alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
On his third album, the in-demand producer and solo artist ends up splitting his time between careful rock songwriting and carefree pop singing, leaving a minor impression of both in the process. | On his third album, the in-demand producer and solo artist ends up splitting his time between careful rock songwriting and carefree pop singing, leaving a minor impression of both in the process. | Bleachers: Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bleachers-take-the-sadness-out-of-saturday-night/ | Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night | There’s a strain of Tasteful Pop coursing through mainstream music right now, guided by Jack Antonoff’s princely hand. Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey and Clairo and Lorde have all recruited Antonoff as co-pilot on their journey to the soft and lush grounds of Tasteful Pop, cushioned by string arrangements and acoustic guitars and first-person observational songwriting that always seems to ask what is honest right now? as opposed to what might sound interesting later? As a producer, he is more than a hired gun but never an egomaniac, just the footprints in the sand when you need him the most. Even when working on funky ’70s pastiche with St. Vincent or the pop-country of the Chicks, Antonoff remains collaborative, chameleonic, versatile, and difficult to pin down save for one word: tasteful. And there is no accounting for taste.
His third solo album as Bleachers, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, threatens to blow that whole idea out of the water. It’s a confused album that sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops. Everything feels a little too sweaty and effortful, and the yelpy millennial-pop singles gobble up the scenery behind more nuanced and emotionally textured album cuts. Though it’s an album led by a bona fide hit-maker, it is perfumed with the notice-me-dad odor of a solo project. It is mostly inspired, sometimes interesting, and occasionally banal, half All Things Must Pass, half Jack Antonoff and the G League Band.
Antonoff recorded these sessions with his five-piece touring band during the pandemic, crafting an album about falling in love with the sound of the slapback echo. I’m kidding, but not really. The production effect—made famous by Elvis Presley in Sun Studios, a hallmark of ’50s and ’60s rock’n’roll, and used by many since then from Bruce Springsteen to Wolf Parade—is essentially a sixth band member, coloring the songs with a sepia, rockabilly tint. It is the first hint at Antonoff’s desire to create a real album’s album.
On 2014’s Strange Desire and 2017’s Gone Now, he celebrated his nostalgia for the ’80s, but now he seeks something even further in the past, summoning images of lyrics scrawled on foxed pages and captured with vintage microphones. This feeling begins with the lovely “91,” co-written and sung with the author Zadie Smith. The slow prelude has an expressionistic, dreamlike quality, a spectral memory play set in 1991, where there’s a war on TV and a mother waltzing around a room “like there ain’t no rip in the seam.”
Mothers, ghosts, faith, and darkness are a few of the motifs across Saturday Night, cropping up like Bruce-shaped signposts along the side of the turnpike. Antonoff even calls in Bruce—his childhood idol and chief musical and spiritual inspiration—to join him on “Chinatown,” a song that feels like a spec script for a Bruce Springsteen song, glockenspiel and all. (The first line: “Get in my backseat, honey pie, and I’ll wear your sadness like it’s mine.”) It conjures big nights and bigger tomorrows like some viral video where Bruce joins a wedding band on stage—kind of lovely and sad and small at the same time. Antonoff told Billboard that this album was “always about breaking out, knocking at the door of the next phase of your life.” Bruce wouldn’t knock, though—he’d kick it down.
In that way, the nervous and quieter parts of the record are where Antonoff separates himself from his pop career. “Big Life” sounds like a songwriter who knows the rules and is willingly destroying them with a preposterous amount of slapback echo, a surfy guitar riff, and an opening line that is funny and self-lacerating: “I flip back and forth coast to coast like an herb.” There’s a lot of odd creases like this, nerdy songwriter/producer choices that highlight Antonoff’s love of making records: The way he sings the title of the album on two separate songs; the close-mic’d vocals and how they strangely overlap each other on closer “What’d I Do With All This Faith”; the clear homage to another inspiration of his, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, on the acoustic heart-pumper “45.” It is the quintessential Antonoff solo song, the self-professed herb strumming a guitar and singing his heart out about music and records and love.
The bigger swings at pop-rock are when everything gets blurry and Antonoff pulls a muscle trying to make another hit. “Stop Making This Hurt” is a horn-filled, chest-beating Garden State anthem with a shout-scream chorus as welcome as a troupe of theater kids doing an impromptu number at an IHOP. The big rave-up “How Dare You Want More” fares a little better because it sounds like it was recorded all huddled around one mic, the kind of infectious live-show staple that might really cook if it didn’t stall out completely when the guitar and saxophone start miserably trading fours. It’s rare to find a moment on any record where it seems worth remarking how bad a solo sounds, but there it is.
“I talk so much because I’m scared to begin,” he sings on “Secret Life,” the best and most revealing line on the album. The anxiousness and confusion that bloom in the album’s smaller moments hide behind the bigger songs, which, for all their ’80s and ’50s worship, still sound tailormade for schlocky alt-pop radio. Antonoff remains a curious case for a solo artist, this perennial kid brother archetype with a grin stained on his face even when he’s trying to look serious. His leather jacket says rock star, but his songs are mostly without danger or angst. And even in their hangdog sadness, they are always eager to be heard, yipping at your shins as opposed to inviting you in.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | July 30, 2021 | 6.2 | 342306c8-8139-468e-b230-c08e8b48f5b6 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Okkervil's newest batch of songs create a roomy and natural showcase for Will Sheff's high-wire vocals. | Okkervil's newest batch of songs create a roomy and natural showcase for Will Sheff's high-wire vocals. | Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5963-black-sheep-boy/ | Black Sheep Boy | Will Sheff sounds mad. Not angry mad, but the other mad-- nearly hysterical. On Okkervil River's fourth album, Black Sheep Boy, he oversings beyond the limits of taste and vocal cords, either belting the notes forcefully or overenunciating his syllables at quieter moments. You can even hear his agitated spittle hitting the microphone on "For Real". It's as if his voice is too small a vessel for the big ideas and even bigger emotions that drive the band. As Pauline Kael once wrote of Gene Wilder, Sheff "taps a private madness," as if the pain and heartbreak around him-- the runaway sons, abused daughters, lost friends, damaged lovers, and doomed relationships that comprise the world of the album-- push him to caterwauling arias, his hysteria barely bottled by the demands of his carefully constructed songs. But, like Wilder, Sheff never overplays his hand and always maintains control, which, also like Wilder, makes him at once heartbreaking and somewhat humorous-- more self-aware than Conor Oberst, more serious than Colin Meloy, more legible than Jeff Mangum.
Black Sheep Boy creates a roomy and natural showcase for Sheff's high-wire vocals, and as a result, it may be the band's best album, the crest of a wave that began with 2003's Down the River of Golden Dreams and rose through a subsequent EP and two releases by sister band Shearwater. Okkervil River's major accomplishment-- what sets Black Sheep Boy farthest apart from previous efforts-- is the sense of purpose to these songs: they sound studiously literate, melodic, and concise, which bolsters their cumulative effect. A concept album that moves thematically rather than narratively, Black Sheep Boy was inspired by the Tim Hardin song of the same name and begins with a more or less faithful cover. The following 10 songs expound on these themes of prodigality and wanderlust as the band display an unflinching devotion to the sheepish title metaphor, following it all the way through until the boy becomes a ram.
Writing in first-person, Sheff traffics not in plots, but in predicaments full of concrete details and clever wordplay. On "Black", a man despairs to counsel and comfort his lover, who was abducted and possibly abused as a child. "April 12th, with nobody else around; you were outside the house...when he put you in the car," Sheff sings, capturing the character's boiling frustration and romantic abandon. Meanwhile, the band churns a bouncy pop energy, driven by Jonathan Meiburg's keyboards and Zachary Thomas's rubber-ball bass, which pushes and prods him along, intensifying the emotions even as it seems at tonal odds with the dark material. But, as the music makes clear, "Black" is a love song, a statement of determined devotion.
The sound on Black Sheep Boy, while certainly familiar to fans, is so far removed from the purposefully lulling pace of Golden Dreams that it could belong to another band altogether. To an extent, it does: The quartet has grown into a sextet, and the expanded line-up is evident in the ambitious, intricate, yet accessible arrangements and the dramatic dynamic between the songs. "For Real", "Black", and "The Latest Toughs" are frenzied headlong rushes that nicely offset the quieter moments like "A King and a Queen" and "In a Radio Song". "A Stone" rests on a bare honky-tonk two-step shuffle, and Howard Draper's lap steel adds a flourish to "Get Big", a duet with Amy Annelle. Careening strings and crescendoing horns add catharsis to the eight-minute "So Come Back, I Am Waiting", the album's climax. "A Glow", though, is its dark denouement, a menacing coda to Okkervil River's most sustained and startling collection of songs yet, throughout which the band makes Sheff's private madness starkly public. | 2005-04-14T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-04-14T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 14, 2005 | 8.5 | 34273ebd-8444-422d-9053-2a4db0ec5a49 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon’s understated and modest third album, Mug Museum, is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail. | Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon’s understated and modest third album, Mug Museum, is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail. | Cate Le Bon: Mug Museum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18716-cate-le-bon-mug-museum/ | Mug Museum | Even those dumb tchotkes we own can take on a greater meaning simply by virtue of how long we’ve owned them. Sometimes it’s a small wooden cabinet filled with thimbles or spoons, or little magnets of all 50 states permanently fused onto the fridge door, or a binder full of basketball cards I can’t let go of just yet. For Cate Le Bon, it may be something as simple as collection of coffee mugs that as time wears on becomes a museum on a shelf, endowed with tiny memories of the past. The Welshwoman sings on *Mug Museum'*s title track, “I forget the detail/ but remember the warmth.”
Le Bon’s understated and modest third album is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail. These are small, graceful songs with deceptive amounts of depth, due in no small part to the circumstances surrounding writing the album. While in Wales last winter just as Le Bon was ready to move on from her 2012 album CYRK, her maternal grandmother died. The songs on Mug Museum were written during that time of reacclimation after grief, as Le Bon struggled with her loss and how affected her maternal role in her family.
Le Bon navigates these uncertainties with both poise and a kind of performed confidence, like someone just pushed her out on to the stage from the wings. Inspiration notwithstanding, it’s the most spritely album she’s released, though the songs themselves remain room-sized and unadorned. The band behind her, featuring guitarist H. Hawkline and White Fence drummer Nick Murray, hit at some familiar folk garage signposts from her previous albums. Mostly, they're a tight, scrappy Euro beat band from the 60s held together by a dusty organ underneath, but sometimes they adopt more metro Television sound, or a carefree California psych group.
The main focus though is Le Bon, whose voice grows more and more singular and versatile with each release. The Nico comparisons still linger on perhaps only because the two are just biologically similar in their yawn-to-song delivery. But where Nico’s voice was alluring in a kind of siren way, Le Bon’s is more curious and diverse. Sometimes she sounds like the shyest member of a folksy sylvan choir and other times she rears up and belts out a high soprano note at the climax of “Duke”. These precise melodies are often performed without precision, or at least without consonants—something about her thick Welsh accent and tipsy elocution just makes her voice swirl around words rather than really land on them. When she sings, “split me like timber,” or, “beat me like egg yolks,” on “I Can’t Help You”, it’s less the emotion behind the sentiment and more the joy in hearing the words spill out.
And Le Bon revels in her language. For Le Bon, who is one of a small percentage of people in this world who can speak Welsh and frequently sings in it, her love for words rarely feels ostentatious, and her gentle delivery rarely makes her words intrusive. There’s several simple turns of phrases on Mug Museum that are just captivating: the subtle transpositions in the chorus of “I Think I Knew”, sung in a classic duet format with the well-paired Perfume Genius. There’s the tangled and desperate "Mirror Me" where she sings, "Mirror me/ Like you want me to be/ Like I want you to see me" (a knowing inversion of Nico, perhaps?). And there’s the emotional climax, “Sisters”, where Le Bon, now powerful in her lower register, proclaims, “I won’t die/ I’m a sister”, coated with denial and stuffed with subtext. We finally get a good look at her fear of mortality and sororal dread, and even then, it’s all boiling under her cool and collected voice.
The pen gets away from Le Bon a few times on the record, most notably on “Wild” where the band and Le Bon play with aggresive dissonance and purple prose, respectively. They don’t work especially well trying to fill spaces, they work better at sounding isolated in them. That’s what Le Bon does best: delicately amplify the tiniest moments that would otherwise go unnoticed. From H. Hawkline's erratic, trashy guitar on late-album psych highlight “Cuckoo Through the Walls”, to the creaking of the piano stool on the final track, Mug Museum accumulates hundreds of pieces of Le Bon's life to form an imperfect whole. By the end as Le Bon sings alone above a rusty piano, it sounds like she’s surveying the artifacts around her, her questions and worries laid out in great detail in the nine tracks that came before it. Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it—she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer. | 2013-11-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita / Turnstile | November 15, 2013 | 7.3 | 342ca459-3f4d-4c43-a02a-a30d91f161b0 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
After being largely unknown throughout most of 2009, this Southern rapper is suddenly the next big blog-rap hope. | After being largely unknown throughout most of 2009, this Southern rapper is suddenly the next big blog-rap hope. | Big K.R.I.T.: K.R.I.T. Wuz Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14285-krit-wuz-here/ | K.R.I.T. Wuz Here | Big K.R.I.T.'s zero-to-60 career trajectory has taken the rapper mere months-- he was unknown for much of 2009-- to become one of the more buzzed-about blog-rap phenomenons. Compare his sudden rise with that of his obvious influences, like Pimp C, whose impact was still just being recognized upon his death, or T.I., who toiled in the Atlanta underground after a major-label false start before beginning his ascendancy. K.R.I.T. is a talented artist, a rapper with dimension and ambition who has learned much at the feet of the masters. His new record, K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, is a strong release from a kid who has a lot of ideas and approaches, although he hasn't quite established himself as a distinctive star, and often falls back on a collection of well-crafted southern rap clichés. The fact that we're even talking about him today is because he stands on the shoulders of some rappers who didn't have such an easy path to critical acceptance.
It helps that K.R.I.T. seems uninterested in following the paths of major-label creative casualty B.o.B., who seemed to outgrow rap before he could even grow into it. Instead, the rapper joins a first wave of new artists (G-Side, Yelawolf, Pill) working a vein of Southern rap traditionalism, embracing the production aesthetics of UGK and Organized Noize. K.R.I.T.'s ear is his biggest strength; as a producer, tracks like "Return of Forever" and "Country Shit" find him revitalizing the staid indie rap template with the 808s and swagger of Southern rap.
As a rapper, K.R.I.T. still seems to be working his persona out, as if his talents have leapt ahead of his sense of self. Just as he deftly emulates great producers, his rap influences are the best of the best; choosing Pimp C as a stylistic forefather suggests he identifies with strong personalities, even if he's working his way through them to find his own. And T.I.'s topical breadth and lyrical flexibility serve a strong example for an artist uninterested in painting himself into a corner. Goodie Mob certainly laid a blueprint for his more socio-political verses. It's also smart of him to work with rappers like Curren$y-- the most charismatic nu-South backpack rapper. If K.R.I.T. follows this path, he could end up with a truly great career.
And while this tape is strong, it's as much about potential as it is an achievement in itself; as great as it sounds hearing K.R.I.T.'s scrappy rap style ride "Country Shit"'s energetic beat, the track is almost undercut by its topical genericism. Tracks like "Just Touched Down" and "See Me on Top" feel like steps further back; standard soul loops, archetypal exercises flawlessly executed but ultimately quite empty. The flip is tracks like "They Got Us", "Children of the World", or "Small as a Giant," where K.R.I.T.'s reflective, conscious approach shows signs of personal honesty, political frustration, and hints at the person hidden behind the music. | 2010-05-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-05-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 27, 2010 | 7.7 | 342ebb48-0c72-4c47-bfe6-e37d0a72c6d8 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
On their second full-length, Cotton Jones take a more wistful and weary tone; the result sounds like classic country music filtered through dream-pop haze. | On their second full-length, Cotton Jones take a more wistful and weary tone; the result sounds like classic country music filtered through dream-pop haze. | Cotton Jones: Tall Hours in the Glowstream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14747-tall-hours-in-the-glowstream/ | Tall Hours in the Glowstream | Michael Nau of Cotton Jones sounds like he's aged 40 years since his tenure as the frontman of Page France. That band pushed his boyish vocals front-and-center, most notably on 2005's Hello, Dear Wind, and he sang almost-hushed heart-on-sleeve lyrics about love, loss, and devotion. If the Michael Nau of Page France was the young man immersed in wide-eyed wonder while taking in everything around him, the Cotton Jones iteration of the same person proves to be wiser-but-wearier, stricken with a sense of longing and regret even when singing lines like, "How sweet it is to roll up on your floor."
The directness that once defined Page France's music (and Paranoid Cocoon, Nau's first album under the Cotton Jones moniker) is brought into more atmospheric heights on Tall Hours in the Glowstream, while the lyrics shift from proclamations and heartwarming imagery to the uncertainty of love. On opener "Sail of the Silver Morning", Nau's dusky, southern-tinged vocals (along with those of co-vocalist Whitney McGraw) fit snugly atop the otherworldly doo-wop shuffle, complete with ethereal background humming cloaked in reverb. "If there was a path your feet could follow, where in the world would it lead?" sings Nau on "More Songs for Margaret" in a place where his own legs seem far too tired to carry him any farther. Toward the end of each verse, with the float and drift of blissed-out keyboards and distant tambourine, Nau intones, "Always the mornings keep coming onto me." Even when found in the occasional bright spot, even when realizing that his days are far from over, still Nau can't help but sound wistful and downtrodden.
This is apparent on songs like "Man Climbs Out of the Winter", where Nau's wistfulness is carried through the clouds by softly strummed acoustic guitar and the faint whine of pedal steel, evoking the country & western greats of yesteryear. The romanticism of a bygone era also permeates through songs like "Place at the End of the Street" and instrumental "Soft Mountain Shake". As a whole, Tall Hours in the Glowstream sounds like classic country music filtered through a dream-pop haze, a glittery summer night somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the sky is filled with fireflies and bright stars. The blurry sound drifts through the music and seeps its way into the lyrics, as much of the album is steeped in uncertainty, Nau's footing never steady enough to see a bold, clear image as he had in his Page France days. Closing track "No Things I Need (Like Some Time Ago)" finds Nau and McGraw at the center of a lilting duet, walking hand-in-hand and "singing sad songs backwards" as they head to the downtown of an unspecified city. Even with such an optimistic ending to a work of deep longing, it sounds like Nau is slightly remorseful to leave where he is in search for something better. | 2010-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Suicide Squeeze | October 18, 2010 | 6.7 | 34327fd1-3f5d-44ed-a26e-fec170984103 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
This oft-bootlegged, now greatly enhanced 29-song recording finds the Replacements on the brink of a crucial turning point—like a final college bender before entering the working world. | This oft-bootlegged, now greatly enhanced 29-song recording finds the Replacements on the brink of a crucial turning point—like a final college bender before entering the working world. | The Replacements: For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-replacements-for-sale-live-at-maxwells-1986/ | For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986 | When you talk about the Replacements’ early years, the myths and outrageous anecdotes quickly pile up like empties around a trash bin. But for all the tales of drunkenness, “SNL” bans, and cross-dressing that define the band’s legacy, no transgression encapsulates their prankster personality better than the decision to christen their 1984 breakthrough album Let It Be. As frontman Paul Westerberg has famously quipped, the heretical act of shoplifting an album title from the Beatles was their simple way of saying “nothing is sacred.” And for the Replacements, that maxim went beyond an isolated title swipe—during their first half-decade of existence, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that took root every time they stumbled onto a stage.
While the Let It Be buzz would yield a major-label deal with Sire Records at a time when bands like R.E.M. were burrowing a path from the underground to the mainstream, the Replacements harbored no ambitions for big-budget MTV videos, Grammy Award galas, or establishment acceptance. For them, playing rock’n’roll was seemingly no more meaningful than doing a shot of tequila: It’s invigorating and disposable in equal measure—something that’s downed quickly and messily, courses through your veins, and makes you do things you regret before you piss it out of your system. But as much as their live history houses a junkyard’s worth of booze-fueled train-wrecks, the true legend of the Replacements hinges on the fact that their messiest moments could immediately be followed by triumphant, transcendent displays of rock’n’roll valor. And on this pristinely preserved live document, the entire underdog-comeback narrative of a Rocky movie plays out and repeats itself in recurring five-minute intervals.
If the Replacements story is one of anarchic inebriation gradually giving way to more sobering introspection, then For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986 is like that last college bender before entering the working world. This oft-bootlegged, now greatly enhanced 29-song recording finds the band on the brink of a crucial turning point, mere months after the release of their Sire debut Tim, and a few more before they ousted wild-card guitarist Bob Stinson. Fortuitously captured on a 24-track mobile studio set up at the venerable Hoboken venue, it’s a crisp, broadcast-ready portrait of the moment when the tug-of-war between the Replacements’ split personalities—the perma-blotto garage band vs. the refined rock craftsmen—had escalated into a bloody battle.
Even as they found themselves headlining clubs and crashing network soundstages, the Replacements approached live performance with a determined lack of ceremony. Traditional set-list rules—like making a grand introduction, establishing a natural flow, saving the best for last, etc.—got tossed out the window. From the opening rip through “Hayday” onward, the Replacements rifle through their back catalog as if randomly clicking on songs in a jukebox. Four tunes in, they’re already attempting the sort of sloppy covers most bands trot out in the encore (in this case, an aborted one-minute romp through Sweet’s “Fox on the Run”). Less than a half hour in, they’ve already dispensed with their two most emotionally wrenching songs back-to-back, “Unsatisfied” and—in embryonic form—“Can’t Hardly Wait” (with Stinson’s swirling leads subbing in for the horn section that would eventually appear on the Pleased to Meet Me version). And in lieu of rousing stage banter, Westerberg inexplicably shouts out “murder!” periodically, while the overzealous crowd shouts out requests for Big Star covers as if pelting the band with ice.
But even if you’re not nearly as soused as the Replacements obviously were at this show, listening to this set will still leave you feeling delightfully off-balance—because on a song-to-song basis, you’re never quite sure which Replacements will show up. By Tim, the ratio of juvenile rockers to savvy pop songs on a given Replacements record had tilted toward the latter. But here, the band still have one foot planted firmly in their basement-punk roots, taking raucous rave-ups like “Otto” and “Fuck School” out for some empty-parking-lot donuts. And along the way, they recast classics by T. Rex (“Baby Strange”) and the Beatles (“Nowhere Man”) in their own roughshod image.
But if the aforementioned “Fox on the Run” flub plays right into the Replacements’ drunk-punk reputation, it’s instantly answered by an absolutely heroic “Hold My Life.” And if cutting off “Left of the Dial” right before its anthemic outro seemingly reaffirms Westerberg’s nothing-is-sacred credo, then the full-band blitz on “Answering Machine” transforms Let It Be’s closing song sketch into the fist-pumping salvo we always imagined it to be. The punked-up pillaging of Kiss’ “Black Diamond,” meanwhile, shows how The Replacements could redeem cock-rock posturing with a genuinely unbridled intensity.
The latter song is also but one of countless moments here where Stinson’s frenzied fret-work squirts extra kerosene all over this fiery performance. More than just provide a rare, radiant snapshot of a legendary live band previously enshrined on an infamously crude cassette, For Sale is a long-overdue concert-album commemoration of the Replacements’ resident Ace Frehley-in-a-tutu, whose playing personified both the band’s cheeky charm and wounded soul. (Sadly, he never found his way after getting fired from the band; he died of organ failure—spurred by years of substance abuse—in 1995 at age 35.) Stinson was the band’s wobbly kneed but fleet-footed running back, sneaking his way through every open space, forever on the verge of toppling over but always managing to dance his way into the end zone. He tricks out the driving roar of “Color Me Impressed” in little six-string ringlets, casually dropping off-the-cuff solos underneath Westerberg’s verses; on the countrified ballad “If Only You Were Lonely,” he playfully punctuates each line as if drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. He was the difference between the Replacements being merely a great rock’n’roll band and an ecstatically unpredictable, brilliantly absurd one.
The Replacements would go on to make more classic songs without him. But from this point, they would swiftly mature into the sort of steady, semi-professional rock outfit that gets invited to open Tom Petty tours and makes it through televised appearances without swapping clothes. With For Sale, we get the bastards forever young. | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | October 9, 2017 | 8.7 | 3436dd38-7402-45a8-81eb-fc21ff8503e3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Half woozy Los Angeles beats and half lo-fi techno, Mount Kimbie’s new double album doesn’t sound much like anything they’ve done before. It’s also some of their least original work. | Half woozy Los Angeles beats and half lo-fi techno, Mount Kimbie’s new double album doesn’t sound much like anything they’ve done before. It’s also some of their least original work. | Mount Kimbie: MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-kimbie-mk-35-die-cuts-or-city-planning/ | MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning | As one of post-dubstep’s signature acts, Mount Kimbie were always more interested in the post than the dubstep. On early EPs, they swapped out sub-bass pressure for wheezing organs, broken music boxes, and the clatter of tilted pinball machines, and over the intervening 13 years, the UK duo’s sound has remained a moving target. First, on 2010’s Crooks & Lovers, they folded in feathery guitar and little curlicues of R&B, channeling a downbeat tradition running back through Mo Wax and Boards of Canada. With 2013’s Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, they further sidelined overt club aesthetics, fleshing out moody miniatures with slowcore guitar and mumbled vocals. They abruptly feinted into ’80s post-punk with 2017’s Love What Survives, working once again with King Krule’s Archy Marshall, along with James Blake and Mica Levi, and allowing the British singer’s gloopy, elastic tenor to shape the bruised outline of their own synths and guitars. But now, on MK 3.5 Die Cut / City Planning, the path doesn’t just twist; it forks.
While this is technically album number four, the title suggests that MK 3.5 may represent a stopgap measure or a detour. It is, in essence, Mount Kimbie’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, in that each of the duo’s members gets one disc apiece to run free. Dom Maker, who moved to California some five years ago and soon began racking up sessions with artists like JAY-Z and Travis Scott, delivers a record steeped in R&B and hip-hop and informed by L.A.’s collaborative spirit. Kai Campos, who remained in London, turns his back on Mount Kimbie’s habitual fusion and immerses himself in lo-fi techno purism. Though they share a common focus on mood, it’s striking how vast the gulf between the two men’s interests is.
Maker’s disc, subtitled Die Cuts, is the more outgoing of the two by a considerable margin. Stitched together from musical samples, bits of movie dialogue, and sessions recorded with friends and peers like Sampha and Duval Timothy, it plays out like a single, interconnected suite. The prevailing aesthetic descends from neo-soul and derivations of Dilla-esque boom bap, filtered through contemporary bass music’s molten sound design. No sound comes to us straight: Drum machines are muffled through cheesecloth, keys are reversed and repitched, stray voices are sped up or slowed down. Foreground and background are interchangeable; everything feels smeared into a suggestive haze.
Like Marshall, Maker’s guest rappers—slowthai, Danny Brown, Wiki—favor marble-mouthed flows that emphasize timbre over text. It’s not always pretty to listen to—the yelpy insistence of “in your eyes” undercuts the tenderness of the surrounding songs, though you can see why Maker gravitates toward these guests; he likes squawkers who can bend their voices like synthesizers. But singers like reggie, Nomi, and KeiyaA make a more satisfying fit for Maker’s whisper-soft textures; the most understated songs—the opening “dvd,” featuring Michigan’s Choker, and the trip-hop jazz of the closing “a deities encore,” featuring Liv.e—use his nuanced sound design as a foil for the singers’ own expression, elevating mood pieces into something more substantial.
If Maker’s Die Cuts represents a contemporary model of pop production as a creative free-for-all, Campos’ City Planning suggests a more hermetic vision: the techno producer locked in the studio, conjuring imaginary worlds into being. Where Die Cuts is lush and melodic, City Planning is a grayscale grid of fizzing hi-hats, muffled kicks, dusky squelch. Campos’ disc also plays out like a single piece of music: Tracks bleed together across index points, and while the tempo and beat patterns occasionally shift, most of the elements sound like they come from a single bank of machines. Campos’ touchstones are artists like Robert Hood and Drexciya, Detroit producers determined to cut their grooves as close to the bone as possible, along with his sometime collaborator Actress, who has fashioned an entire language out of static. The mood is resolutely wintry; the textures suggest an ice scraper dragged across a frosted windshield. There are no vocals. Titles like “Satellite 7,” “Satellite 9,” and “Satellite 6 (Corrupted)” offer a snapshot of work in progress—intensely private music that becomes public once pumped through a big system on a packed floor.
Like so many cultural products nowadays, Die Cuts / City Planning is presented as not just an album, but a multimedia arts project. Maker’s half is accompanied by a short and very NSFW film by Tyrone Lebon, a fashion photographer who directed the video for Frank Ocean’s “Nikes,” consisting largely of artfully blurred yet profoundly intimate scenes of couples having sex. City Planning, which Campos says was inspired by kinetic sculpture, received an actual urban footprint via an outdoor installation by sculptor Tom Shannon, who created a stack of giant silvery balls to represent the music’s eerie sheen. (That installation came to a premature end when high winds sent the orbs careening down the streets of Camden.)
Both art projects feel like overreach—attempts to lend gravitas to records whose ambitions end at their parallel articulations of contemporary mood music. Though neither side sounds much like anything that Mount Kimbie have done before, this is, paradoxically, their least original album; there’s little that we haven’t heard elsewhere. There are still worthwhile ideas here, but Die Cuts / City Planning doesn’t have the bolt-from-the-blue quality that Mount Kimbie’s music once did. There’s always been something vaguely anonymous about Mount Kimbie; their character and uniqueness lay in the way they took the sounds in circulation around them and made something new. What we learn here, mainly, is that Maker and Campos are into different things these days. In that sense, Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be. | 2022-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 14, 2022 | 6.7 | 343a5892-68ef-4098-87be-01c2ccf4b8b3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, this living legend of pop crafts a final, surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs. The set includes new songs by Paul Westerberg and Robert Pollard and guest spots from Billy Corgan, the Dandy Warhols, and more. | Recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, this living legend of pop crafts a final, surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs. The set includes new songs by Paul Westerberg and Robert Pollard and guest spots from Billy Corgan, the Dandy Warhols, and more. | Glen Campbell: Ghost on the Canvas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15769-ghost-on-the-canvas/ | Ghost on the Canvas | Recently, Glen Campbell received the kind of diagnosis that everyone of a certain age dreads: Alzheimer's. Before the disease grows worse, he decided to record one final album and launch one final tour, and while most celebrity retirements seem suspect (ahem, Jay-Z, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Adams, and on and on), this one really does feel permanent, which is tragic. Campbell has had one of those impossible careers that sound more like the stuff of outrageous fiction than rock biography: An Arkansas native and music prodigy of sorts, he moved to L.A. and played in a band called the Champs (Tequila!) and worked as a member of the infamous Wrecking Crew, a group of studio musicians who backed Elvis Presley and Simon & Garfunkel and played on Phil Spector's infamous wall-of-sound recordings. That's him laying down licks on Pet Sounds, while he was a touring Beach Boy. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he scored huge hits with "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (both by Jimmy Webb, long overdue for a retrospective). Often dismissed as a practitioner of slick country-pop, he favored florid strings, stately vocals, and an interpretive approach most likely informed by his experience as a sideman. "Rhinestone Cowboy" pretty much sums up the contradictions of his music, which is simultaneously country but urbane, slick but still soulful.
Perhaps because he was a Nashville outsider but not a Nashville outlaw, Ghost on the Canvas sidesteps all the current conventions of country farewell albums, a growing subgenre that found its apotheosis in Johnny Cash's later recordings and Kris Kristofferson's recent pair of affairs-settling records. This is no tastefully solemn acoustic affair, with a hushed tone communicating a kind of easy-read mortal gravity. Instead, Campbell conveys a certain nostalgia for that defining sound of his prime-- or at least a nostalgia for a time when that sound was popular. "It's Your Amazing Grace" and "A Thousand Lifetimes" deploy the same tricks he's been using for decades-- those ornate string arrangements and prominent guitar themes that recall fellow Wrecking Crew member Jack Nitzsche-- but they sound fresh on these tracks, even at times adventurous. The short, instrumental interstitials are distracting as Campbell tries to cover every corner of his history, but the the presence of Billy Corgan, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and all the Dandy Warhols on Ghost suggests that the influence of this style has been, at the very least, broad.
Campbell is still taking stock of his life and career ("Sometimes I get confused, Lord/ My past gets in my way"), and that sounds odd only because it's not something he has not historically been inclined to do: He's more renowned as a sensitive vocalist than as a confessional songwriter. So songs like "A Better Place" and "There's No Me… Without You", both co-penned with producer Julian Raymond, sound perhaps a bit too direct for Campbell, although his voice remains strong enough that he doesn't need your pity to put these songs across, no matter how silly some of their sentiments. Anchoring Ghost is a handful of covers that are perhaps only slightly less adventurous than those on his 2008 album, Meet Glen Campbell. The title track and "Any Trouble" are lesser Westerberg, but they fit the album's theme all too well. Likewise, "Hold on Hope" is an obvious GBV choice (what, you expected "Tractor Rape Chain"?), but Campbell owns its schmaltz as well as its simple optimism, suggesting that Bob Pollard wrote the line "there hides the cowboy" with Campbell in mind. Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs. | 2011-08-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-08-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Surfdog | August 31, 2011 | 6.5 | 343ede86-99fa-4fde-ae0a-8f62fb18b317 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On With a Little Help From My Fwends, the Flaming Lips tackle the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with help from Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, My Morning Jacket, Foxygen, Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale, and others. These aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments. | On With a Little Help From My Fwends, the Flaming Lips tackle the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with help from Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, My Morning Jacket, Foxygen, Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale, and others. These aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments. | The Flaming Lips: With a Little Help From My Fwends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19862-the-flaming-lips-with-a-little-help-from-my-fwends/ | With a Little Help From My Fwends | Back in the mid-1980s, the easiest way for underground bands to draw ideological battlelines separating themselves from their 1970s arena-rock antecedents was to appropriate their most hallowed songs for devious ends. And so we got J. Mascis moaning his way through Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way”, the Minutemen chopping Van Halen songs in half, Pussy Galore licking the burnt spoons littered throughout the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Sonic Youth swiping the title of CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” for their Reagan-era state-of-the-union address, and the Butthole Surfers grinding Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” into skunk weed. In this context, what made the early, garage-punk iteration of the Flaming Lips so strange was not their sordid subject matter, disturbing cover art, or 23-minute acid-rock jams. It was their contrarian reverence for tradition, with the band dropping straight-faced covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” into their repertoire for no other reason than they loved the songs.
As the Lips scored sudden mainstream success in the early '90s with a fluke MTV hit, their cover choices turned decidedly more esoteric, as the band used their modicum of celebrity to shine a light on known artists’ lesser-known work, reclaim new-wave novelties, or to promote then-unheralded underground peers. But in the post-Soft Bulletin era—during which the Lips’ music became both more tonally serious and relentlessly experimental—cover songs have become a necessary salve through which the band can reassert their playful side and maintain the circus-like atmosphere at their concerts even when touring behind decidedly more downcast material.
And ever since they trotted out old warhorses like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “War Pigs” on their 2006 At War With the Mystics tour, the Lips have seemingly been on a mission to modernize the entire classic-rock canon, by curating full-album, collaboration-heavy reconstructions of Pink Floyd and King Crimson milestones (with a Stone Roses debut-album redux thrown in to show they’re still fond of music made after 1980). But while such recurring retro-gazing exercises may seem antithetical to the adventurous, boundary-pushing ethos the Lips displayed on 2009’s Embryonic and last year’s The Terror, the mere task of making the most totemic (and, by extension, contemptuously overplayed) rock songs of all time seem fresh presents its own formidable challenge, one they’ve answered by gradually shifting their cover-song approach from faithfully sacred to kill-yer-idols profane. Now comes the greatest challenge of all: tackling the Beatles’ Summer-of-Love soundtrack Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a generation-defining achievement so masterful that its very title has become the official shorthand descriptor for masterful achievements.
The Lips aren’t the first to give Pepper a shake, but even the post-punk/new pop makeover the album received on the 1988 NME-curated comp Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father—complete with Mark E. Smith warbling “A Day in the Life”—feels overly staid and deferential compared to what transpires here. And even by the standards of the Lips’ previous tribute-album overhauls, With a Little From My Fwends is a colossal, chaotic undertaking, its 27-collaborator guest list bringing together pop singers (Miley Cyrus, Tegan & Sara), fellow alt-rock veterans (J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan), Bonnaroo royalty (My Morning Jacket, Dr. Dog), indie phenoms (Foxygen, Phantogram), and maverick MCs (Cool Kid Chuck Inglish), alongside the usual army of Lips affiliates like New Fumes and Stardeath & White Dwarfs. And where previous experiments were limited to Record Store Day releases or iTunes exclusives, this one is a more widely publicized benefit album for the Bella Foundation, an Oklahoma City-based animal shelter that provides crucial veterinary services to low-income pet owners. But while the charitable component lends With a Little From My Fwends a noble purpose beyond just being another Wayne Coyne-commandeered, clown-car-filling amusement, the end result occasionally suggests your time might be better spent revisiting the original album and making a direct donation.
One of the great breakthroughs of Sgt. Pepper was how it used the recording studio to create a vivid, three-dimensional sense of space and place, bringing the lyrics to life in audio-storybook form. (Think of the live-concert ambience of the opening title-track “With a Little Help From My Friends” suite, or the carnival-esque clamor of “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”; even the clarinet refrain of “When I’m Sixty Four” gives off the musty scent of a grandparent’s house.) But the Lips and Fwends go to town on these songs with little regard for thematic resonance or big-picture atmosphere. In the spirit of the aforementioned 80s-era indie cover-song desecrations, these aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments that replace the guts of the originals with a tangle of short-circuiting exposed wires. And given that the Lips weren’t even around to supervise all of their guest contributions (Coyne and co. actually only appear on a handful of tracks), things undoubtedly get messy quick, if not downright hazardous. With its scatterbrained, kinder-pop take on the title track (which climaxes with an arrhythmic, atonal guitar solo from J. Mascis), and a strangulated call-and-response between Wilco offshoot the Autumn Defense and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale (aka Black Pus) on “With a Little Help From My Friends”, the project effectively gives Sgt. Pepper the shreds treatment.
Of course, even the most successful cover songs in pop history are inherently blasphemous—in that they suggest unexplored avenues that the original could’ve taken, coax lurking undercurrents to the fore, and cast the source material in an entirely new light. But the problem with a lot of these versions is that they’re unruly on just a surface level. Whether it’s the wobbly-kneed Dr. Dog/Morgan Delt/Chuck Inglish gang-up on “Getting Better”, Maynard James Keenan’s inert, industrialized “Mr. Kite!”, or Def Rain and Pitchwafuzz’s vocoderized, static-swirled “When I’m Sixty Four”, the Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.
It’s the simple revisions that yield the greatest revelations. The Electric Würms—aka the Lips alter-ego aggregate that promotes Steven Drozd to lead vocalist—recast “Fixing a Hole” as a charmingly low-key psych-folk reverie that amplifies the song’s slow-percolating existential ennui; Stardeath’s stuttering synth-funk take on “Lovely Rita” is given a sly queer spin by guests Tegan and Sara (while their robotic delivery —coupled with the song’s mechanistic motion—craftily adapts the song to a modern world where parking enforcement is largely an automated process). And while Foxygen—with the help of MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser—stretch out the Sgt. Pepper title-track reprise to nearly triple the original’s length (making it even longer than the song it’s supposed to set up, “A Day in the Life”), it’s transformed into precisely the sort of wiggy organ-pumped workout Billy Shears and the boys might have used to close down some imaginary festival set on the Isle of Wight.
Ironically, the seemingly most outrageous aspect of this entire endeavour—i.e., the mere presence of Miley Cyrus—proves to be its grounding force. On an album where everyone is trying way too hard to out-freak one another, Cyrus—much like the Led Zep-loving Lips of the '80s—stands out by simply playing it straight (which feels strange in and of itself). Tellingly, she’s entrusted with the album’s two most celebrated songs, turning in effective duets with Coyne on a splendorous, slow-motion surge through “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and a suitably mournful “A Day in the Life”, where she handles an electro-ticked, space-age update of Paul McCartney’s middle eight (and really does sound like she just woke up, fell out of bed, and dragged a comb across her head). Curiously, the relatively reverential reading of the latter song leaves out its most notorious feature—that dramatic, sustained piano-pounded finale. The omission is both intentionally heretical (how can you end that song any other way?) yet oddly reverential, suggesting that, even if you’re subjecting one of the most revered albums of all time to sadistic sonic surgery, some things are sacred. According to the eternally loopy logic of the Flaming Lips, reinforcing a spiritual connection to your greatest influence means cutting the chord. | 2014-10-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 27, 2014 | 5.5 | 34420d8f-5f69-4ead-8ffd-a016a0afb73a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner’s expansive side project embraces new guests and familiar sounds, but sometimes feels lost in its own pleasant fog. | Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner’s expansive side project embraces new guests and familiar sounds, but sometimes feels lost in its own pleasant fog. | Big Red Machine: How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-red-machine-how-long-do-you-think-its-gonna-last/ | How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? | Outside of their main bands, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of the National share a vast extracurricular network: Through collaborations, festivals, and charity compilations, they’ve built a musical universe populated with the indie singer-songwriters and mainstream stars who’ve made their way through Vernon’s April Base and Dessner’s Long Pond studios. Big Red Machine is a project borne of those collaborations, a chance to roam in familiar terrain; its 2018 debut was a natural synthesis of the pair’s electroacoustic comfort zones. Their new record, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last, builds on the presence of alternating voices from the National’s 2019 record I Am Easy to Find, with frequent Dessner cohorts like Taylor Swift and Sharon Van Etten taking the lead. The heads of the project don’t stretch themselves much, but the best moments provide a solid foundation for their guests and, eventually, Dessner himself.
For the most part, everyone here is doing what they do best. Dessner’s cozy and languid upright piano chords lead nearly every song, a signature sound that’s lovely in a vacuum but repetitive across 15 tracks. Vernon’s characteristically cryptic musings work to particularly inscrutable ends: “So I beg on knees/Can we share IDs?” James Krivchenia of Big Thief contributes live drums on several tracks, competing for attention with drum machines and Dessner and Vernon’s own programmed beats. Most of the guests contribute either lead or backing vocals: Over a decade after Vernon played Orpheus on folk-singer-turned-Tony-winner Anaïs Mitchell’s concept album Hadestown, Mitchell returns the favor on “Latter Days.” She pens some of the best lyrics on the record, evocative instead of impenetrable: “Stacked yourself against the odds/Talkin’ back to an act of God.” Pop songwriter Ilsey has fewer obvious connections to the National/Bon Iver organization, but she naturally fits into the tumbling “Mimi.”
When Dessner, Vernon, and co. drop the murkiness and craft proper songs, the album soars. The lightly swung piano and sentimental chorus of “Phoenix” are endearingly reminiscent of 1960s and ’70s AOR, a sound the pre-chorus winks at with the line, “How do you bear the full weight?” On “Renegade,” Swift swaps the wistful storytelling of her folklore era for some startlingly direct lines: “You fire off missiles cause you hate yourself/But do you know you’re demolishing me?” Dessner’s frenetic acoustic guitar and Vernon’s counterpoint intensify Swift’s lyrics until they threaten to drown her out. On the other end of the dynamic spectrum, the sparse “Hutch” mourns the loss of Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison with a choir of Van Etten, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova, and Lisa Hannigan: “You were unafraid/Of how much the world could take from you/So how did you lose your way?” Nothing more is needed; it’s just a brutally honest snapshot of losing a friend to suicide.
The best National songs build controlled, quiet tension—riffs and backing vocals bubbling under the surface as if the calm could break at any moment. How Long is content to bubble away indefinitely, without the threatening aura of a song like “I’ll Still Destroy You.” The album is strongest at its most simple, as evidenced in Dessner’s excellent stripped-back solo songs, where the topics are refreshingly specific: “The Ghost of Cincinnati” is a folksy evocation of emotional burnout, “Magnolia” a sympathetic ode to a woman isolating herself after an abusive relationship. “Brycie” stands out for its intimacy: Named for Aaron Dessner’s twin brother and lifelong collaborator Bryce, it’s an honest, endearing appreciation spiked with guilt: “You watched my back when we were young/You stick around when we’re old,” Aaron sings, acknowledging the selflessness it takes to support a sibling struggling with depression.
The moments of emotional truth leave a stronger impression than the duo’s meandering if pretty first record, but even with the addition of guests, nothing much about the Dessner/Vernon empire is surprising anymore: It’s not that these songs feel homogenized, it’s that they’re all different in the same way. “Easy to Sabotage” is genuinely weird in its formlessness, but it takes Naeem Juwan’s sing-rapping to truly differentiate the track. In contrast to the National’s infamous competing tastes and personalities, Big Red Machine’s instrumentals feel like the work of several people toiling in one soundbed. There are glimpses of new sounds, like the heavily manipulated acoustic guitar on “Hoping Then,” or the faintly hip-hop influenced beats on “8:22am,” though it takes multiple listens to pick these out. How Long is frequently gorgeous, but even on a deliberately messy side project, Dessner and Vernon still feel like they’re holding back.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / 37d03d | September 1, 2021 | 7 | 344211c1-14e0-4419-b47c-1c33e5efb6ce | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The indie rock quintet’s second album is more spacious, folksy, and adroit, centering on the evocative voice of lead singer Alex Menne. | The indie rock quintet’s second album is more spacious, folksy, and adroit, centering on the evocative voice of lead singer Alex Menne. | Great Grandpa: Four of Arrows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/great-grandpa-four-of-arrows/ | Four of Arrows | Two years ago, Great Grandpa were a different band. The Seattle quintet’s 2017 debut album, Plastic Cough, nestled right into the wave of anxious, quippy rock bands like Charly Bliss, Diet Cig, Dude York, and many more that still roam the indie landscape. But there was something about lead singer Alex Menne’s voice, their clear and emotional delivery on casual lines like “Always killin’ it” that was particularly striking. But when bassist and vocalist Carrie Goodwin and her husband and primary songwriter Pat Goodwin relocated to Milwaukee from Seattle last year, the move left the band in flux while they wrote their second album, Four of Arrows. With 2,000 miles between them, Great Grandpa’s songs became more spacious, folksy, and adroit, losing almost all of the grunge that characterized Plastic Cough. They taped a paper sign on the studio wall that said, “Go slow, big choices.”
On Four of Arrows, the band takes a step back and thrives in more deliberate songwriting. Great Grandpa retain their tweemo sensibilities on songs like the two-chorus single “Mono no Aware,” whose almost-cloying pop-rock sound, lines about pathos, dead birds, and grandma fading from Alzheimer’s like a “lifeless steak in that empty diner” recall the best of Rilo Kiley. They lean into more adventurous arrangements throughout, especially on “English Garden,” a song about dreams and fears on which Pat plays banjo and piano, and Abby Gunderson is on the violin and cello. (Mellotrons, synths, and harmoniums also make welcome appearances on this record.)
Menne’s vocals—all their many croons and yelps—are truly front and center this time. Songs like the bursting opener “Dark Green Water,” hold the kind of emotional urgency of the best Hop Along songs; Menne’s springy voice carries a similar power and effect as Frances Quinlan's. “Digger,” the record’s tarot-inspired centerpiece, pierces the veil of mannered indie rock when Menne wails, “That’s why I hate you” four times in a row.
Plastic Cough’s mid-point was a particularly cacophonous track called “Expert Eraser.” But the interlude on Four of Arrows is the piano instrumental “Endling,” composed and played by Pat Goodwin and recorded on the piano from Death Cab For Cutie’s 2003 album, Transatlanticism. The album doesn’t really benefit from this soundscape, except to tie them to their emotional indie-rock forbears, and to make their shift in sound unmistakable. There’s a lot more piano and there’s a lot more death on this record—“Rosalie” and “Split Up The Kids,” both songs penned by Carrie Goodwin, deal with the “relentless regress” of growing old and how she only ever saw her grandparents together at her grandfather’s funeral, respectively.
Four of Arrows’ best songs are ones Menne co-wrote, ones that keep the energy up and the ideas simple. On “Treat Jar,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on ‘90s alt radio, Menne sings daggers to the heart: “I can’t help you if I can’t help myself,” and, “Everything is hard this time of year.” And “Bloom,” an ecstatic track about letting your spirit bloom and being “young enough to change” is one of their strongest yet. “I get anxious on the weekends, when I feel I’m wasting time,” Menne croons, “But then I think about Tom Petty and how he wrote his best songs when he was 39.” Time is on their side.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | October 29, 2019 | 7.4 | 34428506-1591-4763-afff-48b0f292d908 | Leah Mandel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/leah-mandel / | |
Christopher Owens, formerly of Girls, calls Curls—a trio with drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—his first “real band.” Their new EP contains some of the most lavish-sounding music he has released. | Christopher Owens, formerly of Girls, calls Curls—a trio with drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—his first “real band.” Their new EP contains some of the most lavish-sounding music he has released. | Curls: Vante EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/curls-vante-ep/ | Vante EP | Christopher Owens formed Curls in 2005 with his then-girlfriend Liza Thorn, not long after he’d moved to San Francisco. The early version of Curls never quite took off—Owens soon found himself busy alongside Ariel Pink in the band Holy Shit—and once Owens and Thorn split, so did Curls. Owens, not one to rest on his laurels, took the songs he’d meant for Curls to new pal Chet “JR” White, revamped a lyric or three, and Girls was born. Late last year, after two LPs with Girls and three of his very own, Owens—joined by drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—dusted off the Curls moniker and decided to give it another go. Owens has taken to calling this second iteration of Curls his “first… real band,” which is a somewhat curious distinction for a guy who’s been in one band or another for most of his adult life.
Still, Curls have got something distinctive on the four-song, 13-minute Vante. The EP makes for a brief reintroduction: two sweeping instrumentals and two stately pop-rockers, over and done in the time it takes to put the coffee on. Instrumentally, Vante is the most lavish-sounding Owens offering since the last gasps of Girls, brimming with rippling percussion and smears of sunset-pink synth. Owens’ solo works have veered wildly between the rinky-dink to the ornate, leaving cohesion by the wayside, but the lush, farsighted sound of Vante—with producer Shane Stoneback at the helm—is a real mark in its favor. Even with the small sample size, these four tunes really do feel like the work of a proper band: expansive, serene, unruffled.
The regal opener “Dynamite” draws back the curtain, revealing a spacious, sun-bleached city on the hill somewhere between Buck Owens’ Bakersfield and Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas. “Dynamite” manages to set a scene without saying a word, pushed along by the Rhodes’ slippery percussion and the glint and glare of those silvery synths. Next to the three-men alchemy of “Dynamite,” the jazz-inflected curlicues of “Golden Gate” feel a touch tentative. A little Grant Green here, a pinch of Lawn Boy-era Phish there, “Golden Gate” takes a beat too long to get where it’s going, and doesn’t seem to know quite what to do once it gets there. But it’s telling that Owens would spend half of Vante with the mic in a drawer. For the first time in a long time, he is putting himself and his bandmates on roughly equal footing, pushing the idea that Curls is a full-on musical unit and not simply another vehicle for Owens’ bohemian rhapsodies.
“Emotion,” the first of Vante’s two proper pop tunes, is textbook Owens: a riff you’ll swear you’ve heard before (and you have; it’s “Sweet Jane”), matched to a lyric so free of guile, you’ll want to reach out and shake its hand. The impossibly earnest, noontime-sunshine of “Emotion” presents the not-so-radical notion that feelings are meant to be felt, not avoided or otherwise blotted out. For almost any other songwriter, these gee-whiz tactics would come off like a daily affirmations desk calendar. But in Owens’ hands, it becomes a kind of hard-fought mantra, a lesson worth repeating, a return to innocence spray-painted across a wall of sound.
Lilting and luxuriant, closer “Gentle and Kind” is the best of the bunch; judiciously adorned by the pocket-orchestra of Baće and Rhodes, it floats along on a nimble melody in the neighborhood of John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels.” Owens, a little ache in his voice and his heart fastened to his sleeve, has wisdom to impart: “Please remain open in mind/Let your spirit show and grow/Let it glow,” a particularly swoony Owens sings, beaming instant karma into the universe in the hopes that a little might come back his way.
Owens hasn’t always seemed too sure of himself as a solo artist: too ambitious one minute, too scattered the next. The swift ending of Girls seemed necessary for Owens, but his music’s lacked a certain purpose without “JR” White at his side. Vante, brief as it is, suggests a course-correction; the mild meanderings of “Golden Gate” aside, the rest of Vante is sharply written, sumptuously produced, and almost totally devoid of the nervy, strewn-together energy riddling his lesser solo work. Vante doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but what’s here is promising: for the first time in years, with Rhodes and Baće at his side, Owens sounds at ease. | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Urban Scandal | November 9, 2017 | 6.6 | 344c20df-a173-4eb9-963f-be3ba63b7929 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
Grandaddy's sad, quaint, low-key Y2K-era classic, which captured the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation, gets the deluxe reissue treatment. | Grandaddy's sad, quaint, low-key Y2K-era classic, which captured the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation, gets the deluxe reissue treatment. | Grandaddy: The Sophtware Slump | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15723-the-sophtware-slump/ | The Sophtware Slump | I remember the year 2000. I remember how we called it Y2K, which sounds more like the name of a virus than a year, like something that might make you rethink where you get your meats and produce. I remember a global panic about data that might be lost on computers programmed to interpret years as only two digits instead of four. When we hit 2000, they would just read "00," as if God's finger slipped on the reset button. Ironically (and of course), it was all our fault. But then January 1, 2000 came, and I remember it being like every other day. Some slot machines at a racetrack in Delaware stopped working, and a little after midnight, an alarm at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan went off in the dark.
I remember how in 1999 Grandaddy were like a lot of other decent underdog indie bands that I had an indefensible soft spot for: mopey and withdrawn, with a few mixtape-worthy songs. Then they released The Sophtware Slump in early 2000, and all of a sudden they sounded like they had a particular perspective, a particular substance. Their gift is that they still managed to sound insubstantial. The sadness that sounded like passivity on 1997's Under the Western Freeway turned into philosophy on The Sophtware Slump: nonchalance as a way of isolating yourself from what bothers you. Not that The Sophtware Slump is in any way major-- being major is the work of artistes, and part of Grandaddy's appeal was that they just seemed like low-key guys from central California tooling around in the basement.
Most of the album sounds like countryish Neil Young songs coated in synthesizer gloss-- a style that borrows a little of Young's earthy tenderness, a little of Pavement's studied indifference, and a little of the switched-on melancholy of an ELO ballad. They sang about national forests filled with broken appliances and robot friends who woke up drunk in parks. The text on the cover of the CD booklet was spelled out in letters from an old PC keyboard over a grassy meadow with mountains in the background. Flip through to the last page, and you'll see a cowboy walking into the sunset with a Casio under his arm.
Basically, The Sophtware Slump is the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation. The fear isn't that computers would destroy us, it's that we'd end up living in a futuristic world but still have the same old problems. It's like how David Bowie released "Space Oddity" 10 days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: Somehow, he knew people would get lonely up there, because people get lonely no matter where they go. If Radiohead captured a feeling of pre-millenial tension, The Sophtware Slump captured the feeling of disappointment that came afterward-- the feeling that life was going to be more or less the same as it had been, only now we'd have to live with the fact that we once thought it'd be so different: the feeling of January 2, 2000.
At the time, Grandaddy weren't the only band that played sparkly, cinematic indie music: Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs had come out in 1998, and the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999. The difference is in both scale and character: Unlike the Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev, Grandaddy were a five-person band that sounded like five people playing together in a room, not five people using the studio to make the sound of a hundred. Even when they use synthesizers to replicate orchestral instruments, it has a miniaturistic quality, like the grandeur of early Hollywood trapped inside a snowglobe.
Lyrically, the album is just as contained. Instead of singing about the grand and tearful breakup between man and nature, Jason Lytle sings about wanting to lie down and sleep under a single tree. Fluffy, abstract lyrics like, "I dream at night of going home some day," are grounded by concrete ones: "Tire scraps on federal roads look like crash-landed crows," a metaphor that uses one tactile, breakable thing to describe another.
Does the album sound quaint now? Sure. It sounded quaint then, too. Grandaddy's image-- crunchy guys with trucker hats and beards-- was instantly rustic. Their sound was irrelevant. Blowing minds and challenging conventions takes hard work and ego, and Grandaddy never seemed like they had a real capacity for either. But being as essentially easygoing as they are is also what makes all the thematic material here so approachable, if you buy into it at all: Most of the time, it just doesn't sound like they're trying to prove a point-- a sense of modesty that made them feel more seductive and appealing to me than artists who showed up with grand statement in hand.
It's funny to me that this album is being given the deluxe reissue treatment only 10 years after first being released, but I guess nostalgia is kicking in sooner these days. Deserter's Songs was reissued recently too, along with records by Sebadoh and Archers of Loaf-- records that don't feel like they were gone all that long. The sound is clearer and better delineated here than it was on the initial release, and the bonus material-- which includes demos and a couple of EPs released around the same time-- is interesting to listen to once or twice but never gives me the feeling that they could've made The Sophtware Slump any more focused and consistent than it is.
And sad, too. What a sad, sad album. There's not a happy song on it, really. But there's no angst or despair either, because angst and despair are exhausting emotions. Most of the time, Lytle sounds like the archetypal 90s slacker: observant, slow-moving, dulled by a suburban kind of pain he can't shake. Beck in 1994, without panache or a flair for Art. Beck comes up once, actually, in "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)", a lyric supposedly written by their robot friend, Jed: "I try to sing it funny like Beck/ But it's bringin' me down." Cheer up: It didn't get better, but it didn't get much worse, either. | 2011-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 / Interscope | August 31, 2011 | 8.5 | 346872ce-0230-46d1-abf3-160949130010 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Following his 2022 collaboration with Charlotte Adigéry, the Belgian-born producer examines his Hong Kong heritage on an album of clean-lined synth pop and invigorating club tracks. | Following his 2022 collaboration with Charlotte Adigéry, the Belgian-born producer examines his Hong Kong heritage on an album of clean-lined synth pop and invigorating club tracks. | Bolis Pupul: Letter to Yu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bolis-pupul-letter-to-yu/ | Letter to Yu | On 2022’s Topical Dancer, producer Bolis Pupul and frequent collaborator Charlotte Adigéry examined xenophobia and misogyny by transmuting them into discursive electro pop with a cheeky sense of humor. On his debut solo album, the Belgian-born producer takes a more personal turn. Pupul lost his mother, Yu Wei Wun, suddenly in 2008, a death that shaped his life from that day on. Yet it’s one he says he couldn’t grasp fully until nearly a decade later, when he first traveled to his mother’s native Hong Kong. There, he discovered a connection to his roots that diasporic people often feel upon visiting a familial homeland, forming an elemental bond even without an ancestor to guide him. The life-changing experience informs Letter to Yu, a shapeshifting ode to both his mother and Hong Kong that darts between sawtoothed club songs and more languid comedowns. Pupul’s music is at once contemplative and exuberant, moving with a rhythm similar to navigating the teeming crowds of a new city.
While Pupul was making trips to Hong Kong, visiting landmarks like the bustling Ma Tau Wai Road or traversing the city subway, he recorded every day, even if just capturing snippets of found sound. Those recordings give Letter to Yu a distinct sense of place, like the din of a train platform that courses through the background of “Completely Half.” Over a tugging synth melody, Pupul grapples with the language barrier that deepens the split in his identity: “People talk to me like I’m a local/A sense of shame is my part,” he sings in a halting melody; “I wish I spoke what they speak/So I could blend in easily.” Many of Letter to Yu’s best songs dip into that pondering register—like the brooding, hypnotic title track, on which Pupul pitch-shifts his voice down as he reads a letter to his mother. “This is where you were born 59 years ago/And I’m finally here,” he intones as chimes echo around him. “Why did it take me so long?”
Pupul’s productions alternate between pensive moments and out-and-out floor-fillers. Letter to Yu’s most energized songs recall his limber production on Topical Dancer while ratcheting up the intensity: The martial stomp of “Doctor Says” builds to a jagged synth freakout, while the turbo-charged “Kowloon” folds droning keys into a sauntering drum beat for a madcap French rave-up. It’s a fresh and invigorating take on electro pop, twisting and buckling into different shapes with each surprising beat switch. Pupul puts his foot on the gas on the bracing standout “Spicy Crab,” where crinkled synths clamor for attention over a dizzying spiral of electro riffs; its kaleidoscopic climax is one of the album’s high points.
Through all of its stomping, head-banging turns, the album often circles back to its emotional core. “Mau Tau Wai Road” features vocals performed by Pupul’s sister Salah, adding another layer of intimacy to the project. Over tolling bells and a bouncing, midtempo beat, she sings about forming a connection to their mother simply by walking the titular street: “The sound of the city/The color of the sea/Don’t know what I’m after/… a soft embrace,” she sings, her voice growing more yearning with each verse. On the twilit “Cosmic Rendez-vous,” Pupul puts a finer point on the sense of loss, combining delicate piano arpeggios and a sidewinding bassline as he sings about coming to terms with the finite nature of life. “You will be able to contribute to the creative pool of the universe,” he sings in Dutch, sounding comforted by the thought. “Something permanent will remain after you leave this planet.”
On Letter to Yu, Pupul’s path through grief radiates outward; it is both an expression of acceptance in the face of bereavement and a declaration of enduring optimism. The album also offers ample proof of his singular voice as a deft producer and idiosyncratic musician. Drawing on a sumptuous palette of classic synth pop and leftfield electronic music, Pupul imbues his songs with personality and soul, unearthing complicated truths about his relationship to his heritage while finding welcome release on the dancefloor. | 2024-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | DEEWEE / Because Music | March 9, 2024 | 8 | 34691303-f346-4b1a-ad8d-51b0f05cceec | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney say goodbye to their longtime home, blues staple Fat Possum, with a salute to deceased former labelmate Junior Kimbrough. | Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney say goodbye to their longtime home, blues staple Fat Possum, with a salute to deceased former labelmate Junior Kimbrough. | The Black Keys: Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9005-chulahoma-the-songs-of-junior-kimbrough-ep/ | Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough EP | The Black Keys are now well beyond obvious blues-rock duo comparisons, having carved out three of the best head-in-the-past, riffs-in-the-future albums of the past decade. Before ditching the only home they'd known, blues staple Fat Possum, for the NPRarified air of Nonesuch, Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney threw together this fitting farewell, saluting deceased labelmate Junior Kimbrough. In the process, they avoid the hammy recreations that cover albums often bring: This is no Encomium or Radiodread, but rather an acknowledgement of a hero and a simple cap-tip.
Working from the same modal electric blues that Kimbrough plied for decades, Black Keys take these songs and apply the swinging rollick and bended notes for which they've become known. Each track is a yearning, often flagellating ballad of sorts (titles: "Have Mercy On Me", "Work Me", "My Mind Is Ramblin'", etc.), and that's what Auerbach seems to have in common with Kimbrough-- a desperate wail coupled with subtly sophisticated guitar playing. But the songs sound completely different from the originals, sometimes distorting lyrical structure but mostly throwing a hazy, almost psychedelic trip onto what were once melodically downtuned blues arrangements.
The Keys have covered Kimbrough twice before and each of those other approaches was more straightforward and amped. "Do the Rump", from their debut The Big Come Up, is pretty ferocious rawk stuff. The aching "Meet Me in the City"-- perhaps Kimbrough's best ever-- is a nice contrast to some of the liberties they take elsewhere. For a guy who sired 36 kids and died with a common-law wife, Kimbrough seems pretty screwed romantically, yowling "Please don't leave me right now, girl, right now, oh no..." Like his inspiration, Auerbach sings in an unclear mumble that adds a lived-in weight to the music. The white-boy imitators from Ohio jacking a Mississippi Delta shaman's style is an idea fraught with unmanageable questions. The Black Keys, however, have been graceful and more than honoring in the past about their muses, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of culture-transmogrification, other than the occasional ripped-off riff. That much is testified to by Kimbrough's widow, Mildred, on the last track via answering machine, where she notes that Auerbach and Carney are "the only ones that really really played like Junior played his records." The track is a bit of a shameless pat-on-the-back to round out a classy six-song affair, but I doubt Kimbrough would have a hard time jamming with these two. | 2006-06-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-06-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | June 19, 2006 | 7 | 346b9a99-3771-4c84-90f9-c803df530ae6 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Only the mind of Meg Remy can take the trauma inflicted on Earth and our childhoods and create something as wonderful as Heavy Light, another vivid and highly affecting album of experimental pop music. | Only the mind of Meg Remy can take the trauma inflicted on Earth and our childhoods and create something as wonderful as Heavy Light, another vivid and highly affecting album of experimental pop music. | U.S. Girls: Heavy Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/us-girls-heavy-light/ | Heavy Light | In her long career as a sound collagist and pop music obsessive, Meg Remy has thrived in moments of feminized vitriol. The women of Remy’s songs are so often threatening to asphyxiate themselves, on the verge of suicide, and mad as hell. For much of her career, U.S. Girls has been an exploration of female violence and rage. But Heavy Light, Remy’s seventh album, lives in that period of emptiness that comes after.
Like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Heavy Light is a sideways look at the history of pop music and the capitalist world in which it thrives. What’s different here is how it sounds, and how it feels. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless grief. It’s dense, heady, hard to grasp, but that’s what makes her music so rich. Remy casts herself as a pop star and reflects on the traumas of childhood and earth through parables and the music we grew up on.
Heavy Light taps into a deep well of pop music, the product of someone who listens to ’60s girl groups and Bruce Springsteen records with equal passion. The slick disco song “4 American Dollars,” with all of its vocal harmonies and synthesizer freakouts, feels indebted to the plastic soul of David Bowie’s Young Americans. Remy includes words of advice that she lifts from a Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “You gotta have boots/If you wanna lift those bootstraps.” “State House (It’s a Man’s World),” is a soured reimagining of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” with a hallucinatory kick drum and a layer of dense noise that feels like watching the third rail on the subway catch fire in half-time. “But it’s just a man’s world, we just breed here,” Remy and her backing choir sing. Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another.
So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall. Listening to “Born to Lose”—with its surreal nod to Sam the Sham’s “Wooly Bully”—feels like walking out of your body; a vibraphone solo spirals into dissonance and congas float like debris after a hurricane. Remy’s mezzo-soprano is emotive and clear, like someone doing Patti Smith karaoke to an empty room. On the emotional heavyweight “IOU,” she muses about the idea that no one chooses to be born. She is art-pop’s own Orpheus, singing about the end of the world as she watches everyone she knew and loved disappear from her field of vision.
The album reaches its highest altitudes on “The Quiver to the Bomb,” a sweeping anthem about the birth of humanity and the environmental disaster that has followed. The pain you hear in Remy’s voice is drawn from the terror humanity has inflicted upon the earth. We are not just killing one another through our bottomless hunger for violence: we are mutilating our planet, too. “Accretion speaks louder than words,” she sings, flatly, banging the gavel on the trial of our species.
Peppered through the record are three potent sound collages, fugues of overlapping voices that speak about the experiences they had when they were young and malleable. “I would tell her that I loved her, and that life is long,” one voice says on “Advice to Teenage Self.” “The Most Hurtful Thing” takes a headlong dive into the pain of being young, reminiscing about a parent who tells you that they fucked up raising you, and the sensation of being called insane to your face. So much of being alive is an exercise in denying the existence of personal trauma. Collective trauma, Remy seems to suggest, is the reason for the fracturing of our society. We carry our pain everywhere; it molds and destroys our environment. If so much of living with trauma is about needing to find a path ahead, Heavy Light shines the way. | 2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | March 9, 2020 | 8.5 | 346bc849-0d0e-4af2-add9-61f1db7b9954 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Chicago instrumental trio Russian Circles' fifth album, Memorial, builds off 2010's Empros, but these songs, one featuring Chelsea Wolfe, feel bigger and more polished, and somehow more intimate. | Chicago instrumental trio Russian Circles' fifth album, Memorial, builds off 2010's Empros, but these songs, one featuring Chelsea Wolfe, feel bigger and more polished, and somehow more intimate. | Russian Circles: Memorial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18675-russian-circles-memorial/ | Memorial | It's impressive what Russian Circles can do with a basic guitar, bass, and drum setup. There are plenty of metal-leaning instrumental bands who dial up big climaxes, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one that creates such an array of textures and emotions with so little. Bassist Brian Cook also uses keyboards, and on the Chicago trio's excellent fifth album, Memorial, they bring in guest cello and violin. But the core, buttressed by imaginative arrangements and strong compositional skills, is strong enough that there would be more than enough chills without these add-ons.
The collection follows 2011's Empros. That was a strong effort, too; the eight tracks here, though, feel more polished and fluid, bigger and yet somehow more intimate—even though the pristine recording, again by longtime producer Brandon Curtis, also fits well with the vast, mountainous cover art. Empros had a swing to it, a groove that bled between tracks even when they got darker or heavier. Memorial offers more pronounced dynamics in both directions—the metal moments frenzied, the quiet parts somber and restrained—and instead of offering a push or pull, it goes for higher star-melting theatrics. In that regard, you'd have to place them in the company of Explosions in the Sky, another band that can create compelling narratives without words.
Russian Circles do seem to be telling a story here. The clean guitars and strings on brief opener "Memoriam" make it feel like a eulogy, and the remaining songs offer the various emotions that come with loss (anger, panic, nostalgia, pain). "Memoriam" is an airy piece that jarringly shifts into the heavy, lurching "Deficit", an almost seven-minute track that, like "Mladek" on Empros, shows you that they have no trouble breaking into a black metal blur. They conjure the Fucking Champs and go explosion-for-explosion with the aforementioned post-rock titans.
It's followed by the longest and best song on the album, the seven-and-a-half minute "1777". This piece opens with loud, crisp drums that are reminiscent of early Tortoise—John McEntire locking into a groove for a snare-drunk 20 minutes. Cascading guitars and a steady bass circle it, adding a sense of flight to the grounded beats. The dynamics here are reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who also balance darkness and muck with a sense of the sublime. The slow-motion crescendo at the five-and-a-half-minute mark, the additional layers of spiraling guitars, and chaotically controlled drums could build for another hour and not get boring.
You don't get anything that great on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic. For instance, the somber, melancholic "Cheyenne" is a doomier, more spacious and cinematic song, like 2013 Earth collaborating with Mogwai. The mathy "Burial" is heavier, angrier, and complete with pick slides. This may be the album's real climax, at least mentally—during it, you're thinking about the suffocation in death, and not the release. It feeds into the romantic, ethereal "Ethel" and the rocker, "Lebaron". On Memorial, the more they move away from the straight-up rock moments and into more ambitious constructions, the stronger it feels.
The collection closes with vocals from labelmate Chelsea Wolfe on "Memorial". It's a chilly, pretty piece that, like the opener, adds a softness to the record, along with a sonic and thematic echo. Wolfe, whispering and layered, sounds great per usual, but her vocal turn confirms something important: Unlike a bunch of bands who opt to go it without a singer, these guys really don't need one. | 2013-11-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Sargent House | November 21, 2013 | 7.8 | 346d8091-71b7-4bd4-8ddd-fd2d11335012 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Welsh songwriter Polly Mackey expands her bedroom-pop sound on her intimate and adventurous second album. | Welsh songwriter Polly Mackey expands her bedroom-pop sound on her intimate and adventurous second album. | Art School Girlfriend: Soft Landing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/art-school-girlfriend-soft-landing/ | Soft Landing | As Art School Girlfriend, Polly Mackey blends her experience in the shoegaze band Deaf Club with her love of electronica: Guitars are processed to sound like synths, synths function like lead guitars, and drums flip between electronic and acoustic. Mackey’s voice—a grainy, yearning alto with a muted intensity—sets her apart further. In 2017, producer Paul Epworth signed Mackey to his Wolf Tone label, and she spent the next few years developing her sound at his Church Studios. For her full-length debut, 2021’s Is It Light Where You Are, she enlisted several producers to flesh out a breakup narrative with a vast array of electronic sounds. For her follow-up, Soft Landing, she works with a tighter pair of collaborators: longtime co-producer Riley MacIntyre and fellow songwriter Marika Hackman, Mackey’s partner.
Despite the skeleton crew, Landing is a dramatic expansion of Mackey’s sound that still retains the intimacy of her early work. Its songs share a newfound sense of focus, building to satisfying payoffs that never lose their thrill even when you see them coming. “The Weeks” and “Heaven Hanging Low” open in low-key arrangements before boiling over with post-punk and drum ’n’ bass twists, respectively. In the studio, Mackey sought a “roomy” sound with live guitars and strings accompanying the complex synth programming. The mysterious plucks on opener “A Place to Lie,” for example, are actually heavily processed nylon strings. Even the more basic tracks have some surprising textures, like the glitchy mush within “Blue Sky” or the warping synths of “How Do You Do It.”
The lyrics don’t always match the intricacy and confidence of the music: Songs called “Blue Sky” and “Waves” lean on predictable imagery about skies and waves. The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss. On “The Weeks,” she writes about getting to know a partner better after the honeymoon phase, when the “halo slips away.” This nuance makes the full-on love songs land harder: “Heaven Hanging Low” is an ode to queer love with imagery that’s both Biblical and absurdist (“Slide through paradise, I was caught in the light/Pulling planets out the sky, taking a bite”). It’s her best song to date, intimate and thoughtful yet still magnetic. On Soft Landing, Art School Girlfriend are less focused on ecstatic joy than quiet contentment, shedding light on the abiding peace—and the creeping anxiety—that may await you at your destination. | 2023-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fiction | August 7, 2023 | 6.9 | 347246b0-5633-42dd-ad63-28126050fce5 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The dreamlike performances at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return are collected on a new soundtrack, celebrating a triumph of musical programming, mood, and David Lynch’s strange reality. | The dreamlike performances at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return are collected on a new soundtrack, celebrating a triumph of musical programming, mood, and David Lynch’s strange reality. | Various Artists: Twin Peaks (Music From the Limited Event Series) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-twin-peaks-music-from-the-limited-event-series/ | Twin Peaks (Music From the Limited Event Series) | The talent booker at the Roadhouse is an enigmatic figure in the town of Twin Peaks. Unseen, unnamed, and unmentioned, the bar’s curatorial mastermind secures acts to play this small-town dive bar, acts who wouldn’t ordinarily pass within 30 miles of the place. Fashionable English indie rock bands appear as a matter of course, synth-pop trios descend upon the stage from Brooklyn, Latin jazz singers perform alongside Moby, Nine Inch Nails premiere a new single—even Eddie Vedder turns up in an oversized fedora. How do they do it? It’s a triumph of musical programming. Not since Modest Mouse graced the Bait Shop in Orange County has a minor concert venue been so ambitiously booked.
Of course much about Twin Peaks: The Return seems governed by the logic of a dream. Nightmares have always been David Lynch’s metier, and he and Mark Frost’s long-awaited 18-part revival series is thoroughly, obstinately phantasmagorical. But while the efforts of Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to shake off a quarter-decade slumber and thwart his nefarious doppelganger sometimes seemed fantastic, they still retained the shape and momentum of narrative television: However strange, there was a plot. The same can’t quite be said of our time at the Roadhouse. The nightly shows felt ethereal, hallucinatory—unreal somehow, even by Lynch’s standards. Did these concerts really happen? Does the Roadhouse exist inside a dream?
More readily apparent is how these scenes function as episodic punctuation. Our arrival at the Roadhouse toward the end of an installment nearly always heralded its conclusion, and therefore seemed a kind of reprieve from the terror and tumult outside its doors. Lynch has said that he considers The Return not a serial but one coherent feature, or an 18-hour film. In this respect, the Roadhouse may be his concession to the demands of TV: The performances cleave the drama along hour-long grains, dividing its unwieldy sprawl into manageable, broadcast-ready chunks. This also accounts for their restorative effect. Amid a series that is staunchly unpredictable, the Roadhouse is one of the only things we know to expect.
”We’re watching all the streetlights fade,” sings Ruth Radelet, of the Chromatics, at the end of the show’s two-part premiere. “And now you’re just a stranger’s dream.” The sentiment is certainly appropriate. By virtue of inaugurating the Roadhouse-band ritual, “Shadow” set the tone for the music of the series to come: delicate, atmospheric, utterly hypnotic. It helps that the song’s performance, bathed in cobalt and relished with the patience of a concert film, lands so indelibly. These may amount to little more than end-credits music videos, but rarely have end credits been as moving when the words “Starring Kyle MacLachlan” appear. It’s the moment where you feel like you can breathe again.
At the Roadhouse, the familiar often collides with the new. It’s the sempiternal haunt of Peaks regulars, where we find James Hurley (James Marshall) longing for Shelly Briggs (Madchen Amick) again, and where Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) dances in a reverie from which she can’t seem to wake. But it’s also home to a host of fresh faces: We’re introduced to slimeball Richard Horne (Eamon Farren), where Megan (Shane Lynch) and Sophie (Emily Stofle) discuss a curious incident over drinks, and where Ruby (Charlyne Yi) crawls across the floor and screams. The procession of talent on stage reflects this generational diversity. The music is a testament to how much things have changed over the course of 25 years—and how little.
Some nights, the Roadhouse plunged us deep into the past: James reprised “Just You”, the distinctly Deerhunter-esque song he performed long ago with Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Maddie (Sheryl Lee), while the penultimate episode culminated with “The World Spins”, a song Julee Cruise hadn’t sung at the Roadhouse since the evening Maddie was murdered. (You may remember that this song was interrupted the first time by a supernatural warning: “It is happening again.” It still is.) Elsewhere, acts from Lynch’s other work surfaced as if from a subconscious shared with the Peaks universe. Rebekah Del Rio materialized from Mulholland Drive with a song written by Lynch himself, one that would hardly be out of place at Club Silencio. And Trent Reznor reunites with Lynch for the first time since 1997, when he produced the soundtrack for Lost Highway.
Other evenings keep us firmly in the present. Some of these artists Lynch has professed his affection for frequently: Au Revoir Simone, who twice take the Roadhouse stage, have counted the director among their fans for years, while Illinois-based singer-songwriter Lissie was hailed by Lynch as “incredible” as far back as 2010. Others are conspicuously the product of Lynch’s influence—which tends to make their presence in Twin Peaks fascinatingly strange.
Johnny Jewel, in particular, is so indebted to the aesthetic Lynch developed with Angelo Badalamenti that his involvement with The Return—he performs three times throughout the series, twice with Chromatics and once with Julee Cruise, and contributes two instrumental cuts to the soundtrack—is both a vindication and a sort of joke. Twin Peaks is all about doubles and doppelgangers. Is Johnny Jewel one? This opposition between old and new, in any case, is clearly present by design—another reminder from Lynch and Frost of the distance between 2017 and 1992, between Twin Peaks and The Return.
Enjoyed in isolation—severed from the series on the soundtrack album Music from the Limited Event Series—the Roadhouse hit parade loses the interstitial quality it had parceled out one episode at a time. And yet the collection is peculiarly compelling. This is, foremost, an anthology of largely excellent songs, selected for their artistic merit rather than merely for their usefulness to the drama or their connection to some arcane Lynchian lore. And furthermore, it’s an impressive cross-section of the listening habits of a filmmaker with plainly discriminating tastes.
Things remain the same as ever at the Roadhouse. Young punks and romantics still flail through adolescent turbulence; hearts long-since broken still haven’t been repaired. Like the unfamiliar citizens of the town these Roadhouse scenes often introduce us to, the indie bands that hit the stage each night carry on a legacy they may not even be aware of. Their elders, meanwhile, simply keep enduring—and some of these performances are graphic proof of their endurance. This dive bar is like so much of The Return: irreconcilable. People appear only to disappear soon after. Stray threads of plot are picked up and summarily abandoned. Is that how the implausible booking may be accounted for? None of this is reality. It’s just a stranger’s dream. | 2017-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Rhino | September 5, 2017 | 7.5 | 3472e10e-177e-43de-98ec-ba14945baff3 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
With spruced-up production highlighting new subtleties in their sound, yet never abandoning their melodic fundamentals, the Cleveland indie rockers’ latest radiates a renewed sense of purpose. | With spruced-up production highlighting new subtleties in their sound, yet never abandoning their melodic fundamentals, the Cleveland indie rockers’ latest radiates a renewed sense of purpose. | Cloud Nothings: Final Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloud-nothings-final-summer/ | Final Summer | For someone who’s spent nearly half his young life as a professional musician, Dylan Baldi still has solid work-life boundaries: The free jazz, ambient instrumentals, and acoustic experiments he’s posted to Bandcamp have yet to leach into the bottle-rocket pop-punk of Cloud Nothings. But the first single off their new album, Final Summer, has finally allowed one of Baldi’s extracurricular activities to infiltrate the band’s creative process. “I’m trying to [run] a marathon in every state,” he recently boasted, and while countless time trials and deadlifts have been set to “Stay Useless” and “Psychic Trauma,” “Running Through the Campus” suggests a more focused sort of cardiovascular exercise. “It’s just a thing I do for myself,” Baldi rasps, sounding like someone in tune with the discipline of physical and mental upkeep, and the usefulness of tracking incremental progress and pragmatic goals. That’s really where Cloud Nothings find themselves on their latest album, the first since Baldi entered his thirties. It’s a satisfying series of sprints from a band committed for the long haul.
Final Summer radiates a renewed sense of purpose for a band that had begun to feel like they were spinning their wheels. Up until the remotely recorded The Black Hole Understands, Cloud Nothings switched up producers on every album, lending a distinct character to records that otherwise work within a fairly narrow sound. Reuniting with Steve Albini on The Shadow I Remember drew on the goodwill generated by their most beloved album, yet it felt like a cheat code on a set of songs that lacked the frothing urgency of Attack on Memory. Just about everything leading up to Final Summer seemed to acknowledge the opportunity for a retooling, if not a total reboot: unexpected yet sensible new tourmates, new producer, new label, all signifying security in their status as a legacy band in 2024.
But you’d never guess any of that from the title track. A synth twinkles for a minute, and then another one, before the vocals enter. The mesmeric, three-note riff is more like amped-up Krautrock than spiky pop-punk. If the instrumental bridge doesn’t quite approximate Baldi’s alto sax recordings, it at least sounds like MIDI horns. Jayson Gerycz eases up on his typically runaway locomotion and propels “Final Summer” forward like a bullet train. At once instantly recognizable as Cloud Nothings and having no precedent in their catalog, “Final Summer” marks the first time in years that an entirely new lane has opened up for the band.
They quickly swerve back, yet “Daggers of Light” is a subtle reconfiguration of their past work, grafting the triumphal melodies of their singles to the ornery plod they typically reserve for the deep cuts. Meanwhile, “I’d Get Along” is Cloud Nothings concentrate, creating verse and chorus, tension and release, out of a single line. For all of its boneheaded brilliance, “I’d Get Along” can’t help but poke at a concern raised by the last few Cloud Nothings albums: Do they sound effortless because they’ve mastered their craft, or is it because they’re not pushing themselves?
“Silence,” or “Mouse Policy,” or, really, take your pick—they’re all melodic without being cloying, expressive without pandering, true believers in the enduring relevance of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements without devolving into “dudes rock” cliche. That was also true of The Shadow I Remember and The Black Hole Understands, which occasionally felt marooned between Cloud Nothings’ more bracing earlier work and a more considered, robust sound they had yet to achieve.
In the past, “ambition” on a Cloud Nothings song meant playing faster, stretching out for seven minutes, or doing both. That doesn’t happen on Final Summer. But the spiffier production sharpens the edge rather than dulling it, highlighting subtle flourishes that distinguish the deeper cuts from any random track six from a previous Cloud Nothings album: the harmonized punctuations on “Daggers of Light” balancing out the bile with psychedelic sweetness; the aural illusion of the title track’s endlessly repeating riff set against Chris Brown’s bass melodies; a melancholy piano line underscoring Baldi’s State of the Universe address on “Silence.”
“You can make any heaven you want/Why do you blow out every little light/And live in the dark?” Baldi asks on that song, ostensibly to the assorted bigots, fundamentalists, and climate-change deniers he addresses earlier on. His query might also be aimed, just a little, at the mirror—a challenge to make a Cloud Nothings album that meets the standards set by the ones with the black-and-white covers. In both its brighter sound and sentiment, Final Summer can be taken as a do-over of 2017’s underappreciated Life Without Sound, a shiny, sunny pop-rock album that led Baldi to claim, “I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted my life anymore.” Certainly a change in outlook over “Wasted Days,” but not the same thing as welcoming serenity. “I need to be happy with what I got for me,” Baldi yells on Final Summer’s title track, realizing something that would have been frankly inconceivable on previous Cloud Nothings albums—that happiness is work, but it’s worth it. While passing through a quad full of college kids the same age he was when he started the project, Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance. | 2024-04-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pure Noise | April 19, 2024 | 7.5 | 34752ef9-bdd5-4317-a762-8f0245efba15 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On her debut solo album, the Dama Scout singer explores her heritage and grapples with otherness in knotty electro-pop shot through with field recordings and traditional Chinese instruments. | On her debut solo album, the Dama Scout singer explores her heritage and grapples with otherness in knotty electro-pop shot through with field recordings and traditional Chinese instruments. | mui zyu: *Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mui-zyu-rotten-bun-for-an-eggless-century/ | Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century | Reconciling otherness with selfhood is at the heart of Eva Liu’s work as vocalist of indie-rock trio Dama Scout and in her solo project mui zyu. On her debut EP as mui zyu, 2021’s a wonderful thing vomits, the London-based artist reckoned with feelings of alienation by building an immersive dreamworld of shapeshifting soundscapes. Liu, who was born in Northern Ireland to a family of Hong Kong immigrants, was more confrontational on Dama Scout’s debut album: Traversing the turbulent, psychedelic art rock of gen wo lai (come with me), she worked towards healing by piecing together fragmented memories of her childhood.
mui zyu’s debut album, Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, glides between mystical portal fantasy and fragmented reality in pursuit of self-acceptance. Liu delves deeper into her Chinese heritage, emulating the eerie folklore of Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling and his uncanny ability to cast the everyday in the realm of the supernatural. Envisioning herself as a lonesome warrior on a quest for liberation, she offers a mutated take on bedroom pop: Her yearning vocals are cocooned in a cacophony of bounding instrumental melodies, muggy synths, and bursts of fuzz. It is an unsettling world where feelings of cultural displacement manifest as demons.
A dense, tumultuous mixture of contorted electronics and discordant keyboard melodies forms the bulk of the album’s arrangements. Occasionally, Liu hides fragments of her childhood in the mix: 8-bit synths are reminiscent of video-game soundtracks, and field recordings of Chinese restaurants buried in the background mimic the noise of living above her father’s restaurant. mui zyu’s abstract lyrics match the warped dissonance with grotesque imagery. “We could cry blood in our eyes, we can’t breathe/We laugh so hard we could die,” she sings on “Dusty.” As the guitar melts, she’s caught somewhere between torturous anguish and bliss.
Some of mui zyu’s most interesting experiments are built with traditional Chinese instrumentation. On “Ghost With a Peach Skin,” a guzheng—a type of zither—is digitally distorted and folded into a danceable beat without losing its rich character, mimicking the transformative process of renewal. Liu uses the image of a peach—a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture, despite the fruit’s fragility—to remind herself of the trauma she must carry even in rebirth. Liu joined several local cultural groups as part of her exploration of her Hong Kong roots, and that sense of community emerges as revitalizing support in her fight against ghouls on “Demon 01.”
Repairing familial relationships is central to Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century’s drift between dimensions. Interlude “Ho Bao Daan” features her father reciting a recipe for the titular Hong Kong egg dish before it whisks mui zyu back into the otherworldly setting. The album’s most poignant moment arrives on “Mother’s Tongue.” Across glistening washes of dream-pop guitar, Liu sings, “Don’t need to forgive you for something you don’t mean to do.” It’s her most direct statement here, her voice filled with empathetic understanding as she relinquishes old resentments. She seems to recognize that love sometimes entails letting go, yet leaving a path open for the loved one’s return. A voice note from her mother cuts through the tense air: “Eva, I’m so proud of you,” she commends, before she’s swallowed by the ambient swell.
mui zyu’s crusade culminates in an open-ended resolution. A world away from the daunting vortex of the opening “Rotten Bun” and its guzheng, arpeggiated piano, and haunting erhu solo, the closing “Sore Bear” is little more than an ominous, sinewy piano line. The song dampens into an acrid hiss as its melody sidesteps a tidy conclusion, trailing to a ghostly calm. “I dismember words/You won’t believe/How much they can hurt,” Liu sings, but she resists yielding to despondency. Instead, she softly delivers commands across the commotion in what feels like a moment of restoration, a quiet yet self-assured reclamation of personal agency. | 2023-03-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Father/Daughter | March 10, 2023 | 7.4 | 34837e17-5b69-4499-b2e2-f2227db373e9 | Michael Hong | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hong/ | |
On her debut EP, the Kazakh/British violinist, likely most familiar from work with Radiohead, creates teeming and imagistic environments with four strings and electronics. | On her debut EP, the Kazakh/British violinist, likely most familiar from work with Radiohead, creates teeming and imagistic environments with four strings and electronics. | Galya Bisengalieva: EP ONE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galya-bisengalieva-ep-one/ | EP ONE | Even if you have never heard her name, you might have heard violinist Galya Bisengalieva. In the past few years, she’s played on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Thom Yorke’s Suspiria soundtrack, and several of Jonny Greenwood’s scores—Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Justice’s Woman, too. Many of these appearances owe to her leadership role in the London Contemporary Orchestra, the new-music ensemble that also collaborated with the electronic musician Actress on the post-classical LAGEOS earlier this year, for which she co-wrote “Galya Beat.” The Kazakh/British violinist is part of a vital community of contemporary composers and players; now, on her EP ONE, she presents commissions from Claire M. Singer and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, along with a new piece of her own.
All three works, written for violin and electronics, take a timbral approach to minimalism, focusing their attentions not on melody but on long drones, scraped strings, and glistening harmonics. The music director of the 1877 Henry Willis organ at London’s Union Chapel, Singer wrote “Tús” after being inspired by Glen Coe, a valley in the Scottish Highlands with a stunningly primeval aspect. Singer’s 2016 album, Solas, concentrated on a shimmering mixture of organ, cello, and electronics; likewise, “Tús,” whose title translates as “beginnings” in Scottish Gaelic, zeroes in on a narrow field of tone. It opens with nearly two minutes of a long open fifth—the sound of wholeness, of concord—before the notes begin to slide across minor sevenths, major thirds, and major seconds, the different intervals piling up in a shifting matrix of tension and release. As the faintest candle flicker of high notes gradually gives way to a bassy rumble, an entire universe comes into being. There is a palpable sense of immanence in its deeply soothing movements, a sense of divinity flickering all around us.
Bisengalieva’s “TULPAR,” the shortest selection, is just as imagistic. The title refers to a winged horse in Turkic mythology and the state emblem of her native Kazakhstan. Lightning-fast string plucks thrum against great sheets of drone, suggesting galloping horses taking flight across the steppes. As with the LCO’s work for Yorke and Greenwood, Bisengalieva’s bowing saws across the spectrum, harmonics periodically flashing up like a river catching afternoon light. For all its simplicity, it’s a tense, electrifying sound.
“Oparin,” written by French pianist and composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, closes out EP ONE. The title references Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin, whose book The Origin of Life introduced the concept of the “primordial soup”—the fog of carbon-based molecules from which, he theorized, all life arose. You can hear an approximation of that cauldron in Bisengalieva’s looped violin lines. For two, three, four minutes, she saws and plucks, trembling drones and hiccupping pizzicato layered into a hazy miasma. It’s alien and hypnotic, the high notes hissing like steam from volcanic fissures. Finally, a bold glissando bolts through the murk, dives, and rises again. A tentative melody takes shape—searching, dissonant, almost breathtakingly lyrical. If what has come before is the soup, then this, surely, is life itself. Against the restrained backdrop of the rest of the EP, it’s a remarkable development and a keen demonstration of Bisengalieva’s interpretive instincts. | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nomad | December 8, 2018 | 7.6 | 348d62e6-5809-4fbb-95c7-0a6a2c5feb28 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The British house producer’s contribution to the longstanding series offers a broad cross-section of his tastes, mostly letting his selections, and not his mixing, do the heavy lifting. | The British house producer’s contribution to the longstanding series offers a broad cross-section of his tastes, mostly letting his selections, and not his mixing, do the heavy lifting. | Leon Vynehall: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leon-vynehall-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | In this bountiful age for DJ mixes, where even the most avid fan struggles to keep up with the digital deluge that falls upon Soundcloud daily, the DJ-Kicks name still stands for something. The venerable mix series is now onto its 67th edition: It’s a run that stretches back to 1995 and has come to be seen as both an arbiter of taste and a sign that an electronic act has arrived. Putting your name to a DJ-Kicks is still a big deal in 2019, even as over-familiarity has robbed the DJ mix of its currency.
Leon Vynehall sits well within these hallowed surroundings. His most recent album, 2018’s Nothing Is Still, marked a significant development in both profile and sound for the British producer, shifting his deep-house style to incorporate traces of modern classical and ambient music. That restlessness suits the series, which has never been as closely allied to the dancefloor as many mix franchises. With that in mind, Vynehall says, “To me, compiling a DJ-Kicks is a significant statement of intent and representation, so with that in mind, I thought more about the selection than the mix.”
Vynehall has certainly dug deep: the 26-track mix includes previously unreleased songs from UK bass musician Ploy, rising house producer Peach, and Pavilion, alongside a handful of tracks that make their official digital debut. The best known of those, by some distance, is Richard D. James’ impish “Children Talking,” from AFX’s 1995 EP Hangable Auto Bulb, while the fiercely open-minded tracklist takes in everything from dancehall to footwork, passing by Mancunian street soul and classical piano. The house sound for which Vynehall is known doesn’t get a look in until track 17, Crinan’s wonderfully spring-loaded and loose-limbed “Kilimanjaro,” and then only hangs around for another 15 minutes before giving way to warped drum ’n’ bass.
A well-paced, thoughtful running order facilitates these potentially difficult transitions. One of the most enlightening things about DJ-Kicks is the way the British producer joins the dots between different eras of music. Bourbonese Qualk's clank-ridden and angsty 1980s industrial number “Moving Forward” flows effortlessly into Shamos’ 2017 lo-fi electro track “Nuws,” while Etch’s modern drum ’n’ bass oddity “Unsung Hero of Irrelevance” combines beautifully with Mirage’s fearsome 1990s jungle roller “Deep Rage.”
But it’s hard to shake the feeling that Vynehall is trying a little bit too hard to impress. At times, DJ-Kicks comes across like an overworked aux cable in somebody’s living room—you want to tell the DJ to slow down a little with the relentless genre switching, lest the party be done and dusted by 10pm. The range is impressive but there’s something vaguely unsatisfying about the depth of it all, or rather the lack thereof: a couple of d’n’b tracks is enough to pique your interest in Vynehall’s love of the genre without coming close to quenching your thirst.
The traditional mix-album format doesn’t really help. Cramming 26 tracks into the length of a CD means we only get to hear about three minutes of each song, which would be understandable if Vynehall mixed them up inventively. But with the focus firmly on selection, his mixes tend to be brief, functional transitions that seem in awe of their source material. The digital release, which includes full-length downloads of all 26 tracks as well as the original mix—a format also adopted by Fabric’s new mix series—probably serves listeners better.
That might sound perverse for a mix series whose name promises turntablist thrills. But DJ-Kicks has long given reign to both dedicated DJs (Nina Kraviz, Seth Troxler) and artists who are better known as producers than disc jockeys (Nicolette, Erlend Øye), with frequently brilliant results. Vynehall’s mix sits firmly within the latter territory: more selector sensation than DJ spotlight, but still an impressive showcase of the producer’s ear. | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | !K7 | February 5, 2019 | 6.8 | 349573ee-7e94-4871-910f-d079e55d27c0 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
This series of five vinyls (or one CD) is techno guru Ricardo Villalobos' most substantial solo release in five years. Over the course of its 80 minutes, naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones and synthetic elements imitate the natural world. | This series of five vinyls (or one CD) is techno guru Ricardo Villalobos' most substantial solo release in five years. Over the course of its 80 minutes, naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones and synthetic elements imitate the natural world. | Ricardo Villalobos: Dependent and Happy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17156-dependent-and-happy/ | Dependent and Happy | Inside the world of contemporary techno, Ricardo Villalobos is a guru: Fans worship him, skeptics think he's a crackpot, and he doesn't seem to care much either way. Parts of his discography read like Spinal Tap for dance music: In 2006 he released a track that looped Serbian brass bands for about 37 minutes, and a year later, he made a mix for the London club Fabric consisting entirely of new Ricardo Villalobos productions, which is like giving a toast at someone's else's wedding about your own marriage. Halfway through the mix, a woman starts angrily delivering her opinions on how to deal with chicken giblets. Then the big Japanese drums come in. From where, it's unclear. In Villalobos tracks, all doors are trap doors. The music he makes is loose, chaotic, and highly detailed, but the overall effect of it is like watching traffic: In the end, nothing really happens. His gift, though-- and this is where the worshipers start to worship-- is that a different kind of nothing seems to happen every time.
His output from 2006 to 2012-- which is basically the moment he waded into the deep end-- is a catalog of extremes: On the one hand, you get these long, linear, endlessly unfolding pieces of music like his Fabric mix; on the other, you get 37 absurdly repetitive minutes of Serbian brass bands. Dependent and Happy-- a series of five vinyls or one CD that picks up where the Fabric mix left off-- is his most substantial solo release in five years, and basically an extension of the kind of music he started making on the Fabric mix. Over the course of its 80 minutes, we hear people talking, cars honking in the street, and someone playing the bongos. Naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones, and synthesized sounds imitate the natural world. Villalobos wanders in to play a few notes and then disappears again.
There comes a point in listening to his music that almost any sound feels like it might belong. That's the exciting thing about it. That's the disorienting thing about it, too. Dependent cements a slow evolution from left-field house music to something like sound collage or electroacoustic composition pinned to a house beat. Every element is carefully managed, but the outcome mimics that haphazard feeling of real life. And like life, Dependent moves in a straight line. Whatever repetitions are there feel accidental, like a trick of perception. (Your brain, after all, craves patterns, and will make them whether you like it or not.) Even drums-- techno's anchor-- can vary from bar to bar, sprouting weird extraneous noises as they go.
Given the open nature of the music, the tracks that seem easily excerpted from Dependent are also the ones that feel most out of place while listening to it as a whole. "Put Your Lips", for example, is as good a place as any to sample what it is Villalobos sounds like in 2012, but when it comes up int he course of the album it feels self-contained-- a strange quality when the beauty of the music is how radically open it sounds. In the end, it's the looser tracks that form the album's backbone. When I first put the needle down on "Tu Actitud", I thought the record had been cut wrong. The music seems to start in medias res-- like it's always been there, but you, the listener, just fell into it.
I hesitate to be prescriptive about these things, but both the vinyl and digital experiences are great in their own ways: Digitally, you can just let the music run, which can be more hypnotic; on vinyl, having to change sides every 12 minutes or so is a constant reminder of just how substantial the set is. Over the past few years, Villalobos has become almost mystically preoccupied with sound. "There is a fairly strictly limited range of frequencies available for the production of electronic music," he mused in a 2011 interview, surrounded by very nice-looking speakers that resemble the bells of trombones. "When you 'marry' these with all these acoustic recordings that have all these atmospheric spaces, it is in some ways a complementation of the things that electronic music lacks."
In other interviews, he's talked down software like Ableton, which offers pre-programmed instruments at affordable prices that Villalobos, with his impossible ears, can identify in "two seconds." Instead, he uses modular synthesizers, building each electronic element from raw wave forms. Bar soap? No. He makes his own. (Maybe now is the time to mention that the vinyl edition-- i.e., the one for the hardcores-- has three extra tracks, all of comparable quality to anything else on the CD version. Villalobos, of course, encourages attentive listening; most of the vinyl only has one track on each side, which is a very different experience from listening to it as an almost continuous block of sound.)
Basically, he's a snob. He's monkish in his austerity. There's also nobody making the kind of music he's making right now. Like last year's collaboration with Max Loderbauer re-imagining tracks from the catalog of German jazz label ECM, Dependent breaks down genre and expectations, but does it with a polite kind of confidence. It recalibrates the ear. Maybe it's appropriate to assess it like a drug: Side effects may include a heightening of sensitivity to the sound of the world around you. Call his tracks "environments"-- my guess is, he would. In them, even melody-- one of the most basic components of music-- can sound totally foreign. It's true that destruction can be an act of creation, but the same goes the other way around: In building, Villalobos, with his big ideas and cheerful disposition, tears down. | 2012-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Perlon | September 24, 2012 | 8.2 | 349a8071-b025-4bf0-aeeb-463b90b83ed5 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
While not as egregiously baffling as Indie Cindy, the latest from the ’90s indie icons is nonetheless a middling effort missing all kinds of dynamics the Pixies used to offer. | While not as egregiously baffling as Indie Cindy, the latest from the ’90s indie icons is nonetheless a middling effort missing all kinds of dynamics the Pixies used to offer. | Pixies: Head Carrier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22437-head-carrier/ | Head Carrier | The Pixies weren’t the only band that blazed the trail for alternative rock’s mainstream takeover in the ’90s, but they were the rare band that got to be trailblazers twice. When they regrouped at Coachella in 2004 after an 11-year breakup, they effectively ushered in another musical phenomenon: the indie-icon reunion-tour circuit. It granted the Massachusetts misfits a long overdue opportunity to play for the sort of massive crowds that their famous fans—Nirvana, Radiohead, and Weezer among them—had built on their influence. But what was once a valorous underdog-victory narrative has slowly turned into a cautionary tale about pissing away all the goodwill you’ve accrued.
For the rest of the 2000s, the Pixies toured and toured as if they were on a mission to perform for every last person on Earth who longed to hear “Debaser” in the flesh. By the time they finally decided to release new music again in 2013, not only was bassist Kim Deal gone, so too was any lingering excitement about the prospect of new Pixies music. What’s more, the three scatterbrained EPs they issued between 2013 and 2014—later compiled and reshuffled in album form as Indie Cindy—only served to answer those deflated expectations with a collection of songs that overcompensated for their lack of vigor and volatility by amping up the egregious eccentricity.
And yet despite that misfire, not to mention an aborted attempt to replace Deal with another Kim, the Pixies are giving it another go. With bassist Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, the Entrance Band) now officially sworn in, Head Carrier feels like an attempt to stabilize their course. The Pixies are no longer the legends resurfacing with their first album in 20 years; they’re just a steady-as-she-goes rock band cranking out another record. With Head Carrier, they’re essentially in their Voodoo Lounge phase, turning in the sort of middling, late-career album that will clog up the Pixies bin at your local record store when you’re looking to upgrade your worn-out copy of Surfer Rosa.
If Head Carrier has no ambitions to be a return to a form, it at least doesn’t incite the same sort of facepalm incredulity as Indie Cindy. (Seriously: what the fuck was “Bagboy”?) On tuneful songs like “Classic Masher” and “Might As Well Be Gone,” you can hear traces of the band that made “Here Comes Your Man” and “Velouria.” But there’s scant evidence of the band that made “Vamos” or “Gouge Away”—the volcanic outbursts that made their more melodic songs shine like diamonds in the coal.
The tension points that once made the Pixies so singular and striking—tiki-torched calm vs. eyeball-slicing chaos, sweetness vs. psychosis, American mythology vs. Spanish surrealism—have been thoroughly massaged out by this point. Yes, Kim Deal is missed, but so are Black Francis’ frightening mood swings, Joey Santiago’s blazing grease-rag guitars, and Dave Lovering’s concrete-cracking stomps. These Pixies are happy to just twang and jangle instead of slash and burn; on those rare occasions when they do try to rip up the asphalt (“Baal’s Back,” “Um Chagga Laga”), they sound less like ticking time-bomb terrors drunk on Dali and David Lynch than a mildly cranky Tex-Mex bar band.
As futile as it may be to hold the current Pixies up to the standard of records they made nearly 30 years ago, the comparisons are unavoidable given that they’re still executing the same playbook, only with less enthusiasm. Lenchantin is called on to do everything Kim Deal used to do, but while her plainspoken delivery is genial enough, it doesn’t exude the mischievous glee that made her predecessor such an effective balm to Francis’ tonsil-shredding howls. And given that Francis doesn’t get all that worked up about much here, the contrast between the two is muted—she’s more harmonic support than a full-on foil.
As such, Lenchantin’s lead vocal debut as a Pixie, “All I Think About Now,” is less notable for her performance than the lyrics Francis gave her to sing. Opening with an unsubtle echo of “Where Is My Mind?,” the song serves as Francis’ thank-you note to Deal, a fond remembrance of their working relationship to dispel the long-rumored animosity between the two. That sort of candor and poignancy are rare qualities in the Pixies canon—and credit Lenchantin, who came up with the lyrical concept, for nudging Francis into this uncharted terrain. But the singing-telegram approach feels sort of like, well, quitting your band by fax.
The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian. I’m reminded of that infamous Steve Albini interview from the early ’90s where the Surfer Rosa producer called his former clients “a band who, at their top-dollar best, are blandly entertaining college rock.” At the time, the quote seemed like blasphemy. Now, it feels like prophecy. | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Play It Again Sam / Pixiesmusic | October 6, 2016 | 5.5 | 349fcab6-36e7-42f7-95dc-d19a4a486080 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful and terrifically strange 1979 LP, Tusk, poses the question: What happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work? | Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful and terrifically strange 1979 LP, Tusk, poses the question: What happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work? | Fleetwood Mac: Tusk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21924-tusk/ | Tusk | The autumn of 1979 was, by any reasonable accounting, a challenging time to be alive. The world felt tenuous, transitional: panicked families were fleeing East Germany via hot air balloon, China was restricting couples to one child each, fifty-two Americans were barred inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, pending release of the Shah. It was also the year of Tusk, the album in which Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock band second only to the Eagles in their embodiment of easy 1970s gloss, completely lost their minds. It was the band’s twelfth album, though only its third with the now-iconic lineup of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist Christine McVie, and singer Stevie Nicks, and it reflected a personal tumult so claustrophobic and intense it felt global in scale—an after-the-fall re-telling of catastrophic heartache and its endless reverberations.
By this time, Fleetwood Mac was widely beloved for its melodic, harmonized jams, which evoked Laurel Canyon, curtains of strung beads, turquoise jewelry, pricey incense, scarves flung over floor lamps, and brandy poured into a nice glass. Despite their smooth, murmuring sound, few of the band’s records pull punches emotionally, but even compared to a cry of pain like “The Chain,” Tusk is singular. It is pocked with heartbreak, resignation, lust, hope, and deep hurt. It poses unanswerable questions. It reckons with the past, and what that past means for a future. It invariably makes some people want to lock their door, excavate half a joint from the recesses of their couch cushions, and spend the next fourteen hours contemplating the Buckingham-Nicks union as one of the great failed loves of the twentieth century.
Just two years earlier, the band had released Rumours, a collection of pert and amiable love songs that sold over ten million copies and spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Rumours is presently among the top ten best-selling albums in American history, and, as of 2009, has shipped more than forty million units worldwide. It was—it remains—an album owned by people who have only ever owned eleven albums.
Commercial success on that scale is, of course, a complicated thing to navigate; for Fleetwood Mac, it was presaged and then aggravated by outrageous amounts of cocaine and an awful lot of intra-band copulation. I don’t mean to be reductive about the group’s emotional dynamic, but I can’t think of another assemblage of five able-minded adults who created and survived such a preposterous tangle of romantic investments and divestments (to wit: Nicks and Buckingham, McVie and McVie, Nicks and Fleetwood, Fleetwood’s wife and former member Bob Weston, McVie and the lighting designer, and Fleetwood and Nicks’ then-married best friend—to cite just the handful of permutations known to the public).
By the time Tusk was released, the two primary relationships sustaining the band (Christine and John’s marriage, and Lindsey and Stevie’s long-standing romance) had fully dissolved, which seemed to qualify Fleetwood Mac, in some perverse way, to go on to become one of our best and bravest chroniclers of love’s horrifying tumult. Being tasked with singing backing vocals for a song written by your ex-lover, about you, months (and eventually years) after the relationship ruptured? Hold that in mind—just how excruciating that must’ve been. Then find a video of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Silver Springs” (a song written by Nicks about Buckingham, withheld from Rumours, and later released, either cruelly or keenly, as the B-side to the single “Go Your Own Way,” a song written by Buckingham about Nicks) and try not to lose your mind completely when, as if to narrate the precise mechanics of their break-up, Nicks announces: “I’ll begin not to love you… Tell myself you never loved me.”
It’s “Silver Springs,” more than any other track in the band’s pre-Tusk discography, that tells the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other, and, ergo, the story of Tusk; performing the song live, they frequently end up locked in a kind of tense combat stance. When Nicks’ cool, steady voice begins to dissolve into something feral and nearly deranged (“Was I just a fool?” she finally hollers) she’ll often take steps toward him. He always meets her gaze, calmly, and with determination. Maybe they’re putting us all on, but there’s something in those moments that makes True Love—the preposterous, fairy-tale kind, the sort that never resolves itself, that can’t be outrun or eschewed, not ever, not after decades, not after a lifetime—seem entirely possible, even to the most hard-boiled cynics. I bring this up because it’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the band kept going, despite what must’ve seemed, to anyone watching, like a cataclysmic implosion. True Love doesn’t care if your relationship ends; it remains, it buoys you.
If Rumours was the band’s break-up record, Tusk covers arguably even more complicated ground: how to transform a romantic partnership into a purely creative one, while remaining mindful of all the perilous ways in which love nurtures art, and vice-versa. That the band did this at all, much less successfully, much less good-naturedly—in promotional photos for Tusk, Nicks is pictured resting her left hand disconcertingly close to a bulge in Buckingham’s blue jeans—is dumbfounding.
The result is a beautiful and terrifically strange album. From the outset, Buckingham was insistent that the band not churn out a sequel to Rumours. His was a defensive, contrarian pose: Let’s deliberately not recreate that colossal commercial and critical success; let's instead do something different, artier, less bulletproof, more experimental, more explicitly influenced by punk and new-wave, and less indebted to pop. Tusk contains twenty songs and is seventy-two minutes long. It retailed for $15.98 (or $52.88, in 2016 dollars). Its terrifically unattractive cover features a grainy, off-center photograph of a disembodied foot getting chomped on by a dog. The title is a euphemism for cock. Its sequencing is plainly insane, seesawing between two equally manic moods: “Everything is totally going to be fine!!!” and “This plane is going down and we’re all going to die!!!”
Tusk took thirteen months to make, and was the first record to amass production costs of over a million dollars. It was called self-indulgent, and it is. Legends abound regarding the details of its composition and recording. Nicks described their space in Studio D as having been adorned with “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments, and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground.” Everyone agrees Buckingham was losing it a little—that he was chasing something (artistic greatness? avant-garde credibility?) and pursuing it wildly, haphazardly, like a crazed housecat stalking a black fly about the living room. Did he really have a drum set installed in his bathroom so he could play while on his toilet? (More reasonable minds have suggested he merely liked the acoustics in there.)
One solid argument against Tusk—though it could also be levied against Rumours—is that it lacks narrative coherence, in part because it features three songwriters (Nicks, Buckingham, and McVie), each working in their own distinct style. Still, while Nicks and McVie contributed some truly lovely tracks—“Sara,” “Beautiful Child,” “Think About Me”—the record clearly belongs to Buckingham, who wrote nearly half its songs, insisted upon its scope, and is its unquestionable spiritual center, the hamster on its wheel. The engineer Ken Caillat described Buckingham as “a maniac” during the sessions. He said it without equivocation. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.”
At one point, Buckingham insisted that the band rent out Dodgers Stadium, and arranged to have the 112-piece U.S.C. Marching Band back them on the title track (his bandmates went along with this; none of the group’s foundational romantic relationships were intact, but Tusk still couldn’t have been made by people who didn’t trust one another implicitly). “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?” Buckingham and Nicks chant, their voices paranoid. Buried somewhere in there is a riff that could have sold a zillion cassingles, had this been 1977. But it wasn’t.
Though Tusk’s most memorable tracks are also its strangest (like “The Ledge,” a manic, pitter-pattering kiss-off in which the band’s signature harmonies are overridden by a guitar that’s been tuned down and turned up), there are a handful of songs that harken back to Rumours’ rich palatability. “Save Me A Place” plays like an extension, at least lyrically, of “Go Your Own Way,” in which Buckingham begrudges his lover’s unwillingness to grab what he’s half-offering her. A lot of Buckingham’s lyrics from the late ‘70s seem to simultaneously admit trepidation and cast him as the aggrieved party; he seems, in an endearing way, oblivious to his own caveats, or how they might dissuade another person. “Guess I want to be alone, and I guess I need to be amazed/Save me a place, I'll come running if you love me today,” he sings on “Save Me A Place.” He later described the song as vulnerable. “None of us had the luxury of distance to get closure… It’s about a feeling that’s been laid off to one side and maybe not been fully dealt with, sadness and a sense of loss.” It captures the wildness of recovery: what happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?
Buckingham funneled all of his disorientation into these songs. Tusk is, more than anything else, a document of that feeling and that process—of bewilderment turning into ambition writ large. What happens when a complicated, wounded person grows exhausted and unimpressed by the commercial medium he took to naturally, maybe even instinctively, but no longer believes is important or curative? It’s not hard to imagine the voice of Buckingham’s internal foil during these sessions, whispering seedily, naysaying each new melody, pushing for more: “This is fine, but it’s not Art.” I don’t know anyone who cares about making things who hasn’t at some point lobbed the exact same challenge at themselves: Can’t you do better? Hasn’t someone done this before? Haven’t you done this before? You get the sense of a broken-down person trying to rebuild himself. He is diligent about getting the architecture right.
All of which makes “I Know I’m Not Wrong”—the first song the band started recording for Tusk, and the last one to be finished – even more poignant. When Tusk was reissued, in 2015, the expanded release included six (!) different “I Know I’m Not Wrong” demos, all recorded by Buckingham in his home studio. The chorus is a declaration of intention, of confidence: “Don't blame me/Please be strong/I know I'm not wrong.” It’s not a thing a person gets to say very often. But Tusk isn’t a record that gets made more than once. | 2016-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 17, 2016 | 9.2 | 34a33bc3-a7d1-480d-9128-05e4f1869182 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | |
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 Guy’s self-titled debut, the album that solidified the sound of new jack swing and established Teddy Riley as the most influential R&B producer of the late 1980s. | 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 Guy’s self-titled debut, the album that solidified the sound of new jack swing and established Teddy Riley as the most influential R&B producer of the late 1980s. | Guy: Guy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guy/ | Guy | When Timmy Gatling picked up the phone, it sounded like there was a party happening. “Timmy, you gotta come over here right now—you gotta hear this song,” Teddy Riley said, over a booming drum track and chattering voices. Gatling hung up and walked 15 minutes through Harlem to Riley’s apartment in Building 225 of the St. Nicholas housing project. When he entered the living room that Riley’s mother allowed them to use as a recording studio, there was indeed a party. Riley liked to keep the windows open, blasting his new tracks out to the whole neighborhood—and tonight, Harlem was witnessing the birth of an R&B masterpiece.
The beat playing on a loop—the beginnings of what would become “Groove Me,” the breakout single by Riley and Gatling’s new band, Guy—had the party going crazy. Gatling workshopped the lyrics and melody with Aaron Hall, Guy’s electric lead singer. Hall stepped into the apartment’s bathroom, where blanket curtains soundproofed a makeshift vocal booth installed in the shower, and knocked out a take. Weeks later the group would attempt to re-record the track in a professional studio, but nothing matched the raw energy of the vocals that Hall recorded at the party that night.
Released in the summer of 1988, Guy’s self-titled debut redefined R&B music for the hip-hop generation. With club hits like “Groove Me” and “I Like,” Guy is best known for its melodic, uptempo synth-funk, and for positioning Teddy Riley as the wunderkind producer at the center of the new jack swing craze. Despite the name, Guy was not the work of one guy but of three guys, all in their early 20s: Riley, the resourceful producer; Timmy Gatling, the passionate songwriter; and Aaron Hall, the golden voice.
Childhood friends Riley and Gatling got their first taste of fame in 1984 as members of Kids at Work, a New Edition-inspired teen pop trio signed to CBS. Unlike New Edition, though, the Kids wrote all their own songs and played their own instruments—Teddy on keys and Timmy on bass. They grew up listening to a diverse mix of soul, funk, go-go, gospel, and hip-hop, but the Kids at Work project aimed for safe, radio-friendly R&B. The group’s single “Singing Hey Yea” got major spins on New York City’s R&B stations, rising as high as No. 64 on Billboard’s Hot Rap/R&B Singles chart. The Kids released one LP, but the label dropped them after their manager, Gene Griffin, got locked up on drug charges.
Reeling from the disappointment, Teddy graduated from high school and dove head first into the city’s hip-hop scene, helping a former classmate, Doug E. Fresh, produce his gold-selling 1985 single “The Show.” Rap music was transitioning from its sparse electro sound to the looser, funkier, sample-based beats that would define late-’80s hip-hop. Riley’s early work for artists like Kool Moe Dee and Heavy D split the difference, mixing slinky synth basslines and intricate drum programming with whimsical keyboard interpolations and punchy James Brown samples. In 1987, the Harlem R&B singer Keith Sweat, impressed by Riley’s hip-hop work, asked the producer to collaborate. Their first cut—a dramatic burst of orchestral hits and skittering drum machines called “I Want Her”—rose all the way to No. 1 on the Hot Rap/R&B Singles chart, whetting the public’s appetite for uptempo club tracks that mixed harder hip-hop production sensibilities with smooth R&B melody. Riley coached Sweat through the sultry, nasal delivery that would become his signature and worked on every track from his subsequent hit album, Make It Last Forever. But though he was central to its creation, Riley was paid only $1,500 for his work and received an underwhelming “co-producer” credit on four songs.
Meanwhile, Gatling took a day job selling women’s shoes at the Brooklyn department store Abraham & Straus. There he met Aaron Hall, a pastor’s son and rising local gospel star. Compared to Timmy’s sweet, boyish singing voice, Aaron’s sounded like a powerful beam from heaven. His vocals cut effortlessly through 20-person choirs and rollicking church organ swells, projecting strength and passion while injecting new rhythms and outrageous runs into staid praise standards. He’d recently appeared on the debut album by Brooklyn pastor Hezekiah Walker, but he had ambitions beyond the gospel scene. Hall and Gatling quit their retail jobs and started writing sexy, secular love songs, including early versions of several Guy tracks.
When Gatling approached his old friend Riley to ask for help producing the new songs, he cut right to the chase: “I got this lead singer, man, I’m telling you, he sounds exactly like Charlie Wilson.” Hall’s vocal resemblance to the iconic Gap Band frontman was central to the project that Gatling had in mind. “That was our whole concept,” he remembered in a 2021 interview with Halftime Chat. “Take the old, and make it new.” Led by Wilson’s gospel-influenced vocals, the Gap Band were a touchstone for the ’80s electro-funk sound. To younger people more attuned to the scrappy, hard-hitting style of hip-hop, their music had begun to seem out-of-touch—but alongside groups like Zapp and Cameo, they provided the funk foundation for something new to be built. Blown away by Hall’s talent, Riley joined the group as its third member. Gatling christened the new trio Guy, after a fresh local clothing store named Guy LTD.
They spent the next few months writing and recording in Riley’s apartment in Saint Nick, landing a deal with Andre Harrell’s new rap and R&B label, Uptown, and reconnecting with Gene Griffin, their old manager, who’d recently come home after serving two years in prison. Burned by his experience working with Keith Sweat, Riley knew he wanted to approach things differently this time. “I need protection,” he remembered thinking, reflecting on the birth of Guy in a 2017 lecture for Red Bull Music Academy. “I need Gene Griffin, who’s gonna make sure nobody’s taking from me.” Harrell remembered Griffin’s intimidating aura: “He had gangsta rep all over him when he got to town.”
Gene Griffin may have protected Guy from outside threats, but he also demanded control. As Guy prepared to release their first album, their forty-something manager named himself a writer and producer on every track, though he’d had little to no hand in the music, and slid a thick new management contract in front of each member. Gatling, the true author of nearly every song on the album, refused to sign. Griffin kicked him out of the group, replacing him with Aaron’s brother, Damion Hall. But it was too late to remove Gatling’s vocals—he sang lead on two songs—and too late to re-shoot the album cover, where the original trio posed together. This was still Gatling’s album, but in the liner notes, Griffin listed the members of Guy in this order: himself, Teddy, Aaron, Damion.
Released in June 1988, Guy became a hit in clubs and caught the attention of young music fans. “Groove Me” became one of the summer’s breakout R&B hits, peaking at No. 4 on the Hot Black Singles chart in August; “Teddy’s Jam” hit its top five shortly after. The group’s sound started to cross over to pop radio, too, thanks to Riley’s production work on hits by Bobby Brown (“My Prerogative”) and Johnny Kemp (“Just Got Paid”), as well as Guy’s biggest hit, “I Like.” Guy went gold by the end of 1988, and platinum within a year.
Everyone seemed to agree that something new was happening in R&B music—edgier, younger, and with more hip-hop influence than people were used to hearing on stations dominated by smooth, smiling voices like Freddie Jackson and Stephanie Mills. But this new thing didn’t yet have a name. SPIN magazine called it “B-boy pop.” Others tried “synth-funk,” “hip-hop soul,” or “swingbeat.” Riley himself remembered calling it “sophisticated bubblegum music—because it was young.” That September, The Village Voice ran a profile on Teddy Riley and Guy, and the writer, Barry Michael Cooper, made his own suggestion: “I call it the New Jack Swing.”
The “swing” was a reference to the fast, shuffling rhythms in Riley’s drum programming, while the term “new jack” was NYC slang, meaning a fresh-faced rookie—as in 1986, when Grandmaster Caz rapped, “I’m not a new jack clown, a clone who ain’t down.” Being called a “new jack” was not exactly a compliment, but the name embodied the youthfulness of the movement, and it stuck, partly because Riley adopted it, headlining The New Jack Swing Tour with Guy in 1989 and creating the hit “New Jack Swing” with his brother Markell Riley’s group Wreckx-N-Effect the same year.
“Groove Me” is a perfect introduction to new jack swing because it makes its connection to hip-hop overt. Teddy punched in James Brown’s voice (“funky!”) throughout the track, which echoed Eric B. & Rakim’s 1986 rap hit “Eric B. Is President,” as well as the organ riff from “The Champ,” a b-boy park jam classic from the 1970s that became part of hip-hop’s breakbeat canon. It was the one of the first popular R&B songs to make use of sampling in this uniquely hip-hop way, fusing the genres together for the next 30 years.
But unlike most hip-hop in the late ’80s, Riley’s drums were not sampled breakbeat loops. He pulled his own sounds from Alesis and Korg drum machines, then constructed the patterns on his Akai MPC60, adding extra oomph by padding them with bass sounds and compression. “I like for my snares to hit people in the head like, ‘Yo what is that?’” Riley said at the RBMA lecture. The famous “swing” in Riley’s sound is actually a complex, interlocking combination of ever-changing polyrhythmic syncopation, a faster take on the loose groove embedded in the funk and go-go music of his youth. Rather than programming a loop, he played everything live-to-tape on the MPC pads to achieve a subtle, unpredictable feel in his rhythms.
In 1988, Riley’s keyboard of choice was the Roland D-50, which he used to wash the album in a sea of synth strings, horns, organs, and orchestral hits that add radiant melody and rhythmic counterparts to the booming drum tracks. On “Teddy’s Jam”—the rare instrumental song to become an R&B hit—Riley floats on top of the kinetic rhythm track with three different synth hooks, inspired by his years of re-playing the electro-pop classic “Axel F” from Beverly Hills Cop. The only vocals in the song are Aaron Hall riffing on the phrase “Teddy, jam for me,” and Riley cleverly cuts in another slice of “The Champ” at the exact moment that Hall says “jam,” melding “champ” and “jam” into one indistinguishable rhythmic exclamation. Riley sings lead on one song, the fun, freaky “Spend the Night,” but it’s clear his strength lies in production.
While 80 percent of Guy is dance music, the album’s two slow jams are where Hall truly shines. “Piece of My Love” pulls you in with an easy synth bass groove and a romantic declaration: “I do love you!” It’s not until the first verse that you might realize this sweet ballad is actually a sardonic tribute to the side chick, playing up the passionate devotion for comedic effect:
Baby, you can’t have all of me
’Cause I’m not totally free
I can’t tell you everything that’s going on…baby
There’s a few things in my past
That should not be explained
I'm asking you, baby
Be with me for a little while
Please hush—no questions asked
Less cynical is “Goodbye Love,” a stripped-down slow jam about leaving a partner to go on tour. It begins with Hall and background vocalist Tammy Lucas trading tender pleas to stay together, and by the end of the song, Hall is breaking down, crying, “I’m out of my mind/Just help me to regain my sanity, baby!” In contrast to his contemporaries—singers like Al B. Sure! and Bobby Brown, who were frequently criticized for their lightweight vocals—Hall proved that expansive, gospel-influenced runs could still be modern, not just a technique of a prior generation of stars like Charlie Wilson and Stevie Wonder. In moments like this, you can hear the rhapsodic blueprint used by ’90s R&B singers like R. Kelly, K-Ci Hailey, and Sisqo.
Timmy Gatling’s role in Guy has largely been obscured over the years—the result of getting kicked out of the group before the album release—but his wholesome songwriting is core to their appeal. He was engaged to his future wife during the making of the album, and his romantic yearnings power songs like “I Like” and “You Can Call Me Crazy.” On the closer “My Business,” Gatling gently criticizes the suffocating micromanagement he experienced in the group. “Sometimes I like to stay all by myself, quiet and relaxed,” he sings softly. “But the phone, the phone always seems to ring off the hook.”
The only song that Gatling didn’t have a hand in writing—the overwrought “’Round and ’Round (Merry Go ’Round of Love)”—is also the album’s low point. It’s the most rhythmically straight track, reaching for a stomping anthem like Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” but getting weighed down by a clunky relationship metaphor and a cheesy interpolation of the popular carnival tune “Entry of the Gladiators.” According to Gatling, it’s the only Guy song that manager Gene Griffin was involved in creatively. Luckily, the rest of the album feels more like modern interpretation than tired imitation.
Guy went on to release a second platinum album, The Future, in 1990. After the group broke up, Riley filed suit against Griffin, alleging millions in stolen publishing revenue. Buoyed by his reputation as the architect of new jack swing, which by the early ’90s had become absorbed into the fabric of pop music, Riley continued to be an in-demand hitmaker, producing Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and founding a second successful R&B group, Blackstreet. Timmy Gatling continued his career as a songwriter for artists like Bell Biv Devoe and Mary J. Blige, while Aaron Hall notched a few hits of his own as a solo artist. In 2000, Guy reunited—without Timmy—for a final album, III, that lacked the vitality of their early work.
Between 1988 and the release of Dangerous in 1991, new jack swing was the sound of R&B, while its robust snares, syncopated bass drums, and rap-influenced samples sprung up in the music of nearly every pop artist hoping to score a funky radio hit. Though by the mid-’90s it was falling out of fashion, overshadowed by the rise of smooth G-funk and hip-hop’s increasing distaste for drum machines, the genre’s influence lives on through nearly all the synthesized, R&B-inflected dance-pop that followed, including the Swedish pop sound of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, the global K-pop explosion, and retro R&B stylists like Bruno Mars and Ty Dolla $ign. Amid all the slicker, newer jack swing that would follow, the scrappy, DIY texture of Guy still stands out. Guy didn’t use studio musicians, outside producers, or session writers—every song on the album was made on Riley’s keyboards and drum machines, every lyric and melody was written by Timmy and Aaron, and every song was recorded in that apartment in the Saint Nick projects. Three brilliant young men, moving as one, synthesizing their world into something new. | 2022-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | September 4, 2022 | 9 | 34ae9f55-f5d9-4f3f-a01d-e44e6c7b5983 | Brendan Frederick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brendan-frederick/ | |
The timeless score to David Lynch’s television show doesn't need any visuals to achieve the same sense of unsettling beauty. | The timeless score to David Lynch’s television show doesn't need any visuals to achieve the same sense of unsettling beauty. | Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22327-twin-peaks-ost/ | Twin Peaks OST | As fans of the early-’90s television series and film well know, “Twin Peaks” is a staging ground for conflict between two supernatural locations (or “lodges,” or something). In a famously wigged-out dream sequence, at the the close of the show’s third episode, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper hears an early clue suggesting the nature of this mysterious peril: “One chants out between two worlds: ‘Fire walk with me.’” But by then, the show's soundtrack has already revealed that this town in rural Washington is being manipulated by competing forces. The contest between them is demonstrated every few minutes, thanks to a sweetly naive motif ("Twin Peaks Theme") that can quickly give way to an unsettlingly morbid riff ("Laura Palmer's Theme"). One goes heavy on the piano’s white keys; the other meditates over some black ones.
As the show’s mix of humor and tragedy unfolds, these two compositions guide a viewer’s ability to perceive which mood is holding greater sway. A pleasant moment may end with a startling musical suggestion of horror. Or two characters locked in mutual grief may suddenly find something to laugh about. Situated like the narrative itself between the two worlds pulling on the town of Twin Peaks, the music of the show is eternally with the characters—and the viewers.
Series co-creator David Lynch has always displayed a musician’s facility for nimble, suggestive sound arrangements, going back to his first feature film, Eraserhead. But the potency of his soundtracks hit a new level after the director crossed paths with composer Angelo Badalamenti in the 1980s. Badalamenti contributed original compositions to Lynch’s Blue Velvet and played piano during the performance of the titular pop song. For the first season of “Twin Peaks,” he wrote all the music, with Lynch providing lyrics to tunes sung by Julee Cruise.
In addition to the two mood-setting triumphs that anchor the first season soundtrack to “Twin Peaks,” Badalamenti also came up with brilliant evocations of the show’s various dramatic modes. The bluesy “Freshly Squeezed” defines the show’s approach to seduction. “Dance of the Dream Man” captures the finger-snapping swing of its surreality. Some of the tracks serve multiple purposes, like “Audrey’s Dance,” which starts out as an accessory to chic sleuthing, then stretches out into a dreamy organ drone punctuated by blasts of saxophone and a lascivious clarinet. In these performances, the composer’s keyboard is frequently the star, though jazz drummer Grady Tate’s rhythms are another consistent highlight. Without his subtle, driving percussion, Badalamenti’s mixture of vintage pop and jazz sonics—at once familiar and plenty strange—might not have come off nearly so well.
A great score doesn’t have to play well as an album on its own terms. But this one does. Its tunes are so appealing, Lynch sometimes rips them from their status as commentary on the show’s action and places this music directly into the narrative world. Badalamenti’s pieces show up in jukeboxes that the characters use and in performances by local musicians at the town’s watering holes. When Agent Cooper tries to remember a portion of that crucial dream, he snaps his fingers to the rhythm of the music that originally accompanied the images in his head.
If the characters get to listen to the music all the time, why not fans of the show? During the first wave of “Twin Peaks” mania, its opening theme won a Grammy, while the soundtrack album charted on Billboard. The new edition—licensed by Warner Bros. to the boutique Death Waltz label—features a new vinyl remaster by Tal Miller. Compared to the first CD edition of the album, this version gives greater definition to all the parts of a collage-style piece like “The Bookhouse Boys” (which blends in a bit of “Dance of the Dream Man”).
Elsewhere, the vinyl remaster is more subtly useful than it is revelatory. Which is as it should be, since this music has never sounded thin or in need of help. The vinyl packaging promises a forthcoming reissue of the soundtrack to the movie—Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—that followed the show’s cancellation by ABC. Equally needed are new editions of the show’s second-season soundtrack, as well as Julee Cruise’s album Floating Into the Night (which overlaps with the first-season album a bit, and also contains material from the show that didn’t make this set). But since the “Twin Peaks” revival is still in its early stages, ahead of Showtime’s planned third season in 2017, there's still plenty of time to obsess over those recordings, down the road. For now, the first soundtrack's deft combination of romance and menace provides a stunning reminder of everything Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost dreamed up the first time around. | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Death Waltz | September 10, 2016 | 9 | 34b16e1f-8ad3-4ab0-ab97-930794bc7b0d | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The long-teased sequel to his cult-classic mixtape is a highlight in the Chicago rapper’s career, bringing the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future. | The long-teased sequel to his cult-classic mixtape is a highlight in the Chicago rapper’s career, bringing the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future. | Chief Keef: Almighty So 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chief-keef-almighty-so-2/ | Almighty So 2 | At just 28, Chief Keef has churned out dozens of projects in nearly as many different styles. His influence can be felt from rap’s top rung like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert to the toasted digital landscapes of new-age acolytes like Xaviersobased and Devstacks. He’s one of the pioneers of the Chicago drill sound, and while there have been peaks and valleys—being a volume shooter often comes at the expense of a spotless track record—he’s never lost the thrilling “Lex Luger and Brick Squad dipped in the Chicago River” quality he’s been honing since the “Faneto” days. Even when he’d miss, the boldness of his experiments kept heads intrigued.
One of those peaks was 2013’s Almighty So, a mixtape where Keef and a slew of producers melded drill with the chirpy cloud-rap-adjacent aesthetic that would soon populate SoundCloud. Street rappers weren’t spitting over production like Yung Lan’s “Ape Shit” or Abe Beats’ “Young Rambos” back then, and that adventurousness, coupled with bars comparing guns to dildos, turned Almighty So into a cult classic among fans and slightly younger contemporaries. Between arrests, label disputes, and being blacklisted from shows in his home city (until recently), Keef’s been through a lot on and off the mic over the last decade. Through it all, a sequel to Almighty So, first announced in 2018, has lingered in the margins. Despite Keef’s reservations about being hooked on drugs during that era, it garnered the kind of mythic status usually reserved for alt-rap team-ups and AAA albums that never were. But Almighty So 2 is real, as vibrant and busy and flippant as anything Keef’s ever made, a capstone that brings the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future.
What stands out most about Almighty So 2 is just how different it is compared to the original. As opposed to hiring a dozen producers, Keef employs himself on all but one of 16 tracks. So 1 is airy and saturated, the audio equivalent of watching a neon sign flicker and short out. So 2 crashes in like the Kool-Aid man, leaving a trail of sticky footprints. It also borrows and mutates elements from other Keef extravaganzas: The Trap-A-Holics tributes dotted across this year’s Mike WiLL Made-It collab Dirty Nachos seem to have influenced the drops for fake radio station 4NEM Radio that pop up here; Ghanaian-Liberian comedian Michael Blackson, whose interludes powered much of 2013’s Bang Part 2, is back and desperately trying to make his DJ Drama-esque ad-libs funny. But these would just be nostalgic touches without Keef and his co-producers’ enveloping beats. On “Jesus Skit,” Blackson’s cloying bit about Black entertainers getting reparations is drowned out by Keef, Slowburnz, and MBZ’s production, their hellish keyboard stabs and Gatling-gun drums transitioning smoothly into Keef and longtime collaborator Lil Gnar’s verses on “Jesus.” It’s an update on an older formula that is fuller and more ambitious.
Keef’s ear has always been geared toward the dramatic, and Almighty So 2 gives his gothic raps a new grandeur. His best songs have a certain rawness to them, but here, the mixes are crisper, more professional-sounding. Leveling up in the studio can sometimes mean sanding off the edges, but every one of these songs is diamond-sharp. “Almighty (Intro)” takes a sample of the oft-used Carl Orff composition “O Fortuna” and chops it up while snare drums flurry underneath, building tension as a voice levels affirmations and insults for over a minute (“Your mama could have you all over again, you still couldn’t be me”). Then Keef comes in and the drums gallop while he drops bizarre flexes (“She put my nut in her cup and she chased her Patrón”) and points out how his come-up was ordained: “I was born in ’95, I been ready since ’91…Sense a cougar headin’ for that ass? Boy, you better run.” It checks every box for a great rap intro and puts Keef in pole position to floor it.
So 2 is this big all the way through. Keef stays restless, indulging wild thoughts and building them out to feature-length productions. “Drifting Away” is a marvel of Zaytoven-esque pianos, 808 thumps, glitching synths, and digital flutes that shimmer and stomp behind Keef’s money talk and jabs at Kanye West’s claims of innovating drill music. Ironically, it sounds far removed from drill, like it would’ve slotted as neatly on Uzi’s Eternal Atake or any one of TisaKorean’s last few albums. That’s the magic of Chief Keef—even when he’s sticking to the script, he can make the unexpected happen. Tierra Whack might not have been the first rapper to come to mind for a Keef collab, but she catches a vicious double-time flow over the back half of “Banded Up” that perfectly compliments Keef’s half-time yelps. Would you ever expect Keef to say “I start wearing yellow diamonds, it look like I peed myself” and comparing enemies to the old mascot for Honeycombs cereal over angelic choir vocals on “Treat Myself”? Or to work Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett samples into a roaring vintage drill track on “1,2,3”? Or to fit triplet drum rolls over spiraling piano keys on “Neph Nem”? The fact that they all feel left-field and like no-brainers is a testament to Keef’s sustained ability to surprise after 15 years.
With that confidence comes a new investment in his legacy. Keef’s still focused on present and future success, but he spends just as much of Almighty So 2 considering his arduous journey to the top. Regret and longing aren’t new to him, but at the end of his first verse on “Jesus,” he briefly works through the perspective shift that came with his move from Chicago to California. The streets of his mind are less active but he remembers every run-up. “Prince Charming” is one of several songs packed with the kind of memories treasured most by those who make it out: advice from his grandmother, the bologna that used to be on his plate, situations that made his “front yard look like a GTA car meet.”
Chief Keef put out his first mixtape at 14, recorded his breakout song “I Don’t Like” two years later while on house arrest, and found himself at the center of a label bidding war before he was a legal adult. Think about where he’s come since then. While he’s had his fair share of blunders and petulant ignorance, Almighty So 2 has more consideration for what it means to be one of the most influential rapper-producers of his generation. There’s a sense that with a larger canvas, he’s being more careful with his words and more deliberate about creating the largest rendition of himself possible. This colors every moment on So 2, from threesomes in his home movie theater to the regret of being too gone off lean to enjoy his spoils. “I could live in the jungle and come out with a hyena hat,” he says plainly on “Believe,” like he’s savoring having the rap game in his hands. After carving your own lane, seeing it transform three times over, and living to talk about it before you turn 30, what better way is there to celebrate? | 2024-05-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 43B | May 14, 2024 | 8.4 | 34b8248e-1b77-42d2-8b90-1670d0a0b2cd | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Manchester quartet is still stuck as an imitation act, but their love for 2000s-era singer-songwriter pop—and their star potential—comes through. | The Manchester quartet is still stuck as an imitation act, but their love for 2000s-era singer-songwriter pop—and their star potential—comes through. | Pale Waves: Who Am I? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pale-waves-who-am-i/ | Who Am I? | With their steely, eyelinered gaze and leather jackets, Pale Waves look like the kind of band that knows how it wants to be seen. Though their output is fairly new—they’ve released two albums, 2018’s My Mind Makes Noises and their latest, Who Am I?—they’ve been around for the better half of a decade, founded in 2014 when vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie and drummer Ciara Doran met at university in Manchester. They gained international attention three years later, when the 1975 frontman Matty Healy took the band under his wing, signing them to his label, Dirty Hit, directing a music video, and occasionally serving as producer. “The songs were there, so my involvement in writing was only editing,” Healy told NME in 2017. “I always have a fear of being overbearing. I know what it’s like to want to be prided on your own merits.”
But the bubbly synths, 1980s-style guitar riffs, and syrupy vocal melodies on My Mind Makes Noises frequently sounded like a less experienced 1975 anyway. On Who Am I?, Pale Waves forgo ’80s revival entirely to take cues from Baron-Gracie’s avowed hero Avril Lavigne and shared elements of 2000s singer-songwriters like Michelle Branch or Kelly Clarkson: effervescent electric hooks, strummy acoustic backup, and demure harmonies. Although Pale Waves is still stuck as an imitation act, their love for this strand of pop-rock certainly comes through, resulting in some of the most pleasantly sugared Britpop since the 2010s-era Mumford & Sons invasion.
Aside from the moody cover art, an instantly recognizable homage to Let Go, Lavigne’s influence is most obvious on “Change,” whose guitar-led catharsis is the musical and thematic little sister to “Complicated.” Baron-Gracie’s cries of, “Now you act like I’m nobody/But you still want to go down on me” is an edgier echo of, “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” It’s easy to imagine “Change” falling flat in its imitation, but Pale Waves manage to make a song nearly as good as the original. The rebellious sunshine of “You Don’t Own Me” will make you wish you were skipping school, and “Wish U Were Here,” a lonelier “Kiss Me” filled with comparable yearning, indicate that Pale Waves know exactly what it takes to power a resurgence of ’00s guitar pop. They prioritize characteristic big-but-innocent emotions like love and loss, clever lyrics worth scratching into your notebook, and guitar melodies as sweetly weepy as you imagine your crush to be.
But at times, Who Am I? starts to feel sleepy, suffering from a lack of personality. The line between Pale Waves’ own positive qualities and those they’ve borrowed from their inspirations is wire-thin, and though they clearly know what makes a good guitar-pop song, they haven’t figured out how to make a better one. Baron-Gracie’s singing suffers from too much air, and she wheezes at the end of nearly every sung phrase, a habit that’s only charming on occasion. A pared-down song like the eponymous ballad “Who Am I?” puts Pale Waves’ songwriting and skill to the test, but winds up sounding more like a demo than the closing track of their second studio album.
But this band isn’t without its charms, or the potential for Avril-level recognition that Baron-Gracie is so inspired by. Her vocal limitations, although very present, are distinctive. She cultivates an inspirationally ostentatious goth look and writes lyrics about gay love with tender simplicity (one of the album’s best songs, “She’s My Religion,” is a reverential ode to a partner’s flaws; Baron-Gracie’s girlfriend stars in the music video). She’s primed to become the lesbian rock star young gay girls like me have dreamed of since childhood, the kind that just didn’t really exist in the mainstream until recently. The dewy-eyed sound of Who Am I? appeals to a younger generation, confirming that modern Britpop doesn’t always equate to aggressive young men—it can be gentle goths with their friends, writing songs for kids hoping to figure out who they are. All Pale Waves have to do now is figure out the answer to that question themselves.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | February 18, 2021 | 6.2 | 34bffd71-5ce6-420e-af23-da5ac6a43406 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/602beb81c232c7cb3c832d1b/1:1/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit/Pale%20Waves%20-%20Who%20Am%20I |
Where so many artists give their work the sonic equivalent of a fake tan when they try to "warm" it up with analog sounds, the Russian singer and producer Kedr Livanskiy captures the charm of listening to dance music that’s been taped off a late-night radio broadcast. | Where so many artists give their work the sonic equivalent of a fake tan when they try to "warm" it up with analog sounds, the Russian singer and producer Kedr Livanskiy captures the charm of listening to dance music that’s been taped off a late-night radio broadcast. | Kedr Livanskiy: January Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21661-january-sun/ | January Sun | The first thing you hear on January Sun, the debut EP by Russian singer/electronic producer Kedr Livanskiy (real name Yana Kedrina) is a Nintendo-like synth figure fading away, an envelope filter squeezing the life out of it. A rudimentary combination of beats emerges, one of which sounds like the sped-up bossa nova preset on an inexpensive junk keyboard meant for kids ages 3 and up; the other a prototypical hi-hat figure that has "I’ve just started experimenting with house music" written all over it. As dreamy-but-crude synth pads, hand claps, and Kedrina's vocals all join in, it's easy to mistake the song ("Razrushitelniy Krug") as an unremarkable piece of lo-fi house music, made by someone without a developed sense for how to arrange an instrumental backdrop.
But she quickly proves that not to be the case. Her production touch is too delicate to consign this EP to the same bin as other music current music that arrives already dated because it reeks of Instagram. Where so many artists give their work the sonic equivalent of a fake tan when they try to "warm" it up, Kedrina captures the charm of listening to dance music that’s been taped off a late-night radio broadcast. As such, her nods to the past appear to stem from romance rather than cynical fascination with kitsch.
"Winds of May," for example, begins with a wash of queasy synth melodrama, the likes of which Boards Of Canada turned into a career 20 years ago. Like many tracks on this EP, it sounds like it’s being played on a sluggish tape deck, but here there’s an occasional pitch-up effect, as if you were listening to a tape that sat in a basement for years and skitters forward every time one of its reels makes a full turn. On "Sgoraet" (The Burning Down) and the title track, Kedrina dons her David Gahan hat and captures the flashy brooding of Black Celebration/Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. Of course, Depeche Mode’s stock in trade was to turn personal angst into stadium-sized gestures that mimicked the collective hysteria of political rallies. Kedrina turns that vibe on its ear by catching a tiny bit of it in a bottle and setting it loose on a dingy, half-empty dancefloor.
A close look at the lyrics reveals further layers of interpretation and displacement. The EP title appears on the album cover in Russian, while the song titles alternate between Russian and English. Kedrina's vocals alternate between the two languages as well, but are all listed in English. And even when she does sing in English, her delivery verges on formless much like those wordless ethereal female vocals that became Orbital’s trademark. So even when you’re reading the James Joyce verses that she quotes on "Winds of May"—"Winds of May, that dance on the sea / Dancing a ring-around in glee / From furrow to furrow, while overhead / The foam flies up to be garlanded"—her phrasing creates a sense of distance that isn’t attributable to language barrier alone.
January Sun closes with an acappella version of "Razrushitelniy Krug"/Destructive Cycle (alternately listed as "Cyclic Strength of Destruction")that, even coming as it does after a bunch of songs with spartan arrangements heavy with primitive reverbs, feels like a curveball. With her voice echoing as if across a valley, Kedrina frees the EP from the confines of her home-recording setup, or the provincial Russian club where one can easily imagine her spinning records on an off night. On their own, her vocals take on a stately elegance, and her unbound Russian verses carry and drift. As a coda to her first musical statement, it is both striking and subtle. Whatever direction Kedrina chooses to move in with Kedr Livanskiy from here, the agility she shows on January Sun suggests that we should be watching her.
Correction: The original version of this review referred to producer/singer Yana Kedrina as "Kedr Livanskiy." Kedr Livanskiy is the name of the project. | 2016-03-02T01:00:07.000-05:00 | 2016-03-02T01:00:07.000-05:00 | Electronic | 2MR | March 2, 2016 | 7.8 | 34c40656-9c16-4f94-b43b-4f11624fffd6 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Stretching out keys, piano, and pedal steel in wide-open space, the ambient country trio’s new album underlines the vast scale of evolutionary time. | Stretching out keys, piano, and pedal steel in wide-open space, the ambient country trio’s new album underlines the vast scale of evolutionary time. | SUSS: Birds & Beasts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suss-birds-and-beasts/ | Birds & Beasts | SUSS evoke the blistering days and chilly nights of an American desert. Their take on “ambient country,” a term they apparently coined, is elegant, luxurious, and teeming with technology—less like actually living in the Mojave than watching a time-lapse of the sky dappling its mesas and buttes. The New York trio leans hard into these imagined environs: A 2022 self-titled album featured songs titled “Gallup, NM” and “Needles, CA,” communities along Route 66 that the group’s members knew mostly from the vantage of the tour van. If the cowboy shtick sounds like cosplay, it disguises an equally prominent Downtown sensibility: SUSS, once a quartet with synth wizard Gary Leib before his unexpected death in 2021, weave their sound with a legacy of improvisation that has as much to do with the genre experiments of the Kitchen and the ’90s Knitting Factory as, say, the Grand Ole Opry. The potentially straw-thin gimmickry of “ambient country” is a vessel for urban yearnings, daydreams of pastoral life conjured up in the confinement of the metropolis.
It helps that the band, which now comprises pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg and multi-instrumentalists Bob Holmes and Pat Irwin (onetime guitarist for the B-52’s), emerged during the final years of the last decade, both an efflorescent period for ambient music and a moment when country was becoming more palatable to a wider variety of listeners. SUSS highlight a big-sky sweep that informed the former genre throughout its history: Pedal steel set a tone on Brian Eno’s scene-defining 1983 record Apollo, resurfaced on the KLF’s 1990 game-changer Chill Out, and took centerstage on Bruce Kaphan’s underknown 2001 record Slider, a focal point for the seemingly walleyed convergence of new age and Americana. SUSS’s 2018 debut, Ghost Box, may not have forged an original style, but it drew a bright red circle around ambient aesthetics that had always hidden in plain sight. Sometimes, putting a name to the unnameable is what innovation is all about.
Their new album, Birds & Beasts, takes the time-lapse metaphor to its extreme. The record seems to deal in eons, in the slow progression of ecology—the movements of fauna and the death and rebirth of flora. One can feel millennia pass in this record. The songs are wordless, aside from some muffled speech samples, so the only clues to their themes are SUSS’ highly suggestive song titles—“Migration,” for example, or “Overstory,” which brings to mind a verdant, thick canopy in a part of the world that has since become dusty and arid. (Not to mention novelist Richard Powers’ 2018 lament for the death of trees.) Many of the tunes are based around sighing keys, piano, and pedal steel, but “Restless” and “Flight” forefront finger-picked guitar rhythms, the sound of a small animal scurrying across a huge landscape.
The interplay between wide, somber space and the staccato optimism of enduring life makes for the most thoughtfully structured record of SUSS’s career. Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib. These seven tracks are full of delicate balances, so immaculately produced that supple details assume their own life—the way that the guitar melody barely floats on the surface of “Restless,” for example, or how Gregg’s pedal steel seems to shift its direction in the middle of the song, as though the band just reversed the current of a river.
The only cut to feature their late bandmate is “Migration,” which has kicked around in the SUSS songbook for years before ending up as this album’s closer. The most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Restless” and “Flight”—is sewn by thin stitches of guitar, diaphanous parts that keep this patchwork whole. Meanwhile, Holmes’ harmonica offers a sense of yearning, a train whistle heard in a one-horse town.
Such connotations bring with them all of the postmodern weight and irony accrued since America developed a vocabulary for describing the culture (one-horse!) of its sprawling heartland. Ditto the song’s buried vocal loops, most of them inaudible, although we can hear a male voice say, “Finally, they believed that they had the answers,” a self-serious exclamation that fizzles out like a distant radio signal. We begin the album with an image of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and end thinking about humanity as it zooms forth so quickly that the world-expanding achievements of yesteryear become quaint, bits of modern archaeology familiar enough that they have become part of our species’ natural habitat.
SUSS revel in slippery distinctions between the manmade and the organic, the way that a synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the right hands. Their latest, though, puts human achievement in context—our entire civilization, this searching, glacial music seems to tell us, is merely a blip at the tail end of a slow evolution. Or, in other words: Birds & Beasts offers the revelation of a cross-country road trip, when the towns fall away and the land becomes grander, when people begin to feel as small as they actually are. | 2024-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | July 5, 2024 | 7.8 | 34ca82d3-763f-4a6a-b144-4c59fbebfb81 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Where the Virginia duo’s previous records fused rap, techno, and other aggressive forms, its new album lumbers into a terrifying new realm of noise. | Where the Virginia duo’s previous records fused rap, techno, and other aggressive forms, its new album lumbers into a terrifying new realm of noise. | Prison Religion: Hard Industrial B.O.P. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prison-religion-hard-industrial-bop/ | Hard Industrial B.O.P. | Prison Religion are masters of agitation. The Virginia-based duo of Warren Jones and Parker Black has spent the last few years grinding established tropes of noise, rap, and dance music to shreds. Though they have occasionally flirted with established song structures, the most chilling moments in their catalog let their tracks spiral into chaotic collages of noisy abstractions and misshapen rhythms. Even when they stop screaming, their instrumentals are terrifying on their own.
Hard Industrial B.O.P., their new project on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, pushes Prison Religion further into this uncharted territory, foregrounding the brittle noise and teeth-rattling sound design that has always been an unsettling undercurrent in their music. On some of the duo’s earliest work together, like 2016’s Cage W Mirrored Bars, their queasy reflections of hardcore and rap inhabited the same universe that spawned noise-pop experimenters Black Dresses and New York boundary-pushers like Kill Alters or Machine Girl. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. feels like the next step in an ongoing evolution of their sound, pushing them further into seasick noise and cochlea-shredding distortion.
From opener “Bite” it’s clear that they’re drifting into the outer realms of electronic experimentation. It begins with an unsettling synth drone that sounds like a snippet of a Tangerine Dream film score playing from a pay-phone receiver and only gets more menacing from there, piling on distorted mumbling, distant screaming, and piercing, atonal textures. Tracks like “Banshee, Pale Fire, Landing” lock into legible rhythms (and you might make out a lyric or two if you listen closely), but even these moments are overwhelming and strange, scuffed with bristly electronics and ominous drones. Aided in part by collagist producer S280F (aka Lilith Treglia), Black and Jones conjure up sounds gloomier and more hair-raising than much of their prior catalog. Hard Industrial B.O.P. offers little respite.
All this chaos is by design. Prison Religion have said that they imagine the record as a provocation akin to the hard bop that challenged the jazz of the 1950s. Their music demonstrates a conscious desire to upend established forms. While previous records attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of experimental rap, hardcore techno, and other aggressive forms, tracks like “Survival, Leave me alone” are pointedly more gnarled and crushing than anything they’ve released to date. Here, Prison Religion sound interested mainly in letting out all the negativity they’ve been holding in, without worrying about anything like a memorable melody. Something this horrifying is hard to forget anyway.
Jones and Black have occasionally approached their music—heavy as it is—with a sense of humor. They called a 2018 release O FUCC IM ON THE WRONG PLANET and named a song after Nibiru, a fictional planet that some conspiracy theorists believe is on a cataclysmic path to destroy Earth. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. is more straightforwardly grim, serious, and, consequently, impactful. They have said that they felt that they were duty-bound to make a record that reflected the tumultuous time in the world that birthed it. “In this era, how can we look to space?” they write, bemoaning the seemingly inescapable oppression inherent in modern life. In response, they simply scream, aiming a cosmic cry at an unfeeling universe. | 2022-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | UIQ | June 30, 2022 | 7.4 | 34ce2029-5ea6-4462-931b-7da0cee11024 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On their 1992 sophomore record, UK shoegazers Ride managed one thing My Blood Valentine never accomplished after Loveless: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record. | On their 1992 sophomore record, UK shoegazers Ride managed one thing My Blood Valentine never accomplished after Loveless: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record. | Ride: Going Blank Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17072-going-blank-again/ | Going Blank Again | If the intent of reissuing Ride's first two LPs was to change the group's reputation of being the perennial runner-ups of the shoegaze era-- the human foil to the divine My Bloody Valentine, a great band rather than a legendary one-- then this campaign has been a miserable failure. Mostly because the truth wins out: "The Story of Going Blank Again" contains the following quotes from the members of Ride: "It's a steady work process, which is a great way to do an album," "It was fun, it was a team effort," "I think it was the closest together as a band we ever were. There was no tension, no conflict. Everything just seemed to work."
Ride didn't bankrupt Creation Records; in fact, they partied with Alan McGee. They never advanced the image of being hermetic visionaries; they had to force themselves to stop socializing with other bands. They never disappeared for years on end and would later release some universally reviled trad-rock albums that doubled as applications to open for Oasis, or in the case of Andy Bell, to be in Oasis. But on Going Blank Again, Ride managed one thing MBV never accomplished after Loveless and probably never will: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record.
It might not change the narrative surrounding Ride, but hopefully it does raise the question of why Going Blank Again is assumed to be the contrarian's choice for the band's true masterpiece. Some of it is pretty understandable: Going Blank Again is a noticeably lighter affair and lacks the monolithic heft of its predecessor, which is readily apparent from their respective album art. I mean, compare the two covers, which one looks like the classic to you? Perhaps more crucially, Going Blank Again was without a movement, the UK looking to move past shoegaze towards something more personality-driven, though it wasn't clear quite what yet.
Strange thing is, Ride could be included in that. Many lesser bands followed in Ride's wake, and "Leave Them All Behind" is as close as a mission statement that you're gonna get from a band whose lyrics are mostly nonsense. Bell and Mark Gardener's guitars somehow got even louder and it can initially register as Nowhere Plus, but it also sets the tone in how Going Blank Again would distinguish itself. "Seagull" started Nowhere with a peal of feedback and six minutes of trebly squall that only revealed its layers when played at tinnitus-inducing levels. Blessed with Alan Moulder's crystalline production, the salutation of "Leave Them All Behind" is a reverberating Hammond organ and an extremely punchy drum break from Loz Colbert, which acknowledge the two encroaching threads of influence of the band: the first of the Who, reflecting Ride's increasing stadium-readiness, the latter acknowledging the influx of hip-hop and funk breakbeats into UK rock.
It might be meant as the valedictory speech of shoegaze, but it isn't actually shoegaze at all, not in the sense where the genre's main goal was to obliterate or obscure. Every single element of "Leave Them All Behind" is voluminous, but not just in sheer loudness: It's overwhelming, not oppressive, and the sonic expanse is even more mindblowing with this remastering job. Bell and Gardener's barnstorming guitars, Steve Queralt's girder-thick bassline, and Colbert's Moon-sized drum fills all could fill canyons individually, yet never once does it sound like something other than four guys in a room, which explains why Ride was pretty much the only band of their ilk that was as good live as they were on record. That said, the inclusion of the Live at Brixton DVD is mostly notable for its stupendously dated visuals.
The band adamantly demanded "Leave It All Behind" be the lead single, and it reached No. 9 in Britain, their first Top 10 hit. This would seemingly bode well for Going Blank Again's fortunes considering the next single was the giddy, nonsensical "Twisterella". Drawing from the same sugar-spun power-pop of labelmates Teenage Fanclub as well as the cuts from The Stone Roses equally influenced by acid and ecstasy, it was rightfully described by the band as their "ace card." Yet it was a baffling flop on the charts and Ride released no more singles from there on out.
Shame, too, as Going Blank Again should have been able to take advantage of its depth and diversity, its main trump over Nowhere. You get Television-styled guitar interplay and Bell and Gardener's most tossed-off lyrics on "Not Fazed". "Chrome Waves" shot for "Unfinished Sympathy", but landed somewhere closer to Seal's "Crazy" and was all the better for it. "Leave Them All Behind" has an equally colossal bookend in "OX4", though the addition of four bonus tracks from the Leave Them All Behind and Twisterella EPs are hardly an unwelcome appendage (particularly "Grasshopper"). And there are the goofy pop songs like "Twisterella" which arguably worked against Going Blank Again's legacy, and even the band will admit the flower-child spoof of "Making Judy Smile" isn't its best work.
Because the typical selling point of shoegaze-- there's classic pop under all that noise!-- doesn't quite explain what Ride excelled at. Speaking on the origin of "Mouse Trap", Bell observed, "occasionally you discover a chord sequence that you'd be quite happy to play for two hours non-stop." There's about eight or so of those on Going Blank Again. Even with Ride's aim to integrate more true pop songwriting, much of Going Blank Again wisely follows the wake of the immortal "Vapour Trail", which rode out a single gorgeous progression for nearly its entirety, its only flaw stopping at four minutes instead of eight. More and more, I think the true impact of hip-hop on Ride wasn't evident in Colbert's drum fills so much as their seeing chord progressions as rhythmic beds as much as melodic ones, the way a rapper might treat a breakbeat. As such, Ride proved to be a band that operated in largesse more than finesse: simply building on these perfect chord changes for five minutes at a time with stretched out vocal harmonies, a brief shift of a couple of bars into a minor key, erratic tempo changes toward the thrilling end of "Cool Your Boots", bent soloing on "Leave Them All Behind", a 12-string riff breaking up the middle of "Mouse Trap". The pleasures of Going Blank Again are cumulative, and if you simply love the sound of guitars-- clean ones, distorted ones, overdriven Leslie amps, Les Pauls, Rickenbackers, whatever-- this is about as indulgent as it gets.
Perhaps the timing is just convenient, but Going Blank Again feels more similar to the recently reissued version of Sugar's Copper Blue than anything that's strictly identifiable as shoegaze. It's certainly reckoning with the aftermath of Loveless and an awareness of Nevermind, if not necessarily its influence. But they're both records that feel welcome 20 years later, because while their more famed peers have influenced hundreds of pale imitators, these more approachable records feel strangely undervalued. Because really, what was the last new band to bear the influence of Sugar or Ride? Not even in strict sonic similarity, since it's hard to imagine the brassy acoustic guitars you hear on "Chrome Waves" ever coming back into vogue. But more in how there's an unfortunate void of very loud, very catchy, and very polished guitar bands that aren't ashamed of commercial ambitions. You can learn a lot from Going Blank Again: Come up with four chords worth repeating for four minutes, hum a pretty melody, overdub the guitars, overdub them again, and make the drums even louder. It's not the stuff of legends, but we need great records, too. | 2012-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Ride | August 17, 2012 | 8.7 | 34de32b5-43db-46ad-9509-5219a59e4eb6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Future Mercury Prize contenders continue to make it difficult for us to take UK hypes very seriously. | Future Mercury Prize contenders continue to make it difficult for us to take UK hypes very seriously. | Everything Everything: Man Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14611-man-alive/ | Man Alive | There's a recurring gag on "The Simpsons" based around Homer's gluttony leading to all manner of culinary curiosities: sometimes the results work, as with his patented Space-Age Out-of-This-World Moon Waffles (caramel, waffle batter, a stick of butter, liquid smoke); more often than not, he finds out the hard way that a combination of, say, Tom Collins mix, cloves, and a frozen pie crust is no substitute for a decent breakfast. Like that disaster, Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.
Even before you consider their name, song titles like "My Kz, Ur Bf", "Qwerty Finger", and "Photoshop Handsome" imply EE are a product of media overload and social-networking culture-- the self-absorbed musical equivalent of having 12 browsers open at the same time. To apparently a lot of people this is a good thing. (Sample prerelease hype: EE sound like the Futureheads and Animal Collective.) But stuffing everything humanly possible into your songs can be overwhelming, if not identity-sapping. The first 10 or so seconds of this record is pretty much the only span with any negative space-- and even that resembles the obelisk-staring intro of Coldplay's "Square One". From there on, Man Alive is jacked up with bizarre key changes, superfluous time-signature switches, electro noodling, and half-rap lyrics delivered in run-on melodies, and you ultimately think, "hey, what would happen if Dismemberment Plan got a crash course in Pro Tools and a record deal with Fueled By Ramen?" Everything Everything aren't afraid to answer those tough questions.
All jokes aside, it actually is an interesting gambit to find a continuum within all of those coordinates in terms of bands interacting with personal computing-- after all, D-Plan had a frontman who was essentially a poptimist blogger before we knew what to call it. But even crediting Everything Everything's unclassifiable combination of itchy art-rock, pop-locking electro, and straight-up Brit indie to musical omnivorism, there's a problem that is impossible to get around: If anyone's got a more irritating voice than Jonathan Everything, they probably also have a harp and a few good stories to tell. It's not the constant falsetto that's the problem-- Passion Pit and the Darkness had that, but they also owned their own ridiculousness (not to mention songwriting chops). Jonathan Everything merely inflicts wispy, intrusive papercuts on your eardrums. Hearing it for the first time is akin to seeing a roach-- unpleasant and unexpected, but then you start to worry about where you'll find the next one. And Man Alive is absolutely infested.
And yet, I'd still recommend at least a cursory shot at "My Kz, Ur Bf", because even if it's a particularly annoying song and you can't quite pick out whether Everything is seeking to get caught in flagrante with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, it does have something of a pleasant whiff of 90s alternative radio. Granted, it comes on way too strong and is a complete mess, but it's certainly *their mess. *Credit Everything Everything for finding their own niche, but it's one that's been unoccupied for good reason. | 2010-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | September 15, 2010 | 3.8 | 34e61637-5e69-4e73-aead-a61964d9c0bf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Sacramento rapper’s six-song EP brings his themes of psychological trauma to the foreground, suggesting alternate readings of his previous work. | The Sacramento rapper’s six-song EP brings his themes of psychological trauma to the foreground, suggesting alternate readings of his previous work. | Mozzy: Spiritual Conversations EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mozzy-spiritual-conversations-ep/ | Spiritual Conversations EP | “No Choice,” the third song from Mozzy’s new EP, Spiritual Conversations, opens: “You don’t wanna live like this, let it sink in.” The line is a callback to the title track from Bladadah, one of the Sacramento rapper’s handful of breakout moments: “It’s deeper than a punchline or trying to sound lyrical/You don’t wanna live like this, my life difficult.” Mozzy’s music, typified by last year’s excellent 1 Up Top Ahk, has long meshed menace with a moral center, where the violence is unapologetic but not unexamined. Spiritual and psychological trauma seem to guide his songwriting, but they appear most frequently as subtext, or as codas on extended narratives. Spiritual Conversations brings those concerns to the foreground. While none of these six songs would be out of place on any other Mozzy record, hearing them arranged here, one after another, serves not only as an interesting aside in his catalog but a suggestion for alternate readings of his previous works.
Mozzy was raised in Sacramento’s Oak Park district, the grandson of a Black Panther, and surrounded by Bloods. He’s been rapping since he was a preteen in the late ’90s, but in the past four years has begun to amass a formidable following, tentacling from Northern California down the coast and through the rap internet. (Earlier this year, he was tapped to appear on the Black Panther soundtrack after Kendrick Lamar quoted him in a Grammys acceptance speech.) He drops music at a remarkable pace, but unlike many of his digital-native contemporaries, he organizes nearly all of his music into traditionally formatted LPs and EPs, which has its benefits but makes it less inviting for die-hards to pick and choose and rearrange songs to build narrative and counter-narratives about the artist’s work. Spiritual Conversations is a compelling listen simply for the fact that it seems to be in conversation with Mozzy’s larger catalog.
The songs themselves are emotionally balanced and lushly produced. On “In My Prayers,” the rap success is a little hollow—it “don’t excite” his mom and does even less to sway the judge. Mozzy’s a dexterous writer, and at times the real-world concerns melt down—giving way to tightly wound word games—then crystallize again at the end of the riddle: “We do the Dolce Gabbana down to the drawers/Google the goon, bodies/They poppin’ up on the blogs.” Think a W. Bush-era Cam’ron with no taste for paparazzi. But instead of moving on to the next fragment, he lets the killing breathe, rapping, “Murder be justifiable when it’s probable cause/But that don’t make up for the losses/Not at all.” It’s a concise reading of a worldview that allows for incredible violence but doesn’t deny the trauma that comes with it.
Spiritual Conversations is best condensed in the hook of “Who I Am”: “They could never live how I live/This shit trife, but it is what it is.” For as deeply as he burrows into the mechanics of murder plots or the soul-wrenching guilt in their aftermath, he tends to write and rap from a place of control, as if he’s a therapist recapping his patient’s manic account. The EP is not an ideal point of entry into Mozzy’s catalog, but as the spotlight brightens and he looks to flesh out his public persona, it’s a more than a worthwhile addendum. | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mozzy / Empire | March 12, 2018 | 6.8 | 34e7c45a-5cc3-4bc6-ba60-1414e12f0109 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Rebranding himself as a kind of everyman Mark Ronson, the EDM superstar steps out from behind the booth with an album of 1980s-inspired boogie. | Rebranding himself as a kind of everyman Mark Ronson, the EDM superstar steps out from behind the booth with an album of 1980s-inspired boogie. | Calvin Harris: Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/calvin-harris-funk-wav-bounces-vol-1/ | Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 | It’s been a decade since Calvin Harris released his debut album, I Created Disco, establishing himself as the Scottish fish-‘n’-chip-shop version of LCD Soundsystem—just the first of many guises in his highly lucrative career as a dance-party-starter. Highlights have included a Rihanna partnership, a DJ residency at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand, where his visage covered several floors of the hotel, and a prime position atop a wave of all-conquering EDM while simultaneously modeling Armani Y-fronts. He became to the clubbing world what Jason Statham is to Hollywood blockbusters: chameleon enough to turn his hand to the latest franchise (in Harris’ case, drop-laden rave anthems, sexy deep house numbers, etc.), and happy to carry the action from the background. But by the laws of party-pill physics, what goes up must come down. So what happens when the host gets a hunch that the lights are about to come on, leaving the dancefloor empty?
All business, he hedges his bets on his fifth album, making savvily risk-averse decisions. Having proven his mettle as the one-man Brill Building of doof-doof hits, he’s forgone investing wads of energy into radio-ready house smashes. Instead, he provides post-disco mood lighting for a guestlist of pop and R&B singers and rap MCs already stalking the charts on their own merits: Future, Migos, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande, to name a few. Bearing a ludicrous title whose sketchbook-like connotations are at odds with the music's supreme polish, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 invites them under one roof for a sundown-to-sunrise evening of 1980s-inspired boogie.
At its most successful, the album has already proven itself a sturdy soundtrack to the summer of 2017, via a series of singles in which Harris fully soaks up the laid-back vibes of his adopted home of Los Angeles. The reggae-tinged “Feels” is a tropical jammer ripe for a Malibu barbecue, whereas the piano-gliding “Slide” sets the scene for a breezy sunset drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, and the G-Funk-leaning “Rollin” takes the after-party to the skating rink. At its worst, it amounts to expensively made elevator music—a simpler cousin to Daft Punk’s more efficiently crafted Random Access Memories. The Nicki Minaj-featuring “Skrt on Me,” for example, employs a dancehall rhythm so phoned-in it sounds like QVC background music, while the yacht-rock guitars of “Prayers Up” might leave you wondering whether you’re still on hold to housekeeping.
Similar to that Daft Punk LP, this record represents Harris’ own assertion of “real” musicianship, as the superstar DJ attempts to rebrand himself as an everyman Mark Ronson. Just as Daft Punk emphasized live instrumentation and vintage technology, Harris has been posting videos of himself darting between synths, guitars, and computers in the studio. Since his debut album, Harris has produced, written, and performed all of his tracks himself, but never before has he quite so insistently reminded us of that fact. In the video for “Feels,” he stands lanky behind Pharrell, sporting a newly grown muso beard and slapping his Ibanez 1200. Squint, and he could be Jesse Hughes taking a calypso breather from Eagles of Death Metal.
Still, it’s not as a front-and-center pop star but as the backroom executive where Harris continues to excel. While perfunctory guest vocalists engulfed 18 Months and Motion, this time his A&R skills are more adventurous. Take “Rollin,” for instance. Future’s Auto-Tuned robotics shouldn’t careen so effortlessly into the up-and-coming 19-year-old Khalid’s emotional croon, but somehow they make perfect bedfellows. As further proof that he has his tastemaking ear to the ground, Harris puts breakthrough R&B princess Kehlani’s buttery vocals to great use on the downtempo “Faking It,” balancing Lil Yachty’s teenage rap flow with an air of sophistication. Looking beyond the biggest names, the relatively unknown singer Jessie Reyez, who closes out the record in smoky fashion on the seductive “Hard to Love,” is a welcome find.
Harris wears his newfound sense of relaxation well. Back in February, he teased his forthcoming music by tweeting, “Not feel good music. Feel INCREDIBLE music.” A man of his word, he’s dutifully crafted some dumb-but-fun tunes. Take the Katy Perry-featuring “Feels.” The closest the album comes to a standout hit, it revolves around a silly refrain (“Don’t be afraid to catch feels”) that's so meaningless it may as well be about fishing for sunshine emojis. But Harris has always understood the finer points of mindlessness. Clubbing, after all, is about hedonism, escape, feeling invincible with a cocktail in your hand. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 is a breezy distraction from an emcee stalling while he plans his next party trick. Neither reinventing pop nor changing the course of dance music, it’s a vacation of an album that doubles as the producer’s own stopgap until his next wave comes along. | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Columbia | July 7, 2017 | 6.7 | 34e7f35b-fdd2-4773-96a7-7491c5f9ffc7 | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | null |
With each track set around 100 BPM, this compilation from London’s Wisdom Teeth label allows the artists to stretch out and yield surprisingly dynamic results. | With each track set around 100 BPM, this compilation from London’s Wisdom Teeth label allows the artists to stretch out and yield surprisingly dynamic results. | Various Artists: To Illustrate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-to-illustrate/ | To Illustrate | Most genres of dance music loosely correspond to specific tempo ranges. House thumps away at around 120 beats per minute; techno presses the accelerator to 130; drum’n’bass carves its tornado-like path anywhere between 160 and 180. These buckets are, in part, a practical consideration, facilitating the DJ’s beatmatching. But there’s also an expressive dimension to such divisions, and as the lines around subgenres have gradually dissolved, certain tempos have emerged as both organizing principles and creative playgrounds. When dubstep splintered in the late 2000s, some artists began singing the praises of 130 BPM as an umbrella covering bass music, UK funky, broken techno, and similarly rugged, syncopated, quick-stepping styles. Other DJs pledge fealty to 160 BPM as the sweet spot where drum’n’bass and footwork overlap. To Illustrate, a new collaborative album via Wisdom Teeth, turns its lens to the other end of the spectrum: 100 BPM, an ostensibly poky zone that yields surprisingly dynamic results.
London’s Wisdom Teeth got its start in 2014 as an outlet for a muscular strain of bass music that came along in dubstep’s wake; its early releases had a severe, spiky aesthetic similar to that of Bristol’s Livity Sound (with whom Wisdom Teeth occasionally shared personnel). But over time, co-founders Facta and K-LONE have opened up the label’s scope to encompass a more varied set of sounds rooted in ambient and home-listening electronica. No matter the tempo, a Wisdom Teeth release tends to be distinguished by its colorful palette and percussive, almost pointillist sensibility. That holds true for To Illustrate as well. The album’s 10 tracks are awash in lush synths and digitally rendered mallet instruments, while its drum sounds are as finely detailed as an intaglio print—a lattice of rimshots, woodblocks, cowbells, and dry, boxy snares. Metallic pings and laser zaps add a futuristic sheen, while tight spirals of dub delay lend a buoyant feeling, like air bubbles rising from a diver’s mouthpiece.
Ten or 15 years ago, a collection of tunes at this tempo might have been geared toward slow-motion disco or house—the sorts of shuffling four-to-the-floor beats that Theo Parrish used to turn out, followed by Kassem Mosse and the Workshop crew. These days, reggaeton’s patterns are the primary point of reference, and they animate almost every track on the comp. Miami producer Nick León’s “Separation Anxiety” is a stern, lurching club banger driven by staggered kicks, staccato accents, and bear-trap snares. Manchester producer Henzo’s “Whirlpool Vanish” has a similarly minimalist sensibility; its buzzing synth bass and herky-jerky movements recall the resolutely digital style of dancehall favored around the turn of the millennium by producers like Sly Dunbar, Lenky Marsden, and Ward 21, and subsequently anthologized on the Mo Wax compilation Now Thing. But even the dreamier, more laid-back cuts, like Facta & K-LONE’s R&B-leaning “Kiss Me, Can’t Sleep” or Bristol duo Glances’ cosmically inclined “Sun Dapple,” tend to follow dembow’s syncopated pulse. That DJ Python—whose Worldwide Unlimited label counts Henzo among its roster—is nowhere to be found here only serves to show just how influential the New York producer’s idea of “deep reggaeton” has been.
While most of To Illustrate’s artists hail from the UK, Facta and K-LONE also look further afield for like-minded souls. Nagoya’s abentis, whose previous work has been influenced by the log-drum sound of South African amapiano, arrays verdant marimba patterns and steady woodpecker taps into fanciful forest music; the Seoul duo Salamanda extend the style they developed on their 2022 album for Mexico City/New York label Human Pitch into a rich, subaquatic funk in which spring-loaded syncopations unleash the kind of energy you might expect from a tightly wound drum’n’bass tune. If the compilation’s title is meant to suggest didactic aims, one lesson is just how much nuance can be wrung from this tempo. With more room between downbeats, there’s more space to stretch out; time becomes elastic, and synths and drums alike can be bent into svelte little curlicues. To Illustrate also proves how easily even the most unassuming idea—like, say, “Let’s slow things down”—can travel around the world, taking root in unexpected ways. | 2022-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Wisdom Teeth | December 29, 2022 | 7.3 | 34e86ed5-9d45-448e-8caa-992692ca8abf | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Remix album features contributions from Alan Braxe, Erol Alkan, Josh Homme, and Final Fantasy, among others. | Remix album features contributions from Alan Braxe, Erol Alkan, Josh Homme, and Final Fantasy, among others. | Death From Above 1979: Romance Bloody Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2588-romance-bloody-romance/ | Romance Bloody Romance | Worst release of 2005. Beyond awful. Listen, I know a lot of people out these parts didn't dig DFA79's mini-metalisms on You're A Woman, I'm A Machine-- too hard, too soft, too boring, not boring enough, vaguely misogynistic, etc. You wrote these things to me and I have all your emails in a file somewhere.
But understand a simple, if not mathematical fact about this two-piece bass-and-drum duo: By necessity their songs have little to them. They're efficient bursts of less-is-more rock that ride riffs hard then cut out right before they stale. I'd have thought at least one motherfucker tapped for this turkey-shot remix project would have figured that out. Instead we get Justice on some reverso Advantage shit, making "Blood on Your Hands" sound like the theme to Super Pitfall, and that game's the fucking worst.
Hey, let's talk Bloc Party's Silent Alarm Remixed, from which we might pretend Romance Bloody Romance took some Ps and Qs. SAR, remember, featured a different producer doing up a different track from the Bloc's debut. Then it came sequenced just like Silent Alarm, and a few of us (me) actually liked it better than the original LP-- more variety, less helicopters, etc. SAR at least made sense, since every Bloc track physically had a bunch of possible reconfigurations. Romance, meanwhile, has four telling remixes of "Black History Month" (the band's worst song), three of "Romantic Rights", an OK new song and a cover of former Peel favorite La Peste's "Better Off Dead". Inexplicably, nobody behind the papers realized after the second or third dude asked to remix "Black History Month" that maybe, maybe, DFA79's songs aren't suited for the full-on remix treatment-- they don't need it either.
Listen, I respect the renewed interest in tripping up rock-kid disco homophobia (still rampant) with these Phoned-in remix blitzes of late. Vice Records, seems, is fighting the good fight. But the Braxe/Falke and Dählback joints here are so flimsy, that vocoder'd out Makuziak futuro-disco bullshit so obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek, I can't imagine anybody really psyched to hit up his neighb Fixed or Making Time party to try out his new Diesel hightops on the dancefloor. Final Fantasy's string arrangements for "Black History" have their charm, sure, but only Trash's Erol Alkan turns in the album's non-bomb, a simple edit of "Romantic Rights" that overlays percussion tracks for an intro and flips the vocal track a disorienting half-step early. Which is saying something: If the game is to make rock tracks playable in clubs, why fuck with them more than you have to? What's so bad about disco edits? | 2005-11-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-11-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Vice | November 22, 2005 | 0.5 | 34e9e8fd-0567-4172-930f-35fb7cc8a54f | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Despite a stripped-down setup of just acoustic guitar and drums, this Bay Area duo hits with a full-band force. Visiter, their Frenchkiss debut, has garnered comparisons to Animal Collective and new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer. | Despite a stripped-down setup of just acoustic guitar and drums, this Bay Area duo hits with a full-band force. Visiter, their Frenchkiss debut, has garnered comparisons to Animal Collective and new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer. | The Dodos: Visiter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11268-visiter/ | Visiter | To understand where San Francisco's Dodos are coming from, just check the weekend itinerary from their most recent visit to L.A. On a Friday, they did a campus show for USC students; but when a miscommunication foiled their next day's plan to play at the Smell-- the venue at the epicenter of the local scene-- they ended up joining a bill with Thee Oh Sees and the Crystal Antlers at a birthday party at the Silverlake Lounge, an intimate, cozy space where you can't see a thing if you're more than five feet from the stage. It's within those coordinates (campus-quad pop, art-punk, and communal, lo-fi folk) that their Frenchkiss debut Visiter exists; an acoustic-and-percussion duo at their core, Dodos manage to hit with a full-band force that's even more pronounced in their astounding live sets.
On Visiter, Dodos guitarist Meric Long alternates between fingerpicking and breakneck strumming while playing in confounding alternate tunings. Logan Kroeber's clattering, locomotive percussion (which includes shoes outfitted with tambourines) is every bit a lead instrument as Long's guitar, and a big reason the band's music has garnered comparisons to the less abstract moments of Animal Collective and the output of other new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer.
The first quarter of Visiter marries those impulses with fantastic results. The banjo playing and female harmonies on opener "Walking" echo Michigan-era Sufjan, but the connection ends at Long's stridently confident vocal delivery. That song immediately segues into the maniacal "Red & Purple", a bewilderingly worded love song accompanied by a toy piano and fuzzy bass. And after the brief "Eyelids" comes "Fools", which has been bouncing around the web in some form for months, and is fast becoming the Dodos' signature tune-- although it may soon be eclipsed by the rollicking, Feelies-esque "Jodi".
From that point on, Visiter alternates between longer, more improvisatory material and near-interludes, which can leave a slightly spotty impression on its first few listens. With more exposure, the record reveals the celebratory acoustics of Led Zeppelin III or a more song-oriented take on tourmates Akron/Family. Playing with infectious fervor, Long runs through tricky blues-boxing and molten slide riffs on the galloping "Paint the Rust" and the second half of the epic "Joe's Waltz".
Visiter's second half is anchored by "The Season" and "God?", two massive shapeshifters that help define the record. Long and Kroeber here don't seem wedded to power duo minimalism-- and it's intriguing to wonder how they could incorporate their backgrounds in metal, African Ewe drumming, and gamelan beyond a sense of rhythmic intensity. These possibilities could also make more streamlined, Magnetic Fields-like numbers "Winter" and "Undeclared" seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far. | 2008-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | March 21, 2008 | 8.5 | 34ea536e-dea8-4e1f-8b09-f9cc6d90872f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Blending weighty subject matter and loose, meandering grooves, the Charleston-based artist’s latest album moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, natural, and unpredictable. | Blending weighty subject matter and loose, meandering grooves, the Charleston-based artist’s latest album moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, natural, and unpredictable. | Contour: Onwards! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/contour-onwards/ | Onwards! | If you laid out the waveforms of a song onto paper, Khari Lucas once explained during a regional television interview, it might look like a contour map. This is what inspired the Charleston-based musician’s artist name, Contour, and it’s the sort of visual thinking you might expect from a musician who started out producing beats, as Lucas did. Onwards!, his second full-length as Contour, is the kind of music you make when you’re used to manipulating sound shapes on a laptop screen—loose, drifting, free, with many tracks resembling sampled two-bar loops. It’s difficult to tell, without production credits, which sounds are generated by live instruments and which are sampled, and the hazy nexus where one melts into the other is the spot where Lucas’ music lives.
It’s clear that Lucas considers his music as part of a larger project, linking him to a long lineage of Black artists: As a radio host for dublab’s Footprints in the Dark, he compiles two hours of music from a single Black musician each month, as a way to make what he calls his “research practice” public. The choice of archivist’s language feels pointed: Lucas is deeply invested in notions of Black musical inheritance and history. Throughout Onwards!, sampled voices repeatedly bob to the surface to lament, scold, or reflect. These samples all come from films made by the L.A. Rebellion, a group of filmmakers of color that came together in the late 1960s to highlight the lived conditions of Black Americans, leading to independent-cinema landmarks like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.
If this history sounds weighty, then it’s a testament to Lucas’ skill that Onwards! still moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, effortless, natural, unpredictable. The songs are atmospheric and purposefully blobby in shape, while Lucas’ supple singing voice has an improvisatory sense of play, tagging the track with offbeat, searching melodies like a muted trumpet. He has a penchant for locking onto a phrase—“I’m like 10 minutes from bankrupt,” from “Hearing Voices”—and testing out its many resonances, repeating it until every meaning—bitter, frightened, ironic, hopeless, matter-of-fact—has been exhausted. “The price of life I know I can’t afford/The tourniquet is always falling off ” he sings on “Skin Closure,” shaping the phrase into such a lovely, lilting shape it’s easy to miss its bleakness.
Despite the focus on mood-setting and atmosphere, you sense Lucas’ firm hand guiding every decision, pushing the music along its meandering path: the subtle creep of the bass that enters on “Trench Prayer,” or the loping cross-stick snare that opens up air pockets in the groove on “Hearing Voices.” In the close-stacked vocal harmonies of “You’d Do Well to Pack Light” that lag ever-so-slightly behind the beat, you hear a close study of Voodoo, and the distant spirit of the Soulquarians insinuates itself into the mix, both in jazzy, freeform bursts of texture and in the impulse to work away drowsily at a groove until it blooms open.
Like anyone who has ever been asked what genre he works in, Lucas demurs (“Genres are for listeners, not for artists”). But in an interview with NTS, he cited Stevie Wonder, Grouper, and Brazilian music, all of which actually do a pretty good job of preparing you for the easeful float in his music. Onwards! will also strike many listeners as distinctly "post-Blonde," both in its porous genre borders and its stream-of-consciousness airiness. There are surface similarities, as well, between the calm hurt in Lucas’ voice and Frank Ocean’s, the same glassy heat and wounded dignity.
But Lucas’ music is darker, more dour and downcast than Ocean’s, more earthbound. On a song poignantly called “N**** Won’t Reach Mars,” Lucas sings, “Space is not the place,” gently rejecting Sun Ra’s iconic Afrofuturist exhortation and casting Mars as just one more place people of color will not be welcome: “What they want with us on the red rock?... I’d rather plant my feet wherе I can feel the rain.” This is a complicated emotional gesture he repeats throughout Onwards!, one that gains power and resonance the more you notice it being deployed: on the one hand, rejection and negation; on the other, a feint toward affirmation, a glance toward possibility.
On the smoky and spellbinding “Babe Brother,” he sings about the weight of patriarchal oppression—“Many wives carry the burden of/All the suffering.” It’s a lot for anyone to tackle single-handedly, but Lucas smartly avoids big statements, here and everywhere else. The rest of the song, as with the rest of Onwards!, lives where the rest of us do—wandering in clouds of uncertainty, contending with cold jets of doubt (“Can my vow, vow to return it all/Can it solve this?”) and savoring fleeting bursts of resolve (“Taking stock of the heart I got/Share it freely”.) There is no lesson, because Lucas is no teacher, just a citizen, lost as the rest of us. | 2022-11-29T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-29T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Touching Bass | November 29, 2022 | 8 | 34f063cf-b93c-466f-baea-f0fab0623dc6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Texas rapper's new album is a brightly colored spectacle that showcases all the Lone Star state has to offer. | The Texas rapper's new album is a brightly colored spectacle that showcases all the Lone Star state has to offer. | That Mexican OT: Lonestar Luchador | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/that-mexican-ot-lonestar-luchador/ | Lonestar Luchador | The influence of Latinos in hip-hop culture is especially potent in Texas; it’s hard to say what Houston rap would sound like without the lowrider and slab culture Mexican-Americans helped pioneer. Bay City rapper That Mexican OT—the “OT” stands for “Outta Texas”—wears his Tejano heritage on his sleeve. Defining his sound as “grito ranchero,” he blends samples of regional Mexican folk music with the thick 808s of Southern rap while delivering blustery rhymes with an unmistakable twang.
On his new album Lonestar Luchador, OT doubles down on state pride, filling his starting roster with fellow Texans. The exuberant BigXthaPlug guests on “Hit List,” while Maxo Kream goes bar-for-bar with him on “Opp 2.” Veteran Paul Wall pulls up for “Johnny Dang,” a tribute to the iconic Houston jeweler of the same name, a Vietnamese immigrant who became a grill designer to the chopped-up stars. The album is most evocative when it embraces Tex-Mex fusion, particularly on the corrido “Barrio”: Over the nostalgic strums of a six-string guitarrón, OT transforms into a passionate bandleader, crooning at the moon.
Though the loose lucha libre concept is mostly played for laughs in the form of recurring commentary from Dallas comedian Ralph Barbosa, you get the comparison: OT’s quick and nimble flow mimics the high-wire maneuvers of athletes like El Hijo del Vikingo and Komander. And much like a luchador might switch up their mask, OT switches between different personas. On “Skelz,” he rattles off the type of whimsical flexes that would be right at home in a Screwed-Up freestyle cypher—“I need a Burberry blender to make a protein shake”—and then goes full chopped-and-screwed on “OMG.” Tracks like “Breannan” channel the bluesy toxicity of Louisiana crooners like Kevin Gates, as OT violently fantasizes about revenge after heartbreak. But he’s capable of more than Southern charm: On “Cowboy in New York,” he adopts the rapid chopper flow of an East Coast battle rapper, spitting pure venom over a menacing piano line.
That Mexican OT is a consummate entertainer: Sometimes he’s a down-and-dirty villain who cheats to win, other times he’s a comical babyface and a boisterous drunk. On “Cowboy Killer,” he’s in pure crowd-work mode, transforming into a cartoon gunslinger alongside a jaunty saloon piano. All the while, he underscores how syncretic Texas music has always been, infusing traditions from both sides of the border with his own idiosyncrasies. The result is a brightly colored spectacle, a freestyle brawl of rap styles and regional flavors. | 2023-08-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Manifest / GoodTalk / Good Money Global | August 11, 2023 | 7.5 | 34f1b00b-2fa8-426c-a420-0d3c0406e7d3 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Detroit rapper’s standout debut is among the year’s most engaging rap albums so far, packed with disarming metaphors, humor, and introspection. | The Detroit rapper’s standout debut is among the year’s most engaging rap albums so far, packed with disarming metaphors, humor, and introspection. | Bruiser Wolf: Dope Game Stupid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruiser-wolf-dope-game-stupid/ | Dope Game Stupid | In his book Pimp: The Story of My Life, author Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck recalls a conversation with an acquaintance about how the mind is like a movie screen. If so, Detroit rapper Bruiser Wolf’s mind is playing clips from Black Dynamite and that Suga Free pen-and-nickel freestyle. Little is known about Wolf, but Dope Game Stupid—his debut album via Danny Brown’s newly minted Bruiser Brigade Records—turns his life details and a never-ending stream of metaphors into some of the most engaging raps of the year so far.
Wolf’s voice, a helium-toned yawp that sits somewhere between scatting and a breathless jogger attempting to talk, is as distinct as rap voices get. Comparisons to rappers Suga Free and E-40 have been made in the past; and while the influence is clear, Wolf’s flows are more animated and urgent, jumping suddenly like popcorn kernels. “But it is one thing that I learned from E-40/Somebody in the clique gotta be legit,” he says winkingly on “Whip Test.” There’s no shortage of war stories and candid moments on Dope Game Stupid and, much like his label boss, compact metaphors and similes are Wolf’s weapon of choice.
His clever turns of phrase move from the banal (“I’m touching green like I’m accepting calls,” from “Syndicate”) to genuinely profound (“When you live in the streets, you gotta eat with the fork in the road,” from “Whip Test”). When he’s in this zone, Wolf sustains a handful of gut-busters on nearly every song. On “Use Me (I’m Dope),” he gives a lucky partner “the Johnson two times like baby powder.” The third verse of “I’m a Instrument” sees him comparing drugs and guns to every section of an orchestra, from bass and trumpet to the harmonica. His bars repeat themselves on occasion—he relies on the well-worn analogy of piano keys as bricks of coke too many times—but there are no real groaners in the bunch. At his best, he sounds like a Rudy Ray Moore character beamed into the 21st century after binge-watching The Wire and a few hours of RapTok posts.
For all the humor packed into Dope Game Stupid, Wolf is still capable of slamming the brakes to reflect. The peeks into his life throughout the album are illuminating: he compares his gun aim to the “bullets” an unnamed friend would throw, as a quarterback at Texas Tech; he consistently praises the good fortune of (mostly) leaving the street life behind. Songs like “Middle Men” and the heartbreaking closer “Momma Was a Dope Fiend” abandon jokes entirely, embracing somber scene-setting. On the former, Wolf and Detroit stalwart Fat Ray swap stories of botched drug deals and lament the black hole of street life in the Motor City: “Hood money good money where I’m from/Detroit City, everybody sell somethin’.”
“Momma Was a Dope Fiend” drops all pretense and gives Wolf nearly three minutes to sketch out how his mother’s long battle with addiction affected his life and haunted the periphery of his career in the streets: “I cried a thousand tears for every track on her arm,” he admits. It’s raw and grim to the point of nausea, pushed even further by Wolf’s commitment to the same yelp he used to make jokes about the Netflix movie Bird Box one song ago. Even with some jarring transitions, Dope Game Stupid maintains a sturdy atmosphere. Producer Raphy—who handled every beat except for “Dope Fiend,” produced by Knxwledge—provides a batch of pristine loops that crackle with dust and melancholy. The stately beats complement Wolf’s over-the-top persona on some songs and clash with it on others, amplifying the pathos of a performer refusing to break character even as he’s breaking down on the inside.
It may be tempting to label Dope Game Stupid, with its emphasis on Capital B Bars and its co-sign from a neoclassical rap heavyweight, as the antithesis to the melodic street rap movement currently taking Detroit by storm. But Bruiser Wolf has as much in common with 42 Dugg and Kasher Quon as he does with fellow Bruiser Brigade members ZelooperZ and J.U.S. The city is being crushed by opioids and economic plight and remains one of America’s most rabid COVID-19 hotspots. Detroit rappers are used to pushing on through the hardship; Bruiser Wolf just so happens to shoulder his pain with a crooked smile.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bruiser Brigade | April 8, 2021 | 7.6 | 34f2ae04-c6bd-4c86-bb6c-c05c6b6a12e5 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The young polymath’s latest album is mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal. | The young polymath’s latest album is mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal. | Jaden Smith: ERYS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaden-smith-erys/ | ERYS | Last spring it was announced that Jaden Smith will play an “alternate reality version” of Kanye West on an upcoming TV series. He won’t have to study much for the role. The rapper, designer, and Twitter theoretician has been closely following in the Chicago MC’s footsteps for years, adopting both his creative bravado—he recently stated that his fashion icons are Pharrell, Batman, and the Greek god Poseidon—and bombastic style of conceptual thinking.
This creative mode has inspired the 21-year-old to take on some notably big-hearted projects, including a vegan food truck catered toward the less fortunate in downtown Los Angeles and a paper-carton water company that’s reportedly helping the dire situation in Flint, Michigan. It also led to a debut album that was hugely ambitious in sound and scope (Smith cited 2016’s The Life of Pablo as its primary inspiration) but failed to show any potential beyond its shiny production value. ERYS, his newest, is even grander, a galaxy of beat switch-ups, vocal effects, and genre mash-ups that drown his voice in a soupy sonic mixture.
A huge chunk of the project is devoted to Jaden doing everything he can to alter his voice, drenching it in staticky reverb, pitching it down a handful of octaves, or layering it underneath the harmonizing of guest vocalists. When it is distinguishable, it’s stiff and empty, used to deliver stale references like, “Star Wars with the clique, I’m Han Solo with the rips/Kobe with the pass, had to hit it no assist.” It gets even cheesier on the flimsy trap anthem “Mission,” where he fires off a limp diss at XXL Magazine’s annual “Freshman Class” by rapping, “Man, they look at me and know that I’m the freshest,” a gee-whiz boast that could have been ripped from one of his dad’s albums in the ’80s.
Things get worse when he tries to mask his flaws as an MC by overcooking the production. Unlike fellow Kanye disciples Tyler, the Creator and Travis Scott, Smith doesn’t practice balance in his curation; he mashes together his favorite artists’ sounds in the hopes of stumbling upon symmetry. The first four tracks aim to capture the goosebumps of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but instead form a grating mass of Auto-Tuned bridges, piano build-ups, and big drum fills that never arrive at a climax. Not much later, on the backend of “Again,” he imitates the soft guitars, pitch-altered vocals, and sparse drums of Frank Ocean’s Blonde but fails to capture any of the work’s intimacy. Meanwhile, his collab with Kid Cudi, “On My Own,” with its boilerplate organs and stomping kicks, sounds like a Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven leftover.
Smith fairs better when he stops trying to recreate the revolutionary work of his idols and lowers the stakes. The loosest track on the album, “Summertime In Paris,” which features his sister Willow, is also its most successful: a breezy, guitar-driven tune that gets by on simplicity rather than grandiosity. “Summertime is meant to fall in love, I could fall asleep and stare in your eyes/We’ll dance all night,” Smith hums warmly on the chorus. Willow joins him on the second verse as the two siblings revel in their nostalgia. Not even a clunker of a line by Jaden tarnishes the endearing moment. While nothing about “Summertime” is groundbreaking, at least it sounds fun.
Beyond a few other fleeting moments of experimentalism on ERYS—the second half of “K,” when the buzzing of an electric razor slowly morphs into a heaving trap beat, or “Fire Dept,” a decent ode to the fast and distorted energy of SoCal punk—it’s mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal. In an interview a day after its release, Smith stated that he wanted ERYS “to change the world”; in reality, it’s the least memorable thing he’s done this year. | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | MSFTS MUSIC / Roc Nation | July 11, 2019 | 4.7 | 34f75b6a-b16f-4fb7-8cdf-8d53c91968d2 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Keeping their winning streak alive, the Hold Steady plug into something special for a fleeting unplugged EP. | Keeping their winning streak alive, the Hold Steady plug into something special for a fleeting unplugged EP. | The Hold Steady: Live at Fingerprints | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10136-live-at-fingerprints/ | Live at Fingerprints | "You have to see them live" is a phrase that's probably hurt more bands than it's helped. For every Bruce Springsteen or Metallica, whose epic performances helped fuel massive record sales, there's been a Phish, whose cult-like concert experiences never quite convinced outsiders to shell out for more than tickets. You don't need to see the Hold Steady live to get what they do, but it helps. In person, at least the collective experience confirms that you're not the only one buoyed by the band's infectious nostalgia, boundless enthusiasm, outsized personalities, and monster riffs.
Fortunately for the Hold Steady, you get the loud, proud, gloriously unironic idea pretty well from their records. Live, the extra volume, stage moves, and banter only enhance the vibe the group's three records have offered and more or less perfected. Unfortunately, that rarely goes for live records as well, which almost never come close to capturing the experience of attending a show. That the Hold Steady nonetheless opted to release a live EP doesn't come as a surprise compared to the decision to release one of their infrequent acoustic sets.
Still, Live at Fingerprints-- recorded at a Long Beach in-store performance-- underscores something that's easily missed in the Hold Steady's recorded output: It's not the performances that make the band so special, it's the songs. Minus the amplification, and plus such un-rock'n'roll accoutrements as accordion and what may be a washboard, this handful of songs (mostly) from last year's Boys and Girls in America is a blast. Banter and all, it adds up to more than a souvenir or quick cash-in by showing the Hold Steady are far more versatile than some might give them credit for.
It certainly helps that Craig Finn's vocals are up-front and clear, easily made out with the din ratcheted down, the racket better suited to the back porch than the arena stage. Unlike many of rock's would-be poets, Finn doesn't take himself too seriously, but at the same time the conviction coursing through "Cattle and the Creeping Things" and the sentiments he's trying to convey come across as honest and heartfelt. And then there's the banter, where Finn and his bandmates (but mostly Finn) mock themselves with the same big-hug love with which they embrace rock history.
Talking about the "Chips Ahoy!" video: "We were playing this song in Costa Mesa, and it occurred to me that "how am I supposed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you' and 'how am I supposed to know that you're high when you won't let me dance' are two things I've said in real life, and it was to two different people." On "Citrus:" "All the best Led Zeppelin songs are about citrus fruit." It makes you wish there was an indie-rock "Storytellers".
"Citrus", and the gentle take on "You Can Make Him Like You", would make Finn's sensitive hometown hero Paul Westerberg proud, as would the bluesy "You Gotta Dance With Who You Came to the Dance With"-- and not just because it's a drinking reference, either. These songs, stripped to their bare emotions and sharp punchlines, capture the spirit of the left-behind, the guys and girls hanging out in the parking lot because they couldn't get into the sold-out show, kids awkwardly eyeing one another as they split a case of beer and talk about why they love the band they're not watching. Live at Fingerprints is essentially a quick taste of what those kids missed, and if there's a drawback to the disc it's that, at a scant five songs, the tease is over far too soon. | 2007-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vagrant | April 19, 2007 | 7.5 | 34f79943-928d-41e2-a11b-bcfdd6f0e5c3 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
On his seventh solo album, the Constantines member trades straight-ahead country rock for joyful, junk-shop irreverence, reveling in his peculiarities while offering an unmistakably homey atmosphere. | On his seventh solo album, the Constantines member trades straight-ahead country rock for joyful, junk-shop irreverence, reveling in his peculiarities while offering an unmistakably homey atmosphere. | Steven Lambke: Volcano Volcano | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steven-lambke-volcano-volcano/ | Volcano Volcano | Over his two decades in Canada’s indie-rock trenches, Steven Lambke has often thrived in supporting roles. As the second singer-guitarist for soul-punk rabble rousers the Constantines, he chipped in with a song or two per record to give Bry Webb’s moonstruck howl a rest. And ever since that band entered its semi-permanent state of hiatus at the end of the 2000s, Lambke has devoted much of his energies to running the excellent Toronto imprint You’ve Changed Records, which he co-founded with roots-rock shapeshifter Daniel Romano. Beyond acting as the faucet for Romano’s never-ending flow of material, You’ve Changed has introduced artists like the Weather Station and Nap Eyes to wider audiences, while using its platform to make Canadian indie rock less of a straight white boys’ club, releasing albums by queer grunge-pop duo Partner, country spiritualist Fiver, and Indigenous avant-rock artists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Status/Non-Status. (He also brought a similarly conscientious curatorial expertise to his former role as the Creative Director of Sackville, New Brunswick’s annual indie love-in, Sappyfest.)
But amid all his behind-the-scenes gruntwork, Lambke has never stopped making music; since the mid-2000s, he’s released six solo albums (among other projects), initially under the Baby Eagle banner and more recently under his own name. As the Constantines grew into their Neil Young phase on their later records, it became clear that Lambke had a quieter, more introspective side, and his earliest solo efforts functioned as reservoirs for a growing repertoire of mellow campfire ballads and laid-back country shuffles. Over the years, as the Cons faded further from view, he got more comfortable with turning up the volume a few notches, yet he remained beholden to a ragged ’n’ rustic rock tradition clearly rooted in Neil’s “Ditch Trilogy” days. But Lambke’s quizzical lyrics and inherent peculiarities have always kept him from settling into a familiar singer-songwriter archetype. As the Constantines member responsible for that band’s most agitated, serene, and cosmic songs, Lambke has a mercurial voice that contorts itself in surprising ways, veering between comforting, plainspoken whispers; a dazed, Dylanesque twang; and an ebullient, high-pitched creakiness that can make him sound like an elderly 10-year-old boy, childlike and wizened in equal measure.
Where 2019’s Dark Blue drifted toward straight-ahead country rock, Lambke’s seventh album, Volcano Volcano, takes a U-turn from folk-festival respectability and retreats into joyful, junk-shop irreverence. The album was created with assistance from Romano, his bassist David Nardi, Merge Records artist Carson McHone, and Cons keyboardist Will Kidman, but it’s a group effort that has the feel of a hermetic home-recording experiment—probably because Lambke took the bed tracks and slathered on the sort of cheap supplementary instrumentation (sleigh bells, shakers, tambourines) that gets handed out at kindergarten circle time. Listening to the record feels like a visit to an old neglected family cottage—it’s covered in cobwebs, dead bugs are caked across the window screens, and the front-porch floorboards are rotting away, but once you get inside and light up the fireplace, it feels like home.
Lambke spends much of Volcano Volcano pondering natural phenomena, finding strength and inspiration even in their most frightening forms. On the quietly ascendant title track, volcanoes are far from cataclysmic; instead, they offer a potent metaphor for a different kind of uprising, where power in society flows from the bottom up and, as Lambke optimistically sings, “the world is reordered from below.” Throughout the album, he looks upon some of the planet’s creepiest critters—spiders, bats, crabs—with a sense of awe and envy, as they inhabit the sort of oblivious utopia we can only dream of, unencumbered by human folly and ignorance. “Lucky stars, a golden grommet/Vomit in the garden bucket/Look out, snakes have always shouted/And there’s spiders too!” he sings atop the sleigh-belled sway of “April, May, and June,” reframing a messy backyard scene as a veritable springtime Christmas carol.
At times, Lambke’s hand-shaken instrumentation sounds louder in the mix than his voice or guitar, lending these humble, homespun tunes a cinematic dimension: On the twangy psychedelic serenade “Truth Marks,” the relentless rattle of maracas doubles as a nighttime chorus of crickets. But their presence also evokes the old Constantines custom of distributing tambourines to fans in the crowd, and it highlights the participatory quality that unites Lambke’s myriad musical endeavors, where anyone with a dollar-store noisemaker can be part of the band. Nowhere is that communal spirit more deeply felt than on the album’s ecstatic, tambourine-battered peak, “Every Lover Knows.” Channeling the spirit of some gospel-gilded classic-rock nugget from 1971, Lambke works himself up into a mad preacherman lather as he cries, “The truth is/Every truth is tested/By the world until it’s busted, twisted, or frayed/As every lover knows.” Far from an admission of defeat, “Every Lover Knows” is a battle cry for romantic radicals, a don’t-let-the-bastards-get-you-down anthem that doubles as a warning to the haters: This volcano is ready to blow. | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | You’ve Changed | May 10, 2022 | 7.4 | 34f7e4b1-4488-4417-8156-4df1f1e59c91 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Crazed, noisy, and barely finished, the New York rapper’s latest tape digs into his mad mind and hypnotic sound. | Crazed, noisy, and barely finished, the New York rapper’s latest tape digs into his mad mind and hypnotic sound. | Xaviersobased: with 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xaviersobased-with-2/ | with 2 | Nobody combines serrated rap and goofy hi-jinks like Xaviersobased. In “Pediatrician,” Xavier flashes back to his kiddie days watching Noggin at the doc’s office, wearing KidRobot clothing and a SpongeBob wallet in hand, while producer mag blasts some Satan-with-IBS low-end in the “terror bass” style. The surreal combo of cute youthful references and aggro intensity is bizarrely addictive. Adorned with just enough pretty keys and airy cymbals, it throws you into a blissed trance. While January’s Keep It Goin Xav felt like a triumphant celebration of the scene surrounding his collective 1c34, with 2 goes solo and injects this kind of dazed-yet-hyper rap with a new level of screwy psychedelia.
Xavier teased with 2 so many times that it started to feel like it would never arrive. When the tape finally dropped last week, it was because someone leaked it. So Xavier just put it out himself, even though it wasn’t properly mixed yet. But this kind of crazed, barely-finished release moment is perfect for his music anyway, since it often has the feverish rawness of disheveled snippets.
If 2021’s With felt like a demolition zone of abrasive distortion, this sequel is more like a laboratory gone mad. The woozy freakiness remains, but the spiky edge has been softened. Cavernous drums echo over lost-in-reverie synth keys and vocals laced with so much delay Xavier floats through the tracks like a benevolent phantom. His wispy flow on “You See Me” coils upward like he’s slowly ascending a spiral staircase into the clouds. Yet even at its dreamiest, shards of sadness poke through. “linda.mp3” feels like mourning and moonwalking at the same time. Warm rays of synth drape Xavier as he pleads with another artist to quit drinking lean.
While the tape delivers a sizable supply of hypnotic delights, there’s not much in the way of wild surprises. nyli and xion’s twitchy-twinkly beat for highlight “what zit tooya” already appeared in a Nettspend and phreshboyswag song, and straightforward tracks like “jaded” and “Softer” sound like they could’ve been on any xaviersobased tape in the last few years. Xavier’s at his best when leaning into unstable, erratic confrontations, as on “Aight,” whose bassline brawls with the synths like Greek Gods defending Mt. Olympus. The track was produced by cranes and anarchy, a talented Florida teen who offers a glimpse of the next generation beyond Xavier: cosmically unhinged and glitch-wracked stuff that takes distorted rap as a starting point.
Despite a lowkey surge in popularity since Keep It Goin Xav, he’s still disgorging tapes that feel like DIY community zines, packed with madcap thumbnails and an all-star roster of niche producers. Nothing is out of bounds: chitchat about studying in the “1c library,” sounds of mouse clicks, or heaven-high gurgles. Violent threats and moments of emo vulnerability collide with cover art of a scowling purple fish from SpongeBob named “Mr. What Zit Tooya.” As other new-generation SoundCloud upstarts dilute their sound for wider audiences, it’s sweet to watch someone who doesn’t give a fuck. Even if it doesn’t hit all the time, the vision is thrilling. | 2024-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 34Ent | June 12, 2024 | 7.6 | 34fde494-8e88-4a1e-9d23-285a7f93fe78 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
The drums-and-electronics duo’s debut album is a gnarled hybrid of free improv, minimalist composition, and dance music that advances in fits and starts. | The drums-and-electronics duo’s debut album is a gnarled hybrid of free improv, minimalist composition, and dance music that advances in fits and starts. | Methods Body: Methods Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/methods-body-methods-body/ | Methods Body | In Methods Body’s music, nothing feels fixed in place. The drums-and-electronics duo’s debut album is as slippery as the deck of a boat in a storm: Muscular rhythms in strange time signatures, microtonal prepared-piano riffs, droning feedback—they all careen back and forth, colliding, breaking into pieces. The result is a gnarled hybrid of free improv, minimalist composition, and dance music that advances in fits and starts, repetitive until it is not, knotty until it turns unexpectedly smooth.
Despite the size of their sound, Methods Body are just two people: drummer John Niekrasz and multi-instrumentalist Luke Wyland. Niekrasz studied percussion in Cuba and classical Hindustani tabla in India, and his CV boasts collaborations with everyone from drone titan Rhys Chatham to jazz pianist Marilyn Crispell to Joanna Newsom. Wyland was, until 2013, a core member of the group AU, whose fractured, brightly colored fusions of American minimalism and kaleidoscopic art rock anticipated some of Methods Body’s more song-like moments. Methods Body share a lineage with bands like Battles and Horse Lords, groups working at the intersection of rock and non-Western sonics; in places, they tap into the metallic shimmer of Indonesian gamelan, or the tube-driven glow of Konono N°1.
Though this is Methods Body’s first recorded work as a duo, they have been playing together since 2016, practicing five days a week in their shared studio and recording in remote locations: a saloon in the Mojave Desert, a cabin in the Oregon wilderness. But Methods Body feels less rooted in any particular sense of place than in the act of spontaneous creation itself; if there are landscapes here, they are represented as seen through the passenger window at 70 miles per hour, a blur of lines and vectors and splotchy color, morphing without end.
The album’s nine tracks are divided into two side-long suites. The A-side’s “Quiet Pt. 1 – They Didn’t Come Here” begins with layered reeds and sour-tuned plunks, then gallops unpredictably forward, moving in cellular fashion: Rhythmic, repetitive passages build and build, then pivot without warning. “Quiet Pt. 2 – Tell Us to Be” is a silvery reflecting pool of dissonant piano that launches into slow, skulking electric bass, half doom metal and half dubstep wobble. In “Quiet Pt. 3 – They Came Here,” a stomping, polyrhythmic groove gives way to ostinato pianos that sound like a junkyard Philip Glass. The first side comes to a head with “Quiet Pt. 5 – Anthem,” whose monster organ riffs channel ’70s prog beneath wild, guitar-like soloing. The music lumbers like beasts fighting, then pausing to suck air—moments of feral violence punctuated by seething calm.
If the A-side suite is driven by rhythm, the B-side’s four-part “Claimed Events” is an exploration of pure texture, in which piano and electronics rush like water over gravelly drums. Niekrasz favors sounds like resonant toms and the dry clatter of sticks against metal rims; Wyland wrangles plasticky, atonal sounds, bright sheets of tone that crinkle like cellophane. It’s rarely clear what the two men are doing at any given point, how much has been tracked live and how much overdubbed later—there are so many layers, it generally feels like more music than four hands are capable of producing. But the back-and-forth exchange between their playing makes clear that their music is a form of dialog.
In fact, both musicians say that language is an influence on their practice. Niekrasz, who got his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, composes using a system he calls “syllabic notation,” translating the rhythms and tonalities of speech into drum patterns. Wyland, who stutters, finds inspiration in the cadences of broken speech. Methods Body only incorporates text in one song, but it’s a highlight of the album. In “Claimed Events Pt. 2 – Overheard,” the duo falls into what might be a funeral march—a slow, steady tom groove backed by mournful drones—that gradually gives way to an eerie chant from Wyland’s former bandmate Holland Andrews. The low, monotone chant hovers just on the far side of sense: “My friends, however, claimed events would identify them—but to overhear and accept only one month to prepare us in a very small room with rubble in one corner.” What looks dryly factual on the page, like a scrap of newspaper, takes on a weird, ritual sensibility in repetition—line breaks blurred, stresses sanded down, meaning dissolved into pure sonority. It is simultaneously the most calming and unsettling moment on an album in which all certainties feel up for grabs. | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Beacon Sound / New Amsterdam | May 30, 2020 | 7.1 | 3501811d-3e16-4469-aaa4-e56decd65a63 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
iLoveMakonnen's latest EP finds the emerging Atlanta artist—a rapper that doesn't always rap—at the center of the rap conversation, representing the most recent goal post in the ongoing expansion of what a "rapper" can be. The release features production from Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital. | iLoveMakonnen's latest EP finds the emerging Atlanta artist—a rapper that doesn't always rap—at the center of the rap conversation, representing the most recent goal post in the ongoing expansion of what a "rapper" can be. The release features production from Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital. | iLoveMakonnen: iLoveMakonnen EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19774-ilovemakonnen-ilovemakonnen-ep/ | iLoveMakonnen EP | Makonnen Sheran dubbed himself iLoveMakonnen when he was on house arrest in 2008. He had been headed for the Air Force, but a tragic accident with a friend's gun, which Makonnen described in heartbreaking detail to BuzzFeed, ended with his friend dead in a car shortly after their high school graduation. Sheran, who was in the car, was implicated, and his life's direction changed.
He spent his resultant exile trawling MySpace and broadening his musical tastes—the Killers, Bloc Party, Adele, and Lil B, whom he enthusiastically interviewed on his blog. He also posted rough cuts of his songs, which fumbled ecstatically toward some synth-heavy fusion of all of them. Some were raw, unformed blobs, but there were hints of an aesthetic moving beneath. He reached out to everyone he admired and began quietly laying the groundwork for his career.
All this context is already old news—at least, since Drake cleared his throat and launched Makonnen's career into the stratosphere. His latest release, the iLoveMakonnen EP, features production from Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital. He's at the center of the rap conversation, but he also represents the most recent goal post in the ongoing expansion of what a rapper can be.
Makonnen's relationship to rap is intriguing. He dips briefly into signifiers of the street—the juug, the plug, coke, Molly and lean—and throws together some bars on "I Don't Sell Molly No More". But mostly, he sings, and he does so in a rich, untrained, wobbly voice, with an expressive tenderness unheard of even in a rap world with Drake at its center. (When Drake hopped on Makonnen's "Club Goin Up on a Tuesday," he had to adopt an even-softer voice than usual.) "I wasn't trying to be no hip-hop," Makonnen told BuzzFeed, describing the development of his sound. "I didn't give a fuck about drums. But I knew what to do to get the looks I wanted to get."
The fourth song on the i**LoveMakonnen EP, "Tonight", is an airy, strobing house song, with a hip-tugging syncopated bass line and diaphanous layers of synths floating above like hand scarves. Makonnen's melodies have a theatrical swoop to them; "Sarah" has the arc and fever pitch of a Broadway power ballad, and on "Too Much", he lets his voice dip into a Nate Dogg-y basso profundo before leaping into a startlingly unvarnished higher register, his voice shaking and nearly cracking.
The mood of the EP is primarily lovelorn and wistful, with a series of songs directly addressing the girls in his life. Each of them gets named directly—Brianna, Shoshanna, Sarah—and it's hard not to attribute this behavior to Drake, who made all his long-gone exes famous. Drake probably leapt on "Tuesday" because he heard a burgeoning star bearing his direct influence, and he likely signed him directly to his OVO imprint for the same reason—as Jay Z said in the 2000 concert film Backstage, when you find your successor, you sign him.
When Makonnen raps, as on "I Don't Sell Molly No More", he sounds nothing like Drake. There is something loose and bemused in his voice: This isn't really what I do, his vocal tone says, but hey, I'll give it a whirl anyway. There are echoes of his favorite rappers, people like Gucci Mane and the all-important BasedGod, in his cadences and patterns, but the song itself is a prop, a chance to try out some juicy-sounding words. Makonnen's music fairly beams at you with this self-satisfied serenity: even his songs about selling drugs have the weightlessness of a stage full of paper-mache props.
This might sound like a criticism, but that play-acted feeling is one of the most satisfying parts of Makonnen's world. Like Atlanta's previous two rap breakouts, Makonnen has used his unique talents to build a reality-distortion bubble, a place where rap's rules slide off the sides. That bubble swelled to a big enough size that we get to pass through and explore it, and watch rap giants try to contend with it. | 2014-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 4, 2014 | 8 | 35024a8c-3cb0-4e21-818c-06c9cf84f935 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The rapper tries to reinvent himself with his second solo album, showing off impressive range while getting hampered by personality-free songwriting. | The rapper tries to reinvent himself with his second solo album, showing off impressive range while getting hampered by personality-free songwriting. | Offset: Set It Off | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/offset-set-it-off/ | Set It Off | Offset was always the black sheep of Migos. The Atlanta rapper was in jail at critical moments during the group’s rise, and before their blockbuster album Culture, he rarely handled hooks or opening verses. “Lost everything I had like Solomon,” he reflected on 2015’s “First Day Out,” and his music has never shaken that desperation for redemption. He raps like an athlete who was benched by an injury during a championship run, determined to make up for his absence and prove his talent. So on his solo debut Father of 4, he distinguished his music from Migos’ by ballasting the group's gaudy and ecstatic swag rap with wounded soul-searching.
For his second solo effort, Offset attempts to lean further into his de facto pariah status. “I’m Michael, I’m not no Jermaine,” he says on single “Jealousy,” signaling a grand transformation with nods to the king of pop’s Off the Wall era. Hammering home the point, he rocks Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” and “Thriller” costumes in the video for “Fan,” and he bears a single white glove on the album cover. In Jackson, he sees a blueprint for reinvention. “I just feel like Michael felt: wanting more creatively, challenging myself to be a better and bigger artist, and to leave the old stuff in the past,” he told Sharp.
In theory, such a reset is needed. By the time Migos released Culture III, they were approaching music like a legacy act, clinging to old flows and familiar concepts. Few surprises or delights lurked inside that record’s litanies of luxury goods and twisted syllables, and the guests frequently outshined the monotonous hosts. Even before last year’s fatal shooting of Takeoff forever changed the future of the group, Quavo and Takeoff’s decision to form a separate duo—one that largely stuck to the Migos formula—put pressure on Offset to succeed on his own. But despite his overtures to rebirth and new horizons, he remains a creature of habit.
On a technical level, Offset is in rare form. He’s a finesser who can strut, slide, and stutter-step across virtually any beat, a versatility that is foregrounded when he’s alone. These songs never feel as busy as Migos songs, even when Offset is constantly switching direction, as on the flow clinic “Big Dawg.” But there’s a glaring lack of purpose and personality to the songwriting. Offset spends the record narrating a life of decadence, fashioning himself as an A-list star with deep pockets, exquisite tastes, and a legion of paramours—subjects that are all Migos mainstays. While bits of charisma and vulnerability occasionally filter in, as on “Say My Grace” when he mourns Takeoff and his grandmother, these moments are overwhelmed by constant mentions of G6 flights, Chanel, and diamonds clear as water that would make for a punishing drinking game. Offset was by no means an open book on Father of 4, but the intimate theme gave his songwriting and performances direction. The concept here is essentially, I rap by myself now.
Offset’s not a bore, so his agility and the range of sounds keep the album somewhat pleasurable. To avoid retreading the gilded trap of Migos and the brooding laments of his first album, he went beyond core collaborators like Southside and Metro Boomin, who both contribute just one song. The rest are sourced from stalwarts like Wheezy and Boi-1da, and less marquee names like Aaron Bow and Offset himself, all of whom offer idiosyncratic takes on melodic rap. Thick basslines and bits of Delta blues (“On the River”), Memphis horrorcore (“Hop Out The Van”) and gangsta rap (“Jealousy,” “Fan”), and spacey trap (“Buss My Watch”) create a mood of joyful darkness. A sense of villainous liberation guides the motion: “Night vision, I can see the opps when they hidin’,” Offset raps like a lion waiting in ambush.
But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset. Though lines like “I would be lying if I say I ain't miss the three” and “I’m better on my own,” suggest ongoing anguish over the end of Migos and his strained relationship with Quality Control, the music doesn’t develop those feelings. If he were more of a dramatist, brooding penultimate track “Upside Down,” where he gushes in Auto-Tune about feeling his world is topsy-turvy, might have flipped all the preceding exuberance and flexing on its head. But instead, all he offers is flat repetition of the title. Sound familiar? | 2023-10-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown | October 23, 2023 | 6.3 | 3506f953-b062-4d81-9800-523db89d37e2 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran curates an appealingly cohesive compilation of Japanese ambient music that, while decades old, feels uncannily suited to contemporary listening habits. | Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran curates an appealingly cohesive compilation of Japanese ambient music that, while decades old, feels uncannily suited to contemporary listening habits. | Various Artists: Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-kanky-ongaku-japanese-ambient-environmental-and-new-age-music-1980-1990/ | Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 | An under-explored element of the streaming era has been the growth of functional listening. Because we spend so much time near computers that grant us access to a virtually limitless amount of music, we are discovering new ways to soundtrack our lives. Whether it’s kids gathering around a YouTube channel to listen to lo-fi hip-hop while studying or a journalist looking for music to write to, we’re always searching for sound to keep us company. I suspect there’s a connection between that search for functional sound and the recent uptick in interest in ambient-leaning electronic music from Japan in the 1980s. Now that particular curiosity has the perfect introduction. Light in the Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, curated by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks, is the right compilation at the right time, bringing together a wide selection of the music that has been rediscovered in a highly listenable package delivered with appropriate context.
“Kankyō ongaku” is Japanese for “environmental music,” and as used here it’s an umbrella term for calm, spacious, and slightly chilly music generally built from synthesizers and sound effects. In the liner notes, Doran points out that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with composers who became fixated on the work of Erik Satie, John Cage, and, later, Brian Eno, particularly their ideas about background, modes of attention, authorship, and functionality. Those ideas were integrated into culture-specific notions of environmental music—Doran highlights the use of dripping water in Japanese garden design as an example, and there’s a strong connection between some of this work and architecture—and brought to life with emerging synthesizer technology. As a listening experience, the two-hour set is deeply satisfying, sustaining a consistent mood while offering a number of textures and styles. It also feels almost eerily “now” in 2019, as it brings to mind the fetish for early digital culture that informs the work of electronic music composers like Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, and Doran’s own group.
It’s remarkable how artists from such vastly different musical backgrounds (the liner notes offer short histories for each, along with contextual explanations for each track) made music that fits into this sound world. Haruomi Hosono is a wide-ranging singer-songwriter with a clutch of eclectic albums who also made punky, danceable electro-pop with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and his track “Original BGM,” which closes the set, is 15 minutes of slow-crawling bliss, filled with long silences and simple, gradually unfolding melodies. Yellow Magic Orchestra themselves make an appearance with their remarkable instrumental interlude “Loom,” an Escher staircase of drone that sounds like it’s in a constant state of arrival.
From Hiroshi Yoshimura, a composer, writer, and theorist whose ideas were foundational for much of the music found here, comes “Blink,” a simple piece of devastating beauty built around two melodic motifs. Kitamura Masashi made his name in the 1970s prog rock scene and later formed post-punk outfit YBO², and his track “Variation III” consists of crashing waves, bells, and drum hits, bringing to mind a landscape that feels eerily like (but apart from) what we call “nature.” Toshi Tsuchitori worked as a free-jazz drummer but here contributes a piece that is mostly silence interrupted by occasional hits of metallic percussion.
That tracks from such a wide array of musicians can be brought together in a set that sounds so cohesive is a tribute to Doran’s curatorial acumen. These pieces aren’t really bound together by an overriding “scene” but rather by their clear aesthetic qualities—they are gentle, quiet, emotionally non-specific, and filled with silence. The music here also evokes the decade of the set’s title, and the tentative steps made during that era toward the digital world that surrounds so many of us.
Kankyō Ongaku is Light in the Attic’s third multi-disk box set focusing on ambient music in the last 10 years, and each is enriched by considering the differences between them, and how formats shaped the way the music was heard the first time. The 2013 collection I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990, focused on obscure sounds, some of which initially circulated on cassette tapes in new age shops that stocked them alongside packs of incense, crystals, and books about mysticism. The sequel, 2016’s The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986, drew heavily from the trippy kosmische music created by German musicians like Roedelius, Ash Ra Tempel, and Popol Vuh, and it felt very much like a vinyl artifact, a portrait of a time when heads of a certain stripe would entertain themselves by listening to long-form music in front of a component stereo.
Kankyō Ongaku brings to mind the compact disc, which overtook the music industry in the second half of the ’80s and still has a pretty good foothold in Japan. Early ambient music was very much an analog idea, with sounds that were blurred and vaporous, but on Kankyō Ongaku, the sounds are crisp and clean, the edges clear. Perhaps contrary to intuition, the highly “designed” nature of this music also makes it feel very human, and also increases its versatility as far as background listening for other tasks. This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane. | 2019-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Light in the Attic | February 21, 2019 | 8.5 | 350dfcce-0793-40cf-9055-9beccda63e34 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The Antlers singer's proper solo debut* *is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy—a zen-like journey of a man trying to re-enter his own life. | The Antlers singer's proper solo debut* *is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy—a zen-like journey of a man trying to re-enter his own life. | Peter Silberman: Impermanence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22942-peter-silberman-impermanence/ | Impermanence | Peter Silberman headed upstate for the same reason most New Yorkers do: to get some damn peace and quiet. Problem is that he took all the noise with him. Though his work with the Antlers never had anyone confusing him with J Mascis, years of touring left Silberman with a debilitating hearing ailment that started as piercing tinnitus and evolved into a constant sound of “Niagara Falls in my head.” Even if aural healing was Silberman’s priority during his convalescence, there was no doubt what he was really working towards. His proper solo debut Impermanence is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy, a man trying to re-enter his own life.
This is a guy who likened romantic failure to cancer and a dead dog, so the possibility of him turning this into a gut-wrenching metaphorical ordeal was very real. It’s almost more understandable that Silberman wouldn’t feel the need to dramatize his situation, given the timing of it all. “I’m disassembling piece by piece,” he moans on the record’s first line, though that describes less his own rehabilitation than affirms Antlers’ M.O. since their 2009 breakthrough. Hospice now stands as the last true exemplar of “2000s indie,” touching on Radiohead’s quasi-prog song structures, Sigur Rós’ amniotic ambiance, and Arcade Fire’s skyscraping crescendos. But since then, they’ve veered more toward the variously fanged and stoned Burst Apart, which turned out to be a tentative step towards the zonked-out laser-Floyd ambiance that defined their most recent work on Undersea and Familiars. And the process of Silberman’s reassembly has resulted in something not too far from what Antlers themselves might have put together in 2017.
“New York” is the most immediately fetching song on Impermanence, something like Interpol’s “NYC” if it was performed like the Grace version of “Hallelujah.” Silberman’s falsetto hovers over a translucent guitar, homesick for a place where he already lives: “When my nerve wore down/I was assailed by simple little sounds/hammer clangs, sirens in the park/like I never heard New York.” While he doesn’t quite have the natural vocal hops of his immediate influences, Silberman is one of the last true believers of the Buckley/Yorke school of operatic angst and he’s become just as effective as a lead instrument. For a lot of listeners, it’s a short step from Radiohead to Talk Talk and Impermanence unsurprisingly evokes Laughing Stock, the gold standard for mid-career, post-rock spiritual cleansing: “Karuna” begins with a few seconds of low amp buzz and a loosely knotted guitar chord that has to be an overt homage to “Myrrhman.”
It’s a spare album that asks for a lot of patience, if only a fraction of what Silberman needed to rehabilitate his ears in isolation. Impermanence isn’t meant to sound lonely, however; there are nearly a dozen contributors if you include Big Sur and Block Island, RI for their provision of field sounds. The most important is engineer and mixer Nicholas Principe, a frequent collaborator whose Port St. Willow project often felt spiritually akin to Silberman's work. Principe is part of a quartet that providing doo-wop vocals during “Gone Beyond,” a supremely stoned jazz riff that ends with a presumptive cue for a vinyl flip. Yet the bulk of Impermanence suggests that burning these songs to a tangible item is a necessarily evil: the credits include Tibetan bowls and ujjayi breath, and the song titles (“Karuna,” “Ahimsa”) themselves are taken from basic principles of eastern philosophy in accordance with Silberman’s continuing desire to atone for the mean-spirited Burst Apart.
Though Impermanence is unmistakably a record about Silberman’s physical ailments, the lyrics attempt to find a balance between being just about that (“I’m listening for you, silence”) and giving the listener something they can apply to their own lives (“Our bodies are temporary”). Likewise, the six songs take a long time to assess whether they’re meant to offer serenity or a path to transcendence and whether Silberman’s self-imposed musical limitations can support his most philosophically ambitious work yet. It’s not a slight to call Impermanence functional music: If it helps someone else simply cut through the noise in their head, Silberman has gotten his point across. | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | March 6, 2017 | 6.9 | 350ef593-19e3-4ea9-a26d-66212e3b5788 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Five years after her brief but spectacular debut, Tierra Whack digs deep into her psyche for an anxious, dark, and raw follow-up. She remains a magnetic performer even if the music has lost some of its color. | Five years after her brief but spectacular debut, Tierra Whack digs deep into her psyche for an anxious, dark, and raw follow-up. She remains a magnetic performer even if the music has lost some of its color. | Tierra Whack: World Wide Whack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tierra-whack-world-wide-whack/ | World Wide Whack | Content warning: This review mentions self-harm and suicidal ideation.
On her 2018 short-film-as-album Whack World, Tierra Whack introduced the world to a cartoon version of herself. Her grief, romance, and existential crises were simplified and exaggerated into bite-sized rap songs with bold visuals that were part Adult Swim, part Pee-wee’s Playhouse. She didn’t shy away from pain but transmuted it into things like dogs and chicken wings. Reflected through her prismatic lens, her interior world felt surreal, and entirely her own. In contrast, the pain coursing through World Wide Whack feels like a real-life remake of the original animated movie. The record’s extended runtime allows a deeper look into Whack’s head as she tackles depression and anxiety in a straightforward, moving, and darkly funny way. But while her commitment to simplicity lends itself to a big emotional catharsis, you can’t help but feel some of her music has lost some of its color.
Fragments of Whack World can be found in the production, which is spare but encompasses a wide range of genres, from Atlanta trap to Casio-preset funk to pop ballads to her signature singsongy nursery rap. The spaciousness and austerity of the beats allow Whack’s voice to take the spotlight. She has a lot of fun modulating her pitch, tone, and accent like she’s a teenager playing dress-up at the mall. On “Chanel Pit” alone, she shifts between staccato and vibrato singing, explosive bursts in the verse and cool restraint in the chorus. As much as World Wide Whack aims to be still and real, there is still much character in her delivery.
Even though the songs are epics by Whack standards—almost every song still clocks in under three minutes—this album shares some of Whack World’s ephemerality in the sheer randomness of cuts like “Shower Song,” which does what it says on the tin (“Soap and water give me powers”), and “Moovies,” a disarmingly simple track about wanting to be treated to dinner and a show. The songs are fun, but they feel less exploratory and more like a concession to the market of likes and “For-You” pages. She’s at her most magnetic when she loosens her grip on her idiosyncrasies and tries on other people’s flows, like when she adds a little Ice Spice flippancy to a relationship post-mortem on “X” (“Just like a website, he beggin’ to link, I went to his house and sofa was stink”) or channels throwback Migos, ad-libs and all, on “Snake Eyes.”
But the playfulness takes a backseat to the rawness, which she eases into on album opener, “Mood Swings” when she hints at what’s yet to be revealed, singing, “Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me.” On the downward spiral of “Numb,” she gestures towards self-harm (“Long sleeves cover scars”) and suicidal ideation (“To the bridge in my car, now I’m swimming with the sharks”) before finally calling out anxiety and depression by name. And that’s only four songs in. “Imaginary Friends,” “Difficult” and “Two Night” wade deeper into the muck of these knotty feelings, how they affect relationships and daily life. By “Two Night” she’s found some comfort in gallows humor, adding a cheeky postscript to a hypothetical suicide note (“I didn’t pay the light bill this month”) and divulging that, because she’s Black, her last meal will probably be chicken and fries. Her quips are hilarious, devastating, and provocative, but when the rest of her writing isn’t as sharp, these moments of vulnerability can feel heavy-handed.
The darkness becomes pitch black by the album’s closer, “27 Club,” a song Whack says is inspired by the Mary Jane Girls’ 1983 R&B ballad “You Are My Heaven.” It’s jarring at first to hear the word “suicide” repeated like a chant, but it becomes clear that the purpose of the repetition is not to sanction the act but rather to release Whack from its hold. In an interview with Vulture, she revealed that when she started recording the song she didn’t know what it would be about. “But it came so easy,” she said. “I cried, and I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been trying to say.’”
This vulnerability World Wide Whack puts on display is truly affecting, but for a convention-busting artist as Whack, her directness feels strikingly ordinary. The unbound creativity that she displayed in just 15 minutes of Whack World—and that often bursts through on her Instagram freestyles—is reined in here. It’s not that she can’t make longer songs or open up about her struggles, but her endless reinvention made her so thrilling as an artist. It’s one thing to strip away the artifice and speak from the heart, but the beauty of letting go is the space it creates for new things to come in. For much of World Wide Whack, even when wearing new shoes and showing different sides of herself, she’s still treading on familiar ground.
Anyone in need of help can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1–800–273–8255 or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org to chat with someone online. | 2024-03-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | March 18, 2024 | 7.3 | 351853e6-dab3-4542-8095-79a9b3c156cb | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
The deluxe reissue of American Football's only LP benefits from unusually good timing: as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre. | The deluxe reissue of American Football's only LP benefits from unusually good timing: as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre. | American Football: American Football | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19352-american-football-american-football/ | American Football | “Honestly I can’t remember all my teenage feelings and their meanings.” Any list of Great Moments in Emo Lyricism would be incomplete without this curious Mike Kinsella-sung line during “Honestly?”, the third track from American Football’s only album, released in 1999. But really...honestly? We are, after all, talking about a genre assumed to be in constant contact with the feelings of teendom—but the next line gives more context: “They seem too/ See-through/ To be true.” Rather than someone cutting themselves off from or invalidating their own teenage feelings, Kinsella’s just outside that time frame trying to figure out how the emotions and music that moved him during his formative years figure into his current life. That’s why, as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre.
This deluxe reissue of American Football benefits from unusually good timing—and unlike most solemnly revered anniversary sets, this isn’t a mobilization of fan dollars after countless inclusions in Best Of Decade lists, and it's not a case of “You had to be there” nostalgia, either. The raw 4-track demos, generous liner notes (written by guitarist Steve Holmes), and candid photographs are meant to welcome the people who weren’t “there” back in 1999, a grouping that includes pretty much everybody at this point. Still, the album's reach in 2014 is estimable: American Football recently sold out an entire weekend at Webster Hall in New York in the matter of minutes—each night they'll play to a crowd ten times bigger than any they saw during their entire existence.
Personally, it took me damn near a decade to find and appreciate American Football, and looking back, it's easy to understand why it didn’t have made an instantaneous or seismic impact upon its release. After the implosion of Cap’n Jazz, Mike’s brother Tim was the more public, combative and divisive party; meanwhile, the Promise Ring had just released Very Emergency months prior, one of emo's preliminary pushes towards the center. Consequently, American Football came together quickly, stirred up a decent amount of anticipation from a formative EP (its exclusion is the only disappointment the reissue provides), and disbanded almost immediately after the release of the LP.
Of course, hardcore fans claim plenty of one-off collectors’ items as landmarks, and in retrospect, American Football’s existence as something of a cul de sac rather than a connection to Kinsella’s later work as Owen or Owls further serves to show what a unique record it is. American Football’s greatest innovation was successfully removing any trace of punk rock while still functioning within the genre. This was a bold maneuver, since the genre's hardcore roots were about the only thing that gave its practicioners even the slightest bit of credibility. American Football weren’t the only ones headed in new directions (see: the Appleseed Cast), but whatever you think “punk rock” means, they got rid of it on American Football—there’s no confrontation, almost no distortion, no power chords, and none of the verse/chorus structure that was maintained even when emo became virtually synonymous with alt-rock.
In actuality, American Football is one of the more subtle post-rock records of its time—a variation on what the Sea and Cake and Gastr Del Sol were doing a few hours north in Chicago, but crucially operating from the heart rather than the brain. Only “Honestly?” bears some remnant of proper “rock” music, its main riff a twang-free rendering of “Rebel Rebel”. The cascading coda of “Stay Home” alludes to Slowdive's Pygmalion, while “The Summer Ends” recasts the pastoral free-form, flowing hymnals of late Talk Talk as a swooning mash note.
In the reissue's liner notes, Holmes makes numerous mentions of the band emulating Steve Reich and Miles Davis—typical namedrops for people in their early 20s who want to make it clear how seriously they’re taking music these days. There is trumpet on the record, courtesy of drummer Steve Lamos, and no one will mistake its sounds for anything the Prince of Darkness ever conjured. But Lamos’ amateur ingenuity perfectly suits the album's informality. The jarring blue note that introduces “The Summer Ends” sounds like a mistake at first, but by playing it twice the wrong note becomes the right note; it's a Choose Your Own Adventure Breakup Song that leaves its conclusion open-ended, even if you just know something*’s* forever lost. Likewise, over the glimmering motifs of “For Sure”, Lamos' sighing, brassy wail lets you know that when Kinsella whispers “Imagine us together”, the whole thing will end in tears.
Minimalism, repetition, and subtle virtuosity were rare elements amidst Cap’n Jazz’s spazzed-out arpeggios, the Vagrant label's lockstep pop, and the severe start-and-stop musicianship of Jade Tree and Deep Elm bands. So what, exactly, makes American Football emo? Upon announcing their reunion, the band explained their return by joking, “Obviously, we knew the time was ripe for three middle aged dudes to play some old songs about teenage feelings, and stand around tuning guitars for a long time." It’s actually the latter part of that statement that points to American Football's constantly shifting, implacable emotional pull. There isn’t much insight as to what inspired Kinsella’s lyrics and he didn’t emote harder or rawer than anyone else. But Holmes and Kinsella’s guitar playing is the most emotive the genre has been privy to, inverting the typical power trio dynamic and rendering Kinsella’s minimal lyrics as a platform for elaboration rather than the final word.
Very little of American Football is in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined. Instrumental "You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” is the album's most playful cut, and it’s similarly open to interpretation: is it about leaving soon because everyone has to eventually get on with their day after spending the night together, or is it about leaving—like, for good? Nothing suggests a typical narrative arc, but it's worth noting that the song that follows "You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon" is called “But the Regrets are Killing Me”, and after that, “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” (let it be said, these guys had a sense of humor). American Football operates from a mindset where everything is about to happen, and that inability to stay present is a feeling that’s neither teenage nor see-through nor false.
American Football was released in September of 1999, which lends the album a real-time immediacy: the lyrics begin in June and end in August, surely a powerful period of time for teenagers and college-bound kids (American Football were University of Illinois students at the time). Unless you’re a teacher or NFL player, though, the typical adult's day-to-day doesn’t change all that much during the summer—it’s hotter, there are dumber movies in the theater, and that's about it. And yet, those same see-through teenage feelings can still manifest during the change of the seasons, regardless of age; there are many reasons “Indian Summer” is one of the most frequently covered indie rock songs, and similarly we're only now beginning to recognize how American Football struck an emotional chord, one that’s proven to be every bit as resonant. | 2014-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | May 21, 2014 | 8.6 | 351b8f7e-5a9b-401e-a641-94f4f5be175e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A twisted barbed wire sign spans the entrance to the Ben Elektra Kibbutz in Metulla, Israel. It reads: "And\n ... | A twisted barbed wire sign spans the entrance to the Ben Elektra Kibbutz in Metulla, Israel. It reads: "And\n ... | Metallica: St. Anger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5250-st-anger/ | St. Anger | A twisted barbed wire sign spans the entrance to the Ben Elektra Kibbutz in Metulla, Israel. It reads: "And Justice for All." There, in the country's northernmost town, pinched by Lebanon, and set in a valley as arid and colorless as an Anton Corbijn photo, my brothers and I assembled compact discs for Elektra Records, far from the reach of cable modems and CDRWs.
After long days of picking rare bloodberries from barbed bushes for the screened St. Anger covers, which Lars assured us during his weekly motivational videos would only drive hard copy sales, I stripped my soiled black overalls, checked the bunks for banana spiders and sand ants, and settled in to read a tattered copy of Karl "Geezer" Marx and Frederick "Freddi" Engels' Metal Manifesto. Few historians care to document the period in the early 1850s when the pair, influenced by the heart-wrenching blue-collar poems of Bob Seger, abandoned the Bund der Gerechten, shaved their beards, applied eye-silver and rouge, and produced a series of simpler, populist manifestos.
Often, I found myself reading the first line by Zippolight, unable to proceed further, lulling myself to sleep with its mantra:
"A spectre is haunting Metal - the spectre of Metallica."
Decades removed from its writing I didn't find the assertion particularly leveling or insightful. Rather, I was amused by its irony. Originally, Marx and Engels had hoped to shock their staid, academic readers with imagery of the undead, as with the Pushead-inked "Red Monsta" devouring Europe on the cover to their earlier Communist Manifesto. Now the word "spectre" struck me only as a reminder that Metallica had long given up the ghost. The manifesto remained only a document of arrogance and comedy. Marx continued, "Metallica is already acknowledged by all Rock powers to be itself a power." And yet, when MTV recently bestowed Metallica with "Icon" status, they could only dredge up Kelly Osbourne, Ja Rule, Sum 41, Godsmack, Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, Limp Bizkit, Lisa Marie Presley, and Snoop Dogg in tribute.
Time had only made the rest of the text increasingly contradictory and meaningless. Marx and Engels had seen Metal as the antisocial soundtrack that could topple pop for the hearts of the young. "Pop has converted the guitarist, the songwriter, the drummer, the man behind the boards, into its paid laborers," they vented. "The Major Labels cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relation between fans and artists."
I read that last line while seated in a mule cart heading toward the Cardboard Folding Hut. Behind me, shimmering cylinders of stacked St. Anger discs stood in tight rows, an electrical current coursing through them for defense. I snapped the book shut, sickened by the absurdity. If only Marx had lived to see the sides flip over a dwindling battle line. For the first time, a technological advance-- MP3s and digital downloading-- spelled victory for the proletariat. File-sharing had become as anti-establishment as Marx had envisioned metal sounding. And Metallica, Marx's metal champion, had dropped an iron firewall between their music and their fans, who, despite their revolutionary ripping, were, for the most part, bourgeoisie boys choosing bands based on how the logos looked protractor-scratched into study hall desks. We kibbutz workers, who lived here by choice, manufacturing Metallica CDs, faced time in the Lightless Cell if found touching or "experiencing" St. Anger before its shipping date. Yet James Hetfield seemed to always sing about being locked inside a Lightless Cell as a badge of honor. Irony upon irony upon irony. Then again, Marx and Engels did grow their beards back and move on to more ambitious projects.
A banana spider bit into Ktulu the Mule's heel. The animal reared. The cart spilled its contents, the CDs and myself, into the dust. A safety cut the electrical field protecting St. Anger. As the cart master attempted to rein the bucking animal, I slipped a disc into my overalls.
After lights out (or "enjoy the black" as it was called), my bunkmates and I listened to the disc for which we had so diligently worked. What an utter mess. I saved 300 boxtops of Of Wolf and Man Cereal and bought a ticket to Israel for this? Lars Ulrich had taken the return to "real Metal" quite literally, playing a drumset consisting of steel drums, aluminum toms, programmed double kicks, and a broken church bell. The kit's high-end clamor ignored the basic principles of drumming: timekeeping.
Fittingly, Ulrich's scrapyard racket rang senselessly like quickening, imploding industry under filtered, stream-of-cliché riffing. The gimmick overwhelmed entire songs, chiming hollowly over all else. Hetfield and Hammett's guitars underwent more processing than cat food. When they both speedstrummed through "St. Anger", and most other movements, H&H; seemed to overwhelm each other with different, terrible noise. A bevy of pedals-- including the decidedly un-metal wah-wah-- jingled conspicuously like a massive charm bracelet... I mean, a string of skulls. A string of iron skulls.
A dry, crackling blooze melody squeezed out by Hammett on "Some Kind of Monster" brought to mind the time I used my practice amp as a stool in hanging a Ride the Lightning poster over my cot. The amp teetered and toppled, sending my foot right through the speaker cone. From then on I could only produce sounds exact to those on "Some Kind of Monster". I just never thought to release them during the kibbutz's mandatory "riffstorming" sessions monitored by Hetfield via satellite from his motorcycle factory. Bob Rock's bass neither bobbed nor rocked; it simply hid like an undulating grey amoeboid of sound, much like the web of hate pent inside the mind of the "Invisible Kid".
"Invisible Kid" towered as an example of Metallica's new alloy of ineptitude. In the video feeds streaming throughout the mess hall, Hetfield repeatedly reminded us of the cathartic, psychological process behind St. Anger. This implied a personal, emotional vent. However, Hetfield can only convey feeling through the persona of the implied "invisible kid" who cowers from parents and rejection in every song, mirrored in the bedrooms of their audience. Such juvenile confessionals as, "I hurt inside/ I hide inside/ But I'll show you," and, "Mama, why's it rainin' in my room," sound ridiculous coming from the mouth of a 40 year-old man. Is this how he talks to his shrink?
These muscle car confessionals and jerky, rough-edged transitions sounded not so much like metal, but Bruckheimer emo. Like Tim Kinsella, Hetfield found word pleasure in nursery puns such as "purify/pure if I" and "ominous/I'm in us." When "Frantic" cut from the grunting, "My lifestyle determines my deathstyle" refrain and shifted into the cooed "keep on searching" breakdown, it smelled strongly of sloppy pseudo-virtuoso bands like The Jazz June or Spitalfield. Emo bands found the simple process of merely moving from quiet to loud to be breathtaking. They wrote songs where beauty and melody was assumed on the count of clean guitar and picking chords, despite the fact that the two guitars had no knowledge of each other. In Metallica's case, the result was somehow worse for sounding so calculated and plotted in ProTools. ProTools had never been metal. ProTools never snorted ants up his FireWire from the side of the pool while urinating down a woman's dress. ProTools never inserted the sound of a chainsaw into the opening of "Black Metal" off the album Black Metal. ProTools never burned churches in Norway. And yet, ProTools had a major hand in assembling both "American Life" and "Frantic".
The disc ended as the sun was rising over Syria. Had it lasted that long? My comrades and I looked at each other, stupefied. Our only memory was of forced effects, laughable lyrics, and audio surgical scars. I sat up and began packing my duffel. I'd rather pick bananas. One comrade suggested smuggling the disc out of the kibbutz to leak to the Internet. If Metallica were such proud artists behind their music, unable to both allow downloading and refund money after purchase, then we should warn others. Metallica had become less a band leading a genre than a team soaking up payroll in a second-tier sport. This was NASCAR, WWE. Logos, sneers, mustaches, and beards. Hair grows back, but the Jheri Curl of insincerity, of contradiction, and of compromising a cause never straightens. | 2003-06-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-06-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Elektra | June 15, 2003 | 0.8 | 351d1313-af0c-40e3-b568-c617c4549eae | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
On this installment in a series of expanded reissues from the vaults of the late Jason Molina, love songs with raw nerves document a tender, transitional period in his career. | On this installment in a series of expanded reissues from the vaults of the late Jason Molina, love songs with raw nerves document a tender, transitional period in his career. | Songs: Ohia: Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/songs-ohia-love-and-work-the-lioness-sessions/ | Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions | Released in the early weeks of 2000, The Lioness stands as Jason Molina’s purest transmission on matters of the heart. It’s not just that the world is ending or that death seems promised with every passing minute, as was often the case on many of his essential records. There’s also this look he keeps getting from someone he really cares about. He’s not only affected by it; he’s “thrashed by the truth of your eyes.” And when it’s time for Molina to define exactly how he feels, he tells us in his wounded, earnest tenor, “Being in love means you are completely broken.” He sustains the mood throughout The Lioness, and he intends for us to feel that way, too.
The Lioness was a transitional album for Molina and his Songs: Ohia project. The records that came before were jumpier and more raw; the music that followed was smokier and more stately. In these nine songs across 40 minutes, where a series of minor chords recur like creeping waves of anxiety, he located the glacial sadness that would characterize his best writing even while crafting his simplest love songs, jukebox hopefuls he arranged like post-rock elegies. Love and Work: The Lioness Sessions is Secretly Canadian’s latest posthumous release from the vaults of Molina, who died in 2013 at age 39 from organ failure due to alcohol abuse. The package pairs the original album with 11 previously unreleased tracks—plus devastating essays from his wife, Darcie, and several collaborators, along with photos and ephemera from the era, like the two-of-hearts he taped to the studio wall while making the record. It’s a definitive document of this tender, crucial period for the open-hearted Ohio songwriter whose work has only grown more influential in his absence.
At a show in Richmond, Ind., just before The Lioness was released, Molina introduced one of his new songs by noting that fans were starting to ask questions about his lyrics. This was ironic for him, because his style was becoming more straightforward than old oblique beauties like, “My blood’s courage courses to rendezvous/With freedom.” But those curious fans were likely asking because they heard something about themselves within the mysteries of The Lioness. In these songs, Molina created portraits of couples, zoomed in so close that you can sense every nervous glance and twitch. “I watched us talking in the mirror,” he sings during “Tigress.” His writing on romantic relationships sounds patient and studied. Even at their most contented, the songs come out feeling ominous, expanding in open-ended ways. For these tunes about intimacy, Molina assembled a band that featured Alasdair Roberts and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat and David Gow and made him sound completely, dangerously alone.
Some of Molina’s most enduring music is here. The unaccompanied “Coxcomb Red” is an ode to physical attraction sung with such urgency that it plays like an answer to “I’m on Fire.” While Springsteen’s words evoke loneliness, Molina’s longing is as direct as a love letter: “I wanted that heat so bad,” he sings sternly, “I could taste the fire on your breath.” The span of his devotion becomes literal in the title track, where he wavers between two declarations: “You can’t get here fast enough/I will swim to you.” Swooning and hopeless in the verses and more forceful with each repetition of the chorus, the music propels and suspends his words like wind in a rainstorm. Molina was straying from his indie-folk roots and heading toward the sprawling drone spirituals he’d embrace on 2002’s Didn’t it Rain and electrify on 2003’s Magnolia Electric Co. A breathtaking rendition of the centuries-old gospel standard “What Wondrous Love is This,” the final track on the bonus disc here, showcases the clarity and timelessness he desired.
The newly unearthed material is characteristically beautiful. But Molina was a sharp self-editor, so none of these songs conjure exactly the same intensity as The Lioness itself. More tentative and mantra-like, the music sounds closer to his previous album, Axxess & Ace, whose working title of Meet Me Where We Survive was actually taken from one of these songs, “On My Way Home.” Instead of feeling like an outtakes collection, it plays like its own complete if unpolished companion—a testament to how quickly Molina evolved during his brief, prolific career. The peak arrives with “I Promise Not to Quit,” a lost classic. It stops and starts in dramatic swells, mirroring the weathered vow in its chorus: “I will work to make it work.” It’s a distillation of a dedication that seeps through every note of this set. The heart is a risky fuel to burn, but look how the fire sustains. | 2018-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | November 23, 2018 | 8.7 | 351ee0e3-266a-4a61-9211-2e2a2f14b42b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Terre Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. Her 2009 album is getting a no-frills reissue because of its scarcity, and it's a treatise on house music that attempts to debunk the myth that house music was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia. | Terre Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. Her 2009 album is getting a no-frills reissue because of its scarcity, and it's a treatise on house music that attempts to debunk the myth that house music was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia. | DJ Sprinkles: Midtown 120 Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19402-dj-sprinkles-midtown-120-blues/ | Midtown 120 Blues | There's a contradiction at the core of Terre Thaemlitz's album as DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues, that is difficult to resolve. The album, a treatise on house music, goes lengths to debunk the myth that house music is/was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia—that house music is for everyone. She does this, however, while offering up a deep house sound so sumptuous and inviting that it's easy to lose Thaemlitz's socio-political motives: a Trojan horse whose trap-door gets stuck. Midtown 120 Blues is being reissued, in deluxe packaging but with no additional or altered music, after just five years, though the record's scarcity and limited reach justify that decision.
Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. (With 2012's Soulnessless, she claimed to have released the longest-ever album, anchored by a 29-hour piano meditation.) In the early '90s, before she was releasing experimental works, Thaemlitz worked as a DJ in the type of midtown clubs that defined Times Square before it was corporatized later in the decade. These formative spaces gave a home to the different strains of house music emanating from New Jersey and New York, a sound more contemplative than that which was coming out of Chicago: slower, jazzier, more reflective. It was music made and then defined by disadvantaged communities: by latinos and blacks and the LGBT community.
Thaemlitz has produced house music under a number of different aliases, but the deconstructivist instincts that dominate her experimental works aren't as dominant here. Midtown 120 Blues travels familiar territory, working through lived-in hi-hat patterns and familiar, calming electric piano chords. It helps the medicine go down easier, sure, but there's not that much medicine. You get the sense that this style is so dear to Thaemlitz that she's less willing to fuck with it, at least on a sonic level. Midtown 120 Blues, at nearly 80 minutes, is almost womb-like in its immersion, though Thaemlitz rejects the idea of the club as a healing, safe space. You don't "lose yourself" in Midtown 120 Blues; it's a reflection on feeling lost.
Thaemlitz began documenting this scene in 1998, shortly after those clubs were elbowed out of downtown, with the Sloppy 42nds 12", her first work under the DJ Sprinkles alias. Midtown 120 Blues again took this baton a decade later, chronicling the turbulence and violation that existed in Thaemlitz's communities; it's an album that seethes, however prettily, as Thaemlitz laces her patient, supple grooves with short speeches.
One poignant segment of "Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)" finds her railing against Madonna, whose "decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection" of the vogue scene not only misrepresented the scene's origins but left the queen "who actually taught [Madonna] how to vogue" broke. Thaemlitz is a compelling speaker, and the hurt and anger in her voice is obvious; she's also deft enough to let the preachers, whom she often samples, do the preaching. Midtown 120 Blues feels far more personal than political.
Midtown 120 Blues is a remembrance, but it's also a travelogue, loosely documenting Thaemlitz's move from her childhood home in Missouri and her immersion in midtown's scene. "Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)" functions largely like the KLF's Chill Out, organizing samples into an ambient collage that holds your attention even as it drifts for eight minutes. Moments like these feel like a salve for Jesse Jackson, who burns through his (sampled) vocal chords on "Sisters, I Don't Know What This World is Coming To" and the nervous, pendulous piano of "House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own".
Like punk music, house music was an underground phenomenon that offered an outlet to people who really needed an outlet. And like punk music, its history is romanticized to the point that the ills and misdeeds that still permeated the community are largely ignored. In the mid-'90s Thaemlitz was fired from a prominent DJ gig because she refused to play Gloria Estefan, a frequent request from the johns who would frequent the club; the johns, after all, kept the club open.
Thaemlitz quit, exhibiting the kind of principled stubbornness that has guided her career. This persists: Midtown 120 Blues will not be issued on vinyl, a medium unable to provide an accurate stereo bass response. Still, there's a fondness to Midtown 120 Blues, not least in its closing shuffle, "The Occaional Feel-Good". There is love here, however guarded. At its best, Midtown 120 Blues simultaneously acts as a corrective to house's ahistorical narrative and reminds us just how potent and beautiful New York deep house can be. | 2014-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Comatonse | June 2, 2014 | 8.5 | 352124b2-81c3-4254-8a3d-1513462a0fe5 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Nigerian singer-songwriter’s second album is in constant search of innovation, fusing traditional and contemporary African music into a celebration of success and community. | The Nigerian singer-songwriter’s second album is in constant search of innovation, fusing traditional and contemporary African music into a celebration of success and community. | Asake: Work of Art | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asake-work-of-art/ | Work of Art | Asake’s on top of the world right now and isn’t coming down. On “Olorun,” the meditative opener to his second album, Work of Art, he extols the Supreme Being of the Yoruba religion before praising himself. “I’m a brand new man,” he proclaims. Ahmed Ololade’s first love was dancing, but as much as he loved feeling the music, he knew the best way to make money was to become a consummate artist. He took up singing and adopted a stage name, and after a steady stream of singles he released his first full-length, Mr. Money With the Vibe, in 2022. It became Billboard’s highest-charting debut album from a Nigerian artist. He was, undoubtedly, a star.
Asake’s first album was the culmination of ideas percolating throughout his home country. Most notably, it was amapiano—a strain of South African house music in the lineage of kwaito—that brought Asake’s Afrofusion music to another level. This regional style was already spreading across the continent—in Tanzania and Kenya, Namibia and Mozambique—and fellow Nigerians like Davido and Mayorkun were collaborating with South Africans to meld it with Afrobeats. What separated Asake from his peers was how he forged a sound all his own: He incorporated choral harmonies and string arrangements, and worked in elements of the Indigenous Yoruba music known as fújì. The opening track on his debut announced this audacious blend: “Dull” interpolated “Oke Agba” from the pioneering fújì musician Ayinde Barrister.
With Work of Art, Asake understands that his winning formula needs no adjustments. Wistful strings inject solemnity on “What’s Up My G,” and as the characteristic log-drum loop of amapiano establishes a lithe beat, he expertly switches between vocal rhythms and inflections. There are many shades to his wealth, his nimble delivery implies. And when he lists off designer brands and luxury cars, the host of voices behind him frame his braggadocio as a spiritual act. “If you don’t feel blessed, you won’t be blessed,” he recently told ABC News. It sounds like the flipside to a Yoruba òwe, or proverb: “Ẹní lówó kó ṣe bí ọba” (“Whoever has riches should act like a king”).
These two pithy statements reflect Asake’s own mindset of manifestation: His songs often read as a proposition that anyone who hustles can experience the blessings he’s had. On “Basquiat,” he makes sure to let you know that the “work of art” his album title refers to is, indeed, himself. Still, the song’s group chants remind you that celebration can and should be a communal act. Perhaps that’s why he’s so drawn to amapiano, a style of music that South African artist Thandiswa Mazwai has said reflects “how radical Black joy can be.” Inevitably, some of the most irresistible songs on Work of Art are cheery. “Sunshine” is an encouraging balm, its bubbly synths and rising vocal harmonies capturing the warmth of time spent with loved ones. “Awodi” is less summery but just as hopeful. Asake sings about rising from the slums, and his slow, patient delivery feels like he’s extending an arm to lift you up beside him.
Stories of rebirth are nothing new, but Asake’s feel revelatory because they’re in constant search of innovation. “Amapiano” sheds some light on his approach. If the amapiano coming from South Africa is more tied to the country’s dance lineage, then Asake is intent on using it in bite-sized pop song form, as an avenue for intimate storytelling. But this isn’t to say that the production doesn’t stand out: “Great Guy” turns amapiano’s flagellating bass synths into pure, rumbling texture, while “2:30” lets them resonate in a way that recalls fújì’s talking drums. Closer “Yoga” even turns traditional séga—music that originated from enslaved Africans in Réunion and Mauritius—into a contemporary plea for peace. Asake grew up listening to Nigerian artists who continually evolved the country’s music, like Fela Kuti, Ayinla Omowura, and Wande Coal. His cross-generational, intercontinental music is doing the same. | 2023-06-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | YBNL Nation / Empire | June 16, 2023 | 8 | 35277194-0417-4c28-89a4-0f99ecdd41ee | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Every time it seems like conventional indie rock has gasped its last, someone builds a mansion of song that reminds us that, at its best, the genre still pulls off raw, celebratory spirit more convincingly than almost any other... | Every time it seems like conventional indie rock has gasped its last, someone builds a mansion of song that reminds us that, at its best, the genre still pulls off raw, celebratory spirit more convincingly than almost any other... | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1811-clap-your-hands-say-yeah/ | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah | Maybe no one told Clap Your Hands Say Yeah that first impressions are important. Or maybe they've just got massive sack. Either way, their self-released, self-titled debut CD opens with the weirdest, most potentially grating bit of snake-oil salesmanship you're likely to hear until Tom Waits puts out another record. I happen to dig the song, entitled "Clap Your Hands!" (a theme is emerging), but a maniacal carny barking over a stuttering calliope isn't for everyone. Those who persevere, though, will quickly discover that this garish foyer gives out onto spacious, elegant chambers of clean lines and soft lights.
Clap Your Hands are a five-piece from Brooklyn who're known to break out both harp and harmonica. They've recently been garnering rave press in their home city, and, over just the past two weeks, burning up the internet like a vintage Lohan nipslip. The pundits are saying Wilco (not hearing it), Talking Heads (okay), and Neutral Milk Hotel (getting warmer), but if it checks in with a number of modern and classic new wave referents, the music sings for itself: Clap Your Hands traffics in melodic, exuberant indie rock that pairs the shimmering, wafting feel of Yo La Tengo with a singular vocal presence that sounds like Paul Banks attempting to yodel through Jeff Mangum's throat. Or imagine the Arcade Fire if their music were more fun-loving and less grave.
Of course, if Clap Your Hands had a press kit, it would undoubtedly include something about "synthesizing these influences into a sound that's uniquely their own." And for once, it would be true. On the album's first true song, "Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away", a wailing vocal evokes Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser, as hitching, muted guitars and singing melodic ones twist and furl over throbbing bass. On "Over and Over Again (Lost and Found)", the band veers into more Interpol-ish territory, with small, stripped guitars and bass, a thin synth wash, and lilting vocals with woozily yawning vowels. Same goes for the iridescent guitars, purring synths, and weary vocals of "Details of the War".
The record is consistently, remarkably strong, but "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" in particular stands out, with its richly buzzing synth phrases, textbook Modest Mouse guitar lead (a trebly, gliding string bend skimming over the rhythm like a flat stone over a pond), contrapuntal bass, and shuffling drums. The song also features one of vocalist Alec Ounsworth's most memorable performances: He ramps up the urgency as the heavier chords kick in, his voice cracking and shifting in cascading waves as if someone were pressing his vocal cords to a fret board and bending them. "Is This Love?", with its clean, galloping guitars and fruit loop synth trills is the song most blatantly redolent of Neutral Milk Hotel (especially of the unhinged pop and careening vocals Mangum favored on On Avery Island), and its dizzily wowing vocal harmonies carry over to "Heavy Metal", where fuzzed-out bass and wheezing harmonica punch smart shapes into the fizzy guitars.
There's something really refreshing about stumbling across a great band that's trembling on the cusp without any sort of press campaign or other built-in mythology-- you actually get to hear the music with your own ears. While a lot of bands view the promotional apparatus as a necessary evil, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah prove that it's still possible for a band to get heard, given enough talent and perseverance, without a PR agency or a label. Indie rock has received a much-needed kick in the pants, and we have the rare chance to decide what a band sounds like of our own accord before any agency cooks up and disseminates an opinion for us. Damn, maybe this is how it's supposed to work! | 2005-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah | June 21, 2005 | 9 | 3528f1f1-20a2-451f-8ba7-681536f43c96 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Carlile’s sixth LP is a move toward her prestige era, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience. | Carlile’s sixth LP is a move toward her prestige era, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience. | Brandi Carlile: By the Way, I Forgive You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandi-carlile-by-the-way-i-forgive-you/ | Brandi Carlile: By the Way, I Forgive You | One of Brandi Carlile’s strongest points, to her admirers, is her ease with the tonal switch, moving abruptly from honing pin-sharp details at full volume to whispering evocative commonplaces. There’s a similar quality in her relationship to genre: Her deft straddling of country and folk suggests Americana, but Carlile is too restless for that. After the churning and most welcome rock dalliance of 2015’s The Firewatcher’s Daughter, her sixth album is on first listen a return to the acoustic arrangements she favored in the Bush II years. But hairpin turns are Carlile’s specialty, and By the Way, I Forgive You turns out to be something less than an advance but more than a retreat: It’s a move toward the prestige era of her career, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience.
Her collaborators this time are an impressive bunch. A Shooter Jennings credit, in Nashville circles, is the musical equivalent of a Michelin star, a welcome sign of her growing ambition. He and Dave Cobb—the latter helming celebrated albums by Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, and Jason Isbell—co-produced this LP, and they and Carlile (along with longtime bandmates and co-writers Phil and Tim Hanseroth) have got their shit together. Which is not to say there are no reaches: By the Way occasionally succumbs to the overwrought, as if Carlile were still auditioning. She should know better than to outsing orchestras, especially when the late Paul Buckmaster conducts them (“The Joke”). When the arrangement and the song are right, though, the risks pay off. The acoustic hooks, string section coda, and admissions of wanderlust on “Whatever You Do” suggest “Moonlight Mile,” and while her version doesn’t come close, Carlile’s instincts are sure: Knowing she’s singing a keeper dovetails with her narrator’s determination to stay stoic.
Using the offhandedness of the album title as lodestar, Carlile examines the wages of contrition—who needs it, who benefits, the effects on survivors. For gay men and women, reconciliation is an inevitable part of the burden of history. Or call it a whistling in the dark. Hard lives darken By the Way, recollected with the mild unease of someone who has to go home a couple times a year. “I never met a coward I don’t like,” she observes in “Whatever You Do.” An observation as criticism, for one of those cowards is Carlile herself. “Most of All” addresses warring parents whose lessons don’t fit gender expectations: The dad in this song taught her the wisdom of keeping a cool head, the mom how to fight. “Sugartooth,” the album’s catchiest number in part thanks to Jennings’ rolling keys, is a valentine to a schoolmate who’d give you the shirt off his back so long as you didn’t take his drug money. “He was a liar but not a fraud,” Carlile sings, in one of By the Way’s pithiest inversions.
If there’s one subject music-biz lifers know well, it’s the road, where payoffs come in the future if at all. Carlile’s second album, released just over a decade ago and containing her best-known tune, “The Story,” only went gold last year. Rarer still to find an artist who distills the banality of hotel rooms and mud-streaked tour van windows into approximations of wisdom. Told from the point of view of a woman whose young daughter still astonishes her, especially when this daughter breaks heirlooms, “The Mother” pivots around the declarative statement, “I am the mother of Evangeline.” No-nonsense, even curt, “The Mother” is this album’s finest moment. Loudon Wainwright III could have written it.
As the success of Isbell’s The Nashville Sound has shown, there’s an audience for records like By The Way, I Forgive You, particularly when their narratives require fictive leaps no higher than the average 2 Chainz album does. And Carlile has the kind of respect from peers that this audience goes for: With 2017’s Cover Stories project, the likes of Dolly Parton, Pearl Jam, the Avett Brothers, and Adele treated her songs as if she were John Hiatt in 1989. A weakness for vocal histrionics plagued Hiatt, too, recall. But the 36-year-old songwriter, who can count a former president as a fan, knows this is her moment. The album’s a tad awkward, like many projects steeped in the mild tea of sincerity, but By the Way, I Forgive You is the necessary next step in a shrewdly managed career. Brandi Carlile requires no forgiveness from us. | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Elektra | February 17, 2018 | 6.9 | 353405b2-e3cc-4c06-9015-af2152930652 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Having largely eschewed the heavy guitars that weighed down much of their output for the past decade, New Order embrace electronics again on Music Complete. They conjure the kind of synth washes and house-y piano runs that could have easily pulsed across their records during their mid-'80s heyday, making for what is arguably the most refined record they’ve released since 1989’s Technique. | Having largely eschewed the heavy guitars that weighed down much of their output for the past decade, New Order embrace electronics again on Music Complete. They conjure the kind of synth washes and house-y piano runs that could have easily pulsed across their records during their mid-'80s heyday, making for what is arguably the most refined record they’ve released since 1989’s Technique. | New Order: Music Complete | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21036-music-complete/ | Music Complete | In his new memoir, Chapter and Verse, New Order frontman Bernard Sumner recalls the exact moment that the band, having only recently changed their name from Joy Division to New Order in the wake of Ian Curtis’ death, opted for a change in direction that would forever alter their career. "Our music had become so incredibly dark and cold, we couldn’t really get any darker or colder," he says. "I remember quite clearly sitting in a club in New York one night, around three or four o’clock in the morning, and thinking how great it would be if we made music, electronic music, that could be played in one of these clubs." The rest, of course, is history. New Order would go on to become one of the most successful and innovative dance acts of all time, creating an aesthetic that split the difference between guitar-heavy post-punk and club-ready dance music. Some 30 years later, New Order continue to develop and refine the template they essentially created with surprisingly positive results.
Music Complete is New Order’s 10th studio album, and for all intents and purposes, it’s the first thing they’ve recorded since 2005’s Waiting for the Sirens' Call (2012’s long-delayed Lost Sirens was essentially a hodgepodge of Waiting outtakes). It also reflects a series of shifts within the band, created after the departure of bassist Peter Hook and reintroducing original keyboardist Gillian Gilbert back into the fold. For longtime fans, the acrimonious departure of Hook is potentially worrisome, as his melodic basslines were so integral to many of New Order’s most beloved tracks. As it turns out, they needn’t have worried too much. New bassist Tom Chapman, who formerly played with Sumner in Bad Lieutenant, creates a pretty faithful simulacrum of Hook's signature sound both live and on record. Having largely eschewed the heavy guitars that weighed down much of their output for the past decade, New Order embrace electronics again on Music Complete, conjuring the kind of synth washes and house-y piano runs that could have easily pulsed across their records during their mid-'80s heyday, making for what is arguably the most refined record they’ve released since 1989’s Technique.
The 11 tracks on Music Complete essentially touch on all the things that New Order do best, from the wistful melancholy of the record’s first single, "Restless"—a lovely "Regret"-like bummer ode to the perils of never being satisfied—to the pounding eurodisco of "Tutti Frutti", it is as if the band tried to assemble a record based on all of their most iconic vibes. In large part, they manage to succeed. On even their most classic records, New Order can be amazingly inconsistent, the truly great songs always eclipsing the simply forgettable ones. In this way, Music Complete is no exception. "Plastic" is the most inspired bit of dance music the band has recorded in years—a sprawling seven-minute bit of Moroder-ish synesthesia in which Sumner’s perfectly affectless vocal—"It’s official, you’re fantastic, you're so special, so iconic"—plays against tastefully employed bits of Chic guitar jangles and a classically New Order-ish bassline that somewhere is making Hooky's head explode. It’s really the only track on the record that belongs on the same kind of rarefied dance floor as classic New Order jams like "True Faith" and "Fine Time"—which means it’s the kind of slick, slightly chilly, and grandly magisterial electro pop that is essentially begging to be remixed into some kind of ecstatic 12” version that can play on a loop for days.
Elsewhere, "Singularity" opens with what literally sounds like an old Joy Division outtake—an ominous bassline and some warped guitar lines that sound as if they were being played in a room just adjacent to the actual recording studio—before exploding into a digitized electro banger, while "People on the High Line" could be a distant cousin to Republic’s "World", complete with chorus-echoing female backup vocals. "Tutti Frutti"—one of three tracks featuring additional vocals from La Roux’s Elly Jackson—reaches for a similar state of dancefloor euphoria and almost gets there. As always, Sumner’s lyrics are hit and miss ("You got me where it hurts / but I don’t really care/ ‘Cause I know I’m OK / Whenever you are there.") but he always manages to sell it effortlessly. In fact, effortlessness has always been New Order’s greatest trick. The best tracks on Complete are the kind of tastefully deployed dance track that the band has spent decades articulating—perfect, polished, airtight—but one can’t help but wish that Music Complete had a few more of them on board.
The record’s weakest tracks are generally the most tepid. "Academic" and "The Game", while certainly not terrible, suffer from being both unmemorable and somehow overly familiar, sounding like a dozen or so other fine but mostly unremarkable New Order tracks haunting the latter halves of previous albums. Elsewhere, "Stray Dog"—a track featuring a long spoken word passage growled by none other than Iggy Pop—would make for an appropriately larky B-side, but is something of a momentum killer when placed squarely in the middle of a pop album. The record does end on a high note though, with the swooning "Nothing but a Fool" adding the requisite dollop of perfectly-metered melancholy and album-closing ballad "Superheated" (featuring Brandon Flowers in what one can only imagine is his ultimate wet dream of a guest spot) bringing all the feelings to a charmingly earnest song about lost love that sounds like it could/should have played during the penultimate scene of a John Hughes movie (in the best way possible).
For longtime fans, Music Complete is something of a return to form for New Order—complete with appropriately chic minimalist artwork courtesy of Peter Saville. The record’s carefully considered aesthetic and meticulous production bear all the hallmarks of the band’s most iconic work. Still, it’s hard to know if anyone other than the band’s legions of devotees will find most of this material truly arresting. Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order, and now over three decades deep into their career, it's kind of amazing that nothing else really does. | 2015-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | September 22, 2015 | 7.2 | 353466df-c4ef-48a6-86e2-bfebde541a92 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Mastodon find their niche as a thinking man's metal band. Blending Voivod's neuro-thrash, Therion's majestic gloom, Morbid Angel's spirit of restless and morphing liquid black melody, and EyeHateGod's Southern rock gone awry, Leviathan is nothing short of supernatural. | Mastodon find their niche as a thinking man's metal band. Blending Voivod's neuro-thrash, Therion's majestic gloom, Morbid Angel's spirit of restless and morphing liquid black melody, and EyeHateGod's Southern rock gone awry, Leviathan is nothing short of supernatural. | Mastodon: Leviathan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5143-leviathan/ | Leviathan | Famed liberal journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers recently remarked "I believe that journalism is all about writing in the sand and whistling in the wind. The wind blows the sound away, and the sand flows over the writing. A journalist has impact on his time, if he's lucky." Sadly, for many of us at Pitchfork, our brand of journalism is often reduced to pounding sand and pissing in the wind-- particularly where metal is involved. With metal, so much effort goes into pasteurizing the product, congealing an intrinsically harsh and offensive form of expression into G-rated drivel, that our wind swallows the sound. What results seldom resembles the melodic and thematic content of sometimes brilliant modern metal albums, and instead focuses on the critic's unquenchable need for primal screams directed at a genre he/she simply doesn't get.
I've been away from journalism for the better part of two years. In that time I've sat back and stiffly scrutinized the metal landscape. So much of what I've witnessed is offensive-- both in the arenas of music and music criticism. I've seen dozens of rudderless bands ebb and flow, milking the same old derivative metal props for all they're worth. I've seen an entire genre (black metal) continue its decade-long decay into a wretched puddle of milky white afterbirth. And most notably, I've watched scores of pseudo frat boys reinvent themselves as "metalheadz." Whether it's the crystal meth or $10 dollar cases of PBR, these guys have tons of energy, a healthy appreciation for Terrence McKenna, and above all else, a whole lot of noise to make.
Unfortunately for these clowns-- and more so for the "journalists" who lap up this rubbish-- this wolf in American Eagle clothing is little more than the noise of hyperactive brats. Ample time is spent bemoaning the aesthetics of the so-called true metal as puerile, obsolete, and anachronistic, and at the same time lauding the dubious originality of bands like Isis, Pelican, and Neurosis, who seemingly missed the whole point in the first place by latching onto the very unmetal aesthetic of putting their audience to sleep.
And then a band like Mastodon comes along and just clusterfucks the entire landscape for every indie kid who thought they had the whole scene pegged. Starting with their ironically acclaimed 2002 release Remission, Mastodon's Bill Kelliher, Troy Sanders, Brent Hines, and Brann Dailor displayed considerable technicality and staggering chops. Although initially loathed by yours truly, I eventually recognized this album as a turgid-- occasionally murky-- statement from one of the most relentlessly forceful young bands on the Relapse roster.
With their 2004 beast, the aptly titled Leviathan, Mastodon finally find their niche as a thinking man's metal band. Blending Voivod's neuro-thrash, Therion's majestic gloom, Morbid Angel's spirit of restless and morphing liquid black melody, and EyeHateGod's Southern rock gone awry, Leviathan is nothing short of supernatural. Evincing a decade's worth of maturity gained in just two short years, Mastodon have authored a bombastic modern interpretation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the classic metaphor for mortality's eternal (and unwinnable) struggle with divine injustice.
On tracks like the blistering "I Am Ahab", the band revels in one of its most tightly structured offerings to date, showing precision and patience roaring with power chords and drummer Brann Dailor's mastery of playing both within and around the groove. With the fusion of guitar stabs and snare hits assaulting the listener like a hammer to the skull, the track evokes the unquenchable vengeance and contempt of Melville's symbolic white whale in a little over two-and-a-half minutes.
"Iron Tusk" is a particularly resonant ode to Sabbath's raw sludge rock sound; another swollen groove that just grows and flows in circles and waves. What's most impressive about this album is evidenced here: Mastodon have learned how to flaunt their musicianship and still allow a song to evolve. Their confidence is such that they're quite capable of building an awesome wall of drone and harmony and then getting the fuck of its way. Where a band like Isis seems to content to treat the audience like morons and basically repeat the same sound over and over again until it's nothing more than glorified elevator music, Mastodon stumbled onto the delicate art of weaving complexity and sophistication within an audience-respectful format.
"Megaladon" is an ode to the mythos of early 80s Maiden and Diamond Head-- and a simultaneous tip of the cap to Molly Hatchet with a wonderfully idiosyncratic, and damn near arbitrary trailer park riff before going into full throttle thrash for the remainder of the track. Fusing the narrative trademarks of King Crimson and Slayer, "Naked Burn" is one of the more beautiful pieces of Leviathan, a shifting, swaying exercise in orchestration and intelligible vox within a metal format. Marking a stark contrast with Remission, "Hearts Alive" continues Mastodon's revisitation of the new wave of British heavy metal-- and homage to the mysticism of the Viking Metal movement-- by unleashing a sweeping 13-minute epic, briefly featuring some of their most gentle vocals to date. Indeed, the addition of actual sung vocals-- while often suicidal to other metal bands-- lends a coherence and humanity to Leviathan basically alien to Remission.
Ultimately, there's very little to dislike about Mastodon. The genesis from their marginal 2001 EP Lifesblood to present day has been nothing short of stunning, and I can't imagine why anyone with even half an interest in the preservation of metal as a legitimate art form doesn't have a copy of Leviathan on his shelf. These guys aren't part of the tedious mediocrity they've been lumped in with, nor do they hold any contempt for their audience or their forefathers. They're simply one of the best things we metal fanatics have going for us, and if that's not reason enough to toss Panopticon in the trash, I don't know what is. | 2004-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | December 16, 2004 | 8.5 | 353557a2-f68c-412d-ad64-4fcca0d140a9 | Isaiah Violante | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isaiah-violante/ | null |
The accomplished debut from the DIY UK post-punk trio is simmering with possibility and pure conviction. | The accomplished debut from the DIY UK post-punk trio is simmering with possibility and pure conviction. | Big Joanie: Sistahs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-joanie-sistahs/ | Sistahs | Big Joanie singer-guitarist Steph Phillips and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone first met at a black feminist consciousness-raising meeting in their adopted home of London. Taylor-Stone noticed Phillips’ Raincoats tote bag and a friendship bloomed, rooted in a mutual love for feminist punk rock and their hope for a more inclusive underground music scene. In 2013, they formed their minimal indie-punk trio—which now includes bassist Estella Adeyeri—with a deliberate intention of diversifying London DIY. They played their inaugural set of originals and covers (Nirvana, Pixies, TLC) at First Timers, a festival centered on marginalized voices and new bands. They chose the name Big Joanie to evoke strong women and nod to Phillips’ Jamaican roots.
The debut Big Joanie LP, Sistahs, is an impressively woven tapestry of affirmational lyrics, girl-group chants, and deep, slashing guitars that would have sounded very at home on Kill Rock Stars in the 2000s. Big Joanie’s barebones rock songs always sound like they’re simmering with possibility, with pure conviction, something that the best DIY bands communicate almost telepathically. They’re the kind of punks who sing lyrics proclaiming, “I’m the nicest girl you know,” and about a desire to “drown my sorrows in herbal tea.”
In its themes and compositions, Sistahs evokes the collectivity from which Big Joanie was born. Lead single and highlight “Fall Asleep” is an ode to community, a sing-song solidarity anthem that could recall All Hands on the Bad One-era Sleater-Kinney. It circles around the fear of falling asleep: “If I ever fall asleep/Now would you wake me from the dream/That’s kept me crying now for weeks.” The work can be wearying, this song seems to say, but friends lift you up. Sistahs is best, though, on diffuse tracks like “Way Out” and especially “Eyes,” which bears a classic kitchen-sink post-punk style and even features an inspired recorder solo. This adventurousness returns on the minute-long “Down Down,” an oblique, ominous experiment that knows two words (“down down”) can sometimes be enough.
The songs of Sistahs tackle tough emotional terrain: the fraying edges of relationships, platonic and romantic, that must end; the intersection of boredom and lust; the feeling of being tokenized as a person of color. The gummy “Used to Be Friends” has a brilliant refrain—“I’d like to be friends with you but I only feel hatred”—and that uninhibited rawness gives it an edge. When the backup vocal clicks into Phillips on “feel hatred,” it’s like cool assurance. Phillips one-ups herself on the Shangri-Las-like “How Could You Love Me,” tear-stained and sinister: “He thinks I’m a joke/Well he can go choke.” There’s a bravery in gravitating towards these difficult places. Sistahs knows that punk, really, is a willingness to move towards the messier edges of life, to actualize oneself within them.
In a limited-edition zine that accompanies Sistahs, Phillips writes about the sepia-toned and seemingly innocuous photo on the record’s cover: her aunt and mother, Joan Phillips, on holiday in England as teenagers. Phillips goes on to describe the racism her mother experienced on that vacation, of how she was almost conned out of accommodations she’d paid for and had to stand up for herself and demand them. On Sistahs, Phillips hoped to channel a similar spirit of resilience, of fortitude and resolve, of taking what is yours. This rings resoundingly from the record’s first song. “Don’t tell me to wait,” the band harmonizes on its clear-headed “New Year,” a song of self-respect and fearlessness in the face of life’s great blank canvas. Their DIY spirit is manifest in those five words, refusing the waiting room and fighting for who they want to be. | 2018-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Daydream Library Series | December 17, 2018 | 7.6 | 3536cc95-e9c3-4043-b0f2-0e231df1eef0 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Ciara touches on just about every facet of the R&B singer's style to date. While she’s a more versatile, accomplished singer than when she started, her appeal, especially on ballads, remains essentially unchanged. | Ciara touches on just about every facet of the R&B singer's style to date. While she’s a more versatile, accomplished singer than when she started, her appeal, especially on ballads, remains essentially unchanged. | Ciara: Ciara | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18280-ciara-ciara/ | Ciara | Ciara’s 2004 debut Goodies arrived at the tail-end of the last R&B boom. Its best moments used the churn and snap of “crunk’n’b” as a vehicle to re-imagine and repackage the frothy, light-hearted dancefloor charm of early Janet Jackson or Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, only replacing girlish energy with insouciance and reserve. She wanted you to drip the sweat she never perspires. And while this mix of qualities made Ciara seem more distinctive and unique than a more solidly traditional R&B diva might, it’s always seemed like Ciara gets R&B at its core, that she’s invested in exploring all the ways the music can move you. Perhaps consequently, the mixed qualitative and commercial fortunes of her career since have mirrored the fortunes of the genre itself. It’s easy to think that if Ciara could put out an album that consistently captured the best of her talents, that record alone might be enough to help R&B reassume the throne of commercial dominance.
I suspect Ciara is not that album, but it roughly matches the quality of 2010’s Basic Instinct, probably her most consistent album up to that point. Which should be good enough to keep the dream alive a little longer. Ciara also touches on just about every facet of her style to date, and while she’s a more versatile, accomplished singer than when she started, her appeal remains essentially unchanged. At her best, Ciara comes on less as a full-blooded personality or even an object of desire and more as a glamorous big sister, the one you want to be when you grow up, who knows all the right moves on the dancefloor and in life. Complexity and personal drama ain’t in it: Ciara holds out the dazzling promise of somehow transcending all of that.
So it’s not surprising that Ciara feels slightly (though only slightly) weaker when she swims against the current of her own charm and tries for “raw.” “I’ve just been through a break up” she announces flatly on the blaring, Nicki Minaj-assisted opener “I’m Out”, and while she’s probably aiming for some mixture of bold personal statement and casual don’t-give-a-fuck swag, all you can hear is the deliberateness. Rihanna, a more limited singer than Ciara, can sound convincingly dead on tunes like “Pour It Up”, but Ciara’s stabs at a similar vibe can have a dress-ups quality, like she’s practicing her enervated monotone recitals in front of the mirror, singing into her lipstick. Ciara has done “hard” plenty of times, but on past tunes like “Oh” or “Ride” she effectively floated above the fray, untouched by the violence even as she endorsed it. “I’m Out” and Ciara’s Nicki-aping rap on (the otherwise excellent) “Super Turnt Up” are enough to confirm aggression is not her strong suit.
Conversely, the delectable, “My Boo”-referencing slow jam single “Body Party” finds the singer in top form, its billowing Mike Will Made It synth chords and crashing snares the perfect setting for Ciara’s light as a feather performance. The key line is “I’m having so much fun with you”, delivered with startled exuberance: even sex, in Ciara’s world, resembles the more innocent sensual pleasure of dancing. Likewise the double entendre-filled cunnilingus ode “Read My Lips”, perky electro-pop delivered with such frothy, wide-eyed innocence that it’s hard even to notice the subject matter. This same sense of uncomplicated exhilaration raises the straightforward, 2013 carbon dated club-pop of “Livin’ It Up” and “Overdose” from throwaway to highlight status, their obviousness transformed into a virtue through the singer’s palpable enjoyment.
The marvelous closing remix of “Body Party” (with features from Future and B.o.B.) underscores this (and the “My Boo” resemblance) by adding a popping bass beat, further submerging Ciara’s come-ons within easy dancefloor camaraderie. It’s a bewitching vision of life without any room for doubts or sadness-- except, perhaps, for the bittersweet realization that contemporary pop doesn’t sound just like this nearly enough. | 2013-07-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | July 11, 2013 | 7.3 | 3537cf70-f345-4508-a8aa-fd400fb6209d | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
One of the decade's true originals follows The Magic Position with his most populist record to date. Tilda Swinton guests as the voice of hope. Seriously. | One of the decade's true originals follows The Magic Position with his most populist record to date. Tilda Swinton guests as the voice of hope. Seriously. | Patrick Wolf: The Bachelor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13067-the-bachelor/ | The Bachelor | Regardless of his mythmaking and tireless efforts to project an otherworldly persona, Patrick Wolf still tends to write what he knows. One of the first of many bold proclamations on The Bachelor goes "in these hard times, we'll work harder," and whether you see him as an impish genius or a guy who'd be better off without an internet connection, you can't fault his commitment to craft-- all three of his previous records were meticulously imagined; all three sounded like the work of one man but rarely sounded like each other.
The Bachelor ups the ambition ante even higher, but it's just as as notable for displaying Wolf at his most interdependent, fitting in guest shots from Alec Empire and Tilda Swinton. Wolf's changes have been gradual: After the origin story of Lycanthropy, 2005's Wind in the Wires longed for pastoral escape but sounded like it was recorded in a remote hidey hole, all of which made the gushing, Cure-styled romance of The Magic Position a bona fide breakthrough. After that record's major keys and genuine human connections, The Bachelor isn't a hangover album so much as one on which Wolf picks up the morning paper and, without really breaching any specific topic, realizes that we're all in this world of shit together.
The Bachelor was initially conceived as a politically minded double-album entitled Battle, but Wolf's loves and depressions got the better of the initial plan-- either that, or he just realized that a politically minded double-album is a phenomenally bad idea. Nonetheless, the opening salvo of "Hard Times" and "Oblivion" are remnants of the aggressiveness Wolf set out for, the former recalling "The Libertine" in how it's prodded by a serrated, hooky string riff and the latter barreling forth with Wolf's most footloose electro-rhythms.
Most of The Bachelor's strengths sound borne out of arrangements rather than visceral or melodic thrills. For better or worse, that's likely been preventing any sort of real crossover for Wolf despite his acclaim-- while "Blackdown" culminates with a lovely Celtic hoedown, it takes about four minutes of tear-stained ivory tinkling to get there, and "The Sun Is Often Out" follows up with diminishing returns, struggling for a tune until a coda of choirboy chanting tries to make the preceding events sound like they were building towards something cathartic.
Even with all the momentum-sapping balladry, The Bachelor could still be considered Wolf's most physical album. Musical vigor backing worldly attempts at lyricism, however, is better left to Green Day (wait, no, that's not right)-- and here Wolf too often overstates things in search of some sort of populist truth. More worrying is that, despite all of the instrumental bric-a-brac dotting The Bachelor, Wolf leans on a choral mass during all the big moments-- a choir hopes for revolution towards the end of "Hard Times", exalts the listener to "rise up" during the coda of the otherwise understated "Damaris", repeats the title of the seriously Bono-fide arena raiser "Who Will?", and that's covering about half of it.
Wolf's always had an unsteady hand at hard rock, going down the supermassive black hole of fight music on "Battle" is at least a bizarre novelty that's kinda funny. As far as other bizarre novelties, unsurprisingly, "Tilda Swinton as 'The Voice of Hope'" is as ridiculous to hear as it is to type, triggering unfortunate flashbacks to horribly dated Age of Virtual Reality relics like Billy Idol's Cyberpunk and Kirstie Alley styling on the interludes to Prince's Symbol.
Strangely enough, Wolf's unclassifiable work to this point has managed to place him in a god-honest class of similarly minded Kate Bush acolytes-- but like St. Vincent and Bat For Lashes, there's the problem where stressing one's inner control freak can come at the expense of other freakiness. Or at least it can make any semblance of eccentricity feel micromanaged and forced, and Wolf lacks the former's humor or the latter's sultry songcraft to counterbalance it. Which admittedly sucks, because The Bachelor is still admirable in so many theoretical ways-- it's recorded almost flawlessly, and it appeals to the idea that an album is supposed to be an album of considered choices. Which is great, except that for all of the talk of Wolf being a chameleonic drama queen, oddball, or genius, The Bachelor most damningly lacks the charm attendant with any of those character descriptions, continuing Wolf's ability to please one's inner music critic, but too often ignoring any sort of pleasure principle. | 2009-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Bloody Chamber / NYLON | June 11, 2009 | 6.2 | 3537ffef-40c4-4965-9978-c51adeca35d3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his latest mixtape, the divisive Atlanta rapper sounds best when chasing fresher, weirder, spacier styles instead of trying to live up to hip-hop’s storied traditions. | On his latest mixtape, the divisive Atlanta rapper sounds best when chasing fresher, weirder, spacier styles instead of trying to live up to hip-hop’s storied traditions. | Lil Yachty: Summer Songs 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22177-summer-songs-2/ | Summer Songs 2 | “Seven years later and I got the same friends,” Lil Yachty croaks on “All In,” an enjoyable posse cut near the end of Summer Songs 2. Seven years ago I was 20, two years older than Yachty is now, and I remain friends with only about 25 percent of my social circle from back then—where does the time go? While Yachty is rapping about coming up to the top with his team intact, the line invites personal interpretation: What were you doing seven years ago? What was your life like at 18?
Age plays a huge part in enjoying (or not enjoying) Yachty’s music. He shouts “We are the youth!” on the mixtape’s very first track; he calls himself the “king of the teens” on another song that sounds like superhero theme music. The Atlanta rapper has made some uncomfortable appearances on New York radio shows like “The Breakfast Club” and “Ebro in the Morning,” where he was prodded and treated with a whiff of condescension—the weird kid in class with red dreads who embodies a new movement that strikes fear in older people. It all seems like an unfair burden put upon a teenager who doesn’t really deserve such high-strung generational introspection and skepticism. While Summer Songs 2 is better than Lil Boat, his breakthrough release from earlier this year, the music is still too flimsy to garner such “what is wrong with these kids?” hand-wringing.
That said, of his current burgeoning peers—guys like Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, 21 Savage, and Kodak Black—Yachty is looking like the one most poised for crossover success. His dominant feature on the D.R.A.M. song “Broccoli” sits at #34 on the Billboard Hot 100, and his light-hearted persona often shines on songs that are loose and feature less rapping. Which is fine. He gets in trouble, though, when gunning for some kind of respectability in traditional hip-hop circles.
“For Hot 97” mostly falls flat, because Yachty simply can’t keep up with the beat. He doesn’t command a verse as strongly as most of the guests on the tape, like Chicago’s G Herbo, who flattens “Up Next 3,” and Offset, who offers a silky verse on the woozy banger “DipSet.” In contrast, Yachty frequently falls off-tempo—it can be unpleasant to listen to. His high-pitched voice works in his favor on slower cuts but doesn’t blend well when he’s shouting and lagging behind the track. It’s a bit discomfiting—you want to root for the kid, but it’s frustrating to hear him undermining his strengths so frequently.
Summer Songs 2 clicks into focus on spacey, weirder songs like the slow-blooming “IDK,” where Yachty grapples with sudden fame, and the despondent breakup jam “Yeah Yeah,” which features the oddly memorable passage: “Dick so good turn that ho to George/That mean she get curious.” Yachty cops to being a student of Soulja Boy and Lil B (see the #based philosophy of “Life Goes On”) but he’s also got a Tyler, the Creator sense of humor, from his irreverent videos to opening the album by impersonating his “uncle,” Darnell Boat, who sounds like a character from the “Loiter Squad” cutting-room floor. And something about the tape’s late run of songs, when things slow down and the beats wilt, reminds me of chillwave’s idyllic vision of the West Coast, all beaches and girls and sun-soaked afternoons—potent, dreamy stuff that appeals directly to the sensibilities of teens and college loafers. Yachty is delivering an aesthetic, which is catnip to some (mostly those 25 and under) and repellent to others. But if you’re locked in, Summer Songs 2 can be a lot of fun.
On closer “So Many People,” after playing a series of wide-eyed, wistful testimonials to his music, Yachty lowers his voice to a near whisper while a simple, forceful drum pattern kicks—a startling moment of vulnerability, even when he boasts, “I just put both of my feet in the door/I did it two times faster than these other niggas.” It’s the kind of pathos you get from young adults—the confidence is there, but the insecurity and uncertainty of teenagedom still looms. If Summer Songs 2 buckles under the weight of an Apple Music imprimatur and deafening hype, try to think about being 18 again, when you only wanted to listen to yourself. | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control | July 27, 2016 | 6.1 | 35418007-0fa0-4362-b5c8-88d0914cb8cf | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is Luke Wyatt's second album as Torn Hawk this year. He's still playing with the emotional resonance of his own specific memories, and nostalgia is still a primary factor, but it's tempered by a breathy, new age smoothness. | Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is Luke Wyatt's second album as Torn Hawk this year. He's still playing with the emotional resonance of his own specific memories, and nostalgia is still a primary factor, but it's tempered by a breathy, new age smoothness. | Torn Hawk: Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19912-luke-wyatt-lets-cry-and-do-pushups-at-the-same-time/ | Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time | What are we actually talking about when we talk about nostalgia? Taylor Swift’s Polaroid album cover for 1989? Ghostbusters? The Beatles? Nirvana? Limp Bizkit? Illmatic? Nostalgia is fascinating and infuriating because of how specific it is: my nostalgia is not your nostalgia. But when it’s used correctly and on the right person, it’s an emotional weapon, able to warp hazy memories into strong feelings.
Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is Luke Wyatt's second album as Torn Hawk this year, and stylistically, it builds directly on the previous release, Through Force of Will. Wyatt’s still playing with the emotional resonance of his own specific memories, and nostalgia is still a primary factor, but it's tempered by a breathy, new age smoothness that rounds out the jagged edges of his older material.
It’s not quite spa-ready easy listening though. The drums on "Lessons From the Edge" lurch and shuffle under layers of digital murk, like a low-res jpg blown up way too big. Wyatt still loves layering and twisting triumphant guitar lines that are bound to remind you of whatever your favorite movie featuring an underdog coming out on top is, or failing that, a surf magazine from 1989.
But it’s not all triumph. Wyatt skews dark on occasion: "Because of M.A.S.K." is a neon-lit journey through a dystopian present, and "Return to the Pec Deck" sounds like two different Torn Hawk songs playing at once. It’s unsettling and weirdly funny. Yet it still feels like Wyatt is holding back. Each record he releases brings him closer to facing nostalgia head on: both the nostalgia inherent in the sound of his music, and the nostalgia people that write about his music saddle him with. But how deep does he want to go? Pushups, as dense as it is, is a breezy listen. Easy to play on repeat, and easy to find moments of crystalline beauty that don’t have to mean anything more than what they are.
Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is often beautiful, and that’s all it really needs to be, but Wyatt’s been plugging away at this sound for long enough that it feels like he’s making a larger point about the way we engage with our own memories of pop culture—or at least questioning them. It’s impossible to tell if he’ll ever come to any conclusion. If he even wants to come to any conclusion, but there are a couple things that are certain: Wyatt’s managed to take something as idiosyncratic as the way pop culture tangles up with our memories of the past and make a universal sound out of it. Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember. What will happen when he stops asking and starts answering? | 2014-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | November 12, 2014 | 7.3 | 3542e570-8dee-4225-9262-3e4cd38f66e3 | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
The London-born Adrian Sherwood is an adventurous, refined musical talent whose singular sound helped generate momentum for a slew of edgy, iconic bands, including the Fall, the Slits, the Pop Group, and more. | The London-born Adrian Sherwood is an adventurous, refined musical talent whose singular sound helped generate momentum for a slew of edgy, iconic bands, including the Fall, the Slits, the Pop Group, and more. | Various Artists: Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20535-sherwood-at-the-controls-vol-1-1979-1984/ | Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984 | Now in his mid-50s, the London-born producer Adrian Sherwood is a sort of bass-music activist, fighting to keep the "dub" in dubstep with solo albums like 2012's Survival and Resistance and lecturing on studio-recording history and technique at Red Bull Music Academy. But Sherwood made his deepest mark 30-some years ago, working in the slipstream between post-punk, industrial and Jamaican music that ran between London and New York. Once you start picking at the threads of his CV, you'll discover an adventurous, refined musical talent whose singular sound helped generate momentum for a slew of edgy, iconic bands and ensured his own placement in the producers' pantheon.
To stimulate the inevitable reassessment, Sherwood is releasing music from his back catalog on his On-U Sound label, which he originally founded in 1979 as a repository for the work he was doing with Jamaican musicians. Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. I: 1979-1984 explores a thrilling period in music history and makes a compelling point of entry for appreciating Sherwood's influence. Among its 14 selections, dub is a persistent thread. In the London music scene of the late '70s, the sonic touchstones of Jamaican music—oceanic bass, cavernous reverb, spacious syncopation, an overarching sense of studio-applied patience and distance—appeared in surprising places, applied to far-flung genres.
By that stage in his career, young Sherwood had cultivated a reputation beyond his early association with Jamaican expats in London's reggae scene. He was known as a production auteur with a serious ear and bands like the Fall, the Slits and the Pop Group, all represented here in various incarnations, sought his signature touch. On the Fall's "Middle Mass", they sound like a more minimalist version of themselves, demonstrating both Sherwood's collaborative subtlety and Mark E. Smith's predilection for bubbling bass. The Pop Group frontman Mark Stewart's "Learning to Cope with Cowardice" is one of the more contemporary-sounding jams here, the kind of crunchy digi-dub that we associate from modern purveyors like Glasgow's Scotch Bonnet Records or Leipzig's Jahtari.
Stewart wasn't the only Pop Group member to enlist Sherwood after the band's breakup: Guitarist John Waddington recorded with him as part of a group called Maximum Joy. "Let It Take You There" is one of the comp's highlights, six minutes of spaced-out and infectiously upbeat post-punk funk à la ESG. It follows album opener "Hungry, So Angry" by Medium Medium—another fantastic, dancefloor-oriented, sax-driven number, this one leaning toward Talking Heads-like jitter-pop. Several songs later, Sherwood and Shriekback—which consisted of Barry Andrews of XTC and Dave Allen of Gang of Four—push the limits of a LinnDrum machine on the proto-industrial "Mistah Linn He Head".
If you sense a theme, that's not an accident: These songs and artists form a nexus of references for a slew of more recognizable early '80s bands. Sherwood was a physical link between the Jamaican underground to the white avant-garde, and collectively, over the course of years, they pushed unconventional musical ideas into the mainstream, where the likes of David Byrne and the Police made them popular.
But Sherwood—and Sherwood at the Controls—remains unpopulist. The second half of the compilation is especially and deliciously weird. Here we meet Jamaican music luminaries like producer Prince Far I, whose Linton Kwesi Johnson-sampling "Nuclear Weapon" flows at a lava-like pace, and vocalist Bim Sherman, who performs "Reaching the Bad Man" as part of Sherwood's studio ensemble Singers and Players, unspooling an eight-minute foray into deep, skeletal dub. To this day, African Head Charge is one of On-U's flagship bands; their 1982 cut "In a Trap" sizzles with Nyabinghi-style percussion, rubbery bass and faraway guitar.
The depth and breadth of Sherwood at the Controls stuns. These songs aren't just curious footnotes in one man's extensive discography—a bunch of them legitimately bang, and the ones that don't go full-bore into left field. Taken together, they give a sense of the indelible mark Sherwood has left, and hopefully there is more on the way to round out the picture. | 2015-04-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | On-U Sound | April 22, 2015 | 8 | 3545a48c-10c8-44b6-9fe3-5e388f5eb841 | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | null |
The Kansas-bred, New York-based DJ has been stripping techno to its essentials. Yet Emma Olson’s latest contains so much to admire, each track is a glimpse into something much larger. | The Kansas-bred, New York-based DJ has been stripping techno to its essentials. Yet Emma Olson’s latest contains so much to admire, each track is a glimpse into something much larger. | UMFANG: Symbolic Use of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/umfang-symbolic-use-of-light/ | Symbolic Use of Light | A strange discipline rules UMFANG’s work. Her spartan take on techno recorded live in single takes often feels like a riddle with no clues. The Kansas-bred, New York-based DJ and electronic musician has been honing her approach for a few years now: A 2015 self-titled cassette for London’s Videogamemusic label trafficked in spare, chilly studies for drum machine and analog squiggles, driven by an ultra-minimalist impulse reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s grids. The same year’s OK, for 1080p, was more colorful, indulging in deep house organs and chopped-and-looped rave vocals. (UMFANG, aka Emma Olson, has subsequently called it “silly” and “crowd-pleasing.”) But it remained, at heart, deeply weird and frequently forbidding, swirling a cappella diva shrieks into a disorienting ambient morass, and looping the word “OK” ad delirium over an unrelenting 909 groove. It wasn’t all so confrontational: The gorgeous, nearly beatless album opener “Shant” recalled Vainqueur’s weightless dub techno while still putting its own spin on the form. But Olson cut her teeth in underground spaces and DIY communities—she is a co-founder of Discwoman, a collective and DJ agency for female-identifying and genderqueer electronic musicians—and her music proudly foregrounds its uncompromising streak.
She took a major step forward with last year’s Riffs EP: Stripped to little more than a single synth and one or two lumpy drum sounds, the EP’s tracks were sketch-like in form, but they didn’t feel incomplete or unfinished—more like terraforming experiments turned arid and airless. Symbolic Use of Light builds upon those developments, offering a more complete statement than anything she’s done before this—but, crucially, without having added one iota of extra sound.
It’s ironic that the album is bookended by tracks called “Full 1” and “Full 2,” because emptiness is the key metric here—or if not emptiness, precisely, then exactitude. She’s like the world's most unforgiving fire chief: If these tracks were public spaces, their legal capacity would lie somewhere in the single digits. Most of them make do with just a handful of sounds, and some even fewer than that. “Full 1” opens the album with plucked synthesizer tones swimming in thick reverb, a kind of futuristic harpsichord music at once tentative and unsentimental; “Weight” is moodier and, despite a quick-stepping kick-and-rimshot pattern, hardly much more forthcoming. Minor-key organ loops spin until dizziness sets in, and she works the filter as though toying with the controls on an airlock, seeing just how much oxygen she can suck out of the room without reaching a point of no return.
Quite a few tracks are purely ambient: The no-def “Path” sounds like Actress run through the looping tapes of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, with a burbling synth arpeggio smoothed into a faint, glassy ripple, while “Sweep” broods over dissonant bleeps and white noise. (While writing this review, the steady beeping of a construction vehicle backing up outside my house and the arrhythmic sine bursts of “Sweep” meshed together as perfectly as the interlocking components of a DJ mix.) Other cuts, like “Where Is She” and “Wingless Victory,” offer the purest, most unrelenting kind of techno, with beefy kick drums bathed in hangar-sized reverb and needle-nosed arpeggios reminiscent of Robert Hood. Most of her dancefloor cuts hit their plateaus quickly: She’s less interested in building drama than in creating seemingly static environments that take a while to sink in.
The rest of the album focuses on stripping techno down to pure electrical pulses: “Symbolic Use of Light” wrong-foots a Pan Sonic-like drone with a whipcrack snare right when you least expect it, and “Pop” is so unflinchingly minimalist that it features no percussion other than a flat, dry kick drum. Instead, it focuses all its energies on the unpredictable interplay between two bleepy arpeggios of slightly different lengths. A less confident producer might have filled up the track with more drums, more sounds, more effects, but by concentrating on the subtle modulations and dizzying interplay of just those two elements, her fine-gauged pings assume larger-than-life proportions.
Like much of her work throughout her career, each of these tracks feels like a glimpse of something larger. You won’t get the full picture from any single track, but let the whole album sink in, and you begin hearing the implicit connections that link them all. Olson's alias came to her out of the blue, but it just so happens that “Umfang” is also a German word denoting scope, circumference, breadth, etc. It’s a fitting term for her work, given the way she treats the space of each track like a problem to be solved—a search for the missing variable that will turn three dimensions into four. | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | June 17, 2017 | 7.8 | 354858e6-a797-4f1f-9201-34f7f38a6dc0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Walkmen recently went on a “pretty extreme hiatus”, and the first batch of its members’ inevitable solo albums are now starting to appear; for his solo bow, Black Hours, frontman Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t veer far from their established sound, and continues their exploration of old popular music, this time with an emphasis on what was on the pop charts two generations ago. | The Walkmen recently went on a “pretty extreme hiatus”, and the first batch of its members’ inevitable solo albums are now starting to appear; for his solo bow, Black Hours, frontman Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t veer far from their established sound, and continues their exploration of old popular music, this time with an emphasis on what was on the pop charts two generations ago. | Hamilton Leithauser: Black Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19401-hamilton-leithauser-black-hours/ | Black Hours | In 2004, the Walkmen released one of the best rock songs of the decade, “The Rat,” a relentless, spiteful, venom-spewing anthem cleverly designed to sound like it was tearing itself apart while it was in the process of being played. Afterwards, instead of trying to match or exceed its vitriolic brilliance, the band angled sideways instead, embarking on a series of subdued, smart experiments—trading instruments, recording a faithful recreation of an under-loved Harry Nilsson record, and so on. The band recently went on a “pretty extreme hiatus”, and the first batch of its members’ inevitable solo albums are now starting to appear; for his solo bow, Black Hours, frontman Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t veer far from their established sound, and continues their exploration of old popular music, this time with an emphasis on what was on the pop charts two generations ago.
One of the Walkmen’s key strengths were their ability to conjure up an air of non-specific old-timiness, cobbled together from bits of old folk, country, garage rock, oddball '60s pop (which was itself an intentional throwback to the days before rock & roll), and the American songbook. It was an inspired tactic that earned the band a fervent audience among people who cherish vintageness, and the Walkmen were savvy enough to veer far enough from tribute-act territory. For Black Hours, Leithauser dials up the influence of jazzy post-war vocal pop; he recently posted to his Tumblr a playlist of influences that guided its creation, including Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, Randy Newman, and Bob Dylan, whose retro-revivalist spirit has hovered over most of Leithauser’s career.
But the playlist seems superfluous when hearing the album’s opening track, “5 AM”, which puts the aforementioned influences front and center with pensive piano, lachrymose strings, and a theatrical vocal performance that accurately replicates Sinatra's signature blend of heartache and bravado. Leithauser’s reedy-yet-supple voice has always been one of the Walkmen’s strengths, and after years of constant practice he’s become a far more proficient singer than you’d expect for someone working in the indie rock milieu. He wouldn’t have been able to compete directly with Sinatra back in the day, but he could have made a decent opening act.
Largely, Black Hours' first few tracks hew closely to the Walkmen's sound, with a few neat tweaks: “The Silent Orchestra” mixes strings, marimba, and a jaunty rhythm guitar playing on the upstroke that suggests "Mad Men"-era cocktail party music matched with punk raggedness; “11 O'Clock Friday Night” also features marimba, embellished with assorted percussion, jangly guitar, and the kind of casually anthemic vocal part that Leithauser specializes in. The album’s best song, “Alexandra”, is also one of the finest moments in Leithauser’s career, as a deceptively simple melody is paired with acoustic guitar, exuberant handclaps, a gleefully wailing harmonica that smacks of Paul Simon’s '70s bubblegum-folk sound.
Black Hours shares some of its strengths with Leithauser’s work with the Walkmen, and same goes with its weaknesses—namely, an occasional lapse in focus. “St. Mary’s County” takes a step too far in the direction of Sinatra-style torchiness, while the last couple tracks never quite cohere, resembling sketches of the album's stronger material. But the swooning “Self Pity” and “I Retired,” which puts a cabaret-style slant on ramshackle, mid-period Dylan folk rock, hold things together. At the end, Black Hours is a tribute to a diverse range of musical progenitors. But more deeply, it’s a testament to Leithauser’s inexhaustible stylistic ambition, and his ability to conquer expectations by throwing one curveball after another. | 2014-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Ribbon Music | June 6, 2014 | 7.4 | 3549dad2-91d8-49ef-bfba-9e074394fb86 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Lily Allen possesses a terrific flair for irony, but there's a fine line between using irony to make a cutting point and using it as a protective coating to hide the fact that you're not sure exactly what you're trying to say. She was once a master of the former, but her new album, Sheezus, is another story. | Lily Allen possesses a terrific flair for irony, but there's a fine line between using irony to make a cutting point and using it as a protective coating to hide the fact that you're not sure exactly what you're trying to say. She was once a master of the former, but her new album, Sheezus, is another story. | Lily Allen: Sheezus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19322-lily-allen-sheezus/ | Sheezus | A few weeks ago, Lily Allen released a single called "Sheezus", from her new album of the same name. She begins the song in a weary murmur, announcing that, after five years away, she's ready to step back into the spotlight and endure all the "embarrassing" comparisons she will receive to other female pop stars. Then, in the chorus, she all but invites these comparisons by name-checking some artists she seems to perceive as her contemporaries: "Riri isn't scared of Katy Perry's Roaring/ Queen B's gone back to the drawing/ Lorde smells blood, yeah she's about to slay you/ Kid ain't one to fuck with when she's only on her debut."
"Sheezus" is a maddeningly catchy, deeply puzzling song. Is she paying homage to these women? Is she making fun of them? Maybe a little bit of both? (And while we're asking the unanswerable: Why is she dressed like a Na'vi from Avatar in the song's video?) Maybe Allen wants "Sheezus" to be read as a critique of the ruthlessly combative, Who-Wore-It-Better? pageant that our culture creates for female celebrities—though at the same time, she admits that part of her desires that rigged game's flashy prize. "Give me the crown, bitch," she snaps a little too convincingly at the end of the chorus, "I wanna be Sheezus."
All things considered, the Lorde reference is particularly loaded. Nearly a decade ago, Allen was the promising and precociously literate pop insurgent who was "only on her debut." That record was 2006's enduringly charming *Alright, Still—*a personable blast of witty, hip-hop-informed pop that featured lively character sketches of famous family members, eccentric London townies, and shitty ex-boyfriends. It sold millions and made her a star, particularly in her home country. Allen became a fixture on the London club scene and an acid-tongued presence in the British media; she took a brief and well-publicized break from drinking after telling Elton John to "fuck off" on national TV.
Her second record, It's Not Me, It's You, was as shimmery and sharp as a shattered mirror, critiquing the vapidity of fame ("The Fear") and the ways in which the deck is stacked against outspoken women who dare to outlive their ingénue phase ("22", a song about the Rock-Forever-21-But-Just-Turned-30 set, now feels like a bleak sequel to Taylor Swift's hit of the same name). Though the tabloids charted Allen's every affair, her most passionate love/hate relationship seemed to be with her own notoriety. (A telling detail that almost every profile of her dutifully noted: After she was arrested in 2007 for attacking a photographer, she blew up a copy of the police citation and hung it in her foyer.)
Clearly, Allen possesses a terrific flair for irony. But there's a fine line between using irony to make a cutting point and using it as a protective coating to hide the fact that you're not sure exactly what you're trying to say. Allen was once a master of the former, but Sheezus too often finds her drifting perilously in the latter territory. Even before she was disowning her underperforming singles as "docile pop rubbish" on Twitter a few weeks ago, we got a taste of this back-pedaling and double-speak on the album’s lead-off single "Hard Out Here", which fashioned itself a critique of music industry sexism but, to some listeners, sent an unfortunate mixed message. "I don't have to shake my ass for you, cuz I've got a brain," Allen sang, as though the two were mutually exclusive; behind her, a group of black women shook their asses at the camera. When the video was accused of being racist, Allen clarified, "If I could dance like the ladies can, it would have been my arse on your screens." All of this confusion only muddled her original point, and made you wonder if the song had as much brain power as Allen advertised.
Allen was one of the first high-profile artists to cultivate a fanbase via the internet; she posted demos on Myspace in advance of Alright, Still, and later became known for writing confessional posts on her blog. But the controversy that "Hard Out Here" generated seemed like a barometer of how much the internet has changed in a few short years—especially when it comes to talking (or making music) about feminism. As the writer Michelle Goldberg described in a recent cover story for The Nation, it can sometimes feel on Twitter like there is a radical SWAT team that would rather jump on anyone who Does Feminism Wrong (see also: the "Is Beyoncé A Feminist?" Thinkpiece Fatigue of 2014) than allow people to express "well intentioned" but "imperfect" opinions. Because she is making some valid points about double standards in the music industry, some might find it tempting to consider Allen a victim of this kind of hand-wringing. But in the end, Sheezus fails on much less ambiguous grounds.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the way the album sounds: It's a sleek and bubbly, if somewhat indistinct, pop record. It's not easy to write songs that are as catchy as they are verbose, but Allen and her frequent collaborator, producer Greg Kurstin, have not lost the light, agile touch they showcased on the best of It's Not Me. "L8 CMMR" is cheeky summertime pop, and the Sugababes-sweet "Air Balloon" is infectious enough that I can almost forgive Allen, lyrically, for making the same joke as that stupid Bavaria Radler commercial with Elvis and Kurt Cobain. (Almost.) The record's most satisfyingly on-point moment, though, is "URL Badman", a satirical send-up of spiteful internet commenters. Allen sings it in the voice of a parents'-basement-dwelling "London white boy repping ATL" who says things like, "I don't troll, I make statements." Even though he spends his days spouting Wordpress vitriol at famous women who will never fuck him, he wants us to know that deep down he's really just a sensitive guy, "like Drake."
If only this record could put its money where its delightfully dirty mouth is. But too often, there's a tone of scolding, mean-spirited superiority about Sheezus that, after a few spins, makes you wonder why Allen thinks she’s so different from that blogosphere hater. The feather-light R&B number "Insincerely Yours" is bogged down by cheap shots and Twitter-beef petulance: "I don't give a fuck about the Delevingne, that Rita girl, about Jourdan Dunn… I don't give a fuck about your Instagram, about your lovely house or your ugly kids." Allen's venomous tongue was previously effective when it spewed at unidentified love interests or impersonal cultural institutions like "society" or The Sun and The Mirror, but, as on “Sheezus”, she runs into trouble as soon as she starts naming names. Not only will “Insincerely Yours” age about as well as the Fred Durst diss in "The Real Slim Shady", but less forgivably, it contradicts the record’s overall message. How can Allen not see that she's playing into the very catfight narrative that, four songs previous, she was supposedly trying to end?
Even as Allen takes both serious and “ironic” jabs at her contemporaries, she seems plenty interested in borrowing from their sounds and sensibilities. “Our Time” is her obligatory stab at a YOLO-anthem, a “We Can’t Stop” in everything but name and cutting-edge production. There’s also a particularly noxious song called "Silver Spoon", the main argument of which scans as, “Fuck off, I grew up slightly less rich than you think I did.” Although it aims for empathy across class lines, it just comes off as defensive. Furthermore, although Allen’s records have always been stylistic hodgepodges, Sheezus doesn’t flow as fluidly as her last two. When things get a little weary after the mandatory ballad about not wanting to be famous anymore, cue "As Long As I Got You", which is...a zydeco song?
“The game is changing,” Allen sings on “Sheezus”. “Can’t just come back, jump on the mic and do the same thing.” There is something poignant and disarmingly honest about this song—very few artists pull back the curtain on the kind of fears and anxieties she’s acknowledging here. And while Allen’s right—the game is changing—there are plenty of reasons to feel more hopeful about the future than she does. Katy Perry’s “Roar” wasn’t a catty snipe at anybody’s Instagram, but instead a primal battle cry of female self-empowerment. Yes, Beyoncé did go back to the drawing board—and she returned to completely reinvent the album as a relevant format in 2014 and prove that brains and ass-shaking can coexist and the world shall continue to turn. And in the short amount of time she’s been on the scene, Lorde has not only spoken out against the music industry’s sexism but also cultivated a powerful sense of solidarity with other young female pop stars. Even in the context of a joke, the word “diva” feels applicable to her least of all. She is not the girl who wants to “slay” her “rivals”, but befriend and root for them instead.
So “Sheezus” is based on a false conceit. Nobody’s vying for the title of Top Diva in 2014 because—and this is the great and exciting thing about women in pop music right now—there’s enough room at the table for all different kinds of femininities, sexualities, races, body types, and sounds. (It ain’t perfect, of course, but progress is being made.) Sheezus has a few good points and some admirable intentions, but too often it misses the point. In the end, Allen only fans the flames she says she wants to extinguish. | 2014-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Regal / Warner Bros. | May 8, 2014 | 5.4 | 354d8d89-acc9-43f4-9d8c-710ddafe99dc | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Like drawing a perfect circle, making a good power-pop record is an elusive task. Portland's Mo Troper come closer than many have in awhile, with snot-nosed charm. | Like drawing a perfect circle, making a good power-pop record is an elusive task. Portland's Mo Troper come closer than many have in awhile, with snot-nosed charm. | Mo Troper: Beloved | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21905-beloved/ | Beloved | Like drawing a perfect circle, making a good power-pop record is a task that seems easy but becomes nearly impossible when put into practice. So many have aimed for simple and landed on trite; aimed for timeless and landed on toothless; aimed for sweet and landed on creepy. This is precisely why most power-pop albums are not necessarily graded for breaking new ground, but rather, for how competently they fit within the genre’s pre-established formula. Beloved, the debut album from Portland, OR songwriter Mo Troper, indeed recalls some important figures from the past. Over the course of its thirteen tracks, you will find the blushing-schoolboy narratives from the first two Big Star records, the denim-clad rock bravado of Teenage Fanclub, and the lo-fi spontaneity of '90s Robert Pollard. And while these reference points might account for some of the album’s initial thrill, *Beloved *seeks to do more than just impress you with its immaculate Works Cited page.
In fact, it’s almost impressive how much Troper is able to wring not only out of his genre’s limitations but also his stunted lyrical inspiration. Nearly all his songs are planted firmly within either accusatory pop-punk juvenilia (“You’re just another human being/But you’re the only one who’s cool enough to be a casualty/Of everything”) or starry-eyed high school fantasy (“Do you want to kiss me?/Do you ever say my name out loud?”). The latter lyric—from “After the Movies,” the album’s obvious highpoint—is a lot more successful territory for Troper, whose voice is significantly more attractive beneath that song’s cozy distortion than amid the awkward open-mic dryness of “Somebody Special.” On an album that, at its best, sounds like an unearthed live bootleg from an obscure Titan Records band, moments like these can’t help but feel like the local openers coming back to play one more song: you can practically hear the audience hightailing it to the bathroom within the first fifteen seconds. Same goes for eight-minute slow burner “The Biggest” and its acoustic coda, “Teeth,” both of which seem to exist solely for the purpose of pushing the album’s runtime past the thirty-minute mark.
As spotty as the album is, Troper’s gifts are undeniable. “Judy Garland” employs a lyrical conceit not unlike Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” before breaking into a similarly infectious “Ooh ooh ooh” refrain, ensuring the song takes a permanent place in your head. On “Star Wars,” Troper plays up his loner persona (“All my friends want to get drunk again/I just want to stay home and stare at my phone”) before admitting squarely, “All my friends are total fucking bros.” It’s one of the album’s funnier moments, not to mention one that plants his material firmly in the present, as opposed to the unremembered golden age his melodies and production occasionally recall. Plus, it’s nice for once to hear him slightly implicate himself in his trademark, snot-nosed pwnage.
It’s hard to say just how long Troper’s keen melodic sensibility can counterbalance his lyrics’ occasionally mean-spirited adolescent tone; it will be interesting to see whether or not he will be able to pass the ultimate test for power-pop artists—the dreaded sophomore album. Still, in a genre often criticized for its timidity, Troper gets points for confidence. Not to mention, it’s easy to ignore what he’s actually saying in songs like “After the Movies” and “Paint,” in which nearly every couplet feels effortlessly like a hook. While Troper is not the first person to do what he’s doing, he is the first in a long time who can convince you—for the length of a few perfect moments—that no one’s ever done it better. If he’s half as interested in taking advice as he is in giving it, he’s well on his way to earning the authority that these songs seem obsessed with obtaining. | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Good Cheer | May 7, 2016 | 6 | 354e088d-62d7-460e-9d05-bbf1b5d7848b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the trio showcases a carefully stripped-down, psych-jazz sound where the groove reigns supreme. | Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the trio showcases a carefully stripped-down, psych-jazz sound where the groove reigns supreme. | Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin: Ghosted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oren-ambarchi-johan-berthling-andrea-ghosted/ | Ghosted | Multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi, bassist Johan Berthling, and drummer Andreas Werliin are well acquainted with the pleasures of letting go. Veteran improvisers and experimental musicians, all three have been playing together in various configurations for two decades, exploring what happens when sound spills out of its frame. Among their recent collaborations, Berthling and Ambarchi’s 2015 album Tongue Tied united a mutual interest in drone with their shared instinct for bone-quaking pulses; then, Ambarchi brought both musicians on board for the 2019 performances that yielded last year’s Live Hubris, an astonishing album pairing Glenn Branca-grade guitar clang with rhythms inspired by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. But Ghosted is different; it trades their propensity for cutting loose with a newfound interest in dialing back and zooming in. These tracks are plenty muscular, but there’s no bulge, no bloat. They’re as sculpted as the six-pack on a plastic superhero costume.
On Ghosted, the groove reigns supreme. Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the album showcases a carefully stripped-down sound. Berthling plays acoustic double bass on all but the second track, where he opts for electric. Werliin favors a palette of shakers, toms, and glancing snares, sketching out the contours of the beat by tracing its crags and cavities. And while the timbre of Ambarchi’s guitar couldn’t be mistaken for any other instrument, he typically avoids strummed chords or picked melodic lines in favor of a wash of tone run through a Leslie cabinet. The three players fill this wide-open sound with ephemeral shapes that hint at a possible meaning behind the album’s title: The music swims with darting shapes, flickering traces of energy, that feel almost supernatural in origin.
Ghosted consists of just four tracks: three long, extended vamps and one atmospheric coda. The trio is joined on the first, “I,” by Christer Bothén, a Swedish multi-instrumentalist who collaborated with Don Cherry in the 1970s. Here, as on recordings like Cherry’s 1974 album Eternal Now, he plays donso n’goni, a lute-like West African instrument that pairs with Berthling’s bright plucking to create a sound that’s warm and luminous. It’s the most joyful and easygoing of the album’s four tracks, with a shuffling, circular groove and a loping two-note bassline that evoke the feel of a desert road arrowing endlessly toward the horizon. In tone and mood alike, it’s faintly reminiscent of Joshua Abrams and his group Natural Information Society, where the guimbri—a North African descendent of the n’goni—plays a similarly hypnotic role.
On “II,” Berthling swaps his acoustic bass for an electric, on which he plays a single repeated riff for all nine and a half minutes of the song’s running time, tapping out the sort of harmonics that were Jaco Pastorius’ signature. But where Pastorius, on songs like “Portrait of Tracy,” used the effect to hint at the ineffable, as though grasping at moods his instrument wasn't otherwise meant to capture, Berthling keeps his head down and his control all but mechanical. His playing is so steady, it’s easy to wonder if he used a looping pedal—but everything on the record was played in real time, Ambarchi says. Berthling has overdubbed a low-end bassline to add some dubby punch; Ambarchi’s processed guitar sounds almost like a bowed violin. The whole thing moves so naturally, it might take you multiple listens to realize that it’s in 7/8 time; credit Werliin’s locked-in yet fluid drumming, which draws from the same deep well as Can’s “Future Days.”
On “III,” the players tackle an even trickier time signature, but once again, they make it feel as intuitive as breathing. Where the preceding songs are sprightly and vivid, the nearly 16-minute “III” goes long on atmosphere. Berthling again lays down the unchanging groove, his instrument’s tone as smooth as driftwood, while Werliin’s deep, booming toms offer the faintest suggestion of a melodic counterpoint. Propelled by the Leslie cabinet’s quickening-and-slowing rotations, Ambarchi’s guitar is all shimmer, dancing like the Northern lights above the craggy shapes sketched out by his bandmates.
It’s an example of jam-based minimalism at its most transcendent: endlessly repetitive, yet born anew with every bar. The band probably could have drawn this meditative, trance-like track out to an entire album’s length. Instead, they let us down gently with “IV,” a dirge-like song in the same key that spreads out like an oil stain. It makes for a satisfying finish: After the clockwork mechanics of the first three tracks, “IV” feels like they’re letting go again, giving into entropy as the coiled grooves relax into ambient ooze. | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Drag City | May 5, 2022 | 8 | 3550fd82-a0b6-4812-88ab-1e135ba64263 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The second release from the British producer finds him adding global textures and delving further into dance music proper. Where his last album, Lucky Shiner, had a bright, nostalgic glow, Half of Where You Live is distinctly darker and, at points, clubbier than its predecessor. | The second release from the British producer finds him adding global textures and delving further into dance music proper. Where his last album, Lucky Shiner, had a bright, nostalgic glow, Half of Where You Live is distinctly darker and, at points, clubbier than its predecessor. | Gold Panda: Half of Where You Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18121-gold-panda-half-of-where-you-live/ | Half of Where You Live | We still don't know his name, but Gold Panda has made it easy for us to know him. The British producer's debut, 2010's Lucky Shiner, was an emotive tapestry of personal history, with textures that evoked imagery with a distinct personal glow. On his second album and first substantial release in three years, Half of Where You Live, Gold Panda shifts the focus from who he is to where he's been.
This shift makes sense. The success he's enjoyed has sent him far from the suburban Essex enclave he once called home. Lucky Shiner cuts like "India Lately" and "Same Dream China" swirled the culturally distinctive sounds of plucked strings and tangled sitar detritus into their respective mixes. 2009's Miyamae EP took its name from a ward of the Japanese city of Kawasaki; its bookended cuts were named, respectively, "Back Home" and "Long Vacation". Clearly, the act of leaving is far more intriguing to him than returning.
A quick scan of Half of Where You Live's tracklist uncovers more name-checked locales-- Brazil, Hong Kong, the Japanese island of Enoshima, the British town of Flinton-- but above all else, Gold Panda's current residence of Berlin looms large. Whereas Lucky Shiner had a bright, nostalgic glow, Half of Where You Live is distinctly darker and, at points, clubbier than its predecessor. The glimmering synths and hazy, chiming techno featured on James Holden's Border Community label are reference points here, alongside shimmering vignettes that call back to the pretty-sounding IDM that German imprint Morr Music was known for in the early 2000s.
Half of Where You Live doesn't mark the first time Gold Panda's flirted with more distinctly dancey fare, but it's he's never been this successful with it. For all its winsome elegance, there were moments on Lucky Shiner that, for better or worse, sounded truly handmade to the point that you could practically hear Gold Panda's fingers mashing hia Akai MPC. The MPC is still present here-- the gurgling "S950" takes its name from a specific model of the sampling equipment-- but these tracks sound smoother and more refined, a logical progression from the staticky amniotic techno that made up this year's brief stopgap EP, Trust.
Gold Panda's long been someone who works very well in miniature form; his talent for pushing repetition to the brink of its greatest, most pleasurable effect is documented by the attention-grabbing success of early singles "Quitter's Raga" and "You". But his ability to expand his vision to fit longer forms is his secret weapon. The nearly psychedelic sprawl of "India Lately" already suggested as much, and on Half of Where You Live, Gold Panda delivers his most potent side-stretcher in the form of "Brazil". The six-minute track is the closest thing this album comes to in terms of anthems, as a hollow bassline and a male voice repeating the titular city's name build the backbone. A mess of chimes come crashing in, the beat drops, and then picks up again with a tangy, winding synth line that makes for a seismic, satisfying addition.
"Brazil" is Half of Where You Live's big highlight, and the subtlety of its charms extend to the record as a whole. The winsome, direct melodies that marked Lucky Shiner's high points are largely absent here, which may cause some to consider the album a slight disappointment. That's understandable, but ultimately the success of Half of Where You Live lies not in Gold Panda repeating old tricks, but in how he's expanded his repertoire to include new sounds, and his aesthetic proves sturdy enough to accomdate them. | 2013-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | June 14, 2013 | 7.6 | 355181d5-c30d-4071-b26d-3ef04313d31e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Former street performer continues her unusual, late-life transition into accomplished professional artist with her best LP yet. Andrew WK produces. | Former street performer continues her unusual, late-life transition into accomplished professional artist with her best LP yet. Andrew WK produces. | Baby Dee: Regifted Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15240-regifted-light/ | Regifted Light | Baby Dee is what you might call a late bloomer. When she released her first LP, Little Window, she was already in her late forties, and her biography read like a Tom Waits song. According to a story she told NPR, she fell in love with the harp at age four after discovering the one inside an upright piano during a neighborhood piano-smashing party. Later, she often played harp in Central Park while wearing a bear costume. She had stints as a church organist and a Coney Island sideshow. Her music is an equally paradoxical blend of spiritual uplift and tin-megaphone banter.
The transition from street artist to professional has been gradual. By 2008's Safe Inside the Day, she'd learned how to make a commercial album, and her signature harp and accordion gave way to grand piano-- a more typical and versatile foundation. With her remarkable life experience now paired with recording practice, Baby Dee has made her best album yet just a couple of years shy of her 60th birthday. Idiosyncratic but ruggedly classic, Regifted Light is old-fashioned art music with a sheen of downtown grit. Dee caresses and pounds producer Andrew WK's Steinway D to life with the lyrical bluster of Gershwin and the nimble thematic development of Sondheim. It's a welcome change of pace from the post-minimalism that's rampant in indie piano music.
Opening instrumental "Cowboys With Cowboy Hat Hair" establishes the album's harmonic environment, making this more of a song cycle than a collection of individual pieces. Over martial snares, Dee works a theme from the C Minor scale-- light on the sharps as to lean it toward bright C Major-- up and down the keyboard. The theme rolls back and forth on itself and fractures across different octaves in odd places so that lone high notes ring out ornamentally. Regifted Light never strays too far from this tonal vicinity, which creates a unified wistfulness that Dee articulates in every shade from happy to sad. The diversity arises from Dee's inspired handling of the shallow pool of intervals-- you never know which way the themes will veer next, into upper-register dances or lower-register thunder-- and is abetted by conversational accompaniment for bassoon, cello, and glockenspiel.
Dee has an incredible voice that has drawn unavoidable comparisons to Antony Hegarty's. In fact, it is more unusual than Antony's, and more inclined toward musical theater. A little of it goes a long way, which is why it works so well appearing on just four of the 12 songs here. The scarcity gives it an outsized, mythic quality. Dee suddenly appears, utters wisdom or metaphysical fables, and vanishes into the music again. Within a single line, her voice flickers through not just different emotions, but personalities.
"The moon is my redeemer/ The moon is my befriending Jesus," Dee drawls on the title track, merging pagan and monotheistic traditions into a sense of human tenderness that overarches eons. The notion that with each "regifting" of the light, its "gentleness increases" could sound forced and trite in a different context, but in Dee's hands it feels at-ease and hard-won. "Brother Slug and Sister Snail" is a Joanna Newsom-like animal allegory where Jesus sings from the cross, "I am a worm and not... a... MAN!" But nobody hears him. The narrative topology is strange, but not for strangeness' sake: The elegant music bends it toward profundity.
Baby Dee tends to get written about with words like "flamboyant" and "campy," and "The Pie Song" demonstrates why: Dee bashes out mad-composer chords while demanding pie with the indefinable undercurrent of menace minted by the Frogs. While "The Pie Song" is not representative of Regifted Light, those who want to hear the album as camp will do so, despite the fact that Dee's theatrics have been scaled back, and at any rate are not campy but piercingly sincere. The camp pigeonhole is always difficult for transgender artists to avoid in the mainstream. But Dee is simply a musician making very earnest art about a very unusual life. Regifted Light doesn't seem built to shock or cajole, but to connect with all sorts of people, and to last. | 2011-03-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-03-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | March 23, 2011 | 8 | 3553658d-1e75-44bf-809b-f647e3f54ca0 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On his fifth album, Aaron Maine is having more fun, writing more playfully, staying out of his own head. It’s some of his most succinct and enjoyable songwriting to date. | On his fifth album, Aaron Maine is having more fun, writing more playfully, staying out of his own head. It’s some of his most succinct and enjoyable songwriting to date. | Porches: All Day Gentle Hold ! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porches-all-day-gentle-hold/ | All Day Gentle Hold ! | All Day Gentle Hold !, the fifth album by Porches, goes down with all the acrid sweetness of late summer’s most distinctive pleasures. It evokes the unique jouissance of, say, a cheap cigarette that’s a little too tarry or the first sip of a Slurpee cut with a little too much vodka—sensations that define the phrase “too much of a good thing,” the kinds of sensory overload experiences that trigger intense, indelible memories. Running a scant 25 minutes and featuring some of Aaron Maine’s most succinct and enjoyable songwriting, it distances him from the too-cool chilliness of 2020’s Ricky Music, instead embracing the effusive, heart-on-sleeve tone that made early records like 2013’s Slow Dance in the Cosmos so remarkable.
For all its romantic exclamations, of which there are many, All Day Gentle Hold ! is not an about-face or a retread of a past iteration of Porches. The progression is simple but significant: In contrast to the angsty remove of Ricky Music and 2018’s The House, Maine sounds totally at ease. After a few years working out the knots in his music—not to mention a year of forced isolation—he emerges cheekier and more flamboyant. (The lyric sheet, peppered with “u” in place of “you” and an abundance of exclamation marks, captures the new exuberance.) Rather than create a binary where electronic means alienated and rock means engaged, All Day Gentle Hold ! finds a comfortable middle ground: the vocal manipulations feel warmer and the rhythmic backbone carries the energy of a live rock band. At the end of “Lately,” Maine announces himself to the world like he’s standing on the Pyramid Stage: “Crying out! How’s everybody holding up out there??!!/I miss you so much...”
Cosplaying as the frontman of a festival band is just one of Maine’s techniques for conveying the bombastic rush of the Best Summer Ever. He is “sucking on a watermelon slush,” “sipping on another Camel Blue”; he smells “blood everywhere” and likes it. He’s touching and being touched—“Baby has got the keys/Can u stick them into me/Wanna take me for a ride”—and watching a friend sleep in the grass. And, of course, he’s listening, not just to the eddy of guitars and synths that comprise All Day Gentle Hold ! but also to a song that “really slapped, brought me back to life,” and to Sonic Youth, whose “Bull in the Heather” he interpolates on “Swimming Big.” When Maine upcycles that song’s “10, 20, 30, 40” chant, the phrase feels like it’s slipped into his own vernacular, in the same way you might find yourself incorporating the language of a beloved pop song in day-to-day life. It’s less interpolation than diegetic moment. All Day Gentle Hold ! is pleasantly unwieldy in this way, heaving with ideas that are odd in isolation but seem totally normal when used so fluently.
All Day Gentle Hold ! brings its own “10, 20, 30, 40” chant in the form of “I Miss That,” whose hook is one of the most joyfully replicable phrases to come out of indie rock this year. Atop a jolting beat and synths that sound like they’re melting in the sun, Maine’s words take on the redolence of a mantra or a schoolyard chant: “I like that/I like that/I like that/I miss that/I miss that/I miss that.” It’s a perfect hook to sing aimlessly and ambiently, with its own built-in percussive qualities: the sibilance in “miss” cut off by the hardness of “that,” mirroring the hiss of hi-hats and thwack of a snare. It’s one of Maine’s best songs, and all the better for its simplicity. Despite the nostalgizing of its title, “I Miss That” is in the moment.
Those small, important differences make All Day Gentle Hold ! stand out in the Porches catalog. Maine is having more fun, writing more playfully, staying out of his own head, keeping things simple. “Grab the Phone,” a stomping, straightforward rocker, returns to the dynamic vocal performances of his best early work, a reminder of just how much is lost when he deadpans or shrouds his voice in Auto-Tune; his lyrics take the point of view of a fish (“Don’t bite the hook, I just let it slide through my teeth/Pull me up, wanna show u some of my teeth”) but his sing-song lilt imbues the surreal words with mirth and feeling. That All Day Gentle Hold ! is one of Maine’s least ambitious records is part of its puckish appeal. These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 7, 2021 | 7.6 | 3554a72e-7d3c-42c1-b4f0-68ff273a6570 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
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 examine the monumental final album by a singularly talented guitarist with a conflicted relationship to his instrument and an ecstatic vision for his music. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we examine the monumental final album by a singularly talented guitarist with a conflicted relationship to his instrument and an ecstatic vision for his music. | Sonny Sharrock: Ask the Ages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonny-sharrock-ask-the-ages/ | Ask the Ages | Sonny Sharrock never wanted to play guitar. He disliked the instrument when he first tried it out, as a 20-year-old in 1960, and he remained stubbornly committed to that attitude even after he’d radically expanded its expressive possibilities, remade it to suit his vision, established himself as one of the greatest ever to play it. Or so he claimed, to almost anyone who ever got him on the record, until just about the day he died. In 1970: “I hate the guitar, man.” In 1989: “I don’t like guitar, I don’t like it at all.” In 1991, two months after the release of his last and greatest album: “I don’t like it.” In 1992: “I despise the sound of the guitar.” In 1993, less than a year before his death: “I didn’t like the instrument very much.”
Sharrock had asthma as a teenager, which didn’t stop him from singing doo wop, or dabbling in any street-level mischief that was available to a ’50s kid in his hometown of Ossining, New York. But it did rule out the tenor saxophone he coveted after an encounter with Kind of Blue converted him to the church of John Coltrane. An acquaintance had a guitar on hand, so he picked that up instead. The decision, he would later be sure, had saved his life from “whatever young men die of in the street.” Still, he went on resenting the guitar, which he believed was not suited to the outbursts of ecstatic humanity he heard in Coltrane or the other tenor players he came to love, like free jazz pioneers Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, Coltrane associates who took their music even further toward an oblivion outside Western ideas about melody and rhythm. The guitar, to Sonny Sharrock, always sounded the same, no matter who was playing it. It had no feeling.
Just about every musician Sharrock admired had worked on bandstands, or at least begun seriously honing their craft, while they were still teenagers. As a young man, he felt he was arriving to jazz late in life, too late to learn the music by the usual methods: studying other players, absorbing their licks, eventually developing your own. So he decided to simply express himself as purely as he could within the bounds of his ability at the time, on an instrument he didn’t care for. Had he gone searching for guitar idols, he wouldn’t have found any, because no one before Sonny Sharrock played guitar like him.
Only Jimi Hendrix did as much as Sharrock, as early, to push the electric guitar to its limits and explore what sounds were there. Hendrix’s wildest music, like 1970’s “Machine Gun,” involved extreme volume and the ensuing feedback and distortion, spontaneous outer energy that he harnessed and redirected; if he put the guitar down in the middle of a solo, it might go on roaring without him. Sharrock, who liked to keep the volume on his amp at 4 out of 10, was more like a horn player, animating an object that would otherwise lie mute. Everything that came out—as his slide shot past the end of the fretboard, as his pick struck muted strings, as he strummed chords so quickly and ferociously that they began to resemble approaching tornadoes—came from kinetic effort. The energy was inside him.
Sharrock always considered himself a saxophonist who happened to play the wrong instrument. His closest kindred spirit may be Ayler, whose approach to the tenor was as uncompromising as Sharrock’s to the guitar. Both men favored melodies so bright and clear a child could have composed them, then turned them inside out. They might begin with a folk tune and end with music you couldn’t represent on a staff any more than you could notate shattering glass. The sound itself was the thing. A single instant of noise could be as expressive as an entire melody; there was hardly any difference between the two. They were Black visionaries who rejected the strictures of the white European thought that sought to govern all musical expression. But their music wasn’t only, or even primarily, about negation. It was about freedom, transcendence, a joyous embrace of whatever lay beyond.
Even in the revolutionary world of free jazz in mid-1960s New York City, where Sharrock moved not long after dropping out of Berklee College of Music, his music was a difficult proposition. Before he arrived, “jazz guitar” meant the elegantly melodic soloing of Wes Montgomery or Charlie Christian. Most free groups didn’t have a place for the instrument, which seemed stuck inside the buttoned-up tonality of an earlier era in jazz, and was fast becoming an emblem of the current day’s white pop music. On top of that, there was Sharrock’s fondness for sing-song simplicity, not otherwise particularly fashionable among the avant-garde.
No one quite knew what to do with this strange and singular talent. His first few years on the scene produced one masterwork under his own name—1969’s Black Woman, a collaboration with his then-wife, the equally radical vocalist Linda Sharrock—and a series of electrifying but brief appearances on records by other players. They tended to use him like a scene-stealing character actor, letting him dazzle the audience for a moment and then ushering him out of the frame. As a result, being a Sonny Sharrock fan can feel like being on a long scavenger hunt. Have you heard that crazy R&B album he plays on? Do you know about the uncredited cameo with Miles? It’s a lot of sitting through Herbie Mann records, waiting for him to cut the tasteful flute stuff for a minute and let Sonny rip.
And then there is Ask the Ages. In a catalog that is otherwise unruly and difficult to navigate, Sharrock’s final album is clearly the mountaintop. When it was released in 1991, he was 50 years old, five years into an unlikely creative resurgence after a decade in which he hardly worked at all. He was in the best form of his life, playing with impossible tenderness on one tune and unbearable force on the next. For the first time since Black Woman, he was leading an ensemble of peers and equals—players who could match his intensity, but also exerted a certain solemn gravity, befitting his status as a master, that his last few albums had missed: Pharoah Sanders, the fire-breathing saxophonist who had given Sharrock his first gigs back in the ’60s; Elvin Jones, the John Coltrane Quartet drummer whose torrential cymbal work was a key early influence on the guitarist’s guitar-averse approach; and Charnett Moffett, a virtuosic 24-year-old double bassist who understood when to carve space for himself among these elders and when to sit back.
Three years after Ask the Ages, Sharrock died of a heart attack. Viewed from one angle, the album looks divinely inspired: the culmination of Sharrock’s artistry, reuniting him with towering figures from his past and offering a chance to express the sound inside him once and for all, in a dignified final stand against the instrument he treated like a sparring partner—the instrument that saved his life—before he put it down and moved on to the next one.
From another angle, it looks kind of like a fluke. Sharrock and producer Bill Laswell conceived of the album, down to its title, in a single conversation at a bar in Berlin. They intended to make music that would put the guitarist in touch with his own history. “I want to reconnect with the music of John Coltrane,” Sharrock said, in Laswell’s recollection. “That energy, that possession, that power. I want to get back to that level, that quality again. Make something serious.” The guitarist’s primary focus in those years was the Sonny Sharrock Band, his touring group, a burly rock-oriented outfit with two hard-hitting drummers. Their music is as delirious and uplifting as a carnival ride. It does not sound very much like John Coltrane, nor would you necessarily reach for “serious” as an adjective to describe it.
Sharrock was obviously thrilled with Ask the Ages, but the players weren’t making long-term plans; he seemed to see the album as an enlightening diversion from his main gig. When an interviewer asked him about what would come next, he enthused about Sonny Sharrock Band records he planned to make, which would possibly be influenced by hip-hop. The last bit of music he released before dying was the soundtrack to Cartoon Network’s cult-classic talk show parody Space Ghost Coast to Coast, reflecting a deep playful streak that the imposing Ask the Ages doesn’t always convey on its own. (“I think a cat like Al Di Meola would play better if he smiled a little bit,” he told an interviewer in 1989. “The shit ain't that serious.”) Sharrock’s death makes it easy to apprehend Ask the Ages as his magnum opus, but he might have resisted that idea himself. In life, he rarely traveled by such straight lines.
Laswell and Sharrock had been close collaborators ever since the producer helped the guitarist come back from an involuntary early retirement. Herbie Mann, a mainstream-friendly pop-jazz fusionist, had been Sharrock’s most reliable employer in the late 1960s and early ’70s, despite their considerable musical differences. After they parted ways, Sharrock made another album with Linda—1975’s surreal funk experiment Paradise—and his career soon hit the skids. He began supporting himself with gigs as a chauffeur and at a school for children with mental illness, spending years woodshedding and writing but rarely performing and never recording.
Things started to change when Laswell invited him to play on Memory Serves, a 1981 album by his art-punk-dance band Material. Laswell, who plays bass but is perhaps most important for the myriad connections he’s facilitated between experimental musicians across genres, began bringing Sharrock in on more projects after that. Chiefly, there was Last Exit, a band whose ruthlessly discordant music, improvised from scratch every night, favored pummeling punk rhythms over the swing that underpinned even the furthest-out free jazz, sounding more like what was coming to be known as noise rock.
After washing up on the shores of jazz, Sharrock was suddenly celebrated as a visionary progenitor to a new generation of adventurous rock musicians and listeners. Thurston Moore bought a pile of Herbie Mann records and isolated all Sharrock’s solos, dubbing them onto a single cassette. “It was one of the best things I had ever seen and heard,” he said of a Sonny Sharrock Band performance he attended at the Knitting Factory. “It was enlightening. It kind of informed me further, as far as what I wanted to do with the guitar.” The world of experimental electric guitar playing, where white artists often win the most acclaim today, would not exist as we know it without Sharrock.
Ask the Ages brings the intensity of Sharrock and Laswell’s previous collaborations into a format more easily recognizable as jazz. Sharrock, who composed the material himself, channeled his taste for simple and direct melodies into the opening tune of each piece. In these sections, he frequently overdubbed multiple interlocking guitar lines, which massed together with Sanders’ tenor into something liquidy and metallic, a mutant horn section. Most tracks, for the first minute or so, are swinging and approachable, maybe even a little old-fashioned. Then comes the fire.
On “As We Used to Sing,” a stately minor theme ascends to a breaking point, and Sharrock’s solo takes over: first furious and serpentine, then jaunty and staccato, then out somewhere past the horizon. (Despite his stated preference for plugging straight into his Marshall amplifier at moderate volume, it’s hard to believe he’s not getting some more juice from the amp or a pedal.) Even as he departs from the melody and begins summoning waves of pure sound, there is a distinct emotional trajectory. He valued feeling above all else in his playing, and professed disinterest in noise for its own sake. At the passage’s peak, rather than winding down, Sharrock abruptly stops, and the resulting negative space is as striking as the previous cacophony. When Sanders steps in and offers a series of birdlike calls on his horn, it’s like witnessing the first signs of new life after a disaster that wiped the earth clean.
Sharrock spoke in his later years of a sense that he was paring down any extraneous elements in his playing in an effort to get closer to the heart of a given melody. This effort is audible throughout Ask the Ages, and most clearly in “Who Does She Hope to Be?,” the shortest and sweetest tune. Jones and Sanders recede to the margins, hardly playing anything at all. Sharrock’s phrases are spacious and melancholy. He isn’t doing anything fancy, just letting the melody speak. Your attention moves to Moffett, whose fluid self-possession on the bass turns the arrangement on its head. For an album so concerned with legacy, Ask the Ages never gives the sense that this music is anything other than a living thing. “Who Does She Hope to Be?” underscores this attitude powerfully: The young sideman, for a moment, has become the leader.
The album reaches its astonishing apex with “Many Mansions,” the track that most recalls Sharrock’s sojourns in avant-rock. Its pentatonic theme has the elemental quality of A Love Supreme’s “Acknowledgement” section, but as it repeats across nine minutes, it also begins to resemble a Black Sabbath riff. Sanders takes the lead before Sharrock, with a solo that reaches a climax before it even gets going, beginning with an ecstatic fit and growing only more frenzied from there. With the cry of a single sustained note, or a babbling trill between two, he conveys lifetimes. Elvin Jones, in his mid-60s, seems even more potent than he was as a young man, urging the soloists to ever-greater heights. Thanks in part to advances in recording fidelity over the previous several decades, his kit has become a visceral entity, almost multisensory; each bass drum hit is a wallop to the chest, the shimmer of ride cymbals is nearly visible in front of you. According to Sharrock, there is an audible mistake in his guitar solo, a flicker of lost composure brought on by Jones’ rhythmic onslaught. “I flashed back to Birdland when I used to see him with Coltrane,” he said. “And I lost it. For a second you can hear this bump, because I was gone.” Good luck finding it.
Articulating the beauty of Ask the Ages is difficult, because it seeks something that can’t be described. Sharrock was unsparing in his dismissals of music that sidelined feeling—indulging in artifice and imitation, or betraying a desire to impress the listener—including his own less satisfying efforts. “That's not making music; that’s putting together puzzles,” he told an interviewer about a year before his death. “Music should flow from you, and it should be a force. It should be feeling, all feeling.”
“The whole thing,” he said in the same interview, was “just to get this thing in me, get it out, you know? Make it real. Because it’s in you and it’s fine, but it isn’t real yet until you make it music.” Near the end of his life, Sharrock seemed to feel that he was closer than ever to finding that thing. He continued to profess hatred for the instrument he was stuck with, but the love in his late music is unmistakable. Like his hero John Coltrane, he died in the middle of a visionary period, leaving behind work that suggests further revelations to come. “I don’t even think about age,” he told another interviewer. “I’m just so happy to be playing good that I don’t care...I’ve got a long way to go. I’ve just discovered myself, you know? It’s just now started to happen for me musically. I now am able to play the things that I hear.”
Sharrock once said that he was only religious insofar as he believed that Coltrane is God. Still, his quest for truth of expression in his playing was not unlike Coltrane’s more explicitly spiritual yearning. Coltrane wanted a higher power; Sharrock just wanted feeling. Listening to him and the band speaking in tongues across Ask the Ages, you might wonder whether those are two names for the same thing.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Axiom | April 25, 2021 | 9.5 | 3556690b-8302-41e4-8039-ce9fea3d9a69 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
A key album from the great bassist/composer/bandleader's canon is given an expanded 2xCD reissue that includes the complete album Mingus Dynasty. | A key album from the great bassist/composer/bandleader's canon is given an expanded 2xCD reissue that includes the complete album Mingus Dynasty. | Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um: Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13163-mingus-ah-um/ | Mingus Ah Um: Legacy Edition | Chuckle a pitying chuckle over Allaboutjazz.com's guide "1959: The Most Creative Year in Jazz." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: "the quintessential jazz album"; Coltrane's Giant Steps: "a major landmark in jazz history"; Brubeck's "Take Five": "one of the most popular tunes in jazz"; Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come: "the essential free jazz album." Mingus Ah Um? "Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficionados" (emphasis mine).
Poor big-bellied, cigar-loving, temperamental, insecure, misogynistic Charles Mingus. While routinely placed on best-of-genre lists and talked about as one of the preeminent bassists and bandleaders in jazz, his best albums never clump comfortably with anyone else's, or with any particular subset of casual jazz listeners. They're too spirited for cocktail hour, too rough and moody for listeners who revel in crafstmanship, and not radical enough for daredevils.
Then again, Mingus' music never seemed comfortable outside its own world, either. At the dawn of both modal and free jazz, he kept solos short and music composed (even if, as with 1959's Atlantic recording Blues and Roots, the players didn't see the charts before the studio date). In an era where big bands were left behind for small combos or reimagined entirely (as with, say, John Coltrane's late albums), Mingus was a Duke Ellington acolyte who approached his pieces with the formality of an orchestral composer.
"Better Git It in Your Soul"-- if Mingus had his own sound, Mingus Ah Um's opener was it: a warm, striding, Sunday-morning tune carried on moaning horns; a friendly, convivial atmosphere punctuated by hollers Mingus didn't bother suppressing in the studio. Mingus, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother who allowed only church music in the house, embraced blues and gospel in the complex way one embraces a friend they've fallen out of touch with, or their hometown-- cautiously; with a burdened and deep-buried love. The song never struck me as primitive or rootsy, but a comic-book version of primitive, rootsy music-- a form reduced to its most basic shapes and traits; a form almost abstracted.
The album rolls from there. And while "Better Git" is as good a definition of Mingus there is, the album is remarkably diverse: Set pieces like "Fables of Faubus" or "Jelly Roll" (which are a jazz analog to the Beatles's warped, fruity variations on early British pop, like "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite") play alongside factory-pressed bop- and swing-style songs like "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and the mournful, reverent balladry of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat". Harmonies invoke modern classical music almost as often as blues, and his chosen instrumentalists spend as much effort adding color to the ensemble as personality to their brief solos.
Regarding the product at hand: a 2xCD 50th anniversary "Legacy Edition" with a list price of $25. The remaster is the same one performed by Mark Wilder in the late 1990s and still in print. Along with a couple of alternate takes, the second disc contains Mingus Dynasty, an uneven and far less interesting album recorded later in 1959 and issued early in 1960. The liner notes are slim and strangely conceived (do I need to read that a song on this album is a "grand slam home run" even though I clearly have already purchased it?). The bonus material on the second disc, in PDF format, should've been in the booklet if they're charging $25 for a package that probably didn't demand a lot of work to re-release. That's that.
I'm sure I'm not versed enough in jazz to assess what it is that makes Mingus Mingus, but listening to Ah Um again-- an album I plucked from my dad's collection at age 15-- I remember sitting in my family's basement thinking that I had no idea jazz could be funny. (I hadn't yet heard Thelonious Monk.) I thought jazz was all elegance and poise. I remember reading transcriptions of Charlie Parker solos and wondering if my intellectual awe would translate to a real, visceral love of the music. It didn't-- I felt detached. Mingus was slurring and gestural. His compositions that looked prim on paper sounded rusted and sun-bleached in performance. The fiery ones sounded a little tight-assed and penned-in-- you could almost hear the band bucking with discomfort at the form they found themselves playing in. The music had character; it beamed. Still does. | 2009-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Jazz | Legacy | June 10, 2009 | 7.8 | 35602d52-5e42-43d1-b18c-a9ce210e419d | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Wolf Eyes/Stare Case member Nate Young's eerie, dark solo LP-- a sequel to 2009's Regression featuring members of Wolf Eyes past and present-- might be his most minimal work to date. | Wolf Eyes/Stare Case member Nate Young's eerie, dark solo LP-- a sequel to 2009's Regression featuring members of Wolf Eyes past and present-- might be his most minimal work to date. | Nate Young: Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16123-stay-asleep-regression-vol-2/ | Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2) | Nate Young might not have meant the title of his 2009 LP Regression as a description of his musical direction. But the album's stark, slow tones are a sonic reduction compared to his work with John Olson in Stare Case, a project that itself trims back the noise the pair make as a part of Wolf Eyes. Young's path hasn't been completely linear-- Wolf Eyes often sound stark, too, and Regression included a few noisy moments.But his sequel to Regression, Stay Asleep, might be his most minimal work ever.
Each of the album's five songs is built from two basic elements-- a loop of low notes and a metronomic beat. Synths and other electronics add small accents, but often the bass and rhythm march forward unadorned. With this small arsenal of sounds, Young makes music that gets tenser without actually changing much. It's tough to put a finger on how his repetitive notes can feel like a stair-climb instead of a still-life. Every track is pretty clean-- there are no hazy sonics or cloaking distortion. Yet when I listen, I'm less aware of what's happening musically than the mood the music creates.
That mood is almost always eerie and dark. Young's sparse approach gives Stay Asleep tons of negative sonic space, making it as creepy as an unlit basement. The horror-movie feel is similar to that of Prurient's last record, Bermuda Drain. But where Dominick Fernow openly mimics the tropes of 1970s slasher soundtracks, Young's songs are more like analogues to onscreen suspense. In his tick-tock tones, time seems to creep unstoppably toward potential doom.
For Young, though, Stay Asleep isn't so much a countdown to danger as a guard against it, "a hex sign... that can protect against the 'evil eye.'" As he explained to Tiny Mix Tapes, "I like the idea of distracting negative energy with art and holding it at bay." Closer "Collapse" succeeds at that goal, with piano chords that suggest rising optimism in the face of gloom. But it's also the album's weirdest track, with Olson's horns and (ex-Wolf Eye) Aaron Dilloway's tape effects adding a warpy insanity. Ending with such a surreal tone suggests that the title Stay Asleep is an actual command. Maybe this isn't a horror movie but simply a dream, and the only real danger is waking up from its entrancing sounds. | 2012-01-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-01-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | January 5, 2012 | 7.5 | 35606547-c976-4bfd-8279-0ca93b716be4 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
This vinyl-only set contains the influential German band's three original albums plus some rarities, including sessions from an aborted 1986 reunion. | This vinyl-only set contains the influential German band's three original albums plus some rarities, including sessions from an aborted 1986 reunion. | Neu!: Neu! Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14475-neu-box-set/ | Neu! Box Set | There are not many great bands whose canon is as neatly formed as Neu!'s once was. Between 1972 and 1975, the duo of drummer/singer/guitarist Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother, both of whom had previously played in a short-lived lineup of Kraftwerk, made three albums together. (They were effectively a three-member duo: the contributions of the late producer Conny Plank probably meant as much as Dinger's or Rother's.) They were a new kind of rock band: they stripped away the idea of song and riff, and made texture everything. The first, self-titled Neu! album is as visionary a record as has ever been made. Its opening track "Hallogallo" was their manifesto: a single hovering chord, a single beat, rolling forward for 10 minutes that might as well be forever, with tiny variations. Some people called their signature rhythm "motorik"; Dinger later called it the "long line."
Neu! were named after the sort of "new" that appeared on grocery-store boxes containing a different version of the same old thing, and 1973's Neu! 2 is a visionary stopgap product. "Für Immer", which occupies half of the first side, is a souped-up remake of "Hallogallo"; the second side, generated in a hurry when Dinger and Rother ran out of studio time, is both sides of a single they'd released a bit earlier, plus the same material played at 16 RPM, at 78 RPM, and on a broken tape deck. Neu! 75 sounded like the band was on the verge of shaking apart, which it was. (The scalding, Dinger-driven second side, with its two extra drummers, became a touchstone for early punk rock; the floating meditations of the first side weren't too far from the ambient music that Rother's occasional collaborator Brian Eno was devising around the same time.) Rother and Dinger's remarkable musical chemistry was matched by what appears to have been a near-total inability to agree on anything, and after 75, they split.
But the break wasn't as clean as it might have been, which is why this vinyl boxed set contains five records instead of three. There's also a Neu! stencil (should you feel like spray-painting their logo on any public buildings), a nice big booklet, and a code that gets you a T-shirt and digital downloads of all the music. The bonus records, though, are the real bait here, and they're not so much missing chapters from the band's history as they are Rother's version of Dinger's cash-ins. In the mid-90s, Dinger released two more albums' worth of his Rother collaborations without Rother's consent. Dinger died in 2008, and now Rother has returned to that material to put his own stamp on it.
Neu! '72 is a maxi-single with three live-in-the-practice-space jams, edited by Rother from the much longer, murky rehearsal tape that Dinger released as '72 Live. If you've ever wondered if there's any document of the post-first-album lineup that included guitarist Eberhard Kranemann, the answer is "Yes, there exists such a document." That's all that can be said for it.
And Neu '86-- that's a tricky one. Rother and Dinger reunited (without Conny Plank) in the mid-80s to see if the old magic was still there, and most of it wasn't. They abandoned the sessions before they finished an album; the digital drums and synth pads they used sound much more dated than anything they'd done a decade-plus earlier. Dinger called his 1995 version of it Neu! 4-- it's been out of print for a good long while and hasn't really been missed. This significantly shorter version has been reworked and "finished" by Rother. It sounds like an undercooked, mostly instrumental mid-80s synth-pop album with a mild but pleasant Neu! influence among its Flock of Seagulls-isms.
The booklet that comes with the set is a loose assemblage of photographs, quotations, testimonials, a history of the band, and a bit of critical writing-- a real boon for fans. What it unavoidably presents, though, along with '72 and '86, is the Rother perspective on Neu!, in which Dinger was a crucial contributor but alternately an impediment and a loose cannon, and Rother was the one steadfastly working to preserve the glory of their collaboration. As with Dinger's versions of the two discs that deform the band's body of work, this set seems like one side of an argument in which neither side is actually in the right. | 2010-07-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-07-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Grönland | July 29, 2010 | 7 | 35635e98-b597-4ce8-a23e-b704db728f7a | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Spanish artist’s debut cuts and pastes from R&B, hip-hop, reggaeton, and flamenco. It’s bizarre and incongruous—but oddly satisfying. | The Spanish artist’s debut cuts and pastes from R&B, hip-hop, reggaeton, and flamenco. It’s bizarre and incongruous—but oddly satisfying. | Ralphie Choo: Supernova | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ralphie-choo-supernova/ | Supernova | On his debut album, Ralphie Choo, a former chemical engineering student, toys with genres with radical abandon, manipulating sounds like reagents and catalysts in a lab. Across 14 tracks, fluttering flutes, dembow riddims, and flamenco palmas bubble up in a frothy but precisely measured concoction. Ad-libs punctuate the beats like exclamation points. Vocals arrive through aggressive, jagged filters. Everything is glitchy and meandering, gesturing toward familiar genres but never fully surrendering to them. Choo’s music champions fragmented pop maximalism, illustrating what’s possible when you catapult centuries-old traditions into a globalized present. Within the landscape of Spanish-language pop, currently oversaturated with cookie-cutter reggaeton, this freaky confluence of past and present is a welcome respite.
His music may bring to mind other contemporary Spanish pop conceptualists, like fellow madrileño C. Tangana and Rosalía, who slide folk styles like copla and flamenco alongside synth stabs and 808 kicks. Choo’s approach is similarly exploratory and deranged, perhaps even more interested in shredding ancestral practices to pieces. His friends are influences too: Alongside rusowsky, mori, Tristán, and Drummie, Choo is part of the Madrid-based label and collective rusia idk. Their plush R&B and slanted club concoctions exemplify the experimental sounds coming out of the Spanish capital—and Choo is one of the crew’s most gifted international delegates.
Choo is first and foremost a producer, and a masterful worldbuilder. “Juan Salvador Gaviota” threads a bossa nova groove into “NHF,” an aspirated, shimmering R&B tune that stutters into a jungle breakdown. “Total90sNostalgia” radiates a wistful pink glow, like a climactic scene in a coming-of-age film. The piano interlude “Bò” is lissome and pure, even as a cartoonish, helium-infused voice mumbles unintelligibly in the background. These songs melt into a blissful and immersive fog, as if suspended between states of consciousness. It’s just one example of the border-soft magic that Choo conjures in his songs.
Supernova soars when it strips flamenco down to its percussive core, like on “Tangos de Una Moto Trucada,” which is grounded in a palo built out of wooden spoons, knives, and salt shakers and punctured by jarring piano notes. Revving engines and palmas, the hand claps of flamenco, form the foundation of “Bulerías de un Caballo Malo,” but Choo adds cherubic harp plucking, like a banger designed for the kingdom of heaven. The Mura Masa collaboration “Máquina Culona,” which collages brain-scrambling static punches, digital accordions, and clacking palmas, feels like a sudden bout of air turbulence, an exhilarating jolt on an otherwise smooth flight. In the video, a shirtless man cooks a slab of raw meat with a clothing iron, another lights a cigarette in a lobster’s claw, and a third slurps up a bowl of soup wearing a toilet seat around his neck like jewelry. This onslaught of bizarre, incongruous images is oddly satisfying—much like Supernova itself.
Maybe because he was a producer first, the 24-year-old Spanish artist’s strengths lie in texture over narrative; lyrics are secondary. Often, they’re simply onomatopoeic: Choo blows raspberries, coos like an infant, and emits guttural noises, as if he’s just been punched in the stomach. Sometimes, the lyrics aren’t even immediately comprehensible. In their idiosyncrasy, Choo’s personality emerges as cheeky and romantic, like a medieval jester with the impulses of a court poet.
At times, Supernova ventures too deeply into the creative directions developed by Frank Ocean on Blonde. Like that album, Supernova is capricious and loose, arranging instruments in ways that are sprawling and unpredictable. Yet in some instances, Choo’s R&B melodies hew too close to specific moments on Blonde; the end of “Total90sNostalgia” is nearly identical to Ocean’s high-pitched “woo” on “Solo.” “Whipcream,” featuring Los Angeles rap duo Paris Texas, feels mimetic too, although not of Ocean: Both Choo and his guests channel the reckless energy and slurred ad-libs of Playboi Carti and Travis Scott in a way that feels uninspired.
Supernova raises inevitable questions about the recontextualization of genre, especially regarding once-marginalized styles like flamenco and reggaeton. Choo doesn’t seem interested in that kind of intellectual battleground; in 2021, he told a Spanish magazine that claims of cultural appropriation “worry him a bit, but don’t condition him.” Instead, he presents a view of pop music at its most porous, freed from category, history, and geography. Like a mischievous cat shoving a glass off a table, Choo is invested in the thrill of infinite play. | 2023-09-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rusia IDK / Warner | September 19, 2023 | 7.7 | 356cb1f1-c871-418c-a13b-bbe7e518e6fd | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Manchester producer Evan Majumdar-Swift mines the history of club music for slippery, enigmatic electro jams that move in unexpected directions, sounding melancholy yet playful. | Manchester producer Evan Majumdar-Swift mines the history of club music for slippery, enigmatic electro jams that move in unexpected directions, sounding melancholy yet playful. | 96 Back: 9696 Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/96-back-9696-dream/ | 9696 Dream | A timeworn means of rebelling against one’s parents: loud guitar music. But in Evan Majumdar-Swift’s case, embracing rock’n’roll represented a rejection of another strain of music long associated with youthful hijinks. His father, Matthew Swift, is hardly your garden-variety Boomer: In the 1980s, he’d been one of the promoters of Jive Turkey, a beloved Sheffield club night known for its interracial crowd and cutting-edge mixture of funk, soul, and electro. Warp Records was born there; the club’s resident DJs, Winston Hazel and Parrot, were responsible for two of the legendary electronic label’s first three records. So how else for young Majumdar-Swift to declare independence than to choose stoner rock over his father’s hoary old acid-house 12"s?
Eventually, though, he came around. By 17, Majumdar-Swift was programming beats on a screen, and within six months, he’d come up with a song good enough to make it onto his debut EP the following year. That record, perhaps not coincidentally, had more than a little in common with those original bleep’n’bass anthems that his father’s club night catalyzed, 32 years prior. The magic of computer circuitry had brought Majumdar-Swift full circle.
You can probably tell that Majumdar-Swift—alias 96 Back—has a thing for the rearview mirror. Until now, most of his output has drawn sustenance from the 1990s in one form or another, folding elements of classic techno, electro, and IDM into elegant if slightly anonymous throwback jams. By last year’s Sugilite EP, he had developed some genuinely impressive chops, reeling off a pitch-perfect invocation of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher circa 2001. But 9696Dream, the first installment of a projected trilogy, marks a major step toward developing a style all his own.
Majumdar-Swift’s music remains rooted in dance music’s past, but it’s no longer fixated on it. Instead of recreating well-worn sounds, he seems more interested in stripping them for parts. “Sat In” opens the album with exploratory chords that fizzle expectantly; synths squiggle around a tentative boom-tick beat, not a million miles away from Isolée’s spindly etudes circa Rest. “Freepass for Them” begins with an insistent groove reminiscent of Carl Craig at his most emphatic, then pivots to a chilly, square-wave melody that hums like a fluorescent tube. Couching an unrelenting rhythm in soft swirls of static, it’s an unexpected anthem—an android wolf in electric sheep’s clothing. Another neat mix of opposites, “Phone” pairs the glistening timbres of Japanese ambient techno with the desiccated downbeat of Detroit’s Urban Tribe; “RJam for Harp,” a highlight of the record’s back half, smooths blippy grime synths into a slippery electro jam.
There’s a dreamlike quality to these songs, one reinforced by their brevity. Rather than the six or eight-minute runtimes so common in club music, 96 Back’s tracks last four or three or even two—just enough time to set the stage and then, frequently, pull out the rug. The title track, for example, begins with a silky flourish of pads, then tightens its focus around a juddering, spring-loaded arpeggio. Twisting and turning, the melody moves like an animal running a maze, confused yet undaunted. Two-thirds of the way through, it stops, sniffs, and changes direction. The song’s movements have an emotional pull that’s hard to define, with a lyricism to their ebb and flow that’s rare for dance music.
Ultimately, 9696Dream’s ambiguity—melancholy and mysterious yet also playful and a little rogue—is what makes it so unusual, and so satisfying. Sometimes it feels like an ambient record with teeth; elsewhere, it’s club music with puppy-dog eyes. “Hide_NGroove” is a beautiful example of 96 Back’s enigmatic expressive abilities. Made of little more than neon-tinged synths flashing around a 4/4 kick, it encapsulates the kinds of themes that have animated techno for the past 30-odd years—spaceships and rubble, starlight and chrome—but it takes that history as a starting point rather than a destination. There’s a kind of damaged elegance to its lumpy groove; it’s wistful yet stubborn, at once guarded and full of heart. It sounds like the work of someone determined to honor the sounds he once rejected by using them to say something new.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Local Action | April 23, 2021 | 7.4 | 356f0809-55c0-4de4-bb7f-199911f822ee | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The veteran rapper’s latest includes a harrowing look at his personal life buoyed by some lighthearted, throwback fare. | The veteran rapper’s latest includes a harrowing look at his personal life buoyed by some lighthearted, throwback fare. | Murs: A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/murs-a-strange-journey-into-the-unimaginable/ | A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable | “My name is Murs,” the chatty rap veteran introduces himself on A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable, “and I’ve had a rough couple of years.” He’s not exaggerating. If Murs has kept an uncharacteristically low profile in recent years, now we know why: He was withering a divorce and a grueling custody battle, and by his account barely getting by. He cried every day for a year, he recalls on Unimaginable’s harrowing opening track, and just when things were looking up and he and his fiancé were expecting a baby boy, another blow: His son was stillborn.
Murs has always been an unusually candid memoirist, oversharing even the most mundane details of his life in a matter-of-fact flow, yet none of his nearly two dozen albums has ever touched on anything so heavy. And on Unimaginable’s opening tracks, he doesn’t shy from uncomfortable details. “It took me years to get to this point where I don’t want to die every day,” he raps on “Melancholy,” and even now, “I’m not too high; I’m not too low. I’m just here.” On the leadoff track “The Unimaginable” he lays his pain even more viscerally, mimicking the halting breathing of a panic attack. Murs recognizes there’s power in voicing his grief, even if others don’t want to hear it. “I mention the death of my son because it’s something that’s not talked about,” he explained in an interview. “You’re never prepared for it. Friends don’t call you to talk about that because no one knows what to say.”
Those first couple of songs warn listeners that they’re in store for a very rough listen. “This is not really music, it’s me dealing with my thoughts,” Murs stresses. Unimaginable is not Murs’ own A Crow Looked at Me, though. Once he gets some of the weight off his chest, the record brightens considerably and becomes more or less another Murs album, albeit a better than average one. Listeners who stopped paying attention to Murs sometime between his third and his sixth full-length with 9th Wonder may not have noticed when he signed to Tech N9ne’s Strange label several years ago, but here he embraces the new surroundings, recruiting the label’s house producer Michael “Seven” Summers to produce the whole thing. It’s hardly a radical departure—Seven’s jazzy soul and updated boom bap isn’t really all that different from 9th Wonder’s—but Seven gives some of these tracks a looser, live-band feel, and those drums, pianos, saxophones and acoustic guitars lend the record welcome warmth.
For returning fans piqued by the album’s backstory, Unimaginable offers a reminder that Murs is still pretty funny. On “Same Way” he brushes off a cold reception from his girlfriends’ friends and family: “I know what your family saying on the down low/And all your homegirls high key hate me though they still use my login for the HBO.” He leans even more overtly into the comedy on “Superhero Pool Party,” a throwback to the madcap rap of old-schoolers like the Sugar Hill Gang and Biz Markie. Batman won’t take his cape off in the pool; Professor X falls out of his wheelchair; She-Hulk shows up with some “bomb guacamole same color as her skin”—that sort of thing. It’s basically a three-minute dad joke, but he sells it by committing to the lunacy.
Inevitably, nothing on Unimaginable makes as much of an impression as those sorrowful leadoff tracks, which are so potent and heartfelt you can’t help but wish there were a few more of them. But sometimes less is more, and Murs deserves credit for refusing to turn his grief into something performative, a thought he shutters at on the album’s opener. “If I could take all of my tears and cry them into a chain/I wonder how many million more followers I’d gain,” he raps, “I could turn all this salty water that fell from my eyes into some diamond carats/Then when I cry in public I could finally do so without having someone tell me I should feel embarrassed.” Murs rarely preaches, but on this point his insistence is inspiring: Don’t ever let anybody stop you from grieving on your own terms. | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Strange Music | March 21, 2018 | 6.8 | 3570a336-d0b9-4929-955c-782a06d1d022 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter teams up with producer Sam Evian for an assured, exploratory, and warm record that mirrors a newly opened heart. | The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter teams up with producer Sam Evian for an assured, exploratory, and warm record that mirrors a newly opened heart. | Courtney Marie Andrews: Loose Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courtney-marie-andrews-loose-future/ | Loose Future | The promise of a new day lurks within the heart of Loose Future, the eighth album from Courtney Marie Andrews. It’s a switch of sound and aesthetic for Andrews, a singer-songwriter with an emo background—she toured with Jimmy Eat World at the outset of her career—who came to favor austere Americana over a series of albums for Fat Possum in the 2010s.
Listen closely and faint echoes of folk can be discerned embedded within the cool, polished veneer of Loose Future. Andrews sculpts songs with care, her strummed guitar providing a pulse that’s felt as much as heard. Despite this sturdy foundation, the album is essentially the polar opposite of Old Flowers, a stark and sad record that rightfully earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Americana album in 2020. There, Andrews plumbed the depths of a painful breakup, offering a melancholy meditation on the fading of love. Here, the world opens up thanks to a new romance, a reawakening that gives the album a sense of possibility: What lies ahead may be uncertain yet it feels positive, even joyous. As she sings on “Older Now,” a shimmering piece of self-acceptance, “life is better without plans.”
That embrace of the unknown would be enough to give Loose Future a sensibility distinct from Andrews’ other albums yet this thematic shift is eclipsed by her decision to expand her aural palette by working with Sam Evian. A producer who previously has helmed records by Big Thief and Cassandra Jenkins, Evian eases Andrews into a different sonic world, trading upon sounds from the peak of classic rock and new wave, the studio flair accentuating feelings instead of covering them.
Echoes of country-rock float throughout Loose Future—a steel guitar lends “You Do What You Want” a plaintive note—yet it’s only an echo, one of many colors at play. Loose Future is painted in bright, sounding vivid even in its slowest moments, as when “Let Her Go” is graced with layers of vocal harmonies or when “Change My Mind” gets a lift from supple strings. While the album never is quite lively, there’s a perceptible pulse provided by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear, his backbeat giving shape and structure to the gentle swirls of sound created by Andrews, Evian and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman. Sometimes, Loose Future evokes distinct sounds or eras. “These Are the Good Old Days” hints at girl-group pop, “Thinkin’ On You” is ornate country-rock decorated with chiming 12-string guitars, “Loose Future” recalls when Lindsey Buckingham refashioned Fleetwood Mac as a new wave outfit for adult contemporary airwaves. Usually, Loose Future seems to exist slightly outside of time, its retro stylings not there for fashion but emotion.
Andrews’ music always has been emotionally frank, an attribute that can make an album as heartbroken as Old Flowers feel a bit fragile. Although it sounds markedly different than its predecessors, that characteristic remains intact on Loose Future. The smooth, radiant production doesn’t amount to commercial pandering: It’s assured, exploratory, and warm music that mirrors Andrews’ newly opened heart. | 2022-10-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fat Possum | October 18, 2022 | 7.5 | 3572bc86-5806-4c4d-b759-f0ecc1a0c9c3 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s fourth album is largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures. Throughout, Geist presents a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic. | The singer-songwriter’s fourth album is largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures. Throughout, Geist presents a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic. | Shannon Lay : Geist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-lay-geist/ | Geist | Earlier this year, the transcendental folk musician Shannon Lay performed a tarot reading for her fourth solo album, Geist. In a video posted to her Patreon, she revealed one of the deck’s most dramatic and foreboding images: two figures plummeting from a burning castle struck by lightning—the Tower card, known in some decks as the Tower of Destruction, said to be a harbinger of violent and sundering change. Geist, an album largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures, is a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic. It’s perhaps a different way to interpret the Tower: how ruination can lead to resurrection, and life can feel sweetest when one surrenders to change.
After traipsing around Los Angeles’ art-punk and garage-rock scenes, eventually joining Ty Segall’s Freedom Band, Lay now primarily plays solo, turning down the volume and directing her energy inward. Folk music, she found, best translated her pre-modern and mystic vision of the world. Her influences—the soft psychedelic folk and pastoralia of Vashti Bunyan, Sandy Denny, and Anne Briggs—spoke for Lay on her solo debut, 2016’s timid and reverb-drenched All This Life Going Down. On her second album, Living Water, she removed the reverb and inched closer to the center of the mix. By 2019’s August—named after the month she decided to pursue music full-time—she sounded bolder, more jovial and experimental. It seemed to come from a place of generative optimism and willful abandonment.
On Geist, Lay is more distinct and expressive than ever; it’s the sound of an artist seeing themselves—their personality and temperament—reflected back to them for the first time. Lay tracked her vocals and guitar at Jarvis Taveniere’s (Woods) studio, before sending them to multi-instrumentalists Devin Hoff (Sharon Van Etten, Cibo Matto) and Ben Boye (Bonnie Prince Billy, Ty Segall). Those recordings were then transferred to Aaron Otheim (Heatwarmer, Mega Bog) and Sofia Arreguin (Wand) for additional keys and flourishes, while Segall provided a guitar solo on “Shores.” The result is far more aesthetically focused and meticulously arranged than the process might suggest.
Though Lay homes in on ideas about change and metamorphosis, she still encourages stillness and sitting with the present moment. You can hear this in the instrumentation: how it moves like an underwater current, shifting then settling, then shifting again. On “Rare to Wake” and “A Thread to Find,” Lay’s fingerpicked melodies move like two chalices pouring liquid back and forth. Her harmonies, rich as the Roches’, float over piano as her voice simultaneously embodies childlike curiosity and sagacious wisdom: “Without change something sleeps inside us/Rare to wake,” she sings in a slithering melody.
Lay is the kind of songwriter who doubles as a spiritual guide, kindly and patiently directing the listener towards their own sense of inner tranquility. As if leading by example, the songs on Geist gradually decelerate, until, by album’s end, Lay’s simplicity and dilatoriness become the source of her power. “The way you kiss will always be a very special thing to me,” she sings on the slow-moving Syd Barrett cover “Late Night.” The sentiment may read laughably frank and facile on the page, but at Lay’s considered tempo, it makes clear her intention to eke out the most essential parts of each feeling and every moment. It’s the kind of joyous, vital detail that can only be drawn by keeping still long enough to truly take stock.
Correction: An earlier version of this review omitted the mention of Syd Barrett.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | October 12, 2021 | 7.7 | 35731bf8-5a91-4d7d-84d7-7b84bff1ca02 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Three of Wu-Tang's top MCs show up together on this 30-minute LP for three whole songs, padding out the rest with skits and guest verses. | Three of Wu-Tang's top MCs show up together on this 30-minute LP for three whole songs, padding out the rest with skits and guest verses. | Ghostface Killah / Raekwon / Method Man: Wu-Massacre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14112-wu-massacre/ | Wu-Massacre | Initially, the most shocking thing about Raekwon's long-promised 2009 album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II was that it actually existed. You could say the same for Wu-Massacre, a new collaboration from Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and Method Man. Unlike Cuban Linx II-- a long-rumored sequel to a decade-old record-- talk of Wu-Massacre only began to surface last July. Tracks were leaked shortly afterward, videos were filmed, cover art was revealed, and now, it's here. Forget about Wu-Tang product; that timetable is unthinkable for most major hip-hop releases.
The limitations of that turnaround are unmistakable on Wu-Massacre. The three stars appear on a total of three songs together, and the padding they needed to push the album beyond CD-single status is obvious from the credits alone: two skits, guest verses from nearly every Theodore Unit B-teamer (Sheek Louch sorta counts at this point), and three remakes. All to account for about 30 minutes of music.
"Criminology" was on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, and it's probably the one word most closely associated with Raekwon's style. But for reasons that escape logic, he doesn't even show up to open the album on "Criminology 2.5". Hearing Method Man paraphrase some of his old lines ("Fuck that, criminology rap/ Niggas hate and I hate back, floating the flyest Maybach") is a little like watching Speed 2, and the beat itself is just a glossed-up karaoke version of the original. "Mef vs. Chef 2" is better, but again, the sequel suffers from context-- on the original, whoever RZA chose as the winner of the duel of the iron mic would get the track on their solo release. Here, it shares space with a 30-second rant from Tracy Morgan on worthless hoes.
Still, at the record's core are three MCs willing to spend a little critical capital and just have fun over pitchshifted soul beats. Method Man could have felt like a third wheel here, but his concise hooks anchor the more awkwardly wordy ones from Ghost and Rae. Whether he's playing the seducer on "Miranda" or the verboloigst on "Gunshowers", Meth flexes the understated versatility that made his turns on Cuban Linx II so enduring. Ghostface thankfully sounds energized and committed again after last year's cynical Wizard of Poetry, which helps overshadow the familiarity of his material. "Youngstown Heist" finds him back in deranged "Shakey Dog" mode, which is fun again until Sheek Louch and Bully tank the song's second half.
But you evaluate what you got, not what you wanted, and being too harsh on Wu-Massacre is kind of like criticizing a hamburger for not performing a steak's duty. Twenty-five minutes of these three on autopilot still hits more often than not, ultimately making this disc a mixtape-y More Fish-style companion to Cuban Linx II-- hardly necessary, but not inconsequential. | 2010-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | April 9, 2010 | 6.5 | 35777ab3-ddcb-4feb-a943-3d32ed6a717b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, the English musician constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present. | Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, the English musician constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present. | Rozi Plain: Prize | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rozi-plain-prize/ | Prize | Oftentimes when Rozi Plain prepares to perform live, her body shuts down. “It’s just sort of this intense fatigue and I can barely keep my eyes open,” the English singer-songwriter has explained. Under a veil of nerves, she succumbs to rituals she doesn’t quite understand, like frantically brushing her teeth or doing vocal exercises she doesn’t really believe in. It’s as if when Plain tries to picture what will go down onstage, her brain grows weary, overwhelmed by possibilities. Her fifth studio album, Prize, might serve as an antidote. Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, Plain constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present in the moment. Whereas 2019’s What a Boost was a centering breath, Prize reframes her calming presence as a state of mind to take with you after the music stops.
As a bassist in the UK folk group This Is the Kit, Plain understands the importance of subtle momentum, the kind that lends airy music a fiery passion. She replicates that approach on Prize with the help of her go-to crew—drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, bassist Amaury Ranger, guitarist James Howard, and pianist Gerard Black—turning a quiet combination of instruments on “Help” into a breezy, groove-forward single. Plain’s songs flow like streams of consciousness, all ambiance and fade-ins, and her stacked vocal harmonies draw out emotion from that tranquility. On “Complicated” and “Conversation,” she sands down the edges of the electric bass and guitar, creating the illusion that they’re being played inches away from your ears. A compelling cast of guest performers, including saxophonists Alabaster dePlume and Cole Pulice, the Comet Is Coming’s Danalogue on synths, Trash Kit’s Rachel Horwood on banjo, and harpist Serafina Steer, among others, contribute to the music’s dreamlike quality.
Across the album’s 40 minutes, an image of Plain begins to develop: She doesn’t believe in the past as a compass or the future as a roadmap. She has no tinted lens through which to reimagine the world, nor a nostalgic fixation on old memories. Instead Plain writes about her surroundings and the way they make her feel as if she’s in the present. She brushes off the past as merely what “existed before you” and accepts the future with equanimity, offering, “What is it if it’s not?” Time is out of her hands and she knows that denying such is willful ignorance. As she puts it in “Prove Your Good,” “I like to say/It had to be this way.”
Plain’s apparent effortlessness as she grapples with indecision and recenters herself in the now could prompt envy—that is, if it weren’t for how swiftly the music ushers you into that same state of mind. She refashions small details into grounding opportunities: a gorgeous swell of strings, courtesy of violinist Emma Smith, that triples in size during “Sore,” like the sudden explosion of purples and pinks during a sunset; the jaunty vocal harmonies shared between Plain and This Is the Kit bandmate Kate Stables in “Agreeing for Two,” replicating the warm pain of cheek muscles that have laughed too hard; an extended saxophone outro by dePlume in “Spot Thirteen” that mimics the feeling of watching the final wisp of smoke rise from a dwindling fire. Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.
By the album’s closer, “Blink,” Plain distills that mindfulness into a display of camaraderie. “Blink if you love me, everyone everywhere,” she sings cooly. “With elastic energy, circular it has to be.” And with that, the album’s final note segues back into the opening track, inviting you to play it on loop and to linger a little longer in its demonstration of active presence—not quite as an ode to infinity, but as a key for those shackled to anxiety about what tomorrow, next week, next year might bring. | 2023-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Memphis Industries | January 17, 2023 | 7.2 | 357d8267-63ed-43ef-8573-8d84cdaf56aa | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Here, Alan Palomo delivers the most comprehensive Neon Indian album yet. He's presenting the 51-minute record as a double album and there are interstitial bits to ensure the beat never stops. The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples—more of everything. | Here, Alan Palomo delivers the most comprehensive Neon Indian album yet. He's presenting the 51-minute record as a double album and there are interstitial bits to ensure the beat never stops. The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples—more of everything. | Neon Indian: VEGA INTL. Night School | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21041-vega-intl-night-school/ | VEGA INTL. Night School | Alan Palomo of Neon Indian recorded VEGA INTL. Night School over the span of four years at a number of crash pads across America, but most crucial to the album was a self-described "magical winter" the singer spent on a Carnival Fantasy Cruise ship with his brother, who played in the house band. (Insert chillwave joke here.) The album contains enough reggae and Balearic tropical breeze to prove Palomo doesn’t shy away from pleasing the lido deck, but beyond the kitsch, an extended stay in a floating, inescapable city is an apt metaphor for VEGA INTL. Night School, where the inherent danger of total immersion is offset by generous hospitality.
Palomo acts a gracious host, delivering the most deluxe, comprehensive Neon Indian album yet. He's presenting the 51-minute record as a "double album" and the interstitial bits ensure the beat never stops. The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples—more of everything. Palomo might have seemed like someone stumbling onto a recipe with Psychic Chasms, but now it's clear that this is Palomo’s foundational music, his blues or funk.
Palomo's riff on the idea of "night school" is the album's unifying thematic construct: stay up after midnight, and you’ll learn about how human nature really works. In this way, the progression of Neon Indian is best seen as Palomo moving from PG-13 to NC-17—if you dial the Neon Indian hotline he set up for this album, what you hear is a voice purring "hey there, sexy." Everyone’s committing crimes of passion on VEGA INTL.—a missed phone call occasions a "CSI" investigation on "Annie" and on "Baby's Eyes" Vega harbors a charismatic murderer. Elsewhere, we're exposed to a polyamorous tryst in "Smut!" after a chance meeting behind the red curtain in the porno section of a video store.
So consider VEGA INTL. Palomo finally freeing his dirty mind, even as the music maintains a veneer of innocence. Neon Indian is an inherently nostalgic project, and Palomo views the musical cross-pollination of the early '80s as unfinished business rather than something to romanticize. Era Extraña framed Palomo as the rock star he could often seem on stage, engaging in the pouty, guitar-centric forms of post-punk—shoegaze and MTV-friendly goth in particular. Conversely, VEGA INTL. recalls the synthesists who took "post-punk" as a mandate to leave punk rock behind. The reggae bump of "Annie" and "61 Cygni Ave" recall Scritti Politti and the Police, and there’s plenty of Tom Tom Club and Blondie in the album's bubbly disco.
The cumulative impression of VEGA INTL., then, is that of a Carnival Cruise night based around New York's Danceteria, circa 1982, a place and time of glaring blight as well as utopian all-night clubs where synth-pop, disco, funk, R&B, and early hip-hop were feeding off one another. Any artist trying to capture the spirit of that specific era has to reckon with Prince, a personification of the idealism of early '80s pop, and Palomo finally gets there at the end of the record: "News from the Sun (Live Bootleg)" recalls both the insular psychedelia of Around the World in a Day, the "is it really live?" crowd noise of "Purple Rain", and the communal ecstasy of Sign 'o’ the Times. Before the final leap into a daredevil key modulation, Palomo delivers the record’s final line: "We’re all just waiting for something—'til love touches you like a hand in the dark." Those words encompass the starry-eyed ideal as well as the unsavory reality of how people tend to find love. Morning might bring to light all of the shameful things that have just gone down, but "News from the Sun" assures that whatever happens on this fantasy cruise stays there. | 2015-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Transgressive / Mom+Pop | October 14, 2015 | 8.6 | 358109a3-9bbf-4bc5-abe9-bb074dd21909 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This 3xCD set was distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material spanning the period from 1968 through 1977 by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore. | This 3xCD set was distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material spanning the period from 1968 through 1977 by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore. | Can: The Lost Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16733-the-lost-tapes/ | The Lost Tapes | Can have always been a little cagey about what is and isn't in their vaults. The received wisdom is that the German experimental pop group spent years in their studio, jamming constantly and recording everything, with bassist Holger Czukay editing the most promising tapes into the magnificent pieces that they released on record between 1969 and the mid-70s. They've always given the impression that their records were the result of grabbing whatever happened to be nearest at hand; when they've gone back into their archives for studio material in the past, they've resurfaced with outstanding stuff. Unlimited Edition from 1976, a collection of tapes that were lying around, includes career highlights like "Connection" and "Cutaway"; Delay 1968 is a complete, splendid album that the initial lineup of the band, with cracked American vocalist Malcolm Mooney, recorded before Monster Movie but somehow neglected to release until 1981.
For the past 30 years, though, all they've hauled up from the archive has been a few discs' worth of live material. So The Lost Tapes sounded like a very big deal: A 3xCD set distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material (spanning Can's entire original incarnation), it was assembled by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore, with the latter credited as editor. "Halcyon days, not outtakes," trumpeted the album's press release. That's not entirely true. A lot of these tracks are distinctly outtakes: alternate versions of familiar themes, or at least ideas Can executed differently elsewhere. "Dead Pigeon Suite", for instance, is 12 minutes of what appears to be exploratory jamming toward what became the taut, densely packed single "Vitamin C". It's fascinating to hear once or twice if you're a Can-head, but not terribly meaningful otherwise. (The title is a reference to the German TV movie, Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße, in which another version of it appears.)
"Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light", similarly, is Can working out the various hooks that coalesced into "Spoon". Half-familiar titles turn out to be germinal variations on "Mother Sky", "Soul Desert", and "Sing Swan Song". "Abra Cada Braxas" and "Blind Mirror Surf" aren't the same songs as Tago Mago's "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" and "Aumgn", but there's a family resemblance. There are lengthy live versions of "Spoon" and "Mushroom"-- not the same as the ones that appeared on last year's Tago Mago reissue, but of similar vintage-- as well as "One More Saturday Night", which is not a Grateful Dead cover but a live take of Ege Bamyasi's "One More Night". It's nice to hear appearances by both of Can's major singers, Mooney and Japanese hippie Damo Suzuki, although 10 minutes of Mooney chanting "are you waiting for the streetcar?!?" like a psychotic mantra is about eight too many.
The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material. "Millionenspiel", the theme song from a 1970 suspense movie, is a terrific cut-and-paste rocker, featuring Michael Karoli slashing at a single whammy-barred chord on every downbeat and Czukay constructing a looped groove out of what sounds like amp noise. "Barnacles" is a disco-funk improvisation that appears to be from the late-70s period when bassist Rosko Gee had joined the group; it's the sort of thing that would have sounded as bandwagon-jumping as "Aspectacle" did at the time, and sounds as kickass as "Aspectacle" does now. And the jewel of the set is "Graublau", which I'm guessing comes from the sessions for Thomas Schamoni's film A Big Gray-Blue Bird that also yielded "She Brings the Rain": a thrilling suite, with Karoli shooting flames, the rest of the band in monomaniacal garage-rock mode, and Schmidt tossing shortwave-radio loops into the mix to give everyone something to attack and devour.
One more album as good as the good stuff: It's what everyone hopes for from their favorite defunct band. Can's archives, as it turns out, were deep enough for that. But they weren't infinitely deep-- not even three albums deep. Irmin Schmidt assessed the situation himself, when he was asked a few months ago whether there would be more releases from Can's trove of unissued recordings: "The rest is not worth putting out... That's sentimentality." | 2012-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute | June 18, 2012 | 7.1 | 3581bfc7-9c8f-4a29-aa57-a0e4d4ebf546 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The veteran field-recording artist turns his microphones on New York City in the attempt to capture something essential lurking within the ephemeral. | The veteran field-recording artist turns his microphones on New York City in the attempt to capture something essential lurking within the ephemeral. | Chris Watson: Locations, Processed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-watson-locations-processed/ | Locations, Processed | The ache of memory throbs at the core of Chris Watson’s immaculate field recordings. The former Cabaret Voltaire member has become one of the world’s most revered audio documentarians. He has taken listeners into the depths of an Icelandic glacier, up close with the cavernous purr of a leopard in the wild, and across Mexico on a now-defunct railroad. Technically exacting though it may be, Watson’s work is never merely about capturing a sound for posterity’s sake. Watson tries to draw out something more ephemeral: “Events could haunt spaces,” he said in an interview last year. “I became convinced that some of the places I was going to embodied a spirit from another time. I was interested to know if you could soak up, absorb, that sonic environment through sound recordings.”
This is no simple task, and Watson’s approach is, for the most part, to get out of the way and let the spaces do the talking. On Locations, Processed, his new LP for Moog Recordings Library, he set up shop in New York City. The results were reassembled at Moog Sound Lab UK, the modular studio built around the 2014 reissue of the synthesizer manufacturer’s legendary behemoth, the System 55. For a generation or three, the Moog name will instantly conjure up proggy squiggles and Switched on Bach, but there’s not a single synth tone to be found here. The short LP is instead an immersive journey through reverberant halls and clanging streets, punctuated by snatches of quotidian conversation and startling intrusions.
Watson hasn’t always been shy about tweaking and layering his source recordings to dramatic effect, but Locations, Processed feels comparatively raw. It’s a record that requires a new kind of listening; you can’t take this material head on. Face the sounds directly and they can appear blunt, even boring. But sit back and relax your ears, and they assume an eerie, subliminal quality. “Room 343” compresses air into a molasses-thick ooze topped with a haunting whistle. The sound of passing traffic merges with ambient white noise to simulate deep breathing, while voices and an errant car horn slip into the mix with an elegance that feels planned. “Grand Central Terminal” could be recorded from inside a conch shell, so intense is its roar.
The entire A-side drifts through similarly heavy, hissing spaces, closing on the ominous “Central Park.” In its second half, Locations, Processed goes outside. “Times Square” breaks the ice with a brief conversation about apartment hunting before becoming engulfed by atomized bits of dialogue, laughter, and industrial sounds. Undulating low tones, perhaps from air traffic overhead, give the piece an unsettled mood. When sub-bass from a passing car and piercing sirens arrives, two and a half minutes in, the moment has all the power of a dance-music drop. “Broad Channel” clangs and stutters as the sounds of slamming doors and departing trains thud with combative ferocity. It’s barely a minute long and acts like an invigorating shot of espresso during a long, dreamy Tarkovsky film.
There are antecedents to Watson’s work. Brian Eno used frog and insect samples on Ambient 4: On Land, an exploration of England’s haunting landscapes that prefigured Watson’s mystical interrogations. Irv Teibel’s Environments series presented carefully edited recreations of natural phenomena. But Watson seems to exist in his own lane. His pieces hover in a tantalizing region between composition and chance. He cannot control who walks by his microphone, but he is interested in drawing our attention to something that goes beyond mere happenstance. New York is often described in kinetic or grandiose terms: bustling, overwhelming, larger than life. Watson hears something else, something deafening yet distant, filled with people yet weirdly vacant. Locations, Processed manages the impossible: Amid a deluge of energy, Watson records the empty space that surrounds the people who fill it. | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Moog Records | August 13, 2018 | 7.2 | 3582b660-e813-408b-b309-a5a458778c42 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
With sparse arrangements and a lyrical focus on hearing loss and mortality, the latest solo album from the Hot Chip vocalist is a solemn and moving collection. | With sparse arrangements and a lyrical focus on hearing loss and mortality, the latest solo album from the Hot Chip vocalist is a solemn and moving collection. | Alexis Taylor: Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alexis-taylor-silence/ | Silence | Alexis Taylor’s voice makes you root for him. It’s high-pitched and delicate, yet also scrappy: the sound of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks learning that he can finally show his sensitivity, having outgrown his bullies. The friction between Taylor’s persona, lyrics, and delivery has always been part of what makes his art so compelling. Bouncing along to the laddish antics of his long-time group Hot Chip, singing about playing Xbox or professional wrestling, Taylor’s immaculate phrasing and gossamer tone catch us by surprise.
The English singer is now in his early forties, with a solo career that slowly outpaces the celebratory dance music of his main band. While Hot Chip continues to fine-tune its already-pristine style, Taylor has taken his own releases as an opportunity to dabble in new settings and slower tempos. For his sixth solo full-length, Silence, he scrubs away all traces of exploratory splatter. It isn’t his first “back-to-basics” record—2016’s Piano was even more stripped-down, and Silence shares that album’s conceptual bent. This time, though, the music never seems like an exercise in simplicity, but instead an exposition of Taylor’s strengths, namely his expressive vocals: It’s his first solo release that feels driven by necessity, not experimentation.
Taylor recorded many of these songs while navigating lockdown’s innate privacy void, singing softly into his iPhone at night so as not to wake his family. He had to incorporate contributions from musicians remotely—upright bassist Sam Becker, trumpeter Kenichi Iwasa, and harpist Rachel Horton-Kitchlew provided backdrops of string and bass—and Iwasa composed some of the horn parts without hearing the existing tracks. The past year-and-a-half has been chock-full of anecdotes like these, but Taylor also hewed Silence’s sharp focus from a less-widespread hardship: In 2019, he developed tinnitus, a ringing sound that imperils one’s ability to experience silence.
The condition adds immediate pathos to his lyrics. “Silence was my sparring partner,” he sings in a naked falsetto on the ballad “Death of Silence.” “Silence, my only friend/Never again will I experience silence/I’m haunted by the death of that friend.” Considering Taylor’s reputation for cheeky asides, this forthrightness is surprising, and it also sets his album apart in the world of singer-songwriter projects. Plenty of musicians have made records about knocking on death’s door and empathizing with other people’s illness, while others have changed their approaches to writing and recording as a result of auditory problems: Neil Young’s tinnitus informed the relative tranquility of 1992’s Harvest Moon, which shares Silence’s mid-life mournfulness. Taylor’s decision to treat hearing damage itself as a subject, though, feels rare.
Still, the record is never purely confessional. Its scope is wide-ranging, handling silence and its absence as a springboard for a range of subjects. Over swells of orchestration, Taylor references anechoic chambers, moments of silence, and the consequences of remaining silent in response to violence. Since they serve as a reminder that life comes with unwanted consequences, chronic conditions can put you in conversation with death, and Silence is suffused with a recognition of the end. On the nursery rhyme-esque “I Look to Heaven” and the skyscraping opener “Dying in Heaven,” Taylor grapples with Christianity’s promise of an afterlife, while “Strange Strings” describes music as an eternal force, trapped in people’s finite bodies. Hot Chip’s songs have mythologized electronic music’s embrace of repetition, but Taylor explores repetition through more old-school motifs here—the title track, for example, is another rendition of “Death of Silence,” giving the album an evident frame.
“I was melting away/Just melting away/When you played,” Taylor sings on the plaintive highlight “Melting Away.” In the past, he might have peppered this image of someone listening to music with references to fancy gear or nods to heroes like Stevie Wonder or Prince. But this time, there are no quips to separate us from Taylor’s emotion. His voice is like a one-man choir against the grave. Dispensing with the irony and bombast that always seemed essential to Hot Chip’s work, this solemn collection places the onus on Taylor’s singing. A voice, after all, endures: It might be what we’ll pine for when the ringing stops and the silence resumes.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Orbistor | September 20, 2021 | 7.4 | 3583c02e-9cd7-4999-abb2-155a9a2d0a90 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
T**he Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis. | T**he Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis. | John Renbourn: The Attic Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21128-the-attic-tapes/ | The Attic Tapes | T**he Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. Renbourn sourced the core of the tracklist from a tape labeled "1962" that he discovered in the attic of fellow folk revivalist Mac MacLeod, pairing those few songs with various onstage collaborations from his salad days, before he and his guitar-sparring partner Bert Jansch and their band, Pentangle, helped redefine the scope of modern folk. Renbourn had yet to sign a record deal, so these takes are rough with their age and his youth. But the finale, a live duet with Davy Graham of "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down Out", is pristine, with the thin, lithe tone of the dual guitars rendered perfectly. Had Graham and a teenaged Renbourn somehow stolen into a proper studio back in 1962?
Actually, their Clapton Unplugged-like take on the American standard comes from an onstage rendezvous several decades after the heyday of the British folk revival. As a memento, it is quite poignant. Not only did Graham serve as a de facto mentor to Renbourn, but the younger guitarist opens this set with a hurried version of "Anji", one of Graham’s trademark numbers. But as a set-closer, it’s a bit of a bore, the sound of two old friends romping through the blues for their own amusement but without much payoff.
Alas, that makes it a fitting close for The Attic Tapes, a tedious if spirited set that lets us hear Renbourn learn where folk and blues had been rather than guide where it might go. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis.
The Attic Tapes mostly confirms what we already know about Renbourn and, really, the bulk of his motley crew of fellow crooners and pickers: They loved the rawness and magnetism of American blues and folk music, and they tried the best they could to recast it in their own image. There are a few originals here, like the halting and smart blues reordering of "Plainsong" and the peppy "Judy". But mostly, Renbourn plainly shows his roots. He turns Blind Boy Fuller’s doting but vaguely threatening "Little Woman You’re So Sweet" into the sprightly "Beth’s Blues". Like most every other pasty kid with a piece of carved wood and some strings, he works his way through Blind Willie Johnson’s "Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying". He flits between the notes and lifts and leaps with his voice in a way that suggests he’s celebrating his own vulnerability, a young man not old enough to know how painful it all could get.
Likewise, Renbourn’s take on "Portland Town", by itinerant and largely overlooked American banjoist Derroll Adams, seems to delight in tragic lyrics about bad marriages and dead children. And his cover of Jackson C. Frank’s perfect anthem, "Blues Run the Game", is overly emphatic, the verses brandished with unwarranted relish. It’s clear that Renbourn is an incredible guitarist, capable of making intricate patterns seem effortless even at such a young age. His jejune takes on these hard old songs suggest that he was, to date, simply an instrumentalist short on experience.
If you’re worried that The Attic Tapes is an opportunistic ploy to profit from Renbourn’s recent death, like a youthful journal published without the deceased author’s consent, don’t: Renbourn seemed enthusiastic about this project, even penning playful and informative liner notes that trace his lineage and sources more clearly than the recordings themselves. According to Riverboat Records’ owners, Renbourn died the day before they would have sent him the final artwork; he never had a chance to dig deeper for exact dates on these sessions.
Aside from its redundancy, though, the real worry with The Attic Tapes stems from the way it reflects reissue-and-archival culture at large. Though many labels interested in such work do essential excavations of forgotten sessions, albums and artists, there seems to be an increasing tendency to regard most anything that’s survived as a masterpiece—as though time transformed it like common carbon into a rare diamond. Everything presumed to be lost doesn’t need to be found. The situation seems doubly pronounced when the music involves an artist we already know—or, in the case of The Attic Tapes, a panoply of them.
In some way, I wonder if our relatively new era of seemingly instant and infinite information about what our favorite singers had for breakfast or where they’re vacationing and with whom has made the salvage of such basement reels and attic tapes seem more paramount, as though we’re retroactively rebuilding as much of the past as we can. That’s an intriguing endeavor, but it doesn’t necessarily make for essential records. During his 50-year career, Renbourn contributed to several of those, from Bert and John and The Pentangle to The Black Balloon. This makeshift reliquary—perhaps the final release in which Renbourn had a hand—is not among them. | 2015-10-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Riverboat | October 28, 2015 | 6.5 | 3587d544-9356-4329-b221-bb4c63babfcc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
One of Neil Young’s most widely bootlegged lost albums from the ’70s gets an official release. As familiar as the material may be, its ragged, magical charm remains greater than the sum of its parts. | One of Neil Young’s most widely bootlegged lost albums from the ’70s gets an official release. As familiar as the material may be, its ragged, magical charm remains greater than the sum of its parts. | Neil Young: Chrome Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-chrome-dreams/ | Chrome Dreams | Sometime after completing Chrome Dreams in early 1977, Neil Young invited his Malibu neighbor Carole King over to hear his latest album. Years later he recalled, “About halfway through she went, ‘Neil, this isn’t an album. It’s not a real album. I mean, there’s nobody playing, and half the songs you’re just doing by yourself.’ She was just laughing at me. Because she crafts albums.”
There’s no way of knowing whether King’s withering assessment of Chrome Dreams played a part in Young’s decision to shelve the album in favor of the charmingly misshapen American Stars ’N Bars in the summer of 1977. Chrome Dreams may have been gone but it wasn't forgotten. Young lifted four of its tracks wholesale for American Stars ’N Bars, then re-recorded another song for that same album. “Pocahontas” and “Powderfinger” wound up on Rust Never Sleeps, “Captain Kennedy” popped up on Hawks & Doves, and Neil resurrected “Too Far Gone” for his 1989 comeback Freedom. Long before he started excavating lost albums and official bootlegs as part of the Neil Young Archive, Chrome Dreams survived as an acetate that worked its way into the bootleg marketplace, becoming relatively easy to find during the compact disc explosion of the 1990s.
All this subsequent recycling—a practice that ran all the way through 2017, when the late-night session that produced “Pocahontas” and “Captain Kennedy” was released in its entirety as the wistful album Hitchhiker—means that the long-overdue official release of Chrome Dreams carries a vague air of anti-climax. Forget unheard songs: Unlike Homegrown and Toast, two other “lost” albums released under the NYA’s Special Release Series banner, Chrome Dreams barely contains unreleased recordings. The hype sticker attached to the physical edition touts “2 previously unreleased versions,” which amounts to an alternate take of “Hold Back the Tears” and a slow, stumbling early “Sedan Delivery,” which would later take a punishing pace on Rust Never Sleeps.
Disappointing as that may be, Chrome Dreams offers a distinctly different experience than any other Young album from the late 1970s. It serves as an example of how albums manage to be more than the sum of their individual parts. Young is keenly aware how individual songs can harmonize and rhyme. When promoting Chrome Dreams II—a 2007 sequel that bears no overt relation to the album he essayed 30 years earlier—Neil explained, “Quite often I’ll record things that don’t fit with what I’m doing, so I just hold onto them for a while. Some of them are so strong that they destroy what I’m doing. It’s like if you have a bunch of kids and one of them weighs 200 pounds and the other ones are 75 pounds, you’ve got to keep things in order so they don’t hurt each other. So that’s why I held certain things back.”
In a sense, Chrome Dreams is a collection of songs Young held back so they wouldn’t battle with their siblings; he needed to parcel them out in order to give them a fair hearing. When delivered by Crazy Horse in full roar, “Powderfinger” provided Rust Never Sleeps with a clarifying blast of purpose, while “Too Far Gone” benefitted from an older, wearier Neil singing its melancholy refrain nearly 15 years after its original recording. “Captain Kennedy,” a delicate wisp of a song that distinguished Hawks & Doves, offered a bit of a respite in that album's haphazard clang yet it wasn’t quite at home there. It belongs among its bittersweet companions on Chrome Dreams, a record that very much is a product of Young aimlessly wandering out of the darkness that defined his mid-’70s.
“Captain Kennedy” is an airy recording that shows why Carole King didn’t consider Chrome Dreams “a real album.” Young peppers the record with cuts that contain little more than his voice and a guitar, recordings unadorned by such niceties as harmonies and percussion. Compare “Pocahontas” to its overdubbed incarnation on Rust Never Sleeps: The additional 12-string guitars and airy backing vocals turn a stoned vision into a crystalline fantasy. “Will to Love,” a bizarre reverie where Neil imagines he’s a salmon swimming upstream to mate as he strums his guitar in front of an audibly crackling fireplace, continues these hushed hallucinations. These recordings—not demos, although they’re spare enough to be mistaken for them—give the listener the sense that they’re eavesdropping on Young, a sense of hushed intimacy that suggests Chrome Dreams drifts in a twilight slipstream. It’s a waking dream interrupted by sudden jolts of thunder, as when “Like a Hurricane” blows in after a pensive first act.
“Like a Hurricane” is familiar, particularly this version, which wound up on Decade, the ’77 compilation that consolidated Young’s expeditions into a digestible narrative. Heard within this context, though, “Like a Hurricane” sounds bracing, with the loud, lumbering Crazy Horse sounding cruder than usual when surrounded by contemplative calm. Such shifts in tone aren't unusual on a Young record, but these particular songs in these particular versions in this particular sequence carry an unusual power. Individually, many of the compositions are indeed the 200-pound titans of Young’s imagination, songs that defined his rich, prolific peak that weathered the years, enduring as core components of his songbook. It would follow that Chrome Dreams also is one of Young’s strongest albums—and it is, yet it also feels curiously amorphous, lacking the ballast of Tonight’s the Night and Rust Never Sleeps. Without an anchor of gravity, Chrome Dreams almost seems to beg to be broken out into segments yet every quivering, ragged rendition of these familiar tunes benefit from being heard in order. What matters are not the parts themselves but how they’re assembled. The connections, both intentional and accidental, are what gives an album its character. Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick. | 2023-08-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | August 16, 2023 | 8.5 | 358823a2-5025-40cc-b821-319f60256015 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Featuring songs about handling love and fear, Jennifer O'Connor's sixth album seems to be an effort to reconcile the places in life that are rough around the edges. | Featuring songs about handling love and fear, Jennifer O'Connor's sixth album seems to be an effort to reconcile the places in life that are rough around the edges. | Jennifer O'Connor: Surface Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21648-surface-noise/ | Surface Noise | There's a quote attributed to BBC DJ John Peel wherein Peel defends vinyl's imperfections against the flawless sound of CDs, telling an acquaintance, "Listen mate, life has surface noise." Surface noise, on vinyl or in real life, is the gnarly stuff that grounds each of us in reality and gives us a shared point of human commiseration. Jennifer O'Connor's Surface Noise, then, seems to be an effort reconciling the places in life that are rough around the edges. However, in her songs about handling love and fear on her sixth LP, O'Connor scrubs all the grit out of her own music, delivering a flat, fine record that never really gets out of its own way.
O'Connor's voice is pleasant and gentle, floating in a low-to-middle range and surrounded by warm instrumentation. The album as a whole feels tidy and timeless. The flip side of that coin, though, is that you feel like you've heard Surface Noise before even upon first listen. Stacked against other indie-inclined singer-songwriters of recent years, it would be tough to pick Surface Noise out of a lineup. The songs bleed into each other so seamlessly that it's easy to listen to half of the record without realizing you've done so.
The album moves at a painstakingly moderate pace. "It's a Lie" sounds as though it might hold something interesting as it kicks off with slightly scorched guitar riffs, but they're swiftly relegated to the background. Plenty of albums simmer gently with an even temper, but there's usually an undercurrent of intrigue: tension, anxiety, sadness, anticipation. Somehow, none of that makes its way into Surface Noise.
In the back half of the record, "It's Gonna Get Worse" breaks into a half-hearted peppy rhythm, but O'Connor's defeated tone as she sings a refrain of "It's gonna get worse before it gets better" gives little hope that anything will ever improve. The record certainly doesn't.
Still, Surface Noise isn't a bad album by most definitions of the word. The instrumentation is tight and clean, and O'Connor's writing is direct. Together, these pieces make for a record that feels perfectly content, unburdened by hunger or ambition. But in its efforts to make sense of our collective earthly clamor, Surface Noise just feels like static. | 2016-03-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Kiam | March 7, 2016 | 5 | 358919ad-e2bd-480c-af12-ab4a2923bea1 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
The classical violinist Hilary Hahn holed up in Iceland for two months to record with German pianist and indie classical composer Hauschka. The result is a record about fiddling around happily with music's guts. | The classical violinist Hilary Hahn holed up in Iceland for two months to record with German pianist and indie classical composer Hauschka. The result is a record about fiddling around happily with music's guts. | Hauschka / Hilary Hahn: Silfra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16639-silfra/ | Silfra | The 32-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn has been at the lonely pinnacle of the classical A-list since she was all of 16 years old. It's not exactly a sphere that rewards, or even encourages, curiosity: The language used to assess soloists in Hahn's rarefied air comes disturbingly close the the kind used to appraise prize ponies, and the city-to-city nature of the violin-concerto circuit can make for a life that is almost as cloistered and repetitive. But Hahn has resisted stagnation, recording with alt-country singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, the folk singer Tom Brosseau, and even ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (that's her on Worlds Apart's "To Russia My Homeland"). She never seems to be insisting on a strident break from the world of orchestral tours, commissions, and Tchaikovsky concertos with any of these new projects -- just looking for something fresh and interesting to do. It has made her career one of the most refreshingly graceful ones in classical music. No project she has undertaken has felt forced, and that includes her decision to hole up in Iceland for two months to make a record with Hauschka.
Hauschka (real name: Volker Bertelmann) is a German pianist and indie classical composer who plays his piano "prepared," i.e., with small things placed on the piano's strings to produce new tones, à la John Cage. Over a series of albums filled with wistful miniature sketches, he's built a weird little sound world where the grotesque walks arm-in-arm with the twee. His pieces evoke a world of broken, rickety instruments, populated entirely by small, limping things. They can be nerve-rendingly cute and cloying, but at their best, they evoke the peculiar sadness you might feel when looking at, say, a toy-strewn suburban lawn.
Silfra is the result of Hahn and Hauschka's disappearing into an Iceland studio, feeling their way around each other, and recording an album based on their resulting improvisations. This sounds like a recipe for an undercooked mess, but Silfra succeeds where Hauschka's solo records haven't always, in part because his world sounds fuller and more inviting with collaborators in it. Silfra feels and sounds like two serious-minded musicians growing increasingly comfortable with each other, allowing themselves to be playful and silly. Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.
Hahn, for her part, does something that could be considered shocking for violinists in her circle: she willfully drains her million-dollar tone of most of its prettiness. Her playing on Silfra is often sickly, wheezing or shrill, in keeping with the slightly damaged sound of Hauschka's piano. On "North Atlantic", she plays a mournful melody with a breathy, anemic tone, while Hauschka's piano produces a dry "skree" sound that pokes the eardrum like a needle. She begins "Draw a Map" with a forceful gypsy dance that starts hobbling shortly after it gets started: The two of them doodle all over the melody's pristine surface with pockmarks and scribbles. If there's a dance being done here, it's on at least one bad leg.
In the album's liner notes, Hauschka and Hahn lay out specific stories and characters for each track, and a lot of them, it turns out, involved human meddling with existing structures: "Adash", for instance, is "the name of a boy who loves music and scratches lines into his CDs to create unpredictable catches, so that he can hear a section over and over again before it skips ahead to the next part." "Clock Winder" notes: "Some mechanisms still need human interaction to function." This gleeful tinkerer's spirit is what animates Silfra. It is music about fiddling around happily with music's guts, and it's most absorbing when heard through a fat pair of high-quality headphones, where you can register every scrape, plunk, creak, and twang. | 2012-05-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-05-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Interscope / Deutsche Grammophon | May 23, 2012 | 7.3 | 358ae467-671f-4ace-962d-e9ad21728790 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Blending dancehall with pop-rap, 1980s soul, and 2000s R&B, the Jamaican singer’s full-length debut makes a flashy play for the mainstream. | Blending dancehall with pop-rap, 1980s soul, and 2000s R&B, the Jamaican singer’s full-length debut makes a flashy play for the mainstream. | Shenseea: Alpha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shenseea-alpha/ | Alpha | After six years of releasing singles, Shenseea’s full-length debut is here, and lo and behold, it’s a real singles album. The Jamaican singer (born Chinsea Lee) delivers 14 fully formed songs with polished production values, sticky hooks, and a few gimmicks. Not every song on Alpha will crack the Hot 100, but it’s easy to imagine that was Shenseea’s ambition each time she stepped into the booth.
Shenseea’s early music had a certain edge to it: Take 2016’s “Jiggle Jiggle,” where rasping synths, hard-edged drum machines, and Shenseea’s raps in Jamaican patois fused into a sweltering dancehall jam. Since then, her unusual journey to pop stardom has routed her through collaborations with artists as far apart as Vybz Kartel and Christina Aguilera, and she received a visibility bump with two guest appearances on Kanye West’s Donda. Alpha blends dancehall with pop-rap, 1980s soul, and 2000s R&B to form a commercially palatable (in the U.S. and Europe) form of Caribbean music. Rihanna is Shenseea’s most obvious analog, but you might also detect the chart-conquering reggae of Chaka Demus & Pliers and Shaggy. Halfway through the album, we get back-to-back tracks featuring Beenie Man and Sean Paul, two of dancehall’s biggest crossover stars. You can imagine the pair arriving at the studio with a specific remit: to guide Shenseea into the mainstream.
Of course, the quickest possible route is to simply jump on a fashionable sound. Shenseea recruits Megan Thee Stallion to make the very Megan Thee Stallion-like single “Lick.” Thankfully, it’s very good: With sparse electronic elements and extremely explicit lyrics, “Lick” is an obvious sister of “WAP.” Less impressive is “R U That,” where 21 Savage’s haunted-ship-through-the-fog vocals make an odd choice for the role of Shenseea’s would-be romantic beau. And the album is inexplicably bookended by unimpressive guest spots from Tyga. Closer “Blessed” was first released in 2019, but if Shenseea wanted to include tracks from her vast archives, she certainly had more exciting options.
Then there’s “Hangover,” which compares a doomed relationship to the knowledge that a night of drinking is going to leave you with a sore head. This concept, as well as the chipped acoustic guitar chords that don’t really go anywhere, might have been better left unheard. Most experiments do succeed, though, like the trippy ratchet-pop of “Bouncy,” featuring Offset. “Body Count,” produced by Scott Storch and Illa, features moody, ’80s-style synths that draw out Shenseea’s smokiest performance. And she’s an effective vocalist, switching from rapping to singing—or finding a pocket somewhere between the two—with confidence and control. Over the rocksteady-style guitar of “Lying If I Call It Love,” Shenseea summarizes an ongoing fling with enjoyable brevity: “Him fuck me confident/But I’m proceeding with caution.” Her vocal assuredness allows her to carry a risqué bar like “My pum-pum the tightest/My pum-pum-boom-boom-boom” without flinching.
A high point comes on “Deserve It,” a svelte love song that works off a plucked string loop that recalls ’00s UK garage and a syrupy vocal reminiscent of Christina Milian or Mýa. “You make me feel so welcome/And you so damn handsome,” Shenseea sings softly in a more region-neutral style. It’s far removed from Shenseea, the blistering dancehall phenom—but Shenseea, the rising pop star, made the commercially minded album she needed. Once its cycle is complete, more interesting terrain may lie further from the demands of the industry. | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Rich Immigrants / Interscope | March 21, 2022 | 6.8 | 358f635a-304e-404b-ad9c-07bff8a9f528 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The instrumental duo go all-in on the possibilities of their raw steel-string chemistry, publishing an unplanned session straight to wax. | The instrumental duo go all-in on the possibilities of their raw steel-string chemistry, publishing an unplanned session straight to wax. | Elkhorn: The Storm Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elkhorn-the-storm-sessions/ | The Storm Sessions | Many inspired albums rise from the ashes of foiled life plans. Elkhorn’s sixth LP in five years is the rare example of the album that rose from the ashes of “plans tonight”: On the evening of an important gig opportunity, the instrumental duo of 12-string acoustic player Jesse Sheppard and electric guitarist Drew Gardner, along with collaborator Turner Williams Jr., found themselves snowed in and unable to make it to the venue. Rather than let their creative energy go to waste, the three set up shop in Gardner’s Harlem home studio, pressed record, and channeled the forces of weather into two side-length jams, hoping to salvage something. By the end of the night, they had The Storm Sessions.
It’s important to know The Storm Sessions is an improvised album before hearing it—even coming from a band that’s always leaned heavily on improvisation. It contextualizes its shortcomings, and in a way, it’s the most Elkhorn thing Sheppard and Gardner could do (besides organizing an American primitive guitar festival in John Fahey’s hometown): going all-in on the possibilities of their raw steel-string chemistry to the point of publishing an unplanned session straight to wax. Both halves of the album, “Electric One” and “Electric Two,” run a little over 20 minutes and are divided into three parts each. They add up to a pair of space-out marathons that don’t wind as much as they loiter on the same chord and notes for several minutes at a time, like they’re waiting to pounce on prey that never really appears. Sheppard’s 12-string is the anchor; he wields his lowest strings like a giant staff, striking them sparingly and deliberately as if they could vibrate the earth beneath his feet. Gardner plays above and more freely, while Turner is the wildcard third wheel, adding jagged texture with his electric bouzouki and his shahi baaja, an electrified Indian zither.
Their crescendos don’t always feel earned. The final surge of “Electric One (Part C),” for example, takes almost 20 minutes to set up, but the rise is awkward, like a live studio audience responding to the “applause” sign. When it lands, it lands well: Gardner and Turner’s crackling noise envelops them and flutters onto the tender ground of Sheppard’s acoustic like a thick, windless snowfall. It’s really nice; it just doesn’t justify the journey of a full LP side to get there. The predictability and sheer length of these routes mean The Storm Sessions works best for passive listening—not the kind of qualified compliment to which bands generally aspire, but one with plenty of value nonetheless.
Hearing The Storm Sessions repeatedly bump up against these limitations might tempt you to throw on a different expeditionary steel-string album with the benefit of plotting and execution—like Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing, a masterclass in both building a scenic journey and setting trap doors. Or, for that matter, another Elkhorn record: Their double album from last year, Sun Cycle / Elk Jam, was their first to prominently feature drumming (with beautiful results), and there’s a surprising amount of contrast between those records and this one. There, Elkhorn hired someone to keep time; here, they’re less concerned. The Storm Sessions’ improvisation has the spirit of adventure, but the album winds up feeling stuck at home.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Beyond Beyond is Beyond | February 18, 2020 | 6.2 | 35929001-14f7-4b00-9935-73a3f0b3f619 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The younger brother of YNW Melly is only 12 years old, and his debut is sure to have middle school dances on smash. | The younger brother of YNW Melly is only 12 years old, and his debut is sure to have middle school dances on smash. | YNW BSlime: BABY GOAT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ynw-bslime-baby-goat/ | BABY GOAT | YNW BSlime spent his middle school vacation playing Fortnite until his older brother, Florida rapper YNW Melly, told him that if he didn’t leave the house and come hang out at the studio, he was taking back his credit card so he couldn’t buy V-Bucks, the in-game Fortnite currency. BSlime gave in and reluctantly accompanied Melly to New Era studios in South Florida. There he was pushed by his brother to go in the booth and spit a freestyle and to BSlime’s surprise, everyone loved it.
In February, YNW Melly was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Police in the city of Miramar, Florida claimed that Melly shot and killed two members of his YNW crew. (Melly plead not guilty and prosecutors are currently seeking the death penalty.) After his arrest Melly’s music grew; his single, the eerily prescient “Murder on my Mind,” originally released in 2017, peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since gone multi-platinum. Then, in July, as his YouTube account crossed two million subscribers, “Slime Dreams,” the debut music video of his 12-year-old younger brother YNW BSlime, was uploaded to his channel.
Even before his arrest, YNW Melly’s sing-songy rap was breaking through on SoundCloud, YouTube, and in Florida—Kanye West appeared on his January 2019 single “Mixed Personalities.” His piano-heavy ballads sounded like he was performing warm-hearted odes to his first love, but typically they were twisted and heavily detailed stories about murder, death, home invasions, pain, and jail. As a singer, YNW BSlime’s vocals were similar; you could tell he grew up on Young Thug like his brother. But instead of Melly’s rough edge, BSlime’s raps are brighter, like he sings hopped up on Honey Buns and dollar cans of Arizona iced tea.
On BABY GOAT, the debut of YNW BSlime, the preteen sounds a lot like what would have happened if a My World-era Justin Bieber got to experience the pessimistic lovesickness of Juice WRLD. As far as rappers too young to drive go, BSlime is pretty gifted; he has syrupy vocals and he doesn’t rely on shock (See: Matt Ox and Bouba Savage). His love ballads can be mature, but not uncomfortably mature. “Is this love that I’m feeling? I think I’m losin’ my mind/I need you right now, I’ll give you all my time,” he sings on the charming intro “Like That.” Though it’s less about his lyrics, which are what you would expect from a 12-year-old, and more about the whistle high range that can hang with hip-hop’s sing-rap elite.
But BSlime isn’t breaking any new ground. “Just Want You” falls too far down the sappy Kidz Bop lane. On “Wipe Your Eyes,” he deviates from his usual sunny vocals for a grating, Lil Keed-like high-pitched screech over a pedestrian acoustic guitar. “Nobody Else” has a bouncy R&B rhythm and fingersnaps that will have middle school dances on smash, though I have trouble getting past BSlime flirting like someone who has clearly never flirted before. He’s at his best on BABY GOAT when he’s writing mildly angsty coming-of-age pop singles like “Slime Emotions” or when he’s by the side of his brother on “Dying For You.”
Next to Melly, it’s clear that BSlime needs more experience. Their lyrics aren’t that much different, but Melly’s very troubling emotions elevate his writing. BSlime, on the other hand, is harmless. He’ll keep you engaged for two and a half minutes with that glossy singing voice, but after 13 songs you realize he could have held back on some of the melodramatic romance. That should change as he gets older. In the meantime YNW BSlime is still the little brother of YNW Melly that happens to sing—at least now he can run up those video game charges freely. | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 22, 2019 | 6 | 3595849d-17af-4fe3-a2fd-505f86ef4308 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The stalwart and defiantly odd Nashville band Lambchop's latest reinvention finds them embracing a Vocoder-drenched, largely electronic sound. It is as lush and gorgeous as any of their past work. | The stalwart and defiantly odd Nashville band Lambchop's latest reinvention finds them embracing a Vocoder-drenched, largely electronic sound. It is as lush and gorgeous as any of their past work. | Lambchop: FLOTUS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22498-flotus/ | FLOTUS | Over the course of Lambchop’s two decade-plus career, they have been remarkably consistent. Even with their various lineup shifts, there have never been any tumultuous breakups, no big reunions, no major controversies. Any of their 12 studio releases could reasonably be your favorite. But while each of their albums sound unmistakably like Lambchop, no two of them sound quite alike; from the bouncy alt-country of Thriller, to the stark lounge folk of Is a Woman, through the sweetly orchestrated ballads of their last album, 2012’s excellent Mr. M. As a frontman, Kurt Wagner—with his inimitable baritone, like an agoraphobic Bill Callahan—has also shifted and stretched in his own quiet way. Sometimes he’ll greet you with a pre-coffee grumble; other times, he’s singing in the shower with a wispy falsetto. Like any good leading man, Wagner redefines himself for the role he’s playing, but he never lets you forget that he’s in control.
So while FLOTUS, the band’s Vocoder-drenched, largely electronic new album, might initially feel like a shock, the reinvention is not entirely unprecedented. Last year saw the release of The Diet, an album by Lambchop side project HeCTA– featuring Wagner, as well as drummer Scott Martin and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Norris– that found Wagner singing his characteristic melodies over dance beats and au-courant synths (“You shouldn’t have to change a thing, except your mind,” he sang in the album’s highlight). Those ideas come into full bloom throughout the nearly-70 minute FLOTUS, though it’s less tentative and more seamless, with even Wagner’s vocals sounding like an instrument in the mix (this is not merely Lambchopped and Screwed). Like Bon Iver on 22, A Million, Lambchop exist here as a modern Americana act refusing their genre’s assumed aesthetics. But unlike the post-Yeezus cacophony of 22, A Million, FLOTUS is as lush and gorgeous as any of Lambchop’s past work, sometimes floating by with the luxurious chill of hotel lobby music, but never losing its sense of direction.
With the majority of the album eschewing traditional song structure, the most immediate way to listen to FLOTUS is as a bridge between its twin epics: the opening “In Care of 8675309” and its closer, “The Hustle.” In Lambchop’s lineage of long, slow-burning album openers, “8675309” is their longest and their slowest-burning. It also serves as a smooth gateway into the band’s new sound, with Wagner’s heavily effected vocals–like the church organ setting on a cheap keyboard with the speakers muffled–rising from tentative opening notes to full-blown crooning by the end, accompanying one of the album’s best melodies. Wagner has cited both Kendrick Lamar and Shabazz Palaces as inspirations for his new direction, but a more fitting reference here might be Future, whose use of Auto-Tune is less ornamental and more foundational to his very cadence and word choice. As such, “8675309” is not merely a great Lambchop song with a weird vocal effect; it’s a great Lambchop song because of the weird vocal effect.
“The Hustle,” on the other hand, arrives at the end of the record devoid of any vocal effects. Hearing Wagner’s untreated voice by that point makes it sound even more powerful and vulnerable. “I don’t want to leave you ever,” he opens, his voice warbling and reverberating all on its own, “And that’s a long, long time.” Over the course of its jazzy, stuttering 18 minutes, the song slides between movements, like Destroyer’s similar tour-de-force “Bay of Pigs,” before closing with the faint sound of piano. “It was raining like a movie/And it was hard to look away,” Wagner sings, a fitting metaphor for how captivating and uncanny but wholly natural the song feels.
While none of the other tracks on the album are as immediate as “8675309” or as stunning as “The Hustle,” they each reveal their charms on repeated listens. The ones that focus on simple, repeated phrases–like “You are very remarkable” in “NIV” or “Take it on the chin” in “Directions to the Can”–become catchy in an effortless way. The less vocal-focused songs function as opportunities to appreciate the other members of the band. Tony Crow’s piano in “Howe” is as lyrical as any of Wagner’s appearances, and Matt Swanson’s bass in “Old Masters” slithers with soulful charisma. Every part of the record speaks to the greater whole, from the album cover (a close-up shot of Wagner’s wife, Mary Mancini, the Chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party posing with Obama), to the title: both an acronym for “First Lady of the US” and, according to the liner notes, “For Love Often Turns Us Still,” a meditation on how simple things still render us speechless. “Given enough time, I can pretty much draw a correlation between any separate objects,” Wagner has said. The disparate pieces of this album play to that strength, unfolding like a long riddle.
It’s to the band’s credit that FLOTUS exceeds its novelty. In a year when Springsteen, Bowie, and the creator of a hit Broadway musical have all cited Kendrick Lamar’s music as an inspiration, FLOTUS does not come entirely out of left field; it’s a solid, satisfying listen, devoid of context. Wagner’s lyrics are as cutting as ever (“See the flowers wilt/From the government they built/As the hammers wail/On a ship that hasn’t sailed”) and the band already sounds comfortable with their new sound, settling into a weightless groove that make you feel as if they’ve played this way forever. It’s one of Lambchop’s greatest strengths, that even when they’re overtly experimenting, they wear it as naturally as the garish pearls that have adorned their stage attire. “There’s that old saying about an artist having only one or two good ideas in his life and is doomed to repeat them,” Wagner recently said in an interview. “I reject that notion. I think I have maybe five.” What’s clear after listening to FLOTUS, is that he’s only getting started. | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 31, 2016 | 8 | 359ae90d-dcb7-43db-b70a-f7b692b72124 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Confronting the climate crisis and the prospect of humankind’s demise, the veteran experimental musician takes an unconventional approach: He gets in touch with his feelings. | Confronting the climate crisis and the prospect of humankind’s demise, the veteran experimental musician takes an unconventional approach: He gets in touch with his feelings. | Brian Eno: *FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-foreverandevernomore/ | ForeverAndEverNoMore | Brian Eno is known for many things: pioneering ambient music, famous collaborators, the creative embrace of chance, a sly sense of humor, his love of cats. But you wouldn’t describe him as particularly extroverted or sentimental. He’s not, as some might say, “sad boy emo.” So it’s a little unexpected that his new album, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, arrives with an accompanying 375-word statement in which he uses the word “feelings” 13 times. “It took me a long time to embrace the idea that we artists are actually feelings-merchants,” Eno writes, presumably in earnest. “Art is where we start to become acquainted with those feelings, where we notice them and learn from them—learn what we like and don’t like—and from there they start to turn into actionable thoughts.”
What has made Eno suddenly so in touch with his inner child? Oh, just the dying planet and the prospect of humankind’s demise. “I’ve been thinking about our narrowing, precarious future, and this music grew out of those thoughts. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’ve been feeling about it…and the music grew out of the feelings”—bold text Eno’s. Underpinning FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is a theory, one you have to admire for its sheer lack of cynicism: By redirecting our emotional impulses toward the planet and away from ourselves, we’ll have a greater chance of reversing the Earth’s environmental trajectory.
This suggestion is so uncharacteristically hippie-dippie that I feared Eno might, at best, create a patchwork of nature sounds along the lines of Irv Teibel’s Environments series or, at worst, cover “Big Yellow Taxi.” But what’s curious about FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is how little warmth or whimsy the music exudes. In 1975, on his most treasured vocal-based album, Another Green World, Eno created “pop” songs and sound pieces that obliquely imagined the world’s various topographies and ecologies. Almost 50 years later, he’s explicitly addressing the Earth, but he’s producing the sonic equivalent of an icy tundra.
FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE has been touted as Eno’s first primarily vocal-based LP since 2005’s Another Day on Earth, but that’s a little misleading. The singing isn’t straightforwardly melodic; it’s just one more textural layer in smoothly reverberating sound design that’s full of arcing synth notes, periodic pings and chimes, and shimmering background tones. There’s no percussion, no major chords, and no choruses or bridges. Typically, Eno will lay out verses in threes, slightly altering the lyrics each time, like Jewish prayers or dissolving mantras. On opening track “Who Gives a Thought,” for example, he recites the title at the start of each verse to ask rhetorical questions about fireflies, nematodes (an invertebrate otherwise known as a roundworm), and laborers. The implication throughout is that the vocal melodies and lyrics are meant to induce a meditative state, but the arrangements are so mercurial—slight effects intervene suddenly and randomly—that anything approaching zen is impossible.
As glossily stark as the album might be, the music isn’t entirely grim. Some of it is plainly gorgeous. Even when he’s intoning apocalyptic imagery on “There Were Bells” (“There were those who ran away/There were those who had to stay/In the end they all went the same way”), Eno fills the background with chirping birdsong. The very next track, “Sherry,” has a melody structured like one of longtime Eno collaborator Robert Wyatt’s, gently curling around a Rhodes-like keyboard, starry guitar licks, and a distant vocal patch that recalls Aphex Twin’s “#1” on Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. Incidentally, Eno wields that vocal effect most remarkably on one of the album’s two wordless songs. On closer “Making Gardens Out of Silence,” initially composed for an exhibit at London’s Serpentine gallery, eight and a half minutes of undulating synths, strings, and sustained vocal tones bear the otherworldly, transportive qualities of Eno’s Apollo or his Ambient series.
Eno once again has collaborated with Leo Abrahams, Peter Chilvers, and Jon Hopkins, three people he’s consistently worked with in various configurations over the past 15 years. At times you can parse their contributions immediately: Abrahams’ shimmering guitar textures, Chilvers’ Bloom-like sound effects, and Hopkins’ seismic synth-bass rips. These are all skilled musicians with unique perspectives, but their involvement is the album’s one drawback. As an artist, Eno is famous for his sonic “treatments'' and for his willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory, but for all of the record’s virtues, it’s a little too treated, a little too familiar; at times it verges on being a little too antiseptic. Eno’s written statement and the gravity of the subject indicate a grand departure, but FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE feels nonetheless like a continuation of his work since the mid to late 2000s.
Speaking of the 2000s, when I listen to FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, I’m reminded of David Sylvian’s 2003 album Blemish, which similarly used wintry electronic music and off-target singing to evoke devastation, though in that case it concerned the dissolution of a relationship. Crucially, Sylvian offset his blistering laptop electronica with Derek Bailey’s fractured, improvised acoustic guitar, giving Blemish a distinct tension. But what they both have in common is a pronounced sense of intimacy, and in Eno’s case a familial one—his niece Cecily appears as a vocalist, and his granddaughter’s handwriting features prominently in the video for the song “We Let It In.” It’s exactly the kind of unconventional thinking people have come to expect from Eno: an album about something vast and daunting, made with and for the people closest to you. | 2022-10-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Verve / UMC | October 18, 2022 | 7.5 | 35a19fd1-3393-42e9-98be-51a25c066f0b | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.