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On J. Cole’s fourth album, he wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties. He also sands down some of his worst impulses. | On J. Cole’s fourth album, he wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties. He also sands down some of his worst impulses. | J. Cole: 4 Your Eyez Only | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22696-4-your-eyez-only/ | 4 Your Eyez Only | Some time this March, a SWAT team descended on a home in a wooded, well-to-do North Carolina suburb. According to the producer Elite, helicopters vultured overhead as armed officers broke down the front door and raided the house, presumably acting on a tip from a neighbor who believed the occupants were manufacturing or selling drugs. There was no one home; masked and bulletproof-vested men kept pouring inside. Instead of a grow-op, officers found a basement littered with recording equipment, the bones of a creative hideout that had filled the community with little more than some errant blunt smoke.
The house was J. Cole’s. It wasn’t the native North Carolinian’s only property holding: he’d previously purchased his childhood home, at 2014 Forest Hills Drive in Fayetteville, with plans to turn it into a rent-free safe haven for single mothers. On his last solo effort—which was named after the Fayetteville house—he rapped about his adolescent fantasies of white picket fences surrounded by trees, by quiet. The SWAT experience, recounted on “Neighbors,” the best song from Cole’s fourth album, 4 Your Eyez Only, is a grim perversion of those dreams, and it anchors a record that wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties.
For long stretches, Eyez is a rumination on death. Cole frequently invokes other points of view, including that of his late friend James McMillan, Jr., who was killed at 22. The album is peppered with references to his murder, and a testimony from a young girl in Fayetteville, which appears at two points on “Ville Mentality,” echoes the reality faced by McMillan’s own daughter. Cole is himself a new father (“She’s Mine, Pt. 2” is about his wife and newborn child), and the title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date.
He also comes to life on “Immortal,” which sounds as if someone played Cole an unheard 2Pac song from the Makaveli sessions and then dared him to recreate it from memory. The song’s narrator feeds baggies through a burglar bar, watches Bic lighters wave under spoons, wakes up early to hit the Bowflex. It’s details like that last one that set “Immortal” apart from so much of Cole’s early work: you can see the speaker bathed in the artificial light of 3 a.m. infomercials, figuring he needs to put some weight on. He equivocates—“crime pays like a part-time job” is the sort of evocative, economical phrase that has eluded Cole so often in the past. And when he rattles off rhetorical questions (“Have you ever seen a nigga that was Black on the moon?/Have you ever seen your brother go to prison as you cry?/Have you ever seen a motherfucking ribbon in the sky?”) he’s working in a long tradition of rappers and writers knocking a grave present against against its opposite. To that end, at the song’s most defiant moment, Cole nods to his real life: “If they want a nigga, they gon’ have to send a SWAT team.”
At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies. “No Role Modelz,” a breakout hit from 2014 Forest Hills Drive, tried to cast crass, regressive ideas about women as a moral struggle; “Deja Vu” is its mopey inverse, where Cole shouts over the music in a club to ask “Who in their right mind letting you out the house alone?/Tell me, is your house a home?” The song also lapses into some of the album’s laziest writing, like “On a scale from 1 to 10, that girl’s a hundred.” It’s like “Marvin’s Room” for guys who brought their high school letter jackets to college. (It’s worth noting that while “Deja Vu” and Bryson Tiller’s massive “Exchange” share a sample and, at points, have similar drum programming, producer Vinylz claims that he and Boi-1da produced “Deja Vu” before its beat was stolen and repurposed for the Tiller version.)
Speaking of production, that’s the one area where Eyez falls far behind Forest Hills Drive. After “Deja Vu,” the album slips into a three-song lull of pale, ornate music—unfortunate because the songs grapple with the early death of parents, Cole’s love for his wife, and McMillan’s death, respectively. “Ville Mentality” in particular plays like an interlude, and it might in fact be better served with just its hook and the aforementioned words from a young woman. Eyez sorely misses the type of serrated edge given to Forest Hills Drive by tracks like “03’ Adolescence,” “G.O.M.D.,” or “Fire Squad.” For this record, Cole leans more heavily on his singing voice than ever before—a welcome change at points, but it pushes the middle section of Eyez onto the sleepier side of the ledger.
Aside from the moments when he taps into something greater (“Immortal,” “Neighbors,” “4 Your Eyez Only”), Cole’s most marked improvement comes by sanding down the more grating parts of his style. There is less moralistic grandstanding, and no lines about bodily functions or leftover Italian food. In their place are references to airbrushed RIP shirts and private prison shareholders. That said, a dutiful focus on the album’s central storyline means there aren’t big swings or long tangents in any direction, and aside from that trio of great tracks, Cole seldom sounds like he’s leaving it all out on the field.
But Eyez often feels like a natural extension from the more overtly political tone of Cole’s public comments since his trip to Ferguson in August of 2014. This isn’t a protest record in the acute sense, but it’s unavoidably the product of the types of oppression that beckon SWAT teams into suburban homes on nothing but hearsay. In that vein, the most quietly radical decision Cole makes here is following “Neighbors” with a song called “Foldin’ Clothes,” where he and his wife shirk the outside world for Netflix and almond milk. That domestic stillness—stillness that might be interrupted at any moment by helicopters or an evening news report—is fragile, and that fragility is its own devastating statement. | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc Nation / Dreamville | December 14, 2016 | 6.7 | 2e3c053a-e424-470b-8f3f-47209f938a63 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The collected songs from the infamous show would have been better served as a random Weeknd posse album meant to launch the promising minor pop career of Lily-Rose Depp. | The collected songs from the infamous show would have been better served as a random Weeknd posse album meant to launch the promising minor pop career of Lily-Rose Depp. | The Weeknd: The Idol: Music From the HBO Original Series | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weeknd-the-idol-vol-1-music-from-the-hbo-original-series/ | The Idol: Music From the HBO Original Series | If you would like to listen to the music from the first season of The Idol—HBO’s infamous, incendiary show about a young female pop star as told through the eyes of its creators, Sam Levinson (Euphoria), Reza Fahim, and Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd)—you could sit through all five tedious episodes and see the songs come together in bits and pieces, performed diegetically by the musician-actors in the cast. If you maybe want to enjoy the music from The Idol, you’re better off just listening to it without finding out why it exists in the first place.
To put it simply, The Idol is a mess, a poorly written show that—spoilers for the entire first season to follow—graphically uses a sleazy club owner/talent manager named Tedros (Tesfaye) to abuse its main character Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) only to reveal in the end, Scooby-style, that—surprise!—she was the abuser all along. That’s how season one ends, with an incoherent twist framed as an incoherent critique of pop stardom and the music industry machine. With the particular disadvantage of having seen every episode, some songs that deserve better, such as a beatific Troye Sivan covering George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” are now sullied by association—in this case, “My Sweet Lord” appears in an interminable scene of aspiring stars performing for vampiric label suits in Jocelyn’s living room, a mini-showcase that only serves to underscore how little The Idol has going on in the way of plot and character development.
Taking on the show’s self-serious baggage, a sweet song like “Crocodile Tears,” Suzanna Son’s rendition of a misfit’s sorrowful internal monologue, is marred forever with the image of her underage Squeaky Fromme-type character, Chloe, singing butt naked at a piano, for some reason. “Get It B4,” a true jammer on which the Princely Moses Sumney gospelizes his lust, is now forever connected to Tedros using a shock collar on Sumney’s character in order to—and this is implied with nary a hint of irony—deepen his pelvic thrusts. These are intrusive thoughts you do not want while just trying to enjoy some songs.
It may leave you pondering how The Idol feeds into anti-#MeToo backlash (a minor and undeveloped plotline involves a jealous Tedros conspiring to falsely accuse Jocelyn’s ex-boyfriend of rape) for the sole purpose of—what? Exorcising Tesfaye and Levinson’s fundamental misunderstanding of their inspiration, director Paul Verhoeven, while painfully lacking his sense of fun and self-awareness? Revealing that these dudes have possibly never had sex? Maybe, as some have predicted, The Idol will age like fine camp, as Verhoeven’s Showgirls has. I have doubts, but more pressingly for our purposes: This soundtrack would have been better served as a random Weeknd posse album meant to launch the promising minor pop career of Lily-Rose Depp.
The soundtrack, released as a series of six standalone digital EPs corresponding to each episode, opens with Mike Dean’s “The Lure,” the show’s theme, which is built on spare chords and mournful humming by the Weeknd, the sonic embodiment of a fog machine. As erotic thriller themes go, it stays true to its inspirations, setting up a decadent noir mood with a plinky synth stab and strings that owe as much to Ennio Morricone as the Stranger Things and Drive soundtracks. It, too, deserved a better show, and sets the tone for the songs to come, all sexual synth tracks that deploy dramatic minor chords to hint at a seamy undertone.
”Devil’s Paradise,” another Dean instrumental, reprises the themes of “The Lure” with a midnight sax solo that evokes walking through a dark alley circa 1987, maybe bumming a smoke off a skeptical-looking guy in a blazer who just happens to be leaning against the wall. As a score, it’s effective, and transitions into “Double Fantasy,” the Weeknd and Future’s dispatch from the boning phase of a toxic relationship, a serviceable first single with awkward lyrics and a fine bassline courtesy Metro Boomin. “The Lure”’s mien threads through each song here, particularly those by the Weeknd: “A Lesser Man” is a mid-tempo gaslighter from the perspective of Tedros, couching threats in supposed feebleness; a cover of “Jealous Guy” on a bed of John Carpenter-lite arpeggios curdles John Lennon’s original into an ominous threat. “Take Me Back” completes Tedros’ textbook abuser script by begging for forgiveness and blaming it on his childhood, with the Weeknd singing in a hurt warble on a cresting ocean of synthesizers. Its melodrama is slickly beautiful, which might not be enough for a life outside The Idol’s claustrophobic universe—particularly when followed by Sumney’s glittering “Get It B4,” which positions seduction as a much less complicated proposal.
Depp fares better here, as a first-time pop singer whose light rasp is believable, even while singing lines like, “Spit in my mouth while you turn me out,” as she does on the Weeknd’s “One of the Girls,” which can’t be saved even by BLACKPINK’s Jennie. Depp works with what she’s been given on “Dollhouse,” a Lana Del Rey-style sex dirge about submission that ends with the lyric, “Am I playing all right now, daddy?” The song lives in a rare pre-camp space, in that it’s unclear whether it’s meant to be hilarious, though it certainly is on some level. (It should be noted here that the show preemptively sniffed at this criticism via a throwaway line from someone on Jocelyn’s team about Live Nation employees who walked out in protest of Jocelyn’s “misogynistic” lyrics, though it’s unclear whether viewers were supposed to hate the staffers in Jocelyn’s defense or to hate her Live Nation liaison for dismissing their concerns.)
The sexual popsploitation works best when it’s not trying to be deadly serious, as on the soundtrack’s pièce de résistance, “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak,” a camp filmic single in the grand tradition of Ally/Lady Gaga’s “Why Did You Do That?” from A Star Is Born. Co-written by the Weeknd and Asa Taccone, who had a hand in the Lonely Island’s “Dick in a Box” and “The Weeknd’s Dark Secret” from American Dad!, its lyrics scan just absurd enough—“I’m tryna find someone to bang”—that it lets us in on the joke. The show positions this song as a pop throwaway that necessitates Jocelyn creating some real art, which gives away The Idol’s whole dilemma: It doesn’t know how to have fun, muddling its already troubled thesis (the music industry is rife with users) with scenes like the one where Mike Dean emerges herbishly from his custom Tesla holding a giant bong and a blunt with a second blunt tucked behind his ear. The creators of The Idol seem to look down their noses at its viewers for consuming what it spent millions to feed us: Mass-produced pop that’s somehow even more odious and cynical than the industry that it’s meant to critique. | 2023-07-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XO / Republic | July 6, 2023 | 6.1 | 2e3d80ea-ad32-4c5b-bc1f-72c832c209e7 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The duo’s three-part score for showrunner Damon Lindelof’s sociopolitically fraught story of vigilantism is their strongest and most direct since The Social Network. | The duo’s three-part score for showrunner Damon Lindelof’s sociopolitically fraught story of vigilantism is their strongest and most direct since The Social Network. | Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-watchmen-music-from-the-hbo-series/ | Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series) | How committed are Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to their nominal side gig of composing for film and television? Here’s how: In the middle of releasing their sprawling three-volume score for Watchmen, the HBO adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark superhero comic, they dropped a 77-minute soundtrack for Trey Edward Shults’ indie drama Waves, too. Clearly, the bug that bit the duo circa The Social Network in 2010 hasn’t let go. Based on the quality of their music for Watchmen, that’s great news. Their score for showrunner Damon Lindelof’s sociopolitically fraught story of vigilantism is their strongest and most direct since The Social Network—or even Reznor’s soundtrack for the 1996 video game Quake.
The horror-movie atmospherics of Quake are the closest reference point for Watchmen’s first and strongest track, “How the West Was Really Won.” The show’s unofficial theme music—it recurs repeatedly in the series’ most frightful moments, including the ripped-from-the-comic image of a gigantic alien squid in the ruins of Manhattan—it’s the sound of Reznor and Ross going full John Carpenter, with a simple synth hook that seems to swallow up more of the world around you with each repetition. Its melodic structure recurs throughout the score, in the gently acoustic “Watch Over This Boy” at the end of Volume 1, the jazz throwback “Nostalgia Blues” on Volume 2 (co-written and performed by John Beasley), and the major-key weightlessness of “The Waiting Sky” on Volume 3. The original song is resilient enough to mutate in this way, showing off the duo’s skill with leitmotif as well as their considerable range. It’s the theme music Nine Inch Nails fans have been waiting for them to deliver.
It also starts off the soundtracks with a bang rather than a simmer, a mood maintained through much of Volume 1. “Nun With a Motherf*&*ing Gun” pulses and clangs like a reimagined version of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant,” while “Objects in Mirror (Are Closer Than They Appear)” and “Kattle Battle” share a sleazy, slithering bass groove. While the bangers largely vanish by the time the quieter, more ruminative Volume 2 comes around, they return in a big way with Volume 3’s leadoff track, “Doomsday Prepper,” which comes fully loaded with scuzzy Nine Inch Nails guitar.
Reznor and Ross even work covers into the show’s repertoire. The trilogy ends with a quiet, reverent piano cover of “Life on Mars?”, the world-beating ballad by Reznor’s late friend and mentor David Bowie. But the pair are equally reverent toward Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” which they reconfigure into Volume 3’s “No Rhythm.” To my ears, there’s even a tip of the hat to Bernard Herrmann’s jazzy Taxi Driver theme at the start of the big-band pastiche “The Way It Used to Be.” That’s not to say they’re incapable of love themes all their own: “Which Came First” is a wistful piano ballad that mutates into sci-fi synth; its melody returns with a full choir in “Lincoln Tunnel” several tracks later.
In keeping with the disorienting tone of Lindelof’s show, the albums are peppered with dialogue snippets lifted from the series, from teasers for fictional TV shows (“American Promo Story,” “A Man Walks Into an Intrinsic Field”) to pharmaceutical infomercials (“The Elephant in the Room”). Taking this several steps further, as is the Reznor way, the vinyl version of each release comes disguised as an album from within Watchmen’s world: Volume 1 is the latest release by the fake rock group Sons of Pale Horse, Volume 2 is the score for the Ryan Murphy–esque TV show American Hero Story, and Volume 3 is an old album by “The” Nine Inch Nails, the genuine article’s fictional equivalent.
But as has been the case with other Reznor/Ross scores, you needn’t be sold on the show, or even familiar with it, to enjoy the score. Taken together, Watchmen Vols. 1-3 play like a dispatch from some other weird world, one that feels like Reznor and Ross’s alternately paranoid and plaintive music. In other words: a world much like our own.
Buy: Rough Trade (Vol. 1) (Vol. 2) (Vol. 3)
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | The Null Corporation | January 11, 2020 | 7.6 | 2e3e88c6-0ce3-41ce-8854-3e45f0813190 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, the producer and songwriter’s latest album is gloomy, on edge, and disappointingly hollow. | Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, the producer and songwriter’s latest album is gloomy, on edge, and disappointingly hollow. | Finneas: Optimist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/finneas-optimist/ | Optimist | In a recent, live interview for the New Yorker, Billie Eilish was asked to recount how she had experienced the onset of the pandemic. She was on tour, busy and oblivious to the news, she said; she didn’t notice what was happening until she was canceling shows. “I wasn’t looking at my phone,” she explained. Seated next to her in the Zoom frame, her brother Finneas O’Connell piped up: “I was.”
Finneas has something he’d like you to know: He’s been paying attention. Finneas acknowledges his privilege and his whiteness; he’s caught up on politics, has thoughts on cancel culture, and wonders if our phones are poisoning our brains. Finneas is young, only 24, but perhaps he has some wisdom to share: Make the most of your finite time on this earth. Also, call your parents.
These are some of the talking points on Optimist, the misleadingly named debut album from the songwriter and producer best known for his ongoing creative partnership with his younger sister, one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, Finneas—single-handedly, as its sole producer, writer, and, on 12 out of 13 tracks, instrumentalist—made an album that’s gloomy and on edge, encumbered by the alienation of life in the digital era as magnified by the distorting lens of fame and new money.
Optimist enters into dialogue with recent albums by other young stars disenchanted with success and the world that gave it to them: Lorde, Clairo, and, of course, Eilish herself. Aesthetically, these records are united in their movement away from pop bombast and towards softer, slower sounds with less commercial traction. Finneas is on board, to some degree—about a third of these songs are piano ballads; one is an instrumental interlude that does little besides demonstrate his proficiency. The O’Connell siblings share a well-documented fondness for mid-century standards, and Finneas sings in a warm, searching baritone—often double-tracked for maximum texture—that performs nicely in songs indebted to them.
But while bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. “Only a Lifetime” cautions us not to “waste the time you have/waiting for time to pass,” while “What They’ll Say About Us” lays plans to “take the world and make it better than it ever was.” These are pleasant but toothless sentiments, fit to print in frilly cursive on plaques sold at Home Goods. Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them.
Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones. On the hyperpop-y “The 90s,” Finneas longs to retire from the internet and return to the decade of his birth (“when I was not a problem yet”). When he sings, “Now my head feels so heavy,” his voice is glitched out, producer-speak for “I feel alienated.” “Medieval” laments the churn and burn of the celebrity machine with a snarling vocal delivery over a percussive rumble; the playful, plinky “Happy Now?” stumbles on the revelation that fame and money and a “douchebag car” isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Listening to an album that hits such extremes of texture and tone is jarring, much like contemporary digital existence. Maybe that’s the point. Whether intentionally or not, Finneas replicates these all-too-familiar conditions without submitting anything new to the discourse. “The 90s” uses an idea that has been passed around by some other pop (and pop-adjacent) singers—but without the developed narrative arc of Sam Hunt’s take, or the self-aware camp of Charli XCX’s, it falls flat. The satirical intent of “The Kids Are All Dying”—a smarmy song that, it must be said, contains the biggest groaner of all in “I’m whiter than the ivory on these keys”—is undercut by the song’s lack of a target. Instead of scrutinizing one culprit with rigor and bite, Finneas gestures wildly to the ether, citing climate, war, capitalism, gun violence, Twitter activism, and fake news, his narrator slipping between the voice of the critic and that of the criticized.
As a critic, Finneas can do much better. And he has: He co-wrote “Your Power,” a clear-eyed, affecting indictment of abusers on his sister’s recent album, Happier Than Ever. The unavoidable context for Finneas’s debut is, of course, the magnitude of what he’s already achieved. So when he sings, “Now all your memories feel more like films/… /You wonder why the bad ones paid the bills,” on “Someone Else’s Star,” I can’t help but think how much more eloquently Billie captured her own curdled relationship to art and commerce: “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now.” Maybe it’s unfair to foist this comparison upon Finneas, but he does seem to invite it by dropping his album mere months after Billie’s, with a noticeably similar title.
Very much to his credit, Finneas has shaped some of the past decade’s most memorable pop music. Three years ago, he sampled a dental drill and an Easy-Bake Oven on a song that would go triple platinum—choices that felt freaky, unexpected, and daring. Now, on “Someone Else’s Star,” he’s sampling rainstorms, dampening an already dreary track with a too-obvious signifier. The biggest risk that Finneas takes on Optimist may just be invoking inflammatory topics to which he brings limited insight. By the end, it’s all a wash anyway; Finneas throws up his hands and goes out on “How It Ends” (sigh), a disco-lite track that hinges on timeless pop wisdom about dancing away the pain. Bop away while you shield your eyes from the news.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | October 18, 2021 | 5.6 | 2e402c78-1d05-4bcc-9ceb-a71805d884bd | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Lykke Li’s intimate, ghostly fifth album takes a stripped-down approach to the all-too-familiar devastation of heartbreak. | Lykke Li’s intimate, ghostly fifth album takes a stripped-down approach to the all-too-familiar devastation of heartbreak. | Lykke Li: EYEYE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lykke-li-eyeye/ | EYEYE | Lykke Li has a master’s in sadness—“I’ve always had a broken heart since I was a kid,” she recently said. Her music is a companion to sorrow in the same way the sun is a companion to the morning, and on her latest record EYEYE, the Swedish romantic continues her studies in misery with complex supercuts of tear-soaked memories. Reuniting with Peter Bjorn and John’s Björn Yttling, her main collaborator throughout her first three records, Li committed to eight stripped-down songs in an attempt to “break up with the breakup album.” But in the absence of escapist melodic thrills, EYEYE serves as a kind of bloodletting for the heartache that’s nagged her throughout her career.
Loosely based on the concept of a loop, EYEYE opens with the squeak of reversed tape and concludes with a jumble of vocals that suggest Li is being rewound, too. But instead of maxing out her grief with trap beats and double-time delivery as she did on so sad so sexy, or returning to the wall-of-sound production and cathartic choruses of I Never Learn, she turned to her phone. The lo-fi and unselfconscious sound of the voice memos she’d recorded seemed just right, and so EYEYE was ultimately recorded in her bedroom, harnessing the intimate energy of a space that’s integral to dreams, sensuality, and crying in private.
As Li thrusts us into her heavy, moody headspace, background sounds bleed into the music; crickets chirp at odd moments, and subtle white noise fills in pauses. Blurry, underwater guitars accompany her wounded delivery on the first couple songs: “And I know I hold on/To someone not here/But you won’t go away,” she sings breathily on “You Don’t Go Away,” admitting to the dissonance between lost love and lingering romantic feelings. As her voice ascends to a soft soprano, the exhaustion creeps in; the whispered approach is somehow louder than the enraged cry of songs like “Sadness Is a Blessing” and “Gunshot.” But Li isn’t cultivating nostalgia for this former relationship—she’s begging the feelings to leave. “It doesn’t go away/Every night I pray,” she pleads.
Though these heart-in-her-hand lyrics take center stage, the production across EYEYE is both entrancing and bizarre. The album balances mourning and meditation, filling its vast, gelatinous sound field with phantom backing vocals, floorboard creaks, spaceship synths, and eerie, carnivalesque melodies. Midway through the album comes one enlivening, misleadingly playful outlier: “Carousel” captures the sound of an abandoned amusement park ride as Li reflects on the tendency to repeatedly return to a hurtful relationship. “Flying and I can’t come down/Yeah, I’m high as hell,” she sings, stuck on a malfunctioning ride yet hoping it might once again bring some kind of pleasure. At the outro, bioluminescent synths trickle downward like soap bubbles.
It’s after “Carousel” that Li’s conceptual intention comes into full focus. The most devastating aspect of heartbreak is in the way its cyclical ache—the replayed memories and bad habits—shatters the fantasy of a different outcome. “Is it only in the movie you love me?” she asks on “5D.” On closer “ü&i,” she watches a lover walk away and refuses to allow their turned back to become the relationship’s final scene. Instead, she closes her eyes and pleads, “Turn around, yeah you/The movie is you and I.” It’s the greatest conviction Li displays on EYEYE: to command a different ending, even if only in her mind. That dreamy between-worlds effect turns this record into a cinematic opus, even as these painful memories sometimes feel too close for comfort. But you don’t get a master’s in sadness by avoiding your studies. | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PIAS / Crush | May 23, 2022 | 7.4 | 2e43e689-2f50-4ef2-acfe-d58b1ec434c3 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
After the suicide of bassist Sean Stewart last year, the no wave-leaning art noise duo pushes forward with its second full-length. Here they sport a noticeably minimal sound, with dark groaning and clanking that draws from coldwave and a host of other creepy signifiers. | After the suicide of bassist Sean Stewart last year, the no wave-leaning art noise duo pushes forward with its second full-length. Here they sport a noticeably minimal sound, with dark groaning and clanking that draws from coldwave and a host of other creepy signifiers. | HTRK: Work (work, work) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15776-work-work-work/ | Work (work, work) | Bands that find their voice quickly are the lucky ones. Of course, you run a greater risk of repeating yourself in the future, but by and large the hardest part is already out of the way. HTRK (pronounced "Hate Rock") aren't what you would normally consider lucky, both professionally and personally. Formed in 2003, the trio's no wave-leaning art noise found them playing alongside deities like Alan Vega and Lydia Lunch. In 2009, their debut LP, Marry Me Tonight (co-produced by ex-Birthday Party member Roland S. Howard), landed them a few high-profile opening slots for the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars.
And it made sense: Marry Me is doomy and romantically languid, with a pop-smart crispness that spoke of potentially good things to come. But when bassist Sean Stewart took his own life in March of last year, vocalist Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang were left to pick up the pieces and push forward with their second full length, Work (work, work). While dark and otherworldly, much of Work doesn't feel like it has much to do with death, but everything to do with sex. But they've shifted their sound, and in the current climate they come over as zeitgeist chasers without much character.
The music of the past year or so has been hot for dark and moody sounds, from the fleeting pulses of the witch house craze to the dread-stoked, depressive underpinnings that pervade various electronic and R&B offshoots. HTRK also seem to have noticed, inflecting their sound with creepy, crawling signifiers that feel currently cool or just past their expiration date. The crucial distinction is that HTRK have a noticeably minimal sound, funneling their groaning and clanking through no wave and coldwave instead of the viscous twitch-and-bounce of witch house proper (though the drum programming suggests the Three 6 Mafia presets came stock) or the lurid, lukewarm comeliness of jj or the xx (though both of these artists are good for a name-check at just about any moment on the album).
So needless to say, Work is heavy on atmosphere, and while the attention paid to those aforementioned post punk totems could have set them apart (at times it feels as if HTRK could pull off a lounge-y mix-up of Sade and Suicide), there simply isn't enough to sink your teeth into. Occasionally constructed of some interesting parts (the processional G-funk organ squiggles on single "Eat Yr Heart", the pressure-crunched submarine hull moans of "Slo Glo"), nothing seems properly supported. The music feels unappetizingly narcotized and drab, not to mention uncomfortably claustrophobic despite all of the aimless sprawling and spreading the music does. The pair seems to have been so focused on creating a mood that they forgot to attach any songs along the way.
Perhaps most anesthetizing of all is Standish, whose coquettish, layered vocals make all the chic disaffection feel even more purposefully (and problematically) clouded. There's nothing especially bad here, but once the smoke clears from their bland, bassed-out ambiance, HTRK are another band without a sound to call their own. | 2011-09-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-09-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ghostly International | September 6, 2011 | 5.7 | 2e4ba876-1765-4db2-88ef-0c9a3c938af6 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | 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 Beck’s ramshackle 1994 album, a quintessential piece of alternative rock, experimental folk, and hip-hop that felt magically displaced in time. | 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 Beck’s ramshackle 1994 album, a quintessential piece of alternative rock, experimental folk, and hip-hop that felt magically displaced in time. | Beck: Mellow Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beck-mellow-gold/ | Mellow Gold | If you were around to hear Beck’s “Loser” in the early 1990s, you probably felt the plates shift a little. Maybe you heard it on local radio in Los Angeles, where it arrived without context or marketing. Maybe you heard it in Seattle, where, six months after Beck had ad-libbed it in a cramped living-room studio, it became the most requested song on KNDD’s nightly People’s Choice Countdown, beating out the most recent single by Pearl Jam, who at the time may as well have been on the city’s tourism board.
Or maybe you, like me, heard it on MTV, where it seemed like a cool breeze blowing through the abstract pain of mainstream alternative music. When, in July, 1994, an interviewer from Spin magazine suggested that Beck’s backstory—poverty, an eighth-grade education, bouts of borderline homelessness—felt like fodder for darker sentiments, Beck, 23 and blindsided by his own new fame, pitched his voice up and whined, “You just gotta rage against the appliance, man. The toast is burning, and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke.” For Vedder, hearing “Loser” lap you on the radio must’ve felt like getting hit in the face by trash thrown from a passing car.
Much of Mellow Gold was recorded in the home studio of a guy named Carl Stephenson. By “home studio,” I mean a tape recorder set up in such a way that Beck later remembered having to finish vocal takes before Stephenson’s girlfriend wanted to get in and cook dinner. Stephenson had grown up playing in youth symphonies around Olympia, Washington, before quitting his grocery-store job and moving to Houston to work at Rap-A-Lot Records, then home to the Geto Boys. Rap-A-Lot was hardcore; Stephenson was not. He loved watching DJ Ready Red strip samples from old funk and soul records, but he was uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of the material. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he struggled to plant his homey, psychedelic productions in an increasingly gangsta market.
The way Stephenson remembers it, Beck Hansen was a street busker with a bad haircut. But he had a mischievous sense of creativity and no attachments to his own artistic self-image, and when Stephenson—alongside co-producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who ran the small Bong Load label—suggested they pair his rudimentary folk songs with Stephenson’s loops and grooves, Beck went with it. After all, he liked rap—the immediacy, the beat, the sense of performance. In the same Spin interview where he raged against the toaster, he remembered the communal warmth he felt as a teenager riding the bus on L.A., hearing Grandmaster Flash playing on some kids’ boombox from the back, how people from all different parts of the city seemed to absorb the sound, some even getting up to dance.
Mostly though, fashioning himself as a kind of rapper was a chance for Beck to undermine the sanctity of what it meant to be a white guy with an acoustic guitar. That he understood hip-hop as an extension of folk music rather than a betrayal of it—the way rap spun meaningful, entertaining stories out of everyday life using equipment anyone could get their hands on—felt insightful, even subversive, especially at a time when we were starting to digest the reality that grunge was just classic rock after all: the same quest for glory, the same macho, self-serious dream. In press coverage from the time, you can feel the ache of boomers hungering for the next Bob Dylan, but in reality, Beck was more like Tone Lōc or Mississippi John Hurt, or an asexual cousin to the Beastie Boys: a funny, self-styled dope just geeking out on the scene.
Compared to the rest of its 1994 class—Green Day’s Dookie, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, Hole’s Live Through This, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, and Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York—Mellow Gold was both weirder and lower to the ground. It could be direct—the roughness of the production, the visceral noise of some of the songs—but obscure, too, a knot of words that didn’t immediately register as metaphor or reality. And as vivid as it was, it also felt magically displaced in time. The compacted ’70s soul of “Fuckin’ With My Head” and “Sweet Sunshine”; the deadpan folk of “Nitemare Hippy Girl” and “Steal My Body Home”: listening to Mellow Gold was like finding a fossil from the future.
Part of the fun and frustration of encountering Mellow Gold was figuring out what, if any of this, Beck took seriously. His mother, Bibbe, had been in some Andy Warhol movies and later played in a band called Black Fag with the drag performer Vaginal Davis. His grandfather, Al Hansen, was a member of Fluxus, a conceptual art group whose most well-known pieces—Hansen’s Yoko Ono Piano Drop, for example, in which a piano was pushed off a five-story building—functioned less like art than an attempt to make the viewer confront what they think art is in the first place. Mellow Gold wasn’t quite so high-concept, but Beck certainly seemed more interested in the currency of cultural images than the supposed truths of his own dark mind. That said, if you were the kind of listener who heard lines like “my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite who’s choking on the splinters” as nonsense instead of poetry, he was your ideological punching bag come to life, a portrait of the artiste as the charlatan who throws shit at the wall and leaves it to you to figure out what it means.
The funny thing about his classification as a “slacker” was just how hard the content of his music could be. Where punks of generations past responded to dwindling prospects with angst, the slacker supposedly shrugged. Like the millennial 25 years later—another figment of the warped boomer mind—the slacker was ultimately anchored by entitlement: They didn’t not-perform because they couldn’t, but, like Herman Melville’s famous protagonist, Bartleby, because they preferred not to.
And yet here we have a piece of supposedly quintessential slacker art that is mostly about jobs: working them, losing them, the cyclic ruin that comes from not being able to get one and the capitalistic grind that keeps those clinging to them underfoot: “I was born in this hotel/Washing dishes in the sink” (“Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997”); “Fourteen days I been sleeping in a barn/Better get a paycheck tattooed on my arm” (“Soul Suckin’ Jerk”); “I quit my job blowing leaves/Telephone bills up my sleeves” (“Beercan”).
Even when work isn’t in the picture, poverty is the frame. The stories on Mellow Gold take place in trailer parks and subsist on credit and suitcases of cheap beer. They are ground-down, washed-up and loving it, “dancing on the roof, shootin’ holes in the moon.” The music sounds like junk because junk is what he sees from his window. And the punchline of “Loser” isn’t that he lost, but that he didn’t have a chance in the first place.
Listening to Mellow Gold, I’m always left with the same image: a child at play in the ruins of a dying world. “Tonight the city is full of morgues,” goes the first line on “Pay No Mind,” “and all the toilets are overflowing.” We’re at song two. (Or, as the tape-warped vocal at the beginning of the song puts it, “This’s song two on the album. This is the album right here. Burn the album.”)
Between here and there lies mountains of garbage and unpaid bills, the purgatory of menial work, screaming neighbors and rivers of shit and the well-moisturized ghouls who profit from it all and tell you it’s fine. Where some writers synthesize their inner worlds from the insulation of an armchair or desk, Beck seemed to be out there with rubber gloves and a second-hand hazmat suit, bagging up southern-rock compilations and rap mixtapes, reporting live from the brink with a crappy dictaphone. By the time I make it to “Nitemare Hippy Girl”—her giant tofu, her radiant self-obsession—it doesn’t sound like a diss, it sounds like a safe haven. Maybe even a koan: If the world ends outside your window but you’re too stoned to notice, does it still end?
I’ll spare you the fairytale about how this album helped make mainstream music better or more interesting. It did seem like good things came from it, including widening the avenues of conversation between hip-hop and indie-rock, and a weakening of distinctions between what was considered alternative and what was mainstream. In the years to come, labels like Matador, publications like the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal, bands like Cibo Matto and Cornershop and even Björk and Air all made the kind of cultural omnivorousness Beck demonstrated feel like part of a general push away from old myths toward something more eclectic, more effervescent, maybe even more feminine. And as a young white man, I have to say it felt good to see someone up there who wasn’t so invested in their own darkness, especially with Kurt Cobain pointing to where all that darkness went.
Mellow Gold was actually one of three albums Beck released in 1994: Another, One Foot in the Grave, was a lo-fi album of blues and folk, while Stereopathetic Soulmanure—released a week before Mellow Gold—was more fragmented, noisy, and tossed-off. Both, ironically, produced songs later covered by the kinds of classic-rock standbys whose universality Beck seemed to offer an alternative to: “Asshole” by Tom Petty, and “Rowboat” by Johnny Cash. They are both great songs, two of his best, as is “Satan Gave Me a Taco,” in which a luckless young man gets food poisoning from Satan only to discover that his life is in fact a music video. After an odyssey ascending the mountain of fame he is committed to hell, where he starts a taco stand with Satan—“just to smell the smell.”
You could hear the old blues there, the big American yarn of hustlers and idiots and someone trying to sell something and someone else getting his ass burned. Years later, Spin would call Beck a generation’s consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain. But I always heard him as more of a cheerleader, maybe even a coach. Yeah, the world’s a trash heap. Let’s climb it and watch the sun set. | 2020-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC | May 3, 2020 | 8.8 | 2e4c298d-0613-43a4-bc3a-57101a313928 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
Former Be Your Own Pet members add shades of Weezer-like power-pop to their economy-sized psych-rock. | Former Be Your Own Pet members add shades of Weezer-like power-pop to their economy-sized psych-rock. | JEFF the Brotherhood: We Are the Champions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15452-we-are-the-champions/ | We Are the Champions | Nashville's JEFF the Brotherhood are two brothers, Jamin and Jake Orrall. One's on guitar and vocals; the other mans the drums. They also co-run Infinity Cat Recordings with their father, singer/songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall, the only man in the world that can say he wrote songs for Shenandoah and Lindsay Lohan. JEFF's been an ongoing concern since 2002, but the brothers Orrall have logged time in plenty of bands, including the earliest incarnation of Be Your Own Pet. Like Pet, JEFF was fond of the fuzzy spastic two-to-three-minute punk-pop tune, but they were also fond of being unpredictable. Jamin and Jake were just as likely to say their peace in 30 seconds as they were to stretch things out for 14 minutes.
After numerous tours and releases, 2009's Heavy Days saw the Orralls focusing their powers and presenting themselves as an economy-sized psych-rock outfit, an Eagles of Death Metal with one less mouth to feed and a lot more pot in the glove compartment. Big and heavy but still quick on its feet, Heavy Days was a step forward that could please both longtime fans and those new to the party.
That said, anyone who's been tracking the moves the Orralls have made might be thrown off a bit by the way We Are the Champions kicks off, and I'm not talking about the rap-radio-exclusive airhorn that sounds off at the start of "Hey Friend". It's the song proper, and its remarkable similarity to what good Weezer sounds like, which might surprise. Everything about the tune-- its loping mid-tempo cadence, Jake Orrall's Cuomo-like vocals, even the tune's simple-simon sentiments ("I've been thinking about your mom/ You can tell me if it's really wrong")-- makes it sound like a Weezer Blue Album demo. Some might see that as a step backwards for JEFF, but I mean that comparison as a complement. The tune's aw-shucks silliness is as charming as its earworm of a melody is inescapable.
There's a fair amount of Heavy Days' brand of amp damage to be found on Champions-- you'll want to skip to "Cool Out" or "Ripper" to get that fix-- and one sitar-flecked tune ("Health and Strength") that'd fit right in on a Thee Oh Sees album, but the aforementioned poppier M.O. is the way the majority of this album goes. "Bummer" was JEFF's contribution to a split single with Best Coast, but plenty of tunes from Champions, from the gently rumbling "Diamond Way" to the awkwardly confident "Wastoid Girl", could stand toe-to-toe with anything Best Coast had to offer. It's only fitting that this album signals the beginning of a business partnership between Infinity Cat and the Warner Music Group. We Are the Champions might disappoint some diehard fans, but it's also proof positive that JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys. | 2011-05-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-05-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinity Cat Recordings | May 20, 2011 | 7.3 | 2e56e1cf-a0a7-426f-a547-9a1e21439945 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
At heart, the music of Hamburg-based producer DJ Koze is warm and joyous, designed to make you feel good. His entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series is remarkable not just because it's structured so well and flows so seamlessly as an album, but also because it offers insight into its mixer's mind, feeling a bit like an autobiography in sound. | At heart, the music of Hamburg-based producer DJ Koze is warm and joyous, designed to make you feel good. His entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series is remarkable not just because it's structured so well and flows so seamlessly as an album, but also because it offers insight into its mixer's mind, feeling a bit like an autobiography in sound. | DJ Koze: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20677-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | The music of Hamburg-based producer DJ Koze offers an unusual collision of the blissful and precise. In his singles, albums, and remixes, the immersive sensation of shoegaze and psychedelia meets the pointillist precision of minimal techno. So while his affinity for beautiful surface textures conjures feelings of drifting ecstasy, his crisp percussion and fondness for 4/4 propulsion concentrates those airy feelings into diamond-hard bursts. His music can get disorienting and even a bit creepy, but the darker effects feel more like the inevitable result of wandering, like a child taking a wrong turn in one of Grimm's fairy tales. At heart, Koze's music is warm and joyous, designed to make you feel good.
There's a strange kind of alchemy at work on the best DJ mixes, where the sensibility of the music and the connections between the tracks have so much integrity that it's if the person mixing made the music on their own. Koze's entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series is remarkable not just because it's structured so well and flows so seamlessly as an album, but also because it offers insight into its mixer's mind, and feels a bit like an autobiography in sound. As it moves from a front half heavy on blunted hip-hop (as a kid in the '80s, Koze was a competitive hip-hop DJ) into deliciously weird singer-songwriter turns and finally ends with gorgeous selections of gentle house and techno, you begin to hear Koze's music emerge out of the music of others. Along the way, he tinkers subtly with the tracks, transforming them via remixes and edits to make the whole feel like one long suite.
In the record's early stretch, Koze draws heavily from the Stones Throw catalog. On the evidence here, he favors producers that can isolate samples from the '60s and '70s—a guitar pattern, a swoop of strings—and warp them into a hypnotic loop that offers a kind of commentary on sound and memory. Madlib is one master of this approach, and Koze includes the former's collaboration with Freddie Gibbs, "Shame", along with his beat on Strong Arm Steady's "Best of Times". But work from Mndsgn and Swiss producer Dimlite mine a similar vein, a woozy post-Dilla environment heavy on groove with a deep interest in sonic detail.
The first half also shows Koze's fondness for expressive, unusual voices. On the Boards of Canada remix of cLOUDDEAD's "Dead Dogs Two", verses sit uneasily between nerd-rap and twee, while Homeboy Sandman's vocals on "Holiday" sound more like one half of a slurred conversation than a declaration. The slapback echo of Trish Keenan's vocals on Broadcast's "Tears in the Typing Pool" dislodge the song from time, making it resemble a '60s-era Disney animated feature rather than a 2005 album on Warp. And the mash-up of Hot Chip side project the 2 Bears with an instrumental from Cincinnati producer Hi-Tek, putting the bedroom soul vocals front and center, offers the perfect transition from the album's beat-head opening to the dreamier electronics that come later.
The set builds and becomes more interesting as it goes, and Koze takes a firmer hand, tweaking house tracks by Session Victim, Frank & Tony, and Marcel Fengler to bring out their inner Koze-ness. The moment late in Fengler's "Jaz", when the sleek techno opens into a clearing and the wistful piano of Portable's 2014 masterpiece "Surrender" enters, is one of the most breathtaking mix segues in recent memory. And the fact that Koze can make a William Shatner song produced by Ben Folds ("It Hasn't Happened Yet", from Shatner's 2004 album Has Been) sound logical in this context is a testament to his magical ear.
Marker Starling's "In Stride", another odd highlight, like the Broadcast cut, sounds like it could come from one of four different decades, but it actually came out in 2010 on Tin Angel. It's easy to assume that lovely songs like this, first released on a small indie label during a time of vast musical abundance, are easily lost forever, banished to the forgotten tip of the long tail. But Koze finds home for these misfit songs, and by doing so gets you thinking about possibilities, what else that might be out there waiting to be rediscovered. | 2015-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | June 16, 2015 | 8 | 2e5acb36-e048-4dd0-b694-b72f1191f445 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Corrections House is a sort of supergroup of underground metal: Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and saxophonist Bruce Lamont. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home. | Corrections House is a sort of supergroup of underground metal: Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and saxophonist Bruce Lamont. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home. | Corrections House: Know How to Carry a Whip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21207-know-how-to-carry-a-whip/ | Know How to Carry a Whip | Two years ago, Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and underground metal's most prominent saxophonist Bruce Lamont formed Corrections House, a sort of supergroup that turned out to be defined as much by its intentionally haphazard improv streak as its members' heavy reputations. The music they produced combined easy-to-predict elements—like Kelly's churning, doomy guitars and Williams' Burroughsian spoken-word rant-poems—with surprising ones, like the industrial streak provided by Parker's electronic beats.
Despite its seat-of-the-pants beginnings, the group's found equilibrium, and on their second studio album, they're chasing down new ideas with a new confidence. Know How to Carry a Whip brings the electro-industrial elements to the forefront and also pushes into their most unexpected terrain yet—songs with distinct pop structures and even catchy melodies.
While it isn't going to spoil the group's esoteric reputation, Whip's a record that you could feel comfortable passing along to casual heavy music fans. In its first half, the album has headbangable beats, grinding Sabbath-y guitars, and actual hooks. The opener, "Crossing My One Good Finger", might be the catchiest cut any member of the band has ever been involved with, with Neubauten-inspired drums, thunderous guitars, and a fist-pumping chorus (even if the lyrics seem to be about suffocating on toxic fumes). You could actually dance to "White Man's Gonna Lose", as long as Williams' unhinged nihilism doesn't crush your buzz.
All of the catchy and danceable parts are covered in layers of sonic grime, expertly rendered by Parker, one of the world's leading experts at making records sound really bad in a really good way. They are also shot through with the searing misery that only Williams can really bring to a song. As a group, they remain obsessed with destruction and decay; fans looking for more of the nightmare poetry readings that defined Last City Zero should be perversely pleased by tracks like "I Was Never Good at Meth" that frame Williams' feverish, imagistic stanzas in washes of junkyard noise.
Last City Zero positioned Corrections House as one of the more interesting participants in the industrial music resurgence, and Know How to Carry a Whip places them in the lead. Feral and unrelentingly hostile, it's a ragged-edged, rusty shank plunged deep into the ribs of the modern day. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home. | 2015-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | Neurot | November 10, 2015 | 7 | 2e5e4c24-8bba-4da2-a7cf-9d3ccd6169c0 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Shaken-Up Versions is an album of the remixes taken from the setlist from the Knife's Shaking the Habitual tour. It makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work. | Shaken-Up Versions is an album of the remixes taken from the setlist from the Knife's Shaking the Habitual tour. It makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work. | The Knife: Shaken-Up Versions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19465-the-knife-shaken-up-versions/ | Shaken-Up Versions | The Knife’s tour behind last year's Shaking the Habitual was, depending on who you ask, one of two things: that Emma Goldman quote about dance and revolution put into radical, sweat-all-night action and tricked out with top-notch lights and choreography, or a canned and confusing mess of lip-synching and interpretive dance, an expression of social justice as told by the cast of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. This probably had as much to do with your stance on Shaking the Habitual as your spot in the crowd, because from Silent Shout on, the Knife have commanded a massive fanbase who have been waiting almost a decade to finally see them live. Shaken-Up Versions, an album of the remixes taken from the tour's setlist, makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work.
Like most live albums, the material captured on Shaken-Up Versions loses something when taken offstage, since choreography and charged atmosphere is lost in the transition from arena to wax. Fortunately, these remixes don’t need context. Shaking the Habitual, like the theoretical texts it cites, often seems like it’s been praised and referenced more than listened to in full, so it would have been easy for the Knife to aim for easy accessibility—but the reworks rarely smack of obviousness. On record, “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” possessed one of the stronger hooks on Shaking the Habitual—a quietly nagging synth line, percussion like rattling speakers, gonzo humor, and the rallying cry: “What if we can’t make it/ But we say that we can?”—but the Shaken-Up version takes things in a more challenging direction by puréeing the hooks and pushing the dissonant flutes and vox up front. Without a live crowd to prompt you, the remix is paradoxically easier to be studied than danced to, but it’s the Knife, so the polyrhythms and layers give you lots to work with.
The remixes collected on Shaken-Up Versions aren't quite inaccessible, though. The rework of “We Share Our Mother’s Health” takes on a handclap-buoyed, infectious shuffle, with synths like airhorns, vocals pitched forward, and everything engineered to get butts out of seats. Silent Shout's disturbing title track is transformed into a seven-minute breakdown that shudders with an even more anxious energy, Karin’s new vocal frayed and tentative in place of the original's gravitas. The two deepest cuts are the most excitingly recontextualized, both in terms of the Knife’s current sound and general outlook. “Got 2 Let U”, from 2003's Deep Cuts, loses its strident oboe sample and gains a tempo injection—think 2010's Tomorrow, in a Year as UK garage—while lo-fi synth fairytale “Bird”, from the band’s self-titled 2001 debut, practically jitters here, with lines like “But you wanted me to be a girl/ Without feathers, without urge” taking on extra symbolic meaning when paired with Shaking the Habitual’s message.
Shaken-Up Versions truncates the Shaking the Habitual setlist, so for those familiar with the stage show, the omissions are inevitable. and here they’re both obvious (Jess Arndt’s galvanizing spoken-word “The Body Possum” that appeared in the middle of the show), and puzzling (Silent Shout cut “One Hit”, a creepy track that would have nice company here). Yet, it’s a credit to the Knife’s craft that Shaken-Up Versions regardless feels like a complete statement; there’s a logic to the sequencing (Silent Shout’s singles bookend the album, while Shaking the Habitual’s statements of purpose make up the deeper cuts) and a throughline to the remixing choices that make it work on its own.
Shaken-Up Versions doesn’t threaten replace anything in the Knife’s catalog, but it does highlight the levity that’s always been present in their music—yes, even on self-consciously, unsubtly Important Albums like Shaking the Habitual. The centerpiece of both that record and this new one is one line: “Ready to lose the privilege.” To do that, it helps to lose your inhibitions, and you just might need a good beat, too. | 2014-06-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute / Brille / Rabid | June 20, 2014 | 7.3 | 2e66e637-c413-40dd-9362-52e56943341b | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Los Angeles band Warpaint's three-years-in-the-making second album, featuring cover art from acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, was produced by Flood and mixed by Nigel Godrich. | The Los Angeles band Warpaint's three-years-in-the-making second album, featuring cover art from acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, was produced by Flood and mixed by Nigel Godrich. | Warpaint: Warpaint | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18892-warpaint-warpaint/ | Warpaint | It's a rare feat to see an indie rock band as stylishly presented as Warpaint is on their self-titled second album. The Los Angeles quartet's 2010 debut The Fool certainly got them to an admirable level of success, albeit one where having either Flood produce or Nigel Godrich mix the follow-up would be a serious coup; nearly three years in the making, Warpaint has both. Acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham is on board as well, contributing the arresting visuals for first single "Love Is to Die" as well as the cover art. Judging from the talent involved, this all sounds like a massive, star-making rollout from the second Clinton term and unfortunately, Warpaint plays the part too well. Digging in the used CD crates to exhume hours of rightfully ignored post-OK Computer paranoid androids, catatonic trip-hop, and gluttonous Francophile ambience, Warpaint spends 2014 remembering everything 1999 tried to forget.
But for all of Warpaint’s fashionable aesthetics and packaging, they're a most square thing: a jam band. And not even a jam band in the fairgrounds-conquering sense most understand it, where typical verse-chorus structure serves as a jumping off point for indulgent, technically flashy solos. The thrill of seeing Warpaint’s uncanny, egoless instrumental interplay in a live setting didn’t always translate on The Fool, though the record did serve as a good preview. There, Warpaint went past mere jamming, conjuring music into existence, hazy vistas of desert blues, cavernous post-punk, and disembodied, ghostly vocals, summoned to create alluring mirage rock.
But on Warpaint, the band goes from raising spirits to the embalming business, adding layers and layers of polish to lifeless stiffs. To their credit, they haven't changed their compositional approach; though the sound is vastly more lustrous, expansive, and expensive, each individual player is emphasized in a manner that emboldens the group collectively. In her first record since joining the band, drummer Stella Mozgawa is mixed as a lead instrument, and Lindberg’s bass is often tasked with not just the melodic framework, but the actual melodies. Meanwhile, the vocals of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman are given crystalline spaces of their own to act as texture, while their guitars are either padding or swapped out for whooshing synthesizers. It’s a total inversion of pop music, which seems to have been the point.
And like every guitar-based band as of late, Warpaint have stressed that they’ve spent the past four years listening to anything but guitar-based music, seeking out as much R&B and hip-hop as possible. They’ve called Warpaint a mashup with Jay-Z. They also called Warpaint their Dark Side of the Moon. They’re not exactly wrong—the ponderous, bottom-heavy tempos of Warpaint are a triangulation point between space-rock and rap. But while trip-hop has long been derogated as functional lifestyle music, it began as a forward-thinking deconstruction, and the difference between the titans of the genre to which Warpaint has been errantly compared (Portishead, Massive Attack) and the forgotten second tier were the same things that guide pop music from time immemorial: a compelling vocal presence, innovation, a perspective, or more briefly, songs.
The way Warpaint hopscotch through the tricky guitar figures on “Keep It Healthy” is satisfying from a technical standpoint, as is the syncopated, hollowed-out riff of “Biggy” or any number of their muscular rhythmic structures—it’s all the work of accomplished musicians, a rare proficiency that never devolves into showmanship. But the arrangements twist themselves into knots Kokal and Wayman can’t untie—vocal melodies invariably bob, weave, dip and dart, trying so hard to find a sliver of space that they never resolve into a memorable pattern. For the most part, Warpaint take the path of lesser resistance, lapsing into the same layered coos that defined The Fool, but now that they’re mixed to be a focal point, the melodic inertia makes Warpaint’s 51 minutes feel three times as long.
“Teese” slumps its way towards a chorus that recalls Dot Allison’s “Colour Me”, though I’m not suggesting that Warpaint are trying to pull a fast one on us. The problem is that “Teese”, like so much of Warpaint, instantly reminds one of a third-wave chillout chanteuse. “Love Is to Die” stands out for having some kind of verse-chorus structure, as well as the most discernible bit of ineffectual relationship balm (“Love is to die/ Love is to not die/ Love is to dance”). There’s almost no way to make a smooth segue towards that gawky, tuneless hook, and yet, the pivot from the key in the verse is especially awkward.
More troubling than the lack of hooks is the way Warpaint operate in their new, immaculate surroundings like they’re worried about a security deposit, barely leaving a fingerprint on these air-streamed synths, let alone getting their hands dirty. They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute. Even with Godrich and Flood at their disposal, Warpaint work within a limited dynamic range, relying on a busier cymbal pattern or the introduction of a slightly different synth to instigate a tonal shift, but never a crescendo. Their melodic and textural limitations are even more pronounced when during their protracted genre experiments. The M.I.A.-style enunciation and warping vocal effects of “Disco // very” are every bit as forced as the titular pun, but rigorously scheduled playtime is better than none at all. “Drive” similarly makes its source material all too obvious, and it sounds even more dated than its surroundings, a big-budget rendering of the handcrafted, Italo-inspired dark pop whose moment just disappeared in the rearview.
Even those sympathetic to what Warpaint are doing have all but admitted this album lacks hooks, grooves, or even a pulse most of the time—relying on the idea of it as “grower” or an “immersive experience.” But the question never gets answered: to what end are we indulging these jams? As pop, it’s unconscionably tuneless, as transportive space-rock, it’s not analog enough to be charmingly retro, and certainly not futuristic. The lyrics are symptomatic of Warpaint itself, failing to impress or even engage, assuming distance and emotional vacancy necessarily equal “mystery.” So even as a proxy for makeout sessions, it fails—it sits completely still and makes you do all the work. It fittingly does make its demands in a very late-90s way, assuming its status as a limited resource (i.e., a big-budget rock album from an up-and-coming band) for a captive audience either tuned into MTV, the local alternative radio station, or just $17 in the hole and demanding some kind of return on investment. But as the saying goes, time is money and Warpaint is the sound of both disappearing into the void. | 2014-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | January 22, 2014 | 5.7 | 2e67616b-6296-44d9-ab88-50389b069ca9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This live album, recorded in 2017 at the venerated Toronto concert hall, shows the duo sounding reliable and downright professional. It’s missing the wild utopian energy that characterizes their albums and their best performances. | This live album, recorded in 2017 at the venerated Toronto concert hall, shows the duo sounding reliable and downright professional. It’s missing the wild utopian energy that characterizes their albums and their best performances. | Japandroids: Massey Fucking Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/japandroids-massey-fucking-hall/ | Massey Fucking Hall | Right before launching into his set closer on Massey Fucking Hall, Japandroids frontman Brian King takes a moment to thank “you guys up front... [for] making us feel a little bit more like it’s a normal Japandroids show.” Up until this, he and David Prowse had been playing the most not-normal Japandroids show in history. The duo were facing a larger crowd than any they’d seen from the second leg of 2017’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life tour, in their nation’s most venerated concert hall, less than a week after the death of Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, the People’s Champ of Canadian rock. What followed King’s nervous aside is the most normal thing to happen at a Japandroids show: they end with “The House That Heaven Built,” a song that King has admitted he cannot sing for the life of him.
Even Japandroids’ most evangelical fans know that King and David Prowse can’t really pull of most of their vocals live; those “whoa”s and “yeah”s don’t quite hit the same when it’s really two guys doing it, as opposed to two guys overdubbed to sound like 250. Japandroids were capable of live transcendence, but only if they weren’t completely trashed by the time they got on stage or at a point during their marathon tours where King has inevitably blown out his voice. Their reputation as hard-drinkin’, hard-rockin’, hard-lovin’ punk vagabonds ran up against their reality as a couple of studio perfectionists, and Massey Fucking Hall lays this dissonance bare.
The live album reveals a Japandroids that became reliable, downright professional. Or at least practical—here, “Younger Us” truly sounds like it’s being sung by someone older and wiser; “Fire’s Highway” steps off the gas to avoid the daredevil melodic bridge jump of its chorus, staying safely in the carpool lane. The chorus of a Japandroids song is written to be yelled like hell to the heavens while surrounded by hundreds of people who will drown you out. But those people didn’t have to do it all over again two nights later, like King did, and you could hear those calculations creep inevitably into their playing.
The Post-Nothing cuts fare best; they had fewer moving parts and thus didn’t suffer from being played sloppily or off-key. King riffs on the Stooges’ “1970” at the top of “Heart Sweats,” recasting one of their least-essential album cuts into the lineage of brilliantly braindead rock, while “Sovereignty” still thrums on the desperate days when they couldn’t draw a dozen people outside of Vancouver.
The songs on Near to the Wild Heart of Life began to integrate the sort of things that make songs work in 3000-capacity venues—slower tempos, synthesizers, backing vocals and lyrics about the road that were based in reality—but if they added new personnel on stage or had a stage setup that distracted from King’s three amp stacks, they wouldn’t be Japandroids anymore. The steamrolling momentum of setlist highlight “Arc of Bar” redeems the surrealist hokum of King’s most divisive song, but even if you could watch it set to Japandroids’ modest light show, it still can’t quite compete with the Be Here Now-level excess conjured by the studio version.
Despite its flaws, Massey Fucking Hall serves a monument for a band whose vision of non-toxic masculinity remains utopian and inspiring. It’s a world full of wild urges, but also one in which romantic fulfillment serves as the highest form of self-actualization (see: “Continuous Thunder,” “No Known Drink or Drug”). Massey Fucking Hall documents thousands of people bearing witness to two unpretentious guys playing unfashionable rock songs about ordinary people willing to push themselves to extraordinary places in their relationships. If Massey Fucking Hall underwhelms, it ironically functions as the greatest possible endorsement to see Japandroids in person, if that opportunity ever exists again.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | July 8, 2020 | 5.5 | 2e6e4f43-2d54-4e21-bffa-a38b55ae98d8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
L.A. producer Seth Haley remains devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia. | L.A. producer Seth Haley remains devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia. | Com Truise: Silicon Tare EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21757-silicon-tare-ep/ | Silicon Tare EP | As Com Truise, Los Angeles-transplanted producer Seth Haley uses a narrow palette, but it works on a remarkable variety of canvases. Early EPs such as 2010's Cyanide Sisters and 2011's Fairlight introduced a project devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia— an approach Haley continued on Com Truise's 2011 fine debut LP, Galactic Melt, and 2013's rarities grab bag In Decay. Over the years, though, this "Com Truise sound" has seemed equally suited to remixes for pop stars like Charli XCX or Maroon 5 as well as for Ghostly International labelmate Tycho. PARTYNEXTDOOR even sampled Galactic Melt's "Hyperlips" for the highlight of the Drake protégé's self-titled 2013 debut.
Working with other artists gives Haley a vocal presence that can go in front of his cleanly designed backdrops. Plenty of instrumental or nearly instrumental music can dominate the foreground, of course, but listening to Com Truise often feels like listening to a movie or videogame score. Which makes sense: Haley has described these releases as "like a film score... from the mind" for a storyline involving the interplanetary journey of "the world's first synthetic/robotic astronaut." On Galactic Melt, samples of dating advice ("Brokendate") or orgasmic moans ("VHS Sex") served as additional entrypoints, and the standout on 2014's Wave 1 EP was a guest vocal turn that had Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford sounding like a cyborg Scritti Politti ("Declination"). Follow-up EP Silicon Tare sounds once again like vintage Com Truise, but it would have benefited from having more of a focal point.
The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album. Most enticing, unsurprisingly, are the two tracks shared in advance: the drifting, jittery flicker of "Diffraction" and the languid sweeps of the title track. But opener "Sunspot," with its busy drum programming, and the subsequent "Forgive," punctuated by squeals of synth, are of a piece. The closest the EP comes to an outright failure is the draggy finale, "Du Zirconia," which at six minutes takes too long to shift from its high opening bleeps to its eventual midtempo groove. What's a shame is that these tracks do little to expand on their initial ideas, let alone do more than set a vague, unblinking mood for their ostensible subject, the robot astronaut on its voyage through space.
Artists whose work shifts only subtly between releases have some welcome precedents, this year alone including the likes of Julianna Barwick or the Field. What raises bigger questions about Com Truise is the durability of this particular sound. From the soul and funk records that became "disco" to the varied post-punk sounds later boiled down into "alternative," genres often have more to offer before they've become codified; the homebaked synth-funk of Neon Indian or Washed Out didn't really have a name in 2009's deadbeat summer, but popular opinion coalesced around the name "chillwave" by the time Com Truise came to embody many of that YouTube-retro style's basic points. With Neon Indian — Com Truise's former tourmate — recently resurgent, Lindstrøm mastering similar sounds from more of a disco angle, and Chromatics dutifully parceling out dusky gems every several months, how much room is there for ’80s-harking synthscapes? | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | April 4, 2016 | 5.9 | 2e79a9da-fae4-4e8c-876c-3fbfe922cc98 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On her second album, the 24-year-old solo guitarist’s unique style finds inspiration from unexpected places and sounds untethered to any tradition whatsoever. | On her second album, the 24-year-old solo guitarist’s unique style finds inspiration from unexpected places and sounds untethered to any tradition whatsoever. | Yasmin Williams: Urban Driftwood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yasmin-williams-urban-driftwood/ | Urban Driftwood | Yasmin Williams has described her approach to acoustic guitar as a kind of creative problem-solving. Drawn to the instrument after mastering Guitar Hero 2, she dreamed of tapping along the fretboard like rock virtuosos before her. Unable to replicate their style, she laid the guitar on her lap, tuned the strings in harmony with each other, and played it like a keyboard. Drawing from a love of hip-hop, she sought an underlying rhythm throughout her wordless, melodic compositions. Without an accompanist, she attached a kalimba—a type of thumb piano—at the bottom of her instrument, plucking it with her right hand while her left navigated the strings.
Williams’ inventive style, which has also involved wearing tap shoes and taking a cello bow to her instrument, has made her stand out in the field of solo guitarists. But the power of her music is its immediacy. The 24-year-old is not only a skilled technician but also an instinctive songwriter, penning memorable compositions that, even at their most open-ended, proceed in a loose verse-chorus structure. Her smooth and immersive playing belies the complexity below the surface. It is this talent that allows her to, say, cover a Swae Lee and Post Malone song, and have it sound as natural and spellbinding as her own work.
While Williams’ 2018 debut Unwind felt like a showcase for her versatility as a guitarist, her second album, Urban Driftwood, presents her more fully as a composer. It is more focused and fleshed out than its predecessor, with Williams complimenting her acoustic guitar playing with West African instruments like the kora and djembe. She has described the album as an abstract diary of her year in 2020: Opening with the light optimism of “Sunshowers,” it darkens into knottier, more contemplative material over the course of 10 songs. Pensive and bittersweet, the mood can recall William Tyler’s sonic storytelling or Mary Lattimore’s serene harp experiments.
Williams’ songwriting fits into an ongoing trend of instrumental music that more closely recalls the new age-leaning mood music of the Windham Hill label than the droning, pastoral fingerstyle approach of figureheads like John Fahey. But part of the thrill of Urban Driftwood is how untethered Williams sounds to any tradition whatsoever: She has a gift for penning melodies that feel as catchy as pop songs, as in the lightly descending refrain of “Juvenescence,” but her approach to the instrument also allows her to confound expectations, making you question the source of each overtone and rhythm.
The most dazzling moments are often the most intricate. In “Swift Breeze.” Williams uses everything at her fingertips like a percussion instrument, from the harmonics high along the fretboard to her persistent knocking against the wood of the body. In quieter songs like “Through the Woods” and “Dragonfly,” she finds melodies in repeated, hammered-on notes like cycles of birdsong. The clear, keyed-in production makes for a uniformly serene listen but Williams’ performance is masterfully physical; her strumming can sound like brushes on snare drums while her fingerpicking can echo like gentle taps across cymbals.
Other than a mournful violin accompaniment from Taryn Wood in “Adrift,” the only presence besides Williams arrives late in the album. Djembe player Amadou Kouaye offers a steady pulse through the title track, as his hand-drumming guides the album toward its narrative climax. “‘Urban Driftwood’ is more like the music I grew up listening to than any other song I’ve released so far,” Williams said in a press release, explaining the importance of paying homage to her heritage as a Black guitarist. As her kora blends with Kouaye’s rhythms, the collaboration offers a natural evolution for Williams’ music: Within these interlocking grooves, she is both listening and performing, finding her place in a vast history and fearlessly pushing forward.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Spinster | January 28, 2021 | 8 | 2e7ee5fa-ea9d-4b84-97cb-57cf52b646b1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Executive-produced by Johnny Jewel, this Madonna tribute album transports her iconic singles to the boutique label’s seedy, neon-lit lounges. | Executive-produced by Johnny Jewel, this Madonna tribute album transports her iconic singles to the boutique label’s seedy, neon-lit lounges. | Various Artists: Italians Do It Better | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-italians-do-it-better/ | Italians Do It Better | Madonna debuted the phrase “Italians Do It Better” on a T-shirt in the 1986 video for “Papa Don’t Preach,” the song that opens a new compilation of Madonna covers, also called Italians Do It Better, executive-produced and released by synth auteur Johnny Jewel, whose record label, you’ll recall, is called Italians Do It Better. If you’re familiar with Jewel’s boutique musical curation—or his band Chromatics, whose other members unexpectedly announced their split last month—you know what to expect: Italians Do It Better filters some of the most iconic pop songs of all time through seedy, neon-lit lounges where obscure musicians with names like Orion and Desire hover around giant crystal ashtrays.
The Madonna influence is baked into the Italians Do It Better label in more ways than one, and the covers collection is idol worship as label showcase. Many artists here also appear on the Italians Do It Better roster, and on previous comps like 2020’s After Dark 3; Maltese songwriter and sound designer JOON, who sings “Papa Don’t Preach,” and Australian saxophonist turned pop singer Jorja Chalmers, who performs a dark and smoky version of “Justify My Love,” have both issued recent albums through the label. Perhaps you’ve been waiting for someone to put you onto Belarusian post-punk trio Dlina Volny, whose Molchat Doma-esque sense of ennui is the perfect match for the American Life track “Hollywood,” or Los Angeles singer Glüme, a sort of Angelyne for the TikTok era, who covers, of course, “Material Girl” as a waltz.
As a curation project, Italians Do It Better favors familiarity over deep cuts, and with the exception of “I’m Addicted,” from 2012’s MDNA, every one of the original tracks was released as a single. The two MDNA selections, “I’m Addicted” and “Gang Bang,” represent a predictable weakness, and while Vancouver quartet In Mirrors manages to work “I’m Addicted” into a satisfying industrial churn, longtime IDIB associate Farah’s version of “Gang Bang” never gets there. A personal favorite Madonna song was the biggest disappointment: Russian duo Love Object’s dour version of “Frozen” (from 1998’s Ray of Light) trades the original’s weightless trip-hop hum for a flat-affect vocal and blown-speaker growl that lands like a lead balloon.
The subtractive production approach works much better: Sally Shapiro’s angelic “Holiday” retains the original’s synth bass and cowbell, but long instrumental passages and lighter vocals open space for fluting synths and a disco pulse. The most reverent performances become a way to hear old songs for the first time again, and to rediscover a sense of daring that recedes with decades’ worth of familiarity. The percussive finger snaps and JOON’s ASMR-like whisper on “Papa Don’t Preach” evoke its story of teen pregnancy with fresh vulnerability; the only act to receive two slots, Brooklyn-based ex-Latter Day Saints sister duo MOTHERMARY, offer synthy choral takes on “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer,” choices that feel spiritually attuned to Madonna’s own history of religious provocation.
Madonna is famously a generalist, while Italians Do It Better, the label, is specific: faintly narcotized electro-pop, big beats, the streaky nostalgia of VHS tape. Even with 19 contributing artists, Italians Do It Better, the compilation, takes a narrower dynamic and aesthetic range than its inspiration. The effect is dreamier, less full-bodied, more charged by synthesizer arpeggios than sexual innuendo, a mood that carries through to French singer Lou Rebecca’s minimalist, baby-voiced rendition of “Burning Up” (and momentary “Hung Up” mashup) and Bark Bark Disco’s gently exquisite version of “Borderline.” Between the strength of the source material and the singular, streamlined production, Italians Do It Better’s long list of singles approaches the self-contained atmosphere of an album. But at 20 tracks, we might as well have one more, so allow me to suggest: the Italians Do It Better version of “Over and Over.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | ITALIANS DO IT BETTER | September 9, 2021 | 7.5 | 2e84838d-e0b2-482e-acd8-265b5529879d | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The West Palm Beach rapper tones down the intensity of many of his fellow Floridians, favoring more polished beats and a relaxed, casually charismatic tone. | The West Palm Beach rapper tones down the intensity of many of his fellow Floridians, favoring more polished beats and a relaxed, casually charismatic tone. | $not: Beautiful Havoc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dollarnot-beautiful-havoc/ | Beautiful Havoc | Florida has proven to be a hotbed of innovative rap talent over the past decade. Born in New York but bred in West Palm Beach, new 300 signee $NOT lyrically embodies the cutthroat ruthlessness of many of the Sunshine State’s rappers, but his new album Beautiful Havoc is a far cry from the overcompressed emo of XXXTentacion or the lo-fi experimentalism of Raider Klan. $NOT’s sound is more amorphous and elusive, perhaps less cutting edge but also harder to pin down.
Beautiful Havoc presents a spectrum of ever-changing moods, reflecting the binary suggested by its title. The tone is mostly relaxed and casually charismatic, anchored by $NOT’s precise and direct delivery, but there’s a creeping negativity on the margins. Lead single “Revenge” is buoyed by a sing-song chorus and melodic bounce, but as the track goes on, $NOT’s flow shifts into something more like a growl, his voice deepening menacingly as he warns us of his propensity for acting out and the “pistol on his waist.”
Like many of his regional peers, $NOT credits Memphis rap as a primary influence, along with the legion of Memphis-influenced cult icons who have emerged online in the last decade, like Xavier Wulf and BONES. But for $NOT the legacy of Memphis manifests more in attitude than actual sound, beyond the Kingpin Skinny Pimp sample that opens Beautiful Havoc on “Watch Out (Intro).” You can hear the South in the frequent moments across the album where the beat pauses and slows to a chopped-and-screwed crawl.
$NOT can be assertive, braggadocious, and brash, but he also demonstrates a soft, even romantic side. His debut full-length, this year’s - TRAGEDY +, was considerably lighter in texture and tone than the work of the rappers he lists as inspirations. It could often be almost delightful, filled with chilled-out guitar lines, cooing backup vocals, and bright synths, though his tongue occasionally slipped into the twisted flow of Three 6 Mafia and their imitators. On Beautiful Havoc, in contrast, a sense of darkness lies just beneath the surface, occasionally giving way to depressive moods. “I don’t wanna talk to nobody ’cause I don’t feel fine,” he raps on the weary “Life”; “I just wanna chill by myself ’cause I’m not OK.” Though $NOT’s sound hardly qualifies as emo rap, there’s often a tumultuous cloud hanging nearby: “Six million ways to die, choose one/And I think livin’ on this Earth is one of ’em.”
$NOT has said in interviews that he struggles to rap over pop beats, but there is an inherent poppiness to Beautiful Havoc’s production and catchy, frequently gentle melodies. $NOT’s music often sounds like a fusion of indie-pop instrumentation (“Demanding” is complete with ukulele and bells) and trap drum patterns. There’s guitar all over the album, but on tracks like “Havoc” and “Who Do I Trust,” the guitar styling is smooth, almost flamenco in feel, as opposed to the punk-inflected sound so common to contemporary rap. His lyrics may be straightforward—full of familiar rap tropes of trust issues, infidelities, and material gain—but the production often borders on the whimsical.
Though the album’s guest appearances can feel like brief cameos, $NOT is confident enough in his own voice not to rely too heavily on any other. On “Mean,” Flo Milli is like a character actor next to $NOT’s smooth leading man. When fellow Floridian Denzel Curry shows up on the flute-driven “Sangria,” it’s like a thunderclap of aggression, a marked contrast to how cool, calm, and collected $NOT comes off.
The Denzel Curry feature illustrates what $NOT shares with his region and how he stands apart. What’s come to define so much contemporary Florida rap is its extremity, emotionality, and intensity. $NOT’s music also contains these qualities, but in a more limited quality; his work is sonically polished and immediately accessible, if not always the most aesthetically distinctive. There’s enough havoc in the world already—$NOT finds time in his music for more elegant things.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | November 18, 2020 | 6.8 | 2e849c21-9caa-4cd8-8152-4385ace7258e | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Blending traditional Korean instruments with woodwinds and mallets, the South Korean composer strikes a captivating balance between minimalism and improvised music. | Blending traditional Korean instruments with woodwinds and mallets, the South Korean composer strikes a captivating balance between minimalism and improvised music. | Park Jiha: Communion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/park-jiha-communion/ | Communion | There are no electronic instruments or added effects on Park Jiha’s debut album, Communion. In 2018, that alone is almost enough to lend an art-music air to the project. Add in the unorthodox instrumentation—Jiha’s trio of traditional Korean instruments, plus bass clarinet, saxophone, vibraphone, and percussion—and her new-music affinities seem obvious. But when you actually listen to Communion, which contains just under an hour of the Korean musician’s compositions, it’s much harder to fit into one genre. Is it jazz, as the sprawling sax solos and collective improvisation might suggest? Is it minimalism, drawn out in the pulsing grooves established by both Jiha’s yanggeum, a type of hammered dulcimer, and the vibraphone? With its general adherence to conventional tonality and emphasis on ambience, as well as the synth-like quality of the saenghwang (a Korean mouth-organ), is it an acoustic take on modern electronic music?
The only real answer to those questions is “all of the above.” While it may not be strictly representational, the project is dominated by clear, mostly unadorned phrases that almost seem like they might have lyrics that just aren’t being articulated. (Jiha sings as well, just not on this project.) On the title track, where she plays the piri—a double-reed instrument that she says is her favorite—one hears her flair for simple, evocative melodies, made transcendent by her virtuosic ability and lyric style.
Jiha’s gift is in her ability to skirt dull prettiness in favor of exploiting the edges of her instruments, yet not at the expense of tangible, straightforward melodies. It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, and she does it effortlessly. Her occasional dissonance, showcased on the cathartic jam “All Souls’ Day,” is that much more impactful for its rarity. There’s no edginess for its own sake, only unforced and briefly chaotic climaxes that ultimately recede back into the album’s primary vibe: serenity.
Communion, while hardly a project that fades into the background, still has the potential to encourage the listener to do some yogic breathing. It’s melancholy and peaceful without being boring. The production emphasizes each instrument’s natural resonance for a fluid, continual sound—one that doesn’t really suggest any particular time or place. Certainly there are moments in the harmony that evoke traditional East Asian music, but they’re quickly obscured by some soaring solo or pulsing vibraphone. “World music” is a farce of a term, but Communion does feel global in a way that’s unusual.
The project’s overall cohesiveness and clarity of purpose make it almost movie score-like, yet there’s no part of the album that’s intended to underline anything but Jiha’s compelling musicianship. That is what makes Communion so easy to listen to. It’s creative and singular in a way that’s soothing, not alienating.
Jiha’s approachable compositional style and incredibly evocative playing make this album an accessible way into contemporary improvised music. Her debut’s genreless, organic sound makes it almost therapeutic, each piece a meditation on some melody to be explored but never abandoned. It challenges without feeling like homework, and creates ambience without tedium. On the album’s final track, “The First Time I Sat Across From You,” her yanggeum groove begins so lushly it could almost be the backbone to a pop song. Eventually it escalates into a clanging, metal-esque climax before slowing to one of the album’s few full stops. After a breath she begins the groove again, but strips parts away—like an ebbing tide—until there’s nothing left but a single, noteless creak. | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Mirrorball | March 15, 2018 | 7 | 2e866bb5-17cb-4c25-8338-464408798f4a | Natalie Weiner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-weiner/ | |
Drake’s sixth album sounds good but feels labored. Melancholic and often incisive, it becomes an overlong and very familiar journey through the life, mind, and heart of Drake. | Drake’s sixth album sounds good but feels labored. Melancholic and often incisive, it becomes an overlong and very familiar journey through the life, mind, and heart of Drake. | Drake: Certified Lover Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-certified-lover-boy/ | Certified Lover Boy | The Certified Lover Boy is selectively honest, occasionally heartless, and set in his ways. He’ll text, “I love you,” and pretend he doesn’t; he’ll ask for a sympathetic ear, but scoff and leave “if you throw another pity party” about your own troubles. He’s Drake—past, present, and future—and Certified Lover Boy, accordingly, is referential and reverential, an 86-minute omnibus of all things Drake. Being everything at once, the Drake of Certified Lover Boy is also indecisive and even fatigued. Drake is still trying to balance fame, intimacy, ambition, and insecurity, and he’s still learning who to trust—it’s always trust with Drake—but there’s a malaise that lingers across his sixth album, as if Drake has lost himself in the Library of Drake, less sure where he’s supposed to devote his attention while an emptiness creeps into his life and lifestyle.
The labored environment of Certified Lover Boy is a mild surprise after the album’s quick and billboard-heavy rollout. While apparent rival Kanye West took a month and a half to release Donda, darkening the project a bit more with each preview, Drake announced and released his album in the span of a week and played coy, ultimately sharing no singles and letting Tidal’s chief content officer serve as hype man, a role that included confirming the album artwork, world-famous con artist Damien Hirst’s immaculate conception of 12 pregnant women emoji placed on a stark white background. The cover is puerile and the strangest in his discography, as if he wanted to reach an iconographic nadir before his popularity waned, a wink that he can create seismic social ripples with just an iOS keyboard. In that way, the Hirst cover suggested a levity and even self-effacing irony that is not found on the album.
At various points on Certified Lover Boy, it feels like Drake is trapped in the empire he’s built and the narrator-character he’s created. Luxury and pettiness, common Drake themes, are persistent across the album and it frequently sounds like he’s tired of both. On “In the Bible,” he’s with a group of women who are taking shots at the Tao Nightclub in Las Vegas and murmurs, “You don’t know love, you don’t love me like my child.” Later, on “Pipe Down,” he sings, “How much I gotta spend for you to pipe down?” He’s not pining for a simpler life or even his own past, the way he might have on 2013’s Nothing Was the Same or 2016’s Views, but just something to enjoy, something to appreciate, a greater raison d’être than another trip on Air Drake with limitless tequila—seriously, he sounds forlorn when he repeats, “Lotta ’42 on the flights I’m takin’,” on the Jay-Z collaboration “Love All.”
Further communicating Drake’s opulent inertia is the album’s dark and cloistered atmosphere, a continuation of the cold Toronto sound that Drake and Noah “40” Shebib introduced to the world over a decade ago. There is broadly one tone across Certified Lover Boy—the sort of haze that could color a Monet facsimile—which, as ever, foregrounds Drake as the voice and instrument to shine through the mist. And while the album is his most musically cohesive since Nothing Was the Same, it’s also repetitious. There are pleasant, classic Drake moments, like “Girls Want Girls,“ “7am on Bridle Path,” and “Fair Trade,” but, mostly, the production hums along ably at best. Drake’s vocal performances, too, are mostly fine, the “Drake featurin’ Drake” that he could emote in his sleep. The mid-album cut “No Friends in the Industry” is particularly good, a rare song where he sounds animated and interested in what he’s saying, experimenting with a few different flows.
Also among the early standouts of Certified Lover Boy is the tawdry “Way 2 Sexy,” which samples Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.” The song is knowingly ridiculous, opening with Future rattling off all the things for which he’s too sexy, including codeine cough syrup, and Drake is having fun the way he did on his Scary Hours 2 EP and Smiley’s “Over the Top.” The conceit, as confidently dumb as Right Said Fred’s, is too simple to gum up with worries or inwardness. It’s a recklessness that he adopts on “Papi’s Home” and “Girls Want Girls,” where he ribaldly declares himself a lesbian, like the cleverest little boy at sleepaway camp. There’s always been room on Drake albums for these lighter tracks—“Worst Behavior,” generously, is like nothing else on Nothing Was the Same—but they’re fewer and farther between on Certified Lover Boy, immediately among the more self-serious Drake releases.
And seriousness can be OK because Drake albums are always long—Certified Lover Boy is 15 seconds shorter than the deluxe edition of 2011’s Take Care—and submersion into his solipsism is expected if not outright required. When Drake feels something, you’re meant to feel it, too, but he’s feeling everything on Certified Lover Boy, never committing to one particular mode. There is the tough Drake of “No Friends in the Industry” and “Knife Talk,” the tender Drake of “Fountains,” the flippant Drake of “Papi’s Home,” the reflective and regretful Drake of “Fucking Fans,” and even more. The album, in turn, feels more like a survey than an immersion, no particular emotion sticking or leaving a strong impression.
There are also broad contradictions—like when he seems to desire marriage on “Race My Mind,” only to dismiss fidelity on “The Remorse”—and more immediate hypocrisies, as on “TSU,” the song that regrettably credits R. Kelly due to an orchestral sample from “Half on a Baby” and finds Drake rapping, “We used to do pornos when you would come over, but now you got morals and shit/I got like four on the wrist and an adorable kid.” It’s a phenomenon he addresses on the first track, rapping, “Lived so much for others don’t remember how I feel.” There are enough styles of Drake that it’s become natural for him to fulfill one of his own archetypes when, at this point in his life and career, he is laying bare his uncertainty, attempting to square the idea of himself with what he really believes. Still, the music works well when he gives in and combines his styles and eras, as on “In the Bible,” “Pipe Down,” and “Get Along Better,” songs that are subtle evolutions of Drake, bridging gap the between past and present.
Certified Lover Boy opens disorientingly with a swirling, pitched-up sample of the McCartney-Lennon-written “Michelle.” It’s an exceedingly loud loop, a disembodied voice competing with Drake’s “Champagne Poetry” lyrics. Almost impressively, it makes no sense. The obvious reaction is that sampling the Beatles is a flex, but Drake’s clout and wealth have already bought him a Michael Jackson hook enmeshed well enough into its song that Jackson was credited as a featured artist. (There’s also a longer, knottier version of the story where it’s not actually a sample of the Beatles but rather the Singers Unlimited, and the beat is actually seven years old, but Paul and Yoko are still going to collect royalties, so “Champagne Poetry” isn’t necessarily coming cheap.) Sometimes you have to throw your hands up and say, That seems like something Drake would do, whether that means calculated corniness, rote gaudiness, or mandated petulance. He’s the executive producer also forced to take centerstage, knowing he’s got to give the audience what they want while working on the bigger picture. With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | September 7, 2021 | 6.6 | 2e8ead5b-2fda-48a6-9109-77584265b0b0 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The appealing second album from this Colorado group is a pastoral in the extreme, with drifting textures, whispered vocals, and lyrics about the forest. | The appealing second album from this Colorado group is a pastoral in the extreme, with drifting textures, whispered vocals, and lyrics about the forest. | Candy Claws: Hidden Lands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14518-hidden-lands/ | Hidden Lands | The idea that technical proficiency shouldn't be a barrier to artistic expression was a cornerstone of punk rock, and it's also been a license for acts of all stripes to create shitty music. That only partially explains what Candy Claws were up against when they decided to compose their second album, Hidden Lands, on keyboards of which they had no prior knowledge. They're not the first act to trade in their guitars for synths, but often it's a choice of a band looking to make a reinvention of their sound. For Candy Claws, Hidden Lands is likely to be a lot of people's introduction to the Fort Collins, Colo., group.
The lyrics of Hidden Lands were composed by running Richard M. Ketchum's The Secret Life of the Forest back and forth into a translation program, and Candy Claws took notice of how the slightest changes could lead you to think differently about otherwise prosaic phrases. Those whispered words bleed into the sonic fabric of clippity-clop percussion, Theremin-like swoops, and aqueous keyboard textures, but it's almost like the music itself has undergone some transformation that makes it sound distinctly alien and out-of-time.
In terms of precedent, Candy Claws occupy a realm similar to Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs or the back half of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs and Feels. These sounds seemed to exist in an eternal alternate reality. There's a lightfooted bossa nova going beneath the dubbed-out studio tricks during "On the Bridge", and each melodic turn ends up being just a step away from what you'd expect. Chords don't really progress so much as melt down and morph into interesting new shapes on "Warm Forest Floor" and "Hiding", while "Sun Arrow" gives Black Moth Super Rainbow's caricatured synth blurts an herbal bath.
Which is not to say that Candy Claws lack edge-- they just use it judiciously. Hidden Lands starts out with its most amorphous track (imagine if Sung Tongs led off with "The Softest Voice" instead of "Leaf House"), nearly seven minutes of gentle prodding and exploratory chords taking a long bridge to nowhere in particular. But as it draws to its calming close, the fanfare of "Sunbeam Show" blares like an alarm clock, signaling a magisterial procession before evolving into a sleigh-bell led waltz on the chorus. Meanwhile, the tropical vibe of the two songs that precede it seem to have given the alternately wobbling and playful "The Breathing Fire" sunstroke. It's all so strange that the most shocking sound of all is a militaristic bass riff on "Silent Time of Earth".
For an album composed almost entirely on synthesizers, the textures are remarkably downy, perhaps too much so for listeners accustomed to having some sort of abrasive counterpoint. I'm not sure there's a single kick drum or hi-hat on the record. It's an immersive experience, but one that must be consumed in a specific manner. Like the Microphones' The Glow, Pt. 2, Hidden Lands demands to be heard on headphones. In the wild, the album drifts off as a cumulous cloud, even though close listens reveal how the vocals are almost the only thing that exists in the center space. Thanks to intricate stereo panning, the instruments sound like they're conversing with one another from across the room, dodging in and out of the mix as percussion fills in spaces in the left channel that synths leave on the right. It's no wonder that they need eight musicians to tour this thing. And it's true that it's tougher to find a way in here than it is with more explicitly escapist sounds. But if you're intent on total engagement, it's also tougher to find a way out. | 2010-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Twosyllable | August 5, 2010 | 7.9 | 2e8f284c-61c4-447a-bac7-7eb058a78147 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Grounding her second album in moments of real vulnerability, the Australian singer-songwriter zeroes in on her guiding concern as a musician: how we seek and create safety. | Grounding her second album in moments of real vulnerability, the Australian singer-songwriter zeroes in on her guiding concern as a musician: how we seek and create safety. | Stella Donnelly: Flood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stella-donnelly-flood/ | Flood | The opening song on Stella Donnelly’s second album seems to pick up where the Australian songwriter’s 2019 debut left off. Beware of the Dogs was full of cheerfully barbed indie-rock songs about victim-blaming, toxic masculinity, abortion rights, racists, and politicians happy to let the environment burn—songs that resonated in the moment because hoping for change didn’t yet feel totally futile. Leading Flood, “Lungs” is sung from the perspective of a child who sees through the dodgy landlord putting profit over people like her working-class parents and shrugging off the threat of asbestos. It’s stark and lovely, straight-backed with confrontational pride in its clipped disco beat, pounded piano, and wasp-sting guitar; Donnelly’s sweetly biting voice lends itself to a righteous kid’s worldview. But instead of coming off as a polemic about housing rights, as it might have had she written it three years ago, the first-person observations give “Lungs” a new kind of intimacy. It brings Donnelly closer to what seems to be her guiding concern as a songwriter: how we seek and create safety, which she essays with captivating tenderness.
To make Flood, however, Donnelly had to remove her creative bowling bumpers. After three years on tour, she’s said, she had become controlling to the degree that it was affecting her mental health. Enduring Australia’s extreme lockdowns took the sting out of her catastrophizing and pushed her to become “a little bit more comfortable with the unknown.” To counter her perfectionism, she opted to write her second album on the piano, an instrument she had barely touched in years, and she pushed her band to embrace the same unfamiliarity. The effect is naturalistic and enveloping. (It’s a tonic, too, to hear a talented young songwriter resist the apparently universal allure of going synth-pop.) The softly brushed “Restricted Account” is so loose and comfortable it suggests someone playing dreamily at home, unafraid of being overheard. Donnelly leaves a huge amount of space as she propositions a crush to “take me for granted/Take me on,” letting Julia Wallace’s flugelhorn play the chorus melody before she then sings it—like a rehearsal for how it might feel to “be your lover” that gives both parties time to feel out the idea. The sense of care for others lives in the music: Warm beds of male backing vocals and high, gently insistent piano notes coax out the title track, which touches on the challenges of trying to look after someone in a bad place. “I’m taken out to sea in the flood/When I try to dry your eyes,” she sings.
Flood’s first line, from “Lungs,” goes: “Maybe it’s the last time that I’ll see you putting too much salt on the story,” and whoever it’s sung to, maybe it also stands as Donnelly’s challenge to herself. Beware of the Dogs was spiked with little lyrical fireworks—gleeful punchlines, casual references to masturbation. The writing here is subtler, and acute even when she’s describing far less clear-cut scenarios than those of her debut. The sweetly brisk “How Was Your Day?” sets the scene for its rocky relationship with everyday images of people doing their best to ignore looming danger—like the “white-knuckled mum in the passenger seat”—and Donnelly outlines the polite detente between a doomed couple in pristine spoken word. Then the chorus cracks open and the lava churns out: “You said, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore/We let our patterns of bad behaviors take over/I’m no longer keeping score/Levelheadedness has made way for a disastrous love, I know it, you know it.’” It’s a mouthful, but it feels true to life: a desperate but comically reasonable eruption from someone who is sure there’s more out there for them than reasonableness.
Donnelly has an eye for the fault lines that threaten to reduce the status quo to rubble. The riled-up, monomaniacal housemate in “Medals” makes everyone feel uneasy, “like watching a movie next to a chain smoker”; the sweetly sing-songy “Move Me” observes, “You were always clumsy in a good way/Now it’s turned to something we all fear.” To try to save them, she insists, “I wanna be yours ’til there’s no me,” a relatably foolhardy attempt to scaffold someone else’s instability.
Balancing out Donnelly’s astute observations are moments of real vulnerability—often accentuated by paring back the band’s usual genial dynamic. She sings to piano and a rising haze of reverb on “Underwater,” a song about escaping someone intent on destroying her security that’s as shocked as emerging blinking into the daylight. She channels a chorister’s poise for “Oh My My My,” a song for her late grandmother, and you feel the effort of her maintaining her composure. “Part of me died,” she sings in a grave register, a theme she picks up across Flood: where and in whom we place our trust, and what happens when they can’t hold it anymore.
That theme recurs in the minimalist “This Week,” one of the album’s many highlights. It’s a song about taking the small but integral steps to recovery from some rupture, where any deviation from a careful path might upset the whole endeavor. The sighing horn fanfare that crops up midway feels like a begrudging celebration of that work from someone perhaps not inclined to self-compassion; given Donnelly’s usually conversational tone, the rare quiver of vibrato that creeps into her voice as she ventures, “I feel better,” is immensely moving. It’s as if she’s stepping outside those limited bounds for the first time in a long time, confident that she can take a risk and still find a soft place to land. Her quiet yet spirited second album offers one too. | 2022-08-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 25, 2022 | 7.7 | 2e9139ee-8ef0-4257-a9a4-6f3e2316c8cd | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Despite the typical bloated-album problems like pacing issues and forced collaborations, A Boogie hardly ever loses his Bronx edge. | Despite the typical bloated-album problems like pacing issues and forced collaborations, A Boogie hardly ever loses his Bronx edge. | A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: Hoodie SZN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-boogie-wit-da-hoodie-hoodie-szn/ | Hoodie SZN | In New York, time moves at its own pace: Facebook is still the social media of choice, CDs are still handed out on the street, and radio DJs still have the power to break a song. Likewise, the 23-year-old Bronx rapper A Boogie Wit da Hoodie feels like he belongs in a long-gone era. When A Boogie drops in one of his petty, lovestruck tracks on his latest album Hoodie SZN, the quotables could double as a teen in 2008’s AIM away message sent from a T-Mobile Sidekick; when he gets violent, he makes me think that the melodic and stick-talking Tim Vocals has been spiritually resurrected. But it’s all part of what has made A Boogie one of New York’s most essential—and most popular—artists. Because despite Hoodie SZN’s 20 songs facing the typical bloated-album problems like pacing issues and forced collaborations, through it all, A Boogie hardly ever loses his Bronx edge.
Over the last two years, the bright melody and AutoTune flow of A Boogie—that Lil B famously compared to Dej Loaf’s—has become a New York staple. The Bronx’s Lil Tjay, Brooklyn’s Jay Gwuapo, and Long Island’s Lil Tecca, are three emerging New York stars and collectively they have all found inspiration in the vocals of A Boogie. It’s why on Hoodie SZN’s “4 Min Convo,” A Boogie says, “I hear too much me in niggas’ songs, so I had to switch it up.” Thankfully, A Boogie never really does switch it up—the last time he did he released his straining, pop-crossover dud International Artist—and the album’s best moments come when the Bronx songbird embraces his signature style.
The aforementioned “4 Min Convo” is A Boogie at his most engaging and melodramatic. He uses a piano-heavy CP DUBB beat that could believably be an A Boogie-type beat to balance both the spitefully loving and ruthlessly savage aspects of his personality. The track has no hook and is one long verse of A Boogie rambling and venting, then later thanking Drake for inspiring him to record his jaded view on relationships. The intro track, “Voices in My Head,” follows much of that same blueprint as A Boogie questionably compares himself to both Malcolm X (“And I be feelin’ like Malcolm, I got the X on my back”) and Michael Jackson (“I feel like I’m the rappin’ Michael”), in his softest, threat-filled melody. That same vocal success carries over to “I Did It,” in which, despite A Boogie confessing to his infidelity, he irrationally blames his cheating on his lack of trust in women. It’s the exact type of borderline insane and candid take on love that has made A Boogie’s views on the subject come across genuine.
Currently, rappers of A Boogie’s prominence sacrifice project consistency for features intended to maximize streaming numbers—Kodak Black recently admitted to this in an interview about Juice WRLD’s guest spot on his album. Hoodie SZN’s weakest moments come when A Boogie sinks into collaborations, where his vocals begin to mirror the imitators he wants to separate himself from. On “Swervin,” the London on da Track production cannot save yet another strained A Boogie and 6ix9ine collab in which the incarcerated Brooklyn rapper sounds like he’s repaying a favor. And A Boogie’s personality is diluted by the sight of Juice WRLD, as the Chicago emo-rap superstar strangely sings about demons and angels as if he’s unaware this is an Uptown bottle-service club album. But when A Boogie does find a guest he has chemistry with, like on “Come Closer,” the guitar-heavy duet with Queen Naija, they feed off of each other, as she cleverly flips his own pettiness against him.
Hoodie SZN does not offer any new realizations about A Boogie. The Bronx rapper hardly breaks from the moody, tough-talking to hide his heartache sing-rap formula, but with A Boogie that’s when he works. Because if New York dislikes anything, it’s change. And as long as A Boogie stays the course, his music will be loved, appreciated, and endlessly shared throughout the city’s ancient, but still thriving Facebook feeds. | 2019-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Highbridge The Label / Atlantic | January 8, 2019 | 6.8 | 2e92d574-da3a-459f-85fc-d75a07ed1cce | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On what is billed as his proper debut LP after several years’ worth of cassette releases, the Greek producer fashions a wide-ranging attempt to move beyond his dub influences. | On what is billed as his proper debut LP after several years’ worth of cassette releases, the Greek producer fashions a wide-ranging attempt to move beyond his dub influences. | Jay Glass Dubs: Epitaph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-glass-dubs-epitaph/ | Epitaph | Dimitri Papadatos, better known as Jay Glass Dubs, makes dub music from an outsider’s perspective. The Greek producer’s discography, mostly on cassette, amounts to a series of terse statements of discontent. His 2016 release New Teeth for an Old Country glimmers briefly before plunging into noir dub abstraction, as if tracing his native country’s historical timeline from glory to turmoil; 2018’s Plegnic steeps in Athenian nostalgia and ennui by interpolating samples of laïkó, or Greek mainstream pop. Papadatos, far from Kingston or Bristol, seems both preoccupied and at odds with the site specificity of his work. He often emphasizes his self-described “counter-factual” approach to the Jamaican genre by discussing local sound system culture that he was adjacent to, but never really part of.
On Epitaph, which is billed as his “first proper solo LP” (after a considerable catalog of album-length releases stretching back four years), Papadatos moves away from narrow definitions of the genre. He’s excluded the word “dub” from his track titles, choosing instead to pulse the genre's heavy reverberations directly through the veins of his show-don’t-tell effort. Like Papadatos’ other projects, Epitaph is about more than bass: It also incorporates traces of archaic Greek songs, punk rock, choral music, and breakbeats. A sinister religious fervor helps unify the 10 tracks, as do heavy drums and minor-key synths, with the odd touch of blaring saxophone throwing things back off kilter. To purists, dub music carves out the contours of space with a steady heartbeat; Epitaph is as maximalist and nonconformist as a dub record can get without abandoning ship altogether.
Papatados also makes use of his own vocals, to varying degrees of success. Opener “Seikilos & to Console Him” begins with an extraterrestrial take on religious chanting, but the mood is quickly broken by violent hammering and shouting. (The title and elements of the song come from the “Seikilos Epitaph,” the oldest known musical composition.) Papadatos’ incantations infuse the music with a mystical charge, but he struggles to hold onto this quality on “A New Model for Emulation,” which comes off as muddled and flattened by distortion.
Where the first half of Epitaph is caught in a murky undertow, its second half ascends to a higher vantage point. Synths descend from the firmament, pierce through the hollowed percussion on “Intro,” and gain strength among clanging cymbals on “Laid Down.” The drum machine mimics a factory assembly line before a gleaming synth melody emerges from the clamor. When Papadatos’ vocals re-enter in “To My Benefitors,” there’s a psychedelic new calm in his croon, rising like dissipating mist among the low-end echoes and resonant twangs. Lest you forget his dub-contrarian roots, “Reckless” toys with a dizzying matrix of disembodied incantations, throaty drones, and what sound like slivers of glass harp over a tyrannical reverb. The track careens anxiously towards another bold climax only to conclude in an abrupt cliffhanger.
These frequent twists and turns can make for gripping listening, but they’re also the album’s main stumbling block. In a recent interview, Papadatos said he worked on Epitaph over the course of two years, along with a large collection of other projects—and it shows. What he calls his “melting pot” of influences displays impressive range. But as a transgressive take on dub music, Epitaph never quite settles on a final place to rest. | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Bokeh Versions | January 30, 2019 | 6.8 | 2e9b3a03-d1b3-4373-b7ff-50b9811e7468 | Whitney Wei | https://pitchfork.com/staff/whitney- wei/ | |
In the early ’80s, New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery was part of foundational Flying Nun band the Pin Group. His first solo work since 2001 is a 4xLP set that, at its best, plays like a shadowy dream. | In the early ’80s, New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery was part of foundational Flying Nun band the Pin Group. His first solo work since 2001 is a 4xLP set that, at its best, plays like a shadowy dream. | Roy Montgomery: R M H Q: Headquarters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22441-r-m-h-q-headquarters/ | R M H Q: Headquarters | New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery has been involved with so much vital music that it’s hard to believe he’s spent most of his life not making any at all. In the early 1980s he was part of foundational Flying Nun band the Pin Group, then went silent for about a decade. He shifted into overdrive in the ’90s with free-rock outfit Dadamah, guitar duo Dissolve, and a string of excellent solo albums. The last of those, Silver Wheel of Prayer, came out in 2001, and since then he’s been quiet again, save for a few collaborations and an imaginary soundtrack.
For anyone still under the spell of Montgomery’s mesmerizing ’90s work, there’s a lot of lost time to make up for, and apparently he thinks so, too. Motivated by some serious life events—including serving as volunteer firefighter during the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and losing his friend and Flying Nun colleague Peter Gutteridge—Montgomery decided to get playing again while he still could. As he told The Wire, he vowed to “stop taking for granted always being able to return casually to composition and recording.”
There’s certainly nothing casual about R M H Q, whose title stands for Roy Montgomery’s Headquarters. Montgomery has exploded his own creative floodgates to produce nearly three hours of music, available as four CDs in a set, or four LPs released individually. Each disc has its own title, lasts about 44 minutes, and works well as a stand-alone album. But R M H Q is especially compelling when you take it all together, or even just skip around from track to track. Montgomery’s self-made approach to writing and playing becomes deeper the more ways you hear it, and he varies that style throughout 30 pieces while always sounding like himself.
Montgomery’s musical self is most tangible on the first disc, R: Tropic of Anodyne, the only one he sings on. His chillingly low voice has a somnambulant quality, as if he’s walking stoically through his own subconscious. Add his patient, slow-burning guitar, and these first eight songs become like a shadowy dream, the kind where figures are hard to make out and events feel mildly surreal. There’s naturally some darkness to R: Tropic of Anodyne—Montgomery seems to be working through some issues—but it’s a hypnotic darkness, and often a cathartic one, especially when he lets loose on guitar. There’s some wry humor here, too: take “You Always Get What You Deserve,” a wizened variation on the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” that makes accepting fate sound pretty cleansing.
R: Tropic of Anodyne is RMHQ’s strongest chapter, with the most consistent, compelling tone. As if to prove his music isn’t always so downbeat, Montgomery spends the rest of R M H Q exploring a wider range of timbres. Through three albums of instrumentals—mostly centered on guitars, with some drum machine accompaniment—he sounds alternately eager, inquisitive, reflective, world-weary, and optimistic. In some spots he’s even giddy: on the second disc, M: Darkmotif Dancehall, he spends six minutes in “Six Guitar Salute to Peter Gutteridge” riding a bouncy, beatific wave. It’s a pretty positive album marked by rising tones and soaring crescendoes—classic post-rock from a guy who helped create that genre, whether or not he intended to.
On R M H Q’s final two discs, Montgomery seems most concerned with testing out guitar styles, mixing weighty strumming, gradual string massaging, twangy extended chords, and a wealth of reverberant effects. Most of his playing throughout the set has a ringing, chorus-y hue that makes it immediately layered and atmospheric. That effect dragged down his last record, 2012’s Music from the Film Hey Badfinger, but because his playing on R M H Q is subtler and more varied, it’s now more a signature than an impediment. Often, it strikes a mood that enhances the emotions in Montgomery’s songcraft.
As a result, your own mood may determine which parts of R M H Q hit hardest. I’m partial to the times Montgomery plays with abandon, as on “Riding” (from disc four, Q: Transient Global Amnesia). He piles chords until they cascade like a waterfall. But his more subdued moments—see the dusty, moonlit “And Later We Looked Up at the Stars,” on disc three, H: Bender—are just as gripping. And any mood will likely be affected by the set’s denouement, the 20-minute “Weathering Mortality.” Montgomery confronts his own expiration date, and his response—glorious chords that rage against dying light—typifies the life-affirming drive of R M H Q. | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 29, 2016 | 8.1 | 2ea27a76-f8a9-47c1-b95e-52599a63f8cf | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured few artists from its titular city, the soundtrack to Spike Lee's Chi-Raq is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago. | Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured few artists from its titular city, the soundtrack to Spike Lee's Chi-Raq is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago. | Various Artists: Chi-Raq OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21305-chi-raq-ost/ | Chi-Raq OST | Chi-Raq suffers from Spike Lee's worst tendencies as a storyteller. The movie attempts to speak on Chicago's heartbreaking gun violence and gang culture, but it's not so much a narrative as a succession of overwrought messages and ham-fisted editorializing bolstered with history and current-events lessons, heavy statistics, and too many ideas bogged down by rhyme in an ode to the source material, Aristophanes' Athenian comedy, "Lysistrata".
The soundtrack doesn't fare much better. Like the movie—whose trailers were met with head-scratching and rebuttals from Chi-Town rappers across the board—the music was met with controversy before even being released, when DJ Slugo, a Chicago native working as the film's music supervisor, was discovered running an unnecessarily complex payola racket for soundtrack placement. Upon getting caught, Slugo apologized, writing "This is not the way Spike Lee nor his team operates and I take full responsibility for my bad decision," but the mini-scandal casts a harsh light over this collection.
Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured not many artists from its titular city, Chi-Raq's original motion picture soundtrack is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. The city's hip-hop elite—Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Common—are nowhere to be found. Like wise, OG's like Twista, Crucial Conflict, and Shawnna are absent, and the new crop of progressive Chi-Town MC's—Mick Jenkins, Chance the Rapper, Rockie Fresh—aren't here. (Vic Mensa appears briefly in the movie as a hype man, but has no role in the soundtrack.) Most egregiously, save for a beat from Young Chop, there are no notables from the drill scene present—not Chief Keef, not Lil Durk, not G Herbo, or any of the other young talents who could have furthered dialogue about Chicago's horrendous and shameful bloodshed. The movie argues against intra-community crime through a lens of respectability politics—it all but ignores the systemic causes that have made the Windy City a war zone. The Chicago PD—currently under pressure for the cover up of Laquan McDonald's murder, not to mention Homan Square, its Guantanamo-like black site—is treated like an afterthought. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago.
Some of the numbers seem picked from Lee's wishful thinking. Kevon Carter's "WGDB" (for "we gotta do better," the de facto slogan of the respectability movement) is an incredibly sanctimonious string-and-keys lamentation replete with clunky (and false) observations like "We're the only race that shoots and kills themselves" and the laborious opening lines: "Everybody's talkin' about brother Bill Cosby/ Looks like our favorite dad was drugging girls." It's a song that would make sense within the context of a Hamilton-esque musical, but it's not presented in the film as a performance number—it just seems to be Lee believing his audience should be condescended to with simple answers to complex issues.
The disconnect is an extension of Lee's heavy-handed and off-center vision. Nick Cannon, who plays a gang member named Chi-Raq, comes through with two songs in character—the uplifting "Pray 4 My City" (whose lyrics are flashed across the film's opening credits with ebonicized spellings—dey, dat, dis, cuz, Lawd) and the Young Chop-produced thuggery-by-numbers of "My City". Both songs feel like they're trying to bring Afterschool Specials back. There's no true gravitas in any of it, and the only place where these songs fit is in Lee's movie, with its reliance on outdated tropes, such as a ridiculous preponderance of gang colors and a reference to Brooklyn as "Bucktown".
It's not all bad. Treasure Davis' "Simple" is a sunny and bouncing number about on-and-off love; Sam Dew's "Desperately" is yearning, body-grinding boudoir music; Mali Music and Jhené Aiko's Caribbean-tinged "Contradiction" is perfectly tailored for break-up and reconciliation. When Mali sings "If you say that it's over/ I won't die," you're not sure if he's coming or going, but it doesn't matter, because the song just works.
And here's a troubling thing: R. Kelly—still one of the most reviled and gifted artists in R&B—comes through with the album's best song. It makes so much sense—Kelly is as much a Chi-Town icon as Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey. And "Put the Guns Down" is topically in line with movie's message, especially with a guest verse from Tink, who notes that kids are "Fifteen, buying a tool/ Just to feel more safe when they gotta make it home from school." It's targeted, but not pedantic and—most importantly—it's girded by a four-on-the-floor track that actually entertains. When R. Kelly sings, "Just do your dance, get in your zone/ No, they can't take you out that," meaning and music come together as they do nowhere else on this album.
And that's the state of Chi-Raq, a movie that uses a term for a city that no one in the city actually uses: a soundtrack about said city that uses very few voices from the despair it seeks to shed light upon. Its best number comes from guy who is all but a pariah in the urban community, which all but ensures that none of these messages are going reach the people who need to hear them most. And that may be the real tragedy here. | 2015-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | RCA | December 8, 2015 | 5 | 2ea356c8-94ee-4a10-8d22-8055a467a380 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
Beck’s 13th album is his most overtly pop record, one filled with sunshine and sadness, but feels connected to little more than a good idea. | Beck’s 13th album is his most overtly pop record, one filled with sunshine and sadness, but feels connected to little more than a good idea. | Beck: Colors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beck-colors/ | Colors | At the very start of his career in his early twenties, Beck’s voice blistered and cracked just thinking about the pop zeitgeist. “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack,” he declared, on account of everyone being so bright and perky. About a year later, in 1994, Beck scored his first and biggest hit with “Loser” and became the toast of MTV. From that moment on, he’s been the weirdest guy in music’s normiest rooms, mixing non-sequitur rock sleaze and sad-bastard folk with a cut-and-paste hip-hop sensibility and an Ambien flow. Beck was, essentially, post-genre before that became the dominant trend of music listening in the streaming era. But in the last decade, he’s made the most focused, conventional, and polished albums of his career, 2008’s Modern Guilt and 2014’s Morning Phase—tasteful records that didn’t make the pop charts bend to his quirks like they once did but still garnered acclaim from the establishment. With them, Beck officially became a legacy artist.
This, of course, is when someone like Beck normally would do something unexpected, like make a falsetto’d electrofunk homage to getting freaky on the Sunset Strip. Ostensibly, Beck’s 13th album, Colors, is a left turn—his most overtly pop record. He reunited with Greg Kurstin, who played in his live band before becoming a staple of Top 40 songwriting and production with Kelly Clarkson, Adele, and Sia. Together, they aimed to make an album that “was uplifting, had a lot of energy, and made you want to sing along.” Yet Colors is more like Beck’s downtempo records, Morning Phase and its spiritual predecessor Sea Change, in that it is largely bereft of color. Sure, he plays word association games under the guise of rapping on a couple songs, but even the sonic elements that are supposed to instill his songs with a sense of zaniness—like pan flutes, 808s, and pitched-up vocals on the title track and early single “Wow”—feel more like following pop trends than starting them. The precise Beck-ness appears to be somewhat missing.
There are, however, other artists you can hear on Colors. Album highlight “Dear Life” is Elliott Smith doing the Beatles, down to the jaunty piano line punctuating existential woes. “No Distraction” proves there’s room for more than just Bruno Mars to retread reggae-lite Police hits for the modern age, turning a lament about the attention economy into a love song about choosing your partner over your phone. “I’m So Free” is like the best late-era Weezer single: put aside the trying-too-hard-to-be-an-anthem lyrics and the furious, cringe-y rhymes, and it’s a very catchy power-pop cut.
While donning the various masks of pop music, Beck searches for answers to or an escape from the doldrums of modern life. “Seventh Heaven,” a song that sounds so beachy the sun practically glints off its synths, is actually about hiding away with someone who temporarily makes things seem brighter, living in the hope of leaving the shadows only to say: “We’ll shoot for the empire/Land in the dust pile.” On the twinkling toe-tapper “Square One,” Beck sings of lowered expectations and “learning to enjoy the ride,” but pivots midway to a love song when it becomes too much of a bummer. Even “Dreams,” the album’s best and earliest single (released two years ago), returns to the theme of finding freedom, albeit temporarily through sleep. History is filled with major-key bummer jams from the Supremes’ “Baby Love” to the Smiths’ “Ask,” the tension sharpening each element. The songs on Colors don’t possess that kind of contrast—they just feel out of sync among their upbeat soundscapes, neutral choruses, and quietly disappointed verses.
There’s no harm in becoming bright and perky, or whatever you hated in your early twenties. It’s a rite of passage, even. But for Beck, it’s always been a game of pivots, as if each album represents a man with either an endless supply of ideas or a man completely out of them. Beck has been working on Colors since 2013, and by the sounds of a recent interview, spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of “not retro and not modern” just so. He more or less nailed that bit, but what’s lacking from his Big Happy Pop Record is some kind of strong emotion that could elevate these songs above the “well crafted but innocuous” camp—something more than an idea. I heard the sunny, percussive single “Up All Night” wafting through a department store recently. It put me in a decent mood while I waited in line to buy socks. | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fonograf / Capitol | October 17, 2017 | 6.3 | 2ea44883-f34a-4cc6-986f-4fcff0f54533 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
Experimental singer/songwriter Jenny Hval's latest album finds her reckoning with longing and self-doubt, tentatively considering domesticity, fantasizing about rebirth, and wrestling with sex and gender. As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. | Experimental singer/songwriter Jenny Hval's latest album finds her reckoning with longing and self-doubt, tentatively considering domesticity, fantasizing about rebirth, and wrestling with sex and gender. As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. | Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20638-apocalypse-girl/ | Apocalypse, girl | Experimental singer/songwriter Jenny Hval's work is cryptically pleasurable, prone to breeding obsession, and full of surprises. As she mentions several times throughout Apocalypse, girl, she recorded her latest album when she was 33, and like a lot of people in their Jesus year she found herself at an existential crossroads. Apocalypse, girl has plenty of what-does-it-all-mean moments—Hval reckons with longing and self-doubt, tentatively considers ideas of domesticity and traditional standards of satisfaction, and fantasizes about spiritual (or possibly even literal) rebirth—but she seems to have come out of her crisis even more committed to following the challenging path she’s chosen for herself.
Musically, Apocalypse pushes boundaries that were barely visible on her last album. For all its noisy interludes and sharply angular melodies, a lot of Innocence Is Kinky was straightforward, held down by fairly conventional arrangements of guitar, drums, and keys. Working with producer Lasse Marhaug (who met Hval when he interviewed her for his fanzine in 2014) and an ensemble of skilled improv players that includes members of Swans and Jaga Jazzist, she deconstructs her pop sensibilities while still assembling catchy and memorable compositions. There’s a dreamy kind of ambiguity to how the songs are put together: Pop melodies emerge from washes of abstract sound, and sometimes they’ll take charge of the song, but sometimes they simply fade back into the churn. Standout track "Heaven" starts off with vocals over the white noise sound of falling rain, then pivots into moody, Björk-like electropop, and finishes in a tonal cloud of strings and harp.
Hval takes a similar approach to her lyrics, floating intriguing bits of concrete imagery in a matrix of stream-of-consciousness abstraction—Queens-bound subway cars and a scrap of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" tumbling past enigmatic, impressionistic lines like "I separate from feelings/ Complex harmonic notion/ Harmonic notion." As a lyricist, Hval sometimes feels like she has less in common with traditional songwriters than with text artists like Jenny Holzer and Tracey Emin. Like them, her deployment of words lands hardest when it hits a gnomically confrontational tone. And in terms of gnomic confrontation, it’s hard to beat the phrase "soft dick rock."
Halfway through "Kingsize", the album opener full of pungent abstract lines like "I beckon the cupcake, the huge capitalist clit," Hval pauses the song to whisper the question, "What is SOFT DICK ROCK?" How you react during the silence she lets hang in the air for a beat after the question—whether you laugh out loud or frown perplexedly—will probably determine how you feel about the rest of the album.
The most obvious and immediately gratifying answer to Hval’s question is that soft dick rock is simply the spirit of fragile male ego and fear of women that rock music (among other pop styles) has sustained for the better part of a century. Baby boomer guitar gods hogging stages well into their senescence are soft dick rock; so are younger and more critically well-defended artists keeping the patriarchy alive and breathing in the counterculture.
But "soft dick rock" could also be music that runs counter to rock’s testosterone-driven nature. "That Battle Is Over" is Apocalypse, girl’s most straightforward pop moment, with a shuffling quasi-hip-hop beat, an unhurried organ progression, and Hval singing with an uncharacteristically bluesy inflection. The lyrics are about reckoning with the legacy of an older generation’s revolution, and the question of whether the advances they made are actually doing Hval any good. The relationship between the reference and the subject matter, potent and intriguingly ambiguous, emits a weird frisson that’s as fascinating in its own way as her voice. Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. | 2015-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | June 9, 2015 | 7.9 | 2ea46498-2f0b-4f11-ba1e-b7058f86c1b0 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Following up his collaboration with saxophonist Sam Gendel, the Los Angeles bassist returns with a dreamy album that dissolves jazz structures into ambient, vaguely psychedelic forms. | Following up his collaboration with saxophonist Sam Gendel, the Los Angeles bassist returns with a dreamy album that dissolves jazz structures into ambient, vaguely psychedelic forms. | Sam Wilkes: WILKES | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-wilkes-wilkes/ | WILKES | In his new survey of jazz in the 21st century, Playing Changes, Nate Chinen writes that “to be a successful jazz artist today, on some level, is to be a conceptualist.” In Chinen’s suggestion, it is not enough—or maybe besides the point—for an artist to rely on virtuosity alone. It’s more important, he recently told an interviewer, to have “something to say,” as opposed to just the chops to play. Listening to the dreamy, slightly psychedelic debut album from the Los Angeles bassist Sam Wilkes brings Chinen’s point to mind: By evaporating his own performance, Wilkes has allowed it to condensate into a sound bigger than his own bass.
Over the last couple years, as a session player, Wilkes has proven himself an adaptable spark plug for other musicians and their ideas. He’s backed the electronic duo KNOWER on tour and shines in the kitschy, funk-versions-of-classic-songs cover band Scary Pockets. He has also poked around the Los Angeles jazz scene. A few months ago he partnered with the saxophonist Sam Gendel on Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar, a remarkably intimate conversation of an album in which the two Sams play for and off each other and tinker with electronics in a warm, low-stakes environment. The fluency of that dialogue was less about their vocabulary than their good company and ideas.
At least in composition, Wilkes’ debut is a more deliberate affair, and supported by a bigger cast that includes the drummer Louis Cole and guitarist Brian Green. In addition to the writing, production, and arrangement on most songs, Wilkes is frequently credited with contributing “all other instruments,” an obscurance that has the funny effect of shedding performance in favor of production, as though he were bandleading from behind. WILKES also extends the collaboration with Gendel, but the album doesn’t train a spotlight on the saxophonist so much as gather the music around him, propping up his horn and coaxing out the best performance of his young career.
The opener, “Welcome,” is the only track not credited to Wilkes: It’s a sighing John Coltrane number that immediately establishes Gendel as the album’s protagonist and Wilkes’ ambient electronics as the stage. Coltrane’s original is a near-standstill ballad; Wilkes’ version replaces the glossy chatter of the studio band’s vamping with ambient tones that cradle Gendel’s saxophone and nudge his swooping, elongated breaths into an elegantly floating performance. (More even than in the original, you can hear how “Welcome” riffs on and stretches out the “Happy Birthday” melody into a distorted, psychedelic meditation not unlike Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.”)
Much of the album’s background production is characterized by a similar wispiness that lends each track a vaguely psychedelic feeling—an afterglow environment more than a hallucination event. “Hug” presents itself immediately as a dreamy wall of noise, both graceful and a little bewildering in its constant, minutes-long build. The transition from upswell to dissolve is signaled by the fade of Christian Euman’s crashing drum performance. Wilkes regenerates the theme into a downtempo conga groove that glides even further away from the trauma of the opening.
Free of the ambient detours and psychedelic landscaping, “Run” is the most traditional jazz performance on the record, and here Wilkes finally puts his bass forward as the gentle, throbbing center of the rhythm section, a plush scaffold Gendel climbs and eventually launches away from with a soaring solo. It’s not the only moment on WILKES that snapped me into the players and made me want more performative interplay, more actual session recordings. But WILKES feels more nebulous than that. It’s also a remarkably easy record to listen to, inviting in its warmth but also not too smooth. It sounds like Wilkes dreamed up a sound and figured out how to make it real. | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Leaving | October 5, 2018 | 7.3 | 2ea47c4e-822a-423c-af08-f865a7f348dc | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The singer-songwriter finally embraces that label on her ninth solo album, unspooling songs of unhurried beauty and great detail. | The singer-songwriter finally embraces that label on her ninth solo album, unspooling songs of unhurried beauty and great detail. | Tara Jane O’Neil: Tara Jane O’Neil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23181-tara-jane-oneil/ | Tara Jane O’Neil | Tara Jane O’Neil, the one-time bassist for the Kentucky math-rock band Rodan, has made nine solo records under her own name since 2000. In a 2014 interview with Fact, O’Neil remarked, “I’m not writing confessional singer-songwriter stuff, but I do think that my life informs the music I make.” Three years later, she has embraced the “singer-songwriter” label, at least according to the press release penned by her friend and author Maggie Nelson, but Tara Jane O’Neil isn’t really a confessional. Instead, the album whittles away some of 2014’s Where Shine New Lights’ experimental ambience and places O’Neil’s voice and lyrics in the spotlight. The result is a slow-burning record whose warmth stretches across its 11 track like the sun crosses the sky.
Tara Jane O’Neil requires a certain amount of attention, otherwise its unhurried beauty can get lost. Details matter here. In some places, you can see a clear line to O’Neil’s darker, earlier work. Opener “Flutter” begins with traces of Where Shine New Lights’ ghostly tremors thanks to James Elkington’s spooky eerie pedal steel playing. A haunted feeling lingers through the earlier part of the record as O’Neil sings of “the sun, a black star,” “ghost breath,” and “graves and jewels.” The woozy trumpet of “Sand” could soundtrack a spirit’s waltz across dunes; “Let the flow and the coyote lead you/Let the moon be in the morning sky, blue/Let there be another in the making,” she sings on the celestial “Joshua.” The restorative power of nature has been an abiding trait of O’Neil’s music, but here the instruments and lyrics seem more intertwined than ever.
But Tara Jane O’Neil really takes flight in its center, when songs open up and turn brighter. O’Neil’s soft voice and the quivering guitar offer a feeling of blissful peace, as she touches on love (the upbeat “Laugh”) and unity (the euphoric “Kelley”). And then there’s the standout track “Cali,” an anecdote about folk’s favorite subject. “You called me California true bird,” O’Neil sings in a moody, minimal drawl. It would be too easy to say that O’Neil resembles Joni Mitchell here, but “Cali” truly does contain the windswept contentment. On these tracks, O’Neil’s voice conveys the light strength and easygoing introspection of Judee Sill and Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon compatriot David Crosby. After these moments, Tara Jane O’Neil’s sun begins to set as it moves again into a bookending coolness.
These songs ask for nothing more than patience, attention, and a willingness to submit to a lush idyllic. They lack structural tension and contain few, if any, surprises. Because of this, there is not too much to pick apart. O’Neil presents first-person narratives, and as a listener, we are left peering through a small window into her internal world. But while remaining as obtuse as ever, O’Neil’s newfound appreciation for singer-songwriter-dom presents some of her most personal work yet. | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Gnomonsong | April 26, 2017 | 7.5 | 2eace38a-d47c-434f-a1cc-8ad5fcbe3872 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
The daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar has spent years exploring the instrument’s possibilities. Recording in Berlin with Arooj Aftab and Nils Frahm, she zeroes in on the nexus of music and memory. | The daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar has spent years exploring the instrument’s possibilities. Recording in Berlin with Arooj Aftab and Nils Frahm, she zeroes in on the nexus of music and memory. | Anoushka Shankar: Chapter I: Forever, For Now EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anoushka-shankar-chapter-i-forever-for-now-ep/ | Chapter I: Forever, For Now EP | Over the past 25-odd years, Anoushka Shankar and her sitar have carved a wide, idiosyncratic path through the landscape of Hindustani classical and contemporary pop music. The daughter and protege of sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar—hippie icon, the world’s best-known Hindustani classical musician, and the “godfather of world music”—she spent the late ’90s and early aughts perfecting her grasp of Hindustani classical sitar, releasing three albums of strictly traditional ragas that showcased her precocious virtuosity on the instrument (she made her solo live debut at just 13). Then, much like her father, she began to venture further afield, writing and performing music that more accurately reflected a life lived across three different continents.
On 2005’s Rise, she re-imagined the sitar as a thoroughly modern instrument, weaving it into a patchwork tapestry of jazz, pop, flamenco, and Asian Underground electronics. She followed it up with 2007’s Breathing Under Water, a collaboration with Karsh Kale that blended her elegant sitar and piano with his glitchy, jungle-laced tablatronic soundscapes. There would be experiments with flamenco (2011’s Traveller, produced by Javier Limón) and chopped-up hip-hop (M.I.A. collab “Jump In,” off 2016’s Land of Gold), all part of Shankar’s quest to “de-exotify” the instrument.
Now 42 years old, with nine Grammy nominations under her belt, Shankar is firmly established as the 21st century’s most innovative sitar player. Her father’s shadow, long as it is, has receded, and with it the immense pressure to live up to her name. She’s now confident enough to turn her gaze inwards, writing music from a space of vulnerability that she rarely afforded herself before. The 2020 EP Love Letters—written after the dissolution of her marriage with English filmmaker Joe Wright—seethed with anger and heartbreak, eschewing her complex, densely layered compositional style in favor of sparse arrangements for cello, piano, and sitar. Compared to the artfully assembled bricolage of her earlier work, Love Letters sounded almost organic, a natural accretion of harmony and rhythm.
Shankar pushes further into this new direction on Chapter I: Forever, for Now, the first of a planned trilogy of “mini-albums”—she’s already in the process of mixing the next one. Each EP is meant to be an intimate snapshot of a particular instant, with Shankar as a Rothko of the sitar, painting expressionist scenes in blocks of vibrant color (serendipitously, raga literally translates to “color” or “hue” in Sanskrit). The first chapter’s genesis lies in a lazy summer afternoon spent in the garden with her two young boys: A half-forgotten lullaby emerges from subconscious depths, a melody that carries with it phantasmal memories of similar scenes playing out across generations.
The four songs on Forever, for Now—recorded at Berlin’s Funkhaus complex, with Arooj Aftab producing and Nils Frahm sitting in—all exist in that sun-dappled moment, expanded out into infinity. Percussion, music’s time-keeper, only makes one brief appearance: The woody tones of Frahm’s slit-drum anchor Shankar’s soaring sitar runs toward the end of “What Will We Remember?,” in the coda to five and a half minutes of exquisite improvisational sitar alap. The rest of the EP floats free, liberated from the tyranny of the metronome. Its only sense of pulse and propulsion comes from the interplay between sitar, keys, and the bass drone of the harmonium.
Opener “Daydreaming” is a meditative duet between Shankar’s pensive sitar and Frahm’s bright and gentle piano that’s based on an old Carnatic lullaby that Shankar’s grandmother would sing to her. The two instruments weave around each other in a delicate dance, every intricate detail of their waltz blown up to cosmic proportions (an Arooj Aftab specialty). On “Stolen Moments,” Shankar’s sitar speaks in bittersweet tones, evoking the pang of sadness that accompanies the realization that all moments full of wonder and joy must eventually pass.
On “Sleeping Flowers (Awaken Every Spring),” Shankar gets to show off a little, sitar notes twisting and turning in fluid counterpoint to Magda Giannikou’s accordion, each musician egging the other on. But even mid-shred, Shankar’s playing never loses its sense of wistful wonder, as though enchanted by the memory of that warm summer afternoon and the experience of a singular moment fully lived and felt. On Forever, for Now, Shankar offers listeners an invitation to join her, immerse themselves in the here and now, and find transcendence in transience. | 2023-10-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Leiter | October 24, 2023 | 7.2 | 2eaf1abb-b63d-4557-b0ff-0389d93d15b0 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
This companion EP is a more modestly scaled counterpart to this year’s Rave Tapes, offering remixes of three album tracks with a trio of new songs. It has a little bit of something for every type of Mogwai fan. | This companion EP is a more modestly scaled counterpart to this year’s Rave Tapes, offering remixes of three album tracks with a trio of new songs. It has a little bit of something for every type of Mogwai fan. | Mogwai: Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20016-mogwai-music-industry-3-business-industry-1-ep/ | Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. EP | Earlier this year, Mogwai released their eighth album and then reissued their second one, and listening to both in tandem, one could reasonably conclude that the Scottish art-rock quintet have either evolved considerably over the past 15 years or not at all. Sure, Mogwai songs are no longer the ticking time-bombs they once were; now as reliant on sci-fi synths as nuclear guitar blasts, their once forbidding 10-minute-plus epics have been pared down to more digestible, pop-friendly forms. But on an album-to-album basis, that change has been so incremental, it can seem like Mogwai have stagnated. While the sneak-attack tactics of old have been replaced with more carefully orchestrated ascents, their music has nonetheless retained the slow-roiling tension and uneasy atmosphere that defined the band’s early efforts.
In lieu of rewriting their formula, Mogwai have instead opted to outsource any radical reinvention to producer friends who don’t so much provide them with remixes as wholesale rethinks. After subjecting their 2011 release, Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, to a nigh-unrecognizable full-album overhaul, the stop-gap Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. EP presents a more modestly scaled counterpart to this year’s Rave Tapes, complementing remixes of three album tracks with a trio of new songs. Collectively, the EP has a little bit of something for every type of Mogwai fan: those who just want them to stick to the same-ol'-same-ol', those who want to see them steer their sound into new directions, and those who’d prefer they dismantle it completely.
EPs have traditionally been the format where Mogwai showcased their more pensive material, so it’s a wonderful shock that Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. leads with the purest, catchiest vocal track the band has ever attempted. Picking up on the motorik momentum first introduced on Hardcore’s “Mexican Grand Prix”, the glimmering dream-pop anthem “Teenage Exorcists” feels very much like a conjuring of Mogwai’s own adolescence, applying My Bloody Valentine’s beautiful blur to Stuart Braithwaite’s dancefloor confession. But while it’d be intriguing at this point to hear Mogwai attempt a whole album in this mode, the EP proves there are limits to their student-disco aspirations: the promisingly titled “HMP Shaun Ryder” proves to be a textbook Mogwai move from ominous, vibraphoned lurch to ape-shit guitarmageddon onslaught, meaning we’ll have to wait just a bit longer for the band to embark upon its baggy phase. (And, alas, “History” offers more of the same, albeit in more pastoral, less dramatic fashion.)
But rather than feel tacked-on incongruities, the three Rave Tapes remixes found on the EP’s second half provide a welcome, unpredictably outré counterpoint to the linear songs heard on the first. In the hands of Blanck Mass—a.k.a. Fuck Buttons co-founder Benjamin John Power—the Italo-prog excursion “Remurdered” is reborn as “Re-Remurdered”, which deploys the original’s synth line not as a melodic motif, but as the rhythmic foundation for its convulsive electro-funk. And tellingly, the other two remixes tackle Rave Tapes’ two meditative closing tracks in sequence, as if Mogwai were admitting that the album’s anti-climactic comedown was in need of a do-over. True to his hauntological m.o., enigmatic producer Pye Corner Audio recasts the oscillating refrain of “No Medicine for Regret” in a ghostly, post-apocalyptic fog, but uses it as the springboard into a light-headed acid-house odyssey, while German composer Nils Frahm reduces the vocoderized ballad “The Lord Is Out of Control” to a gorgeously spare piano melody, before introducing a skyward surge that channels the angelic grace of vintage Sigur Rós. All told, the final score for Music Industry 3. Fitness 1.: Remixers 3 Mogwai 1. | 2014-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Rock Action | December 1, 2014 | 6.8 | 2eb5ac2a-2c32-4e62-b60f-40a3ab90af1f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The fourth album from the R&B collective is a peak example of their combined powers. It simplifies their sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves. | The fourth album from the R&B collective is a peak example of their combined powers. It simplifies their sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves. | The Internet: Hive Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-internet-hive-mind/ | Hive Mind | The Internet had their big breakthrough with 2015’s spaced-out hip-hop soul epic Ego Death and with its Grammy nomination, they entered into a new echelon where the Miguels and the Weeknds of the world reside. Then, near the peak of their power as an R&B band smudging the lines between rap and funk and jazz, they separated last year to focus on individual projects.
It was a curious decision for a group that had been steadily building momentum for five years, having finally solidified its core creative lineup: The Internet started as a refuge for Odd Future also-rans Syd and Matt Martians and across three increasingly better albums came to include bassist Patrick Paige II, drummer Christopher Smith, and singer-songwriter-producer Steve Lacy. Solo projects can lead to destructive infighting about control, but the Internet seem to be different; after all, they did name their breakout after the term for the rejection of a self-centered existence. Time away from working collectively has only strengthened the bond that powers their songs.
Their fourth album, Hive Mind, is an act of collective conviction. It simplifies and shores up the Internet sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves. The beats are shapelier, more boldly defined, and yet they still have the capacity to bleed into each other. “They gon’ get us to come together,” a chorus of voices sings on the album’s opening song, each utterance louder than the one before. And just as the title implies, they are more in sync here than ever.
The songs on Hive Mind are more deliberate than those on Ego Death, less likely to liquify into sticky funk codas. The two-act game of cat-and-mouse “Next Time / Humble Pie” is a gorgeous model of the band’s evolution into a singular organism; the song is split in half but the parts are interlinked, mirroring each other. The groovy, Martians-led “Beat Goes On” cracks open to reveal an alternate, ghostly drum ‘n’ bass interpretation. These moments feel less like songs devolving into jam session or rearranging into something wholly distinct from what came before. Instead, they are of a piece with what preceded them, mesmerizing blooms and curves in the arrangements that never sacrifice a song’s momentum. Though less of an odyssey, Hive Mind presents a more holistic sound, the band’s members convening around the presence of their effortlessly cool frontperson Syd.
Syd has been an epigrammatic songwriter since the band’s 2013 litmus test, Feel Good, but her time alone on last year’s Fin shaved her love songs down to their thrilling sparks. Where listening to her previous intimate exchanges on Internet songs felt like eavesdropping or catching a glimpse of a text chain in the periphery, such moments on Hive Mind are less concealed without feeling less sacred. The writing is less distinctive and sometimes less specific, but more inviting.
Her quiet turns are even leaner than in the past, jumping straight into the action. “Thinking ahead of time/Why don’t you spend the night/I know you love me,” she sings on the nearly seven-minute closer “Hold On.” “We can book a flight/Wake up in paradise/Sun up above us.” These are cut-to-the-chase expressions of interest that are frank about exactly what Syd is after; blunt even for a woman who once sang, “I can read your mind even from behind/And fuck what’s in your phone, lemme take you home.” There is significantly less room for small talk, for being clever. “This back and forth is energy wasted,” she explains on “Next Time.” Even when there’s friction, she’s only willing to spare but so many words.
So much of the Internet’s appeal is still wrapped up in Syd’s vocals, which smear across hard, smacking basslines and rap-savvy drum programming. Sometimes her voice is a whimper, other times her volume is barely louder than a hum; both enhance her tales of intimacy. The accelerated relationship timeline of “Mood” is presented in tiny, evocative vignettes that Syd teases out across dribbling, staccato croons. Through breathy, low-toned melodies, “Wanna Be” plots on turning a longtime friend into a lover: “I think she wants to be [my girl],” she sighs. “At least I hope she does, shit.” With Syd as their laconic storyteller, navigating modern romances and late-night temptation, the band is mastering the funk jam as a nocturne.
There isn’t a single note or riff on the album that feels contrived or forced, and the entire thing is incredibly smooth and unsegmented, an endless string of hook-ups blurring together. Steve Lacy sings more, Martians serves as the band’s utility player (keyboard on some songs, drums on others, even contributing the occasional synth line), and everyone else contributes in ways beyond their official position within the band. The aim is to have everything happen as naturally as possible, “like, ‘Who has a drum loop they’ve made? Pull it out, let’s put some chords over it and go from there!’” Syd told Entertainment Weekly. This egalitarian spirit and anti-hierarchical approach to song-making fuel the sleekest, most robust music of their career. | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | July 24, 2018 | 8.3 | 2eb8349b-80e4-4808-9e36-8afaaf43710a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The UK jazz pianist Greg Foat deftly balances the rhythmic and ambient poles of his sound on his collaborative album with veteran Italian artist Gigi Masin. | The UK jazz pianist Greg Foat deftly balances the rhythmic and ambient poles of his sound on his collaborative album with veteran Italian artist Gigi Masin. | Greg Foat / Gigi Masin: Dolphin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-foat-dolphin/ | Dolphin | Greg Foat likes to build up, up, up in search of transcendence, augmenting his keyboard playing with so many choirs, horns, and strings that his music sometimes sounds like a ‘70s Joni Mitchell album stripped of vocals, or maybe Kamasi Washington if he got a gig at a seaside resort. Yet the English musician is equally gifted at beatless new-age meditations, and it’s at this lower altitude that he meets Italian artist Gigi Masin on their collaboration album Dolphin. This might not be the most immediately dazzling or symphonically thrilling album in the formidable run Foat’s kept up since 2011, when his Greg Foat Group debuted with the mincing prog-jazz of Dark Is the Sun. But it’s a subtle breakthrough in the way it balances the rhythmic and ambient poles of his sound.
After opener “Lee” drones without interruption for eight and a half minutes, the drum fill that opens “London Nights” is liable to make listeners wonder if they haven’t stumbled into an advertisement or accidentally shuffled to a different record. It’s the first time the two musicians let any empty space into the album, and it feels shocking at first, like a dreamer rising to consciousness. But Dolphin’s sequencing quickly falls into a rhythm, with its long, drumless pieces (“Lee,” “Sabena,” Your Move” divided by more beat-heavy tracks (“London Nights,” “Love Theme,” “Viento Calido”) and two-minute interludes (“Dolphin,” “Leo Theo.”) The album seems to continually unfurl and coil itself back up again, and at 50 minutes, it’s long enough to feel expansive without overstaying its welcome (the vinyl version is shorter, excising “Your Move”). Compare this to Foat’s prior album Off-Piste, a collaboration with saxophonist Art Themen, where the kitschy cantina jazz on the second half felt jarring after the crystalline compositions on the first.
After stumbling across Masin’s 1986 crate-digger classic Wind, Foat inquired about a collaboration. Certainly this sounds far more like a Foat project than one of Masin’s dusky, stately ambient albums. But there’s a mournfulness to the eight tracks on Dolphin, a sense of lengthening shadows, and “London Nights” is cheerful only in comparison to “Lee.” Angel-choir synth presets take the place of Foat’s beloved Beach Boys harmonies, perhaps due to COVID concerns that required most of the album’s recording to take place remotely, and they lend “London Nights” a slightly gothic tenor reminiscent of the miasmatic German jazz band Bohren & der Club of Gore. This music feels breezy and light while at the same time swelling with sadness. It’s a longtime strength of Masin’s, especially on his albums with Gaussian Curve. If Foat defines the sound of the album, Masin defines the way it feels.
This means Dolphin takes a little more time to sneak up on the listener than most of Foat’s work. He’s the kind of artist who comes on strong off the bat; his music is expensive-sounding, sumptuously arranged, relentless in its pursuit of beauty and transcendence, generally easy to listen to, and surprisingly groovy at times. On first listen, this more muted record will probably scan as enjoyable but not mind-blowing the way your first spin of Symphonie Pacifique might be. Its strengths—its command of mood, its sequencing, its pacing, its understanding of ambient music—aren’t the kind of things that hit the listener in the face on a first listen. Luckily, the surface is seductive enough to draw us in over and over again so we can discover its depths for ourselves. | 2023-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Electronic | Strut | June 16, 2023 | 7.4 | 2ebbfcb3-5851-4e62-afd8-68ea99ec1417 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
On his third solo outing as Panda Bear, Animal Collective's Noah Lennox balances blossoming melodic pop with wildly experimental sound techniques, hitting on a stunningly unique sound that's both overwhelming and inspirational. | On his third solo outing as Panda Bear, Animal Collective's Noah Lennox balances blossoming melodic pop with wildly experimental sound techniques, hitting on a stunningly unique sound that's both overwhelming and inspirational. | Panda Bear: Person Pitch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10025-person-pitch/ | Person Pitch | Inside the booklet included with Panda Bear's third solo album, Person Pitch, is a list of artists. The first four named are microhouse artists Basic Channel, Luomo, Dettinger, and Wolfgang Voigt. Maybe Noah Lennox, the man behind the Panda Bear, began this influence-naming exercise in a minimal techno state of mind. On the other hand, the inclusion of these four at the top could be significant. We always knew that the guys from his main band, Animal Collective, had an ear out for electronic music, but with Panda Bear, the impact of the DJ seems to run deeper. The music on Person Pitch soundsnothing like proper dance music, but the basic structure-- the use of dynamics, and above all, the sense of repetition-- draws heavily from that context. Which is particularly interesting considering what else is going on.
The Beach Boys always come up when talking about Panda Bear, and not just because he shares their fondness for certain melodic turns: When he allows the reverb to blanch his voice, Lennox can sound uncannily like Brian Wilson. This tunefulness gives Person Pitch an appeal that extends beyond just Animal Collective fans, but the way the songs are put together also gives them an unusual twist. Producers in Brian Wilson's era never worked like this, sampling old songs and instruments and spinning them in wheels of sound that seem like they could go forever. Most of this record consists of intricately constructed, heavily layered, and highly repetitive loops on top of which Lennox sings oddly familiar and touching melodies. But despite its grounding in guitar pop, Person Pitch isn't likely to be mistaken for the work of a band. It sounds like what it is: one guy alone in his bedroom trolling through music history, picking and choosing bits to make something deeply personal and all his own.
The repetition of the music here, though probably engendered by computer, has a strange analog quality. You can almost see the turntables rotating on the opening "Comfy in Nautica", which loops Lennox's sung "ah"'s and handclaps to evoke ritual campfire music, while the deep reverb on his voice puts us in the same liturgical headspace found on his very different acoustic record Young Prayer from 2004. "Take Pills" repeats a tambourine and twangy guitar during its slower opening section while industrial samples that sound like car parts being followed down an assembly line fill in the vast spaces. The field recordings take an aquatic turn on the track's second half, as Lennox picks up his acoustic guitar and moves the party to the beach, singing "I don't want for us to take pills anymore" to the kind of effortlessly melodic line that once expressed thoughts like "da doo ron ron."
Given the presence of such tremendously catchy pop moments on Person Pitch, the record's indulgences feel completely earned. The flurry of tabla that opens the extended "Good Girl/Carrots" sticks out at first but makes sense once Lennox gets the hectic dub chaos out of his system and settles into the second section's hypnotic tune. When the song edges become wispy and shapeless on "I'm Not", which blends Lennox's voice with an indistinct droning synth, the mood and thrust of the album gives the track the appropriate context. "Search for Delicious", reminiscent of the glowing ambient drift of Lennox's side project Jane, won't leave the drone alone, repeatedly knocking Lennox's singing off track like a clumsy but well-meaning drunk. Music of such warped processing would be a specialist's item, but as a breather here, before the simple and childlike music-box closer "Ponytail", it feels right.
I still haven't talked about the 12-and-a-half-minute "Bros", the astonishing track that serves as the album's centerpiece. It's here that Person Pitch's repetition and DJ's sense of timing are most apparent, while Lennox's songwriting hits a melodic peak. The first few bars turn to the golden age of 60s and 70s radio, with some rattling percussion chipped from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and a chiming acoustic guitar that could be pulled from the Beach Boys' "Girl Don't Tell Me". But as the loops pass on "Bros", the song begins to seem like a glorious travelogue, a journey along a path where all the music's influences are visible along the roadside: the Wilson Brothers in their pinstripe shirts, or the queasy phasing and random sound effects-- a subway, people on a roller coaster, a baby crying-- of Lee "Scratch" Perry. When Panda begins to chant halfway through, we hear an echo of his main band, and when the neo-Latin piano comes in during the latter portion, transforming the track from internally-focused meditation to outwardly-beaming celebration, we get an image of Derrick May's classic techno anthem "Strings of Life" busting into a DJ set to make everyone go crazy.
Person Pitch as a whole-- and "Bros" in particular-- evokes the sunshine of Lennox's adopted Lisbon, Portugal home. But it's the kind of light best experienced with eyes closed-- with the rays filtered through eyelids, turning the world into various shades of red and orange. You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music and see abstractions of its inspirations-- that whole long list and more-- as they cycle around again and again and again. Five of these seven songs have been released in various forms on singles and 12"s previously, so the exceptionally high quality of this music isn't a surprise to those who have been following Panda Bear closely. Still, hearing it all together in one place and listening to it all at one time is both overwhelming and inspirational. | 2007-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Paw Tracks | March 22, 2007 | 9.4 | 2ebce4ab-d8d3-4594-92f3-08b5cec8b91e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Reggaetón’s biggest star closes a career-making 2020 with an album imagining his music in 2030: It’s morose, introspective, and pulls from post-punk and rock en español as much as it does hip-hop and R&B. | Reggaetón’s biggest star closes a career-making 2020 with an album imagining his music in 2030: It’s morose, introspective, and pulls from post-punk and rock en español as much as it does hip-hop and R&B. | Bad Bunny: El Último Tour del Mundo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-el-ultimo-tour-del-mundo/ | El Último Tour del Mundo | From the first moments of his latest LP, El Último Tour Del Mundo, Bad Bunny declares the world his. “Yo hago lo que me dé la gana,” he reminds us of his growing influence. “¿Quién dijo que no?” It’s a hard assertion to dispute: During a pandemic that decimated large swaths of the music industry, his star has only risen. YHLQMDLG, released in March, flirted with the top of the pops and dominated the Latin charts; he’s graced awards-show stages and the covers of Western media’s storied publications; he’s evolved into a vocal ally of marginalized communities, with a willingness to acknowledge and rectify his mistakes; and with the release of El Último Tour Del Mundo, he’s made history with the first-ever No. 1 Spanish-language album on Billboard’s album chart. No other artist had more Spotify streams in 2020.
For El Último Tour Del Mundo, Bad Bunny transports himself a decade into the future, imagining the music he’d play on his final world tour in 2030. It’s not his best record, but that’s almost beside the point. You’ll still find vestiges of his particular nuevo reggaetón sound on tracks like “Te Mudaste” and “Dákiti,” even if the latter is one of its weakest examples, pummeling the dembow riddim into submission with a thumping four-on-the-floor that’s devoid of any actual flavor. But by track four he takes a sharp left turn from the rap and perreo that defined previous LPs in favor of a morose, introspective vibe that pulls from British post-punk and the rock en español of Central and South America as much as it does the hip-hop and R&B of the American South.
For better or worse, El Ultimó Tour Del Mundo’s rock sound leans heavily on producer Marco “MAG” Borrero (and, to a lesser extent, Borrero’s human riff machine Mick Coogan), best known for crafting pop hits for the likes of Flo Rida, Bebe Rexha, and Selena Gomez. The collaboration doesn’t always work; tracks like “Te Deseo Lo Mejor” and “Antes Que Se Acabe” suffer from a saccharine sound that’s generic enough to blend in with Top 40 radio. But when it does, it’s sublime. “Yo Visto Así” and “La Droga” inhabit the same universe of distorted emo rap as the late Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, with grunge guitars ringing out over rumbling trap beats. And “Maldita Pobreza,” a poor man’s lament that effortlessly bounces between buoyant new-wave riffs and booming 808s, evokes Café Tacvba, New Order, and modern-day traperos in equal measure, offering a glimpse of the brilliance that can result from Benito’s experimentation.
These rock tendencies don’t come completely out of left field. Bad Bunny has previously dabbled in pop-punk (“Tenemos Que Hablar”) and metalcore (“Hablamos Mañana”), and even recruited Los Enanitos Verdes’ Marciano Cantero for his and J Balvin’s interpolation of the Argentinian rock band’s classic “Lamento Boliviano.” Each record served to expand the boundaries of urbano, Latin America’s catch-all for the myriad genres in “urban” (i.e. Black) music, eventually stretching it so thin as to render it transparently irrelevant. The new urbano—or el movimiento, as some have taken to calling it—is inclusive, a tent big enough for fans of Soda Stereo and strip-club beats, Pisces Iscariot and pro wrestling, Daddy Yankee and drag queens. Plenty of artists have tried to seamlessly integrate an international aesthetic, treating their tracklists like grocery lists and collecting sounds from around the world without a genuine connection to the music. Bad Bunny succeeds where they have failed because those influences come from within. He didn’t pull the Puerto Rican holiday song “Cantares de Navidad” from a spreadsheet of Google trends; it’s the music of his life. When it’s real, you can feel it.
In that sense, El Último Tour Del Mundo gets at the core of what makes Bad Bunny so appealing. “Maldita Pobreza” isn’t just a trap-rock fusion experiment, it’s a reminder that Benito is less than half a decade removed from bagging groceries in Arecibo, daydreaming of exotic Italian sports cars. He toes the line between rap braggadocio and vulnerable everyman with relative ease—even while crooning about alien sex. Standing on top of the world, with access to abundant fame, wealth, and critical success, he appears free of any pressure to conform, even to previous versions of himself. He’s a beacon of light in barrios around the world, an example for kids with secret skirts or Smashing Pumpkins CDs of what being yourself can look and sound like. When he says he does whatever he wants, we believe him. Maybe we can, too.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | December 8, 2020 | 7.7 | 2ec429c6-9464-44fa-8c2c-abdf9c984e1e | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Their LP was only released two days ago but these Sheffield teens are already considered the UK’s biggest new band since Oasis. | Their LP was only released two days ago but these Sheffield teens are already considered the UK’s biggest new band since Oasis. | Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/497-whatever-people-say-i-am-thats-what-im-not/ | Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not | On Monday, the Arctic Monkeys sold 118,501 copies of their debut album in the UK, more than the rest of the top 20 combined. It’s a startingly high figure not just because they’re set to be the Biggest New Band Since Oasis but because of the speed with which they’ve gatecrashed their nation’s public consciousness, going from unknown indie band to No. 1 on the singles charts in roughly six months. Much of the credit for that quick rise is rightly given to the power of the internet: The then-unsigned band first caught the public ear when its demos circulated last year. The Sheffield quartet eventually signed with Domino and the label wisely hosted the buzzmaking tracks, a move that allowed anticipation for the group's studio recordings to spread rather than stall. Two No. 1 singles, a few breathless reviews, and a load of thinkpieces about how The Internet Will Change Music Forever later and in the UK the Arctic Monkeys are suddenly the biggest band of the decade.
It would be nice to think that a democratized music industry would mean the kids are tossing up alternatives to what they're already getting, but the Arctic Monkeys are, at their heart, the same sort of meat’n’potatoes guitar rock that has dominated the UK since the emergence of the Strokes, if not Oasis. They’re a band that neatly sums up what’s already selling, and in a relatively condensed media market the group was always going to be a hit; what’s changed is that they were pegged quickly, mainlined to their target market and the UK mainstream press and radio for six months, then called an organic success story. (America, don’t get smug: Your biggest download success to date is “My Humps.”) And context still matters: When Oasis or the Strokes rolled into town, they were breaths of fresh air, antidotes to a lack of swagger or hooks or artists who wanted and deserved to be rock stars; Arctic Monkeys are yet another in a string of buzzsaw guitar bands with Northern accents.
What’s meant to be different about them are sometimes keenly expressive lyrics and that irresistible backstory. The band’s more starry-eyed backers compare their hardscrabble tales to those of predecessors such as the Specials, Smiths, Pulp, and the Streets. But wringing lyrics from the everyday or articulating the dissatisfaction of many is risky and difficult business and, unlike those listed above, the Monkeys aren’t so much spinning deft tales of quotidian anxiety as just complaining about their first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates. So they’re the UK’s emo, painting diaristic portraits of small-town and suburban life for teens in a country where fundamentalism is allegiance to a soccer club rather than religion.
Hey, fair play to them—first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates, these should be the worries in their lives, and of their peers they’re among the best at addressing them. Almost everything that’s appealing about Arctic Monkeys is down to singer Alex Turner, who possesses a gritty voice that gets increasingly appealing the more he allows it to stretch and wander. On sharp, observational, and detail-heavy Saturday Night and Sunday Morning tracks like the “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secure,” “Mardy Bum,” and “Riot Van” the band justifies taking their album name from the kitchen-sink drama. (Though it’s still terrible—alas, Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down was already taken). Outside of naming their record, when the band stumbles it’s typically when they’re fumbling around with women (“Dancing Shoes,” “Still Take You Home”) or complaining about the onset of fame (the dreadful “Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But...”).
The singles are a mixed bag. The Five Minutes With... EP’s “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is a witty call to arms, a plea for bands that say something about their lives, but “From the Ritz to the Rubble”’s whining almost makes you want to side with the bouncers. Of the Monkeys’ starmaking tracks, neither sounds like a No. 1, let alone the first sounds from a burgeoning sensation: “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” grates every other time I listen to it; better is the offbeat “When the Sun Goes Down,” the only track here that’s three-dimensional structurally as well as lyrically. Should the band release album closer “A Certain Romance” as its next single, the hit/miss ratio will be greatly improved. A long sigh about living among chavs, “Romance” finds the Monkeys moving between bloody-knuckled and wistful as they paint a picture of boredom breeding violence, of being aware of the faults and faultlines in their environment but feeling too powerless or hemmed in by loyalty to raise a fuss. It’s a neat summation of both the band’s M.O. and a teenage life characterized by existential drift and geographic claustrophobia.
And in the end then this is about teenage life—and a pretty specific type of teenage life at that. NME editor Conor McNicholas told The Guardian last year that “there’s a big sofa supermarket by Doncaster train station. I always look at it and think someone’s got a Saturday job there, they’re 17, they’re stuck in Doncaster and they fucking hate it—that’s the person we're publishing for.” I’d guess that to a disaffected, chavbaiting 17-year-old from Doncaster (or Rotherham, or Hull...) this is the perfect soundtrack to moving loveseats around a stock room. Fittingly then the NME awarded this album a 10/10. To the rest of us, however, the album is at times charming, oddly affecting, and certainly promising but understandably something less than life changing. | 2006-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 24, 2006 | 7.4 | 2ec6df28-912f-4ae5-a57d-a3506b8904b9 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | |
John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate inspired Brooklyn rapper/producer Ka and producer Preservation on their powerful new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The record doesn't retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it, but instead engages with its themes, playing off of soundbytes interspersed between songs. | John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate inspired Brooklyn rapper/producer Ka and producer Preservation on their powerful new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The record doesn't retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it, but instead engages with its themes, playing off of soundbytes interspersed between songs. | Dr. Yen Lo: Days With Dr. Yen Lo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20561-days-with-dr-yen-lo/ | Days With Dr. Yen Lo | In the opening scene in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra’s character, Major Bennett Marco, dreams that he and his former squadron are attending a ladies’ garden party in New Jersey. Soon, we realize the scene is a dream within a dream: The garden party is a shared hallucination by the soldiers, sitting catatonic in a medical theater in China, where they have been made guinea pigs for a Communist brainwashing program. The soldiers’ false tea party and the sordid conference become intertwined—the Communists show up in New Jersey, and the hydrangea-obsessed matron stands at the podium in Manchuria. The film loses itself in the enslaved squadron’s nightmare. Presiding over the pitch-black comedy is the mysterious Chinese doctor and hypnotist Yen Lo, who ultimately brings the garden party to a close by ordering the Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey), to kill two of his own comrades.
The scene introduces the brutal, hopelessly entangled systems of control and indoctrination that dominate The Manchurian Candidate, the elements of the story that interest Brooklyn rapper and producer Ka and producer Preservation on their new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The album does not in any way retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it (a page, half-obscured, is the cover of the album), but instead engages with its themes, playing off of soundbytes interspersed between songs. The album and the twist-filled noir share a paranoiac atmosphere: Tension is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Nothing turns out right; no one breaks the shackles that held them without a scar or much worse. "Yen Lo," in both, is the unrepentant arbiter of fate, both the cold facts and entropy of life, concentrated into one force.
The primary conflict in Ka’s verses is the same as that of Shaw’s and Marco’s: attempting to self-actualize, after realizing you’ve been under the thrall of a deception that has contorted your entire sense of reality for so long. In most of these songs, the lies Ka unravels relate to crime: the insidious desire to commit it, and the systemic filing-down of one’s moral fabric that allows one to do so. In just a few lines, Ka can evoke simultaneously the fear, desperation, and poisonous ennui of his particular troubled upbringing, though he speaks for more than himself: "Crime is how mind rewarded doubt/ Time’s a drought, climb that waterspout/ Itsy bitsy, slung to get crispy/ Almost choked in the web spun to fix me." Ka positions music itself as part of the process of reclaiming himself, and rapping as a way to access thoughts and emotions that might otherwise seem out of reach to him, or those who can relate to his stories.
To communicate all this most transparently, Ka lets his words phrase themselves, recalling NYC-area forbearers like Guru and Rakim. The dizzying inner consonances in his lines jump out of their own accord, as if Ka, with his hushed, unwavering monotone, is simply a vessel for them to move through; all of the action and consternation has already occurred on the notepad. His great skill is his almost inconceivable level of control and precision. Just the honeyed sounds of his words are hypnotizing in themselves; his expertly matched vowel sounds melt into one uninterrupted stream in some phrases, registering almost like one low whistle. His pace is continuous, sometimes dizzying. Processing both form and content at once requires a specific type of meditative listening: the kind that can only happen once one has lost track of themselves in the sound, and let distractions and interference gradually fall away, rather than pushing them off. Trying too hard to latch onto anything here means automatically falling behind.
But reaching this type of deep-listening nirvana is not a necessity; this is music that sounds great any way you come at it. Preservation’s production is a psychedelic, sometimes seasick symphony of fragments from LPs, often cut out in large swatches and dovetailed into one another expertly. At times, a shag-carpet studio orchestra sweeps toward climaxes without really reaching them; more often, a simple, plaintive guitar lick drones, or a warbling organ peals unexpectedly, recalling either a gospel coda or a spy thriller soundtrack. There are also some of the small, locked-groove loops Ka gravitated towards on his previous two LPs—more pulsations than kernels of melody or licks, flickering like candles on the verge of burning out.
One of the most notable aspects of the album is its near-complete lack of percussion. Few of these songs include kick and snare drums, and none are anchored by them. His voice—in the middle of the mix, bolstered by eerie, repitched overdubs—is the only consistent rhythm instrument. Ka has phased out elements of the typical East Coast-indigenous rap beat architecture over his past several releases (most dramatically on the ascetic The Night’s Gambit, with its charcoal-shaded minimalism) and here, we’ve reached a new type of freefall.
Ka’s sound is so specific that it is easy to hear a new release, register it as more of the same, and coast through it. But you’d miss the most stunning element of his work: the way in which the rapper seems to cut a little bit more of something away with each new project, something which unnecessarily complicates his ideal mode of direct and razor-sharp communication. Here, he allows more negative space in, creates pictures more economically, peels away some vestigial density. The old releases hold the same power, but every time you grab a new Ka release, it feels as if you are holding a more refined product. | 2015-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Pavlov Institute | May 26, 2015 | 8 | 2ec91e48-598d-4e3a-95ea-4f7d9c3cb146 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Malian musicians Tinariwen's new Emmaar showcases their ever-swirling guitars while also displaying an increasingly refined approach to album-making. | Malian musicians Tinariwen's new Emmaar showcases their ever-swirling guitars while also displaying an increasingly refined approach to album-making. | Tinariwen: Emmaar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18909-tinariwen-emmaar/ | Emmaar | Tinariwen’s identity as a band is tightly bound up in the Sahara. They are named for the vast empty spaces traversed by the Kel Tamashek (aka Tuareg), traditional nomads for whom modern borders have been problematic. The band formed in Libya while in exile from Mali, and has always made music that passionately evokes its home; their last album was recorded in the open air of that desert. Such an arrangement was not possible this time. The political situation in Mali made returning to the northern desert untenable, and though they’ve been driven from power in most places, the specter of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—an organization ideologically opposed to music—still looms across a large swath of the Sahara.
The band instead set up a studio at a house in California’s Mojave desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Time in the Mojave hasn’t removed the Sahara from them, though—this music still moves like a sandstorm. Even at slow tempos it swirls with motion, and nearly all of its forward drive comes from the guitars and bass, with percussionist Said Ag Ayad able to frame the beat rather than having to provide all of it. The group trades off lead vocals and sings in unison, and the four guitarists seem more capable and versatile than ever. There are phrases and rhythms here that wouldn’t have been heard in their music previously.
That growth extends to their album-making craft as well. They’ve become excellent at balancing feels and flow. “Toumast Tincha” opens the album with this sort of hovering feel that only this band can really do, guitars scattering like dust devils while Saul Williams provides a strange, understated spoken word intro. The album then kicks into a higher gear for “Chaghaybou,” and it’s just the first example of how well-paced it is. A few other Americans drop in. Chavez’ Matt Sweeney and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Josh Klinghoffer melt right into the guitarscape, but Nashville session fiddler Fats Kaplin lights up “Imdiwanin ahi Tifhamam” with a fiery performance that brings hints of his hometown to melodies from Al-Andaluse.
It is in some respects hard to be a band like Tinariwen, releasing albums in a Western marketplace where the initial attention you received had a great deal to do with the novelty of your sound. Remaining true to your identity while also evolving and keeping an audience that’s always a moving target interested in you is a tough gig. On Emmaar, Tinariwen are up to the task. | 2014-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Global | Anti- | February 10, 2014 | 8.1 | 2ecbb5ec-3363-48d3-a837-38eb274d4835 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. | This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11375-dig-lazarus-dig/ | Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! | This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. At 50, Nick Cave's hairline is receding, but he's turned that setback into a "look," growing out his locks and cultivating the coolest mustache in the industry. Over 30 years, first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, he has refined his lurid growl and lascivious subject matter-- the usuals: sex, death, God, murder, redemption, all in the most brutal and salaciously poetical terms possible-- without losing any of his charisma or menace. During the past decade alone, despite sounding hoarse on No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, he has transformed his swagger into a potent brand of musical and amoral authority, honing his persona in tandem with the Bad Seeds, who a few years ago were one of the tightest and most versatile backing bands around and have only gotten better with each release.
Prior to the recording of Cave's latest album, longtime guitarist/piano player Blixa Bargeld left the Bad Seeds and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three, assumed a more prominent role. So maybe it's the line-up changes, or even the thrown-down gauntlet of Cave's side project Grinderman, or perhaps some other unnamed stimulus, but the Bad Seeds sound even edgier and more sophisticated on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, providing a fitting pulpit for their bandleader's ravings. With the emphasis on acoustic guitars with occasional blasts of electric static, there's little of the distortion that colored Grinderman's album, but plenty of odd noises and lewd organs that suggest some sort of twisted take on 1960s psych and garage rock. Cave and the Seeds kick out the jams, kick in the Doors. "Today's Lesson" and "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)" are fierce, yet lean, while ballads like "Moonland" and "Hold On to Yourself" offset that energy with eerie nocturnal ambience.
Just as surely as the 2004 double-decker Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus was Cave's England album-- steeped in imagery that's equal parts urban-miserable Dickens and pagan-pastoral Wicker Man-- Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is his Americanized follow-up. He has always been interested in the darker corners of Americana, especially the Southern mythologies that informed early albums like From Her to Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead, and Cave makes this collection an old-fashioned picaresque through exurban shopping malls, shuttered factories, and dilapidated ranches-- complete with Biblical overtones (and what's a Nick Cave album without those?). The opening title track, with its fierce strut and taunting floor-tom tattoo, opens on Lazarus newly resurrected, a fame junkie traipsing westward before ending up "back in the streets of New York, in a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave." Cave spins the yarn not as a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but more like a sardonic Sunday school lesson-- and pretty funny to boot.
Even the writers Cave namedrops are almost exclusively Americans: Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and John Berryman, whom Cave, like the Hold Steady and Okkervil River, extols beyond all others. To his considerable credit, Cave may be the only rock musician who convincingly doubles as a literary critic. Such pretensions are built into his persona and tempered with his awareness that rock and roll is ultimately low-brow and therefore a subversive vessel for high-bow concerns. In other words, he has a lot more to say about Lolita than Sting ever did. As on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" on Abattoir Blues, Cave assails all things bookish on "We Call Upon the Author", a rip-roaring metafictional rocker that questions not only the need for suffering on Earth, but Cave's own fascination with it. Mingling lines like "myxamatoid kids spraddle the streets" with base puns like "I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker," Cave implies the author in question might be himself or it might be God, which makes the song-ending shout all the ballsier: "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"
When Cave isn't editing the Bible, he's moving Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! westward-- the trajectory of so many American stories-- through the heartland and into the Southwest, through the hilariously iniquitous "Today's Lesson" and into "Albert Goes West", set in the "vast, indifferent deserts of Arizona." As always, it's a strange road trip, with Cave keeping the car between the lines while Ellis messes with the radio. Their collaboration has intensified over the fourteen years since the violinist joined the band for Henry's Dream, and Ellis has obviously called shotgun on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! His strange noises color every track: the sinister wind-up music box sounds on "Today's Lesson", the gentle flute solo on the surprisingly tender "Jesus of the Moon", the delicate violin wheeze behind "Night of the Lotus Eaters". All of Cave's albums aim to unsettle, but rarely have he and the Bad Seeds managed to do it so efficiently, so gracefully, or so forcefully. It all culminates in the haunted closer "More News from Nowhere", on which Cave does Homer doing Dylan to sum up what sounds like his whole career. Ellis fiddles while America burns, and Cave sings, almost sweetly, "It's strange in here. Yeah, it gets stranger every year." Amen to that. | 2008-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | April 7, 2008 | 8.4 | 2ecd8ae8-3e05-4b7f-be31-df9664a89eca | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Japanese quartet returns louder, faster, and fiercer, tearing through 18 hilarious and ferocious songs in 20 minutes. | The Japanese quartet returns louder, faster, and fiercer, tearing through 18 hilarious and ferocious songs in 20 minutes. | Otoboke Beaver: Super Champon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otoboke-beaver-super-champon/ | Super Champon | In John Waters’ 1994 domestic satire Serial Mom, a perfectly coiffed Kathleen Turner murders criminals of etiquette with household objects—a telephone, a leg of lamb. One of her victims has an unfortunate encounter with a plummeting AC unit; another is run through with a fire poker. On their new album Super Champon, Japanese rock quartet Otoboke Beaver make similar munitions of the mundane, weaponizing petty jealousy, maternal conventions, and feminine duties to blistering effect. Louder, faster, fiercer than their 2019 LP Itekoma Hits, the 20-minute, 18-track Super Champon goes down like a tart smattering of face-scrunching, neon candy.
The word “champon” is a Japanese noun that suggests a hodgepodge or jumble. It is also apparently a soup—a Nagasaki-born ramen made with hunks of seafood, pork, and veggies. Otoboke Beaver interpret the word through their maximalist songs, which change direction as abruptly as a thwacked pinball. The band—comprising lead vocalist and guitarist Accorinrin, guitarist Yoyoyoshie, bassist Hirochan, and drummer Kahokiss—have said that “champon” also relates to their “genreless” music. There are components of speed metal, butt rock, riot grrrl, and even pop, but to classify this record as anything other than punk seems like a reach. Still, with titles like “You’re No Hero Shut the Fuck Up You Man-Whore” and “Dirty Old Man Fart Is Waiting for My Reaction,” these ferocious blasts—some under 20 seconds long—are rousing contortions of the style.
Super Champon is crammed with noise: Hirochan sprints up and down her fretboard, Kahokiss punishes her drum kit, and Yoyoyoshie discharges endless rounds of screeching riffs. The lyrics, fired off in quick, sharp bursts, are both menacing and hilarious. On the two-part “Do You Want Me to Send a DM,” Otoboke Beaver turn a familiar action into a ticking time bomb. “Do you want me to send a DM to your girlfriend who knows nothing?” the band warns in unison. “Direct mail direct trouble… Screenshot I make it visible.” Their omission of what exactly is in these messages makes the threat all the more sinister. Could it be nudes? An active dating profile? A particularly incriminating Google search history? Otoboke Beaver know that when it comes to both punk songwriting and blackmail, less is often more.
The turbocharged couplet of “Leave Me Alone! No, Stay With Me!” and “I Checked Your Cellphone” are similar spoofs on toxic affairs. The former is frantic and cyclical; Accorinrin shouts the title over and over, her repetition mimicking the emotional volleying of a codependent relationship. “I Checked Your Cellphone” presents this behavior in overdrive. Propelled by Kahokiss’ machine gun drumming and Yoyoyoshie’s sawtooth guitar, Accorinrin flails through her compulsions. “I don’t know why!” she shrieks. “I couldn’t help looking into/And he found a match on a dating app!” It’s at once a condemnation and endorsement of paranoia: Should you really punish yourself for peeking if your instincts were spot-on? Otoboke Beaver think not: Accorinrin would rather hurl a “full lineup of household goods” at her shady boyfriend instead.
On the hopped-up “I Am Not Maternal,” Otoboke Beaver skewer reproductive obligations, proclaiming their preference for dogs over babies. The song is a celebration: so bouncy it’s carnivalesque—something the Six Flags guy might listen to if he was a street punk. “I Won’t Dish Out Salads” is another refusal of societal norms. In Japan, the serving of salad—in social or professional dining scenarios—is a gesture often handled by a female subordinate. Here, Otoboke Beaver reject the chore, lampooning it as paltry and tedious. “What are you good at?/Wow great! You can dish out salads!” the band teases. “Distribute the dishes for salads to dish out salads!” The song decelerates and then ramps up like a pull-back plastic race car. Otoboke Beaver have called this album their “masterpiece of chaos music,” and they thrive in this high-octane tangle of notes. For them, every social nicety is teetering on a ledge, looking down into mayhem. Super Champon is the sound of Otoboke Beaver shoving them over, one by one. | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Damnably | May 6, 2022 | 7.8 | 2ece241f-2918-45b8-bcf7-c4c7f772a66c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The work of noise musician Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes, exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. His new album strikes a balance between dread and curiosity. | The work of noise musician Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes, exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. His new album strikes a balance between dread and curiosity. | Aaron Dilloway: The Gag File | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23216-the-gag-file/ | The Gag File | There’s always been something fascinatingly off about Aaron Dilloway. While his bandmates in Wolf Eyes, with whom he played during their quintessential early-2000s run, screamed and thrashed around with maces, Dilloway could be spotted side stage—appearing oddly forlorn and entranced, jaw slightly slack with a contact mic secured to the inside of his cheek. A wire would dangle out from his mouth and hang in front of his guitar. After he split from the group, Dilloway took an unexpected left turn and moved to Kathmandu, Nepal to record the Nath family, a group of snake charmers he met while “roaming the streets and villages… in search of sounds and music.” But it’s in his solo work that things get really weird.
Noise music often explores themes of catharsis, using blistering volumes and shredded textures to transport artists and listeners into states outside music’s generally agreed upon borders. The abrasiveness both weeds out unwilling audience members and shields the artists. After all, if you don’t like it, you probably just don’t get it. Not so with Dilloway, whose music exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. On 2012’s Modern Jester, this approach reached its most definitive form, painstakingly stretching grimy tape loops into a rich tapestry of grotty discomfort.
The Gag File is his follow-up to Modern Jester and is every bit as rewarding and unnerving as its predecessor, though at almost half the length, it’s easier to digest. Opener “Ghost” grabs on immediately with a simple, warbling synth drone and a lurching rhythm. On paper it doesn’t sound like much, but Dilloway strikes just the right balance between dread and curiosity. (It feels sticky and unclean, but what exactly is it?) Later, murmured vocals slide into the mix, evoking the dead-eyed whisperings of a B-movie serial killer. “Karaoke With Cal” inverts the dynamic, foregrounding a man’s voice, now choked and gasping in a field of light tape hiss and nothing else, before introducing a heaving, lonely piano figure.
The rest of the record moves this way, stumbling and crawling through sonic debris. “Inhuman Form Reflected” blends crowd noises—maybe from a rollercoaster, maybe from something more disastrous—around lethargic synth progressions. It ends with a sole figure groaning, screaming in panic, and eventually collapsing. Later, “No Eye Sockets (For Otto & Sindy)” contorts a field-recording of a bar; the convivial chuckles and throwback alt-rock bubbling up in the midst of the album’s descent leaves you on edge.
Dilloway has recently collaborated live with Genesis P-Orridge, and the pairing makes complete sense. You can trace a direct line between the slippery, sing-song horror of “Hamburger Lady” and The Gag File—the album’s terror, weirdness, and ambiguity feel just as resonant. Listening at the gym in the middle of the day, with an array of TVs tuned to Trump, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and infomercials for “revolutionary cleaning products,” I couldn’t think of a better soundtrack.
Almost all of these songs hinge on some kind of rhythm, but never the sort that typically drives music forward. These are the rhythms of wheezing, broken down washer-dryers in decrepit basements, the sound of motorik after all the motors are rusted through. Dilloway skips climactic narrative arcs for an unblinking emotional purity, and unlike his compatriots’ work in Wolf Eyes, The Gag File is never guarded, nor overtly dystopian. As rugged as the album can get, Dilloway maintains a diaristic tone—honest, to-the-point, and open to interpretation. One can’t help but imagine him wandering around his old stomping grounds of Detroit, a sly observer taking notes on the city’s eerie mixture of blight, renewal, danger, and possibility. There’s a clear affection for detritus here, an internal logic that reckons both with rot and the damp, fungal growth that follows. Haunted by the ghosts of its own industries, the Midwest has bred a noise underground that feels uniquely disinterested in the hope, warmth, and empathy music can offer. After all, what good would it do? | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Dais Records | May 3, 2017 | 7.6 | 2ed26cb8-e038-4ba2-adcf-33dafe4ae448 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
On his debut album, the alternately waggish and sincere Lil Peep is bona fide rocker warping the edges of rap. | On his debut album, the alternately waggish and sincere Lil Peep is bona fide rocker warping the edges of rap. | Lil Peep: Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-come-over-when-youre-sober-part-one/ | Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) | Emo rap alchemist Lil Peep spends his energy only to kill time. His music mines the contradictions between being young and free and being pessimistic and tortured; how having a future doesn’t make the sheer tedium of existing any easier. It's all fun until he sinks back into dysthymia: “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself/My life is going nowhere/I want everyone to know that I don’t care.” For Peep, depression is a fog that covers the entirety of his lonely and mundane life.
But there’s a certain waggishness to the Lil Peep persona, suggesting he’s at least kind of putting us all on. “It’s like professional wrestling—everyone has to be a character,” he has said. The guy has a huge “daddy” tattoo gothic-scripted on his chest. Peep constantly wants you to wonder what’s going on under that neon mane. His debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One), is a 24-minute bender informally dedicated to destroying relationships and idling around in what he sees as this vain and absurd existence. Peep’s philosophies are no more profound than a great Instagram caption, and he can come off as a bit of an indignant kid, but it’s easy to see why a new class of spitfires are using him as a talisman for their anxieties.
Born Gustav Åhr, Lil Peep emerged as a suburban degenerate from Long Island recording in his bedroom, high on benzos. He has described his drug-addled pop-punk musings as Makonnen meets Fall Out Boy, originally stylizing his name like RiFF RAFF, whom he called “a role model.” The unique lineage from which Peep descends aligned him with like-minded genre-breakers. In early 2016, he fell in with the Gothboiclique, a collective of melodic trappers straddling the emo and rap worlds—among their members: Lil Tracy, the son of rap innovator Ishmael Butler, and Wicca Phase, former lead singer for the emo band Tigers Jaw.
Peep’s rabid and mostly teenage supporters are enthralled by his juvenile dread and mallcore aesthetic, along with his knack for retrofitting 808 kits onto samples of Underoath, Pierce the Veil, Flyleaf, and The Story So Far. His skeptics argue that he isn’t actually emo, merely a poser trafficking in Warped Tour nostalgia to piss people off; or that he isn’t really a rapper, mostly on the optics of emo whiteness invading hip-hop. But a closer consideration of Peep’s catalog and running mates suggests a genuine marriage of the two sounds, orchestrated by an earnest, budding whiz. Putting songs called “Cobain” and “Gucci Mane” back-to-back on a tape wasn’t so much an act of subversion as an actual sonic template: the tormented punk burying his sorrows in lethargic and absurdist flows. He finds the seams between genres and he mixes signifiers, too. He is the middle distance between Brand New and Future. If one must endure being, Peep suggests, then why not be fucked up?
His writing on Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) often stars two broken people wounding each other and finding comfort in their failings. “Better Off (Dying)” resigns itself to a romance in decline. On “Awful Things,” Peep treats trivial texts from a lover like a lifeline when separated; “Bother me,” he implores. The discombobulated timeline of “Problems” mimics the dissociation of a blackout, as Peep sighs into each syllable, piecing together memory fragments and weighing their baggage. Even more poignant than his fleeting thoughts on self-harm and self-sabotage are his dazed reflections on intimacy in the age of read receipts and ghosting. He’s as standoffish on “Save That Shit” as he is guilt-ridden on “U Said,” a cycle of alienation that perpetually leaves him alone.
There’s a bit of poetry to these cutting interactions: “‘What have you been through?’ she asked me/Every fucking kind of abuse,” he all but screams on “U Said.” “The Brightside” ups the ante: “Help me find a way to pass the time/Everybody’s telling me life’s short, but I wanna die.” “Burn me down ‘till I’m nothing but memories,” he snaps on “Awful Things.” Each lyric is born with a bawl or a hiss. Sometimes he belts out like he’s trying to purge his body of impurities. Others, he slumps into a dejected whine. The sole exception is “Benz Truck (гелик),” on which he sounds nearly comatose. In any of these states, he’s intriguing, the deliverer of raw grief or rage or joy or shame.
Peep’s overall effect is measured by the degree of skepticism with which you pick up what he’s laying down. His real impact is in his simplicity: He reduces ideas to their root feelings for force, and very little changes once songs are in motion. This can make Peep seem vapid, which he is when his verse becomes too lazy, but he usually connects on utter intensity. Peep isn’t a far cry from Lil Uzi Vert, who channels pop-punk in a shrewder way, but is just as hook-focused and zealous; or Dashboard Confessional, the way nostalgia feels already baked into Peep’s music. They're like singalongs you already know. Some don’t have verses. Most are just the same few repeated phrases. “Save That Shit” waddles through one hook, almost demanding space in the brain, and the repetition, pushed by his dragging phrases, is hypnotizing.
Unlike past Peep projects, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) is sample-free, comprised entirely of original arrangements and live guitar. Part of the fun in Peep’s early work was identifying angsty songs of yesteryear, the emo-stained 808s gaining several layers of context. That is missed here, but more crucial are the contrasts still at work, amping emotive riffs with the slap of rap drums. Peep isn’t as expressive as his emo ancestors, and he isn’t as eloquent as his rap idols, but he does effectively bring their stylings together in a provocative new way that riles up the purists in both genres. Turning stray footnotes from modern teenage life into music that claims it’s the most meaningful thing ever is just about the only traditional rock‘n’roll thing about this rapper. | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 17, 2017 | 7.3 | 2ed63d75-688f-45ef-9573-237255da05cf | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The 2018 Nicolas Cage vehicle Mandy featured a bargain-brand messiah figure named Jeremiah Sand. Now, Sacred Bones is releasing an “unearthed album,” supposedly recorded in the mid-’70s by the fictional cult leader. | The 2018 Nicolas Cage vehicle Mandy featured a bargain-brand messiah figure named Jeremiah Sand. Now, Sacred Bones is releasing an “unearthed album,” supposedly recorded in the mid-’70s by the fictional cult leader. | Jeremiah Sand: Lift It Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremiah-sand-lift-it-down/ | Lift It Down | “There's a great spiritual awakening in America,” opined Ronald Reagan in 1983, during an address to the National Association of Evangelicals. “A renewal of the traditional values that have been the bedrock of America’s goodness and greatness.” Among the first shots in the 2018 film Mandy, a psychedelic revenge thriller set in 1983, is a slow pan over Nicolas Cage—a hardened lumberjack, in plaid—listening to a radio broadcast of Reagan’s speech on a dusky drive home from work. Cage lets him prattle on for a few more seconds before switching it off—a gesture that’s quick and measured, but that absolutely screams “shut the fuck up.”
That impulse is deeply embedded in Mandy, which pits Cage’s righteous chainsaw-swinger, Red Miller, against a traveling cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Their leader is Jeremiah Sand: a grotesque hybrid of Charles Manson and Bodhi from Point Break, and Miller’s opposite in nearly every respect. His philosophy is a kind of bargain-brand messianism, which he couches in clumsy pronouncements about universal love, though the act is painfully transparent; he’s essentially bad at what he does. He’s also, as it turns out, a musician—in one crucial scene, Sand kidnaps and drugs Miller’s wife, the titular Mandy, and forces her to listen to his terrible single, “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” which Lakeshore Records actually sold as a promotional tie-in.
Now, a full two years after Mandy’s theatrical run, Sacred Bones have taken it a step further and released what they’re calling a newly “unearthed” album from the Jeremiah Sand character, complete with 1600 words of liner notes and fictional backstory from the late experimental musician Genesis P-Orridge. The label is fully playing the part: they haven’t said who really wrote and performed these songs (though the singer sounds a lot like Linus Roache, the actor who plays Sand in the movie), and they’ve neglected to mention that Sand isn’t a real person. Lift It Down blends cheesy psych-folk and chant-like spoken word into music that’s at once grating and platitudinous, silly and sinister. It’s profoundly annoying, which is to say it’s an extremely effective gag, and an implicit commentary on how we engage with our idiot preachers, our snake oil peddlers.
The idea, writes P-Orridge, is that Sand recorded this album in a state of “divine mania” during the mid-70s, at a recording studio turned religious outpost in Northern California, and that the tapes were hidden away in a lockbox for the next 40 years. According to a description on Sacred Bones’ website, the record’s “negative psychic energies” had even pioneering reissue label Light in the Attic running scared. It’s intentionally unpleasant stuff: the last utopian dreams of the ’60s curdling into self-parody.
The menacing title track sums up Sand’s m.o.: “In the void that surrounds you, you scream like a child/No one can hear you/No one can see you,” he incants, before pointing to a way out: “I’ll love and caress you, and force you to reckon with all that’s impure in your soul.” This is more or less how these songs operate—over garish, sun-soaked instrumentals, Sand plays God in an attempt to get laid. “Golden Desert” is cluttered with pseudo-spiritual bromides and half-baked aphorisms (“Fly with me through the dawning sky,” “Escape the maze”), none of which distract from the obvious charade. And while there are some interesting musical ideas smuggled in throughout (strained, mounting yelps on “Love Is,” the bad-trip Prince pastiche of “Taste the Whip”), the sound of the record is as ridiculous as the concept.
When Mandy hears “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” in the movie, she bursts out laughing. The filmmakers are practically begging you to hate this music. And listening to Lift It Down for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to stem the flow of awkward sex metaphors and chaotic Sgt. Pepper homage. But there’s an unmistakable appeal in how the album straddles the real, involving you in its own psychology, and exposing a particularly American hypocrisy. The ruse is surface-level; it’s honest, in a way, about its lies.
If Jeremiah Sand is a gloss on self-interest masquerading as truth, then Lift It Down fully commits to the bit. This album isn’t a call to action, or to reexamine our own relationships with spirituality—it’s just a reminder to tune out the noise. Without a chainsaw, the album suggests, it’s maybe the best you can do.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 30, 2020 | 6.4 | 2ed7de95-f642-432c-b1db-3ff616532014 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
Despite its grand scope and good intentions, the latest album from M.C. Taylor is the sound of an artist beginning to repeat himself: lite music for dark times. | Despite its grand scope and good intentions, the latest album from M.C. Taylor is the sound of an artist beginning to repeat himself: lite music for dark times. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Quietly Blowing It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiss-golden-messenger-quietly-blowing-it/ | Quietly Blowing It | The crickets come in early on Quietly Blowing It, between the second and third songs. As the rustic, two-step rhythm of “The Great Mystifier” winds down, the guitars are replaced by the quiet burble of insects, a lonesome nighttime ambience interrupted by a lurch into the stumbling, country-funk dirge “Mighty Dollar.” It’s an odd bit of sequencing: a solitary sound bridging two songs that are the opposite of solitary. It’s also a familiar bit of sequencing: M.C. Taylor used a similar backdrop on Hiss Golden Messenger’s 2011 album Poor Moon and again on 2014’s Lateness of Dancers. Those were daring arrangements, especially the latter, which found the North Carolina countryside to be a lively collaborator. By contrast, the crickets on Quietly Blowing It sound more like shorthand, a nod to what worked before. This attempt to transport you to some stretch of woods or to a front porch at sunset instead only reminds you that this is an artist beginning to repeat himself.
It’s not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger’s ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve heard all of this before. “Sanctuary,” for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who’d come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. The title track recalls “Devotion” from 2013’s Haw and so many other airy ballads he’s written in the past. Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow.
Except for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of “Way Back in the Way Back” and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner).” On “Angels in the Headlights,” Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault.
Taylor writes about big issues—income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges—but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned. On previous albums, he fashioned songs into question marks, interrogating God and himself, all with the understanding that faith has more to do with struggle than resolution. His songs were so relatable for being so vividly private: a still, small voice amplified through vintage speakers. The songs on Quietly Blowing It, however, are more explanatory than exploratory, treating pat pronouncements as pop profundities because he already knows where he stands in relation to these issues. They’re already settled in his head and in his heart, and he wants you to know it. “Feeling bad, feeling blue, can’t get out of my own head,” he sings on “Sanctuary,” a would-be anthem of perseverance. “But I know how to sing about it.” And yet, the verses sound clipped, the call-and-response on the chorus nowhere near as rousing as you expect from the man who wrote “Heart Like a Levee” and “Saturday’s Song.” The payoff never comes. Good intentions don’t guarantee good art.
In this case, writing such big songs erases much of the nuance in Taylor’s lyrics, reducing those thorny questions to bumper-sticker declarations. “Up with the mountains, down with the system… that keeps us in chains,” he sings on opener “Way Back in the Way Back.” He sends John Prine into the great beyond with the cringeworthy farewell: “Handsome Johnny had to go, child.” There’s a clunker line in every song, and “Mighty Dollar” is nothing but. This is art that strives and strains so hard for meaning and weight that it threatens to become meaningless and weightless: lite music for dark times. Taylor includes in the liner notes a quote from U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo: “Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.” Those are wise words and for any artist a noble calling, but Taylor is so concerned about lighting the way for others that he’s stumbling over his own feet.
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. | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | June 30, 2021 | 5.5 | 2ee7c1a7-d3b1-4150-a212-37e93820b3b3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
With Underachievers Please Try Harder deservedly gaining attention, Merge reissues the debut LP Scottish indie popsters (and Stuart Murdoch proteges) Camera Obscura. | With Underachievers Please Try Harder deservedly gaining attention, Merge reissues the debut LP Scottish indie popsters (and Stuart Murdoch proteges) Camera Obscura. | Camera Obscura: Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1749-biggest-bluest-hi-fi/ | Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi | A few years before Underachievers Please Try Harder whispered its greeting to bookish girls and the boys who write sestinas about them, there was another Camera Obscura record. In those days, the wispy Glaswegian septet numbered merely six, and local boy-with--arab-strap-made-good Stuart Murdoch produced an early single ("Eighties Fan") and arranged strings for them but wasn't yet shooting their album covers.
Upon its release, U.S. listeners could only find this fine indie pop outing while exchanging shy glances in particularly well-stocked imports aisle. Thankfully, Merge has finally dusted off the group's UK breakthrough for American release, and although the record is narrower in scope than its follow-up-- which hopscotches from Leonard Cohen to The Supremes-- it still sparkles.
On their charmingly understated first date, Camera Obscura hew more closely to their contemporaries than their 1960s influences. Winsome, acoustic-driven songs such as "Swimming Pool" and "The Sun on His Back" fit comfortably alongside fellow bedsit pop acts like The Guild League, The Fairways, and of course, Belle & Sebastian. Tracyanne Campbell's stiff-lipped vocals even evoke those of The Softies' Rose Melberg, particularly on "Let's Go Bowling" (one of the reissue's two bonus tracks, along with "Shine Like a New Pin").
Here, Camera Obscura play their teen-romance cards close to their hope chests; the line between earnestness and artfulness is indeed thin. Like B&S;'s best (there I go again!), the sprightly "I Don't Do Crowds" could be an anthem for Victorian Lit majors-- or an ironic pleasure for disaffected hipsters just finding "I'm a Cuckoo" via its Avalanches remix. But more likely, it's both. Campbell, who shares vocal duties with John Henderson, adds to those delicious double layers on opener "Happy New Year", offering this one-of-a-kind couplet: "Did you know I could be a lot of fun?/ I'm aware that friendship can die young."
Elsewhere, "Double Feature" waxes precious about Catherine Deneuve and winter, and "Houseboat" takes an outsider's look at the fun lovin' found in Christine McVie-penned Fleetwood Mac. A dispute over Nancy Sinatra provides the chorus to "Anti-Western" ("I'm taking your boots off," Campbell retorts), and "Pen and Notebook" works in a winning Johnny Marr namedrop over halting piano, which is later joined by swirling orchestration that runs the risk of boring any chamber-pop Philistines still in the audience (their loss).
"Eighties Fan"-- the single that brought Camera Obscura to the notice of John Peel-- has a drum opening that could have played over the Lost in Translation credits. Because of its connection to Murdoch, it's the best-known of these early tracks but there are a half-dozen songs on Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi that are just as good. Very few of them, however, capture the band's songwriting strengths-- placing a modern lyrical twist on the 1960s arrangements of Bacharach, Webb, and Hazlewood-- as well as "Eighties Fan" does. Come to think of it, very few tracks on Underachievers do either. | 2004-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Andmoresound | October 20, 2004 | 7.5 | 2ee841bf-81b2-49c3-b7b3-09e3193823c2 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The unifying thread for Lucinda Williams’ circuitous career might be her own resilience. As if to spite an industry with which she’s forever wrestled, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and the new The Ghosts of Highway 20 rank among the best works of her career. | The unifying thread for Lucinda Williams’ circuitous career might be her own resilience. As if to spite an industry with which she’s forever wrestled, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and the new The Ghosts of Highway 20 rank among the best works of her career. | Lucinda Williams: The Ghosts of Highway 20 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21472-the-ghosts-of-highway-20/ | The Ghosts of Highway 20 | Lucinda Williams is known best for the crags of her voice, an idiosyncratic instrument capable of curling, souring, or (in its own peculiar way) soaring as the song demands. She, too, is an inarguable pioneer of what has become Americana, with her sophisticated songwriting bound to composite foundations of blues and honky-tonk, gospel and soul, folk and rock since the start of her career nearly 40 years ago. But the single unifying thread for Williams’ very circuitous career might be her own resilience.
Indeed, Williams’ doggedness pushed her from a blues-and-country cover artist in the '70s to an aspiring songwriter with a string of broken record deals in the '80s to, in the '90s, a 45-year-old singer who suddenly began to win Grammys, appear on "Saturday Night Live," and be mentioned alongside forebears and contemporaries named Dylan, Young, and Springsteen. Several years ago, the dissolution of her longtime home, Lost Highway Records, empowered Williams to launch her own imprint and audaciously issue consecutive double-albums. As if to spite an industry with which she’s forever wrestled, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and the new The Ghosts of Highway 20 rank among the best works of her career.
Williams recorded much of the material on The Ghosts of Highway 20 during the same prolific sessions and with the same sterling band that yielded the 20-track Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. Surrounded by understated guitar god Bill Frisell, pedal steel master Greg Leisz, and a rotating rhythm section, Williams focuses largely on the nuances of her singing. She aces the challenge, switching between roles with the precision and skill of a method actor. During the soft and sweet "Place in My Heart," where she offers a friend consolation even when it’s a burden to bear, she conjures Patsy Cline, had the country singer survived past the age of 30. But for "Dust," her second update of a poem written by her father, Williams’ voice indicts someone she’s grown tired of tending to. "Even your thoughts are dust," she seethes in the refrain, extending the simple syllables until her voice collapses in exasperation. Still, she seems to smile and wink her way through "Can’t Close the Door on Love," the sharpest ode to romantic devotion she’s ever made.
As she did on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, Williams plays stylistic hopscotch here, jumping between brooding rock and bouncing gospel, swaying balladry and drifting folk. But these 14 songs hold together as a set because they offer a dozen different perspectives on perseverance. She’s an honest survivor, as capable of empathizing with friends tempted by the dark side of the partying life (the slinky "I Know All About It") as she is condemning her own miseries and shortcomings (the flinty "If My Love Could Kill"). During "Bitter Memory," a spirited throwback to the acoustic barnstormers of her youth, she shouts down nostalgia completely, her voice cracking as she demands that the past just let her be.
Even death seems incapable of daunting Williams: At one point, she smirks at suicide, subverting a gospel-blues mold to dare heaven to try and take her. And both "Death Came," a stunning reflection on mortality that rivals some of Nick Cave’s best work, and "If There’s a Heaven" wrestle with the itinerant loneliness of those who outlast the ones they love. She’s not scared of death; she’s scared of more misery. "I’ve seen the face of hell/ I know the place pretty damn well," she sings, delivering the words with conversational conviction. "But when you go, will you let me know if there’s a heaven out there?"
In the past, Williams aspired to make a double album, but she says now that record label executives typically dissuaded her, citing sales figures and shortened attention spans. Now that she’s issued two of them in less than two years, it’s clear that she can manage such long stretches just fine; even listening to the 34 songs of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and The Ghosts of Highway 20 in sequence feels less like a chore than a long trip led by an expert navigator with good stories to share. (She and the boys do settle into the occasional rut, so there are five or so tracks that do feel redundant.) By and large, though, the ups and downs, successes and failures, loves and losses of Williams’ six decades have allowed her to embody and express a range of characters with candor, honesty, and faithfulness. She’s a singing testament to sticking around and, at 63, she is more versatile than she’s ever been. | 2016-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Highway 20 | February 1, 2016 | 8 | 2eebaf55-7f52-4813-8b38-3f493a5c82a1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
By 2007's In Our Nature, José González was mentioned alongside whispery and haunted projects like Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and Sun Kil Moon. The Swedish singer-songwriter's first solo album since finds him picking up where he left off. | By 2007's In Our Nature, José González was mentioned alongside whispery and haunted projects like Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and Sun Kil Moon. The Swedish singer-songwriter's first solo album since finds him picking up where he left off. | José González: Vestiges & Claws | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20251-vestiges-claws/ | Vestiges & Claws | You’d never describe José González’s music as "confrontational," but Vestiges & Claws, his first solo album since 2007, offers an odd kind of ultimatum. After eight years of extreme cultural, political and artistic upheaval, it's likely that you're in a much different place than you were when In Our Nature was released. Meanwhile, the music of José González has not changed at all. Are you in or are you out?
Whether it’s his greatest asset or biggest sticking point, González endures while the context around him changes. Veneer had the benefit of timing, as Garden State and "The O.C." were redefining "alt-rock" as "indie." González evoked the spare beauty of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon but not the crippling emotional baggage, and he had a good ear for crowd-pleasing covers, easing fans into Kylie Minogue, Joy Division, and the Knife (prior to their Silent Shout about-face) when walls between genres seemed more solid. By 2007's In Our Nature, his name was mentioned alongside whispery and haunted projects like Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and Sun Kil Moon; González is the only one that can still be described as whispery and haunted in 2015.
González self-produces on Vestiges & Claws and there’s an unvarnished, prickly edge to the recording. Even when others are in the room, the album feels solitary—the cello and flute on "The Forest" might as well be weaving in and out of González’s head. His best songs don’t unfold, exactly; instead, the cyclical guitar and vocal patterns sound like they’re adding invisible but perceptible layers. Though his vocals are as soft and supple as a down comforter, there’s an eerie quality to González’s restraint and levity. He reaches for high notes and hooks, but he never raises his voice—he’s post-anger, post-verse-and-chorus. His fingerpicking lends a percussive, rhythmic drive that can obscure the actual drums. The percussion on "Leaf Off / The Cave" is almost imperceptible under off-kilter, low-register riffs that sound like Trail of Dead arranged for a campfire singalong.
Though González’s music is pastoral in timbre and placid in pace, his songs ask big questions. How do you situate yourself in the world? What makes a person take dominion over another? How much time should a laborer set aside for leisure? How can you make your voice heard without crowding out those who feel less inclined to speak? His approach to songwriting has appeal in light of the stridency and self-righteousness of modern discourse. But González’s metaphors can also feel unnecessarily feathery or too general: "Every Age" buckles under the assumed weight of its introductory lyric ("Every age has its turn/ Every branch of the tree has to learn/ Learn to grow, find its way"), and while "Leaf Off / The Cave" boasts the record’s loveliest arrangement, the connection between the Garden of Eden and Plato’s Cave is specious and tenuous in a charming, AP English sort of way.
Even when Vestiges & Claws exudes strain, González never gives the impression of truly challenging himself. When he draws on the canons of both ancient philosophy and post-punk, he sounds like José González. Whether covering Massive Attack, Bruce Springsteen, or Low, he sounds like José González. Even when fronting a legitimate, kraut-influenced rock band in Junip, it just sounds like José González with the rhythmic tracework of his solo albums filled in. But as a record that so frequently meditates on unchanging human nature, that could just mean Vestiges & Claws achieved exactly what it set out to do. | 2015-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mute | February 18, 2015 | 6.6 | 2eec4831-4a31-4c09-a2c9-bd448f71d096 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The New York band’s debut is a dreamy, druggy pop album that finds a provocative sweet spot between being chintzy and being sincere. | The New York band’s debut is a dreamy, druggy pop album that finds a provocative sweet spot between being chintzy and being sincere. | Chanel Beads: Your Day Will Come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chanel-beads-your-day-will-come/ | Your Day Will Come | Chanel Beads is what you might call a scene band, the project of producer Shane Lavers who’s associated with the much-maligned lower Manhattan micro-neighborhood of Dimes Square. They play packed shows in lofts and bars full of kids born in 2004 taking pics on a point-and-shoot digital camera while wearing absolutely enormous pants. If you go to a bar called The River and hang out with dripped-out downtown people, someone will ask you: Hey, have you listened to the new Chanel Beads singles?
This is essentially how I was initiated to Chanel Beads: because they suddenly became inescapable, at least in the much-maligned lower Manhattan micro-neighborhood of Dimes Square. It started with “Ef,” a one-off single from last year, which somehow sounded like the Microphones but also kind of like Enya and Gang Gang Dance? I quickly abandoned any prejudices I had about a band that I began to become convinced was a sort of Drain Gang for the art school set. “Ef” felt totally fresh, a sexy bricolage of completely zonked synths where singer-songwriter Maya McGrory’s vocals burst and bloom in a dreamy, sort of druggy way.
The band’s debut album, Your Day Will Come, expands on those dreams and drugs, and delights in more uncommon juxtapositions. It is both Lil Peep and Massive Attack; Prefab Sprout and Yung Lean; a record made by people who really freak out about music, who know every twist and turn on Steely Dan’s Aja and are crazy enough to say, but what if we kind of rapped over this? It is a risky proposition, difficult to avoid seeming winky or gimmicky, but more often than not, the results are supremely lovely. On “Unifying Thought,” Lavers sounds like he’s singing through a waterfall inside a mall. “I don’t do molly anymore,” he sings at the song’s outset, before it gets beatific, with crescendoing strings crashing into a wash of guitars. He continues: “If you love me, I love you more.”
The general approach of Your Day Will Come is to find that provocative sweet spot between being chintzy and being sincere. To fuck around, but with discipline. In practice, this usually means doing something like cutting elevator music with open chords on an acoustic guitar. It means adding some Seinfeld slap bass on the velvety downtempo track “Embarrassed Dog” and having it somehow feel completely intuitive. Or on “Police Scanner,” where the hand-clap drum machine loops and shoegaze guitars get all freaked out by Lavers’ vocals, the repetition of little “yeahs,” which are performed with the same sort of energy of watching Ren & Stimpy reruns in your parents’ basement—paranoia pop, you might call it.
For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty. It’s tied together by the ambient outlier, “Coffee Culture,” a gentle drone of strings, synthetic choirs, dulcimers, and some sort of digitally-treated wind instrument. It’s a welcome break, a comfortable silence. This is the kind of New York cool the band traffics in, not one born of disaffection but of sincerity. More than anything else, Your Day Will Come is cool because it’s a good hang. Like you’re sitting shotgun in the car of someone you have a crush on and you’re taking turns being DJ. Like: you are riding your bike and you are a little bit drunk and it is 90 degrees so you’re wearing a rash guard because baby, you burn easily. It seems to say: to give one shit, to care about your art, to maybe even be a little funny about it, is it so uncool? | 2024-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 18, 2024 | 7.6 | 2eed2b5f-48ca-46c3-894e-cbe9193c723f | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
In 2012, El-P released Cancer for Cure and Killer Mike the El-P-produced R.A.P. Music. These excellent albums shared the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe. The MCs’ new collaborative record, Run the Jewels, is a distilled take on everything that made last year’s records such an event, with all the chrome ripped off and upholstery pulled out so it’ll run faster, louder, nastier. | In 2012, El-P released Cancer for Cure and Killer Mike the El-P-produced R.A.P. Music. These excellent albums shared the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe. The MCs’ new collaborative record, Run the Jewels, is a distilled take on everything that made last year’s records such an event, with all the chrome ripped off and upholstery pulled out so it’ll run faster, louder, nastier. | Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18219-run-the-jewels-run-the-jewels/ | Run the Jewels | Even for those of us who go all the way back to “8 Steps to Perfection” and “The Whole World,” it’s starting to feel like El-P and Killer Mike have always been talked about in the same breath. The connection makes a kind of retroactive sense going back to their early 2000s solo debuts, Fantastic Damage and Monster. Both albums seethed with the anxious funk of retrofuture 808s-and-synths production that rattled trunks and cages with unrestrained intensity. And both portrayed the artists as out-of-control forces trying their damnedest to stay true to friends, family, and hip-hop while confronting disenfranchisement, abuse, and cynicism. That their creators would gravitate towards collaboration makes even more sense now than it does with hindsight in mind, as the 1-2 hooks to the head of Cancer for Cure and R.A.P. Music shared not just a producer and a timeframe, but the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe.
Thankfully, El-P and Killer Mike made a point to keep working together, and by all accounts their two-MCs/one-producer team-up Run the Jewels was meant to be some kind of “cool-down” record—just something they could brainstorm up and record as a sort of fun, no-stress victory lap in celebration of a triumphant 2012. But if that kind of session reads as a low-stakes slack-off, especially in the form of a free 33-minute download, keep in mind just what constitutes “fun” for these guys. At the top of the list, it’s the process—workshopping ideas, putting things together, delivering them with conviction, and bringing it out to a rampant fanbase prone to drawing irreverent fan-art and ordering special-edition herb grinders. No excuse to relax here.
The only significant sign that El-P and Killer Mike are taking things “easier” on this album is the focus on shit-talk: Aside from the confessional coming-of-age self-pep talk of closer “A Christmas Fucking Miracle,” there’s little-to-no high-concept storytelling and a minimum of “Reagan”/“Drones Over Bklyn”–style political science. They haven't gotten complacent—that latter song gets fleetingly referenced in a Mike line on “DDFH,” one of the few verses that catches the same police-state anger that R.A.P. Music did. And El still raps like somebody who’s not sure if he’s the last sane man or the craziest man on Earth, carrying his refined maniacal diatribes over from Cancer for Cure. But the majority of Run the Jewels is a succession of throw-shit-out-a-window anthems which take the early-LL knuckles-first bragging that inspired the name, running their own psilocybin-tinged mean streak through it.
The deepest messages of Run the Jewels are the ones dedicated to figuring out just how many ways there are to threaten bodily trauma in the most over-the-top language possible while not actually coming across like some screwfaced shock-value manchild. It feels as though the options of either catching a bad one or riding with them are easier to decide between because the latter sounds like it’d be a hell of a time anyways. And there’s this sense of friendly, unspoken one-upsmanship between the two MCs that keeps upping the stakes. Mike on the title track: “I’ll pull this pistol, put it on your poodle or your fuckin’ baby.” El on “Sea Legs”: “Try to pet my fuckin’ head again and I’ma put a tooth through the flesh of the palm that you jack with.” Mike on “Get It”: “Stupid goofy stoolie, the gooch in Gucci will slap you/And that go for the cop-kissing cats that’s in the back of you.” El on “Twin Hype Back”: “Me and Mike’ll go Twin Hype and do a dance on your windpipe/Put your fuckin’ jazz hands back in your pants or get them shits sliced.” It’s a game of the dozens where the barbs are aimed outwards and funny-looking moms are swapped for an all-encompassing People Who Fuck With Us category.
In the process, both MCs have both started to meet each other halfway personality-wise, though that wasn’t a long trip to begin with. El’s panic-attack rasp has grown into this fluid delivery that’s become as immersive as his older hitched-timing flow was, spitting slick bars and doubletimes that make the acidic comedy roll out like his own take on vintage Ludacris. And Mike maintains his wrecking-ball mode, but twists it into moments of psychedelic delirium and over-the-top throat tearing, a man incapable of sounding nonchalant about anything getting the chance to turn that elbow-throwing flow into the narrator for a story about getting a lapdance on mushrooms (“No Come Down”) or turning it up to the breaking point on the grimy Tyson-isms of “Job Well Done.” When they get into verse-swapping back-and-forths on “Twin Hype Back,” “Get It,” and “Banana Clipper” (where an otherwise excellent Big Boi verse bizarrely feels like an afterthought in comparison), or throw around conversational line-finishing asides elsewhere, the rapport’s enough to raise questions as to why this teamup was supposed to be unusual in the first place.
This is hardhead music, but it’s also supposed to be a good time—shit, they even brought in Prince Paul to do his oily weirdo pick-up artist Chest Rockwell routine on “Twin Hype Back.” (“I got your glass of Beefeater, I got a brand new deck of Uno cards... how ’bout I come over tonight and pick you up in my brand new Segway?”) So El-P pulls out the stops in making the abrasive, heavy aspects of his production sound boombox-ready. If this stuff’s “dystopian,” you might as well book a party bus to Airstrip One: Growling synthesized basslines do the heavy lifting as percussion skitters beneath like warped distortions of the ’84, ’96, and ’02 versions of analog hip-hop, a cohesive sound that serves as a reminder that Georgia and New York are both technically East Coast. El’s signature production touches—minor-key chord drones, ligament-snapping guitar squalls, highwire arpeggios, twitchy drum patterns that are as restless as a rock-solid beat can get—are put to pretty straightforward use this time around.
The beats fit the blueprint of R.A.P. Music’s tendency to let the voices supply most of the brute force; it still bumps like a bastard, but not in the kind of way that had Yeezus casualties scrambling for punk rock name drops. It’s just a distilled take on everything that made last year’s albums such an event, with all the chrome ripped off and upholstery pulled out so it’ll run faster, louder, nastier. Yeah, it’s a fun album, and it’s probably the most affable thing they’ve done so far together. But don’t take that for a weakness. They don’t yank chains—they snatch them. | 2013-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | July 1, 2013 | 8.5 | 2eee8be9-e785-4a8d-aedf-6a6677f57c62 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | |
The Sub Pop debut from the New Jersey indie rock band arrives refreshingly well-formed. Their music has an urbane sensibility, one that feels not just older in age, but in sound. | The Sub Pop debut from the New Jersey indie rock band arrives refreshingly well-formed. Their music has an urbane sensibility, one that feels not just older in age, but in sound. | Forth Wanderers: Forth Wanderers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/forth-wanderers-forth-wanderers/ | Forth Wanderers | At a Montclair, New Jersey high school, guitarist Ben Guterl had a crush on a girl. So he sent a demo of instrumental sketches to that girl, vocalist Ava Trilling, who in kind returned them adorned with her own lyrics. Soon after, she became the frontwoman for his band of childhood friends.
If this charming prologue sounds like a spec script for an indie teen movie, believe that Forth Wanderers are kind of like the feel-good movie version of a suburban rock band. In 2014, before they even released an album of music, Lorde tweeted about their songs. While Trilling finished up high school, Guterl and the rest of the band packed up for college. In between homework and keggers, they emailed each other more song fragments, patching them together during breaks. In that time, Forth Wanderers’ handful of records garnered praise from both college newspapers and The New Yorker, (who deemed them “confident and untainted” young stars, naturally). So Forth Wanderers, their Sub Pop debut, feels like the end of the montage and the beginning of something real.
Of course, the reason Forth Wanderers attracted so much attention when they were teens was that their music did sound prodigious. Even as high schoolers, Guterl’s spry and smoky guitar lines and Trilling’s blunt, diaristic lyrics gave the band an urbane sensibility, one that feels not just older in age, but in sound. One of their early songs, “Slop,” had the lazily intricate feel of Built to Spill and the concise, emotional punch of the Breeders. Indeed, the heroes of ’90s indie rock haunt their music, but Forth Wanderers don’t seem interested in pure emulation: Their style feels unmannered; their tales of young-adult frustration would feel cutting and relatable in any decade.
The driving force behind this timelessness is Trilling. Like a natural movie star, she doesn’t just light up a scene, she creates the very circumstances for a scene to feel special. Her first words on the album: “I am the one you think of when you’re with her.” On the page, the line is already acidic, but under the direction of Trilling’s cool, unperturbed delivery, it becomes more than just a clever comeback at a disappointing partner: With her steely voice, she conjures up the entire arc of a doomed relationship. Her bandmates, meanwhile, coax every ounce of emotion and energy from this story, their rhythms taut and athletic. Guterel, in particular, has an audible chemistry with Trilling. His scuzzy chords hone in on whatever mood she’s in, as if they’re boxers moving around each other in shadow play.
The stories she tells—of the many beds she wakes up in, the faces that obsessed her, the bodies she’s tangled up with—capture a kind of grappling adolescence that’s hard to speak, write, or even make art about in a way that’s truthful or interesting. She relishes in unpleasant details, like the blood she draws from a lover’s tongue in the middle of a makeout on “Taste,” a track that in its entirety, with its sour guitars and forceful drums, feels just as cutting as that kiss.
Yet, as visceral as the writing can get, and as tight as the band’s sound is, Forth Wanderers’ songs can melt into each other—both lyrically and sonically. Aside from the acoustic outing on “Be My Baby,” every track is built on the same sturdy arrangement of fuzzy guitar licks and shuffling bass and drums. And since Trilling’s lyrics are, at the moment, confined to a limited range of experience, it can make the album, as a whole, feel like one long run on sentence about the intricacies young love.
Still, there is a vigor to their music that’s not just accomplished, but deeper than they might know. The band inhabits a space that can feel bigger than the sprawling tree-lined streets and byzantine freeways of their local inspiration. Instead, the place Trilling and her bandmates create is more personal, messier, and chaotic. They give musical cues to the growing pains of young adulthood that are relatable but never trite—their songs, like any you might’ve been obsessed with in high school, feel like a mirror held up to the all-consuming triumphs and heartbreaks of your own youth. | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 27, 2018 | 7.7 | 2eefdd94-4398-4d62-b450-d2df6a9e7aac | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
Nine albums in and Dave Grohl knows how to keep the machine running. Concrete and Gold is reliable, relatable, and powerful with just barely enough new ideas to keep things interesting. | Nine albums in and Dave Grohl knows how to keep the machine running. Concrete and Gold is reliable, relatable, and powerful with just barely enough new ideas to keep things interesting. | Foo Fighters: Concrete and Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foo-fighters-concrete-and-gold/ | Concrete and Gold | The best Foo Fighters songs always work exactly like Dave Grohl wants them to: Joy-buzzer power-pop hooks, thickly packaged guitars, a couple of throat-shredding screams—since he started the project in 1994, he has never shown much interest in doing something trickier. In this steady, somewhat plodding way, he’s built catalog deep enough for a greatest hits album and earned the mantle of World’s Most Okay Rock Band. What the Foos don’t offer in inspiration, they make up for it with durability and dependability. Hot dog, squirt of relish, daub of mustard, squishy bun—you make it the same way every time for a reason.
But over the last ten years, listening to Foo Fighters has begun to feel more like watching the Food Network than eating: You mostly yearn for what you’re not getting. As Grohl embraced his Ambassador of Rock role, joining awards show lineups and one-offs by the handful, his own music grew mushier and grainer. By 2014’s Sonic Highways, recorded as part of a documentary series traversing the country’s regional rock scenes, the transformation was complete: Foo Fighters albums were Dave Grohl’s enthusiastic PSAs about the life-changing power of other people’s rock music.
Concrete and Gold is their ninth album, and like Sonic Highways, it comes with an outsized goodwill gesture accompanying it: Grohl announced its release date along with the launch of a huge festival, a modern-rock update to the 1974 Cal Jam. He also recently revealed that he was planning to record the album in front of a live audience, before PJ Harvey’s similar Hope Six Demolition Project discouraged him. Nearly all new Foos albums come with one of these PR flourishes now, a near-tacit admission that a new album of Foo Fighters songs might not be news enough for anybody, even Grohl. But maybe having one of his campaigns derailed helped Grohl focus a bit: Concrete and Gold feels more interested in the granular details of rock songwriting and craft of rock album-making than anything the Foos have made in years.
The album begins with a faux-humble, aw-shucks bit of Grohllery: Over a few finger-picked acoustic guitar notes, he croons: “I don’t wanna be king/I just wanna sing a love song/Pretend there’s nothing wrong/You can sing along with me.” Seconds later comes the chandelier-shattering full band entrance, with a stack of vocal harmonies tall enough to demolish the Paradise Theatre. The flourish announces the polishing touch of Greg Kurstin, member of The Bird and the Bee and a pop producer flexible and collaborative enough for both Adele’s “Hello” and Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE.”
Kurstin’s touch helps inject some flavor into the empty carbs larding Grohl’s songwriting, which remains a series of enthusiastic gestures that sometimes trip over each other. First single “Run” has one of Grohl’s biggest choruses in years, the kind of thing I would gladly holler along to in a stadium, and Kurstin sweetens it nicely with synth and piano. But the song lurches like a three-legged chair between that chorus and a gut-churning two-note riff paired with Grohl’s post-hardcore screaming, a battle between Snow Patrol and Chavez that no one wins.
No one could question Grohl’s grasp of rock history, but moments like this remind you that there is a slightly weightless, Lego Movie feel to his use of it. On the goofy and invigorating Farfisa organ-greased boogie rock “Make It Right,” this works to his advantage: It makes me think of Kid Rock, until it makes me think of Aerosmith’s “Last Child,” until it makes me think of KISS. “Hop on the train to nowhere, baby!” Grohl exhorts, forever unafraid of a t-shirt slogan, and Kurstin boosts the hi-hat until it sounds like it’s made from ten tons of iron. “The Sky Is a Neighborhood,” meanwhile, lands in some alt-rock uncanny valley between Eve 6’s “Inside Out” and “Where Is My Mind?”, a territory as nonsensical as the song title. But Grohl builds a big old rafter-raising chorus there anyway, and as it often does, his enthusiasm makes it go over. It’s all rock‘n’roll to him.
There are all kinds of guests floating by as usual: Alison Mosshart of the Kills guests on “The Sky Is a Neighborhood” and “La Dee Da.” Shawn Stockman, of Boyz II Men, harmonizes on “Concrete & Gold.” Hell, Paul McCartney pops in to play drums on “Sunday Rain.” Grohl told Rolling Stone that Justin Timberlake dropped by the studio one day, but Timberlake remains uncredited, leaving us in the dark, since everyone on a Foo Fighters album sounds like Foo Fighters. That holds as true for Bob Mould, who appeared on 2011’s Wasting Light, as it does here for smooth jazz saxophonist Dave Koz, who turns up somewhere, entirely inaudibly, on “La Dee Da.”
Grohl having fun is usually preferable to him flipping the chair around and getting serious, but there are some affecting moments on C&G. Years of belting and screaming have finally put a few notes of grain in his eternally boyish tenor. “Happy Ever After (Hour Zero),” the album’s best song, is a real ballad, not the foot-dragging, somber face he usually pulls when he goes quiet. “There ain’t no superheroes now/They’re underground” he sings jauntily, over a little dancehall bounce. The song is wry, winsome, acidic; unlike most Foo Fighters songs, it sounds like one person wrote it to express a single, legible emotion, parceling out feeling in a beaker instead of from a bucket. Most miraculously, it fades out before any windmilling power chords can wreck the mood.
Rock music has had few ambassadors as affable and tireless as Grohl, and over twenty years on, it remains impossible to dislike the Foo Fighters. Enjoying them, is a spottier proposition, and loving them seems to be out of the question. There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another. Grohl has spent his entire career arguing for rock music’s ability to transcend and change lives, but his own music sends a different, sadder message: Rock doesn’t have to be transcendent or life-changing at all, and all your fantasies can be rendered just as dull and workaday as the rest of your life. | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Roswell / RCA | September 18, 2017 | 6.5 | 2ef18843-9eb1-4c8b-82b7-26f861b996bc | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The trio of drummer Valentina Magaletti and Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead subtly reinvent post-hardcore by plundering the past and making familiar tropes sound fresh again. | The trio of drummer Valentina Magaletti and Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead subtly reinvent post-hardcore by plundering the past and making familiar tropes sound fresh again. | Moin: Paste | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moin-paste/ | Paste | Moin are subtly but brilliantly reinventing rock music. Indebted to 1980s and ’90s post-hardcore, the London-based trio toys with specific formulas and makes them sound like uncanny updates of a bygone era. The tracks on their debut album, Moot!, began with improvised sessions by chameleonic drummer Valentina Magaletti. From there, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead—the duo who made cratering post-industrial music as Raime—chose passages to build songs around. The result was post-hardcore approached with a dance-music framework—vocal samples included. In a time when Numero Group is hosting a festival celebrating seminal rock bands from yesteryear, Moin are a welcome reminder that there’s still room to build on old foundations.
If Moot! was a successful proof of concept, then Moin’s second album, Paste, is a confident assertion of their style. The songs are tighter and groovier, and feature creative flourishes that elevate every mood. “Forgetting Is Like Syrup,” for example, stands out for its pitch-shifted vocal sample. Recalling DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed technique, its warped spoken word is surprisingly desolate, and slots nicely alongside the song’s crumbling electronics and worming guitar melodies. On the other end of the spectrum is “In a Tizzy,” which uses sparse guitar scrapes, tape effects, and a synth choir to conjure an intimate atmosphere that feels like watching home movies. Much like slowcore band Forty Nine Hudson’s “A Certain Code,” it incorporates field recordings to reveal the communal joys bubbling underneath the dreariness and angst.
That Moin are so reminiscent of other artists is part of their appeal. They encourage revisiting their forebears—not because they’re hopelessly mired in nostalgia, but because their songs illuminate aspects of classic bands that may go unappreciated. A track like “Hung Up” is a callback to Slint, but its lockstep instrumentation highlights the way Spiderland’s comparatively loose arrangements bolster that album’s prosaic, contemplative nature; Moin, in contrast, want something more direct and bracing. (The vocals on “Hung Up,” meanwhile, come from a decades-old recording by novelist Lynne Tillman.) Elsewhere on Paste, tracks lift from ’80s spoken word compilations of Californian poets. In sampling a different kind of underground artist, they ask for a deeper consideration of talk-singing in rock and punk, as though to demonstrate that it’s not just something that appears in No Trend or Moss Icon tracks—it has roots that are intertwined with other mediums too.
Alongside their original material, Moin have released mixtapes that juxtapose punk tracks from the past 40 years. These cassettes give insight into why the genre excites them. The piercing guitar tones in Lifetime’s “It’s Not Funny Anymore”—one of many songs on Flush—are triumphant, and “Life Choices” sounds like Moin’s attempt at capturing that same electrifying thrill. Paste is delightfully procedural in this way: Moin study the history of punk music—the hypnotic Ramones-like riff on Friction’s “Pistol,” the texture of the Hated’s “Hey Mister,” the sneering vocal delivery of Gordons’ “Spik and Span”—and build songs from their favorite elements. “Melon,” one of the album’s most exhilarating tracks, is all melodic guitar fuzz and a sample that cuts through the noise. “You don’t know me, but I know you/I sure as fuck know you,” goes its most caustic line. It only hits so hard because Moin’s songwriting is so skeletal.
The small tweaks that Moin make to the post-hardcore tradition consistently impress. “Yep Yep” features brooding guitar and what sounds like a pneumatic drill, but the real highlight is the intersection of the instrumentation and the vocal samples, one of which sounds like terrified shrieks from a low-budget horror film. Every component of the song takes on a percussive aspect, and it’s all held together by Magaletti’s unwavering beat. Crucially, Magaletti is the only member credited on a specific instrument. This indicates the broader role that Andrews and Halstead assume, and the way their songs are approached with a dance producer’s mindset. It’s why “Sink” is such a mesmerizing closer: Its sludgy guitar riffs repeat as if looping, and are self-sufficient enough to keep you in their grip—no cathartic quiet-loud dynamics or dramatic tempo changes needed. Miraculously, Moin sound like every band they have been influenced by while remaining completely inimitable. | 2022-11-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | AD 93 | November 1, 2022 | 7.8 | 2ef4592e-119b-44fe-bc00-79991a8e8b39 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
On their third full-length in 10 years, Swedish grindcore outfit Gadget sustain a blistering pace, while their lyrics implicitly critique the sociopolitical mores of their home country. | On their third full-length in 10 years, Swedish grindcore outfit Gadget sustain a blistering pace, while their lyrics implicitly critique the sociopolitical mores of their home country. | Gadget: The Great Destroyer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21640-the-great-destroyer/ | The Great Destroyer | On T**he Great Destroyer, grindcore outfit Gadget's first full-length in 10 years (and only its third since forming in the late ’90s), the band sustains a blistering pace, but peppers the songs with just enough groove to give the music an anthemic quality in spite of its uncompromising attack. Drum fills appear suddenly, as if drummer and in-house engineer William Blackmon is about to send the song in a new direction, only to dissipate into the static cloud they briefly popped out from. A blast beat abruptly swallows the snaking introductory riff to "From Graduation to Devastation" before the listener has time to settle in. A tiny portion of the riff persists even as Blackmon's drums pound away, the rhythmic equivalent of rain pelting the windshield when you're driving through an angry storm while incongruously steady music plays on the radio.
Unlike many of their peers, Gadget's political leanings don't immediately hit you over the head, even though the music's sociopolitical undertone is always apparent. Bassist Fredrik Nygren's lyrics on "Choice of a Lost Generation," for example, don't explicitly reference refugees. But the song—with its cries of "false propaganda/ denial of facts/ blind man's hysteria" and "idiots on parade / half a generation led astray"—implicitly denounces European xenophobia at a time when the right-wing party won nearly 13 percent of Sweden's 2014 election. Much like Reaganomics set the stage for early ’80s hardcore and Thatcherism planted the seeds for the anarcho-crustpunk movement that gave us Napalm Death, Gadget's lyrics (which all four bandmembers contribute to varying degrees) seem more profound the more you root them in Swedish culture.
There is a pointed intellectual fury animating their music. Blackmon's lyrics on "Lost on a Straight Path" hint at the conflict between socialist values and widespread conformity through oblique angles. Musically speaking, the variety on The Great Destroyer is somewhat more submerged than on The Funeral March and 2010's split LP with Phobia. But the new material's discreet hints of less obvious influences like Deathspell Omega and even Sonic Youth suggest a muted sophistication. But the real coup here is how The Great Destroyer avoids the youthful righteousness of staunchly left-wing pioneers like D.R.I. and Extreme Noise Terror. Preachy lyrics worked like a charm for those bands, but heavy music's outlook needs to evolve in order to avoid sinking into camp. On The Great Destroyer, Gadget proves you can be cutting without being trite.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly quoted the lyrics of "Choice of a Lost Generation." | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | March 18, 2016 | 7 | 2ef6cd12-d378-4de1-9c76-e620ec5eae7c | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On their second album, the French-Cuban twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz make gorgeous, genre-agnostic meditations on resilience and mindful resistance. | On their second album, the French-Cuban twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz make gorgeous, genre-agnostic meditations on resilience and mindful resistance. | Ibeyi: Ash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ibeyi-ash/ | Ash | To hear “Deathless,” from Ibeyi’s second album, Ash, is to be thrust headlong into the fearful memory of a young woman of color and feel that cold grip as instantly as she did six years ago. “He said, he said/You’re not clean/You might deal/All the same with that skin,” sings Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, one half of Ibeyi’s sister act, of the police officer who arrested her in France when she was 16. He had assumed she was a dealer or drug addict; he handled her harshly, shouted obscenities in her face, and took her purse.
There are creases in Díaz’s high jazz trill here, well-worn trails of dismay; other songs on Ash suggest the past year has deepened them. Yet she and her twin, Naomi, respond to this physical and psychic violation with generosity, echoing Solange, Dev Hynes, and other artists who have met today’s emboldened hate with meditations on resilience and mindful resistance. The French-Cuban sisters offer worldly, skyward rallying cries to the distressed that belie their youth. Their genre-agnostic musicality widens the aura of inclusion, twining downtempo electro-soul, hip-hop, jazz, and fervently slapped cajón percussion that nods to West African Yoruba culture. These are sage, heady dialogues, clearly years in the making; the hushed intimidation that opens “Deathless” sprouts into an elated mantra for civil rights warriors past and present (“Whatever happens, whatever happened/We are deathless!”), rippling over plangent sax tones from Kamasi Washington that underscore the sisters’ bedrock spirituality. (In Yoruba, “Ibeyi” is the divine spirit shared between twins.)
In Ibeyi’s parsing of grief, packed with irreducible spirit, Ash shares a through line with the pair’s self-titled debut. (XL Records owner Richard Russell produced both.) But while 2015’s Ibeyi mourned the deaths of the twins’ older sister, Yanira, and their father, the Buena Vista Social Club conguero Miguel “Angá” Díaz—praying in Yoruba and English for sanctity and peace, taking a pop-soul plunge in “River”—its successor sticks to a broader repose of idealism. At first, Ibeyi’s bright rhythms can feel deceptively stable, their harmonies uninhibited as they dip into dissonance, but they are deliberate in revealing the depth of their sadness. On “Away, Away,” a young girl looks out her window at a world collapsing, frozen with terror at her looming “fate of flames,” then finds strength as she begins to sing; the Díaz sisters’ voices here have an inverse, aerial power, gloriously fluid as they inch, then glide, along with their hero. In the opening track, “I Carried This for Years,” an eerie sample of a Bulgarian choir cedes to the sisters’ electronically rasped chanting, each repetition of the title landing like a heavier stone.
The album’s emotional core, the seven-minute “Transmission/Michaelion,” pads Lisa-Kaindé’s throaty vocals—a soliloquy so stark, so unadorned, it blurs between cathartic and interrogative—with soft, fuzzy synthetic bleats and brisk funk bass from Meshell Ndegeocello; it also features a reading in Spanish from The Diary of Frida Kahlo, partially intoned by the Díaz twins’ mother. Their first song in that language, “Me Voy,” is the album’s most chipper pop moment, riding Naomi’s breezy batà drumming, electronically distilled harmonies, and a silver-tongued spot from the Spanish rapper Mala Rodríguez, who chants, “Cualquiera que sufre ama fuerte” (“Whoever suffers loves hard”).
There’s another spoken-word interlude on Ash, a more poignant cameo of sorts: “No Man Is Big Enough for My Arms,” which remixes together lines of speeches by Michelle Obama. Her key quote, rapturously looped several times, was delivered at the New Hampshire 2016 primaries, after footage leaked of a candidate antithetical to her husband bragging about sexual assault: “The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.” It stirs a deep ache to hear today, and Ibeyi make no pretense otherwise in their somber, glacial vocals, longing audibly for that lost leadership and decency as they sing the title (a phrase from Jennifer Clément’s poetic biography Widow Basquiat). Ibeyi’s bittersweet discourse with the former First Lady, a vicious year removed, is the duo at their finest: weighted by their politicized existence yet protecting the glint of a better world.
Listening to Ash, I have been reminded of another French artist who took a bird’s-eye view of a divided world, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Best known as the author of The Little Prince, he was an early mail pilot across Africa and South America, adventures he captured elegantly in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars. Lifting off from Toulouse, an early voyager in empty skies, he wrote, “The most wondrous thing was that there on the planet’s curved back, between that magnetic sheet and those stars, stood a human consciousness in which that rain could find reflection as in a mirror. On a pure mineral stratum, a dream is a miracle.” De Saint-Exupéry once crashed in the Sahara, and almost succumbed to the sand; Ibeyi could have laid down, many times over, in the ashes of their idealism. Instead, with the same ascendant spirit, with soaring harmonies and conviction, they continue to smile, and they defy. They rise. | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | October 4, 2017 | 8.3 | 2ef8837f-0f82-477e-8f57-be70ed519965 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
In keeping with the film’s surreal take on nostalgia, a crew of leftfield pop and indie musicians—Caroline Polachek, Bartees Strange, Jay Som, yeule—pay knowing tribute to the ’90s. | In keeping with the film’s surreal take on nostalgia, a crew of leftfield pop and indie musicians—Caroline Polachek, Bartees Strange, Jay Som, yeule—pay knowing tribute to the ’90s. | Various Artists: I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-i-saw-the-tv-glow-original-soundtrack/ | I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack) | Art and youth form unshakeable bonds in I Saw the TV Glow, director Jane Schoenbrun’s melancholy and claustrophobic document of suburban outsiderdom. Schoenbrun has spoken in interviews about how, as a child, they opted to process their identity through fiction rather than “actually look in the mirror and figure out who I was.” With I Saw the TV Glow, they put a surreal spin on the way beloved cultural objects give us an outlet for hard-to-express feelings. At the heart of the film—the director’s first since their acclaimed loner internet horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—are two teenage characters obsessed with the mysteries and mythos of The Pink Opaque, a weekly half-hour monster-of-the-week TV show in the campily terrifying vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files. Watching the show, the characters find an outlet for their feelings of isolation—and as the borders between their physical existence and the world of The Pink Opaque melt, they eventually come to wonder if their memories of the series might be more real than reality.
The soundtrack seems designed to provoke similarly intense reactions among its listeners. In addition to a ghostly score from Alex G—who returns after his work on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—the film features a robust collection of original songs from artists that inspire feverish fandom not unlike the characters’ obsession with The Pink Opaque. Collecting tracks from hushed singer-songwriters (Florist, Maria BC), fuzz-scuffed indie-rock artists (Bartees Strange, Jay Som), and off-kilter pop acts (Caroline Polachek, yeule), it feels moody and homespun, a sure recipe for cultish devotion—like a CD-R with a tracklist written in Sharpie, passed around a group of friends amid reverent whispers.
The film is firmly rooted in the imagery and cultural touchstones of the 1990s—characters muse about the looks of Evan Dando and Michael Stipe, and posters for Sarah Records are pinned to their walls. And though the soundtrack is full of artists from the 2020s, most of them reach for sounds that evoke the end of the 20th century. Jay Som’s “If I Could” is lit by a gleaming guitar riff that chimes as brightly as Bandwagonesque. Sadurn’s slide-guitar-smeared “How Can I Get Out?” plays like a hazy memory of the mellower songwriters on Drag City in the ’90s. Even Polachek sidelines her sleek synth-pop contortions in favor of anthemic shoegaze on “Starburned and Unkissed.” Though the reference points are clear, the songs never feel too reverential—they’re often loose and deliberately otherworldly, as if heard in the depths of a dream.
That approach is clearest on yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” On its surface, it’s a gloomy trailercore rendition of a song that’s long been an unofficial hymn for teenaged outcasts—an especially on-the-nose choice to kick off a film about adolescent alienation. But underneath the track’s heavy-lidded surface is something stranger: a distant memory of the original, scoured by glitches, with vocals that slip and swirl around the meditative backing track. Where Broken Social Scene’s recording is rhythmically locked in and mantra-like, yeule’s version is distant and dissociative, a bedridden memory of adolescence long since passed. The soundtrack’s most sweeping emotional gesture, yeule’s song also offers the most vivid illustration of the film’s delight in bending linear time. Both I Saw the TV Glow and its soundtrack begin in ways that feel familiar and nostalgic before diving back into the shadows, rendering beloved youthful memories unrecognizably strange. | 2024-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | A24 Music | May 11, 2024 | 7.1 | 2efb2834-ff40-4f2d-afe8-c99d2a95ede8 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The Seoul duo taps into devotional music’s focused intensity in trance-inducing pieces that draw on new age, krautrock, and folk. | The Seoul duo taps into devotional music’s focused intensity in trance-inducing pieces that draw on new age, krautrock, and folk. | TENGGER: Spiritual 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tengger-spiritual-2/ | Spiritual 2 | A fascination with devotional sound-making is at the heart of TENGGER’s music. In a list of inspirations for their new album, Spiritual 2, the South Korea-based duo of itta (harmonium and voice) and Marqido (analog synth) includes a video of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki speaking about sound in Zen practice, as well as recordings of medieval organ music and shamanistic rites. Their Minishiko cassette collects sounds from a pilgrimage to the Japanese island of Shikoku, layering the ambience of 88 Buddhist temples. What joins all of these things is sound’s ability to point the mind toward the unseen—to express what lies beyond the reach of everyday human perception.
The duo’s music, largely indebted to new age, krautrock, and various strains of Asian folk, is built around immersive drones and trance-inducing repetition. These are characteristics common throughout many different devotional styles, from Hindustani classical music’s use of tamboura to the ecstatic call and response of gospel. Though synthesizer is their primary tool, there is a naturalistic feel to the pieces on Spiritual 2, which unfold slowly and deliberately. Even when the tempo is fast, as on opener “High,” which is underpinned by an incessant motorik beat, elements enter and recede at a defiantly gradual pace.
Spiritual 2 is best at its most nebulous, when the music focuses predominantly on texture and immersion. “Kyrie,” named for a Popul Vuh song, from Hossiana Mantra, that features Korean singer Djong Yun, is a remarkable slow build, with gossamer, high-pitched synthesizer pads cyclically ceding to waves of bass-heavy harmonium. Each successive crescendo becomes more harmonically complex, tones stacking incrementally, joined in the final swells by itta’s wordless intonations. The album’s centerpiece, the 16-minute “Wasserwellen” (or “Water Wave”), has a similar structure of recession and expansion, with overlapping drones building almost imperceptibly to an arpeggiated crescendo that slowly decays throughout the last half of the piece.
TENGGER's evocation of ecstatic states is less effective when they draw more explicitly from krautrock's rhythmic template. The repetitive motorik beat is inherently minimalistic, but it can become tedious. “High” and “Ajari” feature virtually identical drum-machine patterns and bouncing synth lines that share more than a passing resemblance. In Shunryu Suzuki’s seminal text Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (which itta and Marqido reference as an influence and guide), he describes repetition as the basis of enlightenment: “Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you become bread.” But here repetition feels less like the path to enlightenment and more like a lack of substantive development beyond a few basic musical building blocks.
There is a renaissance happening in the wider Asian psychedelic music scene right now, building on the legacies of bands like Les Rallizes Denudes, Ghost, and Far East Family band, with labels like Guruguru Brain, which released TENGGER’s 2017 album Segye, leading the charge. TENGGER have the potential to be a major force here: Their music is conceptually rich and frequently rewarding, and on Spiritual 2 they come close to fully integrating the lessons from the devotional styles they admire. The further they drift towards formlessness, the more effective they become. | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Beyond Beyond is Beyond | June 7, 2019 | 6.9 | 2f03d29b-e247-4f96-a38a-b01f8bd174a0 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
With their first album in six years, New York City indie-pop duo the Ballet question the complexities of modern queer life but offer no easy answers. | With their first album in six years, New York City indie-pop duo the Ballet question the complexities of modern queer life but offer no easy answers. | The Ballet: Matchy Matchy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-ballet-matchy-matchy/ | Matchy Matchy | Matchy Matchy opens up like a stranger on a gay hookup app: “Wanna play?” Identities are floated, compliments proffered. “Do you want to call me son or Daddy?/You’re so pretty, my femme, my fatty.” The electro-pop pulse twinkles with promise; it might bloom like a Troye Sivan anthem. But the curious lurker won’t be pinned down. “I’m just checking things out,” he sighs. And the song wanders off.
This amiable embrace of ambivalence distinguishes Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse’s output as the Ballet from the work of their funny musical uncles, like the Magnetic Fields’ implacably ironic Stephin Merritt, the Hidden Cameras’ riot auteur Joel Gibb, even fairy godfathers Pet Shop Boys. It might be the healthiest way to cope with a community that, 50 years after the Stonewall riots, encompasses both pink-cape-wearing Tony winner Billy Porter and Trump-approved Republican ambassador Richard Grenell, public intellectuals like Alaska Thunderfuck and concern trolls like Andrew Sullivan. At this point, some gay men want to diversify society just enough to squeeze in but otherwise resemble the bigots who hate them. It’s an ugly look, but then, some people like ugly. Don’t let it spoil your day.
Matchy Matchy dons its titular wink at over-coordination with a limited sonic palette of bubbling synths, carefully strummed guitar, and featherlight drums. Lyrically, it’s much more promiscuous, depicting the diversity of 2019 gays if not always embracing them. One might successfully navigate his “First Time in a Gay Bar,” but the smalltown boy in “Jersey” stalls for almost five minutes, barely gathering the courage to finally say “I just wanted to hide away with you and never come back,” as a Motorik rhythm never quite shifts into gear. “Messing Around” sounds like an update of Belle and Sebastian’s “Seeing Other People” for the masc-for-masc crowd, in which the guys are old enough to fuck but not mature enough to admit they’d like more. “It’s just a couple hours/Every week or two,” Goldberg sings. “We’re just a couple of guys/But you’ve got that look in your eyes.” It sours, though, the way these things do, into a slight anthem for a city where men leave each other for strangers on a plane, or spend boozy nights deconstructing monogamy under awnings in the rain, or set up joint hookup accounts they don’t always check together.
But then men come and go. The narrator of “Your Boyfriend” negs a potential partner before giving away the game: “I don’t want to watch your student film/I don’t want to take your student drugs…/I just want to be your boyfriend.” And yet, the music is so lovely, all dewy guitars and dripping synth bells, that it makes you understand the appeal of intertwining with someone who doesn’t necessarily respect you. “Love Letter,” with its deliberate worldess space between verse and chorus, is a perfect replication of the exquisite torture of just watching and wishing and hoping for someone to go ahead and finally break your heart.
More chaotic is the plight of the narrator of the album’s first single, “But I’m a Top”: “Outside I look like a girl/Inside I feel like a girl/Why?/Doesn’t anyone?/Believe me?/When I say/I’m a top?” Essentialist compounds of identity—What does a girl look and feel like? Can’t a girl be a top? Are such position-based personas even, like, a thing?—steep until a very queer tea is brewed. At its, well, bottom, “But I’m a Top” is a lovely declaration of self-determination.
Other meandering inquisitions lead to wilder places. The lonely lover in “I’ve Been Wondering” starts off curious, in a casual finger-snapping kind of way, about where their beloved goes after dark, before the track’s gentle exotica perks up into a Northern Soul floor-filler and the destination is revealed: “There’s a little park/At the edge of town/It’s a petting zoo/When the sun goes down.” Cruising has never sounded merrier, and whether the protagonist wants their lover home or longs to join in the fun remains a secret.
In a weird synergy, the album arrives as a current leading contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president is a white cis Christian veteran who happens to be gay and recently covered Time magazine with his husband in a remarkable pose of aspirational assimilation. With their unthreatening visages and similar brown belts, Pete and Chasten Buttigieg appear to be the ne plus ultra of matchy-matchy-ness; they seem like the kind of guys who’d only ever fall for themselves, even as they valiantly fight to serve their country. The Ballet should play Pete’s inauguration, but they’re probably too... much. The state of the nation is strange. | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fika | May 17, 2019 | 7.6 | 2f049de1-ae66-4585-852d-ab77715e5da0 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
I'm Gay was Lil B's highest profile release to date, and he's kept up his free mixtape pace since. I Forgive You was dire, but this recent pair-- especially BasedGod Velli-- have plenty of inspired moments. | I'm Gay was Lil B's highest profile release to date, and he's kept up his free mixtape pace since. I Forgive You was dire, but this recent pair-- especially BasedGod Velli-- have plenty of inspired moments. | Lil B: BasedGod Velli / Silent President | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16082-lil-b-based-god-vellisilent-president/ | BasedGod Velli / Silent President | "I changed the rap game, and a lot of people know that-- a lot of rappers know that," says Lil B at the end of BasedGod Velli. The boast comes shortly after he's thrown out a revealing, eyebrow-raising jab: "I'm the reason you got your deal, bitch, A$AP." The line, and the fact that it's clearly true, says a lot about Lil B's unique perch in rap: Without ever abandoning the fringe, he's changed the mainstream conversation enough that rappers like A$AP Rocky can score six-figure signings in part by copping B's producers and calling themselves "pretty" like he does. But Lil B isn't your standard neglected innovator, grousing in interviews about more successful rappers stealing his style: He's more popular than ever, still constantly retweeting requests from young girls begging him to "fuck my bitches." For a cult rapper with no record deal, the extent of his influence is astonishing.
BasedGod Velli and The Silent President, both released in the past month, will scan to most onlookers like Just More Lil B Mixtapes. It's an impression he doesn't always exactly work overtime to dismiss: After he ignited an Internet firestorm last summer with his lovely, dazed I'm Gay, he followed it up with I Forgive You, a dare-you-to-get-through-it teeth-gritter that worked like bug spray to anyone who'd just climbed on board. But while they lack the unifying-moment ring of I'm Gay, BasedGod Velli and Silent President are both strong entries into the massive, bewildering Lil B canon. If you sit somewhere in the middle of the Lil B-obsessive spectrum, here's the shorthand: You probably need one or both of these.
BasedGod Velli gets the edge over President, for focus and quality of production. The cover, which splits his face with Pac's, Face/Off-style, might get a half-hearted rise out of some rap traditionalists somewhere, but it's difficult by now to imagine many of those types still being undecided about Lil B. He opens the tape up addressing this crowd: "Niggas talk about 'Lil B done killed rap'/ Stupid bitch, man, I brought the rap game back." After that, he doesn't waste time defending himself against anyone. The rest of the tape is high-quality #based music, nothing more, nothing less.
Lil B is in open-hearted truth-teller mode on Velli: there are no gangsta-rap or pimp-rap exercises. At his best, Lil B uses his positivity like a blunt-force object, clearing out his lane in front of him with the heat of his convictions. Witness this remarkable tirade, also from the title track: "It ain't hard to smoke weed and go tote gats/ It ain't hard to pimp hos, man you lame for that/ It ain't hard to rob a nigga at close range/ Much harder to go outside and use your brain/ Much harder to go to college and go get grades/ Much harder to get a job to go feed your seed/ Real easy to give up and go complain."
This passage bears all the scuff marks of Lil B's without-a-net style-- it's artless, it's fumbling, the lines barely connect with a rhyming syllable at the end-- but it's a remarkable outpouring nonetheless. "King Cotton", which borrows the instrumental from Raekwon and Ghostface's "Heaven & Hell", is another highlight, a touching lament framed in the simplest and most direct possible of terms: "How the fuck can I forget about the people hangin' off a tree/ For the simple fact they look like me?" Those who write off B's style as mindless rambling could spend a chastening few hours watching other rappers' attempts at "based" freestyle: B's gift for turning up startling language inside himself with little to no preparation is uncanny.
Silent President is less rewarding and more scattershot than BasedGod Velli. The beat selection and production are lower in quality, and B's real-time fumbling for words occasionally grows outright distracting. But there are some welcome moments: "Great China Sea" repurposes the only bit of Watch the Throne's "Lift Off" beat worth keeping-- the smooth coda-- and turns it into a parade of softly glowing Christmas lights for B to rap over. On "The Based One", he warbles over DJ Khaled/Drake/Rick Ross/Lil Wayne's "I'm on One". "Cap Pillah" and "BasedGod 50" are highly entertaining examples of ignorant Lil B, with gun threats and non-sequiturs thrown out over linoleum-curling beats.
As usual, both tapes have moments of sheer irredeemable silliness: On President's "Beat the Cancer", he raps over a sped-up loop of Metallica's "Fade to Black" and dedicates it to a terminally ill YouTube follower who requested it of him. It's a nice personal gesture but a profoundly ridiculous song (the chorus is "beat the cancer, cancer.") Ditto for BasedGod Velli's "I Got AIDS", which doubles down on Lil B's personal spit-take title sweepstakes and offers a message song so bluntly literal it inspires mostly disbelieving laughs ("on top of that, she gave me herpes when she gave me AIDS!"). What makes them work, though, is their place within the larger Lil B world: His pratfalls are offered up with the same fearless generosity as his triumphs. Without them, we wouldn't feel the audacity of his creative high-wire act. They're the price of entry into Based World, which is still a pretty transformative place to spend some time. | 2011-11-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap / Experimental | null | November 29, 2011 | 7.8 | 2f050b5d-0c18-49f9-a920-8a0d51ae4824 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Israeli singer and the Radiohead guitarist team up with artists from across the Middle East to tackle a range of Arabic love songs, in an act of concerted musical bridge-building. | The Israeli singer and the Radiohead guitarist team up with artists from across the Middle East to tackle a range of Arabic love songs, in an act of concerted musical bridge-building. | Dudu Tassa / Jonny Greenwood: Jarak Qaribak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dudu-tassa-jonny-greenwood-jarak-qaribak/ | Jarak Qaribak | Saleh and Daoud Al-Kuwaity were giants in Iraq. The brothers played violin and oud in the courts of kings and composed new standards for the greatest singers of the Arab world, reshaping Iraqi classical music for the 20th century. But when they emigrated to Israel in the early 1950s, their stature and earning power plummeted; they sank from concert halls to private parties. “My father sold eggs,” Daoud’s daughter remembered in the documentary Iraq N’ Roll. After all, they were Arabs. Still, they retained their fame in Iraq—for a time, until Saddam Hussein had their works redesignated as anonymous folk songs. After all, they were Jews.
Born in Kuwait, with Iranian and Iraqi ancestry, Saleh and Daoud were part of the Middle Eastern and North African Jewish diaspora that came to be called Mizrahi after the State of Israel was formed. As the great Iraqi Jewish musician Yair Dalal put it in the documentary, “It was an identity with a question mark,” and it did not align with the cultural establishment’s European biases. “Their entire journey was blotted out” in both their ancestral and chosen homelands, Iraq N’ Roll director Gili Gaon told Haaretz. Because of this, Saleh and Daoud forbade their children to pursue music. “But it returned in the grandchildren,” Dalal said, moved to tears by the playing and singing of a younger musician named Dudu Tassa.
Tassa is the grandson of Daoud and the grand-nephew of Saleh. His music, sung in Hebrew and Arabic, is big in Israel but less known in the States, and to a foreign newcomer, he seems like a slightly scruffier Chris Martin: a polished, generous rock-and-ballad performer of evident popular appeal. Since 2011, Tassa has been reviving Saleh and Daoud’s music and prestige with his rock band the Kuwaitis, which Radiohead once took on a U.S. tour. Their guitarist, England’s Jonny Greenwood—who is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan—also played on the Tassa-penned 2009 song “Eize Yom.” Thus the conditions were set for Jarak Qaribak, an altogether extraordinary album that seems to create new pieces for the geopolitical puzzle of its backstory, as if doing so might be the solution to eventually completing it.
The title means something like “Your neighbor is your friend,” and the singers come from all over the Middle East. In a quietly ingenious touch for a study of imbricate identity, all of them sing songs from countries they aren’t from. The album consists almost entirely of Arabic love songs, an ancient, refined tradition admired the world over, and one that contains far more than eloquent longing. Take the spark and highlight of the project, a Lebanese song called “Taq ou-Dub,” rendered as a palpitating dance track where sweet flutes reel with tangy plucks. Palestinian singer Nour Freteikh softly bends the title’s three percussive syllables into an adhesive hook. It’s even zestier if you know it means “take a hike,” and the whole thing is basically a Swiftian excoriation of an ex.
While this song was recorded live, most of the vocalists recorded in their home countries. Greenwood and Tassa traveled between Oxford and Tel Aviv to make the music with players of brass, strings, keyboards, and Middle Eastern instruments. Ariel Qassis plays the silky Arabian zither called the qanun, while Mustafa Amal plays the rebab, a spike lute found throughout Islamic culture. There are bamboo pipes and, of course, the intricate intervals and supple slides of the fretless oud. Tassa and Greenwood blend in standard rock kit; the former sings on an electro-cinematic version of the Moroccan song “Lhla Yzid Ikhtar,” while the latter has described the production vision as Kraftwerk in 1970s Cairo. The use of drum machines instead of computers helps to give the piecemeal recording its warm, live feeling.
It would be miserly to call these songs simple covers: The range of interpretation between the microtonal scales and interwound melodies of Eastern music and the harmonizing octaves of the West is too wide for that. Yet the album’s arrangement closes the distance with skill and sensitivity, flowing easily from electronic music to torch songs to classical bricolage. But the difficulty of this musical bridge-building pales next to what it took for this project to exist at all. Tassa has hinted at what one would imagine to be considerable bureaucratic and diplomatic efforts behind getting some of these artists to work with him or one another. Thus the record is organically, even experimentally, political—not narrowly or expressly.
On the other hand, it never would have come about without Greenwood and Tassa choosing to use their clout to do something hard and rewarding. There’s no other circumstance in which the Egyptian singer Ahmed Doma would give a suave account of the Algerian Ahmed Wahby’s “Djit Nishrab,” and Iraq’s Karrar Alsaadi would travel to Tel Aviv to commandingly sing a Yemeni song, and Dubai’s Safae Essafi would fashion a sleeper hit from an Israeli song, “Ahibak,” with its ’60s spy-jazz groove, like fingers running over a beaded curtain. And there’s a tune by Tassa’s great-uncle Saleh, at last restored to his proper place in this story, in a haunting yet poppy rendition by two Tunisian singers. Jarak Qaribak is a rich, fascinating case of music both carrying history and shaping the future, redrawing the limits of the possible in specific, limited, yet meaningful ways. | 2023-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | World Circuit | June 12, 2023 | 7.7 | 2f0dc5b8-76d2-4205-9091-baf5134d4ed4 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Katie and Allison Crutchfield would go on to bigger things in the bands Waxahatchee and Swearin’, but their early band P.S. Eliot made some fantastic music of its own. | Katie and Allison Crutchfield would go on to bigger things in the bands Waxahatchee and Swearin’, but their early band P.S. Eliot made some fantastic music of its own. | P.S. Eliot: 2007-2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22284-2007-2011/ | 2007-2011 | Katie and Allison Crutchfield, the 27-year-old twin sisters now known for fronting the bands Waxahatchee and Swearin’, respectively, began playing music in their early teens, Katie picking up guitar, Allison, drums. They would come home from school in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, grab a snack, and head down to the basement to practice until their family told them it was too late. By the age of 15, the Crutchfields had formed their first band, the Ackleys, a twangy rock four-piece that gained a small local following. In a 2006 documentary-style short about the band, the Ackleys discuss the future of their two-year-old project, which was soon to be challenged by the departure of one member for college. “I see it going on forever, of course,” says a 17-year-old Allison, optimism radiating through her thick Southern accent. But though the factors that break up many friends after high school graduation would indeed extinguish the Ackleys, the Crutchfields were clearly meant for greater opportunities. P.S. Eliot, the band they formed together after the dissolution of their first group, has been lovingly documented with 2007-2011, a 2xCD set that gathers the group’s two albums and an EP, along with assorted demos and home recordings.
P.S. Eliot was directly informed by the Crutchfields’ desire to experience life outside of Birmingham. Then 18 years old, the twins found that they had very little in common with their hometown scene, which, according to an oral history by Pitchfork contributor Liz Pelly included in the box, was largely composed of hardcore bros moshing to music made by men without any awareness of the space they were occupying. Thanks to the Ackleys’ limited but informative tour experience, Allison and Katie discovered that musical spaces don’t have to be hyper-masculine or oppressive. P.S. Eliot was an opportunity to work against sexist social structures from within through the simple strategy of offering an empowering alternative.
Early on, Katie and Allison cited stalwarts like Guided by Voices, Fugazi, and the Velvet Underground as influences. Robert Pollard’s prolificacy inspired Katie, leading her to think that she too had to write many songs, good and bad, in order to find the gems. Though in sound they were more pop-punk than riot grrrl, P.S. Eliot was indebted to the sensibilities of acts like Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney, whose words offered anthems for those expected to sit on the sidelines, who paved a path simply by existing, who created music as a means to survive.
P.S. Eliot’s first recording, the 2008 Bike Wreck demo, sounds decidedly harsh and lo-fi, being recorded in the Crutchfield family garage on a digital 8-track and Macbook, but there’s obvious potential in the five-song experiment, even if it is buried beneath some serious static fuzz. It wasn’t until 2009, with two small P.S. Eliot tours down and after the Crutchfield twins had settled in nearby Tuscaloosa, that they hit their stride. Recorded over two days in their living room, Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds sounds considerably cleaner than the Bike Wreck demo, and for the first time, P.S. Eliot sound like a fully-formed project, existing somewhere between scrappily precise and gracefully shambolic. Now joined by Will Granger on guitar and (briefly) Michael McClellan of the Ackleys on bass, the Crutchfields could focus on a sort of controlled chaos.
Unlike the carefully constructed expression of vulnerability she currently owns as Waxahatchee, Katie’s songwriting with P.S. Eliot exploded in a wild rush. She stacks adjectives with abandon, as words tumble over each other in a race to stay afloat above the churning riffs (see “Augustus”’s 20 seconds outpouring “the subsequent or the demise/to praise or to antagonize, it all sounds the same/the arrogant teenage prestige/seems like such a distinctive breed/disheveled fame taking steady aim/on cerebral wealth, or my own personal hell”). While her stream-of-consciousness style could seem like an attempt at obfuscation, Katie’s lyrics are so deeply rooted in the personal that their excess manages to convey a sincere (and perhaps naive) hunger to experience the highs and lows of life.
The slow-burning “Tennessee,” for example, is about being tugged in different directions by desires: “I’ve got a racing mind and enough gas to get to Tennessee/Baby, let’s push our limits/I got a West Coast heart and an East Coast mentality.” She explores emotional division through anecdotes about a three-year romantic cycle with a partner. On “Incoherent Love Songs,” this takes the form of an unhealthy mutual dependency that is later elaborated as a blind reliance on “memories of content” in “Tangible Romance.” P.S. Eliot’s self-critical admission of uncertainty, bad habits, and the inability to escape recalls the early work of Rilo Kiley, whose singer Jenny Lewis offered assurance that it is okay to feel.
By the time *Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds *was released by Detroit label Salinas in 2009, P.S. Eliot were regularly touring north to Brooklyn and had a growing and devoted fanbase. Their next release, 2010’s five-song Living in Squalor EP shows remarkable growth from the Bike Wreck demo. While both share a similar unrestrained energy, Squalor is cohesive. A telling example is an updated version of Bike Wreck’s “Broken Record”; what was once an (ironically) indecipherable song about the struggle to communicate now came through loud and clear.
Sadie, P.S. Eliot’s final album, was recorded in Birmingham in late 2010. If Introverted found P.S. Eliot processing the world around them, Sadie was an epiphany, a discovery after a whole lot of digging. The emotional ties that bound Katie’s lyrics were dissolving and there is a distinct sense of freedom and confidence. But rather than displaying a pop-punk need to spit everything out immediately, P.S. Eliot instead turns towards slowly, patiently, painting a clear picture. Sadie is more of a moodboard than a list of concerns and complexes like Introverted. Even though P.S. Eliot had not played many of the songs on Sadie as a full band before, they come off as tight and prepared thanks to the production work of New Jersey’s Mark Bronzino. A song like the five-minute “Diana” is a world away from Introverted. It finds a melancholic Katie singing barely above a whisper, but a majority of the track is just a guitar. By their end, P.S. Eliot had reached a state of cohesion many bands never do. Yet by September 2011, the band decided to quit while they were ahead.
Creatively, Katie and Allison were both ready to pursue new projects; there was a distinct feeling that P.S. Eliot had fulfilled its intentions. Shortly after recording Sadie, Katie wrote the first Waxahatchee release, American Weekend, on the same 8-track used to record the Bike Wreck demo. Katie and Allison started a band called Bad Banana, which lasted from 2010-2011. Allison would later go on to start Swearin’ along with a solo act and Katie would commit to Waxahatchee full-time. P.S. Eliot were, for better or worse, a true DIY band, starting and ending equally suddenly. On the plus side, they existed on their own terms, refused on compromise, and developed their own personal politics. On the negative side, they would cancel shows on a whim and fight amongst themselves to the point of once abandoning first bassist Reena Upadhyay in Grand Rapids.
As DIY artists, the Crutchfields possessed agency that has helped determine how they now carry themselves as solo artists. P.S. Eliot wasn’t created to please anyone. It didn’t satisfy Ackleys fans who were just confused by the scuzzy and distinctly feminist project. Its publicity was minimal at best. P.S. Eliot existed for its members. “I feel like the things I wanted were so pure,” reflects Allison in the oral history of the band that accompanies the release. “To just write music, and for people to hear it, and to go on tour, and to hang out with our friends.” Today, in 2016, knowing what would come after the end of P.S. Eliot, it is particularly funny to think about one lyric Katie sings on Introverted’s “Tennessee”: “Because we’ll go to sleep when we’re dead/And I’ll quit when I’m 25.” They had no idea what the future held. | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | September 8, 2016 | 8.2 | 2f0ddadf-59d6-4d10-979a-f13c9fb10147 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Compiling several years’ worth of material and spanning nearly two hours, the Munich producer’s first full-length since 2018 feels cohesive, virtuosic, and thrillingly physical. | Compiling several years’ worth of material and spanning nearly two hours, the Munich producer’s first full-length since 2018 feels cohesive, virtuosic, and thrillingly physical. | Skee Mask: Pool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-pool/ | Pool | This time last year, Skee Mask put out a pair of EPs that felt like dueling reactions to lockdown blues, then stretching into month five in much of Europe and North America. In the sudden and prolonged absence of nightlife, ISS05’s unruly club cuts seemed to kick against the strictures of enforced downtime. On ISS06, on the other hand, a succession of beatless ambient tracks succumbed to numbing torpor. While some frustrated DJs distracted themselves by baking bread, the Munich producer just kept cutting up breakbeats. Mere weeks after the release of those records, Skee Mask, aka Bryan Müller, tweeted that he had yet another album in the can. At long last, Pool, released without advance warning in May, is the promised fruit of that harvest.
Particularly in the case of dance music, a style predicated upon sweaty bodies swapping aerosols in close quarters, it’s hard not to read any given new release as a response to the pandemic year. But despite the timing of its completion, Pool isn't a report on the doldrums of 2020. Its 18 tracks, totaling an hour and 45 minutes, are drawn from the past four or five years of his daily studio regimen. Combined with its surprise release on Bandcamp, the record’s length and semi-archival nature—some of these songs predate the release of 2018’s Compro—might suggest that Pool is a clearinghouse of orphaned tracks meant to bide time before the next proper album. But Müller calls it “a fully conceived project,” the intended successor to Compro. (For now, there are no plans to make the album available beyond Bandcamp: “I just don’t get positive energy from [streaming] companies, and I wanted to send a message to other artists that they didn’t have to put their music on these platforms,” Müller recently said in an interview with Pitchfork contributor Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor newsletter.)
Where Skee Mask’s last EPs split his output between rhythm and atmosphere, Pool brings those elements back together. Müller continues to work with the types of sounds that have animated his work from the beginning: scabrous breaks and clean-lined 808s, seismic subs and airy pads, smoldering overdrive and dub delay. In the past, Skee Mask’s genre experiments have sometimes felt like he was checking various styles off a list, but Pool shows his work becoming more holistic, moving toward a kind of ur-dance music—as though the disparate continents of drum’n’bass, footwork, techno, electro, and downbeat were all merging back together into a spongy musical Pangaea. Twisting acid sequences give otherwise gentle ambient tracks a steely edge; funk basslines wriggle worm-like through drum’n’bass grooves; rugged jungle breaks and ambient dub flicker like two sides of a lenticular image.
As on Shred and Compro, the sequencing is everything here. Both of Skee Mask’s previous albums followed a distinct arc, moving from gaseous intros through mellow warm-up territory before plunging into beefier fare, then coming full circle with languid, contemplative finales. Pool does something similar, but it covers more ground and entertains more switchbacks along the way. (For a while, the album felt scattered to me, more like a hard-drive dump than a cohesive full-length; then I realized I’d inadvertently been listening to the songs in alphabetical order. Once I corrected my error, the whole record snapped into focus.)
An opening trio of pulsing, quasi-ambient cuts builds to an early highlight with “CZ3000 Dub,” a fast, opalescent techno track whose bassline channels the spirit of Kevin Saunderson’s 1997 classic “World of Deep.” On “Collapse Casual,” a feint into ’70s funk (via what I could swear is a sample of Scooby Doo’s bark) flips into a bruising drum’n’bass roller, sounding like vintage Photek being ground beneath a rusty stylus. After extending the peak-time energy with another unrelenting breakbeat track, Müller eases off into a passage of sentimental, supremely chilled-out tunes, including “Ozone,” among the most unabashedly beautiful things he’s ever recorded. He keeps zig-zagging all the way to the end, sometimes within the space of a single track: “Testo BC Mashup,” another career highlight, starts out sounding like a sat-phone intercept of an old-school gabber rave, morphs into Aphex Twin-grade drill’n’bass, teases a winsome breakdown, and finishes—after an honest-to-goodness key change—by sinking into inky murk, like a corpse beneath a stone slab.
There’s a thrilling physicality to Pool. Skee Mask’s 808s run as hot as a laptop laid across your thighs; omnipresent dub delay gives the feeling of pushing through viscous liquid, actually swimming through the music. But even in its heaviest moments, what distinguishes Pool is not so much power as finesse. Müller says that many of these tracks have origins in live hardware jams, and that energy comes through. Though many songs are largely based on 16-bar loops, their elements are constantly morphing. Drum patterns never play quite the same way twice; shifting synth lines twist and turn with uncanny naturalism, less like programmed sequences than living things. Whether in the wanton G-funk portamento of “60681z,” the faux guitar solos of “Harrison Ford,” or the shape-shifting textures of “Pepper Boys,” you can feel Müller’s fingers on the knobs at every turn. It’s a virtuoso display of control made all the more remarkable for its seeming lack of calculation. Skee Mask gives the impression that his music is a flowing current, and he’s just the channel.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | June 10, 2021 | 8.1 | 2f0f500c-3d3f-414f-bf96-c639f4263536 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a slice of hyperactive, politicized nu-metal from 2001. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a slice of hyperactive, politicized nu-metal from 2001. | System of a Down: Toxicity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/system-of-a-down-toxicity/ | Toxicity | Toxicity came out one week before September 11th, 2001. Its lead single, “Chop Suey!,” famously landed on a Clear Channel blacklist of songs to avoid broadcasting in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Chop Suey!” contained the word “suicide,” so it joined Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” on a roster of tracks that might conceivably remind listeners of the recent national trauma.
“Chop Suey!” became a hit all the same, a nu-metal chimera that crashed unintelligible babbling into the chorus’s gorgeous vocal melody. One minute Serj Tankian’s shucking syllables like pistachio shells, saying nothing; the next he’s appealing to the Lord God Himself in a rich, reverent baritone, singing the words Jesus spoke to his father on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” The bait-and-switch between abrasion and allure makes the song irresistible, a songwriting tactic that would elevate System of a Down from the glut of hard rock that occupied a sizable portion of pop radio through the turn of the millennium.
Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. Bush’s presidency. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century; they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound.
System of a Down released their debut self-titled album toward the end of Rage Against the Machine’s tenure as rock radio’s crowning political agitators. Like RATM, SOAD interpolated West Coast hip-hop’s quick vocal clip into a guitar-driven metal milieu. But SOAD’s compositions disoriented as much as they elucidated. Tankian’s wild, flexible delivery spun out of control. Guitarist Daron Malakian didn’t drive home the beat of their songs so much as he threw it into disarray. Malakian and Tankian forged a close chemistry on the band’s 1998 self-titled debut, whose cover image of an open hand referred to a World War II anti-fascist poster designed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany.
Tankien, Malakian, bassist Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan played with the weight of metal, but the quick pivots of their compositions also aligned them with L.A.’s hardcore punk heritage. Political without dipping into preachiness, they accumulated fans who could either tap into the radical messages of their music or easily ignore them. Come to it with political anguish and you’ll find an outlet for that pain. Come to it with more specific personal angst and you’ll leave just as satisfied.
Their second album, Toxicity, succeeded, improbably, in a radio environment that favored simplistic formulas. Max Martin had stamped popular music with his surefire songwriting brand, ushering in a cross-genre rush of structurally identical singles from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears. System of a Down competed with the bros of Nickelback, Creed, and Staind on the alternative charts, bands that dressed up the Martin school of pop with power chords and ham-throated vocals. Most of their songs took the form of the confessional: Men apologized to women and to God for their sins, which tended to include substance abuse, emotional neglect, and general chauvinism. Post-grunge incubated a strain of sincerity so obsequious that no amount of nostalgia has yet to rehabilitate it. It lives on as a punchline that itself has grown passé.
Even when System of a Down quoted the literal Bible, they managed to sidestep the blunt impact of grunge’s sickly dregs. Their lyrics tended toward the surreal, the humorous, and the abstract, and the hairpin turns of their compositions kept them from marinating too long in a single mood. Toxicity is heavy, making abundant use of the juiciest guitar distortion in its class thanks to the density of Rick Rubin’s production. But more importantly, the album is restless, bounding from one idea to another before the first can sink in. With such a nimble hand, System of a Down could smuggle radical politics into the headphones of bored kids drawn in by Tankian’s carnival-barker screams.
The album begins with a song that lucidly highlights the evil of the American for-profit prison system. “Minor drug offenders fill your prisons/You don’t even flinch/All our taxes paying for your wars/Against the new non-rich,” Tankian pronounces in a rapid sing-song cadence. He’s not joking but it sounds like a joke, which helps him ease into his more literal policy suggestions: “All research and successful drug policy shows that treatment should be increased/And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences,” he shouts repeatedly at the bridge to “Prison Song,” biting out every syllable of the last three words. Malakian screeches behind Tankian, punctuating his lines and lubricating their blank seriousness; radical abolitionist viewpoints go down easier when accompanied by visceral nu-metal grunts.
The tension between the state and its subjects plays out more dramatically on “Deer Dance,” where riot police shove their guns into the ribs of peaceful anti-capitalist protesters. “Pushing little children/With their fully automatics/They like to push the weak around,” Tankian chants at the chorus, calling to mind any number of images from the past 15 years: mass shootings at high schools or concerts, demonstrations turned violent at the hands of the cops. There’s a light, playful quality to his voice throughout the verse. He trills the “R” in the word “brutality” and swoops in and out of the melody. Then, at the chorus, Tankian snaps into a scream and Malakian grinds between two chords, squeezing all the space out of the arrangement. The verse is like watching a riot on TV, with commercials breaking up the violent footage. The chorus breaks the glass and transports you into the claustrophobic mayhem of the crowd.
System of a Down practice their politics knowing full well its material limitations. They’ve almost certainly directed a few inquiring minds to Howard Zinn and perhaps they’ve reframed the concepts of prison and policing for more than a handful of millennials. Redirecting attention and softening preconceptions are both forms of political work that music can do, but it can’t pass laws or free prisoners. It can only galvanize, and its effects are almost always invisible, subconscious, and slow. The awareness of music’s inherent failure as a political tool saturates Toxicity. It’s why Tankian twists his voice into a sneer when he sing-speaks, “We can’t afford to be neutral on a moving train.” He’s not a theorist, only playing at being one. It’s why, between “Prison Song” and “Deer Dance,” he breaks out a song whose chorus urges, “Pull the tapeworm out of your ass!”
These comic deflations balance the weight of Toxicity’s politics, though some of their humor pitches into the oppression they purport to resist. “Psycho,” sandwiched between the mournful title track and “Aerials,” cuts the mood with a sequence of complaints about, of all people, groupies. He skips the ritual fun and goes straight to rejecting the groupie for being “cocaine crazy,” an elision without improvement. That women only appear on Toxicity to play disposable nuisances (or, on “Bounce,” orgy fodder) makes “Psycho” a skippable extra at best, and at worst a perfect example of the left’s longstanding deficiency in gender politics. The patriarchy and the police state are one in the same, but System of a Down only strike at one face of the enemy while ostensibly shielding the other.
Though “Psycho” mars Toxicity’s tightly wound wit, it only emphasizes just how magnificent the album gets when it’s not distracting itself with petty sexism. The three singles from Toxicity—“Chop Suey!,” the title track, and “Aerials”—represent a break from its two predominant modes of deadly serious politicizing and patently absurd joke-cracking. These songs are weighty and helpless. In them lies the dead air that rises when all the problems have been named, and the naming brings you no closer to a solution. The picture is clear but the path forward remains obscured.
Tankian’s language breaks down on “Aerials.” He gestures toward a spiritual unity among humans: “We’re one in the river/And one again after the fall,” he sings, rendering all of life as the few seconds between the top and bottom of a waterfall. At the chorus, he stresses every syllable and lapses into barely legible syntax. “When you lose small mind/You free your life,” he urges, a sentence that hints at psychedelic enlightenment, escaping predispositions through biochemical intervention—free your mind, man. Except it’s not the mind that gets free: The mind falls away and the person who’s lost it rises away from needing it at all. This isn’t mind-expansion. It’s mind-sloughing. No wonder the grammar’s bad.
The weight of the instrumentation on “Aerials” captures a sense of exhaustion that spills over into Tankian’s delivery. Having wrestled through his share of abolitionist praxis and scatological humor, he falls, drained, to the reminder that the world still exists even after it’s been defined. These songs, where System of a Down shift away from agitprop and plunge into numbing despair, comprise Toxicity’s gleaming emotional core. It’s that rare artifact among commercially heavy music: a nu-metal band that gets tired, and funnels its fatigue into its most compelling performances. System of a Down let their motor run out. After firing everybody up, they offer solace for the spent.
The lyrics to the title track call to mind the serene, lonely image of a barren highway on a midwinter night. Tankian sings of “Flashlight reveries/Caught in the headlights of a truck” and “Looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub,” as in spinning, exhausted, disoriented. There’s a city in the chorus, and the mock Hollywood sign on the album’s cover suggests the song takes place in Los Angeles, a strange, dry place choked with smog and congested with traffic. Trees grow there, but they’re palm trees, which look the same in emoji or Lego as they do in real life. The song houses a world sick with technology, cars, and apartments and the scourge of software updates, and still, the speaker is “eating seeds as a pastime activity,” like a paleo-vegan cruising the shoreline in a Tesla. Toxicity came out the same year as David Lynch’s surrealist nightmare Mulholland Drive, and both works feel prescient 17 years later, as if both Lynch and System of a Down could see California (and the rest of the country) about to fall into disarray.
“Toxicity” ends on a new idea. It doesn’t trail off into the cold. Malakian plays a lunk-headed riff and Tankian repeats a new lyric: “When I became the sun/I shone life into the man’s hearts.” There’s the potential for a whole song packed into those quick measures—earlier in the track, he sings the word “disorder” for longer than he takes to sing that entire couplet. It’s a big idea rendered in fragments: man becomes sun, sun enlightens man. Why end there? “Toxicity” snaps off, leaving silence. Tankian speaks in the past tense, like he’s already illuminated humanity, as if his work were done. He points to that distant, abstract image of life without suffering, and then he falls back into disorder. | 2018-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | American Recordings | November 11, 2018 | 8.2 | 2f0ff331-a14c-4602-98f9-3b184a75d7ab | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
These are some of the biggest, strongest songs that Baroness has written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best. | These are some of the biggest, strongest songs that Baroness has written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best. | Baroness: Purple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21179-purple/ | Purple | It's been almost four years since Baroness’ last record, 2012’s Yellow & Green. That 18-song, 75-minute double album found the onetime sludge group making calmer, more melodic rock music, and seemed to presage a crossover. There was energy around the band, a palpable sense of momentum. But a month or so after the release of the record, Baroness got into a bus crash while on tour in England. It was a serious accident, a slide off the road, that stalled the Yellow & Green roll-out and almost ended the band. It was jarring enough that drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni, who both suffered fractured vertebrae, ended up leaving the group.
There was emotional and psychological healing, as well as bones that had to be reset: A photo of the banged-up band surfaced and frontman and visual artist (and the group's poet and beating heart) John Baizley said he was close to having his arm amputated. But he healed, as did longtime guitarist Peter Adams. After the accident, Baizley wrote an amazing letter reaffirming his commitment to Baroness and music and art in general before he and Adams went on tour with new members, bassist/keyboardist Nick Jost and drummer Sebastian Thomson. Their shows after the accident were powerful—even the calmer Yellow & Green songs had a magnetic, life-affirming force.
Shortly before Y&G's release, before the accident, I interviewed Baizley. He told me he wanted Yellow & Green’s cover art, like the songs themselves, to reflect the feeling of the moment before or after a disaster. It’s eerie rereading his words now: "A lot of what I tackled lyrically or conceptually with [Y&G] is present on first glance but has... this implication of horror, or 'this is the moment before a car crash,' or the moment after a car crash. It seemed a little bit more engaging and interesting to me to consider those moments before, those moments after, rather than the ease and bluntness that comes with graphic violence or obvious, terrifying things." In a very real-life way, Purple, their first studio album since the accident, has ended up doing this, too.
Purple is the color of fresh bruises. It's also the combination of Red and Blue, which makes sense musically for those familiar with the group's albums of those names. These are some of the biggest, strongest songs Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best. It also marks a number of firsts for the band. They're releasing it themselves on their new Abraxan Hymns imprint, and instead of recording with John Congleton, who produced the last couple of albums, they worked with Dave Fridmann, best known for his longtime collaboration with Flaming Lips (and you'll notice a larger presence of psychedelic keyboards throughout). It's also the first album to feature the new lineup, the same group as that first tour after the accident, and at this point they play together like longtime vets.
It’s shorter and more precise than Yellow & Green, with 10 songs in 43 minutes. The opener "Morningstar" rips into the thoughtful synths of "Shock Me", before that song, too, starts to burn. "Shock Me"'s an elegant song about being shocked into a new reality, about bad dreams coming true, about going into battle without proper preparation. On one level it feels like a song about the struggle and battle of day-to-day living, but this isn't dour or sad music: In fact, Baizley sounds thankful for the clearer, sharper vision personal tragedy's afforded him.
Songs like "Kerosene" and "Desperation Burns" nod to heat or flames, as do many of the lyrics. There are also lyrics about breathing and disappearing, doctors and spines and pills and death. The excellent, epic first single "Chlorine & Wine", features a harmonizing breakdown after a gentler piano bridge that seems to signal survival. In it, the entire band sings (or, shouts really): "Please don't lay me down/ Under the rocks where I found/ My place in the ground/ A home for the fathers and sons." These feel like war stories, or more aptly, stories from some people who feel ecstatic to be alive.
Baizley likes to tell stories through his cover art as well. On the sleeve of Purple, four women huddle together in what looks like the cold, with calm dogs and falcons by their sides. There are some mice (food for the birds) and nails (tools for building). There's a full moon, too, as well as blooming flowers and bees and berries and honey (the promise of Spring). The picture, which seems to be referenced in the lyrics to "Morningstar", communicates the hardiness of spirit it takes to live through tougher times and emerge hopeful. It's easy enough to see the four band members reflected in these four women. Here they are, alive and astonished, and here is this record. | 2015-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Abraxan Hymns | December 10, 2015 | 8.5 | 2f11221e-d3e3-4ea7-a06f-240bf3bbaa97 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The New Jersey rapper and singer’s full-length debut is wide-ranging and unfocused—but it never lacks for energy. | The New Jersey rapper and singer’s full-length debut is wide-ranging and unfocused—but it never lacks for energy. | Coi Leray: Trendsetter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coi-leray-trendsetter/ | Trendsetter | It took Coi Leray a decade to figure out who she wanted to be. At 14, she released her first two songs, “Bow Down” and “Rock Back,” on a YouTube page belonging to her father, former rap media mogul Benzino. Both songs aped the rigid pop-rap aesthetics of hits like Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” and Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” and when Leray returned with 2018’s “G.A.N,” it was a stark rebrand: Her voice, high-pitched and athletic, leaned heavily on melody—in the vein of a then-rising generation of SoundCloud stars—and kiss-offs to trifling men. It wasn’t exactly unique, but as she began dropping singles and EPs and became a fixture on social media, her plucky energy became harder to deny.
Leray’s biggest looks yet came last year when her singles “No More Parties” (with Lil Durk) and “Big Purr” (with Pooh Shiesty) exploded online. Their success felt like vindication after years of growing pains, industry skepticism, and Leray’s increasingly rocky relationship with her father. On “Hollywood Dreams,” the opening song of her full-length debut, Trendsetter, she addresses her haters directly: “It’s funny how they sit back behind they computers/And be so quick.” The song is a moment of reflection, a balance of drinking the pain away and summoning the courage to face her insecurities. Paranoia and anxiety are relatively new feelings in Coi Leray’s music, and they frequently clash with her otherwise boisterous and unfazed personality. Leray isn’t exactly subtle—song titles include “Paranoia” and “Anxiety”—and her bluntness is both a blessing and a curse, depending on what type of song she’s aiming to make.
Across 20 tracks, Leray tries out several trendy sounds: Sad Guitar Rap (“Heart in a Coffin,” “Mustard’s Interlude”); the Moody New York Anthem (“Mountains”); the Plucky Pop Hit (“TWINNEM”); the obligatory stab at an Afrobeats Crossover (“Aye Yai Ya”). She never lacks for energy, but her double act of brash bruiser raps and melodic honesty fits better against some sounds than others. Her staccato croons don’t gel on the G Herbo-assisted “Thief in the Night,” but her straightforward raps fare better over the Chicago drill of solo cut “Box & Papers.” Sometimes, like on “Heartbreak Kid” and the first half of “Anxiety,” she channels Death Race for Love-era Juice WRLD. It can feel like an auditory dressing room, unworthy styles hitting the floor or the return rack.
There are a handful of moments where Leray lands on a style that fits. Out of all the album’s guests, she works best with the ones who came up during the SoundCloud era, whose smooth cadences she’s clearly studied. On “Clingy,” a scorned-lover ballad featuring the Canadian rapper Nav, Leray switches between singing and rapping with ease over a minimal jingle and crisp 808. Her sing-song fits neatly over the colorful synths of “Mission Impossible” and the silky piano of “No More Parties,” mixing well with vocals from Lils Tecca and Durk, respectively. She doesn’t sound like an opportunist searching for her next hit: The appeal is natural.
One of the album’s most impressive feats comes on the second verse of “Anxiety,” after the sprightly hook, when Leray kicks herself into triple-time to keep pace with the hectic beat: “Yeah, you tried to break me/I could never let it faze me/I gotta learn to embrace it/Won’t let it change me, even when life get crazy.” Her flow sounds inherent, unforced, and confident. As a whole, Trendsetter is too wide-ranging and unfocused to scan as the proper debut she aspires for it to be. But when she does lock in, her mission couldn’t be clearer. | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | April 13, 2022 | 6.1 | 2f160073-1a26-44bb-bf34-62fc1179b3aa | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
After its surprising, quietly effective debut, If Children, Merge band returns with a new set of gorgeous songs. | After its surprising, quietly effective debut, If Children, Merge band returns with a new set of gorgeous songs. | Wye Oak: The Knot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13219-the-knot/ | The Knot | Wye Oak's debut, If Children, was a small, surprising record. Surprising because it was the sound of two kids, barely 21, playing earnest, noisy folk-rock that ignored nearly every trend in indie music; surprising because it came out of Baltimore, a city whose indie scene-- lead by Dan Deacon and bands like Ponytail-- is publicized for its spasm and flash. Surprising because of the sympathy in Jenn Wasner's lyrics. Most of the songs on the album were about age and domesticity, and most of the time it was impossible to gauge how old or domestic the band was. The character of Wasner's voice flickered between baby bunny and bitter wife, and swelling, muscular moments in the music were as confidently handled as the quiet ones.
If it's not obvious that I sincerely love the band Wye Oak (and not for sentimental reasons), let me clarify that I do-- and so it's with bit lip and heavy heart that I report on The Knot. The record doesn't feel as varied or agile as If Children did-- which is too bad only because If Children proved they could make a varied, agile record. Songs rarely pick up from a crawl. Sustained guitar chords fan out and crush whatever momentum the band gets going. The bursts of distortion that colored If Children are almost pornographically expanded.
It's also about as close to objectively gorgeous music as I can imagine. Drummer Andy Stack's arrangements are integral and imaginative: The big string-section harmonies on "I Want For Nothing" practically pry the song open; the unrepentantly rock climax of "For Prayer" washes away on the mercurial sound of slide guitars. But dirges like "Mary Is Mary" and "Slight, Flight" end up serving as measuring sticks for how much pretty is too much pretty-- for me, it's about five minutes. If not five, definitely seven and a half.
Wasner's voice has become more expressive, something I'd noticed during live performances of songs from If Children. There's probably more than one good way to sing the lines, "Do you never ask because you know I'll say/ You're the only one?"-- "but you're not the only one," but damn if they don't feel like anvils when she drops them.
I mention all their achievements because I feel like Wye Oak is still a young band, still growing, still singular. When I met Jenn and Andy last April, we talked briefly about the reviews for If Children-- one of which I wrote for this site. Jenn said that the numbers didn't matter to them at the moment, and surprisingly, it looked like she meant it. "The way I see it," she said, "we're going to be doing this for a long time." Here's hoping. | 2009-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 21, 2009 | 5.9 | 2f206d40-dbbc-4506-89d3-f16fdaf0f2db | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Reprise revisits the Bay Area punk band’s pre-Dookie, get-in-the-van days with reissues of its two Lookout! albums. | Reprise revisits the Bay Area punk band’s pre-Dookie, get-in-the-van days with reissues of its two Lookout! albums. | Green Day: 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours/Kerplunk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11896-1039smoothed-out-slappy-hourskerplunk/ | 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours/Kerplunk | Like most reissues from former get-in-the-van types who went on to interplanetary success, it’s weird hearing these records cursed with the knowledge of Billie Joe Armstrong’s future-present as America’s anti-Republican youth ambassador for colorfast eyeliner. But each Green Day album has found the trio slowly growing up, even if until American Idiot all that meant was accordion and ripping off the Kinks. We can chalk up the half-assed politicking and the downer vibe of stinkers like “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to the depressing madness of the 2004 election. (We Americans all went a little nutty that year.) But a character-driven concept album was probably your typical aging rock star inevitability.
So what makes these moldy oldies either charming or frustrating (or both) is your opinion on where Green Day has wound up. When they hit the mainstream in 1994, the band’s too-slothful-to-wank ’tude initially landed them in detention with the rest of the era’s slack motherfuckers. But until the full horror of the coming wave of obnoxiously peppy Goldfingers and Suicide Machines and fourth-wave ska crashed down on us, Green Day were a godsend. And if you were 16 and a budding music nerd, you looked back in the wake of their success and discovered that throughout the 1980s California pop-punk had been speaking your secret language all along, rough and tumble and hooky enough to offset the fact that not every indie rock band kept things as speedy as Superchunk.
1989’s 1,000 Hours EP was recorded when the band was a baby-fattened 16 years of age, and Green Day debuted its three platonic songs: fast and punky, wistful and mid-tempo, and throwaway jokey. Their songs were almost entirely about girls—mostly about how hard they are to get or keep—an honorable pop-punk tradition. But compared to the locker-room explicit sex chat of mod pop-punkers like Say Anything—whose singer Max Bemis can somehow drain all the fun out of phone-sexing your significant other—the lyrics are never gross or grossly sexist, the quality that rightfully makes so many haters screw up their noses in 2007. (What can you do? You can say “balls” on TV now, apparently.) People beefed that BJ’s vocals were biting the Brits, which is debatable. They also continue to gripe that his puppy yelps spawned a million adenoidal pop-emo bands, and sadly that’s a lot harder to argue with.
1,000 Hours, 1990’s Slappy EP, and 1991’s 39/Smooth LP were bundled together on CD as (duh) 1991’s 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. It’s raw stuff, but even at this point Green Day’s records were at least halfway decently recorded, unlike most of their peers’ tin-can-and-twine set-ups. And songs like “At the Library” were downright hummable, always important when you’re trying to make pop music—especially out of only a few chords in a formally restrictive setting. Of course, on a label that at the time included household names Plaid Retina and Sewer Trout, early Green Day were bound to shine, but if they had broken up after 1,039, they’d be remembered—if at all—as perhaps the slightly less emo cousin to early Jawbreaker, or maybe the musically less accomplished Crimpshrine.
Every post-facto review of 1992’s Kerplunk mentions that it’s what got the band eventually signed to a major, and it’s not hard to hear why: Producer Rob Cavallo breaking out the compressors may have helped Dookie become a hit, but the songwriting was pretty much already there. As with many of the best punk records, the bass is often pushed up higher in the mix than the guitar, and here Mike Dirnt has begun to perfect those pop-punk walking b-lines that, slowed down on “Longview,” would become the band’s great hook-machine. The group also realized that, if you slow down on the bridge and strip things back to just Dirnt and new drummer Tré Cool, it makes the push of the final chorus that much more exciting. There are fewer jokey throwaways, like barely-a-gag teenage S&M country-swing of “Dominated Love Slave,” and tunes like “Christie Road” slow things down without spilling over into the band’s later, occasionally mawkish ballad territory. All in all, it’s a magnitude better than its predecessor and only a hair behind the follow up.
It’s weird to think that, in the immediate aftermath of Dookie, Green Day’s success was perceived as some kind of a threat. Former compatriots took swipes in songs and I remember many a zine rant by friends in bands that sounded quite a bit like Green Day. Hard to imagine such ire now that Billie Joe hobnobs with humanitarian aid folks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and keeps major label execs from losing their jobs while Jermaine Dupri gets shit-canned ’cause Janet Jackson no longer goes platinum. If these records aren’t quite as listenable as the band’s major label-era greatest hits collection, the scrappy tunes and fresh-faced songwriting naïveté—which by accident or design lack that arched brow and knowing wink that sink so many modern pop-punk bands—at least help you forget that these formerly lazy goofs have turned messianic on us. | 2007-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 19, 2007 | 8.5 | 2f240922-e662-46e2-a782-ea40411b0cc3 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | |
Though Joan Shelley is a folk traditionalist, she's spent her career playing with its form. On Over and Even, her third and best album, she returns to something closer to her origins to make as compelling a record as that genre has seen. | Though Joan Shelley is a folk traditionalist, she's spent her career playing with its form. On Over and Even, her third and best album, she returns to something closer to her origins to make as compelling a record as that genre has seen. | Joan Shelley: Over and Even | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20930-over-and-even/ | Over and Even | During the final verse of "Over and Even", Joan Shelley discovers the ceiling of her evocative voice and dares to test it. The title track of the Kentucky singer-songwriter’s beguiling third album, "Over and Even" is a gentle canter. Cymbals splash idly against a steady electric guitar, and a banjo babbles in the distance, as though it soon hopes to join Shelley’s fireside chat. The song itself, though, is an anxious number, where images of domestic bliss disintegrate into feelings of longing. At first, Shelley offers scenes of nesting bliss in her warm contralto—smoldering embers and full cups of coffee, handwritten letters and thoughts of friends. But during every other verse, her voice becomes a thin and nervous soprano, as if she’s barely able to utter her own words. With the song's last words, she admits to an abiding loneliness: "I miss your scent and sight," she sings, her voice about to break. "How can I write this?"
Shelley weaves that feeling of vulnerability throughout the dozen songs of Over and Even, an album that is alternately more confessional and prismatic than her previous output—and better for it. Shelley comes from an American folk background, with a history singing songs endemic to her rural region. She records, for instance, with Maiden Radio, a trio that works through standards with traditional instruments and commingled country voices. While her earliest solo records spoke to that pedigree, last year’s Electric Ursa took bona fide compositional risks. "Something Small", for instance, grew like a post-rock phoenix, while "Remedios" suggested a lullaby bound forever in hypnagogia. She embraced elliptical songwriting, too, webbing together evocative phrases to suggest a story more than share it. If Electric Ursa began with a folk core, it ended with folk in fragments.
On Over and Even, however, Shelley returns to her roots without fully retreating beneath them. Accompanied by fingerstyle guitarist and musical archivist Nathan Salsburg, she favors a refined simplicity. "My Only Trouble" is a duet for strummed-and-picked acoustic guitars and her leaping-and-diving voice, while "Easy Now" is a big-chord ballad, where reassuring piano lines offer support behind lithe, bluegrass-like runs. Even the more fully produced numbers, like the organ-lined and electric "Ariadne’s Gone" or the Will Oldham-backed beauty "Stay on My Shore", seem only to dress up simple structures, to cast them in a full studio glow.
The lyrics follow suit, too, with Shelley letting listeners in as she previously didn’t—hence, the hint of unease that ends "Over and Even". "My Only Trouble", for instance, is sensual but bothered, with confessions of intimacy chased by admissions of worry. Likewise, "Stay on My Shore" betrays a human neediness that Shelley might have once clouded or cloaked. As Oldham chases her through the verses, their musical push-and-pull reinforces the give-and-take of any good relationship or, as they sing with their last shared breath, "the pages of our story." That clear lifetime theme returns during the gentle "Not Over by Half". Meant both as a mournful dirge and an anthem of expectations, the song positions a death as a reminder that everyone else still has the chance to live. "Here on the mountain I’m thinking of you," Shelley sings in one of her most vivid bits of writing yet. "The birds are all singing, screaming of youth." She keeps the listener almost as close as the subject.
This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish. Shelley started with folk and then pushed away from it, to Electric Ursa’s spectral and soft version of roots-rock. But now in the middle, where the songs are direct but bent just so, she’s more compelling than she’s ever been. | 2015-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | September 14, 2015 | 7.8 | 2f24234e-d2c0-4a04-9037-dafba90004b9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
null | I couldn't have given a shit about the Lemonheads in 1992, when I was a freshman in college and all the upperclass women were swooning over Evan Dando. For me, his pin-up status de-authenticated his music, which seemed mopey and unsubstantial. He sounded detached, like a stoner at a funeral, and the songs on the Lemonheads' break-out album, *It's a Shame About Ray*, were so short (several under two minutes) and the hooks so nonchalant they sounded accidental, all of which suggested a paucity of ideas and a short attention span reinforced by song titles like "Rudderless" and "My Drug | The Lemonheads: It's a Shame About Ray [Collector's Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11324-its-a-shame-about-ray-collectors-edition/ | It's a Shame About Ray [Collector's Edition] | I couldn't have given a shit about the Lemonheads in 1992, when I was a freshman in college and all the upperclass women were swooning over Evan Dando. For me, his pin-up status de-authenticated his music, which seemed mopey and unsubstantial. He sounded detached, like a stoner at a funeral, and the songs on the Lemonheads' break-out album, It's a Shame About Ray, were so short (several under two minutes) and the hooks so nonchalant they sounded accidental, all of which suggested a paucity of ideas and a short attention span reinforced by song titles like "Rudderless" and "My Drug Buddy".
So, when Rhino's new reissue arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I put it in my early 90s boombox out of pure nostalgia, mildly curious to hear how or if it had aged. Since then, I've kept playing it for very different reasons, which are more difficult to pinpoint and hopefully say as much about the music as they do about me. Almost 16 years after its initial release, Dando's slacker pop sounds almost Zen. Those short songs now seem concise and even disciplined. What was once mopey now plays as something much more complex and contradictory: exuberant pop melancholy.
Some background: The Lemonheads formed in Boston during the mid-1980s and released three albums of fuzzy punk-pop on local label Taang! Records before signing to Atlantic in 1989. Their 1990 major-label debut, Lovey, wasn't a huge return on the investment, but in the two-year interval between that album and Ray, Nirvana and the ensuing alternative boom proved that smaller bands and unlikely signings could have enormous commercial prospects. The Lemonheads both benefited and suffered from this new pop cultural climate: Just as Ray found a more open-minded audience, it was also disregarded by so many kids like me, who were suddenly very serious about music, man, and saw only Dando's model looks, not his songcraft. Never mind that Ray is as much a junkie album as Nevermind, written and partly recorded during a particularly narcotic-heavy trip to Australia. No wonder Dando was a pin-up: He was handsome but damaged, a fixer-upper. If he was the Jordan Catalano before Jared Leto, then the do-they-or-don't-they controversy between him and roommate/bassist/kissing partner/self-professed virgin Juliana Hatfield made them the Ross and Rachel of the "120 Minutes" set.
Now that all of that hubbub has died down and Dando is just another alt-act trying to make a comeback, Ray sounds nearly revelatory in its restlessness, mixing college pop with country flair and relocating Gus Van Sant's Portland atmosphere to New England. The most beguiling aspect of the title track, one of Dando's best compositions, is its impenetrability: It could be about anyone or pertain to almost any bad situation, and that ambiguity suggests some tragedy that can't be named or faced. "The Turnpike Down" descends on a tripping hook that sounds altogether too bubbly for the material, while "Alison's Starting to Happen", inspired by a friend's ecstasy trip, sounds genuinely excited, especially when Dando starts rushing his words towards the end. "Kitchen", with its handclaps and effervescent jangle, rubs elbows with the tense chords and casually manic repetitions of "Rudderless", where the acoustic guitar sounds spikier than the electric. And the bow on the package is the not-necessarily-ironic cover of "Frank Mills", a song from the musical Hair that Dando sings with a charmingly goofy bliss.
This is, of course, a reissue of a reissue: Less than a year after its initial release, Ray was re-released with that cover of "Mrs. Robinson" as a bonus track. It was more of a marketing than a musical decision, some suit's confounding idea to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Graduate. So, take a red fine-point Sharpie and write "(bonus track)" next to that song title, and pretend it's a curious rarity rather than the lame album closer it became. The song is more endearing as a lead-in to Rhino's unearthed bonus tracks, which sound like they've still got dust on them. Aside from the B-side "Shaky Ground", which doesn't need the full-band treatment to convey its slept-on melody, there are nine rough demo versions featuring mainly Dando accompanying himself on guitar. That's three-quarters of the album, which isn't bad.
There's also a DVD of videos and live performances from the Lemonheads' Australian tour, showcasing the circle of friends who inspired the album as well as a dated title-track clip starring Johnny Depp. But the real attraction here is that set of demos: Dando's songs stand up exceptionally well stripped to their barest essentials, especially "My Drug Buddy" and "Bit Part", which loses Peggy Noonan's shouted intro but features tender backing vocals from Hatfield. Ultimately, these demos prove how much craft and care went into the album's unique blend of levity and gravity, which sounds so unaffected it could easily be missed. | 2008-03-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Rhino | March 28, 2008 | 8.4 | 2f290c4f-8e24-4312-8283-54c8036847ed | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On her latest album, Copenhagen noise artist Frederike Hoffmeier has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far. Persona offers disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date. | On her latest album, Copenhagen noise artist Frederike Hoffmeier has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far. Persona offers disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date. | Puce Mary: Persona | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19606-puce-mary-persona/ | Persona | Take a brief listen to any of the dusky tunes that Frederikke Hoffmeier has released as Puce Mary, and a startlingly bleak picture begins to form. Grating percussive scraping and nail-on-chalkboard vocalizations dominate her creeping compositions, even as her instrumental work runs the gamut from deafening drones to clattering industrial drum beats. It's a bitter and icy collection of short form pieces and collaborations when taken as a single entity, but her first LP Success didn't provide a compelling full-length exploration of that tenebrosity. With Persona, her new record for Posh Isolation, she's finally figured out how to present her strain of nauseating noise as a totemic, engaging whole.
Just as friends and fellow members of Copenhagen's underground music scene like Lust for Youth, Lower, and Iceage continue to flirt with slicker production and pop structures on recent releases, Hoffmeier too has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far. But rather than abandon the project's characteristic abstraction and abrasiveness, Hoffmeier uses Persona to diversify the moods that Puce Mary covers, offering disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date.
"Courses" relies on a blown out kick drum and the shrill trill of Hoffmeier's distorted vocals to offer a ferocious red herring to kick off the record. The outright terror and lurching subversions of industrial genre tropes rank it among the best in the mode that she's worked in most frequently. But where other noise records would offer little variations on that track's unhinged theme, Hoffmeier chooses to stagger in completely different directions for the rest of the record's six tracks, offering stark ambient pieces ("The Viewer"), squalling, sprawling noise jams ("Persona"), and the slow drone of the codeine-slurred "Gesture".
It's a daring move to expand the project's thematic focus so drastically, and though it sticks the landing on the tracks that retain ties to the all-encompassing darkness Hoffmeier knows so well, Persona offers a handful of missteps too. Two of the album's longer pieces, "The Viewer" and "Impure Fantasy", rely a bit too heavily on vocal melodrama to underscore their sweeping instrumentals. In the former, Hoffmeier unleashes a string of phlegm-y coughs to punctuate a gradual synthesizer swell; the latter features distant sounds of spitting and rattling chains underpinning what would otherwise be a compelling spoken-word exploration of empowered sexuality. In each of these cases, a flair for theatricality undercuts tracks that were already unsettling enough on their own. But in taking the risks that spawned those blunders, Hoffmeier has managed to create a varied and rewarding record that's uniform in its gloominess. | 2014-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Posh Isolation | July 31, 2014 | 6.7 | 2f295150-b951-4f94-904b-57df43c6a7ca | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Miami underground-metal trio follow-up 2008's excellent Meanderthal with this stopgap eight-song release that has an intense focus on brevity. | Miami underground-metal trio follow-up 2008's excellent Meanderthal with this stopgap eight-song release that has an intense focus on brevity. | Torche: Songs for Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14612-songs-for-singles/ | Songs for Singles | There should be more bands like Torche. The Miami trio sits near the top of the underground-metal heap, but they're also the rare underground-metal band happy to come off as regular dudes rather than medieval warriors or swamp monsters. They churn out fuzz-rock bangers with mechanistic precision, never betraying any signs of pretension or mystique. Since the departure of guitarist Juan Montoya, they're an entirely short-haired band, and frontman Steve Brooks sings in a beer-belly bellow, not an elemental rasp. The band take as many cues from ragged 1990s indie as they do from bongwater-dripping 70s crunch-rock, and you can hear echos of Guided By Voices and Superchunk reverberating around in there. They never sacrifice melody for volume, or vice versa-- and somehow, that quality makes them exceptional.
Two years ago, the band came out hard with Meanderthal, which the metal mag Decibel called their album of the year while admitting that it sometimes sounds like the Foo Fighters. On Songs for Singles, their new eight-song EP, there's nothing that leaves as deep an impression as some of the best Meanderthal moments. Instead there's an intense focus on brevity, as the first six songs stick as tightly as possible to a very basic formula, sort of like the Ramones did. These songs never get far beyond the two-minute mark. The band plays with heads down, never taking time for solos or anything that registers as a chorus. If you're not paying much attention, the tracks bleed into one another and feel like one long rush of effects-pedal rumble and chunky riffage.
Nothing during these first few songs is all that memorable, but it's always impressive that they're able to work up such furious grooves in such confined spaces, hardly even altering the tempos. This is fun, assured heavy rock, and it gets the job done. But the last two tracks-- the ones where Torche give themselves room to stretch out-- are where Songs for Singles really takes off. "Face the Wall" and "Out Again" are still very much wheelhouse songs for this band, but they slow down their attack noticeably, letting space and dynamics creep [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| into the guitar-storm. "Out Again" is six minutes of relentless pounding, and the band spends its back half abandoning the song-form stuff completely and just vamping hard. It sounds awesome.
With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine. | 2010-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Hydra Head | September 16, 2010 | 7.4 | 2f33d022-4509-4c7b-9e96-ac4b122c8df5 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
On his second album for Barcelona’s Lapsus Records, the Tbilisi producer brings a rhapsodic melodic sensibility to rhythms that pay tribute to the golden era of IDM. | On his second album for Barcelona’s Lapsus Records, the Tbilisi producer brings a rhapsodic melodic sensibility to rhythms that pay tribute to the golden era of IDM. | Gacha Bakradze: Obscure Languages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gacha-bakradze-obscure-languages/ | Obscure Languages | If you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, then Georgian producer Gacha Bakradze is conflicted indeed. Since debuting in 2012 on Apollo Records, the ambient subdivision of electronic giant R&S, he has recorded for Fort Romeau’s club-oriented Cin Cin and Barcelona experimental label Lapsus but also Anjunadeep, an imprint run by progressive trance overlords Above & Beyond—a slightly scattered state of affairs that has placed his work in Jody Wisternoff’s progressive dance mixes and Cafe Del Mar’s opulent chill-out compendiums along with compilations from John Talabot’s Hivern label.
What doubtlessly attracts both sides of the electronic spectrum is Bakradze’s clean sense of melody. The nine songs on Obscure Languages, his second album for Lapsus, sparkle with pristine refrains, their cobalt-wash surfaces capable of withstanding great repurposing; stylistically speaking, they’re at home in all sorts of contexts. “Indivisible” opens the album with a gorgeously dreamy melody, reminiscent of a gentle summer breeze, that provides the through line as the song accelerates from beatless indolence into a chattering electro rhythm. “Frame” uses vast synth washes to break up IDM beats and acidic machine babble, like early-’90s Autechre arriving at the pearly gates. Obscure Languages is so utterly untroubled by dirt, in fact, that when a jungle-ish breakbeat turns up on “Thank You for This Upload” it sounds box fresh and possibly a little sterile, however clever its subtleties of tone.
While Bakradze’s previous album for Lapsus, 2018’s Word Color, experimented with micro samples in a way that suggested the future was more than just a date on the calendar, Obscure Languages is unashamedly retro, calling back to the glory days of the early ’90s, when Warp codified the idea of “electronic listening music” on the way to IDM. Obscure Languages is to Black Dog Productions’ Bytes—the third album in Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series—what Oasis’ Definitely Maybe is to the Beatles’ Revolver: an enjoyable throwback that benefits from three decades of advances in musical technology to loom over its predecessor like a muscleman before a nerd at a 1960s beach party. The sub-bass alone on “Endless Tone” is a resounding tribute to hi-def audio processing, a sound so deliciously corporeal you want to wrap yourself in its arms as the nights get colder.
This is the essential trade-off on Obscure Languages. The sound design and immaculate tones that attract progressive trancers and chill-out czars are more notable here than radical ideas or stylistic novelty. Then again, electronic music has long had a nostalgic streak, and Obscure Languages does the retro-IDM shuffle with style, finesse, and an ear for melody that speaks to Bakradze’s long history with the guitar. Album closer “Slow Heart,” for example, has strong Durutti Column vibes in its ornate guitar figures. Bakradze’s music is frequently called cinematic for its epic scope and attention to sound design. In that sense, Obscure Languages is a new Star Wars film to Autechre’s recent art-house opuses: a familiar pleasure that brings comfort if not enlightenment.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Lapsus | February 3, 2021 | 6.8 | 2f35638f-bd6b-467c-aa1b-a9c37da5a7c6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
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 Cure’s commercial peak in 1992, a pivotal, fantastic, and often overlooked album in the band’s catalog. | 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 Cure’s commercial peak in 1992, a pivotal, fantastic, and often overlooked album in the band’s catalog. | The Cure: Wish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cure-wish/ | Wish | Wish is what happens when a daring, visionary rock band starts slowing down; when the album-a-year pace and artistic reinventions pause to let the world catch up; when they reach a peak in popularity but start losing steam as a creative unit in the studio. While touring the album in 1992, the Cure played sold-out stadiums around the world, sounding stronger than ever, and most of the band quit afterward. They found an enduring hit with “Friday I’m in Love,” and a good portion of their fanbase felt slightly queasy about it. They were selling records and charting like never before, and critics began turning their attention to hipper, younger acts.
Granted, plenty of those bands were citing the Cure as an inspiration. From shoegaze to Britpop, alt-rock to post-rock, many of the prominent strains of music in the ’90s pulled from some corner of the Cure’s vast catalog, whether it was the tightly crafted post-punk of 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys or the ghostly sketches of 1981’s Faith, the devilish art-pop of 1985’s The Head on the Door or the immersive world-building of 1989’s Disintegration. Any one song from these records has enough character, vision, and atmosphere to spawn the careers of five entirely new bands.
On Wish, the Cure were beginning to assume the role of a legacy band—more important for what they had done than what they were currently doing—but they still had plenty of peers. Like R.E.M. on Monster, they cranked up the guitars to fit in with the current crop of radio rock; like Depeche Mode on Songs of Faith and Devotion, they ditched some of their signature synths in pursuit of a raw, live-band sound, complete with feedback and amplifier noise; like U2 on Achtung Baby, they took pleasure in challenging expectations, which meant balancing their totems of depression with gestures toward unfettered joy. In “Doing the Unstuck,” Robert Smith closes each verse with an uncharacteristic instruction: “Let’s get happy!”
Unlike those records, Wish is not remembered as a left turn or experiment, neither the start of a bold new phase nor an unsung dark-horse favorite. Instead, Wish is a solid record that sometimes gets overlooked due to the remarkable records preceding it and the largely disappointing work that followed. This humble reputation was aided by the music’s organic, communal genesis: It arrived in a rare moment of peace. Compared to previous career highs, the sessions were smooth and productive, even idyllic. With longtime producer David M. Allen, the quintet recorded in the stately Manor Studio in the English countryside, where they lived together and plastered the walls with cartoons and poetry.
As the sessions proceeded, there were no rumors that this would be the Cure’s final album, no dangerous drug use or health scares, no interpersonal conflicts to seep into the lyrics. Smith, who had gotten married to his high school sweetheart Mary Poole just a few years earlier, turned 33 on the day Wish was released, April 21, 1992. In the preceding months, the most scandalous news story to emerge in the UK tabloids was that Smith—whose severe employment of backcombing and Aqua Net had recently inspired the film Edward Scissorhands—had actually gotten a haircut.
If there is a quality that distinguishes Wish from the rest of their catalog, it’s the dense, buzzing sound—the work of five people in a studio, as opposed to one person’s vision brought painfully to life. An immediate side effect was a creative process that tended to drift all over the place. First, it was going to be a pair of albums: one titled Higher and an atmospheric companion called Music for Dreams. Then it was going to be called Swell. On the cover, you will find a prominent drawing meant to depict a song called “The Big Hand,” an early favorite during the sessions that was cut from the tracklist. These might seem like minor footnotes, but for a band whose leader conceived his work with a monomaniacal focus, they represented a proud embrace of directionlessness.
While it scattered the vision for the record, the full-band approach led to some fantastic performances. Bassist Simon Gallup is irreplaceable, adding latent hooks to even the most abstract moments, a melodic undercurrent that connects singles like “High” to gothy throwbacks like “Trust.” Drummer Boris Williams performs with arena energy, making their ongoing ascent feel inevitable. Weaving between the rhythm section, you can hear guitarists Pearl Thompson—whose electric, mythical leads would soon result in a gig accompanying Jimmy Page and Robert Plant—and Perry Bamonte, a one-time roadie who added a burst of levity to their dynamic. There are records by the Cure that feel like full-body experiences—music that asks you to step inside in order to fully enjoy—but Wish glides, floats, goes with the flow.
It’s not like Smith lost his edge—and to prove it, he paraphrases Sylvia Plath in the very first song. But listen closely, and note what is bringing him down. “Open” seems to be narrated by the saddest attendee of some industry party, the kind of grim, obligatory event that requires massive amounts of alcohol to get through the night: “The hands all on my shoulders don’t have names/And they won’t go away,” Smith sings to Williams’ pounding drums, antagonized by dull conversations and fake smiles. These are not the laments of a hopeless young romantic, grasping for love and meaning in a loveless, meaningless world, but rather the private anxieties of someone who lived long enough to see his dreams come true—and realized they didn’t solve anything.
Smith finds a contrasting setting in the closing “End,” which seems to address the conflicted thoughts of a beloved artist performing to his audience: “I think I’ve reached that point/Where giving up and going on/Are both the same dead end to me/Are both the same old song.” To make matters even clearer, the chorus goes as follows, repeated over and over again like a tantrum: “Please stop loving me/I am none of these things.” In interviews, he described these words—the first he wrote for the record—as a message to himself, a reminder not to fall into the trappings of ego and delusion: “It might seem like it’s quite late in the day for it to all go to my head, since we’ve been going so long,” he explained with typical self-deprecation, “but the success has reached the kind of magnitude where it’s insistent and insidious.”
I imagine most people who play dark, artsy music for long enough will notice a particular show when the audience seems different—a little bigger, maybe a little more distant, maybe no longer wearing entirely black. Smith always took pleasure in writing pop songs as a kind of gateway—“That was always our intention,” he said, “to draw people in and then smother them”—and often, his romantic songs like “Just Like Heaven” and “Lovesong” helped set the stakes for the gloomier material around them. In the lyrics of “Friday I’m in Love,” the Cure’s giddiest single, he condenses this idea to an existential quandary: Can just one day of bliss justify all the surrounding pain and monotony? The chorus offers an answer, and the classic, chiming chord progression does not contradict.
Like a lot of great bands, the Cure have followed a parabolic journey, starting as a cult act, then peaking in the mainstream before settling back with their core audience. For many of those hardcore fans, Wish is a strong album whose deficiencies are diagnosable and treatable. If you’ve got a Cure head in your life, casually mention Wish to them and count the seconds until they bring up the outtakes. From the six excellent B-sides on 2004’s Join the Dots box set to the four instrumentals on 1993’s cassette-only Lost Wishes EP, these shadowy obscurities are enough to fuel decades of conversation regarding alternate tracklists for the true follow-up to Disintegration. (And not to mention, heightened expectations for the delayed installment in Smith’s meticulous, enlightening reissue series, where Wish has been the next item on the checklist for years.)
For new listeners, Wish may be an unrepresentative starting point but it does go down easy—even the filler tracks have a lightness that feels uniquely humanizing. “Wendy Time,” while not the Cure’s most memorable funk-rock excursion, still offers a whimsical adrenaline hit, as Smith’s opening meow snuffs out the fiery momentum of “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea.” This is the precise type of tone shift the band would have difficulty replicating as the years wore on and their records took the form of jarring hodgepodges (1996’s Wild Mood Swings) and overcorrected moodpieces meant to reclaim the brooding melancholy of their signature sound (2000’s Bloodflowers).
Back when they settled on that sound in the early ’80s, the Cure could conjure vast feelings through sheer suggestion. Records like Seventeen Seconds and Faith have a sinister magic akin to those early, low-budget horror movies, full of distant murmurs and ominous shadows, jump-cut climaxes rendered in grayscale. Instead of showing you the monster, Smith realized our subconscious could fill in the blanks with something far scarier. With their increased notoriety, the Cure upped the ante on Disintegration and Wish to color in those details, swapping our primal fear of the dark for elaborate settings and scenery, real characters and dialogue. It’s why “A Letter to Elise,” with its strumming acoustic guitars and keys that sound like a broken xylophone, seems to embody an entire narrative arc in the music alone.
It could veer toward melodrama if the sadness didn’t seem so real, so inhabitable. On Disintegration, the Cure prolonged and accessorized the emotion, embellishing each instrument—the drums with heavy reverb, the bass soaked in chorus, the lead guitar solidifying while it played, like liquid into ice—until everything sounded how we feel at our lowest. It was a creative breakthrough and an emotional one: “The crux of this album is the horror of losing the ability to feel things really deeply as you get older,” Smith told OOR Magazine’s Martin Aston, pinpointing the driving tension of his songwriting. “It worries me and everyone that I know of my age.” There is a reason why so many of his lyrics turn to Christmastime and kittens and first loves—formative symbols that carry past adolescence, never losing their sentimental appeal.
In a sense, the Cure’s entire body of work can be heard as an inquiry into how childlike emotion fares against the crushing tedium of adulthood. “For me, the idea of growing up is this idiot idea, because I was more grown up when I was 13 than I am now,” Smith said in 2004. “To me, grownups [were] people that kind of sighed a lot and had worry lines and looked forward to the weekend. I don’t look forward to the weekend at all.” It’s a funny distinction, but it speaks to the particular escape that his best work provides: The Cure posit that any emotion—sadness, fear, nostalgia, unrequited longing, ill-fated optimism—is preferable to numbness
This is why, in the loudest and most desperate moment of Wish, Smith lashes out using these words: “You don’t feel anymore/You don’t care anymore.” Compared to Disintegration, these songs keep a foot in the adult world, where we are encouraged to appear a little more balanced. “The vulnerable, lost little boy side of my image is gradually disappearing, if it hasn’t gone already. But the emotional side of the group will never disappear,” Smith promised at the time, noticing his use of the word “man” in a lyric where he might have previously written “boy.” Eventually, on Bloodflowers, he would find a way to verbalize this dissonance: “She dreams him as a boy/And he loves her as a girl,” he sang on “The Loudest Sound,” a bleak song about an older couple vowing to live entirely through each other’s fading memories. It’s not exactly a happy ending, but then again, what did you expect?
The years that followed Wish brought some hard lessons: Thompson and Gallup quit temporarily. Williams left for good. Smith endured a long and brutal legal battle with his former bandmate, Lol Tolhurst, a co-founding member who had been fired at the end of the previous decade due to issues stemming from alcoholism. Wish’s distracted and labored follow-up, Wild Mood Swings, landed with a thud four years later, effectively ending the Cure’s tenure in the mainstream. In retrospect, Smith claims he saw the writing on the wall, and the commercial failure forced him to develop a more personal relationship to his art, blocking out the masses to please only himself and his devoted fanbase. You can hear him beginning to embrace this path on Wish, letting go of some perfectionism, accepting the inevitable. Everything ends; life goes on. It doesn’t make growing up sound particularly fun, or any more avoidable. But it assures us we don’t have to do it alone. | 2022-05-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fiction / Elektra | May 29, 2022 | 8.4 | 2f37bc5b-57f4-471c-bb10-e053e7e22c28 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Nas is a pointillist, better at writing couplets than albums, and Magic proves he’s still a transcendent rapper when he allows himself to be. | Nas is a pointillist, better at writing couplets than albums, and Magic proves he’s still a transcendent rapper when he allows himself to be. | Nas: Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-hit-boy-magic/ | Magic | There’s an unwittingly poignant sequence at the end of Magic, Nas’s fifteenth studio album. The final track, “Dedicated,” is pure middle-aged ennui couched in wistful pop-culture references, the sort of preoccupied nostalgia trip Jay-Z perfected on 4:44. Nas name-drops Mike Tyson, Kimora Lee, and Carlito’s Way, alluding to some compelling ideas without really exploring them; it’s breezy enough that you can almost forgive the kids-these-days grumbling. But the chorus—“I dedicated my life, my life,” a simple repetition of an evasive half-statement—is tantalizing in its elision. At 48, the Queens native continues to enjoy the institutional acclaim afforded one of rap’s most prodigious talents. A survey of his latter-day catalog yields a melange of short-lived crossovers and self-indulgent concept records, the cynical musings of the bitterly divorced. To what did you dedicate your life, Nas?
Magic points to hard-earned craftsmanship, the humble cultivation of a blue-collar métier. It asks that you overlook his mid-career miscues and late-career misanthropy, which is just as well—his listeners have long clamored for a return to ’90s pragmatism, and Magic is the most meat-and-potatoes Nas record in years. “Speechless” casts back to the It Was Written aesthetic, with a spoken intro and pealing mandolin instrumental. A flashy performance with a modest purview, it relays a judicious street code (“I’m tellin’ it like it is, you gotta deal with the consequence/When you run in a n***a’s crib, n***a, you better be ready to sit”) with knowing winks at the fourth wall (“Only thing undefeated is time/The second is the internet, number three is this rhyme”). If it’s fan service, it’s the best Nas song in a decade.
The album maintains a sprightly 95 bpm clip, opportune for its focus on verbal acrobatics over Nas’s usual sermonizing. Anything faster is liable to trip him up; anything slower and he’s practically comatose. Unsurprisingly, these songs are far more habitable than the haranguing fare of 2018’s Nasir and 2020’s King’s Disease. Similar to 2004’s “Good Morning,” “Ugly” flips an atmospheric premise (“It’s ugly outside, it’s muggy, it’s money outside/One hundred and five Fahrenheit, thunderous skies”) into a metaphor for societal rot, a tactile slice of life relative to his familiar, narrative-driven methods. “The Truth” packs battle rhymes with bright imagery: “Galactica glaciers, eighty-eight karats, immaculate paystubs/Them n****s do a crime, I drop a rhyme, it’s the same rush.” Nas is a pointillist, better at writing couplets than albums, and Magic proves he’s still a transcendent rapper when he allows himself to be.
But he’s never content with low-stakes grandeur: on “Ugly,” he promises yet another King’s Disease installment for 2022. Although Magic steers clear of Nas’ Achilles heel—his notoriously poor judgment of his own strengths—it’s compromised by the presence of Hit-Boy, a thoroughly B-list producer who’s helmed the last three Nas records. Hit-Boy’s depthless beats are stately at a distance but chintzy up close, like music played through a mangled iPhone speaker. The saccharine melodies of “Hollywood Gangsta” and “Wu for the Children” each sound a half-chord off-key, and when he tries to conjure golden-era ambiance with digitized synths, it lends the air of a Vegas revue. Not to play fantasy sports, but DJ Premier is literally right there doing the turntable cuts on “Wave Gods.” Did no one think to ask him for some loops?
You could knock Magic for being backward-facing, but then again, all of Nas’s music is backward-facing. It’s charming when he revisits his own gospels, but the nostalgia act would be easier to swallow if it weren’t so resentful—the King’s Disease records are joyless Grammy bait, demanding that award committees ignore the elephant in the room. (Needless to say, they’ve complied.) The specter of his ex-wife turns up as a scapegoat on “Ugly” (“It’s grown men jealous outside/It’s grown-ass women that’ll have you set up to die”) and “Wu for the Children” (“One girl for the rest of your life, is that realistic?/Some had told me they like when you call ’em all types of bitches”). These are the grievances of a Bitcoin millionaire, music defined less by what it is than by what it’s not: druggy, minimalist, or improvisational.
But this is what Nas does: If Illmatic and It Was Written have an expository flaw, it’s that their inmates, capos, and Queensbridge Park winos are welded to their fates. His characters rarely exhibit agency of their own, which becomes a convenient narrative device when your wife walks out and the audience’s gaze drifts from New York to Atlanta. Nas needn’t be a tragic figure, and his endless cataloging of things taken from him—record deals, a happy family, a seat at the throne of hip-hop—is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. All that’s left is to go through the motions.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | January 12, 2022 | 6.8 | 2f37efd1-1d59-40c7-88fe-56957ed70427 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
DJ Seinfeld’s entry to the long-running mix series is a competent mix of electro, breakbeats, and deep house for the fledgling selector. | DJ Seinfeld’s entry to the long-running mix series is a competent mix of electro, breakbeats, and deep house for the fledgling selector. | DJ Seinfeld: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-seinfeld-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | It was only after one of Armand Jakobsson’s early singles took off on YouTube that he learned to DJ at all. In an interview with Germany’s Groove magazine last October, roughly a year into his sudden ascent, the Swedish house producer recalled boning up on video tutorials on beatmatching while he sat in the departure lounge en route to one of his early gigs.
The milieu with which Jakobsson is most closely associated—a style and scene termed “lo-fi house,” though no one, artists included, ever seemed to want to have much of anything to do with the term—was always predicated on a certain kind of outsider attitude: autodidactic, anti-virtuoso, cheekily can-do. But if the name DJ Seinfeld, along with the aliases of peers like Ross From Friends and DJ Boring, scanned as almost insufferably ironic, Jakobsson’s music was more sentimental than smirking, and far more grounded than his fledgling audacity might have suggested. (If “Seinfeld” was famously a show about nothing, then lo-fi house might be a genre without a sound—a name without a reference, an instance where there is no “there” there.)
So the big surprise about DJ Seinfeld’s contribution to DJ-Kicks—a 23-year-old series that has hosted mixes from storied selectors like Carl Craig, Moodymann, Four Tet, and Nina Kraviz—is not just that it exists at all; it’s how competent the set turns out to be, mixed with both skill and, at least for the first half, personality. It covers 72 minutes’ worth of wistful deep house, chunky breakbeats, and syncopated electro, classic in spirit without being expressly retro, and with 16 of its 21 tracks exclusive to the mix. (Weirdly, the tracklisting is particularly heavy on Melbourne producers—at least eight of the artists featured in the set are either based there or affiliated with a Melbourne label—meaning that, despite whatever it may say on Jakobsson’s passport, the set doubles as a timely snapshot of the contemporary Australian house scene.)
The first third of the mix is particularly strong. After an exclusive that sounds a little bit like DJ Seinfeld’s take on Burial—misty-eyed and hiss-infused, an evocative mood-setter—he dives straight into house music’s deep end. The mixing is unfussy and direct, but he’s got a keen sense for complementing tone colors: The blend between a pair of ruminative cuts by András Fox and Fantastic Man brings to mind the woozy, watery style that Michael Mayer showcased in mixes like Neuhouse and Fabric 13. As he builds, he maintains a nice balance of weights and textures, with hefty breakbeats and rough-hewn drum sounds underpinning floaty chords and ethereal synth leads. That mixture is particularly convincing on Rimbaudian’s “Simple Call,” another new cut from Jakobsson himself, where synths pinwheel above a slowed-down “Think” break like fireworks over a funfair.
Unfortunately, he can’t quite sustain that effortless mood. Things hit a pothole somewhere around the 20-minute mark, with trancey arpeggios giving way to a featureless breaks tune that sucks all the air out of the room. He wastes little time in picking himself up and getting back to his sun-kissed sweet spot; the “Think” break reappears with Pépe’s mood-brightening “Victory Level,” and Project Pablo’s “Who’s It For” marks the set’s emotional high point exactly midway through. But the back half feels directionless, tugged this way and that across a succession of nervous techno and electro cuts; a shift back toward more atmospheric climes, a few tracks from the end, doesn’t quite gel. The mix closes with six minutes of wide-eyed ambient synths, but the closing drama doesn’t feel quite earned. There’s a nagging sense across the second half of the set that we’re losing sight of who DJ Seinfeld actually is—as though, in trying to meet the requirements of what he thinks a dancefloor set is supposed to be, Jakobsson had lost sight of what makes his own music unique. | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | July 14, 2018 | 6.5 | 2f38f655-acbe-4a06-9099-4251ad04ef59 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his latest, guitarist Delicate Steve seems interested in animating rock’n’roll’s most outrageous qualities, using his studio savvy to make it do all the things it can’t in real life. | On his latest, guitarist Delicate Steve seems interested in animating rock’n’roll’s most outrageous qualities, using his studio savvy to make it do all the things it can’t in real life. | Delicate Steve: This Is Steve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22826-this-is-steve/ | This Is Steve | Over the past six years, Steve Marion has become something you didn’t know you even needed in this day and age: a guitar hero. And just as contemporary superhero franchise reboots tend to focus less on their protagonists’ powers and more on their flaws, Marion wields his ample talent with the humility of a mortal. On the (mostly) instrumental albums he’s released as Delicate Steve, Marion’s guitar playing is always in the spotlight, but never hogging it—rather, his luminous leads form the emotional undercurrent around which everything else flows. What makes Marion a guitar hero isn’t his technical wizardry, but his music’s mission to help you through dark times.
The home-brewed Afro-psych soundscapes of Marion’s previous releases made him a natural collaborator with contemporaries mining similar terrain, like Yeasayer and Dirty Projectors. Last year, he received the ultimate endorsement when he was invited to play on the latest album from the patron saint of worldly pop experimentation, Paul Simon. Though he makes primarily instrumental music, Marion’s never been shy about using his titles to telegraph his aesthetic, be it the Stevie salute of 2011’s Wondervisions or the nod to Sly Stone’s lo-fi funk masterwork There’s a Riot Goin’ On in “Afria Talks to You” (from 2012’s Positive Force). The track list to his new album, This Is Steve, features no such obvious call-outs, but one song title suggests a doozy of a defining statement: “Cartoon Rock.” This time out, Marion is less interested in rendering his inner visions than in animating rock ‘n’ roll’s most outrageous qualities, using his studio savvy to make it do all the things it can’t in real life.
This Is Steve may share its predecessors’ hermetic, self-made M.O. (with Marion once again performing all the instruments himself), but it’s the first Delicate Steve album that feels like it was designed to be performed in front of a crowd—and an inebriated one at that. The pan-cultural influences and meditative quality that permeated his previous records have given way to more carefree kicks: southern-rock choogle, country-funk fusion, and new-wave spazziness. They’re the sort of hazardous materials that, in less capable hands, could easily degenerate into schticky cliché. But Marion handles them with the same craft and sensitivity he approached his previous, more contemplative records, translating the cheeky into the charming.
The aforementioned “Cartoon Rock” is a case in point: what begins as an exercise in Eliminator-era ZZ Top robo-boogie eventually gives way to a joyous synth-pop coda that sounds like it’s being performed through a CalecoVision. Likewise, on the opening “Animals,” Marion revs up a greasy slide refrain in anticipation of an explosive rock-out eruption; instead, at the expected moment of detonation, it dissolves into a celestial disco daydream. In essence, the song plays out like an alternate-universe version of the 1979 Disco Demolition in Comiskey Park, where instead of blowing up Saturday Night Fever LPs, the raging long-haired ruffians storming the field suddenly break into the hustle.
Marion’s previous records occasionally used vocals for textural effect, but here, he lets his guitar do all the singing. And in light of This Is Steve’s more irreverent approach, those George Harrison-styled leads play an ever more crucial role. They invest otherwise frivolous tunes—like the murky boombox reggae of “Nightlife” and the fidgety, synth-buzzed “Together”—with unexpected pangs of poignancy, while on centerpiece track “Help,” he fashions a “My Sweet Lord” for atheists, its chirpy, cloud-parting guitar melody grounded by a gritty acoustic groove.
But Marion is also conscious of not overusing his string-bending skills for emotionally manipulative effect: one of the album’s most moving moments comes during the nocturnal reverie “Driving,” where the chilly, piano-sculpted post-rock atmospherics give way to a flurry of sunrise-summoning acoustic oscillations. Though it clocks in at just 28 minutes, This Is Steve is generously overstuffed—with gorgeous melodies, compositional quirks, sonic details, goofy ideas, and messy feelings. But if there’s a message Marion is trying to convey through the album’s jammed frequencies, it’s that you’re welcome to have a laugh while his guitar gently weeps. | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | January 28, 2017 | 7.3 | 2f397f02-6d5e-45e4-8826-5f03fd6e98a5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On their first commercially released album, Das Racist sound unimpressed by their own staggering ability, as if the actual process of making Relax didn't turn out to be as exciting as planning it. | On their first commercially released album, Das Racist sound unimpressed by their own staggering ability, as if the actual process of making Relax didn't turn out to be as exciting as planning it. | Das Racist: Relax | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15822-relax/ | Relax | Das Racist always come off as being at least two steps ahead of whomever they're addressing on or off record, which goes a long way toward explaining what made their 2010 mixtapes, Sit Down, Man and Shut Up, Dude, so inexhaustibly fresh and frankly pretty fucking intimidating to encounter as a critic. A style so reliant on self-reference and continuity doesn't appear to leave much to coincidence, so I'm wondering what to make of my suspicions regarding a line that appeared on both of their completely free mixtapes, but not their first commercially available release: "You should probably buy it." This isn't wholly unexpected-- Heems, Kool AD, and Dapwell can appear unimpressed to a fault, and Relax draws from a rich tradition of antisocial reactions to newfound fame: at times, it's a sour demystification that seeks to define its own backlash à la De La Soul Is Dead, at others a simplified CliffsNotes for people still playing catch up, and a lot of times it simply wants to be Bazooka Tooth. But even as jaded as they sound toward show promoters, industry types, your band, and white dudes on the internet, Relax is a frustrating, occasionally thrilling record that saves its most pervasive indifference for a far more troubling target: itself.
Though they've had plenty of laughs at backpacker indie rap's expense, Relax comes alive whenever it strives for an honorary Def Jux badge. El-P and Danny Brown are the most notable appearances, and what's initially jarring is how much the otherwise impermeable Das Racist universe accommodates a sound that caters more toward its guests' respective dystopian styles, forsaking the weeded-out levity of Sit Down and Shut Up for industrial grind fueled by cheap coke and battery acid. At the outset, they keep up as the brittle title track finds Heems adopting a rawer style to spit a bracing, strikingly plainspoken verse about his upbringing. Meanwhile, "Michael Jackson" pays homage to the Chinese fire drill productions of Heatmakerz and AraabMuzik, its brainwashing hook reminiscent of "Dipset (Santana's Town)"'s infamous "like Kurt Cobain was here!" in terms of chantable celebrity nonsense. When Relax revisits this sort of bludgeoning approach ("Selena", "Punjabi Song"), you sense the incomplete framework of a record meant to be aesthetically unified and audience-dividing: "Michael Jackson" and the other initially punishing tracks shuttle from "I absolutely cannot stand this song" to "I absolutely cannot get this song out of my head" in about the same amount of time "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" did.
While it would be fascinating to see how their style translates with a mainstream feature (a la Tyler, the Creator's guest spots with Pusha T and the Game), the retrenchment into their inner circle for inspiration rarely feels reactionary here: Yeasayer's Anand Wilder and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij produce, but without credit, you'd have no idea which tracks are theirs. Likewise, their exercise in total lyrical abstraction with El-P comes more naturally than Sit Down, Man's title track, and "Power" is maybe the one track here that can stand up to jaw-dropping quote machines like "hahahaha jk?" or "Return to Innocence" thanks to show-stealing verses from Danny Brown and Despot.
And yet, it's the hook from "Power" that gets to the discomforting center of Relax: "It's too easy. Even if I told you about it, you probably wouldn't even believe me." Like many highly intelligent people who can succeed in any number of pursuits, Das Racist sound unimpressed by their own staggering ability (Heems' much-quoted "I'm fucking great at rapping!" from "Michael Jackson" notwithstanding), as if they got to this point just to see if they could do it, and all of a sudden the actual process of making Relax didn't turn out to be as exciting as planning it. Adopting the same over-it tone they've taken during any number of clueless "hey, these funny guys are really smart!" interviews, hooks like "give us all your money... love everybody" from "Brand New Dance" are the sound of their losing interest in real time. If they're kidding, it's an entry-level joke aimed at...I dunno, proactive behavior in hip-hop? But the disengaged tone starts to wear when it becomes unclear whether Kool AD and Heems are still interested in making rap music anymore as opposed to merely listening to it, rattling off disconnected thoughts not too different from the avalanche of their Twitter feeds-- stray jokes, pan-cultural namedrops, the occasional astute observation, and a slew of repurposed praise, but no real context to prove broader points. After delivering some of the sharpest cultural criticism in any field on Sit Down and Shut Up, when they swipe at low-hanging fruit like "rapgenius.com is white devil sophistry/ Urban Dictionary is for demons with college degrees," there's little insight, just the whiff of audience/performer codependence.
So then what's Shut Up, Dude's "Rainbow in the Dark" doing here? It's still a mindblowing piece of work and welcome in any form, but the fit couldn't be more strange-- both the beat and the lyrics have a generosity in spirit that sheds light on an issue that you can lose sight of while focusing on its attitude or production choices: they're hardly rapping at all here. And when they do, it's almost like 10th-season The Simpsons, where the sheer dropoff in quotability is actually uncomfortable to endure. It's understandable that they'd want to move beyond mere applause for being as handy with Marina Abramovic as they are with Rick Ross' "9 Piece", but they've thrown out their entirely unique point of view-- still their greatest resource-- with it.
While they've made great use of deconstructive syntax, repetition, gibberish, and in-jokes in the past, too much of Relax simply feels like dead air: the clock-watching countdown of "Happy Rappy", the last minute and a half of the title track that sounds like a cackling Autotune meeting its death in a food processor, "Celebration" and "The Trick"'s listless singing, and "Punjabi Song" tripping over its drunk reiteration all merely pass time during tracks already stripped to the bone on a very short record. And while I won't begrudge Das Racist for wanting to make straight-up dance tracks like "Girl" or "Booty in the Air", compared to "Shorty Said", "Irresponsible", or the many other songs they've made that worked as well in Gchat nerd-out sessions as they did in house parties, it's tough to give these one-note riffs the benefit of the doubt. They can do better, but do they even want to?
To this point, they've answered the question of "are they really serious?" in the affirmative or made it a moot point-- whether you just liked the Big Punisher quotes, casually accepted being called a white demon for the greater good, or both, their work could be enjoyed on any number of levels. But Relax feels like it's hovering over a more pernicious escape clause-- "you don't get it." Interpreted through telling lyrics like "when you see me on the streets, don't bother me," "I don't know why people think we give a fuck so often," or, as the closing argument in "Celebration" goes, "you could ask what it is, but I still wouldn't tell you," the title of Relax feels more like a statement of aggression, Das Racist shifting the blame to the listener for their own lack of commitment. | 2011-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Greedhead | September 16, 2011 | 6.3 | 2f39f6c4-6bc2-4a5d-aec1-93aac4600ba8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Some bands embrace consistency, others shy away, possibly fearing the alure of comfortability and the possible stagnation it might eventually ... | Some bands embrace consistency, others shy away, possibly fearing the alure of comfortability and the possible stagnation it might eventually ... | Gang Starr: The Ownerz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3391-the-ownerz/ | The Ownerz | Some bands embrace consistency, others shy away, possibly fearing the alure of comfortability and the possible stagnation it might eventually result in. For established artists, there's no more sleep-depriving quandry than whether to stick with a successful, proven formula or throw it all out the window in favor of a radical change. But even for a few of those lucky superstars, it just comes naturally, without any deep contemplation. Critically speaking, bands who gravitate toward change get high marks for their willingness to continually invent and to challenge convention; the water-treaders simply get fans. It's unfair on any number of levels, I suppose, but it's with that understanding that I declare Gang Starr among the most consistent acts in hip-hop.
Ever since Step in the Arena and Daily Operation laid down the law for East Coast hip-hop back in '91 and '92, Gang Starr have slowed their pace with an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" aesthetic, releasing albums every four or five years between Guru and DJ Premier's increasingly busy extracurricular schedules. And while they haven't broken any new ground since those early 90s classics, their records have been astoundingly solid in bearing the standards set by those canonical discs.
In the five years since Moment of Truth, Guru and Primo have watched as the face of mainstream hip-hop hardened into a countenance chiseled out with bling-bling braggadocio and self-hating diatribes. Fortunately, for a duo that's been hard from day one-- don't let that No More Mr. Nice Guy cover fool you-- there's a distinct possibility their credibility could translate into commercial success, almost as if the rap world has finally caught up with a group that was ten years ahead of its time. The combination of Guru's tough, streetwise lyrics and delivery and Premier's highly polished production fits in perfectly as an honest alternative to today's heavy rotation; it's a situation Gang Starr are well aware of, judging from several lyrical and interlude reminders that pop up throughout The Ownerz.
The record's first single, "Skills", is a prime example of its overall potential to launch Gang Starr into the mainstream with the respect they've enjoyed in the underground intact. Carried by the kind of popping bassline and sucka-challenging bravado that's powered all of their classic cuts, it's incredibly catchy without being overtly commercial. Throw in a couple of high-profile cameos-- most notably Jadakiss' firespitting verse on "Rite Where U Stand" and Snoop Dogg's right-at-home drawling over Premier's "In This Life..." beat (returning the favor of some beats Primo cooked up for his Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$ LP)-- and The Ownerz could accomplish that rarest of feats: commercial success that doesn't require a sacrifice of integrity.
Naturally, not all of the guest spots are wildly triumphant-- back-to-back appearances by Fat Joe, M.O.P., Big Shug and Freddie Foxx on "Who Got Gunz" and "Capture (Militia Pt. 3)" make for a thuggish lag right in the middle of the record, but the flow gets right back in line with the pair of cameo-free tracks that follow. As has been customary on Gang Starr records since Daily Operation, Guru steps aside for some young emcees to prove their worth on the mic: NYG'z and H. Stax contribute solid verses to "Same Team, No Games" and Smiley the Ghetto Child absolutely tears shit up-- like a young Nas or Jeru the Damaja-- on the brief "Werdz From The Ghetto Child". Still, even though the guest spots cover a wide range of hip-hop status levels, they all work to enforce Guru and Premier's aesthetic of consistency-- whether it's Jadakiss or NYG'z, the emcee has to make his style work with Gang Starr, not the other way around.
But all this talk of cameos distracts from all the unassisted cuts that prove Guru and Premier haven't lost an ounce of chemistry in their 14 years together. Primo's jazzy horn breaks underscore Guru's eloquent manifestos with assured refinement on every single track they turn on their own (which, impressively for a major-label hip-hop release, is over half the record), even redeeming what would've been the record's weakest cut with a bit of imagination: a reposession of Curtis Mayfield's "Kung Fu" that makes Guru's mack move narrative on "Nice Girl, Wrong Place" a little easier to stomach. For the record, Guru's candor and lack of romanticism are rather refreshing in this context-- just like hot pants, what you see is what you get.
The Ownerz will have to hold Gang Starr fans over while Premier contracts out beats for usually the only good cuts on otherwise sub-par rap records, and Guru releases another tepid Jazzmatazz or (God forbid) Baldhead Slick & da Click LP. We can't expect a new Gang Starr record until 2007 or 2008, but in the meantime, there's plenty here to celebrate for consistency's sake-- because for what they've lacked in evolution, Guru and Premier have more than repaid in reliability. And while it's probably too late in their career for a breakout hit record, more people are definitely going to know who they are, which will hopefully translate into the same veneration from the establishment they've enjoyed from their fans since back in the day. | 2003-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Virgin | July 13, 2003 | 7.5 | 2f40e71f-48df-4745-9620-cbf2695e5b50 | Pitchfork | null |
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Where the South Korean singer, songwriter, and producer’s deep house is laid-back and breezy, her rapping is quietly, coolly defiant. | Where the South Korean singer, songwriter, and producer’s deep house is laid-back and breezy, her rapping is quietly, coolly defiant. | 박혜진 Park Hye Jin: Sail the Seven Seas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/park-hye-jin-sail-the-seven-seas/ | Sail the Seven Seas | South Korean songwriter, singer, and producer 박혜진 Park Hye Jin’s style might be described as “casual confrontation.” Despite the smoothness of her burnished deep house, she is aggressively matter-of-fact about who she is and what she stands for. One of her earliest singles was called “I DON’T CARE,” after all. But her self-released new album, Sail the Seven Seas, suggests that she’s had a rough time of late. Life on the road—years of touring combined with moves from Seoul to Melbourne, London, and Los Angeles—heightened her self-reliance and intensified her loneliness. Despite its summery vibes, Sail the Seven Seas is often stormy going, venturing into choppy emotional waters that occasionally leave her adrift in her feelings.
Park’s best work has surfed between twinkling house melodies and ruthlessly intense drums. Her style is both distinctive and versatile, folding in disparate genre experiments while always highlighting her signature instrument: her voice. Park’s monotone can be inventive: singing, rapping, spitting, and sighing her lyrics to both dreamy and punishing effect. On a song like “Can you,” the interplay between the pulse of her infatuation and the undertow of her contempt felt panoramic, a portrait of a woman in deep romantic conflict.
So far, though, she hasn’t quite been able to hold a song together with her voice alone. Park falls into this trap at several points on Sail the Seven Seas, where scaled-back production leaves her already shaky vocals painfully front and center. The title track’s lyrics are emotionally naked, but the wistful piano is musically inert, failing to transport her wish-in-a-bottle longing anywhere at all. Her voice is better served when it’s employed as a percussive tool. She tears into her verses with gusto on “Bklyn Babe” and “Sex on the Beach,” which feature some of her best rapping to date. But she undercuts that versatility by too often falling back on blunt-force repetition. The annoyance and desperation implied in the hook of “Tryna Get to over You” doesn’t come through in her disaffected chant, and though “N.Y.C.” features some cool sonic detailing, her mantra-like loop (“New York City… New York City…”) falls flat.
After her previous forays into footwork, techno, and trap, Sail the Seven Seas folds chillwave into Park’s repertoire. Synths flare and fade like sunsets on “Foreigner,” while a dusky guitar riff opens up Park’s leapfrogging verses on “Bklyn Babe.” These tropical accents are a vehicle for some fraught emotions. Frustration is a major theme, and throughout the album, Park addresses a litany of slights and insults in funny, plainspoken language. On “Foreigner,” she recounts the indignities of the immigration process in a venomous deadpan: “Let me get a green card, I don’t want to marry you! I don’t need you for a green card! I’m fucking talented!” The stupidity of the hurdles that Park has to put up with calls for a sharp rebuke, and she delivers.
As satisfying as it can be to hear Park light into rude employees, border stooges, clueless suits, and racist assholes, one longs for the artist to find some sense of safety and security so that she’s not constantly on the defensive. Her greatest work reconciles hardness and softness, strength and vulnerability. The penultimate track, “California,” fuses a rollicking drum break with breezy G-funk synths, making full use of her talents as a rapper, and ends with a call-and-response in Korean that she answers for herself: “Who’s the one? I’m the one.” Whether this self-produced, self-released album is meant as a career reset or a way of marking time between bigger projects, Sail the Seven Seas is a reminder that Park doesn’t take directions from anyone. | 2024-01-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 8, 2024 | 6.6 | 2f4cd4fd-1603-463b-a071-fb00f15dd369 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Throughout the seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs from Boston outfit Mutual Benefit’s proper debut LP Love’s Crushing Diamond, the music can be described in a number of simple ways: loving, patient, warmhearted, and unfailingly hopeful. | Throughout the seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs from Boston outfit Mutual Benefit’s proper debut LP Love’s Crushing Diamond, the music can be described in a number of simple ways: loving, patient, warmhearted, and unfailingly hopeful. | Mutual Benefit: Love's Crushing Diamond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18669-mutual-benefit-loves-crushing-diamond/ | Love's Crushing Diamond | Mutual Benefit’s proper debut LP Love’s Crushing Diamond can be described in a number of simple ways: loving, patient, warmhearted, unfailingly hopeful. Pretty much the utmost qualities you’d want out of a human being, right? Those descriptors are certainly less trustworthy when applied to art, as they’re often considered the byproducts of complacency, or at least a warning sign. Whenever a band comes along that people tell you is “necessary," they’re probably ripping shit up, telling you what to think, espousing conflict against music and listeners that got a little too comfy. Mutual Benefit isn’t revolutionary and Love’s Crushing Diamond is not going to judge you. But in no way is Jordan Lee a complacent songwriter. In fact, throughout this collection of seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs, he’s dealing in perhaps the most pervasive and difficult internal battle of all: how can you be a loving, patient, warmhearted and unfailingly hopeful person in an environment that makes it far easier to not give a shit?
A good start is to surround yourself with fellow warriors of the meek—Mutual Benefit brings to mind the “collective” format, “Animal” or otherwise, that played a large role in defining the tone of indie rock during the early 2000s. Think of Microphones, Sparklehorse, Danielson Famile, Akron/Family, early Sufjan Stevens and Devendra Banhart, where an open-ended “band” surrounds a central voice seeking to explore the ideas of what “folk” or roots music really means. Mutual Benefit certainly qualifies, though not in the way that equates “folk” with rusticity, an acoustic guitar and rigid verse-chorus structure. Songs invariably rise out of twenty or so seconds of everyone getting situated, tapping out piano riffs, trying to get the percussion in rhythm and determining who’s going to sing. From there on out, there’s often contain one central melody and a clearly elucidated mood that spools throughout, while the arrangements are surprising and intuitive, like everyone involved might be swapping instruments as it goes along.
The sound here is proudly analog, though not lo-fi, and Lee’s songs are thick, but not dense. Beginning with his lightly enunciated vocals, soft strands are collected and continuously bundled throughout and nuzzled by reverb without being smothered by it, a big ball of sonic yarn to fall into. Some curious threads peek through to add a shock of color: the banjo lacing Lee’s awestruck infatuation on “Advanced Falconry”, household percussion clacking throughout “‘Let’s Play’/Statue of a Man”, gentle, female harmonies and a steady drum machine tick lending comfort to a wayward drug addict on “That Light That's Blinding” and an indeterminate synthesized instrument playing the glowing riff that explains the title of “Golden Wake."
On that particular song, a riverside meditation leads Lee to quitting his job and realizing “we weren’t made to be afraid.” That’s a major part of the plot engine in cubicle revenge fantasy Office Spaceand a motivating thread throughout the majority of chillwave, another genre thought to be a reaction to an increasingly hostile and hopeless time for socioeconomics. But Love’s Crushing Diamond is not folk in the escapist sense either, though it was recorded during a “year of notable absences” in San Diego, Austin and Boston. Many of these songs take place in mundane, unglamorous locales—city trains, mining towns, cornfields, motel rooms. And in Lee's point of view, you need to discover a little space within those places that you can call your own and then invite some people to share it with. Yeah, it does skew kinda hippie, as Lee’s lyrics detail picking roses by the lake and how a river can’t help but keep on keepin’ on. That’s perfectly fine within the scheme of Love’s Crushing Diamond, which always sounds populated in a way that stresses its central themes of getting your own shit together so you’re better prepared to care for someone else.
This kind of perspective gives Mutual Benefit an unintended timeliness as well. As much as you want to consider music objectively, without some kind of sociological context, think of it this way: when Sufjan, Animal Collective and freak-folk came about, any afterglow of post-9/11 togetherness had given way to a terribly divisive and dirty presidential election, an escalating, vaguely defined war and a general sense that the country was being bullied into submission from the inside. This sort of music would inevitably be criticized for being apolitical and wimpy, but having seen where all this aggression got us, how could Sung Tongs or Cripple Crow not seem like the solution?
Love’s Crushing Diamond works in a similar way and opens itself up to some of the same criticisms, when being positive is the quickest way to have your sincerity questioned. Lee concedes these points without giving in, and makes the case that kindness is in no way a sign of weakness: Diamond’s seven-minute, closing reverie “Strong Swimmer” acknowledges that it takes an Olympian level of strength to swim against the tide of negativity, but it’s the only choice. During “‘Let’s Play/Statue of a Man,” Lee sings “There’s always love/when you think there’s none to give”, true whether it’s “tattered, strained or torn.” I can’t think of a statement that sounds more necessary. | 2013-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Other Music | October 25, 2013 | 8.4 | 2f4cf540-fbce-4f9c-b0df-0403ff64e871 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The songs on M.C. Taylor's fourth album as Hiss Golden Messenger pose questions about spiritual doubt rather than offer the easy reassurances familiar to rousing, populist folk rock. He draws from traditional Piedmont music as well as AM Gold country, jazz, rock, and pop. | The songs on M.C. Taylor's fourth album as Hiss Golden Messenger pose questions about spiritual doubt rather than offer the easy reassurances familiar to rousing, populist folk rock. He draws from traditional Piedmont music as well as AM Gold country, jazz, rock, and pop. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Haw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17819-hiss-golden-messenger-haw/ | Haw | “Sufferer (Love My Conqueror)”, a standout on Hiss Golden Messenger’s fourth album, Haw, is ostensibly a folk rock song, but instead of the expected fiddle playing the solo, there’s an disarmingly baroque string section. On the bridge it swoops and bends dramatically, but as the song winds down, the strings split in two, flowing against each other in strange currents and eddies-- not unlike the North Carolina river that gives the album its title. It’s a powerful moment, one that imbues some real drama into a song that functions as a kind of spiritual interrogation. Is God a liberator or a conqueror? Does man rejoice or despair in His dominion? That ornate string section doesn't skirt the question.
Over the last few years, young folk revivalists have turned to traditional American music as a vehicle for spiritual catharsis: Mumford and Sons tick off rousing anthems like they’re punching a clock, the Lumineers engineer pre-industrial sing-alongs, and Old Crow Medicine Show soldier on as a jam-band comprised of historical re-enactors. At its best, this trend imagines pop music as a potentially communal thing, intended for public experience rather than headphones isolation. In less thoughtful incarnations, the nuances of craft are often jettisoned in favor of fervency. Based out of Durham, North Carolina, Hiss Golden Messenger offers a fine corrective to the recent rash of folk anthems: The songs on Haw pose questions rather than offer easy reassurances, and head Messenger M.C. Taylor is more concerned with spiritual doubt than any kind of comforting certainty.
After nearly a decade with the San Francisco Americana act the Court and Spark, Taylor moved from his native California about as far east as he could, settling in the Tarheel State in the late 2000s. With a degree in folklore from UNC, Taylor has a deep knowledge of Southern folk music, especially that of the Piedmont region of North Carolina. But Hiss Golden Messenger is never beholden to tradition. There are shades of Charlie Poole and Charley Patton in these songs, but also tinges of AM Gold country, jazz, rock, and singer-songwriter pop. So “Sufferer (Love My Conqueror)” includes not only that odd string section, but also gentle bursts of rural psychedelia and backing vocals tinged with both gospel and the Gospel. “Cheerwine Easter”, named for a regional soft drink, is gentle country soul with a sturdy beat and, out of nowhere, a low and lovely sax solo courtesy of Bobby Crow.
Haw is fuller and more adventurous even than 2011’s Poor Moon, with a broader musical palette. It feels more rooted in the Piedmont, thanks to a band that includes Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Black Twig Picker Nathan Bowles, and William Tyler. Notwithstanding the album’s spiritual crisis, the best moments on Haw are also some of the most upbeat and celebratory. “I've Got a Name for the Newborn Child” bounces along on Scott Hirsch’s buoyant bassline; in the promise of a new family, the band channels an excitement that most artists reserve for romance. Likewise, Terry Lonergan’s scissoring high-hat beat lends some joyful pomp to “Sweet as John Hurt”, a tribute to the Mississippi bluesman. But Hiss Golden Messenger remains Taylor’s project, and he exhibits a folksy charisma in this central role. His voice flattens out the hard consonants and savors the softer vowels, suggesting a regional dialect from some dark Tarheel holler. He summons immense gravity for the dark “Devotion” just as easily as he conveys a sense of unburdening on “Busted Note”. Rarely does dark doubt sound quite so inviting. Taylor understands that faith-- in God, in music, in the flow of the Haw-- is more about the struggle than the resolution. | 2013-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | April 1, 2013 | 8 | 2f5038c2-ab0f-4e8d-804d-ad37e6a1b05c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The ambient composer goes back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling. | The ambient composer goes back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling. | William Basinski: Lamentations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-basinski-lamentations/ | Lamentations | Though he deals in abstract sound, William Basinski in many ways resembles a visual artist. It was a picture—the diagram of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s tape-delay system on the cover of Discreet Music—that catalyzed his interest in that style of composition. His most famous creation, The Disintegration Loops, is as strongly associated with an image—the smoldering New York skyline after the 9/11 attacks—as it is with magnetic tape shedding its last oxides. And there is something sculptor-like about his intimacy with plastic loops, more attuned to the transient truth of the medium than the immortal dream of recorded sound. All of this fits with his great theme of mortal decline.
The best description of Basinski’s music, including his latest album, Lamentations, is found in art rather than music theory. Mise en abyme, which literally means “put into the abyss,” describes an infinite sequence nested in different levels of reality: a story within a story, a picture within a picture, a reflection trapped between mirrors. By playing with loops as vivid as human lives—a wisp of piano, a speck of opera, a ripple of radio static—against one another, Basinski produces feedback loops that repeat until they become vanishingly small, not so much ending as slipping beyond our ken.
Last year, Basinski released On Time Out of Time, for which he worked with scientists to capture the sound of two black holes merging more than a billion years ago. He called it a love story. While the high-tech collaboration was unusual for him, the personal touch wasn’t, and on Lamentations, he’s back to raiding his decades-deep personal archives for vintage tape to revive with new perspective and fresh feeling. If the beauty and dread of Lamentations plays out on a less dwarfing scale, the galactic rumble of the first song, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” sounds as much like a black hole as anything on Time did, and the album’s theme has a sort of self-swallowing gravity.
Lamentations shares a title with the biblical poem of exile and loss (“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!”) and, to drive the point home, adds a whiff of Miltonic damnation with a track called “Paradise Lost.” “O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow,” a study Basinski made for Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, is a haunting centerpiece. It integrates a passage of Svetlana Spajic singing an old Balkan song, a mother-daughter dialogue that doubles as one’s lament and the other’s celebration of the so-called loss of innocence. Focusing on a line that translates as “Out of joy, I could not fall asleep,” the track is exhilarating, and choked human emotion somehow rises through the mechanical phrasings of the loops. Other operatic samples appear in “All These Too, I, I Love”—chopped into mellifluous vowels for a moment of brilliant simplicity recalling Gas’s Pop—and “Please, This Shit Has Got to Stop.”
That frank colloquial title breaks the elevated register, but there’s room for all in Basinski’s quiet threnody for one. If “Fin” is a doomsaying ending, where remnants of life flicker through vast, buzzing machinery, his great sorrow also allows kinder prophecies glint through, as on “Transfiguration,” which sounds like a string quartet casting a hesitant, hopeful theme into the abyss of the unknown. Paradise may forever be lost, but this elegant elegy is worth many returns.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | November 12, 2020 | 7.5 | 2f56267d-230f-4b31-9754-c1c866389629 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Scottish power-pop band keeps things light on an album distinguished by subtle touches and twilight grooves. | The Scottish power-pop band keeps things light on an album distinguished by subtle touches and twilight grooves. | Teenage Fanclub: Nothing Lasts Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teenage-fanclub-nothing-lasts-forever/ | Nothing Lasts Forever | Nothing Lasts Forever may seem like a peculiar choice of an album title for Teenage Fanclub, a group devoted to preserving the sound and sensibility of the guitar-pop explosion of the mid-1960s. Six-string traditionalists even when they drowned their melodies in fuzz, the band assimilated the innovations of the Byrds and the Beach Boys, becoming one of the most enduring practitioners of power-pop—a catch-all term encompassing any rock group bearing an undisguised debt to the bright, punchy sounds of the Beatles and their disciples. Their steadfast adherence to the jangle, chime, and sigh of harmonies and hooks suggested Teenage Fanclub was suspended in time, untouched by either shifting fashions or the weathering of age.
Once wielding guitars gnarly enough to make them peers of Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub abandoned any pretext of sounding contemporary at the moment Britpop popularized the very aesthetic they championed. At the height of Cool Britannia, they turned to the American West Coast—their 1997 album Songs from Northern Britain suggested the UK was located somewhere in Laurel Canyon—adding softer vocal harmonies and steady strums, elements that became foundational to Teenage Fanclub. These qualities give the band a gentle touch that feels welcoming even when they’re singing about disquieting subjects, as they often did on 2021’s Endless Arcade, where they learned how to proceed without founding bassist Gerard Love and as their chief singer/songwriter Norman Blake came to terms with the end of his marriage.
Despite its title, Nothing Lasts Forever feels settled, as if the group has accepted the transient nature of the seasons. They introduce this theme immediately with “Foreign Land,” a tranquil tune that opens with Blake declaring “It’s time to move along/And leave the past behind me.” The forward motion echoes throughout Nothing Lasts Forever. In “I Left a Light On,” Blake clings to the notion that there’s a way to emerge from the darkness, a wish that’s later fulfilled in the amiable ramble “Back to the Light.” Raymond McGinley, Blake’s lieutenant songwriter in Teenage Fanclub, is on the same wavelength, declaring that he’s “Tired of Being Alone” and surmising that “everyone feels better lovered.”
The warmth emanating from the lyrics flows throughout Nothing Lasts Forever. Teenage Fanclub never quickens the pace or belabors the melodies, choosing to luxuriate in their twilight grooves. The contained chemistry isn’t insular or monochromatic: They balance the tempered Beach Boys bounce of “Self-Sedation” with the extended exhale of the shimmering closer “I Will Love You.” Such subtle shifts in tone underscore how Teenage Fanclub now specializes in nuance, eschewing production frills in favor of unadorned, subtle colorings. Vocal harmonies glide in and out of the mix, keyboardist Euros Childs adds empathetic texture, and the steady sway of strummed guitars anchor the band more than the backbeat. Instead of driving down on the crystalline hook that powers “See the Light,” the band lets it drift and linger; it sounds as if they’re marveling at its contours. The songcraft matters but so does the interplay, and that’s why Teenage Fanclub’s power-pop still resonates. They’re not interested in crafting the platonic ideal of an AM pop song—they’re using pop music as a lifeline. | 2023-10-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / PeMa | October 3, 2023 | 6.9 | 2f58663f-89a7-4aa3-9ebe-4f4597e64363 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Continuing the straightforward synthetic soul of So This Is Goodbye, Junior Boys' third LP is lush-- sometimes to the point of textural overload. | Continuing the straightforward synthetic soul of So This Is Goodbye, Junior Boys' third LP is lush-- sometimes to the point of textural overload. | Junior Boys: Begone Dull Care | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12896-begone-dull-care/ | Begone Dull Care | Five years ago, Junior Boys-- Canadians with an eye on London's turn-of-the-millennium dancefloor innovations-- merged UK garage's sugary micro-programming with winsome synth-pop hooks and melancholy vocals on their debut album, Last Exit. The record made electronically attuned critics gush, but unlike a lot of supposed crossovers, you could also imagine the Boys reaching a wider indie audience: Frontman/mastermind Jeremy Greenspan and then-partner Johnny Dark learned well from their white-label heroes, while Greenspan's voice oozed a familiar strain of bedridden heartbreak.
Yet Greenspan hesitantly distanced himself from comparisons to indie heartthrobs-- perhaps that's one reason why Last Exit failed to find the mass collegiate audience that turned the Postal Service into the 21st-century's indie-pop/electronic hybrid of choice. Junior Boys' sophomore LP, So This Is Goodbye, dropped two years later with a more traditional sound rooted in classy 1980s electro-funk, trading Last Exit's pinprick jolts of joy for the languid sadness of guys in sharp suits. Commercially, it seems to have been a canny move; a Carl Craig remix of "Like a Child" even brought an improbable Grammy nod. While So This Is Goodbye hardly troubled the Billboard Hot 100, it (deservedly) received some of the attention denied the acclaimed but under-heard Last Exit.
Listening to the new Begone Dull Care, it seems the more straightforward synthetic soul of So This Is Goodbye will remain the Boys' template for the foreseeable future. Lush, sometimes to the point of textural overload, Begone is audibly the work of band that's now been honing its chops for a decade. Whatever its budget, the album definitely sounds like the product of million-dollar multi-tracking. That's helpful when you're referencing an era where even cheap keyboards could put a dent in the fattest bankroll. And listeners might also need to cash-in their pocket change for some swank studio gear if they want to fully enjoy Greenspan and partner Matt Didemus' delicately fussed-over handclaps and scissored vox and lugubrious call-and-response synths.
That's not to totally discount the duo's talent as tunesmiths-- even if "Hazel" is the only thing here that might survive being thrown to the wolves of pop radio-- but sometimes Greenspan and Didemus' attention to detail is the only thing that redeems the album's occasionally sketchy songwriting. At Begone's weakest, the tracks could be easily dismissed as slickly assembled bouts of pre- and post-rave deja vu. The Tangerine-ian arpeggiated bass-synth pattern on "Work" is played-out, almost shtick-y, though the bell-like melody adds an eerie touch. But this slightly unexpected nod to old-school bleep techno bleakness, and Greenspan's latest turn as breathy dude-diva, isn't quite enough to sell a six-minute song to anyone but über-fans or audiophiles. Since I'm not much of an audiophile, but did consider myself an über-fan, I kept waiting for "Work" (and several other songs) to punch something other than my nostalgia switch. In vain, as it turned out.
So what's Begone's draw, especially for those of us who fell in love with the affecting future-funk experiments of the Boys' early work? Well as mentioned above, it is hard not to marvel at how assured the Boys have grown as producers. The album's best tunes, like "Bits and Pieces", retain the mix of ennui and ebullience that marked early singles like "Birthday", but with minimalist restraint traded for so many perfectly placed period touches that you may have trouble picking out your favorite bit: Maybe it's the little glitch-hiccup breakdown? Or the saxophone that slides in mid-track from soft-rock central casting? If Begone is repeat-play worthy, and I'd argue it is, it might be down to the Boys' ever-growing skill as arrangers. ("Bits and Pieces" combines maybe a dozen compositional elements without coming off like a claustrophobic cut-and-paste exercise.) And they're not averse to the occasional sonic curveball. (Is that a banjo on the whimsical "Dull To Pause"?) Plus for all my grousing, it's hard to deny that the album's high-gloss shine can occasionally be seductive in its own right, at least if you've got love for a certain brand of glitz.
Which leads to my nagging worry about the trajectory the Boys seem to be following. The weaker tunes on Last Exit were carried by the incongruity of their component parts; you overlooked an undercooked melody, say, because the band had come up with such a compelling and unexpected hybrid. As Greenspan and Didemus have settled into a classicist groove, they're running a risk well-known to their mid-80s influences. It was a short trip from well-produced woe into camp sterility, and well-regarded uptown aesthetes like the Blue Nile were always only a mixing board misstep from guys peddling digitized woodwinds for cocktail loungers. So when I call Begone Dull Care a "mature" album, know it skirts both the positive and negative connotations of one of the most divisive adjectives in pop's lexicon. | 2009-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | April 8, 2009 | 7.5 | 2f5eb274-c64a-4cc8-a17e-c9deac956eaf | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Drink More Water 5 is the first tape iLoveMakonnen has released since "Tuesday" rocketed him to minor fame, and so it's unsurprising that it's starrier and more polished than anything else in the series. He's a powerful complementary force, whether he's singing hooks or delivering verses alongside rappers who are tonally different. | Drink More Water 5 is the first tape iLoveMakonnen has released since "Tuesday" rocketed him to minor fame, and so it's unsurprising that it's starrier and more polished than anything else in the series. He's a powerful complementary force, whether he's singing hooks or delivering verses alongside rappers who are tonally different. | iLoveMakonnen: Drink More Water 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20473-drink-more-water-5/ | Drink More Water 5 | "Millennial" is one of those terms whose definition was nebulous even before it reached a supersaturation point in the culture—feel free to file it alongside "indie" and "hipster" in that regard—but if there’s any one artist who grasps its spirit, it’s Makonnen Sheran, the singer and rapper who records as iLoveMakonnen. His label boss Drake is more successful and more readily meme-able, and there are plenty of rappers who are younger and/or more stereotypically "youthful," but no one can match Makonnen’s omnivorousness, his openness, his sense of possibility. He’s a product of the Internet and incredible tragedy: A witness to the accidental death of his best friend at age 18, he spent seven years bouncing between jail, house arrest, and probationary purgatory. The online world served as a safe haven, a place for therapy and creative expression. He posted songs on Myspace, interviewed musicians and businesspeople on his personal blog, wrote and sang and drew and designed. His probation finally ended in May 2014; three months later, the most popular rapper in the world had hopped onto one of his songs.
Perhaps it’s easy for young people to see themselves in Makonnen because many of them grew up spending their nights the same way: devouring every bit of culture in sight whether it’s the Killers’ greatest hits or old episodes of "Dragon Ball Z", drowning themselves in tabs they never get around to reading. A few clicks away from some kind of fame, whether it’s 15 minutes on Twitter or a top 15 hit on the Billboard charts: that’s life if you came of age on the Internet, and Makonnen’s no different.
That’s not to suggest that "Tuesday" was a fluke, or a product of sheer coincidence rather than talent or hard work. It became a hit because of Makonnen’s genial nature, his oddball charisma, and his ability to craft a perfect, simple hook, something that stood out even when he was churning out Bandcamp tapes of basement pop that sounded more like Ariel Pink than anything out of OVO’s shadowy, hyper-lean catalogue. You can hear it in the early versions of songs like "I Don’t Sell Molly No More" and "Whip It", in arrangements that are raw but ooze melody. Self-produced until 2013, his work took an immediate leap forward when he began working with outside producers on 2014 mixtape Drink More Water 4. Played against strange, vaguely gothic beats with real momentum and heft rather than the plinky, tinny sounds of his keyboard, Makonnen's own strangeness and versatility was amplified: his workmanlike relationship with drugs and alcohol, his wobbly vocal takes, the way he doodles arrhythmically like a kid coloring with the wrong hand. The iLoveMakonnen EP, released later that year (and again, with a slightly adjusted tracklist, a little later still), took that new formula and refined it further.
Drink More Water 5 is the first tape he's released since "Tuesday" rocketed him to minor fame, and so it's unsurprising that it's starrier and more polished than anything else in the series. But it also serves to illustrate a point you could've made at any point in the last few years: Makonnen songs are inherently risky propositions, destined to become impossibly sticky earworms or blatant failures with no intermediate outcomes in sight. Put another way, he's not interested in hitting singles or doubles: every swing is either a home run or a flagrant, wild strikeout. In "Tuesday" and "I Don't Sell Molly No More"—and his verse on Father's louche breakout single "Look at Wrist", a sing-song transmission from another dimension—he managed the former, and DMW5 has a few of its own, particularly the songs that feature other, more conventional rappers.
In the same way Makonnen took a step forward when he emerged from his DIY cocoon to work with other producers, he's a powerful complementary force, whether he's singing hooks or delivering verses alongside rappers who are tonally different. On the remixed version of "Whip It", he's a welcome burst of color against the hyperkinetic human fireworks of Migos; on "No Ma'am" and the remix of his earlier "Dodging 12", his melancholy spills over the edges of harder-edged, more aggressive drug rapping.
Songs like this are exceptions to the rule on DMW5. Much of the tape's remainder—and the solo Makonnen tracks in particular—are almost tuneless, sketches that are shroomy and distant rather than focused and catchy. Some, like the dewy "Super Clean" or "Other Guys", sound like they bubbled up from the minds of producers like James Ferraro or Daniel Lopatin c. Replica; others still, like stark confessional "Get Loose With Me", are an inch away from the blue, piano-pounding work of Spencer Krug's Moonface. Makonnen is not a particularly skillful singer or lyricist, so these songs are dependent on qualities that are a little more unpredictable or intangible: emotional rawness, amateurish intimacy, a stray line or melodic phrase happening to click into place.
Beyond its value as a standalone release, DMW5 invites larger questions about Makonnen's future as a mainstream star and the cap on his commercial potential. He's planning to release his major label debut later this year, and as the first member of OVO to come from outside of Drake's Toronto cabal, there's a lot of hope being placed on his ability to keep cobbling hooks together, like someone taking handfuls of spare parts and building capable sedans out of them. Can he crack down and deliver an album chock-full of heat rocks like "Tuesday"? It's within the realm of possibility.
But it seems much more likely that he'll follow in the footsteps of his greatest influence, the BasedGod: operating from the periphery, prolific and defiant, largely unconcerned with structure or melody or convention, opening doors for contemporaries who are more focused and/or traditionally skilled. (These doors don't have to be musical, either; consider Makonnen's fluid, nuanced response to questions about his sexuality in this New York Times profile.) In the meantime we're left with tapes like this, floating in the ether, being asked to accomplish things their creator doesn't seem all that interested in pursuing. | 2015-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 13, 2015 | 6.7 | 2f61cdfc-3b0b-448f-9594-b222f5f7b3fe | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
No one does baroque filth like Ty Dolla $ign. Free TC is an R&B epic of wanton bedroom jams, filled to the brim with charming grossness, actual prayers, and E-40. If you've been wondering what kind of sex music to play while you hump in your driverless car, this is it. | No one does baroque filth like Ty Dolla $ign. Free TC is an R&B epic of wanton bedroom jams, filled to the brim with charming grossness, actual prayers, and E-40. If you've been wondering what kind of sex music to play while you hump in your driverless car, this is it. | Ty Dolla $ign: Free TC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20916-free-tc/ | Free TC | There is a song on Ty Dolla $ign's first mixtape, Hou$e on the Hill, that wouldn't be out of place in a Los Angeles Philharmonic pops concert. On the track, an orchestral sample dances under the near-onomatopoeic effect of Ty's "up and down, up and down, up and down-down-down" chant. The song's title? "Stripper Pole".
Ty has honed this musically refined yet lyrically raunchy aesthetic for years, from his Raw & Bangin*'* tapes to his breakout single "My Cabana", to the louche Beach House series to last month's made-in-a-day Airplane Mode. It's a balancing act very few have mastered—and Ty bows to or has recruited anyone who has here—but he does it on a hoverboard while texting two or 10 girls.
To be sure, it helps that his musical gifts are many: he writes hooks that lodge in your head for weeks and he arranges four-part harmonies like an R&B George Martin. His molasses-dipped voice never misses a note even when it darts up into falsetto. He's stoked about sweeping orchestrations, '80s smooth jazz sax solos, and acoustic songs with Babyface. His confidence is why he flies when he swings for the fences on his new album, Free TC. On its dazzling highlight, "Miracle/Wherever", TC, the album's incarcerated namesake and Ty's younger brother, sings a vibrato-heavy hymn of perseverance over a prison phone. Midway through, Ty joins in. After putting God first and damning the haters with the conviction of a newly born-again Christian, he begins to pray. Musically, the shift is exquisite. But what's truly special is Ty's porcelain, Prince-like falsetto. Over dirty 808s and a stirring chord progression, his pristine voice pops out of the ether singing about—what else?—lying with a woman in the, uh, biblical sense. Ty said he spent $60,000 of his own money on the Benjamin Wright Orchestra. If all that bought was the final 20 seconds of "Wherever", he should consider it money well spent.
Predecessors who've climbed that Lucite-heel littered stairway to heaven before Ty are thanked outright. On "Blasé", the best song currently in radio rotation, Ty sings, "I think I'm Nate Dogg." Obviously. Love notes like "When I See Ya" sound ripped right from Nate's notebook. Another standout, "Credit", features Sevyn Streeter and recalls "Be Careful", R. Kelly's collaboration with Sparkle. Kellz actually makes an appearance on the sleek and glittery "Actress", which sounds far more like Hollywood than the Valley. "Straight Up", the album's sexiest song, samples Patrice Rushen's quiet storm classic, "Settle for My Love" and finds Jagged Edge downgrading their classic proposal from the altar to the bar.
Ty's up to his old "how many hoes?" tricks on Free TC, too, even if a woman is responsible for writing "Horses in the Stable". You can credit both his fireside manner and his forthright delivery—there is no fine print in a Ty Dolla $ign song—for the fact that plenty of women will still slip into his silk sheet-covered waterbed despite his warnings. | 2015-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | November 16, 2015 | 7.7 | 2f6f4e7c-ad0c-4e96-ac0d-17b0eccc89e1 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
Long lost folk legend who counts Devendra Banhart among her fans (yes, another one) has her sophomore album, originally released in 1971, reissued by Light in the Attic. | Long lost folk legend who counts Devendra Banhart among her fans (yes, another one) has her sophomore album, originally released in 1971, reissued by Light in the Attic. | Karen Dalton: In My Own Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9623-in-my-own-time/ | In My Own Time | To hear Karen Dalton sing "How Sweet It Is" or "When a Man Loves a Woman" is to hear the song completely transformed. The Oklahoma-bred, New York City-based singer sustains what were previously just grace notes, moves the accents around, inverts the rhythms, and plays hide-and-seek with meter. Dalton even changes the lyrics at the end of "When a Man Loves a Woman", fitting them to her female perspective. Her talent isn't merely interpretive, but imperialistic: She takes these songs over completely, bending their melodies and meanings to fit her specific mood. And In My Own Time, her second and final album, has a very specific mood: These songs exalt love, but acknowledge its transitory nature. Dalton gives herself over to its joys on "How Sweet It Is", notes its passing on her majestic take on Richard Manuel's "In a Station", then sounds resigned on closer "Are You Leaving for the Country?" The album contains just the slightest hint of a narrative-- a struggle between love and loss, the city and the country, joy and sorrow-- but she sounds honestly conflicted, a jaded romantic trying to find her way.
So that phrase "in my own time" fairly neatly sums up her life. She arrived in New York City with her daughter Abra in the early 1960s and became a fixture on the budding East Village folk scene-- even sharing the stage with Bob Dylan. But Dalton moved around compulsively, played rarely and begrudgingly, drank and did drugs heavily, and recorded almost never. She enjoyed playing privately with friends and hated the Billie Holliday comparison that dogged her throughout her entire life. Producer Nick Venet reportedly had to trick her into recording songs for her first album, It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You Best, released in 1969 and reissued by Koch in 1997, four years after her death. Dalton casts a subtle but powerful spell as she sings songs by Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and Duke Ellington with minimal accompaniment. In My Own Time was released in 1971 on producer Harvey Brooks' Just Sunshine label and has since been a collector's treasure on vinyl. Admirers Nick Cave and Devendra Banhart (who is turning folkie resurrection into a cottage industry) extol her talents in the liner notes for this affectionate reissue.
Compared to It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You Best, In My Own Time sounds a little more adventurous and lively with its full band and free-wheeling performances, seamlessly and playfully blending folk, country, rock, jazz, and soul. More than a dozen musicians coalesce into a loose, loopy backing band that knows exactly when to push forward ("In a Station"), exactly when to back off ("Take Me"), and exactly when to let Dalton take front and center (pretty much always). In My Own Time has the laidback, lackadaisical vibe of a close-knit group of friends doing single takes around an inspired singer. They play up the jazzy breeziness of "Take Me" and "Satisfied" and soak "In a Station" with multiple organs and Richard Bell's rambling piano, giving the song a majestic push ideally showcasing Dalton's dramatic range. They tackle the tripping rhythms of "How Sweet It Is" as Dalton sings almost independent of the familiar melody.
With such a clear dynamic between all these musicians, it's ironic that two of the album's most moving tracks are also its most naked: the bleakly existential "Katie Cruel" and the supremely lonely-sounding "Same Old Man" showcase her elastic vocals and piercing banjo with only minimal accompaniment. You could easily spill a thousand words on her pronunciation of "mackintosh." Like her debut, In My Own Time reveals a demanding, intuitive, eccentric singer and arranger who never sang her own words but clearly and confidently expressed herself with others'. She was a free spirit who sounds freest on these ten tracks. So "Are You Leaving for the Country?", with its swooning melody and laidback vibe, closes the album on a poignant note: this is her final take, her last number ever. It makes you wish there was just one more record to reissue and even more music to pore over obsessively. | 2006-11-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-11-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Light in the Attic | November 17, 2006 | 9 | 2f73a377-3335-448a-a1bf-28cf544e12cb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their phenomenal fifth album, the post-hardcore band work with famed producer Ross Robinson and come away with their most affecting and resonant work yet. | On their phenomenal fifth album, the post-hardcore band work with famed producer Ross Robinson and come away with their most affecting and resonant work yet. | Touché Amoré: Lament | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/touche-amore-lament/ | Lament | Jeremy Bolm has spent the past decade striving to live up to the example set by his own words. The music he makes with his band, Touché Amoré, compels guys with neck tattoos to spend a half hour irresponsibly slamming into fellow fans before they corner Bolm after the show and reveal how they felt truly seen by “And Now It’s Happening In Mine.” He’ll be the first to tell you about the ways he falls short: 2013’s Is Survived By explored Bolm’s struggles with the pressures of being in a profoundly impactful (but not famous) hardcore band, which brought even greater success and demands. Bolm missed his mother’s dying day because he was “on stage living the dream” at Fest in Florida. He atoned by making an entire album about her passing from stage 4 breast cancer. This entire history is summarized on “I’ll Be Your Host,” the second single from their phenomenal fifth album Lament, wherein Bolm recognizes the privilege of his platform and the common misconception that he can singlehandedly walk people through their grieving process because he made a great hardcore record about not knowing how to grieve. It’s a long overdue revelation that he alone can’t be there for everyone at all times, which makes Lament their capstone—a Touché Amoré album that can reach the most people as possible from the greatest distance.
To hear Touché Amoré tell it, they had no choice but to work with famed heavy metal producer Ross Robinson if they were going to make this kind of record. Infamously intense and hands-on, Robinson’s anti-Rick Rubin approach irrevocably changed the course of popular metal by enabling chaotic and highly unconventional acts like Korn, Slipknot, and Limp Bizkit to focus their live intensity without compromising to reach suburban adolescents like Bolm—“I saw the ‘Blind’ music video on a local music video channel,” he recently recalled. “And my fucking brain fell out of my head.”
More germane to Touché Amoré, Robinson was also behind the boards for Blood Brothers’ Burn, Piano Island, Burn, Glassjaw’s Worship and Tribute, and the motherlode, Relationship of Command, all wildly ambitious records that pushed already revered post-hardcore bands dangerously close to mainstream success and shortly thereafter, their demise. “Ross is known for two things, getting a drummer replaced or kicked out and making the singer cry,” Bolm joked.
Opener “Come Heroine” does a lot of things that are familiar to Touché Amoré—Bolm begins screaming off-mic; the band launches into a bucking, double-time thrash; they pull back during the verse and rev up the circle pit again. Every single second of “Come Heroine” does these things more emphatically than previous Touché Amoré songs, the intended result of a band with enough time, enough confidence, and enough resources to push everything by 10-20 percent more. The tempo slows noticeably between the verse and the bridge; the time signature shifts subtly; the guitars are newly textured to variously evoke shoegaze and Morricone. As an instrumental alone, “Come Heroine” would feel like a song about interrogating familiar patterns and being open to unexpected inspiration, but then Bolm’s lyrics confirm it’s definitely about that—“When I thought I saw everything,” he intones before returning to his howl, “I SAW YOU!”
Touché Amoré albums usually reserve one or two songs that push their reliably cathartic and anthemic melodic post-hardcore towards something as outright accessible as, say, the National. Lament asks, why not make that every song? “A Broadcast” lingers in a Leonard Cohen afterworld, averting a typically bellowing chorus for an ’00-indie chorale. On album closer “A Forecast,” Bolm sings bravely and rhymes bluntly over twinkling piano chords, which isn’t even the most shocking part of the song. “The funniest Touché Amoré song” doesn’t evoke a lot of competition, but “the most uncomfortably revealing Touché Amoré song” does, and “A Forecast” somehow manages to be both as Bolm airs out resentments over the way he felt abandoned by family, friends, bandmates and even Epitaph Records after Stage Four—“It’s not like I wrote some lyrics/Detailing the exact events/Some profit off the album/Most I just consider friends”; “I’ve lost more family members/Not to cancer but the GOP/What’s the difference I’m not for certain/They all end up dead to me.”
If Lament had come out in 2000, “Reminders” could have been their “One Armed Scissor” or “Pretty Lush,” a Trojan horse of a single that landed them on MTV2 and late-night shows. There’s no Touché Amoré song quite like it, a straight-up pop-punk singalong that’s just as goofy enough to be convincing and lyrically devastating enough to be what it really is: an otherwise prototypical Touché Amoré song about trying to find simple pleasures in friendship (human or otherwise) when nihilism feels far more appealing.
Touché Amoré’s influences on Lament are not obscure—they made a “What’s Inspiring Album Five” Spotify playlist that included the softest Deftones song, the heaviest Real Estate one, and soft-rock staples from Orleans and Mike and the Mechanics. None of these reference points are illogical—country music shares hardcore’s proclivity for lyrical directness, while contemplative indie rock adds some silver accents to their blackened bleakness. Lament even makes a sensible kinship with Counting Crows, another metropolitan, California band whose existential yearning can pass for humble heartland rock. “Suffering has no purpose, ‘Round Here’ is an almost perfect song,” Bolm yells on “Exit Row,” and we’re all poorer for missing out on the opportunity to hear a crowd repeat “ALMOST!” like Bolm does a second later.
In the midst of all of this atypical Touché Amoré music, the very atypical lead single “Limelight” now feels at home. At 5:03, it’s by far the longest song they’ve ever made—over the previous 12 years, exactly one Touché Amoré song has surpassed four minutes. The handclaps and backup shouts on the chorus sound like they’re being pumped from a Jumbotron. At a point where most Touché Amoré songs would stop cold, Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull comes in with his instantly recognizable twang, an apt segue to a coda showing off Nick Steinhardt’s newly acquired pedal steel skills. It’s a sequel of sorts to Is Survived By’s “To Write Content,” where Bolm recalled a conversation he had with Hull about whether their personal happiness would eventually become a liability for their bands.
Seven years later, Hull’s music pops up in Hollywood films and Whole Foods, his commercial breakthrough coming on an album inspired by the birth of his first child. Touché Amoré have played Coachella, they created custom guitar pedals, and got signed to Roc Nation. Maybe the ceiling isn’t that much higher for a post-hardcore band in 2020. Bolm takes a hard look at everything he once romanticized on “Limelight”—“saying no just for the thrill,” public adulation—mourns his recently deceased dogs, and reflects on nights that go by without him and his partner sharing a kiss. But rather than being a self-pitying dirge for washed hardcore guys, it’s empowerment for anyone who’s feeling a little burnt out by anything that used to mean everything. A call to find new fires that will blaze slower and longer. For a band spooked by their status as role models, Touché Amoré still can’t help but lead by example.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | October 12, 2020 | 8.2 | 2f777b2f-a7ec-4591-a08b-880e40f75043 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
This live document from 2016 gathers members of Swans, Sonic Youth, and other underground vets to pay tribute to Martin Bisi, the iconic producer whose touch defined the sound of New York noise. | This live document from 2016 gathers members of Swans, Sonic Youth, and other underground vets to pay tribute to Martin Bisi, the iconic producer whose touch defined the sound of New York noise. | Various Artists: BC35: The 35 Year Anniversary of BC Studio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-bc35-the-35-year-anniversary-of-bc-studio/ | BC35: The 35 Year Anniversary of BC Studio | In New York, a city where arts spaces are perpetually shuttering, lasting 35 years as a recording studio suggests no small potatoes. Hell, SoHo’s legendary Magic Shop saw just 28 birthdays, closing in 2016 with Bowie’s Blackstar among the final albums tracked there. Not to say real estate on Crosby Street equates to Gowanus, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where Martin Bisi started running BC Studios in 1981, before he even turned 20. Surely, the disparity related to the nearby Gowanus Canal, a waste-filled commercial thoroughfare so repulsive it once earned the nickname Lavender Lake. Rumors swirled like oil slicks that the canal was a last stop for mafia victims. Once called the Gashouse District, Gowanus had become a post-war wasteland, complete with feral dogs and roving gangs, by the time the Manhattan-raised Bisi arrived.
Thirty-five years later, the pollution remains (the canal was named an EPA Superfund site in 2010) but Gowanus suffers the predacious developmental fate of many New York neighborhoods. It wasn’t until 2015, well into the neighborhood’s gentrification—you could by then see a Whole Foods from the studio roof—that Bisi lost some teeth to muggers on the block. The fact that friends of the humble producer found it necessary to organize a Kickstarter to cover his medical expenses speaks to the demise of a thriving creative class in the city.
BC35 emerged as a result of that fundraiser for Bisi’s medical bills: a compilation of live takes (and a few overdubs) spanning one weekend in January 2016. The credits read like a who’s who of New York’s experimental underground: members of Swans, Sonic Youth, Pop. 1280, Parlor Walls, Live Skull, Cop Shoot Cop, Foetus, and many, many more gathered for a two-day session and show, with an audience present and participating (namely as a choir on the gorgeous J.G. Thirlwell track “Downhill”). Mostly improvised, with a handful of pre-composed songs thrown in, it’s a sonic embodiment of risk-taking, rule-breaking, and antithesis that celebrates the endurance of a man and a space tied directly to New York’s noise, art-rock, punk, free jazz, hip-hop, and alternative movements.
Across 13 tracks, Bisi demonstrates—as a producer, engineer, and general facilitator of the avant-garde—what’s made his name familiar to liner-notes obsessives and New York noise nerds for three and a half decades. Showcasing the opaque, roaring, visceral sound he’s come to epitomize, BC35 acts as a totem to his enduring role in NYC’s rock mythos. If it’s not Michael Gira living on a couch above the studio or the entire Zulu Nation crammed into the control room, it’s the very formation of the space that makes Bisi more than a footnote.
In the late ’70s, a 17-year-old Bisi answered a Village Voice ad from bassist Bill Laswell, becoming a peripheral member of the bassist’s project Material. Laswell, meanwhile, bumped into Brian Eno in their common East Village neighborhood, goading him to check out the group. Eno—who came to New York to produce the second Talking Heads album—eventually caught a Material gig and brought Laswell into his fold. As Eno geared up to finish Ambient 4: On Land, Bisi and Material sought a studio and living space. After another Village Voice ad, they landed at 232 3rd Street in Gowanus, an old factory building where Bisi still lives and works. Eno financed its recording gear. Bisi’s first real task as engineer, at what was then called OAO Studios, became sessions for Ambient 4.
There are gorgeous flashes of ambience on BC35, but a stronger common thread emerges via the 1978 Eno-produced compilation No New York, which came to define the Dada-esque no wave aesthetic and featured James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. Bisi went on to record or perform with all those acts under various permutations, from Arto Lindsay’s collaboration with Peter Scherer to Lydia Lunch’s work with Sonic Youth. The Sonic Youth records Bad Moon Rising and EVOL, made at BC studios with Bisi credited as producer, marked a breakthrough for the space. (Sonic Youth credited the rooms as Before Christ.) Bob Bert, Sonic Youth’s drummer for Bad Moon Rising, appears on “Nowhere Near the Rainbow,” the opening track of BC35, alongside Stu Spasm, Skeleton Boy, Alyse Lamb, and Bisi himself. It is a disorienting melange of wonked-out electronics, pummeling, unpredictable percussion, feverish guitars, and disembodied vocals.
It was the studio’s early experience with Afrika Bambaataa, Fab Five Freddy, and other hip-hop musicians that initially drew the interest of Sonic Youth. The recording of Herbie Hancock’s landmark 1983 Future Shock (the massive single “Rockit” using turntablist techniques) left Material and Bisi at a crossroads: Continue with the pop pedigree, or push further into the underground? Laswell left the space in the hands of Bisi, who dug deeper. It’s notable that Bisi’s mother, a concert pianist who specialized in the technically demanding compositions of Chopin and Liszt, represented “bourgeois aesthetics” and “bourgeois values,” as Bisi once put it. The rejection of virtuosity stands as a core value of much of Bisi’s recorded output, if not the New York underground itself. On BC35, the establishment resentment rings clear throughout and notably on “What a Jerk,” performed by EXCOP, an ensemble made up of Swans and Cop Shoot Cop alums: It’s a thundering, tom-driven song that chronicles the assault of a police officer and might be the strongest statement on the record.
By 1990, Gowanus hit its nadir, seeing its population at its lowest in a century. Yet Bisi verged on another summit. In the wake of Nirvana’s major-label deal (thanks to the very A&R brokerage of Sonic Youth with Geffen) bands that gestated in storied New York dives like CBGB, Pyramid Club, Danceteria, Mudd Club, and Sin Club landed on majors. Improbably, Cop Shoot Cop released an EP, Suck City, and an LP, Ask Questions Later, on Interscope, both engineered by Bisi. New York alt-metal heroes Helmet reportedly scored a $1 million advance with the same label and brought Bisi in (alongside Butch Vig) to track guitars on their third LP, Betty. In 1999, Bisi contributed engineering to Cibo Matto’s second LP, Stereo * Type A, for Warner Brothers.
At the turn of the century, his visibility at an all-time high, Bisi reaffirmed his commitment to the underground as a new wave of no wave and noise swept North Brooklyn. He worked on records for burgeoning labels such as Northern Spy and Sacred Bones while also finding credits on more established indies like Matador, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey. The bulk of his work with the latter label comes with White Hills, the New York psych-rock band formed in 2005. They contributed a stirring, wailing guitar drone to BC35, “End of the Line,” a truly puzzling mix of beauty and pain.
That is to say: There are few hooks across BC35. As is so often the case with music of this stripe, the energy and vitality shine through all the darkness and violence present. The severity of the gesture means as much as the sound. Aside from all the Melvins and Swans worship, as a survey of Bisi’s journey, BC35 gives an incomplete—how could it be anything else—but satisfying look. Though the lore often precedes him, Bisi and BC have made an indelible mark with the distinct sounds of his MCI mixing board and cavernous recording rooms. That’s no bad standing, especially for a scrappy New Yorker constantly rethinking his approach. Let’s hope he survives in Gowanus for another 35. | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Bronson | April 20, 2018 | 7.3 | 2f7bcca4-9f63-4b66-9ccf-c2ccdc981e74 | Dale W Eisinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dale-w eisinger/ | |
On his latest standout EP, the young Midwestern rapper isn’t looking for his voice so much as finding out exactly what he can do with it. | On his latest standout EP, the young Midwestern rapper isn’t looking for his voice so much as finding out exactly what he can do with it. | Kweku Collins: Grey EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23251-grey-ep/ | Grey EP | Up to this point, Kweku Collins has subsisted in shades of grey. His music slides between abstract poetry and melodic rap over production that extracts elements from several genres; he’s biracial, and he’s from Evanston, Ill., a town that almost lets you say you’re from Chicago. His latest project, the self-produced and aptly titled Grey EP, is actually more metallic, reflecting back an artist on the precipice of something great.
In the year since the release of 2016 standout Nat Love, Collins has been on a steady ascent. He’s traveled the world touring, soundtracked an episode of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Black Panther” and, perhaps, found that backup plans are overrated. In nine tracks, Grey examines the life of a 20-year-old just about ready to break into something big. Collins isn’t looking for his voice so much as finding out exactly what he can do with it—it distorts and groans, speeds up and slows down, plays the background and commands the spotlight. He achieves a strikingly cohesive result considering the assortment of subjects and sounds Collins broaches throughout.
”International Business Trip,” the EP’s lead single, is a woozy journey to the faraway places his success has taken him. “I’m just a 20-something thinking ’bout my early years/Thinking how two years ago I couldn’t buy a 20 sack,” he raps, nodding to “Niggas in Paris” as his own fulfilled prophecy. Like his travels, Collins’ brand of rap is borderless. Kid Cudi’s and OutKast’s aesthetic influences are revealed in the melodies, hums and artistically offbeat flows that highlight Grey, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are also here. The ethereal “Oasis2: Maps” reimagines the band’s “Maps,” replacing the guitars with sparkling piano. Collins’ voice feels made for this; the layered echoes and bittersweet lyrics create their own drama as he sings “maybe this time will be different/ain’t that what they always say.” Elsewhere, Sylvie Grace’s cello threatens to unseat the flute as rap’s instrument of the moment, as she transforms “Youaintshit (Shine On)” into a majestic minimalist dream.
The Afro-Latin percussive styles he learned from his father and the spoken word of his past seem to inform much of Collins’ style. The drums have a calming, almost tribal feel on “Aya,” which features fellow Midwestern rhymer Allan Kingdom. The sublime combination of background vocalizations and airy synths on “Jump.i” have a similar effect. The song is sonically dense; the verse is colorful and indefinite, demanding several listens as Collins claims his own light and encourages others to find their own.
“While things crumble around us/We build again” are Collins’ final words on the EP—a reminder, perhaps, of the ongoing work to be done and the opportunities that rebuilding affords. It’s the kind of awareness that comes with existing on the fringes, and while Collins’ story has been underscored by the notion of outsiderism, there’s so much freedom to be found there. Adhering to expectations is optional, and the power of definition lies in the hands of the individual who has found a comfortable space as an outlier. Grey is rap on its own terms, its name an acknowledgment of Collins’ own self-awareness and further evidence that the misfits can be some of the most liberated among us. | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | May 6, 2017 | 7.6 | 2f882843-e8b7-4899-9727-6f26cc11f1e6 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
On his bleak new album, woods doubles down on the misery that snakes through all his music. | On his bleak new album, woods doubles down on the misery that snakes through all his music. | billy woods: Terror Management | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-woods-terror-management/ | Terror Management | Terror Management begins with a clip of Kurt Vonnegut explaining narrative arcs. The most common story structure, he argues, is “man in a hole,” which he breaks down as “somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.” Vonnegut’s audience laughs, but in billy woods’ world, holes tend to be bottomless. His last album was March’s hiding places, a record set in crawl spaces and crags where men in holes settle into the sediment instead of plotting escape. Terror Management, written immediately after hiding places, doubles down on that fatalism, sinking into the darkness at the bottom of the well.
The album’s cover is a jagged ice plain with a fleck of a sun in the distant horizon, and woods channels that sense of chilled abandonment throughout the record, finding misery everywhere he looks: cancelled Christmases, dead spiders stuck in webs, splintered glaciers. The imagery is crisp but plotless; instead of characters, woods offers landscapes. “The sky empty, trees like widows huddled/The bore muzzle nuzzle, iridescent black truffle/Black snow in the forest,” he raps on “Shepherd’s Tone” He sounds like he’s narrating satellite footage.
That sense of dreadful stillness is amplified by the production, which is often tenuously connected to the writing. On “Gas Leak” a blast wave of distortion detonates in the middle of the song, presumably dramatizing the title but also disrupting the momentum. On “Blood Thinner,” hisses and crackles sizzle in the foreground at a steady clip. woods is clearly trying to evoke tension and paranoia, but the result too often feels cluttered and airless.
The record catches steam around the midway point, where woods taps into the sentiments behind his obsession with bleakness. His freeform, street-preacher flow works wonders on “Birdsong,” winding into volleys of gut punches. “First time he saw the word nigga in a book/How it danced on the page/Back in the day/It’s what the family didn't say/How you knew it was AIDS,” he raps. “Trivial Pursuit” turns Open Mike Eagle’s album Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes into a funny conspiracy: “Rappers dying in they sleep/I’m watching Mike Eagle on TV/It ain’t just luck, chief.” Moments like these are reminders that the miseries and absurdities of the late capitalist hellscape are sensory and personal. The abyss is an experience, not just a setting.
Album highlight “Great Fires” centers on the permanence of a breakup, presumably woods’ divorce. woods is oblique throughout, never citing a decisive scene of rupture, but never disputing that the relationship was doomed. “Sleep a steep fall, wake up like a stray dog/You wonder where she found the strength not to call/You’re proud of her, you know what it cost,” he laments, stuck in the aftermath. Built around a tinny horn loop and dusty drums, the song swells to a despondent utterance of the former lover’s name that’s jaggedly overdubbed with the word “love.” The insertion sucks the wind out of woods and lays bare the kinds of losses he sees in the desolation he’s so intent on cataloging.
In 2013 billy woods described himself as the bridge between late Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera and Earl Sweatshirt. There was a defiant pride in that claim, a conviction that despite Marechera’s death from AIDS in the ’80s, and woods’ obscurity, the lineage of artful African perspectives on Western terrors would persist. In 2019 Marechera is still dead, the Klan is active in Kurt Vonnegut’s native Indiana, and Earl regularly tweets billy woods lyrics. The world is absolutely the shitshow woods knows it to be, but even the apocalypse has its charms. | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | October 11, 2019 | 6.5 | 2f896f9a-b672-407b-a177-9b738997f931 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On her third album, the magnetic D.C. multi-instrumentalist pushes from post-punk toward a new clutch of electronic influences, seemingly sorting them as she goes. | On her third album, the magnetic D.C. multi-instrumentalist pushes from post-punk toward a new clutch of electronic influences, seemingly sorting them as she goes. | Sneaks: Highway Hypnosis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sneaks-highway-hypnosis/ | Highway Hypnosis | Eva Moolchan’s first two albums as Sneaks sound fearless. They move at high velocities and seem to orbit imaginary worlds, weaving through conversational fragments in less than 20 minutes. Those records positioned the Washington, D.C., singer and multi-instrumentalist as a kind of post-punk Sappho, with brief songs that were deeply personal but endlessly open to interpretation. Between releasing 2017’s It’s a Myth and recording the new Highway Hypnosis, Moolchan toured extensively, new experiences soundtracked by a fresh set of influences and interests. She gravitated from the chintzy post-punk that animated her earlier work toward hip-hop and electronic music. Highway Hypnosis attempts to articulate those two years as a listener and artist, but Moolchan now sounds untethered, plunging into these new forms and ideas but often losing what once seemed to be sure footing.
Moolchan recorded Highway Hypnosis at Brooklyn’s now-defunct Silent Barn, playing and singing nearly everything, from her customary bass to samples and synths. On introductory spins, Highway Hypnosis sounds cocky and sharp—hearing Moolchan blabber in a made-up language to a dub beat during “Addis,” for instance, is goofy but captivating. But it soon becomes stale, the underdeveloped songs leaving a numbing aftertaste. That dub beat begins to sway like a dinghy on choppy water during a rainstorm—unsure of itself, splintering at the center.
In the past, angular sparsity served Moolchan well, but this just feels bloated. At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still. Even the opening title track, where a pitch-shifted vocal loop serves as the song’s backbone, seems to stretch far beyond its meager two minutes, the pastiche more suffocating than hypnotic. Centered around a grating frog-croak of a synth, “Cinnamon” moves like a bibber slogging through a muddied field or a wet snow after the bar has closed. “Yamaha chang in the ring yeah/Oh my god, Lionel Richie’s dead, yeah,” she deadpans blithely, the nonsense enhancing the stupor. Worse still, “The Way It Goes” plays out like a half-hearted SoundCloud demo; the Princess Nokia-indebted beat might tempt you to move. But it is listless and recycled, the kind of thing that prompts you to step outside of the party in search of fresh air.
There is one moment of brilliance near the end, at least. “A Lil Close” opens with an assault of pulsating, seedy, late-night synths and sequencers that boil over like kettles in an otherwise silent house. A frantic, dissonant bassline emerges, evoking the skeletal freakiness of Suburban Lawns and the ice-cold chill of Sonic Youth. The song exists at a truly joyous, unexpected saddle between post-punk and hip-hop. The gears shift with the energy of a skateboarder’s perfectly executed ollie or a figure skater’s combination jump. But then the album’s presiding smog cuts back in, and you’re left clouded out by it, stuck to wander disappointedly through Moolchan’s unsorted new influences. | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 28, 2019 | 5.5 | 2f8a9b7b-b4d0-4beb-849f-ed4020322c21 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Once again taking up the mantle of the genre and social movement he calls “noirwave,” South Africa’s Yannick Ilunga finds new strength in personal expression and political engagement. | Once again taking up the mantle of the genre and social movement he calls “noirwave,” South Africa’s Yannick Ilunga finds new strength in personal expression and political engagement. | Petite Noir: La Maison Noir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/petite-noir-la-maison-noir/ | La Maison Noir | As music discovery has been outsourced to search and recommendation engines, artists have become adept at gaming algorithms to their advantage, taking bets on wacky genre tags that shoot them to the top of search results and lend an air of novelty. This arms race has produced “genres” like soul trap, catwave, coastgoth, and spaceghostqueef, among many others. These labels are often a flagrant vehicle for self-promotion or trolling, and noirwave, the genre coined by South African artist Yannick Ilunga for his act Petite Noir, has historically been easy to doubt. “Noirwave is more than just a sound,” he explained in 2015, “it’s a progressive social movement that's rapidly breaking out of the pan-African underground, emerging in the creative output of inspiring minds from across the globe.” Sure. On La Maison Noir, however, something has clicked into place. Sleeker and more militant, the genre emerges as a symbol of spirited personal and political investment.
Ilunga’s past work as Petite Noir drew its strength from its gleaming opacity. Like an ocean, his songs, built from elements of post-punk, kwaito, and pop, teemed with life under the surface, and they were just as dazzling on their face. The way songs like “The Fall” and “Chess” smoothly shifted and flowed made genre and style an afterthought. Ilunga was such an acute communicator of mood and pathos that the means of communication felt self-evident; his music came from within him. As a descriptor “noirwave” felt like a protruding tag placed on the collar of an otherwise comfy t-shirt.
On La Maison Noir the term functions less as a logo and more as a medium for Ilunga’s ideas about diaspora and identity. On “Blame Fire” Ilunga opens up about his family’s history as Congolese expats and uses their forced migration to foreground his own forward movement. The song is fleet yet loaded; as wisps of guitar and synths pulse around him, Ilunga evokes images of war and violence but also growth and renewal. “So blame fire, blame fire, blame fire, blame fire,” he chants with both pride and gravitas. “We need to realize that our skin is a blessing. Fuck a curse,” he announces during the bridge, his message clear.
This swing from the personal to the political, the specific to the allegorical, is a consistent source of whiplash. Ilunga works like a trickster throughout the record, injecting levity into images of violence and channeling desperation during moments of joy. The refrain of “F.F.Y.F. (POW),” a song about self-determination, is cartoonish and catchy. As Ilunga and collaborator Rha! Rha! cheer, “Pow pow pow pow,” it feels like they’re mowing down enemies with a Bugs Bunny flag gun. It’s a tad cheeky but the sentiment is real. As the drums and cheers briefly give way to a dancing marimba and Ilunga declares, “This is noirwave, this is it,” it feels like self-affirmation.
“R E S P E C T” is just as double-edged. Demanding recognition, Ilunga spells out “respect” in a pleading, cloying way. As the polyrhythmic percussion pounds beneath his voice like beggar’s cup of coins, the strength of his baritone feels poignantly diminished. It’s as if the louder he shouts, the more invisible he feels. The fact that the song could be about being an underground artist, or black, or a migrant only heightens its potency.
In these moments, the collapsing of distance that noirwave is supposed to embody goes beyond fusionism or self-promotion and feels more like something of a worldview. On the standout “Blowing Up the Congo,” guest Saul Williams weaves the record’s ideas together deftly: “Master-slave binary, Cobalt rubber refinery/Colonial mentality, fed into machines/Dissect the engines and devices/Not just the precious stones that make them run.”
The Congo evoked here is a nexus of history, dystopia, and potential, overdetermined yet unscripted. Whether or not you’re Congolese or African or black, hearing this litany tethers you to how that future unfurls. Music has a way of conjuring a sense of intimacy between listener and artist, and La Maison Noir weaponizes that rapport without dismissing it. Noirwave may not be a movement but it is a force. | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Roya | October 16, 2018 | 7.8 | 2f8e3f89-e5a5-422d-8c13-d762fc3667d8 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Brooklyn electro-pop duo’s fifth album breaks into two mirror-image halves of a guided tour of heartbreak, hope, and longing. They’re still making cryptic indie pop that hits like a sugar rush. | The Brooklyn electro-pop duo’s fifth album breaks into two mirror-image halves of a guided tour of heartbreak, hope, and longing. They’re still making cryptic indie pop that hits like a sugar rush. | Water From Your Eyes: Structure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/water-from-your-eyes-structure/ | Structure | For Brooklyn electro-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, the path to clarity is paved with playful misdirection. On a pair of spoken-word interludes on their fifth album, Structure, frenzied dance punk careens into silence, suddenly replaced by the sort of dry, dead-air ambience you’d expect from a podcast. Within these hushed eye-of-the-storm moments, one smack in the middle of each side of the record, vocalist Rachel Brown plays a kind of word-game version of Exquisite Corpse. Repurposing the lyrics from album centerpiece “Quotations,” they pluck out nouns and adjectives and glue them to one another, seemingly at random, until they resemble the mutterings of a person talking in their sleep: “You’re the embers go sunlight/A line fake feel matching colors/Myth a revealing another constantly now.” Even at their quietest, Water From Your Eyes can’t resist cracking a surrealist joke, dragging you down a rabbit hole of “memories down of in sounds.”
A gambit like this is fully in character. After all, this is a band whose first release of 2021 was an album of covers that began with a stone-faced rendition of Eminem’s Academy Award-winning docu-single “Lose Yourself.” What is shocking is not only how brilliantly the diversion pays off, but that it works not just once, but twice. Structure follows a double-helix layout wherein the two cut-up poetry interludes lead into two marvelously distinct versions of “Quotations”: one an abrasive romp through gurgling synthesizers and whirls of processed guitar, the other (“‘Quotations’,” complete with scare quotes in the title) an ambient collage of Brown’s voice, pulsing in meditative harmony before erupting quietly into IDM breakbeats. But these puzzles aren’t just art-rock pranks; Structure is Water From Your Eyes’ most rewarding album to date. It holds your gaze long after the mystery fades, channeling a powerful sense of empathy to mesmerizing effect.
Structure is far from being a complete about-face for the band; they’re still making cryptic indie pop that hits like a sugar rush. Their most intriguing and satisfying departure is architectural. Compared to the disorienting way that Somebody Else’s Song swung from raging electro punk to acoustic indie pop and back again, their latest record is a carefully tended garden of ideas that reveals Brown and bandmate Nate Amos’ songwriting partnership blossoming in full flower. Structure opts for controlled chaos, unfolding over two mirror-image halves on a guided tour of heartbreak, hope, and longing. Each begins with a slower, psychedelic ballad, moves through blistering post-punk, and closes on one of two versions of “Quotations,” making it tempting to view the album as a pair of EPs, asking the same questions and receiving the same answer in different languages.
As they chart out these parallel journeys, Water From Your Eyes take care to circle back to their roots. Live and on record, they’re experts at using extended jams as a tool to purify the overwhelming emotions of a moment, breaking them down in magnificent detail as they filter through circular dance rhythms and spiraling melodies. “My Love’s” and “Track Five,” the two that hew closest to their origins attempting to ape New Order, capture the infectious melancholy of the ’80s new-wave titans while sounding uniquely of their time.
Water From Your Eyes are at their most unhinged on “My Love’s,” a fiery take on disappearing into the wild momentum of a night spent racing against last call. Brown’s voice, filtered and doubled until it drips with venom, bites through layers of seasick drones: “My love is lost somewhere under the ground/They know their own way out.” Violins stab against blasts of white noise, raising the stakes with a spy-thriller theme before the track blacks out, unconsciousness hitting like a brick wall. These cinematic flourishes are a welcome addition, expanding the scope of their crying-on-the-dance-floor antics by giving them a clear narrative, carving grooves to guide the tears down your face.
Beyond these steady refinements, album opener “When You’re Around” marks Structure’s cleanest break with Water From Your Eyes’ past, and the clearest indication of how far their irreverence for genre and form has carried them. At first listen, the disarmingly straightforward psychedelic pop tune could be mistaken for a test of how subtly they can troll a crowd with a hammed-up pastiche. A single piano chord stutters to life before surf-rock crooning glides in, swimming over a light, shuffling beat. Gentle horns, courtesy of New York DIY mainstay Matt Norman, guide you around a coy self-reference (“There is water in my eyes and I'm alive”) and into a swooning chorus. “I hear your voice and save it for later,” Brown sings, allowing the slightest crack to enter their typically cool delivery. It’s the kind of windswept, golden-hour confession that melts your heart in the moment and haunts you forever when love turns cold. For a band who have coyly dismissed their own work as “weed music,” it’s frightening how sharply they can make a ballad cut when they drop the act and go for broke. Emerging from the haze and snapping into focus, Water From Your Eyes allow nonsense to run its course, even if it ultimately means embracing sincerity.
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. | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | September 2, 2021 | 8 | 2f9211ab-5917-49c7-89e1-34bb58c7bf2e | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
The West Coast beatmaker returns with a new album on Brainfeeder and he adds a new wrinkle to the dusted thump of his productions: his voice, both singing and rapping on proper songs. | The West Coast beatmaker returns with a new album on Brainfeeder and he adds a new wrinkle to the dusted thump of his productions: his voice, both singing and rapping on proper songs. | Matthewdavid: In My World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19488-matthewdavid-in-my-world/ | In My World | Matthew McQueen’s music as Matthewdavid started attracting attention at the top of this decade, and the California-via-Florida-via-Atlanta beatmaker benefited from excellent timing. After a few years of bouncing around Los Angeles’ burgeoning electronic music scene—an exploratory period that included the founding of his initially cassette-focused label Leaving—he caught the discerning ear of Flying Lotus, who signed McQueen to his own Brainfeeder imprint. His proper debut LP, Outmind, was released in 2011, which, depending on how you look at it, was either a very fertile or very tough period for bedroom producers who drew influence from hip-hop. At that time, musicians of questionable talent emerged constantly in this sphere, and many of them directly ripped off FlyLo’s sidechained, fusion-focused sound. McQueen's aesthetic bore a clear debt to his label head, but Outmind stood apart from the pack, a static-riddled document that infused its more straightforward moments with dense thickets of obscured noise.
McQueen’s latest full-length, In My World, could be considered Outmind’s proper follow-up after a few low-profile releases, but the album represents a move away from earlier style. The shift is immediately apparent in the opening title track, which pairs a decaying AM-radio sample with a pulsing rhythmic framework and, most notably, McQueen’s voice. “In my world, it’s paradise for you,” he sing-raps, before stating plainly, “Outer space is where I want to know you.”
This latest detour could owe something to significant life events—McQueen recently married and had a child—and In My World certainly seems more personal than his previous work. Regardless, his choice to sing, rap, and sing-rap throughout In My World is obviously risky; his vocals tend to distract from what surrounds them, and his skill on the mic is, at best, rudimentary. McQueen’s turn here brings to mind fellow West Coast hip-hop-influenced oddball James Pants, another polyglot artist who had a brief moment of increased visibility earlier this decade; at times, In My World’s fixation on R&B-abused frameworks and dub-influenced sonics comes across as similarly dated.
In My World’s back half briefly ditches McQueen’s voice and is more engaging for it—”West Coast Jungle Juke”, in particular, heads back to Outmind’s foggy swarm before quietly erupting in an ‘ardcore break near its end. And when he takes the mic again on the closing cut “Birds in Flight” it’s his strongest vocal on the album: he simmers and whines over a bed of rainforest sonics and distant flute, a soothing and somewhat affecting creation reminiscent of Animal Collective member Avey Tare’s solo work. Even at its best, though, In My World resembles a less-engaging version of someone else, the sound of an artist regressing instead of stepping forward into new territory. | 2014-07-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-07-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | July 14, 2014 | 5.4 | 2f9286e2-018e-43bb-9f29-768221821c8d | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On Sophia Kennedy’s bewitching debut LP, flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage. It’s an unlikely release from DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s dance-oriented Pampa Records. | On Sophia Kennedy’s bewitching debut LP, flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage. It’s an unlikely release from DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s dance-oriented Pampa Records. | Sophia Kennedy: Sophia Kennedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23190-sophia-kennedy/ | Sophia Kennedy | “Being lonely makes you special/But being special makes you lonely too,” Sophia Kennedy sings in “Being Special,” one of the witty, mysterious songs on her bewitching debut. Loneliness is a running theme throughout the album, yet her voice radiates delight; her language wears a faintly hallucinatory halo, placing the humdrum mechanics of living and longing in the shadow of melting clocks and “volleyball weather,” whatever that might be. Special she certainly is: Sophia Kennedy introduces us to a powerhouse voice and a unique sensibility, one where flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage, and where knotty bon mots and curious non sequiturs make heartbreak seem almost surmountable.
Her specialness begins with her trajectory. Raised in Baltimore, Kennedy moved to Hamburg to study film and ended up staying there, writing music for theater—hardly the usual path for an emerging singer-songwriter. Given the kind of music she makes, it’s also unusual that her album appears on DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records, a label far better known for house and techno. Granted, the artists on Pampa’s roster—Axel Boman, Ada, Robag Wruhme, Isolée—are no strangers to quirk, and Kennedy’s idiosyncratic music is as at home there as it would be anywhere else. Her co-producer here is Mense Reents, a veteran of a number of oddball Hamburg acts including Egoexpress, Die Goldenen Zitronen, and the Pampa-signed Die Vögel. The latter duo’s primary claim to fame is “The Chicken,” a minimalist house track that turns an off-the-cuff comment from Werner Herzog (“Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity”) into an unlikely dancefloor refrain. Here, though, offbeat details never overpower the music’s sentimental pull.
If you are accustomed to hearing pop music largely as a nexus of comparison points, a collection of small differences, Kennedy may leave you pleasantly flummoxed. It’s not entirely sui generis; she borrows Lou Reed’s sneering diction and boogie-woogie piano in “William By the Windowsill” and Stereolab’s gleaming organs for “Kimono Hill.” A trim, salsa-inspired bassline nestles inside the flickering machine beat of “3:05,” and “A Bug on a Rug in a Building” offers flashbacks to the DIY electronic pop of the German Wohnzimmerszene (“living-room scene”) of the 1990s. But these fleeting reference points function mainly like windows within an interior of her own design, one defined largely by bold, declarative keyboards and multi-tracked vocals. In “Foam,” trap beats and Phil Collins-grade drum fills serve as fuses for Kennedy’s close-harmonized fireworks. In “Dizzy Izzy,” a buzzing jaw harp twangs against cellos sampled from Nat Baldwin’s “In the Hollows”—an incongruous pairing, perhaps, but one that somehow makes sense in the glow of Kennedy’s arcing melodic line.
It all adds up to a frequently exhilarating listen, so it’s ironic that Kennedy’s lyrics are so often full of doubt. In “William By the Windowsill,” her character longs to stick his head into “The gutter of the roof/And whistle all the saddest tunes.” Behind the inscrutable roll call of “Dizzy Izzy” lies an observation that any high-school-reunion attendee will recognize as true: “In the mirror of our hometown/We are all the troubled ones.” Much of the album’s anxiety revolves around home. “I don’t know/Where I live,” she admits in the slinky, nervous “3:05,” and in the opening of “Build Me a House,” one of the album’s most gripping and immediate songs, she pleads, “Build me a house/Where I can live in.” It’s the most prosaic of requests, but the intensity of her singing elevates the sentiment until it seems almost existential.
Is this longing a kind of homesickness? A clue might be found in one of the album’s most affecting songs. In an early version, titled “Springtime in New Orleans,” she sings of blooming flowers and aching hearts in a voice reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. It feels like a pastiche of a silver-screen tearjerker, but in the album version, her voice has mellowed; gone is any trace of archness or irony. On the album, the song is called “Baltimore,” and with its new closing lines—“Gone without a trace, my love/Lost in Baltimore”—it no longer feels like a character study. Wreathed in warm strings but pierced by a sliver of digital noise, like a reminder that the prettification of grief has cold limits, it feels as real as a song can feel. | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pampa | May 1, 2017 | 7.8 | 2f95cf24-9997-4d38-a073-6635e85c48a3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
King Krule collaborator Kaya Wilkins escapes music-industry servitude and speaks truth on her own terms in a frank, often melancholy bedroom-pop debut leavened by diaristic sarcasm. | King Krule collaborator Kaya Wilkins escapes music-industry servitude and speaks truth on her own terms in a frank, often melancholy bedroom-pop debut leavened by diaristic sarcasm. | Okay Kaya: Both | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/okay-kaya-both/ | Both | Kaya Wilkins’ debut, released under her moniker Okay Kaya, is the soundtrack to a state of limbo where identity, feelings, and sexuality continually shapeshift. The defining qualities of Both—ardent lyrics and vocal melodies that lend a soulful dimension to angst—have long been linchpins of Wilkins’ work. It was these gifts that led her to a partnership with HXC Recordings a few years back. During that time, she laid down tracks whenever she could squeeze in some studio time and suffered the indignities of being a young woman in the music business. An urge to speak truth on her own terms spurred Wilkins to discard two years’ worth of songs made under corporate servitude and retreat to the safety of her Greenpoint apartment, where, over the course of three years, she recorded the majority of Both.
The gloomy atmosphere of Okay Kaya’s early HXC singles, like “Damn, Gravity” and “Clenched Teeth,” drew comparisons to the work of her eventual collaborator, King Krule (whose frequent producer Rodaidh McDonald also worked on “Damn, Gravity”). These releases have an ethereal feel: Their minimal guitar lines echo over spare beats as Wilkins’ lyrics weave intricate tapestries of uneasiness, her voice bobbing lightly above the noise.
Both preserves the beguiling vocal melodies of Okay Kaya’s HXC era, but the polished poetics and calculatedly offbeat styling have disappeared in favor of more unguarded material. No longer satisfied to make music designed for heavy coffee-shop rotation, she has entered the more intimate and experimental world of bedroom pop.
Her first album thrives on oversharing, and diaristic sarcasm brings self-awareness and emotional intelligence to Wilkins’ thoughtful ruminations on melancholy and the many mundane activities it braids itself into. “If I ever get a dog, Imma name it hindsight,” her doubled voice repeats over warm synths on “Hindsights a Bitch.” Electronic elements like the beat on this track add another new facet to Okay Kaya’s sound, which features production assistance from Wilkins’ boyfriend, Porches’ Aaron Maine.
“Habitual Love,” the record’s most infectious bop, is an off-kilter motivational anthem about summoning the strength to pull yourself out of a rut. Wilkins comes across as wise and confident for much of the song: “Who wants to be loved out of habit?” she asks. “I want my love to be magic.” But when the sensual beat drops out at the bridge, it’s like the floor has crumbled beneath her, and she plunges into uncertainty. Wilkins’ tone often varies like this within individual tracks, accentuating the spontaneity of her candid lyrics and imbuing her music with the immediacy of an artist impatient to get bottled-up frustrations out of her system. Instead of performing on cue in the studio, she was free to jump out of bed at four in the morning to record a vocal if inspiration struck—and it shows in the intimacy she creates on the album.
With a total runtime of 37 minutes, Both isn’t a long first effort, but it is one that could have benefited from more editing. On “French Press Girl,” the record’s most puzzling inclusion, Wilkins falls into a familiar singer-songwriter trap, neglecting melody in favor of emotional earnestness. Deprived of the catchiness and wit of the album’s other songs, the track feels unstructured, incomplete, and incongruous.
But excess is embedded in the very title of Both, a debut defined by conflicted feelings and Wilkins’ self-aware sense of humor about them. She describes the subtle but all-consuming sadness that keeps you stuck in your room, unable to open the door. She brings the unexpected happiness of a smile that emerges through tears. She captures the kind of restless melancholy you can only dance your way through. She knows that misery and horniness aren’t mutually exclusive. For Okay Kaya, “both” is a way of life. | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Heavy Body | June 8, 2018 | 7 | 2f96e34d-ce16-490b-a269-3ebf0a8d11ed | Maya-Roisin Slater | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maya-roisin-slater/ | |
Remastered, rescanned, and color corrected after years languishing in Paisley Park’s vault, the 1985 concert film and its soundtrack receive the deluxe reissue treatment they’ve long deserved. | Remastered, rescanned, and color corrected after years languishing in Paisley Park’s vault, the 1985 concert film and its soundtrack receive the deluxe reissue treatment they’ve long deserved. | Prince / The Revolution: Prince and the Revolution: Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-the-revolution-prince-and-the-revolution-live/ | Prince and the Revolution: Live | After only a few months of touring in support of his commercial breakthrough Purple Rain, Prince was eager to move on. Locked into a rigid nightly routine of rehearsing and performing, he grew restless reliving a body of work that, in his mind, he had already perfected. To stave off his growing boredom, he would tweak the show from one stop to the next, shuffling the setlist and dropping in new songs for his band, the Revolution, to learn during soundchecks. In between shows, he’d retreat to a mobile recording system set up on his tour buses, or, time permitting, have a local studio booked during extended layovers. He oversaw Romance 1600, the sophomore album by his percussionist and apprentice Sheila E., from start to finish in these moments of downtime. He also had his own follow-up, Around the World in a Day, completed and ready to go, to the surprise of his band.
With a couple of months still remaining, he sat his crew down and announced he was cutting the tour short. Everyone around him was bewildered. Purple Rain was still brand new and at the peak of its popularity; the album had the potential to be toured for another year at least, but Prince would not be swayed from his course. He was ready to close the book—but he wanted to end his time on the road with a purple flash that could be seen from every corner of the world. It was decided in March 1985, as the final dates were approaching, to record a concert for home video and beam the event live to Europe. At the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, Prince and the Revolution tightened up their act and put on the performance of their lives. This wouldn’t be just any Purple Rain show—it would be the definitive document.
With this concert film finally receiving the deluxe treatment it’s desperately needed, it’s clearer than ever why Prince and the Revolution: Live was such a special moment. The source recordings, which have been sitting in Prince’s Paisley Park vault for the better part of three decades, have been given a full remaster, far exceeding the compressed sound of the original videocassette that bootleggers have been copying for years, or even the DVD included with the lavish Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition from 2017. Every detail can be appreciated with crystal clarity, from Prince’s breathy sighs when he stretches his falsetto to its limit on the bluesy ballad “How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore” to his confident chuckle between verses on “Irresistible Bitch.”
Though the audio sounds better than ever, it’s best experienced alongside the stunning concert footage, which has been meticulously rescanned from the original film and color corrected. Purple Rain’s visual hallmarks—the big hair, the ruffled coat, the purple crushed velvet—would become just as important as its signature sound. Live places the experience in the totality of its context: as a companion piece not only to the studio album, but also to Purple Rain, the film. No expense was spared for the cutting-edge lighting and effects, and everyone on stage donned the role of thespian as well as musician, playing their part in elaborate set pieces inspired by the movie.
Prince leads into “Purple Rain” B-side “God” with a dramatic confessional, simulating the Holy Spirit’s thunderous wrath by smashing against the keys of his piano while a blinding spotlight acts as a heavenly stand-in. Then-unreleased vault curiosity “Possessed” takes on a separate identity from its studio versions, becoming a full-on tribute to Prince’s idol James Brown. The band locks into a propulsive funk groove while Prince gives his best impression of the godfather of soul—imitating his iconic mic stand kick and exclaiming “good God!”—with saxophonist Eric Leeds acting as his Maceo Parker. And, of course, there are plenty of risqué moments, such as when he turns his backside, draped in a pair of see-through pants, to ask the crowd “Does your man have an ass like mine?” The Revolution are in top form, twisting and twirling in perfectly choreographed lockstep with their bandleader while nary dropping a note. (A feat which, while impressive, was rough on the band: “It ruined my back for the rest of my life,” keyboardist Lisa Coleman admitted to Rolling Stone in 2017.)
The Purple Rain Tour was a herculean triumph, made possible by a tangled web of people carefully managing every aspect of the show each night, from staging to lighting to costuming to music. This fact wasn’t lost on Prince; he used the increased visibility of the Syracuse show to give thanks to as much of his entourage as he could. “Baby I’m a Star” evolved into a long, formless jam session, and everyone on hand was brought up to the stage. (Protégé group Apollonia 6 were even flown in to appear, despite not being part of the tour.) Prince placed immense trust in his collaborators, occasionally setting his instrument aside and counting on his band to keep things going so that he could focus on getting the theatrics just right. When he finally holds his guitar for longer for a few minutes—to play an extended encore of his spiritual communion, “Purple Rain”—time bends to his will and a third of an hour goes by in a blink. He’s giving us a firm reminder of what we already knew: “My band is great, but I’m still the greatest.”
The studio album was already indebted to the arena-rock explosion of the 1980s, capturing streaks of that explosive live energy by sourcing several tracks straight from a legendary performance at the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue. At Syracuse, Prince pushed each track as close as he could to its theoretical endpoint; the loudest songs became louder, the sensual moments bordered on voyeuristic, and the spiritual themes came down like divine revelations. Prince and the Revolution: Live is the culmination of months of tireless practice, a refined gem so filtered of imperfections you could hardly believe it came together in one take. Finally, Purple Rain can flourish in the environment it was always meant to—and the whole world is invited to bear witness. | 2022-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Legacy | June 4, 2022 | 8.7 | 2f9e4a2f-66ef-423e-9f76-03ae56887083 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
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 1980 album from the shapeshifting UK prog band, a pivotal moment in their journey to pop-rock stardom. | 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 1980 album from the shapeshifting UK prog band, a pivotal moment in their journey to pop-rock stardom. | Genesis: Duke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/genesis-duke/ | Duke | At the height of his celebrity in the 1980s, Phil Collins developed a habit of writing letters to his many, many critics. You can expect this type of backlash whenever someone reaches his level of popularity, both as the drummer-turned-vocalist of Genesis and through his run of blockbuster solo albums. All of their titles sound like tell-all memoirs by disgraced comedians—Hello I Must Be Going, …But Seriously, Both Sides—and all of their covers feature close-up photographs of his face, because this was his product: eyes you can look into, a single emotion to bathe in, a world where nothing and nobody exists besides you and Phil Collins.
Because of his public persona, there is a misconception that he single-handedly transformed this artful, bookish progressive rock band into the Phil Collins Show as soon as he took over vocal duties from Peter Gabriel in 1976. And in retrospect, the band’s increasingly popular, slow-danceable ballads closing out the decade—“Ripples…” and “Your Own Special Way” from 1976, “Follow You Follow Me” in 1978—do emerge from their discography like exit signs toward the oncoming highway to fame, just up the road.
As natural as it feels to equate Genesis’ turn from progressive rock to pop with Collins’ rise as a solo star, the truth is that Genesis was always a band, and Collins was always just one voice. At some point in the ’80s, Collins and his bandmates—keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford—established a rule that no individual member could enter the studio with pre-written musical ideas. In other words, anything and everything on a Genesis album had to be created within the presence of the entire group: This way, no single person could be credited (or blamed) for the music that emerged.
This process led to songs that could sound like three minds interlocking like a jigsaw puzzle (“Turn It on Again”), or a pinhole view into a lightning-in-a-bottle experiment (“Mama”), or, occasionally, a bad joke that should have never left the room (“Illegal Alien”). But more than anything, the rule created a guiding principle for Genesis: to honor the spirit of collaboration, to push each other beyond what they could accomplish individually, and to invite their audience along as we all discovered something, together.
Even before the ’80s, this was their appeal. The curtains always open on something new in a Genesis song. In “it,” the band sounds like a futuristic piece of machinery restarting; in “Supper’s Ready,” they had an entire mythology to unfold. Or take 1980’s “Turn It on Again,” which blends a 13/8 time signature with lyrics about a guy watching television and an honest-to-god riff into something that sounds like a radio hit: It aims to keep you on the edge of your seat; no matter how many times you replay it, you feel like you are hearing it for the first time.
And so the criticism got to him. The way Collins tells it, the review that really pissed him off was when a San Francisco journalist panned a live show, calling him the “McDonald’s of pop.” As far as I can tell, there are no records of this article on the internet. Googling the phrase only brings up Collins himself repeating it to journalists.
II
The first iteration of Genesis was formed in 1967, and neither the name nor the sound belonged to them. A moody, introspective group of friends at England’s ritzy Charterhouse boarding school passed their demo tape along to one of the school’s more notable alumni, the musician and producer Jonathan King. Knowing he was a fan of the Bee Gees, teen frontman Peter Gabriel did his best Robin Gibb impression. King took the bait and offered to produce their debut album. He dubbed the band Genesis (another idea was Gabriel’s Angels) and he titled the album From Genesis to Revelation. It was released by Decca in March 1969 and sold 650 copies, total. “Oh well,” King thought and disappeared. Gabriel and his angels returned to school.
Around the same time, an unremarkable British band called Flaming Youth gathered in the studio to get a handle on their first album, also destined to be their last. They had been approached by two songwriters, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikely, searching for a band to record their concept album about media coverage of the moon landing. The title was Ark 2, which was confusing to people who thought they had to hear the first Ark first, and the plot had something to do with the apocalypse, the perils of modern media, and the healing power of love. The members of the band seemed to change their instruments from song to song, uncertain about the material and their own identity. The centerpiece was a 12-minute suite dedicated to the planets. It’s hilariously overambitious, and it left the unseasoned performers scratching their heads. Who wants to sing this one? “I’ll do it,” said the drummer.
III
A quick note on selling out: There are easier ways to do it than how Genesis did it. Their eventual pivot came so naturally, appealed so effortlessly, created such a definitive break between the first two decades of their career, that to acknowledge the act of selling out seems mostly tangential to the music they made. Yes, they dumbed things down. Yes, they had hits. Yes, one of them sounded very similar to Toto’s “Hold the Line.” But after the ’70s, nearly every major prog band tried their hand at writing simpler tunes for a hipper crowd, and there’s a reason why the protagonist of American Psycho goes nuts for Phil Collins, and not, you know, Under Wraps by Jethro Tull.
In order to do what Genesis did, you have to be self-aware, self-critical, and willing to adapt. In his memoir, Collins writes that, when he auditioned to join Genesis in 1970, he wasn’t crazy about their music: a bit fussy, a little gentle. Even after he joined the band, he made a habit of listening back to tapes of their live shows, obsessing over mistakes. For most of the decade, he saw his role like a goalie, holding things down in the backfield. It wasn’t until Duke, his eighth album as a member and fourth as lead vocalist, that he began presenting his own ideas confidently to the group. During the sessions, he was often the first one in and last one out of the studio. “We’ve always tried to write singles,” he would say after their commercial breakthrough, sounding a little bit defensive about it. “Now we’re just doing it better, I suppose.”
IV
Reflections on Phil Collins’ auditions for Genesis:
“Anyway, Phil had arrived a bit early, so while the drummer before him was finishing, we sent him off for a swim in the pool.”
—Mike Rutherford, The Living Years: The First Genesis Memoir
“If I’ve learnt anything over the last couple of years, it’s to grab any and every opportunity. Who knows if I’ll ever again get the offer of a dip in a private heated pool in the countryside.”
—Phil Collins, Not Dead Yet: The Memoir
“By the time it came to Phil’s turn, he’d already heard and memorized the part we were using for the audition and, when he sat down at the kit, you just knew.”
—Rutherford
“He had a lightness as a personality, too. He could joke and everything. We were very intense.”
—Tony Banks, Sum of the Parts
“Just the way he sat down on a stool… I knew that he was gonna be good. Some people just have this confidence about what they do.”
—Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins: A Life Less Ordinary
V
In most accounts of the early days of Genesis, Peter Gabriel is described as a serious, shy figure. The legend goes that he started telling intricate fantasy stories on stage because it was taking his bandmates forever to tune their instruments and he had to fill the dead air. Eventually, he wore costumes because the crowds were getting bigger and he was insecure about his slender, shadowy appearance. When he came on stage wearing his wife’s red dress and a fox mask, he did it without telling his bandmates. He knew they would have vetoed the idea if they’d had the chance.
The Gabriel era proceeds this way: a whirlwind of big ideas and surprises that peaks with longform, conceptual pieces like the 23-minute song “Supper’s Ready” and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, their feature-length concept album with ambient assistance from Brian Eno. While on tour for that album in 1974—a multimedia event that featured the band playing the entire thing front to back with a then-unprecedented visual accompaniment—Gabriel decided it was time to go solo. One of his many costumes was so elaborate that he couldn’t actually sing while wearing it, which seems as good a metaphor as any for the dead-end he faced.
VI
There are great bands who evolve by expansion, or by drastic reinvention, or by keen attention to the demands of their time. But I can think of no band besides Genesis who evolved so fluidly through subtraction. Without the guiding, commercial vision of producer Jonathan King, Genesis evolved into a pastoral folk group with a focus on Anthony Phillips’ 12-string guitar. When Phillips quit, they became a heavier prog band led by Gabriel’s theatrical vision. When Gabriel quit, they developed a more atmospheric sound, showcasing the inventive style of guitarist Steve Hackett. When Hackett quit, they were now a trio with Collins on vocals, left to focus on melody and songcraft. And with nothing left to lose, they became one of the biggest bands in the world.
VII
“Within seconds the entire clean, green, smooth surface of the park was a mass of dirty brown writhing objects. Old Michael continued to rub his flesh into the ground. This time he looked even happier. And he whistled a little tune. It went like this…”
—Peter Gabriel introducing “Supper’s Ready” at a Genesis concert in 1973
“I remember being more worried about what I was going to say to the audience than anything else. Because what Peter did have was a communication. Although it was more of a mysterious traveler than a bloke next door or a mate, he did communicate with an audience. And I thought that was very important.”
—Phil Collins on his first show replacing Peter Gabriel as the frontman of Genesis, Genesis: A History
VIII
The origins of Duke can be traced to Phil Collins’ bedroom. It is here that Collins, Rutherford, and Banks gathered to demo new material after a brief hiatus. The latter two had worked on solo albums while Collins flew to Canada to address his failing marriage and make a last-ditch effort to save his family. It didn’t work, and, with his bandmates preoccupied, Collins found himself drinking and sulking, writing sad new songs with a drum machine he’d been gifted during a tour in Japan.
When they reunited, Collins shared some of the songs he had written. Banks and Rutherford liked two of them: a surefire hit called “Misunderstanding” and a tender ballad called “Please Don’t Ask.” The rest—like “In the Air Tonight,” with its basic chord progression and plodding, spacious arrangement—felt distinctly un-Genesis. Collins decided he would save them for his own solo album, the next item on the list.
A theme of failure and extinction courses through Duke: “You know you’re on the way out,” goes the paranoid chorus of Banks’ “Cul-de-sac.” “It’s just a matter of time.” Another song called “Duchess” seems to be about a musician whose immense popularity creates a rift within her own identity. And if these lyrics feel like insights into the underlying emotion of Duke, Genesis never let it show: Duke is a brazenly confident album, written in block letters with exclamation points. The message is not in the lyrics but in the music itself: Collins’ syncopated rhythm and newly expressive vocals, Rutherford and Banks’ guitar-synths and keyboard-trumpets—instruments invented to sound like the future versions of themselves. You don’t listen and think of a band fearing their waning relevance, or Collins and his failing marriage. If they treated the span of their career as a long, epic song, this was the part when the toms start rolling and the action begins again.
IX
Watching footage from Genesis’ tour for Duke is like watching the superhero first become aware of his powers, staring awestruck at the hands that have just done something incredible. With his drumming duties transferred to touring member Chester Thompson—previously of Weather Report and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—Collins stands before the microphone, 29 and bearded, noticing the audience in the palm of his hand. Through Europe and America, he sees sold-out concert halls getting more engaged with the music. They seem more diverse, younger. He sees people who might not even remember a time when Phil Collins wasn’t the frontman of Genesis.
Introducing the part of the set that includes the new songs, Collins recites a monologue harkening back to the old days. He tells of a sad sack deadbeat called Albert who falls in love with a television set. Then, with the kind of comic timing that gets you cast as the lead in a romantic comedy and lands you a guest role on Miami Vice, he reveals that he means this quite literally: “In two days, he was in hospital having the glass removed from his private parts.” Is the audience laughing with him or at the old version of Genesis, the one who once took these preambles so seriously? Does this story actually have anything to do with Duke? In the end, these are questions for journalists. The audience roars; the band is about to play the new stuff.
X
A few moments on Duke offer a glimpse into the future of prog rock in the ’80s. You hear it at the very beginning of the record—an instrumental motif that Tony Banks composed. Played on an expensive-sounding synth, the notes are sudden and decisive as the signs on a slot machine. When the trio lineup of Genesis reunited for a comeback tour in 2007, they opened every show with just this part of the song, letting the rest play in the audience’s imagination.
As for the rest of the song: It’s called “Behind the Lines,” and it kickstarts a suite of interlinked compositions forming the core of the record. There are rumors that the band considered presenting them as an uninterrupted, side-long suite, which offered perfect fodder for betrayed fans who wanted to believe the poppier direction was a result of Genesis compromising their vision for record label suits, or a radio-crazed Phil Collins demanding they preserve the singles. But the truth is that Genesis decided among themselves to separate the music, finding the prog rock gesture to be old-fashioned, uninspiring.
One day in the studio, Collins played a tape of “Behind the Lines” at the wrong speed and realized it sounded a little like Michael Jackson. Funny! But he was taking notes. A few months later, he brought in Earth, Wind, and Fire’s horn section and recorded the sped-up version for his debut solo album, which he called Face Value, and which would go multiple-times platinum around the world.
These alternate versions of the song—one, a utopian vision of prog rock; the other, a jumpy imitation of the most famous artist in the world—mark the first time that Collins’ solo music and the band’s felt in clear competition. On the cover of Duke, a figure stands before a window to who-knows-what: Those eyes on the cover of Face Value show you what awaits him. There is a real person standing there, and his future is the only one.
XI
The critical wisdom is that prog rock was living and breathing and thriving, and then punk rock came and killed it. The story always made me envision a gang of pissed-off kids in leather jackets bum-rushing the stage, ripping capes off old British guys; the sound of Mellotrons coming unplugged as the audience gasps.
There is a kernel of truth to it. The things that punk represented—anger, politics, a new generation fed up with the old one, shorter bursts—did seem antithetical to one vision of prog rock. But prog was already in motion by the time anything resembling punk came to the forefront, and Genesis had been in a steady evolution their whole career. What would have been an actual death sentence, a real sell-out move, would have been if they carried on like nothing happened, repeating themselves, pandering to the people who were already on board—coasting.
Duke takes the opposite approach. It is a divider: If you are a fan of Genesis, their tenth album is either where you get off the ride, or when you buckle up and start paying attention. They had made better albums (nearly everything from the ’70s) and they would make more commercially successful ones (everything else in the ’80s). But they never made one so important to their survival. In his memoir, Rutherford notes that the band considered changing their name after the album’s success. Nothing ever came of the conversations—they didn’t even start brainstorming an alternative—which was fine, because the message had already been sent: If you think you know Genesis, you are wrong. They are united, inspired, and just getting started.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Charisma | February 28, 2021 | 8 | 2f9e6bab-e9ed-4b17-8b49-a0661d097ad8 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Atlanta rapper rewrites the rulebook on winning on his most thoughtful album. | The Atlanta rapper rewrites the rulebook on winning on his most thoughtful album. | 2 Chainz: Rap or Go to the League | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2-chainz-rap-or-go-to-the-league/ | Rap or Go to the League | 2 Chainz formed his rap group Playaz Circle in 1997, the last year he played college basketball at Alabama State. He’d sold dope in the meantime, and for much of his life; he was a felon before he was legally an adult. The College Park native had turned to rap in search of a “legal hustle,” he said, to “stay out of jail and stay out of the grave.” His dream route from D-1 prospect to NBA franchise player didn’t ever pan out, but he eventually found his way to the All-Star game anyway: Last year, he allegedly spent $1 million on a blimp that flew over the Staples Center in Los Angeles. All to announce a rap album.
This construct 2 Chainz embraced in his youth and followed to stardom—that there are only two permissible prospective paths to success for black kids looking for a way out of the ghetto, one of the more well documented ideologies in rap history—is one he reevaluates on said album, Rap or Go to the League. As one of a few people at the center of the rapper-trapper-athlete Venn Diagram (joining alums like Cam’ron and the Game), someone who found recurring success doing at least one as a result, he is in a position to anatomize the process. The album is proposed as the rapper’s rejection of the very premise in the title, and in asides and outros he does occasionally question this bifurcation of black liberation, but the music mostly tracks his own path to prosperity through a minefield. In that regard, it is his most cogent and organized album by far, and his most thoughtful one. As he provides more context for his story than ever, he rewrites the rule book on winning, opening up about his life as certified dealer to rap stars, critiquing the broken collegiate athletics apparatus, and warring against Uncle Sam. Executive produced by future NBA Hall of Famer and Snapchat rap A&R LeBron James, it finds 2 Chainz exploring things he’s danced around his entire career.
The closer on 2 Chainz’s last album, Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, set the table for this one: “See my verses are better and my subject is realer/See my mom was an addict and my dad was the dealer/And their son is that nigga, I’m no Black activist/I’m a Black millionaire, give you my Black ass to kiss,” he rapped. He presented his success as its own sort of affront to a broken system: He opted for one rock over another, transitioned into rap, and became rich and famous. But his is the exception that proves the rule.
2 Chainz still isn’t an activist, but he has tweaked his messaging a bit. It isn’t enough for him to be a Black millionaire now; he must also question the conditions that make someone in his situation so rare. This leads him to break down the exploitative measures of a primarily black sport (“NCAA”), reflect on his corner-boy past (“Statute of Limitations,” “Momma I Hit a Lick”), and lament a framework that pays cops to kill the same black kids it under-educates (“Sam”). He never really makes the point he thinks he’s making—that there are other paths than these, than his—but he intentionally makes another: that he’s a modern renaissance man. Against the odds, he continues to win, and revel in the spoils. The way he sees it, he’s a triathlete turned executive.
There is still plenty of his patented humor, and he sneaks in the zingers (“Have you ever had two one-night stands?”), but there is also an unusual seriousness and thoughtfulness. It’s probably impossible for someone as exuberant as 2 Chainz to feel anything as debilitating as shame, but he does at points express regret. His outsized persona is tamped down somewhat, owing at least in part to his newfound domesticity (“Got a family now so I gotta pipe down/’Fore a young ho fuck up my timeline”) but the flows are nimbler, even by his standards, and more poised. The set-up/punchline structure that has long anchored his verses is largely set aside for spinning yarns.
While it’s bracing to hear the man formerly known as Tity Boi talk openly about married family life, or challenge the established narratives surrounding inner-city escape routes, Rap or Go to the League shouldn’t be mistaken for the “serious” or “mature” 2 Chainz album. There is usually an element of pathos even in 2 Chainz’s funniest lines, and anyone half-listening knows he’s been operating at his peak for at least three years now. Songs like the 9th Wonder-produced “Threat 2 Society,” with its life-affirming sample (“It’s so good just to be alive!”) and “Money in the Way” aren’t really departures, they’re simply articulated differently, with the heavy-ish tone we’ve come to associate with message music. He delves deeper into his personal life more but he is just as sharp as been across his last handful of releases. It isn’t so much that these songs are better; they simply render a more complete picture of him, one he’s been working toward.
In that respect, Rap or Go to the League feels like a personal triumph. There are more eye-popping 2 Chainz raps and more epic 2 Chainz songs elsewhere, but this album offers of 2 Chainz as a man and artist. It finds him retracing his own steps, looking to the world beyond himself, and seeking a way forward for others. Throughout the album, two different stories are unfolding. Just over 1% of NCAA players make it to the NBA; the odds are likely just as bad for rap. “Balling”—in all its permutations—will probably never become the be-all end-all for rebuilding black communities. But it sure suits 2 Chainz fine. | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 6, 2019 | 7.6 | 2f9eb827-e2a5-4019-8120-a00522c298a3 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Like Wavves, this basement lo-fi hero continues to clean up nicely, offering deceptively dense and increasingly clearer power-pop. | Like Wavves, this basement lo-fi hero continues to clean up nicely, offering deceptively dense and increasingly clearer power-pop. | Cloud Nothings: Cloud Nothings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15031-cloud-nothings/ | Cloud Nothings | Last Fall, Dylan Baldi-- the young, bespectacled face and brains behind Cleveland power-pop outfit Cloud Nothings-- was gearing up for two simultaneous releases: a delicious new 7" single and a wide-release compilation that wrangled together nearly every other hook he had burned to cassette, vinyl, or CD-R in the year before. While both shared remarkably strong songwriting, said single was recorded without much of the fuzz and distortion that enveloped his work up until that point. The difference was huge. Baldi's home-recorded hooks had never been hard to hear, but out in the open, free of that lo-fi asterisk, they thrived. Breaks were crisp, turnarounds hit like boomerangs, and every sweet, tightly coiled melody could be savored in full. In the lead-up to this, his first full-length in wide-release, Baldi hinted that he'd continue to clarify his recordings. He stuck to his guns.
The result is another fantastic step forward, though not without some growing pains. In the transition from basement to studio, one component has yet to come into full focus: Baldi's voice. The gap between those sounds coming from his hands and those from his mouth is noticeable. The opening five-song blast, as exhilarating an assemblage of tracks as he's ever strung together, provides a useful chart of his comfort level now that his voice is completely uncovered. Within the insanely hummable, sometimes gummy verses of opener "Understand At All", you can hear Baldi's voice originate just at his throat, where the screams of "Not Important" hail. And while the latter motions toward the skittering Midwestern pop-punk of the Promise Ring and recently reunited Get Up Kids as much as Buzzcocks, its final gasp echoes (as though in tribute) that of Wavves' Nathan Williams, another former lo-fi kid who's made impressive use of the studio. "Should Have" opts however for the suburbs instead of the beach and the unabashed melodicism of Gin Blossoms over Nirvana, Baldi's voice moving even lower. Once "Forget You All the Time" arrives, he sounds as strong and confident behind the mic as he does unspooling all those gorgeous strands of guitar.
That quick trip downward from mouth to core doesn't speak directly to the quality of each song, but it does their overall delivery. When "Nothing's Wrong" and its torrent of sugars and stutters begins just seconds after, the shift in pitch and pace can be jarring. That feeling isn't unusual throughout. Cloud Nothings' pop has become deceptively dense-- there is literally (and paradoxically) so much hook to be found here from corner to corner that, unlike similarly, ostensibly simple records, multiple listens are required to appreciate the taste of all its herks and jerks. In the late sear of "Been Through", Baldi hits a lasting sweet spot. It's a song that moves swiftly and forcefully, the calm vocal at its center not just its equal, but also the sort you hear when you first wake up any number of mornings thereafter. | 2011-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita / Carpark | January 25, 2011 | 7.9 | 2fa910bd-229c-4cce-b38d-ce37366782d4 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
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