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Jim O'Rourke's first solo album on Drag City in six years finds his brilliant ear for arrangement and love of dark humor intact. | Jim O'Rourke's first solo album on Drag City in six years finds his brilliant ear for arrangement and love of dark humor intact. | Jim O’Rourke: Simple Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20488-simple-songs/ | Simple Songs | There was a time, from the late 1990s to the mid–2000s or so, when Jim O’Rourke sat at the center of a peculiar intersection of experimental, indie rock, and electronic music. His name on a record was an assurance of a certain level of quality, and he had his name on a great number of them. During these years, he engineered, produced, mixed, and played on records by Smog, Sam Prekop, Faust, John Fahey, Wilco, Stereolab, Tony Conrad, Sonic Youth (of which he was a member), Beth Orton, Superchunk, Phill Niblock, and many more. In a suspiciously high number of cases, he was involved in one of those artists' best records.
We’ve heard so much about the abuses of digital technology over the last five years—the compression, the brick-walling, the poor mastering, the lack of dynamic range. Well, O’Rourke didn’t do that stuff; in fact, he defined himself against it (he’s never released his solo work on mp3 and, in fact, only released his solo albums digitally at all in the past month). The music he worked on didn’t necessarily surface on radio, but it sounded fantastic in your living room. Throughout the period just before and just after the millennium, no one better exemplified the promise of what was then called post-rock—music steeped in tradition that also looked beyond it, integrating traditional tools with new technologies and exploring new contexts. And then, on top of all that, there were Jim O’Rourke’s solo albums.
Starting with 1997’s Bad Timing, O’Rourke has released a series of what are usually called his "pop" albums on Drag City. Not all of these have vocals (Bad Timing focused on steel string guitar and whimsical Americana, while 2008’s The Visitor is a difficult-to-classify proggy electro-acoustic instrumental suite), but O’Rourke’s Drag City solo records have threads running through them, from shared title inspirations to artwork to musical quotations from one album to the next. O’Rourke enjoys games and references and limitations that allow him to create a world where his music exists. Each album stands on its own but also feels like a brick in a slowly building wall. No two of O’Rourke’s solo albums sound alike; each exists in its own space. For Simple Songs, that space is firmly in the smart singer-songwriter world of the 1970s, the place where Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman might be hanging out and drinking and telling dirty jokes.
When O’Rourke first sang on Eureka, his voice stuck out like a crumpled bag of Cheetos on Queen Elizabeth’s dinner table. Part of the charm of the music came from hearing a guy who could not sing gamely do so, voicing complicated melodies while surrounded by luxurious production. It made no sense and somehow, because of that, it worked. With Simple Songs, O’Rourke’s voice has deepened and become more gruff, and he sounds almost normal. There’s a timbral similarity here to Cat Stevens, though O’Rourke couldn’t have that kind of innocence and sweetness even if he wanted to. Instead, the lyrics are the usual mix of dark humor and misanthropy, with occasional glimpses of warmth. Album opener "Friends With Benefits" begins with "Nice to see you once again," and it seems like he’s addressing it to listeners who haven’t heard from him in a while, but then he follows that with "Been a long time my friends/ Since you crossed my mind at all." O’Rourke’s songs are saying real things, but they are also constantly subverting themselves, in love with pop-lyric tradition while pushing against it. O’Rourke is the kind of songwriter who titles a closing song "All Your Love", but makes the chorus "All your love/ Will never change me" and then cuts that sentiment with "I’m so happy now/ And I blame you."
O’Rourke is always clever and funny, but the driving force in his music is the art of the arrangement. Many of the greatest pleasures on Simple Songs come from how certain instruments are layered together, how the chords are voiced and the harmonic progressions unfold. The songs, played by O’Rourke and a cast of Tokyo-based musicians, are generally driven by guitar and piano, but strings, pedal steel, mandolin, horns, and woodwinds are all featured prominently. There are gorgeous instrumental bridges and codas, like the one in "Half Life Crisis" that finds O’Rourke braiding a Fripp-like electric guitar lead and pedal steel around a violin line. Getting the mix perfect is supremely important; there’s never too much of anything, and nothing is ever buried. Midrange detail is prized over booming low end. Dynamics are powerful but not overpowering. Every instrument has its place.
All of which is to say that Simple Songs is a subtle record that avoids extremes, which also makes it a record out of time. It’s a record that asks you to come to it. If O’Rourke ever felt the need to keep up with every development in music, that time has passed. After moving to Tokyo in the last decade, O’Rourke has been a less central figure. He stays busy in music, art, and film, but much of his work doesn’t travel beyond Japan. He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along. | 2015-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | May 15, 2015 | 8.6 | 30fbfbb5-c432-4bd6-9799-a36b9bfcba6b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | 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 a 2007 album that permanently altered the pop-punk landscape and marked the arrival of the ambitious and brilliant Hayley Williams. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 2007 album that permanently altered the pop-punk landscape and marked the arrival of the ambitious and brilliant Hayley Williams. | Paramore: Riot! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paramore-riot/ | Riot! | Sitting at her computer as a Southern teenager, with anger, confusion, sadness, and God, Hayley Williams opened a web browser, seeking answers: What is emo? “I totally researched the term ‘emo’ before I knew what it was,” Williams told Rolling Stone in 2008, a year after she and her band Paramore became the subculture’s new studded-belt poster children with their breakthrough second album, Riot! “There were websites like Howtobeemo.com… I became so obsessed with punk bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral that I started doing all sorts of research.”
Kids search for a reason. By her pre-teen years, Williams had seen a lot. She has said her earliest childhood memory was standing, at age 4, between her feuding parents who were soon to divorce. Later, Williams and her mother fled her abusive stepdad, relocating from Meridian, Mississippi to Franklin, Tennessee, living between a hotel and a trailer, with the support of friends and a local church. “Mom and I ran away as I was turning 13,” Williams told The New Yorker this year. “I knew almost immediately, when we got past the state line—now my life is starting.”
On her first day of school in 2002, Williams met 12-year-old powerhouse drummer Zac Farro, who introduced her to his guitarist older brother, Josh, and together they would plot a phenomenon. Before Paramore, Williams played in a local funk cover band—she cited her favorite selection, Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good,” as “basically why I sing”—and, to make extra cash for herself and her mom, she cut some country demos in Nashville. But it was camaraderie she craved. “I wanted to be part of a family,” she once said. In a rock band she found one. Paramore’s vision of misfit pop-rock brought the catharsis of clarity to William’s discontent, in every tidal riff and manicured gang vocal, in the brick-heavy drumming and each soaring, structured woah-oh-oh.
In a rabid international pop-punk scene made for the kids, Paramore were, themselves, children: Williams was only 16 when the band released its 2005 debut; Zac Farro, 15, was a ninth-grade dropout. As Paramore legend goes, Atlantic originally hoped to sign Williams in 2003 to mold her into an Avril-style pop star, and her parents didn’t want her to pass up the opportunity. “Explain to me this conspiracy against me,” she sang out, describing her professional torment with pitch-perfect teen angst, on the first tune she wrote with her to-be Paramore bandmates, who she convinced Atlantic to keep along for the ride. On the strength of Williams’ demo CD, the Atlantic A&Rs came to Franklin to check out the band in the bassist’s parents’ living room—majors shipping out to the suburbs to scout emo savants was not uncommon in the wake of Dashboard, My Chem, Taking Back Sunday, et al—and they were allegedly amazed: “Okay, yeah, Paramore, sounds good!” Williams’ own chronicle of how she defiantly rejected a solo career is decidedly more emo: “There was a heated conversation with a team of people [at Atlantic] in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life. It was a very empowered moment. My voice was shaking. I was crying.” She changed music.
Atlantic decided to soften the optics of major-label backing by bringing the band to the bastion of mall-punk excellence, Fueled by Ramen, which was riding the successful debuts of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Fueled by Ramen was originally founded by a member of ska lifers Less Than Jake, but by 2004 Atlantic already had a stake in the label. Paramore played its official first show that year opening for small-town dreamers Copeland (“Coffee” was away-message canon), quickly released the thrilling All We Know Is Falling, and became a fixture of the teen-punk caravan and marketing apparatus of Warped Tour. The band chronicled its own ascent, of course, on LiveJournal.
As commodified-for-Hot Topic dissent abounded, one could have easily viewed the release of Riot! cynically, as a brazen attempt to exploit the passion of underground rebel girls as much as the hunger for candy-coated girl power. Paramore practically dared you to feel that way, and to then reckon with the fact that you just couldn’t. Whether they were grassroots, industry-core, or, more realistically, a group of kids for whom bits of both experiences overlapped, is no matter: Paramore were too good to be denied. Williams, the only woman fronting an emo band of their stature, knew they had to work extra hard to prove themselves. The very feeling of their pop-emo has few analogs still. As Williams asked, “Why do we like the hurt so much?” and confessed, “We are broken”—as she screamed “This time we’re not giving up” and “We were born for this”—the genre’s typical despair was tempered by the uplift in that collective we, so distinct from emo’s persistent I, a unity perhaps learned in the Southern Baptist congregations where she first trained her multi-octave voice. “What a shame we all became such fragile broken things,” she sings on “Let the Flames Begin,” capturing the shared self-pitying spirit of the scene while setting it ablaze.
She wielded her I with tact. “I’m not so naive, my sorry eyes can see,” Williams sings on opener “For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic,” as her youth brightens every note. The whole album cuts as lucidly as that first statement of self-possession, in dimensions rendered by church singing and arena dreams, by Williams’ love for gospel, Motown, and ’90s R&B as much as the incendiary post-hardcore and screamo bands Paramore favored, like Thursday and mewithoutYou. Paramore’s chart-conquering heroes in Jimmy Eat World turned the directive “sing it back” into pop-emo scripture; the teens heeded that call. Paramore pressurized all of these overdriven elements into a swooping, syncopated, ennui-scorching singalong so molecularly dialed-in that it still feels like alt-rock on Adderall. They revved up everything on Riot!: the gloss and scene-defining bitterness, the spite and Smiths-caliber melodrama, the moxie and anthemic scale.
Pop ambition was Riot!’s racing heart. “I’m in the business of misery,” Williams sang at the outset of the avenging lead single from the ultimate mall-punk album, and the rest followed suit. Paramore was a four-piece in 2007—Williams and the Farros plus bassist Jeremy Davis, who she met in the funk cover band—but soon-to-join guitarist Taylor York helped pen its most colossal “emo bop” (as Williams called their early tunes). “That’s What You Get” crashes open with towering riffs that quickly give way to such a staggering procession of sweeping hooks, lightning-bolt drumming, and high-note dynamism; it sound like four kids so certain they’re on the brink that they play as if it’s their last song. “That’s what you get when you let your heart win,” goes the now-iconic refrain, a fantastically cool-headed retort to an era of mostly male romantic apocalypse. These career-making hits scraped the sky with adrenaline and range, with depth and high kicks.
Equally as crucial were the power ballads. Paramore’s cover of Foo Fighters’ “My Hero,” recorded in 2006 and included on a special edition of Riot!, underscores their intent to catapult as high as a crew of suburban teens could. “When It Rains” is a wistful, stadium-sized daydream, from the angel-haloed harmonies to the participatory hooks to its disarming tension and release. On the midtempo “We Are Broken,” Williams bared her soul gravely, belting a tale of innocence lost, capturing the essence of third-wave emo: a movement of despondent young people who were, despite their self-loathing, out to prove themselves.
Paramore didn’t consider themselves a Christian band—and by Riot!, Williams had already publicly questioned the rigidity of her religion—but the album’s Christian sentiment is unmissable. In the thank-you’s in Riot!’s CD booklet, each member of Paramore first expressed gratitude for Jesus Christ. The solemn triumph of “Hallelujah” was allegedly a song that Williams and her bandmates wrote before they’d ever released an album, in order to show Atlantic that the guys in Paramore shouldn’t be fired. Like a prayer to not lose the musical family she’d discovered, Williams pushed her conviction into a gospel-tinged panorama so divine it played like an appeal to a higher power, and an illustration of her worth. “If only time flew like a dove/We could watch it fly and just keep looking up,” Williams sings, as the dropped-D high-note riffage hits the exact tone of discomfiting teen yearning. The band’s churchly upbringings left a mark on “We Are Broken”’s theme of renewal, on “Miracle”’s aggressive bid for salvation, and the fiery exaltation of “Let the Flames Begin”: “This is how we’ll dance/When they try to take us down/This is what will be, oh glory.” It also charged the puritanical subtext of Riot’s biggest hit.
Anti-girl bitterness was third-wave emo’s defining theme, and with “Misery Business” it reached a sinister apex: pitting girls against each other. The vindictive lyrics were a literal page from the 17-year-old Williams’ diary, in which she verbally obliterates her crush’s new girlfriend for seducing him away. Williams claimed that, on Riot!, she drew influence from no band so much as mewithoutYou—whose post-hardcore brewed and convulsed into a storm so menacing, it could be scary—and as the tornado of “Miz Biz” collects power, it’s believable. When she screams “I watched his wildest dreams come true/Not one of them involving you”—“Just watch my wildest dreams come true,” she adds on the bridge that’s carried every emo kid this side of Myspace, on the song that exploded Paramore into the stratosphere—it all sharpens the slash of her revenge.
That the crush in question was her bandmate Josh Farro only foreshadowed the persistent intraband turmoil to come. Paramore became the Fleetwood Mac of 2000s emo—and they did it while mostly straight edge. (The Farro brothers eventually quit Paramore in 2010 in protest of how Williams’ lyrics contradicted the Bible.)
The latent misogyny of “Misery Business” has been analyzed so scrupulously this decade that Paramore stopped playing the song live for four years. At the time of its release, Williams rooted the song’s story in faith and redemption: “every word i wrote was like a thousand weights lifted off my shoulders,” she admitted on the band’s LiveJournal. Regarding the line “God, does it feel so good,” Williams said that when she wrote it, she was taking the Lord’s name “in vain,” which she regretted. “i might have led some of ya’ll to believe that i take my saviour lightly. and i don’t,” she wrote, adding that now, “when I am singing those lines, i’m telling God that it feels good to stand up for myself and be victorious after long months of confusion and pain.”
LiveJournal confession booth notwithstanding, it is also true that Williams came of age during a singularly oppressive time for girls in popular culture, when flawless pop stars were grossly hypersexualized and music’s prevailing youth subculture could be as smugly sexist as its mainstream. So while there’s no question that the line “once a whore, you’re nothing more” holds up poorly, it also follows that a young woman who did not want her music to center her sexuality would seethe at how the status quo threatened her. “It’s easy if you do it right,” she sings, “I refuse! I refuse! I refuse!” By any measure—though “Misery Business” hit No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100—it’s powerful to hear a teenage girl scream her refusal to conform.
A few Riot! songs are helpful if stark reminders that this is music written by kids who were young enough to put Cocoa Pebbles on their tour rider (per a Riot!-era Alternative Press story) and cram homework between gigs. The swagger of “crushcrushcrush” adds another dimension to Riot!’s sound—an homage to Head Automatica, the Glassjaw dance-punk side project—but the lyrics are lackluster. The jarring theatricality of “Fences” bears the influence of Panic! at the Disco and, though its narration of young fame is a gut-punch—“You can’t turn back/Because this road is all you’ll ever have”—its drama-club flourish has not aged particularly well. But Riot! is sequenced so seamlessly that even these potential missteps fold into the album’s bigger story of a seismic band’s genesis and its time capsule of a now mythic scene.
Riot! marked the true arrival of Paramore as astronomic aughts-emo heroes. It sold 700,000 copies in its first year, eventually went multi-platinum, and earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Paramore performed “Misery Business” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien looking like they’d just rolled off a tour bus, with swoopy haircuts and chain wallets and synchronized head bangs. They brought the song to TRL and guest VJ Rihanna sung along to every word. When, one year after Riot!’s release, the band landed two songs on the Twilight soundtrack, the blockbuster teen vampire movie exploded their celebrity even further. “We have an advantage being young because we have our whole lives ahead of us to establish this band,” Josh Farro said in an interview around Riot!’s release. Paramore’s greatest music was to come.
Success wasn’t without its share of Behind the Music-worthy breakdowns for rock musicians who had grown up in public with the hyper-scrutinized lifestyle of child stars. “‘Pressure’ isn’t just the name of one of Paramore’s songs—for these kids, it’s a way of life,” wrote Alternative Press in 2007, referencing a single from their debut. On top of that was the “brutally misogynistic” atmosphere of the pop-punk scene, as Williams herself described it, a bias that would often miscast her as the all-controlling manipulator behind Paramore’s public falling-outs.
But in a fraught era, Riot! was a reset, a brash joyride, a door reopened by a woman overtaking a male-dominated scene. Fifteen years after its release, in 2022, when Paramore headlined the inaugural When We Were Young festival, Williams refused to look back with rose-tinted glasses. “We find ourselves a pillar of the very scene that threatened to reject us. And me,” Williams wrote in an Instagram Story, addressing those who changed it, “young girls, queer kids, and anybody of color.” “WE have shifted this scene together,” she wrote. “Messily, angrily, heartbroken, and determined.” Paramore’s sharp songwriting on Riot! and beyond meant they not only defined and transcended their moment, but also redeemed it. Today the band’s influence has become so essential a block in the DNA of popular music, from zoomers like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo to songwriting colossus Taylor Swift—who called Williams a primary lyrical inspiration for Speak Now—it’s like a color or blood. (Footage exists of Swift and Williams dueting “That’s What You Get” on the Speak Now tour as the young country singer pogoed in a prom dress.)
The paradox of pop-emo, for still-malleable kids to whom it was delivered, was to have an obsessive, germinal love for music so wound up in diffident feelings of self-hate, to experience (as with most sounds descended from punk, however removed they might be) disconnection at the heart of connection. “To be a young girl in love with this scene was to have the hope that I might find my own way to belong,” Williams continued in her statement. “It took years to find that belonging.” But Riot!’s sleek, biting songs of brokenness and strength reproduced the feeling eternally: of not being alone in your pain or fury, of being out of step together—the most enduring definition of emo her generation would offer. | 2023-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fueled by Ramen | December 3, 2023 | 8.8 | 30fe1d19-7cb9-404b-88da-ddc114a9d65b | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
On the new EP from Canadian producer Phoebé Guillemot, she presents tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms, suggestive of old Ethnic Folkways Library records. | On the new EP from Canadian producer Phoebé Guillemot, she presents tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms, suggestive of old Ethnic Folkways Library records. | RAMZi: Phobiza "Noite" Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22807-phobiza-noite-vol-2/ | Phobiza "Noite" Vol. 2 | For the past five years, Canada’s Phoebé Guillemot has been unobtrusively building up a peculiar little soundworld as RAMZi, mostly on small batch cassettes (now available on her Bandcamp page). But over the past few years, Guillemot’s profile ticked upwards, with a release on the 1080p label, an eye-melting video, an art collaboration for RVNG Intl., and a full-length on Total Stasis (the label also responsible for Elysia Crampton’s The Light That You Gave Me to See You). She quickly follows all that up with a tantalizing EP for the buzzing Mood Hut imprint. And the more of her music we become privy to, the weirder, wormier, and more immersive that little world becomes.
Guillemot’s sound echoes trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell—who, on a 1980 collaborative album with Brian Eno, called Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, presented his notion of a “fourth world” to listeners. A mix of Western electronics and indigenous sounds, it drifted between minimalism, jazz, world music, and ambient, preferring the ether above them all. But Hassell’s sound was exotic in much the same way as the painter Henri Rousseau’s jungle canvases were; they came not from globetrotting, but from introspective imaginings of other cultures. Guillemot is not alone in her ethnographic electronics, as a new generation of producers like Don’t DJ and Andrew Pekler (as well as Oneohtrix Point Never) concoct pretend world rhythms and then twist them into curious new shapes.
RAMZi presents her tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms; the sleeve designs for last year’s Phobiza Dia: Vol.1 and “Noite” Vol. 2 resembled old field recordings. Inside, Guillemot takes on aspects of Ethnic Folkways Library records—foreign voices, animals sounding in the landscape, tribal drumming patterns—and spins them through her circuitry.
As the album title playfully alludes, opener “For Vanda” might be the sound of Ibiza right after sunset. Cricket sounds mingle with spring gurgles. A synth patch mimicking a bamboo flute echoes a kilometer away and a voice (maybe Guillemot’s own) gets pitched down until it rumbles like a tribal elder. A hand drum enters, as resonant as a heavy stone splashed into a pond. As it all comes together and grows denser, it approximates the environmental moments of the Orb’s Orbus Terrarum.
RAMZi’s sounds are tangible and tactile, yet each piece feels slippery as river rocks. Guillemot’s voice slides across “Fuma” like a little cloud, and soon other altered voices arise and mix with it. With a grounding tabla pattern, “Messiah” is the most DJ-friendly track on the EP, but RAMZi still makes it feel like it’s floating four inches off the ground. Her whispered exhalations get pitched up until it wavers like a broken spider web. Equally playful is when she slows down her vocals of “Male heya” until they resemble a wobbly AutoTuned hook. She then sets it against another gently dubbed out ecosystem, suggesting what Future backpacking through Hassell’s Fourth World might sound like. | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mood Hut | February 7, 2017 | 7.6 | 30ff3c61-5479-4faf-b150-d609baa28c35 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Well, it's been two weeks now, and I guess it's time to tell you guys something about Cassius ... | Well, it's been two weeks now, and I guess it's time to tell you guys something about Cassius ... | Cassius: 1999 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1341-1999/ | 1999 | Well, it's been two weeks now, and I guess it's time to tell you guys something about Cassius' 1999. I've been diligenty listening to it in my cubicle, my car and at home, thinking, always, of what to tell you, faithful reader. Sad thing is, there ain't much to say.
The concept behind this music is plausible-- relatively easy techno grooves filled with '70s disco sampling and flava. But I found myself too often wondering if these trax benefitted at all from these wistful roots. Maybe I need some coke to truly delight in the seething vacancy of 1999, but I'm pretty sure that it's clearly not happening.
Don't get me wrong-- as pure dance music, this album can stand side by side with the legions of house, techno and rave comps that stress booties on their covers. I mean, it could just be the pompous prick in me, but I've come to expect a more cerebral quality from Astralwerks artists. Sure, there are some decent tracks-- the synthesizer in "La Monde" is a squeezy delight. I'm sure "Foxy" is pumping out the loudspeakers of a club somewhere as you read this. And "Club Soixante Quinze" is just plain groovy. However, it's pretty tepid overall depite its origins in France, the beloved land of quirky DJs. Don't bother with it. There are far better techno records on the market. | 1999-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 1999-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | January 26, 1999 | 4.8 | 3101f9e7-e6d5-460b-96af-8da6ec1f0fbf | James P. Wisdom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-p. wisdom/ | null |
The veteran Chicago footwork producer tests the genre’s stylistic limits on a bracing, sometimes harrowing album that documents her struggles with depression. | The veteran Chicago footwork producer tests the genre’s stylistic limits on a bracing, sometimes harrowing album that documents her struggles with depression. | Jana Rush: Painful Enlightenment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jana-rush-painful-enlightenment/ | Painful Enlightenment | Veteran Chicago footwork producer Jana Rush says that Painful Enlightenment, only her second album since she debuted in 1995, isn’t a footwork record. She might be right: Painful Enlightenment’s abstract passages, tortured rhythms, and sprawling webs of sound have little to do with footwork’s classically coiled energy and perpetual forward motion. But fans of the Chicago genre might also see Painful Enlightenment as an unwitting tribute to footwork’s versatility: Created partly as a document of Rush’s struggles with depression, the album both tests the genre’s stylistic limits and expands its customary subject matter.
After a short introductory track that pairs skeletal drums with determined blasts of saxophone, “Suicidal Ideation” establishes the album’s mood with nine minutes of migraine bass throb, eerie piano, and collapsed rhythms, suggesting the anguished disorientation of personal torment. Desperate vocal snippets jab at the beat like yelps of despair; it’s an exceptionally evocative, if alarming, musical portrait of a mental state. “Drivin’ Me Insane,” featuring Nancy Fortune, is similarly disturbing: An anamorphic vocal flattens the song’s title into the enervating drone of a digital distress signal, while a triplet rhythm drops with the excruciating near regularity of water torture.
Jazz is a major influence on Painful Enlightenment, both in the album’s sample sources—the saxophone trills on “Moanin’,” the swing of the title track—and in the freeform geometric shapes of the songs, which don’t so much go from A to B as crawl about with vague purpose. Not unlike free jazz, Painful Enlightenment sometimes requires a leap of faith from the listener, who has to believe that contradictory rhythms will eventually make sense. “Mynd Fuc” appears to be operating at two entirely opposing tempos, as languid piano intersects with frantic electronic percussion. But it is the combination of these apparently antithetical impulses that gives the song its unique rhythmic feel, like walking in weary zig-zags down a crowded city street, or going out dancing to cover up the pain.
All of this is far from footwork’s familiar terrain of dance crews and rolling basslines. But it would be wrong to entirely dismiss the genre’s influence. Even at Painful Enlightenment’s most abstract moments—“Suicidal Ideation,” say, or “Disorientation”’s patchwork of elevator-machinery funk—footwork’s signature is legible in the songs’ fidgety sub bass and samurai-sharp hi-hat workouts. “Disturbed” takes things even further back, its diva-esque vocal samples and comparatively strait-laced 4/4 rhythm suggesting classic Chicago house, even if the context makes the song’s twin vocal hooks of “I need someone” and “I need you” sound considerably more desperate than they might on a record by the late Paul Johnson, whom Rush counted as a mentor.
Footwork’s durability over the past decade, as it spread out from its Chicago home, has been rooted in its adaptability, with the genre incorporating everything from jungle rhythms to romantic R&B melodies (as heard on DJ Manny’s excellent new album Signals in My Head). Painful Enlightenment matches footwork’s musical malleability with expanded emotional range, using the genre’s base ingredients to explore a world of trauma and resilience. It’s a grown-up album in a world where growing up is frequently painful.
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. | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | August 10, 2021 | 7.8 | 3104f447-7661-4d87-a119-aaaa5ed62f80 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Working in a professional recording studio, the DIY lifer goes big by going small. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made—but it still gets you riled up. | Working in a professional recording studio, the DIY lifer goes big by going small. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made—but it still gets you riled up. | Jeff Rosenstock: HELLMODE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-rosenstock-hellmode/ | HELLMODE | Jeff Rosenstock doesn’t want your money. In the 2000s, as the mastermind of Bomb the Music Industry!, he turned down record label offers, gave away his music for free, and spraypainted his fans’ shirts instead of selling merch at shows. With an ethos equally indebted to the militant anti-consumerism of Fugazi and the fraternity of Less Than Jake, the jack-of-all-trades has long believed DIY is the only answer. “Not only do I think it’s sustainable, I can’t imagine how else to do it,” Rosenstock said before the band’s hiatus. This spirit has remained consistent during his solo career, but as the Emmy-nominated musician stared down 40, he stopped refusing financial assistance and accepted a fancy studio session to record HELLMODE, his fifth solo album, at the behest of Polyvinyl.
Inspired by System of a Down’s recording sessions for Toxicity, Rosenstock and go-to producer Jack Shirley booked a week at EastWest Studios, a space more famously known for Whitney Houston and Pet Sounds. While the luxe setting could have presented an ethical compromise, Rosenstock inhabits it on his own terms. Just as he’s begun playing 2016’s “Festival Song” at major festivals, he isn't sanctimonious enough to deny partaking in the capitalist machine he criticizes in his songs, especially if it involves pushing the limits of how his art can evolve. Rosenstock and Shirley avoid the pitfalls that major studio sessions can tempt, like using every instrument within reach or cranking the production beyond recognition. Instead, he went big on HELLMODE by going smaller. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made, but it still gets you riled up.
That level-up is most audible in HELLMODE’s punk-rock tracks, which offer a dialed-in but not dialed-back tone. “LIKED U BETTER” takes a bite out of Rosenstock’s bread and butter: simple chords strummed aggressively, a bumpy beat, a shout to intro the guitar solo. “DOUBT” takes another classic Rosenstock route: an ambling first half that gives way to a double-time rhythm and gang vocals. Instead of sounding scuzzy like previous albums We Cool? or WORRY., he incorporates textural space. Even the nods to ska—jubilant “oi oi oi” hollers and shimmering trombone by SKA DREAM star Jer Hunter—are tempered. Nowhere is this clearer, or more fun, than “FUTURE IS DUMB,” where Rosenstock commits to ferocious screaming. With every repetition of “The world doesn’t owe you,” his voice grows hoarser—and when the song reaches its euphoric breakdown, he kicks into overdrive for one last wail.
HELLMODE turns the volume knob down halfway for its remaining tracks, opting for a contemplative, refined mood that emphasizes the lyrics. He sings about self-acceptance by way of keeping himself in check, calling out his own hypocrisy, privilege, and paranoia: “Does the weight I’ll carry from here on out even compare to the damage that I’ve caused? No!” His attention to detail on the acoustic “HEALMODE” is particularly moving, as he revels in a newfound appreciation of rain after relocating to Los Angeles from his longtime Brooklyn shoebox. He ponders with a humble romanticism akin to Paul Baribeau: Where do neighborhood coyotes take cover? How do pine needles stick to the car?
In downshifting from punk-rock fervor to indie rock respite, Rosenstock nods to unlikely peers in the genre. Two separate Built to Spill-esque guitar solos pierce through “GRAVEYARD SONG” with elongated whole notes. The Hold Steady’s classic rock-tinted synths and guitar uphold “I WANNA BE WRONG.” There’s even the distinct eras of Weezer between the Blue Album and Green Album adulation on “LIFE ADMIN” and “SOFT LIVING,” respectively. Though they warrant these comparisons, the songs still boast the trademarks of Rosenstock’s songwriting: scratchy sing-yells, x0.5-speed tempos, a buzzing sense of urgency. Listen closely to decipher old Bomb the Music Industry! stylings that have matured through the pristine lens of HELLMODE, like the glockenspiel-dotted refrain of “WILL U STILL U” echoing “Vocal Coach,” or the meter derailment of “Bike Test 1 2 3” spinning out of control on “HEAD.” Even when he careens towards indie rock, it’s with the inextinguishable spirit of a DIY punk stalwart.
Although HELLMODE is more polished than his previous solo albums, Rosenstock is still the same ripped jorts-wearing workaholic laughing his way through the stress. “If I can’t help myself from freaking out, how am I gonna live?” he sings on seven-minute-long closer “3 SUMMERS.” He doesn’t have the answer, but he’s got the next best thing: a cohort of friends—Laura Stevenson, PUP, Chris Farren—supporting him and singing along. Even now, with Spotify and Bandcamp allowing fans to stream his music for nothing, Rosenstock still uploads his albums for free download on his digital label Quote Unquote Records to pay that generosity forward. A day before its scheduled release, HELLMODE appeared there, the most expensive album of his career one click away from being yours forever to spread wherever you please. For all the doubt and unpredictability in his songs, there’s comfort in knowing some things never change. | 2023-09-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | September 5, 2023 | 8 | 310d8bba-f2b3-4db9-8e8b-bcfecf32aeec | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
A newly reissued private-press curio from 1975 captures the bygone sounds of daily life in Portland, Oregon, in dreamy, proto-ambient form. | A newly reissued private-press curio from 1975 captures the bygone sounds of daily life in Portland, Oregon, in dreamy, proto-ambient form. | Ernest Hood: Neighborhoods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ernest-hood-neighborhoods/ | Neighborhoods | In 1975, the Portland, Oregon, musician Ernest Hood pressed his lone solo album, Neighborhoods, in an edition of a few hundred. He passed out copies primarily to friends, and the album, a curious blend of found sounds and proto-ambient, disappeared into the Pacific Northwest mist. Newly reissued by Freedom to Spend (in a much improved pressing, spread across two discs), it’s not the first such rarity to be pulled from the ether in the 21st century, as YouTube’s algorithm accumulates millions of plays for once obscure jazz and new-age records. But it might be the most uncanny, an album that kindles a sensation not unlike watching home videos of your own childhood.
If you’ve sat in the yard at dusk right before the mosquitoes come out, ridden a bike through the suburbs in the summertime, or even just driven around your own neighborhood with the windows rolled down, you’ll hear in Neighborhoods an aleatoric sound set in amber. Who was the fellow that plucked out such moments of everyday life, pared them down, and wove it all together?
Born in 1923, Hood grew up in a time when kids ran unsupervised all day long and the most enthralling sound was big-band jazz. Hood picked up the guitar and started playing ballrooms with a jazz band (his brother Bill would go on to have a moderately successful career in the industry), but in the early 1950s, while still in his twenties, he fell victim to a devastating polio outbreak. He spent a year in an iron lung and for the rest of his life used leg braces, crutches, and a wheelchair to get around. He could no longer hold a guitar in his lap, so he took up the zither. At one point in the early 1970s, Hood’s zither could be heard on Flora Purim’s early albums, mixing in alongside fusion stars like George Duke and Stanley Clarke.
His own career in jazz might have ended abruptly, but Hood remained a presence in Portland, where he cofounded the KBOO community radio station. (Before his death in 1995, post-polio syndrome took away even more mobility as well as his ability to speak and he became the public face of the Death With Dignity Act.) And while his guitar playing was halted, he continued to study recording and production. Starting in the mid-’50s, Hood began using a wire recorder to collect the sounds around him, eventually upgrading to a reel-to-reel and microphone, assembling his field recordings into “audio postcards” for his radio show. As the liner notes recount, Hood would surreptitiously park around Portland, “blacking out the windows of his car with a dark cloth to act as a windbreaker,” which attracted a fair bit of notice from concerned neighbors.
It wouldn’t be until 1974 that Hood started assembling all these field recordings and snatches of dialogue into Neighborhoods, weaving in the voices of his own son and family friends. He was in his early fifties at that point and envisioned the album as a nostalgic glance back at his own childhood, a period rapidly fading from memory in the post-war era. There’s talk of a sunken riverboat and steam-powered trains, and the scrape of a game of kick the can, not all that far removed from what Ray Davies would sing on Kinks albums. But you never get the impression that Hood is pining for these lost times so much as documenting the peculiar similarities between his own bygone youth and what he could hear all around him in that moment.
The album opens with birds, barking dogs, a kid tooting on a whistle, a passing car—the kind of stuff that rushes in whenever you pull up your garage door. When Hood’s own zither and synth musings bloom to life, they move with a logic like the wind in the trees, picking up speed and then dying back down, meandering along at their own pace. He gets one of his early synthesizers to chirp along with bird sound in one moment, and then to mimic a tune the kids down the street are yelping the next.
Hood’s musical musings never take over, but rather move in and out of earshot. Sometimes he strums a whimsical air like something lifted from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and at other times he echoes a radio tuned to an old jazz song. The synth melody that gurgles up throughout “Gloaming” brings to mind another album that wove together pioneering synth work and field recordings, Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Neither moving toward a song nor getting lost in the other sounds, Hood lets it all come to him. While the recordings are documentarian in their way, the music is as vague and open-ended as daily life. There are moments when you might be hard-pressed to notice Hood’s signature at all.
“It hardly matters in which neighborhood you sprouted,” Hood wrote in the original liner notes. “The games we played… and the feelings we experienced… are tantalizingly familiar.” Songs with names like “At the Store” and “After School” could be set just about anywhere. Hood susses out a symphony in the daily noise of American life, like Charles Ives with a portable tape recorder or Norman Rockwell with an early synthesizer prototype. In some passages, Neighborhoods doesn’t feel like a half-century-old curio, but as of-the-moment as a walk to the train. Put it on, hear children shouting out songs, crickets chirping, and the noise diesel engines rumbling past and feel the illusion of time dissolve: You’re in Ernest Hood’s neighborhood.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Freedom to Spend | October 16, 2019 | 8.4 | 3113bd47-b4f6-460f-89da-0300f1010edd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
null | Why U2? How did these four Irishmen become the blueprint for every band with stadium aspirations? The Edge's churchly guitar chime-- which thrives on the same arena acoustics that can turn otherwise booming bands into mud-- is certainly a factor. So is their weakness for the big gesture-- whether it be a giant lemon, heart, or mouth. And Bono's cathartic mix of modern panacea-- love, God, mass culture-- gives them a reach to the back row and beyond. But, perhaps above all else, the band's restlessness and willingness to challenge both themselves and their patrons is why the Killers, Kanye | U2: No Line on the Horizon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12730-no-line-on-the-horizon/ | No Line on the Horizon | Why U2? How did these four Irishmen become the blueprint for every band with stadium aspirations? The Edge's churchly guitar chime-- which thrives on the same arena acoustics that can turn otherwise booming bands into mud-- is certainly a factor. So is their weakness for the big gesture-- whether it be a giant lemon, heart, or mouth. And Bono's cathartic mix of modern panacea-- love, God, mass culture-- gives them a reach to the back row and beyond. But, perhaps above all else, the band's restlessness and willingness to challenge both themselves and their patrons is why the Killers, Kanye West, and Coldplay want to be the next U2 and not the next AC/DC. It's why these four Irishmen still represent the punk spirit decades after they emerged from it.
"You've got to balance being relevant and commenting on something that's happening today with trying to attain timelessness," philosophized the Edge in the early 1990s. The quote sounds like rock star bullshit...until you realize that's pretty much what U2 did for 20 years. From 1980 to 2000, it was difficult to tell exactly what the next U2 album would sound like. Briefly: They added atmosphere to new wave, looked for God and found hits, exhumed their rock'n'roll heroes, sent-up those same heroes while losing their religion, and punctured pop via mutated techno. Each move was more audacious than the last-- even 1997 knee-jerk victim Pop saw the world-beating act taking completely unnecessary musical and financial risks in the name of Warholian post-modern pastiche. They then also managed to surprise on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind by successfully returning to form after shrugging off the notion for so many years. But 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and its subsequent tour were troubling.
That record saw four guys famous for dabbing classic rock into all sorts of impressionistic frames (or dismantling it entirely via Village People costumes) uncomfortably grasping for old-fashioned riffs, when they weren't mindlessly feasting on their own past. It was completely predictable ("City of Blinding Lights"), canned ("Vertigo"), and depressingly Sting-like ("A Man and a Woman"). But the group did little to hide the fact that they were basking in their early-century comeback's afterglow; in concert, in place of the ATYCLB tour's heart-shaped runway was a, um, circle-shaped runway. Still self-aware enough to sense stagnation, the quartet began to work on what would become No Line on the Horizon with new producer Rick Rubin and an imperative to break all those piling U2 trappings once again. As Bono told The New York Times this week: "When you become a comfortable, reliable friend, I'm not sure that's the place for rock'n'roll."
Sixteen years ago, U2 worked a snippet of Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" into their technologically prescient Zoo TV tour-- perhaps fans should heed that bit of sampled advice right about now. Because while this group of slick talkers may have set out to expand their own definition once more, they've ended up with old collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois --along with an album that's neither relevant nor timeless.
First single "Get on Your Boots" is a worrisome harbinger-- to call it a mess would be generous. The song combines sub-Audioslave riffs with Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" and sounds more disjointed than the worst Girl Talk rip off. "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations-- not right now!" claims Bono on the song, before extolling the virtues of tight leather boots. His off-the-cuff attitude and delivery suggests a cheekiness missing from U2's music for more than a decade, but it's a red herring. While other tracks like "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" and "Stand Up Comedy" feature knowing lines that examine the singer's faults and hypocrisy, the album is heavy on half-assed word-salad characterizations and the sort of meaningless platitudes Bono used to be so great at (barely) avoiding. And there's a strong theme of resignation running through the record; whereas many classic U2 tracks have come from Bono's struggle with faith and certainty, he seems content to give up agency on songs like "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller". "I've found grace inside a sound," he sings on "Breathe", and the line seems like a cop-out from a man who spent so much time struggling with salvation.
Meanwhile, the album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms (the three-note ring Edge nicks from "Walk On" for "Unknown Caller", the "oh oh oh" outro from "Stay" apparently copied and pasted into "Moment of Surrender", etc.). While Eno used to work his unique sound-bobbles and ambiance into the fabric of U2 songs, he seems content to offer spacey intros totally disassociated from their accompanying tunes here (see: "Fez - Being Born", "Magnificent"). And oftentimes the band mistakes risk-taking for ill-fated arrangements and decisions. "Surrender"-- reportedly improvised in one seven-minute take-- comes across as lazy indulgence, and the title track's hard-nosed verse is torpedoed by its deflating fart of a hook. As the go-to sonic innovator of the group, the Edge dials in a particularly dispiriting performance throughout; his rare solos usually pack in enough panache to fill stadiums but his bluesy blah of a spotlight on "Surrender" would barely satisfy a single earbud.
"It keeps getting harder. You're playing against yourself and you don't want to lose," Adam Clayton told Q last month. And he's got a point. After nearly 30 years of chart crashing and sell-outs, starting afresh can't be easy. There's only one "One". In a way, U2 spoiled their followers by consistently questioning themselves while writing songs that straddled the personal and collective consciousness. But Horizon is clearly playing not to lose-- it's a defensive gesture, and a rather pitiful one at that. | 2009-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | March 2, 2009 | 4.2 | 31158c37-b506-4589-99c2-a76af67913b3 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
As Special Request, UK producer Paul Woolford aimed to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming. The project's proper debut, Soul Music, is one of the most exciting dance records of this year. | As Special Request, UK producer Paul Woolford aimed to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming. The project's proper debut, Soul Music, is one of the most exciting dance records of this year. | Special Request: Soul Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18621-special-request-soul-music/ | Soul Music | When it comes to evoking nostalgia, Paul Woolford is keeping it extreme. For his Special Request project, the UK producer keeps his studio space loaded with vintage hardware, including an FM transmitter that allows him to broadcast over his own frequency and sample the results. This complicated process, which Woolford has referred to as "creating a false memory," plays a large role in his aim to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the thrilling sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming and, as the years progressed, re-shaping itself into new forms.
"The attractive thing about pirate radio is that it sits outside of convention," Woolford told FACT earlier this year while discussing his still-strong attachment to the format. "So there are no rules." The relative constraints applied to Special Request speak to a method of creating new rules to escape the encumberances of ones already in place; in other words, it's a highly conceptual project, and not the first of its kind. With Death of Rave, sound deconstructionist Leland Kirby dismantled rave's glory days as a tribute to the culture, degrading its sounds until there was little more than an exquisite corpse left over; meanwhile, Burial's own decayed-throwback style owes something to the enigmatic producer becoming enamored with artifacts of an era he didn't experience first-hand: "Old jungle, rave and hardcore...they still sound future to me."
The 38-year-old Woolford's recent tendency of looking towards the past has coincided with a spate of new visibility for the producer, who's been churning out high-grade techno for nearly a decade under his own name: his single for Hotflush this year, "Untitled", has become something of a low-level "hit", adding another jewel to the accomplished producer's already impressive crown. Capitalizing on the increase in attention, Special Request's proper debut LP, Soul Music, pushes the needle into the red again with winning results.
With a sense of nasty-edged playfulness that keeps the project's nostalgia from lapsing into stiff reverence, it's unquestionably one of the most exciting dance records of this year. When Four Tet's Kieran Hebden unleashed his own pirate-radio hat-tip this year in the form of "Kool FM", there was an expectation that the according full-length, Beautiful Rewind, would similarly dive headlong into clattering waters; that record turned out to be more subtle than expected, so anyone disappointed by Hebden's muted elegance on display there will most likely find the head-rush corrective they're looking for in Soul Music's 12 tracks.
Woolford's "no rules" approach is evident from Soul Music's opening track, "Forbidden", an icy slice of techno reinforcing the notion that Special Request is less about evoking the sounds of pirate radio's heyday and more about recreating its anything-goes attitude. Not to say that Soul Music isn't sonically slavish to its nostalgic ideals, too: junglist breaks abound, along with plenty of strangled vocal samples and sound effects that give each track its own open-transmission vibe. The straight-techno tracks that Woolford's put out under his name and other aliases have often been colorful and full, beacons of chaos even during minimal techno's light stranglehold on the genre. The songs collected on Soul Music are similarly and gleefully overstuffed, a series of funhouse constructions that approach mania with cool-handed seriousness.
Soul Music's most straightforwardly dusty moments are reminiscent of the recent work of Zomby, the bass music enfant terrible who's made a name off of contorting dance music's history in his own twisted, smoggy visage. Structurally, Zomby's own 'ardcore-revivalist vibes have often resembled tiny nuclear reactors constantly powering up and malfunctioning, brief bursts of energy with short half-lifes. Woolford's approach is different, as he lets most of these tunes stretch their legs past the five-minute mark with plenty of room to tweak their structures ever so slightly and pleasingly (see: the placid bed of tones that stride into the midsection of "Lockjaw"'s gaping breakbeat maw). Accordingly, the collection's longest cut, a nearly eight-minute "VIP" edit of Woolford's remix of Lana Del Rey's "Ride", is Soul Music's most revelatory head-rush, a constantly evolving torrent of breaks with a serpentine bassline not unlike the one that dotted the undercarriage of his 2011 single "Can't Do Without".
A dense collection of dance cuts that make few overtures to those not previously converted by the genre, Soul Music is a thick listen that carries even more potency when broken up in small chunks than as a still-immersive front-to-back playthrough. Along with a vinyl release that took place at the top of this month, the CD and digital versions of Soul Music arrive with a bonus disc of selections from previous Special Request 12"s, as well as remixes from Woolford and others; while this additional volume has some essential gems—Woolford's remix of fellow Brit Tessela's already-massive tune "Hackney Parrot", NYC house wünderkind Anthony Naples' dissonant take on "Mindwash" that appeared on this year's Hardcore EP—it's perhaps more rewarding to seek out Special Request's excellent run of preceding EPs and build your own "early works" compilation here. As a single-disc shot, though, Soul Music is a truly unique and enriching experience: a collection of old sounds from one of dance music's enduring mainstays, re-assembled in a way that sounds fresher than ever. | 2013-10-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-10-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | October 24, 2013 | 8.1 | 311df3ea-bff1-4c31-b632-39527c09b9a9 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The footwork pioneer sets aside the obsessive minimalism of his previous album in favor of party-starting anthems and sly sample flips. But his work remains a masterclass in rhythmic dexterity. | The footwork pioneer sets aside the obsessive minimalism of his previous album in favor of party-starting anthems and sly sample flips. But his work remains a masterclass in rhythmic dexterity. | RP Boo: Established! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rp-boo-established/ | Established! | One of the many advantages of growing older is that you stop caring so much about what people think of you. This surely goes double for a dance-music legend like RP Boo. Established!, Boo’s fourth full-length for Planet Mu, may be titled to remind the casual listener that the Chicago DJ and producer is no newcomer to the footwork game: His 1997 song “Baby Come On” has been cited as the genre’s founding track. But judging from this gleefully party-starting album, which borrows from orthodox sources such as Phil Collins and Dr. Dre as it calls back to footwork’s roots in Chicago house, Boo is more interested in polishing the dancefloor than burnishing his own reputation.
Established! makes a left turn from Boo’s previous album, 2018’s I’ll Tell You What!. That record was minimal almost to the point of obsession, frequently doing away with the bass-drum punch that punctuates footwork in favor of winsome drift. Established! isn’t maximalist, exactly—Boo’s style favors using a small number of ingredients to maximum effect—but simple good times are back in vogue on the album’s bookending songs. On both tracks, Boo revisits the roots of Chicago footwork via the 4/4 pulse of the house scene that birthed it, weaving in elementary piano riffs on “All My Life” (a track that could almost be the work of the late Paul Johnson) and borrowing from Class Action’s “Weekend” on “Another Night to Party.”
If the latter sounds familiar to RP Boo fans, that’s no surprise: Boo has sampled “Weekend” on a handful of previous occasions and also employs it on “Finally Here (ft. Afiya),” which rounds off the first half of Established!. On paper, this repetition might sound lazy. But in gleeful practice, these songs feel more like the supremely self-assured work of a producer who isn’t ashamed to employ a simple trick in the name of firing up the dance. As if that wasn’t quite enough to drive the festive point home, “Finally Here” also samples Masters at Work’s eternally reworked “The Ha Dance,” a sacred text of ballroom, the two dance-music touchstones skipping around each other with the nervous energy of rookie boxers at their first bout.
Beyond the audacity of these musical moves lies Boo’s knack for reinvention. “Ivory Surface” initially appears to be moving at two entirely different rhythms, as Boo flips the seductive funk of Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” into a spiky ball of musical nerves that promises a sinister end to the original’s silken seduction. The Dre-indebted “How 2 Get It Done!” is another masterclass in sampling, as Boo chops and stitches his material into classically angular footwork constructions using tiny, dextrous moves, like a sculptor coaxing shapes from a block of marble. And if “All Over” leans rather heavily on Phil Collins’ heavily gated 1982 song “I Don’t Care Anymore,” seeing pristine footwork surface from such unlikely source material is still a hoot.
In a big season for footwork releases, with ingenious new albums from Jana Rush and DJ Manny already on the shelves, Established! doesn’t exactly move the needle for the genre; it is a shame, too, that the album lags slightly as a listening experience on tracks like “Now U Know!,” which Boo says he created with dance battles in mind. But if you’re looking for a record to remind you why you fell in love with footwork in the first place, as well as a gentle refresher of the genre’s roots, Established! is perfectly placed to twang heartstrings and hamstrings alike, bursting with audacious energy, liberal sass, and mountains of soul.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | September 17, 2021 | 7.2 | 312344cf-a929-4c1a-943b-4b2a63178cb4 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Accompanied by cello, lap steel, and other acoustic instruments, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter creates abstract soundscapes that envelop even their loneliest songs in a soft, expansive warmth. | Accompanied by cello, lap steel, and other acoustic instruments, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter creates abstract soundscapes that envelop even their loneliest songs in a soft, expansive warmth. | Shannen Moser: The Sun Still Seems to Move | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannen-moser-the-sun-still-seems-to-move/ | The Sun Still Seems to Move | Shannen Moser’s latest album, The Sun Still Seems to Move, lingers in a place of emotional uncertainty. The Philadelphia singer-songwriter understands life’s ephemerality but is still unsure how to stay afloat in the thick of a storm. “You are gone and I am a well of guilt and pain…/In your absence I am learning how to live,” they sing on the title track, one of many instances where the only solution is to fumble forward the best you can.
The Sun Still Seems to Move is Moser’s first album in four years following two folksy Americana releases, a 2017 debut and the full-band arrangements of 2018’s I’ll Sing. Moser initially envisioned their third album as a strictly vocals-and-guitars record. But midway through the record’s creation, a personal tragedy inspired Moser to invite collaborators into their process, hoping that outside players—on cello, clarinet, lap steel, banjo, and other mostly acoustic instruments—could help translate the feelings churning inside. Together, Moser and their collaborators composed abstract soundscapes that envelop even the loneliest of these 11 songs in a soft, expansive warmth.
The correlation between the looser production and the intimacy of Moser’s thoughts is palpable—you can hear it in the woodwinds that stabilize “The Bell” and in the way the thunderous bass at the end of “Two Eyes” gives Moser the strength to shout. Moser’s voice is pushed to the front of the mix, and its physicality is striking, their inflection shifting with a playfulness that evokes Joanna Newsom. (Moser, like Newsom, draws on folk traditions, in this case shape-note singing, a choral tradition that prioritizes collective expression.)
As a storyteller, Moser faces hard truths with open eyes. The opening line of “Ben” is startling not only in its refusal to mince words but also in the measured calm with which it is delivered: “All the boys I’ve known in middle school are dropping dead.” On “Foul Ball,” taking care of an ailing loved one turns into “the world’s best ever game of catch,” as a vitamin tossed across a bedroom is charged with with World Series stakes. There are no happy endings in these songs of death and broken hearts, only something resembling acceptance that sometimes all you can do is laugh. And there is a cheeky edge to Moser’s existential searching: “I know that life’s not one linear, seamless destination/Leaning towards a pillar moment saying you ended up just right,” they acknowledge on the stunning “Oh My God.” “It’s ass-to-ass traffic, sometimes yelling on the freeway.”
It’s an absurd but bittersweet truth, one that Moser must reckon with throughout The Sun Still Seems to Move. “A series of quiet moments makes forever,” a friend advises on the lush opener “Paint By #.” Moser allows this realization to guide them, recognizing eternity all around: in a pair of trees that grow side by side, never touching; in constantly evolving relationships; and in the memory of a dead friend, frozen in time as a scrappy young man. Moser is moved by each, beholden to their lessons. | 2022-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Lame-O | October 6, 2022 | 7.6 | 312632c0-41c2-4c80-b9ea-67b509b4a72c | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On her debut album, the New York polymath roams free across a map of the last 50 years of contemporary pop music, leading to her most accessible and purposeful record to date. | On her debut album, the New York polymath roams free across a map of the last 50 years of contemporary pop music, leading to her most accessible and purposeful record to date. | Lily Konigsberg: Lily We Need to Talk Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lily-konigsberg-lily-we-need-to-talk-now/ | Lily We Need to Talk Now | Lily Konigsberg has a question for the culture: What about Stacy? On “Proud Home,” the raging centerpiece of her oddball-fabulous debut, Lily We Need to Talk Now, she recasts Fountains of Wayne’s enduring “Stacy’s Mom” from the point of view of the jilted Stacy, a wry pop-cultural bloodletting some 18 years in the making. “You’ve got a lot of fucking things to be proud of!,” Lily-as-Stacy seethes. “I know you’ve got a crush on my mom/You come by every time she is home.” Konigsberg plays her part with gonzo commitment and a fanfiction writer’s sense of imagination: She’s Stacy if Stacy started making narky pop-punk in the garage.
In each of her many musical projects, the twenty-something native New Yorker roams free across a map of the last 50 years of contemporary pop music, picking and choosing sounds and ideas as she pleases. Konigsberg seems to recognize that spending time far from the beaten path often yields the most exciting results: Her output to date displays a canny blend of the experimental and the aggressively catchy. In just the past two years, she’s released an EP of charismatic pop-rock experiments as part of My Idea, a collaboration with Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos; Palberta5000, the punky third album by avant-garde trio Palberta; a Jessy Lanza-ish dance record with electronic duo Lily and Horn Horse; an Unsound-ready experimental EP, Laugh Now Cry L8r, with Lucy; and an EP under her own name, It’s Just Like All the Clouds.
Although there are a few qualities that recur in each of Konigsberg’s projects—her cherubic voice and Arthur Russell-indebted sense of melody—for the most part, these records are tied together by Konigsberg’s polymathic musical sensibility, her ability to draw from a dozen different traditions at once. Taking stock of her catalog reveals an artist seemingly more driven by method than style. Listening to Konigsberg’s music, I imagine the questions she might ask herself during her creative process: How can I make this odd song more immediate? Can this pop track be a little freakier? The unifying quality of Konigsberg’s various projects may be that there are no distinct aesthetic or creative boundaries.
Lily We Need to Talk Now doesn’t make any real attempt to reel in Konigsberg’s impulse towards genre fusion, but it is her most purposeful record to date, and her most accessible. Working exclusively with Amos as producer, there’s a consistency of tone. This is, loosely, a breakup record; it runs through familiar beats (you’ll never find anyone better; you need to seek help; why did we split; I’ll always love you) in surprising ways. Unlike The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, a compilation of recent solo music, Lily We Need to Talk Now is lush and coherent, and, at 24 minutes, extremely easy to leave on repeat. Konigsberg cycles through a handful of styles—alt-pop that splits the difference between Sixpence None the Richer and Natasha Bedingfield on “Sweat Forever,” funky, ESG-indebted dance on “Alone,” crunchy pop-punk on “Bad Boy” and “Roses, Again,” bratty garage rock on “That’s The Way I Like It” and “True”—but thanks to the record’s thematic spine, the jumps never induce whiplash.
As a writer, Konigsberg is laser-focussed: Most every song has a hook that’s liable to get stuck in your head, and each is tailored to its environment. The titular phrase of “That’s The Way I Like It” begins staccato and turns into a drawl, a rhythmic style that recalls Whitechocolatespaceegg-era Liz Phair, while the chorus of “Alone” slots perfectly between furious congas and a frenetic bass line. “Roses, Again” seems to nod to Joyce Manor’s “Constant Headache,” drawing out that song’s sing-song, girl-group-ready qualities. The chorus of “Sweat Forever” should play on a loop every time someone looks at the Nicole Kidman post-divorce photo: “I can make you sweat forever/I was right/The last time that I saw you/Said goodbye, knowing it would be forever.”
Although Konigsberg is both prolific and chameleonic, Lily We Need to Talk Now feels like the best showcase yet of her talent as a writer and arranger. Last year, she told Pitchfork that she “want[s] to write songs that get stuck in people’s heads for the rest of their lives,” and while each of her projects thus far has had a song or two that fits the criteria, Lily We Need to Talk Now is wall-to-wall hooks. She draws on the entire history of pop-rock heartbreak anthems and ties it together with sugary-sweet vocals and a witty, whimsical sensibility.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | November 2, 2021 | 7.7 | 312a85d9-b8f6-44f1-8147-9f0664b3325d | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Cloud Nothings’ latest album moves in one direction and at a breakneck pace. Dylan Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor. The band continues to make powerfully utilitarian music for people who don’t seek out this type of music just to be told what to think. | Cloud Nothings’ latest album moves in one direction and at a breakneck pace. Dylan Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor. The band continues to make powerfully utilitarian music for people who don’t seek out this type of music just to be told what to think. | Cloud Nothings: Here and Nowhere Else | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19075-cloud-nothings-here-and-nowhere-else/ | Here and Nowhere Else | Cloud Nothings’ 2012 album, Attack on Memory, aspired to be not only the band's first great album, but one that would eradicate their introductory phase as Dylan Baldi’s solo, no-fi pop-punk project. It succeeded wildly on the first count, the second one not so much: on singles “Stay Useless” and “Fall In,” Steve Albini scoured the reverb and fuzz just to further expose Baldi’s facility with bittersweet melody. Baldi gives it another go on Here and Nowhere Else, enlisting John Congleton to wipe away any remnant of “Hey Cool Kid” and present Cloud Nothings as they’ve never been and probably never will be: a grisly, caustic punk trio knocking out harrowing and powerful singalongs in dingy basements that can barely contain the sound. Once again, though, Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor.
In spite of the grayscale environs, Baldi would have you believe Here and Nowhere Else boasts a sunnier disposition than Attack on Memory, but the lyrics sheet is filled with brusque marching orders: a strangulated repetition of “Swallow” directing the listener through the desolate wilderness of “Giving Into Seeing”, and opener “Now Hear In” stating with cold equanimity, “I can feel your pain/And I feel alright about it.” The more noticeable shift Cloud Nothings make here is physical: They try to enact themselves into right thinking by ditching just about any verbal, mental, or instrumental unnecessary baggage.
Regardless, Cloud Nothings have not gotten “tighter.” Baldi replaces the twinkly leads of the departed Joe Boyer by acting as both lead and rhythm guitarist, alternating low-slung, detuned riffs and shards of dissonance that owe equal debts to Josh Homme and J. Robbins. More than ever, Cloud Nothings are a band that will inspire novice guitarists to play along with their records, an important role for any band to occupy—and forget about the piano that occasionally popped up on the indulgent-by-comparison Attack on Memory: Despite Congleton’s C.V. (Bill Callahan, St. Vincent) the most ornate production trick featured here is an echo effect liquefying Baldi into a molten puddle during the phosphene-inducing coda of “Pattern Walks.” In fact, it’s pretty much the only production trick on Here and Nowhere Else, save for the frightening thwack of Jayson Gerycz’s snare coming off like a percussive Wilhelm scream.
To put it bluntly, Jayson Gerycz is the most beneficial addition to any rock band I can think of in the past decade, and Here and Nowhere Else reiterates that, rather than Albini, Congleton, or Baldi’s newfound vocal prowess, he represents the most crucial alteration to Cloud Nothings yet. His drums are rightfully put higher in the mix than the vocals, so he speaks for Cloud Nothings just as much as Baldi does, as the two define Here and Nowhere Else’s mind/body dynamic where restlessness and an implacable urge for action serves as a paradoxical stasis.
Here and Nowhere Else mostly moves in one direction and at a breakneck pace; by playing just ahead of the beat, taking charge of the song with torrential fills, Gerycz does everything in his power to try and throw it off course. The insatiable drive and urgency of Here and Nowhere Else, as well as the resulting cohesion, means that it might initially appear less ambitious than Attack on Memory. To call it a “grower” would be accurate, though that downplays its visceral jolt, as previous Cloud Nothings records revealed their high points fairly quickly; here, the initial sonic beating's reflected in the unmistakable shades of purple, black, and blue-black in the resultant bruises.
Baldi told Pitchfork in an earlier interview that he wasn’t a punk himself growing up, but rather a musical loner who “didn’t really like anyone.” That’s a mentality easy to latch onto, as Cloud Nothings continue to make powerfully utilitarian music for people who don’t seek out this type of music just to be told what to think. They siphon punk’s righteous physicality and leave self-righteousness, victimization, and nihilism as the subject matter of the privileged. In ridding themselves of talking points, Cloud Nothings espouse a desire to live in the present moment, and that in itself is an admirable ambition. On Here and Nowhere Else, their music becomes a pure resource of energy that allows the listener to do what they will.
Whether you use Here and Nowhere Else to soundtrack a grueling run or a pound-the-steering-wheel commute to work, closer “I’m Not Part of Me” is a hell of a victory lap, Cloud Nothings’ finest song to date. After the satisfying sensory deprivation that precedes it, the song acknowledges the bigger stages the band occupies right now, generously expanding the prior, potent austerity of Baldi’s songwriting to include an EP’s worth of hooks. It also serves as Baldi’s valedictory speech: “It starts right now/There’s a way I was before/But I can’t recall how I was those days anymore.” He’s become a trenchant critic of his own work, and as much as the title of Attack on Memory spoke for itself, that lyric encapsulates everything you’ve heard on Here and Nowhere Else: This may very well be how Baldi imagined himself in his basement back in 2009, trying to make music that reflected the mundane despair of being a kid in Cleveland with no real prospects, while secretly striving to make music that would allow him to get the fuck out. Five years later, it’s almost impossible to remember a time when Baldi failed to hit the mark. | 2014-03-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | March 31, 2014 | 8.7 | 312af7b0-b0dc-4141-980d-d59df46182aa | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The London DJ born Joseph Richmond Seaton crafts a set that channels Fabric’s late-hours ambience, when things get weird and wooly. | The London DJ born Joseph Richmond Seaton crafts a set that channels Fabric’s late-hours ambience, when things get weird and wooly. | Call Super: Fabric 92 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22866-fabric-92/ | Fabric 92 | At its best, a nightclub can be a scale model of utopia, a shared hallucination, an alternate reality that lasts as long as the house lights stay dark. The same holds true for mix CDs. Most merely operate as calling cards for the DJ making them, or flyers for the club promoting them. Occasionally, though, they aspire to be something more ambitious: a postcard from that imaginary place that the best club nights conjure into being out of sheer force of collective will.
That’s the context in which Call Super’s Fabric 92 comes to us. The London DJ, aka Joseph Richmond Seaton, says that he intended the release as a snapshot of the late hours of his sets, when consensus floor-fillers give way to stranger, more personal selections. That’s one unusual thing about the mix; another is that it was born in the wild, but raised in captivity, as it were. His choice of theme and mood reflects a careful study of Fabric’s mix series as much as it does his time in the booth at the London venue. Noticing that the late hours seemed “strangely under represented” within the series, he writes, “I thought it would be good to start there instead of using this opportunity to add another peak-time chapter to the collection.”
Commercial mix CDs have lost the central role in DJ culture that they enjoyed in the ’90s and ’00s; thanks to the internet, mixes are everywhere now, and free. But, perhaps precisely because no one has time to listen to even a fraction of them, Fabric’s series is more of a canon-maker than ever. Fabric 92 is, above all, a testament to digging widely and without prejudice. Beneath house and techno’s broad umbrella, it’s as diverse a set as you’ll find, spanning multiple eras, styles, and scenes, and boasting a final 14 minutes that veers way out into the deep end, from drone to country blues to polemical dancehall reggae.
Seaton’s selections are spellbinding, as every track presents a self-contained world of its own. Some, like Don’t DJ’s polyrhythmic “Pornoire,” are wildly complex; others, like the flickering electro of Shanti Celeste’s “Strung Up,” are relatively tidy. The cumulative effect of the way he layers and strings them all together is akin to moving through a series of wormholes, flashing from landscape to landscape while standing in place. His mixing is never ostentatious, but it generally emphasizes action. It’s rare that a song is left to play out unaccompanied; far more often, he’s got two and even three tracks running in parallel, resulting in a dynamic, shape-shifting fusion that’s far more than the sum of its parts. Early on, he combines muted, shuffling cuts from Jan Jelinek and from Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 project to mossy effect, as though burrowing through underbrush, while using the doleful trumpet of Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux’s “The Same River Twice” to draw bright, silvery streaks overhead.
A few tracks later, following an early climax brought on by his friend Objekt’s “The Stitch-Up”—whipcracks, shrapnel, a heart-in-mouth ostinato—he turns to relatively obscure, mid-’90s cuts from Photek and Two Full Minds to create a subaquatic atmosphere. That relative calm sets up the mix’s most white-knuckled passage, in which Flanger’s head-scratching “Spinner,” in 10/4 time, is teased in and out of Carl Craig’s epic “A Wonderful Life” for three minutes of tug-of-war. At several points, it feels like it could all collapse into the mud at any moment, but it’s precisely that sense of risk that’s so exhilarating.
On the downhill slope, Seaton switches into a more sentimental gear, leaning heavily on melodic IDM and electro from Marco Bernardi, Jega, Shanti Celeste, and Bitstream; concluding with a fleet-footed Detroit techno skip from Convextion, this might be the set’s most satisfying segment. But Seaton has one final trick up his sleeve. As Convextion’s beats fade away, a pair of ambient drones from Karen Gwyer and Thomas Ankersmit & Valerio Tricoli shimmer brightly in the darkness, and a lilting, sing-song speaking voice rings out: “Well I’m just walkin’/I’m trying to find the end/But every time I stop/Look like my trouble just begin.” It’s Walter Brown's “Keep on Walkin’,” an a cappella country blues recorded in Mississippi in 1981 by a pair of German ethnomusicologists.
It’s hardly the first time that archival blues has turned up in dance music—Moby, you may recall, built his empire on wringing as much authenticity as he could out of vintage recordings of black Americans’ voices. But Seaton’s approach, which sets Brown’s rueful blues in an imaginary summer night, lit only by stars and fireflies, is far stranger. And in the context of a club set, it’s nothing short of audacious. Eventually, Yves Tumor’s woozy, soulful “The Feeling When You Walk Away” takes us by the hand and leads us back toward the light, and Speng Bond’s “Cutbacks,” a dancehall reggae tune about economic austerity policies, sends us home feeling righteous. But for just a moment there, at the tail end of the set’s spellbinding denouement, everything falls silent as Walter Brown’s plaintive voice carries on unaccompanied: “On my knees, I’m gonna just/Keep on walkin’.” In a journey full of left turns and switchbacks, this calm, quiet testament to faith and fortitude speaks the loudest; it’s a moment when absolutely anything feels possible. | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | February 21, 2017 | 7.6 | 312d3e6b-8cef-4259-ba66-d7bcafb24418 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
null | Will Oldham's (thankfully) crowded discography gained a pair of low-key releases in the past few months: *Wai Notes*, a set of *The Letting Go* demos and *Wilding in the West*, a Japanese/Australian-only live album from Oldham's 2007 tour that includes at least one "remix" by Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty. On the heels of November's *Ask Forgiveness* EP, these releases risked giving off a "Dear Fans: Thanks, also fuck off"-vibe, but since precisely no one's child is going Ivy League off of 10,000 copies of *Wai Notes* it's probably safe to assume we're being asked to pony up again in | Will Oldham / Dawn McCarthy: Wai Notes / Wilding in the West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11656-wai-notes-wilding-in-the-west/ | Wai Notes / Wilding in the West | Will Oldham's (thankfully) crowded discography gained a pair of low-key releases in the past few months: Wai Notes, a set of The Letting Go demos and Wilding in the West, a Japanese/Australian-only live album from Oldham's 2007 tour that includes at least one "remix" by Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty. On the heels of November's Ask Forgiveness EP, these releases risked giving off a "Dear Fans: Thanks, also fuck off"-vibe, but since precisely no one's child is going Ivy League off of 10,000 copies of Wai Notes it's probably safe to assume we're being asked to pony up again in the name of Art.
Wai Notes comes impeccably wrapped in stamped cardstock, its cover featuring a woman…in a woman suit, the backside boasting a glossy of a hambone Oldham sitting with The Letting Go collaborator Dawn McCarthy. What's not clear is why these 10 demos weren't packaged with their parent album instead of the more useful rarities disc Little Lost Blues, now difficult to obtain itself. The fickle nature of the Oldham cult all but assures that had Wai Notes preceded The Letting Go it would've been hailed as a return to sonically quaint beginnings; on at least two occasions Oldham sings the wrong lyric and immediately mutters a correction into the margin. And it is worth wondering why Oldham no longer makes records like "The Signifying Wolf", on which a tiny guitar unravels and exposes horny animal chants.
But hell: The Letting Go, driven by Nico Muhly's tempest string arrangements, was the most clearly conceived record of Oldham's career. Airing the dirty laundry of sleepy-dog ballads like "Then the Letting Go" or "I Called You Back" does them no favors. Hearing Oldham tiptoe his way through "Wai"-- his fingers hang over chords, as if he's trying to remember the changes-- is thrilling in a voyeuristic sort of way, but Oldham's is a catalog that already contains its share of flubbed notes.
Wilding is harder to pin down but seems more useful. Recorded live in "central coastal California" (no specific venue or date is named), Wilding is pressed by Oldham distributors P-Vine (Japan) and Spunk (Australia), and it's a bit difficult to sort out: Hagerty's unexplained "remix" work includes the random and indecipherable "Naked Lion" and, more intriguingly, a cut-up of "Lost Blues" and "God's Small Song" deft enough to pass as one coherent piece. Ponder also the market that sees "Little Small Song"'s "fuck" intrusively censored but "Naked Lion"'s looped "Yeah shit's hard" given a pass.
Wilding's tenuous cohesion still fares better than 2005's cobbled-together Summer in the Southeast. No one does loins-as-rock better than Oldham and he accordingly wrestles a set of quiet older tracks to the ground: "O Let It Be" and "Three Questions" are pugnacious, and Oldham has never presided over a moment as turgid as this band's teetering "Master & Everyone". Keyboardist Azita tenderly augments deep cut "Weaker Soldier" with barroom piano ambience. McCarthy shows for the Letting Go material, which sees its strings replaced with haughty electric keys and the burly electric guitar of Emmett Kelly.
Then there's "Magnificent Billy", which is either a goof on "Lay and Love" or a live recording spliced with show banter: between harmonies Oldham and McCarthy alternate "Just sayin' what's on my mind" and "Bonny Billy!…Bonny Billy!" Right. Everyone is loose, everyone is happy in central coastal California, interjecting and harmonizing and remixing. Clear as mud. | 2008-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 11, 2008 | 6.2 | 312e98fa-847a-4f8b-956f-608de254a074 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. And just as the 1991 album both fulfilled and upended rock'n'roll myths, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it. | Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. And just as the 1991 album both fulfilled and upended rock'n'roll myths, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it. | U2: Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16022-achtung-baby-super-deluxe-edition/ | Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe Edition] | "If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City". "I think it's part of the deal. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back." Like many of the knowingly audacious quotes from the singer and his U2 mates during this period, it's a little tough to deduce the exact level of sincerity involved. And that was the whole idea. In the early 1990s, U2 were sending up the idea of a "rock'n'roll star." They were offering themselves as an ironic, postmodern band for similarly confused times. They were making fun of themselves and their own humorless, slate-faced 80s reputation. A year after Bono's casual quip about pop stars dying on a cross, Kurt Cobain killed himself. And in Nirvana's final video, for "Heart-Shaped Box", Cobain could be seen making wild eyes in front of one.
Achtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City". "That's assuming we know the truth-- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. Famously, they didn't find it.
But the quest was thrilling-- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. King. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.
Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous-- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report".
This new era was conveniently spelled-out on Achtung's first single "The Fly" with the Edge's metallic skronk and Bono's conspiratorial, effected whisper of lines like, "It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest/ It's no secret that ambition bites the nails of success." And just as the album goes lengths to both fulfill and upend rock'n'roll myths with thorny tales of deep betrayal, questioned fidelity, and ambiguous artifice, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it, too.
Take the album's much-ballyhooed place of origin, Berlin's Hansa Studios. This was the location that played host to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's electronic-inspired masterworks Low and The Idiot. And Hansa is located near the Berlin Wall, which had only recently been breached when U2 set up there in the fall of 1990. Perched literally in the middle of historic liberation, U2 were meant to find inspiration in the world events around them and turn that spark into a new version of the band for a new decade. It's a great backdrop for a great story. But it didn't really go down that way. "We're there, and greatness has left the building," Bono recalls in From the Sky Down, which features the band returning to Hansa earlier this year in preparation for their headlining set at Glastonbury.
While Berlin did inspire bits of the record-- "Zoo Station" was named after one of its prominent train terminals-- it hardly lived up to its lofty reputation. This serves as a lesson for U2, a band that shamelessly worships past rock heroes, to move past such naïve mythologizing. "Berlin was a baptism of fire," says bassist Adam Clayton in the documentary. "It was something we had to go through to realize what we were trying to get to was not something you could find physically, outside of ourselves, in some other city-- that there was not magic to it and that we actually had to put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down." This newfound pragmatism would help them to move past their fantasies about the sanctity of rock. So while Berlin played a part on Achtung Baby, it did so in surprising ways; though "One" was mostly written in a burst of inspiration in Hansa, most of the album truly came together once the group went back home to Dublin.
Most of the audio bonuses in this set are unfortunately superfluous, and don't offer much in terms of insight. There are two CDs filled with dance remixes, and while U2 were at the vanguard of big time rock bands embracing the notion of the remix, even the most devout rave nostalgist would have little use for six remakes of "Mysterious Ways". The disc of bonus material and B-sides is disappointingly slight, and another filled with early versions of every song on Achtung offers a few revelations-- an Irish jig-style version of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" has an easy charm, but generally, it's easy to see why these attempts were improved upon later. Achtung's even more electronic and weirder follow-up, 1993's Zooropa-- which was recorded in a creative frenzy during a break in the Zoo TV tour-- is also included, though it's generally (and somewhat unfairly) glossed over in all the accompanying materials.
The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual. There's Anton Corbijn's gorgeous and colorful photography that covers its case, as well as a big, sturdy 84-page book. And then the four discs of video: It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim's new 90-minute doc From the Sky Down, every video from the era, a full live gig taped in Australia in 1993, interview shows (like "Naked City"), and, best of all, a playfully subversive TV special from 1992 that includes live footage from the Zoo TV tour as well as goofy interludes that play up the surrealism and insanity of the whole project. Moments like the "Even Better Than the Real Thing" video, with the band playing in a glass case while fans look on outside, successfully tie in all the pomo flourishes U2 were chasing. The group was at the forefront of bringing huge video screens into the live arena, and some of the tricks they pull off-- Bono "dueting" with a static-y Lou Reed or flipping channels to live local stations-- still look impressive. And for all the technical wizardry of the stage setup, the band still uses it to complement the music rather than overshadow it. Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band-- including U2 itself-- has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way.
In the Zoo TV special, which originally aired during Thanksgiving weekend in 1992, a "news commentator" covering the show dubs it "the most significant and exciting TV event since the Gulf War." Some of the ideas behind Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were inspired by the television coverage of that initial Gulf War in 1991, and the bizarre reality of being able to switch channels from home shopping to MTV to the bombing of Baghdad. U2 recognized the dangers of this idea, when war turned into just more filler for the burgeoning 24-hour TV-news cycle. And instead of preaching against it in a high and mighty fashion, they embraced that chaos in an effort to expose it. Of course, our collective information overload has been upped exponentially since thanks to the internet, making the flashes of words and slogans that backed U2 during their live campaign seem eerily prophetic. Talking about the Zoo TV audience in the "Naked City" interview, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. says, "They're coming to a rock'n'roll show and watching television, what more can you ask for?" He's joking, but as we go to arenas and see singers on big screens through our cellphone cameras, the question begins to answer itself. | 2011-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | November 9, 2011 | 9.5 | 313193be-0bd9-4f92-a928-b63a4a5a5e61 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Despite the experimental pedigree of their new lineup, Wilco's sixth album finds them receding into the comfort zone. The result is an album that exposes the dad-rock gene the band has always carried but attempted to disguise-- the stylistic equivalent of a wardrobe change into sweatpants and a tank top. | Despite the experimental pedigree of their new lineup, Wilco's sixth album finds them receding into the comfort zone. The result is an album that exposes the dad-rock gene the band has always carried but attempted to disguise-- the stylistic equivalent of a wardrobe change into sweatpants and a tank top. | Wilco: Sky Blue Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10219-sky-blue-sky/ | Sky Blue Sky | Jeff Tweedy's restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco's inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band's line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that's as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band's finest-- or at least most interesting-- music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.
An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy's lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost's "At Least That's What You Said" and "Hell Is Chrome") that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: "Shake It Off" is probably most accurate (not to mention the album's worst track), but "On and On and On" and "Please Be Patient With Me" are both strong alternatives.
It's hard to contest Tweedy's headspace in the making of Sky Blue Sky-- the record's themes of exhaustion and hesitantly returning to normalcy are particularly resonant in the wake of his recent rehabilitation. Perhaps it's just a shame that the music fits the message so well; just as the chaos and space of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fit with that record's message of communication breakdown, Sky Blue Sky's soothing classic rock elements feel like a desperate pursuit of comfort. Even the noisy guitar interludes (often led by Tweedy rather than Cline) play a dramatic role, absorbing the frustrations Tweedy must have accumulated during all the difficult moments documented in the record's lyrics.
Among Sky Blue Sky's most distressing attributes is its misuse of the experimentalist weapons at Tweedy's command: drummer Glenn Kotche is given no room to stretch beyond routine time-keeping, and Cline is used for his capacity to rip and wail rather than his ear for texture and atmosphere. Case in point, the drowsy opener "Either Way" sleepwalks through a list of indecisive sentiments ("maybe you love me, maybe you don't") before breaking for a Cline solo that's straight-up Weather Channel Local on the 8s. Elsewhere the sextet lineup tends to overplay what should be a collection of fragile, lonesome material. Multiple songs ("Impossible Germany", "Walken") end up in multi-guitar Skynyrd jam sessions or White Album aspirations ("Hate It Here") that sound more homage than heartfelt. Meanwhile, quiet moments such as "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)" are marred from being delicate Being There throwbacks by excessive noodling and Tweedy's passive-aggressive self-pity.
On the other hand, "Side With the Seeds" is the rare track where the new band demonstrates its chops without getting in the way of the song. With a soulful vocal, intertwined piano and organ, and guitar conversations that build to melodic peaks over a loosely swinging Kotche drumbeat, it's way jambandy, but epic and triumphant nonetheless. And speaking of the granola crowd, the acoustic simplicity and warm harmonies of "What Light" make it the American Beauty nod that Wilco's always been itching to play, even if the song title calls for an exclamation point (or at least a question mark) and is sung with an indifferent period.
For a band who can credit a hefty part of their charm to always thinking they're weirder than they actually are, stripping away the disconnect between Wilco's earthy adult-alternative center and their more recent ambitious aspirations-- whether they're exploring Krautrock, breaking into a Sonic Youth freakout, or sabotaging a song's structure-- reveals a fairly traditional band that's emerged from their "weird" phase a markedly less interesting group than they were before they entered it. Perhaps after giving the band-member carousel another spin, Tweedy merely ended up with the wrong personnel to articulate his mood here. If that's the case-- as long as his restless habits hold-- we may only need to wait one more album for message and messenger to click back into alignment. | 2007-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 14, 2007 | 5.2 | 31364af4-b8c0-4cf4-8dec-5786a0cda5d4 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The dark and atmospheric album from this difficult-to-classify UK-based project has been augmented with a terrific single and a bonus disc. | The dark and atmospheric album from this difficult-to-classify UK-based project has been augmented with a terrific single and a bonus disc. | Forest Swords: Dagger Paths [Expanded Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14903-dagger-paths-expanded-edition/ | Dagger Paths [Expanded Edition] | The musical recipe that UK producer Matthew Barnes uses in his one-man project Forest Swords is simple enough-- pick some sparse rhythms and sounds, loop them at a pace both languid and insistent, and fold in texture and volume as each piece slowly gathers momentum. But judging by the Dagger Paths EP, released by Olde English Spelling Bee earlier this year, the results are richer than you might expect. Through dense, mesmerizing atmospheres, which conjure faded memories and dream states, Barnes manages to evoke techno, dub, drone, and even hip-hop and R&B.
In fact, when I wrote about the EP back in June, I had a little trouble seeing Barnes' work outside of the fog of buzzy micro-genres like chillwave and witch house. His music's ghostly aura connects to those and other leftfield trends, but really, Barnes has pretty much transcended them all. The more I've listened, the more I've found his hypnotic concoctions to be in a category of their own. Now that UK label No Pain in Pop has re-released Dagger Paths, adding two tracks from a recent 7" and a CD-R with an impressive array of bonus material, the singularity is so clear it's almost blinding.
Most of that bright light comes from the surprisingly integral role of guitar. At first, these songs sound like a slow, sleepy weave of disparate elements-- dubby bass, sparse percussion, distant voices, blurry samples. But eventually, a bold guitar figure crafts a melody that sticks in your head rather than drifting away with all the echo and atmosphere. Barnes' music can rightly be called murky and dream-like, but it's deceptively so. Dagger Paths is much more active and sharp than such descriptions might imply.
The result is that, the further you delve these songs, the catchier each becomes. A few are immediately engaging, like the swinging "Miarches" and hip-hop-in-slo-mo "The Light" [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . But other tracks prove just as memorable once they have some time to burrow into your brain. On "Glory Gongs", winding guitar chimes return whenever the track threatens to fall apart. And even the reverb-heavy, negative-space cover of Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only Knew" retains the hook of the original. That trend persists as Barnes shifts his sound on two newer tracks-- the sparse, reggae-inflected "Rattling Cage", and "Hjurt", which wraps guitar in bombed-out drums and distant cries.
No Pain in Pop's bonus CD-R starts with six early Forest Swords tracks, all of which show Barnes' methods to have been pretty well intact from the start (a few are so heavy on fuzzed-out guitar explorations that Forest Swords could be mistaken for an improv rock combo). Also added are remixes of Dagger Paths cuts by other artists, and a 20-minute mix in which Barnes inventively reworks These New Puritans, Burial/Four Tet, and Wild Beasts. Clearly the guy has wide ideas about sound and what it can do, but what impresses most about Dagger Paths is its focus. All the elements and styles that Barnes collects like a magnet quickly align toward one unmistakable musical vision. | 2010-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | No Pain in Pop | December 1, 2010 | 8.4 | 31366c21-af62-4325-86c2-ffd15aa8b8b6 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Los Angeles-based singer and producer trades the gospel of his previous work for sensual R&B, using the club as his canvas for tender odes to queer desire. | The Los Angeles-based singer and producer trades the gospel of his previous work for sensual R&B, using the club as his canvas for tender odes to queer desire. | serpentwithfeet: GRIP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/serpentwithfeet-grip/ | GRIP | According to memes and folklore, people who wear all-black Air Force 1s are menaces to society. Unkempt and ungovernable, they clomp through life indifferent to the dust accumulating on their kicks and the darkness gathering in their souls. The shoes are so maligned that even in Nelly’s classic paean to the Nikes, no one raps about or rocks black Forces. (One person does buy some.) Despite that stigma, serpentwithfeet dedicates a song on his third album to the quiet confidence of a guy giving off black Air Force energy in the club. “Ain’t nobody fucking with you,” he coos flirtatiously.
Club scenes and sounds are fixtures of GRIP, which trades the gnostic gospel of the singer and producer’s past music for saucy R&B. serpentwithfeet has always been a student of the genre, but lately he’s been in active conversation with its history and motifs. DEACON wove Janet’s earnestness, Brandy’s vocal runs, and Darkchild’s quiet-storm fronts into tender odes to queer Black men. The record retained his signature interest in religious symbols and themes, but the music took more cues from R&B than gospel or electronic—a trend that continues here. Firmly planting a flag in modern R&B, serpent explores the ways that touch sparks and sustains romance.
His songwriting is punchier and more direct in this purist mode. There are more come-ons and solicitations than innuendo or symbolism, a shift that fits the intimate theme. “Kiss you longer, longer than an opera/If we keep on dancing, we gon’ make love,” he sings on floorfiller “Damn Gloves,” framing a deep smooch as an intervention. The humid and pounding beat, produced by Nosaj Thing, I Like That, and serpentwithfeet, ups the urgency of the command. You can feel the charged proximity of the dancers’ bodies.
The writing on “Safe Word” is just as loaded and beckoning. “The safe place is me, safe place is me,” he sings, declaring his body a sanctuary for a lover. Vocal processing embellishes the protective sentiment, smearing his words across Sensei Bueno and I Like That’s soft drums and cool melodies. serpentwithfeet notably treats his vocals throughout the album, rarely relying on his operatic falsetto. The choice feels intentional: As stunning as his upper register is, even at its most ecstatic, it exudes anguish and solitude. The breathy, immediate singing of GRIP is more conversational, evoking closeness, exchange, and community.
The beats aren’t always as distinctive as serpentwithfeet’s storytelling and performances. The bass-heavy and uptempo arrangements of “Black Air Force” and “Rum / Throwback” bring to mind the generic fare DJs play when the club doors open. On songs about the meet-cutes and hook-ups that happen beyond the dancefloor, the production is more striking. “Deep End” is delightfully airy, gentle percussion and puffs of synth nudging along his dulcet melodies as he sings of a one-night stand that lasts 12 days. “Hummin” is built atop a slowed four-on-the-floor pattern that Stwo, Nosaj, and I Like That garnish with knocks and keys. The steady rhythm complements serpent’s sensual eruptions of melody.
At a glance, GRIP can feel slight next to the rapturous drama of soil and the blissful vignettes of DEACON, which both use negative space and dynamics to ratchet up the intensity of the music. These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite. Sticking to R&B helps him refine his focus. Instead of epics, he offers instants, zooming in on the passing gestures and feelings that aggregate into love. “If God is a god at all/He lives in your grip,” he croons on “Lucky Me, sensing a flicker of the divine in a single embrace. Your local black Forces enthusiast might contain multitudes. | 2024-02-20T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-20T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | February 20, 2024 | 7.7 | 3139256d-62b1-485b-8c9f-fd1a7f396000 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
More streamlined than 2007's Person Pitch, yet more rhythmically robust than 2011's Tomboy, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, and funkiest album to date. | More streamlined than 2007's Person Pitch, yet more rhythmically robust than 2011's Tomboy, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, and funkiest album to date. | Panda Bear: Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20079-panda-bear-meets-the-grim-reaper/ | Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper | The great irony about bringing a new life into this world is you start worrying a lot more about death. Not just that of the family members you must provide for and protect, but your own, as well. Plain and simple, the first rule of parenting is: don’t die. When entrusted with the immense obligation of caring for a child, even the youngest of new parents become exceedingly conscious of their own mortality and survival instincts. Behaviors once taken for granted—like, say, air travel or cycling alongside cars on city streets—start to feel more like roulette games wagered with your life; once-considered activities like bungee jumping and skydiving get transferred from your bucket list to a "fuck that" list.
You could hear that sort of uneasiness gradually seep into the seemingly serene work of Noah Lennox—a.k.a. Panda Bear—over the past decade, both without and within Animal Collective. As the first A.C. member to become a parent, Lennox has become increasingly fond of rooting his boundless sonic exploration in meditations on home life, whether cheekily celebrating the drudgery of domesticity ("Chores"), eulogizing the family dog ("Derek"), making heartfelt affirmations of paternal duty ("My Girls"), or openly fretting over his shortcomings as a breadwinner (“Alsatian Darn”). And though he’s avoided explicitly ecclesiastical language in his solo work since writing 2004’s psych-folk hymnal Young Prayer for his late father, each Panda Bear record released since has retained the form and feel of a communal church service: They welcome us in with reassuring proverbs ("try to remember always, always to have a good time") couched in heaven-sent harmonies, provide a sense comfort in the face of encroaching chaos, and strive to connect our physical world to a more celestial plane. And be it the psychedelic pop sprawl of 2007’s Person Pitch or the dub-like lurch of 2011’s Tomboy, a Panda Bear record ultimately requires a test of faith, a belief that Lennox’s beaming voice will guide us safely through the dense, phantasmagoric fog that threatens to consume it. In Lennox’s cathedral of sound, you can always see the stormy skies creeping in view through the radiant stained-glass windows.
On his latest venture, the tension between inner peace and external pressure reaches boss-battle proportions. Lifting its main-event billing from old King Tubby records, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper serves a similar function for its creator as Slasher Flicks did for Avey Tare—it’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes. In Portner’s case, it was divorce and strep throat; for Lennox, it’s the entry into middle age and the substantial familial responsibilities that go with it. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Lennox pondered the possibility of retiring the Panda Bear moniker, which makes sense—part of getting older is doing away with your old college nicknames. But if that is indeed the case, Panda Bear is not going down without a fight.
More streamlined than Person Pitch and more rhythmically robust than Tomboy, Grim Reaper is Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, and funkiest album to date. But all that extra grit and groove doesn’t come at the expense Lennox’s unmistakable melodic graces, which still provide each song with its pulse. As to be expected from an album co-produced with Tomboy holdover Pete Kember (a.k.a. Sonic Boom of '80s psych-punk patriarchs the Spacemen 3) and reportedly inspired by classic '90s boom-bap beat construction, Grim Reaper achieves just the right balance of skull-splitting drone and head-noddin’ drive. In contrast to the unpredictably amorphous song structures that defined previous Panda Bear records, many of the songs on Grim Reaper lock into a looped beat and rarely waver course. However, they’re often prefaced by or dissolve into ominous, buzzing oscillations (some of which, like the half-minute "Davy Jones' Locker", are portioned off into stand-alone tracks) that suggest the onset of a panic attack or some shadowy predator. As such, the midnight-marauding march of lead single "Mr Noah" and electro-fuzzed yodeling of "Boys Latin" are transformed into weapons of retaliation—a strobe-lit assault on the encroaching bleakness. "Dark cloud has descended again," Lennox sings on the chorus of the latter song, but his elated vocal thrusts the black mass back up into the stratosphere.
Lennox told Pitchfork last fall that, despite all the personal rumination that inspired Grim Reaper, he wanted to keep his lyrics purposefully non-specific and relatable. But for all its booming breaks and future-shocked freneticism, Grim Reaper—like all Panda Bear records—remains a highly insular experience, one where it often sounds as if Lennox is speaking into a mirror. "So good, you’ve got it so good," he sings overtop the blissed-out shuffle of "Crosswords"—a simple statement of fact from a happily married father of two who lives in a cosmopolitan coastal European city in between sold-out tours. But his wistful delivery betrays the fear of losing it all. And Lennox spends much of the seven-minute "Come to Your Senses" repeating a question ("Are you mad?") for which there is only one logical answer ("Yeah, I’m mad"), as the song’s shantytown acid-house throb mediates between serenity and insanity. A sobering aftershock arrives in the form of late-album wake-up call "Selfish Gene"—a sort-of post-rave "That's Not Me"—where the incessant synth-jabs provide Lennox with needling reminders of his family-man mission ("When it comes to fill those spaces/ Only you can fill those spaces").
Taken as a whole, Grim Reaper feels like a gradual process of Lennox trying to tune out the extraneous noise of modern life and focus on what’s truly important to him. And it’s an evolution mirrored by the album’s sequence, which bookends the most boisterous, beat-driven songs around two stunning centerpiece tracks—"Tropic of Cancer" and "Lonely Wanderer"—that provide Grim Reaper with an extended and well-earned moment of quiet contemplation. The former is a cosmic doo-wop serenade that stands as the most affecting and beautiful vocal performance of Lennox’s career; the latter projects a gorgeous, aqueous tranquility unheard from the Animal Collective camp since side two of Feels, its light piano drizzle summoning thundercloud rumbles of foreboding reverberations.
But even when it trades in day-glo stompers for weightless ballads, Grim Reaper still crushes. In the unsentimental, funereal refrain of "Tropic of Cancer"—"you can’t get back, you won’t come back, you can’t come back to it"—Lennox invokes his father’s 2002 death and, in doing so, reemphasizes his own current reality as a patriarch, and that pervasive, deep-seated fear of prematurely leaving one’s family behind. If Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper posits adult life as some imaginary horror movie, it’s one where the phone call warning of impending doom is coming from inside the house. | 2015-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | January 12, 2015 | 8.7 | 3146dc8c-3470-4fa4-ada2-e651e8a635ce | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The New York-based electronic musician tries his hand at collage in an appealingly loose, rangy record that's ideally suited to his magpie tendencies. | The New York-based electronic musician tries his hand at collage in an appealingly loose, rangy record that's ideally suited to his magpie tendencies. | Bryce Hackford: Safe (Exits) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryce-hackford-safe-exits/ | Safe (Exits) | The six songs on Bryce Hackford’s 2013 debut album, Fair, could have been mistaken for the work of as many different artists. One loop-heavy house track evoked Moodymann; a fuzzy techno piece riffed on the Field; a song for drum machine, falsetto vocals, and slapback delay might as well have been Arthur Russell cosplay. Taken together, the album felt like a map of divergent paths, as though Hackford couldn’t bear to leave any route unexplored. On Safe (Exits), Hackford’s restlessness leads him to try his hand at collage, which turns out to be the perfect medium for a musician who tends to prefer and to or. The album encapsulates the best aspects of his magpie tendencies, avoiding the clutter that has sometimes plagued his work.
Hackford gathered the album’s raw materials during a residency at the UK’s PRAH Foundation, a recording studio and creative hub in Margate, a seaside town some 90 minutes outside London. (The studio is an extension of PRAH Recordings, a small independent label whose most famous signee is the cellist Oliver Coates.) There, Hackford recorded contributions from 11 different instrumentalists, with one catch: He recorded all 11 musicians independently of one another, without any of them hearing the others’ parts, and then reworked choice bits and pieces of their playing into a coherent whole.
The result is an appealingly loose, rangy record with a deep funk pulse, one that wraps a motley array of sounds—airy woodwinds, scuffed-up electric bass, mercurial Rhodes soloing—around Hackford’s skeletal, and often idiosyncratic, drum programming. The pacing is patient; the record opens with the 13-minute-long “Einmal,” a slow-motion approximation of ’00s minimal techno played mostly on acoustic percussion and overlaid with scraps of jazz. Flute, clavinet, and pitch-bending synths float in and out; it sounds less like a jam session than time-lapse footage of a house party. Their combined movements feel unplanned, but there’s a rhythm to the randomness.
The first half mostly sticks to this mode of woozily controlled chaos. In “Fetish Present,” a lumpy drum-machine groove fights its way through a curtain of bells; “Zajal” is slow and atonal, its synths the color of an oil slick. Halfway through, a saxophone wafts into the frame, conjuring ’80s noir visions. “Holy Mountains” gently weaves contrapuntal lines in a way that suggests a chopped-and-screwed version of the Australian improvising trio the Necks, while “Deep Voices” takes a hard left into dubby post-punk. Throughout, the influence of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew looms large in the music’s freeform drift and inky dissonance.
The album peaks with “After Sun,” a 14-minute meditation for Rhodes and synthesizer. It’s the record’s most successful fusion of groove, melody, and mood, but the final two cuts flesh out the picture of Hackford’s work in intriguing ways. Both are ambient in form and feel, extensions of the kinds of immersive, long-form pieces he’s been experimenting with since his first album. “Coast (Maybe)” arrays plaintive synth pads over white-noise hiss, while the even simpler “Harbor” sets dubbed-out Rhodes keys against a faint backdrop of street noise and the occasional seagull. Rather than a painstaking collage, it feels like someone sitting down at the keyboard in real time, poking idly at the keys for a quarter of an hour. On an album informed by others’ contributions, this contemplative closing makes for a welcome moment of solitude. | 2020-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Spring Theory | April 18, 2020 | 7.3 | 314f52ad-e726-49f4-bcfb-f25ac5c1b9e8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
It’s a terrible night for a moondance: On this risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection, Van indulges in some of his most cherished paranoid theories and deepest-held grudges. | It’s a terrible night for a moondance: On this risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection, Van indulges in some of his most cherished paranoid theories and deepest-held grudges. | Van Morrison: Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/van-morrison-latest-record-project-vol-1/ | Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 | Five decades ago, an agitated 21-year-old Van Morrison recorded 31 original songs about missing royalty checks and ringworm, intended to fulfill the terms of what he judged to be an onerous record deal. Those 1967 recordings, known colloquially as the Contractual Obligation Session, were un-releasable by design: One track late in the running order is titled “Freaky If You Got This Far.” The Contractual Obligation Session was the first of many real and imagined revenges that Morrison would exact on the music industry over his storied career. The most recent of those revenges comes in the form of Latest Record Project Volume 1, a risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection which, in its bonkers way, brings Morrison’s tumultuous career full circle.
If you’re new to Van, or at least blissfully unaware of his pathologies, it can be perplexing to understand why an individual who has made upwards of $90 million playing music could feel quite so aggrieved. The short version is that it appears hardwired: The dark strain of paranoia that runs through his work is the flip side of its meditative beauty. Take 1986’s pastoral masterpiece No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, which briefly interrupts its Proustian song cycle long enough to stipulate that “copycats ripped off my songs/Copycats ripped off my words/Copycats ripped off my melodies.” And by copycats he means: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Elvis Costello, U2, or just about anyone else who ever admired him and also set words to melody. It has seemingly never occurred to him to be, you know, flattered.
Even by his own standards, Van has been on a tear lately. After a career mostly spent steering clear of the political arena, Morrison was apparently radicalized by the coronavirus lockdowns, which, in the manner of privileged white men everywhere, he evidently perceived as a personal affront. This prompted the release of a handful of anti-lockdown songs each more ludicrous than the last and culminating with an Eric Clapton collaboration where the jokes write themselves. With his dander fully up, Van’s in no mood to mince words on Latest Record Project: Volume 1. He’s like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, except his bête-noir is misleading government websites instead of murderous gangs.
The first track on Latest Project: Volume 1 is “Latest Record Project Volume 1,” and immediately it is impossible to know if all of this is a prank. “Have you got my/Latest/Record Project?” Van croons with insinuating casualness over a fetching jazzy stroll pitched somewhere between Frankie Avalon and go-fuck-yourself. The follow-up track doubles down on the light-jazz-dude-taking-no-shit-vibe with “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?” (Spoiler: He’s the only one left.)
As with all things Van, his genius consistently shines through irrespective of the asinine context. In addition to his outsized gifts as a songwriter and performer, Morrison’s uncanny ability as a bandleader and talent curator is perhaps his most overlooked asset. The group assembled for Latest Record Project: Volume 1 is no different in this regard: Regal horns and Hammond organs provide a decorous backdrop for a supple rhythm section as Van and his backing singers conjure frequently heaven-bound exertions. All the difficulties occur when the material is earthbound.
To be a genius is not the same as being a sophisticated political thinker, as we keep learning again and again, to the point of exhaustion. In his press materials for the LP, Van hilariously valorizes himself as the only living protest singer, by which it appears he means he is the only gazillionaire rock star to be a pandemic-denier besides Eric Clapton. For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record. The seven-minute “Long Con” summarizes his strange host of anxieties: He’s a targeted individual, judges and government officials are after him, everyone is jealous. Who is behind the curtain? It’s a terrible night for a moondance.
For those of us who love Van, the concern is always that his madness will overtake his judgment and something will occur that truly desecrates his legacy. “They Own the Media” is a cringeworthy title adjacent to a common anti-Semitic dogwhistle that blessedly turns out to be just another mostly anodyne psycho-non-specific-paranoid-blues workout. Same with “Psychoanalyst’s Ball,” same with “Stop Bitching, Do Something,” and same with (not kidding) “Why Are You on Facebook?” This is the project of loving Van Morrison in the fraught year of 2021. He is the Belfast Cowboy, the dweller on the threshold, the king of the slipstream. He is also transparently insane, in insane times. Together we flow into the mystic.
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. | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exile / BMG | May 7, 2021 | 5.4 | 315256b8-ec0d-4b40-a82e-dc42a97feadc | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
After a decade of composing increasingly difficult music, the experimental duo offers a reprieve. SIGN is an exceptionally engaging listen: lean, intermittently sedate, even quite pretty. | After a decade of composing increasingly difficult music, the experimental duo offers a reprieve. SIGN is an exceptionally engaging listen: lean, intermittently sedate, even quite pretty. | Autechre: SIGN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/autechre-sign/ | SIGN | Machines don’t care. Self-driving cars, data-harvesting algorithms, Boston Dynamics’ hideous quadrupeds—all these things unnerve us in part because we know that they can’t be trusted. They are indifferent to us by design. Autechre have long played to this unease, channeling the unfathomable depth of machine intelligence into forbiddingly complex music that appears to be the product of pure data, intractable and untamed. Using an inscrutable array of home-brewed software and jury-rigged hardware devices that they refer to simply as “the system,” Sean Booth and Rob Brown put the onomatopoeia back into number-crunching.
What is daunting about their work is less the mystery in how it’s made and more the specter of supreme disregard that lurks in the margins of their compositions. Their music can suggest machines running blithely amok, unfazed by the presence of humans, disinclined to kowtow to the human desire for, you know, melody and rhythm. In brief moments of pathos or humor—the apparition of a plaintive synthesizer tone, the momentary outbreak of a groove—the duo’s hands become visible behind the thickets of circuitry. But as their work has grown denser and darker, those moments have become uncommon; it was easy to wonder if Booth and Brown had themselves calcified into silicon. But from the sound of SIGN, something has changed.
It’s not just that their music became gradually more byzantine over the last decade, as though their already fractal beats were further splintering, granulated patterns branching into gardens of forking paths. The dimensions of their work sprawled. They quickly followed 2010’s Oversteps with Move of Ten, a 10-track EP as long as many albums. The 4xLP Exai, in 2013, ran two hours long, a feat doubled by the five-part elseq series in 2016, whose running time doubled again with 2018’s absurd, eight-hour NTS Sessions. SIGN, in contrast, is remarkably compact. Breezing through 11 tracks in just over an hour, it is roughly the same length as the last track on the final volume of the NTS Sessions.
More importantly, SIGN is surprisingly direct: lean, intermittently sedate, frequently quite pretty. The album begins intimidatingly, with a synthetic growl that might be the heptapods in Arrival discovering the ills of gluten. But then, after a minute and a half of rumbling and clanking, what sounds like a submarine crumpling beneath sea pressure, they unleash a single chord that stands among the most beautiful sounds they have created in 29 years. Out of the groaning of twisted metal bursts an explosion of color, like a cloud of powdered pigment hanging briefly in the air before it dissipates, announcing the tonal palette for the entire album. Across the course of the record, this “basic tonal vocabulary,” as Brown called it in a recent interview (possibly borrowing the term from the UK avant-techno legend Surgeon) boils down to a handful of uncannily vivid textures and sensations: sheet metal, soapstone, and pumice; lozenges growing smaller and smaller; renegade foghorns; the taste of copper.
Chaos quickly reasserts itself in the opening track, but that is the only place where the duo’s violent tendencies hold sway; even then, it is as if the beats have been sheared away and sanded down, leaving only the suggestion of great force in the striations left behind. Most of the album is all but beatless. “F7” is a synthesizer etude whose fanfare might not sound out of place in a Michael Mann film, were it not for the perilous detuning and the hollow, buzzing tone, flickering like fluorescent tubes. “si00” chirps and chimes over a muted pulse, like early ’90s ambient techno grown sour; “esc desc” is slow and stately, layered synths slipping between consonance and dissonance like multiple copies of New Order’s “Elegia” being played out of sync. It takes five tracks for Autechre to drop their first real beat, but even here, on “au14,” in which Drexciyan tones bubble to the surface over a rapid-fire 4/4 kick, they seem determined to keep their squirreliest tendencies in check. Every component is perpetually shape-shifting; good luck enumerating all the discrete elements in play, much less tracking their millisecond-by-millisecond mutations. Yet the music flows intuitively. It’s not difficult, simply alive.
Something almost like nostalgia occasionally rears its head, a rarity for this duo. The sullen synths of “psin AM” call back to Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores EP, which is unexpected, if only because the Sandison brothers often seemed like Autechre’s docile younger cousins, out daydreaming in fields while Booth and Brown were soldering shortwave radios in the garage. The serene tones of the album’s many beatless tracks spring from the same well as 2008’s contemplative Quaristice and even 1994’s wistful Amber. “Metaz form8,” the album’s gorgeous ambient centerpiece, might be the first Autechre composition you could conceivably play on piano.
But that outward simplicity is deceptive. Every repeat play of even the most restrained tracks here turns up new details and new shades. The melodies tend to flock in close formation around narrow bands of tones; the whole album feels like a swarm of insects attempting to carry a tune. Even the softest material on SIGN isn’t all that different from the most austere or amelodic material on NTS Sessions; it’s just been smoothed into a form that catches the light differently, emphasizing continuity over disjunction. They have found new ways to make their favorite materials sing.
The album’s shortest track is its most affecting. “gr4” is the most lyrical piece of music Autechre have written in years, with neat contrapuntal motions reminiscent of Baroque music—all buried beneath layers of effects that corrode the orchestral tones into dust. The longer it goes on, the more it feels almost like an actual song. Then, after three minutes, it simply fades away, without ever quite revealing itself. The ending feels sudden and unplanned; you wonder why they chose to cut it here, what happened in the recording of it that they couldn’t have extended it further. But after the last few years’ maximalist bonanza, to be left wanting more is a novel, welcome feeling with Autechre. With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | October 16, 2020 | 8.1 | 3156526f-b6dc-43d8-911e-693de4f16194 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Jenn Ghetto, formerly of now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, makes darkly confessional songs as S. Her new album, produced by Chris Walla, is her most accessible yet, but her songs are as sharply-observed as ever, offering a typical balance of wry humor and sad yearning. | Jenn Ghetto, formerly of now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, makes darkly confessional songs as S. Her new album, produced by Chris Walla, is her most accessible yet, but her songs are as sharply-observed as ever, offering a typical balance of wry humor and sad yearning. | S: Cool Choices | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19847-s-cool-choices/ | Cool Choices | As a former member of the now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, Jenn Ghetto understands the science of bittersweet confession. She writes psychologically acute breakup stories that show what it means to hurt, but her songs aren’t about pretending to make the right decisions—they’re about telling the truth.
Producer Chris Walla recorded her new album, Cool Choices, and he has a lot to do with its approachability. Ghetto worked with him back when she was still making achy, acoustic slowcore as part of Carissa’s Wierd. That group disbanded after releasing their third album, Songs About Leaving, in 2003, at which point Ben Bridwell and Mat Brooke went on to form Band of Horses, Sera Cahoone went solo, and Mat Brooke went on to Grand Archives. Ghetto quietly released records as S, most of them sad bedroom confessionals recorded on a four-track.
Cool Choices’ narrative style is familiar: Ghetto’s last records as S were called Sadstyle, Puking and Crying, and I’m Not as Good at It as You; previous songs had titles like “Pathetic”, “Crushed”, and “Outro (The Agony)”. From here, opening the first line on her latest record with “This is how losers feel/ I am a loser” seems like a natural thematic progression. A blithe melancholy subsumes the entirety of this record, which is also her most accessible record to date.
“Like GangBusters” is a jangly, propulsive ballad the lineage of Tegan and Sara’s “Dark Come Soon”—a comparison that I’m wary of making, if only because Walla also produced that track. The harmonies are similarly clean—sharp arpeggios and barrel drumming drive it’s melodies— and Ghetto’s declarations of “you will not take me down” are measured like they wouldn’t feel out of place on The Con. The effect here and throughout Cool Choices is that Jenn Ghetto sounds more like Jenn Ghetto— Walla lends the record a familiar warmth, and better production highlights lyrical gems like “I’m crazy and you’re fucked up” whenever they occur.
Ghetto typically writes with a balance of wry humor and sad yearning, but Cool Choices feels like a maturation in terms of delivery. Her voice luxuriates over Walla’s blended instrumentals with such command that you might forget how broken the lyrics really are. “It’s so hard to see you around here every day” and “I know about the girl you fucked” are words that Ghetto murmurs in the span of the same hook. Elsewhere her voice grows more assertive-—“You never did any of that/ You never said any of those things/ You never even called me back”—as if she’s finally owning a resentment that her whisper-croon could barely relay.
The difficulty surrounding Ghetto's vocal delivery— a sort of stylized numbness—is that when the hooks don’t catch, or when the instrumentation isn’t interesting enough, the songs are easy to forget. The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable. Whenever her lyrics are twee or oblique— as with the empty phrasing on “Forever Love”—that sense of intimacy is lost. The record’s higher points—“Brunch”, “Loser”, “Vampires”— stay much closer to the chest. Cool Choices succeeds when it feels like introspection, and that should always be enough. | 2014-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Hardly Art | September 26, 2014 | 6.4 | 31595856-4714-4ceb-88ce-ad6987fc3296 | Molly Beauchemin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/molly-beauchemin/ | null |
null | Jay-Z and R. Kelly don't like each other. They've been canceling dates on their co-headlining tour, and the rumors are flying. Kelly doesn't like that Jay got a better reception at the tour's opening show in Chicago. Jay doesn't like that Kelly simulates sex with two women in a cage/jail cell as part of his act. When they're onstage together, they barely look at each other.
So why did they make another album together? It could be for money, but neither of these guys is going digging for change anytime soon. It's not for artistic reasons; both are firmly on autopilot | Jay-Z / R. Kelly: Unfinished Business | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4220-unfinished-business-with-r-kelly/ | Unfinished Business | Jay-Z and R. Kelly don't like each other. They've been canceling dates on their co-headlining tour, and the rumors are flying. Kelly doesn't like that Jay got a better reception at the tour's opening show in Chicago. Jay doesn't like that Kelly simulates sex with two women in a cage/jail cell as part of his act. When they're onstage together, they barely look at each other.
So why did they make another album together? It could be for money, but neither of these guys is going digging for change anytime soon. It's not for artistic reasons; both are firmly on autopilot here. So it would seem, then, that their reasons are entirely egotistical. In March 2002, the pair released The Best of Both Worlds, a collaborative album hyped as a blockbuster union of the two brightest stars in R&B; and hip-hop. But within a few weeks of the album's release, a bootleg video of Kelly allegedly having really, really nasty sex with an underage girl surfaced. Radio stayed off the album like it was infected, and the artists never even bothered to make a video. As a result, the album was a relative flop, failing to sell even one million copies. Neither artist could cope with that sort of blot on their resumes, so now we get Unfinished Business. "In the first week, I predict a million sold," posits Kelly on "Big Chips".
Unfinished Business is a decidedly minor work from both artists; neither strays from his comfort zone. Jay doesn't indulge in any of The Black Album's bittersweet introspection, and Kelly almost doesn't mention Jesus. Instead, they're both in full VIP-section pimp glide, leaning hard, stepping past bouncers, blowing cigar smoke with a girl on each arm and donning immaculately perfect white suits. They're all smoke and mirrors.
Most of the album's beats are reworkings of Best of Both Worlds tracks, and they sound oddly dated. Like Both Worlds, the entire album was produced by the Trackmasters, a Neptunes-lite duo who peaked around 2001 and who haven't been finding a lot of work since. Their sound-- flanged acoustic guitars, jazz-funk piano plinks, rippling clicks-- is so clean you could eat off it. It's the sound of richer, happier times. Sometimes it's effective; they deploy burbling synthesized flamenco guitars on "Mo' Money" and a bazonkers gospel choir on "Don't Let Me Die" to great effect. But they also deliver "Feelin' You in Stereo" and "Break Up (That's All We Do)", some weak-ass bourgie mid-90s slow jam shit. And in 2004, Jay-Z has no business rapping on a track that could've been a City High remix three years ago.
So, then, is Jay still retired or what? He knows you're thinking it: "Y'all nervous/ I ain't back yet/ I'm on extended vaca/ I ain't unpacked yet," he says on "Stop". It's a point he makes very clearly over the course of this record; he's not truly present here, and rarely contributes more than a cameo. This is primarily Kelly's album, and he plays it to the hilt-- all effortless, honey-dripping purr. Sometimes he's Nate Dogg-level lazy, but that falsetto is powerful enough to have put some of the most shocking allegations in R&B;'s storied history a mere footnote to his career. And! He raps! Kelly makes a surprisingly spry emcee, dropping lines in a crisp, lilting, fussy sing-song cadence that bites Slick Rick so hard you almost don't notice when the real Slick Rick shows up at the end of the album. On "Mo' Money", Kelly follows a typically dazzling jackhammer Twista cameo with his own take on Midwest speed-rap, acquitting himself so impressively that Jay has to pull out some weird, breathless, gasping flow shit to top him.
For his part, Jay pretty much sticks with tossed-off playa-isms about whips and jewels and getting this paper. We've heard it before, but he still does it better than anyone else, rolling syllables around for entire verses just for fun. You can hear the joy in his voice when he drops bon mots like, "Take a photo/ Last time you see a nigga so cold/ So below zero, so froze/ So-so rappers are so sore in the soul/ Ain't my fault I'm so rock 'n' roll," on "We Got 'Em Goin'".
Unfinished Business is a light, breezy listen, and surprisingly solid for an album with no real reason to exist from two guys who can't stand each other. But of course, Jay and Kelly are masters of effortlessness-- they can make music in their sleep, and here, that's pretty much what they've done. | 2004-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Jive | October 27, 2004 | 6.7 | 3159cd6a-e72a-4fe3-809f-8e3b6ece26d5 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
This is the Italian electronic producer’s debut album for Munich’s Ilian Tape label; for a record coming out of post-industrial Turin, its aesthetic is surprisingly luminous. | This is the Italian electronic producer’s debut album for Munich’s Ilian Tape label; for a record coming out of post-industrial Turin, its aesthetic is surprisingly luminous. | Andrea: Ritorno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrea-ritorno/ | Ritorno | The roster of Munich’s Ilian Tape may be headlined by locals like the Zenker Brothers and Skee Mask, but the label’s Italian contingent has long been one of its biggest strengths. Turin natives Stenny and Andrea first connected with the crew in 2011, when the former organized an Ilian Tape night and spent a couple of days driving the Zenker Brothers around his hometown. The following year, both Stenny and Andrea debuted on the imprint, and the two have been part of Ilian Tape’s core membership ever since, sharing similar trajectories and helping to solidify the label’s distinct brand of broken techno.
In 2019, Stenny leveled up when he released his debut full-length, Upsurge, which impressively brought together angular breakbeats, dalliances with drum’n’bass, and headier ambient sounds. Now it’s Andrea’s turn to tackle the album format, with excellent results. His productions have always fallen toward the dreamier end of the spectrum, and he’s leaned into that here; it’s not often that Ilian Tape releases could be described as shimmering, but the album’s palette is a lot closer to Café del Mar than Cafe OTO. The sparkling arpeggios of aqueous opener “Attimo” and the dreamy synths that idle atop the peppy breakbeats of “LS September” are just two of the LP’s more Balearic elements, but golden hues and languid melodies drift and linger throughout. For a record coming out of a cold, post-industrial corner of northern Italy, Ritorno’s aesthetic is surprisingly luminous.
Despite its sunny overtones, there’s plenty of low-end weight in the album’s foundation. The fluttering basslines of “TrackQY”—the LP’s most obviously club-ready tune—sound like something lifted from late-’90s drum’n’bass, while the crunchy wobble of “Liquid” is a classic dubstep throwback. There’s an abundance of DJ material, yet the album is practically devoid of staid, linear rhythms. Cribbing from house, techno, electro, breakbeat, jungle, trip-hop and IDM, Andrea’s hybrid creations have a lot in common with the more intriguing strands of bass music coming from UK outposts like Timedance and Livity Sound. From the soaring jungle mutation “Drumzzy” to the shuffling serenity of “Isabelle’s String,” the drum programming taps into a unique sort of organized chaos, with loose-limbed beats regularly teetering on the edge of collapse but somehow never losing the groove.
Ritorno is Italian for “return,” and it’s easy to detect a ’90s vibe in its cosmic inclinations and freewheeling rhythms, which hark back to a sunnier, more lighthearted era when genre lines were less defined and the electronic music world wasn’t quite so balkanized. But Ritorno isn’t a strictly nostalgic effort, and the production is unmistakably modern, even as Andrea criss-crosses through numerous styles and eras. Outside of his long-running affiliation with Ilian Tape, he has never been locked into any particular trend or scene; instead, he has quietly developed his own artistic vision during years spent working in the background. That patience has paid off: Ritorno is a remarkably confident and cohesive work. Nearly a decade in the making, it’s Andrea’s first big statement, and proof that this low-key Italian producer has something valuable to add to the conversation. | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | April 14, 2020 | 7.8 | 315f9dec-39c8-4bf9-99dd-234b71fb0be6 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Four Tet's eighth album is made up of two 20-minute pieces, named "Morning" and "Evening". Both tracks move between diffuse drifts of electronic tones and skittering drum programming, and they tap into an expansive, emotional vein. | Four Tet's eighth album is made up of two 20-minute pieces, named "Morning" and "Evening". Both tracks move between diffuse drifts of electronic tones and skittering drum programming, and they tap into an expansive, emotional vein. | Four Tet: Morning/Evening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20729-morningevening/ | Morning/Evening | When Kieran Hebden began to play shows in support of his 2013 album Beautiful Rewind, one of the album's shorter tracks, "Ba Teaches Yoga", became a set centerpiece. Named for his recently departed maternal grandmother, the burbling track began to dilate beyond its original three-minute length as he kept performing it, eventually nearing the twenty-minute mark by the end of the tour. There might not be a direct sonic correlation between that track and the two twenty-minute tracks that comprise the entirety of Four Tet's eighth album, Morning/ Evening, but they seem thematically of a piece. The former pays tribute to his Indian heritage, the latter displays a structure that brings to mind Indian classical music.
In the same manner that ragas pertain to certain parts of the day, Morning/ Evening has a biorhythmic specificity in mind. Both tracks move between diffuse drifts of electronic tones and skittering drum programming. The "Morning" side begins with a straightforward tap of closed hi-hats and a deep thump that sounds flat at first, before a trickier pattern of programmed drums are overlaid. A melodic swell of bass then appears, as graceful, slow-moving and almost imperceptibly evolving as what you might find in early New Age music or the works of David Behrman.
And then, just over a minute in, a bright, quivering Indian voice manifests, saccharine strings at play around her. Voices often factor powerfully into Four Tet's productions: think of the honeyed utterances of "Love Cry", the chopped pirate radio barks that underpin Beautiful Rewind, or the startling reconfiguration of J. Lo's "Ain't It Funny" on "Pyramids". But the loop of famous Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar, whose voice has adorned thousands of Hindi films over a seven-decade career, startles upon its appearance. It remains foregrounded for much of the duration of "Morning", receding around the eight-minute mark for some of Hebden's most complex drum programming, then reappears halfway through. In using a famous Indian playback singer, which he no doubt grew up hearing in his household, Hebden gives the track an opulent yet pensive feel, which in turn gives "Morning" emotional depth.
"Evening" picks up where "Morning" left off, with a coffee percolator of a beat that never quite solidifies, instead leading into the kind of tones that recall early electronic music pieces like Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon. Hebden allows each element plenty of space to breathe, striking a balance between the abstract and the accessible. Another wordless voice comes into focus about five minutes in, though my ears can't tell if it's Mangeshkar or another Hindu devotional chant.
At around the twelve-minute mark, amid chimes and gentle digital processing, "Evening" drifts into near-silence, but just as you rise to play something else, it returns: a hi-hat figure arises, amid shimmering electronics and a kick. The inverse of "Morning," the last five minutes of "Evening" gather velocity and strength, to where it seems everything is converging on a climax and payoff for this slow twenty-minute build. But right where a release might be expected, everything fades back out instead: You sense a desire to make a grand statement, but the dramatic dissolve doesn't quite stick the landing.
Nonetheless, Four Tet's position in the electronic landscape is solidified: He's able to work on the experimental fringe when he wishes, or collaborate with Burial, Jamie xx and Skrillex. Even news of a possible Diplo team-up doesn't cost him credibility. The scope and ambition of Morning/ Evening is profound, and will hopefully inspire producers to take bigger chances and not be satisfied with pop- or club-friendly lengths. Even where Morning/Evening doesn't quite work, it's daring and expansive. | 2015-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Text | July 6, 2015 | 7.7 | 316b96ed-eefd-4662-b69e-144c7ba9ca2a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Ty Segall's latest collaboration—with Ex-Cult's Chris Shaw and Fuzz's Charles Moothart—isn't a revolution. They’re just three friends, hellbent on sustaining guitar music’s urgency and simplicity | Ty Segall's latest collaboration—with Ex-Cult's Chris Shaw and Fuzz's Charles Moothart—isn't a revolution. They’re just three friends, hellbent on sustaining guitar music’s urgency and simplicity | GØGGS: GØGGS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22059-gggs/ | GØGGS | As one of the most prolific artists in garage rock, Ty Segall faces a slightly uphill battle where his side bands' staying power is concerned. With eight strong solo albums and 20 collaborations released over the past eight years, the axeman’s discography is a genre stronghold, and a veritable wellspring for guitar nerds. But unless you’re a Segall stan, it can be tough to distinguish the *II*s from the Twins, the Sleepers from the Slaughterhouses, the collaborations with White Fence or Mikal Cronin. So when Segall announced the formation of GØGGS–another side project, this time a trio with Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw on lead vocals, Fuzz’s Charles Moothart on drums, and Segall on guitar–just months after dropping the enjoyable (if stylistically inert) Emotional Mugger, it was tough to muster the excitement for their self-titled debut, a 10-track punk record forged during post-tour jam sessions and intra-band sleepovers.
Keeping up with Segall’s catalogue proves an exhausting task at times, but never a slog. He's yet to put out a bad record: a reputation forged by latent musical skill, staunch discipline, and in the case of GØGGS, explosive rapport. Shaw may be GØGGS’ lead singer and principal songwriter, but it’s Segall doing most of the heavy lifting. The Californian’s guitar playing and backing vocals supply most of the album’s melodic thrust. No showboating or exorbitant solos here; on Dead Kennedy-esque rippers like “GØGGS,” “Smoke the Würm,” and “Shotgun Shooter,” Segall sticks to choppy down-strums and feedback-fueled tantrums, grounded by Mootheart’s cymbal-heavy clatter–a far cry from his usual, heavy-lidded psych jams. A few reliable standby guests drop in: Wand’s Cory Hanson plays bass and synths on “Gøggs,” while Vial’s Denee Peetracek lends vocals to “Final Notice.” Cronin lays down some grooves on “Glendale Junkard,” too, because what would a Ty Segall production be without him?
The album’s reliance on tinnitus-inducing sound effects and threadbare production styles safely situate it within Segall’s canon (Lead single “She Got Harder” streamlines the sludgy palette showcased on Twins, while “Assassinate the Doctor” reprises Emotional Mugger’s smothering noise-rock), but Shaw’s atonal, shouted vocals (a product of his hardcore upbringing) and violent lyrics (“I’m creeping through the night/with blood in mind”; “Double barrel in the dark/And I always hit my mark”) cast Ex-Cult’s distinctive paranoid pall over the proceedings. Having honed his skills in Memphis’ hardcore scene, the southerner possesses the sheer power and technical prowess needed to reign in his bandmates’ chaos: most noticeably on “Final Notice,” where Shaw (backed by Peetracek) brandishes a single, clipped phrase–machete-like, slashing through a blaring, glitchy soundscape. (Ironically enough, his screeched, nihilistic statement comprises the listener’s only foothold in the nightmarish whorl.)
Segall, Shaw, and Moothart never set out to shift paradigms or start a revolution– they’re simply three friends, hellbent on sustaining guitar music’s urgency and simplicity. In the age of glossy mixing and instrumental auto-pilot, their ungovernable racket’s refreshing and woefully needed, and judging from Shaw’s remarks in the album’s press release, the band recognize the power of such escapism. “This is not a side project,” he said of the band, “it is a necessity.” Judging from the sounds of this album, they don’t take that responsibility lightly–and it shows. | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | July 11, 2016 | 7.4 | 317b53c0-2093-4772-8da7-c2daebd8804c | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Created with a choral ensemble and a nascent AI, the Berlin-based electronic musician’s third album is a meditation on community, technology, and the future of, and beyond, the human species. | Created with a choral ensemble and a nascent AI, the Berlin-based electronic musician’s third album is a meditation on community, technology, and the future of, and beyond, the human species. | Holly Herndon: PROTO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holly-herndon-proto/ | PROTO | Holly Herndon makes music with that most personal of instruments: her computer, a machine used not only to weave together complex electronic compositions but also to access the frightening and spectacular realm of the internet. In her work, the Berlin-based composer wrestles with systems, both the soft internal system of the psyche and the equally mysterious phenomena of social-media networks, recommendation algorithms, and panopticon surveillance. Herndon’s voice featured prominently on her first two albums, skittering across dense electronic compositions, her words hard to make out and her presence difficult to pin down. On her third album, PROTO, she opens her process to include not just her own voice but the voices of a choral ensemble. The group includes Spawn, a “nascent machine intelligence” that runs on a modified gaming computer and was created in collaboration with AI expert Jules LaPlace. Trained to process audio, Spawn uses neural networks to riff on music she hears; Herndon, who uses she/her pronouns to refer to Spawn, considers the AI not as an instrument or a tool but as an ensemble member.
PROTO is Herndon’s most technologically adventurous work to date, but it is also by far her most ecstatically humanistic. One of its most stunning and revealing moments comes on “Frontier,” a work inspired by Appalachian Sacred Harp singing, an a cappella tradition originating in American Christian communities. A single unadorned voice runs through a scale, as if leading a vocal warm-up; on the last note, a chorus of human and machine voices joins in. The sound undoubtedly stems from human throats and yet it is serrated and compressed in a way that could only have come from digital processing. But the seam between the two is not clear. There is no artificial layer to peel back, no true voice underneath plastic coating. Ninety seconds into the song, vocal notes shudder into a riff. The natural glissando of human singing dissipates; there is one note and then there is another, with no passageway between them, yet the music does not sound inhuman. It sounds like a new kind of human vocalizing, augmented by machine, not reduced by it.
Though PROTO’s vocal treatments sound futuristic, the album builds on a 50-year history of humans singing through computers. One of the earliest musical applications of voice-processing technologies dates back to the late 1960s, when synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos and her composition partner Rachel Elkind ran Elkind’s voice through a machine designed for telephone communications. The result can be heard in the soundtrack to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange: Elkind sings the vocal part to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, her robotic voice perfectly suited to the synthesized instrumentation. When Elkind sings on a single vocal track, her lone voice sounds like a chorus. The machine amplifies the self beyond the borders of the individual.
Voice processors have proliferated since the 1970s, and in many of their most notable uses they have shredded, distorted, and multiplied the voices of women. In the 1980s, Laurie Anderson deployed a series of digital filters oriented toward comically deepened “vocal drag,” which also served as her own trio of backup singers. In 1998, Cher’s “Believe” threw Auto-Tune technology into overdrive to force her voice into a futuristic trill. This century’s musical cyborgs are some of the most fascinating and innovative contemporary performers: FKA twigs, Fever Ray, Charli XCX, SPELLLING, Arca, SOPHIE. That none of these artists are men points to a gender-transgressive impulse within cyborg performance: a desire to use technology to break open the body’s perceived boundaries and take flight away from the repressive and the mundane.
“The popular image of a cyborg is one of body augmentation,” Herndon said in a 2015 interview, whereas she and her collaborator Mat Dryhurst are “more interested in the emotional cyborg—those who use tools to emote, express compassion, build alliances across networks, disperse into anonymity.” It is no surprise, then, that as Herndon’s work becomes more technologically experimental, it also becomes more emotional. Cries of abjection and yearning populate PROTO. “Why am I so lost?” asks a chorus of overlapping voices toward the end of “Crawler.” On the rippling “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt,” a solo voice issues forlorn sentences into sheets of processing: “I need to belong,” sings the voice, a statement that also opens the next song, “SWIM.” Voices cry out for each other and then coalesce, finding communion and solace in their mutual presence.
PROTO is a patient album and a technologically transparent one. Two tracks, “Canaan” and “Evening Shades,” document the process of training Spawn. Unmodified human voices sing and then Spawn responds with her interpretations of what she’s heard, like a young child in speech therapy. Rather than simply dazzle listeners with a perfectly honed AI, Herndon invites us into the awkward but beautiful process behind Spawn’s capabilities, the mistakes the computer makes as it learns. These two live-training tracks are a welcome reminder of the human labor behind automated systems.
Herndon’s last album, Platform, included a spoken-word piece in the form of an ASMR track designed to make listeners imagine themselves as a high-powered executive getting a massage. PROTO’s spoken-word interlude moves away from irony, instead letting a child take on the heavy subject of the future of life in the universe. “Extreme Love” imagines human beings not as Earth’s rightful inheritors squandering our prize but as an intermediary form of life whose primary purpose is to harbor and spread bacteria, “those minds inside us and crawling at our feet.” It is a hopeful narrative, a story of humans unknowingly birthing the next generation of life, incubating extremophiles in our guts that can survive long after we’ve cooked ourselves. “Extreme Love” speaks of human beings as components in a vast and incomprehensible system of life and behavior, an ecological phenomenon acting the only way we know how, opening a doorway into the next phase of the Earth’s history. It is a strange comfort, a vision of the future without guilt.
Of course it is painful to sit here on the edge of what seems like inevitable extinction, to want to keep living while watching enormous systems of human activity conspire to wipe out most life. The inertia of annihilation daunts. “Extreme Love” offers comfort by reminding us how small we are, and how natural—parts of a whole that moves not because of individual will but slowly across eons and of its own accord. It is so human to want more—to want to be, effectively, beyond human—and so human not to get it, except in glimpses. In rare moments survival offers itself. Voices call out and then cohere; loneliness drives us to be less lonely.
The specter of death lacerates PROTO—the closing song, “Last Gasp,” lurches along on a menacing, apocalyptic beat—but Herndon is not interested in preaching fatalism. Her music winnows its way toward what is most alive in its listeners. Hearing Spawn gargling human voices sparks up a mix of pathos and awe—pathos because of how childlike the sound is, awe at its complex and bizarre texture. Herndon and her ensemble displace the human voice from its usual setting just enough that it startles the ear. But that displacement allows you to hear voices as if for the very first time, listening ravenously for proof that out there in the unknown, someone besides yourself exists and is singing. | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 4AD | May 14, 2019 | 8.2 | 317e20d8-13ef-4653-a779-adf9440c3a51 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
L.A.-based quartet Bleached carve out a new identity on their latest, fast-forwaring past '60s revivalism into jagged and precise '70s rock edge. | L.A.-based quartet Bleached carve out a new identity on their latest, fast-forwaring past '60s revivalism into jagged and precise '70s rock edge. | Bleached: Welcome the Worms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21733-welcome-the-worms/ | Welcome the Worms | Over the past decade, California rock has fully embraced the stoner beach party mood, mixing the '60s girl-group sound with a fuzzy, hotboxed playfulness. L.A.-based quartet Bleached have always been able to cruise in this lane fairly easily–their scrappy and infectious breakout single “Think of You” was exactly the type of ear worm that works best lazily blasted out of a drop top while riding down a palm-lined avenue. But even in the summer of 2011, there was an ever-so-slight whiff of “too little, too late” in the air surrounding the band, especially since singer/guitarist Jennifer Clavin and her sister, guitarist/bassist Jessica, were both members of cult art-punk band Mika Miko, one of those locally-beloved outfits who burned out way before they reached their full potential. It's always hard to not judge a new band by the successes of their past incarnations, and by the time Bleached released their flawed-but-solid 2013 debut album, Ride Your Heart, they had fit themselves in snugly with the multitudes of other Shangri-Las idolaters from their home state, but hadn't seemed to carve out a true identity for themselves, which was a shame.
Luckily, with Welcome the Worms, that identity has begun to take form, and surprisingly, it's not rooted in '60s revivalism at all, but fast-forwards a decade into the future with a precisely jagged '70s rock edge. What's immediately striking about the album is its simplicity—its melodies are stark, clean, and in direct contrast to the lo-fi, purposefully muddled sound that has defined Bleached and bands like them up until this point. Instead of scratchy and whimsical, Jennifer's voice comes through sultry and clear. The overall feel evokes Suzi Quatro or Joan Jett—women who slashed their way through a traditionally male genre using sexism's own weapons against it. On “Trying To Lose Myself Again,” in which Jennifer asserts “I know what I want/ And I know what I like/ Keep on feeling good/ Just like I always should,” you can practically feel the dirty heat rising from the Sunset Strip pavement.
There's an anecdote in the Runaways documentary Edgeplay where the band's bassist, Jackie Fox, describes finishing a night by vomiting banana daiquiris onto a telephone in a hotel room, only to be awakened hours later by Lita Ford trying to strangle her with the phone's cord. That's basically what “Keep on Keepin' on,” sounds like: a thundering, sudden, rude awakening that swiftly establishes Welcome the Worms as new territory for Bleached. It calls on rock showboating just a hair, even using a clever fake-out ending three-quarters of the way through, but doesn't come off as tongue-in-cheek in the slightest. You could easily classify this record next to the likes of say, Sahara Hotnights or the Donnas (a compliment or a curse, depending on how old you were in 1999), with the exception that it deftly avoids gimmickry where more purely rockist acts may bask in it.
However, simplicity is a fickle beast, and one that's difficult to maintain. Although Welcome the Worms starts off with a bang, it gradually loses that momentum as it goes on—and at only ten short tracks, it's a problem it never has time to overcome. “Chemical Air” makes perfect use of Bleached's airtight three-part harmonies, but by the time to get to tracks like “Desolate Town” and the downtempo “I'm All Over the Place (Mystic Mama),” that electricity has all but dissipated. While not a record of cast-iron slam dunks, Welcome the Worms possesses enough raw power to cast Bleached in a completely different light, and one that is considerably more sustainable than their debut. | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | April 18, 2016 | 6.9 | 3181e009-c736-4eb2-a629-357b67bcfc06 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Energized by the presence of a new bassist, the death metal pioneers still stand apart from the pack. | Energized by the presence of a new bassist, the death metal pioneers still stand apart from the pack. | Autopsy: Morbidity Triumphant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/autopsy-morbidity-triumphant/ | Morbidity Triumphant | Autopsy were outsiders during the death metal boom of the late 1980s. While rising regional scenes in Florida, New York, and Sweden were beginning to define the young genre’s sound, Autopsy were out in the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by thrash and punk bands. Possessed, arguably the first death metal band, were among their only true peers locally. That isolation, paired with their commendable stubbornness, twisted their musical vocabulary into a thrillingly alien tongue. “Even going back to the first album, we didn’t do anything that maybe we were supposed to be doing, what would be the quote-unquote ‘norm’ of the time,” founding drummer and vocalist Chris Reifert said in an interview with Machine Music.
That first album, 1989’s unimpeachable Severed Survival, is one of the most original death metal albums of the decade. Autopsy absorbed the down-and-dirty energy of the Bay’s punk, hardcore, and thrash scenes, but even more notably, they embraced the slow, blues-based doom of bands like Trouble and Saint Vitus. There’s an undeniable groove to Autopsy’s music that’s unusual for death metal, and a lot of that is thanks to Reifert. He’s the rare extreme metal drummer who can bend the shape of a song to his will, and in guitarists Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles, he found willing partners who could ride his warped groove and add their own violent splashes of color.
That’s still Autopsy’s core trio on their latest full-length, Morbidity Triumphant, and punkish, doomy death metal is still the core of their sound—but the addition of bassist Greg Wilkinson seems to have reinvigorated the band. Autopsy have gone through bass players at roughly the same clip Spinal Tap went through drummers. Wilkinson, a metal lifer who also plays in Brainoil and Deathgrave, is the eighth person to step into the role. Around the same time he joined Autopsy, he also teamed up with Reifert for a sludgy duo project called Static Abyss, and the obvious joy of their collaboration bleeds into Morbidity Triumphant. Though Wilkinson only contributed to one song as a writer (the excellent “Final Frost”), his assured playing anchors the entire album. In one of its most memorable moments, he plays the menacing, dirgelike opening riff of “Skin by Skin” unaccompanied, establishing a center of gravity for the song while Cutler and Coralles layer on wild paroxysms of shrieking, flailing guitar. With Reifert behind the kit, Autopsy has always been a rhythm-driven band. He’s death metal’s Bill Ward, and in Wilkinson, he’s found his Geezer Butler.
Reifert is also one of death metal’s all-time great vocalists, and he’s in fine form on Morbidity Triumphant. Most death metal singers walk down one of a handful of paths—deep, dry gutturals; throat-shredding, higher-register barks; or a wetter, mid-diaphragm growl. Reifert’s approach is to careen across all three tracks on an out-of-control dirt bike. His isn’t the kind of vocal range that’s measurable in octaves, but as a death metal singer, he can go anywhere from the catacombs to the belfry. The way he jumps between styles only serves to emphasize the unhinged quality of his voice. Opener “Stab the Brain” depicts a stomach-turning “ritual abortion sacrifice,” and Reifert’s retching amps up the nausea factor tenfold.
On “Tapestry of Scars,” Reifert embodies a sadomasochist with pathos (“When I cut, my soul’s revealed/Clean is ugly, only scars are real”). Eventually, he seems to lose himself in his own method acting to deliver the album’s most unsettling passage, jumping outside of the meter to ramble in an off-kilter cadence: “Fuckin’ stabbing/Stabbing/Ugh, stabbing!” It’s a trick he’s used before, and it always serves to make the chaos in his narrator’s head feel a little more viscerally real. It’s not the only time on Morbidity Triumphant the band returns to familiar ideas: crazed vocals, punk attitude, churning doom riffs, expressive bursts of lead guitar. Old-school death metal is a crowded scene these days, with albums by aging OGs and new blood alike coming at a faster clip than ever. Without having to reinvent themselves, Autopsy still stand apart from the pack and their brand of bloodletting still sounds fresh. | 2022-10-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Peaceville | October 3, 2022 | 7 | 31946869-86bb-470e-9796-95f0f9f2fd63 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology. | Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology. | M. Geddes Gengras: I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-geddes-gengras-i-am-the-last-of-that-green-and-warm-hued-world/ | I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World | Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the first in his Dark Tower series, is a collection of novellas connected by a shared protagonist, Roland Deschain, and a common setting, a post-apocalyptic American desert. Some of the book’s most striking passages draw on mundane connections to a shared past. In an arid landscape abandoned by society, superficial marks of human life—“The Rain in Spain,” Oreo cookies, “Beans, beans, the magical fruit”—take on almost religious connotations. The mind, King seems to suggest, is desperate to grasp onto the familiar.
M. Geddes Gengras, the prolific synthesizer maven, came to The Gunslinger after seeing his late father suggest the book in a dream. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World is an album loosely based on that novel. Gengras, mirroring King’s prose, disorients the listener through a series of interconnected compositions, where small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology.
Opener “Zoltan” starts quietly, with chimes that ring out in irregular intervals and high-pitched synths that resonate and expand. Dusted with static, the track has an eerie, dream-like effect, and as the song builds with no clear central rhythm, the synths take on a human quality, like a church service that has decayed to reveal a wordless choral echo. Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, Gengras employs familiarity carefully. It is a profoundly disquieting effect, not nearly consistent enough to serve as passive, “lo-fi” ambient background music—but unlike the pleasant synth soundscapes for which he’s known, there is little comfort in close listening, either.
With a shared sustained tone, “Zoltan” progresses into “The Pump at the Way Station,” which takes its name from the second novella in King’s book, “The Way Station.” In The Gunslinger, the station seems like a mirage, a shack that’s outlasted society; Gengras illustrates the scene with synths that conjure a fried, reverberating guitar, like sounds out of a pulp Western. Its flirtation with Americana recalls the twang of David Bowie’s “Moss Garden,” replacing that song’s warmth with foreboding dissonance.
“Cellar/Oracle” begins with low, moaning groans and rippling squeals, halting progressions that seem to reverse and repeat at random, like a computer breaking down halfway through booting up. When the song finally finds a beat, it’s a discordant, muted drum that continues into “Passage Under the Mountains,” which, for readers following along in The Gunslinger, corresponds with Roland’s mescaline trip. Here things fall into a more natural rhythm, as the wooden beat from earlier meets a rubbery, featherlight synth progression. Halfway through, it locks into a chromatic techno groove, as hazy synths, reverberating echoes, and the crackling sounds of the sequencer layer recursively, as if to replay the past hour’s compositions in a new context.
Gegras leaves us with “The Drawing,” likely named for the next book in King’s Dark Tower series. The alien-like ripple effect retreats as slow synths melt into each other, foregrounding the sound of falling water droplets. Spa-like tranquility eventually gives way to more sinister notes, perhaps foreshadowing the darkness awaiting our protagonist. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World finds Gengras pulling at the underlying psychosocial questions of the book—what strange connections do our synapses light upon after the familiar is gone?—and making a home for himself in the cataclysmal ooze. | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | May 21, 2019 | 7 | 3196ab75-3a29-482f-82ef-351f497b154d | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Dusting off an old alias, Nicolas Jaar lets loose a surprise release of sample-heavy cuts both bolder and more refined than his early club tracks. | Dusting off an old alias, Nicolas Jaar lets loose a surprise release of sample-heavy cuts both bolder and more refined than his early club tracks. | Against All Logic: 2012 - 2017 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aal-against-all-logic-2012-2017/ | 2012 - 2017 | Nicolas Jaar has never been the type of artist to impose constraints on himself. Across the last decade, he’s made meticulous, collage-like compositions under his own name and through the longform psychedelia of Darkside. Sometimes he ends up with thrilling, dystopian techno-punk. Other times he ends up with a literal aluminum cube filled with music. Jaar’s work is exciting because its final destination rarely seems fixed.
Jaar snuck his latest album 2012 - 2017 out under his A.A.L (Against All Logic) moniker last week, and it is interesting in part because it is the first Jaar release in some time in which many sounds sit in familiar places and arrive at familiar times. Kicks, snares, and hi-hats assemble in predictable motifs. Samples—largely sourced from funk and soul—sing loudly, and plainly. Pianos gallop, because that is what pianos do at 128 beats per minute. There’s plenty to unpack here, as there is with all of Jaar’s work, but if you wanted to simplify things you could call 2012 - 2017 his house album, in that Jaar imposes upon himself the conventions and requirements of traditional house music.
This is something Jaar seemingly confesses with the title of the loping first track: “This Old House Is All I Have.” That opening sets the table for what is, by some margin, the sunniest and most ebullient song in Jaar’s discography: “I Never Dream.” These are thrilling, racing tracks, but they're also familiar, both functionally—every hi-hat in its right place—and emotionally, with the kind of crests and ecstasies you might find on 1990s labels like Nu Groove and Cajual. This familiarity is welcome, both allowing Jaar to more directly engage with styles he's referenced in the past, and to allow us, as listeners, to hear how his talents and idiosyncrasies shake out in this context.
Jaar’s work can be deeply rewarding but it can also feel stuffy; 2012 - 2017 is much looser and less formal, in part because it appears to be just a collection of tracks, and in part because no one would be expected to sit quietly in the presence of a kick drum and piano vamp. There are moments of downright silliness: The wildly chirpy vocal refrain on “Know You” practically tugs at your pant leg. To borrow from Yeezus—itself a masterclass of brazen sampling—as he does on “Such a Bad Way” is practically the equivalent of grinning after delivering a bad pun.
Samples have long been a foundation of Jaar’s sound. On 2012 - 2017, instead of molding them into obscure shapes, he’s scaffolding stages for them, happy to let long, coherent portions ring out. Stirring vocal refrains, rather than Jaar’s compositional talents, are the real stars of tracks like “Now U Got Me Hooked” and “Cityfade.” Jaar has excellent taste, and laying plain his choices in this manner reaffirms his ability to unearth potent source material.
This is hardly Jaar’s first stab at dance music; his precocious early work came out on club-oriented labels like Wolf + Lamb and Circus Company. (He even had a semi-official EP full of disco edits.) But Jaar has gotten weirder—and better—since then, and the material here is both bolder and more refined. He will occasionally break out some of his more outré tricks, like when he dresses “Flash in the Pan” in queasy synth ribbons, or when he tears open “You Are Going to Love Me and Scream” and exposes its gnarly digital innards. “Rave on U” is 10 minutes of Jaar foraging for a big, transcendent melody. But because the structures of these tracks never veer into abstraction, Jaar’s artful sound design never hits you from unexpected angles like on his previous records. On 2012 - 2017 Jaar’s compositional dynamic is reversed: He’s in service to the beats. | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Other People | March 1, 2018 | 8.8 | 3198f182-6f6c-43c2-b5d9-7e412f18b312 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | |
Augmenting electro-acoustic fusions with speech synthesis and language translation software, Visible Cloaks invoke mystifying new form of dialects and communication on their mini-LP. | Augmenting electro-acoustic fusions with speech synthesis and language translation software, Visible Cloaks invoke mystifying new form of dialects and communication on their mini-LP. | Visible Cloaks: Lex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/visible-cloaks-lex/ | Lex | The new mini-album from the Portland, Ore., duo Visible Cloaks completes a three-part multimedia project which began with the full-length Reassemblage—a strikingly evocative, hard-to-classify synthesis of textures and tones pulled from ambient and Fourth World music and Japanese synth-pop—and a recent animated short with Brenna Murphy, “Permutate Lex,” which gives rippling, acid-bright visual expression to their uncanny aesthetic.
The six tracks that make up Lex feel more fragmented, unsettled, and inscrutable than the dreamy, glitch-dusted ambient moods of Reassemblage, and that’s intentional. Riffing on the word “lexicon”, Lex is based on a palette of voices created by feeding a chain of dialects and accents through language translation software to create a kind of incomprehensible “future dialect”—as if these garbled words were the endpoint of a drastically globalized future where all existing languages have dissolved into one.
The idea that a universal language could resolve conflict is an ancient one that has persisted. In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel tells us why humans are doomed to constant misunderstanding, the second of our original sins. Punishing humankind’s hubristic attempt to climb to Heaven, God knocks down the tower and scatters the builders to every corner of the Earth, destroying their shared language “so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Later, philosophers Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz proposed new written languages based on pictograms rather than words, while in the 19th century the Polish-Jewish doctor Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof thought he could achieve world peace with the invention of a whole new language, Esperanto. Needless to say, none of these test-tube tongues caught on.
Lex’s “future dialect” is as utopian and, inevitably, as mystifying as its predecessors. The album opens with an undulating, almost baroque flute melody on “Wheel,” weaving through unintelligible crosstalk before unfurling into a soft lullaby. Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile fuse sounds from metallophones, wind instruments, and flickering synth pulses, though the sources are purposely obscured, adding a 21st-century digital-versus-acoustic complexity to the mix. On “Frame,” a similar palette, this time augmented with woody percussion and chimes, pops like fireworks, disjointed and disorienting, while “Transient” introduces Lex’s “future dialect” in full, latching glitched, faintly Germanic syllables onto sweeps of glowing choral tones that recall the emotional landscapes of William Basinski. The technique is repeated on “Keys,” cobbling broken speech onto stacks of toppling drum hits and queasy sliding synths; the parts are played together, rhythmically, so they arrive as a barrage of information that does indeed sound more like the patter of actual speech than any kind of melody.
Strangely, the concept is largely abandoned for the final two tracks, with “Lex” offering only faint vocal fragments among its alien ambience. “World” is an extended dive back into the textures of Reassemblage, with serene, sustained tones pricked by rustling and harp-like plucking. Stretching to almost a quarter of an hour, while every other track barely tops three minutes, “World” seems disconnected from the album’s conceptual framework, but it provides, at least, a soothing finale to a jarring experience. Though less memorable than its predecessor, Lex succeeds when it is heard as intended: as a conceptual companion to Reassemblage’s opaque experimentation, an appendix of utopian ideas that adds nuance and provocation to a seductive sound world where East meets West, and breath and circuitry are made one. | 2017-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | December 9, 2017 | 7.1 | 319ab7f9-900d-473a-aebe-9366549c5c6e | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Showcasing a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, Deafheaven’s new album, New Bermuda, is even more overwhelming than their 2013 breakthrough, Sunbather. The group has shaped a suite of songs into one pliable, massive, and ecstatic 47-minute arc, one where they unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience. | Showcasing a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, Deafheaven’s new album, New Bermuda, is even more overwhelming than their 2013 breakthrough, Sunbather. The group has shaped a suite of songs into one pliable, massive, and ecstatic 47-minute arc, one where they unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience. | Deafheaven: New Bermuda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21022-new-bermuda/ | New Bermuda | Nothing about the band Deafheaven makes literal sense, starting with their place in the world. They are a black metal-ish band, but black metal fans either hate them or engage in constant, spirited discussions about why they don't. Their breakout, 2013’s Sunbather, took basic notions about black metal and shoegaze from their first album Roads to Judah and airlifted them into a rarefied emotional realm where track lengths dissolved into the whole along with straightforward interpretations: George Clarke’s lyrics compressed earthbound experiences—depression, material envy, struggles for purpose— into wild, leaping abstractions about love, oceans of light, tears. This was music that yearned palpably to leap across distances, closing gaps like a firing synapse.
New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather. The roiling peaks of that album—say, “Dreamhouse” or "The Pecan Tree”—are the resting temperature of this one. They have shaped a suite of songs into one pliable and massive 47-minute arc, one that is as easy to separate into distinct quadrants as the stream from a fire hydrant. Clarke still screams euphoniously, leaning into long vowel sounds and open tones so that phrases like “on the smokey tin it melts again and again” function as color more than as thought. (You could never discern the words without the aid of a lyric sheet, anyway.) They are a band that works best in colors, as the titles of the albums and the salmon color of Sunbather’s cover attest: On New Bermuda, they revisit an ecstatic sound world that resembles, as Clarke puts it on opening song “Brought to the Water”, “a multiverse of fuchsia and light.”
Having discovered this multiverse, New Bermuda finds them shaping it. The album is shorter and more compressed than Sunbather, and doesn’t telescope into “loud” and “quiet” sections quite as clearly. There is still a nauseous sort of beauty to their chord voicings: the lurches into minor key on “Luna” feel as heavy as their swings back into major, like the motion of a great, creaking iron gate. The second half of the “fuchsia and light” lyric is "surrenders to blackness now,” and if Deafheaven’s music at its best represents a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, the battle feels pitched at higher stakes than it did on Sunbather. Clarke’s voice is sharper and mixed lower, clawing at the smooth walls of the music like something wretched trying to escape a pit.
The lyrics suggest that this confining space might resemble the sort of manicured suburban prison that Sunbather was set inside: "There is no ocean for me. There is no glamour. Only the mirage of water ascending from the asphalt. I gaze at it from the oven of my home. Confined to a house that never remains clean,” runs a passage from “Luna”. But listening to Deafheaven, you don’t feel the particulars of this dilemma any more than you notice the pebbles of a gravel driveway from the window of an airplane. The music acts as an incinerator for any malaise you bring to it. It is a warm blur of noise, and fans of many different kinds of moody sensual guitar musics can close their eyes and place themselves inside it: If you have at any point worn a Deftones, Cure, My Bloody Valentine, or an Explosions in the Sky t-shirt, there is room for you inside here.
But Deafheaven reach further and further on this album: The drowsily sliding guitars on the long coda to “Come Back” conjure the easy warmth of Built to Spill. An organ wells up as the guitars fade, like something Ira Kaplan would do on a Yo La Tengo record. The thick palm-muted chugging on the beginning of “Luna” is reminiscent of the Slayer of Seasons of the Abyss. The undistorted downstrokes on “Gifts for the Earth” are a visitation from Joy Division, while the flagrant wah-pedal abusing guitar solo on “Baby Blue” is pure Load-era Kirk Hammett.
All of these references, which bring together many bands that wouldn’t normally have much to do with one another, points to something dreamlike and uncanny in Deafheaven’s grand sound. At a moment when guitar-centric music feels less central to the conversation, and great indie-rock bands have retreated into hardy local scenes, Deafheaven play like a beautiful, abstracted dream of guitar music's transportive power. The year's most jolting guitar-centered rock records have reimagined the guitar's place in the constellation slightly—on Tame Impala’s Currents, the guitar glimmers distantly at us from beneath a glass, darkly—a distant shape moving beneath the larger, more legible shapes of the compressed drums and programmed synths. On Kurt Vile’s b’lieve i’m going down, it is part of a general out-of-time way of life, a devotion to anachronism and lived-in symbols that keeps the confusion of the outside world at bay.
Deafheaven, meanwhile, unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience. But they have earned their sense of awe, and you can see audiences returning it tenfold in their live performances. The transcendence their music gazes towards has a long spiritual lineage. To wit: I pulled my earbuds out while listening to New Bermuda this morning in a store where Boston's "More Than A Feeling" was playing. The transition was seamless. They were aiming at the same horizon spot, made for the moment when you begin dreaming. | 2015-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Anti- | October 1, 2015 | 9 | 319e43f5-63b0-4b79-a492-6bd056d363fc | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Released last year, this ambitious album by the Japanese singer-songwriter utilizes lush instrumentation to create a dreamlike soundtrack to an imaginary film. | Released last year, this ambitious album by the Japanese singer-songwriter utilizes lush instrumentation to create a dreamlike soundtrack to an imaginary film. | Ichiko Aoba: Windswept Adan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ichiko-aoba-windswept-adan/ | Windswept Adan | Ichiko Aoba’s greatest strength is her ability to create pockets of intimacy. The Japanese singer-songwriter’s breathy vocals and placid guitar playing, often the only sounds you’d hear on her records, create a hypnotizing shroud that makes you feel like she’s performing for you alone. Aoba has been building a following in Japan since her 2010 debut Kamisori Otome—released when she was only 19 years old—but 2018’s qp was Aoba’s first small breakthrough; it connected her with listeners abroad and cracked Rate Your Music’s top rated albums of the year. The two years between qp and her next release gave people time to get up to speed on her back catalog, retroactively catapulting 2013’s 0 to the top spot for its own year. When her latest album Windswept Adan—now her first to be reissued internationally—received widespread coverage from Western critics last year, the established faithful weren’t surprised; this is the recognition they always knew she deserved. On Windswept Adan, Aoba expands her repertoire of sound and brings collaborators into her vision, yet she still holds on to the wistful imagination that allows her to dream up private universes.
Aoba conceptualized the project as the soundtrack to a film that only exists in her head, set on two fictional islands—one where the central protagonist is from, and another, teeming with flora and fauna, she is spirited away to. She began writing Windswept Adan as a story first, intermittently showing her progress to her primary collaborator and producer, TV composer Taro Umebayashi. Umebayashi would begin to compose based on Aoba’s concepts, which would, in turn, influence what Aoba wrote next. Lead single “Porcelain” came from the idea of musically portraying weather conditions on the Kerama Islands, which Aoba visited while researching for her script. One of the album’s densest tracks, it bursts with lush strings, woodwinds, pitched percussion, and Aoba’s feather-light vocals—gentle elements on their own, but when combined they become a tumultuous storm.
Elsewhere on the record, Aoba shows restraint, reminding us that more can also be done with less. Umebayashi plays an almost improvised sounding piano number on “Parfum d’étoiles,” the recording equipment so close to the instrument that the hammers can be heard thumping the strings with every slam of the keys. Field recordings of birdsong hang in the air, and Aoba haunts the track with a distant vocal, so low in the mix that it sounds as though it could have been picked up from another room. Aoba strips back to her own voice and nimble-fingered classical guitar on “Sagu Palm’s Song,” but rather than a return to something familiar, it acts as stark punctuation; after hearing Aoba’s voice accompanied by a rich tapestry of shifting elements on seven prior tracks, here she sounds truly alone. As the story’s protagonist deepens her connection with nature—witnessing its beauty, destruction, and eventual rebirth—each track distinguishes itself as a chapter in that emotional journey.
Aoba’s imaginary film draws to a close with “Luminescent Creatures,” the heroine giving herself back to nature. First, Aoba sings, accompanied only by lightly strummed chords. Slowly, strings start to swell around her as the scene approaches a dramatic end—as the final note rings out, only sounds of ocean waves lapping a shoreline remain. It paints a striking image, inviting you to live inside the world Aoba has dreamed up. In the Dreams & Visions companion book to Windswept Adan, she writes that she hoped her fantasies would immerse her more deeply into the world that she was laboring to create with every passing day. “Not knowing whether I’m asleep or awake is a sign that I’m on the right path,” she said. As Ichiko Aoba continued to dream bigger, it only makes sense that her music would keep expanding to fill the space.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ba Da Bing | November 22, 2021 | 8 | 31a3ee14-d80f-4683-a6c4-d93f836aa75d | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Vince Staples, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Megan Thee Stallion, and more come together for the soundtrack to the modern-day Bonnie-and-Clyde parable, set against a backdrop of police brutality. | Vince Staples, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Megan Thee Stallion, and more come together for the soundtrack to the modern-day Bonnie-and-Clyde parable, set against a backdrop of police brutality. | Various Artists: Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-queen-and-slim-the-soundtrack/ | Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack | Melina Matsoukas, the director for Beyoncé’s incendiary “Formation” video, makes her feature film debut with the romantic thriller Queen & Slim, starring Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. After meeting up for a first date, the titular couple are pulled over for a traffic stop, the encounter escalates, and Slim takes the officer’s gun and shoots him in self-defense. Branded as cop killers, the couple go on the lam. When video of the shooting goes viral, the fugitives become symbols of both terror and justice among a polarized American public, and along the way their unlikely romance blooms.
This is complex emotional territory, and the film’s music does its best to keep pace. In addition to the score, provided by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), the movie has an original soundtrack, courtesy of Motown Records, bringing artists from across its storied roster in attempts to tie the many themes of the movie together.
Everyone seems to have a pretty good idea what they’re getting into, and they all handle it differently. Megan Thee Stallion is proudly complicit on “Ride or Die”; Syd, ever the master of the moody come-on, is raring to go on “Getting Late.” But the 6lack and Mereba-featuring alt-R&B slow-burner “Yo Love” takes Vince Staples way out of his comfort zone, to awkward effect. There are also redundancies and placeholders: Bilal gets help from Raphael Saadiq remixing his 2000 jam “Soul Sista,” a song that already soundtracked a classic black romantic drama, and the psychedelic R&B of Choker’s “Collide” is just a reminder how much better Miguel would be, who is not only more talented but better suited for the task.
The soundtrack’s best songs focus on how having a partner-in-crime would bring comfort in trying times. On “Catch the Sun,” a tender Lil Baby pretty convincingly explains why he and his co-conspirator are better together. Ms. Lauryn Hill is similarly focused on the connection the journey fosters on “Guarding the Gates.” Burna Boy’s upbeat “My Money, My Baby” makes the order of its priorities clear. The outlier is the closer, literally called “Runnin’ Away,” which samples the Pharcyde’s “Runnin’”; Blood Orange makes the iconic hook the center of a noir epic.
The music of a movie like this will always have a social justice bent, and it is clumsily handled. “I’m going out with a bang, I’m tellin’ you what it is/If I get racial profiled, why live?” Lil Baby sings. On the title track, members of Coast Contra address the elephant in the room as hamfistedly as possible. “It’s gun violence, your son dyin’ for nothin’/And your daughters be suckin’ dick ‘fore they even get they first kiss,” Taj Austin raps, putting systemic violence on par with sexually active teens, while Rio Los only adds the most basic cliches. “Yo Love” engages vaguely with the source material, but Vince Staples, who has plenty of experience taking bad cops to task, would’ve been better served here playing a similar role. This soundtrack is desperately missing a song as fed-up as Killer Mike’s “Don’t Die.” Ultimately, the topic of militant policing feels glossed over. The traffic stop is the jumping-off point—for Queen and Slim’s romance, for their lives as outlaws, and for their representation as avatars for black grief and retribution. It is the axis upon which the entire movie turns, and the soundtrack’s inability to unpack that is anticlimactic.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Motown | November 30, 2019 | 6.5 | 31a7b4c4-c8c4-46f4-a784-c30186d2eb4c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Brooklyn drill artist follows up his two-year-old hit “No Suburban” with a grim and terse debut LP. | The Brooklyn drill artist follows up his two-year-old hit “No Suburban” with a grim and terse debut LP. | Sheff G: The Unluccy Luccy Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheff-g-the-unluccy-luccy-kid/ | The Unluccy Luccy Kid | Sheff G’s The Unluccy Luccy Kid comes two years after his breakout “No Suburban.” The eerie anthem found the Flatbush native convincingly adopting Brooklyn drill’s signifiers—brusque threats, lingo-filled punchlines, and a video of hoodied-up men whose ages were betrayed by their backpacks. Millions of clicks later in 2019, Sheff G is still something of an underdog: Unluccy Luccy Kid comes after Canarsie’s Pop Smoke took over the summer with “Welcome to the Party.” The spotlight’s redirection hasn’t deterred Sheff, though. The production here is cleaner, but his debut project finds him repacking his style instead of making large steps forward.
The Unluccy Luccy Kid feels more like an industry necessity than a statement. A few of its tracks can stick out on their own, like the previously released “Flows,” his bluesy collaboration with fellow Brooklynite Sleepy Hallow. But strung together, these tracks are dulled by their own repetitiveness. You’ve heard all these grievances elsewhere: We came from the struggle, don’t like fake love or snitches, and don’t pretend you shot somebody, just be yourself.
Sheff G largely avoids the introspection or detail that would give these tropes weight. He broods about being “a product of power and pain” over the funereal pianos of “Respect,” but his verses are pridefully elliptical about what that means: “Never talked what I did/Still I will never talk what I saw.” To be fair, that’s not really anybody’s business; however, Mozzy’s vivid verse on the ghostly “Menace” (“Meet me on Fourth, right by the court/None of these shooting guards play around”) has more resonance.
Sheff G largely relies on the compact, off-beat syllabic barrages that he rode on “No Suburban.” His approach works best when he’s not trying to contort that flow into singsong melodies, like the clumsy and generic “Designer.” Sleepy Hallow appears on half of the project’s tracks and does well as the choleric foil to Sheff’s bearish presence, landing many of the album’s darkest jabs (“What can they tell me about the trenches, almost lost my sense/So if my name is ever mentioned just tell the judge send a sentence,” he raps on “All My Life,” darkly humorous but dead serious).
The Unluccy Luccy Kid isn’t going to be the groundbreaker that pops the Brooklyn drill scene out of its bubble, but that’s probably how it was designed. Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow sound more engaged when they’re rapping unapologetically about street dealings. A few of drill’s artists have expressed making music mainly for the folks who walked those streets. If Unluccy Luccy Kid connects with them, hasn’t it served its purpose? | 2019-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Winners Circle / Empire | October 5, 2019 | 6.4 | 31acfbc7-a6c5-45a9-97e7-28933d301c5d | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
The collected footnotes from the Baltimore band's decade-long career plays almost as smoothly as a proper album, showing the meticulous construction behind some of Beach House’s spells. | The collected footnotes from the Baltimore band's decade-long career plays almost as smoothly as a proper album, showing the meticulous construction behind some of Beach House’s spells. | Beach House: B-Sides and Rarities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-house-b-sides-and-rarities/ | B-Sides and Rarities | With grace and skill, Beach House tend to hide the evidence of the labor put into making their albums. Traces of writing, recording, mixing, and sequencing fade in service of a holistic, cinematic experience. You don’t see the edges because Beach House wants you to feel like you’re inside of them. But on their first collection of non-album tracks, B-Sides and Rarities, the Baltimore duo expose the tight weave of their work.
It’s a testament to the band’s consistency that B-Sides and Rarities plays nearly as smoothly as a proper Beach House album, even though one of these tracks—scattered non-chronologically through an hourlong playtime—is more than a decade old. All but two songs on the compilation have been released in one form or another; the previously unheard tracks, “Chariot” and “Baseball Diamond,” are not deep cuts off a long-forgotten cutting room floor but outtakes from the band’s most recent pair of albums, 2015’s Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars.
Although those albums were released within months of each other, Beach House insisted that the latter wasn’t a footnote to the former, but a fully realized project in its own right. Here, then, are the footnotes: two songs that retain all the band’s evanescent loveliness, but don’t quite reach the euphoria of Depression Cherry’s “Sparks” or Lucky Stars’ “Somewhere Tonight.” Still, “Baseball Diamond” boasts one of Victoria Legrand’s most compelling vocal performances in years, a whisper poured through a raspy filter. She sings, “I want you to win,” and the way she crinkles the last syllable breaks open a fissure of pathos in her typically stoic alto. It’s one of the most moving dramas set on a baseball field since Rilo Kiley’s 2002 slugger “My Slumbering Heart.”
The band’s deeper listeners will likely recognize most of the 12 previously released tracks included on B-Sides and Rarities; even casual fans should know plenty of these songs. There’s an early single mix of Teen Dream’s “Used to Be”; recorded two years before the rest of the album came out, this version quickens the tempo and dampens the treble, but doesn’t quite match the scope of the glossier, fuller album take. Though it’s not quite a demo, the crunchy 2008 mix of “Used to Be” opens a porthole into Beach House’s long, slow creative process. It also exposes the delicacy of their magic: Tinker with just a few sliders, and their spell dissipates.
Two refurbished cuts from Beach House’s 2010 iTunes Session EP also indicate the band’s strength lies more in the processing of their songs than in the bare writing of them. “White Moon” and “Norway,” anemic on the original session recording, get fleshed out with extra effects and tweaked levels. “Norway” in particular takes on an especially narcotic quality compared to both the session take and the album version; gone are the bright arpeggios, replaced with a more intermittent lurch from guitarist Alex Scally.
Also collected on B-Sides are contributions to various compilations, like “Saturn Song” from 2014’s The Space Project (featuring samples recorded in actual space) and a cover of Queen’s “Play the Game” from 2009’s Red Hot charity album Dark Was the Night. Both fit neatly alongside the rest of Beach House’s miscellany; the latter especially highlights how indebted the band is not just to dream-pop giants like the frequently cited Cocteau Twins, but to classic experimental pop as a whole. Legrand’s voice slides frictionlessly up Freddie Mercury’s octave swoops, and even his lyrics sound like a natural addition to Beach House’s myriad musings on the complexities of love.
Though the majority of B-Sides and Rarities can be easily found by those inclined to find it (the piano sketch “Rain in Numbers” is a hidden track at the end of Beach House’s self-titled debut, making it not much of a B-side or a rarity), the impulse to gather up loose ends into a cohesive package feels like a solid effort at future-proofing recordings peripheral to the band’s primary discography. Many of these songs date to the era of mp3 blogs, when fans meticulously saved their libraries to their hard drives. More listeners rely on streaming now, and while many tracks here could already be streamed officially, some were only previously online due to unauthorized YouTube uploads, whose longevity is always uncertain. Beach House claim their odds and ends under an authoritative title here, improving the already great odds they’ll be around for generations. | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | July 6, 2017 | 6.9 | 31ad4ee0-1226-4394-8f87-acd88f03d8e1 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The British singer-songwriter’s third album is a singular, extraordinarily horny, and occasionally bleak pop record largely about the complexities of queer desire. | The British singer-songwriter’s third album is a singular, extraordinarily horny, and occasionally bleak pop record largely about the complexities of queer desire. | Marika Hackman: Any Human Friend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marika-hackman-any-human-friend/ | Any Human Friend | In Marika Hackman’s telling, life as a twenty-something in a major city means nights where you kiss strangers, consume substances, and stay up until it becomes light again. It also means nights where you stay inside of your apartment and talk to no one. This polarity is the basis of the British singer-songwriter’s third album, Any Human Friend, which is a singular, extraordinarily horny, and occasionally bleak pop record largely about the complexities of queer desire.
Hackman is not interested in being coy or mincing words. As a result, there is much sex to be had within the album’s 40 minutes. On “All Night,” she coos “Kissing (eating)/Fucking (moaning)” in multi-tracked harmonies while a guitar screeches atop languid synths. The snarkily titled “Hand Solo” is about, well, sex for one: “It’s all right/I’m jerking!” goes one extremely emblematic line. Jokes aside, “Hand Solo” is also about feeling lovelorn: “It’s hard to be alone,” she sings at the start, adding “I love this” moments later. You can feel the anomie creeping in as the song rides out its disaffected groove, sounding like pop rock by way of a chilled-out Annie Clark or Hélöise Letissier.
As far as straight-up pop goes, “Blow” is the closest Hackman has come. She has dipped her toe into writing big hooks before, but “Blow” is her most committed and fully realized effort, with thumping drums, a Strokesean guitar snarl, and a very Italians Do It Better synth part. It’s relatively new territory for her, and it suits her coolly unimpressed alto.
There are a few dull moments, like “Conventional Ride,” which explores how it feels to be the object of other people’s sexual curiosity. The lyrics are less cutting and sly than Hackman is capable of, especially considering how adept she can be at tackling the difficulties of being a queer woman under the straight gaze. The broad sloganeering of “The One” draws laughs and eyerolls: Hearing Hackman refer to her audience as “fuckers [that] want my dick” is a little much, and a joke about BDE being a venereal disease feels more like a tweet from the summer of 2018 than it does a line in a song, but it gets a laugh nonetheless.
Any Human Friend reaches its high point with the quietest song. “Send My Love” is not a love song, but it is about love, and what it means to be betrayed by someone you trusted. Hackman sounds totally at peace as she asks, “Did you love me tonight/Or any night of our lives?” This is the continuum that Hackman’s record lives inside: those quiet moments of reckoning with what it means to be alive, young, and cautiously enamored of it all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop / AMF | August 10, 2019 | 7.3 | 31b8c185-956f-4b80-bff3-8b420cd72889 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Inspired by its Afrobeat underpinnings, the Beninese singer tackles an album-length cover of the Talking Heads’ 1980 landmark, in the process unearthing hidden rhythmic and emotional nuances. | Inspired by its Afrobeat underpinnings, the Beninese singer tackles an album-length cover of the Talking Heads’ 1980 landmark, in the process unearthing hidden rhythmic and emotional nuances. | Angélique Kidjo: Remain in Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angelique-kidjo-remain-in-light/ | Remain in Light | Nearly 40 years on, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light remains a pinnacle of New York City rock, in part because it drew from anything but the strictures of rock‘n’roll. Instead it preferred cycling polyrhythms, mesmeric vamps, and dizzying layers and loops. But depending on which half of the band you asked, you might get a different answer as to its sources. For the rhythm section of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, the band’s newfound groove came courtesy of funk, R&B, and hip-hop (Frantz played drums on Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks”). But frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno traced the album’s inspirations to Afrobeat. It’s the latter that perked up the ears of Beninese icon Angélique Kidjo, who first encountered “Once in a Lifetime” in the early 1980s but never heard the entire album until 2016. “It might be rock‘n’roll, but there’s something African to it,” she recently told Rolling Stone about her first brush with the classic.
In taking these coastal art rockers’ nervy sound back to Africa, Kidjo also picked a pregnant moment to cover the album in its entirety: The nuclear pall of the early ’80s compares all too easily to our current predicament. Kidjo’s own track record makes her a natural for such a task, given her expansive vision of the continent’s music (to the point that she has often faced the asinine accusation that her music isn’t authentically “African”). And she has plenty of help here, from Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes, Kanye/Rihanna producer Jeff Bhasker, and the man whose cephalopod-like drumming originally inspired the album, Afrobeat legend Tony Allen. While she foregrounds the 1980 record’s latent paranoia, social disquiet, and political loathing, Kidjo also imparts a tactile sense of resilience to offset the original’s despair.
The ecstatic gush and worming electronics of “Born Under Punches” remain intact, right down to a glitch recreation of guest guitarist Adrian Belew’s arcade-on-the-fritz guitar solo from the Talking Heads recording. But it’s when Kidjo and her cohorts diverge from the source that the album’s headier moments arise. The band’s twitchy approximations of Nigerian pop polyrhythms on “Crosseyed and Painless” and “Houses in Motion” become more muscular and graceful with Allen himself behind the kit.
But the star of the set remains Kidjo. Her poised and powerful presence fleshes out nuances in Byrne’s lyrics that the precocious singer often seemed to approach cerebrally rather than feel viscerally. While he may have gleaned certain ideas about African iconography from Robert Farris Thompson’s 1979 study African Art in Motion, Kidjo has that tradition fully ingrained in her extensive body of work. As Byrne once put it to Thompson about “The Great Curve”: “You think that’s very down and earthy, but I was talking about something metaphysical.” Kidjo, on the other hand, transmogrifies the song’s refrain (“The world moves on a woman’s hips”) back to flesh and blood.
Kidjo also transforms the queasy ambience of the album’s last tracks into something resembling optimism. That dirge for a terrorist bomber, “Listening Wind,” might be the recast album’s defining moment. Against steadfast hand percussion, Kidjo assumes the role of the song’s protagonist, Mojique, while Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig sings backup in Kidjo’s native Fon. Their voices converge in the chorus into something that feels at once desperate yet emboldened, giving voice to that otherwise powerless protagonist.
Whether it’s a coincidence or a more concerted reckoning with patriarchy, this year in music is revealing a number of black (both African and African-American) female artists tackling canonical works by male musicians, many of them white men, and reframing and recasting those classic songs and albums in a manner that feels refreshing and revitalizing. Bettye LaVette breathed life into neglected numbers as well as well-worn standards from the Dylan songbook; Meshell Ndegeocello reimagined both Jam-Lewis and Prince classics so that they might be heard and felt anew. Kidjo finds her own way into these songs, infusing them with a tactile sense of empathy. Rather than echo the emptiness of a line like, “The center is missing/They question how the future lies,” her voice imparts a sense of hope, allowing in a brief glint of light. | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Kravenworks | June 14, 2018 | 7.7 | 31b8df13-a6c6-4cd8-beaa-44ce0233a7cd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
White Lung’s bracing third LP is a product of its environment, one filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem. Its staunch ideals are delivered by a compelling, relatable frontwoman and 22 vicious, compact minutes of melodic punk. | White Lung’s bracing third LP is a product of its environment, one filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem. Its staunch ideals are delivered by a compelling, relatable frontwoman and 22 vicious, compact minutes of melodic punk. | White Lung: Deep Fantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19460-white-lung-deep-fantasy/ | Deep Fantasy | White Lung aren’t subtle—but then again, neither is the doorman who assumes every woman with a band is either a groupie or the merch girl. Nor is your average comments section in response to just about any article posted about a female artist. Nor are the standards of physical beauty, relationship dynamics, and personal happiness promulgated by pop culture. Nor is drug addiction. Nor is the #notallmen hashtag. Nor is questioning Sky Ferreira about how much her breasts are responsible for her success, nor are authorities liable to ask “what were you wearing” to every accuser of sexual assault. White Lung’s bracing third LP Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, that environment being “the real world in 2014,” filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem.
So, White Lung are not subtle. But Deep Fantasy is definitely savvy, ensuring its staunch ideals are delivered by a riveting, relatable frontwoman and 22 minutes of vicious, compact musicianship and addictive melody. It’s an uncompromising feminist punk record that can be grasped by anyone who finds themselves compelled by kickass rock music and basic human decency.
The importance of White Lung’s potential reach can’t be overstated. Formative influence Courtney Love has specifically expressed hope for White Lung to “achieve some kind of mainstream success”, noting, “It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more.” It’s hard to imagine a rock band of any kind to be allowed the platform that Hole, or even less commercially fortunate acts like L7 and Babes in Toyland, could have two decades ago. However, Deep Fantasy is being put out by the same people responsible for Animal Collective, Real Estate and Arctic Monkeys records. In 2014, this is the equivalent of a major-label debut.
The result is a best case scenario retaining the accessibility that marked White Lung’s 2012 breakthrough Sorry, while amplifying the parts that translate to a bigger stage. Sorry producer Jesse Gander returns, and he did a pretty good job last time a long-overlooked Vancouver punk band had the opportunity to put everything on the line. As on Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, the sound of Deep Fantasy is not slick so much as knife-like: piercing, bright, precise and forged under a great amount of pressure.
And it leads with the sharpest part__—__opening duo “Drown With the Monster” and “Down it Goes” assumes you’ve never heard White Lung before, and they're the best and hookiest demonstrations of what they do. These are doomed, minor-key dirges sped up to the point where they become anthemic, performed at the highest possible velocity where they can still qualify as potential pop. Anticipatory guitar roars are required to take off after Anne-Marie Vassiliou's held cymbal-crash introductions and they keep pace with a rigid, doubled-up hardcore rhythm and fill-free drumming. Mish Way often inverts typical song structure, hanging high notes perilously over sludgy, drop-D chords in the verse while she takes a lower, more menacing and tense register on the choruses. Guitarist Kenneth Williams uses technical precision for texture, as harmonics and high treble flicker like sparks from a buzzsaw against metal.
It’s thrilling, and White Lung don’t do much else from that point on. Even compared to 2014’s other high-profile, high-BPM, sub-half-hour feminist punk LP, Deep Fantasy is sonically blinkered__—__there are no ballads, no ambient noise instrumentals, and the few seconds of feedback that close the album is about as close as you get to “atmosphere.” White Lung does just about one thing musically on Deep Fantasy, but it's one thing that no one else is doing right now. Though often positioned in the lineage of bands from a time when Lollapalooza was a traveling circus, White Lung are a modern creation, their kohl-streaked punk more Black Sails in the Sunset than Black Flag. Occasionally, the cohesion of Deep Fantasy can be taxing, but for the time being, this is the band taking their sound as far as it can go.
Way's lyrics can be just as condensed as the music itself, but they're more like concentrate, expanding on contact and allowing the listener to come up with their own formulation. Considering "Drown With the Monster"'s nasty snarl of a hook, some poor sap from an energy drink company might try to mindlessly co-opt it for a commercial, which is a tribute to how open-ended “Drown” is; Way struggles with an undefined addiction and never quite says whether she’s giving in, giving up, or giving herself another chance to fight. “Down It Goes” and “Snake Jaw” are likewise dense and comprehensive, touching on the threatening imbalance in sexual pursuit (“You fear my thick skin/ I’m thinking there’s a knife”), dysmorphia ("You drag me behind/ Like bitter squirming swine"), body image (“If I get fat one day, will you run away?/ I’ll starve if you promise to save me”) and disordered eating ("Here comes my dinner now/ It's for the win").
Deep Fantasy does work best as a multimedia affair; it almost certainly requires its lyric sheet to be understood, and Way’s outside writing supplements her work rather than disenfranchising the listener of their personal interpretation. At Deep Fantasy's center, there’s one song that can be effectively heard as a straightforward demonstration of self-confidence, of friendship, of support. Way explained that it’s the one written as a reaction to rape culture, and it takes on a new, demolishing power upon the realization that its title is the last thing a sexual assault accuser is likely to hear__—__“I Believe You”.
Just about every aspect of White Lung’s music is aggressive and sounds angry and invective, though “I Believe You” stresses the resonance and empathy; while Way’s philosophical and theoretical leanings might not be considered “mainstream,” it’s a compliment to Deep Fantasy to say that none of its calls for dignity, for humanity, for understanding sounds remotely radical—rather, they’re pretty fucking rational. Plenty of people with progressive tastes in politics and pop culture still could reasonably think “feminist punk” (or any political variant of any music) isn’t something they’d necessarily enjoy listening to, and while Hole sold millions of records, surely a great deal had access to their underlying message because they saw “Miss World” jammed between Live and Candlebox videos on MTV. This is principled music, not doctrine, and while inspired by its surroundings, it’s defined by its leader making bracing art. Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, as well as one hell of a survival guide to live through this. | 2014-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 17, 2014 | 8.6 | 31c02da9-ee17-42f5-a542-11282c9fce3d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This collection gathers the cloud-rap pioneer’s earliest and most seminal recordings, in danger of being lost to the digital ether. | This collection gathers the cloud-rap pioneer’s earliest and most seminal recordings, in danger of being lost to the digital ether. | Clams Casino: Instrumental Relics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clams-casino-instrumental-relics/ | Instrumental Relics | “Cloud rap” has been so absorbed into hip-hop’s identity that it’s hard to remember when it was subversive and new. The title of the latest installment in Clams Casino’s long-running beat-tape series implies that the tracks have been scavenged and preserved, like fading artifacts of a forgotten epoch. Michael Volpe wasn’t the only producer weaving ambient textures into trap beats at the start of the last decade—an era where experimental artists like Shlohmo and Evian Christ collaborated with the likes of Kanye and Drake—but few artists were linked as closely with the subgenre.
Clams’ influence on hip-hop has remained at the elemental level; his work with rappers like Lil B, A$AP Rocky, and Soulja Boy truly shifted the sonic window. Without Clams, it’s hard to imagine Yung Lean or Drain Gang, and rap’s ongoing infatuations with the alternative rock spectrum might not be so passionate either. Clams was out there sampling Thursday in 2011, and now he works alongside a new generation who would probably not be making music without his influence: Lil Peep, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Ghostemane, and Nedarb, who credits “I’m God” as the beat that made him want to start producing.
Instrumental Relics contains many of Clams’ most notable early collaborations (Soulja Boy’s “All I Need,” A$AP Rocky’s “Numb”), as well as three tracks from his Rainforest EP on the late Tri Angle records (“Treetop,” “Drowning,” “Gorilla”), an original cut from the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack (“Crystals”), and a handful of other strays. Most were previously available and have only been remastered here, but “I’m God”—the definitive Clams Casino recording—can now be officially streamed as a standalone piece of music for the very first time. The instrumental’s unforgettable sample has gone from an unapproved flip to a full-fledged feature, with Imogen Heap credited alongside Clams Casino.
“I’m God” was instantly iconic, immediately imitated, and impossible to recreate. Like Clams’ most haunting work, it decays and disintegrates inside your eardrum, more like a Burial composition than what you’d normally expect to hear Soulja Boy rapping over—the kind of thing I wish Mark Fisher had gotten to write about. For all its innovation and ethereality, there’s something timeless about “I’m God,” with drum programming that skews more boom-bap than trap, betraying Clams’ roots in New Jersey and his love of the East Coast’s classics — one of his first collaborations was with Havoc of Mobb Deep.
Clams Casino emerged around the same time as witch house, a phenomenon his ectoplasm-laced compositions were often linked to. There’s no smeared eyeliner or guest appearances from Robert Smith, but it’s easy to see Clams as a slightly more uptempo kin to Salem and Pictureplane, not just in the general chilliness of his sound, but in the strong gothic undertone to his early work—that aesthetic sense of haute morbidity is maybe most evident on “Unchain Me,” an instrumental from Lil B’s I’m Gay (I’m Happy) that flips “Cry Little Sister,” Gerard McMann’s theme from The Lost Boys. Clams erodes vocals with waves of reverb and decay, like choirs crying with their mouths sewn shut, but the sample here sings out with a euphoric clarity.
On his most distinctive tracks, Clams utterly destroys the human voice — fragments of human speech frozen into glass panes, fractured with echo and PaulStretch, and played backwards before being reverbed into oblivion. Clams’ approach to sampling is really only one degree away from the contemporaneous Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, a similar experiment in a more genre-friendly package. The sample on “Motivation” is like a found-footage videotape, an inscrutable object drenched in snow and noise. There were words there once, but they’ve been manipulated into a murky pool of pure texture. I know that I could go to WhoSampled and very easily found out the source of those haunting vibrations, but I’d rather entertain the mystery.
As the 2010s recede, it’s increasingly apparent that some of the last decade’s most influential rap music was incompatible with the decade’s most significant shift in music technology: the advent of an endless stream of digital music that can only be accessed and never owned, a gated and guarded community that only so much inventiveness and copyright infringement can slip through. The history of hip-hop’s blog years is written in dead Mediafire links, removed MySpace pages, and uncleared samples. It’s heartbreaking to consider how many SpaceGhostPurrp loosies have been lost to virtual erosion, how much Playboi Carti music vanished when he became a label-sanctioned star and management AstroTurfed his online presence, how nobody remembers who Main Attrakionz are anymore. Beyond the sound itself, Instrumental Relics is vital because it ensures, at least for now, that these instrumentals won’t become relics. | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Clams Casino Productions | May 6, 2020 | 8 | 31c51253-de26-458a-9ce6-116a05df459b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
A woozy dynamic of pushing people away while simultaneously drawing them close courses throughout Lavender, a striking album of beautifully rendered and deeply layered synth-pop. | A woozy dynamic of pushing people away while simultaneously drawing them close courses throughout Lavender, a striking album of beautifully rendered and deeply layered synth-pop. | Half Waif: Lavender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/half-waif-lavender/ | Lavender | Because Nandi Rose Plunkett is so generous with her voice it can be easy to overlook the complex systems of beats and instruments layered behind it. An album about love, familial legacy, and the inevitable decay of human life, Lavender maintains an aversion to linear time. Plunkett’s grandmother, who was near the end of her life when Lavender was recorded and has died since, stirs the titular flower in a pot on the stove and walks through her garden; Plunkett is carried in her mother’s arms like a child; a relationship with a lover appears cross-sectioned in the now, all its conflicts and joys open to the light. Past and future converge on this album, which so badly seeks resolution to the stories in which human beings perpetually ensnare themselves, and so deeply knows that these stories have no ends.
The recursion Plunkett finds when she looks back at her family and forward into her own relationships manifests itself in the album’s instrumental loops and persistent choruses. Its crown jewel, “Silt,” climaxes with a lyric Plunkett sings over and over, each time more urgently. “If you’d only give me what I wanted,” she repeats, stretching the “me” out in the back of her throat to turn the words into a demand, while a shuffling backbeat whips the song into a frenzy. The effect is similar to what happens when Björk lacerates her vowels; it’s as if the voice has to break because it cannot contain the feeling put into it. Earlier in the song, Plunkett deploys a different vocal strategy: She runs a distant-sounding backup vocal through Auto-Tune, depleting her own voice of the nuance it can convey. The overdriven primary vocal and the diluted backing vocal mirror the duality she traces in her lyrics, where she sings, with a note of apology, “Nobody deserves me/I get lonely/I get angry.” Self-effacement and desire compete for space—Plunkett shrinks herself and then explodes herself, awash in what she wants and ultimately unafraid to ask for it.
That dynamic, of pushing people away while simultaneously drawing them close, courses throughout Lavender, Plunkett’s third album as Half Waif. It’s a central paradox of intimacy: No matter how much you’d like to dissolve yourself in someone’s love, you still have to return to the isolated body you’re forced to call home. Among these songs, Plunkett finds herself in opposition to those she cares about most at the same time she wants to unify with them. It’s not an irrational roadblock; it’s just a particular condition of being alive.
Beneath her words, Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism. The jittery synth line on “Lilac House” juts into her percussive delivery, a subtle guitar riff pulses under her searching vocal melody on “Keep It Out,” and even the comparatively straightforward piano ballad “Back in Brooklyn” echoes the lyrics’ feeling of placelessness in the way Plunkett’s hands wander restlessly across the keys. Her voice dips in and out of its surroundings, and the surroundings reinforce the voice—the more you listen, the more they blend together as one. The courage necessary for making an album this emotionally raw bleeds into both the words Plunkett sings and the adventurous, far-reaching melodies through which she sings them.
Through its weighty discussions of desire and love and the impossibility of complete resolution in any relationship, Lavender cracks open a sense of freedom. It would be easy to get bogged down in these subjects, to give up, to make the album a monument to despair. Instead, Plunkett finds momentum in her songs, as if naming and dissecting the finer points of loving people somehow lifted its weight. There comes a point where you realize that devoting yourself to someone will lead to the suffering of one kind or another, and yet you surrender to it anyway. Lavender hits upon that moment of surrender, holding its strange alchemy up to glitter in the light. | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cascine | April 25, 2018 | 7.8 | 31c8e332-b7bc-4553-b580-c856e4feedf7 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Led by the poet and musician Moor Mother, the jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface. | Led by the poet and musician Moor Mother, the jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface. | Irreversible Entanglements: Who Sent You? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/irreversible-entanglements-who-sent-you/ | Who Sent You? | Working as Moor Mother, the Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa styles her music for sensory overload. Compressing hip-hop, punk, industrial, electronic, and noise music into a siren blare, she thrusts hundreds of years of brutal injustices in our faces, as if hoping to cram as much information through as small an opening as possible. The brevity of her songs often reflects this exigency: In discussing the throttling 83 seconds of “Deadbeat Protest” (from her 2016 album Fetish Bones) during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Ayewa said such brevity was “to get all the information in a short amount of time.”
As a member of the jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, Ayewa’s approach to time has shifted. Within the expanse of the form, she knows she can convey the same urgent information at a much slower pace, allowing the group—horn players Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Tcheser Holmes—to elevate her into new places. She picks her spots within the music accordingly, punctuating each of the album’s five expansive compositions.
Space defines the album, the band evoking our American topography, both physically and psychologically, capturing what’s in the news and what’s been repressed underneath that surface. At times, their 2017 debut album felt like a travelogue, and “The Code Noir/ Amina” continues that trajectory, with Ayewa evoking the Deep South, Holy Hill, and South Carolina. Whereas a Moor Mother song would typically clock out well before the two-minute mark, here she’s only just getting started by then, conveying a stunning image of scorched earth: “A mountain ain’t nothin but a tombstone for fire.” Stewart’s bass and Holmes’ drums keep everything at a rolling boil as the horn lines rove, expand, and Ayewa’s focus widens. She speaks of the void, the African ancestors who actually built America and died nameless, then asks: “At what point do we give a shit, do we stand up and say something?”
That’s not the only question she asks. The 15-minute title track begins by interrogating a beat cop, then expands to “stop and frisk” policies in general, and ultimately encompasses the sense that for most communities of color, the local police department is an occupying force at best. Ayewa, Neuringer, and Stewart first played together at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organized after the NYPD shot and killed Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley, and as the band roars toward a furious climax, they even invoke Gurley’s name. Yet right at the peak, Ayewa’s voice vanishes and everything drops away to near-silence. Spare horn lines rise and evoke the eerie space of electric Miles, the mood changed entirely. Five minutes pass before she’s heard again, her voice contemplative now, speaking of a brief feeling of freedom that “tasted so good,” a joy measured in gasps.
Perhaps the group’s most remarkable attribute is that while anger is ever-present, the fury is tempered, the music focused and controlled. As Ayewa’s inquisitive gaze turns inward on the sinewy Latin-tinged groove of “No Mas,” she remains resolved “to love ourselves fully.” Built from a walking bassline and clanging hand percussion, “Bread Out of Stone” never rises above a simmer to convey the message of resilience in the face of oppression. The shrieking, flailing properties of free jazz are often interpreted as unbridled anger, rising as it did during the heights of the Civil Rights era and inner-city unrest. And while Irreversible Entanglements draws on that tradition, they aren’t merely mimicking an older version of jazz. They are making it resonate now, emphasizing it as a music of ritual, much like Ayewa’s other loves, like gospel and blues. It conveys all of the urgency of her raw, earlier work now across a greater vista, untethered by time yet wholly in the present.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem / Don Giovanni | March 25, 2020 | 7.9 | 31c90c77-bcfd-4d38-97c9-f70cdea68c46 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5e7115dc4b101700083a93d7/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/Who%20Sent%20You?_Irreversible%20Entanglements.jpg |
On their debut, the art-punk legends had already arrived at the tunefully agitated sound they’d carry through their career, but weren’t yet attempting to craft a major statement. | On their debut, the art-punk legends had already arrived at the tunefully agitated sound they’d carry through their career, but weren’t yet attempting to craft a major statement. | Talking Heads: Talking Heads 77 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-talking-heads-77/ | Talking Heads 77 | Contrary to the way they sounded, Talking Heads were not in a hurry. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz had no particular plan to play music together when they moved to New York City after the dissolution of Frantz and Byrne’s band back in Providence, where all three had attended the Rhode Island School of Design. That lasted until Frantz and Weymouth saw the Ramones at CBGB shortly after they arrived—the kind of downtown show a couple of broke art-school graduates might wander into in late 1974. Still buzzing, Frantz, the drummer, convinced Byrne, the singer-guitarist, to give it another go. But they didn’t have a bassist in New York, and they couldn’t find one they liked.
Rather than settle and start playing shows quickly, they decided that Weymouth could do it—never mind that she’d never touched a bass before. She bought one on layaway and set about learning, listening to records by pioneering hard rocker Suzi Quatro and receiving occasional words of encouragement from free jazz legend Don Cherry, who happened to live in the same building, down the street from CBGB, where the newly minted trio rented a loft for $250 a month. Talking Heads practiced for six months before they were ready for their first gig: at CB’s, in June 1975, opening for the Ramones. Another two years passed before they recorded and released their debut album. They had a big future ahead of them. Why rush?
During those two years, they developed their music and career carefully. They added a fourth member in keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison, formerly of the Modern Lovers, to fill out their spindly early sound. They turned down one record deal, always waiting for the right fit. They immersed themselves in the profuse richness of music and art that New York made available at the time: dancing to disco and salsa, rubbing elbows with avant-garde improvisers like Cherry and composers like Philip Glass, jamming with Arthur Russell, who almost got Harrison’s seat in the final lineup. And they brought it all with them as they clawed their way to the center of the new thing called punk rock that was happening at CBGB.
Talking Heads 77 feels both like the culmination of the band’s days as downtown New York darlings and the primordial origin of their late-’70s-early-’80s masterpieces. They were already accomplished enough that Rolling Stone opened its review by noting how long they’d taken to record an album, and Talking Heads 77 shows it, expressing an arch, agitated, and abundantly tuneful sensibility belonging entirely to them. If they had gone the way of their less durable CB’s scene peers—say, the Dictators, or the Shirts—and broken up soon after, it might have been viewed as a one-and-done record collector classic today. But they didn’t. Alongside its ingenuity, Talking Heads 77 also exists as a mere glimmer of potential, a fascinating prelude to a few of the most visionary albums ever recorded.
The band’s curiously multivalent relationship with pop music was already being negotiated. Across 11 songs, Talking Heads aspire to pop’s communal uplift while also creating distance from the genuine article. A few seconds into “Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town”— cymbal crashes, four chords ascending toward frenzy, the rhythm locking in—and we’ve arrived indisputably at the Talking Heads sound. Frantz plays like an R&B session drummer with a gun held to his head, just a little too edgy and insistent. Weymouth is bouncy and melodic, with no trace of a beginner’s tentativeness. A gleeful steel pan solo appears from nowhere, an early sign of the band’s disinterest in rock orthodoxy. Byrne yelps, proclaims, and carries on conversations with himself.
As he would again and again, he addresses human connection in the stilted language of an atomized and impersonal society. He frets that falling in love might cause him to “neglect my duties,” as a stockbroker might make a bad investment—so concerned with performing his role that love becomes an incursion, an obstacle toward getting work done. Crucially, however, “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” is not black-witted satire. It may be a postmodern send-up of a love song, but it’s also a love song. The rhythm section does a stiff imitation of the Funk Brothers, but they still lay down a pretty good groove for dancing. Parsing the blend of sincerity and irony in any Talking Heads song is difficult, but you never doubt their belief in the music.
For New York, 1977 was a difficult year—economic freefall, neighborhoods ravaged by arson fires, a blackout that threw the city briefly into anarchy, the shadow of a serial killer who stalked the outer boroughs the summer before—and Talking Heads 77 occasionally embodies that darkness. “Psycho Killer,” the catchiest song ever written about a sociopathic murderer, is more disquieting in footage of an early CBGB performance than it is on record, where it evolved into a campy performance of violence, turning the killer’s chilling laughter into a goofy refrain.
“No Compassion” is more mundane, and more menacing because of it, with a narrator who calmly rationalizes his own refusal to empathize with anyone. Opening with an uncharacteristically hard-rocking riff and lurching between two drastically different tempos, it feels like a last vestige of affinity with the punk scene’s heavier and more nihilistic tendencies. Still, its message probably shouldn’t be taken at face value. “So many people have their problems/I’m not interested in their problems,” Byrne moans at one point, a rich sentiment coming from a guy beset by problems on all sides and eager to tell you about it, whose response to the joys of new love is a resounding “uh oh.”
These moments of intensity arise as occasional spasms across an otherwise upbeat and approachable album. At times, Talking Heads ‘77 seems to leapfrog the stormy minimalism the band would pursue across the trio of Brian Eno collaborations that followed this album, and instead offer a budget approximation of the pancultural dance party they threw on 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. Talking Heads ‘77 abounds with ecstatic rhythms and bright sonic details: a honky-tonk piano disguised as a disco bassline on “The Book I Read”; mallets and Latin percussion building toward a sultry sax refrain on “First Week / Last Week … Carefree”; a toylike synthesizer on “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song whose cheeriness in the face of alienation is both heartening and unsettling. The Talking Heads of ‘77 come off like enthusiastic collagists rather than master sculptors: these sounds are thrilling on their own, but they don’t always cohere with the holism of later albums.
On “Tentative Decisions,” Byrne engages in a one-man call-and-response, switching between his usual whine and a cartoonishly stentorian low register, simulating the interplay of lead and backing vocalists on any number of old pop and soul records. This was a new kind of self-awareness for rock bands, who by the mid-’70s were steeped in decades of pop history, and anxiously searching for their own place within it. Talking Heads articulated that self-awareness without ever sounding smug or lapsing into parody, twisting pop’s stock gestures into new shapes while maintaining their core musical appeal. It was a feat no one had accomplished in quite the same way before them, and no one would repeat in quite the same way. No one except the Talking Heads, that is: Byrne would closely replicate the “Tentative Decisions” vocal arrangement on the chorus of “Slippery People,” from Speaking in Tongues. But by 1983, he had an actual chorus of slick-sounding backing singers—the distance between Talking Heads and the rest of the world growing smaller, but never collapsing entirely.
After its tense final chorus, “Tentative Decisions” explodes into the most jubilant stretch of music on Talking Heads ‘77, an instrumental coda with a four-on-the-floor drumbeat, congas tapping at the edges, and high-stepping piano from Harrison—all of it repeating with minimal variation as the song fades out. More than anything, it sounds like house music, a genre that wouldn’t come along for a few years, but would eventually leave a seismic imprint on pop. Talking Heads stumble into the resemblance on “Tentative Decisions,” and stumble quickly out of it. Still, in 1977, they didn’t need to rush toward the future. They were already there. | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | April 23, 2020 | 8.6 | 31cda65e-c5dc-4dea-966f-2dbb5ab2317f | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On Night Thoughts, Suede delivery a sweeping semi-concept album about addiction and desire. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled. | On Night Thoughts, Suede delivery a sweeping semi-concept album about addiction and desire. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled. | Suede: Night Thoughts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21417-night-thoughts/ | Night Thoughts | Blackstar isn’t the only album released this month to take on added poignancy in the wake of David Bowie’s passing. Suede are releasing a new album mere weeks after Bowie did the same—just like in March 2013, when both parties released comeback records following decade-long hiatuses. And while the timing may be purely coincidental, it’s an uncanny circumstance for a band that, throughout the '90s, provided the most resounding reminder of Bowie’s early-'70s supremacy, and helped rehabilitate his rep amidst a career nadir for a new generation of pretty things. Listening to Night Thoughts now is like hearing a eulogy from a favorite son—from its quasi-conceptual structure to its stardust-speckled guitar riffage to its abundance of misfit anthems and concert hall-crumbling ballads, the record is a testament to Bowie’s steely determination to make every song a seismic event.
That said, Suede are like the faithful scions who inherited the old family home, but didn't do much redecoration. They never shared their godhead’s flair for radical reinvention and experimentation; their discography effectively imagines an alternate 1975 where Bowie never went to Philly and continued to mine the dark majesty of the Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs era on through the '80s. The parameters of their sound were pretty much set with their first two albums—1993’s snappy, scrappy self-titled debut and 1994’s darkly ornate Dog Man Star—and the records that followed slid back and forth between those extremes. Bloodsports, their laudable 2013 return effort, hedged its bets by positioning itself smack dab in the middle of that spectrum, with the album’s invigorating first side balanced by a weightier second act. Their comeback now assured and their bravado fully restored, with Night Thoughts, Suede once again leap up off the dancefloor to swing from the chandeliers.
Night Thoughts isn’t a rock opera per se, though it gamely assumes the form of one. Several songs bleed into one another through swirling interstitials; the opening track is reprised in the penultimate position, Sgt. Pepper’s-style; and it sounds like at least half the recording budget was spent on the orchestra. It’s also accompanied by a fitfully bleak feature-length film (directed by NME photographer/Libertines documentarian Roger Sargent) that shows a drowning man’s reminiscences about the familial tragedy that’s driven him to commit suicide in the sea. (The band previewed the album last fall with front-to-back live performances synced up to the film.) But the songs themselves don’t actually form a linear narrative arc, reference specific characters, or directly correlate to the visuals. They’re more discrete portraits of passion, ostracization, betrayal, and depression—hardly uncharted territory for a Suede record. But the sheer, fetishistic intensity with which Brett Anderson delivers his lascivious lyrics—coupled with the balcony-baiting, pomped-up performance of the band—makes the wounds feel newly opened and the bruises freshly pressed.
That Night Thoughts’ cinematic companion piece centers around the story of an unglamorous middle-class family—rather than, say, the freakish, fashionable deviants that populate the band’s signature songs—underscores an essential truth about Suede today: They are no longer young people, and no longer speaking for them. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled. Night Thoughts is framed by the opening "When You Are Young" and its late-album echo "When You Were Young"—shore-crashing surges of symphonic psychedelia that dissipate into Anderson’s rueful ruminations about the idealism of youth and the impossibility of recapturing it. While the album’s title may hint at seedy suggestion, Night Thoughts is more about those traumatic, sleep-depriving memories that have you tossing and turning and "tumbling out of a single bed."
It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else). The titles tell you exactly what you’re getting yourself into—"I Don’t Know How to Reach You," "What I’m Trying to Tell You," "Tightrope," "I Can’t Give Her What She Wants"—each song more desperate and depraved than the one before, culminating in the latter’s intimations of violence ("The keys are falling from her coat/ As I weave my fingers around her perfumed throat"). Though a master of evocative detail, Anderson doesn't care much for narrative exposition—rather than set a scene, he prefers to thrust you into the thick of the moment where it’s all about to fall apart. And depending on your disposition, Night Thoughts concludes with either with a happy ending, or a dispiriting one. The swashbuckling, orchestro-ballad finale, "The Fur & the Feathers," finds Anderson valorizing "the thrill of the chase"—an optimistic suggestion that even the most bitter, agonizing breakup can’t diminish the rush of romance, or the brazen affirmation of a damaging, heart-ravaging habit that’ll inevitably lead to more sleepless nights. For the sake of Suede’s ongoing renaissance, let’s hope it’s the latter. | 2016-01-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Suede Limited | January 20, 2016 | 7.5 | 31ce3f72-1984-47f3-b6a9-b951c90cb265 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Chock full of woozy sing-alongs and pulsing ballads, Brendan Canning's debut solo album suggests he's just as responsible for Broken Social Scene's life-affirming guitar pop as Kevin Drew. | Chock full of woozy sing-alongs and pulsing ballads, Brendan Canning's debut solo album suggests he's just as responsible for Broken Social Scene's life-affirming guitar pop as Kevin Drew. | Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning: Something For All of Us… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12013-something-for-all-of-us/ | Something For All of Us… | As the chief songwriter and vocalist for Broken Social Scene, it seemed reasonable to expect Kevin Drew's solo debut, Spirit If..., to sound quite a bit like a BSS record. The first volume of Arts & Craft's Broken Social Scene Presents series, Spirit If... even flaunted its affiliations and similarities. Bassist Brendan Canning's record, Something for All of Us, seemed a surer bet to follow the trend set by the side projects of Andrew Whiteman (Apostle of Hustle) and Jason Collett: elaborating on themes and sounds given secondary status on BSS albums. Instead Something, chock-full of woozy sing-alongs and pulsing ballads, suggests that Canning is just as responsible for BSS's life-affirming guitar pop as Drew.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise-- Canning, with Drew, was a founding member of BSS. But even playing in a band that sits dead-center in the underground rock sound spectrum, splitting the difference between pop/rock, noise/tunes, jam/punk, Canning seems like the median. After toiling for the mostly forgotten By Divine Right, he had his spotlight-turn on You Forgot It In People's "Stars and Sons". Since then, he has seemed content to work quietly as the band's melodic gut, counting out orbital, song-serving basslines. Canning-- curly locks, rimmed glasses, professorly beard-- even looks the part of MOR rock daddy. But you can hear Canning on Something; hear his clockwork eighth-notes on the can't-stand-still post-rock of "All the Best Wooden Toys Come from Germany"; hear his propulsive under-thrum during bangers like "Hit the Wall" and "Possible Grenade"; hear him even as Something credits Drew and BSS drummer Justin Peroff (as well BSS contributor Lisa Lobsinger, on vocals) as major contributors.
Something is a Broken Social Scene Presents release, and the group does do a good job showing off and helping along Canning: from the cover, which cartoonishly features Drew, Peroff, and Whiteman, among others, to the familiar, rippling horn of James Shaw or Drew's buddying up on the choruses, his recognizable pipes mixed graciously low. Drew, a more unique singer and stronger writer than Canning, was also more likely to lapse into bullshit poetry or break out J Mascis as indie bling. Canning doesn't strut or preen nearly as well, but he is patient, good-natured, and seemingly in love with slip'n'slide guitar rave-ups.
Something is far from exact in its arrangements and structure; where Galaxie 500 smoothed over many of the distinguishing points of the Velvet Underground, Canning takes his six-string terrycloth and spreads around any number of mid-1990s guitar rockers. "Churches Under the Stairs" is the simplest brand of alt-rock-- throbbing bass, lots of tom hits, and two guitars splashing in a kiddie-pool of distortion. Lobsinger's honeyed exhalations turn the rolling piano chords of "Antique Bull" into a fulfillingy forgettable Breeders song. "Chameleon" morphs a little, sure, but you'll know exactly where it is at all times, a lilting drone followed by martial percussion and tentative trumpets before the tempo picks up and the group chorus-- inevitable from the very first moments-- gets its fingers deep into some of that feel good: "You/ You can throw your arms up/ You/ You can be at ease/ Stick to things that remind you/ Of where you used to be." There's little risk-taking, but Canning is more than capable of the high-pitched acoustic balladeering of "Snowballs and Icicles" or the red-eared, last dance crawl of "Been at It So Long".
Something succeeds because Canning knows his strengths, or perhaps because his strengths aren't particularly volatile (see Drew, Kevin), but when he tries to carve out too ripe a melody-- the repeated choruses of "You bet your life boy" on the title track grow stale-- he sounds a bit out of his league. There's little defense for the blockheaded funk-rock of "Love Is New" which wonders-- for four full minutes-- what Girls Against Boys might've sounded like sober. Mostly, Something lives up to its everyman title by removing the truly heart-pounding moments of a BSS record and replacing them with a sense of community, easy friendship, and a kickass guitar pedal collection. | 2008-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Virgin | July 18, 2008 | 7.5 | 31d966c7-1c79-4a4f-9db6-0ee7f4c6a3de | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Leyland Kirby has a prolific work ethic, and his latest releases are certainly evidence of that: a culling of material from his 20-hour long The Death of Rave album as V/Vm, and a three-hour album under his own name that closely resembles his work as the Caretaker. | Leyland Kirby has a prolific work ethic, and his latest releases are certainly evidence of that: a culling of material from his 20-hour long The Death of Rave album as V/Vm, and a three-hour album under his own name that closely resembles his work as the Caretaker. | Leyland Kirby Presents V/Vm / Leyland Kirby: The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback) / We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19385-leyland-kirby-presents-vvm-leyland-kirby-the-death-of-rave-a-partial-flashback-we-drink-to-forget-the-coming-storm/ | The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback) / We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm | At the onset of 2006, the sound collagist Leyland Kirby started a project called VVMT365 that entailed releasing one new track every day for an entire year. He finished with 602, and this was in addition to three albums as V/Vm and one as the Caretaker. One of those albums, V/Vm's The Death of Rave, was 20 hours long. Calling Kirby's ethic "prolific" stretches the word too thin. Keeping up with his catalog is like watching the wheels of a car accelerate: It makes sense for a second, but quickly becomes a blur.
Kirby's music is cloudy and abstract, but the concepts behind it are clear enough to put on a sandwich board. Rave, part of which has just been remastered and released in physical formats, is based on old techno tracks slowed down and blown out to the point of sounding like ambience. Admittedly, I wouldn't have had any clue that this was the case without Kirby's direction, which is to say that there are times when his concepts lead me into thinking about the music in a way that the music wouldn't on its own. (Kirby, who seems like a thoughtful guy but never presents himself as academic, would probably say that context is interesting but doesn't mean much unless you get some emotional use-value from the music itself.)
Rave is hollow music, with the weight and presence of an empty room. Most of its sounds don't start or stop so much as they bleed in from some unseen edge. Little changes, and when change is present, it's gradual. Even when something threatens to happen—and Rave is music of constant, if subtle, threat—Kirby holds back. In 2014, the idea of music based on salvaging the decaying and half-remembered strains of anything feels ironically old-hat, but in 2006, it was new, so Kirby was a pioneer, as were Ariel Pink and Burial. Even as new releases, their albums had the grain and anonymity of a relic, like something made before being abandoned and left out to rust.
It makes sense that Kirby has always favored longer projects with little discernible rise or fall: His music is more an environment than an experience. Even my favorite stand-alone albums of his—Eager to Tear Apart the Stars and the Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World—are things I usually play on loop, three and four times over. They recede into the background, less the object you focus your eyes on than the tint of the glasses you're wearing.
"In the past, I've done stuff and just thrown it out there, like the 365 project, but in the end it was too big," Kirby told Resident Advisor in 2009. "No one really noticed it." His reformation has been marginal. Earlier this month, he uploaded a new album to his Bandcamp page called We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm. The project was in part to celebrate his 40th birthday. It is three hours long.
Kirby's albums as the Caretaker—much of which sounds like early romantic composition or old ballroom jazz trapped in amber and playing from some distant room—have always been more legible to me than his other projects, and more heartfelt too. As the vandalistic aggression of V/Vm mellowed it left him with nothing but sentiment: tenderness, beauty, the saturation of a moment fully lived. Normally, Caretaker music is based on loops of old 78 RPM records; We Drink, which bears cosmic resemblance to that project, is mostly piano, digital strings and synthesizer choir—a less grainy sound than some of his others, but no less static or removed.
Kirby tells a funny story about how surprised his friends were to hear how melancholy Caretaker music was since Kirby always seemed to be out partying. But like a night at the bar that transcends banality and expectation, there's something about the Caretaker's and Kirby's music that often feels perfect but impossibly distant—the kind of moment you know you can never recall clearly but know you want to relive. Like so many of his albums, he gave away We Drink for free, but noted the suggested price of a birthday whisky. | 2014-05-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | null | May 23, 2014 | 7.1 | 31dbdb89-ffeb-4bdc-8bae-728a423571fa | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
This five-disc set, which includes concert footage, B-sides, and demos, delivers what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery. | This five-disc set, which includes concert footage, B-sides, and demos, delivers what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery. | Prince: 1999 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-1999/ | 1999 | It does not require a particularly close reading to see 1999 as a text about partying in spite of looming disaster, or even to stave it off. There’s that coda to “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” (“You and I know we gotta die someday” sandwiched between one lyric about giving yourself to God and another pledging to “have fun every motherfucking night”); there’s the title track, which opens the album by signaling that the whole thing might be a fever dream, and ends with Lisa Coleman cooing, “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?” It might have been tempting, in 1982, to see Prince’s experiments with synthesizers and programmed drums to be of a piece with these anxieties, emerging sounds turned against emerging fears. It might be tempting, now, to let those once cutting-edge technologies—which now read as obvious date markers—cast those same anxieties as relics of a far-off era.
But those competing threads that Prince drew out so well—a smirking nihilism and a kind of empathy that posits lust and humanism as the same thing—have never disappeared from pop music, and his ability to marshal the Reagan years and the LM-1 for his own purposes, the way he had already done with the tropes of rock and funk, has rarely been replicated, before or after the Berlin Wall came down. And so 1999, which is now being reissued by Warner Records as part of a five-disc set that also includes B-sides, demos, unreleased songs, and concert footage, is the rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.
The album proper sounds, as it always has, like a computer breathing. (The songs have been remastered, and while they sound rich and clear on car speakers and in headphones, it feels beside the point to listen to “D.M.S.R.” out of anything but the nearly-blown monitors inside an overheated First Avenue.) Even a massive, mainstream hit like “Little Red Corvette”—the first Prince song that charted higher on Billboard’s pop chart than the R&B one—begins as if it’s climbing out of a digital muck. “Delirious” sounds like it comes from a very sexual lab experiment that went exactly according to plan. The music is unfailingly funky while still remarkably controlled, precise in the way that a purposefully askew movie prop is precise.
And still, 1999 sprawls: ten of its 11 songs clock longer than five minutes, spiraling outward or, in the case of “Automatic,” locking into a long groove that asks, as we all have at one time or another, ‘What if the aliens fuck?’ It is exploratory without ever becoming impenetrable, “indulgent” but never boring. There is as always the tonal slipperiness that makes Prince’s music so rich to revisit: All the in-jokes and scathing subliminals of “All the Critics Love U In New York” come just two tracks after “Free,” which is marked by disarmingly sincere patriotism. Of course, there’s only one utterance of the word “sincere” on the album: “I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth.”
The demos, alternate takes, and edits of 1999 album tracks, which are mostly confined to this set’s second disc, almost invariably give the impression that Prince and his bandmates arrived at the correct stopping point when assembling the final version of the record. But this reissue includes a number of truly essential B-sides from the album’s rollout, like the tender, piano-only “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore?” and the brief, buoyant “Horny Toad.” (Devoted fans will recognize songs like the stuttering “Purple Music,” which was included in live sets for years and has been floating around in various forms since the ‘90s; it also features “Moonbeam Levels,” which was first released on the posthumous greatest-hits album 4Ever.)
The final disc of the set, the audio from a concert that took place on November 30, 1982 in Detroit, is brimming with the energy that Prince routinely brought to stage. (Also included is a DVD of a show from a month later, in Houston.) And while there are more of those edits and alternate versions than almost any fan will want to wade through, some of these completely (or mostly) unheard songs, like the shimmering “Money Don’t Grow on Trees” or “Rearrange,” which cleverly juxtaposes a playful vocal with a serrated electric guitar, deliver what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery, the feeling that a genuinely great song is, at last, free.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | December 2, 2019 | 10 | 31debc86-54fb-4380-86a8-e59c45dd6dd8 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Producer Arthur Rizk’s band plays heavy metal in the traditional sense: catchy, operatic choruses and chugging riffs that you only need to hear once before you can air-guitar along. | Producer Arthur Rizk’s band plays heavy metal in the traditional sense: catchy, operatic choruses and chugging riffs that you only need to hear once before you can air-guitar along. | Sumerlands: Dreamkiller | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sumerlands-dreamkiller/ | Dreamkiller | Dreamkiller plays like the training montage soundtrack in an imaginary 1980s film where an unlikely, tormented protagonist faces terrible odds beneath a sky constantly on the verge of biblical rain. If this seems an oddly specific setting for a 35-minute metal album in 2022, then remember that Sumerlands is led by Arthur Rizk, the Philadelphia-based producer who’s had a hand in setting the atmosphere for many of the past decade’s most crucial heavy releases. With Sumerlands, he uses this gift for meticulous scene-setting to explore a very particular fantasy, building a dreamworld real enough to live inside.
This is heavy metal in the traditional sense: The songs have catchy, operatic choruses and chugging riffs that you only need to hear once before you can air-guitar along, all presented with a high-quality gloss so it doesn’t take much to imagine them blasting from the speakers in an arena. “We dance on the edge of a knife/So much closer to death than to life,” the quintet’s new vocalist Brendan Radigan commands in one of the record’s best choruses, with absolutely no context for why our situation is so urgent or precarious. And yet we know exactly what he’s talking about: In fact, we are right there with him—dancing, raging, defying mortality.
Accordingly, the pleasure of this music is somewhat counterintuitive to usual metrics of good taste. Between Rizk and guitarist John Powers, there is an unspoken agreement: Why let one note of a solo ring when you can embellish it with a ton of little hammer-ons? Why say “I’m feeling sad” when you could say “The stars have freed a million sorrows to the winds”? Should Radigan’s voice—a sharp blast of autumn wind, soaring through desert plains—be presented organically to showcase his natural talent? Not even remotely: It must be coated in unearthly effects so that when he harmonizes with himself it sounds like a keyboard on the church organ setting. Does a song called “Force of a Storm” that incorporates imagery of a “tempest” and “shelter lost” and people “cast into the fray” get the message across? Not without thunder sound effects to really seal the deal.
In other words, subtlety is not the goal. The musicianship is meant to inspire awe at the uncanny, studio-tweaked precision, and the words are meant to summon vast, eternal feelings. Innovation is not the point either. The familiarity and immediacy of the music are crucial to its appeal. At the same time, what other recent record sounds like this? Dreamkiller is too inspired, too heartfelt, to be filed away as mere pastiche. Compared to the doomier, Sabbath-indebted haze of 2016’s self-titled debut, Dreamkiller adopts a warmer tone, closer to classic rock. If the pleasure of Sumerlands was imagining the sound of some rejected demo tape unearthed in an old metalhead’s basement, then Dreamkiller aspires toward a kind of bargain-bin ubiquity. Songs like “Edge of a Knife” and “Twilight Points the Way” could have been hits in another era—singalongs for football stadiums, uniting the dorks and jocks in the bleachers.
Despite the big picture drama, Rizk uniquely understands the importance of nuance. Crucial choices in the production and arrangements keep the songs’ balance of ridiculousness and craftsmanship at an optimal level. Rizk has a Stratocasters Only rule in the studio (fed through Marshall stacks) but even those uninterested in the associated gear will note how joyfully each element blends into the mix: how the woozy, fiery solo hits three and a half minutes into the title track, or how the fade-in riff of “Night Ride” signals an evening filled with danger and adventure. On any given listen, any of these moments could feel like the climax. It’s a record built to be replayed, transforming us all into the leads in the action movie playing on loop somewhere deep in our subconscious. | 2022-10-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 5, 2022 | 7.8 | 31ded391-69b1-450c-a740-ff860d1b4fb3 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
After selling his gear and nearly abandoning music, the Finnish producer returns from the Arctic tundra with a terrifying portrayal of nature’s violence. | After selling his gear and nearly abandoning music, the Finnish producer returns from the Arctic tundra with a terrifying portrayal of nature’s violence. | Vladislav Delay: Rakka | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vladislav-delay-rakka/ | Rakka | An imagined pandemic salvaged the career of the elusive Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. For nearly two decades as Vladislav Delay, Ripatti pulled together strands of minimal techno and beat-driven bombast, ambient glow and gnarly dissonance, making strange chimeras of oppositional moods. Delay’s best work, like 2000’s Multila, suggested hearing the thrum of a distant nightclub in some dangerous, unfamiliar land—enticing but ominous, as though reaching the source would be more trouble than it was worth.
After 2014’s sublime Visa earned his music a role alongside the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hildur Guðnadóttir in the soundtrack to The Revenant, Ripatti disappeared. As if balking at the prospect of wider success, he sold most of his studio equipment and retreated into isolated experimentation. “I seem to self-destruct,” he later admitted. During the last few years, though, Ripatti repeatedly ventured far above the Arctic Circle, to locations so remote the sun sometimes doesn’t rise or set for days or months on end. Those arctic hikes helped inform his score for Ivalo, a Finnish television series where a mysterious virus that makes people exceptionally evil takes root in the icy region and spreads.
Ripatti’s motifs for the show are what you might expect, like haunting electronic passages that suggest something monstrous and unspeakable or a curious pattern that reflects an investigator’s unresolved questions. But his experiences in the far North prompted Ripatti to consider the impact that such a harsh climate can have on a body and mind, how it can make simply living resemble an endless war, a struggle you will eventually lose. Rakka—his first album of new material in six years and the most compelling work of his career—is a breathless, terrifying newsreel about those battles with nature.
In recent years, a horde of producers have approximated the sensations of black metal, originally a bristling response to the pleasantries of Scandinavian society and the perils of its environment. From WIFE to Ben Frost and even Fuck Buttons, these experiments have often been fascinating and occasionally thrilling. But with Rakka, Delay comes closest to replicating the form’s primal frisson—that is, music that feels as ecstatic as it does existentially doomed. He harnesses the power of blast beats without actually using them and mines the urgency of screams without ever opening his mouth, getting to the core of black metal’s function without co-opting its form.
From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss. And its tones are so brittle that the sounds sometimes crumble like iron gone to rust, flaking into dust. “Rampa” slams between a minimal techno tick-tock and drum’n’bass bedlam during one 30-second span, between a rapturous nod to reggaeton and an industrial rush so acerbic it might make Prurient squirm during another. “Raajat” begins in a trance, its fluorescent hums swaddling arrhythmic paroxysms. But Delay slowly makes each element more severe, until the long tones suggest suffocation, the rhythms a fistfight. You fret over what comes next.
This unpredictability is a simulacrum for the harshest aspects of nature, the sort that threaten human survival in a million different ways. During “Raataja,” concussive bursts of jungle drums and sudden surges of curdled static cut across a pretty loop of pink noise, like barbaric gusts of wind during a snowstorm. Just when you adjust to the cycle, Delay sustains the fusillade, a tireless series of body blows. But they vanish in an instant, leaving you to reel from the whiplash. In the two seconds of silence before closer “Rasite” begins, you recognize just how severe and exhausting those six minutes had been. Even “Rasite,” which wants you to believe it is a comedown, is a feint, emitting slow sighs of placid sound that ultimately coil, like a snake ready to strike. Delay offers reprieves only for the glee of taking them away.
Many of the sounds here—eerie drones that hover like shadows, beats that are too big for their surroundings—recall Wolfgang Voigt’s recent work as GAS, especially 2018’s sprawling Rausch. But GAS’ records are forest baths in the dark, an invitation for immersion even if the night can seem a little scary. The environment that Rakka frames, however, wants to expel you without warning, pause, or mercy, if it cares about you at all. Here, nature’s very existence is a threat to your own.
Rakka is compelling no matter the context, a breathless cycle of terror and retreat that mirrors stresses as ancient as extreme climates and as modern as our frenetic news cycle. But it’s also accurate. I’ve spent extended chunks of the last five years in the woods—sometimes above the Arctic Circle, sometimes trudging through feet of snow on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I listened to Rakka for the first time without knowing anything about it and immediately found myself transported beyond my headphones and back to those wild places, intoxicated by the rush of circumstances that could have killed me. Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras capturing the world’s most isolated locales, you can now see what the world looks like from the side of some razor-thin, windswept perch in the Rockies; turn up Rakka and close your eyes, and I swear you can also understand how electrifying it feels. | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Cosmo Rhythmatic | March 4, 2020 | 8 | 31e25756-0a40-493c-9671-39120c3dab94 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The first collaborative EP from Young Thug and the producer Carnage is an intriguing proposition, and it’s dazzling at times. But it seems to scratch the surface of their potential chemistry. | The first collaborative EP from Young Thug and the producer Carnage is an intriguing proposition, and it’s dazzling at times. But it seems to scratch the surface of their potential chemistry. | Young Thug / Carnage / Young Stoner Life: Young Martha EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-carnage-young-martha-ep/ | Young Martha EP | The Guatemalan-American DJ and producer Carnage has been teasing Young Martha, his collaboration with Young Thug, since December. Meanwhile, Thug—perhaps owing to his ceaseless work flow—seemed practically unaware of the EP’s existence until recently. Carnage did a couple interviews behind the EP, and Thug, in turn, spared a few nondescript promotional tweets. (He did show up for the “Homie” video shoot, at least.) A lot can be gleaned from these respective levels of interest in the project. For Carnage, Thug presents an interesting challenge: an erratic and unruly MC who springs in and out of the pockets of the zaniest productions. For Thug, though, these are just B-sides. Beautiful Thugger Girls, his ambitious, oft-acoustic mixtape from June, was a lofty auteur’s gambit; the stakes are significantly lower here, a beta testing area for new flows.
Still, there was reason to be intrigued by this pairing. Young Thug is rap’s foremost eccentric; match him up with an unlikely beatmaker and the results are usually sublime. Carnage’s rap productions are often weird in their own right, wobbly things that buzz and drone. Young Martha isn’t a perfect marriage, or even the finest taste of their respective sounds, but it can be dazzling in spots. The four-track EP, which includes a year-old SoundCloud one-off, is just a small sampling of what we’ve come to expect from Thug—frantic inflections, screwball punchlines, unconventional mechanics. But Carnage gets a chance to stretch his legs a bit, too.
Young Thug entertains his wildest whims, a practice that has produced quite a bit of brilliance from the prolific artist. Carnage recently revealed that Thug “will go in the studio and finish 10 songs in a day,” and carries around a hard drive with over 1,000 of them. He described Thug as a “musical genius” who has so much material that he probably forgets many of the songs he’s recorded. One imagines that sessions for an EP like this offer an opportunity to experiment and push the limits of new cadences. At this point, Thug has so many it must be a bit like Seth MacFarlane doing voiceover work. The belching “Homie,” almost a variant of a flow on “Harambe,” and the unruffled hum on “Don’t Call Me” are broadcasts from two entirely different worlds. In a snap, without much effort, “10,000 Slimes” dissolves from a yodel into something resembling spoken word poetry.
The ebbs and shifts on Young Martha are all charming and ear-catching, but the writing isn’t as striking as anything Thug has done in the last 18 months. There are a handful of his characteristic, absurdist jabs, for example, “If a pussy nigga play with me/Swear to God, Kirk Franklin can’t save him” or “Put that fuckboy on the newspaper/In the sea with some tons strapped to his ankles.” But for the most part, his writing is less graphic than we’ve grown accustomed to. The issue isn’t just that he’s showing less; he’s both more indirect and less colorful. Some bars are strictly narration. He relies almost entirely on motion to keep songs going. Songs are built on filler, but when they kick into full gear, he rips through as if using muscle memory.
Carnage has worked with his fair share of rappers—Lil Uzi Vert, A$AP Ferg, and Lil Yachty among them—but Young Thug is by far the most dynamic artist he’s produced for, and on Young Martha he takes the opportunity to try on some new sounds. The jelly synths on “10,000 Slimes” are amorphous enough that Thug can adjust the swing of his rhythms without consequence. The cathedral organ on “Homie” and the church organ on “Liger” provide two contrasting tones and textures, and Thug tweaks his raps accordingly. Thug can push Carnage to take more risks, and Carnage can continue to expand Thug’s palette. The chemistry here might lead to a breakthrough, if nurtured. Carnage has already revealed that Young Martha will be a series, in the vein of the Slime Season trilogy, culminating in a collaborative album. There are reasons to look forward to future installments, but the first is merely scratching the surface. | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Electronic | YSL / Heavyweight / 300 Entertainment | September 26, 2017 | 7.2 | 31e78f99-df91-47da-97dc-480516fc6dba | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Arriving at a moment when his worldwide stardom was in eclipse, this 1996 album was the most daringly personal statement of George Michael’s career. | Arriving at a moment when his worldwide stardom was in eclipse, this 1996 album was the most daringly personal statement of George Michael’s career. | George Michael: Older (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-michael-older-super-deluxe/ | Older (Super Deluxe) | In 1993, the Brazilian fashion designer Anselmo Feleppa died of an AIDS-related brain hemorrhage, and George Michael lost the love of his life. The couple had been together for only two years, although Michael would forever speak of them as his happiest. Dazed with loss, he sat down at a piano less than a year later in Notting Hill and was astonished to find a keening ballad, complete with lyrics and arrangements, fall in his lap. For a studio perfectionist like him, this was nothing short of a miracle. He’d already let two album cycles sail past him—a purported second volume to 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice and a duets project called The Trojan Souls—because his own material wasn’t up to his exacting standards. Yet barely a week after writing the song, which he called “Jesus to a Child,” Michael performed it at the Video Music Awards on MTV Europe, standing at the footlights and singing an undisguised paean to the man he loved, complete with lyrics that addressed the secrecy of their relationship: “Sadness in my eyes/No one guessed/No one tried.” “For anyone watching ’Jesus to a Child,’ I was coming out,” he said later. “For anyone who had a clue about any kind of symbolism, I was coming out.”
Of course, Michael’s sexuality, he would later deadpan, was the worst-kept secret in show business—it was rumored that Michael broke off his Sony contract after he heard Tommy Mottola mutter a gay slur under his breath when he thought the pop star was out of earshot. And yet in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” climate of the ’90s, it was expected that Michael would work to keep the secret and preserve the delicate fiction of his heterosexuality. Gay pop stars did not come out—unless circumstances conspired to out them, as they eventually did for Michael.
After he wrote “Jesus to a Child,” Michael found himself newly energized, and the second track he wrote, “Fastlove,” was, if anything, even more boldly autobiographical. Where “Jesus to a Child” was chaste and tender, “Fastlove” was unsentimental and frank: “All that bullshit conversation/Baby can’t you read the signs?” The subtext, for those bothering to parse it, was obvious. “It’s all about cruising,” Michael said in the Showtime documentary Freedom, which he worked on up until his death in 2016. “Blunting out that pain with fast love.” Even the BMW Michael mentioned in the lyrics was his own.
This track took him months to complete, which was more his typical pace. For years, Michael had been chasing synthesis as album delays mounted, seeking to merge the raw propulsion of his funky early dance tracks with the refinement and poise of his ballads on Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. “Fastlove” represents that moment of fusion, running as fast and purring as softly as the sports car into which he silkily invites his lovers. With its sleek Patrice Rushen sample and Michael’s breathy vocal, the song was such a pure aphrodisiac that it was easy to miss the frank grief haunting the lyrics. “In the absence of security/I made my way into the night… I miss my baby tonight.”
Older was the most daringly personal statement of Michael’s career, and it arrived, not coincidentally, at a moment when his worldwide stardom was in eclipse. He’d always been elusive as a public figure: After releasing 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, he refused to promote it in any way, which included appearing in his own videos. “Freedom! ’90,” the album’s biggest hit, was a middle finger to star machinery itself, and a grand-scale refutation of his role as pop savior. But perhaps because he was nearly a decade removed from superstardom, perhaps because he’d been partly undone by grief, he approached the songs on Older with an autobiographical abandon that makes the album unique in his slim discography. “Spinning the Wheel” openly addresses gay partnership during the AIDS crisis, with Michael’s narrator chiding a promiscuous partner for putting him in in danger. Like “Monkey,” the big hit from Faith in which Michael cajoled a partner to drop a dangerous drug habit, the song radiates compassionate anger.
Sex was never far from the surface of Michael’s music—this was the guy who inaugurated his solo career with a song that literally shouted “HOO-AH, sex!”—but apart from the occasional lusty outburst, it was often indistinguishable from melancholy, loneliness, or devotion. Sex, like grief, permeated shadow spaces in the psyche. It was a mood, a color, and it could haunt any moment of tenderness, familiarity, or desolation. On the title track, he sings the opening lines—“Strange, baby/Don’t you think I’m looking older?”—with the exact same melody and cadence as the “hot just like an oven” lines from Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” It was a self-conscious gesture from an artist who very badly wanted to write timeless music on par with his idols. But it was also a playful acknowledgement of a sort of carnality that rarely makes it onto the dancefloor: the heat of longtime familiarity, lust as expressed by an aging body.
The title alone was a bold statement. Older, in the world of pop music, is categorically the least interesting thing you can be. At least old represents a solid state, a fait accompli. Old can be a pose, a statement. Older is ongoing, humdrum, an ellipsis rather than an exclamation point. But Michael endeavored to reclaim this state, own it, make it sexy. The irony was that Michael was only 32 at the time, but he had the elegant remove of a bachelor in his fifties, and the mood of the Older ballads was straight out of Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Any reckoning with age brings with it intimations of mortality, and the pall of death hangs heavy over Older. “You Have Been Loved,” which Michael has called his favorite on the album, depicts a Catholic woman standing at the grave of her son, struggling with her faith. Again, the shadow subject is Anselmo—the senselessness of his loss, Michael’s own attempts to contend with his desolation. The lyrics are so wrenching and plainspoken, they scrape lows that are shocking for a pop song—“I’ve no daughters/I’ve no sons/Guess I’m the only one living in my life”—but the song rests on a redemptive note. “‘Take care, my love,’ she said/‘Don’t think that God is dead.’” If “Jesus to a Child” was the farewell—“The love we would have made/I’ll make it for two”—“You Have Been Loved” is the absolution. Few pop songs about the power of love leave such a cold shadow.
The deluxe package, which could swallow a living room floor when unfolded, unearths some genuine gold. Most notably for fans, EP-only and B-side tracks like the aching “Safe,” which suggested Michael was a Massive Attack fan, and the simmering, midtempo “You Know That I Want To” find a home outside of George Michael forums and unauthorized YouTube uploads for the first time. Michael’s own standards hamstrung his output, but the flip side of that precision means the few cast offs in his discography are bewilderingly perfect and finished-sounding.
The collected remixes add to the story of Michael as a quiet force in dance music even as he became more closely associated with dusky balladry. The “A/C Summer Remix” of “FastLove,” which features sultry sax tootling from Wham! collaborator and ’8os sax-cheese king Andy Hamilton, is welcome. But the nine-minute extended workout of “FastLove Pt. 2” is a revelation, a sparkling night highway of vocoder, arpeggiator runs, and bubbly synth pads.
There are some polite, restrained live versions of hits—“Freedom ’90,” retitled “Freedom ’94” here, shows none of the grit or fire of the studio original, even if Michael is in predictably fine voice. The same goes for a gospel choir-boosted rendition of “One More Try”: The vocal take captured on Faith remains Michael’s high point as a singer, a miracle of pristine tone and abandon. Michael’s perfectionism meant he was reliably excellent on stage, but spontaneity was never his strong point. He has always sounded most at home in the studio, where he could stone-cut to his painstaking and agonizing heart’s content.
Older’s commercial reception was muted, perhaps befitting an album that dealt with such weighty themes and held itself at such a cool remove from the pop marketplace. “Fastlove” peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100, “Jesus to a Child” at No. 7, and that was more or less it for Michael, at least in America. On the fateful night of April 7, 1998, Michael would take a break from work to walk in Beverly Hills’ Will Rogers Memorial Park. A man named Marcelo Rodriguez approached Michael in a public restroom. Unbeknownst to Michael, Rodriguez was an undercover police officer on “potty patrol”—the properly humiliating name given to the ludicrous task of patrolling public restrooms for sexual activity. After he left the restroom, Michael found himself arrested for “lewd behavior.” He passed the time in his holding cell browsing a copy of the National Enquirer, brooding over the certainty that next week’s cover would carry his own face.
Michael handled the incident with unparalleled grace, appearing on multiple talk shows to discuss it. He expressed embarrassment over the incident but emphasized, over and over again, that he felt no shame. The secret was “out,” now: He no longer was obliged to maintain the delicate fiction. But for anyone with a clue, he had revealed himself to the world already, or at least to whoever was smart enough to listen, on his own terms. | 2022-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Legacy | October 1, 2022 | 8 | 31e800b8-bef2-4dde-ab7e-086693335fae | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Running his instrument through a bevy of effects, the virtuoso cellist summons a powerful, mesmerizing sound variously evoking shoegaze, classical minimalism, drone, and doom metal. | Running his instrument through a bevy of effects, the virtuoso cellist summons a powerful, mesmerizing sound variously evoking shoegaze, classical minimalism, drone, and doom metal. | Oliver Coates: skins n slime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-coates-skins-n-slime/ | skins n slime | Oliver Coates was anointed a prodigy in the mid 2000s after notching up preposterous exam scores at London’s Royal Academy of Music. He has since shouldered the burden of excellence—embedding in lofty orchestras, accompanying Terry Riley and Steve Reich, scheming with fellow maverick Mica Levi—while hatching plans to vanquish the “Catholic-style guilt” that frightens virtuosos into musical obedience. In this spirit, the cellist occasionally spritzes out some outré dance music to dispel the musty air of academia. His 2018 album, Shelley’s on Zenn-La, did just that, drizzling puckish beats with heavily manipulated cello and lysergic synth globules.
On the records preceding skins n slime, Coates moved easily between genres yet tended to keep his superhero costumes—the classical virtuoso and the electronics whiz—on separate hangers. Any mix-and-matching occurred primarily in the arena of live solo performance. (Thanks to support slots with Radiohead and Thom Yorke, his arena of solo performance now includes actual arenas.) On stage, he plants a cello between his legs, feeds it through effects units and loopers, and summons currents of mourning and ecstasy. Skins n slime bottles the shows’ volcanic intensity by galvanizing raucous shoegaze, minimalist classical, macabre drone, and lashings of plutonic metal, despite rarely reaching for more than a few instrumental elements.
To promote the album, Coates playfully coined a “pastoral metal” hashtag, which feels about right: On songs like “Butoh Baby,” wing-beating melodies soar over scorched-earth synth that channels both wraithlike black metal and the low-end abrasion of sludge and drone. While Coates favors simple, stately toplines, the record’s underbelly suggests fathomless depths; instead of sprawling outward, like Shelley’s on Zenn-La, the songs pirouette before plunging into the abyss. The album’s splicing of beauty and horror invokes the morbid logic of Greek mythology, where stirrings of triumph tend to foreshadow nasty surprises.
The “slime” of the album title is another Coates neologism, describing what he calls “a viscous and melting approach to live sound” employed on three songs. The base ingredient is a slow, improvised melody on overdriven cello. At predetermined intervals, automated loops and reversals crash back in waves, washing the song into harmonic flux. The flirtation with chance may sound suspiciously academic—like a sort of anti-virtuosity flex—but Coates pulls it off: Doused in chorus and distortion, the slime of “Caregiver part 2 (4am),” “Caregiver part 5 (money),” and the Fenneszian “Reunification” adds a celestial sheen to the album’s peaks.
Coates takes almost sadistic pleasure in contorting, abrading, vaporizing, ensliming, and otherwise transmogrifying the instrument he has played since childhood. One moment, the primordial howl of “Caregiver part 5 (money)” evokes a bagpipe elegy bending through Highland winds; the next, it could be a shoegaze fragment wondrously magnified, as if you were peering down a microscope at autopsied My Bloody Valentine spangle. On “Butoh Baby” and “Caregiver part 1 (breathing),” one or two beatific melodies circle the brink of a crescendo, only for the would-be finale to snag and loop. Like an opera director mercilessly drilling a climax, Coates perpetually re-enacts these flashes of joy until, after a while, they feel like one long expression of melancholy.
Coates wrapped the album last Christmas in Glasgow, working in those graveyard hours when, he says, “caregiver” cleaners would materialize to sweep away the night’s excess. Something in the album’s contrasts—its synthesis of infinite drone and infinitesimal melodies—evokes the grandeur of those small acts. Healing overtones ring clearest on “Honey,” a blaze of cello in six parts, reminiscent of the palliative techno popular at European dance festivals. In the hands of crowd-pleasing DJs, this brand of endorphin-balancing ambience sends hectic ravers peacefully into the night. Coates, by contrast, omits the rousing beats and renders his strings as beams of distortion that radiate an angelic glow. The song’s gentle repetition does not leave you content, but rather as a visitation might: stunned, faintly spooked, yet convinced, in the way you can feel a sneeze coming, that profound change is imminent.
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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. | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | October 20, 2020 | 8 | 31f031f4-ca6b-4392-9b63-c9e6a35eea9c | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
On their second collaborative album, the Toronto saxophonist and Vancouver singer find common ground in the beauty of mundane moments and minuscule gestures. | On their second collaborative album, the Toronto saxophonist and Vancouver singer find common ground in the beauty of mundane moments and minuscule gestures. | Joseph Shabason / Nicholas Krgovich: At Scaramouche | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joseph-shabason-nicholas-krgovich-at-scaramouche/ | At Scaramouche | Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich are ideal musical counterweights. On their second collaborative album—following 2020’s excellent trio record with guitarist Chris Harris—the Toronto saxophonist and Vancouver singer balance each other’s occasionally opposing impulses. Both artists are fascinated by the beauty of mundane moments and minuscule gestures, but Krgovich brings a Zen-like tidiness to his lyrics, while Shabason playfully messes with ambient music, art-rock, and adult contemporary. By significantly expanding the cast of contributors, At Scaramouche dances past the quiet contemplation of their debut, rediscovering the collective joys of being with other people. Yet even when their squiggly grooves lift off the ground, Krgovich’s plain-spoken koans keep his feet planted.
Though it was recorded before the pandemic, Shabason, Krgovich, and Harris’s Philadelphia unwittingly anticipated the periods of isolation that lay ahead. After demoing the songs remotely, they worked up the music in a series of brief studio sessions where Krgovich wrote his lyrics on the spot. His songs about practicing the Japanese tradition of year-end deep cleans or embracing the boredom of being stuck in traffic made those experiences sound like epiphanies, but they also sounded deeply lonely. It took the Talk Talk-esque “I Don’t See The Moon,” where the three musicians’ voices harmonized into one, for SKH to make good on the album’s themes of togetherness.
In comparison, At Scaramouche sounds like a lively, social affair. On the burbling groove of “In the Middle of the Day,” Krgovich’s whisper-soft voice is joined by the luminous Dorothea Paas and Chris A. Cummings, accentuating lyrics that patiently stretch across instrumental bars. They cited Japanese new age as a key influence on the largely beatless Philadelphia, while this album is propelled by the lithe rhythms and electronic programming of Kieran Adams, a drummer for U.S. Girls and The Weather Station, among countless others. Guitarist Thom Gill and bassist Bram Gielen—two of the Toronto musicians invited by Owen Pallett to play on the Mountain Goats’ 2019 album In League With Dragons—tip the busier songs, fleshed out with tasteful flourishes of trumpet, lap steel, and vibraphone, into full-band territory.
Shabason may still be best known for his work with Destroyer on 2011’s Kaputt, where he surprised many listeners—including himself—by making the sax sound cool again. Since that influential album, the Hogtown horn player has become increasingly experimental in his many solo projects and collaborations. At Scaramouche includes audacious musical decisions such as the electronic wind instruments of “What Comes Back,” venturing into an uncanny valley like the MIDI trumpets of Destroyer’s Your Blues. On the album’s second side, “Soli II” and “Templeton Park” both feature overstuffed arrangements that softly sway as they melt in the sun. It’s possible to imagine the album’s sequencing as a chronological narrative: The players seem to slow down as day becomes night, eventually collapsing into a mess of limbs and instruments.
While the music of At Scaramouche is more densely packed than Philadelphia, Krgovich’s lyrical preoccupations remain small in scope as he visits the former location of a childhood McDonald’s or returns to the dog park day after day. Like Phil Elverum wringing meaning from a screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Krgovich makes references to Grimace or Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show sound personal and poetic. Only occasionally, when he name-drops the album’s guitar player or sings about Destroyer .wav files, do the inside jokes become alienating. On the two songs that star his poodle Shelley (“Templeton Park” and the wonky motorik pop highlight “I Am So Happy With My Little Dog”), he shares a feeling of gratitude for the “little muppet” that helps get him out of his head. Krgovich might want a break from his inner monologues, but with songs like this to accompany them, they become universal meditations. | 2022-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Rock | Idée Fixe | October 10, 2022 | 7.3 | 31f2468b-42c3-4ac7-a3b6-9f01647735aa | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
On their fifth album, the White Stripes' ambitions finally seem to outpace their limited musical vocabulary. Making an almost-entirely clean break with the jet-fueled blues-rock of Elephant and De Stijl, they forsake electric guitar on all but a couple of tracks, working instead with pianos, acoustic guitars, marimbas, and other assorted oddball percussion. | On their fifth album, the White Stripes' ambitions finally seem to outpace their limited musical vocabulary. Making an almost-entirely clean break with the jet-fueled blues-rock of Elephant and De Stijl, they forsake electric guitar on all but a couple of tracks, working instead with pianos, acoustic guitars, marimbas, and other assorted oddball percussion. | The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8653-get-behind-me-satan/ | Get Behind Me Satan | White Stripes fans have always known that the time would eventually come when Jack White's abilities and ambitions would outpace the duo's deliberately limited musical vocabulary. And while it may be too soon to proclaim that fated day to be at hand, there are definitely signs on their bold, bewildering fifth album, Get Behind Me Satan, that Jack might be beginning to strain a bit at his self-fashioned yoke.
As far back as their Sympathy for the Record Industry days, the Stripes have been a considerably stranger act than is generally acknowledged-- their tender, borderline-twee childhood narratives, Cole Porter allusions, and dogged devotion to white tees and Santa pants have flown in the face of a garage-punk orthodoxy largely dictated by the iconography of 50s-era B-movies and trashy pulp paperbacks.
Still, the group's past digressions were only faint foreshadowing compared to the ones that populate Get Behind Me Satan. Here Jack and Meg have made an almost-entirely clean break with the jet-fueled blues-rock of Elephant and De Stijl, forsaking electric guitar on all but a couple of tracks to instead work with pianos, acoustic guitars, marimbas, and other assorted oddball percussion.
But even with this reconfigured instrumentation, the Stripes can't resist finding new ways to place unnecessary constrictions onto their work, as evidenced by the fact that Get Behind Me Satan was written, recorded, and released at an extreme breakneck pace. As legend has it, none of these tracks were even fully written before the band entered Third Man Studios in March, and unfortunately, several songs bear the scars of their needlessly rushed delivery. Although raw, combustible immediacy has always been a part of the White Stripes' charm, at some point Jack's desire for spontaneity could resemble sheer cussed laziness, and here the duo have granted a discouraging amount of real estate to what feel like unfinished sketches or works-in-progress.
Jack has cryptically described these songs as an exploration of "characters and the ideal of truth," which apparently can be translated to despair-- and lots of it. There's none of the sunny, innocent optimism of "Apple Blossom" or "We're Going to Be Friends" to leaven Satan's mood; virtually every track drips with loneliness, alienation, and betrayal. Even the album's most outwardly playful song, the bluegrass-tinged "Little Ghost", features a narrator so desperate in his isolation that he falls in love with an apparition. ("When I held you I was really holding air.")
Still, a slight sting of venom appears to suit Jack well, and-- perhaps as testament to his time spent with Loretta Lynn-- Satan finds him delivering his most expressive and nuanced vocal performances to date. Oddly, two of the album's most jarring tracks are among the few to feature electric guitar. The opening "Blue Orchid" maintains the Stripes' impressive streak of stellar singles, as Jack's wild falsetto and processed, strangely electronic-sounding guitar combine for a heightened, spiteful crunch that's unlike anything they've ever done. And even that sounds tame compared to the accusatory "Red Rain", on which the singer-- his voice thick with quavering distortion-- angrily confronts his betrayer ("If there's a lie/ Then there's a liar too/ And if there's a sin/ Then there's a sinner too") with a spellbinding intensity, while a lurching floor of chiming toy bells and Hawaiian slide guitar spins beneath him.
Also exceptional is "My Doorbell", a strutting piano soul number that contains the album's most immediately nagging melodic hook over Meg's effectively funky cavewoman stomp. Meg also contributes surprisingly subtle hand percussion to the quietly self-loathing folk of "Ugly As I Seem"-- a song that illustrates that the gulf separating Jack from freak-folk artists like Six Organs' Ben Chasny or Devendra Banhart may not be as wide as it seems-- and what sounds like tympani to the majestic "Take, Take, Take", an ambitious, Who-like piece that follows an obsessive fan as he asks one favor too many of Rita Hayworth. Unfortunately, tracks like "The Nurse" crumble beneath closer scrutiny, due to their over-emphasis on clever interior rhyming ("the maid that you've hired could never conspire to kill") and soft-focused melodies that never seem able to make their way to the exits.
Other misfires include "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)" and "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)", two great titles that undoubtedly deserve better treatment than they're given here, and the mercifully brief "Passive Manipulation" which again begs the gentle suggestion that Meg not be allowed to sing lead.
Even with a generous handful of tracks that easily rank alongside the White Stripes' best work, Get Behind Me Satan remains a confounding record, one that wears its "transitional album" tag like a heavy peppermint-striped crown. One can't help but feel that if perhaps the White Stripes had seen fit to take the necessary time to give cuts like "Forever for Her" or "The Denial Twist" a sincere revision or two, we might've been looking at a stone classic. As it stands, there's more than enough here to give Stripes fans cause to celebrate, although it may not inspire much faith that the duo will ever find the patience necessary to deliver upon their promising new innovations. | 2005-06-05T02:01:13.000-04:00 | 2005-06-05T02:01:13.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 | June 5, 2005 | 7.3 | 31f5f0d8-7b5a-4a80-9393-c9343a7a8695 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
Drake affiliate and OVO signee PARTYNEXTDOOR follows up his biggest hit, penning Rihanna's summer jam “Work,” with his most assured and confident work yet. | Drake affiliate and OVO signee PARTYNEXTDOOR follows up his biggest hit, penning Rihanna's summer jam “Work,” with his most assured and confident work yet. | PARTYNEXTDOOR: PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 (P3) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22193-partynextdoor-3-p3/ | PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 (P3) | As an aspiring songwriter, Jahron Brathwaite signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell at 18. The songs the Mississauga-born artist wrote for other artists before assuming the moniker PARTYNEXTDOOR never found much traction, but after darkening his sound Brathwaite caught the ear of OVO co-founder Oliver El-Khatib in early 2013. Fast-forward a few months and his vocals were floating in the background on Drake’s Nothing Was the Same. Since then, Brathwaite has become one of Drake’s closest collaborators, with writing credits and/or appearances on each of his last three solo releases. Earlier this year, Brathwaite scored his first Billboard No. 1, penning Rihanna’s humid Drake-featuring summer jam “Work,” which spent nine consecutive weeks at the top of the charts.
The island vibes of “Work” soak Brathwaite’s third studio album, PARTYNEXTDOOR 3. The album helps prove he’s a lot more than just Drake’s patois advisor. Clothes that don’t quite fit his boss feel effortlessly tailored to Brathwaite: “You heard a lot about Jamaicans, and you wanna know what it’d be like,” he sings with an infectious assuredness on “Don’t Know How;” “Only U” is three minutes of sweat and anticipation erected on top of a skeletal swing; on the cavernous “Not Nice,” he expresses his need to “hold the corner and then slow whine it.” The way physical pleasures intertwine with emotional turmoil encompasses most of Brathwaite’s focus on the album—in Brathwaite’s world, sex is not as a shortcut to intimacy but a reflection of it, even if he has a tendency to latch onto carnality in the absence of intimacy.
Given the time PARYNEXTDOOR 3 dedicates to the aftermath of infidelity, that’s pretty often. “Come and See Me” is tuned to more a nuanced frequency, disguising a lament about uneven give-and-take in a relationship in the clothes of an “R U up?” booty-call anthem. Unfortunately, he’s not always as tuned to his partners. “Why do you act like I’m sexist or something, just for calling you sexy?” Brathwaite asks with genuine confusion on “Nothing Easy to Please,” a line suggesting some of his relationship woes might stem from not understanding women quite as well as he thinks. When he claims that “she knows what I have to calm her down” on “Don’t Run,” it’s both a reference to his sexual prowess and the mindful attention of a supportive partner.
Once again, helping elevate Brathwaite’s lust is his production. He tucks unexpected elements in spots they may go unnoticed at first—you might not catch the whistling littered throughout “You’ve Been Missed” until the fifth listen, but once registered, it’s just another memorable hook amongst a litany of others. These are the rewards of a studio rat given free reign, where awe is found in the novel arrangement of sounds in space.
PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 is stuffed with such moments: the random drops of water punctuating “High Hopes;” the rusted pipes that act as percussion on “Nobody;” the Carlos Santana-esque guitars that weave in and out of “Spiteful. ”And then there’s “Brown Skin,” which could go toe to toe with anything from Fade to Mind’s catalog, and Brathwaite never once sounds unsure of his footing on the track’s ever-shifting surface.
The downside: left unchecked, this freedom can devolve into self-indulgence. There’s absolutely no need for opener “High Hopes” to be over seven minutes long, and on “Problems & Selfless” the atmosphere crosses the line that separates intoxicating from suffocating. When Brathwaite decides to let a song breathe, though, it usually works to his advantage, giving something that clicks room to simmer a bit longer without overstaying its welcome. On P3, he has earned the right to stretch the edges of a sound that now feels uniquely his. | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. / OVO Sound | August 16, 2016 | 7.4 | 31f6cf5c-8589-4bce-a2cd-efdc7f3ec7d5 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
The expansive debut from the Berlin-based artist features many guests from the fringes of ambient electronic music. It’s a crinkly, supple, meditative opus. | The expansive debut from the Berlin-based artist features many guests from the fringes of ambient electronic music. It’s a crinkly, supple, meditative opus. | Naemi: Dust Devil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naemi-dust-devil/ | Dust Devil | Across Dust Devil, a notionally ambient electronic double album, Naemi—a Kansan now based in Berlin—crafts songs that rise and fall gently. Each one has a strong point of view but a brittle feel, like they began as sharp statements before the producer whittled them away to nothing. Indeed, like weather.gov says rather poetically about the tornado-like phenomenon that gives the album its name, each song arrives in a haze and when “depleted or the balance is broken,” “will break down and dissipate.” It’s a soft and magical album, big on ambition and small in scale, which is, in my opinion, the proper amount of each.
Naemi, who previously produced under the name Exael, is a member of a loose crew of musicians from Kansas and beyond—most notably Ulla and Huerco S., both of whom appear on the album—working in the more expansive side of electronic music. Expect to hear sweeping vistas of sound, ping-ponging synths, slow laser beams melting across muffled hi-hats, acoustic guitars weaponized into fractal dissonance. These decrepit acoustics share the anti-melody principles of no wave music but not the abrasiveness. The album is quirky, but it’s easy to listen to. Suppleness is part of the approach.
Dust Devil is the opus of this sound, with Naemi gathering together a murderer’s row of young experimentalists as featured guests, talented people who dot the Bandcamps of Motion Ward or 3 X L, whose label head, Shy, appears on this album. They perform an array of musical talents, spoken-word poetry, strumming an acoustic guitar, or cooing the sweetest of nothings over beats that gurgle, buzz, and pulse.
The album opens with “It Feels So Good” featuring “Erika”—who is also known as the fairly popular R&B musician Erika de Casier; so much more well known is she than the rest of the artists it feels like they thought it would be gauche to use her full name—a hazy sweep of sound. The song could easily have been an instrumental; alone it would be a nice piece of ambient music, made of the gentlest version of something between a baby whale’s call and the digitized sound of a trumpet mixed with a harp-like digital twinkle. But with de Casier’s singing, which she does slow and soft enough that she’s almost whispering, the song turns from relaxing to seductive. Brian Eno could never. “It Feels So Good” is likely the closest thing the album has to a “song.” It’s a smart choice to have it open the album, a proper immersion into the album’s warmth before journeying onto the next 13 songs which blur together as they flit in and out of cohesion. Ideas are developed, actualized, and abandoned. There’s not always a ton of development, but not much preciousness either; curiosity reigns.
Despite coming from an electronic music scene, Naemi feels less like a techno producer than a collage artist; imagine an avant-garde take on J Dilla, with crinkles. Texture is substance here; style (or, more specifically, genre) feels largely besides the point. Technically, the production work sweeps between folksy emo (like on the quiet “Day Drifter” with Perila and Ben Bondy’s moody guest track, “Pretty Girl 4K Drone”), trip-hop (the backbeat-heavy “Couch Angel” with Arad Acid and Huerco S.), techno (the anxiously Baeleric “Olivia Prime” with Jason Graf), and an obliterated ambient track that, in principle, is essentially doom metal minus the drums (“Milau” with Zoe Darsee). Tying things together are the tracks’ rise and fall; each fade-out and fade-in arrives quickly, offering a new type of sound but within the same foggy parameters. No sound, whatever its origins, is left crisp. The dust devil brings us on a joyride across the sky before depositing us safely back on the ground.
I listened to the album on the subway one morning. I was on the way to therapy and it was a good soundtrack for gathering my splintered thoughts. At Chambers Street, I was up to track nine, “Ambrosia,” a laid-back neo-soul-ish number with what sounds like a live drum kit and soft singing in Spanish by Daniel Rincón, who goes by NAP. It sounds like something David Lynch would love. The doors opened and a lot of people exited and a few entered, including a man playing muffled rap music straight out of his phone’s speaker and two women pushing a rolling cart wearing headset microphones connected to a small speaker, which they used to offer food, juice, and prayer to all who needed. All the subway clamor blended with the music in a way that felt supernatural, snatches of sound burnished with an elevated aura by their transient nature. I didn’t ask for a prayer because I didn’t need one. I’m not saying Dust Devil is holy music, but I’m not saying it’s not. | 2024-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 3XL | May 16, 2024 | 8 | 31f8dcb8-840e-4383-8509-440b1434511b | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | |
Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook is also a pop poet, and the third album from his nostalgic indie-pop project recalls the grainy, jangly melodicism of college rock. | Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook is also a pop poet, and the third album from his nostalgic indie-pop project recalls the grainy, jangly melodicism of college rock. | Young Guv: GUV I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-guv-guv-i/ | GUV I | Ben Cook wears dark, chunky sunglasses when he performs as his indie-pop act, Young Guv. Put one way, his thick, plastic rims are shorthand for his musical inspirations—Elvis Costello’s effusive power-pop, the Gallaghers’ psychedelic glam rock. But paired with the hazy tracks on Young Guv’s third LP, GUV I, the frames serve as a disguise: Forget about Ben Cook, guitarist for Toronto hardcore icons Fucked Up. For 23 minutes, Cook transports himself to a simpler time, one that may exist only in indie rom-coms, when watching clouds go by or lying around in bed amounted to romance. But maybe that’s reading too much into it; maybe, on an album bursting with sunshine, the shades are simply a practical choice.
Young Guv’s version of nostalgia is less a carbon copy of a particular genre or decade than a drive-by tour of archetypes. Where 2015’s Ripe 4 Luv or last year’s 2 Sad 2 Funk respectively leaned into yacht rock’s theatrics and nu-disco’s syrupy synths, GUV I recalls the grainy, jangly melodicism of college rock. From the opening movie clip about dropping out of society to the tambourine that kicks off “A Boring Story,” it’s easy to imagine these songs spinning on a dusty college-radio turntable, or blasting from the middle of the quad on a bright spring day.
Cook isn’t shy with his references. “Every Flower I See” is a love letter delivered with an earnestness to match its ringing cymbals and fuzzy major chords, and the first line of the chorus—“Don’t go now”—brings to mind a similarly gushy refrain from Teenage Fanclub. Though anyone with a passing knowledge of C86 will hear plenty that rings familiar, GUV I still manages to find new shades within power-pop’s broader palette. The somber acoustic guitar and vocal harmony of “Roll With Me” feels like an Elliott Smith cover band, until a metallic guitar halfway through takes the track on a dreamier path. The bluesy harmonica on “A Boring Story” adds a playful detour to an otherwise slow and ambling closer.
But such diversions from the formula are the exceptions on a largely homogeneous record. Even at only 23 minutes, the songs start to blend together—ringing guitars and reverb-distorted vocals can only combine in so many ways before they start to resemble the Byrds’ Pandora station. At times GUV I can feel like indie rock cosplay, especially coming from a shapeshifter like Cook. When an artist genre-hops with such agility and totality, with titles and performances as goofy as Young Guv’s can be, it’s harder to lose yourself in the familiar comforts of a fuzz pedal and a charmingly off-key vocal. Even so, there’s an ease to the mimicry; the chiming chords on “High On My Mind” sound like the Bats, and the Bats sound like a laconic Saturday afternoon.
Moreover, Cook is a pop poet—his credits as a ghostwriter for artists like Sum 41 and Taylor Swift outshine his heavier origins here—and his sweetly romantic lyrics and “yeah yeahs” are a natural fit for dusty guitars. His lovelorn anxiety can feel nostalgic in itself: “I am rocky waters/And you are crystal clear,” he sings on “Patterns Prevail,” as if matters of the heart could be so black and white. His most memorable lyrics are just quirky enough to stand out, yet general enough to attach to any romance. “Do you ever watch the clouds while remembering me?” he asks, gently hopeful. As a refrain, it’s awkward—a bit wordy, a bit stoned. But for members of the New Sincerity crowd who own too many band tees, that’s not such a bad thing. | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | August 5, 2019 | 6.7 | 31fb1d6b-c7dd-40a7-887c-d9907ebcdd13 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Following the dissolution of the jazz-funk duo Yussef Kamaal, the London keyboardist returns with an urbane, dynamic album that’s deeply rooted in the city’s rhythms. | Following the dissolution of the jazz-funk duo Yussef Kamaal, the London keyboardist returns with an urbane, dynamic album that’s deeply rooted in the city’s rhythms. | Kamaal Williams: The Return | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaal-williams-the-return/ | The Return | Walk the streets of South London and you might catch Kamaal Williams cruising the concrete in a customized Chevy Impala. His swaggering brand of cool-hand jazz makes for potent lowrider fuel—the cosmic keys and snappy drums could tempt even Roy Ayers to ride shotgun. This is music that connects Camberwell to Cali, not just in its affinity for the pioneering cats of classic West Coast sounds but its spiritual kinship to Kamasi Washington, Ryan Porter, Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and other latter-day LA artists. Spanning both sides of the Atlantic, this kaleidoscopic vision of jazz comes cut with a motley set of groovy throwback influences.
Williams (who also produces soulful house as Henry Wu) first laid out his smooth remit alongside drummer Yussef Dayes in the duo Yussef Kamaal. The pair’s still-great 2016 album Black Focus seamlessly blended jazz, funk, boogie, Afrobeat, and hip-hop in a way that captured the culturally diverse districts of the English capital. In doing so, Yussef Kamaal positioned themselves alongside the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Zara McFarlane, and the Ezra Collective as old-school-minded Londoners who made music that gloriously distilled the city’s plurality. Against the acidic backdrop of Brexit-era Britain, where the struggles of immigrants and institutional hostility toward people of color have been so brutally laid out by the Grenfell Tower tragedy and Windrush scandal, Yussef Kamaal’s music felt like a small antidote to the malignancy stirring in the UK’s soul.
Yet the group’s excellence manifested just once. They split last year, the break so sudden that Williams and Dayes didn’t even fulfill all their gigging commitments as a duo. And now we have The Return, which could easily be the sequel to Black Focus—at least, that seems to be Williams’ pitch. The album artwork and fonts match. He even named his label Black Focus! Most importantly, the music maintains the same softly bumpin’ style, even without Dayes by his side.
As soon as Williams’ celestial keys begin to percolate and swirl on the opening “Salaam,” it’s clear that little has changed. The track’s silky chords and sluggish grooves satisfy like a cold beer in the summertime, with the 1970s R&B flavor highlighting Williams’ eagerness to venture a couple degrees further away from jazz than he did on Black Focus. Hearing the young virtuoso contort classic genres to his will is thrilling. And while Dayes’ rasping drumming—so key to Black Focus’ hippest jams, like “Lowrider” and “Joint 17”—is missed, newly recruited percussionist MckNasty offers his own urbane rhythms. The ethos of “Catch the Loop” is right there in the title: The rubbery bassline and crisp drums, evoking the spirit of the funky practitioner Dr. Lonnie Smith, are just begging rap producers to come snatch a sample.
Much of The Return highlights Williams as a master arranger. On “Broken Theme,” the off-kilter drums and keys sound like they’ve been beamed in from two completely different planets, yet every few seconds, they snap into line, bringing balance to the wild freak-out. The calming “Medina,” meanwhile, is the song most rooted in the tradition of basement jazz clubs. The serene mood is as timeless as whiskey and bitters, and Williams caresses the keys like he has all the time in the universe.
Should you be looking for flaws, there are a couple of strange decisions. “Rhythm Commission” could have been an album highlight had it been given room to breathe, but the two-and-a-half minute running time is barely enough to let the funk sink in. “The Return” swoons with string-led orchestration reminiscent of Jon Brion’s arrangements on Kanye West’s Late Registration, but at just 66 seconds long, the track begs to be developed into a full-bodied number. There was room for this album to grow.
Williams’ ambition appears to have been to present himself as belonging to the same continuum as Yussef Kamaal while establishing himself as a solo artist. Job done. Yet The Return does even more. It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018—an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way. | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Black Focus | May 25, 2018 | 8 | 31fcec40-dd90-4503-93cc-d3ca6a50f1d0 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
With restless vocals and shapeshifting beats, the Harlem rapper’s new mixtape innovates on the chaotic sound of rage-rap. | With restless vocals and shapeshifting beats, the Harlem rapper’s new mixtape innovates on the chaotic sound of rage-rap. | Lunchbox: New Jazz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lunchbox-new-jazz/ | New Jazz | A majority of the rappers who have treated Whole Lotta Red like the Bible have misunderstood something fundamental about Playboi Carti’s album: It isn’t cool just because of its self-mythologizing spirit. Sure, Carti flexed the same expensive brands you could find at Dover Street Market and also really, really wanted us to know that he gives no fucks, but that’s where the music starts, not ends. WLR is a sensory overload where the beats are loud and explosive, but also extremely intricate; his producers treat this vortex of flows with the same attention to detail that billy woods brings to his lyrics. In the two and a half years since its release, nobody has gotten particularly close to recapturing its magic, though a new rapper tries to do that basically every week. The handful of noteworthy mixtapes that have come in its wake have pushed the style forward rather than recycled it as their own, like Yeat’s 4L or Yung Kayo’s DFTK. Lunchbox’s New Jazz, which dabbles in a big and chaotic sound that has been loosely labeled rage-rap, should be added to that list.
Nearly five years ago, Lunchbox made his name as the teenage Harlem producer who helped shape the grimy yet booming atmosphere of Sheck Wes’ Mudboy, an album that holds up better for its beats than its raps these days. Lunchbox has AutoTune experiments on his SoundCloud page that go back to 2017, yet it wasn’t until he locked in with producers Mowz, Dulio, and Amir that his style came alive. Those three have their fingerprints all over the 23 songs on New Jazz. Its title could signal Lunchbox’s desire to separate his music from the oversaturated scene of rage-rap, but his offbeat and inventive take on the style does that better than any title could.
Lunchbox has taken a backseat as a producer, but he still has the ear of one. He’s well-versed enough in the subgenre to tweak its loopy rhythms and arrangements; vocally, he is restless, rarely ever staying in one tune or mood for long. He broods, then is turnt; sometimes he’s heartbroken, other times he’s so stoned that he forgets about it. On “Healin’,” he repeats the sung hook “I been through pain, I been healing” three times, the AutoTune intensifying with each subsequent line. That final mutation of “healing” stings. With “Matter,” he raps nearly every word with a different flow, lingering on certain syllables for no real reason other than catchiness. His improvisation lacks the range of Young Thug or Carti, but he’s still able to surprise, even within his vocal limits. Maybe it’s because he has a naturally deep and scratchy voice that isn’t entirely malleable, but is cold when he stretches it, like the high notes on “We Aint/He Say She Say.” The flow switches hit you like an unexpected electric shock—and they all happen on songs that are barely over a minute and a half.
The beats are a doozy, too. Particularly Amir’s, which go from zero to warp speed, and sound like different stages of a robot overheating. Like Working on Dying’s F1lthy and BNYX, Amir is a real wizard with synths. There are songs where synth pads gradually bloom as they go, and others where they abruptly morph. The strongest moments include “Who Dat Is,” which feels like two different beats are playing over each other at the same time; “Feel Things,” where the synths are a shade darker and a nice backdrop for Lunchbox’s dramatic lilts; and finally, “Get Me,” where the beat switch-up and nostalgic sample feel blissful. His beats are so immediately identifiable, it’s easy to check out on the couple of tracks without his touch—they are just underwhelmingly standard.
For the most part, New Jazz is exciting. You don’t even always know what Lunchbox is going on about—he gets high, doesn’t trust folks, gets to the bag, you know—but the meticulousness of the melodies and beats goes a long way. It’s the music of a rapper infatuated with the nuts and bolts of rage enough to know what works, what’s played-out, what needs to be reshaped, or lost altogether. Lunchbox is aware that the music needs to hit more than anything else, and that it’s not just a pathway to sell merch to suckers. Now that’s actually cool. | 2023-06-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 8, 2023 | 7.5 | 31ff2118-9148-4a1a-84a6-aff82ad89d17 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A new anthology uncovers a forgotten history from early 1980s Olympia: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings based on skeletal multi-tracking and looped vocals. | A new anthology uncovers a forgotten history from early 1980s Olympia: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings based on skeletal multi-tracking and looped vocals. | Cheri Knight: American Rituals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cheri-knight-american-rituals/ | American Rituals | Think of the music of Olympia, Washington, and a familiar history unfolds: Beat Happening and Kill Rock Stars, riot grrrl and a young Nirvana. A heavyweight legacy, but these well-told stories also have a habit of bulldozing the smaller, slighter histories that came before. In fact, the Olympia of the early 1980s was a wide-open creative space where a loose community of DIY musicians drifted across the borders of sound art, new-age music, modern composition, and free improvisation. American Rituals uncovers one of these all but forgotten histories: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings made in the early ’80s by Cheri Knight, a music composition student at Olympia’s Evergreen State College.
Hailing from Western Massachusetts, Knight grew up in a musical family, playing piano and clarinet before her head was turned by the music and ideas of John Cage. Through her studies she discovered the possibilities of synthesis and met the composer Pauline Oliveros, whose philosophy of deep listening proposed new ways of understanding and experiencing sound. But you get the sense, listening to American Rituals, that the real genesis of Knight’s music was the access she was granted to Evergreen’s on-campus recording studio. You can hear her formulating her own musical language using just her voice and simple instrumentation, fashioning a unique sound world out of loops and layers.
Knight utilizes a range of sounds on American Rituals: guitar and bass, piano and chimes, rhythms beaten out by hands or on struck metal. But her voice is at the root of her music. On pieces like “Hear/Say” or “Primary Colors”—they’re less songs than chants or mantras—Knight multitracks her voice and weaves it into tessellating patterns. Some of her music adopts the dry tone of an educational text: On “Prime Numbers” she counts upwards, her vocals panned hard left and right, accompanied by music with a faintly post-punk feel; padding drums and shard-like intrusions of guitar brings to mind a band like the Raincoats. But the track also evokes one of those animated musical interludes you might see on an old episode of Sesame Street, a half-remembered earworm both comforting and strange.
As part of her academic work, Knight spent time at New York’s Zen Arts Center and studied Buddhism. Her music doesn’t generally express spiritual themes, but there’s a devotional sensibility to American Rituals, an underlying sense of mindful practice. “Tips on Filmmaking,” the album’s best track, blends chants, handclaps, and dancing marimba to sound like music from a peaceful ashram. “Breathe” takes the form of a meditation exercise—breathe in, breathe out. Still, there are none of the dizzier nostrums common to new-age music. American Rituals feels relatively clear-headed, guided by an academic sensibility.
There is an umbilical link between Cheri Knight and a later generation of independent music from the Pacific Northwest. The selections on American Rituals first came out on regional compilations and cassettes like 1981’s Dub Communiqué, compiled by Steve Fisk—later producer of Nirvana and Screaming Trees. (That compilation also featured a track by one Bruce Pavitt, who around this time had recently started work on his own zine, Subterranean Pop—the rest is history). On another timeline Knight might have slotted into this burgeoning Pacific Northwest alternative history, but life took a different route. She moved back to rural Massachusetts, where she lived on a farm and raised goats. She still played music now and again, but the playful, experimental sounds compiled here gradually passed into memory.
American Rituals feels of a piece with other recent rediscoveries made by Freedom to Spend and its parent label, RVNG Intl.—releases such as Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music and Poetry of the Kesh, or avant-garde autodidacts like Anna Homler aka the Breadwoman, whose sonic explorations sprang from somewhere instinctual and personal. As an anthology, American Rituals is relatively lean, collecting just seven tracks in 40 minutes. But what’s here is worth treasuring: the sound of an artist with a bit of learning and a lot of vision, breathing a new sound to life. | 2022-07-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Freedom to Spend | July 21, 2022 | 7.4 | 32044e88-0e4f-4708-87f6-da4b7cc440c6 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
On the American Music Club frontman's best solo album since 2001's The Invisible Man, Mark Eitzel's tone, formerly accusatory, has softened and turned inward. He revels in the inner elements of his voice rather than growling over them, and sounds more natural and inviting than ever. | On the American Music Club frontman's best solo album since 2001's The Invisible Man, Mark Eitzel's tone, formerly accusatory, has softened and turned inward. He revels in the inner elements of his voice rather than growling over them, and sounds more natural and inviting than ever. | Mark Eitzel: Don't Be a Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17116-dont-be-a-stranger/ | Don't Be a Stranger | There's something fascinating about how singers' voices change as they come to terms with their innate gifts and limits, honing in on whatever is essential about themselves. Sometimes it happens by slow erosion, like Leonard Cohen's voice growing less beautiful and more wise, or the brass leaching off Richard Buckner's to reveal a deeper layer. Sometimes it happens through trauma, as when Levon Helm lost his voice to throat cancer and then miraculously got it back, intact but scarred, giving his old songs a second life. And sometimes, a vocalist who has been feigning something gathers the courage to be himself: Think of how Ghostface has relaxed into the high, limber whine of his natural register, divulging so much more character than the lower, stiffer tough-guy timbre he used to cultivate. All three of these learning processes bear fruit in Don't Be a Stranger, American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel's best record since 2001's The Invisible Man.
American Music Club, the cultiest of on-again off-again alt-rock survivors, have been refining their studious brand of Americana-- which emphasizes old-fashioned strains of jazz, lounge music, popular song, and hard rock-- for 30 years, so Eitzel's voice has had plenty of time to weather. A heart attack in his recent past didn't change his voice the way Helm's cancer changed his, but one suspects that it catalyzed the third, most significant development here. Brushes with death have a way of clarifying people's self-images and drives-- basically, of cutting through the bullshit. On Don't Be a Stranger, Eitzel remains as moony and self-lacerating as ever. He still gets into an oracular mood when hanging around with barflies on Main Street USA. But he dials down the tin-megaphone bluster that, even at its best, could feel strained in American Music Club. Now he revels in the delicate inner elements of his voice rather than growling over them, and sounds more natural and inviting than ever.
Eitzel is funny in that peculiarly Eitzel way when describing how this record came about. He took his "horrible demos" to "poor long-suffering" Merge Records, who replied, "Oh Mark. Really?" Merge relented after a friend of his manager who had won the lottery loaned the money to hire producer Sheldon Gomberg and make a studio recording of the songs. They were first conceived for an abandoned American Music Club album, whose long-term guitarist Vudi joins Eitzel here. The windfall paid for a tasteful, sometimes vivid backdrop that favors rich acoustic instruments. There are intimations of Spanish guitar throughout, most interestingly conceived on "Break the Champagne", where tremolos are implied with a Marxophone. The BooHoo Institutional Choir-- presumably, some people who happened to be around-- adds intriguingly dark-colored harmonies.
Allowing his voice to latch more directly than usual to the mobile cadences of jazz and soul, with the soft honk that was always latent in his croon tenderly magnified, Eitzel channels a number of unsuspected singers across Don't Be a Stranger, like Billie Holliday on "I Love You but You're Dead" and Antony Hegarty on "Costume Characters Face Dangers in the Workplace". Standout track "Oh Mercy" could almost be a Bill Withers song, with a smoky vocal line cracking over a cyclic minor melody, and it lays out a perspective to which the album often returns: that of the ghost at the feast. As ever, Eitzel observes other people having fun while fretting about political iniquities and personal inadequacies. The difference is that his tone, formerly accusatory, has softened and turned inward. It's that of someone presiding at a dark corner table, bemused by his own views, rather than proselytizing on a plywood stage.
The lyrics of Don't Be a Stranger are in the one-sided conversation form that Eitzel likes, with reams of subtly altered clichés abruptly slipping off-register into idiosyncrasy or hostility, as when he sneers out of nowhere on "Costume Characters", "I did not mean to scare your sad little brat." The delicate ardor and tenuous conviction that typify that album are most sentimentally expressed on the gently swaying piano ballad "All My Love" and most honestly on "We All Have to Find Our Own Way Out". There are moments of wry irony, as when Eitzel sings, "The guitar was pure evil like the engines on a jet," over gentle nylon strings on the strikingly written roadhouse fable "I Love You but You're Dead". But even when the lyrics edge on generic, as they sometimes do, Eitzel's singing draws me in. If Leonard Cohen's voice is a story about the passage of time and Levon Helm's is a story about losing what is most precious to you, Eitzel's is about the circuitous roads we take in search of ourselves. It's moving to hear him seem to arrive. | 2012-10-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 1, 2012 | 7.4 | 32072986-e0c0-4251-8931-3a51bb162db0 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine, the Brooklyn shoegaze band’s second album is a patchwork of brainy indie-pop influences with its own absurdist charm. | Bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine, the Brooklyn shoegaze band’s second album is a patchwork of brainy indie-pop influences with its own absurdist charm. | Peel Dream Magazine: Agitprop Alterna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peel-dream-magazine-agitprop-alterna/ | Agitprop Alterna | For as long as Stereolab have written songs about the ills of capitalism, and Broadcast have named lofty indie-pop albums after Gertrude Stein books, there’s been modish art-school types making records that feel like the musical equivalent of a tattered paperback in a back pocket. It’s the kind of lush, atmospheric rock music that might involve buying a Mellotron off Craigslist, naming your band after a famous British radio host, and writing lyrics that could double as poetry in the right context. Peel Dream Magazine, the brainchild of Brooklyn’s Joe Stevens, fits neatly into this lineage. Agitprop Alterna, the band’s second album, is a 38-minute shoegaze record that feels a bit like a term paper on Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx, written to a soundtrack of Tropicália, motorik, and library music.
Out of the gate, Agitprop Alterna is a bookish listen that doesn’t sound particularly unique. At first, it’s tempting to call it My Bloody Valentine karaoke: The endless guitar distortion and the well-matched vocals of Stevens and copilot Jo-Anne Hyun distinctly recall Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. With meditative vocals, outstretched layers of guitar dissonance, and chugging synthesizer, opener “Pill” is prime Loveless pastiche. “Tongue/Pill/I chew/It’s all I do,” Hyun and Stevens sing in calming harmony. The implication is obvious—we’ve all gone numb, relying on drugs to dull the pain of everyday life—yet the song is so undeniably catchy and relaxing that it produces exactly that kind of anesthetic effect. The same can be said for the rest of the record; Agitprop Alterna might be full of grand ideas, but it doesn’t bombard you with information. More often than not, the lyrical content is on the simpler side.
Agitprop Alterna can best be understood as the sum of its influences: a patchwork of brainy indie-pop music from the past 30 years that flows together seamlessly. Soothing drones, a tranquilized drum machine, and Painful-era Yo La Tengo flourishes allow “It’s My Body” to chirp along like a baby bird. The snarky “NYC Illuminati,” one of the record’s least conceptually legible offerings, is dotted in guitar reverb by way of Galaxie 500 and full of late-night stoner truisms like “you stand for nothing at all” or “dressed in fantastic/illusions of starvation.” The equally lofty “The Bertolt Brecht Society,” an homage to the German theater theoretician and playwright, is constructed around a serene vintage organ and a delicate bass groove. Lovely and introspective, it feels as though it were written while deep in thought.
“Up and Up,” the album’s last track, is its finest moment. Competing synth lines rest upon one another like layers of oil in water, and a plodding guitar brightens the scene like light through stained glass. “There are answers the theater will provide/For shallow faces taught to sleep through bigger questions,” Hyun and Stevens sing, summoning Brecht once more. Perhaps those faces belong to us, the song seems to say. It’s a striking—albeit slightly goofy—line on an album with plenty of similarly absurd brain-teasers. Like all the best shoegaze records, Agitprop Alterna is a heady, inward-looking listen. But if you’re able to zone out, or simply to begin walking with no destination in mind, its oversized and introspective ideas make welcome company.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Tough Love | April 27, 2020 | 6.9 | 320ae6dd-24ec-4d58-9ead-01288272978b | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Philadelphia rock band meets the moment with an essential, wide-ranging record that’s mouthy, messy, and self-assured. | The Philadelphia rock band meets the moment with an essential, wide-ranging record that’s mouthy, messy, and self-assured. | Mannequin Pussy: I Got Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mannequin-pussy-i-got-heaven/ | I Got Heaven | “To be feminine,” singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice recently said, speaking historically and contemporaneously, “is profane.” If Dabice and her bandmates celebrated that profanity over a decade ago when they christened their band Mannequin Pussy, their new album, I Got Heaven, is a bacchanal. It’s a mouthy, messy, self-assured record that seeks out conventions primarily to taunt them—genre and social conventions, sure, but also the conventional wisdom that says the delicate flower of a woman’s desire wilts if removed from its man-made greenhouse. Like Hole’s Live Through This, perhaps its closest antecedent, it revels in its most uncomfortable contradictions. It shows its ugliest face, and it always comes out on top. It’s hard to imagine an indie-rock record better suited for the moment.
There is nothing on I Got Heaven like the slick romantic catharsis of “Drunk II,” the instant-classic single from the band’s 2019 album Patience. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” Dabice sings to cap the first verse. That line became something like the band’s calling card, whether wittingly or not, the kind of punchline you spend an entire concert waiting to scream back. It’s vulnerable, almost affectionate, but its power relies on the protagonist’s feeling beholden to someone else against her wishes, if not her will. The stupid “fucks” on I Got Heaven, meanwhile, come from the act of fucking itself, experienced gleefully by people willing to risk their independence and self-sufficiency if it means getting theirs. When Dabice sings, “Rewind yourself, get me off, make me feel so elite,” it’s basically impossible to imagine her ever singing “Drunk II” again.
I Got Heaven is at its best when Mannequin Pussy laugh their way past feeling conflicted. In the title track, Dabice is a dog panting at the knee of a stranger, equally ready to bite or hump depending on how things go. By the time the chorus comes around, though, she’s practically cooing. “Oh, I’m an angel,” she sings, “I was sent here to bring you company.” It’s not a negation of the fantasy—in the very next verse, she wonders aloud what it would be like if “Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch,” her voice nearly breaking into a moan—but an acknowledgment that even a woman playing the dominant hornball role still has to navigate the men who think the whole thing is their gift.
Not that it stops her. “I keep all of my sugar where I know you like it best,” she promises in the very next song. She rides the chorus of “Loud Bark,” her voice rising as it builds toward the climax. “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite,” she sings over and over, over and over, as the song approaches ecstasy. The twinned meanings of her words tumble over one another, vying for dominance: She wants you to fuck off, she wants to turn you on. Of course, screams of pleasure and screams of pain sometimes feel similar. Bites, too. Desire and fear, connection and protection—when they can’t be separated, why not go with what feels best? “Just tell me what you need!” she shouts in “Aching,” a gasp of frustration and a promise of service all at once. Nearly every line on I Got Heaven is both a come-on and a warning.
Appropriately enough, I Got Heaven is an intensely pleasurable album, and far more adventurous than anything Mannequin Pussy have tried before. Over brushed drums in “I Don’t Know You,” Dabice carries the torch for a distant lover whose secrets she holds close, her voice rising with bruised pride only to fall away. It’s a gorgeous melody, rich with the kind of strident heartbreak Neko Case distills on her best songs, shadow-lit by flickering synths from new member Maxine Steen. “Nothing Like” plays out like VH1 delivered through a choppy antenna signal, its distorted disco beat and the suck of Kaleen Reading’s hi-hats nicked from “Lovefool,” its strummy verses a blown-out take on “Kiss Me.” The heavy crunch of Steen’s guitar in “Sometimes” could’ve been taped off of alt-rock radio 30 years ago; tune your dial just right and you might hear a bit of “Everlong” after the chorus. Even the pummel of the title track is tickled by a synth line from Steen that’s more Fountains of Wayne than Suicide.
Delightfully, even as they’ve become comfortable with straying wherever a good song takes them, Mannequin Pussy have somehow become a better punk band, too. In bassist Colins Regisford’s “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” they shift the rhythm constantly, charging then shuffling, prodding for weaknesses before running a battering ram through the coda. “Of Her,” Dabice’s tribute to her mom, never stops accelerating, its 90 seconds of momentum made supersonic by lightning streaks of feedback and rattles of amplifier clutter. “She gave me her control!” Dabice shouts, and the word “control” echoes and fades and hangs around like smoke in a tiny room, only disappearing fully when the band hits the lights on the way out.
Though all three of I Got Heaven’s hardcore songs appear in the album’s back half, they don’t feel like a back-to-basics reset or an attempt to reestablish the band’s bona fides. They function as release valves, rushes of pure pleasure hissing as they escape the tensions of the songs around them. “You’re gonna fuckin’ beg, and heel, and learn,” Regisford sings in “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” both a command and an encouragement. On an album about wanting things badly but not being able to shake the consequences of wanting them, these songs’ straightforward, uncomplicated adrenaline is an ecstatic relief: Throw your body around, let it hit what it hits, then get your shit together. Still, they’re only one piece of a much more complex picture. Aesthetically speaking, punk is no longer the core of this band; like humor in a relationship, it’s just one of the many things holding it all together.
This is a way of saying that I Got Heaven is a pop album. It operates by a pop album’s rules; it’s unashamed of its ambition and unselfconscious of its artifice, and in that way it’s a perfect reflection of its own thematic commitment to self-definition. The vulnerability that’s always made Mannequin Pussy’s music feel personal and urgent has now given them the freedom to expand in unexpected ways and discover what else they might be able to contain. It never feels like pure product; it’s too moist, too clammy, far too impolite. Like Turnstile’s Glow On, I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it. | 2024-02-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epitaph | February 29, 2024 | 8.8 | 3211ce19-cfe4-4cc0-845c-d146be95cef4 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The hyper-prolific Los Angeles saxophonist again opens his archive of ambient sketches, cloud-rap beats, and jazz experiments. It’s a far more compact package than last year’s sprawling Fresh Bread. | The hyper-prolific Los Angeles saxophonist again opens his archive of ambient sketches, cloud-rap beats, and jazz experiments. It’s a far more compact package than last year’s sprawling Fresh Bread. | Sam Gendel: SUPERSTORE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-superstore/ | Superstore | Sam Gendel’s music is largely wordless, but his sense of humor tends to shine through anyway. Sometimes, it’s evident in the music itself—many of the songs on the Los Angeles saxophonist and producer’s new album SUPERSTORE play like minimalist, mattified updates of the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack. But you most often see it in his song and album titles: strange, jokey phrases and non sequiturs like “Lilriffriff” or “LANDCRUISELIFE” that suggest a penchant for everyday weirdness. SUPERSTORE is no exception: The title implies mass production, sameness, pure function over form. It’s a funny, knowing reference point, in large part because it’s hardly the kind of word you’d associate with Gendel—an artist whose eccentricities and fondness for inscrutability mean that he’s rarely done the same thing twice.
The title does highlight one thing about Gendel’s music: There’s a lot of it. Gendel releases albums with the frequency of a sixteen-year-old SoundCloud rapper; SUPERSTORE is his second album in under a month, following last month’s collaboration with 12-year-old Antonia Cytrynowicz, LIVE A LITTLE, and his ninth overall since the beginning of 2021. Coming in at 34 songs and totaling close to an hour, it’s a lot of music to wade through—although it’s still less than a third of the length of Fresh Bread, the 52-song album of beats, live cuts, and pop experiments that it serves as a sequel to.
SUPERSTORE draws from the same well as Fresh Bread—there are ambient sketches (“Surfside”), warped cloud-rap beats (“Squid”), outré experiments (“Pan”), and, occasionally, more traditional jazz cuts (“Sx Mrnng”). Longtime Gendel collaborators Blake Mills, Kevin Yokota, Gabe Noel, and Phillipe Melanson all appear too, adding small, but memorable, flourishes—Yokota provides a soft, jittery beat on “Two-Tone,” while Mills adds a drunken synth guitar line on “Gu Shi.”
For anyone who found Fresh Bread’s 224-minute runtime daunting, SUPERSTORE is a welcome change of pace; it feels more deliberately sequenced than its predecessor, with sharper contrasts song to song. I love the way the dusty, meditative “MFV” lulls you into a borderline-hypnotic state before the squall of “Foothammer” jolts you back into reality, and how the one-two of “La Guerra Di Piero” and “My <3 Sing” offer two vastly different variations on chopped and reshaped vocals. The former is dense and chaotic and the latter slick and bright, like something Solange might have included on When I Get Home; both offer pleasant refinements of the kinds of beats that were on Fresh Bread, and both lend the impression of Gendel as a canny producer, happy to let his samples guide the mood.
Gendel’s music is often described, perhaps unfairly, as “vibe music”—a kind of shorthand for something to put on in the background as you put your mind to something else. That’s true for some of his records, and definitely for portions of Fresh Bread. But SUPERSTORE is a good showcase of the power of Gendel’s music: More than just something pleasant to elevate a listener’s environment, this album forces you to meet it on its level. Walking around listening to SUPERSTORE can make your own city feel foreign and a foreign city feel like home; it has a trippy, kaleidoscopic effect that draws strangeness out of quotidian environments. Songs like the honking, limp-footed “Blueblackred,” or the piquant and percussive “Wave-Mini,” are so peculiar in their timings and textures that you have to readjust your perspective in order to fully get into them.
If Gendel’s music does cultivate a vibe, it’s one that’s pleasantly disorientating and deeply saturated, organic and synthetic in equal measure, playful and occasionally ominous—far from “vibe music” in the streaming-era sense of the phrase. SUPERSTORE highlights this feeling within Gendel’s music—its ability to paint a kind of psychedelic, off-kilter sheen on the everyday—more clearly than any of his projects to date. In this light, the album’s title makes sense—it’s all the Gendel you could ever need, all in one place. | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Leaving | June 13, 2022 | 7 | 32121a6f-fef7-467d-9447-44a6880d85cd | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Originally issued by Rough Trade in 1979, this bizarre outing from one member of Metal Urbain features low-tech synth/noise covers of punk classics by the Stooges, Velvets, Troggs and others. | Originally issued by Rough Trade in 1979, this bizarre outing from one member of Metal Urbain features low-tech synth/noise covers of punk classics by the Stooges, Velvets, Troggs and others. | Dr. Mix and the Remix: Wall of Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2566-wall-of-noise/ | Wall of Noise | My slow crawl around the world in search of new music from the past-- a crawl that finds me falling further behind with each passing minute, as thousands of records in an uncountable number of styles continue to find their way in and out of record bins-- has not yet taken me to the French punk/new-wave scene of the late 70s. And there's a good chance I'll never get there, since punk was never something I identified with much, and I've even been sluggish about hearing all the important stuff released by countries that speak my own language. Given my slight background in the Continental new-wave of the late 70s, I can't tell you exactly where Frenchman Eric Debris, who was a member of Metal Urbain before he started recording solo as Dr. Mix and the Remix in 1979, fits in. But listening to this compilation of his complete works under this alias, I can tell you he was onto something pretty great.
Debris' M.O. as Dr. Mix and the Remix was to record covers of late 60s/early 70s rock 'n' roll and avant-garage classics on which he'd overdrive the guitars to ridiculously trebly lengths, and then sing a bit like Ian Curtis, in a clunky French accent, through a pitifully cheap reverb unit while letting a rudimentary drum machine handle the beats. During Dr. Mix's short run from '79 to '82, Debris released a handful of singles and one full-length album (also called Wall of Noise), mostly on Rough Trade. In the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, The Jesus & Mary Chain's Jim Reid pegged that album his third favorite record of all time-- which says something for Reid's courage, since the distinctive sound of Psychocandy appears to have been lifted wholesale from select Wall of Noise cuts.
The Stooges' standard "No Fun" appears in three different versions: The single, which leads off this disc, was a full-band leftover from a Metal Urbain session; the original album version included later is cheaper and noisier (and better); and then there's a great instrumental "version" (also recorded solo), which served as the B-side of the single. The Dr. Mix treatment of "No Fun" finds Debris sounding like a dork and yet managing a certain cool, democratizing Iggy Pop's sexuality by making it available to anyone with the energy that a few meager tools creatively deployed.
Even more exciting, the insistent and stiff 4/4 kickdrum on a 10-minute version of The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" could become proper dance music with the right EQ settings, and Debris' slurred and drooling vocals lead one to believe he did, in fact, hit the mainline-- possibly sideways. The Troggs' "I Can't Control Myself" finds Debris turning down the guitar a bit to focus on his vocals, the barking cadence of which suggest that Wolfman Jack might have done a radio tour of France at some point.
Not all the old chestnuts fare so well ("You Really Got Me" is dinky synth-pop, and its clean recording makes it seem amateurish rather than inspired) and the Dr. Mix originals are generally pretty bad, mostly warmed-over rockabilly forms without the wit and energy Debris brings to the covers. Despite these serious dull patches, when Dr. Mix is good, he is very good. Most of all, Wall of Noise gets to the heart of why American rock music became a worldwide phenomenon: The format is supple and can be endlessly shaped and re-imagined without losing its essential identity. | 2004-07-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-07-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Rough Trade | July 20, 2004 | 7.1 | 3212ac6a-b800-4917-8c4a-11821a476a4e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The New York City quartet’s fourth album is classic and romantic, capturing the liberated frisson of disco and house in an ultra-saturated palette. | The New York City quartet’s fourth album is classic and romantic, capturing the liberated frisson of disco and house in an ultra-saturated palette. | Mr Twin Sister: Al Mundo Azul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-twin-sister-al-mundo-azul/ | Al Mundo Azul | Mr Twin Sister anticipate trends with alarming precision: Their 2014 self-titled breakout fused R&B with low-key, nocturnal dance music years before Okay Kaya and Erika de Casier emerged as indie darlings, while Salt, the band’s 2018 follow-up, incorporated tasteful 2-step beats and lush jazz textures before PinkPantheress had even sat her A-levels. Slowly but surely, Andrea Estella, Gabel D’Amico, Udbhav Gupta, and Eric Cardona’s distinctive sensibility has inched its way into the zeitgeist. In 2021, Mr Twin Sister’s back catalog sounds better than ever.
The band’s fourth album, Al Mundo Azul, doesn’t depart from the sound of Salt as much as find the next mutation in its genomic sequence, largely foregoing the wavey tones of 2010s dance pop in favour of lurid Danceteria neons. Queasy, dub-influenced tracks and flashes of synthy psychedelia still abound, but the unifying presence on Al Mundo Azul is a strain of ebullient oddball disco that sounds like it originated four planets left of 2020’s Dua Lipa-led disco revival. At the center is the band’s forever-conflicted protagonist, Estella, whose sly, vagrant vocal style—that of a disco diva after a few too many bumps of ketamine—belies lyrics concerned with the American cult of youth, tech addiction, and social disconnection.
At its best, Al Mundo Azul captures the liberated frisson of disco and house without resorting to simple recreation. “Expressions” plays like “I’m Coming Out” as covered by Fever Ray, a clammy synth squelch rubbing up against the song’s Chic-like strut. The entire song takes place in the moments before a hookup, channeling the electricity of waiting at home for the phone to buzz. The rhythm of Estella’s voice—melismatic and ecstatic at one second, staccato and forceful the next—conveys the tension and release: “All this waiting/Wanting you/And I love how it feels/When you’re coming near.” Estella has a flair for inhabiting anticipation of all kinds: “Polvo,” one of the band’s first songs to be written entirely in Spanish, explores the grotesque wonder of the human life cycle. “Cualquier cosa podría estar en el polvo/Una semilla y los muertos (Anything could be in dust/A seed and the dead),” they sing. It’s a huge, potentially morose topic, but Mr Twin Sister approach it with impishness and verve, adding telescoping synth sounds and cartoonish drum fills that make the whole affair feel like light work.
Al Mundo Azul is full of high-key setpieces like “Polvo,” but the tracks that stray from the album’s ultra-saturated palette tend to stall its momentum. Opener “Fantasy” is too busy by half, irregular drum beats and Estella’s glissading vocals creating a sense of panic that feels unfocussed and incoherent. “The Pine Tree,” a sax-heavy dub track, is a frustratingly stagnant interlude between “Diary” and “Despoil,” inquisitive, psychedelic house songs that number among the band’s best. These vignettes might have worked were the throbbing beats of songs like “Polvo” not so deeply intoxicating. Disco is clearly a good fit for Mr Twin Sister. By now, though, they’ve probably moved on to the next thing with a spring in their step.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Twin Group | November 19, 2021 | 6.8 | 32189828-6502-47a6-9322-b02b5c5d8277 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Angel Marcloid’s vaporwave side project trades the electronic screamo fusion of her Fire-Toolz alias for glistening smooth jazz inspired by the Weather Channel. | Angel Marcloid’s vaporwave side project trades the electronic screamo fusion of her Fire-Toolz alias for glistening smooth jazz inspired by the Weather Channel. | Nonlocal Forecast: Holographic Universe(s?)! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nonlocal-forecast-holographic-universes/ | Holographic Universe(s?)! | Elevator music gets a bad rap—unfairly so. Like wallpaper, it asks nothing of you, not even that you pay attention; it’s just there to help you pass the time. It’s easy to connect that particular strain of soft, inoffensive jazz with the unpleasant experience of waiting or being put on hold. Muzak’s association with actual elevators is an inherited cultural memory at this point, but a bitter aftertaste still lingers.
Chicago’s Angel Marcloid is best known as Fire-Toolz, but with Nonlocal Forecast, her vaporwave-indebted side project, she’s dispelling some of those negative connotations. Last year’s Bubble Universe! riffed on ideas of background music with a fizzy blend of new age, prog, and paint-by-numbers jazz. On the follow-up, Holographic Universe(s?)!, she leans so hard on pastiche that she breaks through to the other side, embracing cheese wholeheartedly. This is full-on waiting-room-core, with guitars that moan, saxophones that mewl, and synths that twinkle like costume jewelry.
Marcloid cites the boilerplate jazz fusion that used to accompany Weather Channel broadcasts as an inspiration for the project, but Holographic Universe(s?)! has a way of feeling immediately familiar even without that particular reference point. For me, it calls up the supremely kitschy Mall Tycoon soundtrack and the strange, polygonal dreamscape of the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2. These are sounds from the background of your life, Marcloid suggests, and they’ll find their way back to you as you listen; the lingering presence of those hazy, half-formed memories is crucial to the experience of the album.
As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid juxtaposes happy-go-lucky electronics with the anguish of screamo. And though the Nonlocal Forecast moniker is mostly a hub for the former, the music plays with opposites in its own way. The bright, jumpy “Imprinted, Encoded, Shone (Emergence)” gives way to samples of thunder and rain in its final seconds. True to its title, “The Bubbling Up of Duality on an Autumn Night by a Forest Stream” builds something gleaming and plasticky on top of a nighttime field recording. The world of this album is almost homeostatic: Things never get too hot or too cold, too extreme in one way or the other.
The album isn’t exactly kidding about any of this (the Kenny G-ish sax tones are completely straight-faced), but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. “We’re Smeared Across a 2D Surface (Part 1)” opens with a ridiculous koan delivered in a thick New York accent: “She encounters and falls into a super hot soup of bits at the horizon.” There’s also a track called “My Big T.O.E.” and a sister song called “My Incomplete T.O.E.” on which Marcloid credits, uh, Fire-Toolz as a featured artist. Rather than feeling arch or insincere, this surreal, comic edge only enhances the feeling of riding the metaphorical elevator to a plane where goofiness is inherent and there’s space to let your mind wander.
Marcloid’s respect for that goofiness, and that brand of mid-grade pleasantness, is what makes it all work. “I think Nonlocal Forecast is very safe music, and that’s intentional,” she told the Chicago Tribune. A lot of music under the general rubric of vaporwave is “about” capitalism in a way that can be pedantic or reductive, but this album’s lack of ironic distance keeps it out of that trap. Smooth jazz may have been co-opted by customer service hotlines, but there’s no reason why we can’t just enjoy it for what it is, rather than what it means. Rescuing these sounds from corporatist purgatory, the free-associative daydream of Holographic Universe(s?)! ennobles the safety of leisure time.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | December 18, 2020 | 7.3 | 32261b2a-c010-4fdf-9db8-eb8670795e42 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5fd7d69758f883c36ef89bf9/1:1/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit/Holographic%20Universe(s |
A new live album from the avant-garde power trio led by Japanese noise icon Keiji Haino is a demented joy, best experienced at high volumes. | A new live album from the avant-garde power trio led by Japanese noise icon Keiji Haino is a demented joy, best experienced at high volumes. | Nazoranai: Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nazoranai-beginning-to-fall-in-line-before-me-so-decorously-the-nature-of-all-that-must-be-transformed/ | Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed | Every member of the international avant-garde ensemble Nazoranai is a lifer and a legend, or at least one in the making. During the last four decades, the Japanese multi-instrumental improviser and vocalist Keiji Haino has emerged as one of music’s most restless spirits, bastardizing rock and noise, folk and jazz to create an idiosyncratic expressive lexicon. His mysterious persona—suggested by his all-black-everything clothes and omnipresent shades, and sealed by his love of koan-like poetry—adds to a sense of mystique that’s increasingly rare. Though the guitarist Stephen O’Malley is best known for the colossal drones of Sunn O))), his pursuit of pure tone has taken him from the psychedelic smog of KTL to the malevolent metal of Khanate; those one-note jokes about Sunn O))) don’t at all apply to O’Malley’s larger oeuvre. And Australian drummer, guitarist, and programmer Oren Ambarchi has developed a fascinating fluidity, meaning he’s as capable of pristine pop as he is corroded rock, precise techno programming as he is ruptured sound design.
The gravitational pull of Haino’s storied career is so strong that Nazoranai has often felt like his project—the elder musician’s power trio, buttressed by an unlikely rhythm section. The band’s first LP, a strange self-titled 2012 beast, was a clear combination of each member’s characteristic sounds. Its slow lumbers, for instance, felt guided by O’Malley, its more devilish gyrations anchored by Haino. Two years later, the trio spliced together four sides of chaotic and enthralling noise-rock, with moments of exploration into the unknown led by Haino’s keening screams. This trend comes to a head on Nazoranai’s third and shortest LP to date, Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed. A two-side live recording captured at Tokyo’s intimate SuperDeluxe in 2014, Beginning finds the full force and finesse of Ambarchi and O’Malley now behind Haino, a puppeteer who directs the trio through waves of anxiety and eruption. The result is a demented joy.
Beginning is best experienced at high volumes and close to the speakers, conditions that approximate the atmosphere of its original live setting. All three players are very busy during these dual 23-minute improvisations, rarely sitting still or laying back. When you’re surrounded by the action, you can intuit their interaction, as if you’re enjoying a spirited conversation between strangers speaking an imaginary language.
The first side begins with a murmur—twinkling bells, sporadic drums, a low-key rumble from an amplifier. It is an invocation for Haino, whose arrival with a shrieking hurdy-gurdy immediately escalates everything else. Haino has been playing the hurdy-gurdy for decades, steadily releasing a series of solo improvisations in the wonderfully titled series “The 21st Century Hard-Y Guide-Y Man.” But it’s still a special, scintillating thrill to hear the instrument in this context, howling out like the irascible ghost of Tony Conrad or a string quartet that’s finally tired of Haydn and sailed headlong into the abyss. At various points, Haino sustains menacing drones as the rhythm section thrashes beneath him—or he slices into their fray, zigging and zagging between drums and bass. At this album's best, the brittle wail of the hurdy-gurdy becomes a ping-pong ball, rapidly batted back and forth by O’Malley’s slow pulses and Ambarchi’s impatient energy.
The second side flows out of the first, with Ambarchi and O’Malley simmering as the hurdy-gurdy gradually recedes into the distance. The rhythm section lingers here for a moment, waiting for Haino to suit up for the next act. Suddenly, sharp splinters of electric guitar drive into the patter and, again, seem to activate the rest of the band. They growl and rumble through open-ended noise-rock, dive-bombing into deep passages of dissonance, each somehow more extreme than the last.
And then, near silence arrives in preparation for the finale: Haino speak-singing, this time in English, his voice a permanent scream. “No one can change anything,” he shouts on repeat. “I keep on changing. You can change—just you!” It’s strange to hear Haino in the role of self-help coach, a surprising spot of human vulnerability woven into his mystical veneer. It serves as a command; Ambarchi and O’Malley explode, leaning into their instruments with abandon. For the last six minutes, they have the force of Mats Gustafsson’s The Thing or Albert Ayler’s Bells-era band—pure paroxysms of sound, digesting a lifetime of listening and delivering it in ecstatic, urgent fashion. It is the peak at the end of a slow climb, an exit rendered in delirious unison. | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | W.25TH / Superior Viaduct | October 21, 2017 | 7.9 | 32286dac-dfb9-4e33-a580-72739af90a0b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
"My hands 'round your throat/ If I kill you now, well, they'll never know." Dickon Hinchliffe may be talking ... | "My hands 'round your throat/ If I kill you now, well, they'll never know." Dickon Hinchliffe may be talking ... | Tindersticks: Waiting for the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8071-waiting-for-the-moon/ | Waiting for the Moon | "My hands 'round your throat/ If I kill you now, well, they'll never know." Dickon Hinchliffe may be talking to a character he created, but he may as well be addressing you directly: that's the effect Tindersticks have. Even their gentlest moments can grab and startle you, and their fiercest always overwhelm. These six sad Englishmen have always been beyond classification; you've never heard anything like them, and the things you could compare them with-- Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg, spy film scores, Leonard Cohen, an apocalyptic bar band-- don't make for an easy description.
Their last two albums settled back a bit from their sharply confrontational, uniquely miserable trio of early works, albums whose sheer brilliance and distinctiveness the band are unlikely ever to match again. A readily identifiable R&B influence unexpectedly came to the fore in recent years, and though it suited them nicely, I was admittedly a bit worried about Waiting for the Moon, which could have very easily seen them losing the plot and slipping into formula. Instead, it resynthesizes everything they've done before, and emerges as a cohesive work mirroring the straightforward format of Simple Pleasure and Can Our Love..., all the while pushing the music in bolder directions than either of those albums.
The fact that Dickon Hinchliffe (the band's violinist and orchestrator) sings the first song comes as a bit of a surprise, though not an unpleasant one. He sounds kind of like Witness' Gerard Starkie, and his tenor is a good foil to the more familiar, foggy baritone croon of Stuart Staples. Opener "Until the Morning Comes" is a subtle lullaby, riding David Boulter's tinkling keyboards and a sweeping string arrangement and never rising much above a whisper despite the violence that crops up in the lyrics.
Staples takes the lead back on "Say Goodbye to the City", which is a tense, brooding grind of violin, syncopated drums, droning bass and minimalist guitar that explodes into gales of dissonant strings and frantic trumpet-- it's their most harrowing song since 1997, and it feels great to hear them back in this territory. Staples turns to a deadpan spoken narrative on "4.48 Psychosis", as the band builds a steadily boiling drone around him, letting drummer Alasdair MacCauley splatter jazz over his rock beat while Hinchliffe's violin coats everything.
Tindersticks are still pretty heavily set in their soul phase elsewhere, as on "Trying to Find a Home" and Hinchliffe's gorgeous "Sweet Memory"; the way the songs sit on the album, you can just feel the group constructing them, letting the pieces fall together naturally. The title track is a pensive music box of strings that gives Staples a perfect bed to shine on-- his vocals are probably one thing most likely to drive someone away from Tindersticks, but once you've acquired a taste for it, his deeply soulful gutter croon becomes a salve for all the worst emotions.
Waiting for the Moon is just what I needed from Tindersticks: an album that doesn't abandon their recent direction, but breathes new life into it by drawing breath from their noisier past. They may operate below the radar of hype and trends-- especially in recent years-- but for whatever public ignorace, Tindersticks are one of the best bands going today. I'm more than happy to have their hands 'round my throat. | 2003-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | July 9, 2003 | 8.3 | 323655d4-e825-41fd-b94b-4858e55e0766 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
null | "I might not write a very good second album. The thing to do is not take yourself so seriously. The moment when you sort of start to believe all that stuff is when you get in trouble." That's Lily Allen talking to this website in November 2006. At that point, her MySpace clarion of a debut, *Alright, Still*, was four months into what would become a 17-month stint on the UK's album chart. With her bluntly nonchalant, blog-like songwriting about dudes with small dicks, breezy beats worthy of a terrible *Ska-lright, Still* joke, and link-happy marketing campaign from the web | Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12662-its-not-me-its-you/ | It's Not Me, It's You | "I might not write a very good second album. The thing to do is not take yourself so seriously. The moment when you sort of start to believe all that stuff is when you get in trouble." That's Lily Allen talking to this website in November 2006. At that point, her MySpace clarion of a debut, Alright, Still, was four months into what would become a 17-month stint on the UK's album chart. With her bluntly nonchalant, blog-like songwriting about dudes with small dicks, breezy beats worthy of a terrible Ska-lright, Still joke, and link-happy marketing campaign from the web up, Allen offered the music industry a way forward if not fiscally, at least artistically. She was the New Pop Star-- slight voice, bawdy, prom dress 'n' trainers, self-sufficient. The Anti-Idol. "Refreshing" followed her; "candid" was her friend. And, more than anything, Lily Allen was funny, excelling in the droll British humor of someone who had sold drugs in Ibiza at age 15 and realized the absurdity of a 15-year-old selling drugs in Ibiza.
So it seems odd for this chart guerrilla to fall into so many trad-pop trappings on sophomore album It's Not Me, It's You. There's the sound: Alright, Still's hissy, homey samples are booted for decidedly more streamlined and schizophrenic backdrops. The voice: Allen's conversational and unpredictable flow is replaced with broad, upfront lines. The words: Since she's the story day after day now, the singer's journalistic wisecracks have turned inward-- and this time Lily's taking on biggies like religion, family strife, and drug abuse. The publicity: photo shoots for every wheezing print mag left, including brooding black and whites for Interview and Blender. She's taking herself a bit more seriously, in other words. It's troublesome.
But there is such a thing as good trouble. The push-pull between Lily's sober side and the side that slurred about how she'd "still fuck" 82-year-old Tony Bennett at an awards show last year can make for some appealing and slippery social commentary. Take first single "The Fear", part admission, part brag, part apocalyptic vision. "I want to be rich and I want lots of money/ I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny," she starts, "I want loads of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds/ I heard people die while they're trying to find them." For almost any other artist, the lines would be barbed, sarcastic, and, ultimately, uppity and bland indictments. But not for the loudmouth who recently told Spin about how she hopes to marry a multi-millionaire and admitted to The New York Times that she spent $143,000 on clothes and jewelry in 2008 alone. She's part of the problem and is plagued by an overwhelming sense of collapse; she has her cake, throws it around the restored dining room and then feels a tinge of panic while observing the mess. This is perceptive pop for a consumer culture OD'ing on consumer culture and Houdini investments. "I don't know what's right and what's real anymore," she confesses, sounding like the world's loneliest Real World alum.
When she turns her nose up at easy targets-- W., faith, hypocritical druggies-- this typically beyond-her-years 23-year-old can seem naïve. Futuristic Justice-meets-Care Bears synths flit by as Allen condemns cracked-out teens and their prescription parents on "Everyone's At It", but such revelations come off about as insightful as one of those "but Dad, I learned it from you" PSA's. Righty-baiting "Fuck You" utilizes "Sesame Street" piano plinks to serve its too-goofy hook-- and makes it clear just how easily Allen's winsome brattiness can turn into grating novelty. In her Spin cover story, she talked about her penchant for older men, complaining how 25-year-olds "think they know everything and they're just fucking idiots." Given songs like "Fuck You"-- and considering her usually savvy self-awareness-- the quote is particularly unfortunate.
Aside from a couple Alright, Still-type kiss-offs-- the quotable country lark "Not Fair" about an underwhelming bedmate and oom-pah circus lark "Never Gonna Happen"-- Sincere Lily takes grip on the rest of the LP. Family-minded tracks "Back to the Start" and "He Wasn't There" attempt (and fail) to hide rote therapy maxims behind maddening electro and faux-jazz, respectively. Britney/Kylie/Nelly producer Greg Kurstin works like a radio-ready Jon Brion, tossing out disparate styles with ease, but the stunt arrangements sometimes sound entirely divorced from Lily's accompanying sentiments. But form meets function well on two mid-tempo love songs, "I Could Say" and especially "Who'd Have Known". An airy, angst-less rewrite of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone", "I Could Say" is snarkless and lovely-- Kid Icarus theme music via bulletproof Europop. "Who'd Have Known" is prime Lily 2.0, growing up without the heavy-handed, 2D "maturity"; it's a knowing ode to early love and all the uncertainty, excitement and irrationality that goes along with it.
"I don't have anything that I'm really passionate about. Maybe I just haven't found what it is yet. But it's not music, which is a shame, because it would be good if it was." That's Lily Allen talking to the New York Times last week. After the quick-hit success of her offhand debut, such a blasé attitude toward international success would be understandable, if a bit nuts. But, given the more considered It's Not Me, It's You, the quote comes off more like hedging; there will always be someone for vultures to photograph, but she's wise enough to know it might not always be her. Even if the new album can be cheaply on-the-nose and opportunistic at times, it's hard to root against Lily Allen. Her plight-- bare, self-conscious, petty, fearful-- is familiar. You see me; I see you. | 2009-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | February 11, 2009 | 6.6 | 323a484d-842f-4e0e-8b22-d5c98d41c834 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Originally released in 1999, Underworld's newly reissued rave-inspired fifth LP is often thrilling, but is mainly a fascinating snapshot of the UK group at a moment of ambivalence. | Originally released in 1999, Underworld's newly reissued rave-inspired fifth LP is often thrilling, but is mainly a fascinating snapshot of the UK group at a moment of ambivalence. | Underworld: Beaucoup Fish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/underworld-beaucoup-fish/ | Beaucoup Fish | It was 1999, and Underworld were in a dangerous place. After two decades of ups and downs—they’d been dropped by labels and management, gone deeply into debt, and cycled through four different band names—Underworld had become what they’d decided they never wanted to be again: a real band.
This was a significant change of fortunes from just six years prior. When Rick Smith and Karl Hyde, bandmates since 1979, and a DJ named Darren Emerson, a little more than 10 years their junior, released the trio’s landmark 1993 album Dubnobasswithmyheadman, they were starting from scratch. After getting turned on to the UK’s acid-house scene and abandoning the unfashionable, high-gloss pop-rock of Underworld’s previous iteration, they’d spent the previous couple of years recording a series of dance singles that they sold out of the back of their car.
Underworld weren’t a natural fit for the rave scene—there was Smith and Hyde’s age, for one thing, along with Hyde’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness vocals—but somehow, they struck a chord. Dubnobasswithmyheadman anticipated a growing desire for what’s sometimes been called “progressive house,” but in their case just meant a sound that was psychedelic and enveloping, with a little bit more personality than much of the era’s dance music. (Melody Maker called it a “breathtaking hybrid [that] marks the moment that club culture finally comes of age and beckons to everyone.”) Second Toughest in the Infants, the second album from their new incarnation, burrowed deeper into their moody psychogeography and fueled their continued upward trajectory with critics and fans. Then came Trainspotting. Getting “Born Slippy .NUXX”—until then, a B-side that had attracted little attention—onto the film’s soundtrack earned the band a whole new set of fans, particularly in America, where their vestigial rock trappings poured a spoonful of sugar over the bitter pill of unfamiliar rave beats.
Inspired by rave’s parallel economy—a world apart, massive but underground, with few ties to the old-guard music industry—Underworld had set out to remain independent. But their success, ironically, found them absorbed back into the pop music machine. Beaucoup Fish, the best-selling Underworld album, is fascinating precisely for the ways in which it captures them at a moment of ambivalence.
In many ways, the ’99 record represents a logical extension of their previous two albums. Track lengths have shrunk a bit—there’s certainly nothing like the pair of 15- and 16-minute colossi that kicked off Second Toughest—but they feel long, with tumbling synth arpeggios pushing forward like great big sawtoothed corkscrews. Even at just four and a half minutes long, the barreling piano house of “Push Upstairs” seems epic. And the way the 12-minute opener “Cups” cycles through its different phases even feels like a DJ set in miniature.
On balance, it’s the heaviest of the trio lineup’s three albums. One of the principal takeaways from this remastered reissue is how thrillingly fast techno used to be: Most of the proper club cuts here hover around a blistering 140 beats per minute, and their drum work pulls no punches. Underworld had always taken pride in their idiosyncratic approach: “The purists all hated us, because we were so eclectic,” Hyde told SPIN. But the only thing standing between “Moaner” and techno’s textbook definition is Hyde ranting, “Get the sound in your head/Black metal walls are crawling/I am the hunger above your town,” like a sidewalk preacher beneath his end-of-days sandwich board. (Another revelation here is how much, in retrospect, Sleaford Mods owe to Hyde’s imagistic armchair-sociologist shtick.) “Kittens,” ironic title aside, is an even more straight-down-the-middle take on boomy, big-room techno, albeit fleshed out with pastel-colored shoegaze guitars—part rave, part rocket launch. Blame it on the crash cymbals, maybe, but the track’s atmospherics have aged far better than the beats. The best of the bangers is undoubtedly “Shudder / King of Snake,” which riffs on the bassline of “I Feel Love” and adds bare-knuckled chord stabs and so much percussion that it sounds like a street fight between rival samba schools. There’s not a tougher piano-house track in the annals of Ibiza.
Despite the trio’s significantly raised profile, Beaucoup Fish makes surprisingly few overtures to pop. The only thing that comes close is “Bruce Lee,” a 100-BPM breakbeat tune that takes after big-beat contemporaries like the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. Still, there’s no melody to speak of, just an atonal clank buttressed by turntablist scratching. Hyde’s lyrics, which resemble scrambled advertising copy (“Life kid suck/Drink from the box/The juice kicks up/Live give suck the box drink/Yeeaaaah”) are “pop” only in the way Warhol’s soup cans were pop. More intriguing might be two nearly ambient sketches, “Winjer” and “Skym,” that set Hyde against a backdrop of synths and little else. Both songs suggest the lengths the group was willing to go to test listeners’ expectations; that they sequenced the two songs side by side on the album only reinforces what a curiously atmospheric vision they were pursuing.
The album’s most exciting and enduring moments are the ones that pair this suggestive ambient energy with their rhythmic instincts. “Cups” teases a hint of that: Hyde’s bluesy, vocodered melody swirls like colored smoke over one of the album’s most hypnotic grooves, and incidental keys sparkle like the light from a disco ball. “Something Like a Mama” smoothes over its tumbling breakbeats with soft sunrise pads, and the unresolved qualities of its bass-and-synthesizer counterpoints give the track an unmistakably searching feel. And then there’s “Jumbo,” one of the two or three most affecting tracks in their entire catalog. It’s as fast as anything on the album, fueled by crisp, snapping drums and a spring-loaded bassline, yet it feels like falling upward through clouds, like a midsummer snowstorm. It’s here that they truly made good on the immersive, otherworldly potential that always inhabited their music; it’s here that they outdid themselves as makers of extroverted music for introverts, of rave anthems for people happiest alone in their heads.
The extras on the 4x-CD expanded edition comprise mainly alternate takes and DJ remixes. The latter are mainly of interest to collectors. Unless you’re a working drum ‘n’ bass DJ, chances are you don’t need both a vocal mix and an instrumental of DJ Hype & DJ Zinc’s jump-up reworking of “Bruce Lee.” (That said, the techno titan Dave Clarke’s “King of Snake” remix, which folds “It Takes Two”-style hiccups and a bizarrely backmasked cymbal into the original’s rushing chord stabs, is truly a thing to behold.)
The alternate takes are not much more essential, but they offer an intriguing glimpse of any number of possible albums that Beaucoup Fish might have turned out to be. “Skym - A A1317 Nov 97” plays out like an unplugged rehearsal for keys, brushed drums, and Hyde’s unadorned voice. “Bruce Lee - Ricks 1st Dobro Mix” pitches the tune up by a half-step or so and adds silvery steel guitar to the mix. And “Jumbo - Diff Bass 2 A1317 Nov 97” sounds virtually identical to the album version, but without the bright synths and cutting bassline of the latter, it feels like a dimmer switch has been turned down; it’s good, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the glories of the canonical version.
Hyde has complained that by Beaucoup Fish, some of the “rough edges” had come off their work. “We’re getting a bit professional,” he said of that period. “And by that I mean less intuitive, and more streamlined.” Yet what the outtakes show is how easily it all could have gone wrong. The album’s best tracks, like “Jumbo,” are the most streamlined ones; the album is most successful when it strikes a balance between their habitual grit and a newfound polish. Perhaps they never meant to come back as a real band, but the best of Beaucoup Fish finds them at the height of their powers. | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UMC | August 28, 2017 | 7.4 | 32479675-59e4-4dfb-8c1b-86ed9b0e5120 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Co-produced with Nashville’s Dave Cobb, the onetime boy bander’s new solo album is a coming-clean, “back to basics” record that hits like background music. | Co-produced with Nashville’s Dave Cobb, the onetime boy bander’s new solo album is a coming-clean, “back to basics” record that hits like background music. | Zayn: Room Under the Stairs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zayn-room-under-the-stairs/ | Room Under the Stairs | Zayn’s solo career has been a series of fits and starts, a product of a modern pop landscape where being a talented singer is far from enough to capture the zeitgeist. It may have been a mistake to initially define himself by what he was not: not a Simon Cowell shill, not a squeaky-clean boy band idol, not above laborious concept albums. His chosen character of the brooding, afflicted Don Juan, provocative as it may be, is not exactly unique; even the Weeknd has begun working beyond its creative limits. And with ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS, Zayn seems to be finally casting off that tried-and-tested persona, at least to an extent.
If you’ve ever tuned into SiriusXM’s The Coffee House station, you know what this album sounds like. Doing away with the pulsing, club-ready R&B of Zayn’s past solo work, Dave Cobb’s co-production paints a new backdrop of beachy guitar and live drums, playing into Zayn’s former One Direction role as the introspective crooner. “I’m finding my way on the highway this year,” he declares on “Concrete Kisses,” over sparkling keys and a meandering bassline. Recorded at his home in rural Pennsylvania, this is apparently meant to be Zayn’s coming-clean, “back to basics” record, channeling the likes of Chris Stapleton (another Cobb collaborator) and John Legend as a way of projecting sensitivity. The sound is pleasant enough, if a little too picturesque. The strongest entries are the trio of songs that Zayn didn’t co-write: “Stardust” is a gushy ode to new love, “Something in the Water” has Zayn doing his best Blonde impression, and “False Starts” carries a propulsion that’s sorely missing everywhere else.
While not completely devoid of references to partying—“So fucked, I can’t feel my face”—ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS gestures towards a vaguer messiness of long-term relationships. “Take me as I am, I’m tired/Of dancing around the point,” Zayn sings on “What I Am,” then proceeds to spend the whole album doing just that. Apart from a few true groaners (“Got a big old cup of shit/Told me to drink it”), the lyrics are mostly forgettable mush, circuitous nothings like, “These days, I live to my depiction” (“Grateful”) or, “With no senses, ain’t no sentence/Making sense of us” (“Dreamin”). These garbled thoughts only reinforce the songs as background music—the soundtrack at a boardwalk cafe where you’re only meant to hear every third word, or the needle drops on reality TV whenever one contestant proposes to another. They’re not bad, per se, but they’re anonymous.
ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS follows Zayn’s split from his on-again-off-again partner Gigi Hadid, which ended in 2021 when Zayn pleaded no contest to four charges of harassment for allegedly striking Hadid’s mother. Why, then, are relationship narratives on this album ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness? There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it. | 2024-05-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mercury | May 22, 2024 | 5.8 | 3247cc3b-ad23-4a94-b6d6-1255b89aec5d | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
The London artist's latest is a protean collection of a new kind of reggae lovers rock record that finds power in its diverse, hybrid style. | The London artist's latest is a protean collection of a new kind of reggae lovers rock record that finds power in its diverse, hybrid style. | Gaika: Spaghetto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22585-spaghetto/ | Spaghetto | Gaika Tavares is from the south London neighborhood of Brixton. It is a heterogeneous immigrant neighborhood endemic of the city’s rapid pace of gentrification. Just this year, protests erupted after a cluster of small businesses along the area’s railway hub were presented with sharp rent increases. Gaika returned to Brixton from art school just as the face of the neighborhood began to change. He notes, in an interview with the Fader, that the schizophrenic logic of real estate development would place an artisanal grocery store across the street from a housing project. That image in itself, while increasingly common throughout the globe, still feels like some anachronism playing itself out, as if the future of the neighborhood was flipping off its past.
In just the last two years, Gaika’s been busy archiving this experience of local change into defiantly industrial and viscerally uncomfortable music. His self-released mixtape Machine and his sophomore release Security (for Dre Skull’s Mixpak label) were the building blocks for a musical identity that he has called “ghetto futurism.” In each, he’s honed his blood-curdling howl and hypnotic patois into a sophisticated weapon he uses to castigate the milquetoast evil of the Queen’s government. He is not exactly a rapper, hewing closer to a dancehall deejay (in the style of Popcaan or Vybz Kartel), but the riddims he chooses to “toast” to are startlingly hybrid. He simultaneously borrows from the opiated beats of Clams Casino, the futurist dancehall of Rizzla, the industrial sneer of Death Grips, and the digital discomfort of Objekt or Amnesia Scanner, combining them into a slippery and metallic iteration of unique dance music. His latest release, Spaghetto (and his first for Warp) is a protean collection of eight songs that Tavares has described as his reggae lovers rock record.
Opening with “Neophyte,” he displays a new liturgical aspect to his sound. There is nearly a minute of humming, ambient static, and clouds of hisses before he enters the scene. It renders the entire vibe of the album far more gothic than any of his previous releases and allows himself to widen the scope of his sound and subject matter. In “Neophyte,” he considers the ways in which the black body has been pathologized by racist theology: “We're insecure in this image of God,” he says, and repeats with desperate urgency a warning about the shared vulnerability that creates: “Don't you know they'll break your body?/Don't you know they'll take your body?” He’s joined by Leila Adu, whose chorus (“Feelin' so raw/Livin' in these times/Oh, raw, so”) gives the track gospel-like feel.
In fact, Gaika creates his version of lovers rock by weaving electronic gospel into his dystopian sound. He manipulates his voice in different ways, dropping his howl for a syrupy and sometimes shaky singing voice, and relies on the help of female vocalists. He resides mostly in the background of “The Deal” complementing the singer Alyusha with sharp lines (“It's the deal that we made in blood/And it's written on your skin”). It almost sounds like a knockoff Kelela track, but Gaika's voice is such a weird instrument. It can be goofy and melancholic, almost recalling Lil B. He adds a tinge of goth sad-boy to his production that can soften the acidic dystopian vibe he usually works under, like on “Glad We Found It,” where he relies on a strangely tantric whisper that is overly earnest but lovable. It would almost be more interesting he if sung more songs with his inimitable howl. When he does, like in songs like “3D,” his screed on gentrification and cold city politics feels more forceful and intimate.
That said, Spaghetto is a strong EP from an artist who is surely going to release something even more wondrous variable and strange. He might not have the range, but he does sure have an intelligent sense of adventure and experimentation. Perhaps his music works so well because of its hybridity: mixing dancehall into German techno into gospel into stuff that sounds like Yeezus, all so powerfully. As Homi Bhabha theorized in regards to colonization, hybridity in cultural expression was an essential form of subversion on the part of the colonized and the oppressed. Gaika, like say, Elysia Crampton, is able to fuse vernacular forms into the sounds of popular culture in ways that are pleasurably disruptive and undeniably in your face. | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warp | November 10, 2016 | 7.8 | 324aef50-d8bf-4134-8a43-6b1c22c7e973 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' fourth album, they returned to the casual creative processes that produced their first demo and electrifying debut album, yet they struggle to recapture their early vitality. | For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' fourth album, they returned to the casual creative processes that produced their first demo and electrifying debut album, yet they struggle to recapture their early vitality. | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mosquito | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17868-yeah-yeah-yeahs-mosquito/ | Mosquito | There's a refrain you often hear about bands running on the sort of quick-burning demon energy that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were channeling in the early part of the last decade: You had to be there. But on rare occasions, a band will make a record so thick with atmosphere that "being there" is just a matter of pushing play. Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, is one of those achievements: Even if you didn't make it to one of the infamous early New York shows and have the pleasure of getting your glasses sprinkled with the beery spit of a grinning, lipstick-smeared frontwoman in tattered Christian Joy, the record itself did a commendable job of bottling that experience. It was a debut that aced music's classic chemistry lesson: Combine a few unlikely, molten compounds, take a step back, and wait for the bang.
When they put out their second album, it seemed, at least at the time, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were growing up too fast. Show Your Bones favored songcraft over shambolic energy, and sounded disappointingly tame on the heels of Fever's maniacal night-sweats. (It was also the beginning of a creative schism in the band; as Zinner told Spin in 2006, "I didn't want to write and record in a studio... I just wanted to do demos on a four-track in somebody's apartment." He lost that argument.) But in the long run, Bones has aged remarkably well, and now feels like a pivotal moment in the band's arc, setting the tone for a career of evolution, reinvention, and constant forward motion; 2009’s excellent It's Blitz! was a record of glammy, neo-Blondie avant-pop, staying true to their quirks but successfully expanding their range.
Mosquito, the group's fourth record, is its first step backwards. It feels uncharacteristic, calling to mind a lot of words that have never fit this band before: confused, dreary, uninspired, and-- on one particularly baffling song about aliens-- uncool. Karen may have bleached her hair electric blonde and donned some inspired, tinselly Elvis suits, but for once the band hasn't applied a similarly gleeful spirit of reinvention to its sound. Instead, Mosquito aims for more of a back-to-basics approach. "We have this shitty little downtown studio [in New York] that belongs to us," Karen said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "so we wrote songs and recorded demos whenever we felt inspired; it was kind of like Fever to Tell and our first demo." But the often limp Mosquito lacks their earlier material's spark.
Mosquito is not without highlights, but it requires some patience to unearth them, because when this record is bad, it's loudly, brazenly bad. "Area 52" is probably the lowest point in the band's catalog; its lyrics have a Spinal Tap syntax ("Message came from outer space/ Future of the human race") that makes it play like self-parody. The song also features an uncharacteristically wooden vocal from Karen, who's eventually drowned out by a wash of spacey blips and bleeps. At least she sounds like she's having a little more fun with "Mosquito", but even her trademark charisma can't inject a sting into the weak chorus ("They'll suck your blood! They'll suck your blood!" she tries, over and over). It's surprising how off the mark these songs sound coming from a band who used to be able to do goofy well. The upbeat songs on Fever careened with a wobbly, inebriated energy, but whenever Mosquito aims for "zany" or "light," it teeters around like an exhibitionist "drunk" on non-alcoholic beer.
"Mosquito" should have been a B-side at best, but the fact that it's the title track-- and the inspiration for the garish, David-Cronenberg-vomiting-on-a-Garbage-Pail-Kids-card cover art-- makes it that much harder to ignore. That a thin, overly literal song like "Mosquito" is at the center of the artistic statement they're trying to make only makes this album more of a head-scratcher. Whatever's holding this collection of songs together never quite congeals-- a problem exemplified by the James Murphy-produced "Buried Alive", a moody, nocturnal groove interrupted halfway through by a verse from Dr. Octagon (the high-concept, time-traveling alien persona of avant-rap legend Kool Keith) that lands in the song with a heavy thud.
On repeated listens, though, a few diamonds emerge in the rough. Built around Zinner's expectant single-note riff, the gradual crescendo of "Despair" plays like a more muted take on Show Your Bones' best single, "Cheated Hearts", though its refrain is even more poignant. "Oh despair, you've always been there," Karen sings with the perfect combination of exhaustion and defiance, "You were there through my wasted years... there through my wasted life." The closing track, "Wedding Song" (which Karen sang to her husband Barney Clay at their 2011 wedding reception) sounds a bit like a happy-ending sequel to "Maps", brooding with a similar emotional intensity ("In flames I sleep soundly/ With angels around me"). But the most promising-- and perhaps only truly new-- avenue the band wanders down on Mosquito is "Subway", a subtle, evocative sound collage driven by Karen's falsetto and the percussive churn of a train on the track. It's heavy on conceptual follow-through and finely crafted atmosphere on a record where both are in short supply.
On their best and most smartly sequenced albums, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs create a sense that their bratty swagger and disarming vulnerability were emanating from the same power source. In the wake of Fever's amped-up "Date With the Night" or "Tick", "Maps" feels like an inevitable come-down, but the songs on Mosquito don't feed off each other in the same way. The album's most keyed-up moment comes early, in the solid lead-off single "Sacrilege", but when a gospel choir storms the song's closing coda it feels unprompted-- this is a band that used to be able to kindle the same kind of fire from the minimal components of its own chemistry. Still, even if Mosquito suggests otherwise, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' much-lauded SXSW showing and recent homecoming performances in New York prove that magic can still happen for them on stage. Maybe now you just have to be there. | 2013-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | April 15, 2013 | 6 | 32554e32-af8e-4ac8-a136-f193cf88cf61 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The second album from the mercurial singer lets listeners in on another intimate journey of self-reflection, this time drawing on laconic folk, downtempo rock, and upbeat disco. | The second album from the mercurial singer lets listeners in on another intimate journey of self-reflection, this time drawing on laconic folk, downtempo rock, and upbeat disco. | Okay Kaya: Watch This Liquid Pour Itself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/okay-kaya-watch-this-liquid-pour-itself/ | Watch This Liquid Pour Itself | For Kaya Wilkins, songwriting is therapy. On Both, her 2018 debut under the name Okay Kaya, the Brooklyn-via-Norway singer built a small diorama of minimal bedroom pop with lyrics about her mental health, traumas, and desires. Its moments of feeling lost in social and sexual scenarios were oddly relatable, whether earnestly asking a lover to come with her to get an IUD, or exploring her curiosity about BDSM via Matrix costumes. On her second album, Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, she again lets listeners in on another intimate journey of self-reflection through frank disclosures about her life, this time drawing on laconic folk, downtempo rock, and upbeat disco to foreground a different mental cleanse.
One of Wilkins’ inspirations for Watch This Liquid was Hippocrates’ theory of chemical systems regulating human behavior, especially the black bile secreted by the kidneys that was said to cause depression and melancholia. The album is likewise Wilkins’ own purge, giving equal weight to an everyday encounter, a moment of longing, and a fleeting memory of her past, including time in a psychiatric hospital following a depressive episode. She tells her stories through a lilting voice that crawls from a whisper to a crisp contralto, which highlights her wry sense of humor. “Overstimulated” floats on a gently plucked electric guitar, easing you in as she describes feeling turned on with deadpan over-awareness: “Anything could happen/At any given time/No wonder why I’m overstimulated.” This trick works best with some of her more cynical lyrics; “Everybody, please give a warm welcome to this current mood,” she begins in a woozy, sardonic voice before reminding us we’re all at the mercy of the planet on the deceptively buoyant pop-disco interlude “Mother Nature’s Bitch.”
The album’s more pointed instances of stilted, blunt-force lyrics sometimes undermine Wilkins’ sarcasm. Her verbiage can be so edgeless as to pull you out of the song entirely, like when she grips you by the shoulders in the beginning of “Asexual Wellbeing” for some inexplicable brand-name whiplash: “All I need is your cerebral per diem/That midnight Van Leeuwen/Netflix and yeast infection.” It’s charming and funny in doses, but dilutes the power of her confessionals and keeps us at arm’s length. Later on the album, she tries to get ahead of the most salient critique here: “My lovers used to like all of my songs/Now they only find me annoying.”
Watch This Liquid eventually finds its footing, even if it’s a little off-kilter. “This is Scandinavia,” she pronounces on highlight “Givenupitis,” populating a vision of her home with droll references to its “children of apathy” and “politicians” over a spare trip-hop beat and a ringing bell. In moments like these, Wilkins’ obliqueness gives way to something deeper, raw, and atypical, like on the dreamy, horn-laden “Popcorn Heart,” when she compares her heartbeat to ducklings, “strong, streamlined, and quick.” At times the honesty on Watch This Liquid Pour Itself might be its worst fault, but it’s usually its finest quality.
Buy: Rough Trade/Vinyl Me, Please
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Jagjaguwar | January 28, 2020 | 6.8 | 3263fa2a-7c55-4f53-85e1-9642152b46b7 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
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 Ice Cube’s 1990 debut solo record, a groundbreaking piece of hard and funky reality rap that introduced the tabloid decade. | 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 Ice Cube’s 1990 debut solo record, a groundbreaking piece of hard and funky reality rap that introduced the tabloid decade. | Ice Cube: AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ice-cube-amerikkkas-most-wanted/ | AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted | Ronald Reagan knew television. Broadcasting since the birth of the medium, he always understood exactly how he looked on the other side of the camera. He used TV to cast himself as a kindly septuagenarian who loved jelly beans and playing cowboy, while his aides prepped him not with foreign policy debriefings but by telling him what to do in a particular “scene.” His major political battles were waged by the combined force of law and the mass media against enemies foreign (the Soviet Union) and domestic (the poor, especially Black).
Throughout the decade, a credulous, ratings-hungry TV news media used Reagan’s “law and order” style of right-wing governance to cast young Black men as the nation’s primary criminal menace, known mainly by their Action News poses, described by Ice Cube on “Rollin’ Wit the Lench Mob”: “On my knees in the street /Interlock my hands and feet.” Los Angeles made a great staging ground for Reagan’s so-called war on drugs, and in 1989 the hardline, media-savvy LAPD Chief Daryl Gates invited Nancy Reagan (and a phalanx of TV reporters) to observe a staged raid on a suspected dealer. “The working press arrived to find Mrs. Reagan and Gates munching fruit salad in an air-conditioned motor home parked beside the alleged rock house,” reported the L.A. Times.
By the early 1980s, television had replaced the daily newspaper as the nation’s primary news medium. Increasingly, the cultural relevance or accepted truth of an event was only fully acknowledged once video surfaced on the nightly news, or an evening TV drama ripped the story from the headlines. TV’s unique capacity to absorb, juxtapose, and regurgitate current events through pre-existing genres and cutting-edge visuals would soon come to be characterized as “postmodern,” but a more useful term came from critic Todd Gitlin, who described ’80s TV programming as the ultimate “recombinant” platform. Writing in 1983 of TV shows and films mimicking the increasingly torrid pace of Reagan’s unregulated late-capitalist consumerism, Gitlin explained that “in a world stripped of transcendent unities, the strategy of collage, of juxtaposition, makes the best of a bad situation,” in which “order can be assembled only from the juxtaposition of shards.”
Pop music had been juxtaposing shards into new forms for decades by this point, and no form was doing so more virtuosically than hip-hop, whether via DJs looping rhythmic breaks or rappers adopting outlandish personae and shuffling through pop culture references. As hip-hop became more political, rappers started mimicking the news reporters who were constantly prowling around their neighborhoods. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” opened with Melle Mel braying a tabloid headline about the shards he saw all around him: “Broken glass, everywhere!” A year later, Run-D.M.C. debuted with their own form of recombinant street journalism by flipping Walter Cronkite’s epochal and confident CBS Evening News signoff—“And that’s the way it is”—to a mordant slogan for young Black no-hopers at the dawn of Reaganism: “It’s like that/And that’s the way it is.” A few years later, Public Enemy frontman Chuck D—who was born in 1960 and came of age during the peaks of Black Power and 1970s Black television—took the metaphor to its logical conclusion, telling Spin that “rap is Black America’s TV station,” a medium that “gives a whole perspective of what exists and what Black life is about.”
Ten years Chuck’s junior and perhaps his most prominent admirer, Ice Cube also came of age in front of the tube, and thought of his creative process via televisual metaphor. In a 1990 interview for the rap TV show Pump It Up, Cube pointed at his temples and told host Dee Barnes, “This is my VCR. I just like, go through the streets and live, and kinda observe.” Fittingly, the interview coincided with the release of Cube’s debut solo album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, the title a timely riff on Fox television’s groundbreaking “reality” television program. America’s Most Wanted was itself very recombinant: host John Walsh addressed viewers from a set that merged the imagery of a TV police station, news studio, and charity telethon, introducing flashy, dramatic re-enactments of violent crimes for which the fugitives were still at large, then prompting viewers to call a 1-800 number with tips. Walsh himself had taken a unique path to fame: after the abduction and murder of his son, he became a national advocate for child safety, and was himself portrayed on TV by Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in the blockbuster 1983 made-for-TV movie Adam.
With America’s Most Wanted, John Walsh repackaged his family’s trauma into the character of a mercenary news anchor: Cronkite with a dash of Dirty Harry. On “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,” Ice Cube also plays an entertainingly inflated version of himself: an intelligent, cocky, and preternaturally media-savvy Black 20-year-old from South Central, who just so happened to have spent the previous summer with his previous group, N.W.A., being surveilled and harassed by cops across the midwest for the crime of writing and threatening to perform a song called “Fuck Tha Police.”
But apart from a quick “FBI on my dick, stay off!” in the third verse, Cube elides the previous year’s drama on the title track (he also saved his epochal N.W.A. diss for his next album). Instead, he casts himself as a fugitive from America’s Most Wanted’s armchair vigilantes, holing up in the hood after a profitable and fully armed “trip to the suburbs” a few weeks earlier. When he sees his face on television, he tries to make a quick escape, but has already been snitched on by a woman down the street watching the broadcast, and is immediately loaded into the back of a police cruiser. The lesson? The police will ignore him for robbing his “own kind,” but the second his character moves into white neighborhoods, he’s got a target on his back.
Cube’s larger point should sound familiar: Sister Souljah made it after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and became a national pariah. It’s the same justification for why, apart from the police, pop radio was Cube’s biggest enemy, such that he devoted an entire AmeriKKKa track to assailing radio programmers’ fear of alienating advertisers with “real” Black music. A couple decades earlier, it was the same idea that kept the books, films, and recordings of some of Cube’s forerunners and inspirations—The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Rudy Ray Moore, Donald Goines, Melvin Van Peebles, Iceberg Slim—limited to Black bookstores, record shops, and nightclubs; and inspired J. Edgar Hoover to label the media-savvy armed revolutionaries the Black Panther Party as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” Less than 25 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Cube and a new crop of vociferous young Black men were actively trolling “the color line”—a phrase popularized by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk that still dominated U.S. race relations.
But at the dawn of the 1990s, it was clear that the latest front in the long-running war for Black American self-determination would be waged as a mass-media spectacle, attempting to counteract a vast new culture war. The struggle against a supposed coarsening of popular culture, led by far-right conservatives, evangelical Christian groups, and ad-hoc organizations like Tipper Gore’s PMRC, quickly filled the significant political gap left by the waning Soviet Cold War. Democratic congressman Sidney Yates explained it succinctly in a 1990 interview: “You’ve got a fight going on today that is just as emotional as the fight that took place (in the 1950s). Except communism isn’t the bogeyman. This time it’s pornography and obscenity.” Predictably, rappers would soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a media spectacle with dire political stakes.
Hip-hop’s ascendant political revolution would be televised, and not only via Cube licking shots at Soul Train and Arsenio Hall on AmeriKKKa, Public Enemy sending-up of B.E.T.’s news programming on “Night of the Living Baseheads,” or Ice-T squaring off with Tipper Gore on Oprah. After teaming up with P.E.’s production team the Bomb Squad, Cube and his producer Sir Jinx used the newly released digital sampler to mimic cable TV’s depthless channel-flipping phantasmagoria, stirring L.A. electro-funk, a bleak sense of humor, and plenty of TV clips into a fun-house mirror of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’s ceaseless barrage of Malcolm X and James Brown soundbites. Taking additional cues from De La Soul’s skit-heavy, TV-poisoned masterpiece 3 Feet High and Rising and 3rd Bass’ sampledelic The Cactus Album, AmeriKKKa is what critic David Toop called “television structured music, influenced as much by tabloid news dramatizations as by the fragmentation of TV narrative by over-frequent commercial breaks.” Cube, Jinx, and the Bomb Squad were deploying Reagan’s preferred cultural weapon against the world he bequeathed them.
At the end of the skit that opens AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, during which Ice Cube is executed by electric chair, a man’s voice weaves its way into the soundscape: “Was America willing to maintain order, no matter what the cost?” The voice belongs to civil rights icon Julian Bond, narrating the landmark PBS civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize about the heated late-1960s moment after the FBI had assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton and police had opened fire on protesters at Attica prison. For Ice Cube, the answer to Bond’s question was an unqualified “yes”: The nation’s very existence was predicated on, at the very least, shutting people like Ice Cube up. But then the sample leads into “The N***a Ya Love To Hate.” Not only would he not shut up, but Cube fought back as the first major rapper to create a brand out of the language’s most notorious slur.
It started as trolling—Cube’s erstwhile collaborator MC Ren loved baiting white journalists into awkwardly saying it aloud during interviews. The word had been intellectually and politically reclaimed via the fire-and-brimstone soul of Curtis Mayfield, the incisive comedy and commentary of Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory, and the minimalist poetry of hip-hop’s politically minded originators. At the time, Cube would occasionally don a black ballcap with that word emblazoned on it. On AmeriKKKa’s single “Who’s the Mack?”, he clarifies that in lieu of the wide-brimmed hats and loud suits of hip-hop’s emergent pimp contingent, he’s “just a straight up N-I-double-G-A.”
The music video for “Who’s the Mack?” was where Cube first demonstrated his gift for cleverly assessing and satirizing Black pop culture. In the clip (directed by Alex Winter of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), Cube positions himself as a different kind of “street reporter” than he was on “Fuck Tha Police” or “Straight Outta Compton.” Here, he addresses the camera like a TV newsmagazine host while DJ Pooh dramatizes different versions of young Black men trying to get over in the modern world: an abusive pimp throwing sex workers into the trunk of his car, a conniving “squeegee man” bugging motorists for change, and a sleazy ladies’ man talking about his hot tub to women at the club. To Cube, they’re all playing the same con game. Light years from Max Julien’s Goldie character, Cube democratized macking: At the end of the video, President Bush is “President Mack,” disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker is a “Busted Mack,” and over-leveraged Manhattan real-estate developer and soon-to-be-divorced tabloid icon Donald Trump is a “Broke Mack.”
The “Mack” track clearly demonstrated the possibilities of the Bomb Squad and Cube/Jinx’s creative and comedic mind-meld, weaving a period-appropriate sample from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man soundtrack with Shock G’s winking pimp caricature from the previous year’s pop crossover “The Humpty Dance.” When Cube and Jinx showed up in New York to record, P.E.’s production team sent them to scour a Long Island warehouse basement packed with records to find the samples they wanted to use. “With (the) Bomb Squad it was like, ‘We can’t go to the real studio until we fill these two crates up with records that you like,’” Cube recalled. A couple years before Dr. Dre re-cast P-Funk as G-Funk, “You Can’t Fade Me” flipped the smooth hook from “Rumpofsteelskin,” the Chuck D collaboration “Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside)” used George Clinton’s “Bop Gun” scream, and “The Ni**a Ya Love To Hate” borrowed “Atomic Dog”s electro-thwack. AmeriKKKa’s production wasn’t nearly as earth-shatteringly great as the Bomb Squad’s on Fear of a Black Planet—the highest possible bar to clear, to be fair. In fact, the album’s best production moment comes on the all-too-brief dice-game drama “What They Hittin’ Foe?”, which sounds closest to what the Dust Brothers had just cooked up for Paul’s Boutique.
During production, Chuck D acted as something of an older brother to Cube. “You don’t gotta become conscious overnight, but you also have to grow,” Chuck said. Though AmeriKKKa was far from the political call-to-action Cube would shape for 1991’s Death Certificate, “Endangered Species”—the subtitle of which was cleverly flipped from the era’s creepiest syndicated TV horror show—laid out his politics clearly. After a news anchor frames the track like an investigative TV news report, Cube dismisses calls to ally with African freedom movements while describing Black Los Angeles as America’s own Bantustan, crawling with racist cops whose primary concern is adding to their personal body count of murdered Black youth. Cube raps it in an angry bark that was becoming his trademark sound. Where Chuck’s booming delivery channels Black oratory through Marv Albert, Cube in high dudgeon raps like a bully taunting you to your face, through a megaphone.
Off-record, Cube was dating a woman whom he’d marry in 1992 (and is still with). On wax, however, women were targeted as much as “the police, the media, and suckers that went pop,” never more than via the selfish asshole who narrates “You Can’t Fade Me.” An R-rated Maury episode a few years before the fact, the track cycles through numerous imagined and violent scenarios to avoid responsibility for a child: “Then I thought deep about giving up the money/What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy.” When critic Greg Tate asked Cube to explain that line, Cube replied, “Everybody has fantasies,” aligning the perspective with someone who imagines robbing a bank while waiting for a teller. (“You Can’t Fade Me” was actually quite tame compared to the Geto Boys’ gruesome 1990 track “Mind of a Lunatic,” on which the trio imagined themselves as the most sadistic, murderous villains imaginable.) On “It’s a Man’s World,” Cube’s protégé Yo-Yo plays the straight woman to Cube’s outsize sexist buffoon, but as a battle of the sexes, it’s not a fair fight. This is Cube’s world, and within it, women are required to contort to the vulgar imagination of a 20-year-old with plenty of emotional growing to do, but who still always gives himself the last word.
But at the same time, “You Can’t Fade Me” offers insight into Cube’s greatest gift: storytelling. It’s a macabre view into the mind of a young man with fucked-up priorities, but Cube lays it out with the condensed detail of Slick Rick or Ice-T. Cube’s preternatural skill at evoking the Black suburban experience that served as the mundane background to his gangsta fantasies is still somehow underappreciated, and “Once Upon a Time In the Projects” displays the youthful, creative demeanor that would produce Friday five years later. As the story opens, Cube’s in the family living room of a young woman he’s hoping to hook up with—naturally, the suburban chaos reminds him of Good Times and Robin Harris’ standup routine “Bebe’s kids.” But like an amateur version of a Richard Pryor bit, the scene quickly grows bizarre when, at the end of the first verse, Cube realizes he’s sitting in the front room of a crackhouse. When the cops show up, they misinterpret the word “dope” on his t-shirt and toss him and the girl into a police cruiser. Of course, there’s a moral: “Now the story you heard has one little object/Don't fuck with a bitch from the projects.”
On the surface, Cube’s politics on AmeriKKKa would appear to be a simple reactivation of the Panthers’ media-savvy push for Black liberation in the shadow of Reaganism, but clues to a deeper conservatism are everywhere. Not just in his consistently articulated belief that women were nothing more than sex objects to be used and discarded, but also in “Who’s the Mack?” when he instantly assumes that Black people asking for spare change are up to something sinister, or in “Projects,” when he says the woman’s gang-affiliated younger brother “needs to pull his pants up.”
It wasn’t a Bill Cosby-style integrationist conservatism that Cube aspired toward, but, as a 1990 Rolling Stone interview revealed, the worldview articulated by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam—whom the reporter observed Cube watching with interest on an episode of The Phil Donahue Show. Over the prior decade, Farrakhan had dragged the Nation of Islam from near-irrelevance onto television and into hip-hop lyrics, selling out Madison Square Garden with an ideology rooted in economic and social separatism. The “projects,” for Cube and Farrakhan, weren’t the symbolic origin of future Black success like they’d soon be for Nas and Jay-Z, but an embarrassment to the Black community that, importantly, it was up to the Black community itself to fix.
Cube would explore his unique approach to Farrakhanism in depth on the double album Death Certificate, but that was still a year away. In 1990, Cube and AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted served as a bombastic introduction to what would later be dubbed “the tabloid decade,” a merger of Reaganist law and order and TV’s shift to lurid infotainment drawn from the supermarket checkout line—otherwise known as the first wave of “reality” entertainment. Specific to hip-hop, it was AmeriKKKa as much as Nation of Millions and Straight Outta Compton that laid the groundwork for hip-hop’s brief and dramatic evolution into an expansive truth-telling media spectacle. | 2024-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Priority | June 9, 2024 | 9 | 326eca1b-4991-4e1c-918b-6707ef5cd4ee | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
JT and Yung Miami strive to regain their spot as the dirtiest, most provocative hitmakers in rap. | JT and Yung Miami strive to regain their spot as the dirtiest, most provocative hitmakers in rap. | City Girls: RAW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/city-girls-raw/ | RAW | The title of the new City Girls album is a shocker: RAW aka Real Ass Whores. It’s an attempt to convince the music world that their X-rated anthems of tricking and scamming haven’t lost any edge just because they got real professional in the three years since City on Lock. In that time, Yung Miami, who chants like New Orleans bounce and Miami bass pioneers of the past, settled into the role of talk show host with Caresha Please, an occasionally raunchy and often therapeutic interview series designed to make her the next rapper-turned-mogul. JT, the more hardened rhymer, transformed into a Vogue-approved It Girl, with more appearances at runways than on rap songs. They’ve intentionally steered their image away from the Miami fast life and closer to Vivica A. Fox’s businesswoman in Two Can Play That Game.
As this transformation was taking shape, the City Girls' lawless, horny, club-hopping escapades became a living mood board for the next generation. It’s not out of pocket to say that Sexyy Red’s Hood Hottest Princess, arguably one the biggest mixtapes of the year, wouldn’t have been able to flourish like it did if the duo’s 2018 album Girl Code hadn’t come before it. But who wants to be discussed like musical relics? The City Girls sure don’t. Throughout RAW, they’re on a mission to regain their spot as the dirtiest, most provocative hitmakers in rap.
Too bad they sound too splintered to get there—I wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of RAW was recorded while Miami and JT were in different cities. They don’t feel like they’re on the same wavelength nearly often enough. Most of the standout moments go to Miami. Her verses are always rich with carefree personality, like how she erupts over the hushed beat of “Line Up” for a few of the most emphatic bars on the album: “It’s just somethin’ about a nigga who put money in a brown bag/Ooh it turn me on like a light switch.” That “ooh” sounds like she’s panting in the booth. Then on “Show Me the Money,” over a flip of Rebbie Jackson’s “Centipede” so fly that you could imagine it in the hands of turn-of-the-century Hov, Miami’s shifty-flowed flexing does Trina on “Nann Nigga” about as well as anyone except Trina herself.
JT isn’t quite an afterthought, but it sometimes feels like she’s clocking in. Her solo track “No Bars” is supposed to be her close-up, and the thudding Michigan-style beat makes you believe that she’s about to black out. Instead the song is pretty tame, full of clean-cut bars about which brands she would like to be sponsored by. (“Got bitches tannin’ for this dark skin” is a good one, though.) There’s a little swag to her opening verse on the Magnolia Shorty-interpolating “What You Want,” even if it’s quickly upstaged by Miami going for broke: “Fuck them kids, I’ma swallow that jit.” As a unit the City Girls are at their best when JT is the core and Miami is the wild card. That’s the case with “I Need a Thug,” a twist on LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.” The way JT rips into her verse (“He walk in parties and you know the sticks is up/I walk in parties and you know the dicks is up”) allows Miami to act more like Freaknik host.
By now you’ve probably noticed that there are a ton of obvious samples on RAW, as is the trend in popular rap. I’m not against that as long as the flip has a point aside from nostalgia mining, and for the most part, the City Girls are good about that. Turning “From the D to the A” into “Fuck the D to the A” (one of their earliest loosies from 2017, sentimentally repurposed on this album) is clever and spiritually right. The Usher hook on “Good Love” can go, but one thing the City Girls should always do is reimagine bass throwbacks. The spin on the “Int’l Players Anthem” sample on “Fancy Ass Bitch” is on the dull side, though without it we wouldn’t have that explosive Miami verse where she breaks out some French: “Hit Paris, oui oui.”
Then there is “Face Down,” straight up first-rate City Girls. Miami and JT take the concept of one of the filthiest—and most degrading—2 Live Crew time capsules and reclaim it by flipping the power dynamics. As the pummeling Mike WiLL and P-Nasty beat goes, Miami lays down imagery that in this day and age could get its own obscenity trial (“I make him face me, nasty, squirt in his mouth”) and JT sets the tone with one of those bars that you want to yell every time, even if you’re part of the demographic whose pockets she’s trying to hurt: “Shoutout my bitches gettin’ bags out of niggas.” It’s two racing minutes that will make you think that the City Girls still got it. | 2023-10-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | October 26, 2023 | 6.8 | 32721e36-8df8-4190-8441-1b8366cff55e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On Willis Earl Beal's second album, Nobody Knows, the music is more diverse and expansive than it was on his 2012 debut, Acousmatic Sorcery. Sounds and styles he only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice is given the sonic space it probably deserves. | On Willis Earl Beal's second album, Nobody Knows, the music is more diverse and expansive than it was on his 2012 debut, Acousmatic Sorcery. Sounds and styles he only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice is given the sonic space it probably deserves. | Willis Earl Beal: Nobody Knows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18460-willis-earl-beal-nobody-knows/ | Nobody Knows | Acousmatic Sorcery, the 2012 debut by Chicago songwriter Willis Earl Beal, was an album of mysterious, crudely recorded folk and blues that wouldn't have gotten half the attention it did if it weren't for Beal's backstory. An army vet drifting from Albuquerque to his grandma's house on Chicago's South Side, Beal released his earliest recordings via CD-R, usually accompanied by hand-drawn zines, left, as he put it to GQ, "all around the hipster places and the coffee shops"-- places where Beal rightly guessed that people would be drawn to strange, singular art objects that seemed like missives from a subterranean world.
If that all sounds calculating, it's because it was: Like his hero Tom Waits, Beal presented himself as a savant-like character who just crawled out of the swamp but was in reality a savvy performer aware of peoples' longstanding fascination with outlaws, boogeymen, and characters who present themselves as forces of nature rather than products of society. At one point last year, he even told Time Out Chicago he wanted to be an outsider artist, somehow forgetting that one of the conditions of being an outsider artist is not knowing you're an outsider artist.
Thankfully, Beal's backstory isn't as relevant to Nobody Knows, which in 2013 arrives more or less like any other album: Recorded in a studio, released by a label (instead of picked up by one retroactively), marketed, hopefully, like the work of another singer-songwriter just elbowing his way through the crowd. The music is more diverse and expansive than it was on Acousmatic Sorcery, which is probably just a function of better resources: Sounds and styles Beal only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice-- a bellowing, conventionally soulful instrument-- is given the sonic space it probably deserves, sitting in the mix like an old iron anchor.
The songs on Nobody split their influences between old-fashioned blues and indie ballads, replete with the sounds of glockenspiels and warm, staticky ambience. The modes aren't all that different. Blues ballads, like indie confessionals, can be almost threateningly intimate, like a cage built from the singer's feelings designed to trap and hold a listener in place. Parts of Nobody-- like parts of Acousmatic Sorcery-- imitate nervous breakdowns, sexual frenzy, and other states of uncomfortably heightened awareness, but that's the point: A born seducer, part of Beal's routine is to draw his listeners into dark places, lower his eyes, jingle a set of keys, and grin.
Like Waits, Beal is a mishmash of tropes made from a shared language you know without having to be taught it: he's "Cool like a fool in the summertime" on the hymn-like highlight "Wavering Lines"; he's "in transition goin' from town to town" on "Ain't Got No Love"; he's "nine hard inches like a pitchfork prong" on "Too Dry To Cry". He's a shadowy figure skulking the streets at night; he's a corner-store preacher on the brink of revelation; he's a little hambone and a little field holler. He's less a blues singer than a blues incarnate-- an artist that will appeal to people more interested in blues as a theatrical concept than a genre of music.
Which is all to say that despite his apparent idiosyncrasies, Beal is pretty up the middle. Compared to TV on the Radio, Autre Ne Veut, or even Daughn Gibson-- all of whom have experimented with weird, histrionic mutations of the blues-- Beal sounds like a traditionalist more interested in moving ideas around than expanding on them. The real irony of Nobody Knows is that it makes him sound like a more fully realized artist, but a more conservative one, too. | 2013-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | XL / HXC | September 12, 2013 | 7.2 | 327c7123-be79-4db1-80ea-dce3492ba811 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Chilean American producer’s latest album is his most probing and existential, taking influences from all over his career and placing them into grim atmospheres that slip in and out of reality. | The Chilean American producer’s latest album is his most probing and existential, taking influences from all over his career and placing them into grim atmospheres that slip in and out of reality. | Nicolás Jaar: Cenizas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicolas-jaar-cenizas/ | Cenizas | Nicolás Jaar wrote much of his arresting third album in isolation, holed up in a remote corner of the world without booze, cigarettes, or caffeine. It was an attempt to rid himself of negativity, the electronic musician said, but the solitude didn’t work as he planned. Negativity haunted him, as did his ego, and eventually Jaar realized the only way out was through: that he’d have to face his flaws in order to heal. (Indeed, the optically deceptive cover art suggests a turn inward.) Cenizas latches onto this revelation and burns with suspense, fury, and sadness. It isn’t a work of clarity but of cleansing—of reckoning with constructive anger—and offers little relief aside from a few fleeting moments that are so vivid and lovely they almost hurt. It’s Jaar at his most interrogating and existential, exploring grim atmospheres that feel both hallucinatory and troublingly real—a relatable image in a disorienting time.
Occasionally, the audacious way Jaar strings sounds together—warping melodies, skewing rhythms, stretching soundscapes into horizons of feeling—can make you question your perception. How can it sound both noisy and minimal, mournful and alive? Layer by layer, he reveals new dimensions and expands our understanding of what this album is: a cerebral study in sound design that insists upon asymmetry and atonality; a storm of texture and tension that refuses tidy resolution; a heady, meditative glimpse into Jaar’s widening third eye; a quietly radical political statement about inequality and resistance. It is a world in which future jazz, warped psychedelia, ambient noise, and monastic chanting coil together like vines–an example, perhaps, of the producer’s own vision of coexistence.
Jaar, a Chilean American who grew up between Santiago and New York City, appears to be feeling a heightened sense of geopolitical dread. Both countries are in states of violent unrest, albeit of different forms—riots and uprisings across Chile, a slow and ugly unraveling in the U.S.—and it’s hard to find an interview where Jaar doesn’t sound distressed. (His father, the activist-artist Alfredo Jaar, looms in his work.)
Over time, Jaar’s music has become increasingly confrontational and politically charged. His 2011 debut Space Is Only Noise introduced listeners to his disruptive spirit and global tastes. Sirens, his ambient-leaning follow-up, conceived partly in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump, illuminated the cyclical nature of power and the illusion of democracy. Jaar now runs a handful of musical operations—the excellent techno-club alias Against All Logic, the Dave Harrington team-up Darkside, and his own label, Other People—all of which delight in dissonance and rage against cliché. Outside of his solo projects, he’s worked with FKA twigs on her 2019 album MAGDALENE, crafted pipe organ compositions for a cathedral in the Netherlands, collaborated with sound artists in the West Bank, and performed through speakers buried in the Arabian desert for an installation about land rights and climate change. Jaar is determined, he’s often repeated, to explore electronica as a form of protest: “Can electronic music talk about the world around us? Can we get out of this abstract bubble? How can we resist?”
All of these endeavors show up in Cenizas—the choir in “Hello, Chain,” the monastic humming in “Xerox,” the references to saints and sin in “Sunder”—but Jaar’s environmental efforts also trickle in. After completing an artist residency at Amsterdam’s Het HEM, he participated in an exhibit questioning the military’s use of local forests and quoted anthropologist Anna Tsing: “These livelihoods... show us how to look around, rather than ahead.” The line reappears in “Faith Made of Silk,” the album’s absorbing final track, where it doubles as a call to action. “A peak is just the way towards a descent,” he warns. “You have nowhere to look/Look around not ahead.”
Given all the technical ground Cenizas covers, Jarr is an impressively meticulous guide. Every pluck, ping, buzz, scratch, and whistle is intentional, a bump in the tunnel as you slide down the rabbit hole. Once you’re there, he makes even the most discomfiting sounds—a frantic glissando after a tirade of keys, the squawk of a bow dragged across muted cello strings—feel natural. As these foreign environments begin to feel familiar, the less attached you become to your reality.
Jaar seems eager to make you question your instincts. On “Gocce,” he plays with order and chaos, control and surrender, until you’ve suddenly forgotten which you prefer. Do you sink into the meditative loops of “Garden” and rock in its hammock of major-to-minor keys? Or do you prefer the spontaneous turbulence of “Rubble”? Your impressions might shift as you venture deeper. “Agosto” mystified me the first four or five listens, so fitful and deranged. Now, I’m dumbstruck by its strange, serpentine beauty. Every mysterious element of Cenizas—the prickly stimulations, slithering melodies, unnerving atmospheres, and imposing instrumentation—feels designed to get under your skin and stir you awake.
Despite the urgency that permeates the album, it never feels sanctimonious or preachy. Jaar is subtle and ambiguous, sometimes frustratingly so; even his rage is rendered in mournful tones and heaving, negative space. “Mud,” one of the few tracks with a steady beat, marches right up to conflict but doesn’t engage, evaporating into high-pitched hums and electronic vibrations. You can’t help but wonder if Jaar is holding back, and if that in itself is a form of resistance. As he indicated on Sirens, his mission isn’t to further an agenda as much as it is to implore us to act—to speak truth to power, to save ourselves. Cenizas is an album for inner battles, where it’s even more important to keep the faith. Jaar uses the Spanish word for ashes because of its duality; it’s a reminder that destruction generates renewal. | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Other People | March 31, 2020 | 8 | 327eb65a-c76f-45b3-a6b2-c2cd3d7eb7be | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
Detroit underground hip-hop star comes to grips with his particularly difficult 2009 on this deeply determined LP. | Detroit underground hip-hop star comes to grips with his particularly difficult 2009 on this deeply determined LP. | Black Milk: Album of the Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14619-album-of-the-year/ | Album of the Year | Between his solo release Tronic, Fat Ray teamup The Set Up, and his production work on Elzhi's The Preface, Black Milk's 2008 made him look invincible. And you might note the potential tongue-in-cheek hubris in calling his follow-up Album of the Year and assume that he feels untouchable now. But the self-congratulatory name of his new release is deceptive. The year in question isn't the 2010 that the drop date places its contention in, though anyone who loved Tronic or hard-bumping, densely expressive hip hop in general wouldn't be off base in considering it as a candidate. The title is actually more closely connected to a different year: 2009, when Black Milk lost his close friend, Village's Baatin, and saw his manager HexMurda go through a life-threatening experience after a stroke left him comatose.
"'09, hardest year in my lifeline," he admits in leadoff track "365", and you can hear the evidence in this album. But it's not some morose attempt to dwell on a rough period-- it's more like the product of a deeply determined effort to persevere through it all. Some artists redouble their work efforts when they're confronted by trying times, as though hours spent over a notebook or an MPC is the one thing that'll keep them centered. And whether or not that's what pushed Black Milk to another solid album, it's clear he came out of his time in the studio with something more to him: an even tighter grasp on his production-auteur approach.
That approach stretches out a bit more in ambition, even as the sonic imprint becomes more recognizably his. Album of the Year might be called his acid-soul record: "Gospel Psychedelic Rock" practically asks for that tag, but its Westbound-era Funkadelic allusions and heavy R&B mood are echoed throughout the album. And it's a logical progression from his previous work, whether placed up front (the metallic funk of "Keep Going"; "Distortion" and its reverbed, congealed-mercury wah-wah) or woven into beats that recall Tronic's digital pulses and the rich analog bass. In his work with straight-up samples, like when he reconstitutes Blackrock's garage-funk monster "Blackrock Yeah Yeah" for "Deadly Medley", he translates a dusty cratedigger discovery into one of his characteristic headknock beats while amplifying the strengths of the source material. And when he brings in live-band musicians to complete his compositions-- drummer Daru Jones and keyboard player AB chief amongst them-- it all snaps into a deep-breathing focus worthy of the latest Roots record.
There's a lot of sprawled-out jamminess to those tracks, and at their best-- like the understated Afrobeat inflections of "Round of Applause" and the sun-drenched guitar in closer "Final Chapter"-- they ride out in a way that reveals a certain synergy between the way Black Milk approaches rapping and the way he builds beats. There's a real musicality to his flow, and he raps like a producer in that it's hard to tell whether he tailors his voice to his backing tracks or vice versa. He does sound a bit more comfortable riding a sparse groove than a busy one; the wall-to-wall drum fills of "Keep Going" make his voice push like a sprinter trying to charge through knee-high surf, while sparser cuts like the electro-soul "Welcome (Gotta Go)" foreground it in a way that makes it the strongest, most elastic piece of percussion. Either way, he's got enough authority to thread his voice into a rhythm in a way that takes it over, and enough confidence in the beats themselves to let their outros ride out unaccompanied for a good minute or so.
As a lyricist, Black Milk's typically come across as a man who makes being down-to-earth sound like a source of strength. And while there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper. There's still plenty of quoteworthy moments that serve equal measures of acrobatic internal rhymes ("Coolest flow, signal to my crew the cue to go/ With they fingers on triggers, gunpowder under cuticles") and rib-jabbing punchlines that might risk some eye-rolls. But they wouldn't mean as much if they weren't coming from a man who now drops them in the service of working through some heavy thoughts, dealing with the trials in his life ("Distortion") and the perseverance that helped him get through it ("Final Chapter") in a way that only makes the triumph sound that much more rewarding. | 2010-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Decon / Fat Beats | September 15, 2010 | 7.5 | 328435de-a33d-4843-90cf-25f257ab04ef | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
A collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years, Lioness: Hidden Treasures presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite. | A collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years, Lioness: Hidden Treasures presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite. | Amy Winehouse: Lioness: Hidden Treasures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16112-lioness-hidden-treasures/ | Lioness: Hidden Treasures | Lioness is not Amy Winehouse's long-lost gem or interrupted follow-up album, nor is it a revealing view of a tortured star in the fraught final stages of her life. Instead, in true record-industry fashion, Lioness is a collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years of recordings to create something that kinda-sorta feels like an album. Executive produced by longtime partner Salaam Remi, who helmed her 2003 debut album, Frank, Lioness carries little of the subversive swagger or playful arrogance of the Mark Ronson-dominated Back to Black. Whether it's merely all the material that was left, or an effort to salvage her image after years of tabloid drama and self-abuse, Lioness presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite. And let's be honest: Polite is the last thing we expect (or want) from Amy Winehouse.
That's not to say the results aren't satisfying: No matter what she's singing, it remains thrilling to hear that voice come to life again. On Lioness, for better or for worse, she takes on the role of standards singer: It feels like a hearkening back to her jazzy Frank days, the result of having Remi at the head of the project rather than Ronson. When it works, it really works: Opener "Our Day Will Come" is a gorgeous blend of triumph and autumnal wistfulness, a savvy intro to a record that's bound to evoke emotions just as nuanced and conflicted in its listeners. However, on tracks like "The Girl From Ipanema" or first single and Tony Bennett duet "Body and Soul", she sounds like a lounge singer, that unmistakable wit and smarmy charm only a faint glint in otherwise serviceable performances.
Considering that Mark Ronson-- producer of her signature tracks like "Rehab"-- is probably more responsible for her fame than anyone else, it's surprising to see his involvement reduced to such a minuscule level. As ever, his contributions are the highlight: A new version of the Zutons' "Valerie" turns what was a tongue-in-cheek cover into one of her most infectious vocal performances. Meanwhile, his melodramatic rendering of Carole King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" toes the line between elegant and overblown, but better yet it's a shroud of pomp surrounding one of Winehouse's most delicately powerful vocals. When she breaks out into her best falsetto on the track's bridge, it's one of the few moments on Lioness that feels truly, heartbreakingly poignant, enough to cut through its stodgy accompaniment.
Winehouse's best material never came from covers or standards, however, but her personality: her bitter sarcasm, her flagrant profanity, and her dominant-but-demure air of not-giving-a-fuck. Even though half of Lioness is by her own pen, it's a different view of Winehouse's songwriting persona: The gorgeous ballad "Half Time" is endearing but lacks the sardonic bite of her other slower material like "Wake Up Alone" (which itself is included in an alternate Remi-produced version here), and it's easy to imagine the fake-cutesy "Best Friends, Right?" being more effective given an arrangement that wasn't so transparently cutesy. Back to Black highlight "Tears Dry on Their Own" is present in its "original version," an almost unrecognizably elegiac arrangement that on the other hand not only emphasizes the strength of Winehouse's own songwriting but its diversity as well.
Chalk it up to fine-tuned and image-conscious execution, but there's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential. Released before the album, the Nas collaboration "Like Smoke" seems like an attempt at a new Winehouse jam, a pertinent reminder of her slightly more adult-contemporary-challenging "urban" side, the part of her that made her more than just a Grammy-adorned, technically proficient singer. Here the track sounds like a guide vocal, unsure and smothered in reverb, with Nas filling in an excess of white space rather than just guesting. On the otherwise funny, doo-wop-styled "Between the Cheats", her detached drawl enters full-on mumble territory, Winehouse sounding like she either can't remember or can't enunciate the words. The chorus of backing vocals feels mocking as a result, but it's a necessary moment of discomfort on a record that sometimes feels like it's desperately trying to sanitize a wild spirit after years of chaos.
If that all sounds a little negative, it's because Lioness is still weighed down with the baggage that goes along with any posthumous compilation-- but as these things go, it's a pretty strong disc. It flows well, and if Winehouse didn't sound so oddly neutered on so much of it, Lioness could easily be another solid entry in her catalog. As it stands, though, it sounds like the anachronistic time-travel job it is, going backward through the career of an artist who had a very distinct developmental arc. At least in one regard, Island and Salaam Remi have done the "honorable" thing: There's no pretense of artistic intention here, and no exploitative stabs at an artist in the most vulnerable moments of her short life. But in their mission to present Winehouse as a singer first and foremost, whiting out her personal problems and demons-- the very things that made Back to Black such a transcendent album in the first place-- they reduce her to her pre-Black standard of budding talent. Instead of adding anything concrete to her legacy, Lioness only reaffirms what we already knew about her, and hopefully why she deserves to be remembered as an artist rather than a media circus. | 2011-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | December 9, 2011 | 6.3 | 32847afc-7741-4798-a810-73c531c381a8 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
The underrated Los Angeles-based producer returns to his Filipino roots on his latest album, a psychedelic collection of blunted tracks and club compositions. | The underrated Los Angeles-based producer returns to his Filipino roots on his latest album, a psychedelic collection of blunted tracks and club compositions. | Free the Robots: Kaduwa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/free-the-robots-kaduwa/ | Kaduwa | Free The Robots (né Chris Alfaro) has been a familiar presence in the Los Angeles beat scene, but he’s never been given the same flowers as Nosaj Thing, Shlohmo, or at least a half a dozen artists who put out records with the word “Brainfeeder” printed on the back. For the uninitiated, beat music is a grassroots movement started in the late 2000s by a loose collective of musicians who typically congregated around the Low End Theory club night at The Airliner in Lincoln Heights, dedicated to testing the boundaries of hip-hop production by transplanting in genres like IDM, jazz, and ambient. Low End wound up almost four years ago now, but Alfaro’s eclectic proclivities have only intensified. New album Kaduwa is a product of a trip to the Philippines, the country of his roots, which unexpectedly turned into a year-long stay when Covid-19 hit. While immersing himself in his ancestral influences on Siargao Island, Alfaro used just the bare-bones equipment he had with him.
It’s a compelling origin story, the kind labels love to seize on to help promote a record. But unlike Free The Robot’s previous album, DATU—which mixed samples sourced from Filipino albums with organic percussion instruments and chirping nature noises—the local influences are identifiable only intermittently. There are some indigenous-sounding drum patterns complimenting the programmed beats; “Aswang” takes its title from creatures of Filipino folklore, but leans heavily on a sample from obscure prog rock band Experience. There is the compelling trip-hop of “Far Away,” which features Cambodian-American singer Chhom Nimol of the band Dengue Fever. For the most part, Alfaro’s compositions are blunted, funky, and psychedelic. There are tracks for club nights, tunes for early morning comedowns, and songs that are suitable for both.
The album stirs to life with “Machine Language,” and immediately there’s a lot going on: a probing bassline, Pharaoh Sanders sample, spliced audio clips from an 1980s Commodore 64 tutorial video. With its loungey keyboard playing and shuffling beat, “Outta Sight” is deep house music for the cocktail club, while “Fangoria” is more head-splitting electronica. If Free The Robots was streamlined by a lack of access to equipment, he has wrangled everything he could out of the hardware he had available.
Kaduwa was also partially recorded in Barcelona and L.A., and Alfaro’s home remains a muse. “Welcome to Los Angeles” features an audio clip from what sounds like an old tourist video, the carefree keyboard play mirroring this pre-packed idyllic image of the city in an ironic, almost derisory, way. Meanwhile, three songs feature singer Salami Rose Joe Louis (real name Lindsay Olsen), who hails from the Bay Area and is now signed to Brainfeeder. Salami adds her soft, magical vocal style to Alfaro’s compositions that slink pleasantly along with unhurried grace—see the European pop flavored “Flowers.” Once more adding new ripples to his sound, Free The Robots continues to explore new frontiers, keeping the torch burning for the L.A. beat freaks. | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astral Travels | June 15, 2022 | 7 | 32873367-a86c-4f2d-83db-8b097e565d0b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
In the spring of 1970, Miles Davis was fresh off his trailblazing, artistic watermarks In a Silent Way and Bitches ... | In the spring of 1970, Miles Davis was fresh off his trailblazing, artistic watermarks In a Silent Way and Bitches ... | Miles Davis: The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2200-the-complete-jack-johnson-sessions/ | The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions | In the spring of 1970, Miles Davis was fresh off his trailblazing, artistic watermarks In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and focusing on the development of his live show. His band included some of the greatest session musicians in jazz at the time: bassist Dave Holland, keyboardist Chick Corea, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and all were helping Miles to push the musical ideas he'd introduced on his records into uncharted territory in concert. But he was also very much inspired by the concept of using recording studios as compositional instruments, and when he set out to create the soundtrack to an obscure documentary on boxing icon Jack Johnson, it turned out he had many more ideas than could possibly find their way onto two sides of a single LP.
Following in the vein of Miles' recently issued Complete Sessions box sets for In a Silent Way or Bitches Brew (and featuring more raw material than either), this new five-disc collection shows a man consumed with evaluating the arsenal at his disposal. That meant recording countless takes on a theme, and, with assistance from producer Teo Macero, splicing those takes together into one coherent 40-minute release: 1971's A Tribute to Jack Johnson. But now, this compilation documents the sessions in their virtual entirety (there are a couple of missing takes, but nothing too essential), offering an incredible six hours of largely unheard material. As with the previous boxes from this era, fans will delight in hearing just about everything the musicians put to tape, as well as paging through the invaluable session info, extensive liner notes, and unseen photos included in the extensive and beautiful packaging. Obviously, though, anyone who hasn't heard and loved the original Jack Johnson album should check that out before dropping $60 on this exhaustive collection.
Disc one opens with several takes from a February 1970 session of the misleadingly titled "Willie Nelson" (it is, in fact, a Miles Davis original)-- much of which was incorporated into the original LP's largely ambient piece "Yesternow". The band, which here features Miles, Corea, Holland, DeJohnette, bass clarinetist Bernie Maupin, and guitarists John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock, set up a downbeat-heavy groove that reminds me of Funkadelic's "Music for Your Mother", if much less drugged-out. Davis enters about 40 seconds into "Willie Nelson (Take 2)" with a typically elongated phrase before settling into his "jab" motif with Maupin. Each take of the song offered here center around melodies similar to this one-- the real differences lie in Sharrock's, Miles' and Maupin's solos. It's a great way to kick off the set, if not quite as fiery a start as the original LP's "Right Off".
Later that month, Miles reconvened with a smaller band, keeping his rhythm section fully intact, but trading in Sharrock, Corea and Maupin for 19-year-old saxophonist Steve Grossman. They recorded a couple of speedier takes of "Willie Nelson" that boast more colorful McLaughlin lines and Grossman's pleasantly spooky soprano. Miles also gives some great solos, even sporting some of his bebop chops at times-- sax player Gary Bartz, a member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop and soloist on Miles' Live/Evil, said that some of the most exciting moments during the shows that eventually comprised the 1974 live offering Dark Magus were when Miles would reach back into history to pull out some of his old runs, and they certainly shine here. This band also tries out three versions of a tune called "Johnny Bratton" (previously unreleased, and starting the run of songs titled after boxers), a very rock-centric piece that sounds a bit like they were unsure of how to really nail this style. "Johnny Bratton (Insert 1)" is basically straight-ahead rock pounding (something like a fusion approximation of "Louie, Louie") with McLauglin doing his best to ensure that any tonal center is wiped out, and Holland entering with some admirable fuzz-wah bass playing.
In early March, Miles again headed into the studio with this same band to cut "Archie Moore" and several versions of "Go Ahead John". The former tune is a hard blues number with some very potent lines from McLaughlin-- in fact, Miles and Grossman sit this one out entirely, allowing the trio to bring it home like a seasoned rock band. Five takes of "Go Ahead John" pop up on disc two, showcasing Miles' midnight cool melody. The first part is a sparse, somber exercise in minimal blues, and features McLaughlin reeling off short, staccato statements similar to the ones played by Sharrock on the first disc. The second part of the tune is an odd combination of jittery funk and acid-rock, with DeJohnette playing a prehistoric drum-n-bass pattern and Holland holding a single bass note while McLaughlin shreds on the right. All five performances were later edited into a version released on 1974's Big Fun.
Mid-March saw Miles lay down two takes of the previously unissued "Duran" with McLaughlin, Holland, Maupin, soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and drummer Billy Cobham. Miles' band was certainly getting a better idea of how to construct "simple" funk, as the basic, syncopated groove here could have been played (though never written) by any number of funk bands at the time. However, the robo-tight interplay of Cobham and Holland, along with McLaughlin's ever-edgy solos, make it much more interesting than just any ordinary breakdown. Miles reports, "that's some raunchy shit, y'all," and he's right. These guys (exit Cobham, enter future Return to Forever drummer Lenny White) also did the stop-time, angular funk tune "Sugar Ray", which Bill Mulkowski's liner notes curiously describe as "Devoesque" and "proto-punk." It sounds more like The Meters playing head games to me.
As April came around, Miles re-entered the studio with McLaughlin, Cobham, Grossman and Mike Henderson, a teenage bassist from Aretha Franklin's band, to record "Right Off" and the first half of "Yesternow". These two songs, of course, ended up serving as the tracklist on the original Jack Johnson LP, and anyone familiar with that record can attest to just how beautifully they pulled off "Right Off"'s uptempo shuffle, with McLaughlin's aggressive outcomping transforming the track from a merely interesting jazz experiment to full-on streetwise fusion. Herbie Hancock dropped by the studio as well (from the grocery store!) and got talked into laying down a fuzz-fried solo on Farfisa, a kind of organ he'd never played before. The track ended up purely celebratory, and the four takes on disc three provide just about every solo angle you could want. The two lengthy takes of "Yesternow" offered here are masterful runs into electric ambience, but inevitably not quite as interesting as Macero's final album edit.
In May, Miles added Keith Jarrett and percussionist Airto Moreira to the mix, cutting versions of "Honky Tonk" and "Ali". A short excerpt of "Honky Tonk" ended up on Live/Evil, but until now, the track has never been released in its entirety. Shame, too, because it's an excellent slice of blues-rock: Miles plays with confidence using an octave pedal while McLaughlin peals out still more spiky color for Jarrett to run rampant over. Considering that Jack Johnson would be Miles' last studio recording until On the Corner over two years later, it's hard to believe this song wasn't issued somewhere along the line.
"Ali", leading off disc four, sees the same band (here including longtime Elvin Jones collaborator Gene Perla, who nicks a riff from Hendrix's "Who Knows") following a groove similar to that of "Willie Nelson", but with a much better idea of how to flesh it out. And then there's "Konda", which the guys recorded without a bassist at all, and which didn't see release until 1981's Directions compilation. Jarrett's opening solo on electric piano perfectly sets up Miles' eerie, beautiful melody, and McLaughlin's harmonic work is practically unearthly, helping to make this track one of the box set's coolest pieces. Miles followed this muse a few days later for takes on Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal's "Nem Um Talvez". Neither of the versions here are the one from Live/Evil, though the second is remarkably close.
Miles wrapped recording in June, but not before taking most of the band from May's sessions (adding old friends Hancock and bassist Ron Carter) back into the studio for one last go at "Nem Um Talvez", three other Pascoal pieces ("Little High People", "Selim", "Little Church"), and another Davis original titled "The Mask". All of Pascoal's ballads seem to advance the side of Miles' music best heard on In a Silent Way, and serve notice to anyone who thought he'd abandoned that style for good at the turn of the decade. Unfortunately, "Little High People" is almost distractingly straightforward, at least in principal: The uptempo pop/rock groove brings Hancock's organ transmissions down to earth, and keeps Miles' wah-wah solos a bit too in check. Meanwhile, "Selim" (really just "Nem Um Talvez" with a different title) ended up on Live/Evil, along with the two versions of "Little Church" found on this set's fifth disc. Dave Holland came back to the fold to record both parts of the previously unreleased "The Mask": the first is a very out, keyboard-heavy free-jam with little assistance from Miles or McLaughlin, while the second-- hardly easy listening-- closes the sessions with an exhausted, punchdrunk swagger, finally collapsing after nearly 16 minutes.
The box, however, ends on a high note, with the original LP versions of "Right Off" and "Yesternow". I hesitate to go through them blow by blow because anyone investing in this box will almost certainly have already heard them many times over. Which, ultimately, is my only real caveat to The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions: there's more of interest here to fans; for a casual listener to tackle all five discs would be commendably ambitious, but an arduous challenge nonetheless. This set ranks behind both the Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way boxes in terms of the amount of music I'd want to just let play, uninterrupted. However, Miles Davis is one of those rare musicians who rarely failed to let a take pass without trying out something cool. As usual, the deeper you dig, the more you find. | 2003-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Columbia Legacy | October 14, 2003 | 8.6 | 328e4907-65bc-468e-ab11-c61e561256cb | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The soundtrack to Questlove’s excellent documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival tells a nuanced story of Black creativity and perseverance at the end of a transformative decade. | The soundtrack to Questlove’s excellent documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival tells a nuanced story of Black creativity and perseverance at the end of a transformative decade. | Various Artists: Summer of Soul (...Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-summer-of-soul-or-when-the-revolution-could-not-be-televised-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Various Artists: Summer of Soul (...Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Album Review | Pitchfork | Playing Harlem for the first time was a major step for the 5th Dimension. The St. Louis vocal group had scored a string of hits throughout the late 1960s, but they practically owned 1969 with “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” a medley of two songs from the musical Hair. It wasn’t just one of the biggest hits of the year, but a song that continues to define the era when counterculture ideas were infiltrating the mainstream. However, “we were constantly being attacked because we weren’t quote-unquote Black enough,” says singer Marilyn McCoo in an emotional moment of last year’s documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). “Sometimes we were called the Black group with the white sound. We didn’t like that. We happened to be artists who were Black and our voices sounded the way they sound.” The Harlem Cultural Festival in the summer of 1969 gave the 5th Dimension an opportunity to perform for a predominantly Black audience.
And they absolutely killed it. Summer of Soul shows a group that never stops moving, filling the stage with a buzzy energy to match their orange-sherbet outfits. They dance from one microphone to another with synchronized steps, singing harder, louder, rawer than they did on the studio recording. It sounds like they’re trying to fill all of New York with joyful harmonies and hippie optimism, as well as a focused urgency to put those ideals of love, happiness, and community to work. The documentary suggests they’re able to sing the medley very differently in Harlem than they did at other venues. About McCoo’s emotional response to viewing that footage, director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson told Pitchfork: “I was wondering, why is this particular show hitting your heartstrings with the millions of things that you’ve done? And suddenly, I realized that she and I had something in common. No matter what job they have, every Black person in their workspace has to juggle code-switching. Between Motown and certain acts that wanted not to make it but survive, you had to code-switch.”
As a director, Questlove uses the performances at the Harlem Cultural Festival to explore issues like code-switching and to highlight the unique challenges Black artists faced as the ’60s turned into the ’70s. That focus lends Summer of Soul an unexpected emotional power, making it the finest music documentary in a year crammed to bursting with fine music documentaries. Now, it has a fine soundtrack featuring 16 songs on CD and 17 on streaming services. The sequencing is identical to the film, grouping gospel songs in the middle and jazz toward the end. There are some artists missing from the tracklist—most notably, Stevie Wonder, who opens the film—but it’s remarkable how well the music tells a nuanced story of Black creativity and perseverance at the end of the 1960s.
Assembling the documentary and the soundtrack, Questlove had a lot of remarkable material to work with: hours and hours of performances by gospel groups like Clara Walker & the Gospel Redeemers, blues acts like B.B. King, jazz instrumentalists like Max Roach, rock-oriented bands like the Chambers Brothers, pop artists like the 5th Dimension, and R&B singers like David Ruffin. There’s also a lot of Latin jazz, with Puerto Rican and Cuban performers like Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaria. Both the documentary and its new soundtrack argue for the sweeping diversity of Black creative expression in the ’60s, and both make the most of these very different stylistic approaches: If you want the sublime optimism of the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” (featuring an incredible lead vocal from Shirley Miller), then you have to take the righteous outrage of Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues,” too.
Arriving at the end of a decade that saw great strides in civil rights as well as ugly resistance to that progress, the festival showed the many ways pop music might confront political and social realities. This is music filled with optimism and joy, but also anger and urgency. Most of these artists capture all of those emotions at once, in particular Simone. Questlove uses her set as the documentary’s climax, and it’s not hard to see why: She distills so many of the film’s ideas into her three songs, especially “To Be Young, Gifted & Black” and “Are You Ready.” The latter, which closes the film and the soundtrack, is a sharp recitation of a poem by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, with Simone almost needling the audience: “Are you ready? Are you really ready?” Her performance acknowledges the struggles that await them in the new decade, but also emphasizes the power of their shared heritage and community to overcome anything America might throw at them. “Are you ready to smash things and burn buildings?” she asks, barely a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
King’s death hangs over the proceedings, although he’s only mentioned a few times. The Rev. Jesse Jackson introduces “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” as a memorial to the slain leader, and it becomes a showcase for Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson. Their unrehearsed performance is one of the finest moments in the documentary, although the loss of visuals—the closeups of their faces, the ecstatic quality of Staples’ jumps—robs the soundtrack version of just a bit of its power. It’s a passing of a torch that Staples would carry into the 1970s, but it’s also a glorious impromptu church service, each singer pushing the other to new heights and taking the audience along with them.
The summer of ’69 has become a focal point of white Boomer nostalgia, to the extent that events that don’t quite fit that narrative have been misrepresented or ignored altogether. Woodstock in particular becomes a touchstone for the Harlem Cultural Festival, and Questlove even invokes that event in the film’s first title card. The only overlap between those two festival lineups was Sly and the Family Stone, who obliterated audiences in Harlem just as they obliterated audiences at Yasgur’s farm. They get two songs on the soundtrack, both funky in a way that speaks to unspeakable joy yet acknowledges the misery of the late 1960s. The distortion and PA feedback add a bit of visceral aural violence to “Everyday People.”
Some of this footage aired on TV in 1969, but most of the tapes were stowed in producer Hal Tulchin’s basement, unseen and largely forgotten. It was never truly “lost,” but it might as well have been, considering how thoroughly other aspects of the era have been packaged and repackaged. But the music speaks as loudly and as powerfully now as it did then. It’s alarming how many of the issues cited by artists and presenters persist today—police violence, systemic racism, poverty, cultural erasure—yet that makes the music sound fresh, lively, relevant in its celebration and commiseration. Both the film and the soundtrack bear that weight of history gracefully and jubilantly.
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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. | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Legacy | February 1, 2022 | 8.8 | 329174c6-2a66-4f7b-b0e1-6f3d95cf2c2b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On their sixth record, a gloriously pretty collection that features guest vocals from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, the Walkmen have made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. | On their sixth record, a gloriously pretty collection that features guest vocals from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, the Walkmen have made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. | The Walkmen: Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16635-the-walkmen-heaven/ | Heaven | "I was the Duke of Earl, but it couldn't last/ I was the pony express, but I ran out of gas." This is the first thing Hamilton Leithauser sighs on the Walkmen's new album, Heaven. It is a distinctly un-rock'n'roll sentiment. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing your grandpa might say. Ten years ago, the Walkmen were a magnetic, messy young rock band, and they did all the things we expect young rock bands to do: swung in unexpectedly on friends, drunk-dialed exes, pleaded pathetically that things would get better with zero evidence that they would. But over the course of their last two albums, they began receding gracefully into sepia tone: Both You & Me and Lisbon felt like more breezy postcards from abroad than seething dispatches from here. Heaven, their gloriously pretty sixth studio record, marks the moment they shuffle off into that 4x6-sized sunset forever. The title they've chosen says it all: Look where they ended up! We all know that's not where rock bands go.
Heaven, as Talking Heads famously defined it, "is a place where nothing ever happens." For most sentient people, that sounds like the definition of hell, which Byrne's lyrics admitted: "It's hard to imagine how nothing at all/ Could be so exciting/ Could be so much fun." Similarly, it might not thrill longtime Walkmen fans to picture the band as a bunch of rumpled, beaming dads slotting recording time in between play dates. But on Heaven, they've made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. Heaven feels infectiously drunk on its own good fortune and kicks out a barstool for you to drink alongside it.
It helps that Hamilton Leithauser, with his oddly aristocratic presence, remains a magnetic frontman even when he's basically taking a song to make goo-goo noises at his one-year-old daughter (the lovely if borderline-saccharine "Song for Leigh"). There was always something airily entitled in Leithauser's on-record persona; he was the rich kid who didn't have to do his homework, because he knew you'd do it if he asked. That this kid had feelings too was a fundamental dramatic premise of the Walkmen. To hear this former kid now ruminating on big-picture stuff, like the statistical improbability of lasting love ("Love Is Luck") or the emptiness of perfection ("We Can't Be Beat") is to hear the band's purview expand quietly. On "Southern Heart", he even plays a pleasantly tired cuckold, like the Leonard Cohen of "Famous Blue Raincoat": "Tell me again how you loved all the men you were after," he mutters.
Some longtime fans might not like their Walkmen like this. They were great, after all, at being sexily unstable. But this retro-yearning tendency has been there since the beginning if you looked for it. So to hear them ease out of sturm-und-drang and into something resembling durable adulthood is to witness a great rock band evolve along a logical path. In what may be a tacit acknowledgement of this shift, Heaven glows with nostalgic pre-rock'n'roll sounds: "Jerry Jr.'s Tune" is one-and-a-half moonlit minutes of classic doo-wop; "No One Ever Sleeps" has a faint mariachi-sounding horn section; "Love Is Luck" is a sparkling calypso song. "Heartbreaker" echoes the chords, melody and rhythm of "Be My Baby".
All of the Walkmen's albums have been recorded with meticulous, stone-cutting care; by now, listening to them is like entering a room where you can tap your foot in corners to test its resonance. "We Can't Be Beat", one of a few songs on Heaven rounded out with harmonies from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, eases into a full-band march after about two minutes of wry, twinkling acoustic guitar. On "Line By Line", Leithauser croons tenderly over a single rippling guitar until a string section gradually soaks in at the song's edges. The beery, cock-eyed "No One Ever Sleeps" transforms the Walkmen into a schmaltzy gypsy band serenading the outdoor tables at a white-tablecloth restaurant.
This group has always been able to carve out dramatic gestures like this, and even at this end of the spectrum-- far beyond personal explosions and exclamation-pointed delivery-- they continue to craft music of wry vitality. It may be that they can no longer convincingly deliver tortured, existential desperation, and if so, that's just as well. With Heaven, they've turned out a record that finds a thousand affecting variations on contented hum. | 2012-05-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / Bella Union | May 25, 2012 | 8.1 | 3293d137-c2fb-43fd-ab2a-f440c8b09aea | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Jeff Goldblum’s debut album, a live-in-the-studio ersatz nightclub affair, is a sincere, classy, and competent homage to the golden age of vocal jazz. | Jeff Goldblum’s debut album, a live-in-the-studio ersatz nightclub affair, is a sincere, classy, and competent homage to the golden age of vocal jazz. | Jeff Goldblum / The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra: The Capitol Studio Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-goldblum-and-the-mildred-snitzer-orch-the-capitol-studio-sessions/ | The Capitol Studio Sessions | Jeff Goldblum has located fame’s sweet spot. The man veers happily between being a star in lucrative Hollywood franchises and a sort of sentient, benevolent meme. Every sensible person should aspire to this precise degree of celebrity: Goldblum is rich enough not to have to worry about money again, yet he can still wander into a Trader Joe’s without a security detail. He is curiously beloved, but not so beloved that he’s at risk of sustaining paparazzi-induced injury. When Goldblum, with his bespectacled good looks, is summoned to BuzzFeed’s video studio to recite tweets from strangers calling him “daddy,” he seems to genuinely enjoy it. That is the dream, isn’t it?
Goldblum also enjoys an offscreen hobby as an accomplished jazz pianist. He has honed this skill since his childhood, long before films like The Big Chill and The Fly made him a regular in America’s VCRs. The Goldblum Fame Quotient seems ideal for indulging a musical side hustle: He can easily land a deal with Decca Records, yet he won’t be suffocated by public scrutiny. For years, the actor and his ensemble, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, have been bringing big-band-era jazz standards to clubs in New York and Los Angeles. The Capitol Studios Sessions is billed as his debut album, but it feels more like a variety-show special, with Goldblum feeding off the energy of a studio audience and exchanging flirty banter with guest vocalists like Haley Reinhart. In truth, it’s both: The album was recorded at Hollywood’s Capitol Studios, which Goldblum converted into an ad hoc jazz club, with a boozed-up crowd of fans who do not address him as “daddy.” So we get the freewheeling spirit of a live album and the pristine mix of a proper studio LP.
Goldblum is a skillful and competent pianist, whether he is recreating Red Garland’s arpeggios on the Miles Davis arrangement of “It Never Entered My Mind” or improvising bluesy licks during a synthless rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Mess With Mister ‘T.’” He is not a showy player. On most tracks, he seems content to cede the spotlight to virtuosic guests like the trumpeter Till Brönner, whose bebop-inspired solos fill up jaunty renditions of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and the King Cole Trio’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” or the “American Idol” alum Haley Reinhart, whose distinct vibrato is an elegant match for the 1930s standard “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” (That song is performed in the Nina Simone arrangement from 1958.) Imelda May makes several appearances, including a slinky, inspired deconstruction of the Rosemary Clooney hit “Come On-a-My House,” which features the sexiest known enunciation of the word “apricot.”
The only track Goldblum deigns to sing on is also the album’s most overtly comedic moment: “Me and My Shadow,” a spirited duet with Sarah Silverman, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. to Goldblum’s Sinatra. The Rat Pack duo introduced topical references of the 1960s to the Kennedys when they performed the song, and Goldblum and Silverman duly insert stale nods to climate change and the Redskins controversy that seem better suited to a Jay Leno routine.
As an homage to the golden age of vocal jazz, this stuff is classy and sincere enough to put on the playlist at your local Italian restaurant without prompting any odd looks from customers. Even the most tedious material (“This Bitter Earth”) matches the nightclub-circa-1962 mood. To his credit, Goldblum fully commits to the kitschy bandleader guise. But there is a lingering sense that Goldblum’s considerable charm is more suited to the club than the turntable. In between numbers, the actor hogs the spotlight as a suave emcee, and bits like an extended riff on Silverman’s elegant attire just hang awkwardly without visual accompaniment. Much of Goldblum’s banter has a you-had-to-be-there quality, like squinting at a friend’s blurry photos from a party you weren’t invited to. That makes The Capitol Studios Sessions feel more like a document of an experience than the main attraction. Goldblum’s most devoted obsessives won't need much persuading to visit his club. | 2018-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Decca | December 15, 2018 | 6.3 | 32977334-7ad3-400e-b548-5796edb20b66 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The upstart Connecticut band Sorority Noise’s second LP is motivated by a drive to get over your own bullshit. Their 2014 debut bristled with pop-punk steeped in self-pity, but they've learned to channel their energy in their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, and well-produced. | The upstart Connecticut band Sorority Noise’s second LP is motivated by a drive to get over your own bullshit. Their 2014 debut bristled with pop-punk steeped in self-pity, but they've learned to channel their energy in their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, and well-produced. | Sorority Noise: Joy, Departed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20711-joy-departed/ | Joy, Departed | For those who identified with emo during its artistic (if not commercial) peak in the '90s, the most demoralizing development over the past decade is the term becoming synonymous with a performative, juvenile sadness that commodifies depression, often treats women as props, and is expressed in a voice that sounds like the worst version of your 8th grade inner monologue. And so it's understandable to be skeptical of an all-male band named Sorority Noise, often tagged as emo, making a song called “Art School Wannabe”. In it, Cameron Boucher sings in a nasal tone, pinpointing that post-pubescent sour spot where snark becomes an all-purpose defense mechanism against emotional disturbance. It bops along to a chipper shuffle that brings to mind, depending on your age and generosity, the Front Bottoms, mid-period Weezer, or Ben Folds Five. But it also contains the lyric upon which the entirety of Joy, Departed hinges—“Maybe I’m just scared to admit that I might not be as dark as I think/ Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be.”
On their 2014 debut Forgettable, Sorority Noise's pop-punk was so steeped in self-pity that the title felt like more of an epitaph than a punchline (“Nobody likes me/ That’s what I tell myself...I spent a lot of last year learning I don’t like me too”). As indicated by "Art School Wannabe", Joy, Departed is motivated, above all, by a drive to get over your own bullshit, and this has become an emergent and necessary theme for other bands in its realm. A similar mindset serves as the basis for the near entirety of Annabel’s recently released Having it All and was touched upon on by Modern Baseball's “Two Good Things” and You Blew It!’s “Better to Best”, both of whom contribute guest vocals on Joy, Departed. The Connecticut band also strains with ambition, and the most exciting thing about Sorority Noise and their ilk is that they’re courting a larger audience, reaching for something that seems to be out of their grasp. Both of these aspects can occasionally make Joy, Departed an uncomfortable listen, but they’re also the reason why it’s such a consistently engaging record.
Over the last year, Sorority Noise have learned to channel their energy towards their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, well-produced and also more vertiginous in all aspects. Boucher’s bedheaded vocals are contrasted against gorgeous, sighing strings on “Blissth” and “Fluorescent Black” and both build to soaring peaks that cruelly cut out, as if Sorority Noise temporarily forgot they were still an upstart emo band and were snapped back into reality out of their arena-rock dreams. “Your Soft Blood” has the gripping bombast of Bright Eyes or Cursive or Say Anything from 2002-2004, projects where an untrained, verbose speaker is pulled between caustic punk and ornate chamber pop, fighting against the perception that they haven’t earned such grandiosity.
They haven't completely overlooked what worked on Forgettable. The clean twee-punk center at the outset of “Corrigan” bravely holds as blaring fuzz guitars encroach in the chorus. During the verses of “Nolsey”, Boucher slumps around aimlessly like a teenage dirtbag, before a surprising barbershop harmony leads into a glorious explosion of symphonic guitar.
The guitars tend to speak more directly than Boucher himself. Whereas Modern Baseball will just flat out admit to staying at home on Friday night, “wishing you were still my girlfriend,”Boucher strives to find more convoluted, pungent ways to make the same point—he wants to be “the heroin that keeps you warm enough,” “the smoke too clear to see,” “in bloom for you.” Instead, he’s “the autumn wind that blows your hair and the hand that’s out of reach,” “a boathouse, alone on a lake,” and “the reason your leaves are withering.” It’s hard not to wince for a split second, but once the initial sting wears off, the underlying emotions are relatable. Much of Joy, Departed occupies an awkward space of figuring whether “love” means being of service or being validated, of wondering whether poetry enhances honesty or obscures it.
And yet it’s the fairly standard palm-mute/pedal-stomp dynamics of “Using” where Sorority Noise’s mania is most convincingly expressed. At the outset, Boucher gives into any number of things: pills, drugs, cigarettes, the like. It’s an inventory of self-negation until a group yell of, “I stopped wishing I was dead!"—the excitement of living again (or for once) expressed with redlining distortion, a surge of joy that’s so overwhelming and unfamiliar it still feels like rage. That lyric pops up a second time, during an ankle-breaking pivot to a new key.
Boucher claims it’s the first song that he wrote while trying to take ownership of the his battles with addiction and mental illness and turning it into something positive. After a friend recently committed suicide, he told Alternative Press, “Depression is not a trend...Stop glorifying sorrow and start lending a helping hand to those that need it the most.” You can tell it wasn’t the first song he wrote for Joy, Departed and that his revelation didn’t come easily: after “Using”, Joy, Departed concludes on its two most despairing tracks. It results in a perhaps unintentional but honest point about the fleeting nature of all emotions and that when the instinct for self-preservation kicks in, it should be grasped upon like a matter of life and death, because it may be exactly that. | 2015-06-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-06-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | June 23, 2015 | 7.3 | 32997d38-2d5f-43d1-8afc-ce2a77597379 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A set of previously unreleased demos for the influential Dayton band’s never-completed major label debut offers a fascinating glimpse into their strange, singular evolution. | A set of previously unreleased demos for the influential Dayton band’s never-completed major label debut offers a fascinating glimpse into their strange, singular evolution. | Brainiac: The Predator Nominate EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brainiac-the-predator-nominate-ep/ | The Predator Nominate EP | First Ohio, then the world. Brainiac laughed at their own ambition with the tongue-in-cheek cover of their 1995 Internationale EP, which read “Dayton London Paris Tokyo Berlin Moscow.” Still, the band moved from strength to strength with amazing rapidity: A tour with the Jesus Lizard led to a show at Lollapalooza which turned into an opening slot for Beck. A single on Limited Potential earned them an album on Grass Records which caught the attention of Touch and Go. By 1997, Brainiac was one of the most sought-after bands in the post-Nirvana era, fielding phone calls from Rick Rubin and negotiating million-dollar record deals. The pressure led to fistfights and panic attacks until they settled on a contract with Interscope. Then, disaster struck. Lead singer and songwriter Timmy Taylor died in a car accident in May 1997. All at once, the band’s limitless potential was cut short. Brainiac’s thwarted evolution has haunted fans ever since; it’s impossible to imagine next steps when a group takes such creative leaps. The Predator Nominate EP, a collection of demos from this era, gives the fullest picture yet of Brainiac in their final months.
Brainiac started out strange and only grew stranger. Taylor’s fascination with synthesizers—tremendously unhip among rock bands in the early ’90s—set them apart in the wake of the grunge explosion. He ran his vocals through old Moogs, modulating and distorting his voice into a robotic caterwaul. Guitarist John Schmersal, who bassist Juan Monasterio initially pegged as too weird even for Brainiac, pushed their sound even further out with his fried electronics and circuit-bending. Taylor’s pop sensibility broke through on 1996’s Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, setting expectations high for the band’s next album. Brainiac’s follow-up, the Jim O’Rourke-produced Electro-Shock for President EP, was their last official release before Taylor’s death, leaving fans to puzzle over it for clues about what might have come next. The previously unreleased demos on The Predator Nominate EP come from the band’s sessions for their speculative major label debut, making it the last and best hope of charting their trajectory.
At nine songs in 15 minutes, Predator Nominate is piecemeal and incomplete but still full of compelling ideas, like a great artist’s sketchbook. Experienced on its own terms as an imperfect representation of the band, it demonstrates Brainiac’s process at the height of their powers. Taylor may have preferred to wash the raw, clean vocals on “Smothered Inside” in a wave of distortion, just as he did after recording the demo for Bonsai Superstar’s “Collide.” But even without Brainiac’s usual brain-addling noise, this version stands on its own as an exhibit of Taylor’s remarkable feel for melody. As rare Brainiac instrumentals, “Predator Nominate” and “Pyramid Theme” showcase how adeptly they incorporated outré electronics into their thrillingly propulsive sound by this point.
Despite the lo-fi quality, several songs have all the hallmarks of fully realized Brainiac tunes. The earworm melody of “Kiss of the Dog” is saved from being overly saccharine by Taylor’s unmistakable sasscore vocals. “The Game,” with its nightmarish synths and threatening voiceover intoning “You don’t play the game I play/You know nothing,” serves as a disorienting interlude akin to Electro-Shock’s “Fashion 500.” The dreamy “Come With Me” is the farthest cry from classic Brainiac as Taylor’s repeated call to “Come now, with me” drifts over ethereal hums into silence. Though we’ll never know his creative destination, Predator Nominate is a welcome invitation leading us in the right direction. | 2023-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | January 20, 2023 | 7.5 | 3299abbc-9fac-48fc-948b-a09648de7b82 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The wildly ambitious albums that cemented Rundgren’s legend as a studio genius in the early 1970s return in illuminating new editions. | The wildly ambitious albums that cemented Rundgren’s legend as a studio genius in the early 1970s return in illuminating new editions. | Todd Rundgren: Something/Anything? / A Wizard, a True Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/todd-rundgren-somethinganything-a-wizard-a-true-star/ | Something/Anything? / A Wizard, a True Star | One of the first things they warn you about with hallucinogenic drugs is that some people never recover. Many years ago, a teacher might caution, my friend Frank dropped acid. Long story short, now Frank can’t drive his car because he sees frogs in it. An equally evocative tactic might be to introduce students to Todd Rundgren’s discography. In the thirteen months between his two finest records—1972’s Something/Anything? and 1973’s A Wizard, a True Star—Rundgren got deep into mescaline. “Well, I know I wasn’t high on Jesus,” he later reflected on the era. “Every once in a while I took a trip and never came back.”
The effect those trips had on his creative output cannot be overstated. In a transformation akin to the ones pulled off by Scott Walker on Scott 4 and Radiohead on OK Computer, the playful soft-rocker morphed into a three-eared, insomniac prankster who treated the recording studio like a surreal public-access channel he broadcast to the world. The albums he made in this period were high points, in more ways than one, and they have now been reissued on SACD via Analog Spark, offering illuminating, immersive editions of two of the 1970s’ most fascinating works.
There’s more to Rundgren’s evolution, of course, than drugs. In interviews, he has attributed the radical shift in his mid-20s less to his own changing perspective than to other people’s perspective on him—he got tired of being seen as merely another piano-playing, lovesick troubadour. While he still stands by the folk-pop simplicity of his earliest solo records, Rundgren is quick to note their lack of depth, citing their obvious reference points (thematically, a high-school break-up; musically, the work of Laura Nyro). After achieving commercial success on his 1970 debut with the slick single “We Gotta Get You a Woman” and critical success a year later with his moodier sophomore album, Rundgren sought to expand his range. And he wanted to do it by himself.
Before Rundgren turned to psychedelics on A Wizard, a True Star, he turned to Ritalin to make Something/Anything?, an obsessive, feature-length masterpiece in both a creative and technical sense. Rundgren performed the double LP almost entirely on his own, at a time when self-recording meant turning the tape on, running to another room to play each instrument, and then running back to press stop (hence the Ritalin). The album remains the definitive showcase of his gifts. Among its tracks is the very first song he wrote (the immortal “Hello It’s Me,” resurrected from his early band Nazz and later slowed-down and re-popularized by the Isley Brothers). It’s also home to his greatest song (the irresistible power-pop anthem “Couldn’t I Just Tell You”) and one of his biggest (“I Saw the Light”). It’s the perfect introduction for newcomers, and the new reissue makes it sound as overwhelming and virtuosic as Rundgren intended.
Something/Anything?, while being home to Rundgren’s most recognizable music, is a more challenging record than its classic rock reputation suggests. Anyone who grew up on FM radio is used to hearing “Hello It’s Me” sandwiched between, say, America and Elton John. But on Something/Anything?, it sits proudly between the absurd, confrontational tracks “Piss Aaron” and “Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me.” Elsewhere, there is plenty of extended jamming, studio banter, and, in one of the LP’s most jarring moments, a full minute-plus track of Rundgren breaking the fourth wall to teach listeners about poor production. (“If you have a pair of headphones,” he says, “you better get ‘em out and get ‘em cranked up, because they’re really gonna help you on this one.”)
The “Sounds of the Studio” bit, in which Rundgren instructs us on how to avoid auditory flaws by deliberately invoking them, might now play like an indulgent dad joke: arguably the geekiest of music geeks pandering to his devoted fanbase of fellow music geeks. But for Rundgren at the time, it was a declaration of freedom. A preview of the rebellious streak to come, it shows the teacher’s pet breaking the rules when no one was there to stop him. Throughout the decade, Rundgren was one of the first prominent artist-slash-producers, as competent behind the scenes as he was in front of the microphone, earning him the admiration of a young Prince and, later, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. As he discovered his own identity on record, Rundgren was hellbent on learning what happens when those two roles converge. When everything about a record is fully under the artist’s control, he suspected, the product can become something singular.
With the money he made from the hit singles on Something/Anything?, Rundgren built his own studio in New York, called it Secret Sound, and began recording a follow-up there. He learned as he went along, fine-tuning his equipment and writing new songs in one continuous, sleepless process. It was around this time that psychedelic drugs entered the picture. In Paul Myers’ excellent 2010 book about his studio sessions, also called A Wizard a True Star, Rundgren reflects on the influence of the substances he was taking. “I became more aware,” he says, “Of what music and sound were like in my internal environment, and how different that was from the music I had been making.” You get the sense that he exhausted himself on Something/Anything? so that he’d have no choice but to start over.
While the drugs can explain away its album cover, the music on A Wizard, a True Star itself is too beautiful, too intentional to merely play like one man’s acid diary. The flow of the album, however, does more or less follow that path. It turns nonsensical, nostalgic, hysterical, and horny at a pace that defies logic, let alone cohesion. There are tracks that deny any of Rundgren’s strengths—a dismal blues pastiche, 60 seconds of dogs barking—and more familiar ones that seem to mock themselves. There’s a swirling, paranoid breakdown in the exquisite “Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel,” and a dizzying rush of confidence expressed through a ten-minute medley of soul covers. Overall, it’s exhausting and electrifying and unlike anything in Rundgren’s discography: his Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks, and Berlin Trilogy, all tie-dyed into one. Its fingerprints are evident on bedroom auteurs to this day, from Ariel Pink to Frank Ocean, who sampled its synths on 2016’s Blonde.
After Wizard, Rundgren’s work remained fascinating if inconsistent. He matured in his own strange way, but he never again reached such moments of enlightenment. On 1978’s Hermit of Mink Hollow—the only other record in his catalog that approaches these two—Rundgren returned to his early works’ stripped-back sound and their themes of lost love. But now it was clear that he wasn’t talking about a high-school relationship. The ballads were heavier, and the moments of levity felt more compulsive, like a man punching himself in the head to get out of a funk. (It’s not surprising that his next solo hit would be a grating anthem about secluding oneself from society to make a deathly, violent racket unto the void.) Rundgren understood all along that things would never be the same. There’s a reason why he sang “I Saw the Light” in the past tense: his life’s work depended on knowing you can never get that first high again. | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 20, 2018 | 9 | 329bccee-40a5-4c98-ad76-f23d208a9c1b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Australian songwriter returns with a beachy, airborne set with subtle hints of something darker lurking underneath. | The Australian songwriter returns with a beachy, airborne set with subtle hints of something darker lurking underneath. | Carla dal Forno: Come Around | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carla-dal-forno-come-around/ | Come Around | After stints in Berlin and London and years of nomadic living on tour, Carla dal Forno returned to Australia. The electropop singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist settled in Castlemaine, a township roughly 80 miles northwest of her native Melbourne. With a population of 6,750, its pastoral, tree-lined streets are a far cry from the dense urban infrastructures that have loomed over dal Forno’s music for the better part of a decade. Her chilling 2016 debut, You Know What It’s Like, felt like a late-night dispatch from a cold concrete tunnel. Dal Forno’s precise synth work was ominous; it could sound like steam hissing from a pothole, or the unsheathing of a blade. Some of the smog lifted on 2019’s Look Up Sharp, the contours of each song gleaming a bit brighter. On her latest album, Come Around, dal Forno seems even lighter, emitting the stillness of her new home. These nine songs are beachy and airborne, with only the slightest suggestion that something troublesome is lurking underneath.
The most menacing entry is dal Forno’s cover of the United States of America’s 1968 ripper “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Dal Forno’s minimalist interpretation is far creepier; totally tranquil, she lists off an arsenal of poisonous plants, as if she’s already slipped their venom into your tea. “I wanted to produce something enticing and emotionally resonant—a reflection of a false sense of security—alongside these lyrical depictions of scary wilderness,” dal Forno recently said of her version. She heightens the suspense with a tight focus on arrangement, contrasting the song’s botanical lyrics with machine-like instruments. Dal Forno spent months honing the rhythm and timbre of side stick percussion, which underpins the track like a shaky scaffold.
Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline. On opener “Side by Side,” Dal Forno adorns the spare plucking with swells of static and sickly warped synthesizer. The wordless “Autumn” is anchored by a thick, rubbery bass loop, but more intriguing are the spindly filaments that wrap around it: slight fretboard scratches, simmering metallic thrums, and what sounds like a cricket chirping through an echo chamber.
“Stay Awake” is spurred by digital wind and shrill bells, but the song is stained by a foreboding narrator and a gnawing tension. “When you’re counting the days that you might withstand,” she sings, her voice breathy and serene. Dal Forno’s delivery makes this line especially unnerving—highlighting the contrast between the placid character and the tedious endurance of daily life. In the same chant-like melody, dal Forno offers an alternative to the grind, daydreaming of “when the waves come to shore and take you out.” It makes you question the role she’s playing in the song…self-help cult leader? Or meditation bot with a dark sense of humor?
On the title track, dal Forno sifts through sunnier memories in Australia. “After many years in big cities I’m enjoying being surrounded by trees rather than tall buildings,” she told Brooklyn Vegan last month. In the lyrics, she celebrates exploration, moving to a new town and discovering those “special spots” only locals know. It is Come Around’s breeziest track—like a Beach Boys demo melting in the sun. Delayed surf guitar riffs drift in and out, as dal Forno modulates synthesizers to sound like seaspray. But even her sweetest piece leaves a tart aftertaste. “It’s not every day that I’ll want you beside me here,” she sings, before confessing that previous lovers have all looked the same: “You could be the next one in my life,” she concedes. Old habits have a way of following us, even to the most tranquil places. | 2023-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kallista | January 4, 2023 | 7 | 32a342b6-872e-4192-8c51-6efc2a20e53c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Of Katie Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But the Melbourne-based artist completely corrodes her voice. | Of Katie Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But the Melbourne-based artist completely corrodes her voice. | Katie Dey: asdfasdf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20685-katie-dey-asdfasdf/ | asdfasdf | Like regions, genres have accents. There are pop-punk yelps, post-punk groans, dream-pop whispers, and the clean, enunciated croons of mainstream stars. Katie Dey's first album asdfasdf positions her as an alien to vocal geography. The Melbourne-based artist is a singer as well as a songwriter, but in each of her songs, she completely corrodes her voice. While many home recordings paint the image of the artist singing real words into a real microphone attached to a real tape recorder, asdfasdf refuses to ground itself. It is hard to imagine these seven songs coming from a physical space; chaotic and gritty, they prioritize energy and motion, making audio fidelity feel like an obsolete concern.
Of Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But women's voices in music are especially policed for annoyingness, and Dey pushes that quality to an extreme edge. The first you hear of her on "don't be scared" is a high-pitched croak processed beyond recognition among clean acoustic guitar riffs and unsteady drum beats. She later programs a synthesizer to mimic her vocal tone; aside from the vague definition around her words, the line between human and machine feels smeared and unstable, as if Dey were as present in all of her instruments as she is in her own voice.
asdfasdf's most defined and energetic song comes in the form of "unkillable", a minute and 20 seconds of buoyant melodies that constantly threaten to veer off course. Dey's lyrics shine through clearest here, with phrases like "teen poetry" and "sucks the blood from my feet" flashing through in strange, disembodied glimpses. The song is catchy, which makes it all the stranger. Most hooks go down smooth by design, but Dey's nightmare pop forces you to swallow something decomposing and sharp. The name of the song suggests its own inversion—not "unlikable", as it may read on first glance, but immortal, unstoppable, powerful.
Dey is hardly the first songwriter to use broken rules as weapons, but she takes palpable pleasure in the conventions she upends. Voices, especially women's, are expected to be pretty and easy to grasp, especially in quieter, gentler music. Dey amplifies her rough edges, splitting the space inside her tape machine and chasing herself down its fragments. asdfasdf sustains a level of textural complexity that most musicians won't attempt, and its clever melodic core supports the layers of abrasions. A warm playfulness radiates from deep inside Dey's music. Its inscrutability makes it all the more rewarding to wade through over and over again. | 2015-06-22T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-06-22T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Orchid Tapes | June 22, 2015 | 7 | 32a6d388-1a5f-4dca-a02a-f7a154690ba2 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
Shy Layers’ debut is one of the year's great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Graceland. | Shy Layers’ debut is one of the year's great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Graceland. | Shy Layers: Shy Layers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22183-shy-layers/ | Shy Layers | For a while now, the material on Shy Layers’ debut album has been hiding in plain sight as pay-what-you-wish downloads on Bandcamp. His first EP, featuring six of the album’s songs, came out in January last year; its follow-up, from which three more songs were plucked for the album, appeared this past April. But if an LP release from an obscure German label is what it takes to give the music more exposure, then so be it, because Shy Layers’ eponymous debut turns out to be one of the year’s great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Its almost-August release couldn’t be better timed: This is an album that evokes rumpled linen, Aperol spritz, and balmy Mediterranean breezes, with a bittersweet undercurrent to suggest that autumn is just around the corner.
Growing Bin, the label responsible for releasing the album, is an unusual proposition. It began in 2007 as an MP3 blog for an obsessive collector named Basso to post vinyl rips from his personal collection of rarities—library music, cosmic disco, Polish jazz, German progressive rock, etc. Somewhere along the line, he launched a mail-order operation for secondhand records, and in 2013, he started up the label. By virtue of its founder’s idiosyncratic tastes, the label has carved out a highly specific niche in the overlap between new age, ambient jazz, and lite funk, and if you didn’t know better, you could easily mistake Shy Layers’ debut for one of the vintage, private-press LPs unearthed on Basso’s digging expeditions. It’s a quiet, sometimes cryptic record where purring vocoders veil hushed singing, plucked guitars are wreathed in reverb, and African highlife melodies nimbly snake around echoing drums and arpeggiated synthesizers. It’s hard to say exactly which parts are played and which parts are programmed; it’s not even terribly clear whether there’s a whole band jamming, or just one person laying down overdubs.
In fact, Shy Layers is JD Walsh, a multi-media artist who recently relocated with his family from Brooklyn to Atlanta. Although Shy Layers is the first of his musical projects to achieve any measure of notoriety, he’s been making music forever, and you could guess as much from his deeply intuitive understanding of pop’s mechanics. As understated as a lot of these tunes are, he’s got a keen melodic sensibility that keeps even his simplest chord changes bubbling in your head long after the glossy digital reverb has faded out. While nearly every song floats tranquilly atop a pneumatic bed of synthesizers, the album rarely scans as electronic music, per se. His rhythms combine electronic percussion with acoustic drums cloaked in warm, dry room tone, and guitars frequently take the lead.
Some of the album’s influences are easy to pinpoint. His vocoders sound like kinder, gentler versions of Kraftwerk's robotic choirs, and his bright-eyed melodies share that band’s almost- naïve quality. Highlife and Afropop make their presence felt in lanky electric guitar and mbira-like synthesizers on “Too Far Out,” while “Bees and Bamboos” attempts a kind of ersatz Ethio-jazz with twinned guitar leads and splashes of piano; the chintzy keyboards and dubbed-out saxes of “SEG” have a distinctly Caribbean feel. The dreamy “Holding It Back,” meanwhile, is an obvious Arthur Russell homage, right down to a refrain, “Kissing on the dark side of the moon,” that mingles romance and childlike innocence.
Other aspects of the album’s deeply referential sound are more difficult to put your finger on, even though you know you've heard them somewhere. Plucked guitars, watery synth pads, flanged acoustic strumming, and gated reverb conjure hazy memories of the 1980s: echoes of Tears for Fears, Talking Heads, and Phil Collins swirl together into a home-recorded pastiche of big-money studio polish. And on “Playing the Game,” spindly synths and a high-necked bass melody reminiscent of Joy Division dissolve into giddy falsetto coos, suggesting an alternate universe where goths wear pastel colors. It is the sweetest kind of déjà vu.
As much as Walsh may traffic in the familiar modes and well-worn tropes that have populated chillwave and Balearic retro for over a decade now, Shy Layers really doesn't sound like anything else out there. At times I’m reminded of Sandro Perri’s Impossible Spaces, due to the two musicians’ mutual fondness for Arthur Russell and Steely Dan; Invisible Conga People’s after-hours music for introverts conjures a similar kind of disco hush, while Domenique Dumont’s “L'Esprit de L'Escalier” zeroes in on the same sort of beatific pop. Ultimately, though, Shy Layers’ music flies solo. As the album’s exquisitely melancholy closing song, “1977,” captures so well, the record doubles as a love letter to solitude, offering a different kind of take on yacht rock. It’s not aspirational, and it's not even particularly concerned with leisure. Instead, it’s about standing at the stern of the boat, alone, hands stuffed in pockets, humming a half-remembered melody to yourself as the coastline recedes and the sun dips below the horizon. | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Growing Bin | August 2, 2016 | 8.2 | 32b2936b-c00f-4fc6-a5a4-b52a8133ef9a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
George Lewis Jr. adopts a bad-boy persona for the pristine follow-up to 2010's Forget. It's a laser-focused, sharply posturing collection that eulogizes the coldness of modern relationships, and the confusion of lust over love. | George Lewis Jr. adopts a bad-boy persona for the pristine follow-up to 2010's Forget. It's a laser-focused, sharply posturing collection that eulogizes the coldness of modern relationships, and the confusion of lust over love. | Twin Shadow: Confess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16805-confess/ | Confess | I don't know much about the man who writes Twin Shadow songs, but the man in them doesn't really seem like a good dude. In fact, he's a total dick most of the time. "I don't want to believe or be in love," was George Lewis Jr.'s climactic mission statement on "Slow", and the rest of Forget negated its new romantic sounds with accounts of people who chose to ignore his warning. There was the girl who promised to "never let another black boy break [her] heart" and became the subject of "Tyrant Destroyed", and then there was the partner in crime on "Shooting Holes", who took her father's gun and was sworn into secrecy. And as a message to the fellas, there was "I Can't Wait", where Lewis stole your girl from right under your armpit because she hated your moves, the implication being that she was going to love his.
This persona played a huge role in distinguishing Forget, despite much evidence of it being wholly of Brooklyn, ca. 2010: Pretty in Pink sonic nostalgia, a cosign from Grizzly Bear, smeared cover art. But in light of brash interviews and surprisingly torrid live shows, Lewis' careerist ambition, pretty boy swagger, and leering libido made clear he was not long for the world of back-patting, hand-holding indie rock. You might find the bad-boy posturing on Confess' cover too blatant in announcing Lewis' arrival as a self-identifying pop idol, but he refuses to apologize for anything here: not his brash lyrics, laser-focused songwriting, or glossy production. It's a purposefully arrogant star turn that would otherwise be insufferable if Confess didn't make it abundantly clear that Lewis is one of the few guys out there capable of living up to it.
He's adjusting his role models to fit the situation, staying within the 80s but moving from the Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds. Instead, he's taking *Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A. *and Lost Boys as guides. We're talking leather jackets, sullen glowers, salvation through hit-making. And Confess aspires to the excess of the Reagan years, when all genres were competing for the same MTV slots and the production on pop, rock, and R&B records was essentially the same. But while Confess is slick, it doesn't sound slavishly retro or expensive; in fact, there's a eerie, disembodied artificiality to many of these sounds.
Lewis' rangy vocals rightfully remain at the forefront-- sultry and vulnerable in their lower reaches, with a clarion burst in its higher notes that recalls both Peter Gabriel and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. But nearly every other sound is so crisp and airless that they become compellingly dehumanized. The snares during the disparaging chorus of "Golden Light" hit like open-hand slaps or a glass of cold water to the face, and harsh digital clipping on the kick drums and vocals express the claustrophobic lust of "You Call Me On". "I Don't Care" underlines the startling cruelty of its lyrics with a coda of grunts. "The One" is a rare moment of devotion communicated with blinding acoustic glare, while the exaggerated courtship of "Beg For the Night" accents its chorus with the utmost of new-money sounds, the orchestra hit.
On a purely sonic level, Confess will tell you "greed is good," and it's underlined by the economy of the songwriting, which shows a clear progression from the occasionally stunning but unbalanced Forget. The 10 songs on Confess operate only in power moves, the verses sneering, seducing, doing whatever they can to draw the listener in before every choruses ascends and explodes. Having recorded nearly all of Confess by himself, you hear a perfectionist's internal competition in Lewis, each song subject to merciless editing to assure that if he realizes the death wish alluded to in the "Five Seconds" video, he'll leave a beautiful corpse and a record of 10 fail-proof singles. It's textbook, time-honored stuff, but it's rarely done at this level. Whether it's the lush power-balladry of "Beg For the Night" and "Be Mine Tonight" or throttle-pushing rockers like "You Call Me On", Confess is defined by its melodic and emotional immediacy. This is no where more evident than it is on the cyclical refrain of the all-hook single "Five Seconds"-- "straight to the heart."
The ruthless efficiency extends to the lyrics, and this is what ultimately gives Confess its edge, pushing it into something more illicitly alluring. It's indeed a hyper-masculine record, almost every single lyric occurring at a relationship flashpoint between Lewis and a royal female "you" whose lust only confirms her misunderstanding of him. Combined with his refusal to sugarcoat anything, the first instinct is to assume it's a misogynist record as well, but Confess isn't macho or "bro." The songs are about dishonesty and what is revealed in desiring love but acting out of lust. The arrangement of "Golden Light" takes its cues from the secular uplift of Arcade Fire while flipping the carnal chorus of "Atomic Dog" into something simultaneously metaphysical and cynical-- "Some people say you're the golden light/ And if I chase after you, doesn't mean it's true." It's all to easy to hear a lyric like "I don't give a damn about your dreams/ A whole world that is falling at the seams" from "You Call Me On" as pitiless. But there's an equanimity to Lewis' viewpoint as he offers "that's what it's supposed to do" as a stark epigram of cold comfort.
And he gets as good as he gives, rarely painting himself as a savior or even someone worthy of envy. "Patient" describes a no-strings fling that you'd think would be the optimum scenario in a Twin Shadow song, but the refusal to define it as such is torture for Lewis and you can hear it in Confess' most over the top arrangement, a bridge cobbling together drumline snares, a shredding guitar, and a push of his 80s influences somewhere towards New Jack Swing. Twin Shadow gets into darker metal-R&B territory on "I Don't Care" whose superficially shocking admonishments to a morally suspect woman brings it awfully close to "Dirty Diana" territory. But "I Don't Care", like most of Confess, doesn't sound ego-fueled or even hateful. Lovers on Confess are equal co-conspirators, liars, fully complicit and bent on mutually assured destruction. Records from the likes of Drake and the Weeknd have been instructive on how to toast to groin-led douchebags. But there's little hedonism or depravity here. On Confess, sex is dispassionately viewed like any addictive substance, one that basically destroys people who use it to fill a spiritual void.
This corrosive thread running throughout Confess helps illustrate the difference in intent between Twin Shadow's two simply titled albums. Forget hinted at traumatic experiences that Lewis was trying to process years after the fact and figured he'd be better off ignoring, whereas Confess doesn't actually cop to much-- just the challenge to "say just what you mean and give up everything." So then it's curious that during one of the softer moments of Confess, Lewis admits, "I'll cry when the movie's over." He's the cocky, successful, brutally honest lothario who almost always gets his comeuppance in cinema and is verboten in indie rock. But this is pop music where the bad guy wins. | 2012-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | July 6, 2012 | 8.6 | 32b54477-b006-4fe9-a206-8d1ca3733ed2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his debut Kindness LP, the buzzy UK songwriter Adam Bainbridge offers washed-out new wave, strobing disco, lite funk, atmospheric balladry, and a couple unexpected covers. | On his debut Kindness LP, the buzzy UK songwriter Adam Bainbridge offers washed-out new wave, strobing disco, lite funk, atmospheric balladry, and a couple unexpected covers. | Kindness: World, You Need a Change of Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16576-world-you-need-a-change-of-mind/ | World, You Need a Change of Mind | From the project name to the album title to the beautiful hair framing Adam Bainbridge's face on the cover to the competently percolating grooves, everything about Kindness' World, You Need a Change of Mind goes down easy. The UK-born singer-songwriter has a real feel for idiom. He can do washed-out new wave, strobing disco, atmospheric balladry. He'll throw in a sax break and the odd cover. In one way, Kindness represents the end-point of the chilled aesthetic that tints our memories of the summer of 2009 until they have the look of an Instagram photo. Where much of that music was homemade and owed a lot to Ariel Pink, Bainbridge's Kindness gives that "songwriting as mixtape" approach a professional sheen. With production from Philippe Zdar of French dance outfit Cassius, it's all rendered just so, every element placed where it should be.
That might sound like a faint praise, but the truth is it's hard to get music to sound like this. Back when Bainbridge's musical heroes (Nile Rodgers, Jam & Lewis, Cerrone) were at the peak of their game, the industry generated a lot of revenue and a lot of that went back into studios. People knew how to craft records that sounded good, and they had the tools to make it happen. So the fact that Bainbridge's scratchy lite-funk guitars, rubbery bass, and layered, reverb-saturated vocals are all in their right proportions bears note. When World, You Need a Change of Mind is playing, it's unlikely to make anyone who doesn't spend all their waking hours tracking blog trends mad. So on that level, purely as an audio object, World is a success. It can fill up a room and turn it into a cool and friendly place (those choosing music for the sales floor of your hip local retailer are sure to notice these qualities).
Like a lot of young producers in the electro-pop sphere, Bainbridge started out recording covers of songs by favorite artists in order to figure out how it was done. But his songwriting progression since then hasn't kept pace with his technical know-how, and this set runs into trouble when considered outside of pure style. It's telling that the two most memorable melodies on World come from other writers, and oddly, the chosen covers have something to bother people on both sides of the Atlantic. "Anyone Can Fall in Love" is a 1986 UK hit by actress Anita Dobson, and it was the theme song to the show she starred in, "EastEnders". While I have no associations with "Anyone Can Fall in Love", as heard here it comes over as pretty but ultimately cloying and silly, an unearned stab at at soul-driven tenderness.
The other cover is of the Replacements' "Swingin' Party", a song for which I do have a lot of associations. The Kindness version is lovely in its way, with delicate production and loads of atmosphere, but it basically strips the song of its meaning and leaves only an ethereal, vibe-laden shell. "If being afraid is a crime, we hang side by side" is a line of desperation, the kind of thing that made Paul Westerberg such a distinctive voice. But with Bainbridge, you feel like he has the world on a string. There's no vulnerability. His version is "sad," I guess, but almost anything sung with his layered, ghosted-out vocals would be. You don't get a sense of his personality, what he brings to it.
Bainbridge's original material is not quite as tuneful but it does possess a consistency of vision. The appealing "Cyan" sounds like Arthur Russell collaborating with Toro Y Moi, and it finds just the right mix of dreaminess and propulsion. "Seod" has an appealingly thick blend of vintage synths and ping-ponging percussion. And "That's Alright" is the set's one true curveball, zeroing in on that late-1980s moment when Prince and Jam & Lewis were using the gated snare to inflate pop to absurd proportions. Forget that it lifts the vocal hook from Escort's "All Through the Night" and is essentially a genre exercise, and it's easy to wallow in just how well it's all done. "That's Alright" also sounds oddly fresh at this moment, one of the few places where Bainbridge makes a choice that doesn't feel obvious. And that's ultimately the issue with this record. World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with. | 2012-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Polydor / Female Energy | May 3, 2012 | 6.4 | 32b602e1-86d5-4d1b-8f2c-756e71df6ce2 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After coming to prominence as the producer of Robyn's UK #1 "With Every Heartbeat", Kleerup unveils his debut LP, with assistance from Lykke Li, Marit Bergman, the Concretes' Lisa Milberg and Neneh Cherry's baby sister, Titiyo. | After coming to prominence as the producer of Robyn's UK #1 "With Every Heartbeat", Kleerup unveils his debut LP, with assistance from Lykke Li, Marit Bergman, the Concretes' Lisa Milberg and Neneh Cherry's baby sister, Titiyo. | Kleerup: Kleerup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11581-kleerup/ | Kleerup | Before you waste any more precious eyeball moisture on this record review, stop and look at that face. Framed by stringy, grunge-rock hair, it's the face of Stockholm's Andreas Kleerup, already one of the most internationally successful players involved in Sweden's current reign as global pop incubator. Perhaps unlike, say, Robyn, Peter Bjorn and John, ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, or Jens Lekman, you probably don't recognize him-- by name or by face. All right, then. That's why they call this an introduction.
If you know Kleerup already, you probably first heard about him as producer of Robyn's 2006 single "With Every Heartbeat", an orchestral electropop ballad full of soulful melodies and the queasy emotional conflict of a breakup that hurts every bit as much as you know it's right. Re-released last year in the UK, the song went to the top of the charts, and the new U.S. single has done well on domestic dance and singles sales charts this year as well. After the Robyn coup came remixes for Shout Out Louds, the Concretes, and others, along with a collaboration on the latest Cyndi Lauper album (seriously).
Kleerup's self-titled album-- currently import-only outside of Sweden-- marks his solo debut, though he has appeared on a few scattered releases (including a remix of the Tough Alliance) as a member of an electropop trio called the Meat Boys. The CD booklet offers seven more portraits of the artist's unsmiling face, each about the same except for different color schemes or shadows. The album itself puts Kleerup's best face forward, featuring "With Every Heartbeat" plus 11 other home-recorded songs; aside from several completely solo excursions, the tracks stay pretty much within the same computer-plus-Swedish-chanteuse template. Good thing it's an enjoyable template.
"With Every Heartbeat" still sounds devastating here, and the other collaborations take a similarly lovelorn path. The best is "Until We Bleed", with up-and-comer Lykke Li, which again relies on strings and a house beat, this time with frazzled synths coaxing out the volatility that distinguishes Li from her peers. It's as good an introduction to the singer as anything on her estimable, Bjorn Yttling-produced debut, Youth Novels. The Concretes' Lisa Milberg brings the gentle anguish and pop-oriented lyrics of her group's latest, Hey Trouble, to "Music for Girl", which sounds like the Knife doing Motown: "The songs, you know, they never leave you for another." Closer to the Robyn track's bright expressiveness are lonesome, Italo-tinged comedown "3AM", with Marit Bergman (who has also been produced by Yttling, including on a 2002 debut titled 3.00 A.M. Serenades) and Titiyo-sung second single "Longing for Lullabies". Titiyo's older sister, none other than Neneh Cherry, strikes a vague, awkwardly worded political stance on children's choir-assisted "Forever", though her smoky voice still resonates.
Kleerup's tracks without guests are the real revelation. "Thank You for Nothing" is another standout, with the producer's own wounded vocal repeating within whirring beats. "On My Own Again" takes a peppy John Hughes-film left turn, with the cheeriest synths on the album and ramshackle acoustic guitars. The instrumentals-- from hard-charging, Simian Mobile Disco-esque opener "Hero" to fragile, ambient-leaning finale "I Just Want to Make That Sad Boy Smile"-- don't break the momentum. Look at that album cover again. Yep, it's the face of a guy who just recorded an accomplished, cohesive debut, one that should please fans of "blog house" and Swedish pop alike. Now if only he owned a razor. | 2008-06-27T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-27T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | EMI | June 27, 2008 | 7.7 | 32b7ae6f-e70a-40f0-8653-5a3e425f3e08 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On their new album Bottomless Pit, Death Grips stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques, renewing their focus on songcraft. | On their new album Bottomless Pit, Death Grips stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques, renewing their focus on songcraft. | Death Grips: Bottomless Pit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21879-bottomless-pit/ | Bottomless Pit | The experimental band Negativland introduced the concept of “culture jamming” to the world in 1984, defining it as “an awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life.” They coined the term largely as a cynical reaction to America’s commercial monuments: billboards, logos, fashion trends and the like, but the phrase’s subtext isn’t as nihilistic as it may seem. By defining the phrase, Negativland and their peers legitimized it as a tool to deface and expose the dark side of capitalism, inviting artists to punch back through graffiti, guerrilla radio, fliers, and other media. With the advent of Internet and social media, culture jamming’s grown more ubiquitous than ever. (As a matter of fact, the word “meme” also refers to the imagery that jammers disseminate en masse.) Just like graffiti, Dat Boi, Boaty McBoatface, and Make America Great Again hats disrupt our global communication systems and incite reactions ranging from befuddled amusement to anger, fear, and dejection.
Zach Hill, Andy Morin, and Stefan Burnett (otherwise known as MC Ride) are easily the most talented, impactful culture jammers of the streaming age: a distinction primarily owed to just how seriously the California trio take those ideas. Never mind the Trojan Horse they pulled on Epic, the deep web album leaks, the no-shows—the real subversion’s in Death Grips' music, which continues to draw huge audiences (see: the massive crowd who filled the Gobi tent for their headlining Coachella set) and unsurprisingly, co-signs from fellow pranksters like Tyler, the Creator and Eric André. It’s no surprise that the loudest contingency of their fanbase resides on an infamous image-board; Death Grips speak directly to the dark worldview that accompanies years wasted lurking online, getting high off digital schadenfreude. (Been there.)
On their new album Bottomless Pit, they stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques ever, renewing their focus on songcraft, rather than chicanery. It's sure to elicit a sigh of relief among fans who’ve grown jaded with the band’s work. Opening track “Giving Bad People Good Ideas" opens on a feint—an eerie, descending vocal from Cherry Glazerr vocalist Clementine Creevy, the feminine foil to macho, malicious Burnett. The lilting intro gives way to a black-metal sprint, with Tera Melos’ Nick Reinhart churning out jagged tremolo riffs. The follow-up blow carries that momentum further: “Hot Head” starts off inside a cartoon fight cloud spinning off towards oblivion, a blur of percussive jabs, whooshing machines, and screamed gibberish. From there, the song takes an equally disorienting nose-dive into a slack, spacious verse.
Death Grips draw heavily on abrasive styles, but the group are arguably at their most lethal when they're hijacking popular tastes, as they did on 2012’s The Money Store, and as they do here. With their stacked guitar riffs, dissonant samples, and glitchy percussion, “Spikes” and “Three Bedrooms In A Good Neighborhood” invoke an alternate history where hip-hop and metal fusion didn't dead-end into visions of Fred Durst’s punchable mug. The EBM-flavored “80808” supercharges a house-y backbeat with additional crackles and pops; the choruses expand that texture, dialing up the voltage until the synths alight in an arc flash. The most straightforward of these standouts is “Eh,” a rap song anchored in glimmering, burbling synths that dart in and out of the bass drums’ margins. Unmoved by the giddy surroundings, Burnett deadpans his morbid imagery with unusual calm, as if a tranquilizer dart struck him mid-verse: “Catch me hanging from my noose like ehhhh,” he yawns, stretching out the final syllable like putty.
MC Ride has long been regarded as Death Grips’ anchor, both onstage and off: a privilege largely owed to a pair of vocal cords which never seem to tire, even as the man screams himself sick. On Bottomless Pit he offers his most athletic performance to date, double-dutching over fallen power on “80808,” bobbing and weaving over Krautrock shards on “Ring A Bell,” and howling out in agony as the machines draw and quarter him on “Warping.” It’s not all gloom-and-doom, however; “Bubbles Buried in this Jungle” and “Trash" showcase a seething monotone delivery that taps into the absurd, comedic undertones buried in this madcap project. It's certainly difficult not to crack a smile on "Houdini," wherein he roasts hipsters (“Fuck is that, a hairstyle?/This asshole be at pussy church, first”) and instructs us,“Don’t stop that okey doke stroke.”
For all its chaos and fury, Bottomless Pit is Death Grips' most accessible record since The Money Store. It has a distractingly uneven mix, seesawing from grit to gloss and back again, and some of the sparser moments, like mid-album would-be barnburner "Houdini," are trying, but overall it is a resounding success. It might not win them new fans, but "new fans" have never been an integral part of the Death Grips experience: You're either in or you're out. If you're in, you will probably grin wider than you have through any Death Grips album in years. | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Harvest | May 12, 2016 | 8.1 | 32b8f44c-39d6-4f1e-96ad-694d446493db | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Michael Mann’s 1986 film was a critical and commercial flop, but its soundtrack has proved a major inspiration for the music supervision on projects like Drive and “Stranger Things.” | Michael Mann’s 1986 film was a critical and commercial flop, but its soundtrack has proved a major inspiration for the music supervision on projects like Drive and “Stranger Things.” | Various Artists: Manhunter Original Motion Picture Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-manhunter-original-motion-picture-music/ | Manhunter Original Motion Picture Music | By all traditional Hollywood metrics, Michael Mann’s Manhunter was deemed a disappointment upon its release in the summer of 1986, receiving a lukewarm reception both at the box office and from critics. You couldn’t really blame the typical action-flick junkie from walking out of the theater underwhelmed. The movie’s very title was a red herring. Based on Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, the film received its more generic crime-movie handle to either—depending on which story you want to believe—mollify producer Dino De Laurentiis (who apparently wanted to steer clear of any serpent-themed titles after his 1985 epic, Year of the Dragon, flopped) or avoid people mistaking it for a martial-arts movie.
Audiences expected a movie called Manhunter to be a serial-killer thriller that conformed to the multiplex standards of the day—car chases, buckets of blood, and an unimpeachable protagonist who could take down flagrantly evil bad guys with a perfect shot and a cool catchphrase. Instead, they were greeted with a hyper-stylized, meditative film where the most horrific violence happens off-screen, much of the plot is given over to studious forensics analysis, the nominal hero (William Petersen’s FBI agent Will Graham) is a psychologically tormented shell of a human, and the villain (Tom Noonan’s fearsome Francis Dolarhyde) elicits our sympathy as much as our revulsion. Five years after its release, Manhunter’s ignoble fate was seemingly sealed forevermore when one of its tertiary characters—Hannibal Lecter—became the center of another, infinitely more popular film adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs, with Anthony Hopkins’ scenery- (and face-)chewing, Oscar-winning performance all but erasing Brian Cox’s icier, more deadpan turn in Manhunter from collective memory.
But the blockbuster success of The Silence of the Lambs proved to be the catalyst that mobilized a cult of Manhunter fans who prefer Mann’s austere vision of Harris’ world to Jonathan Demme’s operatic grotesquerie (much like the sect of Pink Floyd fans who’ll take the Syd Barrett era over the more famous Waters/Gilmour iteration). Over the years, Manhunter has been salvaged from the 99-cent VHS bargain bin to become the sort of film that’s inspired deluxe DVD reissues, obsessive fan sites, and thinkpiece retrospectives. Yet even the movie’s most ardent boosters can agree with its critics on one thing: Manhunter is the 1980s-est movie of the 1980s, thanks in large part to a soundtrack that instantly carbon-dates the film to its era of origin.
When you go back and read the reviews that greeted Manhunter at the time of its time of release, even the positive write-ups can’t conceal their contempt for Mann’s use of music, which can be as overwhelming as his direction is painstakingly methodical. Not that anyone should’ve been surprised. Whether deploying Tangerine Dream’s electronic vistas for 1981’s Thief or Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” to heighten the nocturnal tension on “Miami Vice,” Mann viewed soundtracks as more than mere background dressing; the music in his work becomes a character unto itself, as integral to the mise en scene as lighting and set décor. Accordingly, with Manhunter, he doubled down on his dual loves of dramatic ambient synthphonies and blatantly expository pop songs, pumping them into each critical moment like a medic administering CPR.
But in contrast to the previous year’s star-studded “Miami Vice” soundtrack, Manhunter is loaded with artists who mostly had little name recognition at the time, and even less today. He tipped Philly new-wave duo the Reds to establish the film’s eerie atmosphere, and their ominous synth-smeared instrumentals make even the film’s most expansive shots—like Graham’s sprint through Lecter’s stadium-like detention center—feel suffocating. This expanded double-vinyl reissue adds a crucial piece of theirs that wasn’t featured on the original 1986 soundtrack release: “Joggers Stakeout,” a Floydian aftershock of distantly echoing guitars that suggests “Welcome to Machine” stripped of its mechanical parts. The other unearthed pieces of incidental music—Japanese new-age master Kitaro’s cosmic reverie “Seiun / Hikari No Sono” and Krautrock pioneer Klaus Schulze’s percolating space-age bachelor-pad doodle “Freeze”—serve to further counterbalance the bombast of the soundtrack’s pop songs, which telegraph the characters’ emotional states with all the subtlety of a Times Square neon sign.
But, separated from the film, Manhunter’s pop-song repertoire is a fascinating time capsule of post-punk’s dying days. By the mid-’80s, post-punk’s obsession with mainstream subversion had rendered the genre indistinguishable from the most craven chart-seeking pop, thanks to all the shiny synths, arena-sized grandeur, and nominal gestures toward worldly exotica. There are three selections from Shriekback, the new-wave supergroup featuring Gang of Four’s Dave Allen and XTC’s Barry Andrews that, before long, had drifted toward plush ballads like “This Big Hush,” whose uncanny mix of brooding romanticism and wind-chimed luster forged the heretofore unrealized subgenre of yuppie-goth. And then there are the Prime Movers, an L.A. band that boasted Paisley Underground roots before morphing into Dread Zeppelin (!). But on the journey between those poles, they delivered “Strong as I Am,” a towering bid for Big Music glory that, despite its promotion to this soundtrack’s lead song and its Mann-financed video, failed to make them the next U2.
In Manhunter, “Strong as I Am” frames a pivotal moment of reckoning for the Dolarhyde character, to the point where the song isn’t so much supporting the scene as choreographing it. But in the film’s white-knuckled climax, Mann pushes that concept to the hilt. The late-game appearance of Iron Butterfly’s 1968 acid-rock warhorse “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” is both Manhunter’s definitive moment and its great anomaly, not just in style and era, but in its diegetic placement: It’s the song Dolarhyde flips on his eight-track as he torments his blind paramour-turned-prey. (Mann was reportedly inspired by his correspondence with a convicted killer in Texas named Dennis Wayne Wallace, who claimed “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” was a love song that spiritually connected him to the woman he murdered.)
It’s a selection that belongs in the Music Supervision Hall of Fame—not just because the song infuses an already terrifying scene with even more sinister energy, and not just because its breakdown and build-up sync up perfectly with Graham’s window-smashing rescue, but because Iron Butterfly is precisely the sort of archaic psychedelic rock band that an aging, supremely creepy weirdo like Francis Dolarhyde would still be listening to on his eight-track nearly 20 years after their album came out. It’s a strange, sprawling song that ultimately amplifies the psychological distance between Dolarhyde and normal society (though this soundtrack pares down the original’s 17-minute girth to a tidier eight-minute edit).
As such, “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” is also a song that sounded as dated and out of place in 1986 as the Manhunter soundtrack did throughout the 1990s and 2000s. But just as the film is now credited with spawning “CSI” and other meticulous police procedurals, the influence of its soundtrack has likewise seeped into contemporary pop-cultural phenomena. Sure, the passage of time remains unkind to Red 7’s “Heartbeat” (the slick, chest-pumping MOR rocker that summons the film’s closing credits with all the grace of a hairspray spritz to the face), but Manhunter’s chilling synthscapes have undeniably left a frosty residue on Cliff Martinez’s Drive score and the sinister pulse of “Stranger Things.” And really, this soundtrack has a lot more working in its favor than mere ’80s revivalism: In a world where vintage kosmische records go for hundreds of dollars on Discogs, new age has been embraced by hip reissue labels, and synth-glossed pop has become the lingua franca of post-chillwave indie rock, everything about this once-anachronistic artifact is now perfectly on trend. | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Waxwork | August 4, 2018 | 8 | 32bc3f01-8d01-4eb6-a19f-0ab3f62d4c30 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ |
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