretch of music they’ve ever committed to tape. At least musically, that is; lyrically, the trademark weariness remains. “We had a thing, whatever it’s called,” Lytle moans, which is the most Grandaddy way possible to depict a busted romance. “The Boat Is in the Barn” continues the theme: he’s just another hoarder of junk, hanging onto their shared possessions and memories in hope of keeping the past alive, while the ex gingerly deletes pictures from her phone.
Last Place’s first side sounds familiar, but it also promises a new kind of Grandaddy album: an uptempo collection of skewed pop songs without any kind of higher conceptual calling, music that is laid back but not insensate. While “Chek Injin” is Grandaddy at their most punk rock, that surge in energy only goes so far, placing them somewhere in the orbit of Wilco’s Star Wars. As Lytle yells, “please keep going, please keep fucking going,” like he’s trying to siphon one last drop of gas with his mouth, it becomes an unintentionally meta moment, as it’s the last time Last Place strives for any kind of forward momentum.
“I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore” and “That’s What You Get For Gettin’ Out of Bed” are pleasant, tuneful throwbacks to a pre–2k indie rock sarcasm, but they spend several minutes reiterating the point immediately made by their titles. The rest of Last Place just ties up loose ends: “You know it’s all a metaphor for being drunk and on the floor,” Lytle sings on “Jed the 4th,” over-explaining prequels that couldn’t possibly be interpreted any other way. “A Lost Machine” aspires to the same Floydian excess as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” but unlike “are you giving in, 2000 Man?,” “everything about us is a lost machine” generates less meaning with every repetition.
Taking the long view, Last Place might actually be a concept record about Grandaddy itself, as it recreates the trajectory of their previous four albums in miniature: quirks slowly congeal into banality, back roads are avoided in favor of familiar scenery. And then it ends like Grandaddy once did, with what essentially amounts to a Lytle solo project (“Songbird Son”). They sound exhausted, right where we left them. | 2017-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 30th Century | March 8, 2017 | 6 | 2e2dd5d1-d153-4fc2-ab1f-3486720cb350 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The minimalist drone-riff masters pare away excess and focus on the seismic repetition that made their best work so resonant, creating a new peak in their long discography. | The minimalist drone-riff masters pare away excess and focus on the seismic repetition that made their best work so resonant, creating a new peak in their long discography. | Earth: Full Upon Her Burning Lips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earth-full-upon-her-burning-lips/ | Full Upon Her Burning Lips | “I would hear riffs from bands that I liked, and I’d want them to keep playing that riff,” Dylan Carlson recalled recently. “I was always wondering what would happen if you just stuck on that one riff.” That such a simple idea could spawn a varied, lasting musical career seems impossible. Yet over three decades, Carlson’s band Earth have crafted a rich discography by doing just that. Early on, they stretched single chords into minimalist epics—inspired equally by La Monte Young and Black Sabbath—to coin a drone-metal style later perfected by descendents Sunn0))). But even as Earth’s sound has grown since returning from a late ’90s hiatus, Carlson remains infatuated with the power of repetitive riffs.
Though he and drummer Adrienne Davies have been constants in Earth Mk II, many musicians have flowed in and out of the group over the past 15 years. That culminated in 2014’s Primitive and Deadly, their first record to include vocals, courtesy of guests such as fellow Seattle veteran Mark Lanegan. Five years later, perhaps sensing their expansion had hit a ceiling, Carlson and Davies have finally made a record by themselves. Full Upon Her Burning Lips fits the cliché of the “stripped down, back to basics” album, with Carlson intentionally limiting his sonic options and the duo refocusing on elemental repetition. But Earth’s previous explorations earned them the right to reset, creating a new peak in an already highlight-filled discography.
Full Upon Her Burning Lips hits that upper echelon not just through signature repetition, but also the quality of the riffs themselves. Lately, Carlson has insisted that repetition by itself isn’t enough (“[the riffs] should be something that you want to hear again,” he said), and the range of memorable hooks throughout these ten tracks is indeed crucial. Take the wiry curve in “Cats on the Briar”, the hints of funky groove in “Exaltation of Larks,” the beatific circles in the meditative “Descending Belladona” and the poignant denouement “A Wretched Country of Dusk.” Full Upon Her Burning Lips might actually be more catchy than what many consider to be Earth’s best album, 2008’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull. Though the confident swing of these songs can feel contemplative or even languid, the duo’s knack for adding small shifts and subtle accents injects a lot of tension.
In that, credit is due to Davies’ drumming as much as Carlson’s guitar and bass playing. The way she both leads and supports the songs’ winding paths remains impressive, especially since they could easily drag. Her precision calls to mind drone legend Tony Conrad’s early epiphany that playing slowly is actually harder than playing fast, and “the secret of playing well was playing more slowly.” Davies has recently acknowledged the challenge “to get it as slow as you can get, but still have your momentum.” It’s a task she masters throughout So Full Upon Her Burning Lips, mixing serenity and accuracy into a force that both controls and propels Earth’s music.
That forward motion makes So Full Upon Her Burning Lips more than just a return to a classic sound. There are enough surprises here that what could’ve been just a comfortable glance backward. That’s clearest on “The Colour of Poison,” which opens with a rare Carlson move: chopping up chords rather than letting them ring out, which in the Earth universe counts as a seismic event. But a few minutes in, he turns back with a riff that ranks among the band’s most overtly Sabbath-styled. John Peel’s iconic assessment of the all-time kings of repetition, the Fall, is apt here: “They are always different, they are always the same.” It’s a big thing to say about any band, but in the 30 years since Carlson first struck an Earth chord, he and Davies have earned it. | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sargent House | May 30, 2019 | 7.8 | 2e2e5ca1-89c2-4192-80dd-33f792a4eb16 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Slipping between stark realism and meditative reflection, this is the South London experimental musician’s most intensely introspective album yet. | Slipping between stark realism and meditative reflection, this is the South London experimental musician’s most intensely introspective album yet. | Klein: Frozen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-frozen/ | Frozen | Klein is a collagist who finds the beauty in pieces that shouldn’t fit together. Though often working with fragments of recognizable melodies—she cites both Beyoncé and Pavarotti as inspirations—the South London experimental artist isn’t interested in simply entertaining. “Anyone can do pop, innit? What sonically I want to hear for myself is stories,” she once said. Her stories don’t shy away from darkness or taboo. In her 2018 musical Care, which she wrote and starred in, she depicted a group of children living in a state-run foster home who stumble upon a Narnia-like fantasy world. She made the case that these hidden parts of our society deserve fairytales, too—albeit distorted ones. On her self-released album Frozen, she is as unflinching as ever, riding that slippage between brutal realism and escapist, meditative reflection.
It is, for the most part, an intensely introspective record. On her first two albums, ONLY and Lifetime, Klein’s music was woven from the fabric of the world around her: church services, R&B songs, covert recordings of conversations between mates, and fractured snippets of drums that give the impression of standing outside a club. Her carefully controlled cacophonies stood on the fringes of dance music, but Frozen immediately feels like a more internal landscape. There are no collaborators in the credits; a number of songs were single takes recorded in her bedroom on her guitar.
The murky, industrial first half is the equivalent of lying face down on your bed and letting out an existential groan. It can feel oppressive, like having the weight of the world on your shoulders. The minimalist “U got this,” 15 minutes long, hinges on a scratchy guitar riff and a rush of what sounds like traffic, and it progresses infinitesimally. Two short, jagged songs that follow break the meditative mood. “My friend I just buried him/Another grave,” Klein’s serene, somber double-tracked vocal intones on “another dust,” before reverb-drenched guitar thrashes out her anger on “grit.” Throughout, she pulls listeners in close, then pushes them away, never allowing them to get comfortable. After a half-hour stretch in which it feels like we are alone with Klein, she abruptly introduces other voices via the cut-up crowd noises of the 50-second interlude “reveal itself.” And at the record’s very end, she crashes out on a moment of dissonance with the abrupt, three-second-long “tribute.”
In her most unexpected maneuver, Klein turns the lens outward on the listener. “mark” is a tribute to Mark Duggan—the man who was killed by London’s Met police in August 2011, sparking a week of riots in the UK—and 10 of its 11 minutes are silent. It’s a powerful moment, inviting listeners to reflect on Duggan’s death and the scant progress that the UK has made toward racial justice in the years since it occurred. It’s a brave move for an artist to make in a culture ruled by the skip button, and a testament to Klein’s unyielding commitment to looking directly at tragedy.
Surrounding that emptiness is some of Klein’s most beautiful work. The silence is gradually replaced by a mournful guitar melody and slowed-down cries of “No justice, no peace,” which eventually blur into choral tones. With her vocals buried deep in the mix, Klein sounds ghostly. She creates a vast amount of space in the mix, giving the listener the feeling of standing at the lip of a cavern. It’s beauty with an underlying threat, always just on the brink of overwhelming, but with Klein remaining in control. | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | May 5, 2020 | 7.6 | 2e2e7af7-b70a-44ae-b325-479eed1f4306 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Baltimore’s Dope Body are prolific, averaging one release of scuzzy, groovy noise-rock per year since they started in 2009. Kunk is more of a prolonged howling squall than its direct predecessor, Lifer: They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world. | Baltimore’s Dope Body are prolific, averaging one release of scuzzy, groovy noise-rock per year since they started in 2009. Kunk is more of a prolonged howling squall than its direct predecessor, Lifer: They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world. | Dope Body: Kunk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21024-kunk/ | Kunk | Baltimore’s Dope Body are prolific, averaging one release of scuzzy, groovy noise-rock per year since they started in 2009. On each successive release, they seem to be trying to find their undeniably unique voice by mixing bits and pieces of '90s AmRep brutality and funky alt-rock (Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so forth), a mix that makes a peculiar sort of sense if you also grew up in the D.C./Baltimore area with local freeform-turned-Infinity Broadcasting alt-rock radio titan WHFS in one ear and any number of college radio stations in the other.
Kunk is more of a prolonged howling squall than its direct predecessor, Lifer, though the filters on Andrew Laumann’s vocals are still set to "cargo shorts." Opener "Casual" is nearly all hair dryer guitar, that gated-distortion squeal that is guitarist Zachary Utz’s specialty; it’s the interplay between Utz’s looped noise and powerful drummer David Jacober that makes Dope Body so gnarly. The first single, "Old Grey", is another standout; Laumann’s refrain "I’m living in a trash can" is a pretty descriptive phrase for Dope Body’s ethos, and the track bumps and screeches and spins, lurching forward at regular intervals, crashing into itself spectacularly as Laumann asks himself what this band’s life, what their particular brand of destruction, has wrought.
There are sludgier, heavier moments ("Goon Line" and "Obey"); here, Dope Body feel genuinely precarious, unhinged, and uncomfortable. This is a good move for them; they’ve always been known as a wild band, but to focus on their riffs and the hefty panic a good noise-rock rhythm section can give make Dope Body more powerful and interesting than the never-ending in-joke they could be characterized as. This contextual balance between paranoiac music and absurdist lyrics was something Dayton's Brainiac, a band Dope Body are often compared to, excelled at.
The instrumentals on the album ("Dad", "Ash Toke", "Pincher") are Dope Body’s version of rap skits—little unfinished goofs—and somewhat of a breath of fresh air in that they are sketches, pictures of the band figuring out their directions together. They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world, realizing that there are limits to their subgenre-referencing sound and if they are to grow they’ve got to push themselves. | 2015-09-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 17, 2015 | 7 | 2e2f52c4-4df3-49d2-8116-5ac80bb3610a | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's new record is a eulogy for the seedy New York City where Spencer first earned his notoriety—amid the early-'80s triangulation of hardcore, rap, and the avant-garde—and an attempt to come to terms with the gentrified version that exists today. But it’s also an album that rarely forgets the first three letters of "funeral" are f-u-n. | The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's new record is a eulogy for the seedy New York City where Spencer first earned his notoriety—amid the early-'80s triangulation of hardcore, rap, and the avant-garde—and an attempt to come to terms with the gentrified version that exists today. But it’s also an album that rarely forgets the first three letters of "funeral" are f-u-n. | The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20243-freedom-tower-no-wave-dance-party-2015/ | Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 | "Come on fellas, we got to pay respect!" These are the first words we hear Jon Spencer shout on the new Blues Explosion album and it’s a surprisingly conciliatory statement from a guy who built his reputation on blasphemy. Whether horking up scum-punk phlegm balls like "Cunt Tease" and "You Look Like a Jew" with Pussy Galore, or treating Blues Explosion songs like 1-900 hotline advertisements for his sexual stamina, the Jon Spencer of old was never too concerned with exchanging pleasantries and making friends. But for Spencer, indecency and sincerity were the same thing, fuelled by a devout belief in the sort of primal, provocative, persona-driven rock'n'roll embodied by everyone from Little Richard to Iggy Pop to James Chance. The Blues Explosion name was an both an assertion of tradition and an act of treason, reconnecting '90s post-hardcore indie rock with a history it had disowned, trolling blues purists who assumed the band was mocking the form, all while pissing off their own garage-punk base by importing raps from Beck and beats from Dan the Automator.
Alas, since regrouping after a six-year hiatus in 2010, the Blues Explosion now exist in a world where the context that made their past work so outrageous has all but evaporated, while even a horndog come-on like "baby, baby, you sure like to fuck" seems downright chivalrous at a time when pick-up lines have been replaced by Snapchat dick pics. The Blues Explosion are fully aware that their moment has passed—that line quoted at the top of this review leads off a song called "Funeral", which sets the thematic tone for a record that essentially functions as the Blues Explosion’s answer to To the 5 Boroughs. Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 is a eulogy for the seedy New York City where Spencer first earned his notoriety—amid the early-'80s triangulation of hardcore, rap, and the avant-garde—and an attempt to come to terms with the gentrified version that exists today. But it’s also an album that rarely forgets the first three letters of "funeral" are f-u-n.
Compared to 2012’s commendable if conventional comeback effort, Meat and Bone, Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 more easily locks into the singularly gritty groove the Blues Explosion patented circa 1994’s Orange. ("Funeral" is pretty much "Flavor" squeezed into a tapered set of "Bellbottoms", and destined to usurp the latter as the band’s entrance theme of choice.) And if the No Wave in the album title is a bit of a misnomer—this ode to NYC is more DMC than DNA—they at least get the Dance Partypart right, with an infectiously upbeat energy that keeps that action moving at a brisk clip (albeit without the speed-freak menace that once brought out their berserker best). But even if it mostly avoids the scratched-up boom-bap of the band’s past hip-hop nods, Freedom Tower could very well be the band’s most overtly rap-inspired record to date—it’s just that, instead of absorbing the texture of hip-hop into the album’s production, they cop its cadence in the punky performances.
It’s not hard to detect the influence of early Chuck D on Spencer’s "Wax Dummy" spiel, while "The Ballad of Joe Buck"—powered by Russell Simins’ thundering "Halleluwah"-sized beat—sees the frontman assume the nursery-rhyme flow of a circa-'79 block party MC. But these modes are natural fits for Spencer’s maniacal, motor-mouthed mojo, infused with a playfulness that undercuts the chest-beating posturing endemic to rap-rock. And as far as minimalist three-piece rock bands go, Spencer, Simins, and Judah Bauer are at their most intuitive when acting like cut-and-paste producers—they’re still less interested in songwriting than song-writhing, constantly contorting and distorting a track’s trajectory to maximize the endorphin rush. On frenzied, byzantine workouts like "Born Bad" and "Dial Up Doll", the Blues Explosion cycle through the history of rock'n'roll like one of those YouTube videos that summarizes a season of "Game of Thrones" in two minutes, stripping out stuff like character development and emotional arcs and stitching together only the most essential riffs, rhythms, and one-liners.
Spencer turns 50 this year, a factor that’s less audible in Freedom Tower’s spirited swagger than in the frothy dad-worthy humor that occasionally rises to the fore—like the proud Rufus Thomas-inspired "world’s oldest teenager" boast on the roadhouse funk of "Do the Get Down", or the urban-cowboy blues of "Down and Out", a light-hearted requiem for a modern-day, overpriced New York where even "a million dollars ain’t gonna last you but one year." And while Freedom Tower isn’t exactly a concept album, it can belabor the NYC-nostalgia angle: From the titular nod to Run-DMC’s breakthrough single to the CBGB shout-outs to the archival JSBX interview snippets, "Tales of Old New York: Rock Box" is practically a VH1 special in miniature. But the album’s backward-gazing perspective doesn’t detract from the fact that Freedom Tower contains some of the Blues Explosion’s most inspired, vital music since their mid-'90s peak. And in a world where brawnier but decidedly humorless blooze-belters like the Black Keys and Royal Blood still fill arenas, the Blues Explosion’s cheeky, scrappy brand of rock'n'roll is still something to cherish in the here and now. | 2015-03-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | March 24, 2015 | 7 | 2e31b62e-5e51-416f-9259-c7115795615b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The career of the new age deity has been defined by a string of radiant collaborations. Here, with his longtime partner and a synth trio, he again lifts off. | The career of the new age deity has been defined by a string of radiant collaborations. Here, with his longtime partner and a synth trio, he again lifts off. | Laraaji / Arji OceAnanda / Dallas Acid: Arrive Without Leaving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laraaji-arji-oceananda-dallas-acid-arrive-without-leaving/ | Arrive Without Leaving | Long before he was reborn as the new age deity Laraaji, Edward Larry Gordon’s career depended upon his ability to react. He was initially an actor and stand-up comedian, crafts that thrive or die through a performer’s response to crowd and circumstance. That talent has aided Laraaji in most every aspect of his work, making him a magnetic leader of laughter meditation workshops and a particularly generous musical collaborator. This was as clear on his career-making 1980 masterpiece, the Brian Eno-produced Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, as on subsequent documents of such miraculous meetings. Whether playfully rapping over Japanese dub artists Audio Active on 1995’s The Way Out Is The Way In or melding minds with psychedelic duo Blues Control for the FRKWYS series in 2011, his commitment to working together has spawned much of his best work. Arrive Without Leaving—the next great union in the now 75-year-old’s sprawling discography—again bridges new age generations to create something that sits serenely outside time.
The record follows a March 2018 concert at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, where Laraaji and longtime collaborator and fellow music healer Arji OceAnanda shared the bill with a younger synth trio from Texas, Dallas Acid. They vibed and, the next day, headed to a nearby studio to jam. OceAnanda collaborates with Laraaji on records and in laughter workshops so frequently that they feel like extensions of one other. In addition to chimes, digital flute, and Peruvian seed pods used as subtle shakers, she adds a great deal of mbira here, the African thumb piano that has become one of Laraaji’s signatures. She was uncredited in the title of FRKWYS Vol. 8, though she was as present and essential then as now, where she rightly gets her due. Dallas Acid—Linda Beecroft, Michael Gerner, Christian Havins—play a similar part to Blues Control: younger experimentalists inspired but not contained by new age, eager fans to their temporary bandmates. Their six-hour studio session was edited into Arrive’s concise 36 minutes, a focused, sunny sequence that hits the body and mind like a concentrated shot of B vitamins.
The quartet opens with its longest track, the 10-minute cleanse of “Evening Reduction.” It outlines Arrive’s tranquil vocabulary before building on it during four more soundscapes. “Full Moon Serenade” continues the slow burn with distant chimes and angelic vocals courtesy of Laraaji, twinkling together over synths and birdsong. The album blooms during centerpiece “This Much Now,” which capitalizes on the electric zither sweeps that have defined so much of Laraaji’s music. As with his classic album for Eno’s Ambient series, its folk-dance melodies are almost too lively to fit the famous “ignorable as it is interesting” ethos, but they alter perceptions just the same. Synth washes and seductive strums vibrate the ears and sooth the mind with the same precision that Laraaji’s laughter exercises pinpoint parts of the brain and body.
As the album moves into “Somewhere Here,” the group’s pieces fuse, all their layers cohering into one. It begins simply with a single flute melody before growing into a virtual sound bath, where the beginnings and ends of every instrument blur like acid trails and seamlessly bridge into the climactic “This Much More.” Laraaji’s virtuosic playing can often make him sound like multiple people, but what’s remarkable about Arrive is how this new age mini-orchestra eventually sound like a singular being. Some of that credit belongs to Jeff Zeigler, the veteran recording engineer and kindred experimentalist given the Herculean task of mixing Arrive. But Laraaji provides the one-of-a-kind unifying presence he always has. Whether working with old friends or new collaborators, he can turn any jam session into a day of radiance. | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Flying Moonlight | October 27, 2018 | 7.6 | 2e34d75e-fbbe-449a-af39-c484edbf50ac | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ |
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