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Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz is a free 23-track album—written and recorded outside the governance of Miley Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members. It is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can. | Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz is a free 23-track album—written and recorded outside the governance of Miley Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members. It is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can. | Miley Cyrus: Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21023-miley-cyrus-and-her-dead-petz/ | Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz | Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz dropped from the sky to cap off last weekend’s Cyrus-hosted VMA Awards like so much phallically-deployed glitter. The free 23-track album, written and recorded outside the governance of Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members, appeared on Sunday accompanied by a New York Times interview where Cyrus detailed its making. In it, she recalls being told by her team that the album was too long. She proceeded to add "Miley Tibetan Bowlzzz", as an impetuous reminder that Cyrus plays by no one’s rules but her own. That pretty much says it all: Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.
It would be hard to imagine Cyrus and Coyne’s talents combining to worse results: there’s nothing here as pleasant as her appearances on the Flaming Lips’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover album last year, nor are these collaborations audacious enough to fail in exciting ways. Mostly they are tossed-off Diet Yoshimi detritus, the kind of music these guys can fart out in their sleep. There are bright spots, many of them via former mentor Mike WiLL Made It’s handful of productions. But on the whole Dead Petz is a borderline unlistenable slog through dorm-room poncho bullshit and blissfully ignorant acid koans ("Can’t you see, all the clouds are dying?"), delivered earnestly from an ex-child star seemingly unaware of how fundamentally inseparable her own privilege is from her "do whatever the fuck you want all of the time" ethos, and enabled by a 54 year old who should know better.
Take "Dooo It!", the album's single of sorts. There's a lot going on in the track—weed, flying saucers, queries about the origins of the moon—but the part I keep coming back to is Cyrus proclaiming, "Peace, motherfuckerz! Do it!" Far be it for me to dash the idealistic, psilocybin-fueled dreams of a 22-year-old multi-millionaire whose emancipatory phase has swerved from ratchet-lite twerk ambassador to proudly pansexual LGBTQ advocate and Wayne Coyne bestie: she’s figuring it out, as 22-year olds do, though rarely from such a precipitous platform. But still: "Do it!" As if it were just that simple.
But that’s why having an editor is important, and why "No parents! No rules!" is almost always better as a slogan than as a creative mode. "Self-control is not something I am working on," Cyrus trills on Mike WiLL cut "Slab of Butter (Scorpion)", and while she seems to be having a blast, we are left with the utterly pointless witch-house skid mark "Fuckin Fucked Up" (not to be confused with "I’m So Drunk"), and "BB Talk", a rambling monologue that wastes one of the album’s few salvageable hooks. "1 Sun" namedrops Grace Jones alongside tuneless invocations to "Wake up, world! Can’t you see the earth is crying?" There is a twee piano ballad about a dead blowfish friend, who her human friends eat at sushi dinner. The circle of life, man. (She fake-cries at the end.)
Presumably, Cyrus will look back on all this and laugh, having learned something about herself and about making art, and move on, as she seems to have done with 2013’s Bangerz. And there are moments of promise here—most often, when Coyne backs off a bit. She’s much better at love songs than drug songs. "Space Boots" streamlines the album’s cosmic vibes into an electro pulse somewhere between Kavinsky and Rilo Kiley, with sweet, direct lyrics that pierce through the fog of bullshit: "I get so high cause you’re not here smokin’ my weed/ And I get so bored/ Cause you’re not here to make me laugh." Best of all is "Lighter", a stunning, '80s-nodding Mike WiLL ballad that poignantly redeems the general "whoa, dude" vibes: "We never get to see ourselves sleeping peacefully next to the ones that we love," she sings. It’s genuinely moving.
Cyrus returns to idealized depictions of sleep and dreams often here, and given how hyper-regimented most of her life must have been, her attraction to relinquishing control to drugs or the subconscious makes sense. But for all the Instagram nudes and real talk about gender and sexuality in the press, very little of Dead Petz reveals much about Cyrus beyond the bacchanalia and non-sequiturs. I can’t shake the sense that Dead Petz exists more as a glorified VMA party favor than as a work that can stand on its own.
Speaking of: the biggest irony of Cyrus’ clash with Nicki Minaj is that if Cyrus were to pay closer attention, she might recognize Minaj as a trailblazer for the career path she's trying to take—a massively famous woman who does things the "wrong" way, pisses a lot of people off in the process, and refuses to give a fuck. As far as surrealist pop albums this decade, it doesn’t get much ballsier than Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded. But the stakes there were huge, and there is literally nothing at stake for Cyrus here. In a way, Dead Petz is a fascinating milemarker of pop music in the post-album, post-Internet era: a major pop album that lands with a splash, then sinks like a brick, as ephemeral as the Tumblr culture Cyrus draws from. Maybe that’s the most visionary aspect of Dead Petz: it feels like it was built to disintegrate. | 2015-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | September 4, 2015 | 3 | 35a2c0a1-56f8-4120-a736-4f6e395c39f1 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Prefuse 73 aims to recapture some of the goodwill squandered since the next-Shadow heights of his 2003 LP One Word Extinguisher and its companion piece, Extinguished: Outtakes, and he manages to do so thanks to a bonus disc. | Prefuse 73 aims to recapture some of the goodwill squandered since the next-Shadow heights of his 2003 LP One Word Extinguisher and its companion piece, Extinguished: Outtakes, and he manages to do so thanks to a bonus disc. | Prefuse 73: Preparations / Interregnums | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11622-preparationsinterregnums/ | Preparations / Interregnums | Guillermo Scott Herren's many aliases-- Prefuse 73, Savath & Savalas, Delarosa and Asora, Piano Overlord to name a few-- make it easier for him to organize wav files on his laptop but, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the self-imposed categorisations could be holding him back. Now, when he releases a Prefuse 73 record, it's supposed to sound like a Prefuse 73 record-- blips, bleeps, bap, mood, and a couple of friends offering rhymes and/or production flourishes. In a way, the multiple monikers make Herren a slave to expectation. Such is his plight, from the next-Shadow heights of 2003's One Word Extinguisher and Extinguished: Outtakes to the overcrowded mainstream-baiting blunder Surrounded by Silence to the automatically forgotten pseudo album Security Screenings, the producer has largely squandered his Extinguisher love with a series of missteps and diminished retreads. I was ready to deem the numbingly characteristic Preparations another so-so step in the same direction, but then I listened to the album's "bonus disc," Interregnums, which isn't a Prefuse album (or a Savath album or a Delarosa album...) and is all the better for it.
First thing: Interregnums (def: a gap in continuity) is a bonus in the sense that it's an unexpected benefit, but it is not a bonus in the sense that it's a shameless collection of unworthy ephemera used to sucker loyal fans. In fact, Interregnums is six minutes longer than Preparations. The disc finds Herren in full-on composer mode as its 15 lush suites do away with all the flashy cut-and-paste sampling theatrics, leaving us with a grandiose version the unavoidable melancholy that permeates most of his best material. It's Gil Evans' cool crossed with John Williams' sentimentality and the tortured soul of Endtroducing... and it's a welcome surprise.
Interregnums' swelling orchestrations were apparently borne out of the string-laden pieces originally prepared for Preparations. But while they're buried underneath the typical micro-programming and airy organs on that album, Interregnums fleshes them out into flowery instrumental ballads anachronistic in their sweet sadness. For all his break beat panache, Herren has always marked his Prefuse albums with considerable bleeding heartbreak (see: emo-glitchers like the unmistakably overcast "Storm Returns" off Extinguisher or Surrounded's stop-start hip-hop lament "Now You're Leaving").
On Interregnums, such wrenching sensations are exposed, embellished, and expanded upon. "The Last" throbs quietly like a leftover instrumental from Björk's insular masterpiece Vespertine. Meanwhile, "Let It Ring Ensembles" utilizes a saintly choir and emergency broadcast bleats to recall Sigur Rós trapped between earth-ending crescendos. Herren tracks his tears with lavish silent movie strings that all but write their own screenplay-- "Thorough Light" sweeps with star-gazed longing and the near-seven minute "Spacious and Dissonant Part 2" applies the same Prefuse-style ADD beat making technique to grand emotionalism, swinging from playful to eerie to depressive like so many French art films. With its overt melodrama, the disc can occasionally fall into soap opera-soundtrack territory but, more often than not, its luxurious textures aptly convey its desires.
Oh yeah, the actual new Prefuse 73 album called Preparations. Starting things off with a 31-second intro featuring diced vox and a queasy, uncertain atmosphere, Herren could be forcing a comparison to the similarly ignited Extinguisher. But instead of segueing into a blistering kiss-off like "The End of Biters - International", we get "Beaten Thursdays", a Prefuse-by-numbers groove that bumps along inoffensively before petering out. While there's nothing outright embarrassing on Preparations-- no mismatched collaborations or fast-forward-itching Beans guest shots-- there's little that holds up aside Herren's most accomplished work. Gone is the humor and anger that sometimes livened the Extinguished discs, replaced with a relentless mid-tempo ambivalence. "I Knew You Were Gonna Go" hints at something deeper than a shoulder shrug with its see-saw lilt and closing vocal sample of a bygone version of Jimmy Webb's "Do What You Gotta Do", and "Smoking Red" takes decent advantage of the talents of indie rock's most furious drummer, Battles' John Stanier, but they're exceptions. Even at 46 minutes, Preparations is wearying; it's the same Prefuse tricks once more, with less feeling.
If Herren had integrated the Prefuse qua Prefuse Preparations with the riskier, more rewarding Interregnums, he would've ended up with a double-album hodge-podge not unlike label mate Aphex Twin's fascinatingly bipolar Drukqs. As is, though, Interregnums will be considered the lesser disc due to its unfortunate "bonus" status, which is a shame because it trumps its predictable sister CD in almost every way imaginable. In a Pitchfork news interview from earlier this year, Herren hypothesized about his upcoming release: "I feel like half the kids that buy it are just going to throw [Interregnums] away and keep [Preparations]." He should be emboldened to know it might just end up the other way around. | 2007-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | October 23, 2007 | 5.3 | 35a7fcf8-348d-4fae-abfe-a8adcbe41dfd | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The soundtrack for William Friedkin's controversial and problematic 1980 thriller features a stunning array of hardcore punk and hard funk, including rare songs by the Germs. | The soundtrack for William Friedkin's controversial and problematic 1980 thriller features a stunning array of hardcore punk and hard funk, including rare songs by the Germs. | Various Artists: Cruising OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-cruising-ost/ | Cruising OST | The music on the Cruising soundtrack would not have been found on the jukeboxes at the Mineshaft, the Anvil, Ramrod, or any of the other New York leather bars where much of William Friedkin’s 1980 thriller is set. In the liner notes for this elaborate vinyl reissue by Waxwork Records, the director notes that most nights these bars would have reverberated with pop and disco: “The music in the Mineshaft was the same in all the dance clubs, gay and straight: Disco—Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, the Delfonics, the Village People, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Jacksons, the Pointer Sisters. That is what was playing in the club scenes when we started filming in the summer of 1979 but I didn’t think it fit the mood of the film so I decided to replace it.”
What he used instead was tough, taut hardcore punk and hard funk by acts like Willy Deville, the Cripples, Mutiny, and the Germs. Friedkin’s decision makes a certain kind of narrative sense, as Cruising follows a straight cop (played with deer-in-headlights intensity by Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York’s post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS gay community. For the kind of story that involves catching a killer—or possibly multiple killers—KC and the Sunshine Band might have sounded too welcoming. But DeVille’s sinewy blues-rock grooves and the Germs’ smeary attack helped establish the fetid atmosphere of dread and danger the film was gunning for.
And that’s what made the film so controversial even before its release. Gay rights activists objected to its depiction of the leather-bar scene as violent and depraved, and Village Voice writer Arthur Bell (who penned a series of articles that partly inspired the script) called it “the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen.” Protestors sabotaged shots, blowing whistles during filming and unplugging lighting cables. Cruising was a flop upon release, but it’s one of those films that has enjoyed a long and curious afterlife, constantly reconsidered and reinterpreted, as hailed today as it is reviled for its depiction of this particular subculture.
The Cruising soundtrack lives just outside that ongoing debate, partly because the music is so completely incongruous with the film’s milieu and partly because on its own, it is a pretty kickass punk album. Friedkin worked with producer Jack Nitzsche to corral a bicoastal roster of acts, only a few of which survived beyond this project. Together, they create a mood of constant antagonism: “In the heat of the moment, don’t you forget all the things we haven’t done yet,” DeVille sings on opener “Heat of the Moment.” It’s hard to tell if he’s talking about fucking or fighting, such is the relentlessness of the band’s groove. On the Cripples’ “Loneliness,” frontman and disabled rights activist Shawn Casey O’Brien, who had cerebral palsy and took the stage on crutches, barks and brays like he’s trying to parody blues-rock machismo, and Madelynn Von Ritz makes the most of her androgynous snarl on the swaggering glam-swamp stomp “When I Close My Eyes I See Blood.”
“Lump” is the most obviously danceable track here, but it’s not as light as the pop and disco on the Mineshaft jukebox. A bouncy funk number by Mutiny, a short-lived group headed by former Parliament-Funkadelic drummer Jerome Brailey, the song has a claustrophobic, even frantic edge. This expanded version of Cruising shows not only how versatile Mutiny could be, but how well punk and funk and even avant-garde jazz meshed. Nitzsche’s collaborations with Mutiny bassist Barre Phillips and guitarist Ralph Towner were omitted from the original soundtrack release, but “A-I-A” sounds like the ghost of New York’s long-gone bohemias, Phillips’ bassline veering from springy to hypnotic to menacing to mournful. It’s a full movie in just under ten minutes.
And then there are the Germs. What has made the soundtrack such a fascination for punk fans is the legendary but little-heard cache of songs the band recorded with Nitzsche just after the release of their debut, GI. The sessions were legendarily fraught, with frontman Darby Crash struggling to write new songs; some have argued that the pressure drove him deeper into the drugs that would later kill him. Similarly, the band found the producer difficult to work with and dismissive of punk in general, so they were never quite happy with the results. Those songs appeared in very rough form on the 1993 anthology MIA, but this is the first time they’ve been properly mastered for a vinyl release. Any hesitation on the part of Crash or the other Germs is not evident in songs like “My Tunnel” and “Going Down,” which sustain the attack the band launched on GI. Best of all is the caustically catchy “Not Alright,” which reveals the wit and imagination in their music: Crash stretches out the melody uncomfortably, repeating phrases desperately, while Pat Smear plays his guitar like he’s shoveling dirt into a shallow grave.
If those five songs—all sequenced together on one of six sides—sound like the Germs’ mythic second album, then this whole reissue plays like an alternate history of punk rock, one where the Canadian proto-queercore band Rough Trade exerts immense influence and the Cripples’ O’Brien takes his place as the scene’s poet laureate. In the film the leather-bar scene doesn’t gain much from punk, but on the soundtrack punk gains a lot from its proximity to leather: Especially after the heteronormalizing influence of MTV-era pop-punk in the ‘90s and well into the 2000s, it’s good to be reminded that it was once a safe haven for the misfits and outcasts who flocked to big cities seeking like-minded communities and creating their own scenes. Cruising gives a megaphone to artists whose voices were often squelched in mainstream rock and certainly in mainstream filmmaking. | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Waxwork | March 30, 2019 | 8.6 | 35a98848-1cfc-4b1c-82cb-c7ac2350c120 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Despite the well-fed egos, Jonathan Pierce and co.'s new album-- one that features ugly, petty, real emotion and multiple references to death or dying-- is a smaller, more intimate record than last year's self-titled predecessor. | Despite the well-fed egos, Jonathan Pierce and co.'s new album-- one that features ugly, petty, real emotion and multiple references to death or dying-- is a smaller, more intimate record than last year's self-titled predecessor. | The Drums: Portamento | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15807-portamento/ | Portamento | Like any good TNT show, the Drums know drama. At the tail end of 2010, guitarist Adam Kessler left the band under circumstances that were clearly less than amicable; the band's website stated that the remaining members were "devastated" and were "keeping to themselves and friends at this time." Two weeks later, lead singer Jonathan Pierce told NME that the band had composed "the best song we've ever written" the day after Kessler's departure. It was only a few months' time before Pierce was referring to Kessler's departure as a "blessing in disguise" in UK newspaper The Independent: "We don't know what he's doing or anything. I'm not interested in knowing what he's up to."
In the leadup to the release of the Drums' second album, Portamento, Pierce has sounded dismissive of the band's general career trajectory, claiming that they don't "have a very long shelf life as a band" and that they came close to breaking up this past June following "a lot of shouting matches." Accordingly, that grim outlook is reflected in their most recent work. Throughout Portamento's 12 songs, there are 11 references to death or dying, the most notable arriving on "Days" when Pierce testifies to his past devotion to a broken relationship by casually tossing out the revelation that he "killed myself." Obsessing over mortality is nothing new in indie pop, let alone within the Drums' catalog thus far. Remember, this is a band whose first album kicked off with a song called "Best Friend" that started like this: "You were my best friend/ And then you died."
Clearly, Pierce's ego has been well-fed-- his recent quote-worthy nature in the press reflects that of the leader of a prototypical British buzz band (fittingly, despite Brooklyn ties, the UK has welcomed the band with open arms, more so than the States). Which is why it's surprising that Portamento sounds and feels like a smaller, more intimate album than last year's self-titled predecessor. After all, it's not like they did anything drastically different this time around-- like The Drums, Portamento was largely recorded in a band member's apartment (Pierce's), as well as a few studios in NYC and upstate Woodstock. (For those who bemoaned the production value of the first LP, be warned: Portamento very much sounds like it was recorded in someone's apartment.)
The lack of "bigness" on Portamento most likely owes to the fact that the Drums aren't on a major label anymore (in the U.S., anyway). Here in the States, they've gone to Frenchkiss, a more suitable home considering its strong roster of bands-that-sound-like-a-lot-of-bands. In case you haven't noticed by now, the Drums do sound like a lot of bands, taking in everything from the Beach Boys' controlled falsettos to the loving cloyingness of late Swedish indie-pop greats the Honeydrips. As it turns out, the new surroundings are more beneficial for them: There's not as much pressure to be extroverted for the sake of courting a larger audience. This means that there's no "Me and the Moon" or "Forever and Ever Amen"-- two big, great songs that would sound too anthemic and overblown if they were on this record. In the place of anthems, though, are carefully constructed gems making up a sequencing run so solid it takes a few listens to pick out the exact drop-off point ("In the Cold", in case you were wondering). From the saxes and Theremin-like squeal in "What You Were" to the heart-tugging kickoff of "Hard to Love", it's the small, detailed moments that take you by surprise here-- kind of like life, really.
And, despite all the drama and tortured sentiments, that's what the Drums are all about: real life, and the pains and pleasures (mostly pains) that come along with loving while you still have fresh breath in your lungs. Yes, Pierce talks about selling a gun in "Money", but the song is basically about how he doesn't have enough money to buy a lover a nice present. Being broke (and feeling inadequate because of that) is something we can all relate to, no matter how embarrassing it might be for a bunch of major-label refugees to admit. It's time to stop begrudging these guys for being stylish and faddish, because real emotions like the ones they work in are ugly and petty and hard to bear in public. You can get as many haircuts and buy as many trendy outfits as you want, but you're not going to change the fact that it'll never be cool to feel upset, angry, and alone. | 2011-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Frenchkiss / Moshi Moshi | September 16, 2011 | 7.4 | 35a9fad7-2562-4223-b8f9-abcb7848ced3 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Vancouver-based producer/vocalist is a merciless industrial-rap experimentalist obsessed with the point where sex and death intertwine. | The Vancouver-based producer/vocalist is a merciless industrial-rap experimentalist obsessed with the point where sex and death intertwine. | Debby Friday: Death Drive EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/debby-friday-death-drive-ep/ | Death Drive EP | In his seminal 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud proposed the concepts of the sex drive and the death drive. Building off the Russian psychoanalyst Sabrina Spielrein’s concept of the “death instinct,” Freud asserted that alongside our need for survival and sexual reproduction, humans also harbor an innate desire to find the shortest path to decomposition and destruction. Practically, it was an attempt to explain why humans hold aggressive tendencies towards themselves and others, sometimes to the point that they are compelled to kill.
These twin forces consume the music of Debby Friday, a Vancouver-based producer/vocalist who continues in Deathbomb Arc’s tradition of merciless industrial-rap experimentalists like Death Grips, clipping., and JPEGMAFIA. The source of this outward aggression, as she’s suggested in interviews, stems from the oppression and trauma she endures as a queer black woman and Nigerian-Canadian immigrant. Similar to the work of political activist Moor Mother or the diasporic electronic collective NON, she wields the sound of violence as a tool for resistance and empowerment, conveying it in her ferocious “bitchpunk” tracks through screeching demands for sexual satisfaction. On her new terrifyingly seductive Death Drive EP, Friday continues to entangle polar Freudian concepts, underscoring the similarities between brutality and desire, love and carnality.
Friday’s ideas comes through clearest on “Fatal,” an industrial-pop banger about a partner so good in bed they might be deadly. The song grinds along with the same depraved energy as Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer:” “I am your poison and remedy/Why don’t get you come and get some,” Friday sings, positioning herself as both her lover’s source of life and cause of death. It also works the other way around; on “Tear the Veil,” she sings: “I love everything that seeks to destroy me.”
Death Drive also captures the grotesqueness of human bodies, both alive and dead. The beat of “Good and Evil” is built off the sound of a man panting for breath, highlighting the animalistic noises humans make at the height of desire or terror. Meanwhile, “Neight Fictive,” an eerie blues song where Friday sings of killing her own infant, features an instrumental made up of horrifying sounds like the squelch of wet meat, buzzing flies, and the clanking of chains. They serve to illustrate the truly terrifying nature of the narrative, which Friday outlines with a disturbingly sweet coo. As this homicidal mother figure, she continues to present femininity through the most cutthroat and ruthless lens possible. After all, it was a woman, not a man, who thought of the “death instinct” in the first place. | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deathbomb Arc | August 22, 2019 | 7.2 | 35b08508-d479-4d18-abed-b5532c17b2f9 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
On her new album, the Guatemalan cellist trades her lush, verdant style for moments of austere beauty. She feels more intuitive and confident than ever. | On her new album, the Guatemalan cellist trades her lush, verdant style for moments of austere beauty. She feels more intuitive and confident than ever. | Mabe Fratti: Se Ve Desde Aquí | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mabe-fratti-se-ve-desde-aqui/ | Se Ve Desde Aquí | Mabe Fratti’s music tends to pull in opposite directions, torn between friction and release. On 2019’s Pies sobre la tierra and 2021’s Será que ahora podremos entendernos, the Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist, composer, and singer spun vast, verdant worlds out of tangled loops and layers. Those albums were notable for their fullness: lilting cello lines and Fratti’s high, plaintive voice, often multi-tracked or run through Auto-Tune, entwined above dense thickets of synthesizer and reverb. Her songs could be chaotic—tendrils of noise, like the buzz of a charred amplifier, might run beneath even the most angelic refrain—but their chief characteristic was an overwhelming sense of yearning, expressed in searching vocal melodies. If those first two albums were lush, leafy gardens, the new one, Se Ve Desde Aquí, is a desert. Fratti’s music has always been beautiful, but this is a different, more daring kind of beauty: stark and severe, capturing the cracked earth below and the radiant sweep of the night sky above.
The shift is immediately apparent on “Con Esfuerzo,” the instrumental sketch that opens the album. Dissonant bows flash out above churning synths, a halting drumbeat, and a burst of dubbed-out acoustic guitar. There’s a sense of something building: spirits being summoned, or a storm coming on. In the past, much of Fratti’s best work manifested when she reached into the zone where the elements bled together, as if she were feeling her way toward clarity; here, the mystery deepens as she pares back.
The following track, “Desde el cielo,” is the album’s first proper song, yet it’s just as skeletal. She plucks a bassline on her cello; the synthesizer sounds like a howling wind. “Fuera, fuera,” she sings (“Out, out”), her voice assured despite its wavering tone. Underneath her, an atonal swirl of sax, drums, and guitar suggests a fusion of free jazz and ambient, charged with the energy of spontaneous creation. Across the album, she’s assisted by a handful of wildly talented collaborators, including multi-instrumentalist Héctor Tosta, electronic musician Carla Boregas, violinist Alina Maldonado, drummer Gibrán Andrade, and saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore, whose spectral, silvery glint illuminates several of the record’s most thrilling moments. However it may have been recorded, it feels like a group of players improvising together in real time. Yet despite the complexity of the tumbling movements on “Desde el cielo,” emptiness yawns between each instrument. It’s less a linear piece of music than a space to enter and inhabit—a dwelling, perhaps a refuge.
Stripped of electronic processing, Fratti’s voice is more forceful than on previous albums; the air of refinement that sometimes clung to her singing has burned off. Her tone is still soft and breathy, and in places even thin, imbued with a quick, nervous vibrato, but she makes bolder leaps, happy to lean into imperfection. There’s a newfound confidence to her songwriting, too. She frequently recalls both Arthur Russell and Kate Bush, not only in her melodic choices, but also in her ability to blend the intuitive with the unknown, to make the alien seem second nature.
Fratti’s lyrics favor simple phrases and unadorned metaphors that blur the lines between inanimate objects and living things. “Cada músculo tiene una voz,” she intones (“Every muscle has a voice”). “Cae el sudor a la tierra/Extiende sus alas” (“Sweat falls to the ground/Extends its wings”). She sings of walls falling, echoes with no source, unfamiliar voices that appear to be speaking in her stead; many of her most memorable lines take the form of questions. “Joven el día pide/¿Será la sed de nuevo?” (“The young day asks/Is it the thirst again?”) “¿Qué es lo que pide mi cuerpo?” (“What is it my body wants?”)
The answer to that question is “stop pushing” (“deja de empujar”). Her voice cuts like a narrow beam through murky discord, and it’s clear from the shift in tone exactly what she means by this mantra: Give in, go gently, and find solace in being swept up by a greater force. These are songs about doubt and self-knowledge, and perhaps also about the creative process. In “Algo grandioso,” the album’s sweetest and most consonant track, she sings of embracing something long-awaited, and as her voice slips into a wordless melody, simple and unburdened, it transmits a mixture of exhaustion and joy—the relief, perhaps, that follows the completion of a long and arduous journey.
Fratti says that here, for the first time, she avoided layering multiple instances of individual instruments, but she breaks that self-imposed rule on “Siempre tocas algo,” the final song. The introduction is even more spartan than what has preceded it; through a haze of synthesizers, her cello creaks like a rusty gate. She describes estrangement and presence in typically plainspoken terms: “¿Qué tan cerca puedo estar?/¿Qué es lo que nos separa?” (“How close can I be?/What is it that separates us?”) Then, without warning, her voice erupts into dazzling multi-part harmony, as though all the inchoate longing of her previous albums had been concentrated into a single swollen deluge. Austere yet never wanting, Se Ve Desde Aquí is an album that empties you and fills you up. There’s a desolation at its core, an intimate knowledge of lack, but also a fervent belief in redemption—even if it lasts no longer than a momentary explosion of color, like parched earth blooming after a long-awaited rain. | 2022-10-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unheard of Hope | October 25, 2022 | 8.3 | 35b177e6-5f5d-4713-8f28-db8445da0983 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his debut album, the Milwaukee rapper Lorde Fredd33 emerges fully-formed. He is charismatic and nuanced, painting a complex, deeply-personal portrait of black life in America’s rust belt. | On his debut album, the Milwaukee rapper Lorde Fredd33 emerges fully-formed. He is charismatic and nuanced, painting a complex, deeply-personal portrait of black life in America’s rust belt. | Lorde Fredd33: NORF: The Legend of Hotboy Ronald | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorde-fredd33-norf-the-legend-of-hotboy-ronald/ | NORF: The Legend of Hotboy Ronald | The photograph on the cover here is grim. It features a man sitting on the roof of a car, reading Alchemy, the Ancient Science, a 1970s British tome cataloging medieval attempts to transform everyday materials into gold. A young child is perched on the reader’s lap, staring absently towards the ground. Underneath this pair, a masked figure points a rifle out of the window. Lorde Fredd33’s worldview isn’t easy to neatly summarize but this image manages to capture many of his preoccupations. On NORF, he looks out wearily over a broken city, wrestles with fatherhood, unpacks his own childhood and works furiously to spin his struggles into flaxen gold. He is, at once, all three of the figures in the photograph.
Fredd33 has been kicking around the Milwaukee rap scene for a few years; since 2015, he has more or less worked exclusively with Q the Sun, a local producer who’s landed beats for rap blog mainstays like milo and Webster X. Q the Sun’s production, which has one foot in the jazzy, sample-based sound of rap’s past and one in the electronic sounds of today, is compelling if unobtrusive, the perfect springboard for a rapper as charismatic as Fredd33. On NORF, Fredd33 demonstrates an acrobatic command of his craft, switching up flows, mimicking other rappers’ cadences, and contorting his voice into a variety of shapes. Using this vivid palette of colors, he paints a portrait of an artist and the city that shaped him. Kendrick Lamar is an obvious touchstone (particularly, Good Kid, m.A.A.d City), though Fredd33 is far more insular: he is usually the sole subject in his songs.
Milwaukee’s North Side, where Fredd33 was raised, is home to the vast majority of the city’s black residents. In the summer of 2016, the North Side erupted in protest after the killing of a black man by police officers, though the community’s frustration had deeper roots. Consider the statistics: Wisconsin has both the highest black unemployment rate and the highest rate of incarceration for black men, while Milwaukee is the country’s most segregated city. On NORF, Fredd33 shines a light on this divide, drawing correlations between the numbers in the headlines and life at street-level. “50 percent unemployment, that’s just for black men?/No wonder we trapping, wasn’t we born trapped, then?,” he asks on “Reflections.” But later in the song, he admits that some progress has been made, while punching up at a beleaguered icon in the process: “We the ‘New Slaves’? That’s a damn lie/Just rocking Yeezys instead of shackles, damn right.”
Throughout NORF, these same tensions play out on a smaller, more personal scale as well. Fredd33 repeatedly complains about having to pay child support but when we hear a recording of him speaking with his son at the tail end of “Free (Type Shit),” the rapper sounds warm and attentive. “I can’t wait to see you tomorrow, you little peanut head,” he says before signing off. On the following song, he lists, “Have my son draped in gold,” as one of his “Goals.” These are complex—and at times ugly—feelings and Fredd33 gives them voice without judgement. The difficult task of reconciling the rapper’s love for his child with his resentment over the cost of raising him is left to sit with the listener.
Ultimately, Lorde Fredd33 offers up few conclusions on NORF; his Milwaukee is a place of ambiguity, not of moral absolutes. Most complicated of all is our narrator: an artist and father but also, the guy who “might aim at your head” or the miscreant on “9th North sipping lean.” On the album’s final song, “Reflections,” Fredd33 traces his inner conflict back to its origins. “I grew up playing violins, around sirens and violence,” he sighs, reminding us that he is a product of his environment, for better or worse. NORF artfully illustrates the ways that structural racism shapes people, families, and communities. In so doing, Lorde Fredd33 pulls off a remarkable feat of alchemy, transforming pain, struggle, frustration, and love into his debut album. | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | NewAgeNarcissism | May 15, 2018 | 7.5 | 35b1d70a-ae5b-405c-a44e-f3e60e3f9e0a | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
With biting humor and striking intimacy, the Belgian pop singer’s adventurous third album examines how we humans care for one another—or don’t. | With biting humor and striking intimacy, the Belgian pop singer’s adventurous third album examines how we humans care for one another—or don’t. | Stromae: Multitude | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stromae-multitude/ | Multitude | In the middle of a French TV news interview in January, TF1 journalist Anne-Claire Coudray asked Stromae whether music had helped him to transcend the solitude he sang about so frequently. A soft piano backing track started, and the Belgian pop star born Paul Van Haver swallowed and began to sing his new single, “L’enfer” (“Hell”), by way of response. You expected the camera to pan back, for Stromae to rise from his seat and join his usual extravagantly coiffed dancers on the studio stage, but no: He sat still and sang his mournful song about suicidal ideation while staring down the camera lens, visibly flinching at the massive ripping synths and choral chants.
Rascally pop stars have always enjoyed making mischief on the news—it’s a basic way of establishing the distance between you and the straight mainstream, as well as efficiently converting offense to publicity. But that wasn’t what Stromae seemed to be doing (though in Europe there was no shortage of the latter). In some ways, televised news was an oddly perfect stage for an artist who frequently sets lyrics about stark social issues—domestic abuse, economic precarity, cancer, colonialism—to euphoric, swarming dance-pop. His lyrics also often inhabit the headspace of shitty men, trying on their self-justification for size and unraveling it with glee and a journalistic eye for hypocrisy and weak logic. Coupled with his old-fashioned commitment to high-concept hijinks, Stromae is a delightfully improbable and inscrutable pop star. His ambition and ability to execute it appear undimmed by the nine years since he released his last album—a gap partially enforced by a debilitating physical reaction to anti-malarial medication and its psychological aftermath.
It’s telling that Stromae chose to perform “L’enfer” in this context when the lead single from his comeback album has a far newsier bent: Mixing elegant cavaquinho guitar with a synth line that squawks like pink elephants on parade, “Santé” (“Cheers”) pays tribute to essential workers in the pandemic—though in true Stromae style, it equally simmers with disgust at the hypocrites who toast their heroism while exploiting their humanity. This choice puts him in the crosshairs of his own unsparing lens on Multitude, his third and most personal album. And, yes, “most personal album” is a cliché, but if you come across any other new releases in which the author forecasts the quality of their day based on the quality of their morning shit (in translation: “I’ll be scrubbing endlessly” versus “no wiping needed”), please get in touch at the usual address.
That isn’t the only time Multitude takes an entertainingly scatalogical approach to intimacy. “C’est que du bonheur” (“Nothing But Joy”) characterizes Stromae’s affection for his young son—a love that he sings saved his life—in terms of diapers changed and vomit mopped, and predicts the inevitable moment when his grown-up kid will have his own kids and have to clean up granny and grandpa’s messes. Taking a sideways look at sincerity—or shittiness—risks collapsing the whole endeavor under the weight of irony, but Stromae’s slinky arrangements and actorly charisma are rich with charm. He sings “C’est que du bonheur!” with deranged euphoria, as if expiring from sleepless nights mid-sentence. The four-bar charango refrain is ticklish and light, although the tempo accelerates and stabilizes unpredictably—such are the vicissitudes of parental joy.
Stromae’s pugnacious 2013 hit “Papaoutai” explored the meaning of father figures (his Rwandan Tutsi father was killed in the country’s 1994 genocide) and familial inheritance. He deepens that interrogation on Multitude, reflecting his shoestring childhood travels with his mother across South America and Africa in rich instrumentation (the stringed Andean charango, Portuguese cavaquinho, and Chinese erhu; the Middle Eastern ney flute and woodwind zurna) and song structures that embrace the steady rhythms of folk musics rather than the battering Europop of his first two albums. At the same time, he’s said that using the two-stringed erhu was equally inspired by the music of Kung Fu Panda—a knowingly inauthentic reference that complicates those ideas. In the post-genre era, many artists have pulled global influences into their music (whether out of sincere admiration or a desire to game foreign markets) and many artists have ended up with indistinct soup at the end of it. Stromae delicately folds these sounds into the melodic percolations that glitter beneath each song and also plays on their individual characters: The erhu that weeps through the knocking chimes of “La solassitude” is as off-kilter as the titular portmanteau (Stromae translates it as “Loneweariness”) and brings real pathos to what might otherwise be a risible tale of a guy who goes through the motions in relationships without ever connecting.
That’s one of Stromae’s greatest skills as a songwriter, this ability to refract the wholeness of a person’s humanity through several, sometimes conflicting, perspectives. On Multitude, his primary theme is care—and how humans use and abuse one another as they seek comfort and turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths if it means getting what we want. He embodies these fables through a litany of rogues, often told with piercing humor: The cheating prick of “Mon amour” tries to justify his infidelities because deep down, “tu les aimes bien les connards” (“you’ve got a thing for bastards”), but he’s left stunned and insecure by rejection—wondering how big his rival’s dick is, and where his ex put his clean underpants. On “Santé,” those quickest to toast pandemic heroes are the ones throwing fits at service workers who don’t meet their impossible expectations. “Fils de joie” (“Son of a Hero”) tells three grimy stories of proprietorial relationships to a sex worker, as told by a client, a pimp, and a police officer, each spliced with affecting, proud cries of defense from her son. Stromae is not exempt, either: On “Déclaration,” he empathizes with his wife (designer Coralie Barbier) for having to bear kids and the mental load—he even subverts Simone de Beauvoir to sing “on naît pas misogyne, on le devient” (“one isn’t born misogynistic but can grow up to become so”)—but admits change might take time since the world benefits so richly from women’s labor. As he skewers societal complacency, he also mourns it with his regretful falsetto, the piercing zurna filigree, and a synth as slippery and pretty as the patterns that form on the surface of oil.
Evidently, this is quite subtle stuff (especially for non-French speakers) and fans of “Papaoutai” and Stromae’s 2010 breakthrough “Alors on danse” (“Now We Dance”) may miss his brazen talent for scaffolding EDM’s volcanic textures to sharp songwriting. But he deploys his trademark punchiness sharply here. There’s that cataclysmic peak in “L’enfer,” the daunting welcome committee at the gates of hell itself; the thrilling “Fils de joie” puckers a brisk string quartet (sampled from the Bridgerton soundtrack) with popped-bubble effects that offer a tart riposte to such courtly airs and graces. And opener “Invaincu” (“Undefeated”) is a fighter’s battle cry, a chest-puffed Stromae rapping vigorously about beating a disease that claimed several relatives, bolstered by gruff backing vocals and an exultant Bulgarian children’s choir. His sense of scale has become more nuanced and idiosyncratic, and more captivating for it.
More than on his 2010 debut Cheese or 2013’s Racine carrée, Stromae turns his distaste for hypocrisy and weak-mindedness on himself. It’s there in his unfiltered take on love for his kid, but also in his stark confrontations with his own pain. “L’enfer” is a devastating song about teetering on a mental-health precipice, yet he still negotiates his guilt for feeling that way and how he stubbornly resists consolation. Multitude ends with a two-parter, “Mauvaise journée” (“Bad Day”) and “Bonne journée” (“Good Day”), which contrast the outcomes of justifying one’s reality with glass-half-empty and glass-half-full attitudes to life (with the accompanying poop-based taxonomies). The former is elegant and laden with appealingly petulant ennui; the latter comes alive with deep bass, adrenaline-spiking trap percussion, and a melodically complex vocal part in which Stromae beseeches anyone listening to recognize the pitfalls of this sort of absolutist thinking. “Comme un idiot, fais les pas de la danse de la joie” (“Learn the steps and move like a fool to the dance of happiness”), he sings, chin up. Looking away—or seeing only what we want to see—is a surefire way to get left behind. | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mosaert / Darkroom / Interscope | March 9, 2022 | 8 | 35b4aa3f-29e3-47ff-a4f5-8441c615e298 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
New reissues of the Fall’s first two albums find the band hungry, angry, and taking switchblades to a grim future. | New reissues of the Fall’s first two albums find the band hungry, angry, and taking switchblades to a grim future. | The Fall: Live at the Witch Trials/Dragnet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22033-live-at-the-witch-trialsdragnet/ | Live at the Witch Trials/Dragnet | When the Fall’s “Industrial Estate” plays during the closing credits of High-Rise–Ben Wheatley’s new big-screen adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s classic novel–it’s more than a case of similar subject matter. True, the film is about urban malaise, and so is the song. But Ballard’s vision of a tower block turned hermetic, ingrown, incestuous, and cannibalistic unfolds with a clinical exactitude. On the other hand, “Industrial Estate” is a spew of dissonant chaos, fugue-state chants, and malfunctioning carnival organs that inhabits the liminal space between punk and post-punk–just like the rest of album it appears on, the Fall’s 1979 debut Live at the Witch Trials. At the time, the first wave of post-punks were taking Johnny Rotten’s “no future” rant and parsing it like surgeons, laying it bare and reducing it to its components like Ballard. The Fall were no exception but, where many of their contemporaries used anesthetic and scalpels, they packed switchblades.
Witch Trials came out in the spring of 1979, Dragnet in the autumn of 1979. Accordingly, these albums (newly reissued) are very much spring and autumn records, inasmuch as such acutely urban records can have ties to nature. The Fall came together in Manchester in 1976, the year punk conflagrated across England. Its working-class founder Mark E. Smith and his crew immediately hopscotched over punk, delivering an EP in 1978 (Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!) that tapped into everything from the Seeds’ keyboard-slathered garage rock to Can’s elemental clatter.
Witch Trials was both a step ahead and a step back with true punk bangers like “Futures and Pasts,” two-and-a-half minutes of eye-gouging and haranguing that unravels in hyperventilating gasps. That deconstruction quickly morphs from cheeky to sinister. “Rebellious Jukebox”—one of the first self-aware Fall anthems—churns and stutters, thrown into each successive moment by a serpentine bassline that coils like inside-out dub. Smith is all sneers and snarls, delirious as he struggles against and succumbs to rock’n’roll entropy. “We are The Fall/Northern white crap that talks back,” he taunts, chewing the microphone on “Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow.” Soon after, he takes a leap into the cosmic void: “We are frigid stars.” By the time the eight-minute closer “Music Scene” crawls its way into oblivion—en route, beating Public Image Ltd’s similarly distended “Theme” and “Fodderstompf” to the punch by months—the Fall had already established themselves as something far more wobbly and toxic than the emerging post-punk mass.
You can pogo to Witch Trials; you can’t to Dragnet. Where Witch Trials is wiry, Dragnet is weighty. The eight months separating the release of the two albums saw a huge lineup change, setting the pattern of perpetual upheaval that would become the Fall’s constant. Most notably, guitarist Martin Bramah left, and his empty space was filled by existing bassist Marc Riley and new recruit Craig Scanlon. On Dragnet, Riley and Scanlon echo each other just out of sync, rezoning the rhythmic domain of the songs. “Before the Moon Falls”—an eerie track that hints at such contemporaries as Pere Ubu and Swell Maps—jangles with urgency and decay. “I must create a new scheme,” Smith vows, a dirtbag urchin with a brain too big for his skull.
Dragnet can be overwhelmingly dense, folding in viola-like guitar like John Cale’s queasiest recursion (“Muzorewi’s Daughter”) and then Krautrock-leaning funk spiked with garbled demands and harsh glossolalia (“Put Away”). But the heavy hand lightens by “Choc-Stock,” a singsong slice of feral nonsense akin to Syd Barrett with a head cold and a hangover. There’s an answer to Witch Trials’ “Music Scene” in the form of “Spectre vs. Rector,” but it’s nothing like its predecessor; its sludge and subliminal menace practically invented post-rock as an afterthought. The track is visceral, reeking of spilled pints and machine oil, evoking the industrial scum-scape that incubated it.
In a 2011 interview, Smith said that Ballard’s 1962 post-apocalyptic novel The Drowned World was the only book by the author that he liked. Even then, he referred to it only as “that one where the world’s underwater.” Erudition in the formal sense is never what Smith or the Fall were about, and that’s made plain on Witch Trials and Dragnet, where Smith’s loathing of cultured, mannered learning oozes from every fracture. Instead, the albums are celebrations–if not exhortations–of working-class precocity and street-smart intellectualism cobbled together from thrift stores bookshelves and stolen snatches of philosophy. Hungry, angry, and ugly: that’s the post-punk proclamation of the Fall’s first two albums, a flag that would fully unfurl with the release of band’s masterpiece, Hex Enduction Hour, three years later. But for a fleeting few seasons in 1979, in the hands of Smith and his gang of urban mutant malingerers, all that mattered was feeding the future to itself and seeing what got puked back up. | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 17, 2016 | 8.7 | 35c1ef34-8fb8-4853-a32c-83cb7b0ab70b | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1997 album from a hype-man turned MTV star whose kinetic flows and boundless energy electrified the world of ’90s hip-hop. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1997 album from a hype-man turned MTV star whose kinetic flows and boundless energy electrified the world of ’90s hip-hop. | Busta Rhymes: When Disaster Strikes… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/busta-rhymes-when-disaster-strikes/ | When Disaster Strikes… | The track didn’t bang or knock. It tiptoed. It wiggled. When Busta Rhymes first heard it during the recording sessions of his second solo album, it was unlike anything he had ever rapped on: sinuous, low-key, minimal. A former rapper named Shamello found the sample—a high-calorie AM-radio confection called “Sweet Green Fields” by Seals & Crofts—and his partner, Buddah, sheared off the soft-rock blubber, leaving behind only a single twitching muscle.
Busta must have glimpsed his future in the song, even if he was unsure how to rap on the beat without trampling it. A “Busta Rhymes verse,” up until now, had meant limbs flailing, eyes bugged, spittle spraying. He’d become famous for roaring like a dungeon dragon, both with his teenaged group Leaders of the New School and on countless posse cuts and cameos, but this seemed to require a different approach. It was Puff Daddy who gave him the advice he needed: Calm down. Don’t scream. “You alienating the girls, playboy,” he advised. Nobody wants to dance up close to a dungeon dragon.
Consider that Busta Rhymes thinks of “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See”—one of the most antic hip-hop songs ever, a riot of cross-rhythm and color and jibbering end rhymes—as his “calm” song. He found its success disorienting: “Do I need to get caught up in doing all my records calm?” he asked genuinely on VH1’s Behind the Music. This should give you a keyhole glimpse into Busta’s struggles as he endeavored to have what no one in his position ever had: a career. As a protégé of Public Enemy, Busta watched Flava Flav, perhaps hip-hop’s greatest hype man, up close. He was all too aware of the fate of a hype man without a foil: By 1991, Flava had lost custody of his children and was sinking into addiction. By 2000, he would be scalping Yankees tickets for extra cash. The lesson wouldn’t have been lost on Busta; The guy who riles up the crowd gets left out in the cold.
To hear Busta tell it, he never wanted to be on his own. For years he’d been happy trading lines and high-kicking with his friends Charlie Brown and Dinco D, the other members of Leaders of the New School. Busta met Brown and Dinco in high school shortly after his family relocated from Brooklyn to Long Island, and together with Busta’s cousin Milo as DJ, they started playing local parties and skulking around 510 South Franklin Street, the headquarters of Public Enemy, hoping to get noticed. Finally, Chuck D took them under his wing and began to school them, drill-sergeant style—he used to make them run while rapping, just to test their endurance and commitment.
Busta had already given everything he had to the group, dropping out of school at 17 to record their first album. His father, an electrician, disapproved of his son jumping around and yelling for a living, but Busta was all-in. When his high-school girlfriend got pregnant, the band kicked into high gear, running from one sweat-soaked show to the next all over the five boroughs, sometimes racking up two or three a night. Success was the only option, but Busta had his brothers. “Suffering with a team, y’all can still help be each other’s support system,” he mused once. “Suffering on your own…that’s a whole ’nother ball game.”
But Busta’s charisma had other plans for him. He had a body that moved as if jerked by wires, a megawatt smile that cameras drank up. He was one of six flailing rappers onstage on the Arsenio Hall Show when A Tribe Called Quest performed their hit “Scenario,” and he didn’t even make his way onto the couch for the interview afterward. Nevertheless, he was the only guy anyone remembered, leaping around in stripes and turning his hat inside out as if to produce a rabbit.
Eventually, his charisma won: Demand for solo Busta became so constant and exhausting that it crowbarred the group apart. Charlie Brown, fed up with being an also-ran in the group he started, essentially quit Leaders of the New School on live television during a Yo! MTV Raps interview in 1993. Busta waited outside Brown’s apartment for hours, begging his bandmate to rejoin. Brown never came down to speak.
Thus, one of the longest and most prolific solo careers in rap began out of lonely necessity. As 1994 rolled around, Busta Rhymes had no group. Two years earlier, his baby had died after premature birth, and his second child, T’Ziah, was still in diapers. Busta was going to have to be a solo artist, and he would have to figure it out as he went. When he signed with Elektra Records and went into the studio, it took him a humiliating seven months for inspiration to kick in. When it finally arrived, it was from some of the earliest recorded rap music: The Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder,” with Big Bank Hank’s ebullient refrain of “Woo-Hah! Got you all in check.” The song’s preternatural innocence unlocked something, reminding him of the disco on the radio in his East Flatbush youth.
”Woo-Hah! Got You All in Check,” his debut solo single, went platinum in about a month, based largely on the Hype Williams-directed video. Without Williams, it seems fair to say, there might never have been a solo Busta Rhymes. But the reverse might also be true. Before Busta, Williams was a journeyman, bringing better-than-average filmmaking chops to unremarkable clips by acts like Positive K and Blackstreet. Busta seemed to shake something loose in him. Beginning with “Woo-Hah,” Hype Williams videos became, well, Hype Williams videos—color palette by Dr. Seuss, low angles and flying fists courtesy of Marvel comics. It’s one of his first uses of the fisheye lens, which soon became his signature. With one video, Hype Williams instantly became an auteur, and Busta was his first muse.
But “Woo-Hah” was not a career plan. “Woo-Hah” was the three-minute exhilarating yawp of a class clown who has just locked the principal in the janitor’s closet. It was like Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” or Flava Flav’s “911 Is a Joke”—a wild card’s brief foray into the sun. What is the game plan, an exit strategy, for a guy like this?
”Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See” was the answer. Released in August 1997, the track hit No. 2 on the Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs and helped When Disaster Strikes… go platinum in about a month. In the video, also directed by Hype Williams, Busta sported red leopard print and accompanying face paint in front of a blood-red curtain. Dancers in full regalia seemed to wind themselves up and down to the time of the irregular beat. It was Busta’s tribute to Coming to America, which was playing on mute in the studio during mixing.
If he played the jester on “Woo-Hah,” on “Put Ya Hands” he was the ringleader. His flow, spry and slippery, sounded like someone chuckling to themselves. In “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See,” you can hear a dungeon dragon learning to purr.
Today, the rhythmic tattoo of “Put Ya Hands” is a piece of hip-hop history, as instantly recognizable as the “Shook Ones Pt. II” beat or the “Apache” break. Syleena Johnson sampled it in 2001, inviting Busta and the rappers comprising his Flipmode Squad for the remix. When JAY-Z and Beyoncé wanted to telegraph their status as Black royalty on 2019’s The Lion King: The Gift, there was only one song to reach for: “Mood 4 Eva” interpolates the sample and Jay and Bey pay homage to the video. In 2018, a young rapper named Snowprah broke out of New Haven, Connecticut with an exuberant street anthem called “Yank Riddim.” As she ran through the streets of her neighborhood, waving a Jamaican flag, the “Put Ya Hands” beat twitched in the background. Busta grew up in a household that revered reggae music; now he had put his name on a modern-day riddim.
The next big single from When Disaster Strikes… repeated the formula for “Put Ya Hands,” but went bigger. Rashad Smith, the same producer who flipped a disco-rap record for him on “Woo-Hah,” gave him “Dangerous,” a flip of an electro record. The accompanying video (Hype Williams again) parodied Lethal Weapon this time, another film that, like Coming to America, always seemed to be playing somewhere on television. For good measure, they threw in a brief scene of Busta dressed as Sho’Nuff from the kung fu blaxploitation flick The Last Dragon. For years, everyone was telling Busta Rhymes he was a superstar, and on MTV, he finally found his perfect medium.
The camera loved Busta Rhymes, and he loved it right back. He was made for another generation when technologies were more primitive so the personalities had to be bigger. Even his tip-toe flow has something emphatic about it, like a silent movie actor. Embracing his mascot status among MTV video programmers, Busta carved out his role within mainstream rap. He was the trickster, the pop of color, the light that threw the dark into relief. A hype man again, in other words, but this time for all of hip-hop.
Over the next four years, Williams and Busta would churn out several versions of this video. On “Gimme Some More,” he paid homage to Merrie Melodies cartoons over Psycho strings. On “Fire,” he got swept up by a CGI tornado. In Janet Jackson’s “What’s It Gonna Be,” he imitated the liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2 (the video’s price tag, reported around $2.5 million, made it one of the most expensive of all time.) None of them matched the visual wit of “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See,” but they helped turn Busta Rhymes into a universally beloved household name, a rapper with ironclad cred your mother might recognize.
If he was flashy on MTV, the Busta Rhymes of his studio albums has always been humbler. Who was Busta Rhymes without a camera, in the harsh light of 17 or 18 tracks? What else could a calmed-down dungeon dragon do? His first three albums tried to find the answer in apocalyptic imagery, at a time when major-label rap mostly concerned itself with celebrating and guarding material success. His debut, 1996’s The Coming, hinted at themes of rapture, and on the intro to When Disaster Strikes..., we are warned of a cataclysm that will scour the Earth. “Store your food!” a voice bellows. His next album, 1998’s Extinction Level Event, would take the apocalypse theme even further, with monologues about the slow death of the human race interspersed with his usual slate of party bangers.
It was an unusual fixation for a class clown, but Busta was raised in a Seventh-Day Adventist home, a sect of Christianity with a literal interpretation of the Second Coming. (He gave up the religion as a young man when he discovered the Five Percent Nation, but he never lost his fascination with end-of-days: Along with Method Man, Busta was one of the most enthusiastic believers in Y2K.) Perhaps because he was backed into his career out of desperation, there’s always been a ticking-time-bomb sense of paranoia and doom lurking in Busta’s party music. He rapped—and entertained—like he was certain the wheels were minutes from falling off. His intimation of apocalypse might have just been his own flop-sweat writ large. One question hovered over every album: “How long can I keep this up?”
No matter the skits, album covers, or packaging, Busta Rhymes songs remain primarily receptacles for Busta’s inexhaustible energy. He’s a hypertechnical MC, with a grab-bag of flows and cadences so bottomless that he seems to hear six potential songs in each beat. He played drums as a kid, and when he auditioned for Chuck D with Leaders of the New School, he played the kit while Charlie and Dinco D rhymed. “My flows got so much rhythm, substitute the drummer,” he spits on the first verse of “The Whole World Looking At Me,” and no rapper has ever rapped more like a percussionist. The freedom and joy of Busta’s rhyming came from a sense that he could pick up any part of the beat, any pattern, and run with it as far as he wanted to. In his mouth, words aren’t words—they’re snare heads.
The flip side of this is that when you examine his words on a page, you’re sometimes left with a transcribed drum solo. For every line that squiggles beautifully across your eardrum—“Ha-ha, laugh at ya, oh, me and my passengers/Flip-ass niggas over quick like frying pan spatulas,” from the title track—there is a clunker like, “While you coughing I be flossing like a fucking dolphin,” or a puff of hot air like, “Rhymin’ Rastas eating enough exotic pasta.”
The best songs on When Disaster Strikes... don’t try to burden Busta with irrelevancies like concepts, narratives, guest hooks, or context. “Rhymes Galore” gives him a rubbery sample and a canvas bright enough to suit him, and then clears the decks. Over a flip of Rufus Thomas’s “Do the Funky Penguin,” he pogos off every available space, saying—what? Nothing, anything, everything. He yells “Jumpin Jehovah’s Witness” and rhymes “ampere” with “chandelier.” The hook—“Rhymes galore! Rhymes galore! Rhymes galore!”—is also the message. It hints at the anarchic album artist he might have been, more intriguing and subversive than what he eventually became.
Rap was growing darker, lonelier, the stakes getting higher. The consummate survivor, Busta was intent on keeping up, so he got tougher. On “Things We Be Doing for Money,” Busta does his best version of Life After Death-style street opera, full of merciless bloodshed and bodies left in the streets. The Mobb Deep-style gloom of “We Could Take it Outside” is convincing, but there’s something dispiriting about it; Busta Rhymes threatening to bash in your head was about as much fun as being juxed by Bugs Bunny.
In the second half of the ’90s, rap was approaching terminal masculinity. It might be hard to imagine today, when people like Young Thug casually wear dresses on their album covers and one of the biggest stars in hip-hop is out, but back then, Busta was the only male rap star willing to play with gender lines. Everyone in Hype Williams videos was dressed in bright colors, but Busta was unafraid not only to dress in bright colors but act like he was dressed in bright colors—he was the only one willing to dance, move, gyrate, smile wide enough for toothpaste commercials. His gender play was surface level, strictly vaudevillian—in fact, he’s shown a long and nasty streak of homophobia—but in 1997 he was the only one willing to get on stage in a dress next to Martha Stewart.
Today, Busta Rhymes is earthbound, maybe celebrated a little more than he is heard. His voice has lost its elasticity, and his demeanor is closer to youth basketball coach than living cartoon. He is an elder statesman of the genre, telling all the best stories on morning shows and interviews. Jay-Z has called him the greatest performer of all time; Phife Dawg called him “the James Brown of hip-hop.” He can still pick up the phone and get anyone to appear on his records, at any time, on the strength of his name: His independently released 2020 album E.L.E. 2: The Wrath of God featured Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, Pete Rock, Mariah Carey, and Q-Tip—with Chris Rock acting as narrator.
Poignantly, the album also features some unreleased audio from the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, chatting in the studio. “I wanna do more smooth rhymes and shit, man, know what I'm sayin’?” Dirty jokes. In the background, Busta gives a laugh of appreciation. An acknowledgment, maybe, of a fellow wild card in hip-hop, one who survived paying tribute to one who didn’t. When Disaster Strikes… was the turning point, the moment Busta Rhymes became the Joker of the deck that got to stay in the game. | 2022-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Elektra | April 24, 2022 | 7.5 | 35c478a3-e36e-438b-b45a-aa051a1aae7a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever look toward the cosmic and the karmic, favoring set-it-and-forget-it synth jams that seem ripped from 1970s Germany; they’re scientific and mechanical in their construction, but they still imbue their work with emotion. | Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever look toward the cosmic and the karmic, favoring set-it-and-forget-it synth jams that seem ripped from 1970s Germany; they’re scientific and mechanical in their construction, but they still imbue their work with emotion. | Golden Retriever: Seer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19225-golden-retriever-seer/ | Seer | Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever look toward the cosmic and the karmic, favoring set-it-and-forget-it synth jams that seem ripped from 1970s Germany; they’re scientific and mechanical in their construction, but they still imbue their work with emotion. Perhaps because they come from free improv backgrounds, Golden Retriever’s early cassette and CD-R releases leaned toward steady-state, circuitous instrumental pieces rather than the dramatic engagement of their recent work. Seer, their second record for Thrill Jockey and third LP overall, seems particularly laser-guided in its looping and loping melodies. It continues the careful editing that they practiced on 2012’s Occupied With the Unspoken: synth and bass clarinet lines pop in and splatter the void, and tracks are given room to breathe and unfurl, but they’re never lackadaisical or laborious. Sielaff and Carlson may cop the aesthetics of Klaus Schulze, but on Seer they’re content working on a smaller canvas.
The duo’s increased discipline is most readily identifiable on the interlocking and overlapping instrumentation on “Flight Song”. Carlson sets up an asteroid field of pinging synth parts that Sielaff casually weaves through and around, embracing the reedy squeals of his instrument instead of obscuring them with a mountain of effects. On “Superposition”, Seer’s lengthy closer, the duo wrangle serious timbral diversity out of their creaky gear, as Sielaff’s processed clarinet peals make conversational counterpoint to Carlson’s crystalline atmospherics. Before Carlson launches into the sweeping arpeggiation that gives the song its dramatic momentum, it’s the most relaxed moment on the record, but even when the duo stretches out—on “Superposition” and “Sharp Stones”— it never feels like they’re padding time or wasting space. When Carlson slows down the tempo and Sielaff’s work becomes more protracted, these spacier segments set up the more propulsive sections.
Golden Retriever has carved a niche that’s not strictly indebted to post-Berlin School ambient or to the more organic work of new age composers but rather snags details from both aesthetics. It’s transportive stuff when it’s done well, and on Seer they’ve distilled each of the five tracks down to its basest parts, making each feel like a succinct and potent journey in its own right. Albums in this vein can seem like an argument for sprawl, but Seer makes a case that a wondrous interstellar trip can still be focused. | 2014-04-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-04-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | April 10, 2014 | 7.4 | 35c4efd1-d101-4688-abd8-ba896514f959 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Wolf Parade’s latest album plays like the big leap the band could have attempted last decade—without ever quite recapturing the odd, jittery intensity that made them so beguiling. | Wolf Parade’s latest album plays like the big leap the band could have attempted last decade—without ever quite recapturing the odd, jittery intensity that made them so beguiling. | Wolf Parade: Thin Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolf-parade-thin-mind/ | Thin Mind | Wolf Parade will always live in the shadow of their debut. 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary was one of the great statement albums of indie rock’s blockbuster era, paving the way for years of similarly jittery, nervy bands and launching an entire multiverse of Wolf Parade spinoffs and side projects: Sunset Rubdown, Handsome Furs, Swan Lake, Divine Fits, Operators. It’s a wonder they never burned out. Not all of the records Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner recorded in the wake of Queen Mary were essential, but all of them delivered moments of inspiration.
And yet for all the dependable music these two have released over the years, for casual fans looking for a quick Wolf Parade fix, the go-to will always be Queen Mary. In hindsight, Krug and Boeckner’s prolificacy has cut against them. If they hadn’t so thoroughly flooded the market, perhaps there might have been more excitement around Wolf Parade’s 2017 reunion album Cry Cry Cry (casual fans may never have noticed the group’s 2011 hiatus). Their default has always been to keep the music flowing, though, so just a year and a half later, they’ve followed up that album with a similar one. Like Cry Cry Cry, Thin Mind is perfectly calibrated to evoke nostalgia for Queen Mary without ever quite recapturing the odd, jittery intensity that made that record so beguiling.
Thin Mind is the band’s first album since the departure of longtime guitarist Dante DeCaro, but that absence hasn’t shrunk Wolf Parade’s sound any. Returning producer John Goodmanson makes sure of that. He’s quietly become one of indie rock’s great maximalists, almost incapable of recording an instrument that doesn’t pop. He leaves every surface so sleek you can see your reflection in it. Especially if you’ve sat out a few Wolf Parade albums, it can be a shock to hear the rusty, lo-fi patina of the group’s Isaac Brock-produced debut replaced by the crystalline guitars of an Interpol record.
With that radio-rock sheen, Thin Mind ironically plays like the big leap the band could have attempted in the wake of Queen Mary, during the years when alt radio still looked to blogs as a farm system for the majors. Their sound now feels less like a paranoid revision of ’80s synth-pop and more like an homage to ’80s rock at its most direct. “Under Glass” opens the record with the charging gusto of Elvis Costello’s new wave stompers, while “Wandering Son” rides the dopamine-spiked power chords of a Rick Springfield hit. Dramatic pianos tease “As Kind as You Can” with “Don’t Stop Believin’” pomp, and a thick coat of synthesizers lacquers everything.
It’s all bright and spirited, but also a little obvious, which is disappointing coming from a band that once ran freely with its most left-field impulses. Krug’s songwriting, too, has also grown more direct. “Julia Take Your Man Home” gender-flips the setup of Rae Sremmurd’s “Come Get Her,” swapping out the dancing party girl for a drunkard carving dicks into the bar and prattling on about cocaine. It’s fun on paper, but the premise wears thin well before the song ends.
Thin Mind periodically feels like Wolf Parade’s own Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, a conversation between buddies from a fading era unsure of where they fit in now. “I’m not in love with the modern world,” Boeckner sang on Wolf Parade’s signature song. Fifteen years later, the world isn’t any less modern, and the band isn’t any more at home in it. “Up and down the street there’s a grey procession, they’re going to have a funeral for your profession,” Boeckner sings on “Wandering Son.” It’s almost too apt: a mid-’00s band singing about obsolescence. Wolf Parade’s sound was once state of the art, but Thin Mind captures only intermittent reminders of how wild and wonderful their moment was.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Royal Mountain | January 27, 2020 | 6.5 | 35c56619-6421-4d6a-924b-24cf71c4a9dc | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his eighth album, Lupe Fiasco relinquishes his sanctimonious impulses and refocuses his vision on phonetic thrills and poignant reflection. | On his eighth album, Lupe Fiasco relinquishes his sanctimonious impulses and refocuses his vision on phonetic thrills and poignant reflection. | Lupe Fiasco: Drill Music in Zion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lupe-fiasco-drill-music-in-zion/ | Drill Music in Zion | Sometime after 2011’s Lasers, Lupe Fiasco the ornery scholar overtook Lupe Fiasco the musician. Instead of the high-concept, accessible lyricism of his early days, the rapper ditched attempts at mainstream palatability, a result of fatigue from Chicago violence, label battles, and artistic compromises. Beginning with 2012’s Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album, Pt. 1, his albums became as sanctimonious and unwieldy as they were musically sterile, with grand ideas being stifled by mediocre execution and generic production. Essentially, the music started to resemble required listening for some heavy-handed lesson plan.
Lupe tidies up on Drill Music in Zion, a concise project that distills his best tendencies with a focus unseen in years. Driven by poignant reflection, labyrinthine bar work, and high-wire rhyme schemes, Drill Music in Zion is Lupe at his most efficient. It’s laced with atmospheric jazz that evokes isolation and clarity, courtesy of production from Soundtrakk and Lupe himself. At 10 tracks, the LP is the shortest of his career, and the length helps: Instead of fixating on overarching concepts he doesn’t offer resolutions for, his approach is more episodic. He leans into his strengths early on, and it saves him from the trap of monotony, convolution, and self-seriousness.
Along with phonetic thrills, Lupe’s greatest skill remains his ability to weave disparate ideas into mosaic parables. On “Ghoti,” he connects a Christopher Columbus reference, superheroes, and Neuralink technology for a sprawling yet succinct meditation on capitalism, morality, and the ethics of scientific advancement. Over the mellow instrumentation of “Precious Things,” Lupe gets cheeky and profound, offering a metaphor about frayed friendships and responsibility: “Give scissors to my paper, we not on the same page/We was bat, catcher, and pitcher, now you don’t even wave.”
Lupe continues to flaunt his knack for storytelling on “Ms. Mural,” the final entry into his “Mural” trilogy. On the track, one painter’s conversation with a condescending customer becomes a rumination on Lupe’s fraught relationship with the music industry. It’s personal, but it’s also an existential study for artists everywhere.
Sometimes Lupe trades elaborate wordplay for exposition and blunt force, with mixed success. It’s most effective on the subdued production of “On Faux Nem,” which offers a foundation for Lupe’s simple, emphatic declaration: “Rappers die too much/That’s it, that’s the verse.” From there, he unleashes searing bars about the culture of drill music. In a world where authenticity is typically prized above all, he wishes that drill artists were actually lying in their lyrics.
Lupe’s conversational technique feels a little strained on “Kiosk,” where he raps from the perspective of a tricky vendor trying to sell jewelry to aspiring high rollers. It’s fine, until he lapses into a spoon-feeding third verse that veers off topic. The track is part of a three-song run (from “Precious Things” to “Ms. Mural”) where the beats and one-note tonal inflections melt into one another, rendering a drab slog of colorless sounds.
While the production on Drill Music in Zion is cohesive, it’s not the most adventurous. There isn’t the futuristic psychedelia of “Just Might Be OK” or the euphoric escapism of “Kick, Push” here, so no one song matches the widespread appeal of Lupe’s best work. Still, the overall impression makes up for that lack of dynamism; the understated tracks give his intricate riddles room to breathe and Drill Music in Zion gives Lupe’s humanity and command of language plenty of space to exhale. | 2022-07-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1st & 15th | July 7, 2022 | 6.8 | 35c5a8fc-f01f-4c82-a54b-6272ad841dba | Peter A. Berry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-a. berry/ | |
The Columbus quartet approaches hardcore from weird and skronky angles, but they tear shit down because they have a specific vision for what they want to see in its place. | The Columbus quartet approaches hardcore from weird and skronky angles, but they tear shit down because they have a specific vision for what they want to see in its place. | For Your Health: In Spite Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/for-your-health-in-spite-of/ | In Spite Of | For Your Health have been variously and accurately described as screamo, post-hardcore, and of course, “genre-defying.” But more than any specific sound, the Columbus, Ohio quartet is defined by a gleeful antagonism, and it’s fair to say that the anticipation surrounding In Spite Of is due to For Your Health’s reputation for being equally preening and vicious in all their affairs.
The mere title of “I Slept With Wes Eisold and All I Got Was an Out of Court Settlement” pretty much summarizes For Your Health’s entire M.O.; a mashup of the Cold Cave frontman and a From Under the Cork Tree deep cut and a reference to Eisold suing Fall Out Boy for copyright infringement. In the week or so since the release of In Spite Of, For Your Health have taken aim at the surviving family of Rush Limbaugh, landlords, shoegaze, specific music websites, and also all music critics. Amid these provocations and proclaiming In Spite Of the best album of 2021, Hayden Rodriguez explained “I Slept With Wes Eisold” as a response to “people that talk shit about us while simultaneously doing nothing interesting LOL.” That “LOL” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence, suggesting that talking shit is justifiable if there’s interesting art to back it up.
Take 2019’s Death of Spring split with Shin Guard, a landmark in modern screamo whose reputation has only been burnished by each band’s almost immediate pivot away from screamo; Shin Guard reconfigured their lineup, rechristened themselves Hazing Over, and recently dropped Pestilence, an EP rife with deathcore influence. Meanwhile, For Your Health’s hate5six performance from last November previewed material from In Spite Of and also great showmanship for a relatively unknown screamo band who hadn’t played any shows in over eight months. At one point, drummer Mike Mapes drops a stick and continues playing with his hand. This was a band that had its sights set on much bigger rooms.
This still holds true on In Spite Of, even if they’re still more likely to play Minecraft festivals than clubs for the foreseeable future. There are few moments that could legitimately be considered pop, and I do mean moments—the flashes of mall-punk melody on “Abscess Makes the Heart Grow” and “You’re so United Ninety-Three, We’re so Flight One Eighty” are an illicit thrill, like stumbling upon your still-operational MySpace page that hasn’t been updated since 2006. But In Spite Of tends towards accessibility, a remembrance of a not-too-distant past when skronky, proggy, and altogether weird punk bands like Blood Brothers and At the Drive-In could slide into MTV and Fuse playlists.
Opener “Birthday Candles in the Effigy” introduces For Your Health as a band with a clear post-hardcore heritage and no patience for the elitism of taste. The song at times evokes ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn and/or Take This to Your Grave, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and/or Fear Before the March of Flames’ Art Damage. In For Your Health’s perfect world, these albums were all playing the same game, quasi major-label punk from bands with a distinct fashion sense, proudly pretentious lyrics, and hyper-referential song titles. If you can imagine a disapproving older brother walking in on you while this plays and then immediately walking out, all the better.
For Your Health’s music is all edges: panic chords and fractured time signatures, serrated vocals and poison-pen lyrics. Rodriguez delivers every word with literary gusto, chewing the scenery even as they’re gargling glass: “Latticed bodies bear creeping vines,” “Obsidian eyes lay stoic against construction paper skies,” and on “Everyday at 13:12,” even the curb-stomping of a cop can have a baroque flourish.
For Your Health recognize the impact of brevity in their music; what sounds like the most thrilling shit in the world for 90 seconds loses its impact over the span of 40 minutes. If In Spite Of never stays in the same place for long enough to achieve a true synthesis of their influences, all of their constituent elements cohere like a layered Rice Krispie treat. “Day of the Black Sun” spends nearly two minutes trying to free itself from detuned sludge before it emerges as the dance-punk snot-rocket “Save Your Breath, You’re Gonna Need it to Blow My Head Off”; imagine Liars’ debut played in reverse and fast-forwarded to 10x speed. The seamless transitions throughout In Spite Of somehow make it feel shorter than its 17 minutes, particularly as the boundaries between songs start to feel arbitrary.
Even if For Your Health’s online persona yells “we’re not here to make friends,” In Spite Of is intended a triumph for a community they’ve fostered out of mutual respect. The backup vocals from the similarly progressive Hazing Over and SOUL GLO are almost impossible to recognize without the credits, but the solidarity implied by their existence matters just as much. And as with many of the bands cheering them on—Callous Daoboys, Portrayal of Guilt, awakebutstillinbed, Dogleg, to name a few—their catholic approach to all forms of aggro music is oddly utopian. For Your Health are tearing shit down because they have such a clear plan for a world they’d like to built in its place—one without abusers, clout-chasers, dishonest artists, cops (obviously), and most of all, genre.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Twelve Gauge | February 25, 2021 | 7.6 | 35c7bc74-33cc-4db7-87ed-afd17903d403 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
L.A. singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ debut LP is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others. | L.A. singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ debut LP is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others. | Phoebe Bridgers: Stranger in the Alps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoebe-bridgers-stranger-in-the-alps/ | Stranger in the Alps | Phoebe Bridgers’ career has been propelled by fellow musicians. Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and Julien Baker have all sung the praises of the 23-year-old Los Angeles singer-songwriter, leading up to her full-length debut Stranger in the Alps. Fittingly, the album itself is also populated by other artists: Bridgers writes about lost legends like Bowie and Lemmy down through the local hobbyists who haunt their hometowns like ghosts in faded band tees. In “Scott Street,” she reads into how an old flame tells her his drums are “too much shit to carry.” In “Motion Sickness,” one of the year’s most exquisite breakup anthems, she lands her harshest jab in the chorus: “Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now.”
Stranger in the Alps is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others. The crux of Bridgers’ writing arrives in small details: a casual exchange of words, a song played on a long car ride, the moments we relive in our heads once we get back home. Bridgers’ voice has a breezy, conversational flutter that helps her stories of heartbreak and loss avoid morbidity. She sounds best when she double-tracks it in layers of light falsetto: an effect that, depending on what she’s singing, can sound sweet and soothing or scalding like feedback.
The old cliche about artists having their whole lives to make their debut rings true here. The earliest composition, “Georgia,” dates back to Bridgers’ teenage years, when she crafted her own lyrics out of a misremembered Feist track. Telling the story of an early relationship, she builds to dramatic moments of catharsis like an artist attempting to win over an audience by the end of the song. “Smoke Signals” and “Motion Sickness,” meanwhile, reflect recent events in her life. They’re more patient and refined, unfolding to subtler moments of revelation. The span of time these songs cover can make Stranger in the Alps feel overwhelming and occasionally incohesive. Playing it from front to back comes with the intensity of scrolling all the way through someone’s Facebook photos.
Accordingly, some of the images you’ll find are not especially flattering. “Demi Moore” is an intense song about getting high and sending nude pics. Over gentle, hypnotic fingerpicking, Bridgers travels the terrifying line of thought from feeling sexy and desired to feeling vulnerable and alone, wishing you could delete your texts like tweets before anyone can see them. “I don’t want to be stoned anymore,” she repeats solemnly in the chorus. In “Funeral,” she tries to learn a lesson from the death of a friend but can only summon self-laceration and momentary distraction. “I woke up in my childhood bed, wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself,” she sings, “When I remembered someone’s kid is dead.” Both songs—which are sequenced, somewhat jarringly, next to each other—feel exquisitely raw and revealing.
Bridgers’ tendency to risk heavy-handedness for the sake of emotional honesty brings to mind the recent work of Mark Kozelek, whose 2013 song “You Missed My Heart” gets a faithful reimagining at the end of the album. While its dream-logic murder fantasy ties back nicely to Bridgers’ breakout song “Killer,” Kozelek’s ballad falls short as the de facto album closer. (It’s followed by a brief, wordless reprise of “Smoke Signals.”) Along with the Conor Oberst–featuring “Would You Rather,” this final stretch of songs puts Bridgers at a distance, instead showcasing the musicians she admires and draws inspiration from. It’s a slightly deflating end to an album that succeeds through its unnerving, unflinching personality. By now, the most interesting characters in Bridgers’ story are the ones she puts on the page herself. | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | September 23, 2017 | 7 | 35d5e664-4d80-41bb-94fa-a97b46da4a3a | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian Wilson's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. The original tapes were assembled for this official release, finally giving Wilson's epic story an ending. | Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian Wilson's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. The original tapes were assembled for this official release, finally giving Wilson's epic story an ending. | The Beach Boys: The Smile Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16000-the-smile-sessions/ | The Smile Sessions | It's a rite of passage for students of pop music history: At some point, you learn that the Beach Boys weren't just a fun 1960s surf band with a run of singles that later came to be used in commercials; at their best, they were making capital-A Art. The record that convinces most is Pet Sounds, that understated 1966 masterpiece that articulates a specific kind of teenage longing and loneliness like nothing before or since. Once you've absorbed that record, you find yourself going back through songs like "Don't Worry Baby", "The Warmth of the Sun", and "I Get Around", finding a deeper brilliance where you once heard only pop craftsmanship. As you make these discoveries, you come to learn about the auteur at the center of it all, Brian Wilson, who shouldered the burden of being the creative force in one of the most successful and musically ambitious pop bands of the era. And then you find out about SMiLE.
Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. He followed his muse to the ends of the earth, putting a grand piano in a massive living room sandbox, outfitting another room with an Arabian tent, making session musicians wear fireman's hats for the recording of a song about the elements, freaking out when an actual fire broke out down the street from the studio around the time of recording of said track, and, no surprise, taking enough drugs to amplify the whole scene and turn it into something terrifying. But the record was not to be. The music recorded for SMiLE was too far-out for the rest of the band (lead singer Mike Love hated the lyrics penned by Wilson's collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, an opinion he still holds) and Wilson had trouble finishing tracks. Eventually, he shelved the record for good and the band issued the low-key, weird, and supremely stoned Smiley Smile. By setting the record aside, Wilson became afraid to indulge his talent, and his contributions to the Beach Boys would never again be central to the band.
If you're wired a certain way, once you learn the SMiLE story, you long to hear the album that never was. It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. And the songs from the sessions that eventually made it out on other records-- "Surf's Up", "Cabin Essence", "Heroes and Villains", and more, including material on the 1993 Beach Boys career-overview box Good Vibrations-- were so brilliant that the lack of proper release becomes almost painful. So you might start hunting down bootlegs, poring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the "real" SMiLE could have been.
Only in 2003, when long-time Beach Boys fanatic and tape trader Darian Sahanaja and his band the Wondermints collaborated with Brian on a live version of SMiLE and 2004's Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE album did the lost record assume a definitive shape. But as exciting as that record was at the time, the lure of the originals never went away. So there was naturally a great deal of excitement when, early this year, we heard that the original tapes were being assembled for official release. This epic story finally has an ending, and it's a very happy one. As archival projects go, SMiLE is as surprising, generous, and successful as anything in recent memory. The version of the album, based on the Wilson/Wondermints sequence, feels remarkably complete and whole, even though it was largely built from unfinished scraps.
During this period, Wilson and Parks were working on an enormous canvas. They were using words and music to tell a story of America. If the early-60s Beach Boys were about California, that place where the continent ends and dreams are born, SMiLE is about how those dreams were first conceived. Moving west from Plymouth Rock, we view cornfields and farmland and the Chicago fire and jagged mountains, the Grand Cooley Damn, the California coast-- and we don't stop until we hit Hawaii. Cowboy songs, cartoon Native American chants, barroom rags, jazzy interludes, rock'n'roll, sweeping classical touches, street-corner doo-wop, and town square barbershop quartet are swirled together into an ever-shifting technicolor dream.
Befitting an album concerned with history, SMiLE feels strangely adrift from time, using the technology of the day and an avant-garde approach to pop song form to make the past look both familiar and strange. In 1966 and 1967, old-timey music, if you squinted at it just so, could be imbued with a haze of psychedelia. And this is a deeply psychedelic album, though disorientation mostly comes from its juxtapositions, how the orchestral miniatures (or "feels," as Wilson called his modular melodic ideas) bump into each other and find their way from one song to the next, the "Heroes and Villains" refrain here, the "Child Is Father of the Man" refrain there.
The 2004 sequence divided the album into three "movements," with songs connected thematically, and this reissue wisely puts each on its own side of vinyl (if you want only the record proper, the 2xLP, with key outtakes added on the fourth side, is absolutely the way to go). Each movement has at least one pop masterpiece. On the first, there's "Heroes and Villains" and "Cabin Essence", both exploring western themes in Parks' bent style. Here and especially on side two's "Surf's Up", the level of Parks' writing is astounding. He had the sound-driven jumble of imagery of contemporaneous Dylan, but his words were far tighter and more disciplined. He also understood the power of a good pun. Sounds are slurred together to take on new meaning through clusters that extended beyond the spaces between the words. So, "The music hall, a costly bow," in "Surf's Up" also sounds like, "The music holocaust," and lines like, "canvas the town and brush the backdrop," layer image atop image with breathtaking efficiency.
Each side's arc also serves to push forward the record as a whole. Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE has made this sequencing seem canonical, and there were enough raw materials in the vault available to piece together a worthy approximation. Once in a while, you can hear a stitch or shift that would have no doubt been done over later, but those moments are rare and ultimately only add to the record's charm. By the time the tense and throbbing neo-classical piece "Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow)" comes along in the third movement and then leads into "Love to Say Dada" (mostly an instrumental, it was meant to have lyrics; they were added for Brian Wilson Presents Smile, the song titled "In Blue Hawaii") and then to the extended "Good Vibrations", the strength of the album as a full piece is staggering.
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There's almost a full disc of "Heroes and Villains" fragments and another entire CD with bits of "Good Vibrations". Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we've heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project's being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Not to mention that these modular sections were eventually going to be stitched together with tape and razorblades. Beyond the fragments, there are brilliant single performances, like the two demo versions of "Surf's Up". To my ears, the song is a high-water mark of pop songwriting, positively haunting with its melodic twists and turns. And Brian's vocal performances, with wild leaps into the upper reaches of his falsetto, give the track an almost unbearable poignancy. It's incredible to think that "Surf's Up" would remain in the vault for five years, until it appeared in re-worked form on the 1971 album of the same name.
On the sessions material, you also get to hear Wilson running the show in the studio, and apart from a few asides where he talks about hash and LSD, he sounds excited, patient, and kind, offering encouragement about mood, timing, and tempo. He surely wasn't an easy guy to work for, but hearing his voice on these tapes, it's remarkable how together he seems and how willing he is to work with these musicians to make something great. Most of all, his studio patter provides a nice counterbalance to SMiLE's prevailing narrative, of a crazed genius unraveling in the face of trying to create his masterpiece. We love crack-up stories. There's something in the Western psyche that loves to romanticize the alleged connection between madness and genius. And someone like Wilson-- fragile, paranoid, childlike, and dreamy-- fits one template of the crazed genius to a T. Never mind that he was a student of music, put in twice as many hours of extremely hard work as anyone else in the band, and relied greatly on collaboration and outside inspiration. When thinking of SMiLE, the guy in the fireman's hat thinking his music could burn down buildings is who we remember. But now we have the full picture. SMiLE was never finished, and it still isn't, but we can safely say this is as close as it'll ever come. What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own. | 2011-11-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-11-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | November 2, 2011 | 10 | 35d6fa9a-7df8-4320-840a-742762f52191 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Robyn presents her first solo album in eight years subtly, with slight builds and light hands. But her masterful command of emotions on the dancefloor slowly reveals itself across another enthralling record. | Robyn presents her first solo album in eight years subtly, with slight builds and light hands. But her masterful command of emotions on the dancefloor slowly reveals itself across another enthralling record. | Robyn: Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robyn-honey/ | Honey | Robyn’s work urges on our braver selves. Without sermonizing, she shows us the dignity in our sorrow—throwing her heartbreak onto the dance floor, gulping in its neon glow like photosynthesis. Through her music, we discover our loneliest moments are no longer just valleys to suffer and endure: They are deeper, even beautiful, glimpses into our humanity. It seems possible that these moments are essential turns in our own journey, and that we are indestructible in them after all.
Throughout her career, Robyn has thrived by rejecting the pop music machine. Her genius was too great and too peculiar for the frothy Max Martin ditties of her youth, despite her early success with them in the ’90s. She had the prescience around the turn of the century to reject a deal with Jive Records, embrace her edgier club influences, and start her own imprint. (Jive’s rebound signee, Britney Spears, was never afforded the same route.) Robyn’s rebellion has made her pop’s avatar of exceptionalism: Her path whispers that we can be extraordinary, too, after rejecting the strictures that keep us docile. She cuts a powerful, needed figure in pop music, reasserting the autonomy of women in a genre that labors to keep them disposable; in particular, she subverts and updates the stereotypically male idea of the auteur, whose authenticity comes from a wellspring of self-reliance and removal.
And so Honey, Robyn’s sixth solo album and first in eight years, also carries the sheen of being created on purely individual terms, on a singular timeline. With its diaristic tracklist—sequenced in the order songs were written—the album builds a bridge from its predecessor, the bionic Body Talk, into a place of new conviction and warmth. It addresses several causes of the 39-year-old’s solo hiatus, from the death of her longtime producer and friend Christian Falk to her split and eventual reconciliation with her boyfriend, while extending the previous record’s conversation: What does it mean to forge human connections, to persevere, to be generous to yourself in loss and present for others in love?
But unlike the often frosty empowerment of Body Talk, these dialogues are presented casually, with slight builds and light hands: Airy house beats waft in benignly, a far cry from the martial four-to-the-floor of her past; snatches of chipper, tinny phone conversations unfurl over unhurried tropical house with the casual aplomb of a jam session. Still, Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.
Honey opens itself gradually, as if in the half-life of Body Talk. The sterile, sober “Missing U” is threaded with fresh heartbreak, in the same school of cinematic beat drops that made her “Dancing on My Own” and “Hang With Me” such cathartic floor-fillers. It’s Honey’s most melancholy song, familiar in its duress, and Robyn’s voice carries the evolution: Where she once stripped her tone of cheeky inflections and small breathy affectations—singing with a sort of level sturdiness that amplified her plainspoken pain, Scandinavian to the marrow—here she is borderline gasping; her falsetto is sighing and acrobatic. Bewildered, she echoes in the vacuum between kickdrums, reaching blindly into “this empty space you left behind,” simply existing in loss. This realm is so eerie and empty it sounds post-apocalyptic, as synths interject like torturous memories, and the drums insist on their dull throb of grief, pushing home the devastating coda: “All the love you gave/It still defines me.” As she’s done so slyly in the past, her instrumental emotionally mirrors her words, deepening the cut of both.
Robyn’s path soon turns sunnier and softer; for an artist who brought such empathy to the ostracized role of the Other Woman in “Call Your Girlfriend,” there is no melodramatic, obsessive devotion to be found on Honey. On “Because It’s in the Music,” producers Joseph Mount and Klas Åhlund volley up a glittery, morose disco shuffle—like Giorgio Moroder after 10 spins of “Holocene”—as Robyn laments a song she shares with her ex-love, one she still spins with self-flagellating regularity to his empty side of the bed. But her compulsive behavior is more restrained now, quicker to ask for mercy: “Baby Forgive Me” is the rare Robyn song to ask something of anyone else. Her songs usually relay her experience of dancing alone without urging you do the same; she promises she’ll be “Indestructible” in love without mobilizing the masses behind her. By presenting how she processes her trauma alone, she opens a community to those who need it. (And an eccentric one, to boot: Hear the odd, yawping backing vocals here and marvel at the island of misfit toys Robyn can assemble at whim.)
“Send to Robin Immediately,” with its slow synthpop burn and sample of Lil Louis’ 1989 dance hit “French Kiss,” captures the tentative first steps of assertiveness after heartbreak. “If you’ve got something to say/Say it immediately,” she coos, not unkindly, over producer Kindness’ loping, snowballing pulse. But as it happens, Robyn and her beau won’t be doing much talking: “Honey,” object of so much fan beseeching, arrives next, like a sunbeam. This version, which Robyn labored over for years, is breezier than it was in its tentative debut on Girls; her throaty vocals, like her libido, command the room with full liberty. As she purrs her infatuation—“Every breath that whispers your name/It’s like emeralds on the pavement”—and follows it to the bedroom, the classic house beat gallops to match a racing pulse. The synths melt outward mirroring the euphoria of the lyrics; serene in her lust, she directs her lover to the flower “stuck in glitter strands of saliva.” It’s hazily gorgeous and excessively horny and dreamily decisive, with Robyn as the lone director and receiver.
Robyn and her love’s happy, third-act reunion feels inevitable after the thrall of “Honey”—though she briefly diverts to a ’90s house party on “Between the Lines,” and skitters off to the shore in an electro-samba ditty called “Beach 2k20” in which she basically speak-sings to a group WhatsApp thread about a waterside restaurant hang. (There’s also a sly, blink-and-miss-it vocal nod to her 1995 hit “Show Me Love.”) Its humidity nicely sets up the closing track, “Ever Again,” in which Robyn chirps she’s “Never gonna be brokenhearted/Ever again,” like Scarlett O’Hara clutching a drum machine. It’s as classic a Robyn narrative as any on the album: A passionate peak, full of loopholes, left to resolve offscreen with messy realism.
And so Robyn rides into the sunset, after nearly 15 years spent capturing the nobility of loneliness. It’s such an alluring idea that “Ever Again”’s bittersweet top-note (“Never gonna let it happen/Then it would be all for nothing”) leaves just a glancing blow. But here, finally, is the real romance of Honey: Instead of willing her relationship to be infallible, she’s banking instead that she can bear future pain without shattering. It’s a turn from the grand narrative of moving alone through the world, faltering a little less with each step until euphoria takes over. It’s joyful to hear that Robyn’s found this peace, and as ever, she champions us toward the same. | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Konichiwa / Interscope | October 25, 2018 | 8.5 | 35d72815-6c54-4beb-817e-8ab967fb0ed3 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
Muse frontman Matt Bellamy jokingly described his band's sixth studio album as a "christian gangsta rap jazz odyssey, with some ambient rebellious dubstep and face melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia." If only. | Muse frontman Matt Bellamy jokingly described his band's sixth studio album as a "christian gangsta rap jazz odyssey, with some ambient rebellious dubstep and face melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia." If only. | Muse: The 2nd Law | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17281-the-2nd-law/ | The 2nd Law | When Muse released the "trailer" for The 2nd Law, it was the kind of preemptive shock tactic you typically expect from a record that has a lot riding on it. "MUSE GOES DUBSTEP!!!" created a minor firestorm, albeit one that was containable because it was utterly predictable. Of course Muse fans would storm the YouTube comment section with bloodthirsty vengeance. However you think Muse fits into the lineage of Queen or Rush musically, they've benefited greatly from establishing themselves as a last bastion of technically boastful and very popular prog-rock that's always implicitly held unkind attitudes toward synthesizer-based music. On the other hand, of course Muse would eventually glom onto EDM. It's the last frontier for a band that's only now integrating those sandworm basslines but whose music has always provided listeners with equivalents of "the drop"-- a glass-shattering falsetto run, Wagnerian crescendos, solos that are gunning for the one tab per month in Guitar World that's from the last decade. Having seemingly mastered all modes of excess, you'd think The 2nd Law would be Muse's unimpeachable triumph. It's not, and the problem isn't that Muse have gone too far... they haven't gone far enough.
Wait, this is Muse we're talking about, right? Hear me out, because the first half of The 2nd Law does indeed indicate that Muse have absolutely no interest whatsoever in staying within the boundaries of good taste. For about 45 seconds of "Supremacy", they actually sound like a real band, immediately after which hushed military snare rolls, chesty timpanis, and anticipatory string wells lead you to believe Matt Bellamy has unwittingly sauntered into a Michael Bay movie or Metallica's symphonic tragicomedy S&M. And titans shall clash as Bellamy speaks with the conviction of a man who is either going to tell us they'll never take our freedom or to release the kraken. With dramatic flair, he intones "your true emancipation is a fantasy," which... OK. But "the time..." Go on. "...it has come," that "it," perfect. "To destrooooyyyyyy..." Destroy what? Make sure you put your drink down as Bellamy screams "YOUR SUPREMACYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!" because all of a sudden having The 2nd Law only in audio form feels pathetically inadequate-- next time you will place it against footage from Starship Troopers, although the closest visual equivalent to this batshit moment is a dinosaur with a cowboy hat manning a F-15 and blowing evil aliens to bits while scoring the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. That's not even the most ludicrous part-- wait until that bit of spy guitar comes in at the end, bearing no melodic resemblance to what just transpired and inferring Muse believes they've made their James Bond theme. No, really.
And that's the jumping off point for The 2nd Law, which wields its unlimited studio resources and chops like a stockpile of nuclear warheads, all implicit intimidation and explicit explosion. You think wimps like Purity Ring and James Blake are taking dubstep to stadium status? Peep the genius, stuttering hook and vacuuming bass of "Madness", which serves as a reminder that Muse's pop instinct has them and not Mars Volta headlining Coachella. "Panic Station" reimagines the Red Hot Chili Peppers as multimillionaires back in the "Fight Like a Brave" days, bolstering a pelvic bassline with the finest in gated Linn snares and fake orchestra hits. There's obviously a "Prelude" here, and because this is Muse, it's actually the fourth song, not the first. And "Survival" totally needs it.
"Survival" is by far the most ridiculous song on The 2nd Law, if not Muse's entire career, meaning it's the most successful. Just imagine Watch the (Game of) Throne(s) or if Queen tried to write "Ogre Battle" and "Bicycle Race" at the same damn time. As Jess Harvell noted in his review of The Resistance, Muse have an "us vs. them" perspective that's always fit well in the gamer lifestyle, and this one's for all the Mario Kart heads using Wario to troll the shit out of Princess Peach-- Bellamy bellows, "Life's a race! AND I'M GONNA WIN!" He's soon surrounded by a mock Greek chorus, hamming with operatic haughtiness, "I'll light the fuse, and I'll never lose." And you cross your fingers, sincerely hoping, "please Lord, make him rhyme it with Muse." He doesn't, and it's the first time Muse draw the line. At its best, The 2nd Law is sort of like spending a week in Dubai, the ostentatious excess is simultaneously offensive and weirdly comforting for its mere existence in this economically depressed state.
So what the hell happens? As you might be able to tell from song titles like "Save Me" and "Follow Me", Muse's insatiable quest for sonic largesse is anchored by an equally consumptive messianic streak. This in and of itself isn't much of a problem, seeing as how Muse do create superhero music. (Imagine Christopher Nolan roping in Bono to play Batman and you get an idea of where Bellamy is coming from.) Sure, they're capable of saving the world with their own two hands, but only out of a sense of grim, solemn duty that's recognizable only to adults who've aged out of wanting to be a superhero-- Bellamy's too damn sincere about the fate of the planet to go full-leotard, leaving no space for any humor, sex, or any escapism, really.
"Animals" and "Explorers" are anti-topical enough to leave something to the imagination, but it doesn't give you anything to work with either. They're also where Muse ditch the pyrotechnics for actual piano-tinkling prog and remind you that they're still not that far off from Showbiz, their charming debut of slavish OK Computer worship. You can see the iceage coming on "Big Freeze" from two towns over and every time Bellamy pushes for a higher note, you can imagine him being yelled at by a weightlifting spotter. By the time the trailer-leaked "The 2nd Law: Unsustainable" pops up toward the end, the panicked transmissions about our energy crises are handled as delicately as The Dark Knight Rises' Occupy Wall Street overtones and are every bit as enjoyable.
Truth be told, The 2nd Law superficially succeeds for the same reasons as that movie-- the whiz-bang technical effects and relentless soundtrack is overwhelming, a justification of "you gotta spend money to make money." The problem is that it's not any fun at all, and the "message" feels like an unnecessary overcompensation for the campy streak that draws people into this kind of comic-book stuff in the first place. Sadly, there's a greater chance of Christian Bale dancing the "Batusi" than Bellamy writing a song about big asses for the hell of it. Both seem like a dead end or at least a point where, contrary to the cliché, if it gets any bigger, it will fail. When saving the world feels this much like a chore, you just wish for "Apocalypse Please". | 2012-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 2, 2012 | 5.5 | 35debc9c-f4cd-4b20-9b4e-dafbc50e53df | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A long-lost recording captures the Ethiopian organist and his band at the Hilton Addis Ababa in 1975, laying down deceptively breezy jazz songs steeped in nameless longing. | A long-lost recording captures the Ethiopian organist and his band at the Hilton Addis Ababa in 1975, laying down deceptively breezy jazz songs steeped in nameless longing. | Hailu Mergia / The Walias Band: Tezeta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hailu-mergia-the-walias-band-tezeta/ | Tezeta | In the mid-1970s, the Hilton hotel in Addis Ababa was a refuge, for those who could afford it, from the political turmoil that was otherwise wracking Ethiopia. The Derg military regime seized power over the country in 1974, and soon began imposing restrictions—like a curfew and a prohibition against performing popular songs—that choked out the capital city’s formerly thriving nightlife scene. But the cosmopolitan atmosphere was still strong inside the Hilton, thanks in part to its American ownership and international clientele. Well-connected locals mingled with out-of-towners in the lobby, or relaxed by the pool. The sounds of the Walias Band, led by Hailu Mergia’s effervescent electric organ, drifted in and out like a warm breeze. The Walias held a residency at the Hilton for almost a decade, sometimes performing until sunrise, so that attendees could leave the show without risking detainment under the previous night’s curfew. In 1975, the band released Tezeta, a cassette of instrumentals they recorded at the hotel during off hours from performance. If the recordings are any indication, an evening with the Walias might have been enough to forget the era’s troubles until morning, if you were lucky enough to attend.
Tezeta had been lost to time until a recent reissue by Awesome Tapes From Africa, the label that has helped to spearhead a late-in-life career renaissance for Mergia, who had retired from performance for decades until a 2013 reissue of the 1985 album Shemonmuanaye (under the new title Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument) found him new listeners outside Ethiopia. By the time he made that album, he had moved to Washington, D.C., where few people knew he was a musical pioneer in his home country, and was working on his own in relative isolation, layering an idiosyncratic blend of accordion with electronic keyboards and drum machines. Tezeta, by contrast, is a document of Mergia and the Walias during the prime of their performing career. They were among the earliest acts in Ethiopia to combine the country’s traditional and classical songs with the swing and drive of American jazz and funk, and the very first, according to Tezeta’s richly informative liner notes, to make an album of purely instrumental music. Despite the band’s trailblazing status, Tessema Tadele writes, Ethiopians shared “an overwhelming consensus that [instrumentals] were merely produced as background music,” and Tezeta did not sell particularly well. However, in a country with strict limits on speech, there was a good reason to play music without words, whose ambiguity made it a tough target for censorship.
The Walias were both a band of fearless musical innovators and a cocktail-hour lounge act, playing music that was traditional and modern at once, for privileged audiences who might receive it as unobtrusive atmospheric enhancement or unspoken protest against oppression. Tezeta holds all these contradictions, not attempting to resolve them, but allowing their tension to animate its grooves. It’s true that the music settles comfortably into the background, if that’s where you prefer to keep it. The tempos are brisk but not bracing; the playing is stylish and confident but not brash. There are no jarring dissonances or dynamic shifts. Most tracks vamp on a small handful of chords—sometimes just one—across understated refrains and compact solos. It’s very easy to imagine the crowd at the Hilton, sipping drinks and making polite conversation, maybe even doing a little dancing.
Tune in a little closer, though, and you’ll find music of much depth and invention. Mergia unspools a series of infinitely nested curlicues on the keys, never content to step from one note to the next without spiraling across a cluster of others in between. (He apparently drew this approach from the fluid melodic embellishments of Ethiopian folk musicians on instruments like the krar and masinko). His restlessness never threatens the music’s overall composure. The effect, for me, is like water flowing through a creek: The water is always moving, but the creek stays still. Mergia is the clear star, and the only soloist on many tracks, but the other players also find ways to reach out toward the listener. When guitarist Mahmoud Aman takes the lead during the back half of “Zengadyw Derekou,” he barely steps out of the pocket, but the swagger and spaciousness of his simple lines are electrifying nonetheless. With a repeated lick at the end of his solo on “Tezeta,” flautist Moges Habte strains gently but insistently against the chord, testing its boundaries without breaking them. That approach—committed exploration within the limits of a well-defined framework—is indicative of the album as a whole.
In addition to being the name of the classic Ethiopian ballad the Walias tackle to open the set, the title of Tezeta also refers to the feeling of longing for memories past, and to an entire compositional form meant to evoke such nostalgia. According to the liner notes, many of the Walias’ instrumentals found unlikely second life as bumper music on Ethiopian television, until music from newer groups supplanted them. “Only then did those of us feeling a certain sense of loss started inquiring about ‘that music from TV’ at record stores,” Tadele writes, describing an avenue of nostalgia that Mergia and the band surely didn’t have in mind as they recorded this music. Similarly, in anecdotal experience, I’ve noticed music by Mergia and tezeta-minded contemporaries like Mulatu Astatke popping up with unusual frequency on the vibe-curated playlists of certain stylish restaurants recently—echoes of the Hilton lobby—or when an unrelated album ends on Spotify and the algorithm wants to keep me drifting into daydreamy oblivion. The songs never fail to cut through the circumstances of their presentation, tugging me toward sensitivity and alertness even when they’re used as aural wallpaper. Their very unobtrusiveness, I think, is one reason for their lasting adaptability, the way they can make you feel deeply without calling much overt attention to themselves, and in places so far removed from where they were made. Tezeta may be background music, but in the hands of an artist like Mergia, background music is a powerful thing.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Awesome Tapes From Africa | July 2, 2021 | 7.6 | 35e0ae0f-4cd0-4921-b250-761b0dbebc18 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On their second full-length, the French production duo incorporates the brash sounds of late-1970s progressive rock. The direction is precocious, brave, and surprising even if it amplifies their weak points. | On their second full-length, the French production duo incorporates the brash sounds of late-1970s progressive rock. The direction is precocious, brave, and surprising even if it amplifies their weak points. | Justice: Audio, Video, Disco | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15966-audio-video-disco/ | Audio, Video, Disco | Let's get something out of the way: prog. As in, it's impossible to discuss Justice's sophomore album, Audio, Video, Disco without noting just how thoroughly the Parisian duo has adopted the brash sounds of late-1970s progressive rock. The referents-- Yes for turbulent guitar lines, Goblin for sly italo beats, Queen for unapologetic bombast-- jump off the plastic, announcing that Justice will not re-hash the ornery, clubby obelisks that defined †. Their new direction is precocious, brave, and surprising even if it damns them by placing emphasis on qualities-- arrangement, fidelity, patience-- that Justice lack.
Though it sparked a still-running debate about the duo's credentials, †, by accessing unexplored levels of sleaze and cheese, actually fit into dance music's long, proud tradition of not giving a fuck. That they did this in a rock context-- leather jackets; big live show; loud, terrible mastering-- seemed at the time reverent of peak-era Daft Punk but in retrospect appears prescient: Deadmau5 and Skrillex headline festivals, hellbent on teasing out the most seizure-inducing mix of lighting and music possible. In 2011 anyone looking to beef about "real" dance music stares into a smaller barrel filled with bigger fish.
In this way, AVD is a natural progression for Justice. Their M.O. is bold irreverence, and they've found multiple ways to express it. Still, it's hard not to admire their choice: It threatens to alienate their core audience while endearing them to a group of fans unlikely to take up their cause (or realize they exist). Prog-rock has long been championed by experimental music fans for its complexity and ambition-- it was outsider art that made the mistake of actually selling records.
Prog remains a mostly unclaimed orphan of rock history, and while certain corners of the indie establishment-- Fiery Furnaces, Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Projectors-- have adopted its structure and imagination, they've left the flute solos behind. (Dance acts like Aeroplane and Wolfram have mined this territory to mixed effect.) Justice take the opposite tack: AVD is composed of short, simple tracks stuffed with stairway-climbing solos, ascendant male vocalists, and starry-skied bridges. The duo has called AVD a "daylight" album, presumably in contrast with †'s nocturnal vibe. But just like a low-lit club can mask flaws, Justice's full-bore wall-of-dance bulldozed some of their compositional shortcomings. AVD is brighter and more diffuse (though, sadly, its recording style is no more dynamic), but the light shining through does Justice no favors.
It's easy to admire progressive rock for its immersion and commitment to concept, as well as its musical prowess and scope. These are, sadly, the elements Justice strip away. Instead, they employ prog's sounds in short, distracting bursts, filling AVD with melodies that are curious but difficult to remember or enjoy. They do this in the style they know how-- with hoary, space-eating electronics-- which suggests supreme digital craftsmanship but doesn't do the listener any favors. The guitars sounds are uniformly shrill, the bass flatulent, the rhythms rudimentary.
They employ singers more frequently than on †: male voices, pinched and bleating. I won't do you the disservice of examining their lyrics (they're hardly the point, for Justice or for us), but suffice to say they don't add much. AVD's finest moment is the title track, in which a voice is digitally manipulated into a current of high-strung, winsome tunefulness. "Helix", their most blatant disco move, is robotically funky, a reminder of what Justice are capable of when they commit fully to Daft pyrotechnics.
The majority of AVD, though, is cheese-rock signifiers dressed up as dance music. Once you get over the fact that the band got a little Cerrone in your "Kashmir" ("On'n'on") or spiked your Moroder with Toto ("Horsepower") there's little reason to come back to AVD. Immersing yourself in the record is an exercise in liking Justice as a concept more while liking their actual output less. There's too much space between AVD and actual prog to accept that Justice are committed to this direction. They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction. | 2011-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ed Banger | October 25, 2011 | 5.3 | 35e6e30e-ff51-40af-b0e4-d26bc98afb83 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Sixth full-length is packed with some of the most ferocious moments in the Boston quartet's 15-plus-year history. | Sixth full-length is packed with some of the most ferocious moments in the Boston quartet's 15-plus-year history. | Converge: No Heroes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9680-no-heroes/ | No Heroes | If LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 is good Nike-sponsored running music, No Heroes is what boot-wearing non-joggers use at a punk-slapped punching bag to reach fighting weight. It's pretty amazing to think Converge has been around almost as long as some of you have been alive, especially considering this sixth full-length is packed with some of the most ferocious moments in the Boston quartet's 15-plus year history.
These 14 right hooks are buff motherfuckers, rendered in various shades of blacks and blues and reds, but it's the opening tandem that really cooks. Shoving feedback and a heavy instrumental build out of the way, neck-tat sporting vocalist Jacob Bannon skewers a two-minute sermon on the opening track, "Heartache": "We are all falling down/ We are all falling/ Every word that you pray/ Makes another slave/ Every idol that you build/ Brings another plague." When the mathy mid-tempo returns, the song appropriately rams bass-first into "Hellhound", a one-minute rip-roar of in-the-red calisthenics. And then, well, it's gone, replaced by the equally taut "Sacrifice": "Hit the lights/ I've had enough/ Guilt to build a city/ Shame to fill a sea/ Reasons to give up and lose everything/ Regret to burn this body/ Filth to cut these hands/ Reasons to bury this and everything we have." Vengeance? It's only 58 seconds long. Its motto: "I'm built for war."
The blast radius of those first few pieces is brutal. The rest of the album slows down, but refuses to relent. Only doomy centerpiece "Grim Heart/Black Rose", with its melodic, anguished guest vocals by ex-Only Living Witness fellow Jonah Jenkins, offers a chance to catch your breath. The track's an epic (over nine minutes), its ending a long fade-out, turning down the volume in the room instead of cutting the power. Despite Sabbathian overtones, it manages to maintain the crushing equation when Bannon reemerges near the album's close: A few raps of the cymbal, heavier bass tones, guitar reps, drum hits, adequate build, and then his bloody voice: "Black rose/ Be my light/ In the darkness of nights/ Be my heart." You couldn't cut the tension with a Lifetime record.
There are Nation of Ulysses call-and-response hardcore anthems ("Trophy Scars", "Lonewolves") and lines that could inspire Blake Schwarzenbach to emo feats of strength: "Keep your scars on your sleeve/ And your heart in your hands." Fancy guitars are whittled into sharp-edged daggers. Nugget-sized explosions offer violently poetic sentiments: "I'll strike you down/ With rage and rapture." Eardrums and asses are kicked.
When You Fail Me was released two years ago, there was grumbling about its post-Jane Doe experimentation and misspelled love letters. Some sticking points were the "First Light" intro and the acoustically bent "In Her Shadow". Nowadays, instead of overstuffed, that older album sounds a bit thin. It's a comparative backward glance: Guitarist Kurt Ballou did an especially fine job recording No Heroes. It's huge. Musically, as if panning for gold, the band removed everything extraneous and came up with something richer.
Also surprising: No Heroes is the longer record of the two, even with fewer songs. But because the writing's strong, it speeds by. You see what I'm getting at? I'm a big fan of You Fail Me and the past work, but I'd venture to say this is the band's most fully realized, which (again) is amazing this far into their catalog. Score a victory for old guys with bad knees! Conceptually reminiscent of the way Orthrelm's OV rocked socks within a tight framework, No Heroes is one of the year's most musically cohesive ways to keep pulses beating rapidly. | 2006-12-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-12-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Epitaph | December 13, 2006 | 8.1 | 35ec50d7-ccc8-4c17-a475-372308f1a0db | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The latest collection of sun-dappled pop songs Zooey Deschanel recorded with M. Ward under the name She & Him is the duo's most alluringly casual to date. The breezy, inviting, confidently arranged tunes may come as a surprise to those who've previously dismissed Deschanel on principle alone. | The latest collection of sun-dappled pop songs Zooey Deschanel recorded with M. Ward under the name She & Him is the duo's most alluringly casual to date. The breezy, inviting, confidently arranged tunes may come as a surprise to those who've previously dismissed Deschanel on principle alone. | She & Him: Volume 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17990-she-him-volume-3/ | Volume 3 | In a recent column at the Week, film critic Monika Bartyzel made a convincing argument that it's time to retire the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl." Critiquing a particularly hollow and noxious stereotypical female character that was cropping up in films like Garden State and Elizabethtown, Nathin Rabin coined the popular term back in 2007. But awash in an endless stream of analysis, over-analysis, supercuts, and admittedly pretty hilarious parody Twitter accounts, Bartyzel now thinks the term has “outlived its usefulness and become a part of the very marginalizing trend that it was designed to rally against.”
Not convinced? Look no further than the common perception of Miss Polka-Dots-and-Cupcakes 2013 herself, Zooey Deschanel. The title star of Fox's sitcom “New Girl” and sundress-clad half of AM radio nostalgists She & Him, Deschanel has also become the English language’s most popular synonym for “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” Her pretty-vacant role in (500) Days of Summer and the misleadingly “adorkable” marketing campaign behind “New Girl” notwithstanding, there’s more to Deschanel than the stereotype suggests. True, most musicians have to deal with misconceptions and pigeonholing in some form or another, but pop culture has caricatured Deschanel in a way that’s quietly denied her artistic agency. Need proof? Last week, I conducted a very unscientific experiment: I asked five people in casual conversation if they knew that Deschanel wrote all the original songs on She & Him's albums. All five of these admirably honest people gulped, looked down at their shoes and said no, they did not.
A big reason why it’s easy to underestimate Deschanel is that the actor-moonlighting-as-pop-musican is ripe for both parody and Dogstar jokes-- still, I'd bet the keys to my red Plymouth that most people wouldn't have a hard time believing that Jared Leto at least wrote all of the bloated-ego space-operas on the last 30 Seconds to Mars record. But like the unexpectedly complex character arc of her “New Girl” character Jess Day, Deschanel's breezy, inviting, confidently arranged tunes come as a pleasant surprise to those who've dismissed her on flimsy principle (or hypothetical twee allergy) alone. Volume 3-- the latest collection of sun-dappled pop songs she’s recorded with M. Ward under the name She & Him-- provides further proof. Pulling tricks from the songbook of 60s pop and country crooners like Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline, She & Him bask unabashedly in the glow of nostalgia, but Deschanel also finds a way to assert a unique personality within the pop idiom. “I’m stronger than the picture you took before you left,” she sings in her amiable, mid-morning yawn of an alto on “Turn to White”, one of Volume 3’s highlights. “In the light, it faded to white.”
Perhaps even moreso than the first two She & Him albums, Volume 3 has an an alluringly casual feel: Deschanel has a certain kind of charisma that allows a song to hang loosely but never fall apart. On a few occasions, things get a little too lax: she mumbles the verses of “Somebody Sweet to Talk To” like a person recovering from dental surgery, but she gets it together in time for a sprightly chorus that ends up being one of the album’s catchiest melodies. M. Ward’s production is at once detailed and featherlight. It sometimes recalls the gilded edges and baroque flourishes on his lush, self-produced 2009 record Hold Time, but the songs themselves aren’t as tight as, say, “Never Had Nobody Like You” (an M. Ward track on which Deschanel provides back-up vocals). Ward gives them enough room to sway leisurely, as though a warm breeze is rustling through.
Volume 3 is the first She & Him album since Deschanel’s divorce from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, but those scouring the lyrics for gossip might be a tad disappointed: unlike Ray J, Deschanel is tactfully tight-lipped about her personal business. The best songs here are the ones about heartbreak, but that’s been true on every She & Him album. Deschanel is not a confessional or even very specific lyricist, but she often gets mileage out of zinging, gently self-deprecating turns of phrase like the ones on the excellent opener “I’ve Got Your Number, Son”. “What’s a man without all the attention?/ Well he’s just a man,” she sings, “Who am I without all your affection?/ I’m a nobody, too.” She has a way with that kind of line that Jenny Lewis has perfected-- cutting in one breath and knowingly self-lacerating in the next.
But that’s precisely why Deschanel's music ultimately transcends the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tag: She spends the following 13 songs asserting that she’s not a nobody when she’s alone. It doesn’t shy away from sorrow, but as far as heartbreak albums go, Volume 3 is surprisingly resilient. When she’s wallowing-- as on the drizzly piano ballad “London”, one of the album’s more forgettable numbers-- Deschanel finds comfort in the fact that at least everybody else around her is wallowing, too. “We all go through it together, but we all go at it alone,” she sings on “Together”. The sentiment might be depressing if it weren’t tucked inside the most infectious melody on the whole record. | 2013-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 10, 2013 | 7.5 | 35f1cad0-2d87-412c-9f01-d323bd3d8830 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The half-baked 1999 release Born Again reeks of a posthumous cash-grab. We look back on its place in the Biggie canon on the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death. | The half-baked 1999 release Born Again reeks of a posthumous cash-grab. We look back on its place in the Biggie canon on the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death. | The Notorious B.I.G.: Born Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22954-born-again/ | Born Again | Born Again commences Biggie’s posthumous disemboweling. It’s the first project bearing his name that was conceived, produced, and completed after the Brooklyn icon had gasped his last breaths. By now, rap fans are deeply familiar with this baleful, unlovely creature—the posthumous collection of reworked demos, outtakes, and leftovers cobbled together by executives and hired guns, paired with a list of guest artists and of-the-moment producers. They reek of boardroom meetings. They usually fill you with a hollow, complicit feeling for even hitting “play.” It is hard to think of five such records in pop-music history that justify their existence after their first-week sales figures have posted.
In the two years since Biggie’s death, his mentor and corporate svengali Puff Daddy had already found several ingenious ways to siphon cash and attention from his dead protégé. Puffy's solo album, long in the works, was retitled No Way Out from working title Hell Up In Harlem and overhauled after Biggie’s death, emerging full of gothic dread and intimations of ready-to-die-ness. Its biggest single was his Police-sampling, “I’ll Fly Away”-interpolating “I’ll Be Missing You,” a maudlin tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. that spent 11 weeks at No. 1.
The following year, he released the debut album from The Lox, a hardheaded trio of Yonkers rappers with a deafening street buzz. Puff decked them in shiny suits and dropped them in front of Hype Williams’ fish-eye lens, where they looked about as comfortable as middle schoolers stranded at prom. The album included the less-heralded, equally maudlin tribute, “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa.” In the video, baby-faced Jadakiss, Sheek Louch, and Styles P poured their hearts out to their dead friend, while Puff Daddy stood behind them, pointing meaningfully at the camera. It was clear that whatever Puff thought of the grief process, he didn’t see much need to keep it behind closed doors.
Somewhere in there came the announcement for Born Again. Initial reports promised a sort of Biggie bildungsroman, pairing narration from Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace with unheard demos and unreleased material. Rap listeners had been busily copping and sharing Biggie exclusives from a steady stream of mixtapes, freestyles and unfinished cuts dating back to 1993, but those traveled in rarefied circles, and the idea of a studio album bringing this stuff to the masses was enticing. But the story changed quickly, and often; a full-page ad in the September ‘99 issue of The Source promised some intrigue, including a track that would posthumously reunite Biggie and 2Pac and a new remix of “Party & Bullshit” that foretold an appearance from Will Smith. For better or for worse, this never came to pass, and what ended up being released was a jumble of some older, less well-known verses and some recycled material from already-available releases.
Born Again wasn’t Biggie’s story. Sure, it spawned one or two lasting cuts: the flashy, Duran Duran-sampling “Notorious B.I.G.” and the vicious early pre-Ready To Die demo “Dead Wrong.” But the real story it tells is about Puff Daddy—how he flailed into the spotlight after Big’s death, how he treated his protégé’s legacy. He immediately sought to cast himself as Biggie’s equal: You can see the video for “Victory” as a sort of prelude. Biggie’s verse play is just background music for shots of Puff Daddy running slow motion in front of explosions in the rain.
This is the kind of Biggie album Puff made without the stubborn, strong-willed Wallace present in the room to dig in his heels and say “no.” The production for the album makes no sense—it made no sense for a Biggie album in 1999, and it makes even less sense in 2017. The dank, chaotic original “Niggas” from 1993, produced by Mister Cee and gloriously scarred up with frenetic scratching, gets cleaned up and “updated” all the way to 1999, sounding tame and inert. The Timb-boot funk of that basement session evaporates completely, and the song loses all of its meaning transferred into major-label sunlight.
Similarly, it’s nice to think about Mannie Fresh and Biggie in the same room with Biggie alive—they were both inventive, antic minds that loved surprising word choices and unpredictable flows. But hearing Biggie’s second ferocious verse stripped from the original version of “Dead Wrong”—a song, remember, that appears elsewhere on this album—laid over Fresh’s bouncy instrumental “Hope You Niggas Sleep,” and followed by verses from all the members of Hot Boys and Big Tymers, only underscores how dead Wallace was.
His verse from “Dangerous MCs,” meanwhile, was meant to appear on a song from Busta Rhymes’ The Coming, produced by J Dilla. It was scrapped purportedly because of some veiled threats at 2Pac lurking in it and the album’s makers were leery of tossing any more powder into the keg. With them both dead, Big’s incendiary lines detonate harmlessly over an airless, functional beat from Nottz: “Catch my drift/Or catch my four-fifth lift/At least six inches above project fences/Turn meat to minces/Jumps turn to flinches/When I rain I drenches/Cleared your park benches.” Hearing one dead man launch subliminals at another dead one is perverse, particularly since the producers arranged some East Coast/West Coast unity kabuki elsewhere on the project, bringing Ice Cube to rap a verse on “If I Should Die Before I Wake” saluting Biggie as the “King of New York.”
Is any of it worth it? Tough to say. Without this album, you might have never heard “Relax and take notes while I take tokes of the marijuana smoke.” That’s a canonical line, and it introduces “Dead Wrong,” the only near-classic here. The original, produced by Easy Moe Bee, is a giggly and profane game of Dozens, Biggie indulging his filthy imagination for all its worth: broomsticks get used for unspeakable purposes and Lucifer is laughed out of the room. On the new version, the stakes are higher, and the music sharper, a sideways-jerking, always-falling-off-the-beat thing that samples the Rev. Al Green, of all people. He didn’t even fuck it up by including a new verse from a pissy white kid named Eminem on it, a rapper Big had never heard of who had mostly become famous at that point for making fun of his mom and boy bands. It all sounds a little tired in retrospect—“cannibals and exorcisms, animals havin' sex with 'em”—but at the time, it was a revelation.
The decision to bring Eminem in said a lot about Puffy’s shifting priorities. Mark Pitts, an executive producer on Born Again, likened the project to “building Frankenstein.” Even shortly after working on the project, he sounded queasy about it: “The only thing that bothered me was the [guests artists] on the album. He would’ve respected them all, but he wouldn’t have worked with them all. Just because they’re hot doesn’t mean they mesh.”
Soon, he would accompany artists he wouldn’t have even respected: Korn comes to mind. The trail of artists who can technically claim to have appeared alongside the Notorious B.I.G. has only grown more disheartening with time. “I did real songs with Big, no made-up shits,” Jadakiss sneered at 50 Cent in their 2006 battle. By then, having recorded a song next to Biggie Smalls was no longer rarefied air, and these were the first unreal songs with Big. In that sense, they inaugurated a long and sad tradition.
From Hendrix to Elvis to Nirvana, none of this death-industry stuff is new. But in hip-hop, a music tied so closely to the inhuman ravages of the drug war and the carceral state, the charge pulsed a little hotter. Nineties gangsta rap always smelled of sulfur, of various deals cut with sundry devils, and its most potent tracks gave those who confronted them a mortal thrill. Alive, Big could inhabit this archetype and artfully squirm out of it in the same line, and it only took his presence—no more, no less—to set this animation in motion. “Excuse me, flows just grow through me/Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches,” he deadpanned on a throwaway line from Ready To Die’s “The What.” You could lose an hour, or a year, thinking about the imagery there, plumbing the mind that casually bundled those two thoughts together. “We dress up like ladies and burn ‘em with dirty .380s,” he proposed on the Life After Death cut “Niggas Bleed.” These lines are well-worn by repetition that they should, by all rights, have lost their strangeness. And yet they have not: Imagine Big, all 300 pounds of him, packing heat, dressed in woman’s clothes; once your mind’s eye has seen that, you won’t ever lose it. It’s indelible.
On Born Again, he is immobilized, and can thus perform none of these tricks. You can feel the absence of his animating touch—his hot breath, his shrewd eye, his capacious ear. This is when the mortification of his body was complete, and he was rendered as just a voice that others could manipulate without his consent. He has nothing to do with the music and no way of playing against his environment. As a result, there’s no inner music at work, nothing much to listen harder for. A good artist leads you into their genre from some other, outside place, showing you the familiar shapes through the warping lens of their mind. Their individual predilections and quirks become elemental laws of physics, rules. Biggie’s voice is all over Born Again, but you feel the absence of his mind. Here, he is just a gangsta rapper, the nimblest one that ever lived. | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Boy | March 9, 2017 | 6 | 35f2ae14-c5f4-4a22-922e-a5e8b122868e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Overdue reissue of the 1992 lo-fi classic, originally released in an edition of 500, uniquely packaged copies. | Overdue reissue of the 1992 lo-fi classic, originally released in an edition of 500, uniquely packaged copies. | Guided by Voices: Propeller | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3602-propeller/ | Propeller | At this very moment, there is an original pressing of Propeller selling on eBay with a starting price of $850. In his new history of the band, Guided by Voices: 20 Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, James Greer tells of a copy that eventually sold for more than $6,000. It's not hard to see why these records are so costly and coveted: Only 500 were pressed in 1992, and band members and assorted hangers-on decorated each of them by hand, mimicking Robert Pollard's collage-style graphics, in the process making each one unique.
In its 13 years of existence, Propeller has been much more lovingly preserved on vinyl than on compact disc. For years, I only knew it as the other half of Vampire on Titus, which always made me recall Big Star's #1 Record and Radio City (both bound together on the same disc, still awaiting separate deluxe reissues). That's good company, and an appropriate connection, but for me, Propeller always suffered the proximity of the disinviting Vampire on Titus, as fanged an album as its title implies.
Now, with Scat Records reissuing Propeller, the emphasis is again squarely on vinyl. The CD version has nice new packaging featuring several of Pollard's collages, essentially enabling you to choose your own cover. But it pales in comparison to the LP itself, which includes an insert with 81 of the original collage covers and reproduces the #14 cover ("50 EGGS") and the boxing diagrams in their original 12"x12" dimensions. Despite its release during the heyday of the compact disc, Propeller seems to be an album primarily intended for vinyl and its enthusiasts; any other medium remains an afterthought.
The music that goes on vinyl also comes from vinyl: Propeller sounds like a sonic collage gathered from what would seem like an exhaustive collection of 70s rock LPs-- Cheap Trick, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Todd Rundgren, John Lennon, maybe even some Wings. On Propeller these period-rock influences are closer to the surface than on subsequent GbV albums. It's Pollard's first big rock statement, from the crowd chants that open side one to the anthemic guitar chords that end side two. As such, it's a little rough here and there, its slight imperfections alternately amplified and pardoned by its lo-fi sound, but ultimately it remains insistent and compelling. Bee Thousand is written about more often and exalted more devotedly (and rightly so), but Propeller proves just as essential to the Guided by Voices mythos. More than that, it's just a solid rock album, one that gives you all the tools you need to understand and appreciate it. Enjoying it should be easy.
"G! B! V! G! B! V!" the crowd chants at the beginning of "Over the Neptune", and presumably it's Pollard who yells, "Are you ready to rock?" That's a bold, somewhat self-deprecating kick-off for a band whose audience at the time barely extended beyond Ohio and who were pressing only 500 copies of what they wanted to be their breakthrough album. But that introduction not only predicts the obsessive cult that would gradually surround Pollard, but it also prefaces a medley ("Over the Neptune" bleeds neatly and dramatically into "Mesh Gear Fox") that contains the whole of Pollard's large and complex philosophy about rock and roll and about the inspiration he derives from a live crowd ("It's the way you look it's the way you act when you're near me," he sings at the song's climactic push). Those chanting voices are the ones that guide him, and here they usher you into Pollard's world, where you learn to decipher his coded lyrics and speak his rock language.
Propeller achieves what Pollard calls on "Weedking" a "violent pace." That song picks up where "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" leaves off-- in full rock anthem mode. It begins with the rallying cry, "Long live Rockathon", which is both a shout-out to the band's fledgling minilabel and a concise summation of a credo for long, beery live shows. With its affectionately re-created Beatles harmonies, the chorus of "Quality of Armor" reappears precipitously throughout the song, slyly inverting the come-on of "Drive My Car". "Metal Mothers" bleeds pop melancholia, and the popping guitar melody of "Unleashed! The Largehearted Boy" creates a bouncy momentum that carries into "Exit Flagger", with its unannounced and powerful racing=death metaphor.
After the perfect adolescent wistfulness of "14 Cheerleader Coldfront", Propeller trails off as it makes its way to the finish line. Still, after the odd collage "Ergo Space Pig", "Circus World" and "Some Drilling Implied" give the band a chance to run through more guitar solos, breakdowns, rock dramatics that you'd think lo-fi was capable of sustaining. But the sound preempts any chance of irony-- all those rock anthems, monumental choruses, and microphone windmills are completely from the boy's large heart. That's the key to the band's appeal, the factor often missed or simply left unstated: Pollard believes in rock and roll, and Propeller is his sacrifice on the altar. And that lo-fi sound is essential: it preserved the illusion of connection between performer and listener, hinting at an intimacy that Pollard knows doesn't exist, but damned if he isn't going to try. | 2005-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Rockathon | November 7, 2005 | 9.2 | 35f8939e-c452-4d09-a9f0-027a7bddd2fb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Sordid family history has long been the source of the Houston rapper’s most resonant storytelling. His latest project is such a major leap in craft and style, it becomes a superpower. | Sordid family history has long been the source of the Houston rapper’s most resonant storytelling. His latest project is such a major leap in craft and style, it becomes a superpower. | Maxo Kream: Brandon Banks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxo-kream-brandon-banks/ | Brandon Banks | In a cheeky promo video released on Father’s Day, Maxo Kream’s dad explains the origin of his moniker Brandon Banks. “People could not pronounce Emekwanem,” he says, “I spent 18 hours a day explaining my name...so I changed it to Brandon Banks.” In this telling, which Emekwanem delivers with a jolly charisma, the handle is born from a comedy of errors: his name was hard on American ears, so Emekwanem made it easier.
It turns out that’s the Disney version. In reality, Brandon Banks was Emekwanem’s criminal alias. Maxo knew Banks as the scammer whose grifts enriched and endangered his family in equal measure, and whose jail bids sowed the seeds for Maxo to later embrace street life. Sordid family history has long been the source of Maxo’s most resonant storytelling, and on Brandon Banks it becomes a superpower. As Maxo details the trials of his family, he’s energized by the parallels of their struggles, his bonds deepening as he claims his place within this complicated lineage.
Maxo’s father serves as both a muse and foil, popping up throughout the record as both a character and a presence. Mirroring the album cover, a collage of their faces, Maxo builds stories around their points of overlap and distinction. His father’s scams aren’t laid out in detail, but their effects are felt in Maxo’s ties to street and gang life. “Bissonnet” breaks down the relationship between Emekwanem’s capers and Maxo’s thugging into direct cause-and-effect: “Police kicking in my door/Threw my mama on the floor/HPD took my pops/I bought a heat, hit the block.” When Maxo later gets kicked out by his mom, it feels like he’s following his dad’s lead.
His dad shapes his thoughts in “Meet Again” as well. Written in the style of Nas’ “One Love” and interpolating Ice Cube’s “Steady Mobbin,’” the song is a letter to an imprisoned friend who has become a member of Maxo’s extended family in his father’s absence. Maxo addresses him as a brother: “Let me tell you ’bout your daughter/Yesterday she tried to walk/Everyday she getting smarter/Other day she tried to talk,” Maxo raps like a proud uncle. Because his dad and brother have been imprisoned before, he knows exactly what to write to keep his homie’s spirits up. As he moves from neighborhood gossip to personal news to lawyer updates, his casualness feels practiced. It’s touching and bleak.
What prevents the record from becoming weepy and drab is Maxo’s pervasive sense of pride in himself and in his rapping. He has a dark sense of humor and a wry charm that, combined with his choppy flow and gruff voice, give his music a buoyancy. “Drizzy Draco” is a showy fusillade of gun bars that's as much about wordplay as always standing his ground. “Spice Ln.,” named after a street in his hometown of Alief, details capers with various levels of success, from a burglary in which the victim texts the robbers that they missed the money in the attic to a drug boost in which the victim later buys the drugs back. There are deaths on all sides and the gains are always meager, yet Maxo cherishes his life in full, the ups and the downs, the danger and the absurdity.
On the record’s best songs, the action is the prelude to soul-searching. “8 Figures” is frank about the slipperiness of fast money, but then explodes into flexes. Maxo knows the smarter route, but he can’t deny that it just feels better to spend money than to save it. “Dairy Ashford Bastard,” another ode to an Alief street, is a tribute to and castigation of his dad. Pulling no punches, Maxo claims that Emekwanem was a cheater and domestic abuser in addition to being a convict. In the context of Emekwanem’s goofy interludes throughout the album, this revelation can feel like a reversal, but Maxo yokes these failures to his dad’s strengths, detailing his father’s overall commitment to his family and to Maxo. “I’m glad you spanked my ass/I’m glad that you my dad/And I’m thankful for yo ass,” he says with sincerity.
The forgiveness Maxo offers his dad might feel overly generous or one-sided, given the omission of his mom’s perspective, but Maxo preaches loyalty as the bedrock of all relationships, so loving his dad is a matter of principle. While that sentiment sinks the Tupac-inspired “Brenda,” which feels like a rap adaptation of the Moynihan Report, the larger takeaway is that Maxo sees himself in Emekwanem (who he’s actually named after) and in his many real and adopted brothers. Like Punken before it, Brandon Banks is a major leap in craft and style as well as refinement of his self-image. As Maxo takes stock of the varied fates of his extended family he sees his own life with greater clarity. | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Big Persona / 88 Classic / RCA | July 19, 2019 | 8.4 | 35f952a0-fed2-40d3-8a4c-7fe87b37d5a8 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
In an early-2000s Montreal music community renowned for heart-on-sleeve, shoot-for-the-moon rockestras, the Unicorns were the odd band out. Eleven years on, their messy and often brilliant full-length has been reissued with bonus tracks. | In an early-2000s Montreal music community renowned for heart-on-sleeve, shoot-for-the-moon rockestras, the Unicorns were the odd band out. Eleven years on, their messy and often brilliant full-length has been reissued with bonus tracks. | The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19685-the-unicorns-who-will-cut-our-hair-when-were-gone/ | Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? | It’s a bit misleading to say the Unicorns have reunited after a 10-year absence, because they always seemed like they were barely holding it together in the first place. It wasn’t just that the band was built precariously upon the complementary-but-combative songwriting partnership between Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn and Alden “Ginger” Penner, or that their infamous live shows were liable to degenerate into a chaotic clusterfuck of broken gear and profanity-laden tantrums. For the Unicorns, this instability was embedded into their music’s root DNA; they took the term “pop music” at face-value and left us with a gooey, messy, combustible splatter. But with 2003’s Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone—their first and, to date, final widely released recording—Thorburn and Penner effectively got their shit together just long enough to herald their band’s demise.
In an early-2000s Montreal music community renowned for heart-on-sleeve, shoot-for-the-moon rockestras (see: the Dears, Stars, and, of course, scene lynchpins Godspeed You! Black Emperor), the Unicorns were the odd band out. From the color-coordinated white-on-pink stage attire to their bottomless well of theme songs for imaginary cartoon characters (“Jellybones”, “Sea Ghost”) to the vintage synthesizers set on “fart,” the Unicorns seemed to be the antithesis of their more openly impassioned, stern-faced peers. And the one emergent local band with whom they initially shared a predilection for gimmicky onstage attire, vocal hysterics, and volatile performances—the Arcade Fire—would soon solidify into a model of poise and professionalism, something the Unicorns could never hope to become. Sadly, they didn’t survive long enough to divest their almost-anthem “Let’s Get Known” of its aspirational irony: After touring themselves into the ground over the course of 2004, the Unicorns would unceremoniously disband just as south-of-the-border publications like the New York Times and Spin were flying reporters up to Montreal to soak up the city’s je ne sais quoi.
Eleven years may strike some as a premature anniversary for a reissue, but the Unicorns’ moment feels so much deeper in the past when you consider how slick and streamlined popular indie-rock has since become, and how few records have matched the scatterbrained unpredictability, frayed-nerve unease, and tooth-rotting tunefulness of Who Will Cut Our Hair. Throughout its 13 tracks (many of which are re-recordings of songs from two limited-run self-released discs), the Unicorns gleefully defy easy categorization as if they were a group of sneaky seventh-graders playing dodgeball: Too complex to be classified as garage-rock, too unsettled to be psychedelic, too hooky to be described as art-damaged, and too fiercely funky to lapse into twee solipsism. (The latter quality came courtesy of secret-weapon drummer Jamie Thompson, who only appears on a handful of tracks here, but who became a full-fledged member after the album’s release.) Each song seems to undergo a diagnostics check—squelching synth test patterns, random rimshots, documentary snippets about Satanism—before it’s set loose, eventually traversing enough twists and turns to rival the Who’s epic “A Quick One, While He’s Away” in half the time. And even after living with this album for over a decade, you’re still never quite sure where it’s going to take you.
Unlike many songwriting foils, Thorburn and Penner have similarly peculiar voices, giving their melodic interplay a finish-each-other’s-sentences sense of intuition while lending their moments of playful in-song sparring a discomfiting tension. When the two start trading “No you’re not”/ “Yes I am” schoolyard-grade taunts on “Child Star”, it’s not unlike watching Siamese twins head-butting one another. But if that song—reportedly inspired by an unpleasant encounter with a past-his-prime Corey Haim—sees the two engaged in obvious role-play, other tracks blur the line between pretend-jousting and actual acrimony.
True to their capricious nature, the band’s would-be theme-song celebration, “I Was Born (A Unicorn)”, devolves into a custody battle between Thorburn and Penner for control of the band: “I write the songs” / “I write the songs!”/ “You say I’m doing it wrong”/ “You are doing it wrong!” But while the Unicorns may act childish, their sense of nostalgia flies in the face of today’s Instagram-filtered, #tbt sentimentalism; instead, Who Will Cut Our Hair transports you back to that pivotal moment in childhood when you first realize the meaning of death, and one’s sense of naïveté and frivolity give way to confusion and terror. For all their surface silliness—this is a band whose idea of sensitivity is serenading lines like “Somewhere in the asshole of my eye/ There’s a muscle which relaxes when you cry”—the Unicorns were motivated by a genuine desire to comfort, using fantastical images of ghosts and haunted houses to temper real-life fears and anxieties. After all, an album that begins with the flustered “I Don’t Wanna Die” ends with the peaceful “Ready to Die”, suggesting that acceptance of death is the first step to truly living.
That certainly seems to be the case for Thorburn, whose ambitions have since shifted into overdrive, with forays into hip-hop (Th’ Corn Gangg), Everly Brothers-style harmony-folk (Human Highway), 1950s doo-wop (Mister Heavenly), and cinemascopic art-rock (Islands). Penner, by contrast, has resurfaced only sporadically, taking a rough-hewn, deconstructionist tack with his short-lived band Clues and his recently released solo album. But the duo’s divergent post-Unicorns trajectories ultimately reemphasize the perfect, delicate balance the duo achieved together.
While it remains to be seen if their recent reconciliation will yield any new material, for now, the four rarities included on this reissue function as fresh flowers at an old gravesite, offering affectionate reminders of a legacy cut short prematurely. These include two intricate-yet-immediate songs (“Evacuate the Vacuous” and “Let Me Sleep”) that fit snugly within Who Will Cut Our Hair’s prog-pop parameters, and a live recording of the never-released “Haunted House” that provides a glimpse of the Unicorns’ notoriously off-the-cuff performances and Thorburn’s cheeky banter.
But perhaps the best exemplar of The Unicorns ethos can be heard in their excellent cover of “Rocket Ship” by Daniel Johnston, the Texan pop savant who first formulated the uncanny mix of innocence and horror that informs every song in the Unicorn canon. That Johnston nod further positions the Unicorns’ modest modus operandi in stark contrast to that of their world-beating Montreal-scene mates. The reformed Unicorns will be opening some amphitheater dates for their old pals the Arcade Fire next month, but this reissue serves as a warm reminder that, once upon a time, the idea of the opposite scenario happening in 2014 wouldn’t have seemed so ridiculous. | 2014-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Caterpillar | July 29, 2014 | 8.9 | 35faafe7-b538-49b1-a8fe-13561338f855 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Swedish EDM superstar’s posthumous final album purports to reveal Tim Bergling as he’s never been seen, but the scrum of co-writers and guest singers leaves more questions than answers. | The Swedish EDM superstar’s posthumous final album purports to reveal Tim Bergling as he’s never been seen, but the scrum of co-writers and guest singers leaves more questions than answers. | Avicii: TIM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avicii-tim/ | TIM | What will Tim Bergling’s legacy be? At his commercial peak, the late dance producer, best known as Avicii, was reliable for field-sweeping big-tent anthems explicitly designed for mass uplift. There’s a scene of magical realism in the recent Elton John biopic Rocketman where, during the piano rocker’s legendary residency at Los Angeles venue the Troubadour, the entire audience literally levitates during an electrifying performance of “Crocodile Rock,” and it’s not hard to imagine something similar taking place in a raver-packed field, a collective festival throng floating on air to the cascading synth chorus of 2011’s EDM totem “Levels.”
Despite counting a number of real-deal stars in its confines, EDM itself—a subgenre of electronic music in strict economic terms, less definable by its toplines than its bottom line—has rarely made much hay of those stars’ actual personalities, to the point where some of them rarely (if ever) reveal their faces to the general public. But as his career as Avicii rocketed upwards, Bergling’s personal problems became an inescapable part of his narrative. A warts-and-all 2013 GQ profile chronicled his struggle with alcohol abuse, and he was eventually diagnosed with acute pancreatitis—the symptoms of which include “severe, constant” abdominal pain.
Touring took a well-documented toll on Bergling’s health, and his tendency to overwork himself extended to the studio as well. The 2017 documentary Avicii: True Stories depicted marathon recording sessions in which he’d willfully skip meals, while multiple reports on the making of his final and posthumously released album, TIM, have accentuated Bergling’s capacity to push himself to the point of total burnout. For all the jabs that were thrown at EDM’s practitioners during its height, it’s unquestionable that its biggest stars were on a constant grind in a cultural environment that granted easy access to hedonism.
Two years after retiring from touring in 2016, Bergling, 28, died by alleged suicide last year in Muscat, Oman. As one of EDM’s most recognizable faces (he even notched a Ralph Lauren campaign the same year as the GQ profile), Bergling has come to represent the EDM era—a musical trend that rippled through popular culture as a whole—in a different light than when he was alive. It’s sadly ironic that, despite Bergling’s fastidiousness, TIM was unfinished at the time of his death; after being approached by Bergling’s father Klas, his friends Carl Falk, Vincent Pontare, and Salem Al Fakir stepped in to help finish TIM, proceeds of which go toward the Tim Bergling Foundation, established by his family to benefit mental-health and suicide-prevention charities. The album’s 12 tracks feature some familiar collaborators from Avicii’s world—Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who enlisted Bergling to produce their Ghost Stories cut “A Sky Full of Stars,” and R&B singer Aloe Blacc, of “Wake Me Up” fame—as well as Las Vegas pop-rockers Imagine Dragons and singer Noonie Bao.
EDM’s big names work in sound and style foremost, and perhaps the biggest takeaway from TIM is that, similar to many of his peers, Bergling saw EDM’s drop-reliant trend crashing and had his sights set on mass-market pop as a whole. The finger-snapping “Bad Reputation” smacks of the sanded-down, adult-contemporary electronic sound the Chainsmokers made their names on, while the closest thing the record possesses to a drop—the bassy “Hold the Line"—is less of the buzzsaw variety and more the soft, cushiony blow that Diplo has embedded into his pop productions. Most curiously, the soothed-out opener “Peace of Mind” is strongly reminiscent of Spanish producer John Talabot’s 2012 single “Destiny,” while Martin and Imagine Dragons’ respective contributions ("Heaven,” “Heart on My Sleeve”) don’t stray too far from the CGI emotionalism that’s come to be expected from both entities.
On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. For the most part, Bergling’s past discography as Avicii—the 2013 debut True and 2015’s follow-up Stories—kept the mood as light and starry-eyed as EDM gets, the closest thing to pure melancholia being a surprisingly dour cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ “Hope There’s Someone,” on True. But the lyrics on TIM—which Bergling had a hand in penning—explicitly evoke the personal struggles that have since come to light after his death. “We don’t have to die young,” Zachary Charles of A R I Z O N A sings on “Hold the Line”; over the gently pulsing trop-house of “Freak,” vocalist BONN claims, “I don’t want you to see how depressed I’ve been/You were never the high one, never wanted to die young.”
Elsewhere, Chris Martin sounds characteristically filled with wonder (and characteristically hammy) on “Heaven,” singing, “I think I just died/And went to heaven.” Such grim lyrical prescience is reminiscent of Lil Peep’s “Life Is Beautiful” from last year’s posthumously released Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, on which the late emo-rap icon admits, "I think I’m-a die alone inside my room." Such a statement coming directly from Peep himself packs an undeniable amount of emotional power—but the overall impact of TIM’s lyrical parallels feels different, almost anti-cathartic.
EDM typically relies on guest vocalists to do the lyrical heavy lifting, but hearing TIM’s coterie of voices singing such loaded lyrics seemingly (or at least plausibly) representative of Bergling’s perspective produces an unsettling sensation of remove. The effect of these contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways. It is a sobering reminder that we’re no closer to understanding the roots of his pain now than when he was alive. | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Universal | June 12, 2019 | 5.8 | 35fb6811-ec73-47e8-ad14-c41e8b670d72 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The South Central rapper Cozz emerged fully formed two years ago with his street singles "Dreams" and "I Need That," quickly signing with J. Cole's Dreamville imprint and releasing his first mixtape Cozz & Effect. On his latest mixtape, Nothin Personal, his writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script. | The South Central rapper Cozz emerged fully formed two years ago with his street singles "Dreams" and "I Need That," quickly signing with J. Cole's Dreamville imprint and releasing his first mixtape Cozz & Effect. On his latest mixtape, Nothin Personal, his writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script. | Cozz: Nothin Personal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21446-nothin-personal/ | Nothin Personal | Completists have it easy with Cozz. Where most rappers have their growing pains scattered around Soundcloud or on shoddy tape dubs, the South Central rapper emerged fully-formed, all grit, learned distrust, and half-full/half-empty 40s. Two years ago, his pair of debut singles, "Dreams" and "I Need That," shook the Los Angeles street-rap community to its core; by the fall of 2014, the ink was dry on his deal with Interscope and Dreamville Records, the imprint run by J. Cole. News of the signing was followed in quick order by Cozz & Effect, an excellent mixtape that paired his forceful, sandpapered voice with spare beats.
Cozz’s breakout comes in the midst of a renaissance for L.A.: Kendrick Lamar and YG with their variations on the familiar Compton myths; Open Mike Eagle and Busdriver with their looking-glass art rap; Earl Sweatshirt with his white-knuckled self-improvement; and excellent, often daring music from the likes of Cam & China, Skeme, Speak, Nocando, and more. (Vince Staples and Boogie are lurking down the 710 in Long Beach.) But what makes him stand out in the crowded field is his restlessness. Cozz’s writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script.
His new offering, Nothin Personal, is a low-concept stroll through the Crip-controlled blocks of Cozz’s youth. On the somber, reflective "Grow," he remembers accounting for the $10 his father used to leave him for lunch money: "I used to spend five dollars on the weed/ A 40 ounce with the other half—every day/ Starving myself for the hunger of a buzz." In other hands, "Choice Today" might come off as dull moralizing; here, it’s the eerie, slinking voice in your head that tries, often successfully, to drag you off track. That song is also vocally experimental in a way he hasn't tried yet: he mostly abandons his staccato cadences for a slow warble, something he also trots out for "Grey Goose" and on the latter half of "Tell Me." Unfortunately, the latter is also the clumsiest moment on the record, a song about sex that’s really a song about control in the least interesting way possible.
The tape’s high-water mark is "City of God," which pairs him with Boogie for a slow creep that darts from battered Ford Explorers to boardrooms and back again. One one level, it’s two of Southern California’s finest trading cracks about piety and iPhone read receipts; on another, it finds them in awe of the fact that things are finally, mercifully panning out. But each rapper is inherently skeptical of what’s laid out before them—so it’s back to speeding through Florence, eyes on the road. | 2016-01-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville | January 13, 2016 | 6.9 | 36009c6c-0757-4904-8a2e-afc107192375 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Laura Jane Grace leads her Florida punk band into uncharted waters with a densely packed, vicious, and heartbreaking album about sublimation and transformation. | Laura Jane Grace leads her Florida punk band into uncharted waters with a densely packed, vicious, and heartbreaking album about sublimation and transformation. | Against Me!: Shape Shift With Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22419-shape-shift-with-me/ | Shape Shift With Me | Shape Shift With Me is, according to Against Me! singer and guitarist Laura Jane Grace, an album about relationships from a trans perspective. “Trans people should be able to fall in love and sing love songs too, and have that be just as valid,” she said in a recent interview with EW. In some ways it is more precisely a breakup record; the relationships described in the songs seem to radiate from a locus of rupture. “All I can see is the space in between/The space where you’re missing,” she sings on “Haunting, Haunted, Haunts.” Even the song about casual sex, “Rebecca,” sits in the trembling fermata between a breakup and new love.
The previous Against Me! record, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, depicted the total shattering and rebuilding of one’s sense of self. Shape Shift occurs more externally, is more focused on other people, although the perspective still flows seamlessly between introspection and description. The opener “Provision L-3” is named after an airport body scanner that organizes the body into discrete silver polygons. Unlike other forms of x-ray, the images produced by the scanner are less blurred haloes of flesh and bone and instead look like naked tin people. Grace approaches the subject of the scanner politically at first, but her perspective soon telescopes into the personal and physical. “Hands in the air, assume the position,” she sings. “What can you see inside of me?”
The album then shifts into its depictions of love, which Grace illustrates as a democracy of sensations, a constant shape-shifting in and of itself. In “333,” vivid descriptions of body horror (“studying sophisticated nuances of putting holes in your lungs”) collapse into a plea for intimacy: “All the devils that you don’t know/Can all come along for the ride.” “12:03” is about waiting for a phone call, and the shapeless anxieties that sprout wildly out of an otherwise relatively mundane situation. “Maybe we get where we want to go,” Grace sings. “I don’t know/Fuck it/Maybe the earth opens up and swallows us whole.”
Other songs are about loving an absence. It manifests in the album art: A disintegrating figure, reduced almost to pure noise, licks the boot of someone who’s resting a riding crop against their head. Inside the booklet, the booted form disappears and the submissive figure wags their tongue to a gray and wavering emptiness. “All of the places that we never went before/All of the times that we’ve never had/They’re dead in the past,” Grace sings in “Delicate, Petite, and Other Things I’ll Never Be,” a lyric that’s an inverted echo of another, later in the record. In the dense monologue on “Norse Truth,” she sings, “All the places that we never went, all the time we never had/What about now?/What about that?” Both songs are about the way in which we see people we love, and the ways in which they see us, a flexible interpretive lens that never stops changing or revealing new angles. “I want to be more real than all the others” on “Delicate” turns into “I wanted you to be more real than all the others” on “Norse Truth.”
The band’s music on Shape Shift is less straightforward than Transgender Dysphoria Blues. As a noisy, digressive follow-up to an anthemic rock record, it’s more a parallel to their audacious sophomore album As the Eternal Cowboy, and its relationship to their rumbling folk-punk debut Reinventing Axl Rose. Beyond this, it doesn’t resemble any other Against Me! album. The way it’s produced, they sound less like a band playing together than a band layered on top each other, giving Shape Shift the hollow throb of post-punk or new wave, a space deliberately maintained between the instruments so dread can build inside of it. On “Crash” and “Rebecca,” the band sound as clean and separated as Blondie on Parallel Lines, another album where alienation and absence establish both content and surface.
Of course, Transgender Dysphoria Blues was only straightforward musically. The story it told was a woman realizing that she’s a woman and rerouting her experience of the world through that. Shape Shift is a story about what happens afterward, what it means to interact with and fall in love with others after you’ve finally arrived at a solid idea of yourself, and how this solidity is challenged and reshaped through these interactions. It’s an album about sublimation, about transformation. “I want to be as close as I can get to you,” Grace sings in “333,” describing an intimacy so intense, so close, that it’s like exploding your own shape, so you can flow into someone else’s. | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Total Treble | September 24, 2016 | 7.4 | 36071ba6-6092-4698-b1fb-0553a60b8b55 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Over the course of 26 years, Green Day have gone from pop punks to rock stars. Their latest, however, has little effect on their legacy and lapses into pandering, embarrassing lyrical misfires. | Over the course of 26 years, Green Day have gone from pop punks to rock stars. Their latest, however, has little effect on their legacy and lapses into pandering, embarrassing lyrical misfires. | Green Day: Revolution Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22474-green-day-revolution-radio/ | Revolution Radio | Green Day are victims of accidental evolution. Between Dookie and American Idiot, they shifted just enough in texture and composition that the modest, Bay Area-pop-punk trio eventually generated the aura of an imperial rock band. They managed this without ever directly shedding their pop or punk sensibilities, even as their ambitions slipped into the hysterical space of musical theater. Revolution Radio, their first album in four years, following up the miscalculated trilogy ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ!, seems a deliberate reduction in scale. ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ! documented a band without any ideas; it’s an oddly empty, back-to-basics rock album unreasonably contorted over three records. Revolution Radio documents a band with one idea, which is, as far as one can tell, to make a Green Day record, one with fewer indulgences and overarching concepts and more capital-R Rock.
The opener, “Somewhere Now,” has brief flashes of invention; it’s their first opener on any album to evolve from gentle acoustic filigrees into stomping dinosaur rock. It’s designed to resemble the Who’s unhinged compression of styles, but it’s oddly weighted, so that the classic rock schematic is undermined in its execution. “I shop online so I can vote/At the speed of life,” Billie Joe Armstrong sings. His voice has lost some of its body and occupies an insecure, nasal frequency throughout the record, and it’s in this hollow timbre that he delivers most of the album’s lyrical misfires, which are mostly unrelated ideas juxtaposed to sound important or dangerous. “We all die in threes,” he sings, less like a natural end to the song’s chorus and more of a dead end that the melody struggles to recover from. The clichés fail to resolve into a song, and what’s left is a plastic tray littered with “important” rock gestures.
In “Bang Bang,” the first single, Armstrong tries to assume the perspective of a mass shooter who is eager to see their image preserved and multiplied on social media. For the most part, this approach produces incoherent combinations of social media jargon and historical violence. “I got my photobomb,” Armstrong sings. “I got my Vietnam.” The character study, a hypercompressed and retrofitted Natural Born Killers, is neither interesting nor illuminating. The title track is inspired by a Black Lives Matter protest in New York that Armstrong abandoned his car to join. None of the details or the specificities of the protest or its parent movement enter the song; the lyrics instead are generic kodachromes of activism (“Give me cherry bombs and gasoline,” and, “Legalize the truth!”)
There are some signs of animation and ambition: “Outlaws” embeds nostalgia in more nostalgia, shifting between major and minor chords as Armstrong recalls his youth as a “criminal in bloom.” It also moves through its chord changes so inevitably it almost sounds generated by a Green Day ballad algorithm. “Still Breathing” is the most successful melody on the record; the shift from verse to chorus is thrilling, though restricted to the traditional designs of pop-punk, and, as a kind of vague description of survival, it’s Armstrong’s most convincing lyrics on the record.
But Revolution Radio otherwise rarely escapes the Green Day archetype, an established language that, here, feels inelastic and calcified. It misses the living superstructures on American Idiot, the craft-based, Kinks-esque storytelling approach of Warning:, or even the accelerating entropy of ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRÉ!, which at least tried to shape a collective shrug into something unusual. Revolution Radio feels like the product of three people committed to making the idea of a Green Day record in 2016, but with reduced abilities and without direction. The album cover depicts a portable stereo on fire, which feels like an unintended analogy for the form the band takes on record: burned out, crumbled, warped into an inanimate husk of itself. | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | October 10, 2016 | 5.1 | 36097fc4-5a72-425d-befe-a3e9db9c76c1 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
*Undertow *finds Detroit noise trio Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, as they apply a wrecking ball to the spacious frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae. | *Undertow *finds Detroit noise trio Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, as they apply a wrecking ball to the spacious frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae. | Wolf Eyes: Undertow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23045-wolf-eyes-undertow/ | Undertow | “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” So declared sci-fi grand poo-bah Ray Cummings in his 1921 short story “The Time Professor,” 76 years before the inception of Wolf Eyes, his theorem’s greatest challengers in music. The clock has long since become subservient to the Detroit trio, at least aesthetically. However prominent a role it may appear to play—monumental song lengths, alternating moments of eerie calm and explosive fury that seem to stretch on for eternity—time’s ultimately rendered obsolete under Wolf Eyes’ crushing gravity. The ever-shifting darkness is all that remains, devoid of any logical metric for measuring the band’s 20-year reign of terror—which, naturally, means everything’s going according to plan.
Or is it? Just over a minute into Wolf Eyes’ new album Undertow, vocalist Nate Young takes the mic for a groggy dispatch from his personal hell, deep beneath the rubble of Motor City. “I spent too much time outside, but it never seemed the same,” he moans on the titular opener, later conceding: “I spent too much time on an answer/Wanting to see if I’d ever grow old.” Permanence, it seems, has become a bit of a chore for him and his pals–and how couldn’t it, considering our ironclad perception of the group as monstrous, restless shape-shifters? Still, Wolf Eyes aren’t about to soften, or worse, surrender to Father Time. With this record, they’re just giving him a little room to breathe. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way.
Like the band’s last long player, 2015’s I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, *Undertow *finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae. “Texas” plays out like a new age nightmare, as John Olson’s saxophone stabs into the smoke-shrouded void with skronk after agonizing skronk, electrifying otherwise sedate woodwinds into instruments of war. “Empty Island,” on the other hand, is Wolf Eyes’ dip into dub, presided over by an acrid, guillotine-like *riddim *(which is also present on the title track, albeit to a slightly lesser extent) and Jim Baljo’s hazy noodling.
Wolf Eyes save their biggest, weirdest statement on Undertow for last with “Thirteen,” a primal epic whose nearly 14-minute runtime comprises more than half of this five-track project. The monolith derives its frisson–or rather, its malaise–from a long, tortuous tug-of-war between Baljo’s guitars and Olsen’s synths, which fall upon the ears with all the grace of a Biblical swarm of cicadas. Young’s protracted moans, meanwhile, accumulate and linger, eventually bleeding into the surrounding soundscape. By the 10-minute mark, the acid trip’s reached its hemorrhaging apex and the trio amble off into the murk, hands clutching tambourines and maracas, wild hearts satiated by maniacally-enabled catharsis. | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Lower Floor | March 31, 2017 | 7.3 | 360b2977-272e-4e49-adc3-223bbd486eba | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Primarily showcasing its three core members, the YBN Collective’s first full-length captures the rough-around-the-edges charm of a group still figuring out exactly who and what it wants to be. | Primarily showcasing its three core members, the YBN Collective’s first full-length captures the rough-around-the-edges charm of a group still figuring out exactly who and what it wants to be. | YBN Nahmir / Cordae / YBN Almighty Jay: YBN: The Mixtape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ybn-nahmir-ybn-cordae-ybn-almighty-ybn-the-mixtape/ | YBN: The Mixtape | The formation and rise of the YBN Collective is reminiscent of that of another rap group of young URL-to-IRL friends, Odd Future. The latter spawned from MySpace in the late 2000s, while YBN connected on XBox Live four years ago as a gaming collective. Each broke through thanks to standout singles by their de facto frontmen (“Yonkers” by Tyler, the Creator and “Rubbin Off the Paint” by YBN Nahmir) that grabbed our attention with their abrasive lyrics and catchy songwriting. Both collectives started out the gate extremely young—the oldest member of YBN is still barely of drinking age—meaning that they were (and in the case of YBN, still are) loud, brash and susceptible to obnoxious behavior. Still, as was the case with the adolescent Tyler, Earl, and Hodgy, the YBN crew’s mixture of talent and recklessness gives their art an irresistibly dangerous feel. The question now is whether they can funnel that appeal into consistently good music.
Which brings us to YBN: The Mixtape, their first compilation as a collective. Though YBN consists of 10 members spanning four different states, The Mixtape is wisely credited to its three best-known talents: Nahmir, YBN Almighty Jay, and YBN Cordae. Cordae stands out as the most gifted with the pen (if we’re still drawing from the Odd Future comparison, he’s Earl), while Nahmir and Jay are more in line with the trap stylings that currently dominate hip-hop. The songs on YBN that highlight Cordae’s lyrical ability are the most interesting, pairing his straightforward introspective delivery with heavy, 808-driven production. But he’s featured here the least, which is indicative of the project’s weaknesses. There’s plenty to like on YBN that illustrates the group’s star potential, but it’s also bloated from unnecessary guest appearances and filler. It earns its mixtape title.
The intro, which begins with Nahmir checking in on Jay, harks back to their gaming days, when they’d discuss life through their headsets as they looted and blew up cars on “Grand Theft Auto V.” Dramatic piano chords and a pulsing synth line seep in as both rappers reminisce about their humble beginnings on the street, with Nahmir offering the most poignant line (“I used to be broke and I ain’t know the feelin’/The storm hit my house and I ain’t had no ceilin’”) in his carbonated growl. Though Cordae is the most prolific punch-line dropper of the gang (“Old Niggas,” his viral response to J. Cole’s steady shaming of younger rappers, is full of them), Nahmir has a knack for sprinkling in nuggets of profundity that manage to paint vivid pictures of his upbringing in only a few strokes. And he excels at crafting earworm hooks, like on the solo track “Feel Like,” which is clumsy and off kilter until his sing-songy chorus—“2-4, bitch I feel like Kobe”—snaps everything into place.
Almighty Jay, meanwhile, is boisterous and sloppy in his delivery, which makes him the polar opposite of Cordae, whose flow is polished and calculated. On “Target,” one of his three solo songs on the project (he’s only featured on two of the other 20 tracks), he uses it to spin a tale of getting pulled over by a “redneck-ass cop,” who discovers he’s intoxicated. “He said, ‘What in tarnation,’ hit the gas, I’m car racing,” he raps in a twang. It’s cheeky storytelling that serves as a nice change of pace to the album's braggadocio. Later, on the melodic “Pain Away,” the project’s only true soft moment, Cordae and Nahmir lament about the innocence they lost on way to stardom. Nahmir blends his introspection with boasts of women and jewelry, while Cordae paints a full picture with his pain: “I witnessed my mother she crying/And that fucked my mental, feeling revengeful.”
Even here the production is erected on thudding kicks and a monstrous low end. Hardly ever do the songs on The Mixtape not slap, a fact that’s wildy satisfying at times—like on the springy hustler anthem “2 Tone Drip” or the moody opener “Porsches in the Rain”—but also gets tiring toward the album’s back half, when the stuttering hi-hats start to taste sickly. For whatever reason, the most generic beats tend to serve as the backdrops of the songs with features, like the boilerplate keyboard melody on the Wiz Khalifa-assisted “Cake” or the overblown bass on “Man Down,” a messy misstep with a Chris Brown hook that sounds like it was held over from 2013. The Gucci Mane-featuring “New Drip” fares better at first, with candy Casio chords that recall the playful refrains of Atlanta snap group D4L. But a vintage Guwop verse is nearly wasted by the fact that the instrumental never changes and becomes tiresome by the time he drops his first brick reference.
A lack of finesse can be expected from such a fresh-faced group. But by the final three songs, which are the ones that racked up millions of views on YouTube and put YBN on the map, you’re convinced of the group’s ability to craft hits. Strangely enough, it’s “Chopsticks” by Almighty Jay, the YBN member roughest around the edges, that still sounds most convincing. “YBN, bitch, come get with the movement,” he raps in a slurry drone over bright synth chords. If YBN can tighten up the quality control, the rest of the industry will do well to heed his advice. | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 25, 2018 | 7.3 | 360b5221-3e12-420a-b4b0-24ec80d2b4f2 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
On a set of ominous club tracks billed as a dystopian concept record, the Bristol native brings an industrial edge to that city’s deeply ingrained soundsystem sensibilities. | On a set of ominous club tracks billed as a dystopian concept record, the Bristol native brings an industrial edge to that city’s deeply ingrained soundsystem sensibilities. | LCY: Pulling Teeth EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcy-pulling-teeth-ep/ | Pulling Teeth EP | Pulling Teeth, LCY’s second solo EP for their own SZNS7N imprint, is pitched as a concept record. The EP, we’re told, follows its central character Ériu—part dog, part human, part robot—on a journey through a dystopian, post-human world. As is often the case with these things, the extent to which all of this comes across during the EP’s six tracks depends on how invested the listener is in the concept. In this particular instance, it matters little either way: with or without a post-human dystopia, these are rich compositions, reverent in their admiration for UK club music and successful in their efforts to push it forward.
Last February, L U C Y changed their artist name to LCY and, with an unfortunate sense of timing, dropped the face mask that had previously been a feature of press shots and live appearances. The Bristol native has always infused their music with that city’s deep-rooted soundsystem culture; now based in London—and a former member of the fiercely dancefloor-oriented 6 Figure Gang collective, alongside FAUZIA, Dobby, Sherelle, Jossy Mitsu, and Yazzus—LCY updates that same soundsystem sensibility with a more distinctly industrial edge. These elements are most evident in the EP’s tumultuous and exciting mid stages: In the alien breakbeat of “shhh,” or the clatter of claps and pulsing grime kicks on “slutty siri.”
The EP’s structure follows a loose narrative. Opener “teeth,” with its build of strings, acid bass, and probing drums, offers a sort of birth sequence. This is followed by a short series of dramatic crescendos over subsequent tracks before the EP ultimately withers into a pulpy, organic decay at its close. Sometimes the pull of the conceptual is too much. “bite off the hand that feeds you” fizzes with nervous energy but ultimately drowns in its own deadening loop of cyborg synths. As a transitional moment between the groovy breaks of “shhh” and the grandeur of “decay”—which opens with a wash of strings before, yes, decaying into a well of disembodied voices and guttural bass rumbles—it has its place, but it’s a little overindulgent. LCY has explored the characters and conjured environs of Pulling Teeth in a longer audio treatment for Peckham-based Balamii radio, as well as a series of grotesque clay model figurines, but what binds the record together most is the friction it generates between human and android sounds.
LCY’s voice appears, disembodied, throughout—mostly as wheezy, rhythmic samples, but occasionally in the form of shapeless words and half-strung sentences. It’s just about possible to make out the odd snatch of lyrics here or there, but the effect is boldest in the way it toys with the uncanny valley. It’s reminiscent of the 2010s indie video games LIMBO and INSIDE, which thrilled players by simultaneously conjuring horror and pricking their imaginations, the action unfolding onscreen at once fascinating and unsettling, familiar yet unwelcoming. On the standout dub-techno roller “garden of e10,” industrial crackle and clanks bounce between breathy vocal clips; the track’s title is a pun on the London postcode that encapsulates both the dense urban sprawl of Upper Clapton and the wet greenery of Hackney Marshes, whose not exactly Edenic waters are themselves pumped with sewage and human waste.
The EP’s title speaks to its visceral, sinewy nature: staked on taut exchanges of attack and release, and full of hardened percussion and fleshy basslines. Outside of the dentist’s chair, “pulling teeth” refers to a task that’s difficult, tedious, and tiresome. LCY makes it look easy.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | SZNS7N | April 28, 2021 | 7.2 | 361a3b47-e6b6-4910-b0af-d51c450dcf0e | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The TDE rapper returns with newfound poise and even joy, taking R&B, Southern rap, and his inimitable lyrical style and casting it into a sophisticated collage. | The TDE rapper returns with newfound poise and even joy, taking R&B, Southern rap, and his inimitable lyrical style and casting it into a sophisticated collage. | Isaiah Rashad: The House Is Burning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isaiah-rashad-the-house-is-burning/ | The House Is Burning | It seems as if Isaiah Rashad only makes comeback albums. His last record—2016’s patient, engrossing The Sun’s Tirade, released two and a half years after the debut mixtape that marked him as a star in waiting—opened with a voicemail from the exasperated president of Rashad’s record label, Top Dawg Entertainment: “The fact that I still don’t have your goddamn album… you don’t care that they wanna hear your next shit? You just that good, huh?” At the time, the Chattanooga native cited addictions to alcohol and Xanax for his disappearance from public life and his decision not to capitalize on Cilvia Demo’s momentum; he swore he’d be more prolific going forward. That was five years ago.
Rashad’s new LP, The House Is Burning, comes after a period that included stints in near-poverty and in an Orange County rehab facility; it opens with the rapper noting, slyly, that he “just came back/See, I done been dead for real.” But Rashad is not given to the sort of longform, linear autobiography that would yield a narrative album about his experience. Instead, Burning projects newfound poise and even joy through a sophisticated collage. Rashad’s collection of references and phrases plays like the inside of a jumbled but vibrant brain.
Dating back to Cilvia Demo, Rashad’s music has been full of tributes to older, mostly Southern musicians who came before him. (That record includes songs named after the Baton Rouge rapper Webbie and Master P’s late brother, Kevin Miller; The Sun’s Tirade has “Silkk da Shocka,” to say nothing of the innumerable interpolations of lyrics and melody that dot Rashad’s music.) This has very occasionally given his work an artificial aftertaste, the musical equivalent of a friendship built on shared interest alone. But more often than not, Rashad has been able to render these elements in his music the way they appear in one’s life: as important touchstones but warped by our own experience of them.
To this point, Burning not only makes shrewd use of sampled songs by Project Pat (“RIP Young”) and Three 6 Mafia (the irresistible, Duke Deuce-featuring “Lay Wit Ya”), but in some ways climaxes with “Chad,” which is named after the late Pimp C and builds its chorus around a line from his “Big Pimpin’” verse. “Chad” does not sound like a UGK song per se—the cascading vocal run Rashad uses to open the final verse is his alone—but rather like one made by a tortured kid who grew up with that group’s music, pained but still posturing.
At times, Rashad sticks to the sort of clipped staccato flows that were en vogue when he debuted back in 2014 (see especially the Lil Uzi Vert collaboration “From the Garden”). But more reflective of the album’s mood are the songs that flirt with or fully embrace R&B. The most explicit example of this is the slinking “Score,” which pairs him with 6LACK and his second-wave TDE compatriot SZA, but there is also “Claymore,” which features the St. Louis rapper Smino and sounds as if it might fit even better on one of his albums. Rashad is a very effective writer in this mode. He has a gift for writing in aphorisms that he twists and pinches just enough to sound foreign—the verses are legible enough for listeners to project themselves onto, but specific enough to be Rashad’s own.
That Trojan Horsing of vivid detail into recognizable templates is the crux of Rashad’s music. Whether he is borrowing from his old iPods or from contemporary radio, many of his songs sound as if they began as demos of Rashad trying out someone else’s style. But the blueprints are quickly filled in with new variations, old plans crossed out, notes crowding the margins. If you heard “Don’t Shoot” from a distance it might sound as if Rashad had simply settled into a pleasant autopilot; on closer inspection, the writing is airtight in its economy, acrobatic in its most technical moments. That is Isaiah Rashad in microcosm: someone whose unassuming affect obscures ghastly scars—someone who’s walked through hell and returned with a shrug.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment / Warner | August 3, 2021 | 7.6 | 3625c9cd-102a-48b3-a1e5-55a4802482d5 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Compared to the first Gangin, the Bay Area foursome is now more patient and ruminative. They tap deeper into a give-and-take dynamic that makes them one of rap’s most exciting groups. | Compared to the first Gangin, the Bay Area foursome is now more patient and ruminative. They tap deeper into a give-and-take dynamic that makes them one of rap’s most exciting groups. | SOB X RBE: Gangin II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sob-x-rbe-gangin-ii/ | Gangin II | Nine days before the release of Gangin II, SOB X RBE’s caramel-voiced singer Yhung T.O. made a shocking announcement on his Instagram: “Gangin 2 Will Be My Last Album With SOB Me And [DaBoii] Got sum shit still in tha cut fa y’all tho.” In the caption, he elaborated, “No We Not Fonkin We just on different Terms, Crazy How You make money and Create a New Life wit Niggas you call brother and in the End they still disloyal [...] Sumtimes No matter how hard you try to keep shit together sometimes shit just be destined.” Then, three days later, T.O. and the apparent object of his ire, Slimmy B, posted the same photo with similar captions, asserting that they were “4L [for life].”
The departure of T.O. would have been calamitous. At a time when the line between rap and R&B is all but gone, T.O. is an obvious star. His lyrics have the blistering anxiety and animosity of a 19-year-old snakebitten by violence, but his delivery is measured and melodic beyond his years. (He and Quando Rondo, the natural-born successor to Rich Homie Quan, duet splendidly on “Times Get Hard.”) In a group with three propulsive, adrenal rappers, T.O.’s dulcet tones act as an essential counterbalance—he’s the calming pitter-patter of raindrops to the rolling thunder of Slimmy B, Lul G, and DaBoii.
This dynamic—T.O. cool as the river Styx; his cohorts as rabid as Cerberus—is unchanged from their self-titled mixtape and the first iteration of Gangin. At their best, as they are on “North Vallejo,” “Uber Wit a Dub,” and “Let Em Have It” (with Fenix Flexin and Rob Vicious of Los Angeles arch-knuckleheads Shoreline Mafia), SOB X RBE have the white-orange burn of a meteor in the sky. They’re thrilling in the way precocious gangster rappers tend to be thrilling: everything is intoxicating and acrobatic and, though it can’t be the case, the menace contained herein feels free of consequence.
But youth has its limitations: It’s difficult to contextualize adolescence when not only is it in progress, but it has the added vectors of sudden fame and wealth. And, though T.O. and Slimmy B’s solo projects showed moments of heart-wrenching loss and sadness, their autobiographical instincts have been subsumed in a group setting. This is beginning to change. Compared to the first Gangin—a bug-eyed and breathless gun-fu sprint through a maelstrom of bullets—the second is patient and ruminative. Their incipient political awareness (“Fuck About Us”) and the already-scintillating DaBoii’s increased candor (”Peek A Boo”) can make for a less dynamic listen, but their maturation augurs well for the future of the group.
I suspect that, had T.O.’s fit of pique led to him permanently quitting SOB X RBE, I might feel differently about Gangin II. The album—imperfect, if still very good—would be an ill-fitting and premature final chapter for one of rap’s most exciting groups. Gangin II is the second panel in a triptych or the second act of a novel. It demands a third which is, if not conclusive and definitive, something that builds on their blossoming artistic ambitions. | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SOB X RBE / Empire | October 3, 2018 | 7.7 | 362a2575-3f8f-4c39-beba-55204b185b32 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Ten years after “Go Outside,” the New York duo find solipsistic charm in revisiting their past, bolstering their classic sound with the tactile verve of live instruments. | Ten years after “Go Outside,” the New York duo find solipsistic charm in revisiting their past, bolstering their classic sound with the tactile verve of live instruments. | Cults: Host | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cults-host/ | Host | The indie-pop world has completed several rotations around the sun since Cults first released their Day-Glo earworm “Go Outside.” The New York duo’s synthesis of girl-group harmonies and Jonestown imagery was praised, at the time, for Trojan horsing a conceptual record about anxiety into soundbites ready for an iTunes commercial. Along with Sleigh Bells’ menacing cheerleader blasts and Foster the People’s bluesy hooks about Columbine, they unwittingly became part of a small trend that took the tragedies of American nihilism and washed them out in comparatively mellow, 1960s-inspired tones.
But while the axis of small indie labels has tilted towards synth pop and simplicity in the intervening decade, Cults’ very darkness has been mainstreamed: Billie Eilish’s horrorcore music videos and Lorde’s bummer ballads all embody a “doomer” mentality that set in from the very first notes of Cults’ MIDI glockenspiel. The major-label shift to melancholia offers plenty of room for overt displays of depression and high-concept music videos set in psych wards, but it left Cults’ cheeky creepiness out of step. On 2017’s Offering, they attempted to carve out a lighter sound with breezy guitars and wispy falsettos, displaying a carefree attitude that felt immediately dated. On Host, Cults find solipsistic charm in retreading the shadowy pastures of their past, bolstering the dream pop of their earlier work with the tactile verve of live instruments.
The cymbal crashes, horn blasts, and piano strokes of “8th Avenue” feel like hearing Cults in Technicolor after years of black-and-white, digitally rendered instrumentation. Working with classically trained violinist Tess Scott-Suhrstedt, along with a rotating cast of cellists, percussionists, and a trombonist, core duo Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin dig deeper into the roots of their sound. The strings and drum blasts that open “Trials” recall the lush retro flourishes of Phil Spector’s work with groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals; the thin, plucky acoustic guitar on “Shoulders to My Feet” conjures the slanted folk of George Harrison’s self-titled record. Even when Cults reach for synths, as on “Like I Do,” the snap of live drums lends weight and permanence to Follin’s cool croon, which too often faded into Offering’s layers of artifice.
Host also marks the first time Follin brought her own music and lyrics to the recording studio, and her vocals, occasionally cloying and strained on their previous record, feel appropriately at home in the mix. Her two main modes, a sugary falsetto and a sharp deadpan, work best when they provide texture to the surrounding instrumentation, rather than attempting to overpower it. The simple repetitions of “A Low” and “Like I Do” exemplify this: Her voice echoes the former’s sliding strings and highlights the low bass of the latter’s synth line. The simplicity also faithfully renders the album’s concept, which loosely tracks the toxicity of a parasitic romantic relationship on its “host.” With few details about the emotional leech, “Trials” fills in the gaps: “I know you,” Follin intones, her minor triplets suggesting wariness rather than familiarity. But the relative verbosity of “Working It Over” loses its footing as Follin competes for airtime, the reverberating piano lost behind awkward rhyming structures and crowded verses.
Ten years in, Cults find their power in returning to their origins, if somewhat reluctantly. “We can’t escape ourselves!” Oblivion bemoaned in a recent interview. Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble. The mainstream pop industry has come to inhabit the darkness they pioneered, but Cults finally feel above the fray.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sinderlyn | September 22, 2020 | 6.8 | 363596cf-8235-4ce8-9f4c-1e0be6e4bd5b | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
A new-classical sextet known for pop-adjacent collaborations tackles a set of pieces that highlight its mission to convert new listeners to contemporary composition. | A new-classical sextet known for pop-adjacent collaborations tackles a set of pieces that highlight its mission to convert new listeners to contemporary composition. | yMusic: Ecstatic Science | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ymusic-ecstatic-science/ | Ecstatic Science | The yMusic ensemble has a long track record of reaching out to new audiences for contemporary classical music, collaborating with pop stars like Paul Simon and playing pieces written by artists such as Son Lux. Yet the group’s appeal is not limited to its crossover cachet. The sextet—for string trio, flute, clarinet, and trumpet—has also shown excellent taste in collaborating with composers known primarily to classical specialists.
They’re adept at playing to both sides of the aisle. On its debut album, the ensemble balanced work by Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) with that of the New Amsterdam label co-founder Judd Greenstein. The follow-up included pieces by Sufjan Stevens as well as Andrew Norman (whose major work “Sustain” recently helped the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel pick up a Grammy).
For its fourth full-length recording, the band’s contributor list is less pop-adjacent than it’s ever been, though it’s no less compelling for that fact. The 40-minute program begins and ends with pieces by the young composer Gabriella Smith—a smart programming move, as Smith’s pieces help define the album’s overall sense of serene locomotion.
Her opener, “Tessellations,” boasts a jaunty percussive pattern tapped out on the cello during its early going. Subsequent, soaring lines for flutist and occasional singer Alex Sopp provide a feeling of liftoff. At other points, the trumpet and clarinet collaborate on nimble staccato patterns, creating a regal quality that also seems casually assured.
At the piece’s close, the reappearance of the cello beat underlines the significant round-trip distance traveled, with a minimum of turbulence. That smooth-flight sensibility is a reliable constant on the album, even during pieces that have more dissonant harmonies, like Paul Wiancko’s richly textured “Thous&ths.”
Ecstatic Science wasn’t entirely written by up-and-comers. Missy Mazzoli has broken ground with her upcoming Metropolitan Opera commission; she is also an expert with shorter forms. On this album, her title track suits the group’s expressive range of performance styles. After initially toggling between blitzing melody and languid droning, Mazzoli’s composition bridges these divergent states without any hint of rough edges.
Perhaps the best known artist on this set is Caroline Shaw, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who has collaborated with Kanye West, but whose reputation has been primarily built on the basis of her own warmly experimental compositions. Her three-movement work “Draft of a High Rise” begins with hooky melodic fragments that feel as though they’re begging to be sung (perhaps by the vocal group Roomful of Teeth, which Shaw often works with).
This gift for melody is rarely the only winning element of her music; surprising pivots of harmony and new rhythmic patterns keep coming with a steadiness that might throw unseasoned interpreters. Thankfully, yMusic know this terrain so well that their performances have an untroubled gait—one that reflects their commitment to making new-classical music accessible to varied audiences. Programs of music that are this fluidly engaging aren’t in much need of pop-world assistance. | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | New Amsterdam | February 14, 2020 | 7.3 | 363a81f7-e0b2-489a-826d-b6acbf19ef95 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
A Love Supreme is John Coltrane's defining album. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about it is designed for maximum emotional impact. This exhaustive 3xCD set gathers every scrap of material recorded during the Love Supreme sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year. | A Love Supreme is John Coltrane's defining album. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about it is designed for maximum emotional impact. This exhaustive 3xCD set gathers every scrap of material recorded during the Love Supreme sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year. | John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21158-a-love-supreme-the-complete-masters/ | A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters | John Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, the same year as Miles Davis, he spent his twenties in and out of small-time bands, a promising journeyman moving between playing jazz and the more bar-friendly music that was starting to be called R&B. During these early years he had problems with narcotics and alcohol, alternating stretches of heroin use with periods of binge drinking. Charlie Parker—every sax player's hero when Coltrane was coming up in the 1940s and '50s—had given the junkie life a romantic aura for some naive souls, connecting drug use with creativity. But the underachieving Coltrane was a run-of-the-mill addict, someone broke and in ill health whose habit clearly kept him stuck in place. He was fired from Miles Davis' band in 1957 for showing up on the bandstand dressed in shabby clothes and visibly drunk—by some accounts he took a punch from the trumpeter before being given his walking papers. And if Coltrane had spiraled and his career had ended there, he'd be remembered now as a musician who flamed out just as he was discovering his voice.
But that's not what happened. Everything changed for Coltrane in 1957 when, as he wrote in the liner notes to his defining album, A Love Supreme, he "experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." During that year, Coltrane stopped drinking and kicked heroin, and from that point forward, his career would unfold with an almost frightening amount of focus and intensity. These final 10 years are when Coltrane made his mark on the world of jazz as a leader, and he was then seemingly always on the move, in transition, each moment glimpsed as a blur on a continuum rather than a fixed point in space. He wasn't just covering ground, he was accelerating, and every phase of his later career has the attendant feeling of stomach-dropping free-fall, of being pushed forcefully into new places.
A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane's musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters to Coltrane's stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison's iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—"a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME"—that carries out the opening movement, "Acknowledgement". By the time the record gets to the closing "Psalm", which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he'd written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane's initial vision. It's as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz. Hearing it now as part of this exhaustive 3xCD set, which gathers every scrap of material recorded during the sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year, you get a clearer sense than ever before of the different forms A Love Supreme might have taken, and how Coltrane's desire to communicate something specific and profound led to its final shape.
A Love Supreme is also one of the most popular albums in the last 60 years of jazz, selling the kind of numbers usually reserved for pop (it quickly sold more than 100,000 copies, and has almost certainly sold more than a million since). If Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is the most frequently bought first jazz album for those curious about the genre, A Love Supreme is easily number two. But though they were released just seven years apart, there's a world of difference between the two records, and the success of A Love Supreme is trickier to explain. For all its structural daring, Kind of Blue also functions as an ambient record, with slower tempos and a late-night vibe. A Love Supreme is harder to get a handle on. If you can think of Coltrane's work on a continuum, from the gorgeous melodicism of "My Favorite Things" or Ballads or his album with Duke Ellington on one end and the brutal noise assault of the 1966 concerts collected on Concert in Japan on the other, A Love Supreme sits perfectly at the fulcrum, challenging enough to continually reveal new aspects but accessible enough to inspire newcomers.
Coltrane may have structured the record for just this effect. He had already been further "out" than the music heard on A Love Supreme, including some of the knotty extended jams like "Chasin' the Trane" recorded at his 1961 sessions at the Village Vanguard. He was fascinated with the innovations of Ornette Coleman from the minute he heard them in the late '50s, and though he never completely abandoned chord changes, he regularly flirted with atonality, improvising outside of a fixed key. With A Love Supreme, it was almost as though Coltrane knew he had to dial things back a little in order to share his message of spiritual rebirth with a wider audience. Though conventionally beautiful in many ways, A Love Supreme is, for many, the exact point beyond which jazz becomes too experimental.
It's possible to hear on this set how the album might have gone even further. At a time when a single track might have a dozen collaborators working on it over the course of weeks, it's a little mind-boggling to consider that the music on A Love Supreme was recorded on a single day, December 9, 1964. This wasn't uncommon for jazz records of the time. But though they had the music in the can from that first day, Coltrane wanted to try something else. So on December 10, he called the young tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and a second bassist, Art Davis to play with his quartet. The six musicians then ran through two versions of A Love Supreme's opening "Acknowledgment", so that Coltrane could explore what the music might sound like with another horn and additional low-end rhythm. Shepp was an up-and-comer deeply influenced by Coltrane; the two takes of "Acknowledgment" featuring Shepp find him serving as a kind of textural counterpoint, his more brittle and biting tone commenting on the melody from an oblique angle and hinting at possibilities existing outside of the version recorded the day before. You sense a more abrasive road not taken, one that almost certainly would have found a smaller audience.
We hear a different perspective on the fantastic live version of the suite recorded in France five months after the album's release. Five months in '60s Coltrane time was like a decade in the career of other jazz musicians, and he was already imbuing the A Love Supreme material with an extra intensity. Tyner's clanging chords on "Resolution" have a harsher edge, and Coltrane's attendant soloing is much rougher and more pointed, his notes seeming to attack the structure of the composition from several directions rather than floating along above it. This is the hard-blowing sound that Coltrane would show on Meditations, another spiritually focused album-length suite recorded later in 1965 that never had a chance at A Love Supreme's level of mainstream acceptance.
In the same year, Coltrane would also record Om and Ascension, two harsh and challenging pieces of music that strain against the boundaries of what most people would even consider music. Given what surrounds it, and how sweet and gentle it so often is, A Love Supreme was an expression of a very specific time and place, a conscious attempt by Coltrane to communicate something to his audience that was broad enough to be understood but rich and complex enough to honor both where he was as a musician and the depth of the subject matter. A Love Supreme sounds like nothing else in John Coltrane's discography, and indeed like little else in recorded jazz, sitting at the nexus of so many competing musical ideas.
The final piece of the A Love Supreme equation concerns the civil rights movement and black liberation, and how those swirling ideas were inextricably tangled up with the jazz avant-garde. Coltrane was never overtly political, but he did allow his thoughts and feelings to bleed into his music. Coltrane met Malcolm X, wrote a piece for Martin Luther King Jr., and his 1963 dirge "Alabama", a piece with a close tonal connection to A Love Supreme's "Psalm", was written to commemorate the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing that year. As the '60s wore on, politically conscious "fire jazz" grew in currency, much of it directly inspired by Coltrane's music, but during his life he never quite felt the need to connect his music to specific social currents, even as others drew inspiration from it in that context. Coltrane was seeking something broader, communing with God as he understood it.
For Coltrane, that spiritual journey led him to A Love Supreme, which became the base he'd explore from during his short time left on Earth. Coltrane occupies a unique position in jazz history. He was famous, especially in the jazz world, but he wasn't really a personality. He was not inclined toward interviews and he wasn't very good at them, preferring to let the music speak for itself. He didn't have the mystery of a Thelonious Monk, the tragic genius of a Charlie Parker, the cool comfort with celebrity or flamboyance of a Miles Davis, the combative verbal dexterity of Charles Mingus, the theoretical underpinnings of Ornette Coleman, the comfort with the mainstream of Louis Armstrong, or the symbolic stature of Duke Ellington. He led a quiet life, putting everything into his music.
His chaotic years mostly came when he was an unknown; by the time he was a major jazz figure, almost his entire life was music. If he wasn't on stage or in a recording studio, he was practicing or studying records. Seemingly every other story of an encounter with Coltrane in the 1960s involved him in a room with a saxophone in his hand, playing scales. In his mind, God had saved him, and he was going to give back. A Love Supreme was his expression of gratitude, a hopeful prayer for a better world. | 2015-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Verve | November 25, 2015 | 10 | 363e295b-63ec-4405-ba0f-48c2075cc13e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The third album from the Brooklyn quartet is an intimate and surreal experience, a true masterpiece of folk music from a band working together at the highest level. | The third album from the Brooklyn quartet is an intimate and surreal experience, a true masterpiece of folk music from a band working together at the highest level. | Big Thief: U.F.O.F. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-thief-ufof/ | U.F.O.F. | Big Thief are their own small ecosystem: Guitarist Buck Meek, bassist Max Oleartchik, drummer James Krivchenia, and Adrianne Lenker, the singer and oxygen of the Brooklyn quartet, whose lyrics can, among other things, bind all that is living and has ever lived together at the cellular level. Their music is a network of wood and wire, uncanny in its ability to sound undiscovered, like you’re stumbling upon a new species of folk rock with every song. And because they work so well as an organism, the band has a way of giving value to things that hang damp and wrinkled in our world. In the hands of Big Thief, emotion, dreams, nature, memory, even acoustic guitars are artifacts of immense size and power.
This power that Big Thief give to the natural (and supernatural) defines their third and undoubtedly best album, U.F.O.F., a mesmerizing flood of life filtered down into a concentrated drip. It’s weird in the literary new weird sense: fantastical, alien; it is an unknown presence. Spend time with this album and soon there is no tempo but Big Thief’s trot, no voice but Lenker’s whisper, you are in a now-but-then, a here-but-there. Guitar lines are Mobius strips, basslines lead you off the map, and the drums feel less like Krivchenia is hitting them and more like he is lifting sounds out of them. A dazzling record, no doubt, but the boundless joy comes from its glacial restraint, from sensing all that lies beneath its surface and all that goes unsung.
The mystery of U.F.O.F. comes in part from Lenker’s lonely and elliptical verse, like Emily Dickinson if she picked up a copy of Court and Spark. The darkness that defined Big Thief’s first two albums—the abuse and stalkers on 2016’s Masterpiece, the trauma and railroad spikes to the skull on 2017’s Capacity—has either evaporated or taken refuge deep in the subtext. What were once vivid scenes between lovers, mothers, and children are now rendered more dreamlike and misty, as if observed in the distance through an attic window. On the title track, seasons bend and maps turn blue, as Lenker waves goodbye to her “UFO friend” and sings that the best kiss she ever had was the “flickering of water so clear and so bright,” an image so indelible she revisits the “kiss of water” a few songs later. There are few greater pleasures than following Lenker’s pen to her places of solitude.
In keeping with tradition, Lenker populates her songs with people, avatars, or named vessels for parts of her personality: Jodi, Betsy, Jenni, Violet, Caroline. But more verdant on U.F.O.F. are the creatures that surround them: circling doves and lonesome loons, worms and robins, fruit bats and flies, recurring motifs of the silkworm and the moth. Lenker’s writing suggests a vast consciousness, a direct line between the inner self and the outer world. On “Orange,” hound dogs crow and pigeons fall like snowflakes, but the surreal places she travels only end back at a place of raw emotional clarity—the fragile orange wind, the flesh crying rivers on her forearm—all of it comes back to the chorus: “Lies, lies, lies in her eyes.” Her lyrics, so exquisitely drawn, could make permanent the bond between heartbreak and a blade of grass.
For every color Lenker evokes on U.F.O.F.—auburn hair, black eyes, and turquoise lungs—the band provides a lush backdrop. It is clear that Big Thief perform with a governor, their Berklee training muffled beneath the creaky, simple melodies of folk music. Fleshed out by the band are two songs from Lenker’s 2018 solo album abysskiss, “From” and “Terminal Paradise.” The former is given depth by a hypnotic drum part from Krivchenia, the latter enhanced by Meek, who adds baritone harmony to Lenker’s reinvigorated vocal performance. Meek’s electric guitar work on the album is just alluring, especially the arcing feedback he adds to the show-stopping “Jenni,” which is, in fact, exactly what a big strobe-light shoegaze jam would sound like if it were made by forest elves.
Some of these nearly imperceptible moments are the album’s best, a production flourish or a small crescendo that flicker like a shoal of fish. If you’ll bear with me on the comparison, it reminds of Radiohead at their most intimate, on 2007’s In Rainbows. The interlocking compositions, the points and counterpoints made by Meek, Lenker, Oleartchik, and Krivchenia have the same elegance of design. But the contraction and expansion of a Radiohead song—the way it leads to somewhere big—is contrasted by Big Thief’s subtle turns they breathe into their arrangements. The feedback hum that leads into the final chorus of “U.F.O.F” or the cluster of harmonies that creep in at the end of “Strange” are more like occurrences or phenomenons, things you rush to capture with your phone but before you get it out of your pocket they’re gone.
It’s hard to put a finger on the exact essence of U.F.O.F. though that is part and parcel its majesty. When I think about Big Thief, I think about “deep ecology,” an environmental philosophy dating back to the 1970s that believes the value of nature is not dependent on how useful it is for human life. U.F.O.F. revels in this, an ancient system of great worth still whirring and rustling along, unbidden to the needs of our world.
There’s also the work of the naturalist writer Rachel Carson, who, in 1941, wrote what it feels like to listen to this album when she wrote about the ocean from its shore: “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years … is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” The name U.F.O.F. suggests a connection to the unknown both within and without, and when Lenker sings of being called through a portal on “Jenni,” she beckons you, too. | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 6, 2019 | 9.2 | 36414966-2e39-4101-923f-540873cee1c7 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The Brooklyn musician stretches the boundaries of his psychedelic soul sound, yielding a record that alternates between hypnotic and languorous. | The Brooklyn musician stretches the boundaries of his psychedelic soul sound, yielding a record that alternates between hypnotic and languorous. | Nick Hakim: WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-hakim-will-this-make-me-good/ | WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD | Nick Hakim’s compulsively listenable debut album, 2017’s Green Twins, drew from Curtis Mayfield and D’Angelo while adding twists of beat music and psychedelia. His follow-up, WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, stirs some Parliament/Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone into the mix, but the result may frustrate his fans. This time around, Hakim’s tracks are shapeless, often listless, building tension only to let it ebb away. The new record doesn’t just reward close attention; it barely exists without it. Hakim has said that “If I really sink into a recording, I don’t want it to end.” It feels safe to say that he sank into most of the recordings on Will This Make Me Good, and the result can feel endless.
But there are many worthwhile moments here, even if they’re blunted by an exhausting run time. WTMMG is definitively a headphone record, and it reveals itself slowly, sometimes on an instrument-by-instrument basis. The drums on “Qadir,” Hakim’s gorgeous lament for a friend who died at the age of 25, steal up on you; they’re fairly wonderful. The guitar chords on “All These Instruments” are catchy. In the opening of “Bouncing,” a bassline and a chorus of spectral voices come together and combust in a moment of excitement. Listening to the record becomes an exercise in prying its many beautiful moments from their duller surroundings.
“Crumpy,” buried in the album’s back half, is its strongest song, and it’s not a coincidence that it sounds a lot like the tracks on Green Twins. (Hakim said in an Instagram post that it was recorded sometime between 2017 and 2018.) It is, more than anything else here, a song, and its opening lines have more character than anything on the record: “This town has really started to grow on me/My face has become one with the concrete.” In a gesture that expresses a fundamental reluctance at the core of this album, the lyrics on the title track, a meditation on morality and radicalism that should be one of the more compelling songs here, are distorted and difficult to hear.
In a tweet announcing the album, Hakim appended a note that explained a little bit more about its origin. He said that he had been experiencing writer’s block, but that the blockage had been “a build-up to the three months of expression that led to this album.” Still, he confessed, he was “still trying to figure this record out. People have told me that it’s confusing or it’s messy—that’s fine.” Credit Hakim for his self-awareness and his candor. But the people who told him that were right. WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD has plenty of gorgeous moments. Those moments will inspire the most generous listeners to wonder what this record could have been, if Hakim had given it more time to gestate, and maybe edited himself more.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | May 18, 2020 | 6 | 36423033-e9a4-465e-85ca-1af8ec894424 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The Pro Era lieutenant offers golden-age beats and neighborhood-corner rhymes on his solo debut, with echoes of Biggie Smalls and Phife Dawg. | The Pro Era lieutenant offers golden-age beats and neighborhood-corner rhymes on his solo debut, with echoes of Biggie Smalls and Phife Dawg. | Chuck Strangers: Consumers Park | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chuck-strangers-consumers-park/ | Consumers Park | Stick closely to Chuck Strangers and you just might spy him in a vintage Coogi sweater. That is to say, the 26-year-old rapper and producer cares not one whit for modern trends, swaddling himself instead in the spirit of New York’s golden age hip-hop gods. Emerging as part of Pro Era, a clique of boom-bap beatniks too young to have truly experienced that era, he filed in behind Joey Bada$$ on his breakthrough 2012 mixtape, 1999. Chuck’s convincing retro beats and occasional stints on the mic made him a key lieutenant back then: Take “FromdaTomb$,” where he flips a jazz sample from the video game “L.A. Noire” into a bugged-out opus for him and Joey to pass the weed, talk shit about school, give thanks to Brooklyn, and big up their beer pong skills.
As his more famous friend has matured into a political headspace, Strangers has stayed put in that old-school lane. His solo debut, Consumers Park, drops enough dusty samples, quick-hand record scratches, and neighborhood corner rhymes to appease any historically-minded b-boy. It’s even got shots at mumble rap masters and new-age Soundcloud stars, in the form of the provocatively titled “Style Wars.” Over sentimental piano keys and a reverberating guitar line, Strangers namechecks 2Pac and summons the spirit of the God MC: “Niggas claiming they the best while Rakim still breathing.” Bada$$, meanwhile, chimes in to denounce showboat rappers who care little for the craft. It would be easy to dismiss the pair as salty old-timers in young men’s bodies hating on popular sounds, but the music here feels vital enough to at least make you want to hear them out.
A lot of that has to do with the front-to-back production. “Thoro Hall,” helmed by Los Angeles beatmaker Animoss, is a lavish piece of 1970s uptown cool. The lean soul sample of “Two Pit Bulls,” one of 11 Chuck beats, echoes early Kanye West. The Alchemist-produced “Fresh,” meanwhile, finds Strangers rapping over an old orchestral pop number that could have been snatched straight from a Scorsese flick.
Over these fresh throwback instrumentals, Strangers plumps for a nostalgic vibe. “Class Pictures” could have come off as a series of trite teen clichés, but Strangers personalizes the story in winning ways: Over a minimalist beat that sounds teased from a hacked Gameboy, he recalls getting thrown out of his parents’ house, selling his Jordans so he could take a girl out on a date, and feeling his head explode when he sees his first rent bill.
In these moments, Strangers reveals himself to be a writer with a skill for colorful detail. He’ll drop fun quotables, too. Take the catchy “1010 Wins Pt. 1 & 2,” where Chuck wryly updates classic rap hustlerdom: “Hopping out the Uber, I’m a new-school pimp.” Given how long it’s taken him to fully step from behind Pro Era’s boards, it’s a glorious surprise to find an emcee capable of following the cadences of the Notorious B.I.G., with a streetwise flow that honors Phife Dawg.
While he grew up in Flatbush, Strangers moved to L.A. five years ago. On “No Dice,” his hometown’s influence is at its most clear: You can almost hear the subway cars rumble as the rapper tries to pick up a few dollars shooting craps. As a Spike Lee-esque saxophone wanders in and out of the mix, Strangers links the spirit of Eazy-E to Capital STEEZ, his sadly departed Pro Era comrade. It’s a three-dimensional glimpse at the day-to-day movements and emotions of one man living on the block. That’s the album’s greatest victory: offering a dead-on recreation of old-fashioned sounds while still encapsulating one artist’s distinct personality. | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Nature Sounds | March 19, 2018 | 7.4 | 364294d2-22ca-4993-9cd1-d2184275880b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Folk-rocker Steve Gunn's latest album is a rich and amiable meditation about travel and transition, about exploring, wandering, and letting yourself get lost. | Folk-rocker Steve Gunn's latest album is a rich and amiable meditation about travel and transition, about exploring, wandering, and letting yourself get lost. | Steve Gunn: Eyes on the Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21873-eyes-on-the-lines/ | Eyes on the Lines | “It's not the destination, it’s the journey” is an old cliché, but one that sounds refreshed and alive on folk-rocker Steve Gunn's Eyes on the Lines. It’s an album about travel and transition, about exploring, wandering, and letting yourself get lost. Every song happens on the way to something else, in the patches between starting out and ending up. Often it's unclear exactly where Gunn’s characters are headed, or why, but the flux in his words and music is vivid. To get caught up in these tunes is to eschew standing still.
Despite all the forward motion,* Eyes on the Lines *is also richly contemplative. As Gunn extolls the virtues of ambling, he gives himself lots of time to observe and ruminate. That reflectiveness is matched by the music, which is rarely static—there's always a shuffling beat or winding hook to keep the motor running—yet never rushed. Gunn’s band sounds confident without being complacent, and breezy in the best sense. The effects can be subtle as a whisper, but these songs continually move the air.
Gunn continually refers to roads, paths, and changes in direction. In “The Drop,” he sings, “I think I missed my flight/Looks like I’ll spend the night,” and sounds pretty happy about it. By closer “Ark,” his blissful aimlessness takes on a Zen-like quality: “Here is where we’ll get nowhere/And everywhere is there now.” It might seem indulgent to pair such beatific sentiments with jammy guitar rock, but *Eyes on the Lines *is actually quite focused.
Though Gunn’s songs develop gradually, the tensions mount and momentum builds. Often that comes from increasing jolts of energy, as in the stair-climbing hooks of “Ancient Jules,” which celebrates losing control in a rush of layered guitars. On “Conditions Wild,” Gunn again espouses letting go—“Feel the path and move along/The traces where you’ll go”—but the tune’s ratcheting swing makes that idea exciting rather than passive.
Nine players are credited on Eyes on the Lines, and you can feel their presence throughout, as each song weaves contributions into a tapestry. It’s been thrilling to see Gunn settle so well into collaboration. From his initial forays as a solo artist, to his excellent duo albums with drummer John Truscisnki, to 2014’s lush full-band album Way Out Weather, he’s continually stepped up without slipping. *Eyes on the Lines *continues that ascent, as does Gunn’s sense of the world as a grand vista to traverse. By embracing the expanse, his music has gotten bigger, and more universal. | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Matador | June 4, 2016 | 8 | 3644738f-f7d0-436d-80a9-7a7539f9a812 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Inspired by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, this five-track ambient wonder finds the New York producer letting pulses and motifs overlap until the tracks resemble the inside of a lava lamp. | Inspired by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, this five-track ambient wonder finds the New York producer letting pulses and motifs overlap until the tracks resemble the inside of a lava lamp. | Jorge Velez: Roman Birds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jorge-velez-roman-birds/ | Roman Birds | Jorge Velez has long been prolific, but that’s been especially true in the past few years. Like many underground electronic musicians, the New York producer has taken advantage of the internet’s self-publishing opportunities—in particular, the direct-to-fans platform Bandcamp—to sidestep label gatekeepers, streaming services, and crowded retailers. (Velez’s Bandcamp page currently numbers 26 releases.) Velez first gained recognition a dozen years ago with blippy disco derivatives for labels like Italians Do It Better, but his output has gradually become more esoteric and inward-looking. He’s still capable of ebullient club tracks, as last year’s excellent Forza attests, but many of his long, undulating machine jams sound like late-night missives to himself.
Roman Birds, released with no fanfare at the end of 2018, feels a little like that: a collection of private thoughts accidentally caught on tape. Purely ambient, it’s his most abstracted music in years, even more so than his 2016 L.I.E.S. album, Animals Disk. At the same time, it’s one of the most inviting things he’s ever done—a short, beguiling record that feels enveloping because it holds its secrets so close. “The best creations for me are the ones that seem to materialize out of nowhere—a few hours lost in the sounds being made, in arranging and removing and creating spaces for every element to breathe and act,” Velez has said of Roman Birds. These five tracks move with a dreamlike logic, their ruminative loops unspooling like unmediated transmissions from Velez’s subconscious.
Every track offers a variation on a murky, overarching mood, and they share a basic structural approach, running multiple sequences in parallel, unsynchronized and out of phase. Their burbling, overlapping pulses eventually come to resemble the inside of a lava lamp. His synthesizers’ microtonal tunings lend a viscous dissonance, a kind of coppery gleam; there are no hard edges, no sharp attacks. It feels like a dream of breathing underwater.
The opening “Heart,” the most skeletal of the bunch, sounds like at least three totally unrelated tracks playing at once. A dubby echo of Pole’s early albums rubs up against a chorus of tree frogs; a graceful synth lead, silvery and understated, glides over the top. A flickering riff during “Memory Spreads West and East” might remind certain listeners of a futuristic sound effect heard whenever Lee Majors used his bionic powers in “The Six Million Dollar Man”; the song’s psychoacoustic timbres and rich stereo processing seem to swim around your head. “Roman Birds” is the most peaceful and contemplative of the lot, with rippling tones speeding and slowing over tangled loops.
During the final two tracks, “Irriss” and “A Breeze You Can Swallow,” Velez’s pulses become thick and gelatinous, while the synths in the high end burn bright and clear, a little like Blade Runner. There’s no real melody here, just the hint of one, which rises up out of the churning depths and hovers, trembling, like an afterglow. It’s remarkable how evocative something made with so few simple elements can be: The music licks like flame, dribbles like water, and settles, ultimately, like layers of very fine ash. Roman Birds was inspired, Velez says, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the city of Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago. Eerie, unsettling, and elegiac, it is a strangely moving tribute to that distant tragedy—and among the finest music Velez has ever made. | 2019-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 10, 2019 | 7.9 | 364ab5ee-2033-49e6-8368-e0a369bbe9db | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Vancouver's 2009 debut Post-Nothing was an emotional blast and also a sonic blur; the follow-up finds everything hitting louder and clearer than before, along with making a huge leap in songwriting technique. | The Vancouver's 2009 debut Post-Nothing was an emotional blast and also a sonic blur; the follow-up finds everything hitting louder and clearer than before, along with making a huge leap in songwriting technique. | Japandroids: Celebration Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16564-japandroids-celebration-rock/ | Celebration Rock | Unlike many of 2009's breakout indie bands, Vancouver's Japandroids weren't hanging onto their youth out of nostalgia. For this duo, it literally sounded like a matter of life and death. While the chaotic, fist-pumping anthems of Post-Nothing were as reckless, hormonal, and pleasure-obsessed as any teenager, escapism wasn't an option. Singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse have admitted that Japandroids were shutting down the operation after years of going nowhere, and Post-Nothing was as meant as a swan song more than a debut. And for a half hour, they played with the desperation of young men about to lose something vital forever. That urgency is rarely a renewable resource, so as more time passed between the excellent 2010 single "Younger Us" and Post-Nothing's follow-up, the more worrisome its lyrics became. Where they had once vowed to go into adulthood kicking and screaming, had they survived only to surrender? That was the question every time King began a verse with what Tony Soprano called the lowest form of conversation: "Remember when?"
"Younger Us" is now the sixth song on the awe-inspiring Celebration Rock, and nothing has changed except how its context raises the possibility that it doesn't actually have to be about them. This shift in perspective is crucial to understanding how Celebration Rock can somehow manage to completely dwarf its impressive predecessor despite being made the same exact way-- same personnel, same producer, same minimal-overdub policy, same instruments, same eight-song tracklist. Hell, even the cover's pretty much the same. But in writing about something other than the experience of being Japandroids, the duo taps into a power greater than itself to address impossibly vast and elemental topics-- friendship, lust, revenge, art, self-actualization-- with songs every bit as big. The uptick in ragged and resonant guitar-based indie rock has dredged up a lot of deserved Replacements comparisons, but I don't think anything's captured their spirit to the extent of Celebration Rock: it's the Mats who had the chops to pay homage to Big Star, the irreverence to cover "Black Diamond", and the empathy to write "Sixteen Blue".
Combined with the revved-up riff on opener "The Nights of Wine and Roses", King's first lyric ("Long lit up tonight/ And still drinking/ Don't we have anything to live for?/ Well of course we do/ But until they come true/ We're drinking") recalls a time when the Hold Steady shot for something similar. But whether it was their tendency to write from a storytelling perspective or generally avoid choruses in favor of inside jokes, the Hold Steady always created some sort of distance from the listener. I've never been fully convinced that Craig Finn and co. wrote about people who'd actually listen to their music. Not so here, where Japandroids take on something like a Woody Guthrie anthropological approach. "On a lot of this new record, we actually tried to simulate the sound of what we thought the crowd would do during the songs," King told us in an interview back in March. "Dave and I were in the studio just screaming out as if we were in the audience at our own show."
And indeed, Japandroids are dealing with the real populist stuff on Celebration Rock. Sometimes the roots are exposed; "American Girl" gets a nod during the cow-punk rodeo of "Evil's Sway" and "Adrenaline Nightshift" follows in the footsteps of the Replacements' "Alex Chilton", honoring the lineage of transformative rock music by adding to it. But mostly, it's in how Celebration Rock treats every day like the last day of school, raising a glass to the past, living in the moment and going into the future feeling fucking invincible. It offers itself up as a social lubricant, music meant for radios, keg parties, road trips; the extent to which plural pronouns exceed singular is no accident.
And this is all achievable since the first thing you take from Celebration Rock is just how much they've improved in terms of capturing pure sound, everything hitting louder and clearer than before. Post-Nothing was an emotional blast and also a sonic blur, Prowse and King recreating their cramped live show to the point where they may as well have been in mono. Likewise, some songs lived and died on a single riff or lyric. Celebration Rock remains structurally minimal but incredibly dense, fashioning a bionic kind of rock music from the best parts without a moment that lacks crowd-pleasing purpose. The verse melodies take more chances and any time a guitar chord suspends, there's almost always a windup of a drum fill anticipating the duo gleefully throwing themselves into a flashmob-like chorus. If Celebration Rock were much longer than 35 minutes, it might actually be exhausting, the emotional and melodic onslaught so overwhelming that a Gun Club cover of all things is the only time you might be able to catch your breath between the fireworks that begin and end the record*.*
But "For the Love of Ivy" cleaves Celebration Rock in a way that makes structural sense. The first half feels like the one obsessed with classic rock legacy, and initially you're left reeling from the wallop of "Fire's Highway" and "The Nights of Wine and Roses"'s haymaker hooks. There are micro-level pleasures to appreciate too-- the Tom Petty rip might get the crowd going, but that little pivot before the chorus of "Evil's Sway" where it shifts from a breakneck rant to a major-key bridge is really where I hear a band making a huge leap in songwriting technique.
That's even more evident in terms of lyrics, where Japandroids have gone from having almost none at all to packing their songs with an astonishing command of legend and literalism that all but dares you to feel something. Everything burns brighter than it does in reality here ("sexual red" is their color of choice) and most human interactions are likened to explosions. What's the "Adrenaline Nightshift"? It's a "generation's bonfire," the affection of a girl with "a blitzkrieg love and a Roman candle kiss." Still unsure? How about "there's no high like this." I can't intelligently describe "hearts from hell" or why they "collide on fire highway's tonight" but I don't have to. "We dreamed it now we know," King belts and if you don't know, just wait for the guitar solo which doesn't play notes so much as release a blue streak of endorphins. Now you know.
While Celebration Rock is undoubtedly a fun record, it earns its spot amongst their heroes by discovering its emotional ballast during the near-perfect Side B. "Adrenaline Nightshift" and "Younger Us" are psychologically complex songs about simple pleasures of music and companionship that generate the momentum required for "The House That Heaven Built", the crest of Celebration Rock's rising action and the pinnacle of their songwriting. Over its five minutes, "House" grows increasingly heavy without any adding any superficial layers, Prowse's militant drum beat multiplying into tense fills, King's single guitar chord doubling over itself and a near telepathic vocal interplay delivering maybe the most inspiring of Celebration Rock's life-affirming credos*:* "When they love you and they will/ (And they will!)/ I'll tell 'em all they'll love in my shadow." Whether it's an unappreciative boss, an unfeeling lover, or just a hometown you've outgrown, Japandroids got your back. Throughout "The House That Heaven Built", you hear a band accumulating enough confidence to deliver the valedictory message of an album where 95% of the lyrics are immediately available for a senior yearbook quote: "It's a lifeless life with no fixed address to give/ But you're not mine to die for anymore/ So I must live."
This leads into the relatively restrained "Continuous Thunder", the one song here I'm really tempted to misread so as to apply it to Japandroids themselves. There's a devastating admission in the bridge that bookends the intro from "The Nights of Wine and Roses" ("If I had all of the answers/ And you had the body you wanted/ Would we love with a legendary fire?"), and the opening line, "The heart's terrain is never a prairie/ But you weren't wary/ You took my hand," is obviously addressed to a hesitant partner. But it plays to the overarching theme of being fearless in the face of doubt. Of course Japandroids couldn't act with the same urgency they did on Post-Nothing-- they're not in the same desperate situation, and they boldly manifest the confidence of having survived near-death experiences as human beings and as a band.
It'd be nice to think that Post-Nothing was inevitably too good to be ignored, but as a very untrendy band in a city with little support for live music, the odds were stacked against them. One lame show in front of the wrong crowd, the wrong choice of a single falling on the wrong set of ears, and that could've been it, just as they planned it. And yet, they went ahead anyway and soon found themselves playing to rooms full of people who don't have the answers, don't have the body they want, and have plenty of dreams that may never come true. But so what? Whether it's a result of faith in religion, in rock'n'roll, or another human being, two completely normal people can love each other with a legendary fire and it's no more ridiculous than two dudes pushing 30 years old from Vancouver called Japandroids making a rock record for the ages. You can be ambivalent about yourself but believe in something bigger, and the message is right there in the title: On Post-Nothing, Japandroids were worried about dying. This is a celebration of being alive. | 2012-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | May 29, 2012 | 8.8 | 364ba4f5-99d5-4b53-9a87-24d064880c7f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Ratking holed up in December to craft this quick-hit follow-up to their debut, and it is a lighter, breezier listen than its predecessor, thanks to the group’s eagerness to toy with its sound and writing process. | Ratking holed up in December to craft this quick-hit follow-up to their debut, and it is a lighter, breezier listen than its predecessor, thanks to the group’s eagerness to toy with its sound and writing process. | Ratking: 700 Fill EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20355-700-fill-ep/ | 700 Fill EP | Ratking’s debut album So It Goes was a Delorean trip through seemingly incongruous corners of New York rap music. Touching on insular Def Jux pessimism and outsized Dipset flair and coated by a shroud of bristly noise, So It Goes seemed to search for an old city, one in danger of being thrust into into the East River by an influx of doe-eyed, affluent young professionals. "Welcome to New York" this was not. Their music can feel like a trek through a forbidding city winter, so it’s fitting that the group holed up in December to craft the quick-hit follow up EP 700 Fill. Though it arrives at the tail end of an uncommonly brutal cold season and literally namechecks North Face jacket models and the grade of their goose-down filling on a song ("Steep Tech"), 700 Fill is a lighter, breezier listen than its predecessor, thanks to the group’s eagerness to toy with its sound and writing process.
Much of 700 Fill was written in just a week by rappers Wiki and Hak over beats that producer Sporting Life pieced together ahead of recording. The lack of an overarching concept gives the new material a freer feel, as Wiki trades grizzled storytelling for battle raps and rhyme acrobatics. Still, there are gems here: "Arnold Palmer" kicks a metaphor comparing the titular ice tea and lemonade hybrid to Wiki’s own biracial heritage while pining for a cold Brisk and a fat J on a rooftop in summer, while "Bethel" triumphantly renounces So It Goes’ high school graduate career anxiety after a year of good press and extensive touring. 700 Fill cycles between fleshed out cuts and looser lyrical workouts like "Lenape Lane" and "Sticky Trap" but even the most perfunctory of these exercises are intriguing.
Wiki’s internal rhyme-heavy raps and Hak’s airy hooks were occasionally too divergent to gel on So It Goes, but with 700 Fill, Ratking seems to be figuring out what to do with Hak. The EP confidently cuts him loose on intros, bridges and outros as a confectionary dusting to Wiki’s gruff veneer, although he’s still working out what to do when he’s tossed an entire verse on "Lenape Lane" and "Bethel". 700 Fill’s not afraid to throw the Wiki-Hak balancing act out the window, though: The two best cuts here are "Eternal Reveal", a gossamer Hak reverie with a short Wiki verse stuck in the middle, and "Flurry", a spitfire Wiki solo cut. Sporting Life’s taking verses too, and the brusque, unpolished humor of his voice is a reminder that home base for the group is Harlem.
With Ratking’s rapping axis exploring new forms of expression, 700 Fill is really a showcase for Sporting Life. He’s eased off the needling skronk of So It Goes and the group’s debut EP Wiki93 in favor of spacier, more melodic textures. "American Gods" and "Eternal Reveal" both revisit Sport’s knack for flaying a sample beyond recognition but drop his trademark willful dissonance, the former in service of a soulful sendup of New York’s Just Blaze era and the latter, an idyllic waltz. Otherwise, Sport prefers affixing trap drums to winding, ghostly synth lines to dizzying effect. Imagine Dan the Automator popping in the Mike WiLL era.
700 Fill is the sound of Ratking pulling its sound apart between albums to feel around for what works and doesn’t. Its off-the-cuff sound and free Bittorrent release strategy suggest a group attempting to sidestep the press and PR machine to sneak around and find itself. "We’re talking about practice," Wiki sneers in "Bethel", quoting a classic press conference from NBA superstar Allen Iverson. "Not the game!" If Wiki, Hak and Sport are just in warm-ups here, the form is still on point. | 2015-03-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 27, 2015 | 7.2 | 364c5e86-8f24-4bce-973e-4bc3ae0a28f1 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
L.A. producer Will Wiesenfeld incorporates the woozy pitch-shifted samples of local beatmaking peers into surprisingly affecting songs. | L.A. producer Will Wiesenfeld incorporates the woozy pitch-shifted samples of local beatmaking peers into surprisingly affecting songs. | Baths: Cerulean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14433-cerulean/ | Cerulean | Is there too much of a good thing going on in Los Angeles right now? Considering how instrumental Flying Lotus has been in building a scene of likeminded beatmakers, it was a bit jarring when he admitted to Pitchfork that "a lot of halfway kids, come out here, kids who started making beats six months ago, thinking they can get on stage because their drums are off." It's possible that sort of people he might be talking about would share a similar profile to Will Wiesenfeld: 21 years old, hailing from a sleepy, suburban outpost like Chatsworth, and employing non-quantized drumbeats to... gah, make love songs. But Wiesenfeld's C.V. checks out: despite his age, he's a veteran, previously working in the classically-informed but unclassifiable [Post-Foetus] before being invited by Daedalus to open for a Destroy L.A. show featuring FlyLo and Nosaj Thing. It was there that Baths was born, and with Cerulean, he places himself as something of the pop voice that the L.A. beathead scene never realized it needed.
Wiesenfeld reacted negatively on his MySpace at this site's use of the word "blunted" to describe "Maximalist", and I can understand where he's coming from. After all, his live videos on Yours Truly prove that this is music that's physically demanding to compose and perform, requiring deep concentration and focus. It's not a stretch to liken Baths to any number of beat-minded chillwavers, but the crucial difference is that where Toro Y Moi or Washed Out might let their sampled textures go slack to create a beanbag-ready laidback vibe, Baths' debut, Cerulean, is more suited to the weight bench. These beats have muscle. "Maximalist", for example, hits hard, but its force is drawn from sheer density. The track begins as a woozy wave before a low tide ushers in a Books-like sample stating, "It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence." These are big feelings Wiesenfeld is trying to capture.
Cerulean has clear influences, but it also has its own point of view. It would probably be overload if the lyrics matched the density of the music, but the themes in Cerulean are pretty simple-- the desire for human connection and occasionally ("Indoorsy") a retreat from it. Wiesenfeld is the kind of artist who would write a Latin-tinged song about forbidden love that would show up on your iPod as "♥". And as much as the front-and-center emotionalism on the album threatens to collapse, the record comes unhinged only once, on "You're My Excuse to Travel", when matter-of-fact lyrics ("I love you enough to drive like an hour from wherever I am to be with you") filtered through a fork-in-socket vocal performance that recalls an electrified Passion Pit.
The sturdiest melody belongs to "Plea", and while the plea itself is a basic desire-- "Please tell me you need me"-- there's something deeper going on. It's addressed to a male figure, and Wiesenfeld lives in the battleground of Proposition 8, so the line, "We're still not valid," lends a crushing blow and possibly gives a new layer of meaning to "♥", where the lovers are on the lam because what they're doing is "wrong." But as with Franz Ferdinand's "Michael" or Bloc Party's "I Still Remember", it shouldn't be applauded simply because it's addressing the difficulty of gay relationships in what's otherwise a sexually blank scene. It should be applauded because it's a fantastic song.
When talking to Pitchfork earlier this year, Wiesenfeld was sheepish about the genesis of his stage name-- he just likes baths. But it's a thread that runs throughout Cerulean, trying to find an escape while remaining down to earth, searching for something magical in our day-to-day lives. Some find it in a drink; some find it in nature. Others will find it in Cerulean. | 2010-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anticon | July 9, 2010 | 8.2 | 3650a18f-832d-4d00-aab1-2f9065609219 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
After the breakup of the art-rock band This Heat, guitarist/vocalist Charles Bullen released a solo album as Lifetones in 1983. Now reissued, it remains a strange amalgam of post-punk’s desolation set to dub reggae’s sunny lilt. | After the breakup of the art-rock band This Heat, guitarist/vocalist Charles Bullen released a solo album as Lifetones in 1983. Now reissued, it remains a strange amalgam of post-punk’s desolation set to dub reggae’s sunny lilt. | Lifetones: For A Reason | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21632-for-a-reason/ | For A Reason | On "A New Kind of Water," the penultimate track on This Heat’s last full-length album, Deceit, guitarist/vocalist Charles Bullen sings in a strangulated sneer: "Of course, it's innate we're selfish/ But what if there's not enough to go round?" That he was embittered and frustrated at the start of Margaret Thatcher’s reign is obvious and in a recent interview, he spoke of his disenchantment of playing in a band at that time: "I’m singing to the people who get lulled into thinking, ‘Oh, don’t worry about air pollution. They’ll invent a new way to breathe.’"
This Heat broke up soon after that. But before Bullen threw himself into pursuits outside of punk (activism and education on the politics of health and agriculture), he self-released a solo album as Lifetones. Written and recorded during the bleakest of times for an activist such as himself, after Thatcher’s landslide re-election in 1983, For a Reason remains a strange amalgam of post-punk’s desolation set to dub reggae’s sunny lilt. It’s also been impossible to hear since the reign of the "Iron Lady," left off of numerous rounds of This Heat reissues over the ensuing decades. There have even been two reissues of bandmate Gareth Williams’s equally rare Flaming Tunes record in the intervening years.
Thankfully, Lifetones’s lone album is part of Light in the Attic’s recent This Heat reissue campaign. And while it’s not nearly as vital or serrated as that band’s output, there’s something enchanting about For a Reason. While 1983 was the year that another British punk band that absorbed and wore its reggae influences on their sleeves were releasing their biggest album in Synchronicity, Bullen’s take on Jamaican dub feels gloomy, sullen, deeply personal.
While anger was often the default of punk and post-punk vocalists alike, and one can feel the feral howls of Charles Heyward on a This Heat track like "Paper Hats," Bullen’s voice is disarming and dry in comparison. It doesn’t arise too often on the album, but when it does, its artlessness gets multi-tracked into a mass chant that at times reminds me of old British folk singers, delivering their message flat and without affect. Tinny keyboards and distant dub drums open "For a Reason" and Bullen imparts a sense of purpose with the echoing incant of "Do everything for a reason." Against that skitter of snares and needling guitar, he repeats phrases like "Love the life you live/ live the life you love" and "You have to work so hard" until they act as a mantra.
Too often, the album meanders through instrumentals, not quite getting into a deep groove. Dub effects swaddle an instrumental like "Decide," its one-chord guitar riff turned into effervescence against the echoing drums while "Distance No Object" adds a trill of melodica and chintzy keys to the mix. But unlike most reggae, the beats here are lo-fi, oddly stiff and British. The album’s most interesting track is "Travelling" which forgoes Jamaican tropes entirely and instead roves into Bedouin territory. Full of snaking violins, woodwinds in an Eastern mode, it’s only in the last minute of this mesmerizing track that Bullen sings in his stuffed nose drone: "In the past I was that way/ now I’m this way/ No one is to blame." He sounds like an old punk opening his worldview and finding another reason to continue to fight the system. | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Light in the Attic | March 16, 2016 | 7.4 | 365150a9-c9ae-4eb7-95a3-78cbbbb082f9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
MIKE continues a long run of great records with his self-produced 10th album, a self-assured current of shifting emotional states. | MIKE continues a long run of great records with his self-produced 10th album, a self-assured current of shifting emotional states. | MIKE: Beware of the Monkey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-beware-of-the-monkey/ | Beware of the Monkey | MIKE’s music celebrates the relief of finding the right words. When his inner monologue tumbles out into the world, he basks in the weight of the disclosure. His love of the spoken word is almost devotional; in his heady songs, voicing a thought or emotion is akin to channeling the divine. On Beware of the Monkey, his self-produced 10th album, such revelations come frequently and forcefully. The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.
MIKE sets the tone early. “This my only chance left, to prove to y’all, I’m the best rapper in the fuckin’ world,” he says in the opening seconds of “As 4 Me,” a combo of confidence and urgency that’s present throughout the record. His normally lethargic raps now come with vigor and resolve as he takes stock of the comforts his music career has provided him and vows to support his family and himself. If past albums were journals where he logged secret fears and private observations, this one is a treaty—a public and binding mission statement. “Live like it’s my all, gotta give a bunch,” he says on soulful opener “nuthin i can do is wrng.” His verses throughout have the conviction of oaths.
MIKE has long been a commanding performer whose wounded baritone could draw you in even as his hazy words pushed you away, but here he is inviting and forthcoming. He’s not exactly an open book, but his constant mentions of forward momentum make his oblique references to anxiety and stress more engrossing. “Navy in the sea, shit we steering till the sea waveless,” he raps on the woozy “Ezcema.” Backed by dancehall legend Sister Nancy on the upbeat “Stop Worry!,” MIKE honors his late mother and pledges to push through pain and doubt. “I peep your hustle and ya brains ma/I hold the deed, I can’t fumble on the game shot,” he raps, the last line accented by the sound of a basketball crisply spilling through a net. This sure-shot demeanor makes his words feel even more carefully chosen.
Amid the flexes, MIKE still waxes about depression and losing loved ones, but he seems more intent on weaving those emotions into a wider patchwork of experiences. On the aptly named “Tapestry,” he ties his woes to his achievements. “Dread and blasphemy/Sitting ’laxed in my apartment where these raps put me,” he says with gratitude, his dexterous slow flow expanding and compressing his words like a lung processing air. He has never branded himself a sadboi or bluesman like, say, Rod Wave or Morray, but he clearly seeks to ballast his melancholy with his passions and interests: basketball, punchlines, romance, family. A weepy voicemail from his sister that closes “Ipari Park” and opens “Swoosh 23” captures the range of the music—her tearful words are as jubilant and encouraging as they are glum.
The production embodies that scope as much as the lyrics and interludes. Like his peers and collaborators Navy Blue, Ohbliv, and KeiyaA, as his producer alias dj blackpower, MIKE leans toward slowed soul loops that wallow in the emotive contours of the human voice. The beats on Beware of the Monkey don’t outright break from that formula, but MIKE diversifies his sources, flipping bits of R&B, jazz, and neo-soul. The slow jam sampled on “What Do I Do?” sways like lovers embracing on the dancefloor, highlighting the swing in MIKE’s loping cadences. The shrill horns looped on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love)” ring out like rooster crows, contrasting MIKE’s muffled delivery. “23 around the earth, see the world different/Went deep into the dirt, seen a pearl glisten,” he says, the verse digging through his mind like a hand through loam.
Self-affirmation has been the core of MIKE’s music since early confessionals like “years/alone” and “ROCKBOTTOM/PEACE TO COME,” which find comfort in saying the grim stuff out loud. So even when he’s boasting and rightfully declaring himself the builder of a wave of lo-fi rap on “What Do I Do?” MIKE is still boosting his self-esteem. On Beware of the Monkey though, he expands his idea of self to encompass his inner world as well as the circles, bonds, and sounds that sustain him. As MIKE expresses himself with increasing confidence, the miracle of speaking up feels less like his coping mechanism and more like a resource anyone can tap. | 2023-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10k | January 3, 2023 | 8.1 | 365277f7-e8bf-4cb2-a34f-86e7252ec701 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Filled with numbing vulgarity, warmed-over nostalgia, and actual nursery rhymes, YG’s third studio album is a mindless step backward. | Filled with numbing vulgarity, warmed-over nostalgia, and actual nursery rhymes, YG’s third studio album is a mindless step backward. | YG: Stay Dangerous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yg-stay-dangerous/ | Stay Dangerous | With his 2014 triumph of a debut, My Krazy Life, YG transitioned from an anonymous L.A. mixtape rapper to a dynamic artist establishing a fresh lane for West Coast rap in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s ascendance. He took a cache of buzzy and bouncing beats from his friend DJ Mustard and offered a gripping take on growing up in Compton, an origin story filled with charming swagger and bristling confidence. His second album, Still Brazy, showed a different side entirely. YG was shot in a recording studio while making that record, and with his back against the wall, he was able to plumb the depths of 2Pac-indebted nihilism and political consciousness. Scowling, hardened, and paranoid, he let his hurt and fear unspool over eerie soundscapes largely provided by an unknown producer named Swish. Still Brazy also revealed YG to be something of a profound soul-searcher. “When the police gon’ stop pressing me?/When my bitch gon’ stop stressing me, second guessing me?/Will the truth really set you free?” he asked on “I Got a Question” with the morbidity and hopelessness of Hamlet.
But if you’ve followed YG over the past year, from Cardi B and Post Malone collaborations to a new look anchored by patent leather dress shoes and tiny glasses, you would never know that Still Brazy even existed. Stripped of the raw desperation that once made his rapping so gripping, Stay Dangerous, YG’s third studio album, spends most of its 15 tracks toasting success, repping for the gang, and picking apart women. It’s fun and flashy and club ready. But for YG, an artist we’ve come to expect the unexpected from, someone currently standing at a career-defining intersection, Stay Dangerous is an exercise in predictability.
Maybe the biggest change on Stay Dangerous is simply YG’s rapping. He’s more performative than ever here, his voice speeding and slowing with winded breaths, jumping clumsily between low-pitched mumbles and elongated whines. YG’s never been a master lyricist—his flow and excitement carry his rhymes—but even his most boneheaded proclamations usually have a role in a bigger picture; here, they more often than not land as dead weight. Throughout the album, his verses are increasingly one-note, filled with repetition, dumbed-down jokes, and eye-rolling word play. “Handgun,” an infectious A$AP Rocky collab, has YG locked in from the jump over an ominous beat, but throwing out lazy, meaningless nursery rhyme verses (at one point, he actually recites “Duck Duck Goose”). This is Drunk Uncle YG—wasting his energy leering at women and shouting at hooligans from his porch.
Stay Dangerous has YG once again teaming up with DJ Mustard, but the producer is off his game too. No longer hip-hop’s go-to hitmaker, he’s instead become a purveyor of syrupy pop and cheap imitations of his old songs. “Can’t Get in Kanada,” “Suu Whoop,” and “Too Brazy” (saved by a fiery guest spot from Mozzy) flaunt superficial layers of trademark Mustard bounce, yet they end up falling apart due to YG’s hammed-up flow. At times, it feels like the two of them are playing caricatures of their former selves.
When YG and Mustard do find their stride, Stay Dangerous becomes incredibly fun. Calling back to their early mixtape days, the two serve up “Too Cocky,” which flips Right Said Fred’s “Too Sexy” into a sweaty jerkin’ club song that Mac Dre would’ve slid all over. “Power,” a team up of YG, Mustard, and Ty Dolla $ign, is a winningly raunchy ode to sex. And “666” may be the one sonic experiment that works here, with Mustard handing the reins over to Mike WiLL Made-It, who builds a twinkling Atlanta fantasy world for YG to hiss out a sing-songy ode to hedonism: “Damn this beat got bass/Everything that’s bad for me right here in my face.” And then YoungBoy Never Broke Again shows up, and you forget YG was even there.
Stay Dangerous is void of the narrative and thematic coherence of YG’s first two projects, and as a result, momentum ebbs and flows: For every silly, successful club track, there’s a clunker. The Quavo-featuring “Slay” is the most egregious of all, with a lazy chorus—“One time, if you a bad bitch/Two times just for the savage/All you wanna do is just slay”—seemingly delivered for the sole purpose of providing future Instagram captions. On the Lil Rich-produced “Deeper Than Rap,” YG shows flashes of his talent as a storyteller, sounding genuinely concerned about something other than women, money, or fame: “I got a daughter now/I’m barely around,” he huffs. “Should I choose this life?/Shit, I don’t know.” For a moment, his angst feels real. But then he directly follows those worries with, “I’m in love with stank hoes/When I say stank hoes, I don’t mean stank/I mean the ones that fuck the first date/Dick all in they face!” What, dude? It’s disgusting, nonsensical, and particularly bizarre considering those previous lines about his daughter. What’s most disappointing, though, is that the incessant, inane bludgeoning of Stay Dangerous feels purposeful. For the first time in his career, YG sounds like he’s trying too hard.
Closer “Bomptown Finest” has YG finally removing the mask he’s been wearing throughout the album. His voice returns to the one we’ve come to recognize, harsh and spit-filled, like the sound of throwing a handful of dirt against a wall. Backed by hazy guitar strums, YG beats his chest and stakes his claim, recapping his life and celebrating his hustle. “The past year I been makin’ all profit/My whole team got it/Then somebody shot me,” he raps, “That’s just the devil my nigga/But thank god it didn’t end with a shovel my nigga.” Through this lens, it’s easier to see Stay Dangerous in a more forgiving light: YG escaped a near-death experience and earned the right to party. Yet it’s never that easy. On Still Brazy’s title track, when YG rapped, “Got some problems, a whole lot of ’em/So I stay dangerous,” that final phrase meant looking deeper and seeing clearer, taking risks because there was nothing left to lose. Those problems, whatever they were, most likely haven’t gone away. Now, though, it seems like staying dangerous only means playing it safe, hiding behind tiny glasses that fracture the world into thin, incandescent slivers. | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | August 6, 2018 | 6.5 | 365282d4-dda0-4fa3-aa82-682695330ed5 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
The Long Island rapper’s latest is a restatement of his core principles, recited in the hallowed style of a religious scripture. | The Long Island rapper’s latest is a restatement of his core principles, recited in the hallowed style of a religious scripture. | Roc Marciano: RR2: The Bitter Dose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roc-marciano-rr2-the-bitter-dose/ | RR2: The Bitter Dose | Roc Marciano makes the unflinching pursuit of money sound spiritual. It’s a philosophy he’s been espousing since 2010’s Marcberg, which revitalized the Long Island rapper and producer’s career after previous stints in Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and as part of the underrated, Pete Rock-endorsed crew the U.N. Marcberg gained Roc Marci friends in high places: If you believe ?uestlove’s Twitter chat, it’s an album the Roots drummer and Jay-Z have discussed at length. More importantly, it established Marci’s talent for crafting beautifully gutter music. Sampled loops of old soul songs still flecked with static and drums laid ominously low in the mix conjure up a sort of quiet storm boom-bap. Just like the music, his grainy and blasé drawl resonates with a nonchalance that makes his grisly threats even more menacing—like when he’s recommending dumping bodies in the Hudson River, or warning he’ll physically bite someone’s face off if provoked.
The albums Roc Marci has released since Marcberg have tweaked the formula: 2012’s Reloaded brought in an expanded cast of producers to cinematic effect; 2013’s Marci Beaucoup seemed more like a mixtape with a roll call of guest MCs; last year’s Rosebudd’s Revenge amped up the pimp paraphernalia. His latest, RR2: The Bitter Dose, feels like a restatement of Roc Marci’s core principles, recited in the hallowed style of reading from a religious scripture.
The funeral march piano loop of “Respected” instantly sucks you into his shadowy domain. He shuffles onto the track—outfit embellished with “fox fur on my evening coat”—and outlines his mission: “I give these heathens hope.” What follows for most of the next 13 songs is vintage Marci, with beats hooked around melancholic loops and lyrics that bandy wanton boasts about flooding the scene with “blood stones,” calling out “cuckolds,” and forming bonds with firearms: “Knew I was gully since the young ‘un with the runny nose/Even though we drove here in luxury it was a bumpy road/I had the pump, it feels good to have company though,” he relays on the stirring “Bohemian Grove.”
Going deeper, the ’80s sci-fi analog synths of “C.V.S.” prompt a glimpse into Roc Marci’s original come up: “187s, felons and ‘caine sellers/Back when [Big Daddy] Kane was selling I had the big chain with the name embedded/Made some bread and my ladies aided and abetted/The Mercedes ain’t rented, bitch, I was saving up to get it.” It’s aspirational rapping on the order of the back cover of Eric B & Rakim’s Paid In Full. Or, as Marci puts it, “This is some bucket list shit.”
Of course, after nearly 40 years of recorded hip-hop history, there’s nothing particularly fresh or innovative about rapping about the pursuit of cash per se, whether it’s gained through illicit means or as reward for an MC’s prowess. (Even Wild Style, the 1983 film that helped spread hip-hop across the world, features a prescient scene where old school party rocker Busy Bee celebrates a rap battle victory by spreading banknotes on a hotel bed to make a giant letter B.) What elevates Roc Marci from his contemporaries is that the accumulation of cash—or even what you spend it on—isn’t the climax of his hustle. The real payoff comes with learning the rules needed to translate financial success into respect. Again, there’s a tinge of East Coast rap religion to these tenets. Tellingly, the two guest MCs on the album, Action Bronson and Knowledge the Pirate, both reference Jesus Christ during their verses.
Bringing this theme home, the album’s closing track, “Power,” begins with Roc Marci ad libbing over a gospel-influenced soul song that includes a sung interpolation of John 3:16. “We play it by the book here,” he states. “Niggas think they can come in the game, change the rules, it’s always little corny niggas with no rules, no morals and ethics.” Then after rapping about bringing his family out of poverty by virtue of “printing money, I’m the dollar tree,” the ad libs return to coin the claim that Roc Marciano’s been inching towards all album: “I’m black Jesus out here, I’m black Jesus.” | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Marci Enterprises | March 7, 2018 | 8 | 365306c6-7a10-435b-aceb-e1f674e05d3f | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
This 3xCD/DVD set documents Davis shows from 1967 with his second great quintet. It offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators and be pushed in turn, into a creative frenzy. | This 3xCD/DVD set documents Davis shows from 1967 with his second great quintet. It offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators and be pushed in turn, into a creative frenzy. | Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 1: Live in Europe 1967 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15887-the-bootleg-series-volume-1-live-in-europe-1967/ | The Bootleg Series, Volume 1: Live in Europe 1967 | The Miles Davis quintet of the mid-to-late 1960s occupies a weird place in the trumpeter's canon. Critics (this one included) will tell you that it isn't just the best band Miles ever led, but one of the choicest small groups in jazz history. If you're not a jazz nerd, though, you may not know it existed. This is because the outfit-- rounded out by tenor saxist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams-- doesn't register on Miles' pop-cultural timeline. The group issued a string of brilliant studio LPs during its 1965-68 run, yet there's no Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew among them; by this period, Miles had pushed way beyond the sumptuously chilled-out sound of the former but hadn't arrived at the murky psych-jazz of the latter.
So if the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams band (often called Miles' second great quintet, in deference to his stellar 1950s group) was transitional, a checkpoint between consensus masterpieces, why should you care that there's a new box set featuring previously unreleased live recordings from this time? Given that nearly every microphase of Davis' career has been expanded into box form by this point-- ask an expert before gifting a random one at Christmas-- casual consumers are right to be suspicious. But Live in Europe 1967, which presents five concerts from October and November of that year on three great-sounding CDs and one DVD, is no footnote: This set, Volume 1 in a new Davis Bootleg Series built on the Bob Dylan model, offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators into a creative frenzy and be pushed back in return.
Aside from Carter, each of these players would become giants of electric jazz (Davis and Hancock transitioned into something like pop stardom), and the period documented on this set represents their farewell to their bebop roots: both an ecstatic celebration and a ballsy deconstruction of how small-group jazz had been played for the previous two decades. Live in Europe 1967 won't soundtrack any romantic dinners or inspire dorm-room acid trips, but it does show off the central thrill of jazz-- spontaneous interplay among dangerously skilled players-- as well as almost any other collection you could name.
That "among" is key. As much as this set testifies to the leader's own vision, the real takeaway is the virtuosity of other musicians, and how Miles' anti-hierarchical aesthetic spurred them toward the riskiest, most engaged performances of their careers. No player on this set reaches more than Tony Williams. A famously precocious drumming prodigy-- he first recorded with Miles in 1963 at age 17-- he was exactly the kind of daredevil Miles was looking for, a player naturally inclined toward pure outrageousness. (By 1967, he'd already explored cutting-edge improvisation on deeply unusual masterworks such as Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch.) Williams is in particularly wired form here on the version of "Footprints" from November 2 in Copenhagen (disc two). During Miles' trumpet solo, the drummer casts himself as Donkey Kong to Davis' Mario, throwing out flaming barrels for the leader to navigate; Williams keeps time on the ride cymbal, but runs a near-constant interference pattern of asymmetrical fills and swelling cymbal flurries. (You can hear the legacy of Williams' pot-stirring percussion style, rarely better documented than on Live in Europe 1967, in players like Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, who loves to slide around a song's central pulse, sending bits of rhythmic shrapnel flying at his bandmates.)
As dazzling as Williams sounds, what really catches the ear is how the entire band provides the improvisational boldness that Miles was after. On the Copenhagen "Footprints", Herbie Hancock plays like a deranged outsider artist. Instead of providing a sturdy foundation underneath Wayne Shorter's saxophone solo, he offers squiggly little phrases, like jumbled fragments from a 20th-century classical score; on the outro, he answers the horn players' theme statement with a mocking paraphrase. Ron Carter, meanwhile, constantly reconfigures the piece's waltzing bassline, jumping between half-time and double-time, and mixing in percussive slaps and low, droney digressions.
These performances represent an upending of the soloist-and-background model of small-group jazz up to this point. Miles' second great quintet wasn't the first to play this way; by 1967, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor had each exploded the conventions of 1940s and 1950s jazz in their own ways. Yet none of these other artists had figured out how to combine deep, risky interactivity with such sustained coherence. Many of the pieces on Live in Europe 1967 play like cooperative action paintings, with everyone allowed but no one entitled to be the center of attention at any given time, and with the overarching logic of the compositions keeping chaos in check. It's at this stage, just before the quintet's dissolution-- over the next two years, as Miles engaged with electric jazz, Carter would exit, followed by Williams and Hancock-- that the conversation is at its most lively and lucid.
Crucially, though, freedom, as it was interpreted by this band, didn't always equal volume and density. Some of the strongest moments on Live in Europe 1967 are also the calmest. During "Masqualero" from the November 6 Paris concert (disc three), as Miles plays a poignant, slow-building solo, Hancock settles into a haunting, repetitive figure and Williams quiets to a whisper, marking faint tempo on the hi-hat. Later, when Hancock's solo begins, Williams drops out entirely, leaving the pianist and Carter to play a delicate, free-floating duo. During the same set, on "Walkin'"-- a staple of Davis' 50s repertoire-- Williams and Carter guide Shorter into an up-tempo frenzy and then gradually fade to silence. The saxophonist moves into a rare unaccompanied passage, playing an abstracted kind of bebop, full of tumbling phrases and murmuring digressions.
By late 1967, thanks in large part to John Coltrane (who had passed away in July) and mavericks such as Albert Ayler, shrieking, high-density free jazz was in full flower. As you can hear in Live in Europe 1967's many boldly stripped-down moments, Miles and his band were aiming for a different kind of freedom, one where aggression coexisted with near-stillness. Funk was in the mix too: During the October 28 "Masqualero" in Antwerp (disc one), Williams and Carter keep up an infectious Latin pulse behind the soloists, providing a danceable base for Shorter to tear off his heated phrases and also foreshadowing Davis' groove-based experiments, which would begin in earnest on 1969's In a Silent Way.
Miles clearly savored this band's broad dynamic and emotional range, and constructed its sets accordingly. Unlike the quintet's studio recordings, the concerts on Live in Europe 1967 take the form of unbroken medleys. On four out of the five sets here, the tempestuous "Footprints", a Shorter original, segues into the Thelonious Monk favorite "'Round Midnight", which begins each time as a beautifully sparse dialogue between Davis and Hancock. Other transitions keep these long sets feeling brisk. In Antwerp, a lengthy version of Miles' hard-swinging, midtempo "No Blues", gives way to a turbulent three-minute sprint through Hancock's "Riot"; in Paris, "No Blues" snaps into Shorter's moody, Spanish-inflected "Masqualero", a striking shift that immediately reengages the ear. Live in Europe 1967 marks the first time we're hearing this band engage with such a wide range of material; a previous second-great-quintet live box, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, featured mainly well-worn jazz standards.
As much microscopic variety as there is in these shows, it's important to note that Live in Europe 1967 documents a single tour with a more or less fixed set list. Davis did vary the repertoire occasionally-- trying out "Walkin'" and the standard "I Fall in Love Too Easily" in Paris-- but buyers interested in a more diverse overview of what this band could do might be better off picking up one of their studio releases (E.S.P., from 1965, and Nefertiti, recorded just a few months before the shows heard here, are both great starting points). Don't let the repetition scare you away, though. All five concerts here have their own rewards and idiosyncrasies; the best path through the box is to treat each segment like the concert it originally was and savor it individually.
The DVD, which documents two shows not featured on the CDs, is a sharp addition. There's a bit of arty treatment-- often two players appear superimposed in the same frame-- but on the whole, these are tasteful black-and-white concert films that put you in the midst of the onstage action. You see the youthful Williams bearing down fiercely on his ride, Shorter entering a closed-eyes trance while playing, and Hancock cocking his ear, tuning in to his bandmates' improvisations with genuine curiosity. And in the middle of it all is Miles: his usual, unflappable self. This is one of our last glimpses of the trumpeter in pre-psychedelic mode; the sequined pants and wraparound shades would arrive by 1969, as Miles flipped for Jimi and Sly and started co-billing with future rock legends at the Fillmore and the Isle of Wight, but here he sports natty suits (the sidemen wore tuxes), embodying the same model of 50s cool that won the trumpeter a mention in a 1960 Esquire list of "Some of the Best-Dressed Men in the United States."
That shift in fashion wasn't just superficial; Miles' music changed drastically in the period following Live in Europe 1967. LPs such as 1969's In a Silent Way and 1970's Bitches Brew are still some of the most compelling jazz-crossover experiments ever attempted. And Miles' sidemen would make equally important contributions to the movement that came to be known as fusion: Shorter with the vibrant Weather Report, Hancock with his funky Mwandishi and Headhunters bands, and Williams with Lifetime, one of the grittiest and heaviest of the early jazz-rock groups.
These impending transitions are part of why Live in Europe 1967 is essential: You get to hear exactly how these virtuosos were behaving just before the big change occurred. They were still operating in an old mode, small-group acoustic jazz, but they were interrogating it relentlessly, seeing how far they could stretch its conventions without ditching them altogether. Before they could break into the larger world of pop, they had to reach jazz nirvana, and that's what they attain on Live in Europe 1967. The aesthetic here is less easily definable than those heard on Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, but it's no less significant. At its heart, jazz thrives on bold, sensitive interaction in the moment, and Live in Europe 1967 represents the pinnacle of that practice. | 2011-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Jazz | Columbia / Legacy | October 6, 2011 | 9 | 36538e05-c414-46b5-8830-ef9f6a239ab6 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | null |
Neil Young’s polarizing 1982 album, influenced by new wave and heavy on the Vocoder, has long divided fans and critics. But beneath its cold exterior is a record with a lot of heart. | Neil Young’s polarizing 1982 album, influenced by new wave and heavy on the Vocoder, has long divided fans and critics. But beneath its cold exterior is a record with a lot of heart. | Neil Young: Trans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22905-trans/ | Trans | It’s the end of the world. The sky is an ominous shade of red, and the air is thick with poisonous fumes. Some people are silhouetted with an eerie glow while others are dying of radiation poisoning. “It shoulda been me that died,” Neil Young says, riding a bike alongside actor Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn shrugs him off, and the two make plans for the evening. Tomorrow may never come, but tonight they’ll take their dates to the drive-in, where Tamblyn begs Neil not to play his ukulele or to sing “in that high squeaky voice.” So goes the opening scene of the 1982 film Human Highway, an apocalyptic comedy written and directed by Neil Young under his long-standing nom de plume Bernard Shakey. It’s a muddled and paranoid work, filled with forced slapstick humor and wild jams with Devo. In one scene, the members of the Ohio new wave group haul toxic waste in a flatbed truck down a lonesome highway. “I don’t know what’s going on in the world today,” Devo’s Booji Boy says to himself as images of skulls flash across his bandmates’ faces, “People don’t seem to care about their fellow man.”
This is where Neil Young’s head was at the top of the ’80s. Human Highway—Young’s third picture, following the psychedelic Journey Through the Past and his quasi-concert film Rust Never Sleeps—shares a title with a song from 1978’s Comes a Time. “Take my head, and change my mind,” he sang in its chorus, “How could people get so unkind?.” With its gentle acoustic guitars and fantasies of misty mountains, “Human Highway” plays like a eulogy to a specific type of Neil Young song. The Canadian hippie who sings in a high squeaky voice about packin’ it in and buyin’ a pick-up is only one side of Young. In fact, a decade into his solo career, Neil Young had developed a reputation more like an actor, someone remembered more for the parts he played than the unifying presence behind them all. After Comes a Time, he stepped away from his role as a ’70s folk singer, with 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps introducing a decade of restless exploration. The world was getting meaner, and Neil Young was tired of being typecast as merely an observer: He wanted to take part in the madness.
Although they both speak to the increasingly uneasy state of Young’s mind, “Human Highway,” the song, never appears in Human Highway, the film. Instead, the movie is mostly soundtracked by a record called Trans, released that same year. In the film, Young gets into character by contorting his face, wearing a pair of dorky glasses, and slapping motor oil on his cheeks. On Trans, he transforms himself by setting his songs in a distant future and filtering his voice through a variety of synthesizers, most notably (and infamously) a vocoder. The warped new wave of Trans suits the movie’s otherworldly (if endearingly chintzy) backdrops. You believe that this is the music that would play in the film’s shoddy roadside diner, where Dennis Hopper cooks sausage patties and swats at radioactive, laser-pointer flies. In fact, the movie might be the best context to hear Trans—an album that’s often treated more like a symbol (for artistic reinvention, for failed experimentation, for creative self-sabotage) than an actual entry in a body of work characterized by prolificacy and versatility.
Part of what makes Neil Young’s discography so rewarding for new listeners is that it’s filled with great entry points: the classic rock radio staples with more depth than you imagined (After the Goldrush, Harvest); the intimate passages that, even after all these years, feel like uncovered secrets (Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach); and the bizarre left-turns like Trans that inspire cult fandom just for existing. And while Trans sits comfortably along with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait in a lineage of puzzling-if-fascinating failures, its mythology is only part of the appeal. Reed and Dylan always felt like provocateurs—for Dylan, even finding Jesus felt like a means of snapping back at critics. But Young’s transformations have always felt less divisive, more natural and earnest and instinctual. Even when he followed Trans with Everybody’s Rockin’, a slight collection of anti-capitalist rockabilly songs, he held the latter record in high esteem: “As good as Tonight's The Night, as far as I'm concerned,” he’s said.
Young has made similar claims about Trans. “This is one of my favorites,” he said grimly, holding the album art to the camera during a 2012 interview, “If you listen to this now, it makes a lot more sense than it did then.” Even if Trans is still confusing, it’s a point well taken. In the context of Young’s discography—rich with remakes and sequels, major reunions and minor pet projects—Trans has only grown more triumphant and singular as it’s aged. He would do new wave again, he’d mess with his voice some more, and he’d even return to the idea of full-on concept albums. But he would never make anything quite so conceptually confrontational—a challenge to even his most ardent followers’ understanding of what a Neil Young album sounds like. “If I build something up, I have to systematically tear it right down,” he’s said, referring to his penchant for moving quickly from one project to another, carrying with him few traces of the previous work. It’s remarkable, then, that Trans—an album ostensibly designed to “tear down” a specific image of Neil Young—ends up standing for exactly what’s great about him.
Like so many of Neil Young’s albums, Trans is filled with mysteries and unanswered questions (Why is his 1967 Buffalo Springfield song “Mr. Soul” on here? Why is a track called “If You Got Love” listed in the lyric sheet but not on the actual album?) It’s hard to think of an artist with as many classic albums who has wrestled so constantly against the medium: even his canonized work has a raw, unfinished quality to it. “If anything is wrong, then it’s down to the mixing,” he’s said about Trans, “We had a lot of technical problems on that record.” Fittingly, much of Trans concerns man’s fight against technology. A song called “Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)” details a team of rogue computers robbing a bank, with Young’s voice zapped down to a digital squelch. In “We R in Control,” a choir of robots lists the aspects of daily life—traffic lights, the FBI, even the flow of air—in which humans no longer have a say. Thematically, these songs—with their dystopian images of a world run by screens and numbers, where humans have everything at their fingertips but remain unhappy—have aged pretty well.
It’s the sound of the record that makes it more of an ’80s relic. No matter what format you listen to the album on (and it’s still never been released on CD in the U.S.), you feel as though you’re hearing it from the tape deck of a passing car. Even with longtime collaborators like producer David Briggs, guitarist Ben Keith, and drummer Ralph Molina, these songs sound very little like Young’s timeless ’70s work. The goofier, beat-centric tracks from his previous release, 1981’s shaky Re-ac-tor, certainly set a precedent. But despite its reputation for being aggressive and inscrutable, Trans is, at its heart, a pop record. It’s filled with hooks and beats and synths informed equally by krautrock and MTV. In “Sample and Hold,” guitarist Nils Lofgren—whose solos added an element of bluesy desperation to Tonight’s the Night but would soon light up football stadiums on Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour—points to future hits like Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science.” When the Trans Band played “Sample and Hold” during the album’s comically over-the-top tour—an endeavor that Young claims in Jimmy McDonough's authorized biography Shakey lost him $750,000 (“And we sold out every show,” he adds)—Neil and Nils stalk the stage with rock star charisma, trading solos and bleating into their talkboxes. In the sweet, melodic “Transformer Man,” Neil’s vocoder actually adds an element of purity to his voice, as layers of wordless choruses shower him. Listening to these songs, it’s not impossible to imagine that Trans could have maybe, possibly, in another world, been a pop hit.
But that world is in a galaxy far from this one. While the critical reception to Trans was not nearly as harsh as legend would have you think (Rolling Stone compared it to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; Robert Christgau gave it a higher mark than Harvest), it was a commercial dud—a rough start for the fledgling Geffen Records label, who also released Joni Mitchell’s adult contemporary turn Wild Things Run Fast the same year. Trans wasn’t the album that convinced David Geffen to sue Neil Young for making uncharacteristic records—that would be its follow-ups *Everybody’s Rockin’ *and Old Ways, the country record that plays like a made-for-TV adaptation of Harvest. But the idea had to be floating through David Geffen’s head when he first heard this record. At once Young’s coldest sounding album and his most vulnerable, Trans makes its flaws immediately apparent as soon as you press play—from the murky production to the mixed-bag tracklist.
When you listen to Trans, you’re really only hearing two-thirds of it. Only six of the album’s nine songs were intended for the actual project. The other three came from a different album entirely, one that concerned young love and ancient civilizations. It was to be titled Island in the Sun, and Geffen Records quickly steered him away from the concept. Album opener “Little Thing Called Love” stems from those sessions, and it’s the record’s clearest connection to Young’s more celebrated talents. Its chorus riffs on the title of one of his most beloved songs (“Only love,” he barks in a chipper tone, “Brings you the blues”) and the ensuing chord progression would eventually find a new home in the title track of 1992’s Harvest Moon. While demonstrating the fluidity of Neil’s catalog, the song also makes for a striking introduction in its own right: a singalong before the apocalypse, when human connection would become as archaic as LaserDisc copies of the Solo Trans live show are today.
The Island songs also help highlight a major theme of Trans: it’s an album about affection. At the start of the decade, Neil Young and his wife were enrolled in intensive therapy with their son Ben, who had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The program’s long hours slowed Young’s hectic work schedule and opened him up to writing about fatherhood. His struggles to communicate with his child and the technology that connected them inspired the lyrics of Trans and even informed the way he recorded his vocals: “You can’t understand the words, and I can’t understand my son’s words,” he explained in Shakey. In that context, Young’s naked voice in respective side-openers “Little Thing Called Love” and “Hold on to Your Love” represents the catharsis of an emotional breakthrough. You understand the words he wants you to understand—and most of them just say, “I love you.”
Even with Human Highway serving as a vehicle for the album, Trans was originally conceived with a different film project in mind. “I had a big concept,” Young said in Shakey, “All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button.” That metaphor pops up a few times throughout the record, most squarely in “Transformer Man,” a song Young's openly dedicated to his son. “You run the show,” he sings to him, “Direct the action with the push of a button.” The Trans film might not have moved the album to the commercial heights Neil and Geffen imagined, but available evidence suggests that it would have at least made its digital world feel warmer, more grounded and productive—the qualities fans had come to expect from Young’s work. Instead, the songs would have to stand on their own, their meaning buried inside them, like a constellation of stars you have to connect based on your own perception.
Near the end of Human Highway, a concussed Young enters a long, inscrutable dream sequence in which he, among other things, gets bathed in milk, attends a desert ritual, and becomes a world-renowned rock star. When Russ Tamblyn wakes him, they celebrate the mere fact that he’s alive. For the film’s final 10 minutes, Neil lives with a newfound sense of purpose and ambition (“We could do it,” he says, “We could be rhythm and bluesers, we could go on the road!”). Even with the fiery explosion on its way to squash his dreams and reduce the world to a pile of ash, it’s a brighter ending than what Trans leaves us with. In the lost paradise of “Like an Inca,” Young envisions himself in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, crossing the bridge to the afterlife, at once happy and sad and totally alone. It’s a fitting finale for a heavy album, one whose only brief glimmers of hope come from our connection to one another. “I need you to let me know that there’s a heartbeat/Let it pound and pound,” Young sings in “Computer Age.” His voice is masked beyond recognition, but the pulse—steady and wild—is unmistakably his own. | 2017-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | February 19, 2017 | 7.8 | 36550e64-0aa6-4cf1-9d07-738cc74aedf9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The sprawling and spectacular Cindy Lee album is an essential trove of music. Each song is like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits. | The sprawling and spectacular Cindy Lee album is an essential trove of music. Each song is like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits. | Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cindy-lee-diamond-jubilee/ | Diamond Jubilee | This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more?
Or maybe this is Diamond Jubilee, the sprawling and spectacular new album by Cindy Lee: two hours, 32 songs, each one like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits. Like much of Lee’s past work, its spiritual center is girl group music, reduced to a single girl and reflected through a hall of mirrors. From there, it extends toward the far reaches of the radio dial, and sometimes beyond: the warped classic rock of “Glitz,” the fragmented disco of “Olive Drab,” the sunburnt psychedelia of the title track, the nocturnal synth-pop of “GAYBLEVISION.” “Darling of the Diskoteque” sounds like Tom Waits and Marc Ribot masquerading as Santo and Johnny; “Le Machiniste Fantome” like a cue from some fictional Ennio Morricone score to a film about 9th-century monks. But even at its most idiosyncratic, the music conveys the archetypal yearning of pop. Nearly every song is about a lover who’s gone, and the dream that their loss—the solitary moonlit nights, the resolve to move on, the resignation to wallow forever—might be as romantic as the love itself.
Lee is the glammed-up alter ego of songwriter, guitarist, and drag performer Patrick Flegel. In a different lifetime, they were the frontperson of Women, a brilliant and volatile Canadian post-punk band of the late 2000s. They flamed out quickly after two albums, an onstage fistfight, and the unrelated sudden death of one member, but their spindly guitar lines, asymmetrical rhythms, and surprisingly sweet melodies have remained influential on wide swaths of DIY rock. Flegel’s old bandmates formed Preoccupations and soon gravitated toward the crisp sonics and propulsive grooves of new wave. If Preoccupations found a stable middle ground between their old band’s extremes, Flegel pushed further out in both directions, donning a blue bob wig and Nancy Sinatra boots and releasing a series of albums as Cindy Lee that set pure pop songwriting alongside confrontational blasts of feedback.
Flegel sometimes speaks of “going rogue” from the music industry in interviews, and has released Cindy Lee albums both via small labels and on their own. Nothing about the presentation of Diamond Jubilee, which they self-released with no promotional campaign, signals a change from that outsider ethos. Aside from its demanding length, there is the question of how to hear it: As of this writing, the only officially sanctioned methods are to download WAV files from a Geocities website in exchange for a $30 suggested donation or cue up a single 2-hour YouTube video with no track breaks. Flegel may not have intended Diamond Jubilee as a breakthrough to a wider audience, but the exuberant generosity of the music seems to prime it for one. The recording fidelity remains proudly out of step with contemporary slickness, but there are no clattering sound collages or noisy assaults on the listener this time around. The songs are immediate and inviting in ways that Cindy Lee’s previous discography has only hinted at.
Though Flegel’s songwriting tends to reference the modes of earlier decades, Diamond Jubilee’s melange of styles, united by sheer force of imagination and the haze of home recording, can’t help but recall the ’90s of the artist’s youth. Guided by Voices, with their voluminous collections of imaginary yesteryear classics, loom large. So do Yo La Tengo, in the way they can make even howling feedback come across like a whispered sweet nothing. But where those bands made a virtue of a certain amateurism—the sense that they were cobbling together anthems with the only four chords they knew how to play—Diamond Jubilee is a work of highly accomplished craft.
Flegel is the sort of songwriter who could have gotten a job at the Brill Building had they been born a few decades earlier, and the sort of guitarist whose delicate subtlety could send much showier players back to the woodshed for more practice. Their singing, often but not always delivered in a reedy and androgynous falsetto, is emotionally supple, toughening the sad songs with resolve and softening the rockers with plaintive streaks. It is rare, these days, to encounter a musician so classically skilled and so unprecious about it, with no apparent aspirations toward stuffy respectability or commercial success.
You could look at Diamond Jubilee’s ramshackle outer appearance as a sort of declaration of allegiance to the underground, or you could see it as an aesthetic choice. If Flegel’s songwriting often gives the sense that someone or something is missing, so too do their musical arrangements: additional percussion here, or a bigger bass sound there, to bring them out of the mist and closer to the material world. But if you listen in a certain way—like mentally focusing on some object in the periphery of your vision without actually moving your eyes to center it—a full orchestra might flicker to life for a second behind a keyboard’s chintzy strings preset.
Had Flegel given Diamond Jubilee a traditional album rollout, “Kingdom Come” would have made a fine choice for the lead single. (Some other contenders, for those who would prefer to peruse the highlights before submitting to its overwhelming totality: the funky and vaguely menacing “Stone Faces,” the triumphantly melancholy “If You Hear Me Crying,” the soaring “Flesh and Blood.”) Its twinkly guitar lines offer one of the album’s best instrumental hooks, and its rhythmic bounce evokes no single era or style in particular while drawing elements from several different ones, demonstrating Flegel’s ability to transmute their influences into something uncannily out of time. Its opening lyric, sung sweetly from some far corner of the left stereo channel, could serve as Diamond Jubilee’s thesis statement: “The other day/I could have sworn I heard you call my name/All through the melodies of yesterday/’Til kingdom come.”
All over the album, Flegel similarly entwines images of music and loss, favorite songs standing in for past friends or lovers, and vice versa. If you were to count the frequency of every word in the lyrics—there is, of course, no official lyric sheet—“melody” and “memory” would both surely score well, not too far below “you.” The devastating ballad “Don’t Tell Me I’m Wrong” makes them interchangeable. “Without you close to me/All I’ve got’s this song/And your memory,” goes the first chorus; by the second one, the memory has departed, and Lee has only a melody in its place.
With that in mind, the marathon duration of Diamond Jubilee seems not just like the result of an especially talented and prolific songwriter’s years-long hard drive accumulation—Flegel has been talking about the album’s scope, and mentioning it by name, at least since 2020—but also like a manifestation of the music’s themes. Even after many listens, it is difficult to hold the specifics of every single song in your mind; there are simply too many of them to allow for perfect recall. Which one is your favorite, again? “Dracula,” “Always Dreaming,” “All I Want Is You”? The one with the guitar solo, the one with the eerie harmonies. The music is always on the verge of receding to that phantasmic pop realm from which it came, where love always lives on, in memory and melody alike. | 2024-04-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Realistik Studios | April 12, 2024 | 9.1 | 365725be-bd53-45e8-b89f-813e2426ff29 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The new album from Copenhagen electronic artist MØ—aka Karen Marie Ørsted—ditches shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop exploring the swirling confusion of young adulthood. | The new album from Copenhagen electronic artist MØ—aka Karen Marie Ørsted—ditches shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop exploring the swirling confusion of young adulthood. | MØ: No Mythologies to Follow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19050-m-no-mythologies-to-follow/ | No Mythologies to Follow | Five years is a long time, especially in your early 20s, as you try on certain identities and cast off others in search of one you feel more or less comfortable in. Case in point: five years ago, Karen Marie Ørsted was writing Peaches-aping novelty songs titled "When I Saw His Cock", which included raps as trashy as her beats. Fast forward half of a decade, and the only thing the music of the Copenhagen native, now 25, shares with her earliest demos is an omnivorous musical appetite, one that synthesizes a number of of-the-moment sounds on her self-assured debut as MØ, No Mythologies to Follow.
The album finds MØ (pronounced somewhere between "Muh" and the sound a cow makes) ditching shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop that explores the swirling confusion of young adulthood. Its sound is one that's equally as indebted to the forward-thinking Scandinavian pop scene she comes from as it is to the sounds of Southern rap and modern bass music. It's the kind of output you'd expect from an artist who's grown up with instant, unlimited access to music from every corner of the globe. This melting-pot approach pervades No Mythologies to Follow, which was produced almost entirely by Ronni Vindahl, a fellow Dane who makes up one-half of No Wav., the production team that includes Robin Hannibal, aka the dude responsible for the sensuous, restrained arrangements found on last year's debut from Rhye, Woman.
MØ and Vindahl are a good pairing, sharing an easy chemistry as collaborators; Vindahl's production keeps up with but never eclipses MØ, and she doesn't bat an eyelash at his production, which has some bite. Most of the album's twelve tracks are built on top of a sturdy bedrock of tick-tick-ticking 808s and swarms of pulsing synths; "Maiden" and "Red in the Grey" get the throb of post-dubstep right, and glockenspiels and horns play nice with molasses-thick claps and a gurgling bassline on "Pilgrim". There's often a lot happening on these tracks, and this is only compounded by the fact MØ loves her multi-tracked vocals and ad-libs. It has the effect of turning her into a one-woman girl group—the massive lurch of "Fire Rides", for instance, leaves plenty of space for MØ to harmonize with herself, and she stuffs the track to the brim with ecstatic shouts and fists-in-the-air woops.
At this point you're probably getting the impression that No Mythologies to Follow isn't exactly a study in minimalism; combined with her everything-is-a-hook style of songwriting, MØ ends up building a rather outsized persona for herself over the course of the album. It's never of the one-note all-caps variety, but it sometimes obscures nuanced performances and her ability to simultaneously nail a bunch of conflicting emotions, often within the span of a single line. "I never want to know the name of your new girlfriend" she wails on "Never Wanna Know", both because she's not sure she can handle the piece of information but also because she recognizes that knowing gives her another reason to obsess over her ex rather than move forward and on.
At the heart of everything is MØ's voice, a powerful and versatile tool comfortable expressing emotional turmoil as it is wearing a fuck-the-haters scowl. You can almost see her stretching on the tips of her toes as she soars into the clouds during the chorus of the aforementioned "Never Wanna Know", and she plays a convincing house diva on "Slow Love", a Balearic slinker that recalls John Talabot at his loosest. And although it makes no apologies for the bits and pieces it takes from her contemporaries, No Mythologies to Follow doesn't work because it assembles the right ingredients in the right amount—it works because a likable persona is something you just can't teach. | 2014-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | March 7, 2014 | 7.1 | 3658621f-cbe2-4a78-a735-79d42eda327d | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
On a collaborative album, the Canadian indie stalwarts draw inspiration from domestic life during lockdown, penetrating the familiar haze with sharp insight. | On a collaborative album, the Canadian indie stalwarts draw inspiration from domestic life during lockdown, penetrating the familiar haze with sharp insight. | Julie Doiron / Dany Placard: Julie & Dany | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julie-doiron-dany-placard-julie-and-dany/ | Julie & Dany | Pandemic-era art has given us a shorthand for a collective experience—sourdough starters, whipped coffee, Pelotons, loneliness, confinement, boredom. Over time, adopted by enough of the bored and lonely, repetition sands away the emotional texture until these signifiers feel flat and impersonal. Canadian indie stalwarts Julie Doiron and Dany Placard’s Julie & Dany, recorded in their New Brunswick home during the province’s mandatory isolation from neighboring Quebec, adopts the lofty goal of infusing the staid with fresh meaning. These loose, unvarnished tracks—evocative of the couple’s earlier work in groups like Eric’s Trip and Plywood—penetrate the post-traumatic haze with sharp, keening insight.
When the parameters of life shrink to the size of a home, so does the well of inspiration, but Doiron and Placard sift through the domestic like expert miners. Opener “Dégèle” plunks us into the loop of their routine after a humanizing false start in the first few seconds. As the song gets going, so do we—taking in a little fresh air, dancing lifelessly in the kitchen, planting flowers to stave off creeping fear. Specificity makes this thrumming, harmonized chant—a chorus that translate roughly to “I’m going outside for a little air,” and later, “The earth’s gotta thaw”—all the more convincing, plucky guitars charging ahead like someone determined not to think too hard or too much.
“Lying,” two songs later, is when reality catches up—grief, fear of an unknown future—and its simple, incantatory lyrics sail on Doiron’s plaintive vocals. Intimacy might be a natural consequence of these homebound songs, written by two people cohabitating through a crisis, and the use of regional phrases like “Chu” (“I am”) instead of formal French “Je suis” (also “I am”) lends further charm: We’re pulled in close, sharing internal monologues and mayonnaise from the fridge nearby. Through this diction, the duo further anchors the record not only in a particular (bad) year but also in a particular place, a particular lens through which to see the world.
Julie & Dany’s experiments with degrees of scale are another canny way to ensure the record stretches beyond its physical confines. Where “Lying” and “Vénus” are soft and inward-facing, “Jean-Talon Market” opts for bombast and electric riffs, David Bowie’s “Heroes” with the grit and insouciance of a Liz Phair song. “Tomate” slogs through sludgy guitars and barroom vocals, imbuing the planting of tomatoes with imminent danger. This nimble back and forth between defiance and defeat means nothing gets stale: Sounds and feelings go from large and sweeping to huddled in a corner, whispering into a microphone, a polarity that rings true to lived experience.
Not every track is a revelation. “What If I Said” sounds like a paler derivation of Doiron’s excellent 2004 song “Dirty Feet”; even her evocative, signature vocal style can’t find its pulse. Closer “My Brain” feels more like a sketch than a finished song, too spare and twee to stick the landing. Still, this record is an artifact that achieves what many attempts to depict isolation have not—distilled emotional truths, of varieties both universal (“I’m sick of my partner”) and specific (“I’m sick of these tomato plants”). The album shows its seams, a DIY aesthetic that’s defined both artists’ careers, and this intimacy offers welcome relief. If the approach hasn’t changed, the world has, and Julie and Dany foray into new territory with comforting familiarity. | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Simone | May 4, 2022 | 6.9 | 36625d81-cee2-4aa3-aa4e-522044be6031 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
On his second Big Black Delta LP, Jonathan Bates delivers a maximalist take on electro-pop. On these far-reaching songs, it feels like he’s coloring with every crayon in the box, just because he can. | On his second Big Black Delta LP, Jonathan Bates delivers a maximalist take on electro-pop. On these far-reaching songs, it feels like he’s coloring with every crayon in the box, just because he can. | Big Black Delta: Trágame Tierra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21857-tragame-tierra/ | Trágame Tierra | As a descriptor, "electronic music" is pretty expansive; at a time when nearly all music is produced with the aid of computers, it’s also fairly meaningless. Still, if you attempted to take stock of everything that could be fairly placed under that tent, you might start with experimental music, move through dance music’s various permutations and end up at the sort of post-Postal Service pop you’d expect to hear in a car commercial. Trágame Tierra, the latest full-length from Mellowdrone frontman and touring M83 member Jonathan Bates, feels like just such a survey of all things "electronic." This is a record that pivots from industrial noise to radio-friendly pop on a dime, which counts Debbie Gibson among its guests yet closes with 10 minutes of synth drone. To call Trágame Tierra ambitious would be an understatement.
Admittedly, Bates’ adventurousness and disregard for genre lines results in some novel combinations. "Well My Heart" layers a folk-country vocal over racing synth arpeggios and an '80s pop rhythm. "Overlord" starts out as a pounding house number yet lands somewhere closer to the Knife’s deviant Scandinavian electro-pop. "Kid Icarus" is powered by an appropriately chiptune-like beat but counts a Brian Wilson falsetto among its vocal quirks. And the aforementioned Gibson feature carries "RCVR" to a place where The Cars, Daft Punk, and Vangelis meet.
For the most part, though, Bates’ stock in trade here is middle-of-the-road electronic-pop, the sort of music you might find yourself fidgeting to while standing in line at the pharmacy. There’s an arena-sized ambition in these songs—widescreen production, huge choruses, layer after layer of instrumentation and vocals—but Bates’ ability as a songwriter to deliver on that intent is limited. As eager to please as these songs are, none of them can really be called catchy or memorable; big hooks abound but none of them stick.
Lyrically too, Trágame Tierra offers far too little to hold on to. On nearly every song, it feels like Bates is aiming for maximum reliability but often ends up with phrasings that feel wholly generic: "Gonna grow old in California," "You can bring me up/Just to bring me down," "Well my heart, she is a-melting." One song finds Bates reassuring the listener by repeating the phrase, "It’s OK" ad nauseam. These sorts of lyrics only reinforce the feeling that many of these tracks are more jingle than song.
To be certain, Bates does have plenty of potential as a musician. For evidence of this, just look to some of the minor details tucked away in these songs: the wobbly, mournful synths that open up "I See Fit," the delicate, chiming melodies of "H.A." and "Strange Cakes," the joyously bent notes that scurry through "RCVR"’s coda. However, there are just too many ideas crammed into these songs and far too few that connect. On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into. | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Masters of Bates | May 6, 2016 | 4.7 | 36693078-974c-4e68-a4d8-b3007421c0e5 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The BandGang crew is at the center of Detroit’s rap renaissance, and Lonnie Bands’ latest is a great showcase of its sound and energy. | The BandGang crew is at the center of Detroit’s rap renaissance, and Lonnie Bands’ latest is a great showcase of its sound and energy. | BandGang Lonnie Bands: KOD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bandgang-lonnie-bands-kod/ | KOD | The timing has never been right in Detroit. In the late 1990s, the Eastside Chedda Boyz established a sound with funky basslines true to Detroit’s Motown roots, deliveries inspired by Bay Area rappers like Too $hort, and rough, boundary-pushing lyrics that spoke to the hustle of the city. The collective became local legends, but through a combination of tragedy and the hip-hop world criminally overlooking regional scenes, the Eastside Chedda Boyz never had their breakout moment.
Then, in the 2000s, while that bleach blonde rapper became a phenom, Doughboyz Cashout began to build on the street rap foundation laid by the Eastside Chedda Boyz. They managed to attain a major label record deal through Jeezy’s CTE World Print, but that contract only halted their momentum and they too had to settle for Midwest fame. But thankfully, through the rise of YouTube and SoundCloud, cities that have been historically ignored—like Milwaukee, Baton Rouge, and Orlando—are receiving attention without the assistance of a major label. Which brings us to BandGang—a group of twentysomethings, lead by the mush-mouthed BandGang Lonnie Bands—who are at the center of Detroit’s rap renaissance.
KOD is BandGang Lonnie Bands’ latest album, a 21-song epic told from the perspective of a sedated Lonnie Bands as he rushes us through days filled with drug dealing, pimping, and scamming—where other rappers flex their cars and jewels, Lonnie brags about his credit cards. There’s a steady tension throughout the project set by the manic energy of the piano melodies and the Lonnie Bands storytelling that could double as a Harmony Korine script.
Each song on KOD is its own rapid-paced scene. “KOD” is the exposition, an introduction to Lonnie Bands, who is a traditional Detroit rapper in his lingo and humor who was just raised on the internet: heavy breathing, ad-libs, and a narcotized delivery are abound. “Press Me” is the album’s most action-packed sequence, as Lonnie balances a relationship with his ex-girlfriend and her best friend, sells fake pills, and ends up in Philly just to make a drug deal. He also comes away with one of the album’s many essential one-liners: “Bitch I’m the scam man, how you gon’ scam me.” Then, on “Shredgang 1.5” the RJ Lamont piano puts you on edge like you’re in the backseat of a drug deal gone wrong with Lonnie Bands at the wheel acting extremely calm.
At 55 minutes, KOD drags a bit, but Lonnie Bands injects periodic life into the album with a revolving door of guests. There are his game-obsessed Detroit peers like a slightly horny Sada Baby on “Weird,” the degenerate youthfulness of Drego and Beno on “Come Here” and “10 Freaky Hoes,” and some assistance from his BandGang crew members like a disgusted BandGang Javar on “Mines”: “You one of them dirty ass niggas people ain’t want in the pool.” Lonnie also revives the connection between Detroit and the West Coast, most notably with L.A. producer Ron-Ron, who contributes some of his menacing beat-making. These West Coast additions peppered throughout prevent KOD from becoming yet another Detroit album to exist within a self-contained bubble, and importantly, they aren’t forced. For once, everything in Detroit hip-hop is clicking, and KOD is a step closer to Lonnie reaching a breakthrough that so many Detroit icons before him couldn’t. | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | TF Entertainment / Empire | May 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 36715b61-7f03-4071-bfd7-f36bf7064744 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
As modern music moves beyond modernism, the classical community is still scared of the innovations of 75 years ago. Alarm Will Sound tackles those scary sounds and finds new life. | As modern music moves beyond modernism, the classical community is still scared of the innovations of 75 years ago. Alarm Will Sound tackles those scary sounds and finds new life. | Alarm Will Sound: Modernists | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21801-modernists/ | Modernists | America’s classical music scene is one of the last fine-arts zones in which modernism remains controversial. While museums do brisk business with retrospectives of experimental visual artists—and as hardcore cinephiles flock to see Jean-Luc Godard’s exploration of 3D—you can still find attendees of classical gigs storming out of venues when the music of the mid-20th century is presented. The consistency of this response to the new and recent creates some self-inflicted wounds. Among other problems, the modernist-classical freeze out makes cultural absorption of today’s compositions all the more difficult. (It’s hard to process blazingly new music if you’re still covering your ears in response to Arnold Schoenberg.)
The bleeding-edge virtuosos in Alarm Will Sound have a bit of fun with this state of play on the cover for their latest album, Modernism, with an illustration styled in the manner of a poster for a midcentury sci-fi flick. In addition to pointing out that the history of “modernism” is now long enough to feel every bit as vintage as your favorite piece of B-movie ephemera, the comic portrait of screaming human faces also poses a rhetorical question: Do we honestly still need to act scared by this stuff? Over the course of their 40-minute set, the Alarm Will Sound players and conductor Alan Pierson respond to this prompt by delivering pure modern-classical fun. The six pieces they’ve chosen speak different structural languages, though each one shares a desire to bring across a sense of wildness that is exuberant at heart.
The first composition on the bill is a classical transcription of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”—the legit musique concrete song on the White Album that was famously built from loops and samples of prerecorded sound (including some classical pieces). In interviews, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon were eager to talk up their interest in studio assemblages by European composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. And Lennon’s partnership with Yoko Ono was also an influence (given her pathbreaking, early '60s association with experimental composers like John Cage and La Monte Young).
The arrangement on Modernists was devised by the composer and Alarm member Matt Marks, and it’s clear he’s fully sorted out all the sonic layers of the piece. Using nothing but acoustic instruments, the arranger has notated an impressive range of gestures present on the original. And the group’s performance here is stunning—particularly when Alarm’s woodwind and string sections play a few opening licks in a way that successfully calls to mind some of the backward-masking effects of Lennon’s tape loops. Overall, the performance makes a persuasive argument on behalf of “Revolution 9” as a modernist composition, full stop.
From there, Alarm Will Sound present works dedicated to them by a cross-section of contemporary classical heavy hitters. Charles Wuorinen has a fearsome reputation as one of America’s craggiest atonalists, but his “Big Spinoff” has a riff-fueled energy that’s easy to love. Wolfgang Rihm’s “Will Sound” is designed as a test of the group’s collective nimbleness: the length of the phrases for various players seems to be continually expanding and contracting, with each part needing to click into the overall performance just right. (Naturally, the group never sounds tentative when playing this madly morphing music.) Augusta Read Thomas’ “Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour” superimposes two texts by Wallace Stevens over some active, songful writing for the ensemble. Group pianist John Orfe’s original work “Journeyman” has some rollicking elements that fit in with the overall program, but it’s not quite on the same level as the other recent pieces.
The final composition on the album is another transcription—this time of a piece that’s easier to categorize as belonging to the modernist classical idiom. Yet taking on Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique” is perhaps an even tougher assignment than transcribing “Revolution 9.” The original is plenty musical, but also frequently delicate. On this recording, when Varese’s opening music is assigned to “traditional” instrumentation, there’s a harmonic richness at play that feels at odds with the composer’s more tinny-sounding design. (As the album’s liner notes accurately tell us, Varèse hoped this piece would reach the audience “unadulterated by ‘interpretation.’”)
Though even a performance like this one has its uses—since a question-raising take can help us define exactly how much contingency and revisionism we’re willing to accept from any re-staging of past experimental glories. As with most modern art museum shows, you can quibble with individual curatorial choices. But overall, Modernists makes for a strong show, mounted on behalf of a wing of classical music that isn’t always represented at your local chamber music hall. | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | May 2, 2016 | 7.6 | 3671638e-c006-4acd-badd-b92ef1aa5808 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The jazz saxophonist and bassist’s latest collaboration turns songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and Sheryl Crow into freewheeling, ethereal explorations. | The jazz saxophonist and bassist’s latest collaboration turns songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and Sheryl Crow into freewheeling, ethereal explorations. | Sam Gendel / Sam Wilkes: The Doober | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-sam-wilkes-the-doober/ | The Doober | About a quarter of the way into “Sweet Fire,” Sam Gendel interrupts himself with a raspy, scraping yelp. Moments before, he’d been skronking away on his C-melody saxophone, lobbing a torrent of notes into the spaces around Sam Wilkes’ bouncing bassline. Suddenly, his voice erupts, as though he’s been stung by a hornet or grabbed hold of a searing hot pan. It’s not a howl of pain, but a fleeting exorcism, the power of the jam compelling him to release the spirit. In true call-and-response jazz tradition, he puts the sax back to his lips and conjures a couple of equally coarse honks from the instrument before resuming his dexterous cascade.
That flash of primal joy succinctly conveys the feeling of discovery permeating The Doober, the third album in the Los Angeles experimental jazz duo’s Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar series. As on their first two records, the pair culled these songs from live performances, editing out the audience but keeping the crackling energy intact. Studios allow artists to shape, overdub, and edit their way into an idea, but playing live is inherently raw; feeling the vibe of a room, communicating without speaking, and leaving space for chance are more immediate paths to transcendence. The Doober is another document of these musicians’ innate chemistry and trust, finding magic in the journey with no real destination in mind.
Many of these songs are covers—or at least they start that way. There’s nothing especially faithful about these versions; Gendel and Wilkes are more interested in spacious textural exploration. On “Rugged Road,” they extract the chorus melody from Judee Sill’s yearning psych-folk classic “There’s a Rugged Road” and turn it into a wriggling, cartoonish mass. As the intensity builds, Gendel and Wilkes somersault over each other, layers of sax and bass swirling into a Tasmanian Devil cloud before collapsing, grinning and exhausted. In their hands, Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” becomes a modal study, shifting around itself like a deconstructed Rubik’s Cube. As the minimal drum machine pattern gets more motorik, Wilkes locks his Fender P-Bass into a repetitive groove while Gendel builds a tower of looped drones. Each track on The Doober is a framed photo of outer space, presenting the infinite in a digestible container.
They’re not innovators of form here—jazz musicians have long treated entries in the canonical songbook as blueprints rather than maps. Gendel and Wilkes do it with a cheeky sense of abandon. Their choice of interpolations is sometimes absurd—who knew there was such an aching, rain-streaked jazz number at the heart of Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the opening theme for perhaps the worst James Bond movie? In the final minute and a half of “Ben Hur,” one of the album’s finest moments, the duo’s cover of Miklós Rózsa’s “Love Theme (From Ben Hur)” melts deliciously into Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Gendel’s sax pooling around a bizarre clip-clop percussion loop. There’s a palpable glee to the album, an almost mischievous acknowledgment that any piece of music can become an invitation to greater freedom. | 2024-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Leaving | May 7, 2024 | 7.6 | 367896f8-d8a6-4338-acf0-f1a48ecced43 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s seventh record is a Memphis vision quest—an earnest, ambitious collection that touches on family, nostalgia, and mortality. | The singer-songwriter’s seventh record is a Memphis vision quest—an earnest, ambitious collection that touches on family, nostalgia, and mortality. | Kevin Morby: This Is a Photograph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-this-is-a-photograph/ | This Is a Photograph | There is a Memphis that exists only in song, where the 20th century never ended, and the mahogany heart of Boomer Americana still pounds. It’s a city where legends—Johnny Cash and Sun Records in the ’50s; Isaac Hayes and Stax in the ’60s; Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, and many more—once lived, and might again, if only their footsteps, reverb, and room tone could be perfectly recreated. For musicians, in particular, it’s a kind of mecca: Paul Simon sang about Graceland with an old Sun-style “traveling rhythm” on his big, midlife record, which inspired him to finally go see the Mississippi Delta with his waking eyes. And then there was Marc Cohn, who parlayed a mad dash through Elvis’ estate and Al Green’s church into an anomalous 1991 hit, “Walking in Memphis.” It was crass, blatant musical tourism, but it was rousing on its own terms, and Cohn had the courage to plainly voice the question that haunts all who walk around the city’s hallowed grounds: “But do I really feel the way I feel?”
This Is a Photograph, the striking new album by Kevin Morby, is partly a document of his own Memphis vision quest. With respect to depth and quality, it’s much closer to Simon than Cohn: polished and sure, but full of heart and wild touches; broad in emotional scope, but pierced with thematic chutes and ladders; plush with period furnishings, but arranged in exciting, inviting ways. Morby sounds like Dan Bejar doing his most respectful Dylan, with that wily little wheeze. By infusing his artful folk-rock with the unfailingly pleasing sounds of vintage gospel and soul, Morby has made an ambitious record that proudly stands out in his sprawling catalog.
Morby begins This Is a Photograph by staring at a magnetic picture of his father, young and shirtless—“a window to the past,” as he sings. The driving guitar lick and brisk handclaps seem geared to grab listeners who might have brushed past the Kansas City journeyman’s half-dozen albums, well received but often inconspicuous by design, over the last decade. He had been drawn to the photo in the wake of a bad medical scare. When this jolt of mortality was followed by the new anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic, Morby fled to Memphis, where life and afterlife seemed so closely entwined. Eventually, he would finish recording the song there with the imprimatur of collaborators from Stax and Sun.
While spending a few weeks in the historic Peabody Hotel, Morby visited multiple sites of American tragedy: the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; Graceland, where Elvis slowly died; and the exact bank of the Mississippi River where the water closed over Jeff Buckley. There, he recorded the lapping sound that divides the eerie electric blues of “Disappearing” from the prismatic, pellucid “A Coat of Butterflies.” A direct address to Buckley, “Butterflies” is ravishing as bright sprigs of harp and guitar, aromatic tendrils of saxophone, and singsong harmonies swirl in the pooling embrace of celebrated jazz drummer Makaya McCraven. It’s the perfect medium in which to suspend Morby’s supple phrasing, where sturdy end rhymes hold all manner of expressive pauses and leaps firmly in place.
McCraven’s is not the only name that jumps out; a fleet of string players, saxophonists, and more play beautifully throughout. Cassandra Jenkins sings on two songs, including “Rock Bottom,” a ’60s garage bon-bon topped with beach-rock bop-bops. Tim Heidecker and Alia Shawkat show up, laughing maniacally, and they aren’t even the most surprising credits on a record where the whistle of a tufted titmouse is listed in the liner notes. True, Morby’s devices can risk feeling too clever by half: In the closing “Goodbye to Goodtimes,” he makes the silly choice of adding parenthetical overdubs after a few lines, reciting the names of Otis Redding and Diane Lane to help illustrate his point. Even the most effective meta-musical touches have a you-see-what-I-did-there twinge, but the risks can also amplify an exquisite sincerity that pays for all.
That sincerity comes to the fore on “Bittersweet, TN,” a duet for banjo and solemn fiddle that derives its intimacy less from its lyrics than from their structure, with Morby and Erin Rae trading lines with growing eagerness, until they’re finishing each other’s sentences. And “Stop Before I Cry”—which seems like the flip side of the self-consciously louche “Five Easy Pieces,” with its “tears in the cum rag”—is the record’s hushed tour de force. The strings and horns breathe evenly, in contrast to the lunging trepidation of Morby’s couplets. “Katie, stop the song now,” he pleads. “Stop before I cry.” The music, of course, stops on cue, only to keep returning in new regalia, pizzicato runs and trilling flutes. These quiet, personal highlights make it clear that the record’s flashiest Memphis homages are also its most vestigial parts. This Is a Photograph succeeds not because of its nostalgic freight but in spite of it, and Morby’s dialogues with the living, not the dead, are when he speaks most clearly. | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | May 18, 2022 | 7.3 | 367a9ae8-d911-461c-a085-b5264b4c55f5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Maryland crooner’s dreamy R&B portrays a world where sex is a game and there are no consequences for anything. | The Maryland crooner’s dreamy R&B portrays a world where sex is a game and there are no consequences for anything. | Brent Faiyaz : Fuck the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brent-faiyaz-fuck-the-world/ | Fuck the World | There’s a lot of slow-groove R&B right now, most of which is destined to rack up streams on sleep-inducing playlists with names like “Vibes.” Brent Faiyaz is often lumped into this scene, but he doesn’t deserve to be. The 24-year-old won’t be found crawling on his knees begging for his ex back, or making sugary love songs for lifestyle-advertising mood boards or direct-to-Netflix rom-coms. If you listen to the dreamy soul of his new album Fuck the World long enough, it starts to sound like a horror story. In his world, sex is a game and there are no consequences for anything.
Faiyaz is at his best when he’s cold-hearted, like Future minus the bleak outlook. “Rehab (Winter in Paris)” is unsympathetic from the opening line: “I got too many hoes/But they ain’t you,” he sings warmly over neo-soul ready strings and finger snaps—so warmly, in fact, that you forget that he’s actually telling the girl he’s supposed to be in love with that he’s sleeping around. The stripped-down, self-produced “Fuck the World (Summer in London)” is similar, with countless bars that make him sound like a demon (“Your nigga caught us texting/You said ‘Baby don’t be mad you know how Brent is’”) or stand out for the wrong reasons (on the hook he calls himself a “walkin’ erection”). Both songs are minimal in their approach, but layered, with small tweaks—like his slowed vocals on “Fuck the World (Summer in London)”—that elevate it all.
It’s worth noting that Brent Faiyaz is a savant at caption-worthy one-liners—“I’d probably be dead if I was basic,” “If you ain’t nasty don’t at me.” But there’s more to Fuck the World than Faiyaz’s ability to provide content for fit pics. He’s remarkably consistent as a songwriter; the weakest point over 10 songs is “Soon Az I Get Home (Interlude),” mostly because of its brevity. On “Let Me Know” he shows off his sweet (and under-used) falsetto, adding a coating of earnest gloom: “Who can I love when they tell me I can’t love myself?/How in the hell, could I possibly love someone else?” he croons.
True to Fuck the World’s title, Faiyaz spends most of his time shrugging, and his looseness separates him from his more self-serious R&B peers. The ethereal “Clouded” is an exception. For a moment, he wonders about his legacy: “Is anybody gon’ remember me?/If I go tonight I doubt the world would change.” Then, the moment passes, and he instantly returns to his comfort zone: too much sex, destroying relationships that aren’t his, and breaking hearts without remorse. | 2020-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Lost Kids | February 15, 2020 | 7.5 | 367b22d8-a2cf-4236-84f8-38908bfbe820 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The hardcore-inspired alt-rock of War on Women's second album is as blunt as reality. They're not so much raging against the machine as blazing through the air that keeps it alive. | The hardcore-inspired alt-rock of War on Women's second album is as blunt as reality. They're not so much raging against the machine as blazing through the air that keeps it alive. | War On Women: Capture the Flag | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/war-on-women-capture-the-flag/ | War on Women: Capture the Flag | On March 20, a month after Parkland, a high school student in Great Mills, Md. fatally shot his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey. The same day, the Baltimore five-piece War On Women released “Lone Wolves,” the opening track of their second album, Capture the Flag. “They don’t care if you live/They don’t care if you die/It’s only ever been about control,” frontwoman Shawna Potter seethes. She has said the song is about gun control and “the terrorism of entitled, angry white men that isn’t called terrorism”; she almost called it “Pulse.” “Then the analysts wonder if he got enough hugs,” Potter sings, “Another cycle of ‘too early to mention guns.’”
If, at best, subversive ideas can sneak into popular culture like a Trojan horse—with radical thought encoded rather than didactically stated—then War On Women pay this no mind. Their eviscerating alt-rock never backs down from the supposed trappings of protest music. War On Women state the facts. They are self-righteous. They point fingers. Activism is prominently at the heart of their screeds against the systematic plagues of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The enemy is everywhere. War On Women prioritize taking it down.
Last summer, this uncompromising approach found War On Women thoroughly out-of-step at the roving mall-punk summit Warped Tour. In a groundbreaking move, they brought a booth to promote “Safer Spaces” and teach festival-goers about bystander intervention. “There’s actually very few people who do what War On Women do,” Kathleen Hanna said in an interview about the Capture the Flag song she lent vocals to, “YDTMHTL.” “We do such similar work in the world that I felt an immediate shorthand with them.”
Like Bikini Kill in the 1990s, War On Women are on a fearless mission to change their subculture. (Potter, like Hanna, is herself an activist: She founded the Baltimore chapter of Hollaback!, the anti-street harassment nonprofit.) But while War On Women self-identify as a hardcore band, they largely slick their edges here, thanks in no small part to co-producer J. Robbins of post-hardcore progenitors Jawbox. The effect is accessible but merciless, more AFI than G.L.O.S.S., or a less aesthetically-minded White Lung. Only a handful of War On Women’s new songs adopt the traditional markers of hardcore—aggression, d-beat rhythms, air-tight rage—though these are their best ones. Their fury makes topics like reproductive justice, racist monuments, and female genital mutilation sound as gnarled and unfriendly as they ought to: “You tie us up in red tape/It’s red because we’re soaking in blood,” Potter screams on “The Violence of Bureaucracy.” Potter once said that her dream lineup for Warped Tour would include Babes in Toyland, Brody Dalle, Hole, Against Me!, and Katy Perry—all a testament to War On Women’s brick-heavy and yet manicured feminist rock schema, dynamic and massive.
Potter measures her antagonizing shouts, metallic roars, and cool-headed singing through powerful lines like “Our existence is our resistance/And your fear of us is our ammunition.” The album’s title track pivots on a hurtling, thrilling refrain: “You wanna legislate it/But you can’t even name it!” Its shredded gang vocals are pure solidarity. This is the collective sound of people who have felt in the depths of their souls the non-negotiable need for abortion rights, the anxiety of a pregnancy test, how fucked it is to not be able to afford Plan B. The proverbial flag appears to be a symbol of everything patriarchy wants to strip away, just to wield power over you. Capture the Flag is the sound of brazenly, corporally, unrepentantly fighting back. Its peak comes among the mathy riffs and group screams of the Hanna-featuring “YDTMHTL.” The same way a mainstream band like Rage Against the Machine made it a visceral joy to chant “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” War On Women make it life-affirming to empty your lungs in the name of their pitched rallying cry: “YOU DON’T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE!!!” War On Women are not raging against the machine so much as blazing through the very water and air that keep capitalist heteropatriarchy alive.
Capture the Flag’s lyrics can at times be so on-the-nose as to recall the earliest waves of women’s-lib folk and pop in the 1970s: “I’ll never, never be a silent woman,” Potter sings on the mid-tempo “Silence Is the Gift.” The most literal songs don’t always land. Still, the bleakness of the Trump era has carved space for them. A song called “Predator in Chief,” in which Potter sings of punching Nazis and the hypocrisy of the flag, can right now feel patently heroic. It is hopeful to imagine a room popping off to the sound of Potter wailing “I’ll show you the meaning of fear” or “Fuck this fucking rapist.”
War On Women’s purpose is so clearly delineated on Capture the Flag that the band included a 16-page “companion workbook” with the album. The idea of making punk-adjacent music friendly to academia might seem antithetical to such an anti-authoritarian band, but the Capture the Flag workbook is remarkably illuminating. It (thankfully) does not set out to teach students about “punk,” but rather about the themes of the record, presenting lyrics, some context (Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde are mentioned), and links to further reading. There is a series of incisive questions to accompany each song, with “Lone Wolves” suggesting the prompts: “How are misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia related?” “Connect the lyric ’too early to mention guns’ with a current article on the GOP reaction to gun violence,” and “How much money does the NRA donate to Republicans?” Whether in the form of homework, a festival performance, or this defiant album, the curriculum of War On Women ought to be widely assigned. We should arm teachers, and ourselves, with this. | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bridge Nine | April 17, 2018 | 7.6 | 3681eccb-aae5-4267-a34c-d5abe8f8e993 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Teeny Lieberson’s voice is chameleonic and firmly in command, capable of twisting into a demanding growl or ringing out like the horns that punctuate her band’s newest album. Backed by her sisters Lizzie and Katherine and bassist Boshra AlSaadi, it’s the fault line on top of which TEEN’s art rock dance party is built. | Teeny Lieberson’s voice is chameleonic and firmly in command, capable of twisting into a demanding growl or ringing out like the horns that punctuate her band’s newest album. Backed by her sisters Lizzie and Katherine and bassist Boshra AlSaadi, it’s the fault line on top of which TEEN’s art rock dance party is built. | TEEN: The Way & The Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19227-teen-the-way-the-color/ | The Way & The Color | Were Teeny Lieberson the protagonist of a pulp novel, you could see the cover advertising her adventures with a slogan along the lines of: “Teeny name… big voice!” The literal namesake of TEEN doesn’t sound anything like her figurative one: Her voice is chameleonic and firmly in command, capable of twisting into a demanding growl or ringing out like the horns that often punctuate the band’s newest album, The Way and Color. It’s the fault line on top of which TEEN’s art rock dance party is built. When she rumbles, the band (comprised of sisters Lizzie and Katherine on keys and drums, and newcomer Boshra AlSaadi on bass) rumbles; when she’s calm, they ease into their open-hearted groove. It’s a powerful arrow to keep in their quiver, even if their aim isn’t always true.
The Way and Color is stuffed with chugging synthesizers, gristly bass lines, braying horns, and high harmonies layered into multi-movement suites that sometimes feel like they’ve been crafted out of the ashes of a handful of songs. Despite the commotion, there are a few songs that assemble into something thrilling. Teeny huffs and puffs and nearly collapses on “Rose 4 U” before pausing to patiently build a triumphant peroration, and while “Breathe Low & Deep”’s explicitly proggy take on R&B doesn’t snap as tightly as Dirty Projectors might, it still swells to a satisfyingly spacey outro. At the same time, the most memorable track, “Tied Up Tied Down”, is the shortest one (not counting the wispy and wholly unnecessary instrumental, “Voices”) and the most conceptually straightforward. Reviewing their debut album, Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey wrote that “a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little." Here, they've at least improved to just 10 extraneous, probably cut-worthy minutes.
TEEN say they’re inspired by Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and the songs on The Way and Color address a similar kind of sinewy, sometimes sinister sexuality where bodies don't quite know what to do with each other. But their attempt to slink around doesn’t carry the same comfort level; it sometimes sounds as though the band, while playing, is repeating a mantra of “Be cool, be cool” inside their heads, infusing everything with a level of stiffness. There’s a song called “Toi Toi Toi” that borrows its title from the opera, where “toi toi toi” is said in the same way as “break a leg.” The Liebersons come from opera stock: their late father, Peter Lieberson, was an acclaimed composer, and their late stepmother, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, was a well respected mezzo-soprano. They grew up in a musical household, and in interview have spoken about the performative quality that their parents encouraged, such as singing for people at dinner parties and acting out plays like Oklahoma!.
This background might explain their fearlessness in overpacking their songs with ideas, and you want to give them credit for ambition rather than playing it safe. And they are getting better, inch-by-inch, and if The Way and Color is not all the way there yet you can hear it as a promising document of a formative period. | 2014-04-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-04-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Carpark | April 21, 2014 | 6.6 | 36850301-0f26-4e34-a7b4-e304ba262d65 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1996 mix from Detroit techno icon Jeff Mills, a brazen and electric performance that enshrined his reputation as the most ambitious DJ in the world. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1996 mix from Detroit techno icon Jeff Mills, a brazen and electric performance that enshrined his reputation as the most ambitious DJ in the world. | Jeff Mills: Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-mills-live-at-the-liquid-room-tokyo/ | Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo | Getting onto the dancefloor of Liquidroom was always a mission. You first needed to venture to Kabukicho, the seedy edge of Shinjuku whose claustrophobic alleys and clutter of neon signage are what many think of when they picture Tokyo nightlife. From there, you’d line up around the block, trek a seven-floor staircase, pass security, elbow your way through the typically rammed 1000-cap venue, and hope whoever was playing that night was worth the cover charge. The club had hosted its fair share of notables by October 28th, 1995, but nothing on the scale of what went down that Saturday night. Because whether you were pressed against the stage or posted up at the bar, as soon as the clock struck 3 a.m. and Detroit’s Jeff Mills cued up his first record, you bore witness to the future.
Sixty-eight minutes and 38 songs chiseled out of that three-hour DJ set became Mills’ first commercially accessible mix, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo. No real-time video of the performance exists, nor can you access the audio on any streaming service, but scan the comment sections under dozens of unofficial uploads or spend enough time in the danker corners of club smoking areas, and you’ll crash headlong into a wall of consensus that this is a mix without equal, the Techno Bible, unequivocally The One. You can ask ChatGPT right now what the greatest DJ mix of all time is, and it’ll hedge on the amorphous nature of subjectivity, then list Liquid Room top anyway.
Released in spring 1996, Liquid Room was a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be. The received wisdom of how to construct a club set—one song after another; build-up, breakdown—was obliterated by this lean, striking man mixing like a Spirograph, executing a blur of hip-hop battle techniques over waves of crushing pressure. Records were piped in hot with phased doubles, scratches, stabs, rewinds, inverted frequencies, and hard stops, then torn from the platter without warning and discarded onto the floor, until you couldn’t be certain if this was dance music or a new frontier in free jazz.
A detail still broadly unknown is that Mills wasn’t even using his preferred setup of three turntables: In order to demo unreleased cuts within the mix, he was operating on two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape machines, which upped the difficulty level appreciably. It didn’t hurt that one of those quarter-inch tapes was built around a four-note call-and-response between a higher and lower rung of bells, a quirky splash of chiaroscuro in otherwise total darkness. Bouncing around like a hacky sack off the steel-capped toes of two established Midwest bangers, Mills’ “Life Cycle” and DJ Funk’s “Work That Body,” the track was listed only in the liner notes as “Untitled A.” We know it today as “The Bells,” a stone-cold anthem.
In the decades hence, a vast swathe of DJs and producers from the top of the commercial tree down to the roots of the underground have credited hearing this set or watching Jeff Mills play as their personal eureka moment. It would save time listing those who haven’t been influenced by him, his label Axis, and the collective he co-founded, Underground Resistance, whose infusion of self-sufficiency and martial messaging into electro and techno helped shape how listeners receive the ideology of Detroit and its music. Then, as now, Liquid Room stands as a high-water mark of a Black artform built around space travel and the necessity of forward motion: ’90s techno at its most unyielding and free.
And yet. At surface level, this thing is also… sort of a mess. Liquid Room may be taxing for anyone reared on the high-definition, blemish-free mixes that flood our digital feeds today. You don’t have to make it past the first song to detect crackle and damage in the audio. The third of the mix’s three segments has under seven minutes to build flow, which is shorter than most killer electronic songs. There’s sophistication and structural harmony in a Frank Gehry sort of way, but many of the transitions on Mills’ landmark set are fistfights, and the fidelity hovers a few steps north of garbage.
“What a DJ does with their hands,” Mills told Resident Advisor in 2019, “isn’t something you can expect to hear every time. It’s like sports… like you’re a tennis player, and your timing is really everything.” Well, Liquid Room is not the dignified sound of Mills gliding on clay. He’s in full McEnroe mode, battering aces down the middle of the court, showboating, snapping rackets, double-faulting constantly, propelled by a third lung—all while the crowd deliriously laps it up. Here’s the oracle, and he’s handling records so coarsely that it seems as if he’s close to losing control entirely.
Veteran electronic music journalist Michaelangelo Matos likes to compare Liquid Room to the Ramones’ debut, but I’d strike closer to home. This is techno’s Raw Power, both in essence and spirit. Don’t sweat the blown-out sound or odd loose passage among those daredevil moves; to chart Liquid Room’s influence, zoom out to observe the impact crater it left behind, ringed by onlookers who stood agog at the new possibilities available to them. It’s polarizing for a reason. It’s also brilliant for the same reason.
Jeff Mills’ reputation as a teenage DJ called The Wizard began in the early to mid-’80s, earning him club residencies in Detroit and neighboring Ann Arbor before he was old enough to legally enter the premises, as well as critical exposure on local stations WDRQ and WJLB. From 1982 to 1985, the latter was home to The Electrifyin’ Mojo, then-ruler of the airwaves and an exceptionally influential figure in the tapestry of the city’s late 20th-century musical evolutions. Competition sharpened Mills’ resolve. He would conjure slick open-format megamixes featuring several traits that later bubbled up on Liquid Room: lasered hyperfocus, an elite sprinter’s sense of pace, and the deployment of crowd-baiting feints and fades.
John Collins, Detroit techno historian and a core member of Underground Resistance, was knocked for six by the speed of Mills’ hands, which seemed to zip across the faders as if jammed on fast-forward. “No one had ever really done what he was doing,” he recalled to author Dan Sicko in Techno Rebels. “I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.” Collins wasn’t the only one. In clippings from 1985, the Ann Arbor News spends three paragraphs trying to elucidate the specifics of how a 22-year-old Mills was turning Madonna’s “Into the Groove” inside-out, before waving the white flag: “No, it’s too hard to describe.”
That same year, the release of Model 500’s “No UFO’s” helped catalyze a new electronic movement called techno. The exact provenance of the style remains contested, given the blurry creative overlap with electro and synth-pop, and the techno- prefix was an existing descriptor for music built with or fascinated by advanced technology. But the techno pumping out of Detroit—anchored primarily, though not exclusively, by the Belleville Three of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500, as well as one-half of Cybotron)—was distinct enough to pull clear as a genre in its own right.
By the end of the ’80s, as hometown clubs like the Music Institute sharpened and expanded the sound’s remit, export compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit surfed a wave of British rave fantasia, and Saunderson’s group Inner City became a fixture on the European charts, techno was established. At this point, however, casual audiences still tended to regard it as more Midwest grooves fit for peak time. From the margins, Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks saw things differently. Here now was a fresh medium, one with an unprecedented opportunity to critique the fecklessness of urban blight and mass production that had scarred their predecessors. As a form of cybernetic communication born under Motor City’s smoke-choked skies, it spoke to the sci-fi fantasists on a deeper level. Big fun this was not.
Come 1990, The Wizard was off the air and applying his hand to production. Having already released one LP as part of the industrial outfit Final Cut, the cold austerity of techno was a natural progression. Banks, a former Parliament bassist who had appeared on Techno! and was constantly in hot water with local police for drag racing, was the perfect creative foil, but it took a chance studio meeting with Robert Hood, then MC Rob Noise, for Underground Resistance to be born. “HARD MUSIC FROM A HARD CITY” blared the back of 1992 compilation Revolution for Change, a winning mantra for the label whose sublimation of individual identity, cryptic dispatches from the front line of class war, steadfast refusal to bend to the major label system, and lashings of sonic punishment ignited multiple fires that burn within electronic music to this day.
An early expedition to NYC emphasized the gulf that had emerged between Detroit techno’s first and second wave. At the fabled Limelight club, one unnamed DJ attempted to block Mills from entering the booth until the offender was nearly hurled over a balcony by UR’s enforcer. Out on the street, UR’s matching attire turned the heads of Ice-T and Queen Latifah, who couldn’t discern if the group was a music movement or a militant one, and drew confrontation from local rap crews. (Fearsome they might have been, the label still wasn’t immune from making rookie judgment calls: In 1991, a submission tape arrived at UR HQ entitled Analogue Bubblebath, the very first Aphex Twin record. Mills and Banks passed.)
As the original trio would jet off to live performances in far-flung locations, Mills’ dexterity on the wheels of steel became a front-and-center draw. The baby-faced Wizard was evolving into the man whispered about at ever-increasing volume as the most skilled DJ on Earth, a transition ushered along by a pair of star-making club residencies at Limelight and Berlin’s Tresor. Soon, his shifting demeanor in interviews showed how heavily the responsibility of being an artist able to advance the form weighed on him. By the time Mills peeled off to found the Axis label at the end of ’92, he was on a collision course with destiny.
Prior to 1995, Mills had visited Tokyo two or three times. Japan’s appetite for techno was ravenous, and it’s clear the Detroiter felt kinship with local crowds, given that he agreed for his first official live mix to be a test balloon for Mix-Up, a new series from Sony Japan intended to capture the exponential growth of the club circuit. Until that point, Mills had appeared only on 1993’s Techno-Trance, a niche German tape pack, in which he shelled hard trance and was called “Geoff Mills” in a humiliating misprint on the packaging. It is not considered canon. Mills remains commendably abstemious when it comes to platforming his own work. He hasn’t recorded an installment of DJ-Kicks, nor a Fabric mix, and you won’t find him on Boiler Room (I was one of the bookers there for five years and Lord knows, we tried). Yet he did agree to Mix-Up, a series that ran for all of five editions and then was never heard from again.
Decision made, Liquidroom was sought as a staging ground for the recording. From opening in July 1994 to relocation a decade later, the original space became a favorite of wayfaring jocks like Laurent Garnier and DJ Shadow, as well as a regular host for beloved ’90s Japanese outfits including Melt-Banana, Boredoms’ Yamantaka EYE, and mercurial psychonauts Fishmans. “To say it looks futuristic is valid,” Mills wrote in Liquid Room’s liner notes, “but only if you have seen the future.”
On the big night, a dozen ambient mics were strategically placed around the venue with the intention of preserving a spatial topography of the club within the mix itself. Though this proved too complex to pull off, the idea was decades ahead of its time: In 2011, Four Tet’s FabricLive 59 took a similar approach to mimic the sensation of navigating the London superclub’s multi-level floorplan. Besides, there are moments on Mix-Up Vol. 2 Featuring Jeff Mills – Live Mix at Liquid Room, Tokyo (to cite the Japanese release’s full, and quickly truncated, name) where the audience responds with such deafening affirmation that only left and right in the stereo field was needed.
Taking apart the schematics of the mix reveals how brazenly Mills thumbed his nose at orthodoxy. Selections are afforded little time to settle as the speedometer flickers past the 150 bpm mark. During one showstopping move, Mills pumps the brakes and decelerates into an audibly worn copy of what was then Detroit electronic music’s de facto national anthem, “Strings of Life.” (Its standing has been complicated by the gravity of allegations that broke against the song’s co-creator Derrick May in 2020.) Despite a major tempo collapse, “Strings” is still pitched up as far as the Technics 1200s could handle without intervention. Where the mystique of 20th-century discotheque kings like David Mancuso, Danny Krivit, and Larry Levan was built on extension—either by getting hands-on with splicing tape in order to fashion boutique edits for the dancefloor, or letting the 12" run out in full splendor—here Mills revs in the opposite direction, fixated on dissolution, constantly asking: What’s the fastest I can get a song in and out while still unlocking its integral value?
Seventeen of Mills’ productions make up the backbone of Liquid Room, aired alongside key artists from the golden age of club music: Richie Hawtin, Robert Armani, Ken Ishii, Joey Beltram, Claude Young, and Surgeon. Yet some of Mills’ inclusions were still receiving tweaks mere hours before he caught his flight to Japan, with the crowd reception intended to guide their final form. In Segment 1, the overdriven bass and stacked sirens of an unmastered “i9” submerge the audio in tar thick enough that the crisp rave stabs from “Changes of Life” must scythe through it like a power hose. It worked a treat, so Mills knew the former was done.
Liquid Room also features so many instances of records getting spun backwards and forwards that you might assume there’s a zipper trapped under the needle. Not quite. Unlike club music derived from soundsystem culture—where wheeling up a record is an endorsement of the tune’s popularity and a way to spike energy levels, as much as the functional act of starting over—self-serious house and techno has long treated rewinds like muck tracked all over the floor of a polished blend; verboten except as a last resort. Liquid Room contains dozens of them, all dramatically on the money.
Two passages in particular leap out. First, head to the beginning of Segment 2 and try to picture exactly what’s going on. The Advent’s “Bad Boy,” already a livewire of a tune, is harried constantly from something off DJ Skull’s Met“L”gear EP; as both “Head Basher” and “The 187 Skillz” possess a near-identical growling synth at different speeds, no one can definitively agree which side is in play. Mills punches the faders up and down like a piston to stab in Skull during the fractional gap where the Advent ducks out, deploys a rewind for flair, and repeats the trick again. After six interventions, Mills resets DJ Skull on the platter, scribbles along the edge of the record to locate a different portion that might compliment “Bad Boy” post-breakdown, aligns an appropriate balance of high, mid, and low frequencies using only the left cup of his headphones cued to the mixer, relocks the tempo (the Advent has sped up during all this), then finally throws the channel up again and scratches “Head Basher” in for good, kickstarting another brawl-as-transition.
On a 2024 club-standard set of Pioneer CDJ-3000s with digitized, quantized, tagged, auto-looped, and scrollable audio files that have a visual waveform for good measure, this entire sequence might take a good DJ somewhere around four to five minutes. Mills achieves it on turntables in 97 seconds.
So that’s when things go right. Yet it’s the moments on Liquid Room when things go wrong that give the mix its aura of invincibility. Segment 3 kicks off with Mills phasing between two copies of his track “Casa,” but in a flash they’ve gone massively out of sync—you could drive a Freightliner through the gaps in the kick drums. The same song stumbles over itself like a drunk teenager for what feels like eternity, a disorienting whorl of competing tones that you simply do not hear in professional mixes.
Mills refuses to accept defeat. In a moment of violent perseverance, he starts attacking the trainwreck with frantic reloads, not so much correcting the beatmatch as folding the flub into his rhythmic toolbox, like a blacksmith striking the same iron over and over until it finally contorts into the required shape. Where any other DJ might cut their losses, Mills opts to ride the riptide, then leaves it in for the world to hear. The payoff is mesmeric.
Listening to Mills’ run from 1993’s Waveform Transmission Vol.1 through 1998’s Purpose Maker Compilation today can raise mixed feelings. They don’t, alas, make them like this anymore. Mills’ work helped to nudge techno beyond select early-adopter cities: turning the head of British junglists, directly inspiring the next wave of European stars like Paula Temple, Adam Beyer, and Joris Voorn, and spawning hardgroove, an offshoot of low-bollocks, high-impact rippers captained by Ben Sims, one of the few DJs credibly spoken about in the same breath as the Detroit greats. There’s a reason why an idiom like “Dublin’s Jeff Mills” or “the grimey Jeff Mills” translates without supporting context: His name is not only a reflection of a certain skillset, it’s synonymous with dynamism and quality.
Another word to describe Mills these days is dependable. Even in full flight, shredding the TR-909 or using three-deck acrobatics to coax a football field’s worth of dancers to the edge of ecstasy, control is key. Gung-ho chops and cuts have been supplanted by discrete feathering as Mills prioritizes stealthy exits that are “mainly subtracting sound away.” The same principle guides Liquid Room—ditch the inclination to ID each song and give yourself over to the product as a whole—yet his set progressions rarely accommodate hairpin turns anymore. He starts spacey, then it’s deep, then “The Bells,” then it’s euphoric, then it’s spacey again, then maybe a bonus 909 solo to cap the show. That’s the Jeff Mills Experience. The formula rocks. His reputation as the high deity of techno is staked on it.
For a mix that should have been rendered obsolete by decades of upgrades, Liquid Room’s influence sustains in part because it effortlessly bridges two opposing DJ disciplines: the cultivated depth of techno and the thrill of hammer-time maximalism. That chasm feels as wide as ever. Techno has been suffering an identity crisis for years—it has become simultaneously larger, whiter, and shallower. The big-room-ification of a once proud subculture has resulted in wan approximations of communal escape scaled up to jumbotron levels, then miniaturized to fit the screens in our hands. Equally, for a scene rooted in the shock of the new, there’s profound insecurity among the old guard about fresh blood entering the genre’s arteries. Mills has sat on the top line of an indiscriminately broad array of festivals, including many corporate ones, for longer than today's generation of clubbers have been alive—so whether young audiences currently feasting on devil-may-care DJing regard him as an icon of rave’s radical heyday remains to be seen.
But which is the Jeff Mills we actually want? The one heard on Liquid Room, a capital-A Artist in the mold of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, with acuity of vision and flaws too? Or the realpolitik Mills, dropping “The Bells” every show, still hoping techno might be a curative for social ills, playing the game as it lays? Uneasy collisions between the two—a hometown reaction to The Wizard’s comeback so frosty he retired the alias, or the baffling recurrence of crowds who lob projectiles at him when he’s not matching their expectations—suggest people are settling for the wrong option.
In a recent campaign for fashion house Jil Sander, Mills was asked to expound upon a theme, “mid-’90s optimism”—with the unspoken “that we’ve lost” echoing not far behind. There’s no glint of awe in our collective eye when DJing’s premier cosmologist collaborates with NASA. It’s just a thing that happens. The idea that technology could be inspiring or even fun anymore has dissipated. Accordingly, the notion that techno might be a pathway to revolution has lost resonance. So many arenas and aircraft hangars have passed in front of Mills’ eyes now that, by his own account, he sometimes zones out mid-performance and begins to dream, instead, of the stars. To some degree, he stands as an avatar for a future forestalled.
Yet I’d encourage you to listen to the mix and consider the opposite: that this is the work of an individual who believed so unreservedly in the possibilities of what lay beyond that they gave up their best years attempting to tear open that wormhole. At the root, Mills told author Hari Kunzru in 1998, his spin on techno has always been “about making people feel they’re in a time ahead of this present time. Like if you’re hearing someone speak in a language you don’t understand, or you’re in surroundings you’ve never seen before.” More than any DJ mix before or since, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo makes a persuasive case for this music as an intercepted transmission from another realm, but the one commuting that message over a set of turntables isn’t a computer. It isn’t a chatbot, or an algorithm, or a self-learning system.
Machines can only take you so far, and what they explicitly cannot do is this. Because when the lights go up and the booth clears out, there stands only Jeff, human. And he’s playing the absolute shit out of those records. | 2024-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | React Music Ltd / Sony Music Japan | February 4, 2024 | 10 | 3689b7b6-a6c2-4659-aa96-db3d703d5cc4 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
DIIV's long-awaited follow-up to Oshin is not the radical break in style that Zachary Cole Smith had promised: While it's mostly about getting high and it sounds exactly like DIIV, it finds more interesting ways to do both of those things. Call it Requiem for a Dream-pop, dedicated to a gorgeous yet unglamorous portrayal of addiction. | DIIV's long-awaited follow-up to Oshin is not the radical break in style that Zachary Cole Smith had promised: While it's mostly about getting high and it sounds exactly like DIIV, it finds more interesting ways to do both of those things. Call it Requiem for a Dream-pop, dedicated to a gorgeous yet unglamorous portrayal of addiction. | DIIV: Is the Is Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21462-is-the-is-are/ | Is the Is Are | When "Dopamine" dropped last year, it spent four minutes breaking nearly four years' worth of promises Zachary Cole Smith had made about DIIV’s sophomore album. There was no remnant of the San Francisco magic Smith hoped to conjure by working with Chet "J.R" White. It did not sound like Royal Trux and it definitely did not sound like Elliott Smith. It didn't signal that Smith would follow through on his proposed indictment of guitar-based music’s lack of originality and relevance. It was, however, the most sharply written DIIV song to date, making a promise Is the Is Are actually keeps: While it’s mostly about getting high and it sounds exactly like DIIV, it finds more interesting ways to do both of those things.
Though not the Tago Mago or Tusk-style double album Smith originally planned, Is the Is Are makes unusual demands for an indie rock record. With each of the five singles in its protracted rollout, DIIV confirmed they were making their proprietary sound deeper and more immersive. The revelation of a 17-song tracklist promised scatter and sprawl, like a hybrid of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration. However, this is more in the spirit of Seventeen Seconds to Pornography: gray, gloomy textures, depressive fatalism. And like those records, Is the Is Are doesn’t engage in fantasy or open up new worlds—it builds a nearly impenetrable wall around the self. Call it Requiem for a Dream-pop, dedicated to a gorgeous yet unglamorous portrayal of addiction.
DIIV's signature trick is conflating the treadmill momentum of habit with the false hope for escape, and this was about the only trick they had going on Oshin. Written and performed entirely by Smith with every instrument mixed evenly, Oshin relied on its cumulative effect, soft-selling its hooks. Whereas Oshin was meditative and static, "Dopamine" and "Under the Sun" are transportive and intricate, taking mid-song off-ramps to more interesting vistas. Even "(Fuck)" serves its purpose as an 17-second cleanse between the record’s murky midsection and its luminous final stretch. Now functioning as a road-tested, democratic band in the studio, every member of DIIV has to assert himself, and the slightest alteration to their usual sound brings out new features—a brief glimmer of piano cuts through an enveloping humidity on "Healthy Moon" similar to early R.E.M.; the jumped-up rhythm of "Valentine" is sourced from the Smiths while retaining DIIV’s clenched-teeth tension; Devin Perez’s melodic basslines function as a lead instrument and allows Smith and Andrew Bailey’s guitars to search out more interesting textures and harmonies.
An hour of this ensures there are times where DIIV threaten to become too in love with their own sound, particularly toward the middle. But beyond lending Is the Is Are a necessary heft to back Smith’s claims, these songs are convincing portrayals of checked-out living. We don’t get to find out much about the Roi and Grant to whom "Bent" and "Mire" are dedicated; DIIV’s obsessive tinkering turns everything outside of Smith into a hall of mirrors, false friends and true loves reflecting back on his own struggles. On "Bent (Roi's Song)," Smith sighs, "When it feels right, you just lost the fight," a deflated admission of defeat before "Dopamine" echoes the same sentiment with a false sense defiance. "Mire" repeats "I was blind but now I see" as an epiphany, and Smith immediately regrets awareness thereafter by meeting the "Incarnate Devil."
You can make legitimate guesses as to whom that song might be dedicated—scene guys in Brooklyn, drugs themselves, people once in his inner circle? Smith’s measure of quasi-celebrity might give him unfair advantage over his stylistic peers, but it’s an advantage all the same, so when his conversational lyrics feel insular, we at least know who’s having the conversation. Sky Ferreira contributes lead vocal on the exhaust-huffing "Blue Boredom," deadpanning sing-talk beat poetry that imagines the two as Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore rather than Kurt and Courtney. She’s just as present when DIIV allow themselves fleeting hope on the awestruck "Under the Sun" and resignation on the heartbreaking "Loose Ends"—"Does it feel watered down/ Do you feel older now?" appears in quotes on the lyrics sheet, implying it’s a talk between people stuck having the same conversation over and over again.
Immediately after "Loose Ends," Is the Is Are goes on the opposite of a victory lap, trudging toward its finish with no hint of optimism. Penultimate track "Dust" has been kicking around since 2013, and the lyric "I’m fucked to die in a world of shit" immediately jumped out of their practice space. I expected it to be a placeholder, a sentiment to be expressed more artfully at a later date—unlike his heroes, Smith doesn't allow for humor or irony. But the line remains on "Dust" and introduces a hint of nihilistic sarcasm that, along with its title, evokes an unintentional grunge-era classic: Alice in Chains’ Dirt, the most harrowing document of smack-addled myopia to ever sell five million copies, the scariest aspect of which was its narrator’s utter refusal to acknowledge outside help, let alone seek it. And immediately after "Dust," Smith spends Is the Is Are’s eerie closer warding off interventions with a hopeless mantra: "It’s no good, it’d be a waste of breath."
Even if DIIV turns its morose self-indulgence into a virtue, it’s unlikely to change the conversation amongst their detractors: those who see DIIV as an embodiment of everything insular and insufferable about Brooklyn indie rock will probably find that Smith is no more capable of filling his ambitions to be a true generational artist as he is one of his oversized T-shirts. But Smith’s willingness to open himself up to criticism by making statements—fashion, musical, or self-promoting—make discussions of DIIV more divisive and passionate than those surrounding similarly positioned bands like Wild Nothing, the War on Drugs, or Real Estate.
This aspect of DIIV aligns with songs like "Dopamine," "Dust," and "Waste of Breath," ensuring that Is the Is Are hits on a visceral, teenage level similar to that of the Cure or Smashing Pumpkins, bands who were also mercilessly mocked in their day by gatekeepers of cool as both social climbing posers and "stuck in the terminal malaise of adolescent existentialism." It’s the same immediacy that inspires thousands of high schoolers to rock Unknown Pleasures and Nirvana T-shirts as well, even if they might not understand their cultural impact. But they relate to the disillusion, doubt, and confusion of a compelling, controversial frontperson because those things never go out of style. | 2016-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | February 2, 2016 | 8.1 | 368cbd48-f955-4a8c-934b-00ae98f0b477 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Five Years is an exhaustive 12-disc set covering a significant period in Bowie's development, from his proper debut through 1973's Pin Ups. Included among some classic albums are live sets, singles, and alternate mixes. | Five Years is an exhaustive 12-disc set covering a significant period in Bowie's development, from his proper debut through 1973's Pin Ups. Included among some classic albums are live sets, singles, and alternate mixes. | David Bowie: Five Years 1969-1973 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21066-five-years-1969-1973/ | Five Years 1969-1973 | "Not only is this the last show of the tour", David Bowie announced at London's Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973 by way of introduction to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "but it is the last show we will ever do." The recording of that nugget of rock history appears in this box collecting most of Bowie's music from the years of his ascent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Imagine that Five Years (allegedly the first of a series, though Bowie has always announced many more projects than he's released) was all the documentation there was of his musical career—that he'd entered the public sphere with his 1969 single "Space Oddity", retired from the stage after the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, and vanished to a Tibetan mountaintop following a loving salute to his roots, Pin Ups. He'd certainly be some kind of glam-rock legend, even more than his friend and rival Marc Bolan. He probably wouldn't have the enduring cultural cachet he commands in our world, but there would still be a fervent cult around his three great albums and three iffy-to-good ones, and even more interest in his live recordings and ephemera. To put it differently, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would be the same; LCD Soundsystem wouldn't.
In our world, though, Five Years is only a slice of a much longer curve. The earliest album in the box, 1969's David Bowie—a.k.a. Space Oddity, a.k.a. *Man of Words/Man of Music—*wasn't Bowie's recorded debut, or even his first self-titled album. (In fact, there could theoretically be a Five Years 1964-1968, tracing his evolution from rock 'n' roll wannabe to fussy vaudevillian, although it would mostly be kind of awful.) It was, however, a follow-up to his first successful single, a haunting novelty record about a lost astronaut that had been released a week and a half before the moon landing. The young singer/acoustic guitarist behind these songs obviously has a mountain of charisma, a gift for hooks, and a taste for the language of experimental science fiction, and not the faintest idea what to do with them most of the time. So he wears his influences on his sleeve ("Letter to Hermione" is intensely Tim Buckley-ish; "Memory of a Free Festival" is a hippie rewrite of "Hey Jude"), and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect.
As it turns out, what he really needed was a good hard rock'n'roll band. Bowie assembled a very short-lived group called the Hype with guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti; by the time they recorded The Man Who Sold the World in April, 1970, they'd picked up drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and gone back to using their singer's name. The Man Who Sold the World is the dark horse of the Bowie catalog. There were no singles issued from it, and the title track didn't really become a standard until Nirvana covered it decades later. But toughening up the arrangements made Bowie's stagey warble vastly more effective, and a lot of his artistic risks paid off: the album's opener is a ferocious eight-minute metal sci-fi opus, "The Width of a Circle", with some of the most overtly homoerotic lyrics a pop musician had ever intoned ("He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/ And showed me the leather belt 'round his hips").
The theme of shifting sexual identity became the core of Bowie's next album, 1971's scattered but splendid Hunky Dory: "Gotta make way for the Homo Superior," he squeals on the gay-bar singalong "Oh! You Pretty Things", simultaneously nodding to Nietzsche and to X-Men. He'd also made huge leaps as a songwriter, and his new songs demonstrated the breadth of his power: the epic Jacques Brel-gone-Dada torch song "Life on Mars?" is immediately followed by "Kooks", an adorable lullaby for his infant son. The band (with Trevor Bolder replacing Visconti on bass) mostly keeps its power in check—"Changes" is effectively Bowie explaining his aesthetic to fans of the Carpenters. Still, they cut loose on the album's most brilliant jewel, "Queen Bitch", a furiously rocking theatrical miniature (Bowie-the-character-actor has rarely chewed the scenery harder) that out-Velvet Undergrounds the Velvet Underground.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from 1972 was the record that made Bowie the star he'd been acting like for a while, although its reputation isn't quite the same as its reality. It was mostly recorded before Hunky Dory was released; it purports to be a concept album, but doesn't actually have a coherent concept. ("Starman", "Suffragette City" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" were all late additions to its running order.) It is, nonetheless, a fantastic set of songs, overflowing with huge riffs and huger personae. "Five Years" opens the album with Bowie's grandest sci-fi apocalypse yet, Mick Ronson shreds his way to the guitar pantheon, and the band's flamboyant performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops famously gave the next generation of British pop musicians a bunch of funny tingling sensations. The whole album, in fact, is as erotically charged as an orgone accumulator: Bowie was probably the only person who could have remained sexually ambiguous after declaring "I'm gay, and always have been."
Aladdin Sane, recorded while Bowie and the Spiders were touring their asses off in an attempt to get America to love them the way England already did, is effectively Ziggy Stardust II, a harder-rocking if less original variation on the hit album. There's a paranoid sci-fi scenario ("Panic in Detroit"), a blues-rock stomp ("The Jean Genie"), a bit of cabaret ("Time"), a blunt sex-and-drugs nightmare ("Cracked Actor"). The big difference is that where Ziggy ended with a vision of outreach to the front row ("Give me your hands, 'cause you're wonderful!"), Aladdin is all alienation and self-conscious artifice, parodic gestures of intimacy directed to the theater balcony. Bowie overenunciates his cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" to turn it into a caricature of a disinterested Casanova; his sneering rocker "Watch That Man" is a better evocation of the Stones themselves.
Then there's Pin Ups, a quick-and-sloppy covers album that's more interesting in theory than in practice. The repertoire is the songs he'd heard in London clubs when he'd been starting out as a professional musician (less than a decade earlier), and that had shaped his idea of rock: music by the Yardbirds, the Who, the Pretty Things, and the like. (In other words, not so much his idols as contemporaries who found their audience before he did.) But the original versions of every one of those songs are vastly better, because Bowie doesn't have much to say through any of them, and covers up for it through cruise-ship-entertainer oversinging. His art, in those days, was an art of persona, and songs like "Sorrow" and "See Emily Play" didn't have much to offer it. The band was falling apart, too: the Spiders' drummer Woody Woodmansey had been replaced by Aynsley Dunbar (a veteran of the same London scene), and Ronson and Bolder were gone by the next time Bowie recorded.
Bowie released six studio albums in the '69-'73 period, but Five Years is a 12-disc set. The Ziggy film soundtrack, a document of that allegedly final stage performance that was first released a decade later, appears in its expanded, two-disc 2003 form, complete with a 15-minute "The Width of a Circle" and unnecessary Jacques Brel and Velvet Underground covers (still no sign of the songs on which Jeff Beck played at that gig, though). Live Santa Monica '72, a radio broadcast that was bootlegged for decades and officially issued in 2008, is included here too. Ziggy Stardust itself appears in both its original mix and co-producer Ken Scott's 2003 remix, which is frankly not all that different.
The selling point here for Bowiephiles who probably have all of that stuff already is the two-disc Re:Call 1 (its title cheekily adapts the old RCA Records logo's typeface), a collection of material that only appeared on singles. Some of them are triflingly different mono mixes, but there are a few fascinating oddities: both the never-previously-reissued 1970 dud "Holy Holy" and the much sharper 1971 remake that nearly made it onto Ziggy Stardust, both the frequently-reissued 1972 killer "John, I'm Only Dancing" and the just-as-good 1973 remake that nearly made it onto Aladdin Sane, and a peculiar '71 single (released under the name The Arnold Corns) with larval versions of "Hang On to Yourself" and "Moonage Daydream", both of which were heavily rewritten for Ziggy. Still, Re:Call 1 is far from a complete collection of the officially issued recordings that Bowie made in the 1969-1973 era: there's no "Sweet Head" or "Lightning Frightening" or "Bombers", for instance, and it'd have been nice to include the version of "The Supermen" that he re-recorded in 1971 with the Spiders from Mars' classic lineup.
Five Years doesn't really reconsider or recontextualize Bowie's first classic period—that was more the job of EMI's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane reissues a decade ago, and their 2009 Space Oddity reissue. (The book included with the new set features producers' notes from Tony Visconti and Ken Scott, contemporary reviews of the albums and the final Ziggy show, and reproductions of ads, but nothing especially revelatory.) It's just a collection of some superb records, and some less good ones, from an interesting era of a major artist. If those five years had been all we'd gotten of Bowie, this would be an essential artifact. But they weren't, and the wonders that followed them make the scope of this box seem both over-inclusive and incomplete. | 2015-10-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 1, 2015 | 8.2 | 369303e1-fd3a-4377-be0e-1b5e9f8a058a | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Eleven Into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation is a new anthology pulling unreleased work from 130701’s roster, celebrating not just the label but the hazily-defined genre of “post-classical.” | Eleven Into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation is a new anthology pulling unreleased work from 130701’s roster, celebrating not just the label but the hazily-defined genre of “post-classical.” | Various Artists: Eleven into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22108-eleven-into-fifteen-a-130701-compilation/ | Eleven into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation | The exact meaning of “post-classical” is inherently vague, but is generally suggested to encompass artists who experiment with sounds or structures typically associated with classical music. It's a fluid category: 20th century minimalists like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—and even rock-covering Kronos Quartet—would have once been considered post-classical, but many of today’s younger listeners would probably drop the prefix without thinking twice. Nowadays, the term means something different—a little more experimental, and a bit more likely to tease indie rock and popular music tropes. Coincidentally, many of its most well-known practitioners can be found on FatCat Records imprint 130701’s small but excellent roster. Listeners interested in “post-classical” might then look no further than Eleven Into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation, a new anthology pulling unreleased work from the eleven artists 130701 has signed over its fifteen years of existence, celebrating not just the label but the hazily-defined genre itself.
There isn’t an obligatorily-included dud or clunker on Eleven into Fifteen; it’s a record full of highlights, a cohesive body of work. Unfamiliar listeners might assume it was all one artist, rather than a compilation. Though the eleven tracks follow a variety of the stylistic threads within post-classical—prepared piano lullabies, Rachel’s / Godspeed-esque rock/classical hybrids, experimental sounds—there’s a uniformity to tone and mood that provides testimony both to the talented ears of 130701’s A&R folks and the underlying theory of the genre itself.
Notable songs include Dustin O’Halloran’s delightful “Constreaux No. 2”, which meshes the prepared piano style of Hauschka (also found here) with sun-is-shining strings reminiscent of Rachel’s 1996 minimalist classic Music for Egon Schiele. O’Halloran, like many artists within the genre such as Jon Hopkins and Ólafur Arnalds, has become well known for his film work, having scored such films as Marie Antoinette, Breathe In, and this year’s upcoming *Lion. *It’s easy to imagine his track playing over a scene from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.
Set Fire to Flames’ ten-minute epic “barn levitate” carries some of the cacophonous urgency of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (with whom they share several members), while keeping one foot more firmly rooted in the classical. It doesn’t attempt to cover the same breadth of ground as their sister band, instead allowing a web of atonal strings to create an oddly comforting sort of meditative blanket for the listener. Resina’s “June” follows in this regard, but with a more classical sensibility in placing a beautifully mournful violin melody alongside the racing and impatient background.
If Godspeed were a type of post-rock, Sylvain Chauveau’s “N B” and newly signed 130701 artist Ian William Craig’s “Tender Fire” utilize guitars and noise in a way that feels like some kind of post-Post Rock, still toe-dipping in the paradigms of rock & pop music while being even further removed from genre norms. On “Bach Study,” Max Richter (author of last year’s eight hour-long “cradle song” Sleep) provides what might be the easiest way to explain post-classical to a noob—ostensibly a classical music construct, it's overlaid with a sheen of decaying noise that eats the song up until it fades away, leaving only a tinkling quasi-Satie piano in its place.
The record’s final and longest song, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “They Being Dead Yet Speaketh,” is perhaps the closest thing to a traditional 20th century classical piece. A stately epic with pacing, composition and tone that remarkably echoes Brian Eno’s own 2016 foray into post-classical, The Ship, it’s a pleasantly languorous way to put a bow on 130701’s recent story. 130701 is curated and sequenced so well it might pass as a DJ mix; the fact that each track is previously unavailable makes it an unmissable release not just for fans of the label, but for music fans curious about unfamiliar compositional styles and the entire nebulous world of post-classical. Here’s to fifteen more years. | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | 130701 | July 16, 2016 | 7.5 | 369f20f4-5e4d-487f-876b-196def7433fe | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Will Anderson amplifies everyday heartbreak with towering shoegaze and supersized power-pop anthems that demand to be played loud. | Will Anderson amplifies everyday heartbreak with towering shoegaze and supersized power-pop anthems that demand to be played loud. | Hotline TNT: Cartwheel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hotline-tnt-cartwheel/ | Cartwheel | For most of its existence, shoegaze promised a glimpse of an alternate plane of existence, either in the womb, the afterlife, or the unconscious. You know, “dreamlike,” “heavenly,” “ethereal”—whatever assured transcendence from this mortal coil. Mere words melt into suggestive, non-verbal cues. The typical hierarchy of rock band instrumentation dissolves, the guitars and bass and drums surging as one utopian soundwave. The right effects bank can turn that piece of wood you used to strum “Wonderwall” into a jet engine or a swarm of comets. And though shoegaze has repeatedly rejuvenated itself by merging with digicore, black metal, emo, and even alt-country, perhaps the most impactful change for the genre over the past decade is its acceptance of life on life’s shittiest terms, emerging now from the cramped apartments and overworked laptops of the bummed-out and broke. Such as Will Anderson, the mid-30s mastermind behind Hotline TNT’s intoxicating second LP, Cartwheel, where an average guy’s everyday heartbreak is blown up into a Loveless for the lovelorn.
Though Anderson made his reputation in cosmopolitan Vancouver and Brooklyn, Cartwheel exposes his roots as a quintessential Midwestern indie rocker, born in Wisconsin and mo(u)lded by a non-musical stint in Minneapolis. Much of Cartwheel abides to the Copper Blue standard of redlining power-pop, impressing itself equally with sticky, circular melodies and concussive volumes. But when Hotline TNT tap the keg and hit the gas on “Out of Town,” Anderson throws a winking “baby girl” into the first line and channels his inner Paul Westerberg. “We had to betray the Bob Mould guidance one of these days and see how the other half lives,” he joked in a statement. To Hotline TNT, those Twin Cities indie rock icons aren’t just role models, they’re the authors of the commandments: Be striving but skeptical, passionate but never pretentious.
The Twin/Tone influence on Cartwheel is obvious, and so is its spirituality, drawing out the Midwestern tendency to manifest modesty as self-deprecation and/or self-sabotage. In the early aughts, Anderson made a non-SEO-friendly name for himself with the scuzzy noise-rock project Weed. Hotline TNT gave themselves a similarly hard time by withholding their debut Nineteen in Love from streaming and trying to generate momentum as a live act during the thick of the pandemic. It can’t be a coincidence that the Cartwheel cover art imagines a bootleg Charlie Brown T-shirt, because Anderson spends most of the album breaking his own heart in 10 words or less: “After the fall/I pretend it’s all my fault,” “Tell better lies/Unsatisfied/Maybe next time.” Lead single “I Thought You’d Change” is the most hopeful song on Cartwheel and, for that reason, also the saddest; after whiffing so many times, why would he expect anyone to change?
The recent reimagining of Tim, the Replacements’ infamously tinny major label debut, as their forever-denied blockbuster reanimates the questions that had vexed Anderson when signing to Jack White’s Third Man imprint: How can an underdog band flex its increased confidence and craft without sounding triumphant? The guitar tones on Cartwheel are indulgent, though never gaudy, reflecting the very specific priorities of someone who will happily survive another month with no bed frame because they really needed the latest Death by Audio pedal.
There are the requisite trick shots: Opener “Protocol” rises and grinds both coffee and teeth, its pristine chord progression soon drowned out by what sounds like at least three household appliances stirring to life; the queasy guitars on “Son in Law” are strung with bungee cords. But Cartwheel gets the most mileage out of blunt-force volume. Its digital clipping and deafening compression are load-bearing features that make the hugeness inextricable from its limitations: This is music for jailbreaking the volume limiter on a pair of headphones. “BMX” and “I Thought You’d Change” lean on melodic lead riffs that recall dozens of ’90s alt-rock hits without sounding like any in particular, yet Hotline TNT’s arena-rock dreams ensure that the cheap seats will feel like an underplay at a venue with no noise ordinance.
Though Cartwheel occasionally relents in tempo and density, it’s extremely loud at all volumes, a force multiplier for the saddest secrets of its source material—power-pop love songs in love with the concept of love as learned from other power-pop songs about the same thing. Anderson overdubs himself not to achieve harmony or catharsis, but to prove that misery loves any kind of company it can get. And whereas most shoegaze legends were shrouded in mystery, dehumanized by design, Hotline TNT supplements its music with NBA zines, Twitch streams, and cameos by Brooklyn comedians. No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble. | 2023-11-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | November 3, 2023 | 8.4 | 36a1a7eb-b6a6-465d-8f8d-b9060a8aec69 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
While walking a tightrope across a daring concept album, rapper Riz Ahmed offers compelling, unapologetic account of what it truly feels like to be brown and British in 2020. | While walking a tightrope across a daring concept album, rapper Riz Ahmed offers compelling, unapologetic account of what it truly feels like to be brown and British in 2020. | Riz Ahmed: The Long Goodbye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/riz-ahmed-the-long-goodbye/ | The Long Goodbye | There’s always been a fire in the work of the British-Pakistani actor, musician, and activist Riz Ahmed. In 2006, the same year in which he made his film debut in critically acclaimed docu-drama The Road To Guantanamo, he ruffled feathers in the UK as Riz MC with “Post 9/11 Blues,” a satirical rap song so caustic that it was temporarily banned from radio. On “I Ain’t Being Racist But…,” the spoken-word monologue that closes out his 2016 mixtape Englistan, he lampoons the hateful shibboleths of white supremacism with savage fury. His rise to Hollywood stardom did little to dampen the flames, as he took on roles/played characters like the coldly manipulative Omar in 2010’s Four Lions to his Emmy-award winning performance as Nasir Khan, a Muslim man accused of murder in HBO’s The Night Of. But rarely has his rage been as incandescent and pointed as on his second album, The Long Goodbye, his first project under his full name.
The ambitious concept album reframes the UK’s relationship with British Asians as a “toxic and abusive” love affair that has reached its breaking point in the wake of Brexit and the rise of the far-right. On its face, equating the weight of colonial trauma with a fictional woman is a tough sell, and in less assured hands it could easily come off as insensitive. But it’s an inspired move for Ahmed, a rapper with a PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) degree from Oxford whose lyrics often read like they should come with footnotes. The break-up album format allows him to transform the political into the personal. The dispassionate, sanitizing gaze of academic history gives way to an intimate, heart-wrenching account of the human toll inflicted by the Empire on South Asia and its diaspora.
Opener “The Break Up (Shikwa)”—set to a melismatic qawwali vocal sample—sets the tone with a monologue that traces the trauma caused by centuries of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation. The East India Company becomes a “stray pale chick” named Britney who “came to trade” but then refused to leave. The British Raj’s brutal policies are recast as acts of violence (“Beat me red and blue ’til I knew right was white and not brown”), and Partition becomes a parting act of spite (“Carved a scar down my middle just to leave me stretched out”). Ahmed’s voice turns increasingly frantic as he comes home one day to find himself locked out, his dreams of a multicultural future replaced by the grim reality of homelessness. “Britney, if you break up with me I might just break up,” he pleads, his voice cracking. “This will either be the end of me or be the wake-up.”
That idea of finding oneself in a cultural “no man’s land” is a source of both anxiety and optimism throughout the record. The anxiety is self-explanatory, but the optimism comes from the possibility of staking claim to this middle ground between “us” and “them.” While Ahmed has played around with this idea of a “third culture” identity earlier, such as on Cashmere’s “Half Moghul Half Mowgli” (and much of Englistan), there’s a renewed sense of topical urgency here. “Toba Tek Singh” takes its name from a short story by celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, about the absurdity of waking up to find that your country is no longer your own. Its central protagonist is a Sikh inmate of a “lunatic asylum” in Lahore who is being sent to India post-Partition. But he refuses to choose between the two new countries, falling to the ground in the “no man’s land” between the borders. It’s a story about the trauma of displacement, of being unmoored from your home and identity. Ahmed’s interpretation shares that pain, though he tries to put on a brave face. “Stranded, I’ll make a stand in one place,” he raps on the final verse. “I’ll dig my heels in, so what’s my damn name?”
A similar blend of despair and bravado runs through “Fast Lava,” where Ahmed delivers rapid-fire verses over a fevered jungle beat hammered out of temple bells, chimtas (traditional musical tongs from South Asia), and a bone-rattling bass drum. “I spit my truth and it’s brown,” he declares, paying homage to his Pakistani heritage. “Can I Live” drops the history lessons in favor of a harrowing portrait of a community with its back against the wall. “Please just let me live for two minutes,” Ahmed sings, begging for a reprieve from the Islamophobia, the hate crimes, the exhausting pressures of being one of the Western world’s scariest bogeymen. But he already knows that it’s not going to happen. Lines like, “Hope my people don’t just end up as a memory,” and, “My people floating face down, sinking in sand,” land particularly hard, eerie echoes of the social media posts and news headlines emerging from New Delhi over the last few weeks, after Hindu nationalist mobs carried out a pogrom on Muslim communities in the Indian capital with the alleged complicity of the police.
This is heavy stuff, but Ahmed’s wry wit and laser-focused delivery ensures that it doesn’t feel overwrought. He may be heartbroken but he’s no victim. The tide turns on the second half of the album, as Ahmed progresses from anger and bargaining to acceptance. The task of carrying on the break-up metaphor falls on the shoulders of the surprisingly fun skits peppered through the album—phoned-in messages of relationship advice from brown and black luminaries including Mindy Kaling, Hassan Minhaj, and Mahershala Ali. Ahmed regains some of his swagger on tracks like “Mogambo” and “Deal With It,” having a little more fun as he takes barbs thrown at British Muslims and turns them into thorny badges of honor. It’s reminiscent of the comic villainy of his rap duo with Heems, Swet Shop Boys, though the humor here has a darker, more brittle edge.
That’s only natural, given everything that’s happened in the last four years. The early idealism of the #Resistance has curdled into bitterness and fatalism, the light at the end of the tunnel slips further and further away. Even the jokes have barbs now: “And my cock it just grow/When they kick us in the balls,” he raps on “Mogambo,” an iron fist wrapped in locker room banter. Swet Shop Boys producer Redinho’s production mirrors the anxiety—the shehnais, 808s, synth-sitars, and bhangra drums are now used to unsettle rather than uplift, stabbing and clashing bursts of sound to get your blood up. On the rare occasion that the record strays into more commercial territory, such as rhythm-and-bhangra cut “Any Day” (featuring a heavily Auto-Tuned Jay Sean), the attempt falls flat.
The Long Goodbye is a compelling, unapologetic account of what it feels like to be brown and British in 2020—Mo Salah and “random” searches, bhangra nights and mosque stabbings, “the spoils and the scars.” Ahmed is open to the idea of a rapprochement with his country, but now on his terms, not those dictated by the erstwhile Empire or its UKIP heirs. He’s tired of playing the good immigrant just to claim a piece of what he’s already owed. While the sentiment is enough to make the album worth listening to, Ahmed’s ability to weave experience and cultural touchstones into an affecting tale of heartache, loss, and redemption is something of a marvel. After all, in these years of Brexit, pogroms, and “build the wall,” who doesn’t feel a little estranged from their country right now? | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mongrel | March 12, 2020 | 7.4 | 36a41a22-fcce-4417-a124-dbcb3cac619a | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Originally released in 1997, the German producer’s world of mythic drones and breakbeats is newly remastered and remains a blistering and confrontational touchstone of electronic music. | Originally released in 1997, the German producer’s world of mythic drones and breakbeats is newly remastered and remains a blistering and confrontational touchstone of electronic music. | Christoph De Babalon: If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christoph-de-babalon-if-youre-into-it-im-out-of-it/ | If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It | The timing couldn’t be better to reissue Christoph De Babalon’s brooding, groundbreaking album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. Ambient music is enjoying a widespread boom, dark drum ‘n’ bass has come back into vogue, and De Babalon’s record remains one of the few to successfully combine both styles. More than that, the German musician’s apocalyptic album is the perfect tonic for a moment in which the symbolic Doomsday Clock has literally ticked closer to midnight. The patron saint of gloom Thom Yorke has called it “the most menacing record I own.”
Some intimidating music becomes less so as it ages. Once-radical techniques become commonplace; every year, a new contender arrives with a sound that’s a little faster, a little louder, a little meaner. But De Babalon’s blistering breaks and mythic drones have maintained their power—perhaps, in part, because they were so crude and unusual to begin with. Sullen and misanthropic, his music refused to play anyone else’s game. Twenty-one years later, revisiting the album is like stumbling upon a remote island disconnected from the rest of the world.
If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It wasn’t necessarily an obvious fit for Digital Hardcore Records when it was originally released in 1997. Alec Empire, leader of the band Atari Teenage Riot, had launched the label in the mid-1990s as a platform for savage breakcore couched in punk-rock bluster and guerrilla chic. Early Digital Hardcore records were emblazoned with AK-47s and Uzis; Atari Teenage Riot’s aesthetic, mashing up thrash guitars with gabber drums and lots of shouted sloganeering (“Start the Riot!”; “Kids Are United!”; “Cyberpunks Are Dead!”), suggested a rave-era take on political punks Nation of Ulysses. De Babalon’s album, on the other hand, opens with “Opium,” a 15-and-a-half-minute swath of slowly cycling foghorn drones, church bells, and dubbed-out cries. It is at once terrifying and strangely comforting: druggy as its title, with a sub-bass buzz evocative of distant airplanes. There are surface similarities to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, released a few years prior, but where that record is blissfully eerie, “Opium” is filled with dread. To put it right up front like that was a bold move, a way of saying that punk hadn’t cornered the market on confrontation; slow, gelatinous sounds could also grab you by the lapels and shake the daylights out of you.
The ravers who stuck it out through “Opium” got their reward with the next track. With “Nostep,” we’re back to sounds steeped in the renegade parties where De Babalon cut his teeth. This is the meat of the record: banger after banger, a succession of face-punching breakbeats wrapped up in haywire synths and suffused in foggy wrongness. “Expressure” juggles impish acid squelch with rolling, blown-out snares and tabla. “What You Call a Life” is a kind of chopped-and-screwed jungle, with slowed-down breaks bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back. “Water,” the evil peak of the album’s first half, is a 188-BPM volley of exploding breaks over queasy drones reminiscent of avant-garde atonalist composers Xenakis or Ligeti; it sounds like a full-scale assault on the gates of hell.
Unlike most of the era’s jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, there’s very little funk beyond what’s hardwired into the sampled drums; remnants of dub reggae remain in the form of truncated bass blasts, but they might as well be fossilized footprints embedded in weathered stone. The low end, while voluminous, is mostly a trick of the mix, spreading out beneath rattling snares and cymbals like a shadow or a bloodstain. And unlike more dancefloor-oriented drum ‘n’ bass, these tracks don’t really develop much beyond their perfunctory intros and periodic breakdowns. They stretch from end to end like brick walls topped with broken glass. There is always more going on than the ear can discern; the amount of information packed into any given bar is almost overwhelming. Trying to pick out a given detail—the ice-pick clank of “Dead (Too),” or the banshee wails of “Water”—is like trying to read someone’s wristwatch as he drives his car into a wall.
De Babalon revisits the murky, beatless atmospheres of “Opium” twice more on the 77-minute album. “Brilliance” layers looped string samples in a shifting moiré that’s not unlike what Wolfgang Voigt was pursuing in his ambient GAS project around the same time. “High Life (Theme)” comes close to the bleak perfection of “Opium.” Slowed-down drones are looped, layered, and fed through gentle delay until they lap like black waves against the midnight shore. Subtle micro-tunings play tricks on the brain, creating new tones out of harmonic collisions. Here you can really hear the reissue’s improved sound, which is the handiwork of the celebrated Berlin mastering engineer Rashad Becker. Space has opened up; two dimensions have become three. But it’s still rough around the edges, lo-fi by design, jealously guarding its secrets beneath a faint patina of digital hiss. It goes on like that for 11 minutes, a lonely outpost of musique concrète, desolate as a ghost town, every bit as eerie as it sounded two decades ago. If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It proved unnecessarily wary: No one has ever made another record quite like this one. | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Cross Fade Entertainment | February 7, 2018 | 8.4 | 36a854da-05a8-41c9-b007-f17f17ea5b19 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Kindred spirits in the I-35 noise-rock scene share a split EP rooted in the ’90s underground; the normally pummeling Chat Pile indulge some surprisingly tuneful indie influences. | Kindred spirits in the I-35 noise-rock scene share a split EP rooted in the ’90s underground; the normally pummeling Chat Pile indulge some surprisingly tuneful indie influences. | Nerver / Chat Pile: Brothers in Christ EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nerver-chat-pile-brothers-in-christ-ep/ | Brothers in Christ EP | Chat Pile are shaping up to be landlocked American heavy music’s equivalent of indie film auteurs, nerdishly tweaking the conventions of various genres while maintaining their singularly warped perspective like a rictus grin. On their outstanding debut album, last year’s God’s Country, the Oklahoma City quartet updated sludgy Reagan-Bush noise rock with pseudonymous vocalist Raygun Busch’s grippingly theatrical excoriations of the meat industry, the unhoused crisis, and a purple McDonald’s spokesblob—plus basslines tuned so low they felt more edible than audible. Nearly as winning was the band’s take on alt-country, complete with wiseass lyrics name-checking Kid Rock albums, from last November’s soundtrack to an indie film in which Busch actually acts.
Brothers in Christ, a split EP with Kansas City kindred spirits Nerver, brandishes another set of influences from the late 20th-century American underground. “We’re leaning more into the indie-rock side of our taste a little bit,” Chat Pile’s bass player, known as Stin, told Grammy.com. Elsewhere, he specifically cited canonical bands Slint, Sonic Youth, and Guided by Voices, along with lesser-knowns Starfish, who recorded for Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey’s influential Trance Syndicate label. The EP is a worthy expansion of the greater Chat Pile universe: part loving tribute, part crate-digging adventure, all existentially fucked up.
The first of two Chat Pile songs on the set, “King,” channels the bleak absurdity of God’s Country into a perfectly 120 Minutes-worthy package. Quiet/loud dynamics, militaristic mid-tempo drums, and oily guitar tones that could stain a downtown apartment’s wall pay homage to their chosen milieu, as do Spiderland-like chiming harmonics, but the bass still squelches somewhere beneath human comprehension, and the song manages never to be predictable. By the time the band is chugging at full hair-raising force, Busch has hinted at day-drinking and book-reading—dangerous pastimes, both. He even manages to distill the questioning despair of God’s Country into shout-along non sequiturs: “What makes me alive?/What’s the meaning of this?” Go off, king.
Chat Pile’s other entry on Brothers in Christ, “Cut,” has a video that’s a grim, color-deprived snapshot of life between the coasts: flat land, leafless trees, dreary homes. Said to be inspired by Stephen King, the song itself is closer to Robert Eggers circa The Witch. All through its hyper-realistic recreation of so much “buzzes like a fridge” alt-rock churn that followed in the Pixies’ abstract wake lurks an unseen but palpable menace. Busch veers between conversational deadpan and hysterical pleading, frantically attempting to stave off something that he doesn’t want and alluding cryptically to “God’s voice.” Whatever may end up cutting him before the song ends, it goes deep.
The two songs by Nerver solidify the sense of a family affair within a community of curious obsessives. Not to be confused with the almost identically named NerVer—apparently a splinter project of “Cumbersome” post-grungers Seven Mary Three—the KC band traffics in bellowing, full-throttle pummel reminiscent of late-1990s bands like Unsane. They’ve released a couple of albums, most recently last year’s Cash, but to date they’re fairly obscure; they shared a fateful 2019 OKC warehouse bill with Chat Pile, and the two groups went on a mini-tour together in 2022. Lacking Chat Pile’s distinctively skewed lens, Nerver’s contributions here don’t break much ground that hasn’t been trodden by other bands that have put their own fine spins on ’90s noise rock over the decades, but they’re keen and bracing, a fittingly fervid appetizer to Chat Pile’s cracked main course. Who knows where the sound of Chat Pile’s in-the-works second album may end up, but for the health of their scene, a small-scale, friends-oriented record like Brothers in Christ feels like an important gesture. | 2023-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reptilian / The Ghost Is Clear | April 18, 2023 | 7.2 | 36b0cae3-4eec-4f72-8e9c-5899112cfb48 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months, two of which we've already reviewed. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, we chose to do something a little different... | This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months, two of which we've already reviewed. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, we chose to do something a little different... | Pixies: Catalog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19282-pixies-catalogue/ | Catalog | Ed. note: This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months. Two of these EPs have been reviewed by Pitchfork, and both received exceptionally low marks. In the interest of avoiding redundancy with another standalone review of this material, we’ve instead chosen to explore the band’s back catalog. Though none of the group’s original albums have been reissued recently, they have never been reviewed by Pitchfork.
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The great anecdote about the Pixies is that they formed when a college dropout going by the name Black Francis put out an ad for a female bass player who liked both the punk band Hüsker Dü and the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.
The Venn diagram here would be tight. Hüsker Dü made noisy, bleeding-heart records for the underground label SST; Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Francis got only one response, from a woman named Kim Deal. She had never played the bass before but presumably saw in his ad some sly humor and the spark of liberated thinking that lies behind a bad idea.
Crucially, the Pixies weren’t from New York or Los Angeles, or even Chicago, but Boston: a famous place but fiercely provincial, with all the reticence of small-town New England and almost no cosmopolitan sheen. We can always depend on Boston for more sports and software engineers. Early on, Francis—a comic-book kid raised in an evangelical church—talked about the band’s music with all the pretense of someone fixing toilets or laying shingle. “You want to be different from other people, sure, so you throw in as many arbitrary things as possible,” he told the writer Simon Reynolds shortly after their 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa. A few minutes later, the band’s drummer, David Lovering, interrupted to describe a video he’d seen of “people shooting eggs out of their ass, right across the room into another guy's mouth.”
The band’s songs were about Old Testament Christianity, UFOs and white women who crave sex with big black men—fixations that in certain contexts can turn ordinary people into outcasts. Francis liked the surrealist movies of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch circa Eraserhead, which use violence not as a real-world dynamic but a metaphor for the roiling inner worlds we can cover up but never quite control. On a Surfer Rosa song called “Cactus,” he begs a woman to cut herself up on a cactus and send him the bloody dress in the mail. For the Pixies, this passes as a ballad. In general they remain solid evidence for the theory that the darkest and most violent thinking is done by the quiet kids next door.
In March 1987, the band went into a warehouse studio called Fort Apache and worked for three days straight, producing 18 songs. The project cost a thousand dollars, including printing, tapes, and beer. Eight of these songs were released as Come on Pilgrim on 4AD, an English label that had built a reputation selling, moody, vague bands like Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins but by 1987 had also released some Bulgarian choral music, the number-one dance-pop song “Pump up the Volume,” and an album by their first American signing, the Throwing Muses. More recently, they’ve released albums by Deerhunter and Ariel Pink, and in general remain a safe home for uncommon art.
Pilgrim is 20 minutes long and more of a hint at what the band could do than anything else. Two of its best songs (“Caribou” and “Vamos”) ended up being re-recorded in more muscular forms; another (“Nimrod’s Son”) unfortunately wasn’t. The other songs from the Fort Apache sessions—which came to be called “The Purple Tape”—ended up scattered throughout the Pixies catalog, also in stronger versions. As much as the band changed and refined their sound over time, they seemed almost romantically attached to a big-bang concept of their own music, like a person who measures every relationship against that first love.
Surfer Rosa is highly combustible music, but slapstick, too. Many of its songs feel half-finished or regurgitated in half-digested form, with verses that run on longer than they ordinarily might, choruses that repeat odd numbers of times instead of even ones, and abrupt shifts in tone and volume. Francis was less of a rock singer than a grotesque impression of one, too angry and too tender, a pantomime of extremes. He sounds new but seems to come from an old place, like an obscure bog predator with alien-looking adaptations.
But for all their radical ideas, the Pixies depended on convention—without it, they would have nothing to pick apart. Like Devo or Pere Ubu before them, they were an art-rock band steeped in the 1950s and early ’60s, a period of music before rock was considered art. Their songs feed back to surf, boogie, doo-wop and early R&B more easily than anything post-Beatles. The notion that they were changing the shape of alternative rock seemed like a nice bonus but immaterial. In an anecdote from the sessions for the band’s 1988 album, Doolittle, Francis told producer Gil Norton that if two-minute songs were good enough for Buddy Holly, they were good enough for him.
Doolittle is their most famous album and for understandable reasons. It’s more even keel than Surfer Rosa and better mannered, too, forgoing the harsh live sound of Steve Albini for the lush, almost folksy one of Gil Norton, who had had previously worked with marshmallows like Echo and the Bunnymen. Its songs take aim at the big things important art is sometimes supposed to: good and evil, environmental ruin, Bible stories, death. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” features some allegory about the ozone layer, which in the late 1980s had the same conversational weight and place as “climate change”; “Gouge Away” flirts with Catholicism. “Hey” is practically their “Like a Prayer,” an oblique gospel anchored by the premise that we too may one day break free our earthly bonds and ascend—a trope art has worked with for much longer than rock music has been around.
It’s in Doolittle's margins—the faux-hillbilly cackling of “Mr. Grieves,” “There Goes My Gun” and “Dead”—that the album becomes what it really is. At heart, the Pixies were a kind of American goth band, fascinated by rural violence, the intersection of lust and danger, creepy innkeepers and the sexual magnetism of strangers who wander into roadside cafés from parts unknown. Their biggest crossover single, “Here Comes Your Man,” is less tied to European dada than the rustic imagery of a pulp paperback: The boxcar, the nowhere plains, the big stone and the broken crown.
About four years ago I moved from New York to Arizona and found myself listening to the the band's last two albums—1990's Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe Le Monde—a lot. It’s true what they say about the desert when they say it looks like the moon. Plants and animals seem proud to have survived the odds. Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde make sense to me here, when it’s 110 degrees by lunch and the concrete ripples in the heat. They’re narrower in scope than Doolittle, and have a tough, inorganic presence, like burnished chrome.
But I think what keeps more people from listening to them is that they seem like albums that don’t care whether you listen to them or not. Bossanova is sweeter than Trompe, but its sweetness exists at an impossible distance. “She’s my fave, undressing in the sun,” Francis whispers on the cryptic miniature, “Ana.” “Return to sea—bye. Forgetting everyone.” Later, on “Havalina,” he spots a javelina—an ornery, boar-like animal not uncommon here—walking across a plain. The music is a slow dance between celestial bodies, heavenly but melancholic. So he sees the boar, and in two short lines, the song is over. Late Pixies songs are triumphs of private epiphany: Small, diamond-bright moments that flash in someone’s eyes and then disappear forever.
By Trompe Le Monde the band had transitioned from seeming like quiet people who liked violent movies to violent people who didn’t make much time for movies at all. This is outlaw music, sharpened by conspiracy theory and too much time with too little human contact. “I had me a vision/There wasn't any television/From looking into the sun,” Francis sings on “Distance Equals Rate Times Time,” splitting “sun” into two syllables as though to make sure you heard him and are duly disturbed. He still howls and screams, but had also developed a new voice, a flat, posthuman kind of monotone. Trompe is more aggressive than anything in their catalog but also more confident. They can handle this now, and they do.
Francis’ allusions to Catholicism turned into overt talk about UFOs, which makes sense when you remember that religion has always just been a way to explain the lights in the sky. A kind of concept album emerges, especially toward the album’s end: a song about the geography of Mars followed by a song about a burnout named Jefrey—“with one f”—sitting on a carpet with a tabla, thinking about outer space, followed by Francis staring into the sun, a gesture made out of the desperation to find new answers.
For however classically far out the Pixies got toward the end, they had also never sounded so grounded. The album’s climax, “Motorway to Roswell,” is half-written from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, but turns on Francis’ question: “How could this so great, turn so shitty?/He ended up in Army crates.” Reality had never made such a decisive appearance in a Pixies song.
The band came together in an unusual way but broke up like anyone else: Creative differences, in-fighting, the collision of fragile egos. Francis went on to make several solo records as Frank Black, one of which is called Teenager of the Year and is the sound of a creative person relinquishing himself of the pressures of being in a famous band and appreciating the practice of not giving a damn. Listen to “Speedy Marie”; listen to “Thalassocracy.” Feel the joy and the lightness. Then return to Trompe Le Monde and you can hear how angry Francis had become.
Kim Deal moved on to focus on the Breeders, a project with her identical twin Kelley whose albums sound like abstract slumber-party music for teenagers with comfortable access to weed. Last Splash belongs in the Library of Congress, and their subsequent albums—Title TK and Mountain Battles—remain object lessons in how bands can remain weird without ever becoming alienating.
After 11 years of separation, the Pixies reunited and went on tour, becoming one of a slew of ’80s and ’90s alternative bands lobbying for heritage status. Francis never fully reconciled with Deal, who played several of the reunion shows but opted out of recent recording sessions and has embarked on her own time-capsule show, touring Last Splash with the Breeders. Deal’s symbolic contributions were as important as her musical ones: The cool, down-to-earth woman who defused Francis’ showy angst. She had actually been fired between Doolittle and Bossanova and subsequently rehired, and on later Pixies albums appears just often enough to reminds you that she’s in the band.
The Pixies have now been reunited for four years longer than they were around to begin with, but are just getting around to releasing a new album, which they have called Indie Cindy. Worse than any of the music is the feeling that a band so deft at challenging the system has become part of it in the most predictable ways, rubbing together the tropes of their old art and hoping they can still start a fire, replacing experimentation with routine, filling Kim Deal’s place with not one but two different bassists over the last five months, breaking up the album into three EPs to gin up interest, and generally reminding us that artists of their stature are businesses, not charities.
Things start decent and peter out quick. “What Goes Boom,” “Greens and Blues,” “Indie Cindy”: these are slick songs, a little overextended and puffed up, intimidated by the band’s legacy but charming in their own way. But part of what made the Pixies interesting is that they always seemed to possess some unquantifiable danger, which they no longer do. Three middle-aged guys seeing what happens when they get back on the horse and try again, they now sound most comfortable when they're being laid-back, “Greens and Blues” and the chorus of “Indie Cindy” especially. The album’s lows aren’t so much bad as routine. “Snakes,” “Blue Eyed Hexe,” et cetera: these are just distractions, breadsticks.
Indie Cindy’s title track is built using the template of Bossanova: Spacey and gorgeous, shattered and dissonant, spacey and gorgeous again. Toward the end of the song, Francis offers the line, “As we follow the bouncing the ball/They call this dance the washed-up crawl,” and then, a simple plea: “Indie Cindy, be in love with me.” Part of loving the Pixies has always been the suspicion that they were gracing us from an alien place somewhere beyond love, where sentiment was never easy or necessary. It may be the most vulnerable line Francis ever wrote. | 2014-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 25, 2014 | 8.3 | 36b1c41e-efe3-4750-bdec-7a63bfa1bfbe | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Interview 2016, another strange between-album release from Death Grips, is an intense instrumental EP that showcases the production chops of Zach Hill and Andy Morin. | Interview 2016, another strange between-album release from Death Grips, is an intense instrumental EP that showcases the production chops of Zach Hill and Andy Morin. | Death Grips: Interview 2016 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21796-interview-2016/ | Interview 2016 | Death Grips aren’t above ditching highly-anticipated festival appearances. They didn’t lose sleep after sabotaging their own record deal, and they sure didn’t mind selling thousands of tickets for concerts they never intended on playing in the first place. By any reasonable standard, this band doesn’t give a shit. So it’s been surprising that, in recent months, Death Grips have actually shown generosity to their fans, punctuating the interim between proper albums with low-stakes instrumental work.
In the opening weeks of 2015, the band preceded Jenny Death with a full-length “soundtrack“ titled Fashion Week. At roughly 48 minutes (the second-longest runtime in Death Grips’ catalog after Exmilitary), it certainly had the bulk of a typical album, but the absence of frontman MC Ride, their furious heart and anguished soul, ultimately rendered Fashion Week unnecessary. And now, just prior to the release of their next album, Bottomless Pit, comes another unusual instrumental release: “Interview 2016,” a 32-minute clip that depicts the band playing for actor/TV host Matthew Hoffman in a darkened room before sitting down for a conversation. Had the band not legitimized the soundtrack by uploading it to SoundCloud (and later, other streaming sites), the release would probably be written off as a curio, rather than an entry in the Death Grips canon. Now that it’s isolated, we can see Interview 2016 for what really is: an instrumental EP that abandons Fashion Week’s uneventful expanses for a cramped space that shows Death Grips in confrontational mode.
As with the last soundtrack, MC Ride’s absence diminishes Interview’s intensity, but its brevity gives them space to compensate, narrowing the focus for a sharper sound. Other than the ambient interlude “Interview E,” the EP mainly sees Zach Hill and Andy Morin doubling down on Jenny Death’s unhinged hardcore with a proliferation of over-driven drums and basslines that seem as if they’re fired from from a Gatling gun. And even though there’s not a clear human voice in the mix (save from a quick “Hi Everybody!” in “Interview F”), the instruments do plenty of talking. Listen closely to the slippery percussive sample smattered across “Interview C,” or the barking undercurrent of “Interview F:” the effects themselves are undeniably alien, but they still manage to communicate.
The dynamic and varied arrangements keep the EP from slipping into a formlessness; “Interview B,” the standout of the set, periodically diverts to an eerie, faintly Eastern chorus that pops open suddenly like a trap-door into the void. And lest the din grow dull on punishing cuts like “Interview A” and “Interview D,“ Hill and Morin temper the racket ever-so-slightly through silvery, distant-sounding refrains that comfort even as they contort, like possessed library music. They even transmogrify Hill’s drum fills into an arpeggiating melody on “Interview C.”
While MC Ride might be perceived as the alpha and omega of Death Grips, Interview 2016 underscores that Hill and Morin are quite formidable on their own. This release is far more interesting than Fashion Week, a full-length twice its size, and it suggests that Death Grips' strength as an instrumental entity shouldn’t be underestimated. | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Third Worlds | April 7, 2016 | 7 | 36b83cc9-bab3-4b88-acf7-e9ad562875c3 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Japanese quartet evolve their perspective and sound, exploring the decadent grooves of city pop as they contend with growing up. | The Japanese quartet evolve their perspective and sound, exploring the decadent grooves of city pop as they contend with growing up. | CHAI: Chai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chai-chai/ | Chai | CHAI’s songs glimpsed a band seemingly in a perpetual state of youth. Moles and blemishes became irresistible chocolate chips through their eyes; donuts were equally, if not more, important than a passionate crush. But on their new self-titled album, the exuberant Japanese band seems to be growing up, confronting changes in their personal tastes as well as their own bodies. “Every minute we age/More wrinkles than yesterday,” vocalist MANA sings over the effervescent synth-pop of “From 1992.” Despite the difference in her reflection, she embraces her look with confidence: “I don’t care/I want my skin to peek through my jeans full of holes.”
This more mature perspective accompanies a gradual shift in the quartet’s sound. They made their name with speedy, rambunctious pop music infused with the immediacy of punk, their live-wire antics charged with a sense of youthful spontaneity. But on their last album, WINK, they began to venture outside of rock, channeling the casual, feel-good energy of Mac Miller and ‘90s R&B for unhurried pop jams that felt like daydreams. The band further settle into R&B and funk on their self-titled album, luxuriating in the decadent ‘80s grooves of Japanese city pop as well as the hydraulic bounce of bass music.
The dance floor serves as the ground on which CHAI explore their own politics of Neo-Kawaii, reclaiming beauty standards and self-love in their own image. “PARA PARA” is a sultry electro-disco anthem for a night out; the band turn their bedroom mirror pep talks into self-empowering hooks. “I should practice my kissing,” MANA sings in the chorus, as if to manifest what’s in store for her later. She leans into vanity on the bouncy, elastic “LIKE I NEED,” snapping selfies to fish for attention on Instagram. At its best, the peppy dance production can sound as invigorating as their old punk music.
CHAI’s more explicitly political efforts unfold rather predictably, their messaging losing power as they paint in broad strokes. The riotous new wave statement “NEO KAWAII, K?” is built to cause a scene, but its instructional lyrics can feel flat. The stomping funk number “We the Female!” can seem similarly one-dimensional; its all-for-one hooks—“I’m human, how about you?” and “Mighty, yet feminine”—echo as shallow celebrations of womanhood. CHAI’s music resonates more when they get more personal, like on the sparkling album closer “Karaoke,” which conveys their tight-knit connection. As they muster the courage to sing their favorite songs, they reveal the messiest versions of themselves, the band at their most honest and compelling. | 2023-09-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 28, 2023 | 7.4 | 36b98ac4-fbf2-477d-9d27-f25d54026e02 | Ryo Miyauchi | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryo-miyauchi/ | |
For listeners who knew Kieran Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction, his 2003 album Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers. This reissue adds an excellent live set from the period. | For listeners who knew Kieran Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction, his 2003 album Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers. This reissue adds an excellent live set from the period. | Four Tet: Rounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18050-four-tet-rounds/ | Rounds | The year 2003 was a heady one for listening. On computers in the post-Napster landscape, guitar-rock intermingled with avant-garde classical music as well as “clicks’n’cuts,” which in turn could mix with twee indie rock and the thumps of backpack rap. After Kid A, analog components could fuck with guitars and laptops and soon a slew of new artists were pushing beyond these genre distinctions: DFA’s discopunk was already afoot, Jim O’Rourke had morphed from resplendent indie-pop fingerpicker to laptop noisenik, a producer from Florida named Diplo was mashing together heavy psychedelic rock breaks into something for rap heads, while underground hip-hop was getting strange and musty thanks to Madlib’s myriad personas.
The Class of 2003 also offered up three upcoming producers who embraced every sound on their hard drives and within one month that year, they all released their breakthrough efforts. There was Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, the soon-to-be-renamed-Caribou’s Up in Flames, and Four Tet's Rounds. The first melded IDM’s glitches to backpacker breaks while the second mashed it to psychedelic sunshine pop; Rounds, the third album for Kieran Hebden's project, grabbed at all of the above while also including jazz and folk. For the listeners out there who knew Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction than main gig, Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers.
The album opened with a recording of a dog’s heartbeat before Hebden lets it bloom into free meter drum rolls that evoked the amoebic pulses that defined late 60s experimental jazz before tightening it all up with a beat that headnodded at hip-hop without quite being beholden to it. That three distinct rhythms (cardiac, jazz, hip-hop) could effortlessly convene on “Hands” augured Hebden’s formidable beat skills, which even in the present tense pull from house, 2-step, Afrobeat, and dubstep while remaining singular.
It makes sense that Hebden so easily drew from multiple genres. As he revealed in a recent interview, Rounds was comprised entirely of samples. But that he draws from the most arcane source material available speaks to Hebden’s touch; on Rounds, his obscure sources serve the overall poignancy of the music. So while “She Moves She” retains the crisp snare and hi-hat work that underpinned millennial R&B productions, it’s the twinkling glockenspiel line that gives the track its emotional heft. Same for the harp line that intermingles with the iron lung beat of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.” Sampledelic or not, Four Tet’s music feels personal rather than patchwork.
The media catchphrase for mixing the pastoral airs of folk music with electronic music’s low-end became “folktronica,” a term Hebden detested and kicked against with each subsequent release. He embraced the fiery, brassy tones of spiritual jazz for his follow-up Everything Ecstatic and soon after began collaborating in earnest with free jazz drummer Steve Reid (while also producing for folk-jazz-noise-nonsense freewheelers Sunburned Hand of the Man). And when that generation-gap crossing collaboration ended with Reid’s passing in 2010, Hebden dove headfirst into modern dance music, taking in two-step, jungle, dubstep, techno and house, reconfiguring these heavier rhythms into something suiting his own manner. And as Pink recently showed, Four Tet’s knack for instantly-identifiable melody remains undiluted, no matter how strong and dancefloor-filling his new tracks are.
While touring for Rounds, Hebden began to slough off the “folk” tag of his live shows, pushing at the parameters of what a laptop could do onstage. The bonus disc on this 10th anniversary edition of Rounds reveals him at the height of his powers. Recorded live in Copenhagen, it finds Hebden taking the melodies and beanie-nodding rhythms of Rounds further and further out into the cosmos. “She Moves She” dilates from four to 10 minutes, with Hebden finding new pockets of space amid the string twangs and kick to add skittering samples and blurs of noise. A metallophone sample similarly gets rubberbanded-- at times resounding like a Balinese gamelan orchestra, other times flickering in even patterns like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians-- before turning into “Spirit Fingers”.
The most astounding transformation occurs on “As Serious As Your Life”. The track’s taut drum break suddenly has Tibetan chimes, ghost notes, scraped strings, and electroacoustic gurgles mingle with its snare and hi-hat before the recognizable part of the song drops. But soon Hebden mutates it into a 15-minute monster that gobbles up every single genre tag in the process, until it’s a dervish of noise. As the original album proved and this reissue reinforces, Four Tet showed a new generation of listeners that much like 60s jazz before him-- which could embody soul, gospel, blues and primal howls while still sounding like “The New Thing”-- 21st century laptop music could be as serious as your life, too. | 2013-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | May 24, 2013 | 8.9 | 36bb17cb-4ec2-407e-92ae-b91454281a04 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed "slow rock" trio whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place their music in Microphones territory. | Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed "slow rock" trio whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place their music in Microphones territory. | Horse Jumper of Love: Horse Jumper of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21630-horse-jumper-of-love/ | Horse Jumper of Love | Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed “slow rock” trio that, despite declaring themselves a band, more strongly resemble a solo project. A few years into their career, the group’s already busted into the top tier of the Boston house show scene—a considerable accomplishment for any young rock band, considering the scene’s predilections towards snoozy folk and hostile hardcore. But while Horse Jumper of Love's live performances recall the low, slow burn of bands like Silver Jews and Arab Strap, their Bandcamp output hinges on one man: lyricist and frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos, whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place the group’s erstwhile recordings in Microphones territory.
Like their local, recently-disbanded contemporaries Krill, Horse Jumper of Love seek to balance the intimate with the acerbic. Now, with the arrival of their full-length debut, the time has come for those two spheres to merge. Drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bassist John Margaris plod at a tortoise-like pace, dragging their leader’s acoustic arrangements out of the bedroom and into the open. These songs’ momentum may be minimal—Carissa’s Weird look like the Casualties by comparison—but their warmth proves deceptively hypnotic, making the deviations more attention-grabbing. On “Ugly Brunette,”the trio draw the listener into a lull by way of syrupy, straggling chords only to repeatedly trip up the beat, the whammy-wailing hook swaying like a drunkard. The leisurely arpeggios on “Spaceman,” meanwhile, spiral gently into the void until they’re swallowed up by a fuzzed-out roar. There's suspense in the slump.
Where Giannopoulos the musician seeks to pit sheltered songs against haggard arrangements, Giannopoulos the lyricist is up against the universe at large. He’s openly admitted in an interview with the Allston Pudding that as a teenager, he thought “nothing was real,” angst worsened by the cultural and linguistic divides inherent in his Greek-American upbringing. Rather than tell meandering stories à la Slint, Giannopoulos repeatedly shifts his focus to hyper-specific (if awkwardly-worded) motifs: “America towels,” “July 5th,” and “i love you very much forever,” the latter two of which title transitional lo-fi interludes. He’s a natural at creating sensual, oddball imagery ("Peel an apple with your nails/and there is dirt and there is juice,” “I talk with your teeth,”) but his descriptions feel distant and needlessly vague.
For a full length record, Horse Jumper of Love is actually pretty scant. Three of the eight songs comprising its less-than-thirty-minute runtime are inconsequential ambient pieces that serve little purpose aside from creating the illusion of momentum and progress down in the doldrums.(Their inclusion feels inevitable, given Giannopoulos’ prior dabblings with electronics in the band’s early material and with his solo project the Meat Tree.) The penultimate track, “Sun Poisoning,” proves downright unlistenable; Vadala-Doran, a serviceable percussionist on the rest of the album, suddenly fumbles around like a novice, struggling to keep in step with his bandmates’ funereal pace. The result is a meek introduction to a modest band that feels simultaneously overdue and undercooked. | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Disposable America / Gawk | March 15, 2016 | 5.9 | 36c037f3-86e6-49bd-be4a-8d996b9bfff4 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- frontman Jim James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation. | If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- frontman Jim James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation. | Jim James: Regions of Light and Sound of God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17523-regions-of-light-and-sound-of-god/ | Regions of Light and Sound of God | For a guy defined by his band's take on "roots" music, Jim James' head has always been in the clouds. For the first few My Morning Jacket albums, he often recorded his vocals in an abandoned Kentucky grain silo, one of the few places that could give him the otherworldly reverb he desired. On any number of great My Morning Jacket songs-- "Gideon", "The Way That He Sings", "Circuital", "Golden"-- there's that moment when James cuts loose the sandbags and lets his voice pull the songs heavenward. It's a move drawn from gospel, but although his awareness of mortality is a matter of public record, James has never really affiliated himself with a particular religious ideology. He's a seeker with a strong moral compass, cobbling together beliefs from wherever, and relying on his music to help him transcend the earthly realm.
If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation. James holed himself away in his Louisville home studio, writing and piecing together songs, playing most of the parts himself. It's process-based music, and he admits it in the album's first seconds. On "State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)", James breaks his creative process down to its primordial elements-- vowels, nursery rhymes-- like he's leading a workshop on discovering one's inner poet. Like everything he does, it's deeply self-conscious, wholly earnest, and just a slight bit goofy. And like so many artists chin-deep in Pro Tools, James distances himself from the claim that he's using production devices (computer software or metal silo walls) as creative crutches. As "A.E.I.O.U." slithers to life with a sinuous piano figure, James relates his manifesto: "I use my state of the art technology/ Now don't you forget it: it ain't usin' me."
Mastery over technology is a fitting metaphor for Regions' core theme: exceeding limitations in the interest of personal reinvention. Where in title and subject matter, Circuital marked a return to form for My Morning Jacket, Regions sees James pushing outward in all directions, stylistically and emotionally. At one extreme, there's the shimmering, nearly New Age "Of the Mother Again", suggesting the inevitability of change and the joy of falling in sync with nature's cycles. At the other end, there's "Dear One", with a retrofuturistic rhythm bed that sounds like Stereolab, and a title suggesting both a romantic ode and space exploration vehicle, on which James sees a relationship as a galactic journey: "You always pushed the boundaries of my soul/ With life and love we've finally gained control."
Though his hippy undertones might suggest otherwise, Regions is about asserting control. Even on "Mother", the dewiest track, James follows one lyric about nothing staying the same for long with another-- "close your eyes and its gone"-- that draws the song to a dramatic pause, before bringing it back with a funky rhythm section in tow. It's a theatrical moment on an album full of them-- Regions opens by channeling Traffic's 1971 glam-fusion epic "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", and throughout, James is as comfortable as ever in his Mr. Fantasy guise. Even in My Morning Jacket's earliest moments, he's styled himself a ringleader capable of sonic wizardry, a strummy Southerner cut from the showy mold of Elton John or Wayne Coyne.
On "A New Life", he turns a simple folk song into a showtune, in a way that nods toward Bowie's Hunky Dory. As the song plays out, James adds bits of musical scenery, as if stagehands keep rolling new canvas backdrops behind him. By the end, "Life" blossoms into musical theater, balancing sweetness and schmaltz in a way that only James can. He can't make an album without cheese, this much is obvious-- the less said about the well-intentioned Martin Luther King ode "God's Love", the better-- but as "A New Life" shows, when he's able to rein it in, the results are engrossing. (And when he can't help but crack up the second time he sings "I think I'm really being sincere," you know he's in on his own joke.)
Regions' best moments come when James' sense of wonder and fear are most palpable. On "Know 'Til Now", he channels a face-to-face-with-the-sublime feeling that leaves him wordless, though far from exultant. Sounding like a VHS recording of an old 16mm reel of a clipped sample of a long-unheard soul revue, "Know" took more than a few James fans aback as the album's first single. Yet as "Wordless Chorus" showed, he's uniquely capable of letting the spirit move him past the limits of language, and the lyrics to "Know" offer a glimpse into what feels like an inner monologue-- "How could I have known/ How sweet it could be!"-- before he steps aside and lets the music take over. Instead of the beatific skyward glance we might expect, however, the song's sultry, Lynchian coda aims backward to My Morning Jacket's own genesis, painting from the same color palette as the doo-wop influenced "They Ran" from the band's 1999 debut. On "Know"'s companion piece, "All is Forgiven", however, James finally lets his voice, spirit, fears, and hopes loose. As he wails, he's complemented not by a children's chorus or a pipe organ, but by a sweltering saxophone and mid-tempo rhythm section. It's a surreal effect: a sidelong glance at the expectations for such a song.
Isolation can often lead to indulgence, but not here. In less confident hands (including those of a younger Jim James), creative solitude could easily result in an unwieldly conceptual opus. Blessedly, Regions is the opposite: a svelte, sweet collection clocking in at under 40 minutes-- the shortest album of his career. While addressing the same themes he's been tweaking for more than a decade now, James adds a new trick to his ever-expanding repertoire: transforming the boundless possibilities of solo creativity into a cohesive one-man show. | 2013-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | February 4, 2013 | 7.8 | 36ca439d-d6d2-4cdf-a7f7-4a66a711ec7d | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The experimental artist's new LP tilts its attention towards new age music, its three tracks flowing into each other subtly enough to qualify as passages rather than discrete songs, building and releasing with a patient determination. | The experimental artist's new LP tilts its attention towards new age music, its three tracks flowing into each other subtly enough to qualify as passages rather than discrete songs, building and releasing with a patient determination. | M. Geddes Gengras: Ishi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19439-m-geddes-gengras-ishi/ | Ishi | It’s great to have a shortcut to inner calm, and M. Geddes Gengras' latest release, Ishi, possesses that functionality. The experimental artist's new LP comes off of the two avant-reggae albums he recorded with Sun Araw and Jamaican legends the Congos, as well as last year’s Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years, a collection of compositions for modular synthesizer that existed somewhere in between John Carpenter’s creepiest film scores and the more electronics-based parts of last year’s compilation I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990.
Ishi finds Gengras continuing to take cues from the latter comparison point: its three tracks flow into each other subtly enough to qualify as passages rather than discrete songs, building and releasing with a patient determination. The music moves unhurriedly from moment to moment in a way that traces the clear outline a strong compositional foundation, producing an atmosphere that's both serene and substantial.
It’s tempting to call Ishi ambient music, but it possesses too much presence to fade into the background. It possesses an insistence that just stops short of dominating your attention. Although Gengras’ current mode relies heavily on slow-attack synth pads, he frequently works in dissonant leads and unexpectedly harsh tones that can disrupt the peaceful mood you might find yourself lulled into. It’s a soothing record, but one that’ll still keep you on your toes.
Combined with the rich synthesizer sounds that Gengras comes up with, that serene quality means Ishi is a good record to keep handy (along with a pair of good headphones). It's a sonically dense record, with deep, sustained low end and deft arrangements that are complicated but not cluttered. The bass lines move at whale-song pace throughout, above which bits of melody—flickering clusters of sequenced notes, sounds that resemble synthesized wind—fade in and out hypnogogically.
Ishi is remarkably well designed to block out the world around you. The serene energy it gives off it makes for an effective psychic refuge—put it on in a train station during rush hour and it immediately begins to block out the atmospheric anxiety hovering over the crowd, like an umbrella against the rain. The headspace it produces is calming but frequently, dreamily surreal, and it often seems like a better place to live than the world outside it. | 2014-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Stones Throw / Leaving | June 24, 2014 | 7.6 | 36ca506a-c85a-48d7-9881-7b3b778f3e12 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
On two collaborations—one for tape loops and acoustic instruments, the other for woodwinds and electronics—the New York composer and improviser brings an inquisitive, playful approach to experimental music. | On two collaborations—one for tape loops and acoustic instruments, the other for woodwinds and electronics—the New York composer and improviser brings an inquisitive, playful approach to experimental music. | Ben Vida / Lea Bertucci / Robbie Lee: Murmurations // Winds Bells Falls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robbie-lee-lea-bertucci-murmurations-winds-bells-falls/ | Murmurations // Winds Bells Falls | Lea Bertucci’s music seems to obey laws of physics that only apply at the quantum level. It can give the impression that the listener is hearing the music from multiple directions at once, or that each iteration of a given tone exists in alternate timelines. Sounds unfold in one direction and suddenly shift into reverse. The New York composer and improviser has mastered a technique of manipulating tape loops that creates disorienting sensations of absolute groundlessness, and she bases much of her other work in beds of harmonically rich drones. One moment can extend into what seems like infinity, or be looped again and again in overlapping, arrhythmic coils.
Bertucci recently released two collaborative albums that stand in stark contrast with each other, but both revel in this uniquely playful, if sometimes unsettling, style of surrealism. Winds Bells Falls, which she made with multi-instrumentalist and frequent Mary Halvorson collaborator Robbie Lee, focuses exclusively on her live tape-looping practice. Bertucci records and contorts Lee’s improvisations on celeste, chimes, baroque flute, and contrabass recorder in real time, while Lee responds to the sound of his own playing swirling and dissolving in front of his ears. Bertucci’s method for looping and manipulating tape is physical and expressive, her fingers guiding the wheels of a reel-to-reel machine slower and faster, sometimes jerking them to produce slippery spasms that ruminate and decay. She first explored these techniques in an improvised setting with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, but while that duo’s work is brooding and turbulent, Winds Bells Falls is often bright and gleaming, like light glinting in a funhouse mirror.
Lee’s broad choice of instruments means the album never sits still for long, but each individual piece is based around very specific tones and timbres: the round, full bodied resonance of the celeste (a keyboard instrument that strikes metal bars or bells rather than strings), the breathy toots of the gershon (a 15th century European instrument made out of animal horns), the metallic ring of feet-tall orchestral chimes. Much of the music is simple and spacious, despite the layers of tape-manipulated echoes that murmur and sputter with varying levels of opacity. On “Bags, Boxes, Bubbles,” layers of electronic hiss seep up under Lee’s dissonant celeste chords, but the overall mood is languid, almost serene. Looped clacks of fingers on recorder keys pile on top of pained, moaning tones on “Azimuth” before morphing into elephant-like wails and petering out. When Winds Bells Falls starts to approach chaos, it quickly peaks before settling back into an eerie, pacified quiet.
A similar ghostly intensity permeates Murmurations, Betucci’s first collaboration with veteran electronic musician Ben Vida. In a reversal of roles, samples of Bertucci playing wind instruments become source material for Vida’s modular synthesizer as they are stretched and compressed until rendered barely recognizable. Murmurations is much more solemn and poised than Winds Bells Falls, the continuous interplay and spontaneity replaced by a singular vision of grandeur and foreboding. Deep swells of bass drone, synthesized by Vida, often overwhelm the mix, pushing Bertucci’s flute and saxophone to the margins as they seem to echo in the distance. The duo constantly plays with spatial perception in this way, with certain instrumental or vocal textures close enough to the listener’s ear to resemble ASMR—a technique Bertucci refers to as over-amplification—while others reverberate in some far-away digital environment.
In the final seconds of “The Vast Interiority,” a short piece that consists of warped, half-uttered phrases by both Bertucci and Vida, the pair start to crack up. It highlights a paradox at the heart of Murmurations: The music may be easily read as stoic, but at its heart is a dynamic and persistent playfulness. It is the sound of two musicians on intersecting and exploratory paths, each pushing the other into previously unconsidered territories and endlessly curious about where to go next. The tension between the uneasy sounds and the playful attitude with which they were conceived offers an opportunity to question why these tones and frequencies are often considered imposing. In that inquiry lies the magic of Bertucci’s music—it allows for the emancipation of “difficult” music into the realm of fun. | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | May 6, 2022 | 7.1 | 36ca5ee1-a774-4d36-952d-a9c52a0ba448 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | null |
After three albums packed with peach-sweet melodies, a move to the West Coast inspires one of indie rock’s most underrated songwriters to supercharge his sound and upgrade his showmanship. | After three albums packed with peach-sweet melodies, a move to the West Coast inspires one of indie rock’s most underrated songwriters to supercharge his sound and upgrade his showmanship. | The Love Language: Baby Grand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-love-language-baby-grand/ | Baby Grand | It wasn’t obvious, before the release of Baby Grand, that the Love Language needed to find a new direction. Over the last nine years, Stuart McLamb and a rotating set of musicians brought his lovely, vulnerable songwriting to life with equal parts subtlety and sincerity. They could get loud (see: their charmingly noisy 2009 self-titled debut and “Calm Down” from 2013’s Ruby Red), but a certain lightning-bug placidity was their main mood, with lush horns and peach-sweet melodies that went down easy. Many indie bands past and present have spent entire careers refining elegant sounds like these, and if McLamb chose to do the same, it’d be hard to blame him—especially considering how consistently swell the results have been.
But McLamb packed up his Raleigh home while working on Baby Grand, the Love Language’s fourth full-length, ditching familiar Southern comforts for Los Angeles. (A press bio claims that work on the album began in “a cavernous Virginia hammock factory,” which adds a quirky wrinkle to this mythology.) Relocating to the West Coast to find oneself is a well-worn cliché by now, but the record’s supercharged sound suggests that the move had a profound effect on McLamb’s songwriting: From the glittery avalanche that opens the album, on “Frames,” it’s clear that he’s embraced a new level of showmanship.
The increase in energy isn’t always for the best: The charged-up burn of “New Amsterdam” recalls his former Merge labelmates Arcade Fire’s own brand of throbbing arena music, but its chugging chorus makes for the album’s weakest moment. For the most part, though, McLamb and the gang wear these changes well, zapping bolts of electricity into hidden corners of tunes in a way that livens up the band’s typically solid songwriting. “Castle in the Sky” opens with a gentle acoustic strum before bursting wide to reveal miles-long shoegaze textures and an impassioned drumbeat of the sort favored by classic-rock synthesists like the War on Drugs. “Juiceboxx” is all neon synths and pleasing falsetto vocal takes, melting into the kind of gooey instrumental breakdown fellow L.A. denizen Ariel Pink occasionally allows himself.
Even as these risky choices broaden his sonic palette, McLamb’s music retains the swaying, moonlit quality that has made him one of the most underrated indie songwriters of the past decade. At his best, gorgeousness spills from his every lyric; witness the lush balladry of “Let Your Hair Down” and the gently swaying “Independence Day,” which finds McLamb unspooling imagery about the titular holiday and sand-buried grand pianos before announcing, atop a pounding chorus, “I’d go with you to L.A. if you could just decide/Where you’re going, if you’re going that way.”
On the album’s highlight, closing track “Glassy,” McLamb is already there, and the move has given him a new sense of peace. Over swaths of horns and folksy guitar, he sings sweetly of day-tripping, before remarking, “And the City of Angels won’t save us/But maybe we’ll be famous before we die/If we’re still alive.” It’s a beautiful and nakedly sincere song, streaked with the woozy, lovestruck feeling of falling for a new city and embarking on a new phase in life. Baby Grand would be enough to make you jealous of McLamb’s contentment, if his generosity in bringing listeners along on this transformative trip didn’t elicit such gratitude. If it doesn’t send you down an Echo Park Zillow hole, the album at least makes a convincing argument that leaving your old life behind can lead you to a whole new form of bliss. | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 6, 2018 | 7.3 | 36cf64fd-971e-4bbb-b0a2-00d2f2f31f5e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Weezer's ninth studio album features contributions from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, along with Blue Album producer Ric Ocasek's return to the soundboard helm. The album is one of Weezer's most enjoyable in recent memory. | Weezer's ninth studio album features contributions from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, along with Blue Album producer Ric Ocasek's return to the soundboard helm. The album is one of Weezer's most enjoyable in recent memory. | Weezer: Everything Will Be Alright in the End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19830-weezer-everything-will-be-alright-in-the-end/ | Everything Will Be Alright in the End | Rivers Cuomo has taken your shit for over two decades and he’s had it up to here. Midway through Weezer’s ninth studio LP, he airs his grievances on a song called, not coincidentally, “I’ve Had It Up to Here”—the most valid of which is that people think he’s somehow insincere. You could describe Weezer’s 21st century output in many derogatory ways and most of it would be warranted, but “dishonest” isn’t one of them. Pick anything he’s done over the past 15 years and ask yourself, “What label exec concerned with the bottom line would possibly cosign this?” Rivers Cuomo is making the exact kind of music he wants to make—it just so happens that it sounds like music for the masses and has no currency whatsoever. Yet, in his finest mock-operatic metal voice, Cuomo brings “I’ve Had It Up to Here” to a head with, “If you think I need approval from the faceless throng/ Well, that's where you’re wrong.” The important word here is “faceless.” Cuomo does seek approval, but on Everything Will Be Alright in the End, he realizes that he needs it from a familiar source that he knows quite well: people who may have once been Weezer fans.
That said, you’ll have to give the overt apology “Back to the Shack” a second chance, and I realize that’s a tall order—if recent Weezer has ever driven you to punch a total stranger, this one leads with the chin. There's Cuomo’s tendency to treat The Blue Album’s goodwill as a renewable resource, the lyrics peppered with meta references about Weezer’s past—namely, his lightning bolt guitar strap and that one time he let drummer Patrick Wilson sing lead. You might roll your eyes when he rhymes “rockin’ out like it’s ‘94” with “more hardcore,” and they will bug out when revisiting 1994 somehow means doing fourth-wall rhyme-bustin’ that was perfected on “El Scorcho” and responsible for “Beverly Hills”. And then there are the wincing, “What year is this?” jokes that will certainly be criticized for “lolz rockism”: taking himself to task because “I forgot that disco sucks,” thinking that the radio and “those stupid singing shows” are even in competition anymore, or that they had any effect on Weezer.
But something about this song sticks, and it’s not just the hook, though that’s a big part of it—even those who despise Weezer can admit Cuomo has an inexhaustible, infuriating ability to write melodies that lodge themselves in your brain after one listen, whether you want it there or not. During the second verse, Cuomo drops the yuks and sings, “I finally settled down with my girl and I made up with my dad.” He could not be more direct about what “Back to the Shack” truly means beyond its reprise of “Pork and Beans”'s message about being true to one’s self: those represent the twin engines that powered The Blue Album and Pinkerton’s emotional train wrecks, and there's the possibility that “Back to the Shack” might be a sly, sarcastic rebuke against armchair producers and YouTube commenters, a la Danny Brown’s Old: you don’t want the old Rivers Cuomo, so do you want him to rock out like it’s ‘94 or do you just want him to sing about it and make a record of his (broken) heart?
Because you’re only getting one in 2014, and Everything does occasionally rock out with the same joyous abandon of The Blue Album, albeit without its wide-eyed naivety. If you really want to go out on a limb, this is as close as Cuomo is getting to his own version of Benji—a rock lifer moving forward by clearing out his past, the songs almost entirely dedicated to his relationships with his career, women, and his parents. “Cleopatra” and “Foolish Father” have subjects that are pulled right from Cuomo’s mid-'90s diaries—namely, powerful women who frighten and leave Rivers Cuomo, and absentee fathers. Twenty years later, the lesson here is the futility of hating someone who likely did their best, to forgive them and to forgive yourself.
That part resonates, as does the lived-in wisdom applicable to the songs that are about being in Weezer, even when they sorta aren’t. The generality of “Eulogy for a Rock Band” actually works in its favor when you consider it could very well be about rock music itself (for cryin’ out loud, Cuomo’s favorite rock group just declared rock dead). Meanwhile, the platitudes of “Ain’t Got Nobody” give way to a startling, lucid account of Cuomo’s abandonment issues that have spanned his entire life, from childhood to confused, needy rock stardom: “My daddy loved me/ No one could touch me/ Until he went up and left me lonely/ That’s human nature/ We fail each other/ And keep on searching for another.”
Of course, Cuomo ensures that you don’t have to read that far into Everything Will Be Alright in the End, keeping the melodies up front and the gimmicks mostly in his notebook. The effect of Blue Album producer Ric Ocasek will likely be overstated: the lyrics on any previous Weezer album were not the producer’s fault, and from all accounts, the guitar tones and keyboards on that record were all Cuomo’s idea anyways. Either way, these are simple, effective songs that will settle for constant rotation in your head if MTV’s not an option: “Lonely Girl” isolates the second verse of “Only in Dreams” and reworks Cuomo’s Japanese curio “Homely Girl” into a legitimate buzzy throwback. Meanwhile, Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino—no stranger to criticisms about elementary-school lyricism and stunted relationship dynamics—lends guest vocals to “Go Away”, which is a decent song but an even more important pledge of allegiance.
Heck, even the confounding decisions and filler that inextricably form latter-day Weezer albums are kinda charming. The whistle-core of “Da Vinci” will probably be the only way you’ll remember that Foster the People made a record this year. Meanwhile, the closing, mostly instrumental “The Futurescope Trilogy” probably belongs on Cuomo's unreleased space odyssey Songs From the Black Hole and doesn’t stack up to “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)”, the batshit piece of musical theater that proved Cuomo can set new positive benchmarks for himself in the 21st century.
Everything Will Be Alright in the End doesn’t set a new benchmark for Weezer, but hopefully it can go lengths to ridding them of the ridiculously unfair catch-22 they’ve faced. The past couple of weeks have seen a surprise Thom Yorke album dropped on BitTorrent, the first Aphex Twin record since 2001, and a lavish reissue of Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and almost none of them were subject to the kind of truly wacked-out, incomprehensible standards given to Weezer’s ninth album. Granted, Rivers Cuomo hasn’t done himself many favors, as his music has been marked by refusal to evolve in the slightest either emotionally or sonically. Even still, why couldn’t Cuomo just do this in peace? Because even though Weezer and Pinkerton were never embraced by critics in real time, they sure seem to have been embraced by a lot of people who grew up to be critics, who in turn have relished every opportunity to bash Weezer albums as a way of separating themselves from an embarrassing part of their lives where the perspective of “No One Else” and “Pink Triangle” felt like the truth.
There have been many ways to qualify praise for Weezer and with each successive listen, Everything Will Be Alright in the End certainly earns the typically backhanded compliments: “actually not terrible,” “certainly better than Hurley,” “probably their best since...Maladroit, that was good right?” Or, Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good? As it turns out, about this good. | 2014-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Republic | October 2, 2014 | 6.5 | 36cf7972-dd55-418c-bfb0-9f4e20c2c2da | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple’s new project is his most cohesive yet. As Art Feynman, he emerges as a cool purveyor of dub-kraut. | Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple’s new project is his most cohesive yet. As Art Feynman, he emerges as a cool purveyor of dub-kraut. | Art Feynman: Blast Off Through the Wicker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/art-feynman-blast-off-through-the-wicker/ | Blast Off Through the Wicker | When Luke Temple and his band emerged as Here We Go Magic in 2009, they made knotty, hypnotic folk with long patches of ambience used to highlight Temple’s earworm melodies. They went on tour with Grizzly Bear—the two were simpatico—before releasing Pigeons in 2010, Temple’s first curveball. Since the release of Pigeons—a beguiling album that leaned on krautrock—Temple has used his records as test cases for various styles and sounds. A Different Ship was anxiety-inducing in its delirious survey of the pop landscape, while his last two solo records, A Hand Through the Cellar Door and Good Mood Fool, both incorporated R&B, reggae, country, and folk to mixed results.
What’s most puzzling about Luke Temple’s career is that he has often touched on intensely appealing ideas over the course of his various projects and records. Blast Off Through the Wicker is his most thorough work in years because it adheres to a particular set of sonic ideas over its duration. Under the guise of a new name and sound, Temple has switched up once again, emerging as Art Feynman, a cool purveyor of coked-out dub-kraut. Blast Off is the first Luke Temple record in which he nixes wholesale change from song to song, instead tweaking precise details to highlight the underlying structure of the entire record. It is, finally, a cohesive sound, and his music is all the better for it.
Blast Off is also Temple’s most intensely personal effort, a record that seeks to find meaning in mundanity and celebrate the profound; Temple himself points to animism—giving a soul or meaning to inanimate objects—as a key concept. On “Slow Down,” Temple examines this philosophy. Over busted drums and a vibraphone-sounding synth, Temple sings, “Slow down/Don’t crush yourself to make a diamond.” Ironically, it’s the advice Temple has always suffered from ignoring. For too long he’s been chasing too many sounds at once. Blast Off is his first deep breath in years.
“I Rain You Thunder” would fit in nicely on an early Brian Eno rock record, the electronic work taking precedence over form yet still carrying the bulk of the melodic weight. On “Party Line,” Temple occasionally interjects over house-inspired synth stabs. He has no problem getting extremely quirky on Blast Off. “Hot Night Jeremiah” is also ardently peculiar, a skittering track made of nothing more than Temple’s whispers, light drums, and a slinky-bounce of a synth line. It’s the sort of song that would unwittingly stick out on an earlier Temple album; a one-off experiment best left to B-sides and unheard demos. But when placed correctly within an album like Blast Off, in which the surprises occur within the record’s general scope—not in spite of this scope—it’s very welcome.
Count “Small House Blues” as another in this vein, where lilting drums and delayed keyboard give way to Temple’s funkiest vocal performance on the record. His falsetto is both delicate and strutting—a goofy surprise that eventually becomes an enduring gift. “It’s just the two of us in this small house,” he sings. The line captures the loving charm of Blast Off Through the Wicker. The digs may occasionally seem claustrophobic, the host a bit eccentric, but it’s still a stay worth remembering. | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | July 19, 2017 | 7 | 36de5d2c-a72d-48f0-824f-9cae2d1c765e | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | null |
My Bloody Valentine's output during the band's miracle years between 1988 and 1991 still feels like a gift. | My Bloody Valentine's output during the band's miracle years between 1988 and 1991 still feels like a gift. | My Bloody Valentine: Isn't Anything / Loveless / EPs 1988-1991 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16605-isnt-anything-reissue-loveless-reissue-eps-1988-1991/ | Isn't Anything / Loveless / EPs 1988-1991 | They exist. I'm holding the CDs right now, and I can tell you, they exist. The remasters of My Bloody Valentine's Creation catalog had been announced and delayed so many times, it became a running joke to ask which would come first, the Loveless remasters or the long-awaited follow-up. The inferred punchline was "neither." Advance copies circulated four years ago, but the leaks came and went and no one was sure if they were real. Turns out they were. And now you can buy them. They're available only in the UK for now, but yes, the My Bloody Valentine remasters exist.
In addition to new masters of Isn't Anything and Loveless, there's also a new My Bloody Valentine release, of a sort. EPs 1988-1991 collects four EPs and a single issued during the band’s creative peak, along with previously unreleased (but widely bootlegged) tracks. This release provides the greatest revelation. Imbibing this material in one large gulp feels like a new window into the band's brilliance. You Made Me Realise, originally released in 1988, is a perennial on any list of the greatest EPs of all time and it vastly improves upon their earlier work. They had experimented with guitar noise, but they'd never succeeded in making something like the title track, which walked a razor's edge between bliss and terror. Kevin Shields was a great admirer of the Beatles' flair for melody, but he'd never written a tune as breezy and memorable as "Thorn". And nothing they'd done before sounded as effortless as "Drive It All Over Me". They were finally a real rock band, with pulsing bass and brisk tempos and guitars that sound like guitars.
By late 1988, Shields put together an extended single and an album that secured MBV's status as guitar-pop innovators. The untitled single that featured "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (it was also released as a four-song EP, all songs are included here) found them becoming sweeter and yet more dissonant, essentially pushing every which way in the general direction of "more." If "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "I Believe" can't quite match anything on Realise, they at least hinted that an even wider emotional range was within this band's grasp.
Isn't Anything, a singular item in the My Bloody Valentine discography, is the fulfillment of this promise. For some fans, it's the band's pinnacle. It's alternately dark and slow and joyously effervescent; on fast-tempo songs like "Nothing Much to Lose" and "Sueisfine", drummer Colm Ó Coísóig adds Keith Moon-like fills to the end of every bar. On slower songs like "Lose My Breath" and "No More Sorry", the guitars clang and rattle and MBV seem effortlessly dark and goth, having finally found a way to convey mood without forgoing song.
Even more than the greatness of the individual tracks, Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic. It's an essential document in the noise-pop sphere that was by then already called shoegaze, and much of MBV's influence can be found here rather than on Loveless. But it's also distinctly the work of this one band. At the heart of My Bloody Valentine was the mixture of the crushing power of Dinosaur Jr. and Hüsker Dü and the delicate vulnerability of indie pop; the masculine/feminine dynamic was accomplished not through the brilliant interplay between Kevin Shields and singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher (whose voices complement each other but often sound quite alike) but by the effect of their voices against the guitar noise. My Bloody Valentine offered a new expression of androgynous sensuality in pop, crafting deeply sexual but also abstracted music, short on specifics but heavy with feeling. And Isn't Anything is where this combination came into full flower. The swooning drone of "All I Need" points directly at what was to come on Loveless, but Isn't Anything needn't exist in relationship to another record. If they had stopped here, My Bloody Valentine's reputation would have been assured. Fortunately, they didn't. Another landmark was around the corner.
But before they got there, MBV offered two more EPs, both found on the 1988-1991 collection. Glider, from 1990, displayed a massive shift in sound from anything they'd done before. The opening single "Soon" was a sensation, famously described by Brian Eno as "a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." That vagueness is the key to all that would follow, because Shields was taking his early ideas and seeing how far he could push them into the realm of texture and pure sensation. So "Soon", with its drum break and chord changes and melody, sounds like a "song" on the one hand, but everything is blurred until it seems more like a ghosted memory of a song. And this mistiness happens without losing any of its propulsive force or the shock of the noise when the guitars enter. Clearly, things were very different for My Bloody Valentine.
Glider was rounded out by the instrumental title track, which serves as a showcase for how Shields was using phase shifts and disorienting rhythm tricks to create an underlying sense of unease mixed with awe. It sounds slightly "wrong" but also gorgeous, and like little else that had come before. MBV's following EP, Tremolo, upped the ante further. It stands as the true companion to Loveless. Opening with the staggering "To Here Knows When", it takes the woozy disorientation of "Glider" and mixes it with a vocal from Butcher that is impossibly ethereal. It feels constantly on the verge of breaking apart, which imparts a deep feeling of tension, as bruising distortion meets child-like coo. Both "Swallow", with its looped hand drums and Celtic synth line, and the crushing "Honey Power" match the best of Loveless for sheer beauty.
As you might imagine, a perfectionist like Kevin Shields isn't the sort to have unreleased greatness lingering in the vault, and that holds true for the bonus material that fills out the EP collection. "Instrumental 1" mixes drum breaks and guitar noise and sounds less like indications of a possible new direction and more like a tame example of a lot of the music it inspired. The 10-minute-long version of "Glider" is welcome, as it's built on the sort of hypnotic repetition you wish would go on forever. But better are the crunchy pop tunes at the tail end of the disc-- "Sugar", "Angel", "Good for You"-- which complement to the superior material on the EPs.
Tremolo came out in March, leaving a seven-month wait before Loveless made it into the world that November (six weeks after Nirvana's Nevermind). To say that anticipation for Loveless was high would be an understatement, and it delivered in every conceivable way. Few pop albums are routinely described in religious terms but this is one of them. It's partly because, like any scripture worth its salt, it leaves itself open to interpretation. Going back to that Eno quote, there's no telling what many of these songs "mean," even after you've read the lyrics. They bypass the language center of the brain and head for other areas-- where memory, tactile sensation, and emotions lie. It's an album you feel more than one you understand.
By this time, Kevin Shields was less a bandleader than a mad scientist, constantly developing and tinkering with new sounds. He played virtually every instrument (the lone exception being Ó Coísóig's minute-long "Touched") and obsessively tinkered with the smallest details. And the genius of Loveless is its mix, the exact proportions of one sound to the next. The highlights that led off the two EPs are the tentpoles, but really, Loveless is all highlights. I've heard many thousands of albums in my life and it's one of the few that strikes me as being essentially perfect. It's also the album that has turned two generations on to the wondrous possibilities of sound as sound. It's hard to imagine someone like Fennesz getting anywhere near as much traction among indie music fans if Loveless hadn't taught them how to listen for the emotional possibilities of texture. It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.
Which leads to one of the many strange and ironic things about this particular reissue: Perfection is offered in two competing versions. Loveless comes in a 2xCD set, one remastered from the original DAT and one from the original analog master. We may never fully understand the reasoning behind this unusual decision. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it's possible that the two discs are mislabeled, and that the half-inch analog master is identified as coming from the DAT and vice versa. Which is neither here nor there when you consider that no one in their right mind would ask themselves, "Which Loveless remaster should I listen to tonight?"
Shields says that the effect of the differences is cumulative and best understood over the course of a full listen. Having listened to the CDs on three different pairs of headphones and two different stereo systems of varying quality, I can say that they are slightly different (one is just a hair louder) but the qualitative distinctions are extremely minimal, at best. And there is a digital glitch on "What You Want" on one of the remasters, which seems both comical and tragic considering how long these have been in the works. So I guess I'll be listening to the one without the mistake, then.
Aside from that detail, the remastering across all three sets is well done. Loveless was famously and appropriately one of the quietest "loud" records of all time. Listening on your iPod, you always have the volume close to max and you never feel like you damage your hearing. And this breathing room pays off in spades in the dynamics of the record; when the guitars surge on "Soon" and "Only Shallow", it can still shake you to your core.
The most important thing is that this music exists and probably sounds as good as it ever will. As a band and as an idea, My Bloody Valentine stand for many things: sonic perfectionism, outsized ambition, excess. But the quality they embody above all is patience. They make you wait-- for the follow-up to brilliant albums, for the remastered versions of those brilliant albums, for that D-chord in the extended live versions of "You Made Me Realise" to finally come to an end. Some bands give you everything you want right when you want it; with My Bloody Valentine, you have to come to them and experience the music on their terms. But the demands they make don't preclude generosity. In fact, they reward your commitment many times over. For years, Kevin Shields has discussed his difficulties in following up Loveless. The talk often centers around money-- how he was not given what was promised, how he lacked the resources to bring the music to life and get it out into the world. These releases will set you back a few bucks, but My Bloody Valentine's output during their miracle years between 1988 and 1991 also stands outside of commerce. It feels like a gift, still. | 2012-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | May 11, 2012 | 10 | 36e0f4da-0ff2-4117-987b-b44581ceeb47 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
If you like cerebral rap music, Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman has been your man for some time now. His new album, All That I Hold Dear, utilizes sparkling soul beats and verses that are slightly more modulated than his usual darts of staccato. | If you like cerebral rap music, Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman has been your man for some time now. His new album, All That I Hold Dear, utilizes sparkling soul beats and verses that are slightly more modulated than his usual darts of staccato. | Homeboy Sandman: All That I Hold Dear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18354-homeboy-sandman-all-that-i-hold-dear/ | All That I Hold Dear | In the past, whether or not you’ve enjoyed the music of Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman has had a lot to do with the way in which you digest rap verses. His delivery is halted, stuttering-- not really a flow so much as a series of strategically layered blocks of wordplay. If you like cerebral rap music, Sand has been your man for some time now, but if you just wanted to turn your brain off, the dissonance of his bars and the aggro-quality of some of his beats might not keep your interest.
But Sandman’s newest project All That I Hold Dear proves to be an enjoyable album both for folks who really listen to music and for those who just skim through it. Listeners who don’t want to have to hear to a song half a dozen times before they can understand and enjoy it should be taken with the project’s sparkling soul beats and verses from Homeboy Sandman that are slightly more modulated than his usual darts of staccato.
The release was produced entirely by M Slago, a Dallas beatmaker reminiscent of 9th Wonder. As with the North Carolina producer, Slago’s beats are hardy and stuffed with plenty of soul. But for some strange reason, he can’t really get his drums to hit and those too-soft snare snaps can dull the music's impact.
Sand here is as incisive as ever, stream-of-consciousness rhymes shading in the complexities of any given theme. “Musician” may have some worried that they're about to receive another in the endless cycle of lectures about the distinction between rap and hip-hop, but they've got a surprise coming. The track is a deft complaint about being perceived as a rapper rather than as a musician and forms a defense of rap as an essentially musical profession. "Like there could never be a logical answer other than the music we make," Sand raps, in response to questions about what differentiates him from his rapping peers.
Another standout, "Relapse", details the kind of pseudo break up where the parties involved continue to circle warily, wondering whether or not they've made a mistake and are meant to be together. And while uncle-rap won’t be burning up the airwaves anytime soon, “Runts” is a touching tribute to Sand’s nephew and niece, which makes up for its triteness with well-observed details about the trials and tribulations of dealing with kids.
All That I Hold Dear is the second Sandman release on which the production is handled by a single producer (the first was Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, produced by EL RTNC), a smart idea that provides a cohesive platform for the rapper to zero in on his talking points. The project won’t attract many new fans, but even those who haven’t been following Sand should enjoy this pleasant, low-key brain food. | 2013-08-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-08-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | August 8, 2013 | 7.2 | 36e35f85-e001-402c-9a0c-d4217413d2fc | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
On their second full length, the London electronic trio continue shapeshifting from a forward-facing Kode9/Hyperdub-approved production crew to pillowy dreampop dudes with genuinely charming and well crafted songs at their disposal. | On their second full length, the London electronic trio continue shapeshifting from a forward-facing Kode9/Hyperdub-approved production crew to pillowy dreampop dudes with genuinely charming and well crafted songs at their disposal. | Darkstar: News From Nowhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17575-news-from-nowhere/ | News From Nowhere | Say what you like about Darkstar's shapeshift from forward-facing production crew to pillowy dreampop dudes, but it's probably not a move they made for cred points. After all, back when they were featured players on Kode9's Hyperdub label, the London-based duo of James Young and Aiden Whalley won all sorts of looks for their wonky but thoughtfully-crafted strain of dubstep. The subsequent addition of vocalist James Buttery appeared to position Darkstar at the forefront of a generation of dance acts looking to marry vocals and textured dance sounds in a novel and original way. The ensuing "Aidy's Girl is a Computer" seemed like a bellwether-- for a good six months, it felt like Darkstar was the thinking person's [insert your favorite mildly popular dubstep act from 2009 here]-- on-paper darlings with just the right amount of heat, clearly about to have a moment.
But a funny thing happened on the way to that moment; Darkstar got soft. Not soft soppy-- although this album's detractors might argue that, too-- but soft sonically. Even with Buttery in the fold, a major throughline of 2010's North was Darkstar's constant fascination with how different drum patterns locked together-- a big part of the fun was how they rationalized that into vocalist-led song structures. News From Nowhere is so unbothered by rhythmic invention that it might as well be from a different band. The keening falsettos, new age pads, and chiming bell sounds that signal opener "Light Body Clock Starter" establish an instructive new message that never really fades away: these guys are crooners now, less 2-step than "2 become 1".
You know what, though? This new hairdo doesn't look half bad. Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at. Sure, by embracing more established pop and indie song structures, Darkstar risk opening themselves up to a world of new comparisons, but to their credit, they also seem to relish the moments when they catch themselves wearing another band's clothes. One of the album's best tracks, "A Day's Pay For a Day's Work" features a melody line that sounds like it could have lifted straight out of Grizzly Bear's playbook. Elsewhere, the hiccuping acoustics, low baritone and pneumatic rhythm section of "Armonica" constitutes a pretty convincing Matthew Dear callback. And then there's "Amplified Ease", a studiously shambolic and very likable sing-song which, as an aside, I'm pretty sure is scientifically traceable to Animal Collective.
It's fun to think about Darkstar's raw materials and what they might do with them one day, but nobody's going to come away from News From Nowhere feeling like they've successfully cultivated their own unique universe. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, this might end up being thought of as a necessary transition album that bridges some new future territory for them. But even as a functional exercise in sensitive songs and electronic pastels, you could do much worse. | 2013-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | February 8, 2013 | 7 | 36eeec00-0a58-4dca-8500-ac572142edce | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records. | Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records. | Steely Dan: Katy Lied | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steely-dan-katy-lied/ | Katy Lied | The notes on the back cover of Katy Lied begin: “This is a high fidelity recording. Steely Dan uses a specially constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a ‘State-of-the-Art’ 36-input computerized mixdown console, and some very expensive German microphones.” The note continues with a laundry list of gear and settings, which are probably real but delivered with a smirk, and then concludes with, “For best results observe the R.I.A.A. curve.”
I shudder to think how many people have listened to Katy Lied without observing the R.I.A.A. curve. But this is the kind of thing dudes in the 1970s did—list the gear used to create an album and then give suggestions to the listener about the equipment and settings they might use to realize it. The recording summary reminds me of those on another LP by an audio obsessive that came out in 1975—Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which he may have written while on speed and which definitely makes very little sense. But when audiophile musicians put their music out into the world, they hate losing control of it. What if someone listens to their perfectly sculpted sonic creation on a crappy all-in-one portable turntable with a battered needle? And let’s not even get into what it sounds like on earbuds.
The irony of the note on the back of Katy Lied, and possibly the inspiration for its inclusion, is that the album’s sound was, according to the band, deeply flawed. While Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were recording it with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols, they employed a then-new technology called dbx, which expanded the dynamic range beyond the conventional limit of analog tape. The system worked by compressing the incoming signal and then expanding it on playback, with some filtering in there to reduce noise. It was more complicated than Dolby, boosting and then lowering a wider array of frequencies, and also, potentially, more effective.
But something went very wrong. “It was better sounding than anything you’ve ever heard to this date,” Katz told Cameron Crowe a couple of years later in Rolling Stone. “Even Aja. Unbelievable. We went to mix it, and the tape sounded funny. We found out the dbx noise reduction system we were using was not functioning properly.” Panic set in and some steps had to be done over with the release date approaching rapidly but they salvaged the record, at least as far as the label and the audience were concerned. But Becker and Fagen could never listen to Katy Lied again. The well had been poisoned, and they heard flaws in what to almost everyone else sounded pristine.
That’s too bad for them because Katy Lied is a very good album. It captures Steely Dan in the thick of it all, still hungry and energized by their early burst of creativity but not taking anything for granted. Before Katy Lied, Steely Dan were a rock band, but this is the record where they became something else.
In 1974, following the shows to support their third album Pretzel Logic, Fagen and Becker decided that they didn’t enjoy touring, didn’t make much money from it, and would prefer to focus on making records. It was like the Beatles after Revolver, except that Steely Dan weren’t especially huge and their lives weren’t especially crazy. More than anything, the shift was an outgrowth of their studio obsession. With no upcoming gigs, they no longer needed a steady band, and Steely Dan became officially what it already kinda was—Becker and Fagen and whatever musicians they deemed good enough to complete their vision.
Katy Lied lives at the midpoint of Steely Dan’s first act. Behind them were three records that were incrementally more sophisticated and less rock-centered. After this one were three increasingly finicky and obsessive albums that would find them reaching for a kind of perfection, albums that found them chronicling the decadence around them from the inside. Where they once wrote about the delightfully sleazy underbelly of life in America from a remove, they started to write more about what they saw around them. Katy Lied is the fulcrum in this progression—it’s messier, less sure of itself, besotted neither with youthful confidence nor veteran polish.
After the departure of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter following the dissolution of their touring unit, guitars moved a half-step into the background. These are songs for piano, jazzier and lighter, and the keyboards are higher in the mix. Listening to it brings to mind nearly-empty cocktail bars after the people with something to live for have all gone home and cabaret shows in seedy theaters. Fagen sings with gusto but if it’s possible for sweat to make a sound, then you could say he sounds a little sweaty. Almost all the drums were played precocious by a 20-year-old genius named Jeff Porcaro, who would become one of the world’s most in-demand session players, and there are many distinctive background vocals from Michael McDonald, who would become one of yacht rock’s most in-demand session singers.
The songs Becker and Fagen came up with are the usual mix of the funny, cynical, and cryptic, but here and there are moments of what seems to be actual sweetness. The brilliance of their songwriting is that they always aimed for complexity and never allowed themselves to be pinned down. Everything was up for negotiation, even when the lyrics were studded with clear meaning. “Black Friday” is a brilliant depiction of chaos, describing what it would be like to make your way out of town and cash your checks when the apocalypse hits. Fagen makes evil sound appealing, suggesting that it might be the only sane response to living in an insane world, but listen with the other ear and you hear the satire and even a kind of yearning from someone who might actually wish for a better world. Meanwhile, Becker plays the best guitar solo on the album, capturing the ragged edge of the moment.
Steely Dan made songs about the destructive force of male vanity that came from two people you knew were speaking from personal experience. They never hold themselves above their characters, but they don’t let them off the hook, either. On “Bad Sneakers,” we see a man bopping around the street near Radio City Music Hall like he owns the place. We feel what he feels but also see how ridiculous he looks, while McDonald’s background vocals suggest grace in his awkwardness, celebrating the energy that powers him even though his actions are laughable. “Rose Darling” is the third track in a row to mention money specifically, but on a more casual listen it sounds something like a pure love song. And then two cuts later, the A-side closes with “Dr. Wu.”
Lodged in the middle of the album that came in the middle of the decade and in the middle of Steely Dan’s decade-long, seven-album run is one of their very best songs, a weary and funny and specific and mysterious ode to longing and loss. “Dr. Wu” gave the album its title (“Katie lies/You can see it in her eyes”) and crystalizes its essential mood. One moment it’s about drugs, the next it’s about a love triangle, and then you’re not sure what’s next or even what’s real, and weaving through it all is the saxophone solo from Phil Woods, connecting dots between musical worlds both corny and elegant, from Billy Joel to Billy Strayhorn.
The characters flailing clumsily throughout Katy Lied are paralyzed by desires they aren’t introspective enough to understand, so all they can do is keep stumbling forward. “I got this thing inside me,” Fagen sings in a bridge on the late album highlight “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”, “I only know I must obey/This feeling I can't explain away.” Sometimes obeying those desires lead people to something ugly and inexcusable, as on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a song about a guy who is almost certainly grooming kids for abuse. It’s a Todd Solondz film rendered in sound, and Fagen only shows us the lead-up, forcing us to assemble the pieces in our heads as he hides the crime behind the album’s cheeriest arrangement.
This collision between word and sound—in which the precise moral takeaway and is obscured even as the music makes it go down easy—made the band hard to trust. “The words, while frequently not easy to get the definite drift of, are almost always intriguing and often witty,” John Mendelsohn wrote in a review of Katy Lied in Rolling Stone. But a few paragraphs later he concluded: “Steely Dan’s music continues to strike me essentially as exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock.”
It sounds harsh but Mendelsohn captured how a lot of people think about Steely Dan, then and now. This band was always about asking questions instead of giving answers, and Katy Lied came out in a particular moment of uncertainty and confusion. The fact that Becker and Fagen themselves couldn’t bear to hear their own creation only deepens the mystery. They wanted desperately to render their tragically amusing scenes just so, and the sonic purity they’d been chasing would soon be theirs. But here they give failure a kind of twisted majesty. | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UMG | November 20, 2019 | 9.1 | 36f4a600-a7ad-4d92-ade0-dba309c92555 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Toro Y Moi's Live From Trona is an odd concert album: It was performed in front of no one, amidst the beautiful landscape of Trona—three hours away from Los Angeles. | Toro Y Moi's Live From Trona is an odd concert album: It was performed in front of no one, amidst the beautiful landscape of Trona—three hours away from Los Angeles. | Toro y Moi: Live from Trona | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22207-live-from-trona/ | Live from Trona | Toro Y Moi isn’t exactly the first artist you would imagine releasing a live album recorded in the middle of a desert. His catalog, now seven albums deep, evolved from an intimate version of bedroom-pop that was one of the foundations of chillwave, through 2015’s What For?, an uneven pastiche of guitar rock informed by ’70s adult contemporary as much as it was by Weezer. (There’s even a rap-influenced mixtape in there somewhere.)
A “live album from Toro Y Moi” makes sense, then, when you consider Live from Trona wasn’t recorded from an actual concert or festival appearance: rather, the show was performed in front of no one, amidst the beautiful landscape of Trona—three hours away from Los Angeles and a town home to about 3,000—the perfect showcase for a set of Bundick’s laidback tunes.
Still, how does the beatmaker and songwriter translate live? In a live club setting, it works, because small, indoor venues amplify his layered, dense rhythms that propel his post-2011 output (and accentuate his penchant for catchy, striking riffs). But how does it work from the middle of a canyon? Bundick circumvents this by crafting a set that mostly sticks to the guitar-laden What For?.
This accomplishes a few things: it gives those songs, from an album that didn’t crack the critical accolades of his previous work and was mostly seen as a mild disappointment, a second life. It also fleshes them out in the way only a live performance can. What For’s biggest problem was it didn’t rock: while his demo June 2009, re-released in 2012, also didn’t rock, it was more of a power-pop record, an early recording that made its sins easy to forgive. What For’s smooth adult contemporary sound was five years after “Round and Round” and felt regressive after Bundick created his most dense, funkiest, and obviously Dilla-inspired record with 2013’s sublime Anything in Return.
It’s easy to enjoy Live from Trona as a What For? Part Deux, then, which is to Bundick’s benefit, as his catalog is pretty much bulletproof, with that album his most obvious weak link. Seven of those songs appear here, and they serve as the record’s best run as they sound the most appropriate in the desert. “Still Sound,” a stellar track and stand-out from 2011’s Underneath the Pine, feels limp and exposed live, its crunchy guitar riff in the studio withering outdoors, like a high-res photograph that’s been compressed. (“Say That” escapes mostly unscathed.) This is unfortunately a pitfall of Bundick’s music—if you remove the studio-enhanced sheen, the nostalgic production touches that give his best albums (Underneath the Pine, the Freaking Out EP, Anything in Return) their unique aura—is this some great, unheard, funky Todd Rundgren album?—you’re left with something tepid, like What For?.
The record’s lone new song, “JBS,” featuring jazz duo Mattson 2, has some inspired jamming, but at six-and-a-half minutes, is too long. It’s the kind of thing that might have sounded fantastic if you were there (ironic, considering no one was), but loses its immediacy in recorded form. It’s also the album’s most dangerous turn into self-indulgence, which, to its credit, Live from Trona successfully avoids. The set closes with What For’s pensive closer, “Yeah Right,” which reads likes an artistic statement; it’s a Dear John letter to chillwave. “Who are your new friends? Why did you bring them?” is a subtly devastating line, the kind of thing that stings the most when you resent someone closest to you, and the song, stretched to seven minutes to cap the live set, hits even harder in this version. It feels like Bundick, who will turn 30 in November, is closing the door on the youth-oriented movement he helped ignite back in 2010.
Few live albums are truly essential, and Live from Trona isn’t, either. But by tackling some of his least-loved songs head-on as the centerpiece of this record, Bundick shows a continued willingness to tinker with his work until he’s completely satisfied with the final product, which has been a hallmark of his career. Live from Trona also asks you to consider Bundick’s artistic output as a whole: by exploring sounds we never would have expected to hear from him in 2010, he’s continually evolving. The album leaves you wondering what his next pivot could be. | 2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | August 12, 2016 | 6.8 | 36fe52ec-6d5b-413f-9b8c-2512910f9443 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
The enigmatic Brooklyn rapper’s debut album is part airing of grievances, part origin story: a blood-stained portrait of the forces that made him. | The enigmatic Brooklyn rapper’s debut album is part airing of grievances, part origin story: a blood-stained portrait of the forces that made him. | Taphari: Blind Obedience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taphari-blind-obedience/ | Blind Obedience | Crowned Brooklyn’s “Best Rap Alien” by Noisey in 2019, Taphari has continued to nurture the detachment that drew him into the spotlight. In an interview earlier this year, the rapper shrugged off any affiliation—with Brownsville, Brooklyn, even New York City in general—that might force him into dialogue with the past or position him within a clear-cut lineage, pledging allegiance only to “the eternal present and the evolution of the self.” Taphari wears his alienation like a badge of honor, basking in a deep serenity that seems to defy human origin.
Blind Obedience winds back the clock on his otherworldly mystique. Part airing of grievances, part origin story, Taphari’s debut album is a blood-stained portrait of the forces that transformed him into the unbothered loner emerging from the void on the cover. The icy soundscapes of a five-producer team led by XL Big Alex complement the introspective mood as Taphari reveals a war of emotion raging beneath his cool exterior. Wading through illusions in search of an even higher self, he lashes out at friends, lovers, and himself with a blend of cautious vulnerability and venomous lucidity.
Album highlight “Table 42” comes closest to perfectly threading the needle between the two. Catching the rapper off balance, somber piano chords simultaneously trap Taphari in the darkest corner of his mind and spark admissions of his own fragility (“I wish my heart was as resilient as my expectations”) before he fires off one last text in horny desperation. Speaking from within a specific experience lends much-needed weight to his jaded reflections. The beginning of a romantically inclined trio of tracks that closes out Blind Obedience, “Back Soon” glides in on a swooning chorus courtesy of Bayonet Records labelmate Benét; a long-awaited reunion gleams on the horizon. When Taphari swoops in to deliver the ugly post-mortem (“I see your intentions/There was no connection/Attachment is forced”), his deep voice bouncing through the track’s rumbling bass before joining Benét in a trembling reprise of the melody, the contrast is devastating. His mastery of this newfound tenderness lapses on the next two tracks, meandering too far into platitudes to achieve the same clarity of emotion; Taphari best transcends his own alien enigma when he paints a clear target to aim at.
Thankfully, the undefined shadowy adversaries that crowd around him serve Taphari well in his comfort zone: the energized loner anthems found on Blind Obedience’s first half. “Cost You” shines with a sinister glee as his elongated sing-song cadence chops into the beat in the chorus. Dancing with fists balled behind his back, Taphari winks and turns away, letting the track’s menace dissolve in a hail of punchlines as he retreats into solitude with a giggle. And when the bubble of “Table 42”’s intimacy pops, he immediately springs back into razor-sharp cynicism on “Kathy Bates,” fleeing the scene with premonitions that “The water is rising/And the sharks on the way.” Even as he drops the curtain on his reclusive hustle, Taphari can’t resist throwing up a few new walls to guard his heart. For an artist who draws his greatest strength from disenchantment, knowing when to tear them down again is a battle all its own.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bayonet | July 26, 2021 | 6.9 | 36fe6b6e-d735-40c3-bba5-ada5e660d9b3 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
At this point, a live album seems like a perfunctory addition to the Official Posthumous Legacy package, right between the ... | At this point, a live album seems like a perfunctory addition to the Official Posthumous Legacy package, right between the ... | Jeff Buckley: Mystery White Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/992-mystery-white-boy/ | Mystery White Boy | At this point, a live album seems like a perfunctory addition to the Official Posthumous Legacy package, right between the unfinished album of demos and the inevitable b-sides compilation. But it's also something of a necessity for Jeff Buckley, who did a fairly exhaustive amount of touring in support of his one modestly successful record. When Columbia signed him, before booking weeks' worth of studio time or letting him put together a backing band, the first thing they did was issue the Live at Sin-E EP as a showcase of his raw talents.
Like any live performance, Mystery White Boy exemplifies both the weaknesses and strengths of Buckley and his band. His voice is, naturally, the greatest asset to the package, but in concert, he was more prone to spiraling off into indulgent falsettos, and often struggled to match the band's intensity. Elegantly dynamic songs like the opener, "Dream Brother," and "Mojo Pin" are given a slightly rougher touch for added climax. Sadly, the latter fails to improve on the fragile perfection of its studio counterpart, with otherwise immaculate drummer Matt Johnson rushing through the frantic triplets of the crescendo.
"Grace" and "Last Goodbye," on the other hand, are honored with impassioned, but far from unique, renditions that do them reasonable justice. On "Last Goodbye," Buckley runs through his only hit with luxurious slide guitar that puts more emphasis on the soaring string arrangements. Elsewhere, variation proves fatal for "Eternal Life," whose temporarily intriguing death metal version fails to enhance the already cringe-worthy bridge lyric.
Several previously unreleased Buckley compositions are presented here, if purely to make the compilation more salable. These tracks often come off as a bit ragged and underwritten alongside the complex material of Grace. "I Woke Up in a Strange Place" is hard rocker that whimpers off, as if there was a killer ending planned that never got written. But "What Will You Say" succeeds by its simplicity with one of the most affecting melodies of Buckley's brief career.
Jeff Buckley's always had a fluid repertoire of covers in addition to his respectable originals, and that's represented perhaps too well on Mystery White Boy. The last 20 minutes of the record are dedicated solely to covers. The off-the-cuff Gershwin classic, "The Man That Got Away," is as enjoyable as anything else here, but certainly didn't need to put in an appearance. The majestic "Kanga Roo" is well worth the 10 minutes it requires to rise into a fury, and Buckley gets extra points for taking on a Big Star song other than "Thirteen," for once. Appropriately enough, the set ends with Buckley's definitive reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," here labeled a medley for the impromptu inclusion of a few lines from Smiths' "I Know It's Over."
Such collections are never complete without one glaring omission. In the case of Mystery White Boy, it's the surprising absence of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over." Both the penultimate Buckley ballad and a surefire litmus test for any potential fan, "Lover" begs a powerfully passionate performance, and finds it only in the disc's counterpart home video, Live in Chicago. This seems especially odd and undeserved given that several of the songs from Grace included here have already appeared in live form on previous singles and EPs.
But flaws are to be expected of live albums, even when severe missteps are overlooked in editing and remastering. And despite a selection that leaves something to be desired, Mystery White Boy is a vital document of not only the late Buckley's talent, but of the chemistry and generosity he shared with his bandmates. | 2000-05-09T01:00:06.000-04:00 | 2000-05-09T01:00:06.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 9, 2000 | 7.5 | 3712857e-f2f0-4a2b-8167-21085c88b434 | Al Shipley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/al-shipley/ | null |
After years of unavailability, these seminal 70s no-wave rockers finally offer a definitive 32-track anthology, containing virtually everything they ever recorded-- even the four from Brian Eno's classic No New York comp. | After years of unavailability, these seminal 70s no-wave rockers finally offer a definitive 32-track anthology, containing virtually everything they ever recorded-- even the four from Brian Eno's classic No New York comp. | DNA: DNA on DNA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2568-dna-on-dna/ | DNA on DNA | Question for the young'uns who are studying DNA for the first time: Sure, DNA mattered, but were they any good?
"no-wave" (genre): The stunted strand of noise music/performance art where amateurs played fast, disjointed jerks of songs with no development, making vulgar and even physical assaults on audiences who would've settled for being spat on. Immortalized as much for how quickly it burned out as for how many bands it still influences, no-wave is mostly remembered by a single milestone, No New York, produced by Brian Eno, who picked the four bands that had the best names: James Chance & The Contortions, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, and DNA.
All of DNA's studio tracks and a handful of live ones are here, even the four songs from No New York. Everyone refers to No New York as one of the great out-of-print albums, but if you look around, you can buy it on CD for about $40. But that would be really stupid.
Damn, Francis Crick just died.
People joke that if you've heard one DNA song, you've heard them all, but you really need at least two: one with keyboardist Robin Lee Crutchfield, and another with his vastly more capable replacement, Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright.
Robin Crutchfield, writing on his website about one of his first gigs, in 1976 at a performance art festival: "I mapped out a perimeter on the Floyd Bennett airfield runway with a stick of chalk and took several objects including a toy piano and a blanket with me to live in a self-imposed cage like an asylum inmate for the day. 'The Death of Sparrow Hart' was a persona I took on, part bird, part autistic child, dancing and sobbing and pecking at the piano, hiding under a blanket and so on."
The single biggest reason to revisit DNA is noise savant Arto Lindsay. Lindsay chicken-chokes his guitar, splintering notes and shattering chords like windows falling out of a skyscraper. He cracks his vocals like a bullwhip, then garbles his lyrics with the patience of dry heaving. "Get out of here/ Go fuck yourself," he moans, then sticks his head back in the bowl.
When a woman suffers a miscarriage, a common cause is genetic damage: The egg and sperm unite but the DNA combines incorrectly, causing chromosomal damage that is too severe to allow the fetus to come to term. Children who are born with mental retardation also suffer genetic irregularities, but landed right at the threshold where the damage did not prevent them from coming to term.
Going off the tracklist here, Blonde Redhead could've just named themselves Egomaniac's Kiss instead.
Drummer Ikue Mori can't or won't lock in with anybody. Her frantic cymbal-bashing works better than when she tries to keep the beat-- which is fine, since the rhythms are numbing. As for when she pounds out a tribal tattoo, if you were sacrificing your daughter to a volcano and Mori were the best drummer you could hire for the ceremony, you'd really feel like an asshole.
Crutchfield on how they got Mori on drums: "Arto wanted her to be our drummer. I was reluctant, for a number of reasons. The first was that she had played violin and had no experience on drums. The second was that she didn't own any drums. The third was that she didn't speak enough English for us to communicate and manage to build a 20 minute set of songs in less than 30 days. And the fourth was that her visa was expiring and she was planning to leave the country... She did have one thing going for her. She was interested in working with us."
Is it true that no-wave bands couldn't play their instruments? With the benefit of hindsight, you can figure out who had talent and who just had attitude, but no-wave is still remembered as a lost oasis of committed, crippling unprofessionalism, of a simpler time when making inept noise with gusto actually could shake someone-- except of course, how inept could it be if it's still worth listening to on a record, in your living room?
Lindsay and Mori later worked with cult composer and improviser John Zorn, for example in the "game improvisation" Cobra, where Zorn herded his groups through painfully elaborate rules to produce music that sounds even uglier than this stuff. The nerdification of noise music suggests that for all the posturing and the awareness of posturing that surrounded no-wave, the downtown scenesters really lost something when it just became "skronk."
Lindsay et al had the sense to kill the project instead of developing it. Arto Lindsay went on to become a fine singer and guitarist, and when he isn't playing extreme improv, he records beautiful albums of Brazilian pop.
Meanwhile, Mori switched to drum machine. | 2004-08-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-08-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | No More | August 4, 2004 | 8.1 | 3719830e-c7c7-42ca-8d53-199bbeb59cba | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
The Japanese composer Midori Takada's newly reissued album is an assimilation of musical modes from around the world. It belongs in the pantheon alongside Steve Reich's most notable works. | The Japanese composer Midori Takada's newly reissued album is an assimilation of musical modes from around the world. It belongs in the pantheon alongside Steve Reich's most notable works. | Midori Takada: Through the Looking Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22989-through-the-looking-glass/ | Through the Looking Glass | In a perfect world, Japanese composer Midori Takada and her works for percussion would be as revered and renowned as that of Steve Reich. Much like that world-renowned American composer, Takada drew influence from a study of African drumming and Asian music, and surmised how these sensibilities dovetailed with that of minimalism, serving as means to break with the Western classical tradition (she originally was a percussionist in the Berlin RIAS Symphonie Orchestra at the Berlin Philharmonic). But with only a handful of works to her name and all of it long out of print—be it with her groundbreaking percussion trio Mkwaju Ensemble, the group Ton-Klami or the three solo albums she released across nearly two decades—her music has been impossible to hear since the early 1990s.
Only last year did two pieces from Takada’s Mkwaju Ensemble appear on last year’s crucial More Better Days compilation, revealing Takada’s singular approach to spartan yet euphoric percussion pieces. Touching on gamelan, kodo, and American minimalism (Takada founded the trio in part to perform the works of Reich, Terry Riley, and other 20th-century percussion pieces), each one built carefully to sublime effect. When Visible Cloaks’ member Spencer Doran released his influential mixes of Japanese music, selections from both Mkwaju and Takada’s solo percussion pieces appeared at crucial junctures.
The rarest of all of Takada’s works though was her 1983 solo effort, Through the Looking Glass, never released on CD and fetching ludicrous sums online for an original vinyl copy. Unable to financially sustain Mkwaju, Takada disbanded the ensemble and entered the studio by herself to realize this music. Over the course of two days, she put to analog tape all four of the extended performances here as well as laying down the overdubs, producing and mixing (with help from an engineer) the album on her own. An astonishing feat in and of itself, Looking Glass is one of the most dazzling works of minimalism, be it from the East or West.
“Mr. Henri Rousseau's Dream” is an assured opening, one that moves at its own slow, hushed pace. Takada astutely layers marimba, gongs, rattles and other ambient bits of chimes, recorder, tam-tam and mimics bird calls with an ocarina. In its understated pulsing of marimba, it brings to mind Gavin Bryars’ work from the same era, most notably Hommages on the Les Disques Du Crépuscule imprint. There appears to be little in the way of linear development as Takada instead crafts and sustains an entire landscape of these small sounds, letting them all levitate in mid-air for twelve heavenly minutes.
With “Crossing,” a bit of momentum builds up from a single struck cowbell. Takada goes back over the original clonk and starts to layer interweaving lines on marimba, each successive line increasing the complexity of the lines. More cowbell comes in and suddenly Takada begins to simulate the ornate polyrhythms of Reich’s Drumming all by herself in the studio. And with the introduction of a crossing marimba pattern and the drone of a harmonium some five-and-a-half minutes into the piece, it moves into its own rarefied space.
“Trompe-L’oeil” moves at a more relaxed pace, with Takada’s harmonium lines swaying like an accordion and her use of a Coke bottle as both reed and percussion giving the piece a playful air about it. It’s a breather before the finale of the album, the fifteen-minute pressure cooker of percussion, “Catastrophe Σ.” Using the harmonium to create a darker mood, Takada focuses on tom-tom, bongos, cymbal and a bit of piano to ratchet up and sustain tension over the course of the piece. There’s a breathlessness to the piece as it gathers momentum that makes it one of the most thrilling percussion pieces of its kind.
While her American influences always had an exploratory aspect to their most famous works, there’s never a moment on, say, “Music for 18 Musicians” where you feel like Reich lets loose his rein even a millimeter. There’s something about Takada and the joy of creating this album that fully emerges in this last quarter-hour, as she builds energy up with her drums, her harmonium and that ever-present cowbell. In the liner notes to this reissue, Takada explained just what she learned in her studies of African and Asian music that led her to abandoned Western classical music as a pursuit way back when. “As a performer, this music asked you to personally examine your own physical transformation and to confirm and share this transformation with your counterpart, group or tribe,” she said. “The music stops short of imposing sovereignty or nationality.” And even as the finale builds to a glorious climax, it too stops short. Takada pulls it all away at the last possible moment, a thrill that allows her listeners—nearly thirty-five years on—to soar to a space well within themselves. It’s a space well worth rediscovery. | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Global | Palto Flats / WRWTFWW | March 13, 2017 | 8.7 | 371c0476-3074-43c6-ae19-03148456e565 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On Ella Williams’ second album as Squirrel Flower, the road is a space of intimacy and disaster. Her vivid songwriting and bright, searching voice bring both sides to life. | On Ella Williams’ second album as Squirrel Flower, the road is a space of intimacy and disaster. Her vivid songwriting and bright, searching voice bring both sides to life. | Squirrel Flower: Planet (i) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squirrel-flower-planet-i/ | Planet (i) | Ella Williams was writing tender songs about freeways and driving long before a certain No. 1 hit about a driver’s license came along. Williams, a 24-year-old songwriter who records under the name Squirrel Flower, filled her debut, 2020’s I Was Born Swimming, with meditations on interstates, headlights, and ambiguous lovers who carry her inside when she’s fallen asleep on the road. The follow-up, Planet (i), features songs like “Iowa 146,” “Flames and Flat Tires,” and the uncharacteristically anthemic “Roadkill,” which uses backseat driving (“Slow down/Don’t want to risk the roadkill”) as a metaphor for the nagging weight of imposter syndrome. If automobile companies threw money at indie-rock songwriters the way fashion brands woo influencers, Williams would surely be on their list.
Born into a musical family in Massachusetts—her grandmother a singer, her grandfather the founder of a medieval ensemble—Williams was gifted with a bright, searching voice that she can roughen up when the song calls for it (“Hurt a Fly”) and a knack for imbuing small observations with cosmic weight. She has since lived in Iowa (where she attended college) and Chicago, which explains some of the road imagery, but she recorded Planet (i) in Bristol with English producer Ali Chant last fall; she had just recovered from the coronavirus and realized her antibodies made it relatively safe to travel.
On Planet (i), the road is a nexus of nostalgia and intimacy: “Iowa 146” uses a whisper-sing delivery and gorgeous, fingerpicked guitar melody to capture the sweetness of a night spent on top of a car with a love interest. But it’s also a site of disasters that haunt Williams’s imagination: the careening firestorms of “Flames and Flat Tires,” or the Missouri floods that inspired “Deluge in the South,” which has the openhearted, country-speckled quality of a Waxahatchee deep cut. Williams’ vivid songwriting and versatile voice bring both sides to life.
Planet (i) is bigger and bolder than Squirrel Flower’s previous work, augmenting Williams’ alternate tunings and folkie charm with grand gestures and abrupt tonal shifts. “Roadkill” deploys a key change at the climax, “To Be Forgotten” wrings drama out of a reverb-heavy drum track, and much of the album features airy backing vocals from family and friends. The spiky, acerbic “Hurt a Fly” is an instant highlight, and the rare song where Williams sings in character as someone else. “Took it too far again/Followed you home again,” she deadpans, cheekily impersonating toxic music-scene dudes but cloaking her voice in distortion, as though to create some distance from her own identity.
Like I Was Born Swimming, Planet (i) grows a bit listless towards the back half (“Desert Wildflowers”), and some of its song fragments don’t quite land. The most intriguing among them is “Big Beast,” which sounds like it’s emanating from an antique gramophone before its grainy folk melody crashes into an awkward sludge-metal climax. The payoff isn’t there. Naturally, though, it’s another road vignette, inspired by a time when Williams and her mother were driving around aimlessly and became captivated by a massive storm cloud. If life is a highway, Squirrel Flower wants to dissociate beside it all night long.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | July 6, 2021 | 7 | 371f949f-3f92-4d1f-88dc-5b2d77a8fb4d | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
After two decades fronting Stereolab and her side project Monade, Laetitia Sadier makes a strong solo debut. | After two decades fronting Stereolab and her side project Monade, Laetitia Sadier makes a strong solo debut. | Laetitia Sadier: The Trip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14660-the-trip/ | The Trip | For almost 20 years, Laetitia Sadier has been fronting the dazzlingly retro-futuristic Stereolab, and she's also made room to indulge in a playful dream-pop side project, Monade. But The Trip, her first album under her own name, still feels like a coming-out party. Following Stereolab's recently announced hiatus (the band's upcoming Not Music was culled from the sessions for 2008's Chemical Chords) and the disbanding of Monade, Sadier is finally on her own. She didn't waste the opportunity: The Trip is breathtaking, a rich collection of torch songs and subtle, meandering melodies that clear away the distracting frenzy and Byzantine flourishes of her past groups to expose the humane beauty of her voice.
The Trip was produced by Emmanuel Mario, who recorded Monade's last album, and Richard Swift, the American lo-fi songsmith who makes his own quirky chamber-pop albums for Secretly Canadian. Both are smart matches for Sadier. Mario brings the wisdom that comes with familiarity, knowing how to capture the airy voluptuousness of Sadier's voice without indulging in the drama of its detachment. And Swift, who could make even the most self-serious artist sound whimsical, brings levity and fluidity to the collection, allowing its melodies to amble without Stereolab's laser-focus. Both producers capture Sadier's aesthetic through an appropriately sepia-toned lens, but also leave the palette clean enough so that the emotional weight of the tracks-- be they smoldering or melancholic-- comes from her voice. So, in lieu of bouncy pop melodies, cool, jazzy exotica, or cerebral genre experiments, The Trip is full of autumnal ballads. The instrumentation is graceful and measured, giving Sadier's willowy songs a cozy underpinning.
Sadier's lyrics and delivery, though a wonderful and essential part of Stereolab's aesthetic, have sometimes felt secondary, as if they are chasing bandleader Tim Gane's instrumental ideas. But The Trip is gentler and less melodically direct than her work with that band, so pointedly narrative (and disarmingly personal) lyrics can drive the hazy arrangement. Like on "One Million Year Trip", a haunting number that explicitly deals with her sister's suicide. The light krautrock pulse and gentle, ascending synth chords are muted and stay out of the way, and the tune's power comes from its vocal. "She went on a million-year trip and left everything behind-- her skin, her hair," Sadier sings, "She has a long way to travel, so I will open my heart, and let the pain run along as there is no point in holding on."
Though notably subdued and tinged with sadness, the album isn't a downer. There are a few brisk moments to the dreamy collection-- most notably Sadier's striking version of Les Rita Mitsouko's louche disco rocker "Un Soir, Un Chien", which toys with the playfully mechanical synthesized textures of her former band. She even manages to turn Wendy & Bonnie's somber folk ballad "By the Sea" into a sexy, propulsive swirl of regret.
It's not that Sadier sounds fundamentally different here than she does in Stereolab-- her voice still oozes ethereality and sophistication. But The Trip feels like an expansion into new territory. Without Gane and his spacey-cool affectations, Sadier is free to revel in warm, rich balladry. You sense an artist known in part for her detachment leaning in close to share a secret. | 2010-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Drag City | September 27, 2010 | 8.2 | 37250de1-22d2-4556-b3d9-1cf7998b7eee | Pitchfork | null |
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After a lo-fi triumph, Stuart McLamb records his second LP in a proper studio, supplementing his melodic gifts with reverb and colorful arrangements. | After a lo-fi triumph, Stuart McLamb records his second LP in a proper studio, supplementing his melodic gifts with reverb and colorful arrangements. | The Love Language: Libraries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14464-libraries/ | Libraries | The jaunty, irrepressible indie pop of the Love Language's 2009 debut was borne of a personal tailspin: Stuart McLamb wrote and recorded it after retreating to his parents' house, licking his wounds following a brutal breakup and his subsequent collapse. The songs he produced, however, were anything but self-pitying. With nothing but his melodic gifts and an appealing sense of wry resignation, McLamb spun his despair into music that felt more like a whoop of joy than a cry of loneliness.
On follow-up Libraries, McLamb sounds less down and out but, oddly, more downbeat. The scrappy, lo-fi production of the debut is gone; he recorded the album by himself again but did so in a proper studio, and the record glimmers with soft-pedaled production touches. McLamb's handsome, worn croon is here blessed with the spiraling reverb it demands, and his colorful arrangements swell impressively to fill the new sonic space. "Pedals" announces his intentions out of the gate with an Arcade Fire-size arrangement given a sonic full court press. Like many former lo-fi musicians, McLamb alternately luxuriates and gets lost in his plush new surroundings. On several songs, he evaporates in the arrangement, "ooh"-ing wordlessly in the background as barroom piano and shimmering tremolo guitar swirl around him. The heart-catching "This Blood Is Our Own" is a standout example, beginning as a Stones-y blues ballad before an ethereal countrypolitan string section touches down, sending the song into a delirious coda that hits the same swooning heights Cass McCombs did last year on "You Saved My Life".
The pace on Libraries is more measured and the mood more muted, however, which means nothing here hits with the same immediacy as the first record's "Lalita" or "Sparxxx". Where the debut tapped the effervescent spirit of Merseybeat and the wintergreen harmonies of Dexys Midnight Runners, Libraries nods more to Burt Bacharach, and the record can sag occasionally under the drowsy weight of his influence. Of the album's 10 songs, only the trashcan percussion of "Heart to Tell" and the bone-crack backbeat of "Brittany's Back" match the debut's ragged exuberance. Others, like "Horophones", are well-meaning, well-written mid-tempo tunes that lack an animating spirit. McLamb is still a fantastically talented pop songwriter, though, one with the unerring ability to write melodies that seem to have tumbled out in a spontaneous rush of joy, and several songs here-- the lazy-Sunday-stroll shuffle of "Anthrophobia", for instance-- reveal this talent operating at its peak. | 2010-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 20, 2010 | 7.1 | 372cb2cf-90db-4ced-9708-f792387ce713 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
A workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since Guided by Voices reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe. | A workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since Guided by Voices reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe. | Guided by Voices: Cool Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19336-guided-by-voices-cool-planet/ | Cool Planet | When Guided by Voices played the Colorado stop of Riot Fest last summer, it might as well have been a time warp. The set was eerily similar to the group’s performances in their mid-1990s prime, all wobbles and grumbles with an occasional flash of off-kilter transcendence. But there were elements of the performance that were jarringly different as well, namely an exhibition of cold, canned efficiency that almost utterly undermined the air of confusion and chaos that Robert Pollard and company once brought to their music. That workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since GBV reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe.
Cool Planet coasts on the same mix of curdled ballads, power-pop sparklers, and tossed-off oddities as its most recent predecessors, but there’s a decided kick to the album’s handful of true gems. “Authoritarian Zoo” could be accused of setting the bar too high too early; it's a hammering anthem in which Pollard croons with slightly out-of-tune relish about animals and paranoia—the kind of mangled pileup of imagery that once informed GBV’s best pop songs, and still does. “Pan Swimmer” continues the trend of vintage Pollard made fresh, a 62-second hook-burst that explodes like a time-lapse blossom, while the sprawling-by-comparison “Males of Wormwood Mars” represents the record’s most inspired three minutes. Over an infectious drum fill and riffs that shift between gentle jangle and chunky distortion, Pollard weaves a magic-realist-meets-sci-fi narrative that could pass as a Soft Boys b-side.
The tipping point from mosaic to mishmash happens somewhere near “Psychotic Crush”, a promising squiggle of psychedelia—complete with mocking guitar figure—that ultimately can’t pay its vast debt to Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men”. “Table at Fool’s Tooth” is more successful in its stately yet shambolic, punk-meets-Jethro-Tull pastiche, but on “Hat of Flames”, GBV curiously flops at trying to copy GBV—namely every other song from Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, the period of the group’s own catalog that their current incarnation has most avidly tried to revive. When stacked against inspired tracks like “Cool Planet”, whose apocalyptic power-pop veers spiritedly from triumphalism to fatalism, a backpedaling rehash—let alone half an album of them—just doesn’t cut it.
Ballad-wise, Cool Planet spectacularly disappoints. Save for two stellar, simmering delicacies sung by Tobin Sprout—“Narrated by Paul” and “Ticket to Hide”, both of which shout their gleeful Beatles references even as Sprout himself whispers, especially on the sumptuous, piano-led former cut—the album is strangled by its slower moments. Pollard barely shows up on “Cream of Lung”, a dull muddle that sounds as lively as if it were recorded while he brushed his teeth. “Bad Love Is Easy to Do” fails in its attempt to be direct and sentimental, but worse off is “Fast Crawl”, which spoons out meandering sludge in unsavory lumps. Where GBV’s slovenly, dilapidated grandeur once felt vital and radical, it now putters along crankily, the sound of a band muttering to itself rather than playing to anyone in particular, themselves included. There’s a certain charm to that, of course. It’s just not always enough. | 2014-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. / Fire | May 13, 2014 | 6.2 | 3744a9e2-ad59-41b7-b324-725c8664d6ae | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
This reissue of a 2001 album from Kieran Hebden’s post-rock trio captures the band’s shift from live instrumental jams to the more intricate, experimental style that he’d pursue as Four Tet. | This reissue of a 2001 album from Kieran Hebden’s post-rock trio captures the band’s shift from live instrumental jams to the more intricate, experimental style that he’d pursue as Four Tet. | Fridge: Happiness (Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fridge-happiness-anniversary-edition/ | Happiness (Anniversary Edition) | Long before Four Tet ascended to the top of this year’s Coachella lineup, Kieran Hebden was still best known for his high-school band: a gently post-rocking trio called Fridge, whose music was as abstruse as their name was mundane. Fridge started out in the mid 1990s with Hebden on guitar, accompanied by Adem Ilhan on bass and Sam Jeffers on drums. By the first Four Tet release, 1998’s Thirtysixtwentyfive EP, Fridge already had two albums under their belt, and the two acts would co-exist until Hebden’s solo career took off following his breakthrough Four Tet album, 2003’s Rounds. One more Fridge album followed, 2007’s The Sun, at which point the band went into deep sleep.
Happiness, released in 2001 and newly remastered and reissued, was Fridge’s fourth studio album. From a contemporary vantage point, it might be the band’s most revealing work, for the way it dovetails with Four Tet’s earliest solo releases. On 1999’s EPH, Fridge still sounded like three musicians in a room—deviously talented musicians in a chamber lined with silk drapes and filled with arcane machines, perhaps, but it was still music you could imagine being forged in real time by humans. By Happiness, which followed two years later, the band’s music fell somewhere between live-sounding instrumental jams (“Tone Guitar & Drum Noise,” “Drums Bass Sonics & Edits”) that built layers of detail out of simple riffs, and supplementary studio experiments (“Sample & Clicks”)—sometimes within the same song. The album’s opening number, the self-explanatory “Melodica & Trombone,” illustrates this well: The song’s first half sounds like talented kids fooling around in the instrument closet, and the second half is a nervy ambient presence that looms like low-hanging clouds.
The similarities with Four Tet’s early output—specifically his first three albums, Dialogue, Pause, and Rounds, released between 1999 and 2003—are abundant. Those albums may have been the work of a solo producer, but a song like Rounds’ brilliant “She Moves She” pulsated with the chaotic throb of live performance, helping Hebden win over a fanbase that had little truck with electronic music’s loops and repetition. (Interestingly, after several albums that leaned heavily on house and techno, Four Tet’s most recent solo single, “Three Drums,” uses a live-ish sounding breakbeat that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Rounds.)
There are considerable similarities between the two acts, as well: Both Happiness-era Fridge and early Four Tet favor the sound of treated musical instruments—the guitars, pianos, melodicas, and xylophones that helped give rise to the hated “folktronica” tag. A number of songs from Happiness, notably the smudgy, reverb-heavy “Cut Up Piano and Xylophone,” with a melody as alluring as a spin on a desert ice rink, and the sparkling “Drum Machines & Glockenspiel,” could have fit snugly onto those first three Four Tet albums, which is a compliment to their gratifying yet unusual melodic charms.
The big difference is that Four Tet’s music is perfectly balanced between clean, minimal lines and ornate production trickery, while Happiness is a little overloaded. “Drum Machines & Glockenspiel” spins off in its second half into a headache-inducing mess of squeaking recorders and assorted percussion that seems to go on forever, partially undoing the finely tuned poise of the song’s opening half. It’s not the only song that is too drawn out: Four of the 10 tracks here (including “Five Combs,” a bonus cut originally issued on the Japanese edition of Happiness) pass the nine-minute mark. Even if sprawl is part of the album’s charm, these songs could still stand a good edit. The way they ramble on suggests there’s no domineering arm on Fridge’s collective tiller, in contrast to Four Tet’s more focused solo work.
Happiness should not just be seen as a Four Tet adjunct. On two of the album’s strongest songs—the languid, almost countrified guitar rock of “Long Singing” and the brooding “Five Four Child Voice” (a song that could almost pass for Pavement’s more experimental moments)—Fridge sound most like a band and least like a Hebden solo project. Fans of Tortoise, whose “Why We Fight” Hebden included on his 2004 Late Night Tales compilation, will also find plenty to calmly crunch numbers to. In a year that has seen Kieran Hebden bumble to the top of the dance pile, resurrect shoegaze electronica with “Three Drums,” and team up with guitar cosmonaut William Tyler for the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” Happiness is a glimpse back at the beginnings of a brilliantly illogical success story: part history lesson, part after-school jam, all loose limbs and unbridled inventiveness. | 2023-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | May 27, 2023 | 7.7 | 3745e414-d548-42ac-b1f3-a479d2277c29 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The debut album by Juan Zaballa, a Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter gleefully indebted to the Ramones. | The debut album by Juan Zaballa, a Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter gleefully indebted to the Ramones. | Tall Juan: Olden Goldies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23073-golden-oldies/ | Olden Goldies | On “I Wish I Knew,” the fourth track on his full-length debut, Olden Goldies, Juan Zaballa shows that he can capture the speed and spunk of classic Ramones on an acoustic guitar. In no uncertain terms, his rhythms and vocal melodies telegraph from where Zaballa draws his influence. Just in case, though, the Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter name-drops the legendary Forest Hills punks when he sings about “Sharing good times with you/Listening to Ramones.”
As anyone who loves the Ramones can tell you, their music captures a powerful sense of nostalgia and by-gone innocence. Zaballa discovered the band at the ripe old age of 8, so it isn’t surprising that they have such a strong hold on him. Eight of the 15 songs on Olden Goldies are built on Johnny and Tommy Ramone’s signature groove, as Zaballa does his best Joey Ramone impression over top of them. Zaballa also favors a similarly naive mode of expressing himself. “I Wish I Knew,” for example, could be a love story straight out of the “Happy Days” era. “I know you like fruits, amusement parks too/And staying up all night,” Zaballa sings to his lost (presumably high school) sweetheart. On “Far Rockaway,” he references the subway ride to to the Queens neighborhood the Ramones immortalized on “Rockaway Beach.”
But Zaballa knows he has to do more than simply cop the tone and style of his glue-sniffing, cretin-hopping heroes. He laces several of his riffs with off-color, borderline jazzy chords that would certainly have made Johnny Ramone wrinkle his nose in disapproval. Ironically enough, Zaballa breathes new life into lo-fi pioneer R. Stevie Moore’s introvert anthem “I Like to Stay Home,” by giving it a Ramones makeover and cutting it down to 43 seconds.
Half of Olden Goldies is clearly indebted to the Ramones, and the other half shows Zaballa indulging his taste for garage psych. He accents most of his Joey Ramone-styled verses with a mic-distorting bark that suggests a bridge between the album’s two primary modes. But the song sequence alternates haphazardly between them, making for a disjointed listen. And Zaballa doesn’t follow-through on what could have been fruitful side detours: the ambient Rhodes-like piano swell at the end of “Another Juan,” for example. When Zaballa does veer off the path, such as on the cloud-like guitar-keyboard loop at the base of “Kaya” (a loving ode to his smoking substance of choice), it only highlights how much more variety he has up his sleeve.
By Zaballa’s own admission, Mac DeMarco didn’t actually “produce” this album in the traditional sense, and it shows. Worse, the lack of production makes for a strangely colorless tribute to the rock’n’roll era. It’s odd to say about a pompadoured, rockabilly wildman who alternates between English and Spanish, but Zaballa’s records could use more of his own character.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mac DeMarco engineered the album. | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BUFU | May 16, 2017 | 6.2 | 374816d6-1842-4b26-a8ad-549549df28ba | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The teenaged duo Let's Eat Grandma explore the nightmarish whimsy of nursery rhymes and folktales with a distinctly English flavor on their chilling and impressive debut. | The teenaged duo Let's Eat Grandma explore the nightmarish whimsy of nursery rhymes and folktales with a distinctly English flavor on their chilling and impressive debut. | Let’s Eat Grandma: I, Gemini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22029-i-gemini/ | I, Gemini | Every now and again we need a reminder that, as a society, we really have no business condescending to adolescents, especially with art that insults their intelligence and fails to speak to the depth of their experience. I, Gemini, the debut album by teenaged English duo Let’s Eat Grandma, inadvertently nudges us to remember that we have just as much to learn from teenagers as they supposedly do from us. “Wise beyond its years,” so to speak, the album begins with the funereal beat and keyboard swells of “Deep Six Textbook,” a song that Let's Eat Grandma enshrouded in a haze of gloom.
On “Textbook,” with just a few simple ingredients—including handclaps, glockenspiel, an ethereal keyboard solo that sounds like bagpipes emanating from a dream state, and heaps of reverb—multi-instrumentalists Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton make typical musical expressions of “sadness” seem one-dimensional by comparison. In just about any other musician's hands, the crawling solemnity of “Deep Six Textbook” would be melodramatic if not outright suffocating. Somehow, though, Let’s Eat Grandma and producer Will Twynham (Mary Epworth, Kiran Leonard) manage to make dour moods both enticing and multi-faceted.
From there, I, Gemini assumes a more playful cadence on its second track, the warped Latin-tinged pop “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms,” which recalls Blondie and the Tom Tom Club’s early-‘80s singles. Still, Hollingworth and Walton maintain an air of frosty gravitas throughout the album, even when it’s clear that they’re trying to be whimsical. This is all the more impressive considering that the pair’s high-pitched, squeaky voices at times sound like they belong more to elementary school-aged children than teenagers. Of course, the contrast between the childlike vocals and the daring experimentalism of the music can be rather unsettling.
One can only presume that Twynham and Let’s Eat Grandma are playing up this contrast on purpose in order to re-create the mood of fairy tales that pit children against menacing threats. But other than the misguided rap on “Eat Shiitake,” Walton and Hollingworth don’t exactly come off as naive. In fact, their unwavering air of groundedness that makes for a more chilling effect. Musically speaking, the pair’s control is, in fact, exceptional—especially when you consider how so many adult artists use similar instrumentation to sound like they’re knocking around in a toy store. For all its baroque weirdness, evoking at times both Kate Bush and St. Vincent, I, Gemini holds together remarkably well.
Let’s Eat Grandma have clearly learned to make maximum use of space. Even on the intentionally ramshackle, wobbly-groove of “Sax in the City,” I, Gemini never sounds haphazard. Whenever Walton and Hollingworth reach for a new instrument, they sound assured, not like they’re trying to give the impression that they’re finger painting with sound, and certainly not like they're going to let the music unravel. “Chocolate Sludge Cake,” for example, opens with two and a half minutes’ worth of gentle recorder flutters that recall Peter Gabriel’s flute playing on Genesis’ forays into pastoral English folk during the early-‘70s. The song then blossoms into chaos as Let’s Eat Grandma sing about the different cakes they're going to bake—apple, coffee, chocolate, etc.
Genesis tunes like “Supper’s Ready” and “Firth of Fifth” became classics not only because of Gabriel’s hammy strangeness, but because that band was subverting music and imagery that had been deeply embedded in the English psyche while forging the sound we would come to know as prog. Let’s Eat Grandma appear to tap-into the same collective unconscious of nursery rhymes and folktales, with a distinctly English twist. With I, Gemini Let’s Eat Grandma not only hold their own with their predecessors, but they also create a world that demands you come to it on its own terms, not the other way around. An impressive achievement from musicians of any age. | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Transgressive | June 30, 2016 | 7.3 | 374a3f25-61ff-4e56-bd23-625f5b9fecba | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The first album in six years from Jonathan Meiburg and co. returns to the band’s patient style of baroque, naturalistic art-rock. | The first album in six years from Jonathan Meiburg and co. returns to the band’s patient style of baroque, naturalistic art-rock. | Shearwater: The Great Awakening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shearwater-the-great-awakening/ | The Great Awakening | Shearwater had largely stayed out of politics until the grim state of American affairs caused Jonathan Meiburg to change his tune in 2016. This trajectory describes at least several thousand other indie artists, but Meiburg was ahead of the curve: Shearwater concerned themselves not with their usual ornithological studies nor geographical arcana on their atypically strident Jet Plane and Oxbow, released at least 10 months before the wave of newly activated resisters rose in November. It would be completely logical for Shearwater to continue in this direction, but while there’s been unlimited material to spark outrage, Meiburg has discovered outrage itself is not a renewable resource. After spending at least a half decade buckling under the oppressive weight of worldly horrors and hopelessness, The Great Awakening bravely and perhaps naively offers counterprogramming, going inward to imagine a landscape unscarred by human treachery.
As the first Shearwater album in six years, The Great Awakening is a return to form by default. Meiburg’s projects in the time since have been logical extensions of Shearwater’s ornate, earthy, and occasionally academic mien—collaborating with former tour openers Cross Record to make frequently stirring music as Loma and penning A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, a celebrated work on his most frequent subject. But his previous two Shearwater albums felt intended as a response to the increasingly precious pretense of his “Island Arc,” pivoting towards rock musculature and scene-chewing synth-pop. Animal Joy and Jet Plane were the first time Shearwater sounded conversant with larger trends in indie rock, whereas The Great Reawakening is as much of an about-face sonically as it is spiritually, revisiting a baroque, naturalistic form of art-rock with almost no contemporary peers.
“Enough of this sad dreaming of country life,” Meiburg booms during “Empty Orchestra,” The Great Awakening’s pulse-quickening outlier; it’s a wish to be fully marooned from modern civilization and also a likely shout to Roxy Music, a suitable comparison that started emerging more on Jet Plane. It’s probably the latter, given the King Crimson easter egg in the record’s first line: “Here comes your heart attack/Starless and bible black/And here is the endgame.”
From that point forward, The Great Awakening imagines life taking shape after a spiritual death, emerging from pitch black to a blank slate of blinding white. In his authorial and musical pursuits, Meiburg is unafraid to practice patience to document a beauty that can’t be forced. “There’s no reason to cry,” he intones early on, letting the sentiment linger for nearly six minutes without rushing towards a resolution. The Great Awakening often unfolds at the pace of time-lapse video of land masses forming or plants springing into bloom, orchestrated with enough horns and strings to skew prog, though quiet enough to pass for minimalism. On “Everyone You Touch,” Meiburg is close-mic’d enough to hear his breath and fingers sliding across the fretboard, though the production and his mannered vocals render it both intimate, opulent, and ghostly, like watching an esteemed stage actor rehearse in an empty amphitheater.
Many have paid homage to Mark Hollis since he stepped away from the music industry, but few have walked it like they Talk Talk talk it quite like Shearwater; at their best, Meiburg has conjured not just the incapacitating enchantment of our surroundings, but its terrifying, destructive, and unknowable capacities. But The Great Awakening lacks the latter as counterpoint compared to the band’s peak on 2008’s Rook, as the unyielding prettiness sets a mood that blunts the dynamic arc. “Laguna Seca” recalls the bristling mood of Jet Plane, though Meiburg’s stentorian howl renders “fortune favors the undertone of ugliness” as a biblical proclamation rather than a commentary on 2022. Yet even the gnarlier elements—distended, tribal drums and an unexpectedly acute melodic angle on the chorus—never exert their will on the listener. The run of “Milkweed,” “Detritivore,” and “Aqaba” is quintessential Shearwater in both their titles and the tendency to let the middle of their albums coast by like a warm, welcome breeze.
The Great Awakening is often so sonically captivating that it doesn’t take much for Shearwater to engage: “Xenarthran” and “There Goes the Sun” are barely louder than what surrounds them but land with more impact, with the faintest arpeggiated bassline or implied percussive pulse having more in common with Kompakt microhouse than their peers in indie rock’s aughts-era drama club. Likewise, although the references to encephalons and armadillos let you know that Meiburg is back in his bag, it’s a moment of unadorned poetry that best gets his point across. “God lives in the mind/But in the mind it’s alive,” he beams, offering the best and perhaps only way out of our worldly hell. | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyborus | June 10, 2022 | 6.8 | 375223d2-8b82-4dde-be40-cd698e4203e2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Jazz pianist Robert Glasper assembles an all-star cast in search of a sound that might reflect the tenor of the times; the meditative results are shaded by politics without wallowing in it. | Jazz pianist Robert Glasper assembles an all-star cast in search of a sound that might reflect the tenor of the times; the meditative results are shaded by politics without wallowing in it. | R+R=NOW: Collagically Speaking | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rrnow-collagically-speaking/ | Collagically Speaking | There’s a now-famous clip of the soul and jazz icon Nina Simone pleading with her peers to do more with their art. Her voice is declarative, her eyes full of vigor. “I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself,” Simone tells the interviewer. “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” The video gained traction in 2015 when director Liz Garbus included it in her Netflix documentary on the singer, What Happened, Miss Simone? Jazz pianist Robert Glasper, who helped produce a tribute compilation that accompanied the film, answers Simone’s call to action with Reflect+Respond=Now, a supergroup featuring Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah on trumpet, Derrick Hodge on bass, Taylor McFerrin on synthesizer, Justin Tyson on drums, and Terrace Martin on synth and vocoder. Their debut album, Collagically Speaking, feels shaded by the chaos of contemporary politics without wallowing in it. It is a largely meditative offering that functions as a reprieve from the daily flood of negativity and presidential tweetstorms.
Mixing Quiet Storm R&B, 1970s jazz-funk fusion, cosmic soul, and instrumental hip-hop, Collagically Speaking features a cross-section of top-tier musicians lending their voices to the fluid set. They have all made significant waves on their own, either as established solo artists or well-known studio musicians. The genesis of the band goes back one year, to the Robert Glasper & Friends showcase at the 2017 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, where Glasper, Scott, Hodge, McFerrin, and Martin were joined by Marcus Gilmore on drums. The performance resembled an improvised jam session: Sonnymoon’s Anna Wise sang a verse from her work with rapper Kendrick Lamar; rapper Phonte Coleman spit a few bars as well. Collagically Speaking feels equally loose and spontaneous, as if the group is working song to song to find the right groove. That approach succeeds, for the most part. The almost 10-minute “Resting Warrior,” with its rubbery bass line and fiery trumpet solo, is a clear highlight: an eclectic funk-jazz hybrid reminiscent of Weather Report and Sextant-era Herbie Hancock. Just like the jazz icon, Martin sings through a vocoder on “Colors in the Dark,” using the modified wails to add angelic tinges to the track’s slow-churning arrangement. The song elicits a deep sense of peace; “Resting Warrior” conveys fury and rage.
While the album’s open-endedness largely works to its benefit, Collagically Speaking occasionally meanders. Played back to back, “Awake to You” and “By Design” feel like one 13-minute composition that lingers too long without adequate progression. Between Martin’s manipulated vocals and Tyson’s hypnotic percussion, “Awake to You” draws a direct line to beatmaker J Dilla’s head-nodding production, but without rhymes from a like-minded MC, the arrangement is monotonous. Conversely, “HER = NOW” makes great use of space. Hodge sets the stage here, his fluttering bassline a worthy complement to actress and poet Amanda Seales, who delivers an energetic spoken-word verse about the grand complexities of womanhood. “Don’t fear our strength,” she declares against a backdrop of bass and slow-rising synths. “Step up and step in to replenish it. We are solid, because we are the bridges that make this world connect.” Actor Terry Crews appears near the end of “The Night in Question” to discuss what true creativity is (short answer: be different, don’t do what everyone else does), and on the closing track, “Been on My Mind,” rapper Yasiin Bey offers his own definition of love. “Love is God’s signature on all of creation,” he says. “Love is the reason why everything that you love is here.”
Simone’s call for artists to reflect the times was a plea for political music that spoke truth to power—a perspective rooted in the civil-rights struggles and anti-war movement of the 1960s. While Collagically Speaking isn’t the political firebrand that Simone called for, it’s equally vital for different reasons. In an era of uncertainty, Collagically Speaking is a means of regrouping in times of intense conflict. It’s made to replenish, to help recharge when the burdens of life become too heavy. In an era of “turn up,” Collagically Speaking is a turn-down record that can help you forget the existential despair. Just for a moment, though: The combat continues tomorrow. | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | June 19, 2018 | 7 | 37560b6e-ffc8-4faa-8a58-460687d05fe4 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ |
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