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Sarah Assbring has said her fifth El Perro del Mar album, the first since 2009's Love Is Not Pop, was inspired by the 90s house and trip hop she used to love. She goes so far as to include a very noticeable sample from Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy". | Sarah Assbring has said her fifth El Perro del Mar album, the first since 2009's Love Is Not Pop, was inspired by the 90s house and trip hop she used to love. She goes so far as to include a very noticeable sample from Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy". | El Perro Del Mar: Pale Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17292-pale-fire/ | Pale Fire | In September 2011, El Perro del Mar posted the song "What Do You Expect" online. Comprising a collage of samples over a minimal beat, it was a protest track released shortly after the London riots. Considering that Sarah Assbring was better known for chronicling romantic relations over those between social classes, it was jarring to hear her deploy samples like "The police are not listening to them-- what do you expect?" Toward the end, in her characteristic sullen murmur, she delivers the lines, "Never grow tired of this pale, pale fire." It's a bit vague to be inflammatory on its own, but in context, it bore a certain poignancy.
"What Do You Expect" hasn't ended up on the LP she named Pale Fire, and Assbring has backed off from politics since then, focusing instead on the dueling forces that have preoccupied her since her debut, 2005's Look! It's El Perro Del Mar. "In this world, you think you have no reason to believe in love or in anything much," she said of the title. "Then one day, when you least expect it, a light appears on the far horizon...It's the pale fire. The promise of love and hope-- all consuming and elusive."
A slight cop-out? Sure, though no one was expecting an album of fiery protest songs from one of Sweden's most reliable portrayers of romance and whimsy. What twists the knife is that Assbring has said that Pale Fire was inspired by the 90s music she used to love-- namely house and trip hop. The idea of a dance album from El Perro Del Mar is tantalizing: tears on the floor and a thick, moody fog in the air, as apt for dancing as for watching shadows. The extended version of Pale Fire's centerpiece, "Walk On By", goes so far as to include a whopping, very noticeable sample from Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy", but disappointingly, Assbring's dalliances with the politicized movement and with the bold, era-defining chime of house are reduced to wan dilutions of the original inspirational source material.
Set those intentions aside, though, and Assbring at least stays true to the hushedly sensual vibe with which she's made her name. The title track punches in with a flurry of horns which fade to a tentative murmur and a resigned dance breakdown better made for moping than any frenetic movement. A synth zips its way around "Home is to Feel Like That", and its beat is initially as giddy as its first words: "I just had to see you, I just had to see you." But those words quickly veer south and become a farewell, something that characterizes Pale Fire. Each mention of love is followed by an annulment, and the closest thing to a straightforward declaration of intent, "I Was a Boy", is a delicate husk that's about as appropriate to carry the themes of a love song as is a requiem.
But most requiems aren't this easy to move to, and Pale Fire fortunately picks up the pace from time to time. "I Carry the Fire" is house inhabited by ghosts, and "To the Beat of a Dying World" clings tight to a steady, propulsive drone. "Hold Off the Dawn" comes off like an intensely loud synthpop track heard through layers of gossamer that slowly envelop the song. Somewhere in the mix are lasers, stuttering pianos, and skips of percussion, but picking them out isn't easy. Nothing's exactly immediate -- but that's hardly a surprise either. Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away. Assbring's said as much about the concept of love over the years; on Pale Fire, it sounds just as much like her stance on music. | 2012-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Control Group | November 19, 2012 | 6 | 2faac9ca-e5b1-46f3-adca-755f586a8206 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Bridging the sepia warmth of Laurel Canyon with Appalachian folk, the Mountain Man singer’s solo debut revels in the magic of telling your own story. | Bridging the sepia warmth of Laurel Canyon with Appalachian folk, the Mountain Man singer’s solo debut revels in the magic of telling your own story. | Molly Sarlé: Karaoke Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/molly-sarle-karaoke-angel/ | Karaoke Angel | For a singer whose voice sounds like an amber flame, Molly Sarlé hasn’t always been so sure about singing. Friendship led her to folk trio Mountain Man, where she, Amelia Meath, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig entwined their vocals into uncannily intimate, honey-tipped harmonies. But if their lauded 2010 debut, Made the Harbor, and later tour supporting Feist seemed like a clear path forward, Sarlé had her doubts about a career in music.
A break, a Zen center, and Sarlé’s brief pursuit of acting haven’t fully abated those doubts. “I’m far from knowing/What I’m doing here,” she sings on “Passenger Side,” from her debut solo album Karaoke Angel. She craves perspective, acknowledging her penchant for “looking for a bird’s eye view in my rearview mirror,” as her voice dips in register and an electric guitar echoes cavernously around her. The vantage may never broaden, but Sarlé’s come to see the magic in telling your own story as opposed to performing other people’s.
Sarlé studied performance theory in college, and shades of that framework appear throughout Karaoke Angel, which bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk. On “Almost Free,” she performs a doting daughter for her father, stretching the boundaries of her affection: “So I tell my dad what he wants to hear/I say ‘I love you,’ say ‘I need you here.’” Desire becomes a tangled performance on “This Close.” “Are we really this close, or is it just the drugs?” Sarlé asks, drawing out her phrasing and briefly luxuriating in pleasure, even if it’s tied to a destructive romance.
Finding the space to fit Sarlé’s expansive voice required three years and three recording attempts—in Los Angeles, Durham, and finally Woodstock. The album finally coalesced at Dreamland, the former church turned studio, under the guidance of producer Sam Evian. Evian has said recording Sarlé felt like making a documentary, and viewed that way, her voice threads Karaoke Angel with a narrative cohesion. Absent the surrounding vocals of Mountain Man, or much instrumental framing beyond guitar, synths, and occasional drums, Sarlé’s voice comes into full frame.
Performing for others becomes dangerous when our mask starts to reflect someone else’s needs. On the witty “Suddenly,” Sarlé stumbles into a moment of clarity. “I don’t know why/But suddenly I am exactly what I wanna be,” she sings, her voice radiating. But instead of internalizing that confidence, she uses it to please her lover. “After giving you head/I get the fuck up out of bed,” she sings, as her doubled voice nears a howl. The tempo stumbles, as if Sarlé grows weary of performing what Norman Mailer once called “a mirror of pleasure,” and she refocuses on her own cravings: “Melt some butter in a pan/Throw some cheese between two pieces of bread.” Whatever glow of self-recognition she felt before the bedroom fades. “I don’t know why/But suddenly I am no longer what I wanna be,” she sings, chafing at the frustration.
Sarlé fluctuates between knowing who she is and what she wants, and convincing herself that others hold those keys. “I wanna tell you if you lead me back to myself/I won’t go running to anyone else,” she sings on “Human,” her billowy vocals making the loaded promise seem effortless. Her journey to understanding—that long drive with only a rearview mirror—may have its limits, but storytelling offers a space for control. On Karaoke Angel, Sarlé wields her voice with power, finding actualization in the act of telling. On “Dreams,” her whisper works its own pace against winding synths. “I’ve been working on a version of the truth/I think you’re gonna like it,” she sings. “Call it a song you can sing along to.” | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Partisan | September 23, 2019 | 7.3 | 2fab9bd8-b1f9-4da5-b4cd-8283cc0797c4 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Elegant and perverse, Dan Bejar’s latest album slinks around in the shadows like he did on Kaputt, synthy, sleazy, and newly paranoid. He remains one of the most evocative songwriters of his generation. | Elegant and perverse, Dan Bejar’s latest album slinks around in the shadows like he did on Kaputt, synthy, sleazy, and newly paranoid. He remains one of the most evocative songwriters of his generation. | Destroyer: ken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ken/ | ken | Dan Bejar has been recording as Destroyer for over two decades, and each of his 12 full-length records feels uniquely unmoored in time: It’s as if he’s never been of any era, but merely adjacent to several, attentively noting the mores of the day from some vaguely aristocratic, martini-sipping remove. It makes sense, then, that ken, Destroyer’s first new release since 2015’s Poison Season, contains lessons, both musical and spiritual, about how history repeats itself—all the ways in which we are destined (or doomed) to fulfill old prophecies.
Bejar named ken after the working title of Suede’s “The Wild Ones,” a tense and thrilling ballad first released in 1994 (“Oh, if you stay/We’ll be the wild ones, running with the dogs today,” Brett Anderson sings). “The Wild Ones” is a sad and wistful song about wishing someone wasn’t about to leave you; on it, Anderson sounds both imploring and lost. Bejar has called the song “one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so,” and said he was “physically struck” after discovering it was initially called “Ken”: “In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It’s unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era.”
Bejar was born in British Columbia in 1972, which means he was 18 when Margaret Thatcher, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was forced to resign, in 1990. Thatcher’s legacy is, at best, hugely divisive; a very large faction of the world believes her aggressive economic policies led to an era of unfettered greed and cruelty, from which we are still (barely) recovering. During her three terms in office, many artists responded musically to her policies, including the post-punk band Gang of Four, whose 1979 album Entertainment! is considered a direct and furious indictment of Thatcherism. “It was violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time,” Nick Cave later said of the scene in London then.
Those words, of course, don’t feel any less applicable to late 2017. ken isn’t overloaded with explicitly political lyrics—although plenty can be read that way—but it does cultivate a paranoia that feels especially germane to our cultural moment. On “A Light Travels Down the Catwalk,” Bejar sings of alienation (“Strike an empty pose/A pose is always empty”). His voice sounds dry and desperate over acrid, wobbling synthesizers, but his breath and enunciation—especially on the line, “On bullshit for the night,” which closes the first verse—make him feel extra close, as if he’s just appeared over your shoulder to intone heavy warnings. This is the Bejar of 2011’s Kaputt: slinking around in the shadows, checking to see if you’re paying enough attention.
It’s hard not to reference the synth-pop and smooth jazz of the 1980s when contextualizing Bejar’s musical aesthetic —he uses saxophones and keyboards to express a particular kind of sleazy, noir-ish longing, a yen for anachronistic romance. The images ken conjures can feel nearly cartoonish: a midnight walk down a foggy street, smoking under the tepid yellow glow of a streetlight, wearing an elegant trench coat with the collar flipped high. Yet for Bejar, songwriting is almost exclusively about evocation. His lyrical work isn’t particularly narrative, nor is it directly engaged with the self; this can feel like a revolutionary choice in our present era, in which even more outré genres tend toward confessionalism, or intimate and specific narrations of loss and alienation. One gets the sense that Bejar finds these sorts of unmediated first-person pronouncements garish, if not corny. He isn’t interested in telling anybody exactly how he’s feeling; ergo, there are no easily discerned thematic arcs. Instead, he builds a strange, anxious atmosphere, writing couplets like, “Asleep in cars, theatre under stars/Shakespeare in the park, you’ve come undone.” All that computes, ultimately, is menace. Which means ken is a record that’s more easily felt than interpreted.
And while Bejar is often compared to David Bowie, ken Bejar’s playful and seductive approach to narrative also recalls Leonard Cohen. Take the verses that open “Sky’s Grey,” the first track:
Sky’s grey
Call for rain
Every day
You cancel the parade
Give up acting? Fuck no!
I’m just starting to get the good parts
Walk into a room and everything clicks
It feels like an egregious critical cliché to describe new music as “Lynchian,” yet there’s something about Bejar’s sensibility that plainly evokes the director’s whole gestalt—particularly the way he manipulates and weaponizes nostalgia. Both warp familiar sounds or images until they feel not just foreign, but unsettling. It’s all cocktails and smoking jackets until suddenly, blood is dripping from somewhere weird. Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up. | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / Dead Oceans | October 20, 2017 | 7.9 | 2faef128-51e3-49cf-9e42-91b08823e31f | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | |
Rock might be anathema to house-music purists, but that won’t stop Eris Drew dropping the needle on Led Zeppelin in one of the year’s most anticipated, and most fun, DJ sets. | Rock might be anathema to house-music purists, but that won’t stop Eris Drew dropping the needle on Led Zeppelin in one of the year’s most anticipated, and most fun, DJ sets. | Eris Drew: Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eris-drew-raving-disco-breaks-vol-ii/ | Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II | Good news, boppers—Eris Drew finally released the second edition of Raving Disco Breaks, the pick-up-your-feet, turn-your-whole-day-around DJ mix series she debuted in 2019. The theme of the second edition is Rock the House—not exactly rock as in RAWK, but the verb sense of the word, as in “Keep it rockin’.” Once again the mix is available on SoundCloud and on cassette, though it landed on my desk more like contraband, one gigantic audio file too big for cloud storage to handle. Ah yes, I thought, now that’s the good stuff.
Naturally Drew remains enamored of throwback breakbeat house, a sound she associates with her initiation into underground rave culture as a disillusioned ’90s kid looking for deeper meaning in life. As on Vol. 1, the cuts are fast, the selections will put you neck deep in obscure 12"s on Discogs, and the mixing style is more DIY party poster than endless scroll. Drew spins through speed-dealing ’90s rave tracks, old-school hip-hop samples, and an incredible, improbably perfect Led Zeppelin guitar part that lands like a caped hero. There are strobing keyboard stabs, Pong synth bass hits, a voice that insists on “just, like, rock’n’roll.” You ever heard Janis Joplin sing a feature on a dance track? You have now. Drew guarantees every sample here to be at least 20 years old, if not older. She remains jazzed on horns. You can breakdance; you can bunny hop. It is an entirely worthy successor.
Drew makes body and emotion music, as captured in the name of the label she shares with partner Octo Octa, T4T LUV NRG. And though she’s not the kind of musician who writes lyrics, her love of wordplay is conspicuous. The Raving Disco Breaks mixes make improbably extensive use of language, chopping it up along with the samples into playful cut-and-paste winks. In Vol. 1, it might have been the announcer voice that seems to welcome you to “Clubhouse Disco” (that’s three genres, makes me laugh every time); here it’s snippets of well-worn rock’n’roll attitude slogans and fresh spins of all kinds of tracks that invoke the concept of “rock” in their titles, dialing up famous telephone headset user Terrence Parker’s “Gonna Rock You All Night” and classic b-boy soundtrack “To a Nation Rockin’.”
Drew doesn’t write lyrics but she does write an online newsletter. I’m struck by a passage in a recent edition, on the topic of dancing and drugs, where she describes the miserable local ragers she escaped for the light of the underground warehouse rave. “Most of my peers in high school would find a party at some suburban teenager’s house (unwitting parents out of town) and drink until they were blue in the face,” she wrote. “Everyone either was straight or pretended to be. Rock’n’roll and hip-hop were the only ‘real’ music at these parties. … Social norms and cliques were celebrated and reinforced rather than dismantled.” Contra the spirit of rock’n’roll, clearly, though I recognize the scene Drew describes here (perhaps a slightly younger, more sheltered teen would have turned to reading indie music blogs). The best thing about Rock the House, besides being a hell of a good time, is that those distinctions do not matter anymore, have never mattered, and in fact were fluid all along. Food for thought when you hear that little vocal clip of Joe Strummer rapping on the single most disco Clash song, “The Magnificent Seven,” as extracted and sampled by a deep-cut ’90s club track, as sampled and remixed by Eris Drew.
So I hope it’s not too mind-expanding to pitch Rock the House as a mix about aesthetic integration, in line with Drew’s personal spiritual concept of a universal Motherbeat, one I like to imagine as a kind of ever-present psychoacoustic ether but also a like a big stack of records—one really, really, really long waveform extending back through the entire corpus of musical creation from the latest live mix to the first human to beat on stone (what were they up to?). It speaks to her singular vision and personality as a DJ, too, though I don’t get the sense that she cares whether you care that this is the Eris Drew Show: You come to this rave to expand the collective consciousness. Good luck fitting that on Google Drive. | 2024-04-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | T4T LUV NRG | April 25, 2024 | 7.7 | 2fb7e1d1-bda9-42a3-a52a-6ecc498d797b | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The appeal of the producer, DJ, and Kompakt co-owner's first full-length of new material in eight years largely comes from how self-contained each cut is. Whether it's a horror show theme, a nod to Jan Hammer, a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong, or a jazz workout, each song aims at a distinct idea. | The appeal of the producer, DJ, and Kompakt co-owner's first full-length of new material in eight years largely comes from how self-contained each cut is. Whether it's a horror show theme, a nod to Jan Hammer, a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong, or a jazz workout, each song aims at a distinct idea. | Michael Mayer: Mantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17254-mantasy/ | Mantasy | If the recent appetite for artists like Nicolas Jaar, Actress, and Andy Stott has anything to tell us about the taste of dance music's more studious set, it's that fitful and filthy are in, and streamlined and tidy are out. This development is neither sudden nor surprising-- the swapping of sleek sounds and tidy quantization for more distressed sonic textures and complicated time signatures has been a throughline of pretty much all electronic music for the past three or four years. But it's a difficult enviornment for someone with as crisp an aesthetic as Michael Mayer.
Mayer may be among the more celebrated of the last decade's dance personalities, but he doesn't slot quite so easily into this current landscape. That's partly because the louche, tasteful, and continental sensibilities that defined his best work don't seem like dominant ideologies in dance music anymore. Perhaps correspondingly, it also feels like his ambition and energy have waned. Over the last few years, Mayer's label Kompakt has settled into a comfortable but unremarkable groove, working roughly the same corners of the same circuit for what seem like ever-diminishing returns. Meanwhile, Mayer's solo work has been so sporadic and incremental that his Discogs page might as well be covered in moss.
Mantasy is Mayer's first original full-length in eight years. Considering such a lengthy absence, you'd be forgiven for wondering if he might come back with something dramatically different, but he doesn't take any big swings here, nor does he seem to worry much about stretching beyond his own aesthetic bounds. Detractors will argue that in 2012 his kind of touch sounds more middle-aged than craftsmanlike, and, frankly, they'll be right. In that way, I suppose Mayer is kind of a litmus test for modern dance music listeners: So long as the idea of "middle-aged" isn't total anathema to you, you'll find something to like here.
Even though it operates under the familiar laws of Mayer's universe, Mantasy's appeal largely comes from how self-contained and individual each cut is; whether it's a fidgety horror show theme ("Lamusetwa"), a moody nod to Jan Hammer ("Mantasy"), a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong ("Baumhaus"), or a skronky jazz workout ("Rudi Was a Punk"), each of these 10 tracks aims at a distinct and concrete idea. Which isn't to say that all of them hit.
As with the tepid rhythm exercise "Neue Furche" and the aforementioned "Lamusetwa", Mayer's tendency to dial things like promisingly outre sounds or rhythm sections requiring muscle toward tastefulness instead of coarseness means that he has a frustrating default tendency toward the middle of the road. On other tracks, though, such as the perfectly pitched "Rudi" or the "Billie Jean"-aping highlight "Wrong Lap", which manages the neat trick of containing some pretty nuanced sounds while also sounding huge, you're reminded of how the right amount of restraint in the right places can still lead to unexpected magic. | 2012-10-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | October 31, 2012 | 7 | 2fbcf7b1-1b5c-4479-aabd-23be18c86657 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The Nigerian singer blends the personal and political into a new benchmark of Afro-fusion music. | The Nigerian singer blends the personal and political into a new benchmark of Afro-fusion music. | Burna Boy: African Giant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burna-boy-african-giant/ | African Giant | The music spread across West Africa’s many cultures have been frequently miscategorized, lumped together under the racist “world music” banner, or altogether ignored. There are still mix-ups surrounding Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and the current umbrella pop genre Afrobeats. Somewhere in between the not-so-ambiguous space of that “s” is Nigerian cross-pollinator Burna Boy. His grandfather was Kuti’s manager, his dad introduced him to the music of deejay Super Cat and dancehall great Buju Banton when he was a kid, and a girl he liked at 10 gave him his first Joe CD, initiating a love of America R&B and subsequently rap. He is a musical omnivore who left Nigeria to live and learn in London but never strayed too far from home.
Burna Boy is one of West Africa’s brightest rising stars, and he has long been poised for a crossover moment here in the States, but his position on the Coachella billing earlier this year illustrated a disparity between who he is in Africa and who he is in America. “I am an AFRICAN GIANT and will not be reduced to whatever that tiny writing means,” he wrote on Instagram. The memo was loud and clear: Africa will not be marginalized. When his mother accepted, on his behalf, the award for BET’s Best International Act (an ill-defined category that reinforces just how noncommittal we are as a society about most non-white imported music), she reminded an audience full of Black musicians that they are part of a larger whole: “The message from Burna, I believe, would be that every Black person should please remember that you were Africans before you became anything else.”
This idea of tracing all Blackness back to the wellspring is the crux of Burna Boy’s new album, African Giant; his mother’s words, sampled from the BET speech, are the last ones spoken on the album. Burna’s compositions are all based in something he’s dubbed Afro-fusion—blending pop, American hip-hop and R&B, Jamaican dancehall, and hard UK rap with Nigerian music—and he puts Africa at the root of that expanding lineage while also pushing the more traditional sounds forward. The album is a splendid hour of jams, both personal and political, that never sacrifices its bewitching groove even when it’s dressing down corrupt officials. African Giant is more cohesive, more robust in sound, and significantly broader than his previous music. He siphons external sounds to enhance the shape and texture of his homegrown slappers.
Last year’s Outside made a play for Western audiences in the wake of Burna’s cameo on Drake’s More Life. There’s still a sense of that here but the hybridist isn’t making any concessions for such audiences. The music reaches across the diaspora because his sound has a unifying power. It starts with Africa first, then extends outward. While he used English frequently before, here he sings primarily in Pidgin, Yoruba, and Igbo and pulls guests from all over into his distinctive polyrhythmic world: Nigeria’s Zlatan and Ghana’s M.anifest, Angélique Kidjo, reggae legend Damian Marley and dancehall singer Serani, Jorja Smith in the UK, across the Atlantic with Jeremih, YG, and Future. He described leading the latter two into Afro-fusion as “bringing my brothers home.”
This musical Garveyism produces two of African Giant’s most massive moments. On “Show & Tell,” Burna meets Future halfway, exchanging tough talk as the flavor of his melodies seeps into the rapper’s Auto-Tune. The buoyant sway has all but taken hold when suddenly the song bottoms out into something darker and unpredictable. The Jeremih and Serani-assisted stunner “Secret” melts swaggering Naija pop into an R&B slow burner, the washed-out guitars rolling over Burna as he drifts into a refined falsetto.
Elsewhere, Burna is at his best either holding it down at home or tracing African influence beyond its shores. He trades blows with Zlatan on “Killing Dem,” each hyping up the other. He secured a guest appearance from premier African diva Angélique Kidjo on “Different” with Damian Marley, in which they sing about the similarities and disparities of Black suffering. Burna and Marley’s verses mirror each other, structurally and melodically, rising and crashing, building to a surging Kidjo coda. In his lyrics, Burna uncovers how rampant corruption inspired personal study. “Differently intelligent…/Different studying of my roots and origin/Tell my truth in melodies.”
While Burna Boy takes his position within the expansive and nuanced musical legacy of Africa, he probes Nigeria’s turbulent history. He can’t really be an African giant without speaking truth to power, after all, and he spends much of the album breaking down the narratives that have surrounded Nigeria since it gained independence in 1960. No sequence embodies this better than the two-pronged economic evaluation of “Wetin Man Go Do” and “Dangote”; the brutal nature of a life making ends meet is put shoulder-to-shoulder with the unrepentant drive of billionaires (the song is named after the Nigerian business tycoon Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa). If the Nigerian elite won’t stop amassing wealth, Burna suggests, then he can’t slow down in his pursuit of money either. He comes off both impressed by their appetites and anxiously aware of an expanding fiscal imbalance. In instances like these, Burna Boy juggles roles as an everyman, local griot, global ambassador, party-starter, and occasional badmon with ease. | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | August 1, 2019 | 8.3 | 2fbd9381-1f8c-4ec1-82b6-517b80a3d7c7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Tech-house hot boy's second full-length for Ghostly International's Spectral Sound imprint fails to reach the peaks of his previous 12-inches and debut full-length. | Tech-house hot boy's second full-length for Ghostly International's Spectral Sound imprint fails to reach the peaks of his previous 12-inches and debut full-length. | Matthew Dear: Backstroke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2527-backstroke/ | Backstroke | Every morning, Detroit tech-house artist Matthew Dear has to wake up to the painful realization that, for the rest of his career, he might never again release anything as good as "Dog Days". This is hardly a slight to Dear-- "Dog Days" just happens to be one of the most irresistible house numbers to come out in years, and the song casts a long, pitch-black shadow over the rest of his work. Even Dear's 2003 solid debut LP, Leave Luck to Heaven, which tried to keep "Dog Days" tucked away until the sixth track, ultimately suffered from this emergent disparity.
Dear definitely feels the pressure. After Leave Luck to Heaven, he tried his best to match the hook and energy of "Dog Days" with the feisty 12-inch single "Anger Management". The fractured acid-house groove had just as much energy as "Dog Days", but lacked Dear's breathy vocal hook, relying instead on the warmth of the synth sounds themselves. B-side "Future Never Again" fared similarly with gorgeous high- and low-end production, and from the release, it seemed that Dear had decided to forgo the "Dog Days" formula entirely and instead to concentrate on this very exciting warm acid-house approach. Dear's abrasive debut Kisses EP as Audion only fortified this expectation, the 12-inch bearing the faint hint of a denser, club-friendlier Pan Sonic.
Given this trajectory, Dear's new Backstroke LP comes with two surprises: For one, Dear relies much more heavily on his vocals to carry the songs than before-- more than half of these tracks prominently feature his vocals. What consciously results are Dear's first pop songs, most of which make recourse to traditional verse/chorus/verse structure. The other surprise is more frustrating: Dear's instrumental tracks are remarkably flat. They hardly match the energy of "Anger Management" or Kisses, let alone Dear's fantastic earlier EPs. What's worse, since the instrumentals come between the vocal tracks, an otherwise exciting Backstroke suffers from some serious drag.
The torrent of noise that delays opener "Another" for over a minute finally gives way to a pulse of timid synth straight out of Warp's back catalog. Dear updates the line halfway through with a bubbly glitch treatment, but given the line's fragility, he can't do much else with it, and the song stagnates. Dear himself must have realized this about "Another"; in fact, the vinyl release of Backstroke pulls it from the tracklist altogether.
Percussion sounds on "Tide" fire off and recoil while Dear snakes a simple but gargantuan bassline and some twitchy guitar action into the mix. By the time Dear enters in verse with modest reverb, the song's chorus is about to take over: The guitar drops out, and Dear's catchy nanny-nanny boo-boo potshot ("I don't care 'bout you anymore") is closely followed by a trail of deadened vocals, used to bewilderingly great effect.
Unfortunately, what life "Tide" manages to breathe into Backstroke is enervated by "Takes on You", a seven-minute instrumental that boasts the precision of Kompakt but none of its heart. Dear won't reclaim the listener's rapt attention until "Grut Wall". Here, Dear contrasts trench-deep but well-defined low-end with bright clicks, while a tired bee-like buzz flutters between the two. Shortly thereafter, the song's colorful electric piano melody-- perhaps a sinister counterpart to Jurgen Pääpe's line on "So Weit Wie Noch Wie"-- settles in for good. "Grut Wall" would have killed even as an instrumental, but Dear's exorcised vocals send it rocketing up to meet "Tide" as an album highlight.
After "Grut Wall", Backstroke becomes particularly disappointing. "I Know Howser" is Dear's lazy attempt at schaffel-pop; the possibly tongue-in-cheek "Huggy's Parade" is an undeveloped, infantile "Dog Days" rehash; and there's not much to say about "Good Girl" other than that it's just fucking terrible. Thankfully, the album's epic closer, "And in the Night", redeems some of the album's second-side sins. Though definitely out of place on Backstroke-- it sounds more like an overloaded Happy Mondays than the minimal house approach to which Dear primarily subscribes-- its storm of horns, keyboards, bell sounds, and tape hiss work quite well behind Dear's multitracked vocal melodies.
It's unclear if "And in the Night" marks a new direction for Dear or just a fluke, but it stands as one last reminder here of how much Dear is capable as an artist. In this sense, Backstroke could become even more of a burden to Dear: The album makes it strikingly clear when he's dead on, and when he's miles off. | 2004-07-25T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2004-07-25T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Spectral | July 25, 2004 | 6.8 | 2fc12c2f-4122-4cde-b535-6389a48319c6 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The eccentric 29-year-old guitarist, artist, model, and former city council candidate’s new solo guitar album showcases his studious and inventive approach to the genre. | The eccentric 29-year-old guitarist, artist, model, and former city council candidate’s new solo guitar album showcases his studious and inventive approach to the genre. | Hayden Pedigo: The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayden-pedigo-the-happiest-times-i-ever-ignored/ | The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored | John Fahey occupies a paradoxical position in American life. Born and raised in suburban Washington, D.C., his music invokes a kind of a kind of localism by way of the folk, blues, jazz, and country traditions that initially inspired his intricate fingerpicking style. Yet it’s also remarkably placeless, only taking on a specific regional feel by way of its inheritors and the pastoral styles they’ve developed in their own areas. While Fahey’s music itself doesn’t feel of a specific time and place, it’s easy to imagine a map dedicated to all the local sounds it’s informed over the past 50 years, with pins to denote Jim O’Rourke’s Chicago, William Tyler’s Nashville, and Daniel Bachman’s Virginia, where undoubtedly, the city of Amarillo, Texas, would be reserved for Hayden Pedigo.
As a child of Amarillo, the 29-year-old guitarist has found lasting inspiration in his locale, developing a mode of fingerstyle performance that’s specifically indebted to the area. His 2017 album, Greetings From Amarillo, made this connection explicit in both its track titles and on its recordings, which placed his temperate fingerpicking alongside dreamy kosmische soundscapes, and included a vocal interlude from the local visual artist and outlaw country icon Terry Allen (whose music has itself been the subject of recent reissues). Pedigo’s commitment to the region has only seemed to deepen in recent years; in 2019, he starred in a series of surrealist videos announcing his plan to run for Amarillo City Council, which resulted in an outpouring of online support that inspired him to take the election seriously and follow through with an actual campaign, as documented in the 2021 film Kid Candidate. “I definitely mulled it over a lot. It wasn’t a knee-jerk thing,” he told Rolling Stone at the time.
Despite ultimately losing the election to a more monied contender, Pedigo’s campaign introduced the world to his offbeat sense of humor—part John Wilson, part Tim Heidecker—which has since emerged as a central part of his music career. While the recordings themselves have remained just as tranquil and stone-faced as before, they’ve arrived with new photos, videos, and album art that lean into the stir-crazed insanity that seems to accompany the feeling of being an outsider in a small town at every level of success. “Solo guitar music, to be frank, it’s such a stuffy genre,” he said in an interview with Aquarium Drunkard. “People pose for their press photos wearing a tweed jacket with their guitar on their lap. I’ve done that too. But I’m willing to not take myself too seriously.” In 2021, he brought his cowboy charisma to the runway, walking in Gucci’s “Love Parade” show in Hollywood and later sitting for portraits with the celebrated fashion photographer Hedi Slimane. Precisely the kind of surreal career milestones that could easily go to another’s head, these experiences haven’t seemed to phase Pedigo in the slightest, whose music remains as focused and surprising as ever.
The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored arrives a full decade removed from Pedigo’s debut cassette. Gone are the buzzing organs, clumsy multitracking, and unfocused picking that lent Seven Years Late and Greetings From Amarillo an understated charm, replaced by taut phrasing and melodies that push back against the guitarist’s early abstractions. The album adopts the phrase as its basic unit of expression, stitching neighboring tones from open tunings into melodies that fan out across the fretboard. On “Looking at the Fish” and “Elsewhere,” this approach is contained within the bouncing mid-tempo grooves that populate Pedigo’s earlier material, but other songs embrace new temporal possibilities that produce some of the strongest melodies of Pedigo’s career.
Consider “The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored”; in the first few seconds of the track, a distorted electric guitar cuts through the mix at a hurried pace that seems to knock the acoustic melody off-center before stumbling back into alignment with the electric. The short, roughly 15-second phrase is repeated with slight variations throughout the track, embellished with lead melodies that wander ever-slightly before returning back to this central theme. It’s the kind of phrase that could easily grow stale in another guitarist’s hands, but one that his deft touch and deep understanding of tradition lend a feeling of timelessness.
The album is filled with similar moments of splendor that feel like clear triumphs in the context of Pedigo’s catalog. Both “Nearer, Nearer” and “Then It’s Gone” feature equally disarming phrases with the kind of expressive, even-keeled rubato that comes with endless practice. Yet even while releasing songs that feel expertly arranged and rehearsed, Pedigo still retains his sense of humor; alongside the title track, the guitarist released an instructional video for the single that echoes the spirit of his campaign videos. Draped in vintage TV effects and peering out from behind a pair of oversized glasses, Pedigo assumes the role of a cheesy, washed-up guitar instructor, offering real guidance on how to play the piece and warm words of encouragement for students of all ages at home. Loosely framed as comedy, it’s a scene that comes from a sincere place that feels both authentic to Pedigo and genuinely new in the context of his musical career. There’s an honesty and understanding of self here that feels refreshing, especially amid so much fingerstyle traditionalism. | 2023-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | July 5, 2023 | 7.4 | 2fc52eb4-13ff-44e0-8d97-f932a2f8be82 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The latest collaboration between the heavy psych-rock mavens and the master of noise music consists of two separate CDs meant to be played simultaneously. | The latest collaboration between the heavy psych-rock mavens and the master of noise music consists of two separate CDs meant to be played simultaneously. | Boris / Merzbow: Gensho | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21672-gensho/ | Gensho | Gensho, the latest sprawling collaboration from fellow Japanese experimental giants Boris and Merzbow, seems made and marketed to elicit the attention of Gizmodo or Mashable. The set splits 13 tracks unevenly between the artists; Boris takes credit for nine, while Merzbow can claim four. But compare the track lengths—add them up, even—and you'll notice that, collectively, the running time for Merzbow's contributions essentially equals that of Boris' drum-less recreations of its greatest hits. The halves are meant to be started and played simultaneously, so that the mixing between the two happens in real-time and at the high volumes facilitated by two separate sound systems. It's a more modest rendition of The Flaming Lips's Zaireeka, enhanced by the twist of partnership between these longtime collaborators.
Don't be surprised if, upon first spin, Gensho sounds like a mess, or if listening to the whole 75-minute cycle gets exhausting. Boris and Merzbow, of course, are dual institutions of loudness; the former has a classic called Amplifier Worship, the latter a masterpiece called Sonic Command. At times here, they seem to go at one another's throat, Merzbow's spirals of clipped-and-mangled signals lashing out against Boris' honeyed drone.
Each time you run this gauntlet, you will undoubtedly notice new cooperative nuances between the two acts, particularly moments when Merzbow seems to be working to fit inside Boris' world and to augment it. When the band lurches into "Sometimes," for instance, with sweeping guitar chords moving like tectonic plates beneath airy vocals, he locks into a sustained signal and guilds it with quick, near-manic cuts. It's as though he's adding a bass line and his version of a blast beat to the low, slow rumble. He's almost playful during "Akuma No Uta," countering the band's grand, ascendant riff with a crosstalk of dissonant bits and shards. Such moments, though, are either so few and far between or so constant (it's hard to determine which, really) on Gensho that the entire experience becomes more arduous than enjoyable. Both Merzbow and Boris have built enormous legacies by being monolithic in sound and singular in style, but those assets become liabilities here.
Listening to these sets separately is actually the more interesting experience. The two-part "Goloka" suite, which takes the middle 40 minutes of Merzbow's contribution, finds the master in all his versatile glory. He slides seamlessly between electroacoustic radiance and concussive punishment, between drones that are nearly pleasant and scrambles that suggest all the world's servers stalling at once. And the nine preexisting songs that Boris chose for this set—the tidal "Farewell," the snarling "Vomitself," the floating "Rainbow"—are among the landmarks in an enormous catalog. Re-created here without drums, they're newly fascinating, with forgotten elements pulled suddenly into the spotlight. Boris' side of Gensho is the band's most assured and purely pleasurable album in years. As if knowing they'll be overshadowed by Merzbow's volume, anyway, the trio seems to be enjoying itself here, delighting its way through the classics of its own canon. Perhaps it's best to think of Gensho, then, as a split box set.
Still, particularly for this era of instant, easy access to almost everything, Gensho is an intriguing, subversive concept. It makes the listener work to hear the music as it's intended, and that process allows the listener input as to how, exactly, the music should be heard. Which side should be louder? Who gets the right channel? Should the stereos used be the same? Gensho feels delightfully out of step with our present notions of convenience, our belief that music should practically come to us if it wants to be heard. It's not quite so extreme as the infamous Merzcar, in which Merzbow's Noisembryo was locked crypt-style into the CD player of a decrepit Mercedez-Benz, but it's certainly more involved than Adele circumventing Spotify.
Alas, that challenge is the most lasting aspect of the least rewarding partnership between Boris and Merzbow to date. By the fourth or fifth trip through Gensho, the idea begins to slip into pure gimmickry, as though this were a notion that sounded fun for old friends to try but isn't so fun to hear. What's more, Boris' decision to plunder its back catalog for such an album dovetails with the recent feeling that this band, no matter how hard it tries, is simply running out of ground and energy. They couldn't even be bothered to write new songs for this old, borrowed concept. At least it's good to revisit the ghosts of a force that seems to be fading. | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock / Experimental | Relapse | March 21, 2016 | 5.7 | 2fce448b-c46c-4ae2-89ab-1eafc18268c9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Even on this shorter EP, saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington displays a tireless ambition with his compositions, performance, and spiritual approach. | Even on this shorter EP, saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington displays a tireless ambition with his compositions, performance, and spiritual approach. | Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamasi-washington-harmony-of-difference-ep/ | Harmony of Difference EP | Where the standard path through jazz usually involves an ascending series of apprenticeships and supporting gigs, saxophonist Kamasi Washington and his compatriots essentially created their own scene in relative isolation in South Central Los Angeles. Washington first gained national notice for his playing and arrangements on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (the album also included contributions from members of Washington’s loose collective, the West Coast Get Down), but by the time that album was released, he was 34 years old and had written enough music for an audacious three-hour, three-disc debut album, 2015’s The Epic.
Instead of a jazz label, that record came out on Flying Lotus’ imprint, Brainfeeder, and Washington’s band got booked to play clubs and festivals that typically host indie rock or rap groups; which is to say that so far, nothing about Washington’s rise fits an established template. His music is very much of jazz, but the context he and his collaborators have created sits slightly outside it. Continuing the trend, Washington’s new EP, Harmony of Difference, comes courtesy of Young Turks, a sublabel of XL that has released music by Jamie xx and FKA twigs, and it contains music written for an exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial.
Harmony of Difference was originally part of a multimedia work that illustrated how forces that seem to be working in opposition could come together as a composite of complex beauty. This was illustrated in the original exhibit by a series of projected paintings (created by artist and Washington’s sister Amani Washington) that were gradually overlaid to form an abstract image of a face. Musically, Washington explores the theme by writing a series of five short pieces that are also folded together into a lengthy, recombinant suite.
That extended piece, called “Truth,” was released earlier this year as part of a short film by director A.G. Rojas (which was also part of the Whitney exhibit). The structure lends a sense of déjà vu, as motifs and riffs and melodies are introduced and then reappear later. Where musical counterpoint was the driving idea for the compositions, Harmony also feels like a meditation on memory, association, and vantage point. Hearing it in one sitting is like looking at a sculpture from multiple angles and suddenly the three-dimensional form clicks in your mind and you apprehend the whole.
In approach and tone, Harmony feels of a piece with parts of The Epic. “Desire” anchors the suite with its elemental one–two–three bassline, which hints at the iconic motif from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, while “Humility” is driving and jagged, focusing most on Cameron Graves’ spray of piano notes. “Perspective” is a mid-tempo groover in the soft funky vein of Grover Washington Jr. There are elements of ’60s small-group jazz and ’70s R&B; calypso rhythms percolate under tightly arranged ensemble sections and then the structure gives way to thematic improvisations. Throughout, Washington has a particular mode of arranging and layering the horn section (which, along with his tenor, includes Ryan Porter on trombone and Dontae Winslow on trumpet) that’s dreamy and lush, a slowly drifting cloud of healing sound.
Though Washington is a fine tenor soloist, the essence of his artistry is found in his explosively grand compositions and arrangements. “Truth,” like parts of The Epic, is a dense, maximalist tune with strings and choirs reaching for the heavens in the manner of an old Hollywood production number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, and for some people the sheer drama of it all may prove to be overwhelming. But Washington expertly juggles all the parts to create music that is deeply (and surprisingly) accessible. As a player/bandleader/composer/arranger, Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson are two of Washington’s clear antecedents. Albums like Jones’ 1970 classic Gula Matari and Nelson’s 1961 outing The Blues and the Abstract Truth featured exceptional soloists on extended pieces where genre was fluid and the composition and the arrangements were the biggest selling point. Like Jones and Nelson, it’s not hard to imagine Washington having great success in film scoring—his sense of shading and the broad sonic palette available hint at a vast well of possibility.
But what ultimately binds Washington’s work together is his spiritual approach. As with The Epic, the title of this release and of the individual pieces suggests the scope of his ambition. The concept for Harmony and the video for “Truth” make clear that Washington is framing his work so that they’re in conversation with the biggest social issues facing the world. His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said. Following on its massive and sometimes unwieldy predecessor, Harmony of Difference, a brief and concentrated blast of emotion, is a great place to catch up on what Washington has to say. | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Young Turks | September 28, 2017 | 8.5 | 2fcf6dd8-fafc-4000-8dc6-28b320db6d59 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Mackenzie Scott’s fourth album is both her most intimate and eclectic. Its best moments are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again. | Mackenzie Scott’s fourth album is both her most intimate and eclectic. Its best moments are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again. | Torres: Silver Tongue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/torres-silver-tongue/ | Silver Tongue | In 2017, singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott released Three Futures, her most aggressive, starkly arranged, and provocative album to date. Despite its direct lyrics and instantly memorable visual aesthetic, Futures failed to meet the commercial expectations of her former label 4AD—maybe it didn’t stand out enough against records like St. Vincent’s Masseduction, or maybe it was too unflinching to be as accessible. Maybe a line like “I’m not a righteous woman, I’m more of an ass man” would have trouble reaching a mainstream audience.
Scott wrote Silver Tongue, her fourth album as Torres, after the unceremonious fallout with her label left her feeling ambivalent towards her musical career. It would be several months before she started writing again, using her “cyclical muse” relationship with her girlfriend, the artist Jenna Gribbon, for an album about love as a stabilizing force. Her first album on Merge, Silver Tongue is less confrontational than Three Futures and less theatrical than 2015’s Sprinter (and less raw than her 2013 self-titled debut), but that makes sense given the circumstances that inspired the record. Scott self-produced this album out of necessity, due to a smaller budget but a wide-ranging vision for the record, taking equal influence from Gregorian chant music, Phil Collins’ percussive Tarzan soundtrack, and the in-vogue new-age legend Enya. Even as Scott’s ambition sometimes clashes with the content of the actual songs, Tongue is both her most intimate and eclectic album thus far. As long as the unrelenting stare that is her contralto takes prominence, it’s still Torres.
Scott’s Southern roots have long informed her music ever since she recorded her debut in “swamp rock legend” Tony Joe White’s Nashville studio while she studied at Belmont University. She would occasionally reference her upbringing in songs like “Cowboy Guilt” off Sprinter (the clearest precursor to her current electronic direction) or in the video for “Three Futures.” While she wasn’t openly identifying as queer in 2013, Torres consistently used cowboy iconography as a means to a gender-defying end. Silver Tongue opener “Good Scare” distills her background into a single line about Tennessee pickup truck sex, and even if she acknowledges that “folks here in New York [will] get a kick out of” country motifs, her references are more meaningful than simple namechecking. “Dressing America” is even sweeter, a love song of extreme devotion (she sleeps in cowboy boots in case her lover needs her) featuring a mix of distant pedal steel and blown-out drum machines.
That sweetness is the biggest change from her past records. Conflating an artists’ life with their music inevitably brings to mind the word “confessional,” a term used to implicitly dismiss a songwriter’s abilities to write beyond her own experience. Yet several songs here, including the penultimate track “Gracious Day,” unambiguously explore Scott’s relationship with Gribbon. The pleas of “Gracious Day” sound vulnerable, but Scott admitting, “I don’t want you going home anymore/I want you coming home” over interlocking guitar lines and eavesdropping synth flutes is as affecting as Three Futures was intimidating. The only weak lyrical moment on the whole album comes on the broader strokes of “Good Grief,” as the punchline “there’s no such thing as good grief” engulfs nearly a quarter of the five-minute runtime.
The way the lead guitar gradually overtakes “Good Grief” is uniquely exciting on this largely muted record. The mood of Silver Tongue is caught between plaintive country, spacey alt-pop, and jagged indie rock, but in a way that leaves some of the most confident songs Scott has ever written feeling strangely inert. Lyrical highlight “Two of Everything” is a (more) sapphic “Jolene,” only from the person about to steal rather than the pleader: “To the one sharing my lover’s bed/It’s not my mission to be cruel/But she don’t light up the room/When she’s talking about you.” A would-be standout gets lost in an arrangement both undercooked and overwrought, uninspired drum patterns clashing with guitar synths, both drowning out the vocals. “Good Scare” has the opposite issue, gliding for three and a half minutes then fading out—it sounds pleasant, but the washy mix doesn’t serve the lyrics.
The best production moments, like the chaotic, paranoid “Records of Your Tenderness” and soaring closer “Silver Tongue,” are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again. To rediscover her path, Scott sings more openly about love, about her love, than she ever has previously. The high-concept “gregorian country” vision aside, what Silver Tongue really depicts is the need to find comfort in a period of transition—taking stock of what’s still there and holding onto it tightly. In the case of the video for “Dressing America,” it becomes literal; Torres carries Gribbon, wrapped in a blanket, through the streets of New York. That could be as good an album cover as the one Gribbon painted; Silver Tongue makes clear that Gribbon has carried Scott too.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 3, 2020 | 7.4 | 2fd023de-cde4-4f90-9f87-06de788a6c5f | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann strikes a balance between dancefloor techno and avant-garde experiments; his tracks slip into the cracks between common melody and rhythm. | Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann strikes a balance between dancefloor techno and avant-garde experiments; his tracks slip into the cracks between common melody and rhythm. | Efdemin: New Atlantis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/efdemin-new-atlantis/ | New Atlantis | There’s a quality that sets Efdemin’s music apart from most techno: a soft, pneumatic heft; an all-encompassing glow. Efdemin, aka Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann, is known as a minimalist; he was long affiliated with Hamburg minimal-house label Dial, home to Lawrence, Carsten Jost, and Pantha du Prince, and he is a resident DJ at Berlin’s Berghain, a techno nightclub with a famously austere aesthetic. New Atlantis appears on Ostgut Ton, the club’s in-house imprint. But if the elements of Efdemin’s music can be stripped down, the suppleness of the results is anything but. Ironically, the linearity of his productions contributes to their sumptuous character: His tracks glint like a ribbon of asphalt that stretches toward the horizon, shimmering in the heat.
New Atlantis is his first album as Efdemin in five years (not counting a mix CD, a showcase for his Naïf label, last year). In the meantime, Sollmann has been exploring pastures far from the dancefloor, teaming up with percussionists and electric guitarists and toying with bell tones and neo-kosmische abstraction. He has a particular interest in unconventional methods of generating sound: His Monophonie project utilizes fanciful instruments by the American composer Harry Partch, sound sculptures by the Detroit furniture designer Harry Bertoia, and a 19th-century double siren, a steampunk gizmo by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. What all of those have in common: an escape hatch from the strictures of just intonation and the conventional 12-tone scale.
Those tonal experiments have rubbed off on New Atlantis, the most diverse and ambitious recording to appear under the Efdemin name, incorporating not just standard electronic kit but also dulcimer, sing-drum, hurdy-gurdy, and guitars. On its face, it is a techno album. The majority of its tracks barrel forward, fueled by four-to-the-floor kick drums and strict, time-keeping hi-hats. “Good Winds” gallops along, its kick drum as dry as an anechoic chamber, the better to emphasize the softly thrumming organ chords that slowly expand over every molecule of its atmosphere; “Black Sun” pairs a punishing thud with gurgling synths reminiscent of classic minimal techno and then wraps both in more of those gorgeous, ever-expanding chords, as nuanced as the gradients of a sunset.
But the presence of a techno beat does not always translate to what many might recognize as conventional techno. “A Land Unknown” marries the rigid pulse of trance music to buzzing drones evocative of Indian raga, and the title track is even more bare-bones, underpinning its gaseous clouds of overtones with the merest boom-tick drum pattern for more than 14 hypnotic minutes, closer in spirit to La Monte Young than to Ricardo Villalobos.
Sollmann has said that lately, he has been seeing how far he can reduce the elements of his music, and occasionally, listening to the ticking-clock minimalism of a track like “New Atlantis,” you wonder if perhaps he muted one too many channels on his mixing desk—or, conversely, if he should have just gone whole-hog ambient and done away with the drums entirely. But there’s a reason they’re there; bit like in Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, the static kick drum functions like a handrail leading you deeper and deeper into the shifting layers of overtones.
A few tracks leave the dancefloor behind entirely. “At the Stranger’s House” brings John Gürtler’s processed saxophone, a la Jon Hassell, to a microtonal field of water-drop pulse and shimmer; the all-too-brief “Temple” overlays Jeff Mills-style loop techno with whistles and flutes and deflating balloons—not so much minimal techno as techno in miniature, a kid’s birthday party set to the beat of an 808. The album’s title comes from a utopian novel by the philosopher Francis Bacon, published in 1626, in which he predicted, with startling prescience, the synthetic nature of music production 400 years hence. A portion of his text is read over the album’s closing track, “The Sound House”—“We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not… Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown… We also have divers strange and artificial echoes…”—in which Efdemin cleverly does his best impression of a Renaissance ensemble anticipating the music of Aphex Twin.
But the album’s most affecting track takes a very different tack. The opening song, “Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death,” takes angelically beautiful chords and overlays a mournful a cappella recording of an 18th-century Methodist hymn. The subject of the song carries the beauty of the human corpse—not in some gruesome sense, but as the ultimate mark of purity. “Longing to lie in his stead,” the subject of the hymn envies the dead man’s final union with god—“No longer in Misery now/No longer a Sinner like me.” This is also a kind of vision of utopia, albeit not one you might expect to find associated with Berghain, a club with a decidedly un-saintly reputation. But it’s a testament to Sollmann’s vision that the music betrays no apparent contradiction. Techno has always been about the promise of disappearing into nothingness. And just as Francis Bacon foresaw (in a roundabout way) synthesizers and Spotify, Sollmann finds a pre-echo of rave’s dissolution of the ego in a melancholy funeral hymn from 1780. | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ostgut Ton | February 20, 2019 | 7.6 | 2fd37380-eb7d-4173-8611-b47d7fa49275 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
With his ever-ambitious quartet, the legendary saxophonist from many of Miles Davis’ best records again reimagines his own standards, now with the help of a graphic novel and an orchestra. | With his ever-ambitious quartet, the legendary saxophonist from many of Miles Davis’ best records again reimagines his own standards, now with the help of a graphic novel and an orchestra. | Wayne Shorter: Emanon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wayne-shorter-emanon/ | Emanon | Wayne Shorter has released just four albums since 2002, all with the quartet of relatively young hotshots he formed only a couple of years earlier. By comparison, during one particularly productive span in the mid-’60s, the saxophonist issued seven now-canonical records in three years, even as he composed and performed at a furious pace with Miles Davis’ classic second quintet. But the purpose of Shorter’s current ensemble—a fierce and finessed assemblage, with Brian Blade on drums, Danilo Pérez on piano, and John Patitucci on bass—was never to put out easy records. Shorter started this band, in large part, to deconstruct his own compositions, many of which had become standard jazz repertory. He wanted to shake his music from the weight of legacy in a highly improvised, reactive setting where each member shared equal footing. The band’s anarchic approach hasn’t always worked on stage, but the quartet has nobly pursued this high-wire act for nearly two decades, a veritable eon in this realm.
Shorter’s new Emanon—that is, “no name” backwards, a title borrowed from a Dizzy Gillespie classic—makes up for lost time by gathering three discs of stage and studio work. It’s accompanied by a space-themed graphic novel of the same name, illustrated by accomplished comic artist Randy DuBurke and with text by Shorter and the screenwriter Monica Sly. Emanon combines a four-part suite recorded with the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with two discs of the quartet playing those pieces and a few others live in London. The suite includes tunes that are old, recent, or altogether new—“The Three Marias,” from Shorter’s 1985 album, Atlantis, sits alongside “Lotus,” for instance, which makes its debut.
This assortment suggests a sort of circularity. Shorter is simultaneously looking back and forward, scrambling your sense of time and space. The ambitious works occasionally sound like scores, as in the opening to “Prometheus Unbound,” where snare rolls and dramatic string flourishes recall the overture to an imaginary musical. They feel static as a unit, perhaps because the 34-piece orchestra is so dense it drowns out the quartet. The orchestra and the quartet occasionally come together, as at the beginning of “The Three Marias,” in which Blade maneuvers deftly around a skittering melody. Still, the most satisfying moments come when the orchestra stops playing, allowing the quartet to settle into its own groove, as it does often for those London sets.
Live, the pieces begin slowly and somewhat tentatively. “The Three Marias,” for example, is recast as a 28-minute abstraction, the rhythm expanding and contracting as the band darts around it. But on each tune, at some point, a pulse appears and the musicians dig in. Pérez is a master of atmosphere, delivering dark vamps and bluesy licks on “Lotus” and “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean,” a tune from the quartet’s 2005 album, Beyond the Sound Barrier. Patitucci holds down the low end with round, resonant notes. Like Tony Williams before him, Blade is the group’s trickster. His tom rolls, rat-a-tat snare work, and explosive bass-and-cymbal hits keep the music in flux. Shorter, on tenor and soprano saxophones, slithers in and out and around, often wailing wildly but at times playing tenderly.
Shorter turned 85 last month, and the Kennedy Center will honor him later this year. But he’s still a protean force, not focused on shoring up his oeuvre for preservation. He’s now working on an opera with the jazz singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding, and, in January, his quartet will play four nights at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, a testament to his vitality. “At this point I’m looking to express eternity in composition,” Shorter, a practicing Buddhist, says in a biography. On Emanon, it’s thrilling to hear him search for it, even when he comes up short. | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | September 20, 2018 | 7.5 | 2fd6ad07-2038-46ed-bf74-ee2ac5f060ed | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
The Baltimore band goes back to the well for another record of languorous, heart-on-the-sleeve synth-pop that hits all its marks but smacks of diminishing returns. | The Baltimore band goes back to the well for another record of languorous, heart-on-the-sleeve synth-pop that hits all its marks but smacks of diminishing returns. | Future Islands: As Long As You Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-islands-as-long-as-you-are/ | As Long As You Are | Since Future Islands entered the national spotlight on live television in 2014 while promoting their fourth album, Singles, frontman Samuel T. Herring has made an entire career out of obsessive, deliberate public vulnerability. In past iterations of Future Islands, Herring’s exploration of heartbreak felt like a bombastic release, a cut umbilical cord. People still talk about it: Singles, released over a decade into their career, was a revelation, one that launched an indie-pop band in their second act into the kind of viral stardom they could never quite follow up. In many ways, it felt like a zenith for indie rock at its most hopeful and naive.
Six years and two records later, Future Islands’ latest album, As Long As You Are, is not so different thematically or even musically from anything they’ve released in the past six years. But it’s not nearly as compelling. That one perfect moment on Letterman’s show feels impossible to repeat; a reminder of how things were. The band’s bare-it-all earnestness no longer evokes such strong emotions. The feelings here are static, rendering the booming new-wave synths and crystalline bass somehow lifeless.
What happened? It’s not that Future Islands lost the ability to write songs so fully realized they make your heart bloom and break. The dreamy “Moonlight” smolders with synthesizers that glisten like violets at night, and the bass is searching and soft. Herring’s baritone is expressive; he sings about putting his whole heart on the table in the hopes that his lover won’t break it. The production is cavernous as ever, plucked from the depths of OMD B-sides and the most blue-eyed of New Order singles. But it sounds like any other Future Islands record from the past decade: The scaffolding is the same, just slightly more polished and streamlined. Even the way Herring delivers these sentiments feels strangely anesthetic. Instead of inviting a moment of quiet introspection as Future Islands songs have in the past, it makes you want to check your email.
All of the parts are there on all of these songs, but when you piece them together something feels amiss. On the twilight ballad “City’s Face,” looking out at a skyline is all it takes to recall someone you’ve lost and the memories you once shared. The sentiment is deeply saccharine, which isn’t necessarily bad, but the song is so gratingly slow and monotonous that it is hard to focus on anything else. The textures feel hollow, lost in the retro-fetishism of a wide-eyed version of the ’80s that made more sense at the beginning of the far more optimistic last decade but now just feels dated. The lyrical content of “For Sure,” is maudlin at best and it plays as disorientingly anthemic. “Carving the wind/Dawn of your eyes/Dust off your smile,” sings Herring over crisp guitars and a barrage of synthesizers that belong in a trailer for a rom-com you’ll never watch.
There is nothing wrong with sticking to a sound. Beach House, like Future Islands, comes from a parallel legacy of Baltimore-based indie-pop bands more interested in refining a signature style than reinventing it. They make essentially the same album every few years, finding subtle ways to challenge themselves, creating music that feels comfortable, consistent, yet still melodramatic. As Long As You Are lacks those subtle—but noticeable—tweaks. The record feels like standing water, Herring is so entrenched in the past it’s hard to tell who he really is on so much of this record. There are, however, moments when the light shines in with the vibrancy of stained glass. On the lovely “Waking,” Herring demands to know his purpose is as synthesizers burn up the sky. The song is a photo from a disposable camera: ephemeral, nostalgic, perfectly tender. There’s a moment when a synthesizer is delicately arpeggiated—you want to live there. It feels like home. But “Waking” is a rare moment on a record that doesn’t say anything new about Future Islands, or about anything else.
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. | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 14, 2020 | 6.1 | 2fd88359-7a95-4db5-a41f-2504f64afa8a | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Drain Gang collaboration is one of the best projects to come out of the rap and hyperpop-adjacent Swedish collective. It’s a softly textured and sweetly spiritual quest for something bigger than ourselves. | The Drain Gang collaboration is one of the best projects to come out of the rap and hyperpop-adjacent Swedish collective. It’s a softly textured and sweetly spiritual quest for something bigger than ourselves. | Bladee / Ecco2k: Crest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bladee-ecco2k-crest/ | Crest | Though sustained by a fanbase that’s fluent in memes and irony, Sweden’s Drain Gang is propelled by a rare kind of sincerity. At once, their music possesses a childlike sense of wonder, an adolescent infatuation, and a grown-up fear of the future. Whereas so much of the rap internet is steeped in ideation and a nihilistic rage, and so much of the hyperpop they’re also linked to is honed to an ironic edge, Drain Gang most embodies the smiley-face positivity of turn-of-the-millennium rave culture, an influence that’s been obvious in their music for years, but has become even more apparent in their worldview and their communal live shows.
Drain Gang’s deep connection with their audience mirrors the deep connection between the collective themselves. Above their creative kinship or shared taste is friendship, which you can feel in how effortlessly the voices of group members Bladee and Ecco2k blend together on their new project, Crest. The collaborative album has been steeping for several years now—its first single, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” is almost a time capsule, a track released to a very different pre-pandemic world in February 2020. Crest was recorded together with producer Whitearmor while stowed away in a cabin on the beaches of Sweden, not too far from where Ingmar Bergman filmed the famous scene where a knight plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal.
That kind of existentialism associated with Ingmar Bergman, whether informed by Lutheran guilt or a more layered Zen understanding, seeps through every beat and bar of Crest. Though not quite religious, Crest plays with the iconography of heaven, angels, and ectoplasmic intelligence, building a spirit world that exists beyond dogmas or deities. In almost every song, there is a yearning for some greater beauty beyond the self, a kind of connection that can only be found within the convocation of a rave or the transcendence of the afterlife; on “Faust,” Ecco cries, “I want to live in heaven/I wanna reach closer to you.” Straight-up pop is nothing new for Drain Gang, but songs like “White Meadow” reach new heights, a kind of euphoria that can best be described as movie-climax music.
While the conception of a seraphic realm feels Christian, the philosophical approach taken is more Buddhist. Bladee and Ecco are all-too-aware of the pitfalls on the road to self-improvement, falling into traps of materiality and vanity; as one track bluntly puts it, “Desire Is a Trap.” At the core of the quest for ascension, there’s still an emptiness, a desire for beauty and perfection that can evolve into covetousness—the group’s hesitancy to foreground their own faces makes sense given the frequent lyrical yearning for a different life and self. Mantras are central to Bladee and Ecco’s approach to songwriting, as words shift and transform into one another through a kind of spiritual looping; “Yeses (Red Cross)” begins with Bladee repeating the words “Literal Christ, literal Crest” and ends with Ecco’s tongue-twister refrain of “Sex sells/Success/Yes, yes.”
And where most Drain Gang songs are short subliminal blips, “5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)” is an odyssey that stretches out over nine minutes. Whitearmor sprinkles in an audio tag of the word “Perfect”—a voice that sounds when you finish a game in Street Fighter 2 without taking any damage, but likely more familiar at this point from the Charlie Heat remix of Kanye’s “Facts.” What might just be a DJ drop in another context here becomes another mantra, a single word that encapsulates Drain Gang’s desire for wholeness and completion. The beat switches multiple times, a living and fluid pop organism that’s constantly mutating—at each segment, Ecco and Bladee lead us in a series of refrains that reach its climax with a flurry of jingle bells as Bladee intones, “Death is beautiful, give it to me raw,” before rhetorically inquiring, “We think we exist, that’s why we suffer, do we not?”
Bladee and Ecco find beauty in the gateways, not just in their tendency to exist between genres, but a belief expressed in their lyrics that loss and uncertainty offer the potential for radical transformation and change. The sentiments are stunningly direct, almost universalized in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar from Carly Rae Jepsen’s infinitely relatable crushing, even if the image Drain Gang has developed is intentionally obscured and distant: blurry photos with faces obscured by hair, their on-stage presence silhouette by fog and flashing lights, and their elusive and infrequent media profiles.
In their own style and presentation, Bladee and Ecco foster an image that’s androgynous and almost cherubic, and at times even outright feminine—perhaps most blatantly in a song like “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which obviously nods to Cyndi Lauper’s anthem about the existential femme condition. Bladee and Ecco’s twin falsettos twist and wrap together, gently Auto-Tuned and cooing, a chorus of angels over a driving synth-pop firmament. Drain Gang’s sound and lyrics alike frequently channel the spirit realm, summoning ghosts and angels, transporting the listener to a place where there are no bodies, only voices. Maybe heaven is a place where no one has a gender, where we are free of the confines of identity or genre, finally able to exist as fluidly and endlessly as the beams of light at a rave. | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B / Electronic | Year0001 | March 23, 2022 | 8 | 2fda3c67-a86b-4036-973f-f2c217d7b0ad | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Traditional Fools, Ty Segall's trashy surf punk LP from 2008, and Reverse Shark Attack, his 2009 collaboration with Mikal Cronin, are an interesting pair of albums to release at the same time. One's a collection of dumb-but-fun rock'n'roll, the other's a spotty series of tracks that owe more to Beefheart than garage*.* | The Traditional Fools, Ty Segall's trashy surf punk LP from 2008, and Reverse Shark Attack, his 2009 collaboration with Mikal Cronin, are an interesting pair of albums to release at the same time. One's a collection of dumb-but-fun rock'n'roll, the other's a spotty series of tracks that owe more to Beefheart than garage*.* | The Traditional Fools / Ty Segall / Mikal Cronin: The Traditional Fools / Reverse Shark Attack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17534-the-traditional-fools-reverse-shark-attack/ | The Traditional Fools / Reverse Shark Attack | As 2013 began, Ty Segall quietly released a 7"-- "This Time I Got a Reason" came out on Trouble in Mind under the band name Fuzz. It's his sludgy stoner metal studio project with his friend and frequent collaborator Charles Mootheart, and while the song isn't exactly deep, it's a wholly satisfying nugget of 1970s hard rock. Aside from being yet another notch in his famous prolific streak, it's a natural step for Segall to start the year with a new project. As he explained to Spin, he thrives in the studio. "I've been on tour for three years straight, basically. It's not my favorite thing; recording is. It's so fun," he said, adding, "You can get weird." And throughout his recording career, he's gotten weird time and time again with a revolving door of collaborators: Thee Oh Sees, Sic Alps, White Fence, and most frequently, his old friend Mikal Cronin.
Around 2006, Segall and Cronin started the Laguna Beach garage punk band Epsilons, and since then, they've worked together several times. The duo were both in the short-lived hardcore band Party Fowl, and Cronin has been a member of Segall's touring band for quite a while. Most recently, Cronin's harmonies and bass were an essential contribution to Slaughterhouse. And unsurprisingly, Segall was in the studio to help with Cronin's excellent self-titled debut LP. But as one man comes off his 2012 three-album hot streak while the other just signed to Merge for his second solo record, the weirdness of their 2009 collaborative album Reverse Shark Attack doesn't hold up.
The album's first six tracks are garage songs washed in acid-soaked sonics, and they're ultimately unremarkable when stacked next to the rest of either man's discography. Throughout the album, Segall and Cronin tap into John Dwyer-ian psychedelics, and with pitched-down throaty vocals, the effects feel like a gimmick and cheapens the material. Their more straightforward readings of "I Wear Black", for example, are immediately more interesting than the markedly slower studio version. (Evidence: the Daytrotter version.) But when they stick the landing on their more psychedelic tendencies, the results are extremely satisfying. Easily, the best tracks on the album are the final two: Their muddy-but-faithful cover of Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn cut "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" and their 10-minute opus "Reverse Shark Attack". The title track switches gears several times, incorporating bubbly psych pop, soft acoustic guitars, a Dick Dale fast-surf outro, and the same sort of slow-burning melodrama you could hear in the Pallbearer album. For a song that jumps around to a few different melodic devices, they're strung together beautifully.
Reverse Shark Attack is a fine example of the downsides to getting weird in the studio. Sometimes, you strike gold. Sometimes, veering into psychedelic territory makes your songs sound unnecessarily cheap. It stands in contrast to Ty's work with the Traditional Fools, who shy away from additional effects and stick to drunken, lo-fi budget rock. In 2008, the trio-- Segall, David Fox, and Andrew Luttrell-- bashed out a series of trashy surf punk songs, four of which are just over one minute long. (That proved to be a troglodyte year for Segall-- he also released his raucous one-man-band debut solo album on Castle Face.) And really, if the sunglasses-clad cheeseburgers on the cover don't already give you a sense of the album's overall vibe, the track titles should: "Snot Rag", "Shredstick", "Get Off My Back", "Party at My House".
But here's the thing-- while it's not an ambitious album, every song is solid. Their intention was to create a rock'n'roll party album (from "Party at My House": "Parents comin' home,/ Won't you get the fuck out?"), and with that mission in their sights, they recorded 12 earworm-laden tracks that wouldn't sound out of place at a deranged Frankie and Annette beach party. There's a sped up version of Billy Childish's Thee Headcoats song "Davey Crockett" and a fuzzed out version of Redd Kross' "Kill Someone You Hate". With speed, volume, great riffs, and a sloppy delivery, they breathe punk rock life into surf.
These two albums are an interesting pair to release at the same time. One's a collection of dumb-but-fun rock'n'roll, the other's a spotty series of tracks that owe more to Beefheart than garage*.* On their own, these albums could imply that Segall's strengths rest in the loud and fast material. As Hair, Goodbye Bread, and Twins have all proved, that's not the case at all-- he can slow jam with the best of 'em. But early on, he was a master of trash rock, and The Traditional Fools is 20 minutes of some of his most fun material to date. | 2013-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | null | January 18, 2013 | 7.9 | 2fdf7a1c-e438-4ed5-8620-eb3d2cf53884 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the KLF’s sample-heavy dreamscape, one of the most influential records in ambient house music. | 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 KLF’s sample-heavy dreamscape, one of the most influential records in ambient house music. | The KLF: Chill Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-klf-chill-out/ | Chill Out | In 1959, a young composer named James Tenney enrolled at the University of Illinois, one of the few places in the United States where an aspiring iconoclast could study electronic music. The form was still in its infancy; oscillators and magnetic tape promised a doorway to new worlds. When Tenney sat down to compose with these unfamiliar materials, he was stymied. It wasn’t until 1961, in an act of sheer desperation, that Tenney started futzing around with a piece of music that was a world away from his classical upbringing: a recording of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” which had come out just five years before. He sped it up, slowed it down, cut it to ribbons. One “feverish” week later, he had completed a landmark work of appropriation art: “Collage #1,” an alien stew of chirps and gurgles in which Presley’s voice floats in dreamlike fragments, barely discernible.
Decades later, in 1985, when John Oswald took the stage at a Toronto conference of electro-acoustic musicians to deliver a provocative lecture titled “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” a tremor was shaking the music industry—the sustained aftershock of DJ Kool Herc’s invention of breakbeat DJing at Bronx block parties. As scratching and its digital cousin, sampling, had migrated from community rec centers to recording studios, it had become clear that copyright laws were ill-equipped to answer the question implicit in these new technologies: What if commercial recordings were not just products to be owned, but also the raw materials, anarchic and free, for new creative works?
“A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist… becomes a musical instrument,” declared Oswald, who saw in the turntable and the sampler the birth of a new folk music. Oswald believed that creative sampling does not eclipse prior works; it builds upon them. He cited the English poet John Milton’s view that borrowing becomes plagiarism only if the object “is not bettered by the borrower,” and quoted Stravinsky’s oft-repeated epigram, “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” Tenney’s “Collage #1,” Oswald said, was an example of that “better borrowing,” precisely for the way it expanded upon the original recording while preserving its essence: “Tenney took an everyday music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim’s piece.” What was the point of copyright law in a world that could produce such profound results? Why police creation? Art, like people, yearned to be free, to go forth and multiply.
Two years later, in 1987, as the sun came up over a remote Swedish field at the end of a long dirt road, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty watched—maybe ruefully, maybe gleefully—as a small bonfire turned the remaining copies of their debut album into a column of acrid smoke. It was not the last time the two would incinerate what they made. In 1994, flush with cash from becoming one of the best-selling bands in the UK, their band known as the KLF would set fire to £1 million—just torch it, hidden away in a deserted boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, tossing bundle after bundle of £50 notes into the fireplace, until the suitcase they’d brought it in was empty. Episodes like that made the pair as famous for their hijinks as for the music they recorded—maybe more so. Today, they’re best known as the band that set fire to a small fortune, shortly after giving up music for good. But before they called it quits, in between the provocations, court injunctions, and unexpected hits, they snuck out Chill Out: a strange, idiosyncratic album that would alter the course of ambient music for decades to come—and prove that even their quietest, most cryptic statements could be as powerful as their most anarchic stunts.
Formed on New Year’s Day, 1987, the KLF had quickly become one of the most audacious acts in British pop music. Before they became the KLF, they started out using a name they borrowed—something they would do a lot of in the coming years—from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of sci-fi novels about a group of shadowy agents of chaos: the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs.
Drummond and Cauty’s Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the misspelling was unintentional) released their first single, “All You Need Is Love,” just three months after forming. It began with an extensive, unauthorized excerpt of the Beatles’ song of the same name, then cut abruptly to the MC5’s infamous “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!”—a sly reference to the Illuminatus! books. The rest of the song was similarly loaded with uncleared samples. “Touch me, touch me,” chirped Samantha Fox, best known to British audiences as a tabloid pin-up model; “Sexual intercourse/No known cure,” warned the actor John Hurt, whose voice had been lifted from newly implemented government AIDS-prevention PSAs. Its jagged scratching and anvil-drop guitars were a clumsy pastiche of Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys; it was, frankly, kind of a mess. Sounds magazine declared it “the first single to capture realistically the musical and social climate of 1987.”
The DJs at the BBC refused to touch the single, but “All You Need Is Love” nevertheless attracted scads of attention, from the press and lawyers alike. A court ordered that all remaining copies of the record be destroyed; lucky for the JAMs, the single-sided pressing of 500 had already sold out. Undeterred, they rushed out their debut album, 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On?, which was similarly chock-a-block with pilfered sounds—bits from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” etc.—over rudimentary hip-hop beats. They flaunted their stolen goods, making no attempt to hide the samples’ sources. (The title of the Dave Brubeck song: “Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want).”) That same year, underground rockers Negativland and the one-off dance-pop project M/A/R/R/S both put out career-defining records that shared with the KLF’s output one central tenet: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.
Another court ordered that all remaining copies of 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On? be destroyed. This time it was an unlicensed ABBA sample that got Drummond and Cauty into trouble—which is how they found themselves in Stockholm, hoping to convince the Swedish superstars to reconsider their demand. After failing to get a meeting, the duo kept the letter of the law, dutifully if somewhat petulantly, and burned most of the records in that Swedish field; the rest they dumped overboard on the ferry ride home. Presumably, a mass of black wax discs lies there still, smoothed by the waves and covered in mollusks, a misshapen mile-marker on that North Sea whale-road, an underwater monument to artistic stubbornness.
Drummond and Cauty went on like that for another year or so, releasing trouble-making records, taunting the industry, and nurturing a reputation for perpetual reinvention. In 1988, they killed off the JAMs and adopted various new aliases. As the Timelords, they stumbled into a No. 1 hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” by shamelessly mashing up the Doctor Who theme song with glam-rock stomps from Sweet and Gary Glitter. A month later, they reached No. 5 with “What Time Is Love,” a sinister seven-minute techno anthem that marked their arrival to the nascent rave scene. The alias they used for that record was the KLF—a name rumored, though never confirmed, to stand for “Kopyright Liberation Front.”
The musical thread that had defined the duo’s work up to this point was its abrasiveness. Yet in February 1990, they set aside the jarring edits and jagged rave stabs and released Chill Out: an unbroken 44-minute collage of synthesizer, steel guitar, railway noises, bleating sheep, found sounds, and samples—some half-buried, some plain as day—of Fleetwood Mac, jazz clarinetist Acker Bilk, and even James Tenney’s old muse, Elvis Presley.
Chill Out offered a whole new way of thinking about ambient music. Brian Eno had codified the idea of ambient with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, and there was a long tradition of dreamy, psychedelic synthesizer music in bands like Tangerine Dream, but that stuff was the province of beard-stroking hippies, while the new-age-adjacent drones of Steve Roach and Robert Rich were found mainly in the cassette racks of crystal emporiums. After the explosion of rave, old-school ambient didn’t just belong to another generation; it might as well have come from a different planet. The canonical albums of ambient’s next generation, meanwhile—artists like Aphex Twin, Pete Namlook, and Global Communication—lay several years in the future.
In a press release, the KLF announced Chill Out as the birth of a new subgenre: ambient house. At the time, its name sounded like a paradox: House music is about rhythm, movement, bodies in motion; ambient is amorphous, atmospheric, fundamentally disembodied. In fact, they said, the fusion was a natural response to the physiological and chemical stresses of rave culture, a format grown “out of spending 12 hours at a rave, dancing nonstop all night, and then needing something to ease back into the reality of Sunday morning.” As the first generation of ravers was still discovering the effects (and aftereffects) of watching the sun come up over muddy fields, the idea of music tailor-made to soothe fragile synapses was still a novel concept.
In typical KLF fashion, it was hard to know to what extent they were actually serious about any of this; half the press release was unabashedly tongue-in-cheek, a none-too-subtle sendup of new-age woo (“Ambient house makes love with the wind and talks to the stars”). And then there were those sheep on the album’s cover art—inspired by the cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, according to Drummond. The sleeve, he said, captured the feeling of daybreak in a grassy field full of sleepy-eyed ruminants; there was something deeply English and deeply rural about the whole raving phenomenon. The sheep, the KLF explained, represented “spiritually highly-evolved creatures who are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”
Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.
The album begins with the sounds of crickets and rushing water, then sinewave bleeps and a momentary snatch of Spanish-language radio, all run through a pleasantly disorienting wash of dub delay. The chorus of what will later be released as the KLF’s 1991 single “Justified and Ancient” floats dreamily through the mix and quickly dissipates, a fleeting (and cheekily meta) point of reference in a landscape where the compass needle mostly spins willy-nilly. After a minute, a freight train’s rumble rises and falls, followed by the liquid peal of pedal-steel guitar. Both are deeply coded sounds, inextricable from the idea of rural America, which seemed to fascinate the KLF as much as the pastures of their own country did. They provide crucial scene-setting for the album’s road-trip theme, which plays out in its sound effects and freeform radio-dial spin. The track titles, which loosely organize Chill Out’s continuous stream of music, reinforce the impression that this is an all-night drive along secondary highways: “Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border,” “Pulling Out of Ricardo and the Dusk Is Falling Fast,” and “Six Hours to Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold.”
Beneath its tranquil surface, the album teems with activity. There are jangling cowbells, car engines, honking horns, the chop of what might be an outboard motor. Car doors slam, birds chirp, dogs bark, sirens wail. The principal through line, along with that pedal steel, is a handful of drawn-out synthesizer chords—otherworldly echoes of a high, lonesome train whistle. All these sounds glide by so swiftly and softly that you don’t realize how many discrete elements are in play; they proceed like a stream of down feathers gushing from a firehose.
But it’s the voices that really bring this virtual world to life. A Long Island news announcer reports the death of a 17-year-old boy, killed in a drag-racing accident after finishing work at his father’s diner. A boisterous man, frequently identified by fans as one Dr. Williams, serves as a kind of Greek chorus, peppering track after track with gravelly running commentary: “Come get your mojo, hey! Go down to Atlantic City, come back fat as a rat!” Invoking the Christian broadcasts found all over the American airwaves, the KLF sample a jubilant pastor raving about Matthew 9. One wonders if Drummond and Cauty simply liked the sound of his evangelical bellow, or if they were also familiar with the contents of Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The interwoven pieces play out like a radio broadcast heard while half asleep, tapping into the same surreal aesthetic that David Lynch would explore in Twin Peaks’ debut just a few months later. Call it the American uncanny, in which familiar tropes are turned strange, and tantalizing snippets suggest hidden narratives—root systems of stories burrowing deep underground. Like the Swiss heritage of photographer Robert Frank, another eagle-eyed traveler of America’s backroads, the KLF’s foreignness gave them special purchase on American myths. It was all a product of the duo’s imagination; Drummond had never even been to the places they were evoking, and they only settled on the titles after recording. “We thought that it had the feeling of that sort of trip,” Drummond told X Magazine in 1991. “I love maps and atlases and I love place names, and I just sat down with the atlas and picked, you know, and saw the journey that it was and it all seemed to fit.”
The KLF’s sensibilities might have softened since the days of “All You Need Is Love,” but their Plunderphonic instincts had not waned. A compendium of songs sampled by the KLF, posted in 1994 to the Trancentral listserv, cites Pink Floyd’s “On the Run” and “Echoes,” Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross,” and the Boy George group Jesus Loves You’s “After the Love Has Gone,” among other borrowings. (The fact that so much of their source material was British in origin only underscores the purely imaginary nature of their Deep South sojourn.) The shimmering overtones of Tuvan throat singing offer an eerie pre-echo of acid house’s TB-303. Peppy chamber music, the kind once encountered in all-night grocery stores, lends a whiff of air-freshened kitsch. The most unexpected detour, shortly before the end, is a mercilessly garbled edit of Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnic guitar solo from “Eruption”: a veritable tornado of pick slides and whammy bar that probably scared the hell out of the loved-up clubbers who had come to the album in search of nothing more than a landing pad after a long night out.
For what was supposed to be an ambient house record, there was precious little house at all—just an E’d-up preview of their 1991 single “Last Train to Trancentral” in the pumping keyboards of “Trancentral Lost in My Mind,” and then, barely audible, amphetamine-laced hi-hats set against a drowsy clarinet in “A Melody From a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back.” Every time that melancholy refrain appears, I think of the scene from Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys where Bruce Willis’ time-traveling character encounters Fats Domino’s hit “Blueberry Hill” intermingled with a beach-resort ad on a car radio. Accidentally or otherwise, that scene distills the feeling of Chill Out: an overwhelming mix of sounds, voices, and emotions that seems to move simultaneously backward and forward in time.
Even in the absence of beats, the album blurs the line between composition and DJ mix. Drummond and Cauty assembled it using two DAT players, a turntable, a couple of cassette decks, and a mixer; they started off by jamming out 20 minutes of synth pads and began building from there, bouncing from DAT to DAT, pulling variously from records and tapes as they went, sampling in real time. The final mix was recorded live, and followed a handful of aborted takes where they screwed something up just as they reached the end and had to start over.
“It’s not just bits and pieces thrown in, every bit is exactly how we wanted it to be,” Drummond told i-D in 1990, shortly after the record’s release. But the recording session was nevertheless guided by a characteristically anarchic spirit. One morning, Drummond’s clock radio awakened him to the sound of Elvis Presley; he promptly ran out and bought the King’s greatest hits, which he and Cauty sampled that very day, working 1969’s “In the Ghetto” into “Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in My Soul.” The genius of Plunderphonics reveals itself here. It’s perfectly easy to imagine Chill Out without the sample, but once you’ve heard it—the way Elvis’ voice intermingles with the chugging of the railway and the dubbed-out curlicues of pedal steel, perfectly in key—it’s impossible to un-hear it. It completes the album, becomes an essential part.
The KLF’s slapstick early singles represented a kind of culture jamming—Negativland’s term—that used hip-hop’s techniques to lampoon pop music and, by extension, pop culture. Chill Out turned those same techniques toward different ends: gentler, stranger, more psychedelic—a nebulous fog in which the source material flickered like a lenticular image. Where the JAMs would have highlighted Elvis’ thrusting hips, his gaudy outfits, his drug use—all the things that made the King a garish, larger-than-life pop spectacle—Chill Out homes in on his voice, his pathos, the otherworldly quality that haunted his music. The KLF’s idea of chilling out isn’t a passive stupor—it’s a kind of heightened awareness, the clarity that comes from fixing one’s gaze on the center line as it bobs in the headlights, throwing up phantom shapes.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Chill Out. Ambient music has gone from being a niche concern to a widespread way of interacting with the world through sound, from sleep playlists to sound baths. And the idea of chill is even more widespread, though it’s a good bet that neither Drummond nor Cauty would be particularly enamored of its passivity, its packaging of mood as lifestyle. (A few years ago, Drummond said that the era of recorded music had itself worn out its welcome.) It is, of course, entirely possible that ambient house and techno would have happened without the KLF—the idea was in the air, and Cauty's onetime DJ partner Alex Patterson and his group the Orb would have taken up the torch. But the KLF set the tone for a particular fusion of texture, tone, and attitude. They may not have invented ambient house, but they channeled it, midwifed it, dowsed it: They felt something coursing through pop culture and brought it to the surface, gave it a name and a shape.
Chill Out isn’t available on any streaming service (except YouTube), and you can’t purchase a download of it. The KLF took their album off the market, along with the rest of their back catalog, when they called it quits in 1992, yet another immolation of sorts. But it feels fitting that this definitive album from the most lawless of groups wouldn’t circulate within established channels.
Whatever copyright law might have to say about it, Chill Out is an idea that can’t be stopped. Its essence lives on in artworks like this tribute mix—an element-for-element cover version, essentially, of the entire album, swapping in all-new samples that capture the mood and feel of the original pieces. It belongs to anyone who has ever stared at the vanishing point driving down an unfamiliar stretch of highway, the thrumming motor an accidental techno counterpart to Elvis’ voice as it comes warbling across the years and through the speakers, a shepherd leading his flock toward the dawn. | 2020-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | KLF Communications | February 16, 2020 | 8.9 | 2fe17465-3df2-4897-9f2a-85caed935a46 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
null | Dear Diary:
Wake up, slightly dazed and out of it, and just like every other morning for the last eight months of unemployment, it begins the same way. Tie on the robe, fumble for the coffee mug, the ketchup-y Bloody Mary, and the initial pipe pull, and clumsily drop the needle onto the crackly, burnt first side of the record that remains glued on my turntable, waiting for those same "Chopsticks"-esque piano notes that bang singer Harry Nilsson out of his slumber for "Gotta Get Up", the opening song on 1971's *Schmilsson*. He's still in his robe too, out of focus, | Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmilsson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5887-nilsson-schmilsson/ | Nilsson Schmilsson | Dear Diary:
Wake up, slightly dazed and out of it, and just like every other morning for the last eight months of unemployment, it begins the same way. Tie on the robe, fumble for the coffee mug, the ketchup-y Bloody Mary, and the initial pipe pull, and clumsily drop the needle onto the crackly, burnt first side of the record that remains glued on my turntable, waiting for those same "Chopsticks"-esque piano notes that bang singer Harry Nilsson out of his slumber for "Gotta Get Up", the opening song on 1971's Schmilsson. He's still in his robe too, out of focus, unshaven, a hash pipe in his fingers. Harry wakes up, weary, but rouses quickly, showers, resigned to being late for the day's meetings. He's already mourning the salad days and wasted nights slowly slipping away to the high-fiber diet and working late. As the music hall accordion and tuba breathe in the evening's hiccupy bubbles and the bass bumps along with lines about a sailor's conjugal visits, we're back in the swing times of the early 70s, where the 60s' residual good times hid, trying to stay high and jovial even as the highs got slightly more complicated and expensive.
Long considered the "American Beatle" by The Beatles themselves (and John Lennon's drinking buddy during his year-long "Lost Weekend"), Harry Nilsson originally reflected them in his quirky, knowledgeable pop (and was a rumored Paul McCartney replacement) before scoring a Grammy for his delirious version of folkie Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talking" that loped throughout Midnight Cowboy. As the clime of pop hardened into rock, and groups like The Beatles dissolved, Nilsson teamed up with producer Richard Perry to bolster both of their careers. Moving the party over to London, and drawing on a pool of players that would have hands on rock landmarks of the era like All Things Must Pass, Layla and Assorted Love Songs, Tumbleweed Connection, Sticky Fingers, Plastic Ono Band, and Transformer, Nilsson's rock record Schmilsson is easily the most loveable scamp of the bunch. Its success was the watershed (and all the subsequent washing out that word implies) of his career.
As spins run into the thousands for me now, new little sonorities appear in the song craft. I'll always love the way he paved over the sub-Lennon scream of Badfinger's chorus on "Without You", beyond the simplistic resignation of the original and into a cathartic, climactic release. (The Spanish version included "Si No Estas Tu" as a bonus track-- the song's more Romantic lingua showcases the true force of Nilsson's operatic reading as he tremors and holds the notes.) The pounding, detuned-bass rocker "Jump into the Fire" and the similarly belted and horn-blasted "Down" define Nilsson's harder take on this particular album (the former could still burn up dancefloors), although his stab at the golden oldie "Let the Good Times Roll" humorously weaves about, drunk on its own Bacchanalian clank of keys.
My new favorites took awhile to come to the fore. One is the incredibly human-- if somewhat George Harrison-esque-- commuter meditation on "Driving Along". "The Moonbeam Song" is succinctly perfect, with a visual aesthetic worthy of Taoist poets: moonbeams light on train tracks, windowpanes, weather vanes, and the eye of the beholder himself. Its sweetest line is about "a fence with bits of crap along its bottom, blown by a windbeam," and as Herbie Flowers' bass slides between the luminescent clouds of mellotron, Harry catches all of the Beach Boys in his Brandy Alexander'd croon. Closer "I'll Never Leave" is sumptuous and bittersweet: a farewell to Harry Nilsson's baroque pop past with producer George Tipton. Over an aching vocal performance, Tipton swaddles Nilsson all in bells, oboes, glockenspiels, blurted brass, pizzicato'd violins, and xylophones, bidding an elongated adieu to pop's previously ornate design.
Tipton also provides the orchestration for the added demo of "Gotta Get Up", a shiny remainder of baroque tendencies that has our man keeping the song at a bubblegum level, sidestepping the album's more "blue" themes. The soap opera twinkling of the demo version of "The Moonbeam Song" reveals its beauty from the start. Weirdest of the bunch is the throwaway, "Lamaze". Banged out on piano and with a grandiose burst of Franco-babble about contractions and moving the left and right leg, Nilsson's joker smile flashes for an instant, a goofy, eclectic streak that riddled other parts of his catalog, like the follow-up, Son of Schmilsson. Aiming for the heart and the top of the pops, though, Nilsson's Schmilsson, in its shuffling, slightly askew, and idiosyncratic way, hit it all perfectly, and this ridiculously overdue reissue still makes my day. | 2004-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2004-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | February 11, 2004 | 9.4 | 2fe2d6e1-3d00-4d60-b3f8-fd1a574d1a87 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Channeling the sound and spirit of 2000s indie rock, the Chicago duo’s debut album feels like a generational passing of the torch. | Channeling the sound and spirit of 2000s indie rock, the Chicago duo’s debut album feels like a generational passing of the torch. | Friko: Where we’ve been, Where we go from here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/friko-where-weve-been-where-we-go-from-here/ | Where we’ve been, Where we go from here | As you might expect from a scene named after a Neu! song, the young bands emerging from Chicago’s Hallogallo collective see themselves as torchbearers for previous generations of cutting-edge rock. Friko fit the mold, as a precocious pair namechecking ’90s indie rock, post-punk, Leonard Cohen, and, why not, Chopin. Someone who came of age in the early 2000s might also hear Saddle Creek’s all-hands, band-camp blowouts in Friko’s surging drama—or the blog-rock bands that made guitars and drums exciting again in the age of mashups, or maybe the buzziest act at a late-aughts CMJ showcase or Empty Bottle afterparty. But even if Friko recall the sound of those days, their debut album, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.
Despite its bullish title, Where we’ve been doesn’t scan as a monolithic statement of purpose, but rather a presumptive greatest-hits compilation. It’s no slight to say that it could be just as enjoyable on shuffle; nearly every song feels designed to either begin or end a live set, whether at SXSW, Schubas, or even Bonnaroo. Only the finale, “Cardinal,” is locked into sequence as an acoustic comedown. Friko’s songs open grandly and gather intensity all the way through their equally grand closings; these aren’t just anthems in the abstract sense, they’re theme songs. And even when the lyrics turn desperate (“It doesn’t get better, it just gets twice as bad,” from the bittersweet, tightly wound “Get Numb to It!”), Niko Kapetan’s swashbuckling trill recasts the subject matter as a hero’s journey.
“Twenty years spent above this place/You could smell the iron from the room,” Kapetan sings as the album’s preamble, a curious image that conjures the smell of blood, of trains, of something that should be in motion. From that point forward, Where we’ve been might as well be a blues album, given how much time Friko spend at a crossroads, forced to choose between struggle or complacency, life or death, going big or going home.
Twin peaks “Where We’ve Been” and “Crimson to Chrome” cleverly reenact the pervasive drive to get out of a rut and into the groove, hammering at remarkably similar melodies until the arrangements crack open. “Chemical” sounds like it learned its riff from the Walkmen’s “The Rat”—and also, more importantly, that a song can be all tension for four minutes. When Kapetan yells the title over and over, the band shifts into what sounds like a truncated time signature, as if they need to knock out the chorus as quickly as possible before their studio time runs out. Even a song as blatantly bleak as “Get Numb to It!” can double as celebration rock, its a cappella finale sounding like a gang of drunken football fans chanting their school’s fight song hours after the home team has left the field in triumph.
There are ballads, too. But most of the time, Kapetan operates at a similar emotional pitch to a Japandroids song, as if it’s the last song he’s ever going to write. In “Crimson to Chrome,” he wails, “I’m sitting here writing the same sad song/With the cogs on fire/Spinning on and on/ Till I’m old and tired/Even then I’m on fire.” But whichever direction they take—pensive piano etudes or rave-ups that channel the feeling of being burned alive—Friko’s goal is the same: to make the same sad songs sound like the bonfire for a new generation to rally around. | 2024-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | February 17, 2024 | 7.9 | 2fe73dd0-aa44-496d-a2a0-229715ca7a67 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
New Orleans band follows in the shimmery, usually electronics-led footsteps of JAMC, Fennesz, and Tim Hecker. | New Orleans band follows in the shimmery, usually electronics-led footsteps of JAMC, Fennesz, and Tim Hecker. | Belong: October Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1196-october-language/ | October Language | Mark Richardson, in a rare show of hand, once admitted in a review that he had a crippling soft spot for this specific shimmery wet electric sound, as championed by everyone from Jesus and Mary Chain and MBV to Fennesz and Tim Hecker to Wolfgang Voigt and Radian to Yume Bitsu and Polmo Polpo. I'm prone to the same critical shortcircuiting; if you make a record with that sound, I will probably like it; if you do it well, I will abuse it.
Recorded in pre-ravaged New Orleans, this processed guitar noise record might get tagged "Disintegration Loops for Hurricane Katrina." But the album is much more nuanced emotionally, less conceptual, better edited, and songy in the way Black Dice or Isolée can be songy. Some tracks, like "Remove the Inside", sound like Belong may have written them out on staff: simple melodies stretched out so we feel the jumps in tone from note to note, and hear the color changes as those perfect pitch adverts tell us.
Glee Club kids, there's a song here called "Who Told You This Room Exists" that sounds like Josquin's "Tu solus" slowed down, burnt vinyl caught on the lock track, the guitars swelling like bass men right before the progression resolves and breathes in again. The nylon is more audible on "I'm Too Sleepy...Shall We Swim", guitar strums blowing over crackly, pitch-black silence like fingers brushing skin-- nerve-wracking, romantic, intense, and hardly there at all.
Of course, the second I mention the title track's slide guitar siren or the breathy static, how it drapes waves of rolling white noise that inch closer and closer until it swallows us loud and whole... I mean if October Language isn't about Katrina, it's at least about hardship, big or small or personal, and music's curious power to help us deal. | 2006-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz / Rock | Carpark | February 8, 2006 | 8 | 2fe8b706-cf01-4fd8-b401-2544537d7113 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. Alma Do Meu Pai is an EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release is refined and mature. | Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. Alma Do Meu Pai is an EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release is refined and mature. | DJ Firmeza: Alma Do Meu Pai EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21195-alma-do-meu-pai-ep/ | Alma Do Meu Pai EP | Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos perched in the hills surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. As DJ Marfox, the scene's unofficial current figurehead, explained earlier this year, it's also "the same word for when your heart beats when you have a car crash." It's perfect sensory context for the heavily percussive polyrhythms streaming from these isolated projects, mostly filled with emigrants from Angola, São Tomé E Príncipe, and other former Portuguese colonies: jarring, frantic, but alive.
But for years, there was no platform for batida producers to release any of this stuff; it existed communally—in the Quinta do Mocho and Quinta da Vitória and other remote housing projects, built hastily after Portugal's 1974 revolution brought a sea of immigrants from former colonies to the crowded city—or not at all. Then came Príncipe Discos, a tight-knit local label fiercely devoted to "100% real contemporary dance music coming out of this city, its suburbs, projects and slums." Since their first release in 2011, DJ Marfox's Eu Sei Quem Sou EP (or "I Know Who I Am"), the label has been committed to respectfully representing and propagating these singular, community-driven sounds.
The label's latest is Alma Do Meu Pai, a six-track EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release on the label is refined and mature. Within the Príncipe catalog, Firmeza is more of a minimalist than peers like DJ Nigga Fox. Melody is almost never a factor on Alma Do Meu Pai, which translates to "Soul of My Father" in honor of his recently deceased dad. His focus is percussion above all else—sparse, efficient, streamlined. Closing track "Suposto" evokes a soca rhythm whittled down and deconstructed; a lilting flute traipses through the remains, head-faking towards melody before it becomes a percussive element itself. You don't see it coming.
Most batida tracks are short, two-minute bursts, suited for dancers' wandering attention spans. But the title track "Alma Do Meu Pai" clocks in at over six minutes, churning and lurching at a breathless 143 BPM. At a glance, it's repetitive; it's easy to let it all blur together and submit to its current. But with focus, you notice subtle deviations in rhythm, the layers, the way the percussive components move in connection with one another. But instead of cold metallics, this stuff feels warm, organic, very much human, as though each element of a track is part of a larger conversation.
It's tempting to explore Alma Do Meu Pai in parallel with underground dance genres like footwork or grime. The movements function in socially similar ways, forging stunningly unique sounds and dances from urban tensions. But batida is different. As Pedro Gomes, one of Príncipe's four label heads, emphasized: "This is not techno, this is not house, this is not dubstep, this is not grime—this is this, it's not anything else, so if you want this... present this for what it is." Alma Do Meu Pai, then, is a calm, strange, and deceptively simple study in what can be wrung out of rhythm. It is music for dancing, and for contemplation. And though it is not an explicitly political record, the fact that we are hearing it at all, from the remote projects of Lisbon the city itself forgot, is a political act in itself. | 2015-10-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | October 19, 2015 | 7.6 | 2feaa937-680f-490a-9fd1-acfcec89bc15 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The debut album by American alt-R&B singer/songwriter Jillian Banks often feels far too cultivated; it's all trendy misery assisted by equally fashionable producers, without any substance to hold it all up. Shlohmo, Jamie Woon, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and others contribute. | The debut album by American alt-R&B singer/songwriter Jillian Banks often feels far too cultivated; it's all trendy misery assisted by equally fashionable producers, without any substance to hold it all up. Shlohmo, Jamie Woon, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and others contribute. | Banks: Goddess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19787-banks-goddess/ | Goddess | The worst crime wrought by this decade's wave of woozy, trip-hop-influenced R&B has been inciting boredom. Dreary, midtempo music often triggers that feeling, and those are two adjectives that could describe Goddess, the debut album by Jillian Banks, at both its best and worst. Banks is an American singer/songwriter in her mid-twenties who made it big after Zane Lowe played her single "Before I Ever Met You"on his BBC Radio 1 show; with its dull greyscale backing track, the tune put all the emphasis on her voice, husky and rough around the edges. Banks' vocals carried an ambiguous and perpetual fatigue that might have been personal, or just a response to the crush of the world around her. As embryonic as it was, "Before I Ever Met You," showed real promise, like a Martina Topley-Bird for the Weeknd generation.
In the year that followed, she hooked up with a number of fashionable, bubbling-under producers: Shlohmo, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Lil Silva, and Sohn have all put their magic on her vocal tracks, and she's built a coherent catalog by sucking the color out of their work, like some ravenous musical Marceline. When it works, the effect is mezmerising, with an atmosphere that hangs thick in the room like incense. But as with any scent so strong, it can just as easily linger and turn stale. Compare the Shlohmo-assisted "Brain" with last year's "Waiting Game", produced by Sohn. The former seems like a match made in heaven, but Banks ends up duetting with Shlohmo's distorted squalls, and the two lock step into one blandly weary march. "Waiting Game", on the other hand, is a naked ballad where Banks' voice floats high and reedy, and the only flourish is some wafting gospel vocals in the background.
"Waiting Game" is Banks' best moment, a tortured torch song directed at another performer: "What if I never even see you 'cause we're both on a stage/ But don't tell me listen to your song because it isn't the same." It originally appeared on London, a 2013 EP that saw her backed up by UK artists Lil Silva, Jamie Woon, and Tim Anderson. They're also responsible for "This Is What It Feels Like", a should-be-smoulderer that can't quite ignite—imagine the writhing bassline from Ginuwine's "Pony" turned limp and lifeless. The tender "Change" comes from the same EP, while "Warm Water" is a holdover from last year as well. Goddess ends up with the hodgepodge feel of a music industry product that was forced to exist, rather than an album that came together naturally.
If London caught Banks at an especially vulnerable moment, showing off her range and raw emotion, then Goddess tries too hard to push in either direction, alternately shrouding her in smoke ("Stick") or hammily over-emoting ("You Should Know Where I'm Coming From"). Opener "Alibi", another Sohn-produced cut, has an impassioned chorus, but her multi-tracked voice dissipates on impact, too wispy and rehearsed. On "Goddess", her run-on mushmouth obscures an otherwise fiery scorned lover narrative, and the same goes for the jaunty "Fuck 'Em Only We Know", where she practically whispers the chorus as if she were afraid to let a profanity slip.
Buried deep in the album is "Beggin for Thread", a brief respite of (relative) sunshine with perky drums and a lilting chorus. Catchy in spite of its desperate lyrics, there are moments where she sounds unpretentious and charming, which is more than you can say for the rest of Goddess. Banks' aesthetic often feels far too cultivated; it's all trendy misery assisted by equally fashionable producers, without any substance to hold it all up. Whenever she does try to get personal, the phrasing and lyrics come off stilted and awkward, the hallmark of a novice songwriter ("What if I said I was built on bricks of carelessness and crumbs?"). Armed with a voice that can go from brooding and low to spine-tingly icy in the span of one musical measure, Banks could certainly go places—but Goddess doesn't, and instead seems content to wallow in the same depressive rut for an exhausting 59 minutes. | 2014-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Harvest | September 9, 2014 | 5 | 2fec99c0-197b-4d94-a601-d0fc14433f0c | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
At last out of prison, the Louisiana rapper returns with his hard-hitting verses and endearing croon—and lots of new stories to share. | At last out of prison, the Louisiana rapper returns with his hard-hitting verses and endearing croon—and lots of new stories to share. | Kevin Gates: Luca Brasi 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-gates-luca-brasi-3/ | Luca Brasi 3 | As Luca Brasi 3 begins, Kevin Gates has even more to dish than usual. The new mixtape is the gabby Louisiana rapper’s first major project since he was released early this year from a longer-than-expected prison stint. He’d finished serving 180 days for kicking a fan in the face from the stage when authorities discovered an outstanding weapons warrant against him, costing him another nine months.
True to his reputation for candor, Gates gets right into it with “Discussion,” which documents the ins-and-outs of his negotiations with the D.A., the respectful glances of his fellow inmates, and his long hours in the weight room. But what he lingers on the most is the frustration of the sidelines. “Got some niggas who love me, they outta reach,” he raps. “Got some children who coming up, gotta teach/Got some family who mad ’cause they tryna leach.” Then there’s the toll on his marriage, which he captures with emotion on “Find You Again”: “This is a burden that none of us want/The judge broke us up when I went back to court/Sentenced the time, and it tore us apart.” Gates’ storytelling is never entirely linear, as he writes in impressions, not scenes. But the crumbs he allows here frame an admission that the two nearly didn’t make it.
Before his incarceration, Gates’ career had been playing out like a dream. He followed a run of outstanding mixtapes with 2016’s Islah, his Atlantic debut and the rare major-label effort that did blockbuster numbers without making obvious commercial concessions. It quietly became one of the best-selling rap records of that year, behind only Drake. Gates’ subsequent projects have been strong, too. Even last year’s stopgap prison release, By Any Means 2, felt mighty given the circumstances.
Gates doesn’t let his time away knock him off his stride. Luca Brasi 3’s subject matter trends heavier, but Gates is such a gregarious presence that he instinctively makes room for levity. On “Kung Fu,” he brags that he’s “a great example, great sex-haver/In shape for the Met Gala.” During “Shakin Back,” he somehow turns a urine test into a flex: “I’m pissing clean for my P.O./I’m a living legend.” His hearty warble remains a thing of wonder, too. He croons like a guy on the bus singing over his headphones, fully aware that everybody can hear him. Gates is like a pitcher with just two pitches, his hard verses and that chesty singing. But he mixes them so effectively that he can carry an hour-long project by himself.
If Luca Brasi 3 feels less necessary than its predecessors, though, that’s mostly because the hooks aren’t quite as titanic. Few linger in the head like his best; some that actually stick do so for all the wrong reasons. Even without its unfortunate title, “Me Too” (decidedly not a #MeToo statement) crosses the line into snickering silliness. The song exhausts its conceit in its first chorus: “I like fucking you in public, she say ‘Me too’/She don’t like using no rubber, I say ‘Me too.’” And “M.A.T.A.”—short for, as you feared, “Make America Trap Again”—should be the mantra for a far lazier, lamer rapper than Gates.
He is much better when he’s painting with shades of grey. On “Shoulda,” he offers a more mature spin on the trendy you-missed-your-chance takedown of an ex-girlfriend, epitomized by Post Malone’s “Better Now” and Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams.” Those hits have a petty, juvenile posture, where the ex is always the villain. Gates’ spin on the subject matter spares us the indignation and animosity. He wishes his ex happiness and even admits his stubbornness denied them a second chance. As always, on Luca Brasi 3, Gates serves as a corrective to a rap landscape that favors absolutes. In his world, everything is always a little less clear-cut. | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bread Winners’ Association | October 4, 2018 | 6.9 | 2ff0e725-451a-43b3-82f2-6d55b623e0f5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Mutual Benefit's Skip a Sinking Stone, a gorgeous collection of orchestral folk, focuses on the carefully plotted tours of a newly successful band and frontman Jordan Lee's adopted home of New York. | Mutual Benefit's Skip a Sinking Stone, a gorgeous collection of orchestral folk, focuses on the carefully plotted tours of a newly successful band and frontman Jordan Lee's adopted home of New York. | Mutual Benefit: Skip a Sinking Stone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21725-skip-a-sinking-stone/ | Skip a Sinking Stone | Jordan Lee had quietly released *six *albums prior to 2013, so Mutual Benefit didn’t exactly come out of nowhere three years ago. But Love’s Crushing Diamond sounded like it did: a document of emotional and physical displacement during Lee’s “year of notable absences,” its florid, orchestral folk was an anachronism compared to the slick, extroverted, and heavily-hyped pop that defined that year's indie breakthroughs. Much about Mutual Benefit remains in 2016: Lee’s still a wandering spirit surrounding himself with an orchestra of friends, recording in “forests, attics and hotel rooms” and it still sounds completely out of step with prevailing trends. But *Skip a Sinking Stone *is the first Mutual Benefit album to come from a very identifiable somewhere; the first half follows a newly successful band through carefully plotted tours and the second takes place in Lee’s adopted home of New York City.
In addition to Lee’s itinerary, the autumnal color scheme and loping cowboy strum of first single “Not For Nothing” evoked Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning: another clutch of traveling songs from a collectivist, indie-folk vagabond who settled into NYC. And like that record, *Skip a Sinking Stone *doesn’t sound or even *feel *like New York City. Nonetheless, the mere invocation of the city provides a kind of metaphysical importance and universality to Lee’s concerns, that he’s not just another dude in his late 20s trying to come to grips with personal success, lessons in love, and the sense that America is slowly, irreversibly headed towards self-destruction because people like him are never in charge and never want to be.
The similarities end there: Lee’s never been given nor has he sought out “voice of a generation” plaudits. Skip a Sinking Stone is invariably gentle, speaking for Lee and maybe those around him. Lee surrounds himself with people as equally curious, lovestruck, and positive as himself. As a result, *Skip a Sinking Stone *is probably the most chipper album about gig life ever recorded.
“Let’s take the long way home, let’s throw away our phones,” Lee sings moony-eyed during the very literal “Lost Dreamers,” a song which establishes Mutual Benefit as a natural convergence point between Neil Young’s Harvest* *and early 2000s freak-folk; this is the prevailing theme of *Skip a Sinking Stone’s *first half, where touring is just a mind-expanding road trip that happens to be interrupted by occasional load-ins, blog interviews, and stints at the merch table. “And if we get lost in a dream, wasn’t it worth all we’ve seen?,” he asks. It can all seem at odds with reality, but *Skip a Sinking Stone *is just at odds with the harried, hassled perspective that voluntarily serves as reality for most; Mutual Benefit never tries to force its viewpoint or really much of anything on the listener.
Besides, Lee’s POV is wholly embedded in Mutual Benefit’s music, so if you want to take his sentiments to task for being a little cloying, you might as well criticize the string parts for being too pretty. But even if this is a *gorgeous *album, fantastically so, that quality is occasionally to its detriment. “I’m so afraid to fall in love again, I know how it ends,” Lee sings on “Skipping Stones,” and that’s about as dark as things can get here. When “City Sirens” alludes to police brutality and Eric Garner’s death, the problem isn’t that the tonal shift is too jarring; it’s that there’s barely any at all. Though heartfelt and honest as everything else, a very specifically rendered line like “killers exposed through broken windows/there’s oaths they swore but what’s it all for?” hits with the same impact as “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that all the good times go, and the hard times too.”
After Love’s Crushing Diamond, Lee admitted he was wary of attaching any kind of story to his music, let alone his radical politics. And it seems like even stories as commonplace as “the road” and “New York” can moderate the ineffable magic of his previous work. Likewise, the mindset of *Skip a Sinking Stone *is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks. But the enduring sadness in *Love’s Crushing Diamond *was drawn from Lee witnessing the destructive force of escapism in others. So if the newfound pragmatism and stability of *Skip a Sinking Stone *seems inevitable for Lee after Mutual Benefit’s success, an inveterate dreamer can’t help but make it sound transitional. | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mom+Pop | May 19, 2016 | 7 | 2ffbe9e4-2c89-4a37-b3cc-de59f08af80e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
After challenging himself to make music without kick drums, the Berlin-based producer reverses course on an innovative, high-contrast new EP. | After challenging himself to make music without kick drums, the Berlin-based producer reverses course on an innovative, high-contrast new EP. | Barker: Unfixed EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/barker-unfixed-ep/ | Unfixed EP | Sam Barker possesses the kind of restless intelligence that’s best expressed within a set of parameters. The Berlin-based producer and Leisure System boss is fond of approaching music through the lens of behavioral science, both to reevaluate our collective cognitive biases and to locate his own blind spots. ”We’ve developed a lot of rules for how to make people dance,” he observed in an interview. “I don’t want to dance just because there’s a kick-drum telling me to.” His creative breakthrough as Barker came about by eliminating that seemingly core component of techno on his 2019 debut, Utility, resulting in a set of shimmering, ultra-propulsive tracks.
In the immediate wake of Utility’s release, Barker made pains to stress that he wasn’t entirely opposed to the kick drum; in fact, he had privately begun making tracks exclusively from the instrument. His latest EP, Unfixed, began as an inverse of his original standpoint, before abandoning the strict confines of that trial. Almost all of its tracks are allusions to the idea of “functional fixedness,” the mental block of only using a tool for its traditional function. If these concepts sound lofty and foreboding, Barker handles them with a casual, funny immediacy. He makes a motto of philosopher Abraham Kaplan’s Law of the Instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
The EP can be roughly divided into two camps, ones that seamlessly weave kick drums into Barker’s weightless sound and ones that make controlled cacophony. The same glassy textures and vaporous synth washes that Barker perfected on Utility appear on “Wick and Wax,” which sprawls for nine minutes and establishes such an atmospheric, well-integrated groove that the kick-drum is barely perceptible at first. “Golden Hammer” and “Percussive Maintenance” hinge on a more dramatic contrast, as Barker’s shifting, uneasy rhythms are pierced without warning by jagged synth shards.
Lead single “Birmingham Screwdriver” is the most brutal track on the album, and possibly Barker’s back catalog. A fistfight of sour acid house breaks out as the atomized parts of a sampled bass drum ricochet through the track. It’s an incredibly unstable piece of music and an incredibly inventive one too, reminiscent of Autechre’s defiantly varying “Flutter.” The artist noted in the press release that in the process of working on the record, “tracks were started and then left unfinished, only to be approached again and again over lengthy intervals.” One’s left to wonder if the song’s build-up of caustic energy indicates a merciless new direction for the artist, the start of a brand new experiment. | 2023-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | August 31, 2023 | 7.1 | 2fff473e-8eb1-4d85-8629-0591a258e13a | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Culled from the band’s sessions at Maida Vale Studios in 1994 and 2004, this double-LP that captures, in great fidelity, the acerbic personality and power of Steve Albini’s trio. | Culled from the band’s sessions at Maida Vale Studios in 1994 and 2004, this double-LP that captures, in great fidelity, the acerbic personality and power of Steve Albini’s trio. | Shellac: The End of Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shellac-the-end-of-radio/ | The End of Radio | Steve Albini’s convictions about music production and distribution paint him as nearly a mythic figure in the already esoteric world of analog audio engineering. But underneath his impenetrable, iconoclastic facade, Albini practices a sort of radical humility, charging market rate for his engineering services and constantly taking chances on obscure, burgeoning groups in his Electrical Audio studios. This approach to the industry likely came from the rapacious work ethic of the late John Peel: “He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task,” Albini once noted of the British DJ. Coming from the man whose screeds against popular music make it onto massive billboards, the comment practically reads like hero worship.
And the admiration was apparently mutual—when Peel was asked to list his top 20 albums of all time, he placed Albini’s first band Big Black’s Songs About Fucking at 15. And there is a palpable level of trust in these recordings, collected and newly reissued on a double LP. With only an unofficial EP to their name at the time, Albini’s new band Shellac kicked off their 1994 session at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios with “Spoke,” a track that wouldn’t appear fully formed for another 13 years. After Albini’s screeching directive—”Radio 1, play the drums!”—drummer Todd Trainer plays a straight-ahead rock groove and bassist Bob Weston opens with a thick, chugging bassline. Then, as if to poke fun at the inscrutability of his absurdist, often violent lyricism, Albini and Weston exchange some indecipherable gibberish, sounding like an unhinged political debate. Within 15 seconds, the entire dynamic of Shellac is fully formed in real time, months before they’d put out their debut LP.
Playing live is a quintessential element of Shellac’s legacy; bootlegged copies of live performances circulate among fans, desperate to hear unreleased material or even riffs on studio versions of tracks (the Peel sessions themselves have been circulating in a lower quality since their broadcasts). Albini has said that the band improvises “40 percent” of their material in any given performance. “Canada,” recorded in the 1994 session and again in 2004, manifests these changes as a kind of loosening of their proverbial neckties. There‘s a hypnotic melodicism in Albini’s singing, but where the 1994 version is all business, wound tightly around the rhythmic crunch of Weston’s low bass, the 2004 version features the band singing the theme song from the Canadian SCTV sketch “Great White North,” as they’ve done live, and a markedly slower pacing to the tinny riffs that lurch the song forward.
The 2004 session at Maida Vale favors songs from 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound; there are hints at that record’s more extemporaneous approach here—the strumming intros to “Paco” and “Billiard Player Song” sound like the band tuning its guitars; closer “Il Porno Star,” from 1994’s At Action Park, finds Trainer and Weston darting between time signatures while Albini rambles semi-audibly about the titular adult film actor.
The second session, recorded with a live studio audience shortly after Peel’s untimely death, feels like a funeral procession cut with an air of irony. “The End of Radio” features Albini narrating from the perspective of the last DJ on earth. Years before its studio release, it carries an eerie “War of the Worlds” realism; one can imagine an innocent listener hearing “This is the BBC World Service. Is this thing on? Can you hear me now?” and thinking their dial had been hijacked by a particularly irate hacker.
As far as Shellac songs go, “The End of Radio” is a postmodern masterwork, balancing Albini’s nihilism with an evergreen critique of the centrality of mass media. In a music industry filled with nameless and countless boogiemen, its genius lies in its constant relevancy. To Albini and plenty of other fans at the time, a post-Peel radio landscape clearly felt like the end of something. “The BBC is a miracle, but John Peel was one of the things that kept it human,” Albini later said. On that day, the man who saw potential in Albini’s earliest works was dead, and Shellac had a message for listeners at home: “John Peel was a hell of a man. This session tonight, it’s the end of radio!”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | June 24, 2019 | 7.6 | 2fff4eaf-af7c-4ea5-85f7-1f6705ca26b1 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The criminally slept-on Chicago rapper and singer Tink got a big break when Timbaland announced he was executive-producing her album. Winter's Diary 3, the latest in the Chicago rapper and singer's mixtape series, sees her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice. | The criminally slept-on Chicago rapper and singer Tink got a big break when Timbaland announced he was executive-producing her album. Winter's Diary 3, the latest in the Chicago rapper and singer's mixtape series, sees her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice. | Tink: Winter’s Diary 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20905-winters-diary-3/ | Winter’s Diary 3 | It seemed like it could only be a good thing when Timbaland announced he'd taken on Tink as his new protégé last year, signing her to his Mosley Music imprint and revealing that he'd be executive producing her forthcoming debut album. Finally—the big break for Chicago's most criminally slept-on talent (though she hails from south suburb Calumet City), a double threat who'd dropped five good-to-great mixtapes before she'd turned 20. But things got weird quick: specifically, during the Breakfast Club interview where Timbaland recounted a dream in which Aaliyah's ghost told him Tink was "the one." Then came "Million", the capable-yet-creepy single centered around a prominent "One in a Million" sample. The whole thing felt perverse: Timbo dressing up his new muse in his dead muse's clothes. It was hard to ignore the nagging fear that the super-producer was going to smother her.
Tink is not the next Aaliyah; most likely, nobody is. But she doesn't need to be, and in fact, attempting to mold her into Baby Girl the Sequel undersells her extraordinary talents. Despite her girl-next-door demeanor, there was always something mysterious about Aaliyah. At her core, Tink's appeal is that she is very much of this world. She bares her soul completely, putting her most private hopes, fears, and fantasies on paper in hopes of making things a little easier for someone else. Her Winter's Diary series—spanning from her 2012 debut to her latest, Winter's Diary 3—hinges around the loose concept of journaling about a boy that's fucked her entire world up. And as far as Tink's come since that first project, she's very much still that girl in her room, staying up too late stuck in her own head; the tape opens, as the first Winter's Diary did, with the sound of her pen scribbling furiously as she narrates: "It's December 1st, and I met this guy…" (No matter she's dropped it in the height of summer; the Gregorian calendar is irrelevant in Tink's universe, where cuffing season is year-round.)
With WD3, any concerns about her impending debut album should be at least temporarily assuaged. It's a slighter work than last year's Winter's Diary 2, still her best project to date. But it shows her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke and the fun but slightly forced single "Ratchet Commandments" to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice. Though she's an excellent rapper, her tough, straightforward rap songs on Alter Ego and Boss Up often tended towards the generic. WD3 is the best example yet of her fusing her rapping and singing. On the brief but powerful "Medicine Interlude", she lapses almost imperceptibly between the two. "Look at the flicka the wrist/ I look at the way that you gotta regret every day waking up to your bitch," she seethes, rapid-fire, before slipping into deceptively sweet-sounding song: "Baby you took that L." Her bars give her ballads an essential edge, and her dense, nimble rap delivery often informs the patterns of her sung vocals: on "Jupiter", a slow-burner with a current of Zapp-style space funk, she switches up her flow more frequently than a Young Thug verse.
There's only one Timbaland production here, and it's better than any of their previous collaborations: "L.E.A.S.H.", a quick-and-dirty bad-bitch anthem in the vein of early hit "Bad Girl" that subtly hints at a bass-heavy update of "Indian Flute". "I'ma turn this boy into a man," Tink purrs, and though she's still not old enough to legally drink, I can't help but believe her. But elsewhere, her mentor gets out of her way, giving her space to strengthen her old habits and branch out into new territory. "Very Very Special" is a quintessential Tink sex jam, dirty but subtle, with a Cookin Soul beat that lets its juke-referencing hook ride out into a slow bounce. "Stripclub" is a showcase for Tink's singular knack for empathetic, reality-grounded narrative (and a prime example of why only women should make songs about the plight of sex workers), telling the story of a single-mother stripper without moralizing or patronizing: "Can't nobody judge you/ Make that money, don't let that money make you." But the tape's most promising moment is its closer, "Afterparty", which ends the tape's arc from infatuation to breakup on an optimistic note. It's a weightless, '80s-nodding dance number—practically a freestyle track—and completely unlike anything Tink's released before. If her album's anything like this, we're in good hands. | 2015-08-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 13, 2015 | 7.2 | 300b7604-1f3b-4f17-bd7e-2a684bccd99d | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
As tense and exploratory as a sci-fi epic, the Los Angeles musician’s new album meanders through eerie, desolate prog rock and synth-pop. | As tense and exploratory as a sci-fi epic, the Los Angeles musician’s new album meanders through eerie, desolate prog rock and synth-pop. | Mega Bog: End of Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mega-bog-end-of-everything/ | End of Everything | What use is beautiful language in a crisis? On her previous album as Mega Bog, 2021’s Life, and Another, Erin Birgy found breathtaking ways to describe the world around her and the one inside her head. On “Station to Station,” she hoped her memory would one day “dissolve like an artichoke being gutted around its spine”; a character on “Before a Black Tea” was “30 and scrutinized, the blimp of a moth.” Verdant, intricate arrangements grew around Birgy’s lyrics, like vines from a jasmine bush, blossoming into jazz, avant-folk, funk, and twitchy indie rock. On her seventh album, End of Everything, things have changed: Instead of intricacy and whimsy, the Los Angeles-based musician uses plain, emphatic images to capture the blunt-force horror of the world outside her door. “City skies turn black in the daytime,” she sings on the sparse “Anthropocene.” “I see a burnt-up alligator/What the fuck?”
On End of Everything, a newly sober Birgy is working with far more intensity. The vast, open world of Life, and Another has been replaced with harsher terrain: Environments built with brittle coldwave synths, funereal piano lines, and howling saxophones. End of Everything begins with a suite of propulsive, exhilarating synth-pop tracks, but it soon settles into an eerie, claustrophobic take on prog, its second half devoted almost entirely to tense, exploratory passages. Across these desolate and distended tracks, Birgy comes across a little like a sci-fi heroine, trekking across the surface of some gloomy and unnerving planet. These songs are dogged, searching for some kind of brightness amid universal dejection. “It’s something I’m trying to commit to/The all and everything,” Birgy sings at one point. It feels hopeful, until moments later, when she lets out a chilling, mournful howl.
Birgy has said that End of Everything was inspired by both personal tragedy—a home invasion and subsequent assault she experienced—and the ecological terror of the 21st century. Before the album slips into existential dread and malaise, she makes room for a handful of songs that seem to find at least a little solace in the idea of human connection. On the soaring “Cactus People,” she begs someone not to “leave tonight,” as the taut pulse of drum machines and live drums, both by Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, rattle underneath. On the neon-lit “Love Is,” the kind of pulsating Italo anthem that maybe only the disco divas on an After Dark compilation can really pull off, she tells a lover she’ll “leave my door unlocked/Just in case you want to stop by and let me get lost in your eyes.”
These songs are booming and vivid and catchy, but they almost underserve Birgy; the nuances and intricacies of her music are what make it feel so precious and self-contained. The album still possesses tiny pearls: There’s an aqueous, almost imperceptible whisper beneath Birgy’s vocals on “Cactus People” that’s cool and deeply discomfiting, as if recorded by her own shadow; Birgy’s description of freaking out a potential boyfriend (“I really scared him/Because all I talk about with him is/Beheading young men”) is one of her most casually hilarious lyrics ever. For the most part, though, these details are obliterated by the barnstorming synths that coat the early tracks; squint, and they could resemble old songs by Future Islands or Lower Dens. Life, and Another felt like the musical equivalent of overturning a log to see the insect life teeming beneath; these bullish, ambitious, chunkily melodic songs crush some of that nuance.
When not in this mode, Birgy still captures the beautiful, occasionally petrifying vastness of her earlier music. “Complete Book of Roses” is a universe unto itself, Birgy singing over a tinny drum machine and serrated guitars about a painful, never-ending restlessness: “I’ve got every book out,” she sings, “And the warmth of the words is unnerving.” A guitar solos in the background like a phantom limb, as the beat blooms into a kind of frenetic, moorless samba; Birgy’s voice builds and crumbles, more guttural yelp and exclamation than concrete words. On this song and on “Anthropocene,” she recalls Julia Holter, making formless chamber music that echoes out into a wide, empty universe.
End of Everything’s synth-pop singles were a feint; it’s these longer, more ambling, more psychically tortured songs that define the new epoch of Mega Bog. This album is far more challenging than the lush, sprightly Life, and Another; although a good deal shorter, it’s more dense, and it can feel overwhelming. For that reason, it can sometimes feel more rewarding, too. The title track is a twinkling sermon that casts a breakup and the apocalypse as the same thing. Over a wash of pianos and synths, Birgy sings, plaintively: “What then, I feel shaken?/What then, I feel small?/It’s like Part I: The Punishment/For ever being brave at all.” The rich fantasies of past Mega Bog records have evaporated; all that’s left is harsh, uncompromising reality. | 2023-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer | May 23, 2023 | 7 | 300ed414-c24a-4561-ae58-2d0d5a220ce6 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
In 2013, the composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney devised an unconventional opera piece inspired by the 1984 psychological horror novel The Wasp Factory. Its music is shockingly beautiful. | In 2013, the composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney devised an unconventional opera piece inspired by the 1984 psychological horror novel The Wasp Factory. Its music is shockingly beautiful. | Ben Frost: The Wasp Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22713-the-wasp-factory/ | The Wasp Factory | How do you stage an opera that mostly takes places inside a child’s murderous mind? That was one problem facing composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney when they set out to make a musical theater piece—Frost’s first ever—of Iain Banks’ 1984 psychological horror novel, The Wasp Factory. The book tells the tale of a psychopathic teen named Frank, who devises bizarre, violent rituals on a desolate Scottish island. Another problem: Frank is a misogynist, and this is no time for the glorification of misogynistic antiheroes.
Frost solved both problems in one stroke by asking Pountney to split Frank’s phantasmagoric monologue into a trialogue. Then he assigned the three roles to powerful women, entirely omitting Frank as a character. On this newly-released Bedroom Community recording—the opera premiered in 2013—they are sung with wicked charisma by Lieselot De Wilde, Jördis Richter, and Mariam Wallentin. Not merely aspects of Frank’s psyche, they’re like the Furies, bearers of divine retribution. With justified ferocity, they chew and spit Frank’s infernal confession, and Frost’s music, played by the Reykjavík Sinfonia, coldly stokes the flames.
The Australia-born, Iceland-based Frost is popularly known for his electro-acoustic hybrids of classical music and heavy metal. He combines post-minimal finesse with modernist severity and Wagnerian daring, charging into the deepest abysses of quiet and storming up the fieriest peaks of noise. Though the focus is now live sound and the human voice, The Wasp Factory should still resonate with fans of his ambient music. It’s By the Throat inverted, foregrounding classical and recessing electronics, with no entropy in Frost’s signature blend of concussive brawn, delicate tissue, and intricate logic.
A small string ensemble pulses in tight swarms, slashing out parallelograms in a holographic medium of bass and distortion. As always, Frost’s hyperreal acoustical shapes don’t seem symbolic—they just uncannily exist, deforming spacetime. This is captured in a recording of rapt, intrusive closeness, the singers lunging into your face, unlike the polite remove typical of classical music.
It’s not the only way The Wasp Factory bucks operatic convention. Don’t expect Italianate phrasing or proper coloratura. The vocal lines are lean and soulful, more like jazz, blues, cabaret, and pop. The belling timbre on “Blyth” is very Björk, while the indecorous bellow of “Wrong!” on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” is midway between Benjamin Britten, composer of Peter Grimes, and Nicki Minaj on “Monster.” If you’ve been looking for an accessible way into contemporary opera, this could very well be it. (If you’ve been listening to art music by the likes of Jenny Hval, let alone Shara Worden’s chamber operas, you’re almost there.)
Frost is well suited to a narrative form like opera because his music is dense with acoustical narratives, interlocked from the atomic to the cosmic level. A single bass drop on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” tells a whole story in seconds. It’s nested in the shape of the song, an inexorable grip and release. “My Greatest Enemies Are Women and the Sea” rises to a vertex right in the middle, as the title line is sung, flooding it with climactic power. And these well shaped songs are also absorbed in an album-long struggle from dark to light, as a pearly shimmer gradually emerges from the dark, lush crags of the early reaches.
The Wasp Factory is mad but serene, vile but alluring. The plot is strictly nightmarish. Frank’s brother has escaped from the hospital, and the exact length of a certain knife must be ascertained; he murders his cousin Blyth, with an artificial leg, using a venomous snake. Stark vignettes divulge Frank’s brutality to animals (and worse), his obsession with what it means to exist. “To be mastered,” we learn, “the world must be named.” Frank can find mastery only in violence, which infests his language. The opera’s title refers to a maze he makes from a clock where wasps meet various gruesome ends. To Frank, it’s a divination device; to us, it’s a searing illustration of a worldview in which time and life are machines that manufacture doom. Frost winds this bleak psychology with shockingly beautiful music, and finds in opera an exciting new form of expression for his profoundly psychological sonic abstractions. | 2016-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Bedroom Community | December 27, 2016 | 7.3 | 300fdf40-421a-4901-8a00-3164dc31f1f5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Paw Tracks issues its first non-Animal Collective release. The debut full-length from Hollywood freak Ariel Pink is a part idiot, part idiot savant trip into Gary Wilson and R. Stevie Moore territory. | Paw Tracks issues its first non-Animal Collective release. The debut full-length from Hollywood freak Ariel Pink is a part idiot, part idiot savant trip into Gary Wilson and R. Stevie Moore territory. | Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: The Doldrums | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6553-the-doldrums/ | The Doldrums | It seems as though Ariel Pink has beaten "Weird Al" Yankovic to a 69 Love Songs parody. Instead of "Asleep and Dreaming", Pink's debut album, The Doldrums, offers "Among Dreams"; instead of "Strange Eyes" we get "Strange Fires"; instead of "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" we get "The Ballad of Bobby Pyn"; instead of "Bitter Tears" we get "Crying"-- there's a list and it goes on, and the musical side of this hilarious send-up is even more masterful.
Maybe that claim is absolutely cuckoo. I mean, it has to be. There's no way this Hollywood hillbilly called Ariel Pink knows who Stephen Merritt is, and if asked, Pink would surely play Peter and deny the man three times. Either way, I've been trying for weeks now to figure out if Ariel Pink is a genius, an idiot, an idiot savant, or some combination of the three. Everybody's new favorite Collective-- Animal (not Nortec or Soul, though each group had its day)-- clearly seems to think highly of him. So much so, in fact, that Pink's crude and crooked pop affair is Paw Tracks' first non-Animal Collective release. That's quite a vote of confidence.
Everybody's heard these songs before-- they sound straight out of 60s pop radio, 80s shampoo commercials, and 90s soap operas. The melodies themselves are great but worn from overexposure. Yet the songs are secondary to Ariel Pink himself, the oddball who understands these melodies in vastly different terms than the rest of us do and, consciously or not, is dead-set on resurrecting them. The Doldrums isn't a collection of songs so much as an excessive human spectacle-- violently personal and necessarily confrontational. Think autistic kids covering Brian Wilson or Tom Waits singing a nursery rhyme or Shakespeare eating shit in an alley or Jesus giving birth to a pack of bear cubs.
The key to all of these spectacles, of course, is sincerity, and on The Doldrums, Ariel Pink seems pretty goddamn sincere. It's a shtick record, but the self-engrossed Pink probably doesn't think so. Its ultra lo-fi creepiness doesn't feel like a "trick" so much as an unfortunate necessity, as if an eight-track was all Pink could afford. The man is free as a bird with a rocketpack. He shoots off in falsetto with a smile, not a smirk. He pens lyrics that would put Rodd Keith's clientele to hippy-happy shame. He explores keyboard presets that should never make their way outside of the Sam Ash piano room. To be honest, it's all sort of beautiful.
My biggest gripe with The Doldrums is that most of these tracks are twice as long as they should be. Yet, criticizing the songs for their excess completely misses the point. This album can't contain Ariel Pink, and wasn't supposed to, and his next 500 CD-Rs will have the same problem. The songs are secondary to Pink's bourgeoning cult of personality-- the album turns its imperfections into selling points, its pigheadedness into firm resolve.
After opener "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups", we understand the supposed appeal of The Doldrums: These are normal songs, except a "crazy" guy is singing them, and he has "crazy" lo-fi production. The rest of the album functions as half endurance test and half a chance for us to find reasons to say, "Oh my god, this guy's a genius!" in that self-congratulatory "it takes a genius to realize genius" sort of way. I'm on the "he's not a genius" side-- Pink just happens to have a traditional pop sensibility but a bleak budget. Then again, maybe it is all shtick. It's a debate that invites endless speculation, further putting the emphasis on Pink while taking it away from the songs themselves.
It follows, then, that the best Ariel Pink songs are the ones that do the least to shape his mystique. "Haunted Graffiti" has the Bee Gees playing a frat party but its warbles and hisses turn the song into a high-stakes peep show. The song's melody succeeds here without being tied down to Pink's off-kilter delivery. "Let's Build a Campfire There" drops the Magnetic Fields parody and cuts straight to mimicry, and it works out nicely. Closer "Young Pilot Astray" follows that same Merritt line, with a fantastically whimsical melody and loads and loads of vocal overdubs for the refrain. Yet, there's something wrong about recommending any of these songs as starting points for Haunted Graffiti virgins: They're the most self-reliant, but they're also the least Pink.
And that's the trouble with The Doldrums, and the reasoning behind this conflicted rating. The album is not so much Ariel Pink's creation as it is Ariel Pink himself, a real-time observation of his brain synapses at work. His nerves are either firing at Einstein levels or misfiring like harlequin babies, and in fairness, I'm hardly the staff brain surgeon. | 2004-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Paw Tracks | October 25, 2004 | 5 | 3014cf2f-e4fd-4f6a-a66d-ea7842b50b14 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The New York producer’s second album is a showcase not only for the marquee guests but for Swizz’s talent as a great arranger and knowing when to step out of the way. | The New York producer’s second album is a showcase not only for the marquee guests but for Swizz’s talent as a great arranger and knowing when to step out of the way. | Swizz Beatz: Poison | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swizz-beatz-poison/ | Poison | “It’s a difference between a beatmaker and a producer,” producer Swizz Beatz said, in a recent interview with Mass Appeal. “I’m not calling you to just jump on something. No, we’re producing here, this is the concept, I’mma put you on this ... Put this here, do that there, say this line instead of that line ... It’s levels to it.” The implication is that a producer is hands-on where a beatmaker is not, and has a greater impact on the song’s direction without necessarily playing on it, in an almost advisory role. That seems to be an important caveat for his new album, Poison, which bills him as a lead artist despite the fact that he rarely raps and made only half the beats.
Poison was culled from a massive backlog and whittled into a curated rap relic. It was made in a series with four other projects: an R&B album, an “energy” album for “motivation,” an “acoustics” album that’s “just vibes” and “for Sundays,” and a “global” album featuring international artists. There was an early version of this album that featured Kanye West, Bono, and Bruno Mars, but a change of direction led him to pick these 10 songs out of 70 to make what he called the “East Coast Chronic.”
For what it’s worth: Poison isn’t East Coast Chronic, or even close. That album was helmed by two titans at the peak of their powers delivering under colossal stakes. This one has far less vision, less focus, and no stakes whatsoever. It isn’t essential or transcendent. But the album doesn’t have to invoke the authority of one of hip-hop’s greatest monuments ever to be produced effectively and full of defining moments. Where else can you find Young Thug tighten up and barrel through the fidgety MPC programming of AraabMUZIK, or hear 2 Chainz two-step and swagger for Bink? The characters shuffling through these songs are worth following, thanks in large part to Swizz stepping back and letting the guests star, playing the role of director more than performer.
With his 2007 solo debut, One Man Band Man, Swizz Beatz cosplayed as a rap star that, for some reason, almost exclusively rapped about being a rich producer. (His attempts to rap about anything else were disastrous.) The idea that Swizz could do it all himself as a rap Swiss army knife was put to bed rather quickly. After more than a decade to reflect on that, Swizz has learned from his mistakes. His mic time declines exponentially from his first album to this one, with him mostly punching in for his typical hypeman duties or for a freestyled mini-verse or two. Those moments are still cringy but not insufferable, going on only long enough to be noticed and not long enough to become a nuisance.
Some of the hooks he performs can get irksome—one chorus is literally just him counting to 10—but he largely stays out of the way, negotiating space for the rappers he wrangled to flex on his behalf. It’s fitting that a man who puts a premium on the power of producing doesn’t seem to be above producing himself, which means limited exposure. He understands being the most prominent voice on the album won’t make it a good one.
With “producing” as the directive, Swizz treats Poison as an outlet for the artists he features without letting the inmates run the asylum. He leads each of them into a space where they’ll be most comfortable, which usually causes them to provide flashes of their signature stuff. After flipping “Special Delivery” into a Lil Wayne slapper (for Tha Carter V’s “Uproar”), Swizz pushes Weezy to find the ceiling of his gun metaphors for “Pistol on My Side”; his free-associative bars are reminiscent of a hungrier Wayne. Swizz gets Pusha T, the amoral dope dealer, to consider the way drugs ravaged communities on “Cold Blooded”: “Broken black homes is the modern slavery/You can’t raise a savage and deny the rabies,” Push raps, a rare glimpse of morality from him this decade.
Rappers of yore sound refreshed in his hands. Swizz draws Nas away from the Ye-induced bombast of his self-titled mini-album and ushers him back into a narrative space, where he uses that project-window vision to eulogize the old New York, and the producer gets the best verses out of Jim Jones since the Bush administration. He lets Jadakiss and Styles P reenact their longstanding call-and-response partnership with wondrous results (“Cartel ties and dope bars/Life is a movie and death is the co-star”) as Kendrick wakes the neighbors (“Something Dirty/Pic Got Us”). It isn’t just that everybody gets to do what they do best, it’s that he puts them in positions to make it so.
If nothing else, Poison is a shrine to the art of producing. Swizz’s fingerprints are all over it and the rappers who serve under him here are better for having felt his influence. At a lean 32 minutes, the album is nearly filler free and full of well-executed teamwork. No one will be adding Swizz Beatz to the pantheon of all-time rapper-producers anytime soon, but that’s not the point. In stark contrast to One Man Band Man, the album is not in service of Swizz, or some misguided solo rap aspirations, but in service of elevating others and realizing the power of collaboration. | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | November 9, 2018 | 7.1 | 3017d953-c456-4315-8146-66d1cf4bcc6d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On their sixth album, the Springsteen of Philly pop-punk and his bandmates look to the world outside their hometown, with fewer big choruses than ever. | On their sixth album, the Springsteen of Philly pop-punk and his bandmates look to the world outside their hometown, with fewer big choruses than ever. | The Wonder Years: Sister Cities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-wonder-years-sister-cities/ | Sister Cities | In the decade-plus since the Wonder Years formed outside Philadelphia, there have certainly been more popular and beloved pop-punk bands, but very few have insinuated themselves so credibly into the conversation as a band to believe in. The Wonder Years put themselves forward as the type of band a young fan could build an identity around without worrying that it would seem embarrassing years later. That’s proven remarkably true: Even as predecessors like Brand New have slid into ignominy, the Wonder Years—tracking a roughly parallel creative arc—have kept going, leaving suburban frivolity behind for broader musical horizons, darker thematic material, and dozens of imitators.
As much as the Wonder Years’ five previous albums followed the broad tenets of modern pop-punk—nostalgia for a youth they’re too young to realize isn’t even over yet, the melancholy of the middle-distance tour schedule—a specificity of place has distinguished their music from all the soundalikes. Frontman Dan Campbell is a Philly Springsteen in an extra-medium hoodie, filling his lyrics with diners, basements, bowling alleys, and parks that delight local kids and make the songs come alive for people who’ve never set foot in his city. But every successful band eventually outgrows its hometown, and it’s clear on the Wonder Years’ sixth album, Sister Cities, that they’re struggling with where they fit in as citizens of the world.
“It’s a record about distance, or maybe how little the distance matters anymore,” Campbell recently said, hinting at the feeling of international saudade that comes through in nearly every song on Sister Cities. Even its title comes from an idealistic international program that Dwight Eisenhower launched in 1956 (and a park in Philadelphia that was the result of that effort). This is an album about how art lets us attempt, and sometimes fail, to relate to the rest of the world. The band underscored this theme with a pre-release scavenger hunt involving unlabeled vinyl records with spoken-word poems in various languages. “I left pins on a map. I’m handing you the string,” the band tweeted. “Tie them together. Unite us...” To those not already enthralled by these guys, it might have come off as some Radiohead-ass nonsense. But with the Wonder Years, it’s hard not to be swept up. As in everything else they do, there’s an overpowering sense of earnestness and vulnerability that makes it work.
They wrote the title track on Sister Cities, a characteristic toggle between quieter bass-led verses and cathartic, shouted choruses, when they were adrift in South America a few years ago. Campbell and company, lost after a canceled performance, found themselves at Santiago, Chile’s version of a sister city commemorative monument. Eventually a group of locals helped them put together an impromptu show. “I’m laying low/A stray dog in the street/You took me home/We’re sister cities,” Campbell sings. Even when he’s singing about finding community, there’s a sense of being on the outside observing.
That sense of insecurity and displacement comes to define the album, making it a more subdued record than the Wonder Years’ previous onslaughts of heroic underdog anthems. Album opener “Raining in Kyoto” revolves around another act of unprompted kindness from strangers, as Campbell attempts to honor his dying grandfather at a shrine “an ocean away,” and a Japanese man ushers him through the proper steps. But the guilt and pain of distance still shadow his thoughts: “You’re half-awake/And I bought you a radio to play the blues away/With my hand to hold, you asked about the way you wish they’d let you die at home.”
On “It Must Get Lonely,” a weary, slow-build track that forestalls the inevitable furious outro chorus for minutes of resigned meandering, Campbell confronts Irish seas, English streets, and “Montmartre in Paris where the crows seem to know my name.” That musical restraint, also heard on this album’s “We Look Like Lightning,” “Flowers Where Your Face Should Be,” and “When The Blue Finally Came” (the latter two of which withhold any payoff whatsoever), isn’t a new technique for the band, but its prevalence here is indicative of a progression in their technique. There are choruses, but they’re fewer and further between than on any previous Wonder Years album.
It borders on critical malpractice to call the Wonder Years a pop-punk band at this point—not because that term is a pejorative, by any means, but because it implies a creative stagnation that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Fans of big, stadium-swinging hooks might find Sister Cities a sparser, more introspective affair than they prefer, but the band seems okay with leaving South Philly basements behind and seeing more of the world. After doing so much to put the spirit of their hometown into music, they’re aiming for something larger now. | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hopeless | April 6, 2018 | 7.1 | 3018cc84-e6f3-40dc-a647-41ba7e670fd6 | Luke O'Neil | https://pitchfork.com/staff/luke-o'neil/ | |
The St. Louis band’s fourth album scrapes away their unwieldy experimentalism in favor of the approachable, frustratingly anonymous sounds of 2010s festival rock. | The St. Louis band’s fourth album scrapes away their unwieldy experimentalism in favor of the approachable, frustratingly anonymous sounds of 2010s festival rock. | Foxing: Draw Down the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foxing-draw-down-the-moon/ | Draw Down the Moon | In the early-to-mid-2010s, an earnest, urbane kind of indie rock ruled festival stages, Tumblr, and the pages of NME. Bands like Foals, Two Door Cinema Club, and the Wombats captured the hearts and minds of teens who craved the accessibility of pop but could only accept it when gussied up with skinny jeans, button-downs, and over-enunciated vowels. The sound was poreless, grit-free, and brutally effective: The squeaky-clean riffs and perfectly timed beats of songs like “My Number” or “Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)” are still etched deep in the millennial psyche.
Logic would suggest it would take at least a few more years for this specific brand of indie rock to face a revival, but St. Louis, Missouri emo three-piece Foxing have other plans: Their fourth album, Draw Down the Moon, plays like a reboot of the Peak Yelp era, retreating from the art-rock sprawl of 2018’s emotionally and musically weighty Nearer My God and redirecting towards forceful, 4/4 rhythms and Yannis Philippakis-lite howls. The effect of this genre realignment is uncanny, scraping away the experimentalism that made the band’s earlier records so interesting and reining in lead singer Conor Murphy’s grizzled bark. You only have to listen to single “Go Down Together,” an uninspiring piece of festival rock built around a disco-rock shuffle and a falsetto “you-hoo-hoo” chorus, to understand the trade-off: Although this may be Foxing’s most anonymous record, it also feels like their surest shot at mainstream fame yet.
Their two prior albums, Nearer My God and 2015’s Dealer, suggested that Foxing were working hard to reconcile the emo-folk of their 2013 debut, The Albatross, with their proclivity for grandiose, Explosions in the Sky-style abstraction. Songs like “Slapstick” and “Night Channels” were compositionally and intellectually distended, but they were also melodically distinctive and attuned to the pop songcraft inherent in Murphy’s writing. So it’s disappointing that Draw Down the Moon tamps down Foxing’s brazenly unpredictable streak in favor of what Murphy describes as “songs that sort of sound like Passion Pit.” At least four tracks rely on some variation of the shuffle that animates “Go Down Together,” and only two find Murphy modulating his voice beyond a strained, monotonous yell—not the articulate emo cadence of past records, but something closer to a blandly emotional monotone.
Sometimes, Foxing sound as if they’re about to venture somewhere new—as on the glitchy “Bialystok,” which opens with a muffled clatter in place of drums, or “If I Believed in Love,” a slippery ballad where Murphy’s vocal sounds weightless, refusing to resolve with the song’s ever-changing beat—but that’s rarely the case. Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.
Lack of depth is a problem across the board: Murphy’s lyricism on Draw Down the Moon is frustratingly platitudinal. He has two main modes: Saying “I’ll be there for you” (“If you should fall, l’ll follow behind/We’ll go down there together/Side by side,” he sings on “Go Down Together”) or asking “Will you be there for me?” (a blood-curdling scream of “I can’t do this alone, I can’t” on “737” provides one of the record’s most dynamic moments). There are some notably good exceptions: The invocation of a “bad luck demon” who is “a rockslide on Halloween,” “a totaled rental in 2016” on the plaintive acoustic guitar ballad “At Least We Found the Floor” is inspired gallows humor; the image of a grounded plane on “737” being sold from hand to hand but never flown is a perfect symbol of hopelessness.
At its best, Draw Down the Moon uses indie-rock convention to initiate the same kinds of destabilizing left turns that animated Nearer My God. “737” builds not to the requisite triumphant peak, but to that baroque, violently screamed climax. “Cold Blooded” gets similar mileage out of Murphy’s ability to step into a full-throated scream; his serrated vocal appears sporadically to hack, machete-like, through the otherwise mundane “ah-ah-ah” chorus. Best of all is “Speak With the Dead,” the record’s portentous closer, which uses power chords and rolling drums to conjure action-movie spectacle. In these moments, Foxing’s new high-gloss exterior feels purposeful: a necessary contrast to the grotesque, a scale for the grandiosity.
There’s nothing strictly wrong with period-specific revivalism; in the same way that black midi bring back memories of King Crimson and Japanese Breakfast’s latest album evokes Jens Lekman and Beirut, Draw Down the Moon memorializes a certain sound and style with all the right period dressing. But where those other records deploy their influences with intent—black midi to sketch a landscape of alienation and political incoherence, Japanese Breakfast to reflect the joy and abundance of her lyrics—Foxing’s evocation of ’00s rock seems to serve no coherent purpose beyond pure accessibility of form. Maybe that’s a fine excuse, too, but Total Life Forever and Holy Fire are hardly old, and, frankly, they still sound pretty good. Draw Down the Moon comes off as simply more, a premature revival with limited utility for anyone who still enjoys the era it conjures.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Paradise / Hopeless | August 18, 2021 | 6 | 301da021-966b-428d-8d4d-20d855231e05 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Brooklyn singer and songwriter sounds more hopeful and more vulnerable on a mellow, reggae-infused companion EP to last year’s album. | The Brooklyn singer and songwriter sounds more hopeful and more vulnerable on a mellow, reggae-infused companion EP to last year’s album. | Yaya Bey: *Exodus the North Star EP * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaya-bey-exodus-the-north-star-ep/ | Exodus the North Star EP | On her remarkable 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a sparkling addendum and a joyous new extension of her biomythic approach to soundtracking Black Caribbean womanhood. On Exodus, Bey exchanges rhythm and blues with riddims and grooves and stretches her limbs across reggae, mambo, gospel, house, and jazz. It’s a sunlit, stained-glass depiction of self-love in the key of Jamaica, Queens.
Across six tracks, Bey names her desire for unhurried love and affirmation. Against the breezy reggae of the title track, she singjays “take me where the love is free” over fuzzy saxophone and swaying percussion. Toasting to the word “free,” she emphasizes her worth and sings of a tenderness that matches her sturdy, assured fly. “On the pisces moon” is another stripped-down reggae tune, prefaced this time with fluttering electric guitar plucks. “But I want more,” she repeats, her lingering delivery conjuring a balmy sense of longing.
Her sunny outlook fades on “munerah,” a metallic, bare-bones mambo for one that explores the struggle to let go of old narratives. Bey breathlessly oscillates between singing and rapping about her desire to maintain solitude but finds no resolution. “Ascendent (mother fxcker),” a lo-fi house hotbox produced by D.C. beatmaker Exaktly, restores her peace. Atop a wash of electronic pulses, she flexes her faith in herself, singing, “Sunshine won’t last all of my days, but I’ll be sunshine all of my days” with an audible grin. The swelling synths and subtle grooves evoke a sense of inner hope, a promise to stay blessed, free, and favored.
On “when saturn returns,” Bey leans on the concept of astrological rebirth to rejoice in having reached a new stage of personal evolution. Led by lustrous piano strokes, this organ ballad travels across time: a gospel choir pirouettes into a misty house beat co-produced with collaborator Nativesun. This is the fountain from which Yaya Bey drinks, drawing from an abundant source of diasporic teachings and traditions without overworking the sound. She makes use of space and darkness, of her flaws and her fierceness, experimenting with the sounds of her childhood to forge her ever-expanding language of love. Sometimes, that’s the only way to get free.
Correction: This review has been updated to clarify production credits for “when saturn returns.” | 2023-03-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Dada | March 30, 2023 | 7.9 | 302cbc4e-c66c-4420-8a8f-0bf905b2c184 | Tatiana Lee Rodriguez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tatiana-lee rodriguez/ | |
The shapeshifting multimedia artist ventures into pop with a concept album that stages arch critiques of art and consumerism within a retro arcade game. | The shapeshifting multimedia artist ventures into pop with a concept album that stages arch critiques of art and consumerism within a retro arcade game. | Kilo Kish: American Gurl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kilo-kish-american-gurl/ | American Gurl | “Featuring Kilo Kish” and “by Kilo Kish” hit different. Though Kish’s breezy, playful voice turns wry, manic, and bubbly in her collaborations with Vince Staples and Gorillaz, that range rarely carried over to her solo work—especially her early music, which tended to be indistinct despite its diaristic accounts of life in New York City. For Reflections in Real Time, her 2016 debut, Kish dialed up the autobiography but struggled to assert a musical identity, her songwriting hamstrung by scattershot production. Things began to click on EPs Mothe (2018) and Redux (2019), left-field forays into throbbing electronic music that traded her signature whisper-raps for charged singing. For American Gurl, a concept album about consumerism, she ventures into pop. The shift doesn’t always pay off, but Kish sounds renewed and self-assured.
When Kish began to lean toward electronic music on her EPs, she credited performing live with the change in direction, saying it made her seek sounds that matched the spunk and angst of her personal life. The other key variable was producer Ray Brady (Vince Staples, Santigold, Black Eyed Peas), who produced Mothe and Redux in their entirety (and much of Reflections). The bracing instrumentals he supplied for those records, characterized by thick slabs of bass marbled with strobing synths and fizzy melodies, helped Kish hone the kinetic delivery on display here. She rarely uses the lithe, conversational whispers that were the cornerstone of her early music, instead bouncing from breathy melodies to raspy coos to fleet rapping. If Mothe and Redux were the proofs of concept for her pop pivot, American Gurl is the finished design, presenting Kish as a madcap shapeshifter.
Again teaming exclusively with Brady, Kish stages the album as a retro arcade game, using the concept to hop genres and smuggle social commentary into outwardly fun songs. Reminiscent of Santigold’s 99¢, Kish often speaks as and likens herself to a product. “Do you see me?/Lost my face in the TV,” she chants on “TV Baby V.2 (Latch Key March).” On “Distractions III: Spoiled Rotten,” a follow-up to two meandering tracks from her debut, she’s pithy and arch. “I ain’t shit/But I can pay to fix it,” she sings over a frothy house beat.
“You want it/I got it/This soul is/A bargain,” Kish raps over hilarious Vince Staples ad-libs on “New Tricks: Art, Aesthetics, and Money,” the album’s best song. Its gelatinous bass kicks, machine shop SFX, and sneering take on fame would be right at home on Big Fish Theory, to which Kish and Brady both contributed. Still, it’s very much Kish’s song, her verses skewering the grim nexus of art and commerce and her willingness to let the two mix.
American Gurl fumbles when Kish tones down the sarcasm and guns for straight-up pop. It’s a tough sell. A number of choruses are garbled and anticlimactic, fracturing songs rather than holding them together. Also, her beat selections don’t always play to her strengths. The frantic rhythm of “Choice Cowboy” outpaces her sedate singing. And on “Attention Politician,” Brady’s screeching synths swallow her voice whole. American Gurl’s apt sequencing and constant forward motion keep these lapses from stopping the party, but Kish’s game could use some debugging. For now, her pop instincts aren’t as sharp as her wit. | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | March 30, 2022 | 7.2 | 303132d8-8e5b-460b-a8a6-a20c1204e6b1 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On Austra's disarmingly personal second album, the Toronto band's core trio has doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction. | On Austra's disarmingly personal second album, the Toronto band's core trio has doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction. | Austra: Olympia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18195-austra-olympia/ | Olympia | Olympia has been tipped as Austra's "dance album," though the Toronto band's debut, Feel It Break, contained enough club-worthy material: the arpeggiating likes of "Beat and the Pulse", and B-sides "Energy" and "Young and Gay" much more so. Its remixes came off less like mandatory singles life extensions than a glimpse into what these gothy tracks got up to after the witching hour. On Olympia, the main change from Feel It Break isn't adding beats but adding more in general: the core trio doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction.
It's an obvious-seeming move these days, but Austra was close enough to this sound previously that it's not too jarring a development. Plus, they push in that direction with an unusual sonic palette: sparkly harp solos, deadpan early-Knife riffs, vocals that sound druidic, even guttural, including New Age-evoking morose choral drones. Much continues to be made of Stelmanis's opera training, but opera's just about the only sound that isn't represented here. It takes a while to get familiar with these sounds, which seems deliberate. "You'll never know me, I'll never know you," as Stelmanis sings on "Sleep", outright repudiating the notion of instant dancefloor connection.
Stelmanis' solo work would turn single lines-- "be your own company," "join us"-- into manifestos, a tendency for studies on a single riff that carried through into Feel It Break. Olympia sounds far more expansive and a little less removed-- "We Become" even grooves. Though opener "What We Done?" has the bass throb and synth counterpoint of a late-night dance hit, it doesn't do much else, and vocalist Katie Stelmanis sings her melody as if what she's hearing is a requiem. "Annie (Oh Muse, You)", the noisiest, synth-clappingest track here, mutters where there might have been melodies. Lead single "Home" is built on a house piano riff any of today's revivalists would envy, but it takes its sweet time getting there.
Stelmanis has said she listened to a lot of early Cat Power while recording Olympia, and while nothing here sounds anywhere near as stark, the lyrics often do, and lead appropriately tense, nervy sounding songs. There are still hints of Feel It Break's aesthetic-heavy mysticism, but in general, Olympia is an album where a title like "You Changed My Life" is the sort to be delivered over sincere piano. (Over a low-end-heavy chug, but still.) "Forgive Me", a plea to an estranged lover or friend, is blunt both lyrically ("What do I have to do to make you forgive me?") and musically: obsessive, pinprick-tense, desperate for closure. "Home" has a similar centerpiece-- "you know that it hurts me when you don't come home at night"-- and the arrangement sounds like the feverish, sleepless worry that accompanies.
Much of Olympia is disarmingly personal, and some, as usual with Austra, is political-- but not the stuff of Stelmanis and drummer Maya Postepski's previous riot grrl band Galaxy, nor the cinemascope revolution of Shaking the Habitual (another cited inspiration) but something subtler. Throughout Olympia, love is a radical act and heartbreak-- in greater supply here-- a failure of community; but the album doesn’t speak in those abstractions. “Painful Like” addresses bigotry, specifically anti-gay (“We don’t have to marry…. In this town we’ll bury all the minds that clench too tight”), but makes its point through quick flashes of detail (“bruised skin on top of mine”), a startling, candid sort of intimacy Olympia’s remaining tracks grasp for.
Later on comes the album's centerpiece "I Don't Care (I'm a Man)", the most fuck-off title Austra's ever written, but the track has no dramatics, just a coolly dispassionate gaze. Stelmanis plays something between a satisfied troll and a coroner surveying the third crime scene of the day, monotone while detailing "the whimper in her sigh, the softer brutalizing-- but I don't care, I'm a man." It barely lasts a minute, as if about to break into something more bracing; but the group's going not for shock but shrug value, the sort that gets disturbing once you process what you've just heard. This, it turns out, might be Austra's greatest strength. | 2013-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino / Paper Bag | June 26, 2013 | 7.2 | 30384473-3c4f-4ec3-8cbe-57fa2a902172 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
In its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, Trent Reznor's 1999 magnum opus *The Fragile *scrapes the sky like never before. Its companion, a reworking called Deviations 1, is mostly a curio. | In its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, Trent Reznor's 1999 magnum opus *The Fragile *scrapes the sky like never before. Its companion, a reworking called Deviations 1, is mostly a curio. | Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition) / The Fragile: Deviations 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22746-the-fragile-2017-definitive-edition-the-fragile-deviations-1/ | The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition) / The Fragile: Deviations 1 | When Trent Reznor debuted The Fragile, the followup to his star-making The Downward Spiral some five years after that record’s release, comparisons to Pink Floyd’s go-to double album The Wall abounded. For one thing, Reznor tapped that record’s producer, Bob Ezrin, to help sequence from the chaotic collection of tracks he’d assembled. For another, both records were released at the turn of their respective decades, and could be seen as summary statements for much of the music of the ten years that preceded them.
But the most direct point of comparison is the sheer scale of both recordings. No, not their length, but their height, if you will. Years of overfamiliarity might have dulled our appreciation for just how goddamn towering they both sound. The Wall’s two versions of its anthemic introductory track “In the Flesh” and David Gilmour’s soaring solo on “Comfortably Numb” all but demand you look upward to see where the notes are coming from. Reznor and his collaborators—most notably producer Alan Moulder and guest guitarist Adrian Belew—similarly made The Fragile’s songs sound like vertical constructions, piling element on element, often with dizzying rapidity. And in its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition), the record scrapes the sky like never before.
“The Fragile” and “Just Like You Imagined,” highlights of the album’s first disc (thinking it of a CD is a hard habit to break after nearly twenty years), are two of The Fragile’s most effective moments in this regard. Shambling into existence with a slow, steady drum beat that sounds like rattling chains, the title track works its way through three iterations of its chorus, the sole lyric of which is the disarmingly direct promise “I won’t let you fall apart”: first softly, near the bottom of Reznor’s vocal register; then at an ear-splitting, double-tracked shout, accompanied by cinematic synths; and finally with multi-tracked, major-key harmonies that turn the phrase into something close to a prayer. “Just Like You Imagined,” arguably Reznor’s finest moment as a composer, picks up where “The Fragile” leaves off, using that same celestial-chorus harmony construction and prominent cameos from Bowie sidemen Mike Garson on piano and Belew on guitar to create a wordless epic, spiraling upward in volume and intensity.
Which is not to say that The Fragile is all lacerating art-rock bombast. On the Dr. Dre-assisted “Even Deeper” and the late-album high point “The Big Comedown,” Reznor crafts a methodical industrial robo-funk that evokes deep-sea sonar pings and a malfunctioning robot, respectively. “Into the Void,” a direct Black Sabbath reference, juxtaposes the very NIN sentiment “Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away” with very un-NIN “ooh-wah-ah-ah” backing vocals. Its follow-up, “Where Is Everybody?,” is a sludgy pelvic thrust with a title cribbed from “The Twilight Zone” and a delightfully dark doggerel chorus: “Pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding, exceeding…Trying and lying, defying, denying, crying and dying.” Both are reminiscent of first-disc standout “The Wretched,” a relentless throb with a chorus that bellows “Now you know this is what it feels like” (itself an answer to “How does it feel?,” the refrain of Reznor’s collaboration with industrial supergroup Pigface “Suck”) and the almost comically spiteful line “The clouds will part and the sky cracks open and God Himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just to hold you down.” Misery loves comedy!
But it loves empathy too, and this is where The Fragile stands out from NIN’s catalog. On tracks like “The Fragile” (that “I won’t let you fall apart” chorus, the climactic assertion “It’s something I have to do—I was there too/Before everything else, I was like you”), “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally,” and “We’re in This Together” (the proof is in the song titles), Reznor dismantles his reputation for solipsistic self-loathing and outwardly aimed anger. There’s plenty of both, sure; album lowlight “Starfuckers, Inc.,” for example, is familiar to students of the alt-rock gossip circuit of the period as Trent’s kiss-off to his estranged former protégé Marilyn Manson, while their subsequent rapprochement led to a video where they teamed up against a Courtney Love lookalike. But in the main, The Fragile depicts an artist desperate to preserve the few connections he still has in the face of ever-growing substance abuse (this was the final album he’d record before getting clean and sober) and crippling grief (the record contains a dedication to his grandmother, a beloved figure who’d recently died). Whether positive or negative, the roiling, confessional tumult of the lyrics is reflected in the monumental sound, and vice versa.
The cumulative approach is at its clearest in “10 Miles High.” Cut from the CD version of the album to trim minutes off its already elephantine running time, the song had previously been relegated to B-side status, appearing only on the relatively obscure original vinyl edition, where both space and pacing permitted it to remain. Heard it in its proper context at last, “10 Miles High” comes across as the emotional and sonic key to the whole album: titanic in scale, unpredictably varied in its dynamic range, and absolutely annihilating in its despair and rage.
Beginning with a tinkling synth shimmer and distant-sounding vocals that murmur “I’m getting closer/I’m getting closer/All the time” (a callback to the band’s biggest hit, of course), the song gains ominous strength with loping, pounding drums and an assertive bassline. A repetitive, sour-sounding guitar joins in just before initial chorus bursts through the murk: Reznor shouts “I tried to get so high/I made it ten miles high,” each “high” echoing like a sonic exclamation point through the crunch of the guitar and drums that sound like they’ve been covered in cast iron.
Then the song peels back to a low hum, with a sardonically jaunty guitar strum and Reznor’s incomprehensible whispering dimly audible in the background. When the chorus and its repeated proclamations of miles-high self-medication come back, everything sounds muffled and choked rather than crisp and piercing. “I swore to God I would never turn into you,” Reznor’s muted voice screams, his disappointment in his failure dripping from every word like venom. The song ends as quietly as it began, with Reznor chanting the words “tear it all down, tear it all down” over and over until everything cuts off. As a lyrical and musical chronicle of complete and total personal failure, it’s peerless in the Nine Inch Nails catalog; only Broken’s scabrous “Gave Up” and The Downward Spiral’s title track (a song whose sonic toolbox “10 Miles High” raids extensively, but which somehow sounds optimistic in comparison despite its suicidal subject matter) come close.
All of this makes The Fragile: Deviations 1 a truly perplexing proposition. Reznor’s on record as saying that the original album emerged from perhaps the darkest period of his adult life, but that the recording process was a life-affirming period in retrospect. He’s teased a revamped re-release for the better part of the past decade, up to and including a more straightforward Apple Music-exclusive instrumental version a few years back on which several new tracks were debuted. Deviations 1 (Reznor’s obsessive ambition makes that numeral worth noting) is the fulfillment of this promise. Less a remix than a recreation, it’s meticulously constructed by Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross from the existing recordings, stripping away the vocals and introducing alternate takes and brand-new songs culled from dozens of unused tracks. The result is a complement to the original, but not necessarily a compliment; its deviations are worth exploring for the curious and the completists, but they’re ultimately less than the sum of the additional parts.
Most of Deviations’ deviations, and certainly the best of them, are structural. By adding the new songs, a dozen in total, Reznor is able to seed melodic and rhythmic ideas for more thoroughgoing use later in the album. This, granted, is nothing new for Nine Inch Nails: The plinked-out keyboard hook at the end of “Closer” returns as the central melody of The Downward Spiral’s title track; “The Frail” is an acoustic work-through of the chorus of “The Fragile”; and “La Mer” introduces the playful melody later used to punishing effect in “Into the Void.” Reznor returns to this well with at least a couple of the new additions: “Missing Pieces,” inserted prior to “We’re in This Together,” serves as a prologue that introduces several of its key sounds, while “Last Heard From” revives them just prior to the album’s final stretch.
But *Deviations’ *experiment with musical foreshadowing goes a bit deeper. On the original, the breakbeat-and-guitar bedrock of “Starfuckers, Inc.” was a sonic anomaly, making the already dubious song even tougher to take in context. Here, new tracks “One Way to Get There,” “Taken,” and “+Appendage,” plus the skittering direct lead-in “Feeders,” insert that Atari Teenage Riot/Earthling-era Bowie sound at multiple points throughout the record, which goes a long way to making “Starfuckers” easier to stomach. Yes, it’s still a less-good “The Perfect Drug” with a goon-squad chorus, but at least it can’t sneak up on you anymore. (The inclusion of the single version’s pisstake coda—a sample of Paul Stanley shouting “GOODNIGHT!” at a crowd that begins chanting “WE WANT KISS! WE WANT KISS!” in response—indicates Reznor’s aware of the song’s goofball nature.)
More interesting still is the intermission that Reznor inserts between the original break between discs one and two. In its original incarnation, the first half ends with the synth-Floyd soundscape “The Great Below,” and the second half begins with “The Way Out is Through,” a tear-down-the-sky (literally: the lyrics in the vocal version prominently feature the phrase “the heavens fall”) behemoth of distortion and vocal reverb. Deviations tosses in a trio of tracks as a palate cleanser between these two showstoppers: an open-ended guitar-and-drum loop called “Not What It Seems Like,” a wobbly bass-and-percussion number named “White Mask,” and “The New Flesh,” moved up in the track listing from its place on the original vinyl, its crescendoes serving as a sort of precursor to the high-volume “The Way Out Is Through.” Given the concrete purpose they serve, perhaps it’s unsurprising that they’re the best of the the new tracks. They are nevertheless bested by “Was It Worth It?,” a newbie crammed in amongst the party jams “Into the Void” and “Where Is Everybody?” Between a handful of squalling guitar lines and a keyboard melody that sounds like a rotating prism, it has more hooks than the opening scene of Hellraiser.
Yet even at a dozen strong, the new tracks don’t fully tell Deviations’ tale. That task falls to the now all-instrumental versions of the original songs, few of which hold up when compared to the originals. In some cases this comes down to dubious editing choices: “Pilgrimage (Alternate Version)” strips away its precursor’s “Tusk”-style marching-band section. Closing track “Ripe With Decay (Instrumental)” adds a backbeat, stripping much of the power of the entropic original. Most bafflingly, “10 Miles High (Instrumental)” builds up the regular version’s secondary guitar riff—played so quietly in the original that its presence seems almost sarcastic, like a mockery of the whole idea of riffs—into a dull cock-rock stomp and strut.
The album’s biggest problem, though, is a lack of editing, not a surfeit. Most of these songs have a pretty reliable melodic template; take out the words, and you’re left with overlong and unvaried segments. Groove-based songs like “Even Deeper,” “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, and “The Big Comedown” weather this excess relatively well, since their rhythm-oriented structure has a funk-like momentum that carries them through the surplus sections. More straightforward rockers like “No, You Don’t” or “Please,” however—never the album’s strongest moments—drag noticeably without Reznor’s voice. If you want a metaphor for what’s lost in this new version, the revamped cover—a black, white, and gray David Carson photograph of a waterfall, now denuded of the original’s vibrant red overlay—pretty much says it all.
Reznor and Ross have no shortage of experience with instrumental recordings; indeed, turning The Fragile into an instrumental album merely brings it line with the bulk of the duo’s recorded output over eight years since NIN put out its sprawling collection of soundscape sketches Ghosts I-IV. At the time of the album’s original release, Reznor already had the unjustly forgotten score for the first-person shooter game Quake under his belt, and The Fragile 1.0 has no shortage of instrumentals. This makes the lack of a more stringent editorial hand all the more perplexing. Far too many of Deviations’ freshly vocal-free songs sound like karaoke versions rather than instrumentals that can stand on their own. The result is a listening experience that outstays its welcome on a song-by-song basis, let alone over the course of its massive 150-minute running time.
Fortunately, the originals are still out there. The Fragile arrived a stylistic turning point, emerging at the point where the “alternative” sobriquet fell out of fashion and “indie” achieved dominance. Today, though, reservations about the lyrics’ outré confessionality and the music’s jam-packed, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink gigantism seem positively quaint. (Don’t care for titanically hyper-produced albums stuffed with uncomfortably intimate and self-mythologizing lyrics about your emotional world falling apart? Tell it to Lemonade.) The Fragile may lack the tightness of Nine Inch Nails’ other highlights: the concise fury of Broken, the inexorable depressive logic of The Downward Spiral, the late-career professionalism of Hesitation Marks. But it takes the emotional distress that gives it its title and transmutes it into something colossal, defiant, and resilient. Listen to it at your strongest or your weakest (and I’ve certainly done both) and it will offer you a sonic signature commensurate with the power of what you feel inside. | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 11, 2017 | 8.7 | 303f29d9-3f5c-47c9-b00e-e052524f9367 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | null |
Releasing three markedly different albums over the past seven years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience. Their latest is an uncomprimisingly self-possessed record that finds them shedding any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble. | Releasing three markedly different albums over the past seven years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience. Their latest is an uncomprimisingly self-possessed record that finds them shedding any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble. | These New Puritans: Field of Reeds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18103-these-new-puritans-field-of-reeds/ | Field of Reeds | On Field of Reeds’ title and final track, Jack Barnett idly sings, “You asked if the islands would float away… I said, yes.” The answer comes back with a dead-eyed conviction that makes it feel as if Barnett has lost sight of the solid shoreline, something he'll definitely be accused of with These New Puritans’ third album. It sees the Southend group all but shed any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble. The result is an uncompromisingly self-possessed record whose intimate qualities shouldn't be mistaken for an easy listen-- in many respects, its clearest analog is Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. It opens with a Portuguese jazz vocalist, Elisa Rodrigues, singing a sparkling, barely half-remembered version of Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You”. As it ends, Adrian Peacock, who has the lowest known singing voice in Britain, unleashes an apparently bottomless vocal drone, sounding as if he’s humming along to a Sunn O))) song, while Barnett chants in phonetics like a tricksy goblin.
Despite releasing three markedly different albums over the past five years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience, allowing them to go wherever their iconoclastic spirit takes them. Their debut album, 2008’s Beat Pyramid, took the moony British post-punk phenomenon of the preceding few years and made it nasty, agitated, and wholly uninterested in emotive melancholy or accessible lyrical subjects. Numerology and olde magick were central, though good luck trying to prise much else from it. “You know I’ll be thinking this music’s symbolic/ This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I/ You’ll be slashing at the air, describing nothing,” Barnett sang with deterrent glee on “Swords of Truth”. He's been equally oblique describing Field of Reeds. “I’m just putting one sound in front of the other and thinking about what comes next,” he told the Guardian.
Its follow-up, 2010’s Hidden, sounded like a strikingly, elegantly choreographed war, at once global and gothic with its destructive beats, mournful laments, and taunting vocals. And now, Field of Reeds is a stilled, abstract pastoral of sorts, where the music seems to grow and swarm as naturally as moss across rocks. Its closest modern peer might be Julia Holter's equally pristine Ekstasis. Where Hidden traded in damning impact, Field of Reeds uses Barnett’s self-taught compositional prowess-- and the borrowed skills of composers André de Ridder, Michel van der Aa, and Hans Ek-- to explore the effects of memory, requiring investment on the listener's part, too; “Spiral” seems to repeat a clarinet motif from Hidden; “Organ Eternal” rekindles the glassy pulse of “V (Island Song)” with the resonator piano, a riff that in turn strongly recalls “Tubular Bells”.
Field of Reeds was recorded over 12 months in three different studios. The drums were added around structures determined by the strings, horns, and magnetic resonator piano-- a haunted, silvery-sounding creation-- and barely appear at all in the album’s final third (Barnett has suggested there are three movements here). Somehow, the effect is more intimidating than the parts on Hidden where they smashed melons to simulate crushing a skull. The spareness and sense of space on Field of Reeds is remarkable, the kind that'll make you glance over your shoulder as beguiling mercury-slicked glows slip into an overwhelming, sometimes vicious sense of anxiety; "There is something there," as Barnett sings on "Fragment Two".
These shifts are made even more unsettling by the lack of aggression in the playing; where Hidden’s M.O. could be found in “Attack Music”, on Field of Reeds there’s the sense that these glowing clarinets and strings are occurring naturally, almost as if emanating from a landscape. Gone too is the obtuse vocal phrasing that ran through Beat Pyramid and Hidden; Barnett has talked about spending “hours going through each sentence of the lyrics getting rid of all the consonants,” a defamiliarizing effect that makes his lines as slippery and memory-foxing as the dream-speak in “Twin Peaks”. It's as upsetting too; Field of Reeds' quiet lyrical narrative seems to follow a period of loss; first a person, and subsequently, trust in any kind of concrete meaning, underpinned by the way lines disintegrate into phonetic babble. As his fastidious techniques show, Barnett is a total perfectionist-- he proudly made George play 76 drum takes on one song-- yet his control freakiness hasn’t killed the record; the effect is naturalistic, and often deeply moving, rather than in any way inert.
While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate; remember, "This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I." By removing any imposition of context, his words of consonants, his music of attention-grabbing impact, his ensemble of rock band-status, he’s created a truly strange and beautiful record. Whether Barnett makes it explicit or not, These New Puritans’ songs have always been concerned with their South-Easterly corner of the coast, the smoggy bowel of London where rusting World War II fortifications stand demilitarized among the islands, just like the sounds on this album. “Secret recordings were made in the marsh,” Barnett chanted on Hidden’s “We Want War”. It feels as though he finally trusts us to hear them on Field of Reeds. | 2013-06-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Infectious | June 14, 2013 | 8.4 | 30420648-a21b-4401-ad23-fa0ca747ec00 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Using her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, the Calif.-based composer arrives at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation. Her impressive debut owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries. | Using her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, the Calif.-based composer arrives at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation. Her impressive debut owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries. | Holly Herndon: Movement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17356-movement/ | Movement | In a recent interview with the British magazine FACT, Holly Herndon refuted the trope that electronic music is the stuff of impersonal and inhuman androids. The Tennessee native bought into that narrative herself while living in the electronic hub of Berlin, where, though she played with a band named Electrocute, she began taking contrabass lessons. Her hope was that if she could master a "real instrument," she might, one day, be taken seriously as a composer. But after returning stateside to study at the electronic sanctum of California's Mills College, she realized that her laptop-- a web of code and a fountain of sound-- could make music as personal, intimate, and important as that of any ensemble. "This is actually the most interesting instrument for me," she told FACT. "I also think that it's the most personal instrument that the world has ever seen."
Many people might balk at that idea, that a computer is somehow a more personal instrument than the customary acoustic toolset of music. After all, how can a box of wires, circuits, and chips connected to a screen and controlled by fingers be more individual than a guitar, with its strings simply pressed by fingers, or, better yet, the human voice, the sound of someone simply singing? But, to an extent, computers are forever malleable, able to be programmed and reprogrammed to fit needs and whims and, in turn, to alter those old modes of expression in ways that they couldn't do themselves. On her proper full-length debut Movement, the California-based composer uses her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, ultimately arriving at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation that owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries. It's a record with the rare capacity to turn cynics who might scoff at the idea of laptops-as-intimate-instruments into believers.
It seems overly convenient and coincidental to compare Herndon's Movement to Laurel Halo's Quarantine. Here are, after all, two American women releasing records in the same year that weave their respective voices into intricate electronic music that sits at the borders of pop, dance, and more esoteric forms. The links are reductive enough to be insulting. But both Movement and Quarantine are bold records, dependent upon a multiplicity of voices from one source to press against borders of populist versus experimental media-- or, better yet, to unite them. At times, both Halo and Herndon seem like would-be popular sirens, ready to deliver hooks to the radio; at other points, however, they seem destined for careers of gigs in small art spaces or extended fellowships at universities. But at their best, they seem like both and neither, composers and thinkers unafraid to elide convention, circumvent categorization and arrive, fully formed, at an intersection of things often thought to be mutually exclusive.
Movement's humanity stems in part from its variety of moods. At times overtly playful and slyly sexual, decidedly monastic and obviously extroverted, these seven pieces skip between feelings with a true-to-life mercurialness and unpredictability. Herndon's sonics are impressive; see the subdural bass moans of opener "Terminal" or the careful, Oval-like slices of "Control And" for proof. But she never betrays the soul of her music for the sound of it. During "Breathe", for instance, Herndon takes a series of deep breaths and scrambles the patterns of inhalation and exhalation. She splits the actions across the channels, conjuring an unlikely choir of dissonance and consonance. Sonically, it's impressive enough, but emotionally, it portrays the struggle to rise above the world's din, to stay centered in a bustle of hyperactivity. It's electronic Zen: Herndon successfully links an electroacoustic premise to a pragmatic observation.
Especially considering that this is her first LP, Herndon's ability to steer music that's simultaneously complex and approachable is astounding: "Fade", for instance, should lure fans of the Knife with its iterative keyboards and sticky arctic hook, but the structure-- or, more specifically, the way Herndon handles the beat in relation to her voice-- is a marvel all its own. Herndon frames the rhythm with her voice, syllables darting between its cracks like water washing through rivulets. But that's just the most superficial layer of Herndon's voice. Underneath the hook, samples of her singing crisscross beneath the beat, supplying counterrhythms and serving like little magnets that draw the listener deeper into the song with each pass. It's a perfect interface of machine and user and of intricate composition with irrepressible songcraft. Likewise, though the noisy 64-second track "Interlude" might seem ostracizing at first, it plays out like a miniature video game of voices. Herndon manipulates her own tone into blips and volleys that clash with one another in their own electronic Mortal Kombat. It's quixotic, a dose of levity in a field not known for it.
"Dilato", the brilliant closer, is the only track that doesn't key on Herndon’s voice. Instead, she samples and stretches the patient intonations of classical baritone Bruce Rameker, pulling his syllables until they turn into a brooding, wordless chorus. The piece is Movement's most unapologetically academic; it treats speech with such force that it recalls Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, in which the composer repeatedly played back and recorded a tape of himself reading text in a room until his speech hummed into howling oblivion. But listen closely for Herndon's own voice, which joins Rameker's most notably just before the three-minute mark. She harmonizes with him for a moment, singing one syllable with an operatic grandeur. It's over in an instant, but it's enough to reiterate Herndon's symbiotic thesis and to make "Dilato" feel like much more than a rote exercise in bending one person's voice into phantasmagorias.
Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers. It's an invitation by example to move in several circles at once and emerge with something that’s brazen, fresh, and entirely individual. | 2012-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | November 20, 2012 | 8.1 | 30420e4f-1620-4e23-a971-59cecc09b1fa | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
More than a half-century after its release, At Last! remains one of the greatest records about loneliness ever made: a languid, jazz-inflected paean to (reluctantly) working it out on your own. | More than a half-century after its release, At Last! remains one of the greatest records about loneliness ever made: a languid, jazz-inflected paean to (reluctantly) working it out on your own. | Etta James: At Last! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21797-at-last/ | At Last! | Anyone trying to reverse-engineer the particular way contemporary pop ballads are now sung— the careening melisma, the guttural, quasi-unscripted grunts, an apparently boundless capacity for emotion–needs only to consider a handful of tough, pioneering American singers: Bessie Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Alberta Hunter, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James. This past Record Store Day, Portland's Jackpot Records reissued James's masterwork, At Last!, on limited edition vinyl, including the four bonus tracks which first appeared on a CD reissue in 1999. More than a half-century after its release, At Last! remains one of the greatest records about loneliness ever made: a languid, jazz-inflected paean to (reluctantly) working it out on your own.
James was born in 1938, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, as Jamesetta Hawkins. She never knew her father, and her mother was only fourteen when she gave birth. James was raised by a series of foster parents, and came of age singing in the Echoes of Eden choir at St. Paul's Baptist church. Stories of her childhood— including the ones she recounts herself in Rage to Survive, her tellingly titled autobiography—are grisly. One of her foster parents, a loutish man called Sarge, used to drag her from bed in the middle of the night and force her, via brutal and humiliating beatings, to sing for a cabal of his drunk poker cronies. In the early 1950s, she joined a girl group (the Creolettes; later the Peaches) and met the R&B producer Johnny Otis, who suggested she re-name herself–transmuting "Jamesetta" into "Etta James"–and eventually helped the Peaches book a spot opening for Little Richard on a national tour. James left the group to sign with Chess Records, and began collaborating with Harvey Fuqua, then of the Moonglows and later a crucial, visionary producer for Motown. At Last!, her debut album, was released by Argo, Chess's jazz imprint, in the fall of 1960.
If there's anything anachronistic about At Last!, it's how plainly vulnerable James sounds while performing these songs. Insomuch as it's possible to distill any one theme from the last couple decades of pop music, it's the presentation of—and insistence upon—self-empowerment as an infallible path toward joy. Those sorts of affirmations can induce a wild ecstasy in the moment—I AM THE BEST! NO ONE CAN TOUCH ME! SUCK A DICK, JERKS!—but eventually, one has to worry about whether those same notions are not, in fact, a deeply odious and toxic force in the world. It can't be great for whole generations to come of age hollering self-aggrandizing anthems that never quite acknowledge the most gratifying and dangerous thing a human being can actually do: courageously make room for another person in her heart.
So when James loses her man, and sings a verse like this one, from "Stormy Weather"—"Life is bare, gloom and mis'ry everywhere / Stormy weather, stormy weather / And I just can't get my poor self together / I'm weary all of the time, the time / So weary all of the time"—it sounds fearless. Most of At Last! concerns itself with unmitigated heartache. James isn't the sort of singer capable of or interested in couching true anguish in anything prettier or more reassuring, and there is a glorious synchronicity between the frankness of her vocal and the heaviness of the lyrics. James was a professional, and a true expert—her control is astounding; she bites off each note like she's taking a chunk out of an apple—but there's no moment on At Last! that feels explicitly or distractingly performative. There's something almost punctured in her breath, like a person who has been struck in the chest, effectively felled by pain.
James opines, repeatedly and without guile, her inability to find and keep the right person for her to love. There are moments where she thinks that she had it, maybe, for a minute (like on "Anything to Say You're Mine," in which she waits for a letter from her lover, hoping their correspondence might finally reveal his devotion to her), and then moments in which she is convinced she has already lost, and will continue losing – that the ecstatic, unspooling, true, true love she watches other people share and celebrate will elude her forever.
The latter idea reaches a kind of brutal apotheosis on "Sunday Kind of Love," in which James sings, over a spare, barely-tinkling piano melody (interrupted, on occasion, by rising swells of strings), about what she wants but can't ever seem to get: an earnest communion that lasts long past Saturday night, "for all my life to have and to hold." James isn't necessarily having a tough time attracting men to her bedroom, but she can't seem to land a caring or truly unafraid partner. Periodically, James lets out a little "Uh!" between lines of the verse. Those little vocal punctuations are commonplace now, but when James looses one, even the quickest, most under-thought "Uh!" communicates tremendous certainty. She knows what she wants, even (especially) as it remains just out of her reach.
What's maybe most satisfying about At Last! is the record's title track, arguably the single greatest unburdening ever laid to tape. It plays like a person stumbling into a hotel room and simultaneously dropping all of her bags on the floor. In an album of lost and mangled love songs, in which relief and fulfillment begin to seem truly impossible ("I can't love nobody unless I'm loving you," James announces in the bonus track "If I Can't Have You," a duet she co-wrote with Fuqua), here is a moment of extraordinary deliverance. Finally, James finds her man: a person who doesn't get spooked, doesn't waver, doesn't leave her crumpled somewhere, alone and pining. "My lonely days are over, and life is like a song," she sings, her voice buoyant. The irony – that her own songs, in fact, express considerable pain – is deep and heavy.
Beyoncé famously performed "At Last" at Barack Obama's first inaugural ball, while he and Michelle shared their first dance. The performance was poignant for obvious reasons—there was, at last, a black president in the White House—but James quickly called bullshit on it ("She ain't mine… I can't stand Beyoncé," is how James expressed her annoyance during a Seattle concert, shortly after the ball aired on television). There is a sense, among singers of a certain era—who came of age as performers in a pre-Civil Rights America—of ferociously protecting what they have made or claimed as their own, usually against staggering odds (Aretha Franklin still insists on being paid up-front and in cash, and keeps her purse firmly wedged under her arm as she strolls onstage). James didn't write "At Last"; it was written in 1941 by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, for a musical film called *Orchestra Wives—*but she animated it, made it feel real. And there isn't a single moment on At Last! that doesn't feel unmistakably her own, and forever. | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Jackpot Records | April 25, 2016 | 9 | 304304bb-5c9a-4fb2-b71d-9c8bc658dc7a | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The newest Fleet Foxes member has been crafting hushed folk for years, and he stays prolific as a solo artist with this, his second LP of the year. | The newest Fleet Foxes member has been crafting hushed folk for years, and he stays prolific as a solo artist with this, his second LP of the year. | J. Tillman: Year in the Kingdom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13467-year-in-the-kingdom/ | Year in the Kingdom | J. Tillman's got one a hell of a voice, of course: The newest Fleet Foxes member wasn't just plopped down behind the drumkit post-Sun Giant 'cuz he gives good beard. It merits mention that Tillman's been crafting hushed folk yearners for years, and that Year in the Kingdom is Tillman's second LP of 2009. And it's right around here that we can stop bringing up those other dudes; whereas Foxes trade in the precise and the pristine, Tillman's songs drift along like a piece of ragged wood in the river, a little gnarled but easygoing nevertheless. He's also dealing in a much more contemporary style of folk, kinda, taking plenty of cues from Mark Kozelek's placidly expansive work with Sun Kil Moon and even more recently Bon Iver's ambient whirl. Tillman's records-- and there's no shortage-- are quiet, pensive, unassuming things, Sunday morning kick-around music. And, while the loose, oft-airy tunes can occasionally feel inexact, when cloaked in that voice and a few inspired rattletrap arrangements, you'll barely register the deficit.
Year in the Kingdom kicks off with its tidy title track, a strummy, stripped-way-back affair with nothing more than Tillman and his guitar. It's a pleasant enough intro, but I'd have gone with the significantly more adorned "Crosswinds" to kick things off. Tarting Tillman's tune up is a touch of banjo and a few woos while the whistling of the wind teases out the nooks and crannies of its central melody; the effect is not unlike Jim O'Rourke's crackling but never overdone production on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with a relatively straightaway song taking on new dimension with the addition of a few key elements. Tillman's long been good at coloring in his compositions on wax; his partiality to slow and steady song structure and his avoidance of most vocals besides his own does leave plenty of room to screw around, but there's an incidental feel to the extraneous noise here, in service of the song rather than some kind [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of cloak.
As a lyricist, not unlike Foxes' Robin Pecknold, he leans on the pastoral pretty hard, and there's some references to laying a lamb on somebody I suspect might just be biblical. But even when they fail to connect on their own terms, there's a journeyman feel to his words as they unspool (helped along by his lived-in pipes) that conveys meaning even when it's not necessarily there, evoking images of long walks under the stars and that sort of thing. That, plus Tillman's intimate, close-miced voice, does lend Year in the Kingdom a lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion. Next time, maybe; for now, the stout, supine Year in the Kingdom, Tillman's second fine record of the year, will certainly do. | 2009-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | September 23, 2009 | 6.9 | 30438643-eec5-4014-9344-949a8ab9c346 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The newest Aphex Twin since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus shows a simpler side of his music, with slower tempos and spine-tinglingly rich tunes and timbres. | The newest Aphex Twin since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus shows a simpler side of his music, with slower tempos and spine-tinglingly rich tunes and timbres. | Aphex Twin: Cheetah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22072-aphex-twin-cheetah/ | Cheetah | Aphex Twin has always contained multitudes, and in the two years since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus, we have been reminded not only how many different facets he has, but also how good he is at compartmentalizing them. Each of his last three releases has shone the spotlight on a different aspect of his identity. Syro, his comeback album, was a bold, virtuosic, big-tent statement in the vein of I Care Because You Do and the Richard D. James Album—a showcase of all his talents across a variety of rhythms, timbres, tempi, and techniques. The hermetic, atonal Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP featured James in his mad-scientist lab coat, going to town on MIDI-controlled player pianos and programming robotic gizmos to thwack at drums. And Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP gave us James—technically recording as AFX this time—in dancefloor destroyer mode, laying waste to the rave at 150 beats per minute.
Cheetah, his new EP, shows us yet another side—at first, you might even say a simpler one. The record's tempos are, for the most part, slower than on Aphex Twin’s last few records, and its beats are straighter. You might think that’s a bad sign; after all, much of James’ genius has always been his dizzying rhythmic dexterity. But James’ take on four-to-the-floor is not like other producers’ approach to the same cadence. Even here, his sense of swing is unparalleled; accents flick to and fro with abandon. Machine claps splash like Baka water drumming, and 32nd-note fills spill forth like bags full of ball bearings. Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.
That’s particularly true of openers “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” and “CHEETAHT7b,” both of which trudge along at a torpid 100 beats per minute. Their titles reference a British electronics company called Cheetah that was active in the late ’80s and early ’90s; the particular instrument to which they pay homage, and which James presumably used to make them, is the Cheetah MS800, a short-lived digital synthesizer that has been described as “one of the most unfathomable instruments ever made.” (When Warp surprise-premiered Cheetah at Nashville's NAMM convention in late June, they displayed an MS800 under Plexiglas.) What makes the MS800 unusual is its wavetable technology—or, as described in the user manual, in a phrase Warp repurposed for *Cheetah’*s press release, “sounds programmed to sequence through changing waveforms as the note plays, giving exceptional movement and character to the music.”
You can hear and feel that mutability in action: The synthesizers in “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” move with a slippery, sidewinding motion, and the phaser applied to the drums feels almost greasy. Those wispy, warbly qualities give it a creepy, vaguely gothic air that's reminiscent of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, which is certainly not a thing I ever expected to find myself saying about an Aphex Twin record. “CHEETAHT7b” uses some of the same sounds and melodies—both tracks, it seems, are variations on the same core material—and its synths give off an eerie, palpitating glow. It’s remarkable what different moods he can evoke from such similar sets of sounds: Where “CHEETAHT7” is calm and meditative, “CHEETAH2” rolls with a sly sort of swagger, like someone in wraparound shades driving a convertible very deliberately around the block, leering.
Two short, ambient sketches show off the MS800’s mercurial properties in even greater detail, but the centerpiece of the EP’s latter half is a pair of tracks whose titles reference the Sequentix Cirklon, a multi-track hardware sequencer that also turned up in the titles of two Syro tracks. Here, we’re back in slightly more familiar territory: Both tracks ride the kind of snapping electro rhythms that were common on Rephlex records throughout the ’90s; “CIRKLON1” plies the kind of naïve, winsome melodies that have been James’ stock-in-trade from the very beginning, while “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” ropes some hyperactive slap bass into the mix. Both are case studies in beat-based electronic music in which no two bars are alike: they are wriggling dynamos, and wrapping your head around all their moving parts is a little bit like herding centipedes.
There’s one other aspect of James’ personality showcased on Cheetah: the archivist. He first revealed that side of himself in 2015, when he uploaded nearly 300 old demos to an anonymous SoundCloud account, and he continued in the same vein with Orphaned Deejay Selek, his first official release of vintage, previously unreleased tunes. Two of *Cheetah’*s core tracks, it turns out, were included in his monumental SoundCloud dump, under slightly different names: “CHEETAHT7b” (as “CHEETAH7 Teac”) and “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” (as “CHEETAH3 Teac”). What’s striking about the versions included on the new EP is how much better they sound. They’re clearly the very same recordings as those that went up on SoundCloud, but the rough versions sound like they’ve been wrapped in a dozen layers of cheesecloth; they're flat and muffled where the polished versions boast the sharp angles and bright gleam of quartz crystals. When James uploaded all that material to SoundCloud, it seemed like he was washing his hands of it, throwing it out so that he could move on. But it looks like one more aspect of his personality intervened: James the obsessive-compulsive, determined to make one final pass at perfection. Lucky for us, too. | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 7, 2016 | 8.2 | 3044ba90-245f-47f6-ba2f-665fe0129e26 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his second album, Bartees Strange widens his stance and levels his gaze, staying grounded in his nimble genre-hopping and his dynamic songwriting. | On his second album, Bartees Strange widens his stance and levels his gaze, staying grounded in his nimble genre-hopping and his dynamic songwriting. | Bartees Strange: Farm to Table | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bartees-strange-farm-to-table/ | Farm to Table | Bartees Strange’s 2020 album Live Forever was an exuberant declaration of freedom, and few rock debuts of recent years have filled me with such a desire to stand up and cheer. Strange spat rap verses, belted emo choruses, and stomped his distortion box with a conviction bordering on frenzy: Look at everything I can do, the album nearly screamed. Wading into the border separating rock and rap has long been a quick way to get tangled in barbed wire, but Strange leaped effortlessly over policed barriers that ensnared countless artists before him. “Genres/Keep us in our boxes/Keep us from our commas,” he rapped on “Mossblerd,” probably the clearest manifesto on an album full of them.
Live Forever jump-started his career, landed him on year-end lists, and got him signed to 4AD. At the root of any kind of sudden stardom lies a question: How well do you handle getting noticed? Based on his second album, Farm to Table, his first for 4AD, Strange gets noticed well. On Farm to Table, he’s saying many of the same things he said on Live Forever, but more with his chest, with his feet planted even further apart, his gaze more level with ours. The genre leaps in his songwriting have grown more sure-footed and, if anything, even wider—“Mulholland Dr.” opens with a clean tangle of emo guitars, then ascends into a chorus massive enough that you could uproot it from its home terroir, switch the arrangements, and sell it to Adam Levine. The chorus on “Wretched,” meanwhile, sounds like an actual Maroon 5 hit, its synths and side-chained beat exploding overhead like fireworks over a stadium.
Strange only works in big swings, and the contact high of his music is partly from his own audible elation when he connects. He likes sweeping gestures and reliable pleasures, which he deploys with force and conviction. Check the big horns on “Heavy Heart”; you can practically see him jubilantly cueing them with his arms over his head. On “Black Gold,” he retells his journey from Oklahoma to the D.C. in strokes broad enough for an MGM musical: “Now it’s big city lights for a country mouse.” His writing jumbles emotional extremes until they start to blur into one another: His lyrics are full of pained apologies that sound like bravado, chest-banging declarations that sound like cries of despair.
Strange’s genre leaps land so clean because of his remarkable voice. As a kid, he sang opera, and he can do pretty much anything: twirl into a falsetto, scale up an octave to punch a Broadway-sized high note, unleash soul shouts. On “Hennessy,” he flexes melismatic lines over a lo-fi acoustic guitar set up, and it sounds like someone caught D’Angelo on an iPhone. Recalling the loneliness of his itinerant upbringing as the child of an Air Force engineer on “Tours,” he rasps “I’m your son” with a venom that is surprising, nearly vengeful, shading a tender ballad with abject and primal undertones.
Working as a Black man in indie rock, he’s alive to the political dimensions of his stylistic choices, and the songs find subtle ways to exploit them. With its ragged, meandering Auto-Tune vocal, “Cosigns” is very close to a straight Future song, except instead of boasting about sleeping with models or driving push-button cars, Strange brags about hanging with labelmates Big Thief and 4AD founder Martin Mills. The song starts out feeling sly—a major label flex on an indie budget—but winds up excavating the circular pathology behind his ambitions: “How to be full, it’s the hardest to know/I keep consuming, I can’t give it up/Hungry as ever, it’s never enough.” Likewise, the mellow, lawnmower-beer groove of “Escape This Circus” recalls Real Estate circa Atlas until it becomes clear Strange is singing not about New Jersey sunsets but rather late-capitalist breakdown: A man with holes in his shoes mumbles to Strange about cryptocurrency while he ponders starting a war that could “end on the news.”
The most overtly political moment is also its simplest—“Hold the Line” is a prayer for Gianna Floyd, the daughter of George Floyd. It’s a power ballad, essentially, a lighter-waver in the mold of “Purple Rain,” with slide guitar solos that cry out in between the verses. Strange doesn’t have much to say, strictly speaking, about watching a young girl speak on camera about her murdered father. “Can’t imagine what’s running through her young mind now,” he sings, his voice husky and full. In another Bartees Strange song, this moment would preclude the explosion—a burst of guitar distortion, a vocal leap. But here, he lets the guitars trail away into silence. It’s the most subdued music he’s ever written. So much of Strange’s music is driven by declarations—of power or need, of pain or love. But in a catalog full of affirmations, “Hold the Line” is his first unanswered question. | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | June 21, 2022 | 8 | 3046a84e-f3a8-45de-8bf2-eea0f7d5bab2 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The beachy post-punk duo are at their most confident, with a sense of anguish that brings emotional depth to otherwise plain lyrics. | The beachy post-punk duo are at their most confident, with a sense of anguish that brings emotional depth to otherwise plain lyrics. | Surf Curse: Heaven Surrounds You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/surf-curse-heaven-surrounds-you/ | Heaven Surrounds You | Los Angeles musician Nick Rattigan has always kept his artistic personas clearly divided. There’s the somber, introspective Rattigan, sole member of Current Joys, whose seclusion manifests in downtempo guitar pop that echoes like a tinny speaker in a cave. Then there’s the bolder Rattigan, drummer and singer of Surf Curse, whose self-deprecating heartaches spiral into restless guitar riffs. Current Joys songs feel like private reflections—particularly on last year’s A Different Age—but his music with bandmate Jacob Rubeck pulls you in by the hand. While early Surf Curse often fell victim to juvenile songwriting (“I’m Not Making Out With You” and “Forever Dumb” appeared on their 2013 EP Sad Boys), their third album, Heaven Surrounds You, is the most confident Rattigan’s ever sounded.
Lead single “Disco” is the best song here, driven by clean, racing strums reminiscent of Vampire Weekend’s debut. But where Ezra Koenig bobbed his head under a chandelier somewhere near the Columbia campus, Rattigan shuffles and twists beneath prom-night decor with a Mia Wallace type. “Disco” invokes the allure of legendary couple dance scenes, the kind that make you want to fall in love with somebody just so you can replicate the choreography. As Rattigan coos “I can’t wait for you,” the track imparts a corresponding salacious urgency: Nothing is more important than right now.
The closest Heaven Surrounds You comes to matching “Disco”’s silver-screen magic is “Safe,” with a whirling keyboard refrain worthy of a climactic montage. “Safe” swaps the lust of “Disco” for complacent loneliness. “I held you away… I can’t leave my home/I’m safer at home,” Rattigan sings, opting to withdraw entirely rather than risk getting hurt again. “I’m safe alone,” he concludes, though his repetition of the line suggests he’s second-guessing himself.
With help from violinist Eliza Bagg of Pavo Pavo, songs like “Opera” and “Trust” exude a baroque-pop eeriness that compliments Rattigan’s occultish references: “Beware of the witching hour/’Cause I can feel you in my room/Is that still you?” he warns in “Hour of the Wolf.” “Tie my wrists and fuck my mind,” he demands in “Opera,” seeming more sinister than inviting. Rattigan isn’t the strongest vocalist—when he belts, it sounds like he’s really trying—but there’s an anguish that surfaces in his quiver, bringing an emotional depth to otherwise plain lyrics.
When things get too plain, the album falls short: Lines about “another night of feeling lonely and confused” feel like they could’ve come from anyone. Dull melodies make tracks like “Labyrinth” and “Dead Ringers” mostly forgettable, and a borrowed title like “Midnight Cowboy” relies on the classic cinema reference to conjure what Rattigan’s uninspired lyricism can’t. In its final moments, Heaven Surrounds You attempts to deliver profound awareness of mortality: “I love all the people in my life/All my friends keep me alive,” Rattigan sings. As with much of the record, there’s likely a far deeper implication behind the clichés—he just needs a more insightful script.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Danger Collective | September 23, 2019 | 6.5 | 3047adbe-3e3e-4a9c-8d0c-ff371ebe6cc1 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Returning to the apocalyptic club setting of its early-’90s work, the industrial metal duo crafts the most inviting record of its late career. | Returning to the apocalyptic club setting of its early-’90s work, the industrial metal duo crafts the most inviting record of its late career. | Godflesh: Purge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godflesh-purge/ | Purge | Since forming in 1982, Godflesh have mastered a sound that blends overwhelming intensity with superhuman restraint. Along with the announcement for Purge, the duo’s first studio album in six years, Justin Broadrick explained the title is a reference to his recent diagnoses with autism and PTSD. “I'm blessed with the fire of creation, and it’s how I transcend the curse,” he wrote. “I have to create, and regularly, or I disappear further into the realms of my conditions.” In Purge’s songs of alienation and frustration, Broadrick does battle with himself, animating his struggles through a set of colossal beats and blistering guitars that forecast what the ambience of a club might be like at the hour of judgment.
This isn’t the first time Godflesh have taken to this setting. On 1991’s Slavestate EP, they took inspiration from EBM (electric body music), which they further explored on the following year’s bleaker full-length, Pure. Those songs relied on drum loops and trance-like structures paired with Broadrick’s harsh, often atonal riffage to introduce a metallic, hip-hop-inspired post-metal sound that has never left their music since. Godflesh’s programmed drums have always sounded like your hand might get caught in them if you got too close, and Purge brings them back to the bounce of early landmarks like “Spite” and “Mothra.” “Nero” opens the record with swinging hi-hats and a spoken vocal sample laid over top of Broadricks’s wave of syncopated picking patterns and abbreviated two-note melodies. But any dancefloor euphoria is quickly undercut by the lyrics, as Broadrick growls instructions to “restrain yourself” and “betray your needs.”
The brighter sound of Purge sets it apart from the first two post-reunion Godflesh albums, 2014’s A World Lit Only By Fire and 2017’s Post Self. B.C. Green’s bass takes on a more quiet and diffusive presence, a suffocating rumble instead of his more characteristic crushing overdrive. Broadrick’s guitar, meanwhile, sounds like it’s running on gasoline, and it’s complemented best on the climactic, breakbeat-driven “Permission.” A crunchy “OH!” responds to each snare hit while Broadrick’s echoing pleas collapse into full-throated barks and his guitar dips into dissonant frenzies. The repetitive structure lends a false sense of stability that makes the shift all the more unsettling, a slowly unfolding floor-filler of a track that recalls Edmund Burke’s assessment of the sublime as “not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror.”
The militaristic “The Father” and head-crushing “Mythology of Self” are a stark comedown: Their spare and lopsided drum patterns draw attention to the moments when Broadrick and Green lock in, each unison hitting like a blow to the face. Broadrick has said that he sees Godflesh’s brand of aggression as a defensive gesture opposed to the chest-puffing masculinity he’s wrestled against in other extreme genres. His aim is catharsis, channeling violent extremes for the sake of security not domination. On Purge, Godflesh strike a balance between communal vulnerability and seething hostility that makes for the most inviting entry in their late career. | 2023-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Avalanche | June 26, 2023 | 7.4 | 304904d4-23c9-4818-8b79-cddd01183b92 | Mateo Rispoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mateo-rispoli/ | |
The New York rapper’s highly anticipated debut album is another big, long flex from one of the most skilled rappers to emerge in the last five years. | The New York rapper’s highly anticipated debut album is another big, long flex from one of the most skilled rappers to emerge in the last five years. | Young M.A: Herstory in the Making | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-ma-herstory-in-the-making/ | Herstory in the Making | In the immediate wake of the viral 2016 hit “OOOUUU,” Young M.A was quickly projected to be a trailblazer for modern New York City rap, pegged as a rejuvenator for quintessential New York City rap, and preordained as the city’s best pure rapper in what had felt like ages. She was the hottest rapper of the moment, maybe the most promising hometown prospect since 50 Cent, and even he was impressed.
Usually, all stories of viral rap success play out in the same way—a label swoops in after a bidding war, new music is released posthaste, and most of it sounds dangerously close to the viral hit itself. But something funny happened with M.A: She never signed with a major, she held off on rushing out an album, and she retreated deeper into her notepad, not once trying to recreate her signature song. Without much of an attempt to capitalize on her virality, the hype subsided, and many wrote Young M.A off as a flash in the pan. In a twist, in the years since, she has quietly lived up to everything unfairly foisted upon her.
Young M.A isn’t just one of the best rappers in her city, she’s one of the best anywhere. She has spent her free moments, during on-air appearances or hijacking other rapper’s songs, putting beats through the torture rack until she’s cracked them. Though a longtime master of the form, her freestyles have become epics. Her singles have become confessionals. In these structureless spaces, she’s unleashed. Her verses feel undiluted and ceaseless; she seems inexhaustible, like she could rap forever. Herstory in the Making, her long-awaited debut album, was supposed to be a punctuation mark. It was meant to put a cap on this arc, to give shape to her untreated verses and her story. Instead, it is merely another flex, another display of her competence and skill. She runs the gauntlet and comes out largely unscathed.
A name like Herstory in the Making implies biography and Young M.A has confirmed as much in interviews. She always seems to be setting the record straight in her raps, but these aren’t her memoirs. In an attempt to offer all of herself, she ends up providing only glimpses, never settling long enough to divulge much. Despite that, she finds enough balance to provide a convincing self-portrait. There is plenty of the tough M.A—the raw M.A—to satiate fans of her bruiser raps, especially on bum-rushing songs like “No Mercy” and “Bleed,” but there is vulnerability elsewhere. The NY Bangers-produced “Sober Thoughts” reveals struggles with depression and substance abuse in the aftermath of her celebrity. When she lets her guard down, she grows as a storyteller.
The most glaring illustration of this is “No Love,” on which Young M.A wrestles with her brother’s murder and her own proximity to street life. As the song goes on, she keeps reliving his death in different contexts, feeling its impact in different ways. It is some of her most centered writing. “I seen my brother go from human to Casper/From a bed to a casket/Tryna move on, but it’s like my life goin’ backwards,” she remembers, trapped in a nightmare. There’s no love in the streets so she finds it elsewhere—down a bottle of Hennessey, in her mother, and in God. She always raps with clarity, but when she writes with purpose her songs become even more affecting. Sometimes, the writing is so crisp that it becomes like journaling in its detail and narrative focus. “My paychecks use to be a pair of Jordans/And I know I can’t afford ’em, but I went ahead and bought ’em/Then I quit, started slangin’, spent my money on recordin’/Yeah, the studio was small, but man, that shit made me a fortune,” she raps on “Car Confessions,” as clear a rendering of converting aspiration into inspiration as you’ll ever hear.
There is such a natural finesse and composure to M.A’s rapping that it can, at times, seem almost casual. But it’s easy to underestimate what’s happening on Herstory in the Making because she performs a rap clinic for nearly 70 minutes without exerting much energy. While the album may not be the resounding statement of self the title makes it out to be, it is a fine endorsement of everything that those who have ignored her have been missing. If nothing else, Herstory in the Making is an exhibition of Young M.A’s ability to rap proficiently over anything. She bobs her way through the muted, glowing Mike Zombie-produced “BIG” and then lurches through Zaytoven’s trap gospel on “Kold World” like Peak Gucci Mane. She slides off the “My Hitta” synths with singsong flows. With each song on her debut, Young M.A is reasserting her place in rap. | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | M.A. Music / 3D | October 3, 2019 | 7.3 | 304a9734-5357-47a9-b708-57895e9f03a4 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On their follow-up to 2012's Shrines, Purity Ring find the pop world about where they left it. If their balance of delicacy and danger doesn't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute. | On their follow-up to 2012's Shrines, Purity Ring find the pop world about where they left it. If their balance of delicacy and danger doesn't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute. | Purity Ring: another eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20306-another-eternity/ | another eternity | In early 2011, Purity Ring showed us the perfect balance for "future pop": Be ahead of your time, but not toofar ahead."Belispeak" and "Ungirthed" perfectly anticipated the reframing of indie pop as festival-ready "Internet music", and when Shrines came out, about a year later, the Edmonton duo saw their star rise alongside the similarly-minded polyglots like Grimes, kindred spirits who helped shift the sonic paradigm further away from guitars. But if pop listeners come for the songs, they tend to stay for the personalities, and this is the issue facing Purity Ring on another eternity. On their debut, Megan James and Corin Roddick were hard to read and analysis-averse, and they remain so. Their sound remains singular, but is it still interesting?
Staying the course, as they largely do on another eternity, isn’t that risky a proposition for them: The pop world seems right about where Shrines left it. Accordingly, James and Roddick try to close the gap separating their vision of pop from actual pop. The bolder and brighter presentation of another eternity singles "push pull" and "begin again" gets them awfully close to latter-day Taylor Swift or Katy Perry; "repetition" could’ve popped up on If You’re Reading This It's Too Late or serve as a backing track for the next Miley Cyrus single, all acts whose 2013-2014 output drew liberally from Purity Ring.
But if Purity Ring don't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute. Within the first minute of another eternity, the ease of recognizing Purity Ring amongst their still-growing brood of imitators is actually startling. If the lower-case stylization of another eternity and its song titles seems overly precious, at least it’s congruent with James’ distinct vocal approach. She works something like an origami expert, quickly folding and refolding melodies until they’re acutely angled, pointed, and elegant.
James’ lyrics explore the same juxtaposition of delicacy and danger, though less so than on Shrines. She promised a more personal, present-tense perspective than her past work, and so her macabre, childlike fascination with bodily functions is applied to more adult situations, like breakups and such. At best, James’ impressionism leaves an imprint on your brain—on "repetition", the curious boast "Watching me is like watching the fire take your eyes from you" is delivered with enough gusto to hit at a gut level.
However, by posting the lyrics sheet prior to the release of another eternity, the duo revealed as many "o’ers" and leering, stiff turns of phrase as a Decemberists album ("Baby why don’t you see my sea/ Get inside and build your castle into me"). At times, the moony metaphors devolve into Wordsworth Tumblr-jumble, and on "stillness in woe", James achieves a sort of Purity Ring singularity with one line: "Meet me in the back shed/ I’ll be hanging up the knives/ Humming melodies that rhyme/ Building castles out of shovels."
It's this twee undercurrent that manages to keep Purity Ring nominally "indie", and also provides crucial contrast with Roddick’s productions. Roddick wants to remind listeners more of Mike WiLL Made It and Noah "40" Shebib than Burial and the Knife this time, and he makes everything sound more cushy and cavernous, evoking the sensation of sitting on the most comfortable couch in the club after everyone leaves. Throughout, Purity Ring manages to sound big without sounding expensive, forgoing nuance and detail for scalability. Stream it on laptop speakers and you can still picture every dazzling MIDI trigger in a live setting.
James and Roddick altered their process for another eternity, working together in the same studio, and as a result they seem to have gravitated towards the sort of tricks meant to provoke an immediate, contagious enthusiasm from the person standing right next to you. Credit to Purity Ring for being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they’ve spent the past couple of years playing festivals and collaborating with the bigger names in oddball mainstream rap (Angel Haze, Danny Brown, Ab-Soul). The beats that pop up during the hooks of opening duo "heartsigh" and "bodyache" are meant for bleacher stomping, while there are legitimate "Levels"-level drops on "begin again". Any sort of indignation feels misplaced—you might as well shake your fist at a rock song for containing a riff. But most of Roddick's "new" tricks could’ve ended up on Shrines, whether it's the apparitional, pitched-down vocals, flickering Auto-Tune, warped bass and a fairly brazen nick of Frank Ocean’s "Thinkin Bout You" on "stranger than earth". As a result, it's difficult to tell when another eternity builds on Shrines and when Shrines is being stripped for parts.
By every objective standard, even the one set by its near-suffocatingly cohesive predecessor, this is a narrow work. Eight of its 1o tracks clock in between 3:15 and 3:40, and its tone, timbre, topicality and flow are pathologically even-keeled; there’s nothing to upset the equilibrium like Shrines' jarring Young Magic guest spot "Grandloves". Verses and choruses are pretty much equidistant at all times. You can imagine another eternity as beat-tape like source material, where just about every melody could be extracted for outside hook use.
Perhaps we should’ve saw that coming considering the numerous allusions to repetition and new starts in both the album and song titles. But the most worrisome bit of referentiality comes not from Roddick's production or James' melodies, but from a recycling of Shrines’ most powerful image. That one came on "Fineshrine", where James experienced a love so overwhelming and frightening, she asked them to climb inside her rib cage. "seacastle" likewise views sexual congress as a supernatural escape plan and on "repetition" she echoes the favor from "Fineshrine"—"Climb up in my rattling spine and I’ll contract." This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves. | 2015-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 4AD | March 2, 2015 | 6.6 | 304af0a3-b39e-4dd4-8fcc-c2666ac5ad38 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Portland quartet crank up the chorus and distortion pedals in service of jangly hooks and gleaming counter-melodies. | The Portland quartet crank up the chorus and distortion pedals in service of jangly hooks and gleaming counter-melodies. | Alien Boy: Don’t Know What I Am | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alien-boy-dont-know-what-i-am/ | Don’t Know What I Am | Like any hopeless romantic worth their weight in mix CDs, Alien Boy wears its heart on its sleeve. The group takes its name from an EP by Portland punk legends the Wipers; their roster of covers includes a bleak take on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and a morphiated Morrisey on the Smiths’ “Hand in Glove.” And like her influences, Alien Boy guitarist and vocalist Sonia Weber works at extremes: Every TV show is Friday Night Lights, every romance is like a dream, every melody is coated in chorus effect. The band’s new album, Don’t Know What I Am, wraps contemporary angst in a shimmering haze, drowning depression in lustrous dream pop.
With a pedal roster longer than the tracklist, Don’t Know What I Am vibrates with echo and reverb. The album arrives during a resurgence of shoegaze within emo and metal, with bands like Deafheaven and Nothing leading the charge. Alien Boy check some of those boxes: Like their 2018 debut full-length Sleeping Lessons, this record was produced by Jack Shirley, a former screamo bandleader known for his expertise in effects-heavy, effusive metal.
But where many of their contemporaries lean into the genre’s jagged edges, Alien Boy reach for chorus and distortion in service of jangly hooks and gleaming counter-melodies, more Cure than Codeine. “Nothing’s Enough” bounces with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ psychedelic sheen; “Ache #2” (named for the Jawbreaker song) recalls the paranoid bassline of “Every Breath You Take.” Where Sleeping Lessons felt top-heavy, with no song quite matching the nostalgic gleam of its opener, Don’t Know What I Am uses pacing to its advantage. Just as things begin to grow sleepy on “Seventeen,” “How Do I Think When Yr Asleep?” opens the proverbial pit with drum rolls and breakneck guitar solos. Weber’s vocals are clean and earnest, more about feeling than perfect form, as if to match the vulnerability in her lyrics.
She sings about “you” and “me” and “them,” obscuring the proper nouns of her life, but her disarmingly intimate words ache with a specific loneliness. As on Sleeping Lessons, the lyrics track the bitter end of a relationship, but here, Weber wrestles with messier aspects of acceptance and identity long after the breakup: “Sometimes I look in the mirror and you’re all I see,” she confesses on “Memory’s Vault.” “Something Better” comes closest to a thesis for the record: “Is it okay to still feel this way?” She takes a cue from Moz, repeating words and phrases until they turn into chants that inject energy into the album’s most despondent moments. “I want something better than out here,” she cries. Shouted enough times, it starts to sound aspirational.
There’s nothing jaded about the world of Alien Boy; Weber picks over old fights like scabbed wounds. The emotional openness of her writing sets the band apart from contemporary shoegaze inclinations towards existential ennui. It’s one thing to cover up your detached nihilism with reverb; it’s in some ways riskier to lean into the desperate romance of Loveless. And sure, hearing Weber sing about giving her “fragile heart” to a lover might summon a few eye-rolls from the Sargent House crowd. But Alien Boy knows that it’s futile to put up a front. As Weber concedes on “Memory Vault,” “It’s just too hard to be cool.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Get Better | August 24, 2021 | 7.4 | 304b8931-d000-4a1e-a0e8-e2ee77e95e07 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they ... | These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they ... | Liars: They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4764-they-threw-us-all-in-a-trench-and-stuck-a-monument-on-top/ | They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top | These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they hate you. You didn't do anything; they're just sick of your bullshit. And what're you gonna say back? The singer's a towering, lanky Australian named Angus-- that's Scottish for "Bubba"-- and the music's a gray nightmare of art-punk and noisy beats. It's vicious, but you can dance to it!
No matter how much buzz they draw-- appearing on the John Peel show, touring with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, having their debut re-released on Blast First-- the Liars will stay hostile and insidious. They make what I can only describe as cyborg junkyard rock. Guitarist Angus Hempell plays messy power chords and high-pitched, lobotomizingly zen-like guitar lines, but he also has a drum machine: dig "Mr. You're on Fire Mr.," where he sticks programmed fills where you'd expect guitar riffs. The lo-fi electronics and sound effects that pervade the album give it a rhythmic kick, but while other artists try to make samples sound human, the Liars work to sound hypnotically mechanical. On "Nothing Is Ever Lost or Can Be," they lurch and march-step to jerky high notes and tumbling drum fills.
Angus Andrews is impenetrable, showing the emotional range of a matchbook: he's either flat or flared. His sing/shouting switches from weary to angry and back again, and just try to make sense of the splintered, hostile lyrics he spits like rat poison: "They cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up at the medical school."
It's up to bassist Pat Nature and Ron Albertson on "friendly drums" to reign in the noise, and Nature puts all the torque into the band: listen to "We Live NE of Compton," where the bassline kicks it into a killer dance-punk number; and to see his modest side, check out how his steady rumble keeps "Loose Nuts on the Veladrome" together while the rest of the band buzzes off in every direction. He's the reason it's impossible to write about this band without comparing them to Gang of Four-- that post-punk tendency to impale rage and noise on the sharp edge of a floor-beating rhythm.
But sticking with that would be too easy. Every time the Liars bust out a stone-cold party favorite, they answer it with a track that feels like sticking your head in a vice. "Tumbling Walls Buried Me in Debris" is disorientingly repetitive, with a sinking, introverted melody, zen-like chimes and an eerie beat that sounds like the delusion-sequence music from a P.O.W. film: Charlie's got us gagged and bound and tortured, and nobody gets out of here without a migraine.
I've played They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top a dozen times in the last couple days, and I get something different each time. Sometimes I find new sounds; sometimes I feel like I get less out of it with every listen. It's not clear where their tactics are going, whether it'll come together on the next album, or whether this fragmented style is the thing that makes them great. In fact, all that is clear is that it's rare that a band rocks this hard and still challenges you at every turn.
The last track is the final showdown. "This Dirt Makes Mud" is a drawn-out slide of grinding, throbbing rock with Andrews moaning and shouting while Hempell squeaks and squalls and Nature rumbles menacingly underneath. In direct opposition to the brief songs on the rest of the album, this is a rock epic, but here's the trick: the music doesn't stop. At roughly the moment any other song here would end, the band fades into a four-second loop, and once the machine's going, they take off and get a beer while it plays over, and over, and over, for more than twenty minutes. You can leave whenever you want, but then you're quitting before the album does. Maybe this is a statement, maybe they're killing time, and maybe it's just the sound of a band crawling up its own ass. But when's the last time a record dared you to blink first? | 2002-07-17T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-07-17T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Gern Blandsten | July 17, 2002 | 8.1 | 304c3f1c-41a8-484d-922a-d02478966220 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Stuck at home on lockdown, the London rapper returns to her long-running mixtape series with a gloomy, affecting meditation on self-reliance that feels as claustrophobic as a one-room apartment. | Stuck at home on lockdown, the London rapper returns to her long-running mixtape series with a gloomy, affecting meditation on self-reliance that feels as claustrophobic as a one-room apartment. | Little Simz: Drop 6 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-simz-drop-6-ep/ | Drop 6 EP | Little Simz punctuated 2014 and 2015 with her Drops series: spontaneous, carefree mixtapes that established her as a curious and brave voice in UK rap. She used these Drops to open up with diaristic verses and work freely with collaborators from across the spectrum. Since releasing the last Drop in December 2015, she’s reached new heights. Her third album, 2019’s acclaimed GREY Area, was her brassiest, most daring, and most profound work yet. But this year, finding herself locked down in London, where she lives alone, Simbi Ajikawo decided to go back to her roots with Drop 6: a gloomy meditation that proves she’s still spontaneous and self-reliant, if no longer carefree.
Simz retains the confidence of GREY Area, opening the EP with an urgent running bassline and a lyric aligning herself with “Lauryn Hill back in the ’90s” (a comparison that has been bestowed upon her many times before). But this time, between the stripped-down drums and the metallic echo that haunts much of the record, a palpable feeling of loneliness surrounds her self-empowerment. As the EP loosens its pace, and more anxious thoughts creep into its fabric, you get the sense that these lines about self-confidence are not so much boasts as notes to herself. On Instagram, Simz talked about how she pushed through a crisis of confidence to finish the EP in April, while lockdown was sparking mental-health issues. Struggling against “all that self-doubt shit I never imagined thinking,” she notes, “I gassed myself up. There’s no one else here, I’m alone, I had to.”
In between lines celebrating her success, Simz gives the impression of an artist halted mid-stride. She’s elated to be at such a successful point in her career, but she faces the pressure of calculating her next move—and, more to the point, she’s locked down like the rest of us, confronting mortality as well as enforced solitude. The world of these songs feels as small as a one-bedroom apartment. Each consists of little more than drums, snaking bassline, and Simz’s flare of a voice, and most run for less than three minutes. The shuffling, spare “you should call mum” is a song for the quarantine era: “Crabs in a barrel, we all in this,” she spits, between slow-rolling choruses about sleepless nights and nap-filled days. This circling of the same sounds and themes is an extreme form of introspection from a notoriously introspective artist. Occasionally, it becomes too claustrophobic, as with the off-the-cuff “damn right,” on which Simz cruises steadily in one gear.
This confinement prevents the EP from reaching GREY Area’s heights, but Drop 6 still contains deeply affecting moments—particularly when Simz lands on cautious, conditional optimism. At the EP’s end, on “where’s my lighter,” she looks ahead to the future and her “next masterpiece” while keeping one fearful eye on the present. The EP’s final verse finishes mid-thought: “Breaking my back to make sure my family eats like...” That sense of uncertainty bleeds through every track—two of which have “might” in the title, including the most upbeat, with a hook that boasts, “I’ve got one life and I might just live it.” But it hits hardest on that piano-embellished final song, which is lifted by the smoky tendrils of London singer Alewya’s voice, and where Simz herself takes vocal leaps. Where the other songs are short and sharp, this one twists and turns through melancholia toward a lighter, softer promise that better days are still to come. | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Age 101 | May 13, 2020 | 7.7 | 304de8dd-db04-4aa8-9e94-88d95ba20785 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Toro Y Moi’s new album serves as further evidence that malleability is the project's most endearing quality. If What For? is Chaz Bundick’s "indie rock album," the "rock" part is a vestigial appendage: This is guitar music without abrasion or yearning. | Toro Y Moi’s new album serves as further evidence that malleability is the project's most endearing quality. If What For? is Chaz Bundick’s "indie rock album," the "rock" part is a vestigial appendage: This is guitar music without abrasion or yearning. | Toro y Moi: What For? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20385-what-for/ | What For? | Calling What For? a return to Chaz Bundick’s roots is accurate and also fairly misleading. The guitar-driven giddiness of "Empty Nesters" was a surprise whether or not you’ve heard June 2009, a collection of early Toro Y Moi recordings given a quiet, proper release in 2012. But at the very least, it provides precedent: before "Blessa", Bundick was sorting out what he wanted Toro Y Moi to be, and he wrote a number of classicist, lo-fi indie rock songs. Some of them kinda sounded like Weezer. (No, really.) That said, the past five years have seen Toro Y Moi change from a bedroom project to a tight, adventurous and successful touring band, so if What For? is Bundick revisiting his awkward phase, he’s doing so like a late bloomer confidently showing up to his high school reunion knowing just how well he’s aged.
Every Toro Y Moi release finds the band in transition, and so What For? might be seen as a regression in some ways; ditching guitar rock for electronics has become a sign of maturity for both listeners and artists, inverting the typical rockist trajectory. However, Bundick has always been canny about switching lanes: at the time, 2013’s Anything in Return felt like Toro Y Moi hitting its stride, making liquid and limber electro-acoustic dance-pop. Or, he sounded like a cuddly, plush Caribou, a role easier to accept in the absence of new Caribou music and the mutual artistic appreciation between Bundick and Dan Snaith. But then, Our Love threatened to make Toro Y Moi redundant and while Bundick’s Les Sins has run concurrent to his main gig, it's proven him to be an enthusiastic, earnest, and ultimately functional dance producer.
What For? then serves as further evidence that Toro Y Moi’s malleability is the project's most endearing quality. That and Bundick is something of a post-grad role model, having the ability to be flexible, amenable to change, and ultimately successful in all ventures without showing much struggle. There are a handful of new modes here: the Woods-y rusticity on "Ratcliff" and "Run Baby Run"’s pinwheel-eyed pop-rock would’ve been out of place on any prior release. But throughout, there’s revelation in the aesthetic familiarity Bundick has established: in particular, the globular harmonies, cushy production, and a pervasive dampness that either recalls the fog of his new home Berkeley or the humidity of his native South Carolina.
So if this is called Toro Y Moi’s "indie rock album," the "rock" part is a vestigial appendage: yes, the basis for pretty much everything here is a trad power trio set up and the synthesizers use tones that predate the '80s and will thus be called "organic." But this is guitar music without abrasion or yearning, and it’ll play just as well in the venues in which Underneath the Pine and An**ything in Return were suited for—rooftop parties, barbecues, apartment get-togethers.
And after his first three LPs were given counterintuitive deep winter release dates, What For? admits to Toro Y Moi’s music sounding best when the weather’s making you feel a bit more irresponsible than usual. So, even when the band shows vigor during the liftoff of "Empty Nesters", the quick pivots of "Buffalo", and the uptempo funk of "Spell It Out", nothing seems particularly pressing. Even as Bundick appears to have moved on from post-collegiate concerns to straight-up adult problems, What For? most oftens advocates tabling discussion until emotions have settled.
Which is to say that the pleasantry of Toro Y Moi might not be its most endearing quality, but it’s certainly the most enduring. The conversation should not end there—they’re pleasant, but so is Real Estate. So is Mac DeMarco. So is the War on Drugs. So is the vast majority of popular indie rock. And though these are Toro Y Moi’s peers, putting Bundick against them might seem unfair: he does not deal with Big Emotional Issues as directly as the aforementioned. The bigger problem is that What For? doesn’t address much of anything directly, and that’s an issue on a record which appears to make Bundick’s chops as a songwriter and a lyricist a focal point.
Befitting a guy best known for crafting a vibe, one can sense these songs are emotive and heartfelt. But close reading for confirmation shows thoughts that may have once conveyed relatable feelings forced against their will to become lyrics, i.e., "Let’s awaken and turn on our minds/ No one is waiting for you in this line." Either that or the persistent indifference tipped by the title of What For? becomes maddening whenever Bundick soft-sells waffles like, "It’s whatever you want to do" or, subsequently, "What is it you want to do?" So when he pleads, "do I need to spell it out," the answer is actually, "well, yes." Without any kind of emotional or sonic grain to grip, what were well-constructed, well-meaning songs minutes prior are reduced to placeholders in your memory—"the one with the clavinet," "the lead single," "the six-minute closer." The problem isn't that Bundick avoids confrontation or confession—most people do. But What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it. | 2015-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | April 7, 2015 | 6.6 | 3053e6be-fa4b-4e41-9e55-e42ccc6a6272 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
After returning to solo status as a bandleader, Jilian Medford drops the spiky singing style that was her trademark, finding a softer delivery within the darkened corners of dream pop. | After returning to solo status as a bandleader, Jilian Medford drops the spiky singing style that was her trademark, finding a softer delivery within the darkened corners of dream pop. | IAN SWEET: Crush Crusher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-sweet-crush-crusher/ | Crush Crusher | The premise of Crush Crusher, the second album by Ian Sweet, reads like the tagline for a Meg Ryan rom-com that will, as always, end well: “Jilian Medford is on her own… again.” After several years with a trio, the Ian Sweet founder went solo after her bandmates went misogynistic. This isn’t altogether unfamiliar territory for Medford, who began the band as a solo project while attending Berklee College of Music. Still, she sounds wary of how everything will turn out—her love life, her anxiety, her self-worth. Crush Crusher captures Ian Sweet during a growth spurt, and, in spite of some growing pains, Medford embraces the change, pushing herself as a singer, songwriter, and musician pursuing independence.
Until now, Ian Sweet’s trademark has been Medford’s spiky singing style. Her voice rocketed into squeaky bursts that were dramatic and playful, like a child being tickled. The sound carried the melodies on her 2014 debut and subsequently separated Ian Sweet from their peers on 2016’s Shapeshifter. Melodramatic guitars countered what could have been a crutch, and they fed off one another. Alone for Crush Crusher, Medford tries something different: a softer, breathier delivery that elongates in pools of reverb. Lyrically, the album is about insecurities and the burden of carrying a loved one’s feelings (see “Ugly/Bored” or “Borrowed Body”), but the straightforward way Medford sings about those subjects spotlights an increasing self-assurance that bolsters her words.
This shift in style, plus slimming the band from three to one, opened more space in these songs, which Medford fills with guitar amps. Inspired by the synth-heavy sway of Peter Gabriel and the gruffness of Crass, Ian Sweet veers here into the noisier side of dream pop, immediately seeking its darker corners. The riff-centric “Spit” gnarls its way through some of Medford’s best guitarwork, drifting toward Slint. “Crush Crusher” tries out electronic drum pads for a groove that recalls Autolux. These gloomy tones sometimes make the songs fade into one another like infinite shades of gray, especially when her voice recedes into the background. But when it’s front and center, as on “Hiding,” the two complement one another. With every reprise of “I forgot myself in you” during the chorus, Medford does the opposite, stepping into the spotlight and away from the shadows of her past.
Crush Crusher asks questions of and frets over transition: “Did you get out of your head to get into mine?” Medford sings in “Borrowed Body.” She doesn’t offer the answers because she’s still figuring them out. What makes Crush Crusher notable and compelling is the confidence she displays in spite of what she doesn’t know about now or the future. She pulls her softer singing style to the forefront. She struts from noisy indie rock into dream pop. She commits to change, even while admitting her faults. | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | November 3, 2018 | 6.5 | 30542dd5-ad38-4806-9227-d2d809e03762 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
After the complex structures of his quintet’s debut, the rising Brooklyn jazz musician strips down to a trio of bass, trombone, and gayageum to explore fluid arrangements and textural interplay. | After the complex structures of his quintet’s debut, the rising Brooklyn jazz musician strips down to a trio of bass, trombone, and gayageum to explore fluid arrangements and textural interplay. | Nick Dunston : Spider Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-dunston-spider-season/ | Spider Season | If the New York jazz scene handed out Rookie of the Year awards, Nick Dunston would have been a top contender for 2019’s honors. At just 23 years old, the Brooklyn bassist spent the year logging live dates with avant-garde luminaries like Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, and Tyshawn Sorey; landed a year-long fellowship at Roulette; and released his first album as a bandleader, Atlantic Extraction, which a rhapsodic JazzTimes review declared “the debut of the year.”
Though Dunston had already proven a qualified and prolific sideman, the album confirmed that his real talent lay in composition and arrangement. He has mentioned in interviews that as a teenager, he gravitated toward the complex arrangements of big-band jazz rather than the free-form shape of more improvisational styles. His structural inclinations were much in evidence on Atlantic Extraction: Fractured into 16 relatively short vignettes, the record embraced the modular nature of his quintet, shuffling players in and out of the studio to test as many combinations of performers and instruments as possible. Braxton-esque classical fusion stood shoulder to shoulder with winking forays into twangy bluegrass and no-wave skronk, bridged by interludes of loops cut and pasted from other tracks. It was a kaleidoscopic work, revealing genres within genres and overlapping ideas that blurred together as soon as you thought you’d grasped them.
Spider Season, Dunston’s stark sophomore record, inverts the formula. Scaling his band down to a trio featuring Kalia Vandever on trombone and DoYeon Kim on gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument, Dunston relies on variations in technique rather than arrangement to maintain a state of flux. He often takes the lead on upright bass, lunging ahead of his colleagues to rattle off dense clusters of notes. But his improvisation is just as engaging when he takes a step back, sawing with his bow or toying with effects pedals to produce eerie drones. He’s fascinated by the diverse range of pitchless textures he and his bandmates can produce with their respective instruments, and Spider Season’s strongest tracks zero in on their atonal interplay.
On “Ficus Elastica,” Dunston and Kim fashion an unsettling collage out of scuttling fingers and the scrape of bow against bass, drawing attention to the severity of their playing before returning to the tonal sphere. Vandever’s trombone assumes a supporting role as the pair knot tense, sharply plucked phrases together; sustained notes soften the joints like cartilage. On the following track, “Pre-Nasal Tension,” Kim ad-libs wordless vocals atop ominous instrumentation, producing raspy, glottal creaks that remind listeners that the voice is also, in part, a stringed instrument. While the piece’s stream-of-consciousness structure verges on obscurity, players carve clear pathways through the chaos.
The 10-minute “Thousand-Year-Old Vampire” offers a revolving showcase of the band’s full creative arsenal. Dunston opens with a solo, swerving in and out of piercing registers and scrubbing at strings like he’s trying to snap them in two. His jagged, unaccompanied playing sounds like a slasher flick’s climactic scene, but Vandever’s somber trombone blasts rein him in. The two briefly tangle, bowed notes grinding against brass, with Vandever eventually coming out on top. Dunston returns to pizzicato as Kim enters the mix halfway through, and the band concludes in a flurry of quick melodic stabs and incidental rattling.
Offering a holistic overview of Dunston’s range, Atlantic Extraction might make for a more accessible entry point into his work, but Spider Season’s narrow focus reveals more about his tastes as a composer and improviser. By placing equal value on the musical and decidedly non-musical qualities of each instrument, the record maps out the shifting web of relationships between performers. Each scrape, thump, or screech has a tangible effect on the room’s energy. Even in a trio setting, Dunston’s curiosity creates a plethora of possibilities. No two songs of his ever sound alike. | 2022-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Out of Your Head | July 19, 2022 | 7.2 | 30582273-6a7d-4202-b235-58101d3380aa | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
This ’60s-loving London band, featuring former Veronica Falls member James Hoare, craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop. The new LP is a warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony. | This ’60s-loving London band, featuring former Veronica Falls member James Hoare, craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop. The new LP is a warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony. | The Proper Ornaments: Foxhole | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22784-foxhole/ | Foxhole | Looked at cynically, the Proper Ornaments is a great name for a band infatuated with their record collections—a group that decorates their spare little songs with only the most finely curated influences, like so many baubles on a tree. The Beatles’ White Album here, Pink Floyd’s Meddle there. The Beta Band here, Yo La Tengo there. The Velvet Underground everywhere.
But there’s no reason to be cynical about this London quartet. The Proper Ornaments are based primarily around the songwriting partnership of James Hoare (of Ultimate Painting and Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold. Unlike some of their ’60s-loving, vinyl-obsessed peers (Crystal Stilts, say, or looking back a little farther, Brian Jonestown Massacre), it’s possible to separate your appreciation of the Ornaments’ nifty influences from your appreciation of their songs. The pair craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop stitched together by gorgeous, laidback harmonies. Compared to their excellent 2014 album, Wooden Head, Foxhole turns down the six-string jangle and turns up the sad-sack vibes for a more intimate, lovelorn affair. This is a Sunday morning, lay-in-bed-’til-2 p.m. album—a big warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony.
True, this kind of thing has been done many times before. But what’s remarkable about Foxhole is just how effortlessly the Proper Ornaments pull it off. (Of course, the band is well aware that making the effortful sound effortless was a major part of the Velvets’ mojo, too.) The Ornaments’ new focus on the piano smooths out the band’s rougher edges, giving songs like “Memories” and “Just a Dream” a seductively sad pallor. Hoare and Oscarnold’s sly guitar work remains the band’s centerpiece, however. On “The Frozen Stare” and “Cremated (Blown Away),” their supple electric guitars trade riffs like old friends at a bar.
The Ornaments take their time on Foxhole. Tunes built on layers of acoustic guitar, piano, and soft percussion unwind lazily, never drawing too much attention to themselves (see, in particular, “I Know You Know,” a dead ringer for a B-side from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned & Dethroned sessions). No one plays very hard, yet the melodies stick. As with Wooden Head, the Ornaments’ power lies in their restraint.
Despite all the comfy sounds, the band’s lyrical vision is chilly, dead-eyed, sinister. A near-suffocating sense of regret over lost love and good times past hangs over the entire record. On “Cremated,” Oscarnold longs to be turned to ash with his former lover, their remains dumped together in the same jar. The album title itself is a reference to the claustrophobic horrors of war: “Private, don’t speak/Don’t move at all/Keep your head down/In the foxhole,” Hoare sings on “Jeremy’s Song.”
All that gloom goes down easy, however. The Ornaments are rarely heavy-handed or solipsistic about their troubles. And anyway, it’s nostalgia—regret’s more hopeful, more sentimental cousin—that remains the record’s core concern. “See me in the back page of last year’s modern age,” Hoare sings on album standout “Back Pages,” positioning his band as both defiantly out of step with the status quo and dedicated to the ideals of an earlier, better time. The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical. | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Tough Love | January 18, 2017 | 7.4 | 305b964c-0704-4539-8c52-a6b5ba740680 | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
The cartoonist and drummer for the post-punk quintet Pottery explores gently lysergic visions on his psych-pop solo albums. | The cartoonist and drummer for the post-punk quintet Pottery explores gently lysergic visions on his psych-pop solo albums. | Paul Jacobs: Pink Dogs on the Green Grass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-jacobs-pink-dogs-on-the-green-grass/ | Pink Dogs on the Green Grass | Paul Jacobs’ cartoon world is constantly expanding. Since uprooting himself from the border city of Windsor, Ontario to the perpetually buzzing Montreal music scene, his hand-drawn animations and hallucinatory illustrations have graced the covers of multiple albums per year. As the drummer of post-punk quintet Pottery, Jacobs is the engine behind yelpy extended jams that sound equally at home on a nightclub dancefloor or at a psych festival. Yet it’s solo albums like Pink Dogs on the Green Grass where Jacobs’ soft-focus, lysergic visions truly bloom.
Before moving to Windsor, Jacobs grew up in the even smaller town of Leamington, a city recently making headlines for drug busts and lockdown non-compliances. At age 4, he started playing drums in the church where his mom worked as a cleaner, but could only find hardcore and death metal groups to join in the sparse local scene. By necessity, Jacobs first emerged in the early 2010s as a one-man band, stomping out echo-drenched garage-rock reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees. As Jacobs’ discography grew, so did his songwriting ambitions, with 2016’s Pictures, Movies & Apartments providing an early glimpse at a tuneful side under smears of no-fi shoegaze.
Now that Jacobs has reinvented himself as a psych-pop troubadour, the simplest comparisons are probably Kurt Vile’s pretty daze and White Fence’s trippy haze, but it’s Cass McCombs he has namechecked as an enduring inspiration. Pink Dogs on the Green Grass bursts at the seams with twinkly keys, acoustic jangle, and clopping bongos, accentuating its sly hooks with sounds from a Summer of Love revival. Winnowing down 40 half-finished demos to 13 overstuffed songs, Jacobs handed the album off to mastering engineer Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangers, a band that has made a career out of finding the sweet spot within squalls of noise.
Jacobs’ lyrics drift between banal observations and an oddball cast of characters, pushing his songs into surreal realms. The bongo-propelled “Christopher Robbins” reimagines the Air America author as a boss writing his paychecks. Moody standout “Cherry” is Jacobs’ tribute to the color red, while “Most Delicious Drink” is his ode to a beverage “that you wish would last forever.” Midway through spoken-word groover “Dancing With the Devil,” he stops to shop for “that brand new pair of shoes I had my eye on,” before his voice becomes garbled like crank-call auteur Longmont Potion Castle.
“Half Rich Loner” is the album’s closest hint at autobiography, with first-person lyrics describing the defeated thoughts of a middle-class working stiff who harbors artistic ambitions. As the song choogles on a single guitar note, Jacobs waxes depressedly: “This town has got me under some sort of spell/I was the half rich no good for nothing/Never amount to anything, never going to make it.” But is it really so bad to build new worlds on his lonesome if there’s no one else around? “When I’m not feeling music I can spend a lot of time drawing,” Jacobs has said. “When I was younger I definitely spent most of my time building skate ramps and stuff like that. It’s all the same, to just create and not trap yourself in your own head.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Blow the Fuse | May 3, 2021 | 7.5 | 3060995c-254b-47b4-9e37-2450ca9633b4 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The guitarist’s latest album features almost nothing but the sweet sounds of his instrument. You’ll know within its opening notes whether this music is for you—and if it is, you’ll feel instantly at home. | The guitarist’s latest album features almost nothing but the sweet sounds of his instrument. You’ll know within its opening notes whether this music is for you—and if it is, you’ll feel instantly at home. | Nathan Salsburg: Third | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-salsburg-third/ | Third | The best modern guitar albums do one of two things: They either change the way you think about the instrument or brilliantly reinforce what you already know. Artists who take cues from avant-garde music, like Daniel Bachman and Sarah Louise, are often behind works that fall into the former category. They use the guitar less for its melodic potential than as a conduit to new atmospheres—to echo and drone and crescendo. The second category leads to more accessible triumphs, and it’s in this territory that Louisville native Nathan Salsburg reigns. There’s nothing really to get on his records; their thrill is in hearing something so gorgeous and intuitive executed with new energy.
In a field crowded with talent, Salsburg stands out for his quiet gift for melody and his deep connection to the past. (He currently serves as curator of the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity.) His two previous solo albums are open, autumnal, and pristine. As I’ve moved into new apartments, his records have been the ones I’ve consistently played first; they have a purifying effect, like burning sage. With the plainly titled Third, Salsburg has made his purest, sweetest music yet, which is a notable achievement. The record runs 35 minutes and features almost nothing but the sound of his guitar: no overdubs or guests, no mid-album experiments, no singing. You will know within the opening notes of “Timoney’s” whether this music is for you—and if it is, you will feel instantly at home.
Salsburg’s songwriting works in increments. Flowing in repetitive, ascending waves, his melodies are fluttering and lyrical and hammered-on like limericks. It’s a sound that’s equally unadorned and intricate—bountiful, with not a thought wasted. As an accompanist, Salsburg has made this style equally compatible with Joan Shelley’s spacious odes to serenity and with the wordy thought spirals on the last Weather Station album. But in his own compositions, adding lyrics would feel redundant. He can conjure dramatic shifts in tone with just a pregnant pause of his right hand. In multi-part songs like “Ruby's Freilach/Low Spirits” and the elliptical “Exilic Excursions,” you can practically feel the deep inhale before he picks up and changes direction.
Listening to Third, it’s possible to imagine these songs unfolding as one uninterrupted breath, like he pressed “record” and didn’t stop until the mood passed. The album’s production, crystal clear and close, adds to this immediacy. In songs like the beatific “Walls of the World,” the artist he most reminds me of is Windham Hill founder William Ackerman, a guitarist whose music is so serene and soothing that he’s sometimes credited with founding the New Age genre. Yet on Third, this breeziness belies the intricacy with which each song is composed. “Planxty Davis,” a new arrangement of a traditional Irish folk song, fits in seamlessly with his own material. Brief closer “Offering”—which features the album’s sole foreign sound, a recurring rush of noise that could be a passing car or a distant wave—surges with such familiarity that you could imagine it blossoming into a classic-rock ballad. He touches on modern influences and music as ancient as the instrument itself, but Salsburg’s greatest skill is his ability to make his playing sound like a sudden thought he’s sharing just with you. | 2018-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | July 23, 2018 | 7.8 | 30627bcf-744e-40e6-a711-420d16f21a54 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Manipulator represents the inevitable pause from Ty Segall's usual breakneck pace, its 17-song, double-album sprawl the product of an unprecedented (for him) 14-month writing process. The extra attention to detail is felt on every song here. | Manipulator represents the inevitable pause from Ty Segall's usual breakneck pace, its 17-song, double-album sprawl the product of an unprecedented (for him) 14-month writing process. The extra attention to detail is felt on every song here. | Ty Segall: Manipulator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19668-ty-segall-manipulator/ | Manipulator | Since popping the cork on his career back in 2008, Ty Segall has become synonymous with the word “prolific.” But unlike so many artists who commit their every passing whim to tape, in Segall’s case, it’s not just an impulsive quirk or random data dump—it’s the very engine that pushes him to greater heights. Whether it’s the sad-eyed garage-rock of the 2011 LP Goodbye Bread, the scorching psych-punk of Slaughterhouse from 2012*,* or the acoustic stoner reveries of last year’s Sleeper, the increasingly narrow windows between Segall’s discrete releases seemingly inspire him to knuckle down and fully inhabit a specific aesthetic before conquering the next one. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of material he releases, because each new album has revealed a different facet of both his sound and personality, and built up anticipation for where he might go next.
With Manipulator, Segall arrives at his own personal promised land, the place where all the divergent paths he’s travelled intersect. As Segall has revealed in interviews, Manipulator represents the inevitable pause from his usual breakneck pace, its 17-song, double-album sprawl the product of an unprecedented (for him) 14-month writing process. You can feel that extra attention to detail on every song here: In sharp contrast to his previous album-to-album (or, in the case of 2012’s grab-bag Twins, track-to-track) stylistic shifts, the songs of Manipulator represent a perfect melting-pot synthesis of Segall’s many sonic signatures, as if each component—from the British Invasion-inspired melodies to the glam-rock affectations to the berserker guitar solos—was carefully measured out in beakers and test tubes before being mixed together. “He’s going to make a movie/ Of his entire life,” Segall sings on the gritty acoustic groover “Green Belly”, and even if he’s not referring directly to Manipulator’s career-spanning breadth, he certainly embraces auteur theory here, playing pretty much all of the instruments himself. (His trusty Ty Segall Band appears together on just one track.)
Manipulator sticks within a clearly demarcated comfort zone—i.e., the turn-of-the-’70s classic-rock canon spanning The Who Sell Out to Raw Power—but manages to touch upon every significant development in rock ‘n’ roll during that period. Want string-swept Bolan-esque serenades? Meet “The Singer”. A glitter-smeared proto-punk face-melter? Check “It's Over”. Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds mod-rock romps? Keep it real with “The Faker”. Ornate Forever Changes-worthy psych-folk? You can’t beat “The Clock”. A Grand Funk'd boogie that yields a drum-banging breakdown just like the one on Rod Stewart’s version of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You”? Get your fill with “Feel”. But perhaps the most pervasive influence of all is David Bowie circa The Man Who Sold the World—not just in Segall’s fanciful, faux-Brit diction (a quality he shares with his equally effete pal Tim Presley, aka White Fence), but in the way he welds electric shredding to percussive acoustic underpinnings, with the stripped-down strut of “Tall Skinny Lady” and “The Clock” bringing to mind the Bowie/Ronson match-ups on “Black Country Rock” and “Width of a Circle”.
And yet, even though his musical frame of reference is fixated upon an era that began 20 years before he was born, Segall is very much consumed by modern problems. As to be expected from someone who hasn’t updated their Twitter account in three months, Manipulator takes a skeptical view of technocracy, its lyrics dotted with allusions to surveillance, privacy invasion, identity theft, and TV addiction. In this light, the album’s acoustic/electric symbiosis feels emblematic of the tug-of-war between old-world authenticity and new-world convenience playing out in Segall’s head. (As if the aforementioned “Feel” doesn’t make his preference for IRL connections explicit enough, he answers it with another song called “The Feels”.) Of course, like any tried ‘n’ true garage-rocker, Segall still has girl trouble on his mind—but, in this case, it’s trouble with a girl addicted to her devices named, natch, “Susie Thumb”.
With its fuzzed-out Kinksian hooks, “Susie Thumb” is an obvious choice for Manipulator’s lead single—and, really, they could all be singles here. But that’s a comment on both Segall’s consistent craftsmanship and the songs’ very similar sense of scale, the latter of which ultimately prevents Manipulator from becoming the career-crowning milestone its protracted gestation period suggested. Manipulator may be 50 percent longer than the average Ty Segall record, but it doesn’t always make the case that it had to be. The issue isn’t song quality so much as a flattened topography: Whether they emphasize regal violins or squealing leads, the tunes here are pitched at the same cruising altitude and rarely upset their steady, maraca-massaged choogle. As such, Manipulator feels less like an epic Side-A-to-Side-D journey and more like an hour-long CD that would benefit from some editing (particularly when the songs start to feel like dopplegangers of one another—see: “The Crawler” vs. “It’s Over”). As his red-hot, silver-lipsticked recent appearance on Conan proved, Segall is ready for prime time. However, the ample generosity of Manipulator highlights the cruel paradox of showbiz: When you give the people everything they want, you can’t leave them wanting more. | 2014-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 26, 2014 | 7.8 | 3067632c-156c-47ab-b57b-c6d8a9371a08 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With their true Norwegian black metal days behind them and nothing left to prove, the longrunning duo trumpet their joyful debt to classic heavy metal. | With their true Norwegian black metal days behind them and nothing left to prove, the longrunning duo trumpet their joyful debt to classic heavy metal. | Darkthrone: Old Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/darkthrone-old-star/ | Old Star | Norwegian metal duo Darkthrone’s career has been a long, strange trip, one that’s always hinged upon the relationship between two rock’n’roll obsessives from Kolbotn. The band’s sound has morphed from the grating, lo-fi black metal barbarism that won them international acclaim in the 1990s into a looser, black metal/punk vibe that debuted on 2006’s The Cult Is Alive and injected new life into their career. Since then, they’ve ditched their more abrasive tendencies in favor of a sonic mish-mash that trumpets the duo’s joyful debt to classic heavy metal to the rafters.
Darkthrone’s 18th album, Old Star—which perennial mouthpiece Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell has described as the band’s “most ’80s album so far”—is a celebration of their storied past, produced by Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skjellum in his own Necrohell 2 Studios and polished by veteran knob-twiddlers Sanford Parker’s mix and Jack Control’s mastering job. Both members of Darkthrone share vocal, guitar, and bass duties (with Fenriz also putting in time on the drums), and over the years, they have forged the kind of bond most musicians can only dream about. This new album is in line with what fans of the band’s more recent (as in, post-2006) material have come to expect, but with a new twist—namely, the outsized impact that traditional doom bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus seem to have had on the songwriting. Darkthrone still stand firmly in the heavy metal (with a dash of punk) camp, but they’ve definitely got a soft spot for old-school gloom.
There’s a melodic strain running through Old Star, particularly on tracks like the delectably doomy “Alp Man” (which suits Nocturno Culto’s breathy rasp) and the up-tempo “Duke of Gloat” (two of several delightfully nonsensical titles on this release. What is an “alp man”? We’ll never know!). “Duke of Gloat” is also the only track on Old Star that could convincingly be labeled “black metal”; despite Darkthrone’s roots in the second wave, their status as genre godfathers, and the designation on their label’s promo materials, the duo’s true Norwegian black metal days are long over. However, with its icy, mid-tempo malevolence and Satanic bent, this song is a thrilling reminder of past evils.
“The Hardship of the Scots,” on the other hand, is pure Celtic Frost worship, with a twist—as metal site Last Rites astutely noted, the song’s main riff is a fairly blatant homage to AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You.” Darkthrone and Fenriz in particular seem to delight in sneaking references to other beloved bands into their music, lyrics, and album artwork, and while it isn’t quite as apparent as on albums like F.O.A.D. or Circle the Wagons, Old Star is no exception. That rock’n’roll influence serves them well in the more rollicking moments of songs like “I Muffle Your Inner Choir,” and on upbeat album closer “The Key Is Inside the Wall,” and keeps things from getting too serious. All in all, they’ve come a long way from Ravishing Grimness.
Fenriz firmly cemented his status as heavy metal’s timelessly cool, occasionally goofy uncle years ago, and has only settled more comfortably into the role as he and his counterpart have reached the upper reaches of both metal legend and middle age. Over three decades into their career, neither of them have anything left to prove, or anyone left to impress. The band didn’t even bother sending out promos for Old Star, preferring that journalists and industry types hear the new record at the same time as fans, because Darkthrone doesn’t need the hype, or advance accolades. They don’t need to worry about festival slots or booking headlining tours, because they don’t play live; as Fenriz proudly proclaimed on the 2010 track “I Am the Working Class,” they both have day jobs (and live in a country with a high standard of living and robust social safety net), so album sales aren’t a pressing concern.
At this point, one gets the distinct impression that, unlike so many other elder headbangers who keep on churning out new material and touring themselves into the ground—because, hey, the mortgage payment is due and the kids gotta eat—Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are just doing this for fun. Darkthrone keeps pumping out albums a full 25 years after their best-known records dropped, simply because the two dudes in the band sincerely, obsessively love heavy metal, and like making music together. It shows an impressive commitment to both their friendship and to rock’n’roll, and, for all their warts and spikes and grunts, there’s something almost sweet about that. | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Peaceville | June 11, 2019 | 7.8 | 30676c73-9b4f-4af9-8a6a-3b786c874c7d | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
With spine-tingling whispers and cavernous synths, the San Francisco-based sound artist traces the ghostly shores of her past. | With spine-tingling whispers and cavernous synths, the San Francisco-based sound artist traces the ghostly shores of her past. | Lucy Liyou: Dog Dreams (개꿈) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-liyou-dog-dreams/ | Dog Dreams (개꿈) | The title of Lucy Liyou’s second album, Dog Dreams (개꿈), comes from an elastic Korean concept of the fleeting nonsensical visions we have, whether they’re quaint reveries or ghoulish fears. Liyou’s new record considers both with gut-wrenching clarity, meditating on recurring dreams and memories of sexual violence. Where previous records deployed type-to-text skits, aggressive industrial sampling, and pig noises, Dog Dreams (개꿈) brings Liyou’s pleading, sonorous voice to the fore. Floating between Korean and English, her maximalist compositions create beautifully textured worlds to guide us through the possibility of connection and repair.
In a 2020 interview with Tone Glow that touches on her gender identity, Liyou discussed the “personal, caring, and loving” idea of 언니 (unnie), or older sister, in opposition to the “impersonal, idolizing, competitive” concept of 형님 (hyungnim), or older brother. These compositions reckon with both sides of the coin, blending confessional lyrics with opaque instrumentation and field recordings. On the standout “April in Paris,” Liyou takes the month of new growth as a muse, drawing on the jazz standard of the same title for a discussion of cemeteries and assault against a rhythmic backdrop of static. “I can be everything/A son/A daughter/Spring,” she sings, ushering in a season of possibility as Andrew Weathers’ guitars and synths coo behind her. At times these quiet, direct moments feel like a reward for the cluttering murmur of lips and ruffling paper, carefully built with co-producer Nick Zanca. The minimalist content of Liyou’s lyrics against such vast soundscapes allow the production to shine.
Later in the song Liyou samples an archival interview with Mariah Carey, who’s asked if her life parallels the story of Cinderella. “I think the way it happened is very fairy tale-esque,” Carey replies. There’s a reductive trans narrative to be drawn from such a statement about outward transformation, but Liyou’s work sidesteps it. She’s not alone: Peers and fellow trans musicians like Rachika Nayar and Issei Herr have similarly found a home in the cloaking mutability of experimental music. “I think it’s important to have trans narratives and trans ideas and stories that don’t always just touch up on how important it is to reach that gender euphoria,” Liyou said in a recent interview with Our Culture. Her instrumental landscapes confound simplistic narratives of representation.
The seductive quality of Dog Dreams (개꿈) comes from the way it seamlessly blends dissonant pieces of life into a symphony of tiny noises. Across these landscapes feelings arise and evaporate amid bells, amorphous guitars, and repurposed radio interviews. On the title track, galactic synths and brash programming roll together create an oceanic sense of depth. Liyou employs a chorus of distorted staccato voices to harmonize alongside her like a deconstructed, gored-up parody of a pop song until she cuts to silence. The ebbing nature of the track creates an eerie lullaby, sweetly longing one minute and disorienting the next. On “Fold the Horse (종이 접기)” Liyou channels Klein, surrounding a cautionary tale of a fortune teller with squeaks and hints of ASMR before an organ-like synth ushers in her final supplication for love. After all, anything is possible—but in a dog dream, one can never be too sure.
Correction: This review has been updated to correct translations for the Korean terms 언니 (unnie) and 형님 (hyungnim). Also, Klein is not the head of American Dreams; their label ijn inc released Lucy Liyou’s previous album. | 2023-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | American Dreams | May 16, 2023 | 7.6 | 306d0328-493b-4142-a472-652962efbbd3 | Grace Byron | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grace-byron/ | |
On a dozen songs that transcend stereotypes of women in country music, this supergroup explores love, politics, and family. | On a dozen songs that transcend stereotypes of women in country music, this supergroup explores love, politics, and family. | The Highwomen: The Highwomen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-highwomen-the-highwomen/ | The Highwomen | At the start of their powerful self-titled debut, the Highwomen—four leading women, banded together from distant corners of the country-music universe—go for the genre’s androgenic throat. “I was a Highwoman/And a mother from my youth,” sings Brandi Carlile, who helped recruit the quartet after fellow singer Amanda Shires realized how few women rank as modern country stars. It is a rewrite of “Highwayman,” of course, a composite sketch of the fabled spirit of valiant men. Written by country hit machine Jimmy Webb, the tune gave the collective of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings their collective name, The Highwaymen, in the mid-’80s.
For some, rewriting “Highwayman” may be an act of sacrilege, tantamount to, say, riffing on “The Star-Spangled Banner” or goofing on “Stairway to Heaven.” But Shires and Carlile rewrote it with Webb’s blessing, turning its four macho verses into remembrances from persecuted women—a Honduran immigrant, a Salem witch, a Freedom Rider, a pioneer preacher—and testimonials to their immortal temerity. “We are the Highwomen/We sing a story still untold,” everyone sings in the chorus, fashioning a mission statement into magnetic harmony. “We carry the sons you can only hold.” It is at once better than its classic original and a brilliant gambit, at once illustrating the genre’s gender gap and rushing to fill it once and for all.
The membership of the Highwomen is a marvel alone, an effort to reach across the aisles of country and then out of them. Maren Morris is the quartet’s exuberant star, having channeled the magnetism of early hits like “My Church” into a city-slick, chart-climbing bauble with Zedd and a second album, Girl, that unapologetically offers her up as a stadium-sized star if the world will have her. Carlile, meanwhile, is the adult-contemporary crossover dissident, as whip-smart as she is poignant. She has inched her way towards the spotlight over the years, and on last year’s enormous By The Way, I Forgive You, it found her. Shires has deep country bona fides; a fiddle-playing mystic, she sings like Emmylou Harris and writes like Van Morrison. And Hemby is one of her generation's Jimmy Webbs, a prolific hitmaker who co-wrote Kacey Musgraves’ “Butterflies” and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born standards. The Highwomen’s collective résumé quietly says that a woman’s place in country music is, well, anywhere.
These dozen songs pull all those perspectives toward the center. Country music has tended to reduce women to stereotypes, like the doe-eyed lover or the vengeful ex-lover or the sassy sex symbol. But The Highwomen contains and welcomes multitudes, reflected by “Crowded Table,” an ode to the value of intersectionality and solidarity that calls back to the folk revivalism of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. (To that end, Yola, a black, English-born country-soul singer sings the title track's early verse about being a Freedom Rider, hurtling over a half-dozen expectations at once.)
During “Old Soul,” Morris gracefully embodies a woman who has given herself over to domestic duties and reasonable responsibilities but daydreams about escaping into the life of a “wild child for a day.” Playful and political, the irrepressible “Redesigning Women” alternately invokes Paula Deen and Rosie the Riveter, or the impulse to buy too many shoes and rear a generation sparking a social revolution. Motherhood is both deeply meaningful (tenderly voiced by Hemby on the swaying “My Only Child”) and sporadically annoying (as on “My Name Can’t Be Mama,” a modern honky-tonk ringer fit for Dolly Parton).
Love looks different here than the standard country conception, too. During “Loose Change,” Morris sings about a dude who doesn’t appreciate her value and her quest to leave him romantically bankrupt; Carlile and Shires arrive in the chorus, a unified posse you’d be a fool to fuck with. But the album’s centerpiece and wrecking ball is “If She Ever Leaves Me,” written by Shires with her husband and the band’s guitarist, Jason Isbell, for Carlile, who married another woman before it was even legal stateside. It is, on the surface, a sardonic kiss-off for a man hitting on her wife, a piece of you’re-not-her-type perfection anchored by the quip, “That’s too much cologne/She likes perfume.” The song’s real power, though, is its vulnerability, expressed through Carlile’s confession that she’s not the best partner, but she’s trying all the time. The Highwomen is a safe space for all kinds of honesty.
The Highwomen have expressed a rebellious kinship with their predecessors in The Highwaymen. “Wanting to do things their own way is what we’re sort of trying to mime,” Shires told The New York Times of the connection. But in the ’80s, The Highwaymen were aging outlaw gods, banding together after the initial glow of their own careers had dimmed; between the awkward drum machines and a Bob Seger cover, you could hear them fumbling with questions of relevance and senescence. The Highwomen, however, are now at the height of their respective powers and part of a larger cultural push, as vital as any four stars might be. The Highwaymen have often been called country’s best supergroup, but the Highwomen are better. They do here what the men never could—stretch the notions of what country can and must become.
Correction: An original version of this review misidentified the singer of a line in the title track.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Low Country Sound / Elektra | September 18, 2019 | 7.7 | 306fe2b6-f670-4594-9a79-435c3bc2e1c1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On the Internet's third album, which features guest spots from Janelle Monáe, Vic Mensa, and Tyler, the Creator, Syd tha Kyd comes into her own as a writer. The band's purposeful instrumentation clears room to showcase her words, and she has a war story for every stage of love and loss. | On the Internet's third album, which features guest spots from Janelle Monáe, Vic Mensa, and Tyler, the Creator, Syd tha Kyd comes into her own as a writer. The band's purposeful instrumentation clears room to showcase her words, and she has a war story for every stage of love and loss. | The Internet: Ego Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20783-ego-death/ | Ego Death | The renewed critical interest in soul and R&B music that sprung up around the rise of Miguel, Frank Ocean, and the like over the last four years has helped award some much-deserved prestige on the form after years of undue neglect, but the push broke as much as it fixed. The music commands more respect now, but the accolades are disproportionately showered on a boy’s club of talented, offbeat songwriters circuitously linked together under the banner of "alternative R&B" by little else than the fact they all had very good albums out the same year. "Alt-R&B" isn’t just circuitous, though; it’s not real. Cordoning off and lionizing an alternative quadrant of R&B dismisses gifted but traditional singers like K. Michelle as plebeian, and worse, it carries the subtle insinuation that this music can’t be—and hasn’t always been—delightfully weird.
California soul collective the Internet frequently weather the alternative R&B tag, but hopefully their new album Ego Death will help shake the descriptor. It made sense around the group’s 2011 debut Purple Naked Ladies, a quiet collaboration between Odd Future affiliates Syd tha Kyd and Jet Age of Tomorrow architect Matt Martians. On Purple, Syd stepped out of her role as Odd Future’s house engineer into that of singer-songwriter for a batch of quirky, sometimes-crass tunes about the peaks and pitfalls of love and sex. Since then, Syd and Matt have expanded the project into a fully functional band. While the arrangements grew more accomplished between Purple and 2013’s Feel Good, the songwriting lagged, sultry and intimate, if, at times, not much else. Syd comes into her own as a writer on Ego Death, and the band steps up and reins Feel Good’s jazz-chords-for-jazz-chords’-sake extravagance into tight, hooky hip-hop soul.
Ego Death is both spare and quietly musical, its crisp low end anchored in hip-hop as the rest of the band coolly branches out into jazz, funk, and rock. Think of it as an offspring of early neo-soul pillars like Groove Theory and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, bedroomy but also lush and progressive. Ego Death is leagues too studiously retro to fit anyone’s idea of "alternative," but it’s still plenty odd. These songs frequently take hard, unexpected turns: Opener "Get Away" is a tribal bass and percussion stomp in the verses (twice as sinister live) but gossamer and pretty around the choruses. "Gabby"’s hip-hop strut melts into a psychedelic waltz-timed coda adorned with pretty, wordless melodies from Janelle Monáe. "Girl", the album’s Kaytranada-assisted centerpiece, hangs spectral keys over thick, heavy bass until the groove trails off into a spacey interlude. Ego Death’s short cuts get straight to the point, while the longer ones tease out instrumental sections without coming apart at the seams.
The economic, purposeful instrumentation clears ample room to showcase Syd’s writing, and she’s got a war story here for every stage of love and loss: "Special Affair" and "Go With It" are horned-up player’s anthems ("Fuck what’s in your phone, I wanna take you home."), while "Get Away" and "Under Control" beg a suspicious lover to stop nagging about girls she’s not cheating with. "Girl" is the big syrupy cohabitation ballad, the song couples will hug and sway through at the live show, but "Partners in Crime Part Three" raises the stakes, testing our duo’s mettle with a Thelma & Louise police chase. Syd taunts an old flame on "Just Sayin/I Tried", chanting "You fucked up," but ultimately coming to peace with the break because she did everything in her power to stop it. Parsing Syd’s lyrics can feel like eavesdropping on a lover’s quarrel in a restaurant; she’s adept at tackling complex matters of the heart in a voice that’s both relatable and conversational. The Internet’s songs have always felt like scenes of salaciousness happening just out of earshot. Ego Death finally pulls us into the maelstrom. | 2015-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Odd Future | July 9, 2015 | 7.4 | 3070cefb-3df9-4a8c-b446-0fde9af3c59e | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Cleaner, sharper, and stronger than the quartet's excellent 2009 self-titled debut, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. | Cleaner, sharper, and stronger than the quartet's excellent 2009 self-titled debut, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. | Real Estate: Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15918-days/ | Days | For a mix of songs made at different times, Real Estate's self-titled 2009 debut was impressively consistent. Given how well the New Jersey band fused disparate moments, you had to figure they could reach even greater heights were they to craft their next set all at once. They did just that last winter, and the result is indeed a step forward. Cleaner, sharper, and just plain stronger, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements-- a suite of subtle variations on a theme.
Its coherence sounds remarkably effortless, as if stringing together catchy gems is as easy as, in the words of one song, "floating on an inner tube in the sun." Interestingly, Real Estate actually acknowledge this sense of ease. The opener is bluntly titled "Easy", and references to carefree simplicity abound. As singer/guitarist Martin Courtney puts it, "If it takes all summer long/ Just to write one simple song/ There's too much to focus on/ Clearly there is something wrong." But the band's celebration of the uncomplicated is less about how Days was written than about the beauty of life seen in retrospect, especially young life in small towns.
Like the stirring scenes of suburban Texas in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, these songs find meaning in daily mundanities-- in houses and gardens, phone lines and street lights, names carved in trees and leaves pressed by footsteps. "All those wasted miles/ All those aimless drives through green aisles," sings Courtney wistfully. "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." That sentiment was evident on the band's debut, but here they've honed it to its essence.
The music bears a simplicity to match. These aren't minimal songs by any means, but the layers of cycling guitar, rolling rhythm, and gentle echo are always understated, more about conveying feeling than showing off the band's considerable chops. There's also a smooth efficiency in these rich tunes. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Much of this precision comes from guitarist Matt Mondanile, whose nimble playing adds color to each song's shape. It's most noticeable in the insistent "It's Real", but I'm even more taken with his sonic smoke rings in "Out of Tune", and how his shimmering guitar evokes sunrays mingling through branches and sparkling off pools.
That idyllic tone permeates Days, and in lesser hands could deprive it of tension or variety. But Real Estate have such a knack for classic-sounding melody that every song quickly engages on a musical gut level. It's a quality their music shares with the jangly hooks of early R.E.M., the breeziness of later Pavement, and the garage twang of the Fresh & Onlys. But their closest kin are New Jersey forefathers the Feelies. That group's undying ability to mine repeated chords and Zen phrases is matched best by the album's closer, "All the Same", a looping study of how night and day are merely sides of the same coin. Lasting over seven minutes, it might be Real Estate's first epic. But it's as subtle and unassuming as anything on Days-- more evidence from this band that great music doesn't have to sound hard to make, even if it is. | 2011-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 18, 2011 | 8.7 | 30723d2b-3a54-4813-bc6e-1cf806c318d0 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
A mix CD comprised of new Villalobos productions, Fabric 36 is in the unenviable position of both having to deliver the arc of a great DJ mix and to stand as the first multi-track collection of material from the Chilean producer in over a year. In both cases it can be judged a triumph. | A mix CD comprised of new Villalobos productions, Fabric 36 is in the unenviable position of both having to deliver the arc of a great DJ mix and to stand as the first multi-track collection of material from the Chilean producer in over a year. In both cases it can be judged a triumph. | Ricardo Villalobos: Fabric 36 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10688-fabric-36/ | Fabric 36 | Though he conjures an instantly recognizable atmosphere from the moment his records begin to play, a new release by house/techno producer Ricardo Villalobos is also characterized by a slight apprehension in those seconds before you drop the stylus, as you wonder if you're going to walk away feeling like you've actually been had. Villalobos' sparest stretches of pure rhythm can be frustratingly opaque while still daring you to give the record just one more spin; even those who've called him a genius (like me) sometimes worry they're not in on some inscrutable gag. But where last December's "Fizheuer Zieheuer" single intoxicated (or irritated… see, I still can't decide) by stretching just a handful of parts across 37 minutes, the hour-plus Fabric 36 brims with the piled-up (and pilled-up) rhythmic layering that characterizes Villalobos at his most intriguing.
Fabric 36 is Villalobos' ravenously awaited mix CD, and it just happens to be blended entirely from his own new productions and remixes. These cut-and-paste percussion clinics would be already straining with detail as stand-alone tracks, but their interlocking beats become ever more complex in the virtuoso way Villalobos meshes them, as when the opening electronic tones of "Groove 1880" sprout acoustic cymbal accents and jazz snares nine minutes later during "Moongomery". The hyper-percussive top end of the mix is perpetually bustling, too: Peppering his tracks with preverbal hiccups, askew extraneous rhythms, and halting half-melodies is one of Villalobos' favorite (and most effective) tricks throughout Fabric 36-- both for keeping the listener engaged and for lending his music its trademark uneasy quality. Phantom voices are layered into bad-trip swirls on "Organic Tranceplant" and "Fumiyandric 2". Strange sizzling noises flare up during an otherwise austere drum track. Fabric 36 constantly slips and slides around multiple percussive pulses, yet remains utterly sensual.
If the snapping tick-tock of "Farenzer House" or the bouncy full-vocal cut "4 Wheel Drive" suggest the Villalobos of old-- standard electro-house with a case of the shivers and sniffles-- then the rumbling "Andruic and Japan" is the most audacious example yet of the Chilean producer's freehand approach to disassembling techno's grid. Over 12 minutes long, it drops thunderous bursts of arrhythmic wooden percussion over autistic percolation, shattering the mix's momentum. But slowly, Villalobos reconfigures those skull-crushing mallets back into the almighty 4/4. That (often nearly undetectable) hand ordering things is what keeps Fabric 36 from turning into flurry of spooky sound effects and aimless drum loops. Villalobos' barely-there melodies (like the descending deep-house organ hum in "Prevorent") and unerringly steady tempo float you downriver as swarms of beats circle overhead. It's that gentle but unyielding push that keeps even his most outré moments-- the woozy soccer stadium chant "Premier Encuentro Latino-Americano" bleeding into "Chropuspel Zündung", Villalobos smearing the cacophony of a sampled crowd into a jumbo jet roar-- from wrecking not only your head but your equilibrium.
Thanks to Villalobos' cheekily narcissistic tracklist, Fabric 36 is in the unenviable position of both having to deliver the arc of a great DJ mix and to stand as the first multi-track collection of mostly new Villalobos material in more than a year. In both cases, it can be judged a triumph, a controlled burst of rangy productivity that offers a full-spectrum look at Villalobos' various obsessions (the power of percussion, haunted house vibeology, dub science applied to Latin swing and Germanic snap, minimalism vs. maximalism). The ebb and flow of a heterogeneous DJ set makes it easier listening than the often grindingly static repetitions of 2004's Thé Au Harem D'Archimède, while it still offers moments so polyrhythmic that they make that earlier record sound downright ingratiating. Technically, it's just stunning-- the most alchemical digital-into-analog (and vice versa) home-listening DJ mix I've heard in years. And if you've ever felt on the wrong end of Villalobos' formalist stunts-- if you have a love/hate relationship with his mix of the engrossing and exasperating-- you can take comfort in the fact that while Fabric 36 is hardly pop, it repays your undivided attention from the first listen. | 2007-09-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-09-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | September 26, 2007 | 8.7 | 307266a1-2428-44ba-b149-2e149b0c5053 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On his debut solo album, Tom Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting gelled with Jeff Lynne’s restrained production. They crafted a laid-back sound but kept the tension of heartland rock‘n’roll. | On his debut solo album, Tom Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting gelled with Jeff Lynne’s restrained production. They crafted a laid-back sound but kept the tension of heartland rock‘n’roll. | Tom Petty: Full Moon Fever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-full-moon-fever/ | Full Moon Fever | Part of the reason Tom Petty’s passing earlier this month felt so profound was his unofficial status as the mortar of classic-rock radio. The Florida-born, Malibu-haunting music lifer had top billing on a slew of songs that served as the glue between your Stones and Beatles chestnuts—the spitfire chronicle of lovers’ wariness “Refugee,” the sparkle of “The Waiting.” The format’s parameters had already been well-established by the time Full Moon Fever—the first album credited to Petty without his longtime musical pals the Heartbreakers—came out in the spring of 1989. But as soon as its first single, the laid-back yet steadfast “I Won’t Back Down,” was released, the rule book was rewritten.
Full Moon Fever came out of a most Southern Californian set of circumstances. In November 1987, Petty—then coming off his seventh album as frontman of the Heartbreakers, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), as well as a May 1987 arson attack on his house—had a chance encounter with Jeff Lynne, the songwriter and maximalist producer behind Electric Light Orchestra, at a traffic light (“just before the Thrifty [Drug Store],” he told SPIN in 1989) that, as it happened, was located near where they lived. Lynne was just off producing George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, the 1987 album that spawned the surprise MTV hit “Got My Mind Set on You,” and was at work on Brian Wilson’s “Let It Shine.” ”Around Christmas that year, I wrote a couple of songs and showed them to [Lynne], and he had a few suggestions, which really improved them,” Petty told The Chicago Tribune in 1989. “So we ended up going over to [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell’s house and putting them down in his studio… by then I was already having too much fun and I didn’t want to stop and go back to doing nothing, so I kept convincing Jeff song by song to do one more, and then finally hooked him into finishing the whole album.”
Even at its most urgent, Full Moon Fever has a laid-back feel. Petty’s sardonic observations, delivered in his wizened drawl, coast on loose-limbed riffs that were largely written with the rhythm guitar parts at the forefront of Petty and Lynne’s collective mind. Every song was written on 12-string or 6-string acoustic guitars. Petty told The Boston Globe in 1989: “I wanted to experiment with the art of rhythm guitar. Jeff and I feel that acoustic guitars can be rock’n’roll instruments, not just folk instruments.”
The sun-soaked chords that open the sprawl-dwelling and regretful “Free Fallin’” set the album’s tone. They tug the action along while Petty, half-sly and half-wistful, recounts the wounds suffered by a young woman who was focused on Elvis and horses before the allure of the bad boy creeps into her life. On the chorus, his voice cracks into a “free!” that sounds liberated, but it almost immediately skids into a descending “fa-lli-ing” that reveals the more alarming aspects of being unmoored, an uneasiness that persists even as the churning bridge rises up. The rest of Full Moon Fever balances that tension beautifully. Lynne’s restrained production and Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting combine into a sneakily powerful collection of songs.
Full Moon Fever is billed as Petty’s “first solo record,” although it’s not a clean break from the Heartbreakers—keyboardist Benmont Tench and bassist Howie Epstein have brief cameos, Campbell has a co-writing credit on the new wave-tinged “Love Is a Long Road” and laid down the insistent riff that propels “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” That song’s journey toward being history’s most chilled-out jock jam rides on Campbell’s blistering skill, both on the song’s signature riff and on the pyrotechnic playing that closes it out. Petty’s meditative, rueful vocal acts as a knowing counterpoint, its descriptions of frantically driving around in search of “somethin’ good waitin’ down this road” winds around Campbell’s forward momentum.
The lyrics are often minimalist, packing a punch with the subtle detailing that made Petty’s earlier work appealing to arena-sized crowds. “Yer So Bad” opens with an of-its-moment observation about a woman whose romantic trajectory veers, unfortunately, from a money-laden yuppie to a swinging singer, with Petty unable to “decide which is worse.” “A Face in the Crowd” is all atmospherics, Petty’s murmured refrain and the crystal-gilded guitars giving a rainy-day feel to its full-hearted, yet sparsely told tale of having someone parachute “out of a dream, out of the sky” and into his life.
Petty’s love of rock—specifically, his belief in its power to unite—permeates his catalog, but on Full Moon Fever it especially shines. There are references to Elvis and Del Shannon dotting the lyrics, a nod to Buddy Holly in the form of the smoothed-out rave-up “The Apartment Song,” and a reverent cover of the Byrds’ chiming 1965 single “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” which either kicks off Side Two of the album or follows the Petty-narrated pause that the singer helpfully inserted for CD listeners who might not get full experience of actually sitting with an album, paying attention to its nuances instead of letting it burble in the background. But it’s not an entirely besotted romance: “Zombie Zoo,” a drowsy kids-these-days lament, was inspired by Petty meeting punks who haunted a club night of the same name—Petty’s portrayal of the white-lipstick “little freak[s]” is a bit condescending (“It’s so hard to be careful, so easy to be led/Somewhere beyond the pavement/You’ll find the living dead,” he notes)—the first fissures in the rock generation gap that would eventually become fodder for his public persona.
MCA Records, Petty’s label at the time, initially rejected Full Moon Fever; once it did come out, it spawned five singles that reached the Hot 100 and sold five million copies. “I waited awhile, until the top regime at the record company changed,” he told Esquire in 2006, echoing the steely-eyed Full Moon Fever smash “I Won’t Back Down,” which uses backing vocals from Lynne, Epstein, and Harrison (Petty and Lynne’s eventual bandmate in the Traveling Wilburys) to bolster Petty’s case for staying steadfast in his beliefs.
But the damage to the label-artist relationship had already been done, and Petty signed with Warner Bros. in a deal that wouldn’t become common knowledge until two years after it was signed. Full Moon Fever, in a twist that made the early executive apathy toward it become a setup for poetic justice, became one of the late 20th century’s most storied rock albums, a stripped-down, yet richly realized presentation of the man behind the stadium-headlining star. | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | MCA | October 10, 2017 | 8.1 | 30742ab0-ff85-40e5-b432-2252e46f2a29 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
Soul Jazz Records’ companion to the Tate Modern’s exhibition of black art from the 1960s traces pivotal developments in funk, soul, jazz, and spoken word that still resonate through popular music today. | Soul Jazz Records’ companion to the Tate Modern’s exhibition of black art from the 1960s traces pivotal developments in funk, soul, jazz, and spoken word that still resonate through popular music today. | Various Artists: Soul of a Nation — Afro-Centric Visions in the Age of Black Power: Underground Jazz, Street Funk, & the Roots of Rap 1968-79 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soul-of-a-nation-afro-centric-visions-in-the-age-of-black-power-underground-jazz-street-funk-and-the-roots-of-rap-1964-79/ | Soul of a Nation — Afro-Centric Visions in the Age of Black Power: Underground Jazz, Street Funk, & the Roots of Rap 1968-79 | By the summer of 1968, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, and America’s inner cities burned in enraged response. But like seeds in the ground, the messages of both X and King had taken root with the era’s artists and musicians and were blooming throughout the culture. As the Tate Modern’s recent Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition attests, a profound movement was taking shape both visually and musically. And while the potent visual works of Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Barkley Hendricks may not have filtered through to the mainstream during that era, the music that arose alongside it became an undeniable cultural force.
Soul Jazz’s 13-track companion to this long-overdue exhibit shows that while the revolution may not have been televised, it nevertheless spread like a fire across jazz, soul, spoken word, gospel, funk, and pop. One can look at artists like Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and “The Tonight Show” house band the Roots (who used Bearden’s art for 2014’s ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin) and see a direct lineage back to the art and music presented here. Musically, it was a heady and fecund time for music that empowers, inspires, and uplifts, and Soul Jazz’s curation here is impressive. The example of John Coltrane, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin runs implicitly throughout, as does that of the black church, but the compilation largely draws on lesser-known music from a wide array of labels (many of them artist-run imprints) and presents a message that remains powerful today.
The most obvious selection is the most well-known: Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which, despite the well-trodden appropriation of the phrase, still astounds decades later. For those resigned to the weathered sound of Scott-Heron’s voice during his precipitous decline, hearing him full of vim and vinegar here, rapping about “a white tornado, white lightning, or white people” is thrilling, as is his ability to twist slogans into a message of defiance.
From there, different narratives emerge, such as the embrace of pan-Africanism. “These are African rhythms/Passed down to us from the ancient spirits/Feel the spirit!/A unifying force.” So intones Oneness of Juju, an American group that drew on Afrocentric chants and rhythms, fusing them with Afro-Cuban percussion and pop-friendly R&B song structures. Years on from their polyrhythmic “African Rhythms,” included here, their 1981 disco single “Every Way But Loose” would get spun at the Paradise Garage, showing how the ancients could also boogie. Former Ornette Coleman trumpeter Don Cherry joined forces with the West African group Mandingo Griot Society in the 1970s, presenting a percolating forerunner of world beat and fusion. Jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers’ “Red, Black & Green” harks back to the pan-African flag that Marcus Garvey hoisted back in 1920, its message now set to a glistening vibraphone funk groove. And a heavy tribal drum throbs underneath the poem “Strong Men” by spoken-word artist David McKnight.
The set also shows a shift in African-American jazz in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as artists wrested control from major labels and instead pressed their music up under the model of self-determined black businesses. Chicago’s Phil Cohran, who spent time as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and taught Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White, released his musical homage to Malcolm X on his own Zulu Records. In Detroit, trombonist Phil Ranelin and fellow musicians established the Tribe label to release their collective output as well as a quarterly magazine. And while Horace Tapscott didn’t found his own imprint, the Nimbus West label was started in order to properly document the music from this unheralded pianist and composer. Tapscott’s “Desert Fairy Princess” is the longest track here and one of the most beguiling: a loose-limbed large-ensemble piece winding from swing to abstraction with ease.
It’s purported that Duke Edwards at one time played percussion in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, but the only album under his own name is a stirring hybrid of spoken word, free jazz, and gospel that asks, Is It Too Late? Across its pensive and mournful 10 minutes, Edwards’ soliloquy looks to the fraught future, and his throat trembles as he wonders what became of the world he once knew. What good is mankind’s progress, Edwards asks, if we lose the little thing called “love our fellow man”? No answer is forthcoming, but as Soul of a Nation reveals, it remains a question vital for a society to ask. | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Soul Jazz | August 9, 2017 | 8 | 3076fbd5-ec7a-4a71-9fa5-809e6eeb348a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Australian singer and actor is blessed with a commanding and magnetic voice. Over these soul ballads and torch songs, she holds nothing back—for better or worse. | The Australian singer and actor is blessed with a commanding and magnetic voice. Over these soul ballads and torch songs, she holds nothing back—for better or worse. | Grace Cummings: Ramona | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grace-cummings-ramona/ | Ramona | Ramona, the third album from Melbourne belter Grace Cummings, feels at first like a possible masterpiece, a new apogee in the pantheon of tormented soul. Across its 11 allusion-rich character studies and screeds of lovelorn retribution, Cummings renders every moment with unmitigated emotional intensity, as though every feeling were the last one that would ever matter. Hear her grow, for instance, from long-faced tenderness at the start of “A Precious Thing” to an operatic mercenary howling about love. “But it’s nothing I care about,” she roars like Diamanda Galás on a Disney ride designed by Dante. Or witness the cracks in her voice as she surges beyond an Amy Winehouse coo during “Something Going ’Round,” testaments to the self-doubt ingrained in this opening love letter. Built by a band that has clearly studied the Wrecking Crew’s glories, and gilded with strings and harp, Ramona holds a singular and mighty voice in a spectacularly grand frame, not unlike Rufus Wainwright’s Want One or Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising.
But you know that friend who you love seeing for an hour every once in a while, who shares everything new about their life in an exhilarating but exhausting torrent? That could be Ramona after repeated spins, when Cummings’ lack of restraint, combined with the band’s hidebound insistence on repeating sounds that are often 60 years old, becomes too taxing to take for very long. After self-producing her first two records, Cummings linked with Topanga Canyon vintage king and session ace Jonathan Wilson, who freed her to focus on not holding back. That is commendable, but it results in an album that has the dynamic range and limited application of a strong flashlight. You recognize its incredible power, but you’d do best not to stare into the source for very long.
Cummings is not shy about courting legendary company. After all, the protagonist of “Ramona,” a smoldering pseudo-goth number that ultimately flames into a full torch song, is borrowed from Bob Dylan. (She summons him again for the number’s finale, with sneering repetition that mirrors “Just Like a Woman.”) There’s a bit of Johnny Cash’s “Cry, Cry, Cry,” toward the end of “Everybody’s Somebody,” which borrows the sound of Memphis’ Stax rather than its Sun to impugn a wayward partner. She lifts from Townes Van Zandt during “Without You,” where she again flips Dylan lines twice. There are glimpses of Nick Cave and Nancy Sinatra and, in the album’s closing verse, Cummings quotes standards from Dylan, Neil Young, and George Harrison, like some thrift-store magpie. The band, led by Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Drew Erickson, responds in kind, stitching clear threads of Radiohead, Phil Spector, Hal Blaine, and Chris Isaak into these songs.
As with Ramona itself, these references first seem remarkable, the group’s audacity commendable. An homage to “Wicked Game” as a preamble to “Common Man,” Cummings’ romantic cowboy portrait? Those impossibly tense strings that Radiohead favor as a bed for “Work Today (And Tomorrow),” a fiery ballad about the endurance of modern survival? Cool! But it soon becomes clear how gestural this all is—that Cummings, Wilson, and company are a crew that will repeatedly point to the classics they love without finding new depth for them. There’s not a sound or story here you haven’t heard done better elsewhere.
So we’re left, then, with Cummings’ voice—a truly dazzling instrument, with the heft of Nina Simone’s and the height of Angel Olsen’s—to carry Ramona anywhere else. And goddamn, can she sing. That growl toward the back of “Help Is On Its Way,” that bluesy scorn at the middle of “Everybody’s Somebody,” that hall-filling howl leading out of “On and On”: She is a consummate technician with an enormous range and an identifiable grain. In those moments, Ramona still lands like the masterpiece it initially resembles. But it overpowers these rather skeletal songs and, over very little time, overwhelms the listener, too.
Ramona is perfectly emblematic of the sort of singer-songwriter record that seems to be creeping into ubiquity and that Wilson tends to specialize in—big and unabashed, where every sentiment appears illuminated by massive stage lights. (Cummings, for what it’s worth, is also an actor, which you can sense as Ramona starts to wear you down.) Subtlety, intricacy, and delicacy are horse-traded for bombast. Is this a symptom of streaming and the attention economy, where it takes a little oomph to rise above the background hum? Or is it instead a symptom of songwriters trying to add something new to a form two or three times older than they are and deciding that the simplest way to fake it is to crank the volume? In either case, chockablock with theater-kid gusto and references to aged idols, Ramona’s instant magnetism slowly starts to seem like just a dream, a vacuum, a scheme. | 2024-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | ATO | April 12, 2024 | 6.4 | 3078c455-7f47-4fe1-b0c4-be5ee3975fe8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The star beatmaker reunites with past collaborators like Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and Larry June on a breezy new EP. | The star beatmaker reunites with past collaborators like Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and Larry June on a breezy new EP. | The Alchemist: Flying High EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-alchemist-flying-high-ep/ | Flying High EP | The Alchemist has churned out steely boom-bap and psychedelic loops for icons across three generations of hip-hop and helped pioneer the one-producer/one-rapper mixtape wave of the 2010s. He’s Eminem’s tour DJ, worked on the score to a Grand Theft Auto game, and has his own production master class. But his most impressive accomplishment has to be ALC Records, the independent label he founded in 2004 that’s home to his solo discography, whether that be one-off collabs with underground royalty or compilations packaged like deli sandwiches. It’s boutique indie rap at its finest, the ALC label serving as a seal of quality assurance.
Not every ALC project is high stakes, though. Take Flying High, the latest in a long line of EPs where rappers spar over Alchemist’s unvarnished loops. It fits the mold of earlier projects like 2018’s Bread and 2021’s This Thing of Ours while retaining a breezy atmosphere: a space for rhymers in Alchemist’s orbit to unspool for the fun of it. He’s made full projects with half of the guests featured here, and it’s appealing to hear them try out different variations on the Alchemist sound. Opener “RIP Tracy” flutters on a warm, simmering bed of violins, bass, and vocal hums while Earl Sweatshirt anxiously blends Ghostface and Jordan Peele references; billy woods cuts through the steam with deadpan humor (“I’m just a regular guy/Put designer jeans on one leg at a time”). The meandering stagger-step of this beat is a far cry from the dubby sway of the trio’s previous collaboration, “Falling Out the Sky,” from Armand Hammer’s 2021 album Haram, but their slippery styles adapt well.
Every guest gets space to stretch and show out. MIKE and Sideshow sound right at home on “Bless,” where nightclub piano and occasional streaks of electric guitar anchor stories of family history and high-school bathroom brawls. Compared to the airy production on MIKE and Alchemist’s Tommy Hilfiger-sponsored One More EP with Wiki from last year, it’s somber but peaceful. Closing track “Midnight Oil” sounds like it was made with guests Larry June and Jay Worthy in mind—its luxurious, wavy sound could’ve easily fit on a deluxe edition of June and Alchemist’s recent album The Great Escape. The weakest link is Kansas rapper T.F, who opens “Trouble Man” with a verse that feels formless next to the exceptional Boldy James feature on the back end (“Slappin’ all this bass, I show you why they call me B.B. King”).
None of these songs sound like demos or leftovers, but Flying High doesn’t reach for the stars, either. This is an exhibition bout for the MCs—the pairings are solid but unsurprising—and, like most Alchemist solo projects, it concludes with instrumental versions of each song. Some float (“RIP Tracy”) and some seethe (“Trouble Man”) but all share a casual, humid saunter, like they’re on their way to the swanky pool party in Boogie Nights. Flying High isn’t supposed to be life-changing, but most rappers and producers would be lucky to flaunt this level of skill in their downtime. | 2023-07-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ALC | July 6, 2023 | 7 | 307a8d58-3eba-44b4-b6cf-27602fb34fae | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The instruments of war have always been percussion. I'm not referring to tanks, battlerams and firearms, but musical instruments ... | The instruments of war have always been percussion. I'm not referring to tanks, battlerams and firearms, but musical instruments ... | Primal Scream: XTRMNTR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6474-xtrmntr/ | XTRMNTR | The instruments of war have always been percussion. I'm not referring to tanks, battlerams and firearms, but musical instruments. Granted, the incessant thunder and crack of explosives is percussive, albeit erratic. The quick history lesson on the Bicentennial quarter reminds us that suckers with snares kept the beat of destruction. Tolkien's trolls thumped skin timpanis. Genghis had gongs. War has rhythm. I was reminded of this at the two most exhilarating concerts I've seen. Last weekend, a pogo bacchanal erupted in a cramped club. Clothes were shed and azzes were backed up on an altar with a $6 cover. Six months ago, a crowd stomped dust and flicked cigarette ash off the floor of Chicago's Metro as three drummers locked into a primal groove. Revolution starts with a dance that the stuttering chugs of guitar can't provide. Funk, not volume, pulls people to the streets.
Primal Scream have always understood the power of a groove and a lyrical grenade. Their entire career reaches a melting point on the raw, caustic XTRMNTR. With this album, Primal Scream point their finger at multinationals and conservatives, and forewarn the fate of Pentheus.
XTRMNTR's sound lies somewhere between the kraut-loving Chemical Brothers and latter-era Fugazi. Recent recruits Mani from the Stone Roses and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine up the ante. Mani's gritty, nasty basslines form the coral of Primal Scream's gunmetal grey and apocalyptic orange reef. The title track bounces guitar freakout sparks across congealed grease of bass. "Swastika Eyes" races on high-velocity loops like the soundtrack to a behemoth final boss in a spaceshooter video game. Primal frontman Bobby Gillespie seems to see himself as the little "Gradius" ship facing the myriad-howitzer monster of the WTO, NATO, and whatever other "The Man" organization you can name.
XTRMNTR's lyrics are sparse and terse, but Gillespie spits bullets like, "You've got the money, I've got the soul," and, "Tell you the truth/ The truth about you/ The truth about you?/ You've been true." Even when his delivery is awkward (i.e. like an aging white Brit trying to flow, as in the former examples), it's barked as if sincerity has locked his jaw like rabies. It's hard to disagree with sentiments like "Kill All Hippies." Even the music mirrors the anti-superfluidity, anti-nostalgic, anti-bucolicness, anti-bathos lyrics. The vehicle is stripped and the skeleton spiked. Like the vowel-less title on the cover, XTRMNTR is all corners and crunch.
Typically, electronic-rock fusion falls flat for smelling too much like silicon and solder. XTRMNTR defies such classification thanks to the brilliance of Kevin Shields. This is the man who crafted one of the most sonically incredible records of all time, and his work here proves his skills have not diminished. "MBV Arkestra" drifts in hypnotic rhythms. Shields mixes countless tracks of accelerated drums into a thick snakecharm. Layer upon layer of sandstorm guitars and horns sweep over the shifting dunes of beats. The song feels like a drugged-up rush through a packed Punjabi streetmarket. People, it's My Bloody Valentine! On "Accelerator" Shields pushes the volume to an exploding point like gravity pulling an MC5 song back into the atmosphere. White flames flare off charred drums as strings turn to magma. Elsewhere, his influence is felt, like on the wargame instrumentals of "Blood Money" and "Shoot Speed/Kill Light".
The album has its shortcomings. "Keep Your Faith" and "Insect Royalty" dip a bit too much into the more sentimental song-based style of the last record, Vanishing Point, and "Swastika Eyes" needs no reprise. But the fighting spirit keeps Primal Scream ahead of the pack. Gillespie now sports post-lice hair and mysterious face scratches. He's a battered veteran who's making up for some horrible moments in the past. Rest assured, Rod Stewart will not be able to cover anything from XTRMNTR.
Some still sadly associate Primal Scream with their baggy rock days. Yet few other bands evolve this deep into their career, let alone care. At some point in the mid-90s, Primal Scream woke up and realized they'd made a mistake. Their new political agenda digests much easier than bands like Rage Against the Machine who market their entire career off such stances. In the end, Primal Scream understood that under all of the rants there has to lie a steady throb of rump-shaking war. | 2000-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Astralwerks | April 30, 2000 | 8.1 | 307aeab6-a0e5-491f-809c-73fd5bc8dc11 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
This collaboration between Italy’s ambient techno artist Donato Dozzy and Rome-based vocalist Anna Caragnano focuses on the sound of Caragnano’s effervescent and honed voice, which is thie only instrument on display. Dozzy finds fascinating ways to mirror, multiply and fracture Caragnano’s flexible voice across nine tracks. | This collaboration between Italy’s ambient techno artist Donato Dozzy and Rome-based vocalist Anna Caragnano focuses on the sound of Caragnano’s effervescent and honed voice, which is thie only instrument on display. Dozzy finds fascinating ways to mirror, multiply and fracture Caragnano’s flexible voice across nine tracks. | Anna Caragnano / Donato Dozzy: Sintetizzatrice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20387-sintetizzatrice/ | Sintetizzatrice | One might be forgiven for anticipating that this collaboration between Italy’s ambient techno demiurge Donato Dozzy and Rome-based vocalist Anna Caragnano would be equal parts Dozzy and Caragnano, with his productions coursing beneath garlands of her voice. But Sintetizzatrice thrills in inverting such expectations. Imagine if Andy Stott’s Faith in Strangers drew upon only Alison Skidmore’s voice and you have an idea of what Dozzy and Caragnano are up to here. There’s not a throb, kick or ambient wash to be heard, no hardware to spot. Caragnano’s effervescent and honed voice is the only instrument at work, providing stratospheric highs and low end, with Dozzy deploying an array of strategies and processing to mirror, multiply, and fracture Caragnano’s flexible voice across these nine tracks.
“Introduzione” begins with Caragnano surrounded by multitudes of herself, a solo performer on a subway car soon crammed with chattering commuters jostling for space. While it sets the stage for what will follow, it’s one of Sintetizzatrice’s least interesting moments. But once Caragnano’s utterance “rain” on “Starcloud” begins to sound through the space, soon surrounded with innumerable echoes of herself, we enter two-and-a-half minutes of rarefied space, Caragnano’s every hum and sigh transmogrified into a heavenly body.
Dozzy finds myriad ways to recast Caragnano. “Luci” brings to mind the likes of Grouper, Julia Holter and Julianna Barwick. Dozzy takes the gossamer thread of a single breath at the start of “Fraledune,” loops it until it becomes as expansive as a choir and then once that mass of sound is built, teases an even high sonority out of it. He moves Caragnano to the other end of the register for “Parallelo,” favoring deep resonant tones, as if she is sounding from the bottom of a well. Another small mouth sound is used to approximate a thump on “Parola,” which leads into the traditional Italian folk of “Festa (A Mottola).”
Myself, I prefer Caragnano when she’s less tangible and earthly, more cloudy and ineffable, as she is uttering “love without sound.” About the only complaint to level at Sintetizzatrice is its brevity. The body-erasing moments collected here don't even break the half-hour mark, which is a shame, because the sound of Caragnano’s brief sighs stretched towards infinity is a wonderful sound in which to luxuriate. | 2015-04-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Spectrum Spools | April 8, 2015 | 7.2 | 307af145-1956-4eb5-89e0-488a84224cb4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his solo album, the London producer cloaks his self-doubt in deceptively danceable electronic beats that fuse elements of rap, pop, and UK bass in unexpected ways. | On his solo album, the London producer cloaks his self-doubt in deceptively danceable electronic beats that fuse elements of rap, pop, and UK bass in unexpected ways. | Sega Bodega: Salvador | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sega-bodega-salvador/ | Salvador | Until now, Sega Bodega, aka Salvador Navarette, has tended to work on the sidelines. He co-runs the label NUXXE with Coucou Chloe, Shygirl, and Oklou; he’s been busy producing for singers like London’s Cosima; and he contributed sound design to Brooke Candy’s ambitious PornHub film I Love You.
On 2018’s self*care, Sega Bodega’s last sizeable solo release, he was bright, brash, lashing outwards; on Salvador, his debut album, he has grown up and also grown more unsure of himself. Shedding the hard shell of youthful self-confidence, he has become lost and self-doubting—an all-too-recognisable condition of one’s mid-twenties. Having titled Salvador after himself, he embarks upon a far more personal project than his previous ones. It’s a raw album, emotionally and psychologically, and it masks sincerity with production that is hard and experimental. Utilizing a production style similar to his work on Shygirl’s recent single “BB”—overdriven rhythms inspired by rap, R&B, and UK bass; vocals processed to disorienting extremes—Navarette deliberately cloaks his self-contradiction and ugly thoughts with deceptively danceable electronic beats. The album is a trippy descent into Sega Bodega’s dark side.
In his lyrics, Navarette delves into the destructive patterns we allow ourselves to fall into in the name of self-preservation. This comes to the fore on lead single “U Suck.” Upon first listen, it’s the album’s most unsparing song (“I don’t mean to be rude but honestly/Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.../I can list the ways you suck/You suck, you suck, you suck”). But his singing is soft rather than accusatory, the chords gentle; the major-key outro is so subtle that it’s easy to miss the final twist: “Sometimes you don’t see it but I love you.” Pitched up, his vocals are childlike and coy, shying away from a truth that is hard to acknowledge.
The album, as a whole, is better than its singles. “U Got the Fever” is a swirling dreamscape that switches to double time, mimicking the compelling anxiety of a codependent love affair. “Heaven Knows” flicks easily between major and minor chords, mirroring the lyrics’ conflation of pleasure and pain (“Keep your hands around my neck/Cut me with glass”). “Masochism” contrasts harsh beats with soft, closely recorded vocals. Layered on top of each other, the vocals create the sense of an inner dialogue that, combined with the pulsing, fast-strummed guitar towards the end of the track, show an unhealthy cycle beginning again.
Navarette’s keen ear for pop and rock blends well with his electronic experiments. The short “Know (Interlude)” is the only place he allows himself to let loose with more abrasive beats; the album’s last two songs “Calvin” and “11 Kuvasz in Snow,” are led by piano melodies—an unexpected choice, given the way the rest of the album foregrounds such an aggressively digital palette. The piano suggests a newfound vulnerability, as if he’s finally dropping his guard and letting in both his listeners and the “you” addressed in most of his lyrics.
If self*care showed someone in youthful fluctuation, searching for his identity, Salvador is a self-portrait of an artist in turmoil. What makes the record click is that it feels relatable, yet entirely on Sega Bodega’s terms: ambitious, lonely, and aching for intimacy. | 2020-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | NUXXE | February 24, 2020 | 7.2 | 307bcc69-f1fa-4bae-b634-f8ecfebaadcb | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
Even when he’s stealing the spotlight, Mark Lanegan still seems like he’s lurking in the shadows, not so much singing a song as haunting it. So it’s appropriate that Lanegan’s now receiving a tribute that most don't receive until they're dead, the career-spanning collection Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011. | Even when he’s stealing the spotlight, Mark Lanegan still seems like he’s lurking in the shadows, not so much singing a song as haunting it. So it’s appropriate that Lanegan’s now receiving a tribute that most don't receive until they're dead, the career-spanning collection Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011. | Mark Lanegan: Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18852-mark-lanegan-has-god-seen-my-shadow-an-anthology-1989-2011/ | Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011 | Well before the Seattle rock scene of the late-80s became fodder for big-screen rom-coms, Marc Jacob-designed runway collections, and ill-conceived trend pieces by easily duped New York Times writers, Mark Lanegan was already plotting a life after grunge. Of all the handsome, long-haired Emerald City singers to front rock bands that sold hundreds of thousands of records in the early 90s, Lanegan ranked a distant fifth in high-school-locker pin-up potential, exuding neither the bare-chested sex appeal of Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder nor the fashionable misanthropy of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. Even within the context of his own band, the Screaming Trees, Lanegan felt like the odd man out, his bronchial drawl serving as a grainy, black-and-white contrast to the band’s kaleidoscopic surges.
In the midst of the Trees' brief run as 90s alterna-darlings, Lanegan refashioned himself as an old soul who wanted nothing to do with a young man’s game, releasing a handful of simmered-down solo releases on Sub Pop steeped in blues and Americana traditions that presented a more natural fit for his slow-and-low singing style. Though it initially counted as something of an anomoly amid Sub Pop’s super-fuzzed roster, Lanegan's 1990 debut, The Winding Sheet, was a harbinger of the label’s post-grunge tilt toward the torn 'n' frayed roots-rock of the Friends of Dean Martinez, Red Red Meat, the Scud Mountain Boys and the like (though today the album is probably most remembered as the record that gave Kurt Cobain the idea to cover Leadbelly). And following the Trees’ official dissolution in 2000, Lanegan’s outlaw ethos would become further entrenched, both on his own increasingly spartan solo releases, and his mercenary approach to collaborating with everyone from Queens of the Stone Age to former Belle and Sebastian chanteuse Isobel Campbell. But despite his considerable C.V., Lanegan typifies the classic singer-not-the-song conundrum, as he's better known for personifying a certain mysterious vibe—with a fistful of tattoos to go with it—than for his deep canon of black ‘n’ bruised ballads. Even when he’s stealing the spotlight, Lanegan still seems like he’s lurking in the shadows, not so much singing a song as haunting it. So it’s appropriate that Lanegan’s now receiving the sort of elaborate retrospective treatment that most artists don’t get till they’re dead.
Though it spans two discs and 32 tracks, Has God Seen My Shadow? is by no means a definitive compendium of Lanegan’s work, focussing squarely on material released under his own name while steering clear of his countless extracirricular projects and growl-for-hire guest appearances. As such, it’s a rather narrow overview of an artist whose interests and pursuits have proven far more eclectic than this stridently low-key collection would suggest. (Even the gnarlier extreme of his own songbook—like “Methamphetamine Blues” and “Message to Mine”—isn’t represented here, while the chronology also stops short of his most stylistically divergent album to date, 2012’s synth-colored Blues Funeral.) But it also underscores how the popular image of Lanegan as the gruff, gravelly-voiced drifter is so often shaped by the company he keeps, the harsher qualities of his voice and personality amplified by his beauty-and-the-beast match-up with Campbell, or his showdowns against the more dramatic Greg Dulli in the Gutter Twins. The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.
The set’s first disc employs an odd, loosely reverse-chronological sequence that groups tracks from each of Lanegan’s solo albums, starting with 2004’s Bubblegum before tumbling deeper into the past. There’s a bit of a Benjamin Button effect at play in the march from the wood-cabin minimalism of “Bombed” and the creaky-door unease of the PJ Harvey duet “Come to Me” back to 1994 release Whiskey for the Holy Ghost’s “Carnival” and “The River Rise", the sort of mystical psych-folk odysseys you could easily imagine the Screaming Trees cutting for an MTV Unplugged session with a guest string section. But regardless of era, Lanegan’s work has always been tethered thematically to the twin poles of regret and redemption (this guy sings about saving his soul so much, he had to join the Soulsavers), and Has God Seen My Shadow? is a testament to his unwavering knack for coming up with clever ways to distill his endless bummer into a wickedly evocative one-liner: the seemingly optimistic titular refrain of Holy Ghost’s “Sunrise” is answered with “should’ve covered up my eyes,” while “One Way Street” (from 2001’s Field Songs) sets an instantly despairing scene when Lanegan intones, “stars and the moon aren't where they're supposed to be,” before taking a shot of whiskey and lamenting how he “can’t get it down without crying.”
The collection also shows all those Tom Waits and Nick Cave comparisons Lanegan gets saddled with to be somewhat offbase. Neither as wilfully eccentric as the former nor as outrageously provocative as the latter, Has God Seen My Shadow? posits Lanegan more as a patron saint to wounded romantics like the National. His best songs disarm with their simple elegance and plaintive performances, like the downcast doo wop of “Pill Hill Serenade", the breezy “Kimiko’s Dream House” (a songwriting collab with late Gun Club founder Jeffrey Lee Pierce), and “Last One in the World", which could be the best ballad Keith Richards didn’t bring to the Tatoo You sessions. Disc two of Has God Seen My Shadow? presents a random grab-bag of previously unreleased material that ping-pongs between different periods—from a mellotron-swirled 98-era cover of John Cale’s “Big White Cloud” to a vocal version of the chilling 2001 instrumental “Blues for D” to a handful of raw, acoustic tracks recorded with QOTSA cohorts Troy Van Leeuwen and Alain Johannes in the mid-2000s—and while it may be short on revelations, it reinforces Lanegan’s consistency of vision. So it’s ironic that the set closes with a rare letting down of the guard: a live version of the Jackson C. Frank folk standard “Blues Run the Game” (recorded in Portland circa 2000) that gets derailed by sideman Mike Johnson’s short-circuiting guitar. But with some encouragement from the audience, Lanegan regains his composure to finish the song, putting into practice the philosophy that’s guided his long and winding career for over two decades: the best cure for the blues is to keep on keepin’ on. | 2014-01-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | January 17, 2014 | 7.5 | 307d1047-8601-4939-8c66-897f6d882e82 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
German producer builds minimal techno epic from a beautifully textured sound palette. Panda Bear guests. | German producer builds minimal techno epic from a beautifully textured sound palette. Panda Bear guests. | Pantha du Prince: Black Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13947-black-noise/ | Black Noise | Though he lacks the crossover name recognition of producers like the Field, Burial, and Lindstrøm, Germany's Hendrik Weber is one of the leading figures in modern techno. As Pantha du Prince, he has up until now released two albums of meticulous, minimal-inspired house music. The last, 2007's This Bliss, found the rare balance between ambient sweep and dancefloor bounce, and it's only grown in stature since its release. In part because of a move from the smaller Dial Records to Rough Trade and guest spots from some indie heavyweights, his new LP, Black Noise, is being met with more excitement this time around. And with good reason: Said to be born out of a period of musical exploration in the Swiss Alps, the record is both a stylistic departure for Weber and an extension of what he already does well.
Weber is unlike most minimal techno producers in that he doesn't look to locate one groove and ride it for the course of a track. His songs open up, unfurl, and regularly change course. With Black Noise he develops this to incorporate a wide range of sounds-- field recordings, atonal noise, and stray percussion all populate the album. Above all, here he aims to reproduce sounds already in nature, and where This Bliss was airy and celestial, this record is gritty and earthbound. It's darker, more forceful, and more chaotic.
From the first moments of opener "Lay in a Shimmer", it's clear that we're in for a different kind of Pantha du Prince album. The track begins with a cluster of noise-- crowd voices, clanging scrapes, the rev of a car engine-- before building into a groove of low-end synths and glistening bells. While the core arrangement is still carefully constructed and precise, the clamor around it makes the song far looser than anything Weber's done to date. Subsequent tracks also strike a balance between the natural and electronic. "Abglanz" combines woodblock percussion with a gritty dubstep instrumental, and "The Splendour" (which features !!! and LCD Soundsystem bassist Tyler Pope) sets pinball plonks loose over a muted minimal backdrop.
The album moves through a few distinct phases while maintaining this earthy, psychedelic quality. In its middle section, starting with "A Nomad's Retreat", Weber plays with asymmetry and extreme textural contrast. He puts gravelly bass next to reverberant synths in a way that shouldn't work but does. He revisits the icy atmospheres of This Bliss toward the end of the record, rendering them grainier but equally haunting. On the gorgeous "Welt Am Dracht" and closer "Es Schneit", eerie vocals drift over taut drum programming and shredded synths flutter around like pieces of confetti. During both stretches, the songs tear and split at certain points, giving way to pockets of noise that reinforce the album's overall theme.
Ironically the only track to stumble is the one that will likely attract the most new listeners. "Stick to My Side" is Weber's much-drooled over collaboration with Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, but oddly it doesn't come together like one would hope-- Lennox's traditionally warm vocals sound detached from Weber's chilly arrangement. That's disappointing considering the duo's combined potential, but it's not enough to derail what is otherwise an exceptional record.
At 70 minutes, Black Noise is a big, dense listen but also the kind of album that rewards investment. Each track is its own micro sound world with enough rich detail to draw you back for deeper investigation. The album is undoubtedly a success for Weber-- if not an outright step forward, then a graceful lateral one-- who probably could have gotten away with not making such a comprehensive shift in sound. Instead he chose to deconstruct his signature style, and the result is strikingly unique. | 2010-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rough Trade | February 19, 2010 | 8.3 | 309337cd-c8ad-40ed-a1fb-93bdd61ff9ce | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The shiny, beat-heavy sound of nu-blink-182 works in starts and stops, but feels half as fun as the band used to be. | The shiny, beat-heavy sound of nu-blink-182 works in starts and stops, but feels half as fun as the band used to be. | Blink-182: NINE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blink-182-nine/ | NINE | Pop-punk’s appeal has always been the fusing of the hook-filled sentiments of pop music with the direct current of punk. They are two prongs that any band, particularly those that find something close to mainstream success, are forced to straddle. This dilemma—how to, in the misquoted words of Donnie and Marie Osmond, be a little bit pop while also being a little bit punk—is one that blink-182 has been struggling with for years now.
The apex of their fame revealed serious fissures in the group’s long-term stability, leading singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge to leave the group after their 2003 self-titled album, start the new band Angels & Airwaves, and get really into U.F.O. conspiracies. He’d rejoin for 2011’s Neighborhoods, but since 2015, DeLonge’s place in the band has been taken by Alkaline Trio singer Matt Skiba. Blink picked up their first Grammy nod with 2016’s California, and the band now seems singularly focused on making sure the brand endures into the future, which never really seemed like much of a priority during their most erratic years.
With NINE, their eighth album, blink is in search of a more sustainable kind of success. They’re aiming at a more youthful audience, maybe the kinds of kids who inadvertently came to pop-punk by way of Lil Peep, but blink-182 have long held appeal to people who didn’t cut their teeth in the punk scene. Take drummer Travis Barker, who is all over the last decade of hip-hop, from Run the Jewels to Lil Wayne to Young Dro. He tends to work with artists who aren’t exactly in vogue, usually aggressive, Generation-X rappers, like LL Cool J, Cypress Hill, and Xzibit, or the younger and critically unacclaimed, like Machine Gun Kelly and Yelawolf. But Barker has benefited tremendously from hip-hop’s du jour reverence for pop-punk, emo, and alternative rock, repositioning himself into something of a Rick Rubin-esque Svengali of a younger generation of SoundCloud rap. Over the past year, he’s shown up on songs by Lil Nas X, XXXTentacion, and Ghostemane and executive produced EPs by $uicideboy$ and 03 Greedo.
It’s Barker’s drum programming that shapes the sound of NINE more than anything else. His beats have always sounded a little bit like Pharrell’s, with that booming bass sound you can hear being so clearly played by a human hand on a drum machine. There are shades of Barker’s hip-hop work all over NINE, particularly on a song like “Hungover You,” which opens with an uptempo, danceable drumline and ends with a pattern of bass tones begging to be blasted out of oversized trunk speakers.
This is a clear bid for the kind of success currently enjoyed by bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Blink-182 worked on NINE alongside pop songwriting teams like Captain Cuts and the Futuristics, as well as Ali Tamposi, the co-writer of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.” It’s impossible to hear a song like “I Really Wish I Hated You” and not sense the Chainsmokers lurking in the corner. “On Some Emo Shit” pulls from the same well of lazy Big Apple tropes (“I thought I saw you at the Bodega,” “Thinking back to times in Manhattan and that SoHo Gallery”) as Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.” It’s a song that sounds written to accompany B-roll of the fictitious Brooklyn of TV Land’s Younger, a show about a middle-aged woman masquerading as a millennial—an experience that’s probably relatable to the members of blink-182.
Even if their sound is somewhat refurbished and compressed, blink-182 still avoid guest features and a full pivot from pop-punk to pure pop. Their flirtations with light EDM and hip-hop backbeats aren’t exactly new—“Run Away” sounds a lot like Linkin Park at their peak, with stuttering drums and manipulated vocals scattered across the rest of the album. There’s still plenty of speedy guitar playing and a lot of mournful rage. Mark Hoppus’ lyrics largely stem from his recent personal experiences with depression, but with the new sound, there’s also a new commitment to offering advice and inspiration to younger fans, like on the song “Happy Days,” where the band addresses a kid whose head is filled with “dread and doubt.”
It’s surprising how well the new sound works, though the voice of Skiba doesn’t always mesh comfortably with the production. As always, angst and unrequited affections are aplenty, but it all feels far too tame. Skiba and Hoppus wail to high heaven on “No Heart To Speak Of,” nothing approaches the bleeding feelings of “Josie” or the paranoia that permeates 1999’s Enema of the State.
Blink-182’s late-career work has largely been overshadowed by Tom DeLonge’s sincere effort to prove that aliens really do exist, in its own way a less surprising late-career pivot than a developmentally arrested band courting of a younger crowd. DeLonge has moved on, but he’s stayed weird in a way the rest of blink hasn’t. The band fits neatly into their shiny new suit, but they look better naked.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 28, 2019 | 5.2 | 309521c7-7ea1-42b9-8ee9-9a15a2250aad | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
On this London group’s first LP for Impulse!, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings uses jazz’s cultural memory as a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation. | On this London group’s first LP for Impulse!, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings uses jazz’s cultural memory as a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation. | Sons of Kemet: Your Queen Is a Reptile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sons-of-kemet-your-queen-is-a-reptile/ | Your Queen Is a Reptile | American jazz has often been described as an accumulation of cultural memory—music that survives by staying in touch with its own history. But the music of Shabaka Hutchings, the 33-year-old saxophonist and bandleader of London’s Sons of Kemet, insists that memory isn’t enough. Hutchings is a fixture in many projects, including cosmic jazz trio the Comet Is Coming, Afrofuturist outfit the Ancestors, and occasionally as a guest player with the Sun Ra Arkestra. His work with Sons of Kemet is notable for its fervent politics and open-borders approach to genre. On the group’s third LP, Your Queen Is a Reptile, Hutchings merges his classical clarinet and jazz orchestra training with the music he’s heard growing up in the Caribbean, traveling in South Africa, and living in London. “That’s an aspect of being a part of a musical diaspora,” Hutchings says in the press materials for Your Queen. “Not being from the place that jazz is born from means that I don’t feel any ultimate reverence to it. It’s just about finding ways of reinterpreting how we’re thinking about the music.” For Hutchings, jazz’s cultural memory is not just something to recite, but a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation.
On Your Queen Is a Reptile, that conversation covers a lot of ground with a limited vocabulary. Rendered only with tuba, saxophone, drums, and voice, Hutchings’ compositions are diverse and rhythmically ambitious. He’s not only leveraging jazz, but a broader sonic lexicon including Afrobeat, dub, Caribbean soca, and grime. Your Queen is thematically aspirational as well—as the group’s first LP since the 2016 Brexit vote, it directly challenges the conventions of nationalism and the British monarchy. In their place, Hutchings offers his own version of a royal family, comprising visionary black women like Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti queen mother who fought against British colonialism in the early 20th century; the longtime radical activist Angela Davis; and Hutchings’ own great-grandmother, Ada Eastman. Hutchings’ coronation of these remarkable women is a celebratory act, but he’s also commenting on the arbitrariness of all inherited hierarchies. Royalty is a dangerous ideology, and Hutchings counters it with a high court of trailblazing women whose achievements, rather than their bloodline, inform their worth.
On “My Queen Is Mamie Phipps Clark,” named for the social psychologist who researched the detrimental effects of segregation on African American schoolchildren, Hutchings melds sprawling dub and nocturne jazz. Led by Congo Natty, an English producer and vocalist who helped popularize jungle in the early ’90s, the track pays respect to dub’s Jamaican origins as well as its rebirth as 2 Tone ska in late-’70s London. Natty’s vocals seep to the song’s periphery on a wave of reverb while Hutchings’ sax paints in broad brushstrokes in the foreground. Theon Cross subs grumbling tuba for dub’s signature bass, letting out wonderfully guttural brass belches, for a fun and accessible fusion of genres that evokes the Specials’ woozy “International Jet Set.”
“My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu,” an homage to a noted South African nurse and anti-apartheid activist, is an Afrobeat shimmy that suggests furious dancing. Cross’ tuba and Hutchings’ tenor tangle phrases, while drummers Sebastian Rochford and Moses Boyd provoke them with anxious raps on rims, hi-hats, and djembe. Hutchings plays in sweetly curving licks before fracturing into staccato blurts. His instrument often reaches manic, searching measures, bringing to mind something saxophonist Evan Parker once told him. “He said: ‘You need to play as if it’s your last chance to play,’” Hutchings recently told The Wire.
Hutchings has said he wrote lead single and album highlight “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman” as an interpretation of Tubman’s initial escape from slavery. The effect is urgent—the drummers mimic the pace and posture of someone running for their life, at times slipping and hitting a cowbell or snare with added force, but never losing speed. Saxophone and tuba reach bumblebee frenzy, sputtering by the end of their turbulent flight. It is an exhilarating and highly original piece of music that showcases Hutchings’ ability to translate politics to melody.
Sons of Kemet are most effective when they transpose concept to instrument this way. But despite the group’s skill for conversing between genres and generations, words are Your Queen’s greatest weakness. Guest vocalist Joshua Idehen delivers his poems with a bravado that at times distracts from Hutchings’ nuanced compositions. On “My Queen Is Ada Eastman,” Idehen’s vocals don’t arrive until minute three, and when they do they dampen the song’s energy. His diction can be a bit goofy, and lines about London winds that “shiver my thin moustache” don’t necessarily help. The poet redeems himself, however, with a simple phrase that seems to speak to the resilient immigrant experience in post-Brexit Britain: “I’m still here,” he repeats.
Your Queen is Sons of Kemet’s first release on Impulse!, the label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders at their peaks. This adds another dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with American jazz, placing him among the players whose work he’s trying so hard to subvert and deconstruct. It is a peculiar achievement for him in some ways, but it is also a testament to his talents as a composer and player. Hutchings may not feel any “ultimate reverence” to the genre, but its tastemakers see a lot of promise in him. Given the passion and innovation he’s breathing into contemporary jazz, why shouldn’t they? | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | March 30, 2018 | 7.6 | 3098c43c-d108-44fb-a92c-f9b0b3b49e19 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Like Battles' Mirrored, this Kompakt remix album delights in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice. | Like Battles' Mirrored, this Kompakt remix album delights in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice. | DJ Koze: Reincarnations: The Remix Chapter 2001-2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12769-reincarnations-the-remix-chapter-2001-2009/ | Reincarnations: The Remix Chapter 2001-2009 | It was fitting that Germany's Stefan Kozalla-- aka DJ Koze/Adolf Noise and one-half of techno-pop duo International Pony-- wound up the dance producer tapped to remix Battles' slippery electronic-rock single "Atlas" back in 2007. Obviously there was the track's queer bounce, the future-retro glam-rock rhythm partly inspired by Battles' interest in German "schaffel" techno, a sound pioneered by the Kompakt label, one of Koze's benefactors. But also: Go back and listen to Battles' Mirrored. Then throw on Reincarnations, this bulging new collection of Koze remixes. Rhythmically, they have next to nothing in common. Instead, they're two albums that delight in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice.
There's hardly a track on Reincarnations that's not peppered with tweaked vocals. Koze is a devotee of the ancient art of the vocoder or its modern-day software plug-in equivalent. He loves to use gender-flipping filters to turn his singers into robot androgynes. And he's not above a David Seville-ian blast of pitch-shifting just for fun. Sometimes, as on the sublimely silly "Minimal" by Matias Aguayo, the vocal is outlandish enough that Koze can more or less stay out of its way. And other times, as on Matthew Dear's "Elementary Lover", Koze the remixer overstuffs the track's four minutes-- from arch, starched whiteboy funk to a Venusian stadium rock outro. If you're cringing slightly at the thought of yet another techno remix album filled with identikit instrumentals, know that Koze's vocal play on Reincarnations adds new facets to already interesting tracks and turns boring cuts beguiling.
And lest you think his cut-ups are all laughs, there's nothing comedic about Koze's take on the laid-back funk of Heiko Voss' "Think About You". Instead he stretches the "I" in the "I think about you" refrain into an angelic background hum that sets the whole track swooning. It's a subtle move that points up the other thing that makes Reincarnations so listenable: Koze's craftsmanship, which is often put in the service of the kind of spaced-out, gentle loveliness that characterizes the "Think About You" remix. He may have a shameless a weakness for novelty shock tactics, but Koze's also a big softie with deft touch. The aforementioned "Atlas" remix is on the one hand truly perverse, stripping away that big, booming, instantly recognizable schaffel beat for fractured mid-tempo micro-rhythms. But its oddness becomes enchanting when the drums drop out entirely for a twinkling breakdown straight out of the late-1990s IDM school of music box melodies. Indeed, Koze's breakdowns alone elevate many of these tracks, even the "already good" ones: the water-torture pauses in Sascha Funke's "Mango Cookie"; the rave-y bleeps colliding with smeary swells of strings on Malaria's "Kaltes Klares Wasser (DJ Koze & the Tease Remix)".
Reincarnations isn't flawless. Koze's take on Lawrence's "Rabbit Tube", for instance, settles for the kind of passable but generic minimal techno that's so temple-clutchingly dull across an entire album. But the fact that the "Rabbit Tube" remix acts more as a palette cleanser here, slipped between Koze's sonically restless techno-pop (Wechsel Garland's "Swim", with its long, silty intro) and dancefloor experiments (the drunken jazz of Noze's "Danse Avec Moi"), points out how effectively Reincarnations is programmed, if nothing else. That ear for sequencing means Koze's fashioned that rarest of remix albums: the kind might play start to finish, and more than once. | 2009-03-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2009-03-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Get Physical | March 12, 2009 | 7.5 | 309b1e2c-26d3-4270-a52c-8b22fa41b80e | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Carly Rae Jepsen's third album E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless as any pop album you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. It is flooded with winning moments, even if it lacks the personality of great pop records. | Carly Rae Jepsen's third album E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless as any pop album you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. It is flooded with winning moments, even if it lacks the personality of great pop records. | Carly Rae Jepsen: E•MO•TION | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20898-emotion/ | E•MO•TION | Carly Rae Jepsen's ambition for her new album E•MO•TION could not be clearer. "We had the biggest single in the world last time and didn't have the biggest album," her manager Scooter Braun told the New York Times in July, referring to her 2011 breakout hit, "Call Me Maybe". "This time we wanted to stop worrying about singles and focus on having a critically acclaimed album." It's an ambitious campaign, but the Shellback-produced opener "Run Away With Me" announces it with clarion synths that sound like battle-call horns: Carly Rae is at the gates with an army, hellbent on returning home with your love.
In many ways, she succeeds: E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless a pop album as you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. More than 200 tracks were workshopped in sessions with some of the pop world's most prestigious hired hands, including hitmakers Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, neither of whom made the final cut. In the end, just 12 made the album, with six more filling out the deluxe edition.
The hand-picked collaborators that do appear on E•MO•TION include Sia, Devonté Hynes, and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, all of whom contribute excellent work (Hynes, on the twinkling Prince-inspired ballad "All That", and Batmanglij, on the weird, warbling "Warm Blood"). The synth and drum programming, handled by Ariel Rechtshaid, may be his best, building off the sound he developed for Haim's Days Are Gone. I can think of a few fans and gearheads who would pay good money to have Rechtshaid break down the sounds on this album, as he's done in the past.
But whatever lessons we learn from *E•MO•TION—for example, *that this palette of '80s synth sounds and Madonna hat-tips will probably endure for eternity—we don't learn much about Jepsen. The best pop stars distill attitudes and emotions into gestures so perfect they can take on a life of their own. This is why pop icons inspire endless memes: Rihanna for when we give no fucks, Beyoncé for when we're feeling imperial. We have Drake for performative vulnerability, Taylor for performative generosity. Jepsen, on the other hand, hasn't captured the Internet's imagination in the same way. Her best performance is still as a shy, boy-crazy brunette, a role she reprises on the "driving the speed limit on the zeitgeist" first single "I Really Like You". Her efforts on E•MO•TION to break new ground around this reductive portrait are fitful and unconvincing. (She told the Guardian she "spent an entire week vaping" to sound "gritty" on the song "Your Type", yet she sounds no different on that track than on any of the others.) Ultimately, you can listen to Carly Rae Jepsen for days and still have no idea who she is.
This may seem like a surface-level concern, but it's an important one, because E•MO•TION is all surface. It's unfair to deeply scrutinize lyrics on a pop record—the goal is to write smart, but skew broad—but E•MO•TION fails to tell us who Jepsen is or wants to be. The economy of her writing is impressive, especially on songs like the shadowy "Warm Blood" or the booming closer "When I Needed You". "LA Hallucinations", her collaboration with members from little-known indie rock bands Zolas and Data Romance, stitches a bubblegum vocal to a no-frills electronic production. (It is also the rare pop song to include the word "BuzzFeed.") But the album mostly feels like the conclusion of a team determined to create an unassailable pop product.
That's why it falls short of its ultimate goal of setting the world on fire; for all its ironclad hooks and studio precision, Jepsen's third album, like her second, lacks the personality of the most memorable pop records. There's an unshakeable vagueness to her—her last album was simply called Kiss, and this one bears the generic title E•MO•TION, with inexplicable punctuation. It may be flooded with winning moments—the bridge on "Gimmie Love"! the build to the last chorus on "All That"!—but E•MO•TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name. | 2015-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Schoolboy | August 17, 2015 | 7.4 | 309ba10d-e03c-4d55-80a2-c171805d91a4 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
On Joey Bada$$'s debut LP B4.DA.$$, the rapper revisits golden era sounds and aims for greatness. | On Joey Bada$$'s debut LP B4.DA.$$, the rapper revisits golden era sounds and aims for greatness. | Joey Bada$$: B4.DA.$$ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20146-joey-bada-b4da/ | B4.DA.$$ | One of the longest shadows in hip-hop is cast by a 14-month stretch from September '93 through November '94. Arguably the last and finest run of hip-hop's golden age, this period is bookended by the releases of De La Soul's alt-rap classic Buhloone Mindstate and Redman's surreal, grimy *Dare Iz a Darkside—*and encompasses so many distinctly earth-shaking individual statements it's almost beyond belief. Midnight Marauders, Enter the Wu-Tang, Illmatic, Ready to Die, Doggystyle, The Diary, Hard to Earn, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, *Resurrection—*even the stuff that hasn't crossed over to the same extent, like Black Moon's Enta da Stage or O.C.'s *Word…Life *or Del the Funky Homosapien's No Need for Alarm, reign as certified classics, each with their own stories to tell and unique elements that made them stand out in rap's busiest creative flourish of the coming-of-age '90s.
As profiles and reviews have regularly pointed out, Joey Bada$$ wasn't alive for any of these albums' release dates. That's not really the issue here, though it's easy to draw conclusions from that fact; when the weight of influence an artist carries has the additional weight of history piled on, that can't be good for the backbone. But as his career has developed, from the claim-staking mixtape 1999 to the moody regrouping effort Summer Knights to a litany of guest verses (A$AP Rocky's "1 Train"; the remix of Madgibbs' "Knicks"), he still hasn't strayed far from that two-decades-past area of influence, a narrow purview that's resulted in some fine mood music but little that's been transcendent or reinventive. Official debut B4.DA.$$ keeps that frustrating formula going.
And make no mistake, B4.DA.$$ is a case of squandered resources rather than some expected mediocrity inoffensively met. It sets a compelling mood well—a restless-youth disbelief in actually making it, even when all the evidence is laid out in front of him, until finally the cloud cover breaks and it all starts registering. (One of his most unguarded moments of cynicism-shaking excitement comes at the end of "Piece of Mind": A jailed friend admits that he caught Joey's new single on the radio and Joey's reaction—"oh, you heard that shit!"—is pure, hard-earned pride.) And even at their most obvious, the beats nail that East Coast melancholy winter sensation, whether coming from vets of the era Joey nods back to (DJ Premier on "Paper Trail$"; a Roots/Dilla reconstruction on "Like Me") or Pro Era hands like Kirk Knight ("Big Dusty"; "Hazeus View") and Chuck Strangers ("Escape 120"; "Black Beetles"). Some of the homages are blatant to the point of distracting; if you can hear Statik Selektah's beat for "No. 99" and not scoff at the idea of putting a Canal Street "Scenario" knockoff in the middle of an otherwise moody album, I envy your reserve. But the heavy traditional soul-jazz/boom-bap backing is at least well-executed, and the occasional shakeup via drum'n'bass-adjacent uptempo breaks ("Escape 120"; bonus track "Teach Me") is welcome. You could do far worse than to pick this record up for meditative late nights or bad-weather commutes, where it's best to just zone out and let the vibe sneak up on you.
But the catch for an MC aiming his sights at the pantheon of stylistic greatness circa '93-'94 is that the people who appreciate that music the most—especially the people who came of age with it as their soundtrack when that shit was new—are also the least forgiving when it comes to lyrical complacency. And with a voice and a flow barely distinct enough to be instantly recognizable just yet, there's no margin of error for Joey here. There aren't enough intricate lines to make up for the ones so flatly familiar they feel like placeholders: check one-verser "Christ Conscious" and its opening-line "Motherfuckin' microphone checker/ Keep that grip tight, like my Smith & Wesson" couplet, then realize that there's still Namedrop 101 references to Ike Turner, "Dragon Ball", and Thriller-era Michael on the way. There aren't enough unexpected detours to compensate for the constant quasi-iconoclastic invocations of other artists' well-known hooks, with "Paper Trail$" and its nuance-draining "Cash ruined everything around me" maybe the most egregious. And most disappointing of all, there's not enough spark to the rhymes to excuse the goofy metaphors ("Hazeus View": "I'm a titan, like Zeus I enlighten 'em/ Kick flows till it's kung fu fightin' 'em"). He's still relatively young, but Joey's experienced enough worth sharing that it feels like his words are inadequate to even cover its scope.
And that's what separates albums like this from records you just kind of shrug at and move on from. Joey's less than a month into his twenties and he's already lost a close friend in Capital STEEZ, is trying to figure out his place in the rap world (and the rest of the world) under a social media microscope, and has to live up to being the type of new-hope torch-carrier who can get friggin' Primo to do a beat for him. Through all of this, he still has to develop and evolve, in public, after already setting a precedent for himself as an ambassador for the aesthetic of a previous, endlessly revered and long-lamented era. That he can hint at who he really is beneath the simplistic words and still-developing voice is a good sign, and with the opportunity to vent on this record—dealing with money woes ("Paper Trail$"), strengthening familial ties ("Curry Chicken"), reflecting on a childhood he's growing out of yet still strongly shaped by ("O.C.B.", short for "only child blues")—he's gradually but noticeably building up a real identity on record. But if that next level's within reach, there has to be one obstacle to overcome: Firsthand truths take longer to sink in when they're delivered with secondhand styles. | 2015-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Cinematic / Pro Era | February 3, 2015 | 7 | 30a0cd2f-5d59-4259-ae2d-c2bf6c40a4b5 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop, 1986's C86 compilation is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes. | After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop, 1986's C86 compilation is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes. | Various Artists: C86 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19423-c86/ | C86 | In pop music, 82 seconds can be an eternity. That’s how long Primal Scream’s “Velocity Girl” lasts, and the song was enough to have crystallized an entire era and established an undying narrative. As the opening track of C86—a 22-song cassette compilation of British indie bands released by the legendary music magazine NME in 1986—“Velocity Girl” has become iconic. Around the time of its release, Primal Scream’s frontman, Bobby Gillespie, left his post as the drummer of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Disentangled from that band's major-label whirlwind, he resumed activity with the virtually unknown project he'd initially formed in 1982. Primal Scream then proceeded to reduce the pop song to its subatomic essence: quick, breezy, quirky, and above all, exquisitely small.
“Velocity Girl” sounded humble, but it was not without ambition. It falls shy of the minute-and-half mark, and shyness can be heard in the song’s desperate refrain: “Leave me alone,” Gillespie pleads in a Glaswegian warble as guitars ring like chimes around him. It was the sound of soaring punk rock as filtered through the Byrds, and its expression of angry introversion— told in an almost Morrissey-esque manner, via the tale of a troubled, sensitive young woman— was only the first stage of evolution for Primal Scream, whose sprawling 1991 album Screamadelica would all but eclipse their formative work. Regardless of what the future held for Gillespie, “Velocity Girl” became C86’s signature song, and it’s the track that, more than any other on the tape, helped turn C86 from a comp into a genre.
After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop—and of being a hefty influence, direct or otherwise, on everyone from My Bloody Valentine to Belle and Sebastian to the Strokes—C86 is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs have been assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes (drawn in part from his upcoming book, C86 & All That:Indie 1983-86). These 50 bonus tracks represent an additional fifty bands that Taylor claims should have been contenders to be on C86 in the first place, and his claim is correct. Not only does the expanded reissue provide context and insight, it’s packed to the back teeth with song after head-spinning song. One of the joys of C86 has always been its impressive lack of filler, and even expanded to a staggering 72 songs, this holds true.
Two words pop up most often in discussions about C86—“jangle” and “twee”—and although those who make those associations aren’t inaccurate, the descriptors don't tell the whole story. Inspired largely by the bands on C86’s ancestor, 1981’s C81 compilation—which featured, amid various post-punk, industrial and ska luminaries along with the wiry romanticism of Josef K, Orange Juice, and Aztec Camera, three alumni of Glasgow’s Postcard Records—the jangly, twee bands on this reissue wholeheartedly embrace their forebears. The Pastels, who had yet to install themselves as stalwart upholders of the C86 torch, crawl along forlornly with “Breaking Lines,” while Miaow—who recorded for Factory Records and were led by NME writer Cath Carroll, later immortalized by her unabashed fans in Unrest—brought a jaunty spring to their indie-pop step. McCarthy, featuring future Stereolab mastermind Tim Gane on guitar, waltzes wistfully with “Celestial City”. On one of the bonus discs, B.M.X. Bandits (featuring a pre-Teenage Fanclub Norman Blake), finally get their due with the charmingly remedial “E102”; in 1989, the band cheekily titled their debut album C86. A mere three years after the release of the compilation, it was already being mythologized.
While some stereotypes affiliated with C86 have been overstated over the years, there is an aching, shimmering delicacy at the heart of the compilation's more elfin contributors—but the ghost of punk past still lingers. Razorcuts named themselves after a line from Buzzcocks’ “Love You More”, and their track that appears here, “Sad Kaleidoscope”, is an unabashed homage to Pete Shelley’s warbling, wimp-punk songcraft. The Buzzcocks don’t get mentioned often as an influence on the C86 school, but on this reissue, the evidence is everywhere—from Pop Will Eat Itself’s buzzing “Mesmerized” (made before they became sample-heavy provocateurs, and before frontman Clint Mansell scored Darren Aronofsky films) to Talulah Gosh’s lo-fi, pop-punk romp “I Told You So” (made before sugar-spiked singer Amelia Fletcher formed the more refined Heavenly). The Wedding Present fall loosely into this camp, too, even though their song for the original C86 tracklist, “This Boy Can Wait (A Bit Longer)”, demonstrated just how much mastermind David Gedge seemed to want to one-up his peers in regard to heart-pounding desperation, Smiths-inspired cleverness, and an inhumanly hyperactive strum that put many thrash guitarists of the time to shame.
The line between C86’s jangly, dreamy representatives and its more distortion-smothered counterparts is blurred by bands like 14 Iced Bears. An oddity both then and now, the group’s song featured here, “Inside”, alchemically combines droning noise, hushed melancholy, and a nearly nauseating aura of discordance that presages My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything by two years (a time when MBV themselves had barely begun to absorb the influence of C86). But 14 Iced Bears aren’t the only group on the box set that prophesied shoegaze: “Go Ahead, Cry” by 14 Iced Bears’ Sarah Records labelmate, St. Christopher,is underlain with an atmospheric smear of static that might as well be a wormhole to the next three decades of noise-pop.
On the other end of the gentleness spectrum, Meat Whiplash’s “Here It Comes” is Cure-indebted goth with a Metal Machine Music fetish, a bizarre formula that nonetheless feels as much like proto-shoegaze as anything on the 4AD roster in 1986. And the Jesus and Mary Chain, one of the prime sources of C86’s DNA, are officially canonized in the compilation's canon with the inclusion of “Inside Me”, from its 1984 debut Psychocandy. The similarity between the titles of 14 Iced Bears’ and JAMC’s tracks isn’t likely intentional, but it’s eerily telling: again, the specter of introversion—of masking one’s mumbling sweetness behind sheets of lacerating, pseudo-psychedelic treble—is raised, and loudly.
Every precious stereotype associated with C86, however, is blown out of the water by the box set’s avant-garde contingent. Big Flame’s “New Way (Quick Wash and Brush Up with Liberation Theology)” is a Manchester-bred doppleganger of Minutemen’s funky, sardonically militant post-punk; Stump exhibits bona fide musical virtuosity on “Buffalo”, even if it’s bent toward a Carl-Stalling-meets-Captain Beefheart cartoonishness that ultimately provides one of C86’s most singular, brilliant moments. The Nightingales—a veteran of the '77 punk scene that included ex-members of the Prefects, who toured with the Clash for their legendary White Riot Tour— feed wobbly folk into post-punk on “Part Time Moral England”, right around the time that their contemporaries Mekons were beginning to do the same. The spirit of '77 manifests itself in an entirely different way on Pigbros’ “Hedonist Hat”, a clanging, churning, art-rock spasm that draws reverently from Brian Eno’s 1977 album Before and After Science. Partly in defense of these perpetual C86 outliers—the geeks so weird that they make the other geeks nervous —The Guardian recently a piece titled “C86: The myths about the NME’s indie cassette debunked”. As well-intentioned as it is, it misses the point: The sounds may be different, but the souls are simpatico.
As eclectic as C86 is, by no means does it try to encompass the entire British indie scene circa 1986. As Taylor recounts in his liner notes, “The aim […] was to take an aural snapshot of the moment. Were these acts representative of the state of a certain kind of indie music at that time? Very much so. Was C86 intended to be the be-all and end-all of independent music at that time? Of course not”. In fact, some bands refused to be included, fearing it would lead to being pigeonholed—like the June Brides, one of the major players in the admittedly loose-knit scene that C86 gathered together. That’s been rectified by the reissue, with the June Brides’ horn-punched, Burt Bacharach-like gem “Just the Same” serving as the first song on the box set’s first bonus disc. And some bands that were surely nowhere near being seriously considered in the first place— such as Happy Mondays, whose undercooked “Freaky Dancin’” is a minor skirmish of the dancefloor havoc they’d go on to wreak— serve more as a historical curiosity than a corrected omission.
Hindsight has been more than kind to C86, but not everyone agrees on its place in the indie firmament. In Marc Spitz’s new book Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film, Sarah Records cofounder Matt Haynes maintains that, “Even by the time it was released, C86 was being treated as a term of abuse, and most of the writers [at NME] were embarrassed by it. These days, people tend to think of it as a landmark moment, but… I think that’s a slight rewriting of history.” Revisionism, though, is the prerogative of the reissue curator—and that prerogative is exercised impeccably by Taylor, who glosses over none of the conflict or confusion of the era in either his liner notes or his choice of bonus material. This reissue triumphs by celebrating, rather than denying, the richness and invention—the dissonance and paradox—at play within a small scene of bands whose joyously erratic racket was much huger than their humble songs could contain. | 2014-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Cherry Red | June 10, 2014 | 9.2 | 30a29ad1-7b1a-49f7-95db-a4f6faea3a75 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
On their second album, this proudly gratuitous Philadelphia quartet dives headlong into extreme gore and extreme sonics, making a real-life mess of death. | On their second album, this proudly gratuitous Philadelphia quartet dives headlong into extreme gore and extreme sonics, making a real-life mess of death. | Pissgrave: Posthumous Humiliation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pissgrave-posthumous-humiliation/ | Posthumous Humiliation | Pissgrave had only one option: to get more extreme. In 2015, the Philadelphia band released one of the most disgusting death metal albums in recent history, Suicide Euphoria. A more frenzied version of Revenge’s blasting war metal, the album led with cover art where bones floated in what’s most politely called brown death goop. Posthumous Humiliation makes the gore even more clear, sporting a ripped-open face with its jaw prominently split in two. If you’re familiar with goregrind’s frequently exploitative, voyeuristic tradition, it’s nothing new, though most goregrind bands wouldn’t pass the muster of a tastemaking, subgenre-agnostic label like Profound Lore. As such, some potential Pissgrave fans may actually be turned off by such a blatantly malevolent image. But the music matches it: Posthumous Humiliation is gratuitously violent, getting off on its own vulgarity. It is not the first great death metal album of 2019 in spite of being reprehensible but because of it.
Pissgrave are again chiefly driven by war metal’s savagery-above-all approach, but the crucial difference comes this time with intensity. Despite its fury, war metal—black metal concentrated on speed and near-endless blasting, nothing else—is tight and controlled. Pissgrave are not sloppy, but they understand that carnage is messy, and their music should reflect that reality. Humiliation is louder and noisier than Euphoria, as Demian Fenton and Tim Mellon render endless sheets of mangled guitar noise, screamingly incoherent but cohesive. Blown-out riffs, torrential blastbeats, and vocals so low they seem subterranean crowd the same space, inseparable in their pain. “Emaciated” has what you could loosely call guitar solos, so damaged they make Kerry King’s Reign in Blood squabbles sound like the disciplined work of some YouTube shredder. Even when these leads suggest something familiar, like the swells and carnivorous bird pecks of “Into the Deceased,” they feel wonderfully senseless.
As with the cover, those guitar sounds may suggest that Pissgrave only provide denim-and-leather’s version of shock and awe. But there’s more here. Where their chaos ultimately leads is not as important as its blistering, tumultuous course, akin to Cecil Taylor’s percussive, jarring piano flights or Australian extremists Impetuous Ritual’s howling towers of noise. They seem free and unplanned, not deliberate. Each track is a new trial, a chance to live again through a cycle of misery and pain. Are the opening blasts in “Canticle of Ripping Flesh” and “Celebratory Defilement” the same as opener “Euthanasia?” Not quite—it just feels that cyclical, the ultimate source of Pissgrave’s bloodlust. “Catacombs of Putrid Chambers” seems like it offers a different path through Incantation-like dirges, yet it’s ultimately the same torture.
Despite how frenzied, blurred, and gory Pissgrave can become, they sometimes charge toward a horizon of approachability. For Euphoria, it was the thrashy, Power Trip-via-Absu tune, “The Second Sorrowful Mystery.” Here, the closing moments of “Rusted Wind” draw upon Dissection’s melodic mournful passages. Melodic? Yes, this record really is that fucked up. “Wind” is the funeral procession that follows Humiliation’s wave of violence. It’s as though they’re grieving, if not exactly remorseful.
It’s tempting to dismiss Humiliation as a mere edgelord monument, propaganda with no core. But you’re missing the point: Even if you’re incapable or uninterested in hurting anything, your internal life can feel ravaged and violent and chaotic. Pissgrave’s utter depravity proudly maps those feelings on Posthumous Humiliation; some days, this mess may be the only thing that makes sense. | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | March 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 30a638ed-88a5-42d5-b6ed-e9460dc68c54 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The Savannah sludge metal band Black Tusk's first album since the death of co-founding bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon is a joyous wake, not a somber funeral. Athon's tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish Pillars of Ash in his absence, and it's their strongest record yet. | The Savannah sludge metal band Black Tusk's first album since the death of co-founding bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon is a joyous wake, not a somber funeral. Athon's tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish Pillars of Ash in his absence, and it's their strongest record yet. | Black Tusk: Pillars of Ash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21498-pillars-of-ash/ | Pillars of Ash | The latest album from Black Tusk has all the swampy, sludgy goodness listeners have come to expect, and if you don’t know the backstory, you might not know that it’s overshadowed by tragedy. After a string of splits and EPs, Black Tusk were hard at work on their first full-length in five years, the follow-up to 2011’s roiling Set the Dial. One November evening, the bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon decided to take a break from recording and take his Harley through the cypress-lined streets of his native Savannah with his girlfriend Emily.
A driver ran through a stop sign and into his motorcycle, critically injuring both riders. While Emily recovered, Athon incurred irreparable brain damage, requiring an induced coma. You can't take positives from a tragic situation like this, but Athon died upholding the ideals that made the sludge metal band he co-founded so great: careful risk-taking, hometown pride, unconditional (if unconventional) love, and most importantly, a bullheaded devotion to living life as if it could end in an instant.
When a key member of an active band dies, the entire venture incurs trauma, often accompanied by creative moratoriums and existential crises. This is especially true for Black Tusk, a trio of lifelong friends who have distributed the musical weight equally and distinctly among themselves from the get-go: guitarist Andrew Fidler and drummer James May are the scathing screamer and middle-range complement, respectively, to Athon’s mucky growls, and their tripartite howls instantly set them apart from their peers. It would have been understandable if they'd followed the lead of their idols Motörhead and laid down their instruments, to have resigned out of respect. But Athon’s tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish the record and tour behind it (Corey Barhorst, of Niche and Kylesa, will take Athon’s place on the road). Pillars of Ash, then, should be considered Black Tusk’s latest album first, tribute second: this is not a somber funeral, but a joyous wake, not to mention the band’s strongest album yet.
Pillars of Ash doesn’t alter the formula of the past two albums, but rather accentuates them with doubled-up aggression; slip on a pair of headphones for the album’s 35-minute duration, and your ears’ll be ringing for an equally long period of time. With a fellow sludge-punk—Toxic Holocaust frontman Joel Grind—behind the boards, Black Tusk’s sound is in the hands of a talented technical wizard, and his mix ramps up the volume without obscuring the churning melodic backend, or the high-low contrasts of Fidler and Athon’s vocals, which take center stage on tracks like "God’s on Vacation" and "Still Not Well."
Of course, source material is everything, and Black Tusk’s refusal to repeat themselves makes for a dynamic, diverse listen: a welcome respite from the paint-by-numbers paradigms that often dominate the modern inclination of the "swamp metal" the group helped pioneer alongside fellow Savannah natives Kylesa and Baroness. Despite the after-the-fact uneasiness of "Walk Among the Sky"—a barnstormer that reimagines death as a chance to take a transcendent stroll, rather than a six-feet-under slumber—the track sprints circles around the reaper, its rapid-fire key-changes and frequent, furious digressions never letting up. At the same time, "Desolation of Endless Times" and "Punkout" honor the group’s punkish roots, making ample use of Fidler's yelps and Athon and May’s pogoing percussion.
The band may toss an occasional nod to Slayer ("Born of Strife") and Motörhead ("Bleed on Your Knees"), but there's no cribbing of influences here. Rather, Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies: "Black Tide" packs in all the sugary stomp we’ve come to expect from Torche, while the Athon-dominated "Desolation of Endless Times" (particularly its intro) could soundtrack an MMA highlight reel. With Athon’s passing, this LP may mark the end of the Black Tusk we fell in love with—but it’s the highlight of the band’s catalog, and the best tribute they could have imagined. There’s no telling what the future will hold for Fidler, May, and Barhorst as they soldier on without their friend and anchor, but judging from the sound of Pillars of Ash, their spirits are far from crushed. And Athon’s? Well, he’ll live forever, with every press of the play button. | 2016-02-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 2, 2016 | 8.2 | 30b288c5-42b5-49f4-985a-13c8cc193dd4 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Japanese heavy rock heroes release two LPs at once, but they aren't what you'd expect: one is electropop and shoegaze, the other a metal grab bag. | Japanese heavy rock heroes release two LPs at once, but they aren't what you'd expect: one is electropop and shoegaze, the other a metal grab bag. | Boris: Attention Please / Heavy Rocks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15460-attention-please-heavy-rocks/ | Attention Please / Heavy Rocks | Boris have never been one for hedged bets or bridled ambitions. In the past 15 years, the Japanese trio has released more than 20 albums of heavy eclecticism-- stoner bludgeons and thrash blasts, dense drones and noise screes. They're the band with Atsuo-- the screaming, gong-banging drummer with one of those arena-rock, hands-off microphones-- and Takeshi, a multi-instrumentalist who plays a double-necked guitar so often and well that it doesn't seem like an affectation. Michio Kurihara, one of the world's best psychedelic guitarists, works as Boris' touring sideman. From former labelmates Sunn O))) to fellow Japanese sonic explorers Merzbow and Keiji Haino, they've also collaborated with a long list of experimental luminaries. All of this seems to be part and parcel to Boris' methodical quest to build a legacy of expansive, new heavy music, where no form is too sacred to break, no idea too mainstream to incorporate. If that's their plan, it's largely worked.
Accordingly, there are few release-day gestures more rock star than issuing two albums at the same time, as Boris will do with the slight electropop-and-shoegaze departure Attention Please and the requisite metal grab bag Heavy Rocks. What's more, this is the second Boris LP to sport the title Heavy Rocks; the first was released in 2002, and nearly a decade later, it still stands as one of Boris' best efforts, a landmark distillation of stoner metal and noise rock built with enviable precision and aggression. This moment, then, is not only Boris' look-how-popular-we-are exclamation but also their look-how-much-we've-grown assertion; essentially, Attention Please and Heavy (Heavier?) Rocks are logical next steps for the Boris legacy. But riddled as this pair of albums is with confounding musical indecision and listless stylistic repetition, they mostly serve as reminders of how remarkable and inventive Boris have been and often threaten to be. Heavy Rocks was sturdier back in 2002, while the appropriately titled Attention Please-- even if the more interesting of these two discs-- is a flimsy showcase for Boris guitarist Wata as a would-be college-rock frontwoman.
Heavy Rocks does the things you expect a Boris album to do: It explodes open with "Riot Sugar", a brutal blues-metal march with a rote, ragged riff and background grunts from the Cult's Ian Astbury. "Missing Pieces" alternates between spare guitar drift, gnarls of noise, and an epically forlorn crescendo, while the other 12-minute-plus tune, "Aileron", growls and swells before drifting off into a piano-and-distortion haze. For fans of Boris, the material is a double-edged sword: It's the sort of motley metal that brought you to the fold one way or another, but that means you've already heard it-- all of it, from the massive soundscapes on Pink to the dynamic sizzle in Amplifier Worship-- several times before. Here, it's all offered like a mixtape, with no narrative arch or musical momentum.
Attention Please at least offers something fresh for Boris. For the first time in the band's long run, Wata takes lead vocal. Her consistent presence offers an atmosphere of patience, plus a cohesiveness that Boris have long since foregone. Sure, she leads the band through several different looks, from the tense, pretty opening title track to the dance-metal anthem "Party Boy". During "See You Next Week", she drifts like a ghost between a world of broken drum machines and guitars meant more for texture than melody. There's a ruminative instrumental for acoustic guitar, and "Spoon", a blustery tumble that-- Wata's willowy vocals aside-- favorably suggests the sound of 1990s American modern rock radio. What's best, the trio doesn't give up on its heavy metal experience; though this album suggests a stylistic mix of new wave and Mazzy Star, Boris play with the rumble and roar of a loud rock band. The bass line during the chiming "Tokyo Wonder Land" is a menacing throb, the guitar solo an acid-damaged roar. "Les Paul Custom '86" emerges as a dance number through sheets of noise, anchored by a riff that would have fit Earth in 1993. Those tell-all touches and Wata's command suggest that this is the better, if unforeseen, avenue for Boris' future. Though not fully developed, this is a space where they might actually explore without the constraints of reputation and expectation.
The heavy metal landscape of 2011 is tailor-made for (and, sort of, by) Boris. Sure, the black metal kids are busy retrenching against boundary breakers like Liturgy and Altar of Plagues, and a whole lot of older burly bros will tell you that stoner, thrash, and melodramatic metal were done better the first time. They're not necessarily wrong, but those sorts of attitudes provide a welcome contrast for the tone of inclusion and acceptance for ideas that permeates not only some of the moment's most exciting metal but also music at large. Whether it's the elegiac folk singer heading for stacks of finely orchestrated keyboards or the black metal band backing its melee with a pure and purposed disco-punk throb, a whole crop of young acts now seem open to the possibilities within their forms. Their audiences largely seem interested in tagging along, too. After all, we obtain and hear music in radically different ways and contexts now than in 1996, when Boris were making their recorded debut as a noisy sludge-metal band from Tokyo. Boris' post-modern eclecticism is, in theory, perfect for this moment. But pastiches and piss-takes-- by and large, the sort of material that's scattered between Attention Please and the second Heavy Rocks-- can only satisfy so much. Boris seem to be racing to stay current, to show that they can change as rapidly as these hyper-wired times. With each new addition to a catalog that's becoming more adulterated each year, we're learning that maybe they can't. | 2011-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | null | May 20, 2011 | 7.1 | 30bb8423-b2aa-4199-a116-76e6debba33d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
null | If Markus Popp is misunderstood, he has no one but himself to blame. When your interviews include answers like, "My music is embedded in a very concrete, completely tangible, everyday workflow far less occupied with theoretical notions of debatable authorship and digital discourse," to questions like, "Dude, did you, like, work out the songs beforehand or pretty much put this album together in the studio?" you can expect people to miss where you're coming from.
Two misperceptions about Popp are that he makes ambient music and all his work sounds the same. In the watershed year 1994, the ambient label almost | Oval: Ovalcommers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6066-ovalcommers/ | Ovalcommers | If Markus Popp is misunderstood, he has no one but himself to blame. When your interviews include answers like, "My music is embedded in a very concrete, completely tangible, everyday workflow far less occupied with theoretical notions of debatable authorship and digital discourse," to questions like, "Dude, did you, like, work out the songs beforehand or pretty much put this album together in the studio?" you can expect people to miss where you're coming from.
Two misperceptions about Popp are that he makes ambient music and all his work sounds the same. In the watershed year 1994, the ambient label almost applied, due in part to Oval's composition process at the time. That year, Popp, along with then-collaborators Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, decided to take copies of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, apply a magic marker to the CD surface, and record and manipulate the ensuing tracking errors. This resulted in a beautiful audio object called Systemische, a record that proved hugely influential in the experimental electronic community. And yes, it was generally placid enough to be categorized alongside Music for Airports.
But I defy anyone to listen to Ovalcommers' first track and think of Brian Eno. It begins with a two-note riff that prudent car alarm manufacturers should consider licensing, and then slides into a massive pit of raging black sound, full of bassed-out distortion and explosions of static. The opening siren continues to wail and actually takes on a pathetic quality as it drowns inside the din; you begin to feel sorry for that annoying little sound, so overwhelming is the clamor surrounding it.
Though every Oval record has a unique flavor, Ovalcommers is the most radical shift yet, one that easily dispels the second misperception. We saw glimmers of this development in 1999 with Szenariodisk, a gorgeous EP (my favorite Oval record next to 94diskont) that found Oval cutting exceptionally detailed sound figurines out of slabs of sonic chaos. At that point, Oval's sources began to acquire a prickly edge, as an increasing amount of information being stuffed through an ever-narrowing pipe had caused the protective coating to fray. Still, on Szenariodisk, controlled, icy beauty was the order of the day. On the full-length follow-up, Ovalprocess, Popp reigned in the discord and experimented with conventional sounds (the album is filled with organ chords), creating a warm, enveloping environment that throughout could still be called "pretty." The adjective seldom applies to Ovalcommers.
On this record, every sound is in constant danger of being shoved into the red. The most common elements-- sampled guitar plucks, an organ-like synth patch laced with static, modem transmissions, assorted drones-- appear and reappear over the course of the record, yet they remain in constant motion. Any complaints I've had recently about the "grid" that rules over time in computer-generated music do not apply here; the patterns of Ovalprocess would take years for me to understand completely. Loops are used as accent, not to drive composition.
Most prominent of these is the thing that set Oval apart initially: the now ubiquitous CD skip. It seems a relief when it first appears on Ovalcommers as Track 1 becomes Track 2 (the idea of Popp naming his pieces now seems silly) and the initial blast slips down to a manageable level. The CD skip has been incorporated into every past record except for Dok (a strange release that now sticks out of the catalog like a sore thumb), and Ovalcommers is no exception. People are tiring of the sound and I can relate. If nothing else, it's puzzling. Why has it stayed around so long, even outside of Oval? Why didn't Christian Marclay's memes multiply in the same way? Despite it all, for me, an Oval record without the trademark skip is like a Built to Spill album sans guitar.
Most of those who've run with the glitch have used it in a minimal context, but Oval is moving in the other direction. This is an album packed with abrasive tones of unimaginable density and uncertain origin. Oval shares with Autechre the ability to craft sounds that defy explanation. The human hearing system simply was not built with this record in mind. It's like trying to graph the emotional intent of a tropical storm. The listener has to fight a million years of evolution just to pay close attention, and when he does, there is no system of classification in place to describe it. It's clear that Oval has left pastures of beauty behind and is ready to ride wild and free in Merzbow country. Calling this album ambient is a joke; with Ovalcommers, Popp brings the noise. | 2001-05-22T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2001-05-22T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Thrill Jockey | May 22, 2001 | 7.8 | 30c1ad90-b436-49dd-9faa-cfe1f088ccdc | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The legendary punk band's 11th studio album is its first without Bruce Gilbert, making it an unexpected turning point despite appearing more than 30 years into Wire's career. | The legendary punk band's 11th studio album is its first without Bruce Gilbert, making it an unexpected turning point despite appearing more than 30 years into Wire's career. | Wire: Object 47 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11979-object-47/ | Object 47 | Object 47 marks an unexpected turning point in the 30-year history of Wire: It's their first album that doesn't feature all the original members. When drummer Robert Gotobed (née Robert Grey) temporarily fired himself from the band in 1990, reasoning that drum machines had rendered him redundant, the remaining members shortened the bandname to Wir. For whatever reason, the recent departure of Bruce Gilbert-- who made only minimal contributions to the Read & Burn 03 EP-- hasn't led to the same symbolic gesture.
The album opens with a rush on "One of Us", with Graham Lewis' sharp and strongly melodic bassline, Grey's efficient beat, and a Colin Newman vocal that may be his best since the band reunited in 1999-- his refrain ("one of us will live to rue the day we met each other") is both ominous and oddly celebratory. In fact, the track is so strong that the rest of the record feels like a bit of a let-down in contrast. At least at first. While none of the other songs share the opener's bracing immediacy, they eventually reveal more subtle charms and innovations on repeated listens.
Part of this replayability stems from the fact that the album's nine songs are widely varied. "Perspex Icon" finds Newman layering guitar tracks and filtering his voice to fit the straightforward punk his bandmates give him-- one of few times the band attempts to compensate for Gilbert's absence with overdubs. On "Circumspect", they simply let Newman's circular guitar figure get swallowed by undulating bass while he sings in a subdued, almost tired tone. "Four Long Years" is effortlessly rhythmic, but it still has that very distinctive sonic coloration-- mechanistic but warm-- that's characterized Wire's reunion records.
The sound of Object 47 is generally clean. Even when the vocals are being run through processors and the guitars are distorted, it still feels managed, and a lack of high-range makes it inviting and easy to listen to even at its noisiest. This rings especially true for the buzzing "All Fours", featuring feedback courtesy of Helmet's Page Hamilton. The clear production doesn't serve "Patient Flees" as well, though-- it's the only track here that genuinely doesn't work. The list of spoken words that stands in for a chorus just doesn't have the intended impact, and the floundering verses can't make up for it. Still, on the whole, it's another strong outing from post-comeback Wire. Though Gilbert was an essential member and his contributions are missed here, there's still no mistaking Object 47 for the work of any other band. | 2008-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | July 10, 2008 | 7.5 | 30c8d274-f4a7-4b9a-a163-8ca21006f29f | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Black Bananas boasts the same personnel as Jennifer Herrema's other post-Royal Trux band, but she fashions it as an alternate-universe RTX, one that isn't afraid to absorb modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house. | Black Bananas boasts the same personnel as Jennifer Herrema's other post-Royal Trux band, but she fashions it as an alternate-universe RTX, one that isn't afraid to absorb modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house. | Black Bananas: Rad Times Xpress IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16209-black-bananas/ | Rad Times Xpress IV | The institution of classic rock-- and all the FM-radio stations, VH1 specials, and "Disco Sucks" rallies it has propagated-- is built upon a certain they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to purism. But the genre's most esteemed icons have ultimately survived because they've occasionally been willing to break down rock's rigidity to absorb decidedly non-rock influences, be it the Stones flirting with reggae and disco on Black and Blue, Paul McCartney trying his hand at new wave on McCartney II, or Neil Young's infamous synth-pop odyssey Trans. None of these may count as those artists' definitive works but, given that rock'n'roll itself began as an unholy union of blues, jazz, folk, and country, these sorts of sacreligious stylistic detours and genre experiments were arguably truer to the music's original spirit than anything that tried to milk fresh inspiration from the I, IV, and V chords.
Jennifer Herrema's first band, Royal Trux, understood this all too well, as she and partner Neil Hagerty broke down and reassembled their 1970s blues-rock foundation into all sorts of distorted shapes over the course of a tangled, tangential 10-album discography. But since that band dissolved in 2001, Herrema has been following a more linear path with her post-Trux outfit RTX, who, with each successive record, have been gradually refining and polishing themselves into the last hair-metal band standing-- a stance so antithetical to prevailing indie-rock mores, it's practically avant garde. If Royal Trux were about deconstructing rock mythology, RTX aggressively reasserted it, from the cover-art drawings of Herrema that look like they were cribbed from some daydreaming high-school student's notepad, to giving their studio albums titles such as JJ Got Live RaTX that suggest they're some long-lost concert bootleg, to the intra-band references (RTX being an acronym that first appeared in the 1990 Royal Trux track "RTX-USA") that casts Herrema's entire oeuvre as some sort of secret-society code waiting to be deciphered.
The narrative gets even more convoluted with the arrival of Black Bananas, which boasts the same personnel as RTX; copped its name from an RTX song lyric; and whose debut album title, Rad Times Xpress IV, makes a smidgen of sense only if seen as the fourth RTX effort. (It also includes a song titled, confusingly enough, "RTX Go-Go".) And RTX's penchant for straight-up sleazy rock'n'roll carried through to the new band's first public offering last fall, a faithful cover of the Stones' "Before They Make Me Run", complete with an uncannily Neil Hagerty-like guest vocal from Kurt Vile that actually makes the song sound more like Royal Trux than anything RTX ever attempted.
But that cover selection proves prophetic not for its form but for its source: 1978's Some Girls, arguably the Stones' most stylistically varied album, what with Mick Jagger channelling his New York-nightlife escapades into the Studio 54 strut of "Miss You" and the CBGB snarl of "Shattered". Following the same logic, Herrema fashions Black Bananas as an alternate-universe RTX who aren't afraid to absorb more modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house, and (for 10 seconds of "RTX Go-Go" at least) dancehall, while guitarist Brian McKinley lays off the usual Eddie Van Halen histrionics in favor of lysergic Eddie Hazel funk. The album doesn't so much begin as burst its dam, with opener "It's Cool" arriving in such a thick surge of wah-wahed guitars and phased-out synths, it takes you a minute to realize the song actually adheres to standard blues structure.
In accommodating all of these disparate sound sources in a limited-range but densely textured mix, Rad Times Xpress IV finds a direct antecedent in Royal Trux's 1998 classic Accelerator (which essentially sounded like an arena-rock band playing inside of a vacuum cleaner) while feeling remarkably of a piece with contemporary strains of chillwave and electro-rock. (To wit, Black Bananas' first North American tour sees them opening for Sleigh Bells.) Where past RTX albums faithfully approximated the flash and thrash of 1980s metal with all the diligence of a Civil War reenactment, Rad Times Xpress IV illuminates how well that music lends itself to more experimental renderings (the tape-decayed boogie of "TV Trouble" and "Hot Stupid" sound like Aerosmith as produced by Ariel Pink; "Rad Times" crosswires Kraftwerkian funk and KISS crunch) while the songs seemingly engineered to hold onto RTX's denim'n'leather constituency yield surprises: "Acid Song" is actually a sultry slow jam, and "Killer Weed" rides its Ted Nugent riffs into a dubby denouement. However, even as its title track excitedly welcomes us to "The future! The future!," Rad Times Xpress IV doesn't shy away from referencing Herrema's notorious junkie past, as "Foxy Playground" recounts all the times and ways she "could've died." But instead of playing up the pathos of that sentiment, the song's slinky bounce effectively plays it for laughs, and for good reason: Twenty-four years into her musical career and still busting skulls, Jennifer Herrema is not about to let a little rumination on mortality get in the way of a rad time. | 2012-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | February 1, 2012 | 7.8 | 30c94efc-7827-41e8-810f-199c2ff9327d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt has said his second album for Kranky in two years uses technology as a way of expressing androgyny. He moves into intellectual electronics without losing the playfulness that initially made his work appealing. | Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt has said his second album for Kranky in two years uses technology as a way of expressing androgyny. He moves into intellectual electronics without losing the playfulness that initially made his work appealing. | Steve Hauschildt: Sequitur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17360-sequitur/ | Sequitur | Blacklight posters. Telescopes. Stacks of VHS tapes. A grainy video of a comet traveling across the pitch black expanse of space. If Emeralds, the Cleveland-born synth and guitar three piece, are known for anything, it's their ability to take empty nostalgia and flip it into deep introspection. It's a skill that speaks to their musical prowess as much as it does their sincere love of things that many people would initially write off as ironic.
As solo artists, each member has taken their love of ephemera and abstract ideas in different directions. John Elliott went cosmic, making music that sounds like it was conceived on a space shuttle, while Mark McGuire's burrowed further into his guitar, creating gorgeous ripples of dusky sunlight-tinged music that sounds like the work of a band instead of one guy. Steve Hauschildt, on the other hand, is steadily molding soft drone, spa-ready new age, and breathy keys into something that isn't quite dance music, but isn't fully ambient either. On Sequitur, his second album for Kranky in two years, he manages to make the jump into intellectual electronics without losing the playfulness that made him appealing in the first place.
The most immediately noticeable aspect of the record is that Hauschildt is now singing. Sort of. His vocals are masked by a vocoder, rendered borderline indecipherable. This isn't an accident. In the press release for the record, Hauschildt explains that he wants to make an album that uses technology as a way of expressing androgyny. By mixing male and female tones, he's arrived at a vocal sound that isn't exactly either. It's a heavy concept to broach, especially when he could just as easily carry on without explaining it at all, but Sequitur is an album for thinking to above anything else.
Across eight tracks, he combines layers of glittering synth with smooth washes of mechanical hum. There are moments when this stuff fades too far into the background, like in the pretty but overly repetitive "Vegas Mode", which is technically accomplished but lacks heft. "Kept", the most explicitly ambient piece on the record, demands attention due to its gummy web of textured keys that pulse with vitality. If "Vegas Mode" is Hauschildt straddling multiple genres and not really pulling it off, then "Kept" shows that maybe he would be better served tackling one thing at a time. Which is not to say that Sequitur is a bad album. More than anything, it's a hint at what Hauschildt's capable of.
Today, you could walk into just about any remaining record store and pick up a wide array of deluxe reissues of long haired dudes from previous decades messing with synthesizers they wanted nothing more than to understand. It's great that they exist. Those records are often mind bogglingly ahead of their time, and are a clear influence on a new crop of electronic music obsessives, but they often feel like curiosities-- as if the end result was just experimenting with the equipment rather than using it to make fully formed pieces.
With the academic concept behind Sequitur, Hauschildt initially seems like he's part of that school, but when the album reaches closer "Steep Decline", everything's overwhelmingly human. On that track, cavernous drums boom across a tangle of triumphant keys, and it sounds like Hauschildt's attempting to drag emotion from a sterile soundscape. He'll certainly make better records, yes, but right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever. | 2012-11-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-11-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kranky | November 19, 2012 | 6.6 | 30d4614b-1983-43de-b4f3-1e868128f12a | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
I Decided. attempts to bury Big Sean’s wide mean streak and present the 28-year-old in a mature light. | I Decided. attempts to bury Big Sean’s wide mean streak and present the 28-year-old in a mature light. | Big Sean: I Decided. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22898-big-sean-i-decided/ | I Decided. | 2015’s Dark Sky Paradise was a massive and hard-earned leap forward for Big Sean. When pressed, he’s a very good rapper, and the right selection of beats framed his words with a sense of new importance. The album was also unapologetically mean. Of course, its breakout hit was “I Don’t Fuck With You,” but the same bitterness was applied across the LP to foes and exes alike. Perhaps no rapper is as obsessed with his own dick as Big Sean, and given the opportunity to brag and scorn, he found a comfort zone. I Decided. attempts to bury that mean streak, and present the 28-year-old in a mature light. In short: It doesn’t work.
On I Decided., Sean continues to recount his come-up—a banal narrative for a platinum-selling artist who’s cracked the Top 5 with each album. The record’s new twist is that Sean is quickly growing weary of fame and being in the public view. Bemoaning success is certainly a quick ticket to earn more success (see: Graham, Aubrey; West, Kanye), but Sean conveys no details or feelings to make his struggle compelling. “I don’t want [paper] if it can’t change shit drastically, dramatically,” he claims on “Halfway Off the Balcony,” but there’s no sense of what change he wants, and therefore nothing to connect to. It doesn’t help that he still leans on forehead-slap lines like, “Everything gold like I just practiced alchemy,” from the same song.
Sean also badly wants to show us that he is an album artist, not a singles rapper. “Voices in My Head / Stick to the Plan,” is a two-part would-be epic in which nothing of consequence happens. Over a spare, diffuse beat, he hears voices telling he “could do better.” Then the always-powerful Metro Boomin tag appears, as does a captivating beat, and Sean runs down the various distractions in his life—women, money, fame, “negative energy,” etc.— but the undertone is that “the plan” is making hits. In attempting to demonstrate how layered and complicated he is, Sean reaffirms what we already knew about him—he’s better when rapping well-delivered nonsense over heavy beats.
And so the best moments remain the pop songs. “Bounce Back” has already gone gold, and it sticks to the Dark Sky Paradise script as much as anything else on the new record. Sean does an honest-to-God Cartman impression on the song, suggesting that he’s at his best when he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The other single, “Moves,” is equally effective—Sean’s agile flow is his best weapon to distract you from his litany of clunkers, jokes about Jason Statham and Mini-Me and Channing Tatum all blurring together into a rubbery and enjoyable bounce.
On the album’s best song, “Sacrifices,” Sean raps, “I came a long way from that ‘Marvin & Chardonnay.’” Quite literally, it is a true statement: The Finally Famous single came out over five years ago, and like the rest of the world, Sean has had thousands of days to deal with life’s quotidian pressures. But while he has become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album. He continues to be a talented pop act attempting to be something he is not. | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / G.O.O.D. Music | February 9, 2017 | 6.3 | 30d49cec-7d5d-4cf1-a94d-5f5a9f7f6576 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album from Belle and Sebastian, a little-heard school project that defined the sound of one of indie rock’s most beloved acts. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album from Belle and Sebastian, a little-heard school project that defined the sound of one of indie rock’s most beloved acts. | Belle and Sebastian: Tigermilk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-tigermilk/ | Tigermilk | In March 2020, when the world went into lockdown, Belle and Sebastian asked fans to share their self-isolation experiences. These responses became the lyrics to an audio-visual piece featuring aerial footage of an empty Glasgow and partly narrated by the Scottish band’s chief songwriter, Stuart Murdoch. The result is understated, serene, and heart-ripping: At one point, a father says goodbye to his high-risk son, who was already hospitalized before the COVID-19 pandemic. “If this is God’s experiment,” recites a friend of the band Alessandra Lupo, who co-narrates, “aren’t the good guys supposed to come through this?”
Although a departure in form, the project was a welcome reminder of qualities and themes that have helped define Belle and Sebastian for almost 25 years. From mailing lists, club nights, and a shock victory in an online popularity contest to that viral moment when they forgot their drummer in his pajamas outside a North Dakota Walmart, participatory culture has always been a big part of the band’s story. Their songs are often quiet and serious, their characters full of life yet cast out by a cruel and rapacious human society, their presentation fragile yet unafraid of old-fashioned beauty. The tale of the band’s rise is so unusual that it’s difficult to separate the music from the myth, like a used book you treasure as much for the smell of the paper and the scrawls in the margins as the words on the page. And it starts with Belle and Sebastian’s immaculate oddball of a debut album, 1996’s Tigermilk.
One of the most important myths about the group involves Murdoch’s own period of unwanted isolation. The second of three children born to a merchant navy officer and a midwife, Murdoch grew up in a home in coastal Ayr that still had an outhouse; he did well at school, played soccer, and gravitated toward loud rock bands like AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, and Yes. By his third year studying physics at the University of Glasgow, he’d run a marathon, tried amateur boxing, and amassed an alternate musical knowledge of northern Britain’s robust indie guitar-pop legacy while working as a DJ, roadie, and record store employee. Then, in his early 20s, he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. “It came along and took seven years out of my life,” he told a biographer.
Murdoch quit school, stopped working, and moved back in with his parents, bedridden. Severe fatigue, muscle aches, and unrefreshing sleep would trouble him for decades. “It’s never abated,” he told an interviewer in 2018. But while trapped alone with his thoughts, he began dreaming up snippets of melody. “I started writing songs because I had to,” he has said. As Murdoch felt better, he tried and failed to resume university, then stayed in Glasgow, supported by government disability aid. He sang at occasional open mic nights, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his cult heroes, like Lawrence of the ingeniously askew ’80s band Felt. Murdoch also spent a great deal of time on public transportation, observing and imagining the lives of all the “normal” people.
Improbably enough, the band and album were born out of two educational programs. One was a Scottish welfare initiative called Beatbox, a course for out-of-work musicians where Murdoch met founding Belle and Sebastian bassist Stuart David—who’d only enrolled to hold onto his unemployment assistance. The other was a music business class at what is now Glasgow Kelvin College, where one of David’s flatmates, Richard Colburn—the drummer who would, years later, spend hours stranded in a parking lot between U.S. gigs—had enrolled. A four-song demo recorded at the Beatbox by Murdoch, David, and others built a steady local buzz and soon caught Colburn’s attention. Every year, the music course at Colburn’s college picked a single to record, release, and promote. In 1996, it was an album: Tigermilk.
Except that Belle and Sebastian didn’t exist yet. The band name on the demo tape was Rhode Island, and their lineup was in flux. Along with David and Colburn, Murdoch was soon able to enlist guitarist Stevie Jackson, a seasoned ’60s-style rhythm-and-blues player who periodically hosted a Glasgow open mic night. One of the songs from the Beatbox demo was “Belle and Sebastian”; in late 1995, when Murdoch showed David a short story he’d written about a “boy” named Sebastian teaching guitar to a younger “girl” who was still in school, the band had a new name. At a New Year’s party, when Murdoch met cellist, singer, and songwriter Isobel Campbell—a local university student, “Bel” to her friends—their boozy introduction must’ve felt like stars aligning. With the addition of another younger member, keyboardist Chris Geddes, Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk-era roster was complete. The full six-piece played only a couple of shaky live shows before recording.
Tigermilk is one-in-a-million in part because of these one-in-a-million circumstances. Tracked in three long days at a proper studio, CaVa Sound, under the expert guidance of in-house engineer Gregor Reid, the album is a vibrant snapshot of a band coming into existence while the tape was rolling. “It was like the first flushes of romance,” Campbell has said. Without even so much as an indie label boss to answer to—Electronic Honey, which originally released Tigermilk, was affiliated with the university course—the album was also an unusual opportunity for Murdoch to realize the musical vision that had been floating through his brain since his years of solitary illness.
Inspired by ’60s chamber-pop like the Left Banke, the Zombies, and Love, the sound was lush and loose: Murdoch insisted on recording his acoustic guitar and scratch vocal first, leaving his newbie group to catch up with his racing tempos. Lyrically, Murdoch’s songs were like great short stories, fast-moving and richly detailed, often about school-age characters (a school setting was universally relatable, he argued, and besides, school was the 27-year-old’s last major source of memories before getting sick) and yet there were usually darker currents beneath the superficial lightness. He delivered all of this nonchalantly, in a wispy yet commanding lilt, with rippling melodic runs and soaring choruses: The tunes were as catchy as his meanings were enigmatic.
Tigermilk’s first track, “The State I Am In,” can be heard as a salvo of artistic intent that carries across Belle and Sebastian’s entire career. The title suggests an earnest confession, the unaccompanied vocal that opens the song furthers that impression. But as the full band gallops in, the song becomes something else, almost like a Trainspotting-era Glaswegian’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” a statement of self that seeks to encapsulate the human condition. Singing about 1975 and 1995, his brother’s coming-out and his sister’s simultaneous wedding day, Murdoch collapses past and present, fictional and personal—“Riding around city buses as a hobby is sad,” opines the fatigue-hobbled bus-riding hobbyist—from the perspective of a witty raconteur who ricochets around all sides of morality. He’s self-obsessed yet fitfully altruistic, variously rescuing and mistreating his “child bride” and, in quasi-biblical parlance, “crippled friend.” The coup de grâce: All of these tangled tales become grist for a priest who turns his parishioner’s confidences into a trashy novel, also titled The State I Am In. When Murdoch gives himself to God, the Almighty hesitates. It all ends with an “oh yeah,” the way a prayer might with an “amen”; the only higher power worth surrendering to, it seems, is song.
The rest of the 10-track, 42-minute album colors in and around the ideas presented in the opening track, like delving into J.D. Salinger’s short stories after reading The Catcher in the Rye. “I Could Be Dreaming” is similarly abundant, as upbeat surf-rock gives way to broader paranoia about workaday life (“They’ve got a knife for every time you take the same train into work”). Before the song is over, the dream Murdoch sings about seems to become a fantasy about murdering a female friend’s abusive lover; he dismisses the violence with the pop fan’s “la la la,” and then Campbell twists the narrative blade with a cleverly selected reading from Rip Van Winkle.
The subjects of Murdoch’s songs, usually women, are as complex and compelling as his first-person narrators. “Expectations” follows a lower-income student whose life-size models of the Velvet Underground earn her a schoolyard rep as a weirdo (although in a 2006 NPR interview, Murdoch described her as “someone I would have thought was pretty hip at the time”). Harassed in the lunchroom, she suffers a teacher looking up her skirt, and her mother remembers having little choice but to endure groping at her department store job. The cycle of aggression continues when our heroine finds someone apparently even lower in the social pecking order, Veronica—“a fat girl with a lisp”—who’ll take the heat for her. Despite all of this, there’s a hook so dainty, so optimistic—“You’re on top of the world ag-aih-ehn”—that it hints at a way of transcending the world’s brutality.
Similarly, “She’s Losing It,” a meditation on a couple, Lisa and Chelsea, who are haunted by past abuse, has a jaunty chorus that sounds like a Folgers coffee jingle. Delicate finale “Mary Jo,” with tender backing vocals from Campbell, focuses on a lonesome character who always reminds me of Eleanor Rigby—though in how she comes fully alive in her dreams, she could be a stand-in for Murdoch. The book she reads: The State I Am In. It fails to satisfy.
By this time, Murdoch was working as a live-in janitor at the Protestant church he had been attending, but the softness of these songs shouldn’t be misread as puritanical. “Drop a pill and then say hello,” Murdoch proposes on “Electronic Renaissance,” a synth-pop reclamation as skin-tingling as the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” a couple of years earlier. “You’re playing with something/You’re playing with yourself,” Murdoch teases over the chugging power-pop of “I Don’t Love Anyone.” He’s always a bit funny, but sometimes he’s funny haha.
Tigermilk also leaves room for a bit of self-mythologizing. Murdoch wrote “My Wandering Days Are Over” after meeting Campbell, and the lyrics contain direct references to Campbell’s job serving drinks to tired businessmen at a piano bar, as well as “the story of Sebastian and Belle the singer.” The moment when Murdoch sings, “I said, ‘My one-man band is over/I hit the drum for the final time and I walked away,’” it’s as if Belle and Sebastian becomes no longer his solo project but a true unit.
After two days of mixing, all that was left to decide was an album title and artwork. Murdoch settled on a photo he had taken of a then-girlfriend, Joanne Kenney, naked in a bathtub pretending to nurse a stuffed tiger. Claiming inspiration from venerable jazz label Blue Note but more often compared to their melancholic UK poet-laureate predecessors the Smiths, Murdoch presented the image in monochrome, a tradition that, with a few exceptions, has carried across Belle and Sebastian’s discography. With its mix of sensuality and childlike whimsy, the shot could hardly have been more strikingly appropriate, and the title, Tigermilk, naturally followed.
Electric Honey manufactured only 1,000 vinyl copies. At Tigermilk’s release party, attendees threw the records like Frisbees. At least one was spotted at a shop the next day. Murdoch continued his job at the church; Campbell’s bartending days weren’t over. The album received just a single review on its initial release, with Scottish arts magazine The List favorably opining, “Let’s hope Belle and Sebastian reach the size of audience they have the potential to seduce.”
But the students at the music business course remembered to send the record to BBC DJs John Peel and Mark Radcliffe, who began to champion the group. The mystique of Tigermilk spread when Belle and Sebastian released their masterpiece If You’re Feeling Sinister later in 1996 via London indie Jeepster, with U.S. distribution via now-defunct imprint The Enclave. They dropped three more EPs, including the demo with the original “The State I Am In,” and a third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, which brought Campbell and Jackson to the fore on vocals for the first time, before Tigermilk finally received its first widespread release, in 1999. By then, copies of the original vinyl were selling for as much as £850; cassette dubs circulated, but few people could’ve heard the album.
From the beginning, in January 1996, Murdoch had written in response to an offer from Jeepster of his desire to “draw in my audience, instead of bombasting them.” Because the band was averse to interviews, traditional publicity photos, or touring, it’s appealing to think that fans had to find out about Belle and Sebastian for themselves, through word of mouth, hearing them on the radio, or in my case, downloading “The State I Am In” in my first week of college after hearing a classmate name-check them as her favorite band. No music exists in a vacuum, of course—purposefully mysterious 21st-century acts from Burial to Jungle can attest how a lack of information can sometimes be a media angle in its own right—but Belle and Sebastian left space for the already-formidable songs on Tigermilk to grow into listeners’ lives.
When it was made, the album was a pointedly melodic, anti-machismo rejoinder to Britpop’s increasingly lunkheaded swagger and the post-grunge bluster of American alt-rock radio. “There’s no sex in your violence,” Gavin Rossdale grunted on Bush’s “Everything Zen”; “There must be a reason for all the looks we gave/And all the things we never said before,” Murdoch chirps atop a hand-clappy T. Rex stomp on “You’re Just a Baby.” Tigermilk was also a worthy successor to the “oppose all rock’n’roll” ethos of early UK punks Subway Sect, the droll yearning of Glasgow indie pioneers Orange Juice, and the confrontational tenderness of Kurt Cobain’s beloved K Records. By the time of Tigermilk’s 1999 re-release, critics either sneered or swooned accordingly. “Do you want to know how much I hate them? Even their name raises my blood pressure,” a mid-tier Scottish pop singer told The Guardian, amid juvenile complaints about “wussiness.” In those lad-mag, anti-“P.C.” years, it was still acceptable for an otherwise-approving Rolling Stone review to use the disparaging slang term “swish” (Pitchfork’s gonzo original assessment was also positive).
These days, Tigermilk’s radicalism may be harder to perceive, but it’s no less essential. In recent decades, as Belle and Sebastian have became reluctant elder statesmen of a twee movement in music and film, the early caricatures of them have also spread—a 2015 review on this website cast them as “the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls”—but to buy into that overlooks the depth in these songs. As keyboardist Chris Geddes felt forced to complain to the NME as far back as 1997, “We’re human beings, not sensitivity machines.” And while the notion of male un-macho-ness has been hijacked by a basket of deplorables I’d rather not talk about here, you need look no further than the White House to know what type of man is still truly in power in 2020. Tigermilk might not preach revolution; with its low-key insistence on the notion of art as a source of personal epiphany, it feels revolutionary nevertheless.
In the 2007 book on If You’re Feeling Sinister, former Pitchfork editor-in-chief Scott Plagenhoef suggested that Belle and Sebastian were the last band of their kind. The iPod age, as he saw it, had encouraged indie acts with more adult-contemporary sheen, and the intimacy of early online fandom had been overtaken by breathlessness and trolling. Never again could artists reveal themselves so slowly and deliberately without the public losing interest. Now, with music streaming like water, the idea of one or two people gathering to listen, attentively, to a full-length by an obscure group just because an acquaintance recommended it seems ever more distant. The social safety nets that allowed Belle and Sebastian to form have been cut, the economic model of record sales upended. But for all the trauma on Tigermilk, what I walk away with is its hopefulness.
Technology always changes, and the good old days were seldom really so good. At its best, Tigermilk is proof that pop can foster a community without catering to elitism or attempting to be one-size-fits-all—an off-kilter signpost that “unfashionable, vulnerable music,” as Uncut’s 1999 review put it, can mean “everything” to people who get it, nothing to those who don’t. Side B piano ballad “We Rule the School,” which contemplates the nature of graffiti like Holden Caulfield if he were a character in A Charlie Brown Christmas, contains a lyric seized upon by the band’s fans and adversaries alike: “Do something pretty while you can.” In a vast and indifferent universe, this sounds like as good a gospel as any.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Electric Honey | November 1, 2020 | 8.5 | 30d6f37c-fd7e-4b96-939f-3a04bf20a518 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Isolating his various traits into easily defined tracks, the Baton Rouge rap star’s new 30-song album suppresses the knotty, uncomfortable nuances that make his best music distinct. | Isolating his various traits into easily defined tracks, the Baton Rouge rap star’s new 30-song album suppresses the knotty, uncomfortable nuances that make his best music distinct. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: The Last Slimeto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-the-last-slimeto/ | The Last Slimeto | YoungBoy Never Broke Again has long positioned himself as an outsider, but he’s more of the music industry than he likes to believe. The 22-year-old Baton Rouge rapper’s latest project, The Last Slimeto, slots right in with some of this year’s other middling major-label rap releases—where the goal isn’t to make the best album possible, but to make an album that preserves an artist’s stardom. Think of Gunna’s DS4Ever, Lil Durk’s 7220, and Future’s I Never Liked You: drawn-out albums that have their fun radio hits but function more like fan service.
Despite an overwhelming 30-song tracklist, The Last Slimeto may be the neatest YoungBoy album, which in a way feels contrary to the point. His best songs are messy: They fluctuate between fickle emotions like pain, anguish, and paranoia, usually with a hint of bitterness bubbling under the surface. On “Make No Sense,” one of the most commercially appealing singles from his 2019 tape AI YoungBoy 2, the celebratory lyrics can’t quite disguise a feeling of being underwhelmed, as if the rush of success hasn’t quite brought the relief he’d expected. Like so many of YoungBoy’s most memorable songs, it’s too complicated and raw to be described with only one emotion.
Meanwhile, too many of the tracks on The Last Slimeto are simplified. They’re types of YoungBoy songs rather than the temperamental excerpts from the confessional booth that made his best work distinct. It’s music that aims to appeal to everyone by isolating the traits of YoungBoy’s persona into crisp, easily defined tracks. If you prefer lovestruck YoungBoy, here is “My Go To,” an unromantic and chemistry-free duet with Kehlani set to a generic pop groove. If you’re partial to the YoungBoy who sulks on top of gloomy acoustic guitars, then “I Know” is that and nothing more. If you follow YoungBoy’s life like a reality television show, check his Lil Durk diss “I Hate YoungBoy,” where the rapping is solid but the over-the-top aggression is more attuned to YoungBoy the meme than the person. They’re dumbed-down YoungBoy songs—not an entirely new trend, but more visible than ever on The Last Slimeto.
On an album nearly as long as a movie, you’ll have to dig a little to find the meticulous details that make YoungBoy songs great. “Fuck Da Industry” is similar in spirit to “I Hate YoungBoy,” except that the beefs and drama are secondary to how seamlessly his flows transform and tempos shift: In one instant he’s in a rageful holler, the next trying to calmly croon as he holds back another outburst. His verse on “Home Ain’t Home” swings skillfully between reflection and regret, though Rod Wave’s melodramatic wails break the mood. On “7 Days,” his writing and vocals finally click at the same time; when he belts out, “I ain’t tryna say a thing, nigga, I can barely think/I said I quit for seven days and then I’m back on drank,” the words are defeated but the rumble in his voice makes it sound like he’s fighting with himself. That’s a YoungBoy track right there: Bring a different aspect into focus and it’s a whole new song.
But moments like that shouldn’t feel like anomalies on a YoungBoy album. The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate, even as competitors have tried. Commercially, that’s not necessarily a problem: DS4Ever, 7220, and I Never Liked You were similarly muted and each of those records are well on their way to becoming the most financially successful solo albums by their respective artists to date. In the past YoungBoy was a breath of fresh air because he scoffed at playing the game. Now that he’s gotten access, it’s proving hard to pass up. | 2022-08-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Never Broke Again, LLC / Atlantic | August 9, 2022 | 5.8 | 30d91497-f7d8-4b6a-9f7a-8585150024f6 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The latest tape from the 20-year-old rapper is dense and mystic. MAVI delivers revelations from the shadows, concealed and mysterious, in search of fresh air and sunlight. | The latest tape from the 20-year-old rapper is dense and mystic. MAVI delivers revelations from the shadows, concealed and mysterious, in search of fresh air and sunlight. | Mavi: Let the Sun Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavi-let-the-sun-talk/ | Let the Sun Talk | MAVI is a kid studying neuroscience at Howard University, who is asking existential questions in his raps during his spare time. There is something profoundly mystic—even shamanistic—about how his raps attempt to bridge gaps between the mind, body, and soul, best encapsulated by a lyric from his song “moonfire”: “Cap trapped in my schooling, rap asking for time to spit/Unwinding brain, mind, and consciousness.” Some scientists believe that the same region of the brain that processes language processes spirituality as well, and MAVI seems to be tapping into both at once. “I try to use hip-hop as a conduit to do something, rather than being a composer of hip-hop songs,” he said in April. “My songs are statements, and poems, and equations of their own.” It’s effective to think of his music in each of these ways: as affirmations of deep-rooted personal ideology, enigmatic and beautifully lyrical poetry, and equations to be balanced and then figured out.
Released for download on his website and uploaded to SoundCloud as a single, 32-minute-long track, Let the Sun Talk is a young sage discovering the full extent of his powers. These are revelations from the shadows, concealed and mysterious, in search of fresh air and sunlight. “We be hanging in the dark/We surprise ’em with the prowess/If it ain’t to give a spark we’d be still hidden,” he raps on “daylight savings.” The most recent stage of his music, he has said, is about teaching and learning black aestheticism, and the album’s terms and conditions are a mantra on what it means to be “pro-black.” He has classified it as three movements of four songs broken up by interludes, but it can be taken as a lesson in form: As one long song, the album feels limitless, like you’re wading into his inner monologue.
MAVI started piecing things together in October 2017 with the mixtape No Roses, full of fleeting but dense songs in pursuit of a clear head. His heavy raps and unsteady flows were supported by a beyond-his-years insightfulness. The names frequently associated with his music are Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, and for good reason: they too had this same knack for silver-tongued philosophy as teens. Not only have both co-signed MAVI’s ponderous songs and produced a couple of them (on this album), but his music shares traits with theirs. Let the Sun Talk exists in the same loopy, lo-fi realm that governed Some Rap Songs and Tears of Joy. What distinguishes MAVI’s music is its heady, nonlinear flow, as if he’s performing incantations. In the years since No Roses, he’s grown far more comfortable when lost in thought.
Some writerly rappers are so obsessive about cramming words together that their rhymes lose their shape. (A self-possessed technician like Logic is so concerned with the formatting of his bars that they’re nearly soulless.) MAVI’s raps have an understanding of capacity and intervals and margin that eludes many seasoned rap veterans. “‘What kinda songs you make?’/I make the kind you gotta read, baby/I leave the silence you can see baby/I weave the darkness you can hear baby/I leave my carcass in the field, baby/I parse my garden on the real daily/And you can sense it,” he explains on “sense.” It’s a spatial awareness that shows great feel and balance. He doesn’t sacrifice meaning for empty tongue-twisting displays. Instead, their equilibrium is dependent on how layered and carefully organized the writing is. (Fittingly, all of his lyrics are available fully transcribed on his website.)
Choruses are few and far between, and none of them could be considered “hooks,” which only feeds the stream-of-consciousness flux of his bars. Sometimes he raps like he’s foraging for some sort of spiritual nourishment; sometimes he raps like he’s leaving something behind for someone else to find and decipher. The crypticness can make these songs feel like riddles, but attempting to unpack all they have to offer is crucial to the experience. They start to crack open eventually, and out come MAVI’s fundamental code of ethics. “I’ll take the nigga hitting cars up over cops any day/Who more often called upon for guarding all the chocolate babies?” he asks on the stark “ghost in the shell.” On “selflove”: “Offer free smoke to all the niggas behind a me too/To my niggas: we ain’t free until she free too/To my sisters: we ain’t free until they free too.” Each bar on Let the Sun Talk is building toward something greater.
In the album’s waning moments, MAVI raps, “Can’t wait until my raps is more than stashes for my secrets.” It’s interesting to imagine what his songs might sound like if they were more open and direct or they took more of a narrative arc, but what they lack in clarity they make up for in mysticism. Let the Sun Talk rewards (and often demands) close listening and there are instances where parsing the album can be like trying to unscramble a coded message in another language. There are seemingly many answers buried within it, but only you will know when you’ve found yours. | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 15, 2019 | 7.8 | 30df11f9-c373-4359-9cec-a5f8359c723e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Canadian power-pop duo take underappreciated micro-genres for a test drive in a bid to make music that’s as funny as their lyrics. | The Canadian power-pop duo take underappreciated micro-genres for a test drive in a bid to make music that’s as funny as their lyrics. | Partner: Saturday the 14th EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/partner-saturday-the-14th-ep/ | Saturday the 14th EP | Partner, the endearingly dirtbaggy duo of Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, lie somewhere on the spectrum between Tegan and Sara and Bill & Ted. Their 2017 debut, In Search of Lost Time, paid joyous homage to pot, pussy, and the golden age of power-pop, with wickedly funny songs about lusting after lesbian jocks and hitting the supermarket while too stoned to function. Lost Time flew under the radar in the United States, but at home in Canada, the record netted Partner a nomination for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize.
A singular gift for humor is at the heart of Partner’s work. Their new EP, Saturday the 14th, takes this project a step further; the music itself is now as critical to Partner’s comedy as their lyrics. On these five songs, Partner devote their considerable skill to shining up underappreciated sounds, departing from the stylistic uniformity of their debut to explore several distinctly lowbrow micro-genres.
The lead single, “Long & McQuade,” is the sound of Nirvana as rendered by Kurt Cobain-worshipping suburban teenagers. With no life experience to speak of, these aspiring rockers are reduced to constructing an epic song around a trip to Long & McQuade, Canada’s staid answer to Guitar Center. There, they drop their allowance on flame-spackled guitar straps and hog the demo instruments. Mercifully, Caron and Niles have more charisma and stronger musical chops than the dweebs they’re skewering, making for a rewarding parody. “Stoned Thought” is more subtle, plumbing elements from the iPod of a weed-loving college freshman: a fried funk bassline here, a smattering of bongo drums there, some whistling pipe-organ keyboard for good measure. Mirroring the narrator’s attention deficit, each instrument holds its own for a phrase or two at a time before disappearing into the smoke.
The overtly goofy “Tell You Off” opens with an orchestra of barnyard sounds and bounces along on an impish, folksy rhythm. It recalled a band from the primordial ooze of Canadian childhood—was it Barenaked Ladies? The giddy Maritime folk of Great Big Sea? Finally, I recognized the unmistakable influence of the Arrogant Worms, the seminal Canadian comedy-rockers whose hits, like “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate,” made them minor national icons. It’s a treat to see Partner, like Amy Nelson and Captain Tractor before them, working in a distinctly Canadian tradition of musical comedy.
If all of this sounds haphazard, or even sloppy, fear not. Just as Caron and Niles grounded Lost Time’s randy humour in masterful construction, they steer Saturday the 14th with careful attention to the intricacies of maligned genres. The jam-band favorites of collegiate stoners, the meanderings of amateur garage bands, the niche comedy derived from Maritime shanties; none of these are critical bait. But all contain goofy, genuine pleasures, which Partner mines to mostly glorious effect. The exception is “Fun for Everyone (Minions),” which fuses the musical stylings of pre-YouTube flash animation with the ubiquitous meme of Facebook moms. It’s stiff and shticky, in contrast to the genuine warmth of the other, funnier songs.
The final track, “Les ailes d’un ange,” doesn’t bear a wisp of humour on its surface. Lyrically, musically, and linguistically—physical copies of the EP include a version sung in English—it is an unabashed borrowing of Céline Dion’s bilingual power balladry. We hear the requisite soaring guitar solo on the bridge and the requisite soaring key change on the final chorus, but never a wink at the song’s origins, nor a smirk at the sound’s inherent corniness. Nestling lyrics about assumption and damnation on a soft bed of piano and gently insistent strings, Partner drives in Dion’s lane for fun, allowing themselves to be swept away in her sparkling grandeur.
Listening to “Les ailes d’un ange,” I recalled a moment in Carl Wilson’s indispensable contribution to the 33 ⅓ series, Let’s Talk About Love, in which Wilson, a devoted Dion hater, finds himself weeping at her Vegas residency. “The songs of devotion began to probe at the open sore of my own recent marital separation, and even coaxed a few tears,” he wrote. “For a few moments, I got it.” He cringes, recalling “what a subcultural snob I was… how vigilant I was against being taken in—unaware that I was also refusing an invitation out.” Rather than resting in the mode of polished power-pop, Partner have written themselves an invitation out of their comfort zone—and perhaps yours. | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | April 10, 2019 | 6.9 | 30e25e98-57ea-45c3-af60-d405ec1e3b47 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The Portishead singer and conductor (and film-music icon) Krzysztof Penderecki deliver a surprisingly disquieting take on Henryk Górecki’s canonical symphony, a piece so familiar that it’s often taken for granted. | The Portishead singer and conductor (and film-music icon) Krzysztof Penderecki deliver a surprisingly disquieting take on Henryk Górecki’s canonical symphony, a piece so familiar that it’s often taken for granted. | Beth Gibbons / Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra / Krzysztof Penderecki: Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beth-gibbons-henryk-gorecki-symphony-of-sorrowful-songs/ | Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) | We will never be done with Henryk Górecki, the Polish composer whose Symphony No. 3 won some obscure cultural lottery by entering the popular consciousness in a way 99.999 percent of new orchestral works do not. The work is quite simply deathless: Just three years ago, avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson offered his own version. Stetson, normally associated with more pitiless and hair-raising stuff, like the score for the modern horror classic Hereditary, bowed before the solemnity and the soft curves of Gorecki’s piece with a faithful interpretation, as does nearly everyone who approaches it.
And now comes Beth Gibbons—the voice of Portishead, and thus, by extension, the purveyor of trip-hop’s most vivid bad moods. Gibbons is not a powerful singer in the athletic sense—she’s never going to threaten the structural integrity of a chandelier. But her grainy, sour wail, coated with streaks of dried spilled coffee and nicotine stains, strikes deep chords of clammy fear, of desperation, of vulnerability.
Her voice, from the moment it arrives over the breath-bated haze of strings in the first movement, is arresting and close to your ear. Symphony No. 3 has a nightmarish undertone that tends to get smoothed out in dulcet recordings—one of the texts is meant to be the sound of a woman calling out for her murdered child—and Gibbons brings that squirming danger right to the surface.
Part of the tension comes from hearing her untrained voice scale these rocky heights. Her vibrato, tight and trilling and barely controlled, sounds an awful lot like someone fighting off a panic attack. This would get her dismissed from a traditional opera audition, probably, but it is magnificently effective at sending raw shudders through what can be a pretty well-worn work.
That second movement, in particular, has been wrung dry through a few too many TV spots—and yet again, here, when Gibbons sings, it feels positively Gothic. Gibbons learned the Polish text, despite not speaking a word of the language, and she manages to clear that hurdle impressively, too; there is no distance, no remove in her performance. She is accompanied by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, himself an icon of Polish classical music (that’s him you heard on The Shining and The Exorcist) and the orchestra seems to feed off her brittle, searching interpretation. The sheer intensity of the string playing here produces a diamond-like hardness, a glittering beauty that feels like it could cut you. It fairly thrums with nerves, which is a remarkable achievement for a piece that for decades has been associated with a sort of classical easy listening.
One of the reasons Symphony No. 3 remains evergreen is that there is nothing remotely “modernist” about it—whatever the term might mean to you, whether it’s fragmentary collage or sharp fierce angles or a complete lack of sentimentality. Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible of mid-20th-century modernism, allegedly shouted “Merde!” from the audience during the symphony’s premiere. It is flowery, it moves in big billowing breaths, and it could have been written in a time before there were cars driving on paved roads, maybe by Anton Bruckner or Gustav Mahler. It has long since outlived its disdain, but there is still something magnificent about what Gibbons, Penderecki, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra have accomplished here: They have managed to make the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs feel dark, even dangerous. | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | April 4, 2019 | 8 | 30e373d7-9b3b-45f6-81f7-97a42a717d7b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Io Echo singer’s debut solo album expands on the gothy, mythical undertones of her earlier work. | The Io Echo singer’s debut solo album expands on the gothy, mythical undertones of her earlier work. | Ioanna Gika: Thalassa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ioanna-gika-thalassa/ | Thalassa | The music Ioanna Gika made as one half of dream-pop duo Io Echo was watery and celestial, her crooned vocals swimming through a pastiche of synth, koto harp, and violin. Their style was dubbed “New Orientalism” by some, as she and her musical partner Leopold Ross donned kimonos in music videos and released songs titled “Shanghai Girls” and “Tiananmen Square.” The surface-level gesturing at pan-Asian culture was culturally insensitive, as well as a questionable musical choice: Mining influences without a clear purpose often led to songs that felt muddled and directionless.
Gika’s debut solo album, Thalassa, thankfully abandons the orientalizing and instead takes its name from a Greek goddess of the sea. Here, Gika expands on the gothy, mythical undertones of her earlier work, wisely foregrounding her strongest asset: her voice. At once delicate and looming, it establishes a gauzy eeriness that underscores wistful songs with lyrics about crumbling cities and rising seafoam. She wrote the album in Greece during “a period of familial grief and romantic dissolution,” and themes of loneliness and romantic strife provide a through line.
Throughout the album, Gika’s winding falsetto cuts through propulsive, pointillist production reminiscent of video game soundtracks or Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network. On highlights “Roseate” and “Out of Focus,” the juxtaposition of her voice against jabbing synths and staccato drums creates a thrill of dissonance and momentum, a surreal dream where molasses flows like water. Slower songs like “Swan” display her vocal dexterity, allowing her to pivot to a husky smoulder that adds emotional weight to lyrics like, “I'm in love here, but I don't belong.”
Gika’s music requires commitment to convincingly pull off. The baroque imagery of her lyrics gesture at grand sentiments—falling statutes, golden dawns, and headless ostriches symbolize unrequited love and burning longing. The arrangements swell and pulsate. Thalassa lacks the necessary conviction, particularly on its latter half. Gika is clearly experimenting, pasting together combinations of synths, strings, chimes, and vocals that evoke the searing darkness of Zola Jesus one minute and the meandering, layered instrumentals of Solange’s When I Get Home the next. This playfulness results in a diverse array of textures and lends the album a sense of potential. But because she never fully commits to one mood or genre, it is difficult to feel fully immersed. Gika’s songwriting is sometimes too vague to resonate emotionally, and her delivery, though gorgeous, never feels fully unencumbered.
There are certainly moments that get close. The layered vocals on the title track are lovely, and the droning repetition of “New Geometry” is magnetic. But, unlike its namesake deity, Thalassa never quite masters the ferocious power of crashing waves nor the beguiling, mysterious vastness of a calm sea. | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sargent House | April 6, 2019 | 6.6 | 30e980e6-6ce9-46c8-b19d-f94c9a17cdbb | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
London's Idjut Boys, the duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonell, deploy heavy dub FX on their mischievous house sides while their remixes are often rendered in a delicious haze of reverb and delay. Versions nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals. | London's Idjut Boys, the duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonell, deploy heavy dub FX on their mischievous house sides while their remixes are often rendered in a delicious haze of reverb and delay. Versions nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals. | Idjut Boys: Versions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20875-versions/ | Versions | Each generation comes upon Jamaican dub and its stoned spacetime elasticity in their own way. Twenty-first century dubstep fans might have traced that wobble back to the likes of Jah Shaka’s soundsystem while alternative rock fans in the '90s learned about such music thanks to the likes of Tortoise and the Lee "Scratch" Perry cover of Grand Royal. But dance music fans were well aware of the mind-altering properties of dub since the days of disco. While hot singles were on the A-side, club DJs often spun the more adventurous and unfamiliar B-sides for their dancers, as that's where producers like François K., Jellybean Benitez, Walter Gibbons, and Tee Scott (to name just a few) went deep into dub elements on their remixes. And as the '80s emerged, such experiments got higher and wilder, the ideal soundtrack for the wee hours at the Paradise Garage.
A great many of these experimental American dubs were compiled by Dimitri from Paris on the heady Night Dubbin’ comp, which boasted an hourlong mix from London's Idjut Boys. Ever since their start in the '90s, the duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonell have deployed heavy dub FX on their mischievous house sides, But when the duo finally got around to their noodly debut album, 2012's Cellar Door, that spacey, playful side of them took a backseat to placid, at times flaccid, instrumentals. Versions, presented now as a complete overhaul and re-imagining of Cellar Door, nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals, offering drastically warped takes on that underwhelming album.
Their dub of two-minute acoustic guitar sketch "Rabass"—now as "Ambient Rab"—inverts proportions, the acoustic guitar now swinging in and out of earshot amid copious amounts of delay, with great gobs of bass pushed to the fore. But even at twice the length, it leaves me as unimpressed as the original. Things fare far better on the piano-led "Kenny Dub Headband", which isn’t so surprising in that "One for Kenny" was already the original album’s standout. The driving piano provided by Norwegian jazz musician Bugge Wesseltoft on the original (named for deceased British DJ Kenny Hawkes) now gets run through all manner of effects, making the Steinway sound monstrous as other details: scratch guitar, handclaps, electric gurgles, and snare drums lurch in and out of the mix. By dilating the track to about twice its length (nearly 10 minutes), it gives the Idjuts an ample playground in which to run wild.
The longest track on Versions is the 11-minute "Another Bird". But rather than swing wildly like "Kenny Dub Headband", this is a more gentle, blissed-out Balearic ride, reminiscent of the Idjuts’ subtle and effective remix of this slow-chugger. Full of guitars arcing towards the horizon, it’s perfect for manning a sailboat at sunset. Or as Phil Sherburne recently put it on a round-up of all things Balearic: "If you're not full-on levitating by the end, you need to check the settings on your stereo."
"Going Down"’s dub benefits from a few minutes more than the original, which got diluted by the vocals and guitar. Here the Idjuts accentuate the darker turns that got lost amid the nylon-string strums of the original, but it takes a few minutes before the druggy effects take hold. When it does, they push into a far stranger headspace, the echoed female vocal asking "Why you going down to hell for love?" particularly effective. And while the driving beat of "Love Hunter" was the previous album’s other highlight, in the dub the duo scale it back by three minutes. In narrowing the space and pushing the hand percussion and all its Echoplexed permutations up in the mix, as well as distorting the guitar into alien timbres, the track tarts to resemble the strange productions of Arthur Russell circa "Schoolbell / Treehouse", suggesting yet another world of echo still to be discovered. | 2015-09-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | September 1, 2015 | 7.4 | 30ec40ed-bc63-468f-bcc0-a80fc84b5ee4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Three weeks after We Don’t Trust You, Future and Metro return with another 90-minute cinematic project that’s mostly the same but a little bit better. | Three weeks after We Don’t Trust You, Future and Metro return with another 90-minute cinematic project that’s mostly the same but a little bit better. | Future / Metro Boomin: WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-metro-boomin-we-still-dont-trust-you/ | WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU | Earlier in their careers, Future and Metro Boomin always sounded committed to bringing the best and the weirdest out of each other. The menace in the pits of Metro’s beats matched Future’s drug tales and bouts of dead-eyed hedonism, and darker, stranger variants on that chemistry kept things exciting. Whether it’s the seething snap of an “I Serve the Base,” the creaking minimalism of a “My Collection,” or the fidgety pomp of a “Jumpman,” the duo always pushed the boundaries of mainstream trap in seedier directions.
And that was the biggest issue with their first official collaborative album We Don’t Trust You. They still crafted a few mean sleeper hits, but outside of the rich-guy rapper beef simmering in between the lines, their edges had dulled. For all the buildup, too many of those songs took the Capital-R Rap Album prompt too seriously, rehashing old ideas in grander, blander ways. The double-disc sequel album, We Still Don’t Trust You, is a more encouraging heel turn. Future and Metro sharpen some of that bite by bringing their ears to a brighter, slightly sappier space.
It’s still familiar ground for both of them. Future, in particular, is back in the emotional headspace that fueled so much of HNDRXX, swirling between flexing from his throne and lovesick come-ons. He still relishes playing the villain on occasion—“One Big Family” is about juggling upwards of 20 women at a time, three of whom share the same name—but there’s just as much tear-soaked reflection over exes and post-coital shopping sprees. On the neon-bright “Drink N Dance,” he croons about racing Maybachs and throwing lavish sex parties in Abu Dhabi like he just found a rare foil Pokemon card. Later, on “Mile High Memories,” he’s looking for silver linings in a lover who might be doing him dirty, belting “You can fuck on him as long as you thinkin’ ‘bout me,” trying and failing to sound above it all. It isn’t often that Future gets the short end of the stick, and hearing him jump between player and patsy, sometimes in the same song, remains electrifying.
For Metro’s part, he’s actually found a way to turn the Achilles’ heel of his post-COVID output—production that sounds too polished and anonymous—into a strength. The title track veers toward synth-pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Weeknd’s Dawn FM, complete with Abel mocking his old label OVO in falsetto (“They shooters making TikToks!”). Several songs dip into various shades of R&B, from the new-age Isley Brothers smoothness of “All to Myself” to “Gracious,” which sounds like a stripped-back version of the kind of plugg&b that Summrs or Highway would drool over.
Don’t get it twisted: Metro still has plenty of the brooding maximalist thumpers that powered both 2022’s Heroes & Villains and Metro’s soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse, but it’s a bit looser, more willing to explore and have fun slightly removed from Metro and Future’s comfort zones. At the very least, none of it sounds as forced or unnecessary as when he conducted an actual orchestra through some of his greatest hits.
It’s also nearly 30 minutes longer than the already overstuffed original, which makes the slow sections drag even more. Future and Metro shine brightest when they’re shrugging their way through the prettiest or nastiest music you’ve ever heard, but a handful of songs are just lethargic, existing solely to spin their designer wheels. Cuts on the 18-track first disc like “This Sunday” and “Came to the Party” overcome generic beats because Future sells his jet-setting and chauvinism just well enough to earn a chuckle or two (I laughed at Diddy’s name being audibly omitted from a joke about The Notorious B.I.G. on the former). But the seven songs that make up the second disc mostly pale in comparison, back to the self-serious recycling of the first album.
We Still Don’t Trust You is in an odd position compared to We Don’t Trust You, and that may or may not be by design. Kendrick Lamar turned the heat up on a decade-long rap cold war with Drake during his appearance on “Like That,” and a handful of the album’s main and guest verses were fueled by that roiling sense of animosity, even if it boils down to a bunch of rich musicians jabbing at each other for sport. But outside of a handful of snippy soundbites from The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky and a candid verse from feature-killer-turned-beef-dodger J. Cole, the feud isn’t the binding agent it previously was. Instead of trying to manufacture a viral moment within a long-awaited collab from two icons of 2010s rap, the tenuous trust in We Still Don’t Trust You is aimed mostly at the lovers instead of the fighters. It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak. | 2024-04-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / Freebandz / Republic / Boominati Worldwide | April 17, 2024 | 7.1 | 30ecb8ea-8969-482e-90d2-192373ddecdc | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Working with pop architect Andrew Watt, the agelessly incendiary rocker unfurls a parade of timeless archetypes: profane punk, seedy crooner, lovable curmudgeon. It’s Iggy Pop as a jukebox musical. | Working with pop architect Andrew Watt, the agelessly incendiary rocker unfurls a parade of timeless archetypes: profane punk, seedy crooner, lovable curmudgeon. It’s Iggy Pop as a jukebox musical. | Iggy Pop: Every Loser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iggy-pop-every-loser/ | Every Loser | Iggy Pop’s improbable survival has been part of his act for years—way back in 1996, Trainspotting found the punchline to a joke about the perennially bare-chested rocker in the fact that he was still very much alive. Today, the human being born James Newell Osterberg, Jr., age 75, remains uncommonly lithe and spry, with a million-dollar smile. But for much of the past decade, rock’s eternal real wild child has been slowly crowd-surfing his way into the sunset—he ended the last Stooges album with a pair of battle-scarred, soul-searching ballads and ventured deeper into existential reflection on 2016’s Post Pop Depression, while 2019’s Free suggested his periodic detours into after-hours jazz experimentation had become a more natural end state. All the while, Iggy has seemed perfectly content to ride out his golden years in his adopted home of Miami and play the role of punk-rock priest, handing out blessings to underground upstarts like Sleaford Mods and Chubby and the Gang through his BBC Radio 6 show.
But as history has shown time and again, any assumptions of Iggy’s demise are premature, and with Every Loser, he tosses away the gold watch to reapply his dog collar. Like almost every Iggy Pop comeback album before it, Every Loser was created in close collaboration with a savvy big-name producer—though, unlike past compatriots like David Bowie, Bill Laswell, Don Was, and Josh Homme, this one resides far outside Iggy’s usual avant-rock milieu and age cohort. Andrew Watt won the 2021 Producer of the Year Grammy for his work with mega-stars like Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Ed Sheeran, but he’s a modern pop architect with a classic-rock heart: After helping Post Malone get in touch with his inner George Harrison, Watt has emerged as a Rick Rubin-like guru for veteran rockers (Eddie Vedder, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne) in need of revitalization.
For Every Loser, Watt doesn’t try to turn Iggy Pop into something he’s not but rather gives him the space to be every Iggy Pop he wants to be. Over the course of its 11 tracks, we’re treated to a parade of iconic Iggy archetypes: the profane punk, the seedy underworld Sinatra, the Euro-bound futurist, the lovable curmudgeon, and (via the Warhol-inspired comedic interlude “The News for Andy”) the world’s coolest infomercial pitchman. Watt effectively approaches the album as an Iggy jukebox musical—a shiny, over-the-top, but briskly entertaining celebration of its subject—while surrounding him with a supporting cast of acolytes (including GNR’s Duff McKagan, Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro and Eric Avery, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, and the late Taylor Hawkins) eager to do their hero proud.
Watt’s platinum touch can be felt even in the album’s most unruly rockers: Iggy has probably written a thousand songs as petulant as the opening “Frenzy,” but this one gets blown up to stadium proportions with a chorus chant fit for a terrace full of soccer hooligans, along with turbo-charged riffs that remold Fun House into nu-metal. Likewise, “Modern Day Rip Off” retrofits Raw Power with funk finesse, yielding a piano-powered rager about how Iggy can’t really party anymore (“I ran out of blow a long time ago/I can't smoke a J or my guts fly away”). But as that song demonstrates, there’s a knowing humor coursing through the record that undercuts the cranky-old-man caricature. A tribute to his beloved Miami, “New Atlantis” has the sort of breezy, sun-kissed vibe you’d expect from an elder rocker singing about his retirement destination, but Iggy’s peculiar words of affection (“a beautiful whore of a city”) and visions of its imminent, climate-change-induced obliteration render the song the anti-“Kokomo.” He saves the album’s best joke for “Neo Punk”: Any aging anarchist could write a sneering two-minute blitz about the dilution of punk into celebrity fashion-spread fodder, but only Iggy could get face-tatted tabloid fixture Travis Barker to agree to play on it. (“I guess he walked right into that one,” Iggy quipped in a recent interview, though to his credit, Barker responds with the sort of furious, snare-busting display that proves he doesn’t just wear Black Flag shirts for show.)
There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances. The synth-streaked “Strung Out Johnny” channels Iggy’s Berlin phase with Bowie, both in its “China Girl”-esque sophistication and its addiction-ravaged lyrics, which function as a sobering sequel to the orgy of excess celebrated on “Lust for Life.” Free of the doom and gloom that marked Iggy's previous attempts to get serious, the elegiac sway of “Morning Show” practically renders it as Iggy’s answer to U2’s “One.” And fittingly for a partnership that began when Watt enlisted Iggy for a feature on the next Morrissey album, Every Loser ends somewhere between the Smiths and the Stooges on “The Regency,” a surge of shimmering jangle that nonetheless goes for the jugular. In its tug-of-war between grace and grit, the song is a distillation of Iggy’s existence—the sound of a celebrity punk who’s survived long enough to be welcomed into the showbiz establishment, yet still very much an outsider even when he’s inside, and still game to burn it all down from within. | 2023-01-12T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-12T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Gold Tooth | January 12, 2023 | 6.9 | 30ecbc58-cd77-47ff-b3e3-bd22064c807d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Debut album from balladeer Marissa Nadler, whose luxurious, resonant soprano are reminiscent of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval and cabaret stars such as Marlene Dietrich. | Debut album from balladeer Marissa Nadler, whose luxurious, resonant soprano are reminiscent of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval and cabaret stars such as Marlene Dietrich. | Marissa Nadler: Ballads of Living and Dying | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5907-ballads-of-living-and-dying/ | Ballads of Living and Dying | Over the past couple of centuries, the definition of "ballad" has been stretched to include virtually any slow-tempo sentimental song, even on those occasions when it merely means Tommy Lee is coming out from behind his kit to play the piano. But once upon a time the word indicated a more specific, codified form of verse. In the days before widespread literacy, a ballad was a dramatic (frequently tragic) story-poem that functioned as something of an oral newspaper, constructed simply with recurring rhymes so that it could be easily remembered and repeated. And on her captivating debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler does her small part to return balladry to its vivid and illustrious past.
On the surface this might not sound like a compelling proposition, but fortunately Nadler has the sort of voice that you'd follow straight to Hades. Her luxurious, resonant soprano is immediately transfixing, and throughout these songs it envelops the listener like a dense fog rolling in off the moors. Nadler's vocals are highly reminiscent of Hope Sandoval's-- with perhaps the faintest glimmer of the languid phrasing of cabaret chanteuse Marlene Dietrich-- and her unadorned arrangements recall the rain-weary solitude of early Leonard Cohen met with Mazzy Star or Opal at their most hazily narcotic.
Nadler is clearly savvy enough in her material to know that a true collection of ballads must include a body count, and the most obviously successful auld school example here is her arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Annabelle Lee". As you might recall from junior high English, this is a classic tale of ill-starred love with a stretched-by-your-grave finale that fits the ballad form to perfection, and Nadler's melodic rendition here is flawless. And poor Annabelle Lee is not this album's only casualty; there's also "Virginia", which respectfully chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf, as well as dreamier, more ambiguous songs like "Undertaker" and "Box of Cedar" which certainly contain whispers of foreboding for their subjects.
Each song on the album comes lightly-dressed, usually borne along by little more than Nadler's voice, her fingerpicked guitars, and ornamental flourishes from the occasional accordion, autoharp, or blurry wisp of feedback. On "Hay Tantos Muertos", one the album's loveliest tracks, Nadler branches out from the strict balladic format, quoting lines from Pablo Neruda's haunting "No Hay Olvido" ("There Is No Forgetting") in a manner resembling a traditional Portuguese fado, and on "Days of Rum" she busts out a banjo and takes an enchanting turn at a Dock Boggs-style country blues.
It's worth noting that, aside from the Poe and Neruda quotes, all of these songs are original compositions rather than the traditional works they appear. Throughout the album Nadler writes and performs with a weathered maturity that belies her young age. In fact, several tracks ("Mayflower May", "Days of Rum", "Fifty-Five Falls") seem to be narrated from the perspective of older women looking back upon the adventures and mistakes of their youth. Also an accomplished visual artist, Nadler's lyrics showcase a perceptive eye and a genuine empathy for her creations; and when coupled with that intoxicating voice the resulting landscape is one you may want to get lost in for a century or two. | 2004-12-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-12-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Eclipse | December 15, 2004 | 8 | 30ee397c-7869-4001-bc08-07562eb9bef8 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
On what is billed as his final studio album, the late reggae legend is treated as an afterthought, buried in the mix beneath an incongruous blend of electronic styles. | On what is billed as his final studio album, the late reggae legend is treated as an afterthought, buried in the mix beneath an incongruous blend of electronic styles. | Lee “Scratch” Perry: King Perry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-scratch-perry-king-perry/ | King Perry | Late dub reggae godhead Lee “Scratch” Perry flung his creative moon dust so far and wide over six decades of music-making that pinning him down is impossible. King Perry, a posthumous entry in a discography that numbers hundreds of recordings, and apparently his final work, does little to untangle the thorny knot of Perry’s genius as producer, songwriter, singer, and musical mystic. But it does serve as a reminder—albeit a rather muted one—of Perry’s late popularity as a guest vocalist, a position he embraced on records by everyone from the Beastie Boys to the Orb.
King Perry is, in name, a Lee “Scratch” Perry solo record. But the album’s brash electronic instrumentation, from Grammy-nominated producer Daniel Boyle and Bristol maverick Tricky, have the unfortunate effect of making Perry feel like a guest on his own record, his voice often buried low in the mix, where it battles in vain against ear-rinsing sonics.
Perry was always open to new music, be it punk in the 1970s or ambient house in the 2000s. But King Perry’s experiments in blending reggae with electronica, breakbeats, and pumping 4/4 beats ring a little false. On “Jesus Life,” Perry’s gentle chitchat sounds lost and unloved amid an ominous electronic bass line, drum machine thud and (uncredited) Tricky guest vocal, a strand of saffron thrown into an unforgivingly thick musical stew.
“Green Banana” takes a further step backward, making both Perry and Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder—a potentially inspired vocal pairing—sound like they’ve wandered into the wrong studio, where some young punk is laying down acidic breakbeats. A lot of the album’s production, for all its genre-bending, is dull, and it doesn’t help that Perry’s vocals are borderline unintelligible, his gentle croak unable to compete against the studio noise.
This, more than anything, is King Perry’s downfall. Scratch may be best known as a producer—for Bob Marley, the Congos and the Clash, to name but three. But he was also an enchanting vocalist, his magical tone imparting a wistful melancholy on later albums like 2019’s Rainford. This, perhaps, could have been the case here. Perry’s vocal on “Goodbye,” apparently the last song he recorded, should be an emotional shoo-in. But its impact is deadened when overlaid with a prominent drum beat and humming synth line. There’s a fond farewell in there somewhere, but you have to strain like hell to hear it.
King Perry rings with the call of missed opportunity. Boyle did a decent retrogressive production job on Perry’s 2014 album Back on the Controls, and King Perry contains the germ of what could have been achieved by surrounding Scratch with modern production and guest vocalists. “100lbs of Summer” is a green shoot of summer-blushed pop reggae, thanks to a mournful horn line, rolling bass, and what sounds like genuine chemistry between Perry and London singer GreenTea Peng. That congenial feeling extends to Peng’s other appearance on the album, “Jah People in Blue Sky,” a sprawling, but very charming, digi-dub number with an ear-worm chorus and genuine momentum, while the guest-free “King of the Animals” locks into a satisfyingly hypnotic reggae groove that actually leaves some space for Perry to freestyle over.
It’s not enough, though. An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne. | 2024-02-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | False Idols | February 6, 2024 | 5.9 | 30f1c7fc-ec84-4373-8448-be1d120e3856 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Melbourne jangle-pop quartet hits all the right ‘80s pleasure points with an understated sense of humor and anthemic songcraft. | The Melbourne jangle-pop quartet hits all the right ‘80s pleasure points with an understated sense of humor and anthemic songcraft. | Quivers: Golden Doubt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quivers-golden-doubt/ | Golden Doubt | In an era when listeners can sample new music like sommeliers, slurping up tracks and spitting them out after three-second snap judgements, it makes evermore sense for a fledgling band to put their strongest song in the track-one/side-one lead-off position. And on their first proper stateside release, Melbourne quartet Quivers fully abide by that rule by opening Golden Doubt with “Gutters of Love,” an instant anthem that charts its journey from heartache to healing by gradually building from a solitary strummer to a skyscraping chorale. It’s the sound of bedsit 1980s college-rock thrust into the big-tent environs of 21st-century indie, like a Go-Betweens with Coachella-conquering ambitions or a Smiths with greater pub sing-along appeal. And it’s absolutely glorious.
Alas, “Gutters of Love” also sets a mighty high bar that the rest of Golden Doubt doesn’t attempt to clear again, as Quivers are largely content to cruise instead of soar. But even when the band is working within more modest proportions, they still exude a disarming charm. Quivers began as a therapeutic outlet for singer/guitarist Sam Nicholson, who spent much of 2018’s homespun debut, We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses, mourning his brother’s sudden death in a free-diving accident. After Nicholson and fellow guitarist Michael Panton relocated from their native Hobart to Melbourne, Quivers solidified into a four-piece with bassist Bella Quinlan and drummer Holly Thomas. While little has fundamentally changed about Nicholson’s songwriting since that first record, the addition of Quinlan and Thomas’ lustrous harmonies provides a welcome blast of sunshine to break up Nicholson’s rainy-day ruminations and point a brighter light on his understated sense of humor.
Golden Doubt abounds with the sort of effortlessly tuneful jangle-pop you’d expect from a band that released a full-album cover of R.E.M.’s Out of Time last year. They’re the kind of songs you swear you’ve heard before but can never quite place. On “You’re Not Always on My Mind,” you’ll hear traces of the Chills’ Kiwi-rock gallop, Echo and the Bunnymen’s psychedelicized guitar melodies, and the Cure’s mid-’80s shimmer. But the song is ultimately a showcase for Nicholson’s wry romanticism: When he sings “you’re not always on my mind,” he swiftly answers it with “just mostly all the time,” crystallizing the push-pull between outsized passion and self-preservation playing out across his lyric sheet.
While it hits all the right ‘80s-indie pleasure points, Golden Doubt is perpetually torn between reveling in bygone sounds and trying to outrun the specter of the past. Over a funereal drum beat, “Videostores” bids farewell to its titular subject alongside other outmoded phenomena like payphones and horse-drawn transportation. But the song isn’t so much looking back as trudging forward, as it reluctantly acknowledges the impracticality of clinging to days gone by, be it through obsolete technology or memories of extinguished flames. Another track puts a finer point on it: On the doo-wop-tinged “Nostalgia Will Kill You,” Quinlan and Thomas practically function as a Greek chorus cautioning Nicholson against his wistful tendencies: “You can’t go back! Everywhere you want to go!” But with the laid-back country rock of “Laughing Waters,” Nicholson works up the courage to carry on once and for all, as he declares, “I don’t wanna sing about death no more/We’ll go there one day and we’ve been there before,” en route to a sumptuous disco-stringed coda. For as much as it looks back musically, Golden Doubt is really an album to summon the better days that lie ahead.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | July 8, 2021 | 7.3 | 30f27c6e-19ea-4836-a44d-fad6f9e7ce8b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his fourth album, singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold refines and hones Fleet Foxes’ crisp folk-rock sound, crafting another musically adventurous album that is warm and newly full of grace. | On his fourth album, singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold refines and hones Fleet Foxes’ crisp folk-rock sound, crafting another musically adventurous album that is warm and newly full of grace. | Fleet Foxes: Shore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fleet-foxes-shore/ | Shore | For Robin Pecknold, the music of Fleet Foxes has been a coming-of-age story. Pecknold founded the band in Seattle with childhood friend Skyler Skjelset when they were just about 20 years old, making unpretentious yet studied folk music and quickly signing with Sub Pop, who released the band’s pair of landmark 2008 releases, Sun Giant EP and their self-titled debut. Fleet Foxes hid their youth in plain sight, singing fables and channeling musical influences—like Judee Sill and the Byrds—that signaled nous and maturity. By 2011, a 25-year-old Pecknold began to show his age with the existential Helplessness Blues before disappearing and returning, at 31, with the more confrontational Crack-Up. Over the course of just a few releases, you could trace the arc of a songwriter shedding his past, finding his voice, and making more personal, complex, and, often, brooding music.
Shore, the fourth album from Fleet Foxes, brings gratitude back into the fold as Pecknold ascends to a graceful new plateau. The record’s mood is born largely from existential worries and the shadow of death, common concerns of Pecknold, who, now 34, has spent his career transforming anxiety into euphoria with towering, wall-of-sound choruses that belie the unease that inspires them. Career-making songs like the barnstorming “Helplessness Blues” were strengthened by a sense of overcoming despair, the feeling that we could all stare down obsolescence and say, That’s OK, I’m OK. Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.
On Shore, being grateful also means staying true to yourself and expressing what comes naturally. The album is bright and open, recalling, at times, the sunniness of their early songs, as well as the lighter moments of 2017’s Crack-Up, like “Fool’s Errand.” Instead of turning away from major-key melodies and blissful vocal harmonies, Pecknold leans into musical happiness on songs like “Sunblind” and “Young Man’s Game,” among the most jubilant entries in the band’s catalog. On the latter, Pecknold acknowledges the futility of faking it, singing: “I could worry through each night/Find something unique to say/I could pass as erudite/But it’s a young man’s game.” Reinvention, he implies, is deceitful; refinement and reflection, instead, are the paths to progress.
The idea of refinement is crucial to Fleet Foxes because, on the surface, the band sounds remarkably similar to how it did 12 years ago—without feeling like it’s retreading past sounds or themes. The resurgent Crack-Up demonstrated Pecknold’s evolution as a lyricist and songwriter, someone who could write stirring couplets while commanding extended metaphors and maintaining a degree of writerly distance. The album also contained more intricate arrangements, something that Pecknold has carried onto Shore, where the compositions are even more textured and buoyant. The new album, which Pecknold performs almost entirely by himself, is lively, as if he has broken open previous albums’ ambitious centerpieces (namely “The Shrine / An Argument” and “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”) and spread bits of those proggy endeavors across the whole record. “A Long Way Past the Past,” for instance, layers horns and a shifting guitar line beneath Pecknold’s harmonies and words about letting go of regrets. The crisp production details give Shore a natural feel, as if the guitars, drums, and horns warble and float in the breeze alongside the birds, whose chirps lead “Maestranza.”
Elsewhere, there are explicit nods to contemporary classical music, as on “Jara,” which features hocketing by Meara O’Reilly, and “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman,” which pairs O’Reilly with a snippet of Brian Wilson counting to resemble Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and, in its sampling, also recalls the early work of Steve Reich. These moments don’t last long, serving as intros to their respective tracks, but they do signal Fleet Foxes’ continued willingness to experiment and venture beyond the confines of their reputation as a folk band whose music sounds as accessible and pleasant coming out of the speakers at Whole Foods as it does to Post Malone.
In composing some of the most vibrant music of his career, Pecknold also opens up as a writer, returning a bit to the nature imagery of his early work while turning his poeticisms into actual reflections of his thoughts. On the striking “Sunblind,” Pecknold shares his love for late songwriter heroes, including Richard Swift, John Prine, Bill Withers, Judee Sill, Elliott Smith, David Berman, and Arthur Russell. He mourns their loss and thanks them for leaving behind the gifts of their music, while also connecting their art with a life lived fully. “I’m gonna swim for a week in/Warm American water with dear friends,” Pecknold sings, alluding to Silver Jews’ 1998 opus and juxtaposing the jagged brilliance of Berman’s songs with the physical act of “swimming high on a lea in an eden.” “Sunblind” is made all the more exhilarating by how Pecknold arrays the darkness of American Water and the ocean’s vast beauty, acknowledging the former and embracing the latter. He returns to Berman on the sedate closer “Shore,” specifically recalling the day of the songwriter’s death. At the song’s end, Pecknold repeats, “Now the quarter moon is out,” again turning to the landscape in mourning.
Pecknold’s appreciation for life, his joy in spite or because of death, continues throughout Shore. Dark figures creep into the edges of the songs—e.g., “These last days/Con men controlled my fate” from “Maestranza”—as if their invitations to give into self-pity or hate are necessary to propel Pecknold toward music that’s rich and fulfilling without becoming overly sentimental. Every moment feels earned. The album’s climax arrives on the back half of the propulsive “Quiet Air / Gioia,” where Pecknold exalts, “Oh devil walk by/I never want to die.” It’s a consciously excessive declaration that does nothing to obscure our greatest fear, earnest and vulnerable in its very willingness to make the admission.
Fleet Foxes’ music has never been overly heavy, but each release brings expectations. Pecknold said that he wrote some of Helplessness Blues to have new material to play on tour with Joanna Newsom. And the tangled, prog-folk of Crack-Up, of course, came after a six-year hiatus, landing like a great unburdening of every idea gathered during Pecknold’s time as a student at Columbia University. Shore may be the first Fleet Foxes album without such a burdensome weight, arriving somewhat by surprise, without a long layoff, and into a cultural landscape that no longer foregrounds indie rock at the center of the musical universe. There’s a freedom to it that shows in the lithesome “For a Week or Two” and “Thymia,” or at the beginning of the record with the singing of Oxford student Uwade Akhere, suggesting that Pecknold does not feel the need to lead the way or come back immediately with some massive statement. Shore looks to the world and realizes there is already enough, as if staring into a darkness and responding with beauty, acceptance, and light. | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | September 23, 2020 | 8.3 | 30f733a0-10b9-448c-9469-36a35a8aca4f | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The Manchester electronic producer Andy Stott creates ghostly environments filled with glitches, pops, hazes, lurid synths, clarion vocals, graceful footwork, and enormous bass. Faith in Strangers, his first substantive solo release since 2012’s masterful Luxury Problems, offers an expanding set of sounds and ideas. | The Manchester electronic producer Andy Stott creates ghostly environments filled with glitches, pops, hazes, lurid synths, clarion vocals, graceful footwork, and enormous bass. Faith in Strangers, his first substantive solo release since 2012’s masterful Luxury Problems, offers an expanding set of sounds and ideas. | Andy Stott: Faith in Strangers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20021-andy-stott-faith-in-strangers/ | Faith in Strangers | Andy Stott must thrive in limbo. For much of the last decade, the Manchester producer shifted restlessly between varied electronic niches. He darted from spartan techno to luxuriating dub and so on, releasing singles with the enthusiasm of a keen listener trying to stake his own artistic identity. In 2011, he claimed that place with unapologetic if muted audacity, issuing two immersive EPs within four months. Passed Me By and We Stay Together flooded his self-made world of gray sounds and surface static with beats that, in retrospect, he seemed to have spent years learning and bending to his will. The deep house thuds of "Cherry Eye", the footwork splendor of "North to South", the slow-motion stutters of "Execution": They all cohabitated within Stott’s new twilit mode.
The addition of Alison Skidmore’s clarion vocals and Stott’s evermore-aggressive rhythms only enhanced the ghostly environment of the masterful 2012 LP, Luxury Problems. Mixing field recordings, vocal takes, and an assortment of technical processes, Stott operated both inside an uncanny valley and within its inverse, making the artificial seem natural and the alien seem familiar. After more than a dozen releases, Stott could now call an approach—a liminal state of the human and inhuman, of the driving and the drifting—his own.
On Faith in Strangers, Stott’s first substantive solo release since Luxury Problems, he applies that kilned aesthetic to an expanding set of sounds and ideas. If that 2011–2012 trilogy found Stott codifying his style, Faith in Strangers is his attempt to stretch it by piggybacking that recent system onto his early adventurousness. It’s a bold move, one made with a new vote of public valediction. Luxury Problems, for instance, began with its most instant hook. Her voice wrapped in a lacework of effects, Skidmore seductively repeated "touch" until Stott’s shuddering beat fell in behind her. But Faith in Strangers starts with something that belongs more on the landmark sound-art label Touch. "Time Away" opens in silence, or at least the room tone of a field recording. A horn slowly intones one note, which decays against a bed of quiet and creepy field recordings. It’s as though Stott’s world breathed in the long-tone pieces of minimalist composer Yoshi Wada and exhaled them through his trademark filter of glitches, pops, and hazes.
Skidmore’s voice arrives for the second track, the stunning "Violence", but it’s reversed and filtered, pieces of her syllables simply cut off at the root. "Clap your hands/ clap your hands," she sings as though to tease an audience about a beat that, nearly nine minutes into the album, has yet to arrive. When at last it does, the pulse is one of the most forceful of Stott’s catalogue, the shuddering bass and snare snaps suggesting that the producer has now welcomed trap into his vocabulary, too. But it’s damaged and distorted in much the same way as all Stott sounds. He pulls new influences into his fold without allowing them to push him outside of his preordained spheres—a nightclub built with pillows and wired with headphones, or a narcotics den affixed with mirror balls and strobe lights.
Faith in Strangers starts soft and light, only to have Stott gradually amplify the energy across its 54 minutes. By the time the record enters its second half, it’s climbed from half-graceful, half-spectral footwork to minimal rhythms rattled by enormous bass and lurid synths. And then, on "No Surrender", an organ run that suggests the house music at Timothy Leary’s Daheim Castle introduces a catastrophic beat. The kick pounds and snares pop through a sheet of static, moving as if they’ve ruptured every speaker system upon initial impact. Stott applies that distortion to the splintered IDM of "How It Was" and, most tellingly, to the remarkable "Damage".
The meat of that aptly named number is an enormous, bass-backed melody, the exact sort of chirping hulk that turned TNGHT into a set of five adrenaline injections. For Stott, though, it’s just another plaything, an element to drag into his mix. He lets the hook blow out until it’s degraded into low fidelity, and he surrounds it on all sides with caustic noise. The harsh cymbal splashes at the start recall a Max Neuhaus experiment with drums, the clipped ending the manic cut-ups of Hrvatski. "Damage" is the shortest and most magnetic song on Faith in Strangers, Stott’s real shot at a legitimate single. But he rejects the notion wholesale, as though boasting that the rubric he’s rendered simply won’t allow something so straight.
In the last three years, Stott has not only cemented his approach but also upped his ambition, moving from a producer who made disjointed singles to a musician hoping to craft albums with unspoken narrative action. "It sounds cliché to say a ‘journey,’ but it’s got to be a story in some sense," he told Tiny Mix Tapes of this LP. "It does intensify from start to finish." At this point, actually pulling that off remains Stott’s main challenge. Despite his increasingly disciplined and unified technique, Faith in Strangers can feel disorganized when taken as a whole. The intended arc from invitation toward aggression occssionally scans more as zigs and zags between a few distinct suites. Still, the separate moments are astounding, evidence of a musician who has managed to remain inquisitive even as he’s established his signature. | 2014-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | November 21, 2014 | 8.4 | 30fb805e-af50-4ba1-90cd-524d34f703e1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
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