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The soft and luminous six instrumental tracks on Sprague’s latest release convey a sort of serene estrangement from the everyday. | The soft and luminous six instrumental tracks on Sprague’s latest release convey a sort of serene estrangement from the everyday. | Emily A. Sprague: Hill, Flower, Fog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-a-sprague-hill-flower-fog/ | Hill, Flower, Fog | In Emily A. Sprague’s indie-folk project Florist—sometimes accompanied by her bandmates, sometimes solo—the Catskill, New York native makes music of startling intimacy. Her last album, the self-explanatory Emily Alone, was as unadorned as a Shaker chair, stripped down to mostly acoustic guitar and voice. “Death will come/Then a cloud of love,” she sang, a philosopher of monosyllables. But on Sprague’s albums under her own name, she trades language for the mercurial sounds of modular synthesizers, her undulating drones as formless as galaxies. If Florist’s music is a pen-and-ink line drawing, an Emily A. Sprague recording is more like a trick of the light captured on fogged film.
At these two poles, the opposite sides of her music mirror each other. Recorded in the wake of her mother’s death and a move out West, Emily Alone was about grief and solitude. In sound and materials, the electronic Hill, Flower, Fog is a world away from that album’s hushed, introspective folk, but it is also, in its way, a record of mourning. She recorded its six instrumental tracks in a single week in March, in the early days of the pandemic. “I found myself suddenly a part of that stream which flows now separate from the reality we used to know,” she wrote upon first uploading the album to Bandcamp in March, just four days after she had finished it. (The RVNG Intl. edition has been expanded and resequenced.) “It is meant as a soundtrack to these new days, practices, distances, losses, ends, and beginnings.” Rather than fear or discord, though, she emphasizes a grounding tranquility.
Hill, Flower, Fog is cut from similar cloth as its electronic predecessors Water Memory and Mount Vision. Soft and luminous, its cycling patterns trace gentle shapes, generally favoring major over minor keys. They seem targeted largely at the subconscious; once the closing song’s patient andante arpeggios fade to silence, it can be hard to remember many details about the preceding 40 minutes. At the same time, Sprague’s sounds are more sharply defined than before; she has replaced the diffuse pads and gaseous tone clusters of previous albums with cool, woodwind-like leads and bright chimes. Lush as a dewy field, “Moon View” opens the album with what sounds like a duet for music box and pastoral recorder; “Horizon” likewise plays crisp tintinnabulations off reverberant held tones, syncopated delay sending ripples across the song’s placid surface.
That palette doesn’t change much; all six tracks play up the contrast between pin-prick details and drawn-out echoes. The mood throughout is wistful but unburdened, as if acknowledging the pain of the present moment but also resigned to it, and determined to persevere. The slow, steady quarter notes of “Rain” capture a quiet sense of wonder. “Woven” is constructed around wavering open fifths that faintly recall the drones of Indian classical music; around them drip all manner of squiggles and accents, soft as melting ice cream. The nine-minute “Mirror” proceeds as though Sprague had simply set the dials on her modular rig and gone to make a cup of tea; it pings and burbles with a mind of its own, its rhythm like the aftermath of a rainfall, when the dripping from the eaves and the trees creates its own aleatory symphony.
In a break from the extreme abstraction of Sprague’s previous electronic work, Hill, Flower, Fog is accompanied by Greetings from Hill, Flower, Fog, a limited-edition book of her own photographs, which she says relate “moments of pause, peace, and communion experienced at home.” They are simple images of familiar objects. Bougainvillea bobs against a sunbleached wall; the full moon floats in rose-tinted dusk; shadows fall across a deep green lawn. These small moments are charged with a sense of the ineffable; each one feels like a fleeting record of time’s passing. In its aimless repetition, free of moments of tension or drama, the music of Hill, Flower, Fog conveys a similar sensibility—a kind of serene estrangement from the everyday. The year has presented us with much to rage against; Sprague’s benevolent music gives us reasons to be grateful.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | November 19, 2020 | 7.6 | 375b0184-8e37-4a82-aa12-b33d318b55ab | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Bob Dylan’s moody 1975 epic is often referred to as his “breakup album,” but it might be his most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. | Bob Dylan’s moody 1975 epic is often referred to as his “breakup album,” but it might be his most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. | Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22485-blood-on-the-tracks/ | Blood on the Tracks | One doesn't have to be a broken-hearted straight male (or even a Nobel Prize voter) to fall in love with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, but it might help. Filled with open-ended and often gender-specific pronouns, the yous, hers, hes, shes, and theys remain unnamed on all but one of the 10 songs on the moody 1975 epic, each a glowing invitation for listeners to fill in the blanks with their own nearest available emotional devastations. Often referred to as Dylan’s “breakup album,” it’s likewise become just that for many listeners, both expressing and absorbing great aloneness. Dylan himself professed confusion about the album’s popularity. “It’s hard for me to relate to that,” he said the year Blood on the Tracks was released. “I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain.”
But as plenty have pointed out in the wake of Dylan’s Nobel for Literature, his music is about far more than just his lyrics, and Blood on the Tracks is a prime example of just what that more constitutes. Beyond the emotional wreckage, Blood on the Tracks might be Dylan’s most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. The disc-opening “Tangled Up in Blue” uncorks the feels via an experimental narrative that fights conventional linearity, but the reasons to keep listening are contained in the first 11 seconds of forward motion before Dylan’s voice enters. Only after that do lyrics even matter, and (on Blood on the Tracks, anyway) he is pretty fantastic at both.
Blood on the Tracks is pleasing and complete enough to visit repeatedly, until the syllables become words, the words resolve into meanings, and all of it becomes internalized, a space accessible even without the presence of the album. Perhaps the least dated of Dylan’s recordings, there is a nakedness to everything. Untainted by the politics and cool of the ’60s or the gated drums and overdubbed productions of the ’80s, Blood on the Tracks hits with the same immediacy in the 21st century as it did in 1975.
Just as much as Pink Floyd or any other mid-’70s LP-minded artist, Dylan uses the studio to create and sustain a mood on Blood on the Tracks, and this mood is what survives. Drawing from two sets of sessions and at least three configurations of not-fully-identified musicians to capture a singular batch of songs, the album is a full package of writing, performance, and atmosphere. Withdrawing an early version of the album on the eve of release, musicians from sessions in New York disappeared into the credit of “Eric Weissberg and Deliverance,” and musicians recorded later in Minneapolis received no credit at all. Though he received no separate title on the album itself, it is also the first album on which Dylan himself served as sole producer, assembling musicians on his own, sometimes to confusing effect. While staying within the parameters of folk-rock, Dylan finds a rich array of approaches, moving between the vivid brightness of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” the soft-voiced late-night guitar/bass duets of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain,” and the pained autumnal crispness of “Idiot Wind.”
“Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan” ran one of Columbia Records’ ’60s advertising campaigns, but by the early ’70s consumers were deluged with multiple generations of New Dylans, each expanding from territory that once belonged almost exclusively to Dylan, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. After a few years in the wilderness, when Dylan recorded for David Geffen’s Asylum Records (and Columbia released Dylan, scraping up unissued sessions without his consent), Blood on the Tracks might be seen as Dylan’s own assertion that nobody wrote Dylan like Dylan, either. For fans at the time, it was a revelation, both a few notches less cryptic than his ’60s surrealism, but no less mystical, folding in techniques of his old finger-pointin’ (“Idiot Wind”), blues-strummin’ (“Meet Me in the Morning”), vision-havin’ (“Shelter From the Storm”), and story-tellin’ (“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”) self, all while tapping into powerful new realms of vulnerability.
As a writer, Dylan had been through about three lightly overlapping phases over the previous 15 years—young and Woody (1960-1963), young and visionary (1964-1968), and young and happy (1969-1973), and Blood on the Tracks built on them while promising something more. Officially retired and raising children during the early ’70s, Dylan had deliberately downshifted into a less complex lyric style beginning with 1969’s Nashville Skyline, in part hoping to shake some of the obsessive global audience he’d attracted. New Morning and other country-pop sessions from the period found Dylan playing with some of the brighter textures he would employ on Blood on the Tracks, but his reluctance to write in the symbolism-laden voice of his earliest years soon resulted in a period when he “more or less had amnesia,” as he later told an interviewer. Returning to active songwriting in 1973 and the road in 1974 with the Band for Planet Waves, many of his latest songs seemed to lack the all-seeing perspective of his earlier work.
Dylan would say Blood on the Tracks was influenced by lecture classes he took with painter Norman Raeben in New York in early 1974. “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room,” he said of the new lyric writing approach that resulted. Heard most vividly in the long-arc narratives of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” verses and lines present images like shuffled postcards connected by what Dylan referred to as a “code.” It is here that thinking of Blood on the Tracks as a “breakup album” becomes reductive, missing out on much of what the collection of songs has to offer, the “breakup” as much a concept as the bandshell concert loosely framing Sgt. Pepper’s. Just as much as relationships are about more than their breakups, breakup albums are about more than their relationships.
Though the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage might easily be spotted in nearly every song on the album, there are also meditations on the ineffable passage of time (“Tangled Up in Blue”), a transitory love affair in the present tense (“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”) and media jackyldom and other bummers (“Idiot Wind”). For that matter, a full third of the LP’s second side is concerned with “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” a nine-minute 16-verse ballad that bucks the album’s signature themes of time regained, implacable loves, and unnamed names. Though remaining convincingly jaunty throughout with a light melody that catches the details in forensic clarity, its drawn-out story is a chore to decipher. Unlike the ambient emotional narratives of the rest of the album, the linear ballad requires a full and present attention, a reminder of one of the ways that music consumption is different than reading. Reportedly once considered for a film adaptation, the screen may’ve suited its stage-directed characters better than folk-rock. Further separating it from the rest, the blood spilled on this particular track doesn’t seem to be Dylan’s own, detracting from the album’s bigger picture and only underscoring the unifying power of the other nine songs.
Drawing on a range of songwriting tricks (including an open “E” tuning that assures that very few will play Dylan like Dylan, either), Blood on the Tracks emphasizes a feeling of raw expression. Singing live in the studio (with the exception of the overdubbed “Meet Me in the Morning”), Dylan placed his usual focus on capturing in-the-moment performances. And though his reputation for studio and onstage spontaneity is well-deserved, Blood on the Tracks also presents songs that he had spent almost all of 1974 writing and reworking. Personal, perhaps, the songs easily transcend their would-be biographies. If Dylan’s attitudes towards his partners sometimes stand out as patronizing—“You’re a Big Girl Now” acting as an equally infantilizing bookend to 1966’s “Just Like a Woman”—they reveal more about the nature of hurt than anything useful about the songwriter.
One glimpse into the making of the album comes through the version that Dylan very nearly released, scrapping it at the last moment, after jackets and test pressings had already been made. Playing an advance copy at a family gathering in Minnesota in over the holidays, Dylan—at the behest of his brother—decided he wanted a brighter sound, less of a downer. Flexing his superstar muscle and anticipating Neil Young, Kanye West, and others, he had the album recalled, pulling together a band of local folkies in the days after Christmas 1974 to rerecord half of the songs. The New York acetate (most recently offered in 2015 for $12,000) is all late night atmospherics, mostly just Dylan and bassist Tony Brown, the sound of the former’s coat-buttons brushing against his guitar strings. Though tracks have come out via various box sets, bootlegs of the New York sessions—sourced warmly from the acetate—are every bit as magical as the final product, a classic all its own, minus a clunkier “Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts.”
In Minneapolis, Dylan brightened up the sound (changing keys on “Tangled Up in Blue,” striking a lighter keynote) and toned down some of the crueler lyrics (especially on “If You See Her, Say Hello”). If atmosphere was lost (and it was, especially without the pedal steel-drenched “You’re A Big Girl Now”), then accessibility was gained. Charting at #1 on its January 1975 release, Blood on the Tracks is arguably the last Dylan album on which a majority of the songs became standards of their own, part of the invisible canon shared at coffee houses, college campuses, or anywhere bright-eyed young pickers might congregate. In that way, it is also maybe Dylan’s last album of originals to qualify as “folk music” in both senses of the phrase: the popular genre defined by the presence of idioms and acoustic instruments, but also the great shared body of songs with lives and language that exist apart from their studio recordings and original performers. With the Byrds and many others achieving their own hits with his tunes and Dylan himself often circulating unrecorded work via folk music zines and songwriting demos, this had long been the expected fate of Dylan's songs.
Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan’s catalog, that open “E” tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep “Tangled Up In Blue” in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984’s Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.
Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves’ “Going, Going, Gone” and *Desire’*s “Sara,” especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978’s Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn’t. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.
Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn’t so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan’s whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in “Tangled Up in Blue” grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service. | 2016-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 30, 2016 | 10 | 37659231-7349-4087-aa08-bbd1c0c396de | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The Welsh electronic musician continues his run of home-listening albums with a quiet, unassuming record that splits the difference between low-key dance music and ethereal ambient. | The Welsh electronic musician continues his run of home-listening albums with a quiet, unassuming record that splits the difference between low-key dance music and ethereal ambient. | Leif: 9 Airs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leif-9-airs/ | 9 Airs | There’s a distinctly pastoral tinge to Leif Knowles’ music: an air of dewy grass, verdant clearings, mist burning off of rolling hills. Though mostly created with synthesizers, Leif’s records are imbued with the sounds of rainfall, birdsong, and wind chimes. Even some of his synthetic elements suggest natural phenomena: Hissing white noise swishes like reeds; bass tones cleave the air as forcefully and unexpectedly as thunderclaps. Some of these atmospheric qualities are undoubtedly linked to the Bristol-based musician’s many years as a resident at Wales’ Freerotation festival, where DJs spin avant-garde dance music to an intimate crowd gathered on the grounds of Baskerville Hall, a historic manor house nestled between fields and woodlands.
Even in the years when he was focused primarily on the dancefloor, Leif’s music cast a wide net: On the title track of his debut album, in 2013, he sampled a decades-old harp composition of his father’s about Dinas Oleu, a picturesque landmark in Snowdonia. Over the past few years, he has increasingly moved away from club convention. His 2019 album Loom Dream delved into dubby, slow-motion grooves that reward horizontal listening; last year’s even more serene Music for Screen Tests, an unbroken 54-minute suite, was meant to soundtrack a selection of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests—short moving-picture portraits in which subjects would sit as still as possible before Warhol’s film camera for three minutes or so. Commissioned for an exhibition at London’s Barbican, the pieces are a blend of gentle patience and jittery rhythms, nicely capturing the unsteady stillness of Warhol’s films.
9 Airs continues in the vein of those two albums, although it feels less cohesive: No overt themes hold it together, and it runs a wider stylistic gamut, from intricate IDM to airy drones. Calm but rarely entirely beatless, it occupies a kind of mellow middle ground—neither dance music, exactly, nor textbook ambient. In some ways it feels like a collection of disconnected parts, although that is also part of its idiosyncratic charm. It’s a quiet, unassuming record with a restless, exploratory feel—chillout music, but with an emphasis on out.
Acoustic melodies provide 9 Airs’ throughline, at least in its most commanding songs. “Seven Hour Flight to Nowhere” opens the album with floating chimes and the knife-sharpening whisk of backmasked harp plucks. The sparkling stringed textures are reminiscent of Four Tet’s frequent use of the instrument, but Leif’s wafting rhythms have a looser, more tentative feel. The piano takes the lead on “Hiding in Plain Sight,” a downy approximation of UK techno with all the bones swapped out for feathers and blades of grass. And “Low D” begins with an airy swirl of low D whistle—another instrument from his father’s repertoire—before morphing into a coiled, breakbeat-inspired rhythm, like some strange fusion of medieval folk and drum’n’bass.
Those songs constitute 9 Airs’ rhythmic peaks. At the far extreme are some of the record’s most captivating pieces. A mournful swirl of voices, “Hold Gem Cut” summons an almost occult power, as though the wind were sharing wordless secrets. And “Wake Up Now” is a lullaby-like piano etude in which the squeak of the chair is clearly audible beneath increasingly distorted overdubbed layers. Its lo-fi quality reminds me of Sonic Youth’s rumbling “Providence”; as it grows louder it becomes hard and brittle, wearing its damage like dented armor. This is not simply milquetoast ambient, but an expression of something darker and more complicated.
The rest of the songs lie somewhere in the middle between these two poles. “Every Weather” periodically interrupts one of the album’s most dulcet loops with a concussive explosion of drums, like strobes flashing in the club. The organ-like tones of “Emotional Risk Assessment” are gracefully melodic but also curiously aimless; the track lasts six minutes, but it could just as easily go for 60 without feeling much different. The album closes with “Tapping on a Hollow Body,” which is just that: a low-key rhythm that sounds like it’s been rapped out on the body of an acoustic guitar, while strummed chords melt into a watercolor wash of reverb around it. Leif ends the song in the most unassuming fashion possible: There’s a squeak of fingertips on coiled steel strings as the reverb recedes; then a car engine revs, we hear what might be tires on gravel, and the whole thing fades to silence. Even when he’s disappearing, Leif excels at infusing his music with a sense of place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | AD 93 | November 10, 2021 | 7.3 | 376686fd-40c8-463b-b6eb-15b81972bccd | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Originally released as part of a three-disc set, Prince fires on all cylinders at these live recordings from the early ’00s, a testament to his late-night blues and funk reveries. | Originally released as part of a three-disc set, Prince fires on all cylinders at these live recordings from the early ’00s, a testament to his late-night blues and funk reveries. | Prince: One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain't Over! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22338-one-nite-alone-the-aftershow-it-aint-over/ | One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain't Over! | Prince had a curious approach to live albums. After Purple Rain put his crowd-stunning skills on worldwide display, subsequent concert artifacts took the form of coffee table books or low-profile home video releases. And he could be a merciless tease. With “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” from Sign ‘O’ the Times, Prince offered listeners an onstage clip of the Revolution operating at peak inspiration only after he’d broken up that band. During the compilation set Crystal Ball, the conclusion of a searing live take on “The Ride” is rudely cut off by the forgettable dance number "Get Loose."
These perversions are not unwitting. Prince knew admirers bootlegged his shows. Message boards on his various online “music clubs” were often clogged with requests for official live discs. In 2002, before his Musicology comeback, he gave these hardcore fans what they wanted, at long last. Sort of. One Nite Alone…Live! was a box set that chronicled the tour in support of Prince’s similarly titled piano-and-vocals CD. But these setlists also explored another recent Prince recording, *The Rainbow Children—*a concept album that heralded his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Given the outlier that Children was in his catalog, a follow-up live release that repeated the same sermons over its first two discs was met with some frustration. Still, most detractors couldn’t ignore the third CD, which presented a rush of screaming blues licks, rowdy funk-ensemble workouts, and sultry soul, all captured during “aftershow” parties from this same tour.
Years later, Prince carved out this third disc as a standalone title for sale on one of his websites. Similarly, it is now available for streaming and purchase on Tidal, along with the majority of the NPG Records catalog. There’s much to savor from that oft-overlooked wilderness period, but the urgent showmanship of One Nite Alone… The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over! makes it a highlight in Prince’s discography and a gratifying, much-needed connection with his ability to take it to the stage.
While avoiding his biggest hits, this nearly hour-long ride finds Prince engaging with key selections from his repertoire. The opening song, “Joy in Repetition,” dates from sessions that produced Sign ‘O’ the Times, and was later included in the scattershot soundtrack to Prince’s box-office bomb Graffiti Bridge. Here, Prince airs it out for over ten minutes, recasting it as both a band-introduction tool and a showcase for his electric guitar showboating.
Subtle revision of the song’s lyrics is as close as he comes to any lecturing on Aftershow. Prince ad libs a brief bit about his new aversion to “four-letter words,” though the singer’s come-hither delivery ensures that the change does no harm to the song’s slinky vibe. Gradually, his command of the blues emerges as the focal point of the performance. The unhurried stretches of soloing carry a different air than other Prince guitar clinics—such as his famed feature during a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison. He obsesses over individual passages with a spiritual ferocity that can stand with late-period Coltrane. It’s indulgent, excessive, and brilliant.
Then George Clinton joins the band, and the intergenerational lineup of funk visionaries gels just like you’d hope. In the early going of “We Do This,” the track has a loose-booty feel that provides ideal support for Clinton’s scat-rap. And while Prince starts out by shooting rhythm guitar darts into the pocket, the jam climaxes when Clinton’s raspiest vocalizations spur some joyous, arcing lead lines from the bandleader. This song is the most compelling meeting between the two artists yet to see the light of day.
The guest-vocalist portion of the show concludes with Musiq’s appearance during a brief medley that mixes his own tune “Just Friends (Sunny)” with Sly Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay.” After the different extremes advanced by the opening two songs, this selection introduces the more relaxed aesthetic that Prince could use to make these late-night encounters with a global icon feel like casual parties.
Since these recordings date from Prince’s peak period of overt jazz exploration, his backing band is skilled in the art of reinterpretation. The rhythm section of drummer John Blackwell and bassist Rhonda Smith helps transform deep cuts like the instrumental “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton” into something less nervy than Prince fashioned by himself during sessions for The Black Album. On Aftershow, the mood is exultant and celebratory.
“I wanna sing, but it’s too funky,” the artist tells the crowd at one point. And then, after steering the band through a brisk “Alphabet Street,” he mostly dispenses with pop-song singing—all the better to work as a dance instructor for the rest of the album. During the infinity groove of “Peach (Xtended Jam),” Prince reminds concertgoers that this isn’t an arena rock show, but a club (“Ain’t nothing to look at; y’all just party where ya are.”) Then, at the turnaround, he unveils a new rhythm guitar progression: a line that begins with an aggressive stabbing figure, and then rolls on with delirious suavity. It’s a reminder of Prince’s guitar heroics outside the realm of the solo.
The way the whole set works brings to mind black scholar Albert Murray’s understanding of the “Saturday Night Function” during the period of early jazz, which the theorist contrasted with the role of the Sunday morning gospel service. In discussion with Wynton Marsalis, Murray described the Function as “a purification ritual where you get rid of the blues. And as soon as you get rid of the blues, it becomes a fertility ritual. . . . The union of lovers, which is the salvation of the species! . . . If it’s not sexy, forget it.” On his “One Nite Alone” tour, Prince reversed the chronology, putting the sermons during the main gig, and providing erotic release at the aftershow. Both halves of the experience should be fascinating for any fan of this elite composer and performer. But if you’re downhearted by his absence, it may be that you'll want to turn to the blues-chasing set first. Unlike the nudist dip in Lake Minnetonka prescribed to Apollonia during Purple Rain, the purification ritual on offer here is no joke. | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | NPG | September 1, 2016 | 8.6 | 3768f823-2a7b-43ce-8d75-332fa16250b3 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
On its second post-comeback album, the Scottish duo turns its narrative attention to human behavior in the digital age, to incisive and occasionally nihilistic ends. | On its second post-comeback album, the Scottish duo turns its narrative attention to human behavior in the digital age, to incisive and occasionally nihilistic ends. | Arab Strap: I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arab-strap-im-totally-fine-with-it-dont-give-a-fuck-anymore/ | I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 | While Arab Strap always seemed out of step with overground indie-rock trends during their Y2k-era initial run, the Scottish duo’s second act couldn’t have been more perfectly timed—and not just because the current UK indie landscape is over-populated with melody-averse monologists sharing vivid slice-of-life vignettes with a painterly touch. Their first album in 16 years, As Days Get Dark, arrived in early 2021 in the thick of the pandemic, and its thematic concerns—from social media addiction to the porn habits that fill the void in sexless relationships—perfectly aligned with a moment when much of our communication became mediated through screens, and the chasm between virtual connectivity and IRL isolation was widening at a perilous pace. For a hyper-analytical songwriter like Aidan Moffat, all the subsequent cultural turmoil that COVID helped spawn is the gift that keeps on giving.
In a pre-smartphone era, Moffat and partner Malcolm Middleton were the novelistic narrators of twentysomething Scottish life and all the awkward conversations that transpire after the pubs clear out for the night. Now, with their second post-comeback effort, I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍, they stand among indie rock’s most astute observers of human behavior in the digital age. Listening to these songs still feels like you’re eavesdropping on Moffat’s intimate exchanges and innermost thoughts, but now, more than ever, his narratives are firmly plugged into our unsettled collective consciousness. Moffat probably could have written the lyrics to “Sociometer Blues” back in 1998, as a window into a disintegrating dysfunctional relationship: “You take all my time, you take all my strength, you steal my love, you are the worst friend I ever had.” But the sense of exasperation and desperation is amplified upon realizing the song’s object of desire is his mobile device.
Critiquing technology’s dissociative effects is hardly the hottest take, and this isn’t even the only new indie-rock album on the subject to come out this week. But where so much of the discussion around being Extremely Online usually centers on mental health—the way the internet feeds on both ego and insecurity, and how its endless flow of information atomizes attention spans into milliseconds—I’m totally fine with it’s imposing opener, “Allatonceness,” catalogs its corrosive effects in corporeal terms. The song begins with the sound of an old-school modem making a dial-up connection—a cheeky callback from a band that was born at the dawn of the home-internet era, but also an instant-villain origin story of how we got to our current hellscape overpopulated by sedentary keyboard warriors with “atrophied legs.” The song’s queasy, quicksand-thick bass groove further reinforces the symbiotic relationship between habitual computer usage and physical stagnation.
As “Allatonceness” makes clear, Moffat is having a field day digging into the darkest crevices of online culture, and that devious enthusiasm likewise rubs off on the duo’s musical choices. Arab Strap may never fully shake their sad-bastard reputation, but I’m totally fine with it features some of their punchiest productions to date, expanding the cheeky “disco Spiderland” template of its predecessor into more forceful displays of rhythm and discord. Where they once wrote songs about dancing and getting fucked up, “Bliss” actually sounds like a peak-hour electro club thumper, while “Strawberry Moon” suggests the Fall making ‘80s breakdance jams. And “Turn Off the Light” could be the closest this group has gotten to crafting a festival-sized power ballad—though in typically perverse Arab Strap fashion, the song’s seemingly uplifting sentiments (“You came/And showed me the answers”) actually detail one impressionable man’s descent into conspiracy-theory lunacy.
As much as I’m totally fine with it delights in targeting the trolls who make the internet so inhospitable, the album extends the same grace and understanding to its shitposting subjects as you would to any person beset by a self-destructive addiction beyond their control. The sympathetic first-person perspective of “Turn Off the Light” seems to suggest that the roiling cesspool of disinformation can pull in anyone feeling lost and alone. And while it’s easy enough to condemn the deleterious psychological effects of smartphone dependency, for some of Moffat’s characters, it’s the only thing keeping them sane in a cruel world. With its deceptive ’80s soft-rock sparkle, “You’re Not There” tricks you into thinking Moffat is singing a wistful breakup ballad about an ex-lover who’s no longer returning his messages, until you realize the woman he’s pining for is actually dead, and that texting her is the only way he can fill the void in his heart and home. And as “Safe & Well” suggests, the only thing more frightening than getting sucked into the self-promotional hamster wheel of social media is what happens when you live anonymously: Over a mournful folk arrangement, Moffat recounts the based-on-a-true-story tale of a woman who died in her flat near the beginning of the pandemic, and wasn’t discovered for another two years. In Moffat’s account, no horrifying detail is spared—maggots and all.
On I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍, Arab Strap come to terms with the many ways in which the pandemic fundamentally altered the human experience, by turning hostile discourse, endless scrolling, FOMO panic, and polarizing politics into our default mode, while dampening the desire to seek out real-world experience even as the world returns to a state of business as usual. “Sun is shining, I don’t care,” Moffat admits on “Summer Season,” as he opts to drink alone in his flat, reply to his messages, and make noncommittal plans for in-person meet-ups that will probably never happen. It’s the moment where the nihilistic title sentiment of I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 is felt most acutely, revealing a truth that few would be willing to admit: The only thing more painful than living through lockdown is missing it. | 2024-05-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rock Action | May 14, 2024 | 7.8 | 3769d981-0338-45b7-bcde-f8bcfff0b2a9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Like citymates Girls, this group of San Fran all-stars matches wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings. | Like citymates Girls, this group of San Fran all-stars matches wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings. | Sonny and the Sunsets: Tomorrow Is Alright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14069-tomorrow-is-alright/ | Tomorrow Is Alright | You've got your throwback acts-- content to fix a backwards gaze, work on their period-appropriate outfits, and match new words to old riffs-- and then there's San Francisco's Sonny & the Sunsets. They cull their sound from time-honored sources on their debut, Tomorrow is Alright, yet they're a wonderful anomaly-- never feeling tied to any particular era, overly beholden to their source material, or like they chose reverence for lack of better ideas. You can throw out influences all day-- Everly Brothers, glammy garage, doo-wop-- but you'll never quite cover it, and this slipperiness is key to their success. Tomorrow Is Alright matches 10 of Sonny Smith's wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings, never feeling dutifully retro but rather, like their tough-to-pin-down citymates Girls, intangibly classic.
Smith's been kicking around San Francisco for a minute now as both a playwrite and songsmith. The former's written all over Tomorrow's best tunes, which paint slightly askew, slyly funny portraits of wayward spacemen and the women who enslave them, randy youngsters, and Mary Kay test subjects. Throughout the record, Smith himself seems to be playing this unflappable bemused observer character. Smith's bent sense of humor and his sweet, scraggly pipes further sets them apart from their obvious sonic forebears. In no particular hurry to get to his point, Smith comes off as a likeable dude, and that easy charm helps put even the more directly descended songs over. No matter how you dressed these tunes up, they'd still feel cool, confident, and at times, wickedly funny.
The Sunsets, featuring members of Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, and Citay, plus Sub Pop's Kelley Stoltz largely stay in the background, providing sparse but carefully considered instrumentation. Citay's Tahlia Harbour is the lone exception, although even she's used sparingly; her deadpan counterpoints to Sonny's stoney spaceman in "Planet of Women" or rationale-spouting youngster in "Lovin' on an Older Gal" are impeccably timed, a fitting gee-whiz to Sonny's endless aw-shucks. The production's crisp and roomy, allowing each word to linger, each note its own space.
Tomorrow Is Alright feels like the work of a songwriter comfortable with himself and his limitations. Smith doesn't have a knockout voice; he's a natural, unflashy guitarist; and his lyrics skew conversational rather than confessional. Rather than outpacing himself with wild ambitions, Tomorrow Is Alright picks a lane and sticks with it, yet it feels far less reductive than most retro rock due to his easy charm. The couple-three tunes towards the back of Tomorrow that lean just a tad more heavily on older tropes don't leave quite the same mark as the very distinctive early highlights "Planet" or "Too Young to Burn" or "Death Cream", but even those throw an earworm or sweet harmony your way. So many bands put in a lot of work trying to make themselves sound older than their years; with their quiet confidence and no shortage of killer material, the Sunsets make it seem almost too easy. | 2010-03-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-03-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Soft Abuse | March 30, 2010 | 8 | 376b97b3-f405-4152-9e03-08459c0a6f9f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Wolf Alice proudly carry the banner for Britrock on their second album, a holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life. | Wolf Alice proudly carry the banner for Britrock on their second album, a holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life. | Wolf Alice: Visions of a Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolf-alice-visions-of-a-life/ | Visions of a Life | By the time Wolf Alice released their debut album in 2015, the burden on Brit-rock to define epochs had all but disappeared. Even among the genre’s loyalists, whose last project had been the disastrous Viva Brother, little appetite remained for a generational voice to swoop in and erect totems to their pined-for monoculture. With revolutionary pressures lifted, the gates (and charts) opened for Wolf Alice, a more benevolent and satisfying breed. Their debut My Love Is Cool descended from the Britpop-Libertines-Arctic Monkeys lineage, but it was introspective and, in its most unorthodox moments, spiritually involving. Accusations of a ’90s throwback weren’t unfounded. But rather than a straight lift, the north London group ransacked the era’s spirit—brattiness juxtaposed against morbid obsessions—while musically patching together grunge lassitude, shoegaze magnitude, and rock’n’roll attitude.
The similarly sprawling follow-up, Visions of a Life, is not full of aesthetic surprises, either. It subscribes to a necessary conception of rock as the holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life. It’s populated by dreamers and deceivers, dimwitted bullshitters and their fed-up friends. It’s an album about anxiety and freefall, and about death, both of one’s own hypothetical death and the literal death of others.
Frontwoman Ellie Rowsell’s mortal preoccupations are, for the most part, more melancholic than haunting. Wolf Alice sound best when anchored in shoegaze, the kind that suggests human forms dissolving into celestial matter. Recorded in L.A. with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen—whose work on Paramore’s After Laughter and M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming looms large—Visions of a Life is an expansive trip. Devoutly 4/4 and unsyncopated, it nonetheless carves out raucous passages in which to burst open. The brilliant “Planet Hunter” drifts in reverie before whirling into conflict. “St. Purple and Green” revitalizes their trademark grunge-folk hybrid, its mantra-like “one step after the other” climax evoking an ascent to the astral plane. And the title track, an epic three-parter, swirls up an abyss-gazing thrash before closing the album, naturally, on a mournful utterance of the word “dead.”
After My Love Is Cool, Wolf Alice starred in On the Road, Michael Winterbottom’s pseudo-documentary about a rock band—Wolf Alice—whose dull tour routine backdrops a fictional romance. “Suddenly I’m acting as myself, which makes you feel very self-conscious,” Rowsell has said of the experience. Her lyrics suggest the feeling isn’t entirely unfamiliar: Visions of a Life laments the characters we play in life and the psychic toll, particularly on women, of keeping up appearances. “Yuk Foo” petulantly skewers a mystery antagonist, affording him no personality, only a barrage of expletives: “I want to fuck all of the people I meet,” Rowsell spits. “’Cause you bore me/You bore me to death.”
While her writing subsists on observation, Rowsell’s scenes are less interesting than the inscapes bubbling underneath. Now 25, she is a fairly young songwriter, but not quite as young as her characters, who do not always know how to handle themselves. To occupy their thoughts, she slips into her speaking voice, whispers wordy internal monologues, over-divulging, withdrawing into generalities, plunging back into the messy entanglements of it all. On downtempo synthpop anthem “Don’t Delete the Kisses,” she both mocks and romanticizes young-adult drift. “I’m like a teenage girl,” she sing-speaks as the protagonist. “I might as well write all over my notebook that you ‘rock my world.’” It seems a strange thing, grasping to qualify the shallow feelings of a character you created, whose thoughts it is your responsibility to populate. But clichéd romance, the song argues, is tedious and shallow only until it comes for you. Then, it’s electrifyingly real.
Cliché is powerful when it identifies the profundity in common feelings, and it’s a particularly effective tool in loud, cathartic rock music. When we are young and precarious, to shut the door on sentimentality just means locking it in our bedrooms, where it’s liable to grow tentacles and start strangling people. You can feel it in “Formidable Cool,” a teen fable whose hapless lead is caught lusting after an unrepentant playboy. (When we’re introduced, he has his “hand in somebody’s knickers” at the social club.) In describing his allure, Rowsell sneaks in a caution against the perils of rock orthodoxy. “Believe in the chorus,” she teases, “Believe in love.” Taking her word, the protagonist bundles into a hasty sexual encounter with him, and is humiliated; Rowsell, an unsympathetic narrator, mercilessly taunts her for her naivety: “If you knew it was all an act/Then what are you crying for?” The moral is: watch who you mythologize. Being Brit-rock’s most tolerable flag-bearer in years, Wolf Alice are uniquely qualified to dispense it. | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | October 2, 2017 | 7 | 376f031e-b675-4d0c-9516-749a8b8cd806 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
Poliça's United Crushers is a political record, but it's too exhausted to work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out. | Poliça's United Crushers is a political record, but it's too exhausted to work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out. | Poliça: United Crushers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21526-united-crushers/ | United Crushers | "Summer Please," the lead track of Poliça's third album,cuts to the core of the national mood with its first few lines: "It's all shit, it's all shit, it's all shit." It doesn't take a huge amount of observation or wokeness to notice: we're barely eight years off from the US's worst economy and most despairing polls in decades, and the news cycle cuts atrocity with farce hourly. We meme that we're in a cyberpunk dystopia but are actually in the more banal sort, one less suited to blockbusters than slow declines. And winter – though increasingly less wintry – doesn't help, casting everything in a haze of seasonal affective despair.
Though hard to quantify, this national mood – despite perennial handwringing about the supposed lack of protest music – tends to seep into art, and it's natural that artists might feel compelled to address broader themes such as, to quote Poliça, "social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, the rapidly increasing urban decline in gentrification." Where the Minneapolis group's Give Up the Ghost and Shulamith were intensely personal – claustrophobic in the good way, the way that exposes every crevice of someone's innermost thoughts – United Crushers is equally political, but too exhausted to exactly work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out. "Summer Please," a tumbleweed lilt drowned out by pitch-shifted glumness, forecasts the album's mood: immersed, psyche-first, in the crushing malaise of winter in a sick world.
What's curious is that this mostly isn't reflected in the music. Though not exactly a departure from Poliça's sound, United Crushers' arrangements are cleaner, far less dense, and often poppier. The Reznor-like "Top Coat," built atop a massive, cyanide-soaked synth riff, is the successor to "Very Cruel" and "Violent Games," but it is also the outlier. "Lime Habit" almost sparkles, as if spritzed by the titular fruit. "Someway," with its brass stabs, comes off as an alternate-universe pop tune, and "Baby Sucks" alternate-universe disco. "Lose You," though despondent in the lyric, is positively cheery. It takes a close read of the lyrics – and a read, because Leanagh's vocals remain characteristically processed and diffuse – to grasp most of the protest themes, but the lyrics are largely oblique.
While this works for tracks like "Melting Block," a slice of decaying suburban life, things like police brutality are perhaps not topics to be oblique about at this particular moment in time. The most outright political track, "Wedding," is overt and at times searing ("all the cops want in… saying hands up, the bullets in"), yet the otherwise-roundabout lyric and flat affect of its instrumentation leaves the track feeling curiously diffident, even indifferent, which was surely not the intended.
United Crushers is far more successful when it continues to explore Poliça's foremost topic: human connection and the tolls it takes on a person. "Lately," unlike much of the album, is a perfect synthesis of music and message: a love song by someone suspicious of love, with a synth lead that continually skews and hesitates. "Kind" doesn't portray a relationship breaking so much as slowly atrophying, and the track sounds well into doing the same. United Crushers' other preoccupation, and its most haunting, is the alienation of the music industry, how it turns people into quasi-public figures then leaves them to fate. "I saw this record as my last chance," Leanagh told DIY Magazine, and the subtext is most palpable on "Baby Sucks ("giving you less with each note") and "Fish," the simplest track yet by far the most haunting. Over a "Teardrop" percussion riff and hi-hat twitch, Leanagh delivers an eleventh-hour ballad to a distant, unreachable audience "You see me on the stage and you think I'm strong… you hold it over my head and you watch me fall." It's among the loneliest pieces of music Poliça's ever recorded, and it's too good to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Poliça is a group with too much collected talent for that; as in life these days, one only waits and hopes the clouds will clear. | 2016-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | March 8, 2016 | 6.6 | 3772b2d1-4629-43a9-ae83-94873b64b32f | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Dark Matter is Randy Newman’s first album of new songs in nine years and his smart mix of cynicism and sentiment is fully intact. | Dark Matter is Randy Newman’s first album of new songs in nine years and his smart mix of cynicism and sentiment is fully intact. | Randy Newman: Dark Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/randy-newman-dark-matter/ | Dark Matter | I can think of no songwriter as fruitfully unhappy as Randy Newman. Not angsty—there are angstier—and not depressed in the poetic, European sense, but unhappy: that cow-eyed state in which the good stuff doesn’t feel that good and the bad stuff you just learn to laugh at. For 50 years he has delivered us obliquely sentimental, trend-free music about racists, losers, lovelorn deadbeats (“Marie”) and children who tell their parents to come visit anytime—but do call first (“So Long Dad”). His jingoists dream of liberation through atomic war (“Political Science”) and his wife-beaters complain of having to sit down when they pee (“Shame”). His is a world in which it sucks to be at the bottom and sucks to be at the top but at least the people at the top are rich (“The World Isn’t Fair”). Did I mention most of these songs feature an orchestra? Randy Newman can get an orchestra to pull tears from you like a pickpocket. His sleight-of-hand is to bring out a monster and make you see the human underneath. He makes the better part of his living writing music for Pixar movies, and has been awarded several Grammys for the work.
Newman’s new album is called Dark Matter, a phrase intended both in the scientific sense and the figurative one—“it’s a dark matter.” He has lost little of his bite and none of his humor. Comfortably into his 70s, with what many would call a very successful career behind him and still time ahead, he seems less interested in polemics than before, less interested in leveraging sentiment with disgust, giving over—ever so slightly—to a softer intention.
Take “On the Beach,” a breezy piece of café jazz about a guy named Willie who just…never left the beach. Willie isn’t out to screw anyone and yet—like all Newman’s American losers—he will invariably screw himself. Decades on, he’s still talking about the advent of the Hobie Cat the way some boomers talk about the Beatles—harmless, lost, reconciled to a past that isn’t coming back to pick him up anytime soon. Elsewhere, set to a piece of high-striding brass-band music, “Sonny Boy” tells the true story of Sonny Boy Williamson, a blues singer who travels north only to find another blues singer making a living under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. Sonny Boy II ended up touring Europe and became royalty for white blues-rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Animals. Sonny Boy I was stabbed in the head with an icepick during a robbery in Chicago; his last words were reportedly “lord have mercy.” In Newman’s version, the lord does in fact have mercy, and Williamson becomes the first and ever blues singer to enter heaven, a mixed blessing that makes him feel lucky, lonely, and lame all at the same time.
Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth. Another song, “Brothers,” uses an imagined conversation between a worried John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert about the Bay of Pigs invasion as a pretext for John confessing his love for the music of Cuban singer Celia Cruz. Newman, whose songs have been successfully covered by walking moose knuckles like Tom Jones and Joe Cocker, continues to sing like a great writer. Does it even need to be said that the people who love him really love him and the people who don’t just think he’s weird?
The centerpiece of the album is its opener, “The Great Debate.” An eight-minute piece of musical theater pitting ambassadors of science against those of religion, the song will at the very least serve as a stress test for anyone uncertain of whether or not they want to listen to a whole album by Randy Newman. As a sucker for irony, I admit I sometimes take too much pleasure in the simple contrast of Newman’s sweet, old-timey sound with the flat-footed cruelty of some of his lyrics. “The Great Debate” is, on that count, one of his most evolved musical jokes, one in which heathens—like Newman himself, who gets called out by name—are won over not by the wild, tambourine-beating sounds of a Pentecostal choir but the smooth, half-secularized thrust of soul. No longer the explicit, “I’ll take Jesus every time, yes I will,” the message becomes “Someone is watchin’ me”—God as a metaphor for reassurance, companionship, the friend who walks with you even when you walk alone. An atheist, history buff and avowed leftist, Newman is, as I take it, nodding to what he considers the universe’s true high power: music. Of course the church started to sing.
Newman has often joked that he would’ve been more successful if he stuck to love songs. Probably true. Personally I can’t begrudge people their escape—the world is a terrible place. But then he writes something like “Wandering Boy.” Tough, tender, mysterious and sad, the song narrates a simple neighborhood party—the kind Newman, who has spent most of his life in the same area of Los Angeles, has been going to since he was a child, through adolescence, multiple marriages and children, the kind that innocently and without fanfare becomes a fulcrum for the vicissitudes of life.
The scene is this: A father stands to thank everyone for coming, but strays quickly from his script into the memory of a son. “The Little Caboose, we called him, the light of her life. And that’s who I’m waiting for.” It’s not his only child—he mentions four others—but one is enough to lose. Death? No, he didn’t die. He’s still kicking around somewhere, maybe close, maybe far. Everyone at the party knows who the father is talking about—they remember him at five, standing on the diving board—but has been too polite, too ashamed to ask.
Newman based the song in part on the memory of a neighborhood boy his daughter swore would be president one day. He ended up lost, addicted to heroin. Discussing the song with Pitchfork, he said, “There’s no net in this country. In Sweden, you can’t get down there to the gutter. But you can here. So I tried to imagine what it would be like if one of those homeless guys that I see on the street a little ways away from here were one of my sons.”
Newman has often put himself in these situations, the voice for characters nobody should have to listen to, curator of moments nobody wants to name. It is a painful, interesting way to be. And if it isn’t love, then what does one call that feeling, and is there any more worth writing about. | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | August 7, 2017 | 8 | 3773e411-b780-41a8-82e4-2e6b82ecf7eb | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Latest from the electronic producer refines the sounds of his previous records, creating what is, paradoxically, Hecker's most dramatic and most oceanic album. | Latest from the electronic producer refines the sounds of his previous records, creating what is, paradoxically, Hecker's most dramatic and most oceanic album. | Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9497-harmony-in-ultraviolet/ | Harmony in Ultraviolet | Tim Hecker's fourth full-length under his own name isn't so much a new direction as a refinement. The differences between 2002's Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again, 2003's Radio Amor, and 2004's Mirages are apparent but incremental. On each of these records, Hecker plays with pink-into-white noise, tinkling synths that float between the speakers, the occasional over-the-airwaves voice, and knotty samples of guitar with the Earth-drone pedal pushed to the jet-black metal.
But while Hecker continues to revisit some of the same sonic elements, he also seems to be listening closely to what works and playing with structure. So his latest record, Harmony in Ultraviolet, has none of the docile synth instrumentals he borrowed from Brian Eno on his debut, nor the ultimately distracting disembodied radio chatter from the follow-up. Rather, he's taken what's left and focused, zoomed in, amplified, and stretched.
Harmony is, paradoxically, Hecker's most dramatic and most oceanic record. The former implies twists, arc, and carefully planned change intended to evoke specific effects; the latter suggests stasis, immersion, and a state of dreamy contemplation. Harmony manages to be both these things by surprising as it mesmerizes, with Hecker reigning in or tempering any jarring effects just enough to keep the self-obliterating sense of endless drone intact. One key is that the tension never really dissipates, varying only in degree and quality. The opening "Rainbow Blood" sets the scene with a screeching and trebly drone, like an orchestra tuning up in the darkened theater where Rebecca del Rio performed in Mulholland Drive, and for the next 48 minutes, Harmony keeps the pulse elevated.
Tuneful passages like the Tangerine Dream sonata "Chimeras" leading into the Windy & Carl-like blissout of "Dungeoneering" have a relatively lulling effect, but the mood remains dark and uneasy. The four-part "Harmony in Blue" at the album's center, which starts nice and warm, is like a gradually descending slope into a coal black pit. The first section begins with gently modulating drones and only a bare minimum of glitchy accents; the second is dubby and aquatic, with upper harmonics lopped off; the third is a slightly lighter and wispier; and the fourth gathers an increasingly thick blanket of distortion around chilly, held tones.
By the time the suite has finished, the record is zipping along on a tightly ratcheted wire, which leads to the heightened drama of the final act. When the floor gives way following "Harmony in Blue IV", during the explosive "Radio Spiricon", it can seem nearly breathtaking, especially at higher volumes. Hecker's synths here are massive, sounding like something huge that's been torn in half with great force, exposing a bouquet of prickly and splayed binding material. We're suddenly seeing the guts of the thing, the album turned inside out. That the following "Whitecaps of White Noise" gets even crazier with its surges of distortion but then bleeds into a funeral organ drone only adds to the emotional punch. This closing 22-minute suite is some of the finest abstract electronic music of the laptop era.
What Hecker delivers when he's at his loudest and most noise-drunk is the thing that will always bring to mind My Bloody Valentine: a sense of submitting to oblivion. The violence inside tracks like "Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight" and the rougher bits in the "Whitecaps" section is oddly comforting, like it shows a way to tune into and accept the destructive chaos of nature. That this racket which Hecker specializes in-- top-heavy with prickly static, a dark undercurrent of synths providing a wobbly foundation beneath-- can engender such a pleasant sense of surrender is the key to his appeal. Harmony in Ultraviolet is sensual body music of a very particular kind, and it's the sort of record that asks a lot. But if you trust it and go along, it knows exactly where to lay its hands. | 2006-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | October 16, 2006 | 8.7 | 377d4baa-857b-4884-9cb4-b6c9f352ee16 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a ... | It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a ... | Beck: Sea Change | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/617-sea-change/ | Sea Change | It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a new song every day on a beat-up four-track; absorbing Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and old school hip-hop with equal enthusiasm. The aptly titled "Loser", his biggest and most career-defining hit, was recorded in a friend's living room for kicks. His first live performances were on hijacked mics at other peoples' gigs: he'd just step up with a guitar or harmonica between acts and entertain while the often bemused next band set up their drums. On the homemade tapes and scrapped-together compilations that comprised his earliest recorded output, Beck cobbled together all of his influences-- noise, hardcore, country, rap, folk, grunge, R&B;, found sound and classic rock-- and melded it into his own junkyard punk.
Over subsequent releases Beck continued to refine the art of juxtaposing achingly poignant folk songs with lo-fi guitar freakouts, collages of dialogue and noise, and Radio Shack hip-hop. With Odelay he managed to pull all of these disparate elements together in an artful way, blending nimble dobro guitar figures, say, with sample-heavy backbeats, vocal samples, banjo, a loop of Van Morrison covering Bob Dylan-- bottles and cans, or just clap your hands. At live shows, or on Chris Douridas' morning program at KCRW, Beck would often play never-recorded songs he'd likely composed just a few days before playing them, exquisitely voiced and effortlessly brilliant.
What happened to that guy?
Mutations, the genteel quickie Beck recorded on the cheap in 1998, was largely a knee-jerk reaction to the daunting task of ever having to follow up Odelay at all. His label even reneged on a provision that allowed him to release records on independents, and it's little wonder: with Mutations, shit-hot producer Nigel Godrich had crafted a slick, almost clinically glossy record, with clean guitars that never buzzed or hit bum notes. And while "Cold Brains", "Nobody's Fault But My Own", and "Canceled Check" are great songs, lesser tracks like "Lazy Flies" and "We Live Again" were shamelessly gussied-up with tired space-rock bleeps and whooshes-- and I won't even get into the made-for-Starbucks faux-exotica of "Tropicalia". No offense to Pitchfork alum Neil Lieberman, who praised the album mellifluously, but in 2002 we're up to our asses in "futuristic roots albums". Let's call Mutations what it was: a soft-rock One Foot in the Grave made with Pro Tools and a heart of steel.
Perhaps it's telling that his seventh studio album is titled Sea Change-- for rather than the smooth, utterly inoffensive quirks of Mutations, Beck opts for abrupt changes in temperament and lush instrumentation. Recording again with Godrich and his regular band (Smokey Hormel, Roger Manning, Joey Waronker, and Justin Meldal-Johnsen) pounding out a track a day over an intense two-week period, Sea Change rightfully feels like a sequel to Mutations with no alarms and no surprises. In fact, opener, "The Golden Age", would feel right at home on Mutations itself, with its gentle mid-tempo strumming, lonesome wails of pedal steel and predictable space-rock flourishes.
A cloud of mind-numbing melancholy hangs over Sea Change, from the world-weary grandpa-Beck voice he employs on most of the tracks to its unfailingly morose lyrics. "These days I barely get by/ I don't even try," Beck sings in "The Golden Age", and that's just the tip of the jagged iceberg that looms ever larger in Sea Change's periscope. It's obvious just from perusing the song titles-- "Lonesome Tears," "End of the Day," "Already Dead," "Lost Cause"-- that the 2002 model Beck is one sad sack (and it's impossible not to armchair quarterback which of Beck's celebrity girlfriends inspired such gut-wrenching bile). But though the songs are jam-packed with typical Beck imagery (stray dogs, moonlight drives, diamonds as kaleidoscopes) there's very little here that measures up to the eloquence of "She is all, and everything else is small."
It's pretty obvious what Beck is shooting for with Sea Change: that timeless quality that his heroes Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake seemed to exude with every recording. But here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols. Too often Beck saddles these songs with half-baked cliches and easy rhymes: "sky" always rhymes with "die", "care" always rhymes with "there". He doesn't even sound like himself on many of Sea Change's more paint-by-numbers cuts. On "Guess I'm Doing Fine" Beck emotes in an unnatural croak that's likely the product of a digitally decelerated vocal track, but he mostly just sounds constipated. Likewise with the karaoke-honed Gordon Lightfoot impression Beck turns in on the hoary "End of the Day": "It's nothing that I haven't seen before/ But it still kills me like it did before."
Elsewhere, Beck mines Mutations' folky space-rock vibe with more artful and ear-pleasing results. The chiming guitars and groaning strings of "Lost Cause" creak and sway like the tired masts of a pirate ship; washes of backward sound snake through the melody like restless ghosts. "The Golden Age", with its chorus of tinkling glockenspiels and cavernous echo, is a pleasant diversion in the vein of Mutations' "Cold Brains." An unnecessary remake of 1994's "It's All In Your Mind" is tarted up with the omnipresent synth blips and drums, but some tastefully distant banjo licks and Suzie Katayama's swooning cello lend the song a resigned majesty the original certainly never portended.
But it's Sea Change's most daring tracks that are ultimately its most satisfying. Beck's father, David Campbell, contributes inventive string arrangements to three cuts: "Paper Tiger" is a low-key triumph, with a minimal bed of bass and drums punched up by sudden, deep string attacks-- Beck's "Glass Onion," if you will; the deliciously overwrought "Lonesome Tears" is an uncomfortably raw display of emotion, with an unpredictable melody and unbelievably tortured chorus ("How could this love, ever-turning/ Never turn its eye on me?" Beck questions as the song builds to a cathartic tsunami of violins and ear-splitting noise); the moody, cinematic "Round the Bend" cribs the cadence and nocturnal vibe of Nick Drake's "River Man", augmented by plucky upright bass and Beck's subdued, almost intentionally slurred vocal.
But Cap'n Beck saves his strangest songs for the second half of the album, with the enigmatic "Sunday Sun" bathing odd, disjointed lyrics ("Jealous minds walk in a line, and their faces jade the strain") in a Brian Wilson-inspired glow, with mixed but cosmetically acceptable results. The unsettling sea shanty "Little One" is a return to form, with a fetching minor-chord hook and creepy lyrics ("Cold bones tied together by black ropes we pulled from a swing") intoned in a convincing Kurt Cobain growl.
He knots it all together, sorta, with the anticlimactic closer "Side of the Road", which plods along awkwardly amid busy slide-guitar work and a rambling electric piano. It's a far cry from the back-porch perfection of "Ramshackle", but given what it reveals, it'll do. "Something better than this, someplace I'd like to go," sings Beck in a tremulous voice seemingly decades beyond his 32 years. "To let all I've learned tell me what I know/ About the kind of life I never thought I'd live."
On Sea Change, Beck sounds intentionally world-weary, but it's the songs themselves that sound labored. Is it no longer enough for Beck to write profound, genre-bending tunes that stand on their own? Does he really need the crutch of suffocating overproduction and bold strokes of orchestration to shock us into caring again? Two turntables and a microphone, man!
'Cause there was a time when Beck didn't need Nigel Godrich to space out his white-collar blues. A winter spent in Calvin Johnson's basement, an afternoon spent with a beatbox and a slide guitar in a friend's living room was all he needed to pluck otherworldly songs from the fertile Beckscape of desolated views, crazy towns, lost causes and stolen boats. Given how much soul-searching obviously went into this record, it's distressing how little soul the finished product actually has. If there's anything the self-absorbed murk of Sea Change illustrates with unmistakable clarity, it's that Beck has forgotten how to connect with his inner loser-- and it's nobody's fault but his own. | 2002-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC | September 22, 2002 | 6.9 | 37873684-4267-4af4-b4aa-c79c240dfff8 | Pitchfork | null |
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On his first solo acoustic outing in a decade, the former Harry Pussy member shifts from deconstructing the guitar to reassembling it according to his own idiosyncratic design. | On his first solo acoustic outing in a decade, the former Harry Pussy member shifts from deconstructing the guitar to reassembling it according to his own idiosyncratic design. | Bill Orcutt: Jump on It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-orcutt-jump-on-it/ | Bill Orcutt: Jump on It | Bill Orcutt is an unlikely elder statesman of traditional American guitar music. Though he looks the part, with his professorial eyeglasses and John Berryman beard, his confrontational work with ’90s noise rockers Harry Pussy offered little indication of where he’d eventually end up. Harry Pussy called it quits in 1997, and then, after more than a decade of silence, Orcutt returned in 2009 with a set of frenzied improvisations for his four-string acoustic Kay guitar, summoning Lightnin’ Hopkins and Lightning Bolt in equal measure. Since then, he has carved out a niche for himself with deconstructions of the Great American Songbook, solo electric compositions, and Reichian exercises in counterpoint. Like any American master, Orcutt is too eccentric and unpredictable for direct comparisons. His influences are clear—the dissonant improv of Derek Bailey, the athletic fingerpicking of John Fahey, the ethereal spaciness of Loren Connors—but these points of reference outline a completely new constellation.
Orcutt’s early solo records consisted of cubist blocks of sound cascading from his guitar with the speed of late-game Tetris bricks. When he went electric in the middle of the last decade, his notes instead drifted down like snowflakes (though he still occasionally kicked them up into flurries). Jump on It applies this later, more mannered approach to Orcutt’s first solo acoustic outing since 2013’s A History of Every One. Its mic placement gives the impression that the listener is uncomfortably close to Orcutt, ears hovering somewhere between the body of his guitar and the collar of his shirt. His breathing is frequently audible, as is the squeak of his chair. For a guitarist whose frantic outbursts of noise could keep audiences at a distance, these 10 tracks, running just half an hour, offer an intimate glimpse into the minutely considered songcraft hidden within the bang and clatter of his technique.
Jump on It’s beautifully crafted miniatures are often somber even as they shimmer and gleam with natural reverb. Some tracks, like early standouts “What Do You Do With Memory” and “The Ocean Will Find Its Shore,” delicately unfurl into long, flowering tendrils of fingerpicked melody. The album’s second half becomes more dense and winding with “New Germs,” which grows from a tentative beginning into a dizzying swirl of notes backed by soft moans. Orcutt’s penchant for repetition—a constant in his work from before his solo debut through to his most recent album—appears here as well. “In a Column of Air” ends with a tornado of cyclical figures, while the entirety of “Music That Fights Back” is built from variations on a short repeating phrase. If the compositional approaches are not new, the clarity and patience with which they are carried out certainly is. Orcutt spent years deconstructing the acoustic guitar only to carefully piece it back together according to his own idiosyncratic design.
Jump on It is the easiest introduction to Orcutt’s sizable discography. As Charalambides’ Tom Carter says in the album’s liner notes, these tracks express a “conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.” To longtime fans, that may suggest that the music has lost its edge, that it is less blazingly original than his early acoustic work. But careful listening reveals that the album’s welcoming facade is an invitation into a tantalizingly complex world, like a perfectly manicured hedge maze guiding you through concentric pathways. | 2023-04-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Palilalia | April 28, 2023 | 7.5 | 3795c923-14a3-4b4a-9ae0-50194013491d | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The Brooklyn rap group Flatbush Zombies deliver an off-kilter take on '90s touchstones like Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz with a touch of ODB. Their debut LP is a deep dive into psychotropia—the highs and lows—with paranoia and invincibility trading places with suicidal thoughts. | The Brooklyn rap group Flatbush Zombies deliver an off-kilter take on '90s touchstones like Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz with a touch of ODB. Their debut LP is a deep dive into psychotropia—the highs and lows—with paranoia and invincibility trading places with suicidal thoughts. | Flatbush Zombies: 3001: A Laced Odyssey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21549-3001-a-laced-odyssey/ | 3001: A Laced Odyssey | For those paying attention, 2012 represented a minor hip-hop renaissance in New York, with burgeoning rap acts blanketing all corners of the city. A$AP Rocky and his Mob had Harlem secured; French Montana turned the Bronx sound upside down. Action Bronson was out in Queens fighting Ghostface comparisons. And in Brooklyn, we had Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew and, of course, the Flatbush Zombies, invoking the sound of NY eras past.
While Joey and the Pro Era kids blend Golden Era vibes with mid-90s street rap like Boot Camp Clik and early Nas, The Zombies deliver a more off-kilter adaptation — think Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz with a touch of ODB. Defined on the 2012 debut mixtape D.R.U.G.S. and the following year's Better Off Dead, their sound was a combination of visionary and the grotesque, evidenced by the equal-parts dark and absurd video for the breakout track "Thug Waffle." However, by the time their 2014 collaboration Clockwork Indigo with fellow Brooklynites The Underachievers dropped, the Zombies had fallen into the periphery, just another talented rap act that couldn't get traction.
Now that their long-awaited debut album 3001: A Laced Odyssey has surfaced, the group—comprised of Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, and Erick "The Architect" Elliott—seek to hurdle the high wall facing rappers with skill but no significant retail milestones. Songs that have all of the basic food groups (bars, beats, hooks) always help, and perhaps that’s what Flatbush Zombies seem to be lacking the most on 3001. Their talent is obvious—Meechy Darko fills the role of the court jester; Zombie Juice has sharper wordplay, and Erick The Architect fills in for kick offs and clean ups when he’s not producing the hell out of the tracks. But the money-making hooks are missing in action, and so are surprises. This is a group that knows exactly who they are, almost to their own detriment.
Much of the project is a deep dive into psychotropia—the highs and lows—with paranoia and invincibility trading places with suicidal thoughts. The opener "The Odyssey," is an old-fashioned lyrical exercise over beautiful symphonic production that poses the question "Why I feel like the past is catching up to my ass?" The de-facto single "Bounce," has a fitting title with a beat to match, but still falls short of any real hook value. "Fly Away" is a nightmarish dreamscape about questioning life within the context of drugs and suicide, while "Ascension" oozes hypomania with a sort of hook that sounds like a Bonecrusher throwaway. Two tracks "Good Grief" and "New Phone, Who Dis?" pull from the A$AP playbook in their twistedly dismal reflections of fame, the former utilizing singer Diamante to rehash some throwback Aaliyah riffs.
But all of that is filler for a handful of cuts that are the real stars. "R.I.P. C.D." is a flawless tribute to days past, heavy on the ‘90s hip-hop influence and channeling Boot Camp Clik right down to the bassline. The chanting hook "RIP to the CD, can’t even play my hits" is a handy metaphor for how the Zombies see themselves in rap: outdated relics of a realer, prouder era. The closer "Your Favorite Rap Song" is another winner, where the Zombies strip away the bells and whistles of their aesthetic to straight pour out lyrics. "Pave the future for boosters, I'm contributing my two cents / So I'm a nuisance, producing, and I tighten the loop, like it's a noose-sance," spits Erick the Architect.
3001: A Laced Odyssey does an adequate job of reminding us all of Flatbush Zombies’ smart, sharp lyrics. What they lack in hit-single potential, they make up for in talent, but without a calling-card song it's hard to know what their next move is. Their weirdness is a massive selling point, though they’re almost burdened by their dedication to formal, old-school lyricism. It’s a unique quandary to have, begging the question of which asset to forego since right now they live in a rap half-life where they’re too good to be unknown but not distinctive enough to be famous. Now that the group has officially one album under their belt, they can move accordingly from here. But "where to?" is the real question. | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Glorious Dead | March 16, 2016 | 7.2 | 37990ecb-7867-48ac-aaa9-cd22d75daa7b | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
Taso’s new EP features collaborations with DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad, at times evoking the latter’s legendary album Double Cup. | Taso’s new EP features collaborations with DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad, at times evoking the latter’s legendary album Double Cup. | Taso: New Start | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22725-new-start/ | New Start | It is impossible to consider a given release by a footwork artist without confronting the long shadow cast by DJ Rashad’s catalog, particularly his magnum opus, Double Cup. The writing sessions for Double Cup started four years ago in San Francisco, after the producer Taso (Anastasios Ioannis Skalkos III) invited Rashad and DJ Spinn to the Bay Area. Taso appears four times on that album, and though it can be hard to discern an individual footwork producer’s idiosyncrasies, he leaves an indelible mark. He has a remarkable ability to smooth over the acidic edges that come with footwork’s inherent speed. This was especially true in the Double Cup’s introductory song “Feelin,” a revelatory musical moment that almost single handedly brought footwork to a larger audience. The three-man effort from Taso, Rashad, and Spinn was soulful and sensual, but also discombobulating in the way footwork often is. In other tracks like “Pass That Shit,” Taso helped break down the genre’s common barrier between dancefloor utility and home-listening. Overall, he was one of the architects of footwork mainstream jump, and he has returned with a solo effort, New Start, that extracts some of Double Cup’s best qualities.
New Start opens much like Double Cup, with a collaboration between Taso, Rashad, and Spinn. On the album’s first song, “New Start,” there’s an immediate sense of warm familiarity. When these three producers worked together, they generated a sound that is both pulsating and comforting; perfect for both club speakers and paltry headphone listening. There was a pleasurable universality and malleability to the music they made together. On “AM Track,” the second of the trio’s collaborations on the album, they perfect the formula for smooth and soulful footwork found on Double Cup.
Elsewhere, Taso works with other members of the Teklife crew, including DJ Earl, Gant-Man, Manny, and Taye. In all these collaborative works, he finds a way to locate and amplify the voice of another artist. For example, his track with Taye, “In the Green Room,” heightens Taye’s tendency towards a more hip-hop driven footwork by brightening it with elements of Miami bass. In “Da Capo Al Coda,” he is able to draw out the very best of Earl’s melancholic energy by slowing the beat way below 160 bpm, moving towards something closer to billowing ambient. Taso shows his individual voice just once on this album, in a track called “Murda Bass,” which surprisingly paints him a bit of a sentimentalist for vintage British dance music. He borrows freely from garage and UK bass, and it would be a stretch to call this track footwork. Here he showcases his versatility as a producer, able to accommodate and inhabit many styles at once.
Oddly, some of the very best tracks on this album are in their own way slightly retrograde and stuck. They copy and fine-tune the aesthetic of Double Cup, and do little to break the mold. If anything, some of the most forward-thinking footwork of the moment is being made outside of Teklife (take for example Foodman’s intense experimentation). Still, New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together. | 2017-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Teklife | January 6, 2017 | 8.1 | 379a5822-2c45-4b67-907e-adbe05c85817 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Michelle Zauner embraces the spotlight and goes for the brass ring on her third album, a stylish and eclectic record that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities. | Michelle Zauner embraces the spotlight and goes for the brass ring on her third album, a stylish and eclectic record that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities. | Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/japanese-breakfast-jubilee/ | Jubilee | This spring, somewhere between her memoir Crying in H Mart debuting at No. 2 on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list and her turn as a vampiric sugar baby to an ex-Soprano in a self-directed video, it officially became Jbrekkie Season. Michelle Zauner, the musician, author, director, and food enthusiast behind Japanese Breakfast, had seemingly planned it that way, holding her ambitious third record—and first in four years—until the pandemic eased. As she declared in press releases and interviews, Jubilee would be a celebration of joy after years of feeling defined by her writing about grief, following the loss of her mother to cancer in 2014.
This jubilee, like many others, comes with an air of regality: triumphant horns and swooping strings fill the music like a lush 2000s chamber pop record. But no album about joy would be complete without a few killer pop songs, from the sexy-in-slow-motion “Posing in Bondage” to “Be Sweet,” which is frankly begging for an ’80s montage scene to soundtrack. Some have positioned Taylor Swift’s folklore as the great nexus of pop music and indie culture, but an album like Jubilee is a more interesting example of pop’s fluidity: a true blue rock star tempered in the waters of shoegaze, Pacific Northwest rock, and twee, making music that naturally bridges the gap between dream pop and electropop. It’s an exuberant listen that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities, packed with Zauner’s sharp observations and frank desires.
You can feel that specific buzz in the opening track “Paprika,” which layers martial snares, bubbling orbs of synth, and horns that practically announce “I’m here!” The lyrics colorfully illustrate the blessing and the burden of getting to express yourself creatively for a living: “How’s it feel to be at the center of magic/To linger in tones and words?/I opened the floodgates and found no water, no current, no river, no rush.” But Zauner clearly had no trouble finding inspiration for the song itself, which comes to life with a playful sense of grandeur that’s hard not to get swept up in, waltzing yourself around the house, tingling with wonder. When she’s on, her energy is completely infectious, and the beginning of the album thrives on this current while accommodating numerous styles. Swooning small-town ode “Kokomo, IN” channels Belle and Sebastian at their most orchestral, “Slide Tackle” splits the difference between Arthur Russell’s lo-fi disco and Carly Rae Jepsen’s sax moments, and “Posing in Bondage,” with its striking vocal effects and flickering synths that bring to mind flashing tones, is like Zauner’s more guitar-driven take on Lorde’s Melodrama. They’re all quite different and yet feel perfectly at home next to one another on this mission to sustain bliss.
Happiness, unfortunately, needs to be tended to constantly. As much as Japanese Breakfast tries to throw her arms around joy, the back half of Jubilee can get pretty dark, whether it’s the more overtly fictional songs or Zauner crooning lines like, “Hell is finding someone to love and I can’t have you.” Furthering the Jbrekkie sci-fi tradition and exploring the dubious morality of the super-rich, “Savage Good Boy” is told from the perspective of a capitalist space colonizer seeking safety from the coming apocalypse (think Elon Musk but also a Daddy in bad jeans). “I want to make the money until there’s no more to be made/And we will be so wealthy I’m absolved from questioning,” she sings calmly, her words front and center. A driving guitar and piano track, it opens with the chirp of pitch-shifted harmonies and ends with a distorted guitar solo that’ll make your arm hairs stand at attention. In less than two and a half minutes, Zauner crafts this perfect snowglobe of a villain and his beloved floating away, left to wine and dine on freeze-dried food while convincing themselves that a future civilization depends on their sex life.
Michelle Zauner can write devastating prose that explores knotty subjects like loss and her Korean-American identity, as well as craft these elaborate, world-building videos. She navigates the musical hopscotch with ease on Jubilee, even helping to arrange the string and horn parts, but, occasionally, Zauner strains to reach the vocal heights needed to nail the glory notes. Rock stars who come out of punk traditions rarely have the same kind of range as pop singers, and when Zauner moves from breathy, pretty modes into a higher register or a place where soulfulness might enter the picture, her voice can sound a little thin against the glossier production.
The small flaws along the way fall by the wayside in pursuit of something greater. This is a record about happiness and wanting so badly to feel happy, two similar emotional states separated by a chasm. The slow words that fill up the first half of final song “Posing in Cars,” a slow ballad about loneliness and a love that grows deep within, are soon exploded by an epic rock coda in the style of the War on Drugs or mid-era Wilco. It’s challenging, a moonshot at an ecstatic catharsis, that nearly rises to the level of a show-stopping album closer, complete with Zauner shredding until the lights go out. Listeners love Japanese Breakfast because she gives you everything: a buffet of sub-genres, blunt confessions, larger concepts, and on-point orchestration, led by someone with undeniable charisma. Listening to Michelle Zauner go all in on Jubilee provides every bit of the joy she intended. | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | June 7, 2021 | 7.8 | 37a1da87-3750-44d6-b654-17fe815bfc00 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
On their first studio album in 24 years, the long-reunited Southern indie rockers make mighty, angry songs better suited for now than then. | On their first studio album in 24 years, the long-reunited Southern indie rockers make mighty, angry songs better suited for now than then. | Archers of Loaf: Reason in Decline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/archers-of-loaf-reason-in-decline/ | Reason in Decline | How should the coveted bands of indie rock best reunite? Play the hits and relearn some curios, like Pavement? Pick up where they left off and barrel ahead, like Dinosaur Jr. when they reconvened their classic trio and slashed back to basics? Or should they, like Dylan Carlson’s renovated Earth, acknowledge that both they and the times have changed, that past sounds no longer suit them even if the mood remains much the same? Another possibility: sort through the successes and strikes of their bygone days, choose what still feels right, and see if it makes sense now, scrapping anything that feels like a mere simulacrum of then. That is the smart choice that Archers of Loaf made for the mighty Reason in Decline, not only their first studio album in 24 years but also a compelling testament to the way the old you and the new you can make one helluva tandem.
In the ’90s, North Carolina’s Archers of Loaf were the quintessential Southern indie rock band: powerful to the point of seeming brutish, but with an understated streak of sophistication; unflinchingly honest and critical, but with a grace note of wit. Releasing four albums (and a full-length B-sides set) in only six years, they careened wildly among gnarled jangle pop, urgent noise-rock, and snappy hardcore like Hüsker Dü’s younger country cousins, sometimes trying out samplers or sequencers in the madcap way of their moment. The tunefully churlish baritone of Eric Bachmann—a towering, glowering singer mad at love, the music industry, the olds, and pretty much everything else—strung it together, his voice frayed like an old piece of rope forever ready to snap.
And then it did. Despite dalliances with the mainstream and Robert Christgau’s unequivocal endorsement (“other indie bands should just retire”), Archers couldn’t sustain their post-adolescent ire into the new millennium. They broke up right before it began, just as Bachmann softened his stentorian roar into a curious croon in the great chamber-folk act Crooked Fingers. The live Archers reunions began a little more than a decade later, but talk of something more always seemed like a non-starter. The angry young men were husbands, fathers, and even lawyers now, pals getting together to cosplay their past at the occasional festival without pretending they were really the same people. Whenever interviewers optimistically asked Bachmann about another Archers album, he demurred: Why pose about old problems with new songs?
Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse. Bachmann, now 52, funnels his vintage bile into new ducts here. “In the Surface Noise,” for instance, is a righteous elder’s anthem for the inspirational kids demanding systemic change. “Coming up from under/Myth, deception, subterfuge,” he barks, offering both a nod of approval and a wish that his own generation had gotten more things right. He turns backward and inward for “Mama Was a War Profiteer,” a beautiful tune where romantic sounds smartly cloak disdain for those apathetic souls who vacation their way through someone else’s injustice.
It’s not all disgust for Bachmann, who has often turned to sweetness on recent solo records. “Aimee” is a gentle hymn for a friend unsure of anything, while “The Moment You End” reckons with age and the crippling notion that our best times and selves are always in the rearview. Such solidarity is a welcome addition to the Archers’ emotional reach, epitomized by Reason in Decline’s opener and masterpiece, “Human.” Though the song is a chugging jeremiad against some bitter and cruel enemy, Bachmann pulls back in the chorus to recognize his—and your and our—own failures. “It’s hard to be human,” he sings over epiphanic guitars and stomps, a hard-won soulfulness to his tone. “Only death can set you free.”
Longtime fans may balk at how clean this record sounds, how guitars that once seemed to shed sparks as they ground against one another now lock into recognizable harmonies. But see how half of the band hangs back for the first two verses and chorus of “Human,” and the power that drummer Mark Price and bassist Matt Gentling deliver upon delayed arrival. Or spot the way that Eric Johnson’s sunny little riff in “Breaking Even” turns into a feint, catching on a note here and howling there, illustrating Bachmann’s lyrical cycle of hiccupping paranoia. The textural depth of “In the Surface Noise,” the tessellated stomp of “Misinformation Age,” the crisscrossing instrumental-and-vocal urgency of “Saturation and Light”: For act two, Archers of Loaf have simply found more finessed ways to be playful and pissed at once, their defining paradox forever. Where they used to sound like smart kids made wonderfully dumb with disappointment, here they sound like adults who’ve at last seen therapists and learned to channel their gripes.
It is fitting, funny, and maybe a tad sad that Archers’ triumphant return to record comes alongside another round of reunion-and-reissue coronations for Pavement, the cross-country counterparts to which they were exhaustingly compared in the ’90s. Their distinct approaches are telling. Where Pavement seem content to relive old glories every decade or so, Archers made a record that actually fits their setting in the present—mad dads and pals getting together to gripe, playing sharper than ever. Story checks: If Pavement were the wiseasses that lobbed witticisms from the wings of the party, Archers of Loaf were the Tar Heel blue-collar dudes who’d get loaded enough by night’s end to get in your face and tell you the truth. With a little more softness and a lot less concern for the scene than the world, that’s exactly what they do again—having finally reunited in their own defiant image—on Reason in Decline. | 2022-11-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | November 1, 2022 | 7.7 | 37a64604-28a5-483b-a0c7-a122cce9a913 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The band’s first new album in six years is a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures, an inventive backdrop for Isaac Brock’s familiar blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia. | The band’s first new album in six years is a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures, an inventive backdrop for Isaac Brock’s familiar blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia. | Modest Mouse: The Golden Casket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/modest-mouse-the-golden-casket/ | The Golden Casket | Time is now part of Modest Mouse’s process. During the band’s early peak, they raced out three monumental albums in five years—long, sprawling records, seemingly confined only by the capacity of a CD—along with troves of great EPs, rarities, and odds and ends. But after “Float On” elevated them to alternative rock’s A-list, the spigot slowed. It took the band eight years to complete 2015’s Strangers to Ourselves, and although Isaac Brock promised another album “as soon as legally possible,” it took them another six years to finish The Golden Casket.
Even more than Strangers to Ourselves, The Golden Casket never tries to pretend it was recorded in a single time or place—a band that once worked in frantic bursts of inspiration now prefers lengthy, unhurried tinkering. But unlike Strangers, which was the first Modest Mouse album without new things to say or new ways of saying them, Casket has some unique sounds to show for all its slow-cooked experimentation. It’s some of the band’s most luxuriously textured work, a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures. Early on, Brock pledged not to play any guitar on the record, and while he ended up playing some, the instrument’s frequent absence clears space that’s inventively filled by percussion and troves of obscure and vintage instruments.
The album credits meticulously catalog each musician’s contributions down to their finger snaps, because this is the kind of record that differentiates between the sounds of different fingers. On one song, band member Tom Peloso is credited with playing “Fun Machine, piano, mini Korg, and Crumar”; on another, Brock plays not only banjo and melodica but also vibraslap, spacephone, and “soft drink percussion” (it involves soda cans). Even if you can’t place the vibraslap, the textural specificity helps these studio concoctions conjure any number of settings real or imagined: an Archie McPhee warehouse, a 1980s FAO Schwarz, the dumpster behind the Price Is Right soundstage, Danny Elfman’s rec room.
As usual, Brock’s songs are a strange blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia. On the chipper side, there are a couple of easy-drinking radio singles, including the marimba- and drum machine-driven “The Sun Hasn’t Left.” “Lace Your Shoes,” an uncharacteristically earnest love letter to Brock’s children, is the most sentimental song he’s ever written. But he always sounds more believable on the gloomy stuff, and The Golden Casket gets dark. Between mostly tame swipes at selfies and online dating and pleas to put down the phone every now and then (“Just being here now is enough for me,” he repeats as a kind of transcendental mantra on “Wooden Soldiers”), he centers the album on the anti-tech manifesto “Transmitting Receiving,” the bleakest, most upsetting music he’s recorded since The Moon & Antarctica.
The song’s verses play out as long, spoken lists of devices and forces that may or may not be transmitting directly to our skulls (“Computers, clocks, drones, clones, trees and stalks/Moles and trolls, lights at four-way stops”). In interviews, Brock has self-effacingly called “Transmitting Receiving” the “tinfoil hat” section of the album, but he’s also insisted “it’s probably the most important shit that I’ve written about,” reiterating his belief in V2K, targeted individuals, and gang stalking—convictions often associated with mental illness. Like all songs that raise concerns about their creators’ well-being, it’s a difficult listen, but in a roundabout way, it bolsters The Golden Casket’s thesis. On an album about the dangers of the internet, Brock has platformed a lot of conspiracies he almost certainly picked up online.
What The Golden Casket is missing is the kind of contagious earworm that made Modest Mouse radio mainstays. There’s no “Float On” here. There’s not even a “Dashboard.” But the album rewards the time and patience it demands in a way the last couple haven’t. Even the songs that underwhelm at first—like the booming lead single “We Are Between,” the band at its most Coors-commercial pandering—have a way of opening up over repeated listens, revealing loose threads and teasing all the different ways they might have been knotted. Modest Mouse may never again bottle the explosive impulsivity of The Lonesome Crowded West, but they’re getting better at making their polished edges feel like a fair substitute for the old rough ones.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | June 26, 2021 | 7.3 | 37a77e8c-afcc-45ba-aff4-847f566cb42e | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Released on a label run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, this is the emocore pioneers' first new album in a decade and it catches the band fairly close to its late-period shine, though coupled with the wisdom (and differences) of age. | Released on a label run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, this is the emocore pioneers' first new album in a decade and it catches the band fairly close to its late-period shine, though coupled with the wisdom (and differences) of age. | Lifetime: Lifetime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9879-lifetime/ | Lifetime | In the early 1990s I interviewed L.A. pop-punks All in their van outside a club in Trenton. It was around the time "punk broke" (again), and they spoke in semi-veiled terms about bands like Green Day who'd been inspired by their past work with the Descendents and were now enjoying ill-bought commercial success. Bummer, but it seemed sadder that they cared.
Lifetime could definitely get pissy about the success of any number radio-ready emo acts. But 17 years after they formed, and a decade after their last album, they've joined forces with their mutant offspring and signed to Decaydance, a label run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz. As it goes, lots of their original fans will probably shout "sell out" over Maximum Rock'n'Roll and morning coffee, but the quartet's reunion and self-titled comeback escapes the creepy, pathetic feel of, say, Pixies or Dinosaur Jr. Instead, it feels graceful and intelligent, the natural outcome of latent interests rather than an attempt to cash in on nostalgia or compete with the kids.
But nostalgia's a major Lifetime component. In that way, a comeback's an intriguing idea; every Lifetime collection already comes wrapped in memories, ably enunciated by Ari Katz in his addictive, fractured vocals. His words gather the force of things past, conjuring the bygone experiences we still wistfully replay in our minds: The lines beside that girl's eyes when she smiled, or that New Brunswick basement show when she first sat next to you and you each mocked yet another group of Samiam knockoffs. Katz wears his heart on his sleeve, but also the heart of his scene and community.
It doesn't matter that Katz is now married and has a kid. Like the best punk writers weaned on Cometbus, he finds duct-taped Jawbreaker-style poetry in everyday events, evoking youth and youth culture in transcendent ways. It's something for which the Hold Steady's Craig Finn has recently become very famous. He and Katz are after some of the same things, but Finn needs more sentences to pull it off. In fact, Katz's economy is amazing, how he paints a room an all its inhabitants with two strokes. Earning emo stripes, his underground storytelling is also more emotionally tinged (you can picture him in those places, ecstatic and amped).
Katz's writing fits perfectly with his bandmates' playing: Lifetime usually eschewed excess, and as with past efforts, the songs here still end before you expect them to: 11 anthems in under 25 minutes. It's less fragmentary and poppier than 1995's Hello Bastards, but more tightly arcing and less radio-friendly than Jersey's Best Dancers (the recording itself is super compressed, lending the album the feel of a single blast). Lyrically, Katz refuses to let things go; sonically, whenever there's 40 or so seconds remaining in a track, the band pulls out the catchiest stops, launching into a few of their best hooks ever. Goodbyes are redolent flight patterns.
After three dozen listens, there are still no duds. The first few tracks, though, are certainly trying hard to dig their talons into the listener. Packed with bouncy shifts, the opener "Northbound Breakdown" could be a continuation of "Turnpike Gates" from Jersey's Best Dancers, but is also redolent of the premature escape and return of Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King": "I hope you're in your car right now/ Turning this shit up so loud/ I hope you're in the mood to turn it to my favorite station." But a summer cruise can't be without its problems: You run out of gas, need help getting pushed up the overpass. And after an obstacle course like that, Katz's final entreaty feels well-earned.
Lifetime isn't an album of sunny delight; nighttime is the predominant ambiance. "Airport Monday Morning" documents a girl's departure, and its harmonies and last-ditch chorus turn out like this: The protagonist watches a line-halting couple kissing at the airport. Conversely, "Just a Quiet Night" embraces domesticity, as does the one-on-one vinyl listening session "Records at Nite" (have fun guessing what they're spinning).
There is one dig at today's emo stars: During "All Night Long," wandering in the rain after a fight with his lady, Katz mentions "punk rock millionaires with coke up their nose/ ...Writing records in designer homes." He knows, though, that his damp, less plush situation is pretty perfect. And the girl? "It's really all right if we don't talk at all/ It's only one song." This is just one moment of smart, mature meta.
Katz has said that months of touring are no longer in the cards for the band; in fact, it's said to be a reason they broke up in '97. If this ends up as a one-off-- a tiny chapter-- Lifetime catches the band fairly close to its late-period luster, though coupled with the wisdom (and differences) of age. It feels like a recap: There are references to older songs and characters, luggage and leavings, doors opening and closing, the slow creep of adulthood, and tons of people feeling tired. Lifetime is less about meeting the kids at the flagpole and more about the exhaustion brought on by navigating love, boredom, shows, and sickness. The eponymous title? Feels like the signature at the end of a letter... | 2007-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Fueled by Ramen / Decaydance | February 13, 2007 | 7.9 | 37ad6f91-7511-4511-9ef4-ca54fdb1cff8 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
As an initiate of santería, the Havana-born jazz singer is in tune with her religious and musical practices, as Cubafonía illuminates, pulling from genres within and adjacent to Cuban popular music. | As an initiate of santería, the Havana-born jazz singer is in tune with her religious and musical practices, as Cubafonía illuminates, pulling from genres within and adjacent to Cuban popular music. | Daymé Arocena: Cubafonía | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22957-cubafonia/ | Cubafonía | At the top of her brow, underneath her headwrap, Daymé Arocena wears a small feather. She’d received a message once from a saint telling her that it would guide her so that she’d never lose her way. As an initiate of santería, or Regla de Ocha, the Havana-born jazz singer is well in tune with both her religious and musical practices, which are inextricably tied. In her latest project, Cubafonía, Arocena illuminates those ties, as well as those that connect different genres within and adjacent to Cuban popular music.
After her 2015 debut full-length, Nueva Era, and follow-up EP, One Takes, the now-24-year-old took some time to tour. Along the way, she came to realize just how much she missed home, which in turn inspired her sophomore album. Where on her first album, the songs are mostly jazz records with strong Afro-Cuban undercurrents, on Cubafonía, it often tilts the other way too, so that a track might be a rumba or a bolero, but with a distinctly jazz bent. She also makes it a point this time to work almost entirely with Cuban musicians. Leading them, she sounds more confident than ever. The result is a vibrant, bold record that is, at its heart, a love letter to her home country.
True to her roots, Arocena opens the album with a chant to Eleggua, the opener of roads. Otherworldly voices pierce through Ethiojazz-y horns, as she belts salutations to the orisha. Highlighting the influence of different African traditions in Cuban music, she follows up “Eleggua,” which is Yoruba (or Lucumí), with a rumba, which combines various West and Central African musical traditions. “La Rumba Me Llamo Yo” is a lively rumba guaguancó that tells the story of a woman whose mother warns her of a man she doesn't want near her. It ends in an all-out party: “What is it you want them to give you?” the chorus asks in Spanish. “Rumba, ven ven!” they answer. Daymé, for her part, scats her way through a clatter of voices and percussion, coming out the other side unscathed and triumphant.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, her orisha is Yemayá, goddess of the sea. Arocena’s voice, like her laughter, is wide and enveloping. She sings with a warm rasp reminiscent of Buika (as on “Lo Que Fue”), an emotional breadth that recalls Aretha, and an unwavering willingness to lay herself bare. In the first of a three-song run of ballads, “Cómo” is a smooth, ’80s-inspired pop song that sits somewhere between Sade and Selena. In a hazy swirl of jazz saxophone, violin tremolo, and twinkling chimes, the artist laments (in Spanish), “How do I live with my solitude? How do I begin this end?” The very next song over, “Todo Por Amor,” she is in love again—wholly, fearlessly, maybe a little foolishly. “Eres tu mi salvation, todo por tu amor,” she practically bleeds. The song is a bolero but with echoes of bachata, underscoring again the fluidity between different Afro-Caribbean music forms. Finally, on “Ángel,” a slow, minimalist tango, Arocena’s voice arcs and dips wordlessly, longing after something we cannot see.
As unafraid of pain or heartache as Daymé seems, so too is she unafraid of joy. “Negra Caridad” sounds like it could be the soundtrack to an old spaghetti western with elements of 1950s Benny Moré-era Cuban big band music and punchy vocals that recall La Lupe. Meanwhile, “Mambo Na’ Mà” elides the spirit of mambo with New Orleans swing. Horns creak and chug; Daymé cranks her voice like a jack-in-the-box before crying, “Mambo na’ má!” Besides being a good time, it’s also a reminder that Havana and New Orleans are colloquial sister cities with overlapping musical pasts and creole histories.
The album feels warm and full, thanks in part to the production. The texture changes, though, on the very last song—the stripped down “Valentine.” The track is a changüí, a folksy song from Guantánamo, influenced by nearby Haiti. Over the scrape of a güira and a smattering of acoustic instruments (marimbula, très, clarinet), the daughter of Yemayá coos, “Mon valentin, mi valentine, my valentine/In a moment, you gave freedom to my heart.” There is a sense of gratitude in her delivery—and perhaps some relief—to have wandered but finally returned to where her heart is freest, to her valentine, to Cuba. | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Brownswood | March 16, 2017 | 7.6 | 37aee6bf-7635-450c-8d57-b79f6ead626c | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
Working with Michael League, the leader of the Brooklyn-based jazzy jam outfit Snarky Puppy, David Crosby releases his second solo record since returning from a 20-year hiatus. | Working with Michael League, the leader of the Brooklyn-based jazzy jam outfit Snarky Puppy, David Crosby releases his second solo record since returning from a 20-year hiatus. | David Crosby: Lighthouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22549-lighthouse/ | Lighthouse | There’s always been a bemusing disconnect between David Crosby’s art and persona. On record, he often sounds suspended in a haze, caught between folky introspection and steely defiance, but he can come across as cantankerous crank. Recently, he’s been apt to vent his spleen on Twitter, where he maintains one of the best celebrity feeds going, and also in candid interviews where he doesn't hide that he’s feuding with former bandmate Neil Young and is so financially strapped that he’s had to sell his schooner and that he considers purchasing a Tesla an indulgence.
All this turbulence would suggest that Lighthouse, his 2016 record, might be something of a tortured affair, but that’s not the case. Working with Michael League, the leader of the Brooklyn-based jazzy jam outfit Snarky Puppy—an outfit he’s been praising in public since 2014—Crosby abandons the slick professionalism that informed Croz, the 2014 album that saw him reviving his solo career after a 20-year hiatus. This is the first time he’s ever followed an album so quickly—previously, the fastest turnaround was four years, when 1993’s Thousand Roads followed 1989’s Oh Yes I Can—which underscores that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young now belongs to the history books and Crosby has no reason to pursue any path other than his own.
League decided to use Crosby’s 1971 solo debut If I Could Only Remember My Name as a touchstone, but Lighthouse is by no means a re-creation of past glories. First of all, League dispensed with any hints of elaborate production—there is no percussion, no electric guitars—and yet these hushed acoustic numbers can read as jazz: there’s an elastic sense of time and no adherence to strict strong structure. Lighthouse does share some qualities with If I Could Only Remember My Name, particularly in its expansive and lonely mood. But where the 1971 album seemed to ride a melancholy undercurrent, there’s a certain sense of reassurance to Lighthouse. Older, maybe wiser, Crosby is certainly gentler, letting his songs unfold according to no real sense of time. That’s the clearest sign of League’s influence: he encourages Crosby to indulge in his eccentricities.
Usually, this manifests in songs that don’t follow strict contours. Certainly, verses flow into choruses and there are distinct melodies that provide a path to follow, but the lack of percussion gives the nine songs on Lighthouse a dreamlike feel; it seems as if the songs are unfurling as they’re imagined. Pro that he is, Crosby isn’t free-associating: Each of the songs is carefully constructed, the seams between the verses and choruses apparent upon close listening, as is the understated protest of “Somebody Other Than You” and “Look in Their Eyes.” Nevertheless, the pleasure of Lighthouse is that it’s best appreciated as mood music: with its buoyant acoustic guitars and murmured harmonies, it casts a light spell. | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Verve / GroundUP | October 27, 2016 | 6.5 | 37b6cc42-1700-4ce4-a7ee-24ced955f763 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Released in conjunction with his book How to Write One Song, the Wilco frontman’s response to the pandemic is a mellow, easygoing collection of songs stressing the importance of human connection. | Released in conjunction with his book How to Write One Song, the Wilco frontman’s response to the pandemic is a mellow, easygoing collection of songs stressing the importance of human connection. | Jeff Tweedy: Love Is the King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-tweedy-love-is-the-king/ | Love Is the King | It’s conceivable that Jeff Tweedy was in a better position than most musicians to thrive creatively while sheltering in place. Locked down with his family, he could call upon his sons Spencer and Sammy for musical support, and they all could head over to the Loft, the private studio that Tweedy and Wilco built over 20 years ago and maintain to this day. In addition to having access to gear and supporting musicians, the singer-songwriter also benefited greatly from a regular, reliable writing method, one that he documents in How to Write One Song, a book published concurrently with the release of Love Is the King.
Separating Love Is the King from How to Write One Song may be impossible. Tweedy began composing songs for the album while at work on his songwriting handbook, using some of his freshly minted tunes to illuminate particular points of his process. Real-time insight into the writing and recording of a new rock album is rare enough to make this book unique, but How to Write One Song is decidedly not a set of liner notes to Love Is the King. It’s a manifesto advocating the power of everyday creativity, imploring the reader to look at songwriting not as divine inspiration but rather as a practical craft: Assemble the parts, learn how to use the tools at your disposal, toil away for a set amount of time on a daily basis, and it becomes feasible to finish one song; after that, perhaps one more. Love Is the King is a testament to the virtues of this creative approach. Tweedy’s method is designed to sustain a songwriter through dry spells while also doubling as a journal of the moment; such a technique is surely beneficial when grappling with the existential stresses generated by a global pandemic.
Love Is the King contains no attempts at grand pronouncements on the state of the world in lockdown. Rather, it’s a series of vignettes, secular hymns, and snapshots, all loosely arranged around the notion of human connection. Nothing moves too fast here. “Gwendolyn” ambles along to a groove that’s just a shade soulful, “Opaline” moseys ahead with a slight grin, and “Natural Disaster” is a shambling bit of country-rock that stands out not only for its rhythm but also for how its sardonic view of love cuts against the warm sentiments that flow through the record. Warmth doesn’t preclude the presence of loneliness or worry. The gravity of isolation weighs down the narrator of “Bad Day Lately” and self-doubt nags at the heart of “Troubled,” but there’s a recurring theme of the solace and sustenance to be found within lasting love. It surfaces on the hushed “Even I Can See,” whose pivotal verse hinges on finally being able to view the presence of a god through the love of his wife, and in the murmured devotions floating throughout the semi-narcotic thrum of “Half-Asleep.”
None of these songs demand much attention from the listener, but that mellowness is part of the record’s charm. It’s music sprung from the yearning desire for comfort and connection in a difficult time, music whose meaning lies in the act of the creation itself. Since it was made during a time of seclusion, not just for Tweedy but also his audience, the imagery and emotions threaded through Love Is the King can’t help but contain empathetic echoes for listeners still struggling with a year spent apart from loved ones. The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | October 26, 2020 | 7.3 | 37b757d6-694a-4327-b324-b9e6212ed2c7 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The BPitch Control label founder brings the intoxicating humidity of classic techno with a crackling texture reminiscent of 2 a.m. sets at Berghain that became their own balmy, utopian ecosystems. | The BPitch Control label founder brings the intoxicating humidity of classic techno with a crackling texture reminiscent of 2 a.m. sets at Berghain that became their own balmy, utopian ecosystems. | Ellen Allien: Nost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23157-nost/ | Nost | Saying Ellen Allien only spins “real techno” is like Roman on “Party Down” saying he’s only into “hard sci-fi.” It’s no unspoken mark of superiority anymore, being a snobby scene purist, now that pop culture continues to vaporize those borders. Those who stick to the fringes are often the ones outside the party. Today’s veteran house artists, in particular, have embraced crossover projects with shiny FM radio stars, from Benny Benassi pairing with John Legend to Armand Van Helden remixing Katy Perry and Sam Smith.
Techno has always been a different wheelhouse; it’s streamlined without being elitist, its names not so interested in crossovers while still offering a welcome, blooming space. Ellen Allien is one of the brightest and boldest techno DJ/producers in her native Berlin, famous enough to have taken residencies at Tresor and the Bunker, fronted her own minimalist fashion label, and released seven LPs without ever collaborating with a pop star (unless you count one Beck remix in 2007). BPitch Control, the label she founded in 1999, is no small shakes either, having counted Paul Kalkbrenner and Modeselektor to its ranks (and Thom Yorke to its fanboys).
Given her techno mogul status, Allien could surely be complacent with her sound—but on Nost, she brings the intoxicating humidity of classic techno to a place that seems to war with its own humanity. Fittingly for an album themed in the rearview—its title taken from the Greek root for “nostalgia”—it motors on a popping, crackling texture reminiscent of 2 a.m. sets at Berghain that became their own balmy, utopian ecosystems. “Innocence” is particularly charming with this sort of fuzziness; garbled, lightly processed whispers waft amid an unhurried beat that feints and dodges into more minimalist breakdowns. It’s one of the shorter tracks here, clocking in just shy of eight minutes, but feels like the most self-contained world.
Yet, tellingly, this gorgeous sprawl isn’t Allien’s opening salvo—that would be “Mind Journey,” a track as metallic and uneasy as “Innocence” is warm and adoring. Here, a sheaf of ominous, Vocoder-like grumbles roll over high, prickling tones and a synthesized hi-hat pulse. Paired with “Innocence,” the track sets a type of tidal friction between soft and stern that carries across Nost; the scorching, Blade Runner-worthy brunt of harsh tones and crisp breaks in “Mma” push against the orchestral palette of “Physical,” and the sweetly crackling, vaguely electroclash callback of “Electric Eye” follows the acidic funfair sirens of “Call Me.”
“Call Me” is another tetchy intersection of the past and the present. Allien’s ode to Tinder and Grindr, as she’s explained it, has the unblinking, brutalist vibe of CCTV footage: As a female vocal intones “I want your sex” with a dispassion that would make George Michael weep, icy minimalism underneath yields to a softer, more tropical shrug. Hey, this is no romantic era we live in—but a boss like Allien can always find her own way forward. | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Bpitch Control | May 20, 2017 | 7.6 | 37bb55e5-6d3a-4a38-802e-cc518fddb980 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Working with a homemade instrument and utilizing unconventional techniques, the Montreal musician carves vast, expansive forms out of guitar feedback. | Working with a homemade instrument and utilizing unconventional techniques, the Montreal musician carves vast, expansive forms out of guitar feedback. | Mat Ball: Amplified Guitar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mat-ball-amplified-guitar/ | Amplified Guitar | In the trailer for his debut solo record, Amplified Guitar, Mat Ball holds the head of his guitar up against an amplifier as he picks a melancholy tune. The sound that emerges is guttural: A mighty buzz swarms up and creates a cloud around every pluck of the strings. At another point, the Montreal-based musician places his instrument’s head perpendicular to the floor, dragging it across the ground to make the sound wobble. He uses these techniques as ways of shaping the feedback from sustained guitar tones as it grows and changes.
Featuring a series of eight spun-out vignettes, each recorded in a single take, Amplified Guitar explores the noisier side of the electric guitar. The sound isn’t entirely new for Ball, whose band BIG|BRAVE has been carving mammoth textures out of feedback since their formation in 2012. But here, he plays an instrument he built himself—he’s a woodworker as well as a musician—with the aim to maximize both lightness and density. While Ball’s work emphasizes cavernous textures, it is minimalist at heart: He crafts dense lattices from short phrases by looping simple melodies or letting held tones resonate and gradually fade out. As much as Amplified Guitar revolves around blown-out drones, its intrigue lies in miniature details—the way the guitar scrapes along an amplifier, creating a sharp pang, or the way a melody can be deconstructed and pieced back together.
The album’s overarching structure accommodates its blossoming effect. The first three tracks lay out three different sounds—the looping tune of “To Catch Light I,” the haunted fuzz of “Within the Billow I,” and the chaotic pulse of “Steel Wound Arteries I”—that Ball returns to and transforms later on. On “Within the Billow II,” for example, the original track’s eerie textures spin out into high-pitched rings and forceful strikes, a pummeling sound that gradually simmers down into barely there bass pulses. While pieces of the original song remain, Ball tweaks the elements around it, building a new house from the same parts.
Each track offers a different palette to explore, and the “To Catch Light” trilogy proves Ball’s most successful experiment, thanks to its clear narrative arc. These tracks radiate from a forlorn blues melody that Ball blurs with plumes of feedback-induced haze. Each time the song returns, it’s subtly changed: Where “To Catch Light I” feels direct and dejected, “To Catch Light II” is a little murkier until it shatters into a vigorous, colorful final blow. That point feels like a pinnacle, a moment where all of Ball’s simmering ideas have finally boiled over; by the time “To Catch Light III” picks up the pieces, that original melody emerges with a new radiance.
The nuances of Ball’s slowly unfolding songs are what make Amplified Guitar so compelling. Many musicians have explored guitar feedback and drones, but Ball emphasizes the process of building and rebuilding masses of sound from the same small phrases, stacking slight changes into towering structures. Underneath all the distortion lie intricately woven patterns, hidden worlds that reveal themselves more with each listen. | 2022-07-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | The Garrote / Evil Greed | July 8, 2022 | 7.2 | 37bcb9d4-355e-4a19-b25c-b6e0dd76d657 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
In 1991 Pharoahe Monch emerged as half of Organized Konfusion, dropping complex multisyllabic rhymes about nebulous geopolitical threats: He is who people are talking about when they talk about thoughtful MCs whose rhymes go over audiences' heads. His newest effort finds him creating some of the more emotionally incisive and grounded music of his career. | In 1991 Pharoahe Monch emerged as half of Organized Konfusion, dropping complex multisyllabic rhymes about nebulous geopolitical threats: He is who people are talking about when they talk about thoughtful MCs whose rhymes go over audiences' heads. His newest effort finds him creating some of the more emotionally incisive and grounded music of his career. | Pharoahe Monch: P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19244-pharoahe-monch-ptsd-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/ | P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) | Yes, there are plenty of good reasons to assume that an album called P.T.S.D., that's a metaphor about dealing with the music industry from a veteran rapper's rapper, would be an unbearable missive from the land of butthurt MCs. Pharoahe Monch is a perennial critical favorite and industry underdog who emerged, as half of the group Organized Konfusion, dropping complex multisyllabic rhymes about nebulous geopolitical threats all the way back in 1991, before that was a thing. He is literally who people are talking about when they talk about thoughtful MCs whose rhymes go over audiences' heads, which means he's also more or less the godfather of what's evolved into one of rap's most reliably insufferable styles. On top of that, he's a poster child for the way early '00s record label disorganization completely undercut the careers of a certain set of artists, since it took seven years for him to get out a follow-up to his pugnacious, widely admired 1999 solo debut Internal Affairs.
So, yes, you'll be forgiven for assuming that Pharoahe Monch's new album might just be a mouthpiece for all the concerns of cargo-shorted rap conservatives everywhere. It even opens with a loose sci-fi framing device that seems like a particularly bad omen: Pharoahe Monch has entered “Recollection”, a facility that extracts the memories of traumatic experiences from his brain, and the album will show those memories as they are extracted. But other than a few initial flashes of concern about whether we, as a population, are staying woke enough (“I ask: Are we comatose or unconscious?”), what follows is, for the most part, Pharoahe creating some of the more emotionally incisive and grounded music of his career. The promised music industry angle is thankfully more or less absent.
The theme that the album returns to most reliably is instead the psychological effects of various traumas, especially the kind that come from living in dangerous and impoverished circumstances—a topic that, despite being the subtext in a lot of rap music, doesn't tend to get addressed explicitly very much in any form of media. On “Lose My Mind”, Pharoahe refers to flashbacks prompted by police sirens and bluntly points out the challenge in the way that this environment is handled: “My family customs were not accustomed to dealing with mental health/it was more or less an issue for white families with wealth.” Elsewhere he touches on the mind-dulling effects of anti-depressants, as well as his own struggles with severe asthma and self-doubt about his career. The album's best song, the soulful, detailed “Broken Again”, is delivered from the point of view of a heroin addict losing his place in society.
The hungry energy that defined Pharoahe when he was younger isn't quite as strong, but there's still a kind of intensity and occasional recklessness that makes him far more interesting than the bulk of currently en vogue young lyrical revivalists. “REM”, a collaboration with the Roots' Black Thought, may be a total boilerplate rap banger with its hook about being “crack music,” but it's also full of a kind of bravado—including a great bit about Pharoahe growing into a giant so he can pick up the rapper Ma$e and use him as a club to attack other rappers—that's refreshingly old school. The production mostly follows the cheesy, guitar-tinged template seemingly beloved of aging lyricists, but there are a few welcome curveballs, like Quelle Chris's squelching, frenetic beat for “Scream” and Pharoahe's own fascinating contribution, “Heroin Addict”, a tangled spoken-word interlude that could pass for a Gil Scott-Heron outtake.
At the same time, Pharoahe's insatiable desire to craft clever rhymes has always fostered a weakness for corniness, and even the best songs on P.T.S.D. are weighed down with clunkers. He's frequently distracted by wordplay, and other times he comes across like a high school teacher trying to be hip. When things do get really conscious, like on “Eht Dnarg Noisulli”, the result is painfully unsubtle, yielding nonsense like “17,000 times a day the human eye blinks/ making us even more subjectible to the hijinks.” Stabs at targets like rappers "making pussy music” on “Bad M.F.” just feel out of touch.
While he might have been able to crack the Hot 100 in 1999, Pharoahe Monch is now about as far from mainstream rap's center as possible. It's hard to imagine ever being compelled to play many of the songs on P.T.S.D. for someone else. But the fundamental lack of coolness here shouldn't do anything to deter fans of Pharoahe Monch or even newcomers who aren't quite sure what they're getting into: It's a rich album that continues to play into the rapper's long-running strengths while taking a more personal, emotional look at the kinds of issues he's traditionally addressed with more inflammatory missives. What Pharoahe Monch is doing may not be as vitally important as it once was, but it still can feel surprisingly vital. | 2014-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | W.A.R. Media | April 23, 2014 | 6.6 | 37c33ae5-1bd5-4f5b-94f4-b244f119e298 | Kyle Kramer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-kramer/ | null |
Pantha du Prince sidesteps the naturalist preoccupations of much recent German techno with this fusion of the human and the mechanic. | Pantha du Prince sidesteps the naturalist preoccupations of much recent German techno with this fusion of the human and the mechanic. | Pantha du Prince: This Bliss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10273-this-bliss/ | This Bliss | Pantha du Prince's This Bliss hit me hardest during a train ride on a foggy evening. Peering out my window, the electricity poles looming out of the mist and then vanishing again looked like starkly geometrical trees (while the starkly geometrical trees looked like electricity poles), and the fog seemed to press against the window like it wanted inside. Most instrumental electronic music benefits from such evocative surroundings, but the work of German producer Hendrik Weber seems almost to require it: His delicate, brittle melodic techno under the Pantha du Prince moniker is itself only evocative, to the point that it only makes sense when it's making sense of the world for you.
Perhaps I was vibing off how the ambiguity of the world outside mirrored the ambiguity of the music. Weber's productions, filled with fragile melodic sequences, grim basslines, dolorous chimes, reticular house percussion, and unidentifiable found sounds (TV static? Trickling water? Rocks banging together?), seems to dwell at the precise point where nature and industry become indistinguishable. It's a vantage point from which plants and machines become just more shapes to populate the surface of the earth, and from which humans are curiously absent. But Weber is not blind to the differences between the two, and This Bliss moves gracefully between visions of the natural world and its manmade counterfeits. Given the sweeping romanticism of his depiction of the former, it's not surprising that technology adopts a slightly sinister role in his work: If the music quite frequently drifts towards "proper” dance music (often resembling the cavernous grooves of LFO's Frequencies, only with none of its playfulness), this is portrayed throughout as a sign that things are very wrong.
As with Ellen Allien and Apparat's Orchestra of Bubbles album from last year, Weber is less interesting in a sonic fusion of the human and the mechanic than he is in playing the differences off one another, and This Bliss mostly sidesteps the naturalist preoccupations of much recent German techno. For all its intricacy, its lushness, this music is clearly the product of a strictly mathematical technology, its clicks and whirs and tinkling arpeggios evoking images of an abandoned factory in which the machines quietly run themselves. The mechanical abstraction of "Moonstruck" counterposes an ominous, almost gritty bassline and depressive, atomized synth patterns that occasionally resolve into the vigilant bleep of a life-support machine (Note to producers: This trick always works), while for long sections the moody "Urlichten" sounds like it's being sucked through an industrial fan.
Even when Weber is indulging in crystalline and romantic visions of nature, the music remains a stage without actors: The sighing strings, furtive rustles and mournful horns of "Saturn Strobe" could be the sound of an abandoned forest patiently crafting its own elegy, utterly detached and yet quietly sorrowful as it awaits its own demise. Only in the anthemic final act of "Walden 2" is any light let in, with a succession of spectacular synth arpeggios that sound almost hopeful; but the moment passes quickly into a sense of remorse, as if hope is only defined by its own precariousness-- hope itself becomes too much to hope for in a narrative defined by decay. This overwhelming sense of loss, of something slipping away, becomes almost claustrophobic as the album continues, and exacerbates its context-dependence: In the wrong setting its pathos can become intolerable and its fragility ignorable. Choose your moments, however, and the quiet rebuke of this music makes for a magically humbling experience. | 2007-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dial | June 18, 2007 | 7.7 | 37cec723-4255-4768-a24d-a16ee2e670f1 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
The debut full-length from this hazy R&B-leaning lo-fi project is the terrific culmination of a year of heavy recording activity. | The debut full-length from this hazy R&B-leaning lo-fi project is the terrific culmination of a year of heavy recording activity. | How to Dress Well: Love Remains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14678-love-remains/ | Love Remains | In fall 2009, a mysterious artist called How to Dress Well posted a free EP called The Eternal Love, and a half-dozen more EPs followed on the project's blog in the next six months. The music on these mp3 releases consisted of cheap-sounding home recordings that were murky and blown out, but the style drew on the ethereal end of contemporary R&B, with layered vocals, falsetto, and tons of reverb. They turned out to be the work of Tom Krell, a philosophy student who splits time between Brooklyn and Cologne, Germany. The online buzz surrounding HTDW built steadily through 2010, and now we have Love Remains, a collection of songs taken from the EPs (some of which have been re-touched in the studio) plus a handful of new tracks.
Krell has clear and specific ideas of what he wants to do with How to Dress Well, many of which use the process of memory as focal point. According to blog posts and interviews, Krell cares deeply about R&B from the late 1980s and 90s, and he's creating a ghosted version of the music, suggesting how sounds wear down and fade over time. "I Started Remembering in 1989" was the title of a blog post from just before that first EP, and it accompanied an iconic photo of Bobby Brown; as Krell noted on his Twitter, it would be a good title for some future How to Dress Well retrospective.
The conceptual foundation is interesting, but Love Remains succeeds because you don't have to think about that stuff to absorb its peculiar magic. For one thing, it has an arresting surface-level prettiness that offers an easy way in. "Ready for the World", a sort of half-cover of "Love You Down", the silky 1986 slow jam by the Michigan group Ready for the World (it was also a minor hit in the 90s for singer INOJ), sums up the How to Dress Well aesthetic. The lyrics are indecipherable, suggesting that feeling where you're trying to sing an old song you love but can't remember the details, so you mumble along with the melody; the percussion is crude and indistinct, and somehow sounds halfway between a sample and a bad recording of hand [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| claps in a bedroom; a sampled voice from elsewhere repeats through the track, sounding both machine-like and human. Interesting questions come to mind-- Is this a cover, and do I need to know the original? Why is it so distorted?-- but it's also easy to let "Ready for the World" wash over you, which turns out to be true of the album as a whole.
The basic template of "Ready for the World" is subtly modified from track to track, so while the album feels very much like a complete statement, individual songs also stand out. One major highlight is "Decisions [ft. Yüksel Arslan]", a lurching waltz with voices piled up into a mini choir that hits with an almost symphonic grandeur. The hugeness of its sound is something considering how modestly it was recorded, and "Decisions" manages to feel both tragic and uplifting at once. The opening "You Hold the Water" is HTDW at its ambient extreme. Beginning with a sample of dialog from Todd Haynes' film Safe, it pulses along with darker, almost industrial samples bumping up against Krell's voice, offering a mood that intentionally avoids coming together as a song. "Endless Rain" gets an unbelievable amount of mileage from a single loop of drum and piano: As the Soul II Soul-like rhythm bit repeats, Krell ad libs vocals that seem to bubble up from some kind of pre-verbal place. You can pick out "you" and "say" and not much else, but it doesn't matter; the track still manages to capture a feeling in its two and a half minutes.
If the contemporary R&B slow jam thrives on the tension between earthy sexuality and the spiritual concerns of gospel, How to Dress Well mostly does away with the sex part. The thin recording and distant-sounding vocals cause the physicality of the music to dissipate into a spectral fog, leaving behind music that feels intimate and devotional and ultimately lonely-- there's a song called "Can't See My Own Face" and another called "My Body", and you get the feeling that the domain of the music probably stops there. This isn't a space for probing the specifics of relationships; it's far too hermetic for that. There's a lot of rain and a lot of death-- two tracks called "Suicide Dream", another called "You Won't Need Me Where I'm Goin'". An album I keep thinking of when listening to How to Dress Well is Panda Bear's 2004 LP, Young Prayer. That was another homemade record haunted by mortality with blurred words that nonetheless managed to communicate a powerful and highly personal sense of spiritual yearning. There are also hints of Bon Iver in Krell's falsetto and in the way he transforms the signifiers of R&B into something homegrown and personal. You can sense a few different strands of music from the last few years coming together with the sounds of an earlier era to form something new.
The distortion is at places so harsh, it's hard not to wonder why Krell doesn't do away with it. But with the sex and romantic yearning removed, the tension between the ethereal and prayerful mood comes from the quality of the recording, the way the music seems to be breaking apart as you are listening to it. How to Dress Well is to my mind the biggest breakthrough in home-recorded lo-fi in years. It feels brave, like it's going places a lot of artists in this sphere are afraid to go. And since the emotions communicated are direct and palpable even if the specifics are elusive, it also has something for people who don't follow this world of music closely. I can promise you that as I type this right now, 15-year-old kids who have been freaking out over this album are in front of their computers, trying to make their own version of this music. We'll see how that goes. But the impulse makes sense. Love Remains, because of its construction, feels like music that comes from inside, as if the act of listening completes it. | 2010-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Lefse | September 24, 2010 | 8.7 | 37cedc43-18ae-479e-b71c-df61023662f6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Latest full-length from the Southern rock revival's flagship band attempts to demythologize some of the American South's best-known figures. | Latest full-length from the Southern rock revival's flagship band attempts to demythologize some of the American South's best-known figures. | Drive-By Truckers: The Dirty South | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2509-the-dirty-south/ | The Dirty South | There's a stretch of Highway 64 in McNairy County, Tennessee that connects county seat Selmer and nearby Adamsville, called the Buford Pusser Highway. It's four-lane now, but years ago it was only two lanes of blacktop over steep hills and wide curves. Along this road were located both of the county's high schools, about 12 miles apart. Often, before or after school, students would race from one to the other, and several graduating classes were absent at least one student killed along this road. If you were fast enough, you could make it in eight minutes, but it depended on the absence of cops, and you had to have a good car-- like a Corvette, the kind Sheriff Buford Pusser crashed on the same stretch back in 1974, a little over a year after the first biopic of his life, Walking Tall, was released. Before he died, Pusser, a former wrestler, had earned his infamy ridding the county of the State Line Gang, which ran prostitution, drugs, and gambling rings as well as countless backwoods liquor stills. Legend has it that he accomplished this moral purging wielding only an axe handle. A historical placard now marks the spot where his car left the highway.
Pusser is part of what Patterson Hood calls "the Mythological South" in the liner notes to the Drive-By Truckers' sixth album, the inevitably titled The Dirty South. The band has explored this mythological South on previous albums, most notably their double-disc Southern Rock Opera, and like Buford with his stick, they've busted up the larger-than-life myths of figures like George Wallace and Ronnie Van Zant. Similarly, this album doesn't reify or even demonize the late McNairy County sheriff, but simply demythologizes him. As Hood announces at the beginning of a three-song suite about Pusser's legacy, "This is the other side of that story."
On "The Boys from Alabama" and "The Buford Stick", Hood relates the stories of the small-time shiners who lost their stills and their livelihoods to Pusser, who they claim was "just another crooked lawman." In between, Mike Cooley sings "Cottonseed" in the voice of one of the State Line Gang who feels the burden of having dispatched so many souls to their Maker. Neither Hood nor Cooley takes a side in this rural turf war, but they try to reveal another facet of the story and empathize with the people vilified by Pusser's legend. For the Drive-By Truckers, black-and-white aggrandizement is much less interesting than gray-area truths, and in a sense, The Dirty South rescues the flawed man from the ideal perpetrated by the movies.
All of this would be dryly academic if the band's music wasn't so sturdy and solid. As on previous albums, the Drive-By Truckers back their ambitious, word-dense songs with down-and-dirty Southern rock that's direct and bare-boned, yet often explosive. The three songwriters-- Hood, Cooley and Jason Isbell-- are also three rowdy guitar players, and their triple-prong attack instills songs like "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and the live staple "Lookout Mountain" with a raw intensity. Shonna Tucker, who replaced Earl Hicks on bass, and drummer Brad Morgan form a confident rhythm section, accommodating gritty guitar solos and letting the songs sprawl and stretch in unexpected directions. Though rooted in countless major influences-- from .38 Special to Skynyrd to The Band (as explained on Isbell's "Danko/Manuel")-- the Drive-By Truckers' Southern rock always sounds homemade, and like liquor from a still, it's extremely potent.
More crucially, they marshal this dynamic not only to tackle the South's icons, but more importantly to construct a sober, solemn view of everyday Southern life, whether through family histories like Hood's "The Sands of Iwo Jima" or story-songs like Cooley's racecar drama "Daddy's Cup". "Puttin' People on the Moon" is an Alabama version of Springsteen's "Atlantic City" with higher stakes: Instead of escaping on that cross-city bus, the narrator loses his wife and friends to cancer (presumably from NASA testing) and lives out his life in inescapable drudgery, dealing drugs out his front door. Isbell's starkly devastating closer "Goddamn Lonely Love" recounts the torture of a long-distance relationship; although this is only his second album as a Trucker, already he can hold his own with his seniors.
Granted, The Dirty South doesn't play on the band's brash humor like Alabama Ass Whuppin' or Pizza Deliverance, and it isn't nearly as personal an album as last year's Decoration Day: There are only one or two songs about the band members' own exploits and tragedies, so at times it lacks its predecessors' unshakable urgency and tough-mindedness. On the other hand, aside from the Pusser suite in the middle, The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal. Rummaging through the iconography of the South, the Drive-By Truckers distill Southern Rock Opera's myth-breaking and combine it with Decoration Day's family photo album, and the result is a uniquely regional morality. All of these people-- from legends like Sam Phillips ("the only man Jerry Lee would still call sir") to family like Hood's grandfather ("He believed in God and country, things was just that way")-- are points on a compass of good and evil, strong and weak, outraged and complacent, through which the Drive-By Truckers are seeking a true north.
Despite the recent resurgence of Southern rock, this quest for a populist sense of Southern identity-- as it applies to a community and not just to a woman or the rest of the band-- seems rare these days. It's not just self-aware regionalism or Southern-by-the-grace-of-God cockiness, but something deeper: On these 14 songs, the Drive-By Truckers find the connections between these larger-than-life figures and the life-size experiences that shaped them. For them, the South is a stretch of highway where many have died, an ordinary place made extraordinary by human tragedies. The Dirty South is their homemade roadside memorial. | 2004-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | August 31, 2004 | 8.4 | 37d0d3a5-cdb9-4092-aa50-3f3fac9e3963 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The “vocal bible” of pop R&B returns with her first album in eight years, sounding poised and warm but lacking some spark. | The “vocal bible” of pop R&B returns with her first album in eight years, sounding poised and warm but lacking some spark. | Brandy: B7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandy-b7/ | B7 | In the nearly eight years since her last studio album, Brandy has maintained a sturdy foothold in R&B and rap. She elevates Ty Dolla $ign’s weary hometown paean “LA” and serves as the spirit guide on “Ascension,” the climax of Jhené Aiko’s druggy second album. Her megahit “The Boy Is Mine” is the lodestar for two Mahalia songs, “He’s Mine” and “What You Did.” Vince Staples shouts out her song “I Wanna Be Down” on FM!; Chance the Rapper’s “Ballin Flossin” interpolates it. Despite this active influence (as well as her regular TV roles across the 2010s), B7 bills itself as a return. “Sorry for my tardy,” Brandy sings on opener “Saving All My Love,” as if she’s running hours late to a party in her honor. The apology feels warm and sincere, but the music that follows never recaptures that initial glow.
Brandy has never been a particularly scenic writer, but she made up for it with extravagant, heartfelt performances. While her reputation as “the vocal bible” seems to overlook the Gospel According to Whitney, the way she layers coos, sighs, and hums into knots of harmony and texture evokes the interiority of love, how it exists in your mind as much as with another person. Her best music makes romance feel like a transplant, a foreign force adopted into your essence, keeping you alive—unless, of course, it kills you.
The writing and performances on B7, though, are reserved. On “Unconditional Oceans” Brandy flatly describes love as a brewing storm. “The tidal winds blowing/The storm inside is growing,” she sings, sounding less like a storm-chaser than a news anchor reading from a teleprompter. “Lucid Dreams” is just as deflated. “Guilt dealt me tragedy inside/Ate me alive,” Brandy sings, hinting at inner turmoil and strife (and possibly alluding to a fatal car accident she was involved in in 2006) but not really revealing the shape of her emotions. There’s a strong sense of distance to B7, as if Brandy is recounting stories secondhand despite them ostensibly being her own. She’s described the record, which has been released under her newly created imprint Brand Nu, as “freeing,” but she generally feels more withdrawn than liberated.
That detachment might work if there were more sensuousness and motion to the record, but there’s little momentum to these songs. Nothing really builds, progresses, or ascends. Instead of drama, there is poise. Sometimes it works, as on “Borderline,” which is a coil of threats that feel perilously close to coming true. “Don’t you ever hurt me/I’ll change on you,” Brandy warns, her voice quaking with tension. You can feel the strain of her composure. She’s just as vulnerable on “Baby Mama,” proudly reclaiming the often dismissive term, but still baring her fangs. “Ain’t depending on you, I’m a baby mama,” Brandy says, the statement a boast and sneer.
Less compelling are the moments when Brandy holds steady. “Bye Bipolar” is a by-the-numbers kissoff that makes a clumsy pun of “bipolar” as Brandy spurns a leechy ex with saintly grace. Her dressing-down is so respectful and coolheaded you wonder why she’s bothering. On “I Am More,” she tries to end a love triangle, giving the guy at the center of it an ultimatum. “I can’t be the other woman/Mistress or a side piece order/I need more/Cause I am more,” she sings. But there’s no venom to her protest, no stakes.
The production is the album’s saving grace. Brandy, who has production credits on nearly every song, favors colorful and springy arrangements. Hit-Boy’s horn loop on “Baby Mama” is so bouncy that the song sways even when the percussion drops out. The ticking hi-hats and muted chords of Darhyl Camper Jr., LaShawn Daniels, and Brandy’s joint production on “Borderline” highlight the subtle upward and downward arcs of Brandy’s multiple harmonies; her voice is constantly coalescing and dissipating. And the propulsive finger snaps and bass kicks of “No Tomorrow” contrast the song’s grim subject matter about the end of a relationship.
Though Brandy’s voice remains a beautiful, resonant instrument, her songwriting here is so often functional and humdrum, and her performances rarely sparkle with personality or feeling. It’s obvious she has many stories to tell; what’s less clear is what compels her to tell them, what makes her want to sing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Brand Nu / eOne | August 5, 2020 | 6.8 | 37d68e67-4128-4104-bf0f-66aa6351c8d7 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke has made major headway infusing rap with new electronic textures both as one half of TNGHT and as a beatmaker in Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music stable. The guiding principle for Mohawke's sophomore album, Lantern, is to showcase his versatility. | Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke has made major headway infusing rap with new electronic textures both as one half of TNGHT and as a beatmaker in Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music stable. The guiding principle for Mohawke's sophomore album, Lantern, is to showcase his versatility. | Hudson Mohawke: Lantern | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20675-lantern/ | Lantern | Over the last three years, Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke (born Ross Birchard) has made major headway infusing rap with new electronic textures both as one half of TNGHT with Canadian DJ Lunice and as a beatmaker in Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music stable. But he doesn’t seem to want to be defined by his hip-hop dabbling anymore. Mohawke said as much in conversation with Pitchfork this spring, where he was reticent to even utter the word "rap." And so the guiding principle for Mohawke's sophomore album, Lantern, is to showcase his versatility. He’s been pecking away at the record since he got swept up into the Yeezus machine, and it feels like a conscious subversion of everything people might expect to hear from a guy with credits on Nothing Was the Same, My Name Is My Name, and I Am Not a Human Being II.
For one, there aren’t any rappers on Lantern. It isn’t your typical producer's showcase, and our maestro doesn’t hide behind a parade of cleverly curated guest features. Only five of the album’s 14 songs bother with vocals at all, and the performers slide neatly into Hud Mo's vehicles, commanding attention as necessary but often hanging back in the mix, another paintbrush by the artist’s easel. Antony tiptoes around a napping lover on "Indian Steps", while Jhené Aiko mourns a doomed romance on "Resistance". Neither voice raises above a whisper as they bob gently over sparse, swirling arrangements. Lantern’s quieter tracks are broken up with moments of bedlam—Irfane’s helium-voiced lead on "Very First Breath" is the calming focal point in a disorienting array of bleating video game keys—and when it gets loud, the album's guest vocalists are terra firma underneath a pulverizing armada of synths.
The album’s more ambitiously orchestrated sections are a rewarding new look for the producer. The widescreen majesty of "Kettles" and "Scud Books" fully realize a sound Mohawke hinted at years ago with cuts like "Shower Melody", off his 2009 Warp Records debut Butter. "Kettles" abandons the idea that Mohawke needs to make electronic music at all, opting for heart-swelling neoclassical instead, before "Scud Books" takes everything he tried on the previous song and crams it back into a trap cut. "Lil Djembe" picks up Eastern instruments and drops a conventional approach to melody for a two-and-a-half minute excursion that presents one of the few times here Mohawke’s ideas come off better on paper than in execution.
Lantern’s risk-taking is daring and giddy, but its favored mode, and Hudson Mohawke’s best, is hooky, crowded, rap-conscious electropop. Lead single "Ryderz" employs an old trick from Mohawke’s benefactor Mr. West—overlaying a sped-up soul sample with syrupy embellishments —to heart-busting success. "Shadows" assembles an army of 8-bit synths, then runs them through a quick, showy drop for a cheap but mercenary thrill. The album’s closing stretch plays sneaky games with pace. "Portrait of Luci"’s much-needed breather quickly proves to be a fake-out; "System" follows, combining manic keys and a pulsating, insistent kick drum for the album’s most conventionally clubby indulgence before "Brand New World" closes things out at half the speed, loud, ratty guitar in tow like an homage to the overdriven brat pop of Sleigh Bells.
Hudson Mohawke became an EDM circuit sensation sort of by accident three years ago with the success of TNGHT, and he spent the year after that with his hand in a number of 2013’s biggest rap releases. But Lantern finds him wisely darting outside both scenes before anyone gets a chance to pigeonhole him. Scores of great producers settle quickly into an identifiable sound after a big break and proceed to churn out variations on the same song until the calls stop coming. But Mohawke’s puckish eagerness to try new things when the most eyes are trained on him suggests he’s thinking past his next move to the one after that. A less talented hand might’ve faltered juggling six different genres as Mohawke does throughout Lantern, but his knowledge of what gets a crowd moving, coupled with his good cheer in both playing directly to it and coyly holding back as he pleases help keep the album’s experiments a minimum of fun and danceable, but more often shocking and delightful. | 2015-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 15, 2015 | 7.4 | 37d785d3-4180-4e40-aaed-7cb6d6bfd8bb | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
On their second album, the Irish duo Mikron—brothers Michael and Ciaran Corcoran—make promising strides toward defining their own patch of techno turf. | On their second album, the Irish duo Mikron—brothers Michael and Ciaran Corcoran—make promising strides toward defining their own patch of techno turf. | Mikron: Severance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mikron-severance/ | Severance | Contemporary techno is rarely about anything external to the music. Not always, but frequently, a lot of techno is mostly just about techno itself. That’s especially evident in acts on the Sheffield label Central Processing Unit, who, since 2012, has devoted itself to the sounds its city helped make famous in the 1990s, fusing the clean-lined 808s of classic electro (an American import) with the evocative sheen of mid-1990s Warp Records at its most melancholy. The label’s roster has a compelling take on the style: When they’re good, CPU releases might be mistaken for their inspirations from decades earlier. When they’re great, they sound simply timeless. But they almost always stake out a position within familiar terrain. The CPU M.O. entails “pushing at the edges without reinventing the wheel,” as Resident Advisor’s Andrew Ryce once put it.
On their second album, the Irish duo Mikron—brothers Michael and Ciaran Corcoran—make promising strides toward defining their own patch of turf. Their debut album, 2016’s Warning Score, had plenty to recommend it, particularly its fusion of diamond-tipped drum programming with aquamarine synths. But at the end of the day, it was essentially a collection of genre exercises. “Black Sands” paid homage to Drexciya, electro’s avant-garde standard-bearers; “Re-Entry” lost itself in Detroit techno’s buoyant harmonies; the title track indulged in whip-cracking acid roleplay. Severance moves into a more distinctive territory.
The tempos are largely slower and their sound design, already one of their strengths, has become even more refined. Shrouded in bassy shadow, their synthesizers throw off the glow of streetlights in heavy fog; their drum programming flashes like fish in deep water. Severance is even more varied than Warning Score: “Ghost Node,” a highlight, channels new-wave synths into sleek, uptempo techno, while the opening “Embers” is melancholy, atmospheric acid. Mostly, they shuttle between slow-motion electro and ethereal hip-hop, using those spacious rhythmic frameworks to showcase the richness of their sounds. On “Aldergrove,” another highlight, the synths almost sound like a chunk of shoegaze that’s been broken off, sanded smooth, and polished to a dull sheen.
Mikron still aren’t putting any wheelwrights out of business. Echoes of their predecessors are easy to spot: Plastikman’s nimble hi-hats and wriggly 303 run through the opener; the echo-soaked “Imora” taps into the gothic strains of dub techno pioneered by Andy Stott and the Modern Love label; “Locus Reave,” the most forceful cut here, sounds like a more subdued answer to Lanark Artefax’s hi-def electro delirium. And Boards of Canada’s influence can be felt every time a stumbling breakbeat kicks up a lavender-scented cloud of dust.
But one track, in particular, stands out as an example of Mikron’s own developing voice. “Sunken Paths” wasn’t made in a vacuum; you could almost imagine it as a tug of war between Burial and Boards of Canada. But the way they wield its slippery, garage-inspired rhythm and glowing synths is so deft, those comparisons mostly fall by the wayside. It’s not a song about a genre or a style; it’s not about anything except the feeling that wells up while it’s playing. And that feeling, a hard-to-define mixture of melancholy and rapture, hits hard—and leaves a lingering mark. | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Central Processing Unit | February 9, 2019 | 7.4 | 37d7f7f0-1d9c-4c0f-b66f-ff85bd8918f8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their debut LP, Sheer Mag keep biting at the forbidden fruit of 1970s hard rock. They dance the line between proto-metal and power pop on songs about romantic obsession and societal oppression. | On their debut LP, Sheer Mag keep biting at the forbidden fruit of 1970s hard rock. They dance the line between proto-metal and power pop on songs about romantic obsession and societal oppression. | Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheer-mag-need-to-feel-your-love/ | Need to Feel Your Love | Seventies hard rock is like the trans fat of popular music—something the masses once gorged on freely and gluttonously, but which has since come to be viewed as being not all that good for us. From the derisive misogyny, to the skeezy sexual objectification (of minors, no less), to the thinly veiled racism and homophobia the music engendered during the disco-sucks witch trials, hard rock’s anachronistic qualities are as much philosophical as musical. And yet, it remains a forbidden fruit we just can’t resist, with artists both mainstream and underground forever drawing from its trough of pelvic-thrusting riffs, gooey twinned-guitar leads, and shout-it-out-loud hooks. Because, at the end of the day, we all just want to feel as good as the people who made ’70s hard-rock songs felt.
Harboring arena-sized dreams in their DIY-hardcore hearts, Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag have been on a mission to transform junk-food rock into something nourishing and nutritious. And they do this by reminding us of a fact we tend to forget when we see our ’70s heroes clinking champagne glasses at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame galas or embarking on cruise-ship tours: that this was once the music of clock-punchers and outcasts, and of lonely, bullied kids who, by blasting “God of Thunder” in their poster-plastered bedrooms, could imagine what it would feel like to fight back.
That Sheer Mag render their hi-fi fantasies in compact, boomboxed dimensions is not so much an act of punk-schooled subversion or even necessarily a reflection of their modest recording budgets. As guitarist Kyle Seely once explained to Rolling Stone, “We just like that range of fidelity.” Sheer Mag understand that, even though the music they love is often referred to as arena rock, it was more often first experienced through cheap transistor radios, chewed-up 8-tracks, and beaten-up vinyl spinning on Radio Shack Realistic record players.
But warped fidelity isn’t the only thing that separates Sheer Mag from the golden gods of the ’70s. In singer Tina Halladay, they possess a denim-vested, raspy-voiced dynamo who (with the help of co-lyricist/guitarist Matt Palmer) can elevate retro-rock tropes into fiery protest music for the here and now. Arriving hot on the heels of their early EPs compilation, the band’s first proper full-length, Need to Feel Your Love, plays like a Dazed and Confused soundtrack set against a backdrop of Trump-age anxiety instead of carefree Carter-era optimism. On the opening “Meet Me in the Street,” Halladay repurposes the cocksure posturing of an old Ratt lyric as an invitation to the sort of inner-city gathering where the bottles are filled with burning gasoline instead of booze—and where hard rock is both the rabble-rousing soundtrack of choice and something to hurl at the encroaching riot police. But if that song is meant to leave bruises, with others they intend to draw blood: On “Expect the Bayonet,” the gerrymandering that undermined the popular vote in last fall’s election becomes grounds for a violent coup, as the song’s pin-pricked, in-the-pocket guitar melody mimics a gently jabbing blade.
But Sheer Mag’s bilious contempt for the powers that be is always chased by sweet, honey-dipped hooks. Like the band’s first three EPs, Need to Feel Your Love continues to dance along the line separating proto-metal and power pop, but leans more often toward the latter. Bassist Hart Seely’s slightly crisper production lets you better savor the jangly acoustic strums underpinning the power chords, while liberating Halladay’s singing from the payphone fidelity of those earlier recordings. But the cleaner presentation only amplifies the natural grit in her voice—on soot-covered gems like “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “Rank & File,” Halladay comes on like Jennifer Herrema’s feistier little sister, while the band deliver a refined raunch like a Royal Trux whose spirit animal is Dwight Twilley instead of Keith Richards.
Having already struck the right balance of melody and menace at this early stage in their career, Sheer Mag are now eager to get a head start on another ‘70s rock rite of passage: the inevitable disco dalliance. On the title track and “Suffer Me,” the band’s usual Camaro-revving thrust downshifts into slow‘n’low grooves, while the riffs get melted down into a crystalline, sundazed twang from the Mac DeMarco-via-Dean Ween playbook. If the two songs follow similar templates, their subject matter contrasts sharply: the former is a beautifully aching plea to reignite an old flame; the latter is an unflinching account of the 1969 Stonewall riots and the struggles for acceptance that LGBT people still experience a half-century later. (“There’s a fear you can’t define,” Halladay laments, “there’s no peace and there’s no crime in living this way.”) But for Sheer Mag, there’s no difference between personal and political songs—they’re both natural products of the same bruised heart and worried mind. Whether Halladay is singing about romantic obsession or societal oppression, her need for the former only intensifies as the threat of the latter looms larger.
The cover of Need to Feel Your Love shows an airplane navigating dark, stormy skies toward a bright break in the clouds. On one level, it’s a Nevermind-like allegory of a band on the cusp of busting out of the underground to the potentially wider audience that awaits on the other side. It’s also emblematic of Sheer Mag’s desire to power us through these turbulent times toward better days—but they can’t say with certainty if those clouds are parting or closing in. Need to Feel Your Love closes on a sobering note with the melancholic jangle pop of “(Say Goodbye to) Sophie Scholl,” an ode to the White Rose Movement activist executed by the Nazis in 1943 at age 21. In Scholl, Halladay clearly sees an inspirational role model for today’s anti-fascist resistance, but her voice is also imbued with an audible sadness that such a song still needs to be sung in 2017—in America, no less: “It seems so strange/The blind constrictions and nascent pain/The contradiction from which we came.” It’s a long way from the boisterous, brick-tossing battle cries we hear at the start of the record. But when Halladay caps the song’s bittersweet chorus with “don’t forget your white rose,” she reminds us that despair is ultimately the energy source that fuels our ire. | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wilsuns RC | July 14, 2017 | 8 | 37d9d71f-eb79-47c9-bbac-38ac5356a01e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The New York-based songwriter Aaron Maine stays in the lane of writing delicate, evocative songs with homespun beats, but he never quite locks into the kind of groove that made his last record Pool so satisfying. | The New York-based songwriter Aaron Maine stays in the lane of writing delicate, evocative songs with homespun beats, but he never quite locks into the kind of groove that made his last record Pool so satisfying. | Porches: The House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porches-the-house/ | The House | On his 2016 release Pool, Aaron Maine swapped out the ramshackle guitar rock that had so far come to define his primary project Porches for a glitzy set of homemade beats. He applied the songwriting skills he had picked up as the leader of an indie band to an entirely new setting, one which allowed him to indulge the paranoia that had lurked around the edges of Porches so far, but never quite come to the forefront. The House, the third studio LP to Porches’ name, furthers the exploration of the tension between how you’re seen and how you feel, but never quite locks into the kind of groove that made Pool so satisfying.
In its tightest moments, The House boasts some of the most gripping tracks Maine has ever released as Porches. “Find Me” vaults forward with a techno punch as it examines the psychological layout of overwhelming anxiety, the kind that traps you indoors, away from the party, deep in your own head. “I think that I’ll stay inside/If you don’t think that they’d mind/I can’t let it find me,” Maine sings, the usual disaffection in his voice cracked by what sound like raw nerves. While he never exactly specifies what the “it” is that’s hunting him, the blooming instrumentation fills in the gaps. There’s a second voice echoing his own, pitched-up and pixelated, more alien and broken than any of the backing characters heard in Porches songs before. The voice repeats Maine’s words but garbles them, like Kiiara’s gobbledygook chorus on the 2016 hit “Gold,” which only sharpens the tension. It’s like Maine is speaking and has no idea if anyone is hearing what he thinks he’s saying, the gap between his intention and his reception growing unfathomably, unmanageably wide.
“Find Me” also includes the closest thing The House has to a pure pop hook, an indelible chorus complete with chirps of synth horns that’s probably the catchiest thing Porches has put out since 2013’s ecstatically nonsensical “Townie Blunt Guts.” But where Maine once favored the irreverent, he now leans toward the sincerely soul-searching, which can be touching or tepid depending on the song. The spare, lovely “Country” deals in simple imagery: a loved one caught in a pristine moment while swimming in a lake. “Can you make it light?/Can you do no harm? Break the water with your arms,” Maine sings. While oblique, his lines rest solidly enough on a single vision that they hit home; you can almost be where he’s been, which makes empathizing with the moment all the easier. But many lyrics on the album get tangled up in the immaterial and the cliche, like Maine is trying to talk his way out of an ambiguous feeling and never quite getting there. “It is good to know ourselves/Because most of the time/I have no idea/Who I see in the mirror,” Maine pronounces on “By My Side,” reiterating a visual metaphor already sung threadbare by Michael Jackson and Christina Aguilera, for starters. The scattershot instrumentals accompanying him don’t help his case much; he’s singing in circles, both lyrically and melodically, and the syrupy beats he’s laced together struggle to get off the ground.
Punctuating The House’s actual songs are occasionally baffling interludes (one, “Åkeren,” is sung entirely in Norwegian, a first for Porches), which play more like unfinished sketches than intentional moments of quiet. On “Understanding,” Maine’s father guests on the track and warbles vaguely about love over honeyed synth chords; on “Swimmer,” MIDI arpeggios cycle behind Auto-Tuned vocals for just under a minute. These tracks don’t get anywhere, and they add little to their surroundings—they’re not portholes into Maine’s songwriting process so much as they’re the dregs thereof. Breaking up finished songs with undercooked ones can sometimes work as a sequencing strategy, but The House, especially in its B-side, barely has any momentum to break up. Aside from “Ono,” whose muscle does, eventually, kick in, the album’s second half tends to stagnate, circulating the same water metaphors Maine might have put to use on Pool. When The House ends on a stanza mostly lifted from Roy Orbison (“Anything you want/Anything you need/Anything at all”), it feels like a fitting enough synecdoche for the bulk of the album: a reiteration, slowed down and sapped of its original spark, familiar enough to go down easy but not quite spirited enough to get the current flowing again.
Correction: An original version of this article misidentified the singer on the song “Understanding.” | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 22, 2018 | 6.4 | 37dd84e5-b288-4c05-98e1-e9a751008408 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Released in 1983, Noir et Blanc still sounds like a broadcast from the future—the influential work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synths, strange effects, and stranger time signatures. | Released in 1983, Noir et Blanc still sounds like a broadcast from the future—the influential work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synths, strange effects, and stranger time signatures. | Zazou/Bikaye/CY1: Noir et Blanc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zazoubikayecy1-noir-et-blanc/ | Noir et Blanc | Noir et Blanc was released in 1983, yet it still sounds like a broadcast from the future. The work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synthesizers, strange effects, stranger time signatures, and acoustic instruments—steel guitar, clarinet, kalimba—and singing over them in Swahili, Kikongo, Lingala, and pidgin French, it reappears now not so much as a reissue, but as a boomerang across space and time. The title, which translates as “black and white,” doesn’t do justice to a collision of sounds and ideas that yields something more like an iridescent spray of color, like a firehose shot across a beam of sunlight. Far from binary opposites, its composite parts break down into a thousand dynamic shades of grey. It is an album that unseats assumptions.
Most records this influential inspire reams of imitators, sometimes entire genres. That this one did not might come down to the uniqueness not just of its sound but also its circumstances. Kinshasa’s Bony Bikaye was living in Belgium, working on an album by a Congolese soukous band, when he told the French composer Hector Zazou of his interest in krautrock and Stockhausen. Zazou made some introductions, and Bikaye was soon in the studio with the electronic musicians Guillaume Loizillon and Claude Micheli (collectively known as the duo CY1), who laid down knotty sequences and gurgling metallic textures while Bikaye multi-tracked his voice in warm, woozy layers. This reissue makes five of their demo recordings available for the first time, and they sound wonderfully alien: weird, vine-like tangles of arpeggiated synthesizer and sweetly harmonized vocals, robotic and ghostly all at once.
Zazou played the demos to Crammed Discs, a Belgian label with post-punk roots and globe-trotting tastes, who liked what they heard, and the group reconvened in a Brussels studio to record a proper album, assisted this time by a handful of collaborators. Crammed co-founder Marc Hollander played clarinet, and Vincent Kenis, his bandmate from the group Aksak Maboul, contributed spidery guitar—shimmering harmonics, desert-blues pedal steel. The British progressive-rock legend Fred Frith contributed scraping violin to a few tracks. Lithe, raindrop-like pulses alternate with convoluted rhythms in 5/8 time, and drums related to Jamaican Nyabinghi drumming link up with sounds found on Depeche Mode’s earliest recordings. The record’s time-traveling powers are apparent in its very few bars, which sound for all the world like brisk, blippy dancehall reggae from two decades hence, and from there, all bets are off. Congas run through ring modulator erupt into soft bursts of white noise; Hollander’s clarinet traces a Balkan melody, while Bikaye playfully explores the depths of his gravelly baritone.
At times, it’s difficult to tease out exactly what is electronic and what’s acoustic. In the liner notes, Kenis describes how Konono Nº1, whom he had discovered around that time, inspired his use of guitar effects, and in “Mangungu,” his guitar bristles with harmonics, while vine-like synths wrap around a convoluted rhythm. In “Eh! Yaye,” a dry, flat drum machine is garlanded with pings, chimes, and even a bicycle bell, while Bikaye’s voice is spun into an entire chorus. Kenis’ guitar solo here—a tribute to to Demola Adepoju, King Sunny Ade’s steel guitarist—is among the album’s most electrifying moments.
“Dju Ya Feza” comes closest to the period’s post-punk: The grinding beat sounds almost industrial, and the dissonant, hardscrabble guitar glows red hot. Perhaps it’s because Bikaye’s almost comic style of sing-speaking here is so seductive, but no matter how hard you listen, you can’t quite catch everything that’s going on in the background: chirping birds, flying sparks, the whine of ricocheting bullets. “Munipe Wa Kati” explores the same idea to more dulcet ends, weaving plucked kalimba and electronic birdsong around a synthesizer pattern that leads the ear away from conventional notes and toward the realm of pure texture. For these musicians, making sound was a kind of sleight-of-hand, and electronics were alchemical tools for turning familiar sounds deeply unfamiliar.
Adding to the strangeness of it all was the fact that the names on the record’s front cover—ZAZOU/BIKAYE/CY1—obscured more than they revealed. There was little indication that CY1 was a duo, for one thing, and even less that Zazou didn’t play a lick of music on the record. It was a trio masquerading as a quartet masquerading as a trio, basically: Bikaye, Loizillon, and Micheli shared writing credits, while the record was “directed” and arranged by Zazou, according to the fine print. (This was Zazou’s M.O.; in 1993, The Wire described him as “a convener” in the mold of Bill Laswell or Peter Gabriel: “a strong attractor, the hub of a conferencing system through which musicians of the world meet.”)
The record wasn’t entirely without precedent. Two years earlier, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts had run non-Western sounds through Anglo-American art-rock and electronic processing. That same year, Craig Leon’s Nommos had channeled Malian mythology into all-electronic compositions whose metallic machine beats anticipate the sound and texture of CY1’s rhythms. Still, the sound of the record was wildly anomalous for the period. Even today, with modular synthesis arguably more popular than it’s ever been, CY1’s twitchy oscillations sound like a transmission from another planet, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to think of another record, then or now, that combines such far-out beats with such hypnotic Central African melodies.
Whatever accounts for the magic that created the album, it was a one-time thing. CY1, Bikaye, and Zazou would tour together, but the full group never put out another record; there’s nothing else in CY1’s discography at all. And Zazou and Bikaye’s subsequent albums Mr. Manager and Guilty !, with their garish gated snares and comparatively conventional electro-funk flourishes, only underscore how remarkable Noir et Blanc was, and is. Thirty-four years later, its quicksilver palette sounds as joyously original as ever. | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Crammed Discs | November 8, 2017 | 8.2 | 37e79c61-a13b-4e01-8877-6c8b19becad8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut, an existential anchor of the neo-soul movement. | 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 Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut, an existential anchor of the neo-soul movement. | Erykah Badu: Baduizm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erykah-badu-baduizm/ | Baduizm | While recording a demo in her hometown of Dallas in 1995, Erykah Badu found love in the simplicity of a rim shot. It’s a fundamental drum technique: the act of striking the metal edge and the head of a snare simultaneously to produce a full, explosive hit. To her, it was also a creative spark. Badu called up producer-songwriter Madukwu Chinwah, asked what “that tick-tock sound” was, and had him compose an entire rim shot-based rhythm for her. They made a song out of it, connecting the kick and the snare with the stimulating sensation of love: Boom. Clack. Boom. Clack: She made all her music this way, letting the groove lead her into streams of consciousness that became worldwide gospel.
Out of those demo sessions came her February 1997 debut, Baduizm, bookended by the original recording of “Rim Shot,” split into an intro and outro. The record went double platinum by summer and that year won the Grammy for Best R&B Album under the banner of a divisive new subgenre, neo-soul. Baduizm was an instant hit of intimate existentialism. It stripped the act of soul-searching down to its philosophical elements, mining abstract concepts like self-love, romantic love, and spirituality. There’s a throughline to albums like Solange’s 2016 opus A Seat at the Table, which similarly harnesses the power of Black music as a salve. They are full of control and surrender at the same time, confident in their search for answers even when there are none.
Badu’s musical style had roots in the smooth harmonies of ’80s groups like Mint Condition and Tony! Toni! Toné!, along with the early songs of Meshell Ndegeocello, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that neo-soul crystallized into a subgenre with a foundational crew of rebels: D’Angelo, Maxwell, Badu, Jill Scott. Heralded as prodigies, they made lush serenades and instrumental jam sessions with a political center. Their musical and artistic identities affirmed the mutual bond between Black love and liberation. But in carving space for this retro sound, the music world presented neo-soul artists as saviors who were bringing R&B “back to basics,” which dismissed the innovation that was already driving the genre.
The truth is that, in 1997, R&B did not need any saving: Aaliyah’s music lived in the future. Mary J. Blige was turning anguish into hip-hop soul. And while artists from Usher to Brandy to Blackstreet added new-school bounce and flavor to the pop charts, neo-soul glimpsed back to a time when Marvin Gaye was crafting timeless soul out of divorce proceedings. The ensuing neo-soul era was illustrious, merging the familiar crackle of vinyl sounds with contemporary relationship angst. It was prestige R&B, with D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar (1995) and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996) as prototypes. Still, the man who coined the neo-soul term, Universal executive Kedar Massenburg, knew even the acts he’d signed, including Badu, had rejected the label.
In many ways, the backlash was grounded in fear. Black musicians can be hyper-vigilant of the relative impermanence of their culture and wary of being boxed in. “Because, when you classify music, it becomes a fad, which tends to go away,” Massenburg told Billboard in 2002. Though he didn’t see neo-soul as a “marketing strategy,” it was just that: a way to repackage ’70s soul for the masses and train listeners to value live instrumentation and vocals over the computerized pop-R&B of that era. A 2002 Vibe essay described neo-soul as a “sublime paradox,” reflecting a common gripe at the time—“new soul” implied that soul had somehow died. Raphael Saadiq, one-third of Tony! Toni! Toné!, went so far as to call neo-soul “disrespectful,” though he recognized its intent. “I understand it for marketing reasons, I get that,” Saadiq told Billboard in 2002. “But people who really love music can’t respect that because it’s not new soul. You either have soul or you don’t.”
For Massenburg, the endgame was preservation. Neo-soul was helpful as a concept for the moment yet fleeting because Black music perpetually finds ways to escape time. Badu was always shape-shifting her way out of categorization, and Baduizm was the beginning of her decades-long ritual of reinvention. The album builds its ecosystem around her hoarse, cackling tone, which drew so many early comparisons to Billie Holiday that Badu’s publicist began asking interviewers to avoid the subject. Like Billie, Badu performed emotions that hit all corners of a room, her freeform scatting a product of jazz and blues. “More than Billie and I sound alike, I think we feel alike,” Badu said in 1997.
As a child of the ’70s, Badu grew up on Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Chaka Khan. But more accurately, the locus of her sound was hip-hop. She was born Erica Wright in Dallas, two years before hip-hop emerged as a subculture. A young Erica started performing at age 2 on a recorder her grandmother taught her how to use, though she was only allowed to sing church songs. Both her mom, Kolleen Wright, and her grandmother were actresses. (Badu didn’t see much of her father, who was in and out of jail.) Badu’s first show was a first-grade play where she sang the novelty song “Nuttin’ for Christmas.” Around 7, she wrote her first song on a piano her grandmother bought her and then 20 more tunes in the first week.
Badu began interrogating big ideas when she attended a Catholic school. “I thought it was odd that we didn’t question what we were doing,” Badu said in a 2018 interview with Vulture. “What is this ‘blood of the lamb’? What does this mean? And whenever I would ask questions, I would either get manufactured answers or get in trouble for asking questions. I just thought I was not fit for society.” In reality, it was the best artistic vantage point and the genesis of Badu, the philosopher. Curiosity is the centerpiece of her work. She later studied dance at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and majored in theater at Grambling State University before dropping out in 1993. Post-college, she taught dance and theater to a youth group, along with disciplines like yoga and breathwork. Her growing attraction to spiritual methods became the fabric for a body of work devoted to pursuing wisdom and healing. She actually practiced what she preached, then took her studies out on the road, exposing listeners to strange and deeper ways of thinking.
Between jobs, Badu performed in Dallas as a duo with her cousin Robert Bradford, aka Free, under the group name Erykah Free. Their earliest breaks were opening gigs for visitors like A Tribe Called Quest, Naughty by Nature, and D’Angelo. After completing a 19-song demo titled Country Cousins, the two began shopping their music to labels. From Bad Boy Entertainment to Priority Records, everyone, including Sean “Puffy” Combs, passed on signing them. Meanwhile, Badu did another performance at the Austin music festival South by Southwest, which she had been doing since she was 19. She’d changed her name from Erica to Erykah and later adopted the name Badu, after one of her stage riffs: “ba-du, ba-du,” which unbeknownst to her at the time, also meant “to manifest” in Arabic. A demo tape got back to Massenburg and he soon signed her to his Universal label, Kedar Entertainment, as a solo act in 1996.
One unlikely source of inspiration for Badu was her time spent working at Steve Harvey’s Comedy House, where she would play Lucille Ball to his Ricky Ricardo. During shows there she flowed like a rapper and was quick with a joke on the mic. Her humor lent Baduizm a distinctly light edge on tracks like “Afro (Freestyle Skit),” where she threatens to repossess the pager she gave a dude who’s dodging her messages. “Certainly” opens with a sparkle of keys that quickly blends into a trembling bassline as Badu reflects on a surprising new love with sly wonder: “Who gave you permission to rearrange me?” The song’s final note holds and travels effortlessly into the opening crescendo of “4 Leaf Clover,” a vigorous remake of Atlantic Starr’s 1983 hit “Touch a Four Leaf Clover.” It’s a welcome jolt at the album’s midpoint and a master class in vocal control. (It makes sense that Badu cited Brandy’s 1994 debut as a primary influence.)
Outside Texas, a generation of soul stars was cropping up in enclaves like Philadelphia, home of the Questlove-backed Roots, who’d just brought keyboardist/songwriter James Poyser into the mix. Working with Badu, they doused Baduizm with live instrumental flourishes on three tracks: “Afro (Freestyle Skit),” the scratchy lounge number “Sometimes,” and the sleek “Otherside of the Game,” about the dilemma of loving a drug dealer. The latter’s occasional horn stabs waft between rim shots as Badu submits, “Work ain’t honest, but it pays the bills.”
The album’s most transcendent moment, “Next Lifetime,” finds her at another crossroads, not above entertaining an illicit affair. The possibility of it hangs in the air and folds beautifully into the song’s woozy ambiance: “How can I want you for myself when I’m already someone’s girl?” Her solution is more divine than definite: She’d have to see him in another lifetime, maybe as butterflies, such a gorgeous way to use reincarnation as a send-off.
You could just sit and listen to Badu and get lifted if you wanted, but the path to true enlightenment required deeper engagement. “On and On” debuted when I was in eighth grade, where the girls in my chorus class ingested its cosmic mantras, having experienced only puppy love. “You rush into destruction ’cause you don’t have nothing left,” we sang anyway. We, too, picked our friends like we picked our fruits. Paired with the ease of bebop, Badu’s lyricism formed scriptures that were too self-aware to be sanctimonious. As a teacher, she had banter for days. “I work at pleasing me ’cause I can’t please you,” she asserts. There’s a moment in the middle of “Appletree” where she drags a line, as she does, like the most confident cigarette pull, and finishes her thought with a high wail: “I… can’t control the soul flowing in me. Ooh-wee.”
Badu has long been held up as an Earth Mother with an endless stash of sage and knowledge whose image resonated because she adhered to the lifestyle in the real world. This was, of course, an integral appeal of the neo-soul movement: the visual contrast between the authentic bohemian goddess and the glamorized R&B star. Badu brought African aesthetics and scholarship into the pop arena without flattening what they represented. There was a meaning behind the headwrap; the incense and candles she lit on stage; the numerology, derived from the Five Percent Nation (“Most intellects do not believe in God/But they fear us just the same,” Badu crooned in “On and On.”) At the same time, her music actively challenged bad politics and systems. She sounded not only informed but empathetic. And this is the same analog girl who later became a digital savant and a doula who sells out vagina-scented incense. But the current era of reckoning has revealed how some of hip-hop’s most radical thinkers have failed to confront retrograde ideals within their own generation. You could hear the record stop when Badu said schoolgirls should wear knee-length skirts or when she “saw the good” in Bill Cosby and Hitler. Turns out, there are limits to being theoretical versus pragmatic; it lifts the veil a bit off a musician known for both her social awareness and otherworldly mystique. Sometimes the teacher needs teaching.
But under the tenets of Baduizm, that’s how the world should work: an infinite exchange of ideas on our endless journeys of self-discovery. Life is a circle, and fittingly, Baduizm’s endpoint is its beginning: “Rim Shot.” By then, Badu has taken you on an odyssey. It’s a testament to her voice, purpose, and charisma that the album maintains intrigue through its latter half, anchored by musings like “No Love” and “Drama.” Amid subtle knocks, Badu rattles off a list of afflictions: “World inflation, demonstration, miseducation/No celebration to celebrate your lives.” Her follow-up, 2000’s Mama’s Gun, would organize these loose threads into an overtly political project with a less circuitous worldview. As Daphne Brooks wrote for Pitchfork, that record “offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement.” Baduizm, though, set a mood and intention for decades to come, not only for Badu but for her future benefactors. The album positioned her as an artist in flux, immune to categories, whose career is proof of Black music’s ability to morph too quickly to ever be contained.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-09-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | September 5, 2021 | 9.5 | 37ea2cf3-bf2b-4863-aea0-34800cd34bf6 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
The latest from Norwegian electronic producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm finds the missing link between the modern classical works of Steve Reich and Tangerine Dream's cheesy grandeur, resulting in a fist-pumping, hyper-cosmic space-disco epic that conjures both the retro-futurism of Logan's Run and Manuel Göttsching's influential 1981 electro-prog mammoth E2-E4. | The latest from Norwegian electronic producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm finds the missing link between the modern classical works of Steve Reich and Tangerine Dream's cheesy grandeur, resulting in a fist-pumping, hyper-cosmic space-disco epic that conjures both the retro-futurism of Logan's Run and Manuel Göttsching's influential 1981 electro-prog mammoth E2-E4. | Lindstrøm: Where You Go I Go Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12125-where-you-go-i-go-too/ | Where You Go I Go Too | My favorite trick on the opening title track to Lindstrøm's Where You Go I Go Too was first revealed on his 2005 album with Prins Thomas: During long stretches of its near half-hour length, the arrangement does this wonderful and unsettling thing where the music simultaneously seems to expand outwards, curl in on itself, and then unexpectedly swerve off to the side. With its shimmering, strobing synthesizer melodies, dizzy layering, and measured rhythmic pulse, "Where You Go I Go Too" superficially resembles the depth of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and the cheesy grandeur of Tangerine Dream. But, as with his recent covers of Can ("Mighty Girl") and Jon & Vangelis (last year's "Let It Happen"), its logic is all Lindstrøm: The more he embraces the work of others, the more he ends up sounding like himself.
The rest of Where You Go I Go Too transposes the ambitions of the title track into shorter settings: With its floating chords and bubbly enthusiasm, "Grand Ideas" is close to Lindstrøm's more classicist disco work and given a heightened intensity by its placement in the middle of the album, like a moment of clarity amidst the disorienting swirl. Closer "The Long Way Home" apes the title track's splendor but with a twist: The synth work of its first half is complemented by hyper-manicured guitar breaks. In its second half, the track capitulates entirely to its cornier impulses, shifting into plush and suffocatingly slow electronic disco-funk.
Stretching three tracks over 55 minutes and occasionally wandering far away from the dancefloor, Where You Go I Go Too has all the hallmarks of a masterpiece from a reclusive auteur. And while it shares its bloat, excess, and splendor with any number of cosmic disco or Balearic producers at the more decadent end of disco revivalism, it begs for a context more weighty than "disco revivalism." Paradoxically, Lindstrøm knows all the right moves to give his own brand of spacey disco an air of transcendence, but the result feels so effortless that his facsimile and the "real thing" become indistinguishable-- a fake so real it's beyond fake. | 2008-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | August 25, 2008 | 8.6 | 37ee138a-281d-4c89-977d-d144afb9d2b2 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
The Brooklyn producer Max Ravitz makes homespun techno with lush pads, errant noise, and intricate rhythms. His latest LP offers variations on the sound made with a limited palette. | The Brooklyn producer Max Ravitz makes homespun techno with lush pads, errant noise, and intricate rhythms. His latest LP offers variations on the sound made with a limited palette. | Patricia: Several Shades of the Same Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patricia-several-shades-of-the-same-color/ | Several Shades of the Same Color | The album format persists as dance music’s Achilles’ heel. For genres whose popularity have been predicated on 12” singles and DJ mixes, house and techno need albums as much as, say, jazz needs music videos. They’re not necessarily bad propositions, but they can seem excessive and erroneous compared to the music’s roots. Of course, this has never stopped house and techno artists from diving headlong into the album format, often as an attempt to reach mainstream audiences beyond the crate-digging, club-haunting faithful. And from the 2010s’ influx of boutique labels focused on digital and cassettes, another trend has developed: album-length releases as experimental dance music’s bog standard. No doubt, their proliferation has yielded a number of cult classics over the years, but it hasn’t solved the inherent complications of filling a format meant for personal listening with music made for DJs.
Max Ravitz inhabits this unique dichotomy. During the four years he’s released homespun, hardware-built techno as Patricia, the Brooklyn producer has made the album format his bread and butter. His sound—a textural, desaturated techno that often incorporates lush pads, errant noise, and intricate rhythms—befits full-length records more than his less experimental peers. The first two Patricia LPs, Body Issues and Bem Inventory, explored Ravitz’s gritty motif with an ear for heavy dancefloor beats. Besides the strengths of their music, those records also used brevity to great effect, each with six tracks running over 30 minutes. There was plenty of variety for DJs to select from, even as the tracklists seemed intentional enough to encourage repeat plays.
By contrast, Several Shades of the Same Color is the most ambitious Patricia release to date. Its title can be taken pretty much literally: a bunch of techno variations made with a limited palette. Each of the album’s three 12”s develop discrete pockets of mood, ranging from the dubby and emotive to the eccentric and restless. At 15 tracks spread across 91 minutes, however, Several Shades trades its predecessors’ pointedness for glut, and its range for disorder.
Ravitz’s music is at its best when the melodic and percussive complexities entwine into labyrinthine patterns. The opening third of Several Shades iterates that formula masterfully, with the ebullient “Speed Wagon Night Bride” and the drumless “The Words Are Just Sounds” among its most memorable examples. When a markedly darker tone emerges after “Deku Tree”’s modular synth interlude, the shift brings a welcome contrast. “The Electric Eye Is Upon Me” is an ominous foil to the warm bounce of “I Know the Face, But Not the Name”; “Étant Donnés” is the bewitching, Aphexian counterpart to the muddy plod of “Thoughts of You.” And with its sluggish beat and downtrodden synths, “Thoughts of You” reveals some of the limitations to Patricia’s formula—that is, not every shade of techno suits his spartan methods.
There are no explicitly bad tracks on Several Shades, but its more pedestrian and utilitarian fare can seem redundant. Deep and banging as it is, “Shiba Inu Dub” sounds rudimentary next to the low-key alien funk of “Liminal States” or a swaggering oddball like “German Friendship.” “Feel Your Body” and “You Never Listen” are as hard-nosed as they are familiar, whereas “It Gets Worse at Night” subverts its basic 303 squelch with a broken electro skitter and cacophonous atmosphere. That said, “You Never Listen” is a bona fide dancefloor bomb that could go down massively in the mix. Where private listeners may find Several Shades lacking in fresh ideas as it nears its close, DJs will be no less spoiled for choice.
Just before the album’s end, “Alternate Mindset” compresses Patricia’s strengths into a dark diamond of a tune. Ravitz wraps a straightforward acid sequence in punchy syncopation, otherworldly synth, and sumptuous bass, all building on the low-slung groove. It’s at once clever and unrefined, heady and sensual, effortless and elaborate. Such deft balances are key to Patricia’s appeal, and Several Shades shines brightest when he tempers dance music’s immediacy with sounds that linger well after they’ve rattled the speakers. | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Spectral Sound / Active Cultures | July 21, 2017 | 6.9 | 37f1c9bc-6fcb-410c-bbfa-3c8a9e168622 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
The Wake, who recorded for Factory and Sarah, mixed nervously funky post-punk with bedroom synth-pop. After repressing two singles for Record Store Day, Captured Tracks has reissued the Glasgow band's 1985 sophomore LP along with non-album tracks from the era. | The Wake, who recorded for Factory and Sarah, mixed nervously funky post-punk with bedroom synth-pop. After repressing two singles for Record Store Day, Captured Tracks has reissued the Glasgow band's 1985 sophomore LP along with non-album tracks from the era. | The Wake: Here Comes Everybody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16661-here-comes-everybody/ | Here Comes Everybody | Some bands have to wait years or even decades to be fully appreciated. The Wake were built that way from the start. The Glasgow band can claim the unique distinction of recording for two of the preeminent British indie labels of the late 20th century, Factory and Sarah. Fittingly, their best music mixes nervously funky post-punk with wispy bedroom synth-pop. But of course, that combination was hardly obvious at the time, and it's easy to see how in an earlier media environment, the Wake must've sounded like lesser clones of New Order or the Cure.
The Wake will still probably always remain a cult band compared to those groups, but they've proven increasingly influential over the past few years. Stateside indie poppers the Drums have said they came together with "the idea of completely ripping the Wake off." Recently defunct Swedish duo Air France borrowed from the Wake for a song on their 2006 On Trade Winds EP. But leading the Wake revival has been Brooklyn label Captured Tracks, which reissued two of the band's singles for Record Store Day 2011 and has commissioned a handful of cover versions by its roster, whose members generally share the Wake's dreamy melancholy and independent mindset.
Captured Tracks has now lovingly reissued the Wake's 1985 sophomore album-- by some measure their best-- and the non-album tracks from the same era, which are even better. Singer-guitarist Gerard "Caesar" McInulty, who had previously been a member of pre-fame Altered Images, formed the Wake in 1981 with singer-keyboardist Carolyn Allen, drummer Steven Allen, and bassist Joe Donnelly, soon to be replaced by Bobby Gillespie, who would go on to greater fame with the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. But 1982 debut album Harmony hewed a bit too clumsily to the Factory line. Gillespie had moved on by the time of all but one of the tracks here, replaced by Alex MacPherson.
Here Comes Everybody holds up as a touchstone for aching, atmospheric synth-pop, all slinky guitars, crisp percussion, textured keyboard, and limber bass. "This is a page from my diary," Caesar begins on "O Pamela", which has since been covered by Nouvelle Vague; with a guitar-and-synth intro that uncannily predicts Tears for Fears' far glossier (and more commercially successful) 1985 hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", it could be the diary of more recent artists from Washed Out to Youth Lagoon, too. Nor is the album afraid of taking something schmaltzy-- like the embarrassing Don McLean quote on seven-minute "Melancholy Man", or the jaunty harmonica on heartbroken "World of Her Own"-- and investing it with fragile sincerity. Expansively wispy, this is a record best heard as a whole, a missing evolutionary link between Josef K and the Field Mice.
The most immediate examples of the Wake's legacy, however, and the tracks you'll most likely play for your friends, come on disc two, which collects the group's 7" and 12" releases from 1983 to 1987. The ambiguous 1984 single "Talk About the Past", with its twitchy guitar and splashes of piano by the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly, and 1985's loping contemplation "Of the Matter", with its elegaic vividness ("There's a shadow of a shadow moving in"), are both wonderful. But then so is the entirety of 1987's Something That No One Else Could Bring EP, which includes the luminously catchy "Gruesome Castle", with its proto-chillwave hook: "Arise, arise, and keep up appearances." The only relative duds are the murkily sprawled 1983 B-side "Host", with Gillespie, and the dubby finale "Of the Matter (Version)", which at the very least lets the record end with the original song's epigrammatic closing words: "And when you find me, you will find me alone/ Then we'll walk to your house, walk together, walk home."
Here Comes Everybody and its singles have been reissued before, in 2002 by LTM, but this is their first U.S. release, and their first vinyl pressing since the original Factory records. First available on Record Store Day alongside reissues of albums by Cleaners From Venus and Medicine, the box set I purchased online is simply but carefully packaged, with a 12"x12" booklet of historically significant liner notes by Caesar, lyrics, and photography, plus full sleeves for both records and a 7" featuring Portland-based Captured Tracks band Blouse's spaced-out cover of the Something EP's "Pale Spectre". On the flip is labelmates Craft Spells' complementary "Talk About the Past".
That last song, one almost explicitly referred to on the title track of Air France's Sincerely Yours labelmate the Honeydrips' 2007 Here Comes the Future, sounds especially relevant at a time when being internet-famous is no longer a novelty: "Have you heard the good news/ Everybody is a star/ Have you heard the good news/ Everybody works so hard." It's perhaps no coincidence that the title of Here Comes Everybody, a Finnegans Wake reference that confirmed the Wake's relationship to the James Joyce novel, was also the title of New York University professor Clay Shirky's 2008 book on crowdsourcing and "mass amateurization."
It might not be a surprise, either, that Caesar and Carolyn Allen, after teaming up with the Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars' Bobby Wratten as the Occasional Keepers, have selected 2012 to reunite for a new album by the Wake, A Light Far Out, which came out in early May on LTM. They might not ever be truly stars, but the time they've worked so hard for is, well, now. | 2012-06-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 1, 2012 | 8.2 | 37f219c6-1426-4a7f-9238-daf6d186ca45 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
In a season where “pussy” has become a household word again for all the wrong reasons, Pussy Riot return to exact their vengeance. At least, that’s the narrative for Nadya Tolokno’s xxx EP. | In a season where “pussy” has become a household word again for all the wrong reasons, Pussy Riot return to exact their vengeance. At least, that’s the narrative for Nadya Tolokno’s xxx EP. | Pussy Riot: xxx | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22579-pussy-riot-xxx/ | xxx | Four years ago, in October of 2012, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for “hooliganism” after staging a protest performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Pussy Riot leveraged performance and punk rock to critique the Putin regime as well as the Russian Orthodox Church. Although music was initially incidental to the project, Pussy Riot was championed in the Western imagination and among the international pop elite as a band—a characterization made manifest as Tolokno and Alyokhina were writ into riot-grrrl herstory and invited to perform alongside Madonna at a 2014 Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center upon their release. As of last year, the pair has been releasing music for the music sphere, including the Eric Garner tribute “I Can’t Breathe,” a Le Tigre collaboration made for “House of Cards,” and a pro-refugee track filmed in Banksy’s Dismaland. Now, Tolokno is releasing a solo EP on Atlantic imprint Nice Life, produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (who Tolokno also worked with on the chilling anti-corruption track “Chaika”).
Now, in a season where “pussy” has become a household word again, albeit for all the wrong reasons, the original pussy provocateurs have returned to exact their vengeance on macho would-be-rulers the world over. At least, that’s the narrative for Nadya Tolokno’s xxx EP. Working with pop music as a medium makes total sense for Tolokno, considering her irrefutable magnetism and keen understanding of media weaponization as well as the deity-like status with which we imbue pop music icons. That said, it’s disappointing to see the Pussy Riot name, which was built on principles of non-hierarchy, collectivity, and anti-capitalism, leveraged as a personal brand—something she has been critiqued for both by former members of the Pussy Riot collective and by other Russian feminists and activists. (Tolokno maintains that the Pussy Riot name can be taken up by anyone but as one meaning gets reified, the rest dematerialize.)
The songs on xxx are a mixed bag. Two of the three tracks are written in English and either directly or indirectly anti-Trump. At a time when “the Russians” are synonymous with Bond villains or election hacking, there’s something thrilling about seeing Tolokno fire back at America’s own villainous tendencies. However, both of these tracks can ring a little hollow.
Tolokno has said that “Straight Outta Vagina” was written as a response to patriarchy, misogyny, and the overrepresentation of dicks in pop music. In a phallocentric world where normalized derision of vaginas leads to lifelong body image issues, there’s a reason that Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party is in the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection. On the other hand, at a time when genital-centered essentialism is used by to perpetuate violence and to call for violent legislation against trans women, suggesting that only people with vaginas are affected by misogyny feels irresponsibly cis-sexist.
Out of all the anti-Trump songs coming out recently, “Make America Great Again” is the most direct. It’s an earworm that’s not quite as disastrous as Le Tigre’s pro-Hillary jingle, though if we’re going by Tolokno’s own criteria (“Let other people in/Listen to your women/Stop killing black children”) it would be far more accurate to say that America Was Never Great. While the lyrics are relatively low key, the accompanying video is all-out brutal, splicing dystopian footage of real Trump speeches with gruesome imagery of Tolokno being branded, sexually assaulted, and tortured by Trump goons in orange wigs.
One of the more mesmerizing tracks is “Organs,” a deft Russian-language track (English translation can be read by enabling closed captions in YouTube) with Tolokno rapping on the interplay of bodies and the body politic while bathing nude in a tub of blood. “In 2014, I was released from prison and put into a bloody bath,” Tolokno tells The-Village.ru, citing “the annexation of Crimea, the fighting on the territory of Ukraine, the downed Boeing, attacks on political activists (including ourselves), the murder of [liberal politician] Boris Nemtsov.”
The inspiration behind “Organs” is a sobering reminder that, burgeoning music profile aside, Tolokno is undertaking tangible, dangerous activism with regards to the Russian prison system. Shortly after getting out, Tolokno and Alyokhina co-founded Zona Prava, (Zone of Rights) an advocacy group meant to provide legal aid and informational support to prisoners, as well as Zona Pravda (Zone of Truth), a media site dedicated to in-depth coverage of courts, prisons, and labor camps, including trials, human rights abuses, hunger strikes.
The video for “Straight Outta Vagina” co-stars a young girl in a balaclava, implying the potential of a new generation of feminists. Thinking about the inadequate, cursory coverage that the ongoing prison strike has gotten in American media, I can’t help but hope that the next generation is inspired not just by Tolokno’s fearlessness as a performer but also her fearlessness as an activist. | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Big Deal / Federal Prism / Nice Life | November 3, 2016 | 6.6 | 37f599f7-ec8d-4851-b02c-73e01a1f2535 | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper and Playboi Carti protégé aims to set himself apart with his zoned-out sing-rap. | The Atlanta rapper and Playboi Carti protégé aims to set himself apart with his zoned-out sing-rap. | Ken Carson: Project X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ken-cardollaron-project-x/ | Project X | Have you felt the Rage this summer? Click through any major label rap A&R’s Dropbox right now and you’d probably find folder after folder of beats made with the sneering synths and hollowed-out bass thuds that defined Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and a swath of the current rap landscape. It feels like the industry has been using the sound Carti popularized as a kind of cheat code for creating a viral moment: Some of the year’s biggest rap songs, like Trippie Redd’s “Miss the Rage,” sound like WLR leftovers. Label-supported rising stars like SoFaygo, SSGKobe, and midwxst have hopped on these beats as well.
In theory, Atlanta rapper Ken Car$on has a more natural connection to this trend than his peers. The 19-year-old is Playboi Carti’s protégé, signed to his imprint Opium in 2019, and he and his go-to producers Starboy and Outtatown were already experimenting with this type of production before WLR came out. Car$on’s summer 2020 EP Teen X now reads as a testing ground for Starboy and Outtatown, who’d later bring those molten melodies to WLR songs like “Meh” and “Control.” On his full-length debut Project X, Car$on deepens his working relationship with his core producers, and aims to set himself apart with his zoned-out sing-rap.
Unlike Carti, who yelps and screams all over WLR, Car$on is comparatively chill. The way he deadpans about drugs makes him sound like your high school friend’s cooler older brother. On the electric “Rock N Roll,” he seems to just shrug about being so high that he sees a UFO. With Auto-Tune, his voice turns glowing and percussive—think Duwap Kaine if he had a whole team behind him—and it gives rote chants like the one on the second half of “Run + Ran” a little more heft. Sometimes, he’ll punch in sung lines to create bright little vignettes. On “So What,” he matches the sweet thrill of a one night stand with bars that pile up on top of each other: “She love my aesthetic, yeah, she say I’m cool/Diamonds on my ears and necklace, they wet just like a pool!”
But as the album progresses, it becomes obvious when Car$on’s cartoonish cool shrouds lazy songwriting. For whatever reason, he’s hellbent on following every fun song with a record full of cookie-cutter, rapid-fire flows and stock phrases about counting his racks or diamonds wetter than the ocean. The quirks that make him interesting don’t have room to breathe when he’s trying to emulate Carti’s chaos or Lil Uzi Vert’s velocity. The most glaring error of bad imitation and sequencing comes in the two-song run of “Shake” into “Hella,” where he uses the exact same, one-word-chorus formula over beats that sound painfully familiar.
In a generous reading, Project X aims for an entirely different tone than Whole Lotta Red; Car$on and his producers are going for something sweeter, less scorched and serrated, and they achieve it in fits and starts. Still, I can’t help but feel cynical about Car$on’s rage agenda. He grew up around rap veterans like TM88 and Southside, yet in his interviews, he throws out rote rock star answers about his inspirations—in one, he says he doesn’t like R&B and only listens to himself, and in another, he says he doesn’t listen to rap and lists off All-American Rejects and Blink-182 as favorites. In truth, Car$on at his best sounds more like a student of online rap scenes like plugg, giving the swampy vocal techniques and playful songwriting a dazzling makeover. The irony of rage, however, is that by aspiring to be different, too many rappers end up sounding the same.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Opium | August 12, 2021 | 6 | 37f5c573-369b-4a40-ad38-25c1f9b2e1ba | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
Neil Young's new album Storytone involves ten tracks recorded live in front of an orchestra. Despite the manic activity of Neil Young's 2014—which involves a tech startup, anti-oil advocacy, a book and panitings—the high concept of Storytone barely raises an eyebrow. | Neil Young's new album Storytone involves ten tracks recorded live in front of an orchestra. Despite the manic activity of Neil Young's 2014—which involves a tech startup, anti-oil advocacy, a book and panitings—the high concept of Storytone barely raises an eyebrow. | Neil Young: Storytone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19969-neil-young-storytone/ | Storytone | Even for an artist with the mercurial track record of Neil Young, this has been a pretty strange year. Since turning 68 last November, Young has become a tech startup figurehead, an enemy of Canadian conservatives and oil companies, a second-time author, and a watercolor artist. He’s done a European tour with a modified Crazy Horse, U.S. shows all by his lonesome, and recorded a no-fi covers collection with Jack White. And perhaps most notably, he’s divorcing his wife of 36 years, and has been spotted canoodling with a notable ex-mermaid.
Amid that manic activity, the high concept of Storytone barely raises an eyebrow. Ten tracks recorded live in front of a 92-piece orchestra and choir or a jazz big band, the project doesn’t fit neatly within either the acoustic or electric categories that have been the magnetic poles of Young’s career. But it also calls back to some odd moments from his discography: the orchestrated excesses of "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There’s a World" from Harvest, with a dash of 1988’s largely forgettable This Note’s for You. Once again, he’s fallen in love with the actress, and only a symphonic scale will do.
Unlike the Voice-o-Graph pops and crackles of A Letter Home, which seemed like a classic Neil joke on the heels of his fidelity-obsessed Pono pitch, Storytone spares no sonic expense, with the arrangements set to maximum lush. So maybe call it A Little Touch of Schmeil in the Night, even if the songs only sound like standards and Young is far from your typical crooner. A set of 10 songs predominantly concerned with the withering of old love and the promise of new—and, as such, haunted by his recent romantic tabloid escapades—Storytone is unabashedly melodramatic and earnest, occasionally sounding more like the passions of a 17-year-old instead of someone on the brink of their seventies.
Unfortunately, aside from placing that unorthodox warble against a velvety backdrop, Storytone plays it straight, often veering into the deep schmaltz of a Vegas revue. The arrangements, by Michael Bearden (who has worked with Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga) and Chris Walden (an arranger for Michael Bublé and "American Idol"), are exquisitely produced but hollow, gilding the songs without adding any thoughtful counterpoint. "Who’s Gonna Stand Up?", Neil’s latest eco-anthem, is given a dark, cinematic urgency, and the light countrypolitan stomp of "When I Watch You Sleeping" recalls the rustic sweep of 2005’s Prairie Wind, but more typical are the harp and chime twinkles applied without subtlety to "Tumbleweed" or the Navy Pier blooze of "Say Hello to Chicago".
Helpfully, you can assess these additions thanks to Young providing solo versions of each track on the album’s deluxe edition—sparse near-demos on guitar, piano, and ukulele that come closer to the intimate sound of his recent, rambling theatre sets. Stripped down, the dark, doubtful elements of "Plastic Flowers" or "Say Hello to Chicago" come to the fore, Young’s tenor sounding vulnerable instead of overmatched. Here, the contradiction of putting a protest song against fracking and fossil fuels right next to a song called "I Want to Drive My Car" is somewhat resolved, as the latter gets a hushed version that makes Young’s autophilia sound more like an embarrassing addiction than a passion. But the solo versions of the more PDA material in the album’s back half make something of a case for their fancier counterparts, leaving nothing to hide valentine lyrics unavoidably about Daryl Hannah (the “A Man Needs a Mermaid” joke writes itself).
Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing. More so than the goofily overwrought Harvest tracks with the London Symphony Orchestra, the flaws of Storytone throw back to Young’s restless '80s (or 2002’s Are You Passionate?), where genres were meticulously recreated but often a poor fit for his songwriting and performing strengths. For an artist who can make an orchestral roar with Old Black or twist an emotional knife on a pump organ, the extra gloss is subtraction by addition. | 2014-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | November 4, 2014 | 4.8 | 37f6c223-58e6-4f00-a265-24c67c1724b9 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Suprise release Thank Your Lucky Stars is Beach House's second full-length in as many months. Spiritually, the album feels closer to the darker mood the duo cultivated before they signed to Sub Pop. | Suprise release Thank Your Lucky Stars is Beach House's second full-length in as many months. Spiritually, the album feels closer to the darker mood the duo cultivated before they signed to Sub Pop. | Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21197-thank-your-lucky-stars/ | Thank Your Lucky Stars | Over the last decade, Beach House have been remarkably consistent: at regular intervals, they put an immaculate new record into the world, and each tends to satisfy the same need. Until now, their pace of releases has indicated a grasp of the spot their music held in listeners’ hearts; the world that Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand build on their records is a place we want to revisit, but the spaces in between records has felt essential to that magic. They are in their own way a theatrical band, and what’s more theatrical than a well-placed pause?
Which all makes the appearance of Thank Your Lucky Stars, the band’s second full-length in as many months, surprising. Depression Cherry is still very much in view, and as fans, it feels a bit like the cast to a hit show suddenly reappearing for one more encore after the house lights have switched on and we were filing out. Thank Your’s nine songs were recorded at the same time as Depression Cherry, and they do have a slightly darker edge: Legrand said that the album was more "political" in nature and that they felt the need for these songs to exist on their own, separate from the long-lens telegraphing of the typical album release cycle.
Their sound feels purposefully smaller, tamping down the reverb that made Teen Dream, Bloom, and Depression Cherry feel like they were recorded in great stone cathedrals. You can hear them experimenting more with "off" notes in their otherwise-immaculate arrangements. On "Somewhere Tonight", Legrand lets a sour note sneak into one of her organ runs, and "One Thing" opens with a heavy cloud of electric guitar that feels more tethered to snaking cables and rattling amps than usual. Spiritually, the album feels closer to the mood the duo cultivated before they signed to Sub Pop: These songs feel pneumatic, dusty, like they are pulling a blanket around themselves in a heatless attic to ward off a threatening chill.
The mood is also bleaker in spots, as if joy and comfort had vanished from the songs along with the reverb. "All Your Yeahs" is closer to the midnight sulk of Johnny Jewel and Chromatics than their usual open-air romanticism. And "Elegy to the Void", the album’s clear standout, might be the most death-obsessed Beach House have ever been: The organ processional that wells up in the song’s intro has a funereal tinge, while Legrand sings darkly of "Sons and daughters/ Bending at the altar/ Disappearing in the mirror." The song offers a series of gorgeous images—a "black clock, looming distant" and "freckle-faced young virgin"—as it surges into a slow-motion burst, Scally’s normally crystalline guitar breaking apart like a DNA strand uncoupling.
But Thank Your is still undeniably a Beach House album, a familiar mix of warm tones and chilly sentiments. With the imprint still fading on Depression, *Thank Your’*s impact is undeniably dulled, causing a strange "too much of a good thing" problem. You start noticing surface similarities that you wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise: Play the arpeggiated keyboard figure that opens this album’s "Common Girl" next to Bloom’s "On the Sea", for instance. Their music is built on echoes: even their self-titled debut felt like covers of chansons you didn’t remember. Timing isn’t everything, of course, and Thank Your Lucky Star**s, as surprising a gesture of generosity as it is, is still welcome. But Legrand and Scally, who know their way around a stage, would do well to gracefully exit left for a while and give this run of music some time to sink in. | 2015-10-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 16, 2015 | 8.1 | 37f7b01d-c2d3-457d-b706-4ad0db055837 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Drawing on funk, Afrobeat, and spiritual tradition, two beautifully crafted albums from the elusive UK group passionately consider the entirety of the Black experience in this moment. | Drawing on funk, Afrobeat, and spiritual tradition, two beautifully crafted albums from the elusive UK group passionately consider the entirety of the Black experience in this moment. | SAULT: Untitled (Black Is) / Untitled (Rise) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sault-untitled-black-is/ | Untitled (Black Is) / Untitled (Rise) | Fifty-some years ago, Nina Simone recorded a song for the children. On its face, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” offers encouragement and hope. Beneath the surface, its somber chords and heavy gait reach for something more complex, unable to ignore the darkness clouding the aspirations of the next generation. In 1969, there were plenty of reasons for a young Black person to feel broken. Within the decade, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and four little girls in Birmingham had been killed for being Black. The relentless violence communicated that no one was safe, not the exalted leaders or the purest innocents. Amid so much violence, to carry optimism for the youth was more than just an act of resistance. It was testament to the resilience of Blackness. During a live show at Morehouse College that same year, rocking an Afro, hoop earrings, and a black orchid wrapped around her wrist, Simone improvised the melody and lyrics while the band chugged along: “When you’re feeling depressed, alienated, and real low, there’s a great truth that you should know/To be young, gifted and Black, your soul’s intact, don’t you forget it!”
Untitled (Rise), the second of two beautifully crafted albums released by UK outfit SAULT this year, closes with a song for the children. Like Simone’s work, “Little Boy” holds space for light and dark. A frank warning about the “boys in blue” pivots gracefully to divine affirmations: “Heaven’s angels, shining down on us/They won’t go away, God has chosen us,” before the song ends abruptly, on an unresolved note. 2020 is not 1969, and though “Little Boy” contains more sadness than Simone’s song, it champions that same sense of resilience, one forged in a powerful sense of self and unafraid of struggle. It’s a moving finale to a pair of albums that mirror the external and internal tumult of a year marked by global protests for racial justice. Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) are protest music and much more: They are music for the sense of loss that persists when the chants begin to waver and the crowds disperse. They are simultaneously a reprieve and healthy kindling for the fire that rages on in those who don’t have the privilege of turning it off. They are combative, introspective, affirming, and heartbreaking. They are a portrait of Black pain and joy in all its complexities, and in their refusal to flatten Blackness, they are rehabilitative.
While many of this year’s protest anthems have taken cues from hip-hop—think Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” and Pop Smoke’s “Dior”—SAULT’s more obvious inspirations spring from musical styles of the 1970s, blending a rhythmic foundation of funk and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat with disco, soul, and R&B. Not much is known about the elusive group, who’ve shunned press coverage and declined to volunteer their names. But publications like Variety, the Chicago Reader, and Paste have traced them back to at least two British artists, producer Inflo (who’s worked closely with soul singer Michael Kiwanuka and rapper Little Simz) and R&B singer Cleo Sol, with additional credits listed for Chicago rapper Kid Sister and one Kadeem Clarke. In 2019, the group similarly released two albums, 5 and 7, forays into minimal funk with a political edge that hinted at the work to follow.
Untitled (Black Is) arrived, fittingly, on Juneteenth, just 25 days after the killing of George Floyd. If the timing wasn’t clear enough, the album’s sharp refrains, spoken-word interludes, and deliberate use of repetition make its intentions clear. Echoing the best of Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Black Is is shaped by gorgeous melodies and unequivocal messaging. The haunting shouts of children in “Stop Dem” ring long after the rest of the song has fallen away, a forceful reminder that selective listening is not an option. This call to action is repurposed throughout the album’s first half in several related yet distinct styles along the continuum of Black music, mimicking the chameleonic flair of veteran session musicians. Prominent drum kits and bass guitar exude the warmth and fullness of a live band as the group cycles through the West African bounce of “Don’t Shoot Guns Down” and the soulful whimpers of “Why We Cry Why We Die.” Black Is draws heavily from Black religious traditions, from the spiritual quality of the stunning “Hard Life” to the synthy gospel of “Eternal Life,” which feels like beaming straight up to heaven. On the gentle and contemplative “Sorry Ain’t Enough,” the group turns inwards, confronting the challenges that can arise within a movement: “Can you forgive your people?/They’re just hurting inside/If you look in the mirror/You will see it’s just pride.”
As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus. “Bow,” featuring Michael Kiwanuka, brings a mid-album injection of vim via Afrobeat-inspired rhythms and soukous guitar licks as it advocates insistently for pan-Africanism and international solidarity. The lo-fi intimacy of “Black,” the closest the album gets to hip-hop, succeeds in finding a perfectly imperfect loop around its titular thesis statement. The swinging oohs of “Miracles” introduce the album’s soft landing, marking a clear distinction from the urgent militancy of the opening. Like a collective exhale, the record’s final moments are loving and calming. At 20 songs, Black Is is ill-suited for short attention spans but therein lies its strength: It passionately considers the entirety of the Black experience in this moment.
Released 13 weeks after Untitled (Black Is), Untitled (Rise) follows a similar structural course with greater production value and attention to detail. Shiny strings undergird a mission statement that doesn’t sacrifice the bite of Black Is but situates itself more firmly in hope. Rise devotes most of its time to dance-driven grooves that flow freely between disco, carnival-esque drum breaks, and polyrhythmic Afrobeat, embracing the motivating power of finding joy in the face of pain. This joy is not escapist; it’s fuel for the ultimate goal of liberation. The uplifting drum break of “Strong,” coupled with the twinkling electric piano of “Fearless,” complement rather than minimize the clarion call to keep fighting for justice. “Street Fighter” presents the directive more bluntly (“We gon’ fight it whether you like it/Keep playing the music loud”), openly challenging the violent history of backlash against Black music. On Rise, hope is often imagined via religious imagery. With its angelic chorus, album standout “Free” weighs the shortcomings of a close relationship against the love of God, while the bright optimism of “Son Shine” uplifts the divine as a protective force.
Rise’s “You Know It Ain’t” expands the spoken-word interludes of Black Is into a full song. While these moments can feel heavy-handed at other times, here the humor is welcome and specific: “I see you over by the water cooler on your break talking ’bout, ‘Tanisha, your mental health is super important to me’/But you know it ain’t!” Both albums’ energy shifts considerably towards the end, but where Black Is aims for comfort, Rise spills over with grief, fear, and uncertainty. The melancholy chords and frank lyrics of “Scary Times” offer the clearest distillation of this tension, and the heart-wrenching instrumental “The Black & Gold” sounds like the sun setting on a life. Their heaviness feels like an acknowledgment of the loss that shadows Black people’s desire for better, a subtle reminder to say their names and never forget them. Like the bittersweet optimism of Nina Simone’s song for the children, SAULT’s work embraces dualities—light and dark, happy and sad, life and death—transforming them from opposing forces into sources of strength.
In an op-ed for NPR this year, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard lamented the neutralization of Marvin Gaye’s soulful rebuke of Black death, “What’s Going On.” “It hit me then just how many people listen to the groove and the melody of this song, without really hearing the words,” Blanchard said. “And that made me realize that many well-meaning people have heard only the melody of our plight, without knowing what the song means for us.” SAULT’s albums reinvigorate the musical language of Black protest with a message no less urgent—and a delivery no less commanding—than it was half a century ago. Their whole-hearted commitment to making sound inextricable from meaning reflects the demands of a moment when abolition is gaining more traction with young activists than reform. The fight for Black lives deserves art that mirrors the depth of the crisis and the spirit of the movement. SAULT’s work rises superbly to the task.
Buy: Untitled (Black Is) - Rough Trade / Untitled (Rise) - Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | December 24, 2020 | 8.2 | 38000a0c-1e62-41a2-871e-74badb30b6f9 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
The East London rapper/singer is mostly successful in creating a portrait of late nights out by using the sounds he grew up with as the backdrop for his free-wheeling ruminations. | The East London rapper/singer is mostly successful in creating a portrait of late nights out by using the sounds he grew up with as the backdrop for his free-wheeling ruminations. | LYAM: N_O CALLER ID | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyam-n-o-caller-id/ | N_O CALLER ID | The rapper/singer LYAM, born Liam Harris-Williams, got his start through the ad hoc East London crew TTY, an elusive collective of artists who gained a profile for their nebulous rap-R&B music and notorious rooftop parties. Young Turks eventually signed the group, and they holed up in one of the label’s studios to write and record an EP. While they worked on this record, they simultaneously asked for Miharashi jackets and a monogrammed Prada bag in their contract (as one does) and threw parties in the studio with guest DJs Sampha and RZA (also as one does). The resulting Cry, But Go, released last year, came laced with LYAM’s glowering rhymes over sparse, freeform beats drawing on grime and electronic music. The EP acts as a prelude to the styles LYAM adopts across his solo debut, N_O CALLER ID, on which he crafts a patchwork of grime, Motown soul, and other sounds that he grew up around to match his free-wheeling rhymes on ambitions and anxieties.
The album is suffused with an after-hours vibe—drinks, raves, and speeding cars populate his sleek vision of London. Different voices flit in and out: clips of conversation shuffle between backbeats and guest verses heighten the momentum. Some tracks from the Cry, But Go sessions were used for the album, like on the laid-back “Frith’s Place,” where seesawing synths, a jittery beat, and vocals from R&B singer Lauren Aude form an introspective backdrop for LYAM to reflect on a night out marked by jealousy. Clutching a bottle of Hennessy “like a hand grenade,” his mind wanders to his own dark headspace: “I’m blind with open eyes nowadays,” he raps venomously. “Every time I close ’em see my own demise.”
Trying to keep up with LYAM as he unspools his overactive mind over hazy beats offers its own potent buzz. On moody standout “Misery,” New York producer Sporting Life loops Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” into a ghostly, menacing setting for LYAM’s rapid-fire delivery: “Lemme go, lemme be, lemme breathe,” he gasps, words collapsing together, “Look in the mirror and I can’t see me.” When he dials into party-minded decadence, he maintains the madcap energy: The boastful “Apollo” rides a glitchy backbeat cut with sharp vocal samples as LYAM convincingly describes how he’ll steal your girl, while “Origami” has brash London rapper Shygirl delivering one of her best coolly shrugged-off verses to match LYAM’s more languorous flow.
The airier R&B songs on N_O CALLER ID don’t land with the same impact. He leans into meandering melodies on “Willing 2,” which floats on distorted, glassy synths and echoing background vocals. LYAM pinpoints evocative details—losing his license to thrill a paramour, again questioning how much he lives in his own head—but the song barely shifts from its narcotized backdrop and cyclical chorus, leading to stasis instead of intrigue. “AWAI,” the clearest pop song on the album, relies on a similar crutch as LYAM treads water while trying on an Auto-Tuned, Drake-ian voice. Yet the rapper seems comfortable in his own lane, and largely pulls it off across N_O CALLER ID. He soundtracks the late-night mental state after a night out when all the highs and lows blur together into one irresistible image.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | VLF | July 27, 2020 | 6.8 | 3800b80c-ef0b-45fb-b5ad-09a33ba4d6fe | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The producer Sote makes mind-melting electronic music at the center of a vital scene in Tehran. On his latest record, he applies his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments. | The producer Sote makes mind-melting electronic music at the center of a vital scene in Tehran. On his latest record, he applies his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments. | Sote: Sacred Horror in Design | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sote-sacred-horror-in-design/ | Sacred Horror in Design | Ata Ebtekar’s biography complicates the narratives the West likes to tell itself about ideas of freedom, progress, and the relationships between center and margins, modernity and tradition. Born in Hamburg but raised in Iran, Ebtekar moved with his parents back to Germany when he was 11, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war; at 17, he moved to the Bay Area, where he studied audio engineering, taught courses in digital audio, and, under the alias Sote, recorded mind-melting electronic music for labels like Warp. Eventually, however, he chose Iran. Four years ago, at 41, he moved with his own family back to Tehran. There, he teaches computer music and sound design and is at the center of a small but vital scene of artists making bold, original electronic music.
Their success is a testament to their resourcefulness. The hurdles to creating experimental music in Iran are real, from the difficulty in securing venues to the scant availability of gear or recordings. (In a recent interview, Ebtekar noted that he can’t even buy music from iTunes: If he were to log in to an American bank account from Iran, U.S. authorities could freeze his assets here.) At the same time, this community’s dedication to avant-garde music with no overt social message challenges many Western assumptions about “political” expression in a so-called closed society. They get by as best they can, basically—not unlike their peers in the West, caught between capital and their own less-than-ideal political situation.
Ebtekar’s music has always been intense. His Electric Deaf 12”, from 2002, remains one of the heaviest records in Warp’s catalog: Pummeling breakcore run through scabrous distortion, it suggests Aphex Twin or Squarepusher being blasted with an anti-matter ray. Over the years, however, he has focused his approach less upon heaviness than slipperiness, emphasizing microtonal frequencies, electro-acoustic techniques, and the kinds of granular textures and head-spinning polyrhythms employed by Autechre. His 2014 album Architectonic, for Rabih Beaini’s Morphine label, is an answer to the question, “What would techno sound like without conventional percussive sounds?” Its shuddering, clanging pulses suggest magnetic fields colliding, and freezing rain skittering across windshields.
But Ebtekar’s far-out futurism is balanced by an equal interest in the past. A significant proportion of his catalog—particularly 2006’s Dastgaah, 2007’s Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today (1966-2006), and 2009’s Ornamentalism—has been dedicated to fusing electronic processes with traditional Persian music. He takes up those ideas with renewed vigor on Sacred Horror in Design, applying his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments like the santour, a kind of hammered dulcimer, and the setar, a long-necked, four-stringed lute.
It is an immediately appealing blend. The album opens with “Flux of Sorrow,” in which plucked and struck strings dance within vast fields of reverb. As the music progresses, it seems to toggle between the “real,” physical world of force and resistance and a funhouse-mirror digital universe where hard edges and straight lines melt into pliable sheets of sound. “Boghze Esfahan” begins with quiet acoustic figures but quickly turns deeply strange, as string sounds morph into buzzing bell tones, icy clinks, and evil wheezing. In “Plural,” galloping setar is fed into a whirling vortex of rising pitches, suggesting a cassette player about to go supernova. Essentially a trio record with Arash Bolouri (santour) and Behrouz Pashaei (setar), the album exists in a strange and provocative limbo in which Ebtekar’s collaborators’ spare melodic riffs and dazzling instrumental runs wear an eerie electronic halo, and played rhythms spark intricate algorithmic patterns.
There are risks inherent in the project, in no small part because the sounds at the record’s core come coded with such specific sets of assumptions—for Iranian listeners, they’re overwhelmingly traditional, while Westerners will find them exotic by default. Additionally, Ebtekar has worked within traditional Persian scale systems, which lends the music a modal feel that’s a world away from Western music. But what makes the record so successful is how thoroughly Ebtekar has managed to integrate the two sound worlds. Using a fluid, almost narrative sense of arrangement along with his heavily abstracted sound design, he fashions a third way between his influences’ two opposing poles. In a recent interview, Ebtekar explained his concept of what he calls “The Other Sound” as an attempt to “reshape and deconstruct familiar concepts into untried forms to challenge the system.” Sacred Horror in Design does that: Simultaneously honoring traditional musical forms and exploring the far edge of sonic expression, he brings his “Other Sound” flickering to life in a virtual space beyond borders. | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Opal Tapes | August 5, 2017 | 7.8 | 380dff20-e47a-4912-9040-d3ae59996d2f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his fourth studio album, the Louisiana rapper chills out, finds some inner peace, and sticks to the middle of the road. | On his fourth studio album, the Louisiana rapper chills out, finds some inner peace, and sticks to the middle of the road. | Kevin Gates: The Ceremony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-gates-the-ceremony/ | The Ceremony | Picture it: Kevin Gates cuddles a miniature bulldog before strolling past an exotic car collection and stepping into an elevator. Two floors up, the doors open to a Beyoncé concert, and Gates has a ticket. As Adderall meets alcohol, the Baton Rouge rapper leans into the giddy delirium, tearing off his shirt and singing with the crowd, lyrics be damned. The vivid celebration scene Gates conjures on “Yonce Freestyle,” a single from his new album The Ceremony, hovers as high as his most infamous performance photo. So why does the record sound so firmly rooted to the ground?
The different failures to launch across these 17 songs are, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an even keel. Anguish has been a key force stringing together Gates’ weathered bleeding-heart blend of Dirty South beats and unflinching “up-North” lyrics. But grizzled street raps aren’t standard on The Ceremony. Before the lyre-textured album opener unfurls, Gates ad-libs “Real medicine music.” The theme here is indeed healing: through reflection, redemption, and plenty of makeup sex. Phone calls from old off-the-porch contacts ring in his ears as a symphony of birdsong (“Birds Calling”). Sometimes, things get a little hokey. On the cut actually titled “Healing,” Gates is proudly “doing yoga and attracting my twin flame through meditation.” Elsewhere, he cleanses his Mercedes Benz with sage (“God Slippers”).
Well-documented goofiness aside, Gates never aspired to be a meme rapper, and he’s spoken about developing a signature poring over Tupac, Nas, and JAY-Z. Fellow Louisiana gentleman Lil Wayne eventually plucked Gates from a prolific mixtape run to be a bubble player on Wayne’s YMCMB roster, but Gates never popped. After he cultivated an underground following on his label Bread Winners’ Association, Atlantic caught up. Gates had already been mining Taylor Swift melodies for needle drops. His mainstream crossover felt destined, despite the turbulence of his early career.
But over a decade since inking a big-time deal that almost immediately lost momentum due to a devastatingly timed prison sentence, which he addresses on “Letter 2 My Fans,” Gates sounds weary of radio rap. He’s a hall-of-famer as far as major-label debuts go—2016’s Islah exemplifies the spoils of corporatization with minimal compromise in every belted hook. But where a more polished, pop-minded sound was jet fuel for Gates there, it’s quicksand on The Ceremony. The writing is all about moving forward, but the sonics keep Gates frozen in time, fused to an outdated Hot 100 sound that’s incongruous with his matured, quieter stylings.
While Gates is doing sun salutations on the beach, the veteran producers crowding The Ceremony seem content to splash around in the shallows. There’s potential in a more Zen effect for Gates— take the line, “Put her arms over her head and move that ass without no hands” on “Broken Men,” which he trills in a tone so theatrically somber it’s camp. But no one in the studio was ready to capitalize, and Gates’ monkish sermons fall flat atop one too many servings of limp “type-beat” trap. His pen isn’t dry, but his contacts list might be—someone should facilitate an intro with DJ Haram. Longtime collaborator DJ Chose demonstrates the strongest sense of Gates’ style as they dig into trauma on the ballad “Heal You.”
Gates hasn’t lost the dextrous lyricism that carried pre-Atlantic gems like The Luca Brasi Story’s near-acapella “IHOP.” The crashing piano chords of the don’t-give-up diatribe “Do It Again” clearly rustle the enforcer within, and the spare syncopation of “It Won’t Happen” pushes Gates to get gymnastic with his rhyme schemes. When he catches the beat in his upper register, you can almost hear rust flaking off the gears.
He still loves the ladies too, and as soon as he gets to it with a down-low lover via a reverently recycled T-Pain hook on early highlight “Lil Yea,” Gates’ taste for cooed held notes and boy-band arcs shines. Obviously, his shirt comes off. But as with “Yonce Freestyle”—which squanders a Sexyy Red feature that should’ve been a slam dunk—the jubilation is hollow, like the “woo-hoo!” you let out to save face after your friends catch you checking your email at the club.
The peace Gates references throughout The Ceremony is hard-won, but it's also such that you’re not inclined to disturb it. There’s a palpable urge to slip out of the room when he lets you in on a tender moment with his partner, not hang around for another song. Gates hasn’t exactly been lost in the muck of the corporate rap game, but as he focuses on other pursuits, the raw mud he fashioned into some of his greatest music is hardening into something far less ductile. | 2024-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | February 2, 2024 | 6.7 | 38105ac5-1ac1-4670-9f7b-2d1b76c08ebc | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
It's no secret: Les Savy Fav like to fuck shit up. Baldly transgressing the most basic assumptions about rock ... | It's no secret: Les Savy Fav like to fuck shit up. Baldly transgressing the most basic assumptions about rock ... | Les Savy Fav: Inches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4752-inches/ | Inches | It's no secret: Les Savy Fav like to fuck shit up. Baldly transgressing the most basic assumptions about rock singers, the band's frontman is a pudgy, bearded, wild-eyed freak whose unpredictable stage show tends to scare off men and women alike. Their studio output varies from barked, discordant indie anthems to synth-heavy art-punk. And their new singles record, Inches, reverses all the usual rules that compilations of its ilk abide by.
For most rock bands, a singles compilation is an afterthought-- an offhanded concession to fans who may have missed out on the limited pressings. For Les Savy Fav, a singles compilation was a forethought, conceived before the band had even recorded a song for it. Now, seven years after its conception, the career-spanning project finally comes to fruition, collecting the A- and B-sides of nine seven-inches, all originally released by different labels.
For those who've been keeping up with these singles, the excellence of Inches is a foregone conclusion. While many contemporary indie bands reserve their singles for the release of marginal or subpar material, Les Savy Fav's tend to offer songs that are not only better than the band's album cuts but, despite the disparate conditions of their production, more consistent as well. For a band so prone to brilliant and exhausting outbursts, it's not surprising that their defining album would come in this form.
And without a doubt, this is Les Savy Fav's defining album. The high points on Inches are not only the finest songs the group has ever recorded, but are also the most indicative of their strengths as a band. "Our Coastal Hymn", released in live form as a hidden track on The Cat and the Cobra, is possibly the catchiest song in their entire repertoire-- hook after blistering hook, all energized by the band's trademark frenetic grandiosity. Never overpowered by its angularity, "Our Coastal Hymn" is less an anthemic punk song than it is a pointy anthem, unconventionally catchy and tremendously forceful.
Tracing the band's chronology backwards, Inches shows Les Savy Fav continually reshaping and revitalizing their sound with new textures, and expanding their palette of both sounds and approaches to recording. The album's newest track, "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin", is a sparse and direct dance-punk epic, with Harrison Haynes' terse, robotic drumming perfectly anchoring frontman Tim Harrington's pained screams. Les Savy Fav's most recent LP, Go Forth largely failed to sustain itself, as the band's energy was substantially defused by Phil Ek's production, but Inches' diverse pacing allows even the Ek-produced "Fading Vibes," on which the band revisits the more straightforward guitar-rock sound of their first album, to stand out as one of the best and most unique recent Les Savy Fav tracks.
Of all the remarkable tracks on Inches, "Yawn Yawn Yawn" remains my personal favorite. Here, Seth Jabour's endlessly inventive guitar playing is in top form, masterfully and subtly building from a clean, rhythmic figure in the verse to a soaring, distorted chorus. Lyrically, the song is further proof that Harrington has more in common with Daniel Bejar and John Darnielle than he does with his harder-rocking contemporaries. Like many of Les Savy Fav's songs, "Yawn Yawn Yawn" explores themes such as sex, partying, decadence and disaster. And, as usual, Harrington relishes his words like a storyteller, delivering them with both conviction and humor.
The first pressing of Inches comes with a bonus DVD that further solidifies its status as Les Savy Fav's most essential and representative release. Videos of three songs from a 2003 performance at Brooklyn's Northsix provides a welcome glimpse of the awe-inspiring Les Savy Fav live experience. Although Harrington's theatrics are usually the most frequently discussed aspect of Les Savy Fav's live show, the distance provided by the footage puts the emphasis largely on the virtuosity and spontaneity of the band's individual players. And the video of "Who Rocks the Body" is just fucking hilarious, as Harrington asks a stuffed rabbit, "Who rocks the party that rocks the bunny?"
Unfortunately, Harrington's notorious live antics have resulted in many people writing off Les Savy Fav as a joke or a novelty. And without a doubt, the band's previous recorded output has largely failed to demonstrate the musical prowess spoken of by their fans. But Les Savy Fav have always demonstrated a uniquely off-kilter sense of humor, and it seems strangely fitting that the very album their fans have been waiting for has, in fact, been underway since the band formed. With Inches, Les Savy Fav brings together a full seven years of solid musicianship, deviously catchy songwriting, and explosive punk rock energy, discarding all the gratuitous dissonance and convoluted song structures that often plague "post-punk." Finally, this is Les Savy Fav. | 2004-04-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-04-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | April 22, 2004 | 9.1 | 3812b1df-d91a-4348-ab41-6c58780df6dc | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
In the early and mid 1990s, the British trio Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of the era. The Five EPs is a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory. | In the early and mid 1990s, the British trio Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of the era. The Five EPs is a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory. | Disco Inferno: The 5 EPs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15814-the-5-eps/ | The 5 EPs | People talk a lot about how it's easier to be an "experimental" band in the 21st-century. Like most rhetoric about the way the web changed music, that's not quite so true for everyone all the time. But the story of British avant-rock band Disco Inferno certainly proves how hard it could be to try something new in the days before the internet allowed you to get your music out to a worldwide audience without the cost, financial and otherwise, of widespread touring, album production, and distribution-- all that supposedly 20th-century baggage.
Between roughly 1991 and 1996, Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of an era when rock bands were constantly trying to one-up each other in pushing the music into the future. Yet it wasn't until the 21st century that DI finally found the devoted audience they deserved. In a very real way, we can thank message-board word-of-mouth, blog bootlegging, and the work of a few evangelical fans for The Five EPs, a long-rumored legal collection of the cream of DI's output.
It seems hard to argue now, given how widely loved they are, that DI's music is too out-there, too much to process, too difficult to reach a large listenership. Perhaps the grind-- press indifference, label mismanagement, trying to build a fanbase one low-paying and sparsely attended gig at a time-- proved to be too much. Whatever the reason for DI's dissolving, their 21st-century rescue from obscurity is cause for celebration, and so is The Five EPs, a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory.
So what was so experimental, so forward-thinking about DI? Well, they were a rock band who used digital samplers, inspired by the hip-hop and rave wizards making jigsaw-puzzle pop with Akais and bottom-shelf PCs at the turn of the 90s. "Rock plus samples" might have been a novel hook at the time, but not quite unheard of. (Certain industrial acts beat DI to the punch there, for one thing.) And it probably seems so common as to be unremarkable now, when almost every band packs a laptop when going on tour. What made DI so exciting is what they did with those samplers, which sounds as singular now as it did then.
Singular, but not wholly alien. True, The Five EPs can occasionally get pretty abstract. Easily the album's most difficult but oddly inspired nine minutes, "From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea" takes samples of breaking glass and fashions them into something halfway between a Steve Reich-like percussion piece and someone "improvising" with a window and a hammer. But for the most part, these 15 tracks aren't "soundscapes." DI were still very much a songwriter's band, even after switching allegiance from power chords to 1s and 0s.
The rhythm section of Rob Whatley and Paul Wilmott, the band's perpetually underrated foundational element, could still lay down a driving groove learned from years of listening to Joy Division records. Frontman Ian Crause could unfurl sparkling melodies, gleaned from masters like Vini Reilly, that actually seemed to issue from a guitar you could pick up at your local music shop. And Crause's lyrics (more about these in a bit) were among the most impassioned but clear-eyed of the 90s. But after accelerating their standard-issue, garage-band gear with the latest in musical tech, DI replaced riffs with children's jumprope chants or old-time radio show chatter or trilling birdsong, and drums with fireworks popping in mid-air or splashing water or the crunch of hard-packed snow.
Sometimes DI's use of samples feels like thrilling punctuation to what might otherwise be sparkling indie pop or moody post-punk songs, using natural sounds or the noise of urban life the way other bands might throw in a James Brown drum fill or a quote from an old movie. But more often they stripped away everything but a suggestive bass pulse or ripple of guitar. Then they built whole tracks, layer by layer, from those sampled sounds, textures, and noises that seemed like they couldn't be coming from a guitar, bass, or drums. Yet they were. That tension between tradition and future shock means there are moments here that may remind you of something you've heard before. But there are many, many more when you'll wonder why more bands didn't follow DI's lead and make "guitar" music that could actually, truly sound like gale-force winds, or a multi-car crash, or a trip to the dark side of the moon.
At their best, DI rendered a familiar template-- the kind of rock songs once released by Factory Records or Rough Trade-- once again unpredictable and vital. It's probably no accident that they drew the attention of Rough Trade itself toward the end of their career, as torchbearers for the label's visionary spirit. They didn't trash the idea of rock songs in favor of the new genres blooming all around them at the time. They kept rock songs alive by proving you could still write them even after you stripped away just about every familiar element.
That rebuilt-from-unfamiliar-bits approach had the potential to leave accessibility far behind, but DI's music could also have a playfulness about the possibility of alienating people. "D.I. Go Pop", from the third of the EPs, plays like a tape of a three-chord punk pisstake that's being sped up and slowed down by a band that's sick to death of punk rock, until the whole track becomes a see-sawing smear of digital distortion. Unlike the 1994 album of the same name, which is undeniably DI's most willfully chaotic and deeply sad record, "D.I. Goes Pop" has some of the same cheek of the Beta Band, who crafted a much smoother rock-meets-DJ-cut-up aesthetic a few years later, with the same pull between making you laugh and tweaking your nose.
They also had a knack for couching discomforting sentiments in even their most boisterous and agreeable tunes. "It's a Kid's World", which infamously swipes the drums from Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", imagines what the Children's Television Workshop or the producers of Pee-wee's Playhouse might have done with the materials of glam rock. That booming big beat gets swarmed by ray-gun noises and slidewhistle silliness until it builds a whimsical wall of noise, like a kiddie MBV. Yet it opens with some of the most withering lines in Crause's none-too-sunny catalog: "Mediocrity surrounds you/ People pressing down around you/ There's nowhere else to go but down and out." Things don't get much lighter from there on out, and I don't just mean in this particular ditty.
It's almost too easy to discuss DI as if they were some sort of left-field DJ project. Everyone focuses on the mind-boggling musical invention, and they're not necessarily wrong to do so. But one of the most exciting things about DI's music is the way all-too-human feeling is woven into the futuristic collage through Crause's lyrics. Crause again and again takes a long, hard, unblinking look at his country, his time, but most of all himself, and alternating currents of disillusionment and hope, uncertainty, and possibility run through The Five EPs.
The Five EPs describes a world where an oasis of happiness is a rare thing, the best lack all conviction, experimental indie bands are thwarted by indifferent landlords, the free market's left the working poor up shit creek, people who hope to change things have no idea where to start, and immigrants get beaten on the streets while everyone else politely averts their eyes. "Summer's Last Sound" takes the comforting vocabulary of new-age music-- rushing water, birdsong-- and darkens it with mentions of "mass graves" and "broken windows" and "foreigners [getting] hushed-up trials," all while the bulk of Englanders go on about their late-summer fun, oblivious. It's as beautiful and immersive as anything to come out of shoegaze or the ambient house that was being made at the same time, but it also suggests that chilling out is a luxury for those who are lucky enough to be able to avoid the headlines.
I don't want to give the impression that this is a wholly bleak record, though a lot of it can be emotionally hard-going. It's not as if a pervasive unease and sorrow hangs over The Five EPs. There are moments of guarded-if-not-great joy, too. If DI's sound suggests three men endlessly thrilled by the way digital technology could extend and reshape rock, emotionally as much as sonically, then that sense of possibility has to leak into the lyrics and the mood occasionally. "There's so much pessimism in the world it's frightening," Crause sing-songs on "The Atheist's Burden", one of several songs that suggests the past is a country suffocated by mistakes but the future might still have a place for realists, if not cynics.
If the band was wholly without hope, why would they have bothered to push themselves so hard on these records? If disillusionment finally won out, the band is ultimately entitled to its personal reasons for packing it in. Because at least they gave us the records, and The Five EPs, along with DI's last two albums, remain as light and dense, as dizzying and inspiring, as when they were recorded. And hopefully now they'll be heard by many more than they were at the time. | 2011-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | One Little Indian | September 20, 2011 | 9.4 | 381449f9-0ad8-4712-a44a-2911a375fb42 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Norwegian producer continues to refine his highly appealing blend of dub, cosmic disco, house, and Balearic sounds. | The Norwegian producer continues to refine his highly appealing blend of dub, cosmic disco, house, and Balearic sounds. | Bjørn Torske: Kokning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14885-kokning/ | Kokning | Kokning, the title of Bjørn Torske's fourth full-length LP, is a Nordic word that sounds ineffably lewd to American ears. It has no English equivalent, unless there's an obscure English word that means "putting potatoes on to boil, going fishing, and then preparing the fish with the potatoes." The uniquely Scandinavian concept suits the uniquely Scandinavian music. Torske's blend of playful austerity and wistful wonderment can also be found in his Smalltown Supersound compatriots, from diskJokke to Lindstrøm to Kim Hiorthøy. The title also evokes the relaxed, patiently simmering quality of the album, which boils down Torske's long-running fixations upon dub, cosmic disco, house, and Balearic sounds into a highly refined personal style. Sophisticatedly minimal, Kokning improves upon 2007's excellent Feil Knapp by retaining yet streamlining Torske's idiosyncrasies.
To create the album, Torske recorded instrumental parts in various places and then edited them together with rhythm tracks. His sensitivity as a producer makes the album, for all the styles it lightly flits through, an organic room-tone odyssey at heart: alive with inventive sounds and warm with feeling. It opens with three wonderful, ultra-mellow cuts that slide you into Torske's sound-world with zero friction. On the title track, liquidly hypnotic phrases for clean electric guitar weave through shining ambiance, with just a couple of alternating plucks coolly marking time. "Bryggesjau" is a clip-clopping set piece for acid-bright guitar riffs in taut counterpoint, and "Gullfjellet" features rich nylon strings and watery synths, rooted by the calm thump of a kick drum. Besides their appealing sound palettes, the great thing about these tracks is how deliberately they take on definition. By the time the dancier middle run of songs come around, you're deeply immersed.
This middle run is marked by lots of intricate hand percussion, funk progressions, and proggy keyboard swirls, though it retains the light [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| touch and hint of critical distance that characterize the opening tracks. "Slitte Sko" is the sort of casual, chiming beat workout that Arthur Russell liked to cook up, and "Bergensere" calls Prins Thomas to mind with its arch yet passionate funk. As the album progresses, Torske gets more unleashed, slathering "Nitten Nitti" with a goofy-fun vocal synth arpeggio and framing stylized dub reggae with monster-party samples on "Versjon Wolfenstein". After the more focused songs preceding it, the 12-minute closing epic "Furu" is a bit long-winded for my tastes, but at least it feels earned. It also makes me feel Torske is naturally inclined to stretching out-- even his short pieces here have a sense of endless range-- which makes his restraint elsewhere all the more admirable. His shorter tracks have a diorama-like sense of compact but vivid detail, and the merest gestures make big impacts. Unflashy and muted, Torske gets less props than some of his peers. With any justice, Kokning will correct this slight. | 2010-12-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-12-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | December 7, 2010 | 8 | 381ecfba-6a74-4cf9-acdc-506819677317 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Portishead's Geoff Barrow assembles a 40-plus-person cast ranging from hip-hop vets to obscure MCs for an indie rap recording that's engaging in spite of its heavily fractured structure. | Portishead's Geoff Barrow assembles a 40-plus-person cast ranging from hip-hop vets to obscure MCs for an indie rap recording that's engaging in spite of its heavily fractured structure. | Quakers: Quakers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16464-quakers-st/ | Quakers | Quakers features 41 tracks in 69 1/2 minutes. Now there's a fair amount of background detail to roll out when it comes to the latest Stones Throw release-- an indie rap committee project assembled by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, abetted by co-producers 7-Stu-7 and Katalyst, and given over to everyone from abstract-rap vets to obscure, googleproofed MySpace MCs. But above everything else, those numbers still jump out more than anything. Again: 41 tracks, 69 1/2 minutes. Oh, yeah-- and 30-plus different names listed after the "ft."s. That's a whole lot of one-verse wonders, interstitial skits, hidden segues, thematic 180s, abrupt mood swings, and beat-the-clock lyrical scrambling. How do you keep an over-the-top battle royale like this from falling apart completely? The glib answer would be to crack wise about most tracks ending before any flaws show up to tear them apart, but that'd be shortchanging an album that's actually got some engaging weight behind it.
As the most recognizable name, it might be tempting to see Barrow as the creative driving force behind this record, and if heads remember how much "Elysium" sounded like the best beat the RZA never made, they might adjust their expectations accordingly. But the three-man production team doesn't shine the spotlight on any particular member, so it's best to think of the beat-crafting braintrust of Quakers as some sort of hivemind hydra, siphoning the weirder corners of underground hip-hop source material into an unpredictably heavy-hitting body of work. Everything from Radiohead-via-marching-band ("Fitta Happier") to Rachmaninoff-via-soul ("Oh Goodness") gets incorporated into a repertoire that occasionally skews toward the smart-ass eclectic. (The over-the-top Moog prog of "Russia With Love" and the Moroderized synthpop grandeur of "Dark City Lights" also make for attention-getting diversions.) And if that down-for-whatever approach keeps things from feeling entirely cohesive, the team does find paydirt when they approach a common denominator-- the musty-basement vibe of Nixon-era soundtracks and soul-jazz curios turned feral, another valiant entry in the race to find out just how much contemporary pull you can get from a vintage-minded production arsenal.
There's some real inspired filthiness here, too. The Drummers of Burundi around which Joni Mitchell built "The Jungle Line" get refitted to give Phat Kat and Guilty Simpson something to barrel through, and it's one of those drum breaks that has a real supple liquidity even as it knocks, like a torrent of running water that leaves bruises. (The tendon-severing clavinet is a bonus.) The more acidic side of early 1970s R&B is done justice by the slinky fuzz guitar on Dead Prez feature "Soul Power", the elephant-bell jumpsuit strut of "Smoke" covers the rubber-band funk of the decade's second half, and the all-exclamation-point Memphis horns of "What Chew Want" would be all sorts of 1995 even without the ODB singalong. Hell, even the interstitials bump. A skeptic could question why tracks like the seething boom-clap Drive-gone-g-funk "The Lo" or the two-ton analog-synth lurch of "Kreem" were left as segues, rather than getting fleshed out into full-length beats that would make even the most sluggishly zoned-out MC sound diabolical. But listening to the album in sequence, as attention-dividing as it might be, at least makes these sub-minute interludes feel integral.
It would've been easy for a high-profile all-star project like this to just call up a handful of already-established MCs, throw in one unexpected up-and-comer for tastemaker cred, and take that to the bank. But it wouldn't have the bewildering but endearing clusterfuck personality that makes it engagingly weird. A few of Stones Throw's usual suspects show up with their A-game-- that "National Anthem"-via-"Tusk" beat on "Fitter Happier" is absolutely annihilated by Guilty Simpson in peak shit-talk mode, M.E.D. holds his own on the subsequent verse, and Aloe Blacc's turn on "Sign Language" is the coolly self-assured reminder we need that the man who gave us the retro-soul Good Things can rap his ass off when he feels like it. Organized Konfusion's Prince Po ("Rock My Soul"), the Pharcyde's Booty Brown ("TV Dreaming"), and the aforementioned dead prez round out a reliable set of verses that feel like welcome extensions of the retrofitted KRS and Audio Two drops scattered throughout the record-- reverent toward veterans, but still willing to integrate them into a project with a lot of new blood.
All those unknown (or at least under-known) quantities can take some getting used to, however. Not that they're not ready for prime time or anything-- it's just that some of them either have difficulties establishing a unique spark with the limited time they're given, or inversely make such an odd impression that they feel like weird outliers. As much as the whole lyrical-lyricist battler style has struggled with cliché, there's nothing flagrantly corny dropped by the likes of Synato Watts ("Big Cat"), Quite Nyce ("Jobless"), or Buff 1 ("Sidewinder") – just some solid-enough verbiage that gets lost in the shuffle amidst a cast of dozens. And the stuff that jumps out does so to an almost disruptive extent. Emilio Rojas's Oscar Grant-invoking anti-police-brutality verse on "Belly of the Beast" takes up maybe 80 seconds, but its righteous-fury venom is enough to erase any impression that the previous few tracks might have made. "What Chew Want" features a Brooklynite named Tone Tank whose casual ethnic jokes and self-aware faux-stoopidity feel like he's aiming for white-dude Das Racist, while recent Stones Throw signee Dave Dub carries over that ODB energy and grafts it with Biz Markie and Aesop Rock on the woozy "My Mantra". Katalyst collaborator Coin Locker Kid shows up on three different tracks, and the impression the Fayetteville MC makes-- bundle-of-nerves crazy in 7/8 over "Russia With Love", arrogant velvet on "The Beginning", Mos Def-as-Bobcat Goldthwait on "Get Live"-- shows mere hints of what feels like a limitless reserve of strangeness.
Quakers is kind of a mess, and odds are that a not-insignificant number of people are going to find the beats more consistently entertaining than the verses. (The CD version of the album includes a full instrumental version as a bonus disc, so no worries there, at least.) But ambitious messes are the best kind, and riding out the less-interesting moments is worth it in the long run. It's a sprawling, overstuffed deluge that feels longer than it is, but can't really be pared down or scrapped for parts. Best to just let it go start-to-finish and have its constant changes of scenery dart past until you can find something to linger on. | 2012-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | April 11, 2012 | 7.1 | 38202cdc-2d64-40e7-87fe-e6608f048449 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Baton Rouge-based rapper Boosie Badazz was released from prison in 2014 after beating drug smuggling and murder charges. After a triumphant return to rap, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and his brief new album In My Feelings reckons with the fallout. | The Baton Rouge-based rapper Boosie Badazz was released from prison in 2014 after beating drug smuggling and murder charges. After a triumphant return to rap, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and his brief new album In My Feelings reckons with the fallout. | Boosie Badazz: In My Feelings (Going' Thru It) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21424-in-my-feelings-going-thru-it/ | In My Feelings (Going' Thru It) | In the past handful of years, Torrence Hatch has been known by various names: Lil Boosie, the moniker he rode to cult hero status in his native Baton Rouge; Boosie Badazz, the name he switched to when he got sick of grown men calling him "little"; and inmate #560699, when he was locked away in Angola, the country's largest maximum-security prison. Rap fans, particularly those throughout the American south, know him as one of the genre's most distinct voices—literally, for his cartoon-villain-on-helium drawl, and more broadly for a writing perspective that marries grim reportage to an unshakeable, immutable sense of joy.
In March of 2014, Boosie was released from that (barely) repurposed plantation in Louisiana after beating a drug smuggling case and first-degree murder charge. He seemed, finally, free—a pair of freestyles recorded on the ride home had him singing about seeing his kids and figuring out when he could squeeze in a haircut. He quickly went scorched-Earth with a series of guest features and loose singles that saw him very near, or perhaps at his creative peak. (A remake of "Lifestyle" was so good it justified its existence.)
His return to retail shelves, last spring's Touch Down 2 Cause Hell, played like a blues record. There was the snarling intro, the grizzled wisdom on "Mr. Miyagi," the unadulterated happiness of "All I Know." Save for a four-song stretch on the back half, the preceding mixtape Life After Deathrow was even better, and ranks alongside Boosie's best work. For an artist who had spent the ages that account for many rappers' creative primes behind bars, there were remarkably few cobwebs to shake out. It seemed, for 18 months, that Boosie had beaten every odd and would go down as one of the greatest feel-good stories of his era.
Until this Thanksgiving. That's when Boosie posted to his Instagram—then hastily deleted—a notice that he had been diagnosed with kidney cancer. A few weeks later, in mid-December, he reportedly underwent surgery to have half of one of his kidneys removed, and announced that it went well, and that he's now cancer-free. It was a relief to his legions of fans, but the very public process had been disorienting: how is one person so chronically, powerfully unfortunate?
That question is the catalyst for In My Feelings (Goin' Thru It), Boosie's brief new album. As always, he has the ability to explore in-depth and with great precision the extent of his unhappiness, without ever sounding self-indulgent or as if he's wallowing. "Cancer," the record's centerpiece, is plaintive even by his standards: "Told my bitch, she cried/ Told my niggas, they cried/ Mama tried to downplay it to the family—she lied/ I'm thinking, 'Damn, how'd I get cancer?'" There and at Feelings' other high points ("The Rain," the beautiful closer "I Know They Gone Miss Me"), Boosie is who you wish you'd be in his situation, resolute and concerned with others before himself. It's like watching your most positive friend try to speak it into existence one last time.
And yet, while you'd be forgiven for being morbidly curious about 10 tracks of Boosie at his lowest, the album's construction is its Achilles heel. Not only are there no emotional highs like a "Top to the Bottom" or a "Finger Fucking," but the prevailing mood here is weariness. That's probably an honest reflection of where Boosie's at in life, but it can make for a grim listen. Consider "Call of Duty," where he raps about sending a duffel bag full of money to someone's house, then cross-reference his vocal take with how you imagine Boosie would rap about that situation at any other point in his life. It's easy to imagine him crushed under the weight of obligation, but there are a handful of would-be set pieces that end up feeling frustratingly anonymous.
Boosie is still Boosie, and through the din of doctors and ungrateful hangers-on, you can still hear the pen that will keep him in rotation at LSU for generations to come. The hook on "Bad Guy" alone is more carefully crafted than many songs that will hit Top 40 this year. But In My Feelings often feels as if its about to collapse under its own weight, which is doubly frustrating when you consider it clocks in at a slight 34 minutes. Still, it's hard to be too somber when you remember that Torrence Hatch is free, cancer-free, and isn't going anywhere. | 2016-01-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 7, 2016 | 6.9 | 38203dfa-7ac8-475c-8257-08d6ab992347 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Pushing beyond his playlist origins, the New Zealand producer’s debut album revels in eccentric details while adhering to traditional pop structures. | Pushing beyond his playlist origins, the New Zealand producer’s debut album revels in eccentric details while adhering to traditional pop structures. | BAYNK: Adolescence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baynk-adolescence/ | Adolescence | Like so many electronic artists in the mid-’10s, New Zealand’s BAYNK (Jock Nowell-Usticke) got his start making chill, pop-adjacent songs that seemed primed for placement in mood-based playlists. His early attempts at surf-bro EDM sounded like what Kygo and LeMarquis were putting out on SoundCloud at the time; he used his voice sparingly, mainly as material to be sampled. In the years since, though, he has refined his palette. On 2017’s Someone’s EP I and 2019’s Someone’s EP II, his percussion took on the rhythmic impulse of Four Tet, and his rubbery basslines and glossy experimentalism were reminiscent of early Cashmere Cat and Flume. Using his Auto-Tuned falsetto to further texturize his songs, BAYNK’s fusion of house, R&B, and pop soon set him apart from the many similar acts scattered throughout the scene.
Adolescence is BAYNK’s most meticulous work to date. It revels in eccentric, distinctive details while adhering to traditional pop structures. Most arrangements consist of grainy synth loops, plucky subs, and house-inspired drums; his digital sounds are drenched in reverb and slapped with sidechain. On the Cosmo’s Midnight-assisted “How Does it Feel?” languid synth pulses and a funky bassline give way to some of the sharpest vocal melodies on the album. “Remember,” which features Rainsford, exhibits BAYNK’s talent for peeling a heavily layered song back to its component parts before climaxing into an ecstatic yet graceful drop. This is dance music for headphones, club music for late-night walks.
The best songs on Adolescence bend toward straightforward pop formulas and, tellingly, include non-electronic instruments. “Mine” is led by quiet piano and spacey guitar, while standout “Naked” blends acoustic elements and electric bass with shimmering synths. BAYNK gives his best vocal performances here: “Get caught up on trying to pin you down/Your fingers ’round my neck, they’re feeling soft now," he coos on “Naked,” evoking the warm upper register of Whitney’s Julien Ehrlich. He’s not a great singer, as Tinashe makes plain when she steals the show on “Esther”; he scrubs clean his imperfections with layers of automation, delay, and reverb. Still, BAYNK has a keen ear for melody and knows his limits, wisely ceding the mic to guests while he works the boards.
The album is nominally a concept record about the immediacy of youth and romantic first experiences. “I went through this period of not being able to write anything,” BAYNK told Apple Music. Being in a “stable and happy relationship” wasn’t conducive to inspiration, so to get around his writer’s block, he returned to the creative cocoon of “first love.” Lyrically, the album is imagistic and vague, depicting half-baked scenes of lying in the sun, holding hands in a car, and walking through fields. The narrative never coalesces into anything meaningful, and its emotional pull wanes quickly. First love invigorates but rarely sustains; it’s BAYNK’s elastic and original production that propels the album forward, the pulse of the beat begging us to feel something beyond recognition.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misattributed a lyric on the record. The quote has since been changed to reflect one that BAYNK sings. | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | March 24, 2022 | 6.7 | 3821058e-4b82-4190-b2df-1c7399fdfece | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Sufjan returns with a welcome change-up, as he moves away from bookish detail, experiments with electronics, and writes from a more personal perspective. | Sufjan returns with a welcome change-up, as he moves away from bookish detail, experiments with electronics, and writes from a more personal perspective. | Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14738-the-age-of-adz/ | The Age of Adz | With his sixth proper album, Sufjan Stevens does battle with what we've come to expect from a proper Sufjan Stevens album. This time, instead of painstakingly humanizing the locations, historical inhabitants, and trivia of a certain slab of America, he's more concerned with his own state of mind. Banjos are out; moody electronics, deep bass, and drums that burst like geysers are in. The lengthiest song title on his last LP, 2005's Illinois, was 53 words long; here, that same superlative goes to a tune called "I Want to Be Well". He's whispering less, hollering more. And at the climax of The Age of Adz, the devout Christian and poster boy for mannered indie-dude sensitivity shouts, "I'm not fuckin' around!" no less than 16 times. Believe him.
Yet, there is no mistaking this as a work by the Detroit-born, Brooklyn-dwelling overachiever. Trilling flutes, meticulously arranged choirs, and an overarching sense of hugeness are still apparent. The record's last track, "Impossible Soul", is a five-part suite that lasts more than 25 minutes and boasts harps, horns, blips, Auto-Tuned vocals, a twee-dance breakdown, some cheerleader call-and-response, and even a little trad-folk guitar picking, you know, for kicks. That single track bulges with more engaging ideas than most artists could muster in a career, and there's no one else on earth that could've come up with it. Even the record's glitched backdrop isn't entirely unprecedented; Stevens' pre-breakout 2001 instrumental album Enjoy Your Rabbit could be looked back on as a sketchbook for what would become The Age of Adz. So as Stevens' current restlessness fights it out with his past accomplishments, the listener ends up winning.
Once again there's a concept tying everything together, though it's not quite as educational-- or virtuous-- as before. The Age of Adz is a reference to Louisiana artist and self-proclaimed prophet Royal Robertson, whose work appears on the album's cover and liner notes. A paranoid schizophrenic, Robertson translated his anguish through apocalyptic sci-fi posters after his wife left him following nearly 20 years of marriage. His comic-book style pieces-- which have been shown at the Smithsonian, among other museums-- are colorful, vengeful, and crazed. They feature B-movie style robot monsters who spout cartoon captions like, [sic] "I'll distroy much town's of adultress !!WHORE'S!!" Robertson's work is a long way from the cutesy cover of Illinois, and the fact that Stevens chose such an eccentric and hate-prone avatar for inspiration this time is telling.
Because The Age of Adz is a relatively dark affair, with the 35-year-old songwriter sometimes forgoing his child-like naïveté for something more oblique and adult. Considering the triumph of style that was Illinois (and the legions of lesser lights that subsequently turned it into some sort of over-the-top Disney on Ice parody), the change of perspective is welcomed.
The record is book-ended by two quaint, characteristic acoustic passages that find Stevens reconnecting with a past love. "It's been a long long time since I've memorized your face," he starts. This is the Sufjan we know. But, in between that short intro and outro, the album tells the story of a relationship with fantastical zeal. The tale is sordid and a little absurd, filled with betrayal, selfishness, frustration, suicidal thoughts, a raging volcano, and a space ship. "I've lost the will to fight/ I was not made for life," he confesses on the title track, as robo-noises and churchly backups translate Robertson's futuristic drawings into sound.
Across the album, he relives the more harrowing aspects of a deep personal bond, pinging from bitterness ("At least I deserve the respect of a kiss goodbye," he sings over gloriously spare electro-pop on "I Walked"), to confusion ("I thought I was so in love/ Some say it wasn't true," he head-scratches on the hymn-like "Now That I'm Older", a masterclass in modern vocal arrangement), to, um, melodramatic transmogrification (referring to himself in the third person, he inhabits the Pompeii-burning volcano of "Vesuvius", singing, "Sufjan, the panic inside, the murdering ghost that you cannot ignore"). Surrounding himself with music that expertly balances between over-orchestrated and chaotic, Stevens elevates his pedestrian travails about love and lust into legendary myths in which he's rarely the hero.
Right before The Age of Adz's back-to-earth finale, Sufjan finally overcomes his emotional stupor as a host of voices join him for the singalong, "Boy! We can do much more together!/ It's not so impossible!" And then he shakes out of the grandeur, goes back to the finger picking, and sighs the album's more realistic final line: "Boy! We made such a mess together." It's an ambiguous conclusion that, like the rest of the album, was seemingly in jeopardy of not happening at all. In a Signal to Noise interview last year, Stevens said, "I definitely feel like the album no longer has any real bearing anymore. The physical format itself is obsolete; the CD is obsolete and the LP is kinda nostalgic. I'm wondering, 'What's the value of my work once these forms are obsolete and everyone's just downloading music?'" It's a valid question. But instead of succumbing to trends, Stevens barrels through with another long-form work that requires-- and rewards-- time and devotion. As important questions about music's worth in the age of free continue to swirl around him, Sufjan's still combating instant-gratification culture the best way he knows how. | 2010-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | October 12, 2010 | 8.4 | 3824f8cb-bef2-488e-afc7-2c7f6ffe7959 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Adult Mom, the guitar rock project helmed by songwriter Steph Knipe, scrawls gentle notes to self all over their music. Their debut LP, Momentary Lapse of Happily, externalizes many of the same queer anxieties that manifest in Xiu Xiu’s work, but in a lighter, warmer cadence. | Adult Mom, the guitar rock project helmed by songwriter Steph Knipe, scrawls gentle notes to self all over their music. Their debut LP, Momentary Lapse of Happily, externalizes many of the same queer anxieties that manifest in Xiu Xiu’s work, but in a lighter, warmer cadence. | Adult Mom: Momentary Lapse of Happily | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20850-momentary-lapse-of-happily/ | Momentary Lapse of Happily | Adult Mom’s debut LP begins with a song called "Be Your Own 3am", a title that obliquely recalls Xiu Xiu’s 2006 song "Hello from Eau Claire". On that track, Caralee McElroy made a rare vocal appearance to sing, "I can weep through my own midnights" and "I know it’s stupid to dream/ That you might think of me as a man." Like Xiu Xiu in their softer, more reflective moments, Adult Mom, the Purchase, N.Y. guitar rock project helmed by songwriter Steph Knipe, scrawls gentle notes to self all over their music. Momentary Lapse of Happily externalizes many of the same queer anxieties that manifest in Xiu Xiu’s work, but in a lighter, warmer cadence more reminiscent of Knipe’s contemporaries in Eskimeaux, Girlpool, or Elvis Depressedly.
Knipe writes and sings with a dose of humor that balances lyrics like "one day I’ll set fire to your car" (from "2012"). The violence in their words isn’t a joke, but humor helps temper the incendiary impulse behind it. Sometimes you have to choose whether to laugh or scream, and only one kind of outburst is considered socially acceptable. But with Adult Mom’s anger comes a fierce yearning for growth. On "Survival", Knipe sings, "I survive because I have died," as if shedding identities like old snakeskins were the only way to keep moving forward unhunted. Often there’s a bitterness ringing the words, but also an ember of hope for the future at their core.
Though much of Momentary Lapse plays like the residue of deeply private self-soothing ("I hold my own hands in crowds," Knipe sings on "Be Your Own 3am"), Adult Mom nods to friendship and communal healing throughout. Band banter breaks up some tracks, while Knipe references their friends by name in certain lyrics. Adult Mom teeters on the line of needing companionship and also fearing it, of needing to externalize feelings while remaining unsure of whether those feelings can be understood or even heard. Momentary Lapse is an anxious record, and at times a tentative one, as though Knipe felt stifled in the process of articulating just how stifled they feel. "It is okay to feel doubt/ But just know you’re gonna find a way out," they sing on "Told Ya So" between cheery strikes of keyboard. It’s one of many songs on the album that feels like a love letter to a younger self, something that can never actually be sent to its intended recipient, but can be reframed for a stranger out there who needs to hear it. | 2015-07-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | July 28, 2015 | 6.8 | 3826b156-154d-418e-aa3f-4486208eb1ec | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The fourth album from Austin, Tx.’s A Giant Dog fuses the gaudy delivery of 1970s rock and the pillars of modern punk. Its songs offer lyrics about sex without typical depictions of love. | The fourth album from Austin, Tx.’s A Giant Dog fuses the gaudy delivery of 1970s rock and the pillars of modern punk. Its songs offer lyrics about sex without typical depictions of love. | A Giant Dog: Toy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-giant-dog-toy/ | Toy | Drama kids can confirm: The secret to a successful theater production is amplifying everything. From makeup to body movements, all elements must be exaggerated so that the last row sees every detail. In the world of hushed indie rock and disjointed pop, A Giant Dog of Austin, Tx. push themselves to expand upon that rule until they’re faulted for going too hard, too fast, too often. With Toy, their anthemic fourth album, A Giant Dog once again rob the 1970s of its garish delivery and refashions it within the pillars of modern punk, stretching farther than they ever have before.
While last year’s Pile dirtied itself in death themes, Toy tackles sex, and it jumps into the language of softcore porn after a well-timed countdown preps anticipation in “Get Away.” A Giant Dog aren’t concerned with typical depictions of love or relationships: Their gaudy, self-aware songs contain mounds of horny phrases so racy that frontwoman Sabrina Ellis was originally too embarrassed to read them out loud after penning them. “My vagina made of glass/But if you talk sweet/I’ll let you stick it in my past” is less about shock value for raunchinesses sake than it is punk (which itself began as an essentially asexual form) meant to normalize sexual desires. With an updated cover of Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants” or a line in “Bendover” like "I'm not a lover/I am a fight," A Giant Dog aim to dismantle the misogyny of rock’n’roll sex tropes. They reclaim S&M as a way to embrace the vulnerability that comes with power transferral, even if the lyrics could scan as reworked idioms dressed in makeup thanks to Ellis’ voice. There’s an earnesty to her brand of camp, and that juxtaposition turns her into a kind of Iggy Pop figure.
It’d be unfair to say A Giant Dog prioritize lyrics above all else. Musically, Toy is their most experimental and varied album. “Hero for the Weekend” segues from heavy ’70s guitar to a prog breakdown. The organ burning slowly in the background of “Roller Coaster” is miles away from the taut, power pop guitar on “Making Movies.” Even “Lucky Ponderosa,” a Western-tinged rock song that crashes down on the drums with every downbeat, sneaks orchestral strings into the mix. A Giant Dog teem with palpable energy—the benefit of recording live—which gives their music its legs. It’s the propelling speed of “Photograph” and joint harmonies, not just the words, that make an audience want to sing blunt lines (say, “I wanna make you cum/If you can make me laugh”) back at the band. A Giant Dog talk the talk and walk an equally impressive walk.
Yet for all of the fun they offer on Toy, A Giant Dog aren’t oblivious to the wear of life. Joy sounds like it is a part of their survival. That’s clear in their flashy performances and videos, but they go twice as hard in their music in hopes that listeners will pocket an ounce of it for themselves. They leave jokes unexplained—song titles like “Fake Plastic Trees” and last year’s “Creep” are best left as unacknowledged Radiohead nods—and swap innuendos for straightforward slang. After all, when you own it, gaudy details and theatrical crassness become a welcome overindulgence. (Just look at the ribald eroticism of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) This allows Toy’s concluding song, a quiet number about suicide ideation and cheating partners, to hit hard. It’s as if, after all of this, they need to remind listeners one last time: no matter how low life swings, there’s always pleasure worth relishing in. | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 2, 2017 | 7.4 | 382a9d03-da53-48d2-8726-d877983fd371 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
This 2xCD rarities set covers Sam Beam's career from solo acoustic stuff to full-band songs; unlike most odds'n'sods collections, it isn't for fans only. | This 2xCD rarities set covers Sam Beam's career from solo acoustic stuff to full-band songs; unlike most odds'n'sods collections, it isn't for fans only. | Iron & Wine: Around the Well | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13041-around-the-well/ | Around the Well | To this point in his career, Sam Beam has made progressively fuller, more musically complex, and, in this writer's opinion, better albums each time out. 2007's T**he Shepherd's Dog was a complete realization of the full-band sound he'd been building up to in his live shows, his collaboration with Calexico, and to a lesser degree on his recordings; as such, it felt like a milestone. So it seems like a good time to pause and look back at the old county road that runs parallel to the highway of Beam's albums and compile some rarities for the fans. "For the fans" doesn't necessarily mean hardcore types-- if you've liked any of Iron & Wine's albums so far, you'll almost certainly like this, but it's also probably not the first thing to buy.
The 2xCD set covers his career to date, from his earliest solo acoustic material to his later, blown-out productions with Brian Deck, who has a knack for appropriately housing the kind of hushed, ramshackle tunes Beam writes. The chosen tracks range from B-sides and compilation cuts to previously unreleased sessions, and all are out of print. Beam's quiet home recordings are housed on Disc One, while his studio creations are on Disc Two. Your favorite Iron & Wine album will likely determine which disc you spend more time with, but for me, Disc Two is where the greatest treasures lie.
Beam's more sonically adventurous period is well-documented on that disc, which features four outstanding tracks recorded for the film In Good Company. "Communion Cups & Someone's Coat" sports beautifully layered vocals, while "Belated Promise Ring" holds even with nearly any Iron & Wine album track with its softly ingratiating melody. They're appetizers for the nine-minute opus "The Trapeze Swinger", though, which is one of those songs that, in spite of all its finery-- the layered backing vocals, the steady, stomping rhythm, the memorable melody-- reminds you how simply powerful a well-chosen chord progression will be. Beam's casual conception of the graffiti on the gates of heaven-- "We'll Meet Again", "Fuck the Man", and "Tell My Mother Not to Worry"-- are the kind of rich lyrics that reward close listening.
Outside the tracks for that film, there's still plenty more to love. "Kingdom of the Animals" is a wonderful slow country number, with a two-step rhythm and vivid imagery: "Jenny was gone and the moon blooms all shining/ As we dragged our panic up and down the riverbed/ Sweating wild and weird in our Sunday clothes." The banjo-driven "Serpent Charmer" kicks up a dusty racket, while the vocals on "Carried Home" are so stretched out and lush that the song practically qualifies as ambient music. On his solo acoustic version of New Order's "Love Vigilantes", he actually captures the melody more powerfully than Bernard Sumner himself did.
Over on Disc One, there are three additional covers, as Beam takes on the Flaming Lips' "Waiting for a Superman", Stereolab's "Peng! 33", and the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights"-- alas, his most beloved song-- though none is particularly revelatory. His similarly styled cover of the Four Tops' "The Same Old Song" isn't included for some reason, but it's a better example of a cover that reveals something unexpected about the original. His originals fare quite a bit better. "Dearest Forsaken" has his trademark whisper falsetto with a bit of overdubbed slide guitar and banjo to heighten the atmosphere. One of Beam's earliest originals, "Sacred Vision", reveals him as a writer whose talent developed quickly. The simple melody and guitar picking are basic enough but create an intimate setting for lines like, "There's no way to grow that don't hurt."
Around the Well is a great retrospective that heps fans to a lot of difficult-to-locate material from one of this decade's finest songwriters. While there is some fairly flat stuff on the first disc, it really gives the listener the sweep of his development as a writer, musician, and arranger. It also works as a nice palate cleanser for wherever Beam takes his muse next. He's such a prolific writer and recorder that it seems likely he's already begun producing things for his next odds'n'sods comp. Hopefully it will be as good as this one. | 2009-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | May 20, 2009 | 7.3 | 382fc1fb-81a4-4286-93b9-32f109bde09e | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Chicago headbangers’ fifth LP is a confident nod to early grunge. It’s an unusually succinct statement for them, with leaner songwriting and more pointed barbs. | The Chicago headbangers’ fifth LP is a confident nod to early grunge. It’s an unusually succinct statement for them, with leaner songwriting and more pointed barbs. | Oozing Wound: We Cater to Cowards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oozing-wound-we-cater-to-cowards/ | We Cater to Cowards | To borrow a colloquialism from one of their songs, Oozing Wound are living embodiments of the hippie speedball: headbangers both frenetic and spaced out, as if constantly slurping black coffee and ripping bongs. No matter which particular strain of heavy music they’re leaning into at any given moment, they’ve delivered with extreme consistency over four albums and 10-plus years, which makes it all the more ironic that they often inject their work with self-burns for being slackers, sellouts, posers. But do Oozing Wound, in fact, pander to the fearful? They’ve had to try once or twice: Last we heard from them, near the end of 2019’s High Anxiety, they sampled a voicemail delivering the news of an insurance company rejecting them for coverage because “Oozing Wound is too heavy metal.”
If there’s one thing that Oozing Wound excel at evoking, it’s the feeling of being stuck in life, of having a dearth of places to direct a surplus of energy. With their self-deprecating M.O. intact, they find a new outlet on their fifth LP, We Cater to Cowards, a confident nod to early grunge. It’s a more succinct statement for them: leaner, with fewer chord changes and more intelligible lyrics. This newfound efficiency serves their discontent as well as it does their humor, and the band mines it for some marginally more straight-shooting songs. “Remember the good times?” singer and guitarist Zach Weil baits on “The Good Times (I Don’t Miss ’Em),” a fist-shaking ripper with a double-time breakdown and warp-speed guitar solo, before the easy-to-guess switch: “Don’t miss ’em at all!”
Behind a thin shield of wisecracks lies the image of an outsider band wrestling with the despair of attempting to survive in a hostile environment. They see reminders of this everywhere they turn, whether in their own bank statements—on opener and highlight “Bank Account Anxiety,” Weil simply shrieks out the three titular words and everything that they make him feel—or in the faces of those who flinch at the sight of a death-metal T-shirt, like the aforementioned insurance company. “I’m not a violent man,” Weil seethes on “Midlife Crisis Actor.” “But that’s what they’ll all say!” It’s another standout, though this one unfurls in the tried-and-true fashion of taking one solid motif and jackhammering it until vocal cords, fingertips, and frustrations are shredded. The song spends most of its time on one looping measure, and Weil, bassist Kevin Cribbin, and drummer Kyle Reynolds ramp up its intensity from somewhere around vein-popping to full-on nosebleed. The song that follows, “Old Sludge,” takes a similarly cyclical approach one notch higher, riding out their tank-emptying attack on a fittingly convulsive sax solo as Weil pleads for oblivion.
Oozing Wound have always been spitting and restless—at times bravely so, and at times with the smirking, cynical mania of an especially unhinged Tim Robinson character. That much hasn’t changed, but what makes We Cater to Cowards a refreshing move is its reduced approach: They take an idea that feels right, find an easy way to say it, and then obliterate it. For bands that have long known their strengths and identity, growth is often thought of in terms of material additions or dramatic pivots. Oozing Wound aren’t the types to fall for that. They don’t have to stray too far from their zone to prove their flexibility. On We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound have downsized to a smaller ride, but they’ve filled the tank with rocket fuel, and they’ve never sounded more comfortable behind the wheel. | 2023-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | January 31, 2023 | 7.4 | 3832eb00-c1b6-4338-9879-aaa5c34ec04c | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Led by Alex Menne, the Seattle band comes out with a solid debut of anxious bubblegum grunge, though its many charms also become its few flaws. | Led by Alex Menne, the Seattle band comes out with a solid debut of anxious bubblegum grunge, though its many charms also become its few flaws. | Great Grandpa: Plastic Cough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/great-grandpa-plastic-cough/ | Plastic Cough | Alex Menne knows her enemies: entitled dudes, boring bands, boring dudes, keeping up the social contract, public transportation...more boring dudes. And also, zombies. All of them are put on notice throughout Great Grandpa’s debut album Plastic Cough, which probably isn’t aware of what itself is up against. Familial band name with twee sensibilities, quippy grievance airing over fizzy alt-pop: thanks to the revolution started in Great Grandpa’s hometown of Seattle, this sound provided quite a few Buzz Bin hits and resultant entries in used CD bins in 1997 and has somehow become the sound of indie rock in 2017. If nothing other than a testament to the cyclical nature of trends, Plastic Cough is actually kinda zeitgeist-y in 2017, the root of both its charm and its flaws.
Great Grandpa hardly strikes one as being opportunistic: the core members of the group met over a love for math rock. But whatever their affinity for that subgenre’s instrumental precision, steely demeanor, and complicated structures, it’s clear from Plastic Cough that Great Grandpa themselves suck at geometry. One can only imagine how the piercing vocal leap on the hook from “Teen Challenge” or the full collapse during the bridge of “Favorite Show” would look transcribed in proper music tablature. Just about every second of Plastic Cough is in 4/4, there is nothing that signifies “sick chops,” and just about every song has a point where it sounds like all four members are playing at slightly different tempos. But this is something they use to great advantage—what might otherwise be enjoyable, if somewhat commonplace, bubble-grunge lunges out with an instability that becomes its own kind of studied musicality.
It all has to be a conscious decision, given how Plastic Cough doubles up on Menne’s lyrics, most of which run on a constant agitation—a particularly modern dialect lashing out at friends, partners, and anyone else who’s failed to measure up, but reserving some indignation for one’s self. “Don’t say that I’m selfish, too/When I tell you/Everything I’ve wanted/Laughing at myself again” just about sums it up, though any sound drawing from the late-’90s era wouldn’t come fully equipped without judicious sarcasm. “Ooo, always killin’ it”, the band coos during “Teen Challenge”, whereas “NO” makes their love of sickly sweet brattiness more apparent: “Wahoo do do do do do/I don’t want to talk to you.”
Despite the strong introductory run of Plastic Cough, “All Things Must Behave / Eternal Friend” brings it to a peak by playing it straight—hushed, straightforward acoustic strum and static-laced back-up vocals that recall Jimmy Eat World’s “A Sunday” with a deeper, bluer hurt (“All my friends are almost dead”). The stately calm of “All Things...” is even more jarring than the moment-to-moment outbursts that came before, though it’s a signal Plastic Cough was thoughtfully sequenced, perhaps comedown that radiates a quiet dignity to what surrounds it, or a mood reset to prevent anxious exhaustion.
Instead, it just becomes a marker for the point where Plastic Cough suffers from diminishing returns: The whoops and contortions of “Expert Eraser” and “Pardon My Speech” recall what came before but without the same hooky payoff or wild abandon. Meanwhile, “Faithful” indicates that there isn’t room for two ballads yet on Great Grandpa albums. The promise of Plastic Cough is also the source of its frustration, recalling similarly-indebted debuts who couldn’t quite sustain the caffeinated, carbonated buzz of the first half into Side B. But if the closing “28 J’S L8R” isn’t Great Grandpa’s best song, it might be the one that points a direction worth following. In perhaps an homage to current tourmates Rozwell Kid, Menne watches “The Simpsons” season 3, and this is where the zombies come in and she’s too stoned to leave the bedroom. It’s the one time on Plastic Cough where Menne unsuccessfully stands up for herself, and one of hopefully many more where Great Grandpa successfully stand out. | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | July 12, 2017 | 6.7 | 38364f96-7038-4c18-aeca-cb3ebcb972c6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Australian folk artist’s second album is glossier and broader than its predecessor, but the most stunning moments are still ones of hushed reverence. | The Australian folk artist’s second album is glossier and broader than its predecessor, but the most stunning moments are still ones of hushed reverence. | Indigo Sparke: Hysteria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/indigo-sparke-hysteria/ | Hysteria | If Indigo Sparke’s 2021 debut, Echo, felt like a whisper in your ear, her follow-up feels like a howl from a mountaintop. On Hysteria, the Australian folk singer-songwriter opens up her world, a change that’s also reflected in personnel. Where Echo, with its goosebump vocals and fingers brushing guitar strings, was produced with Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, Hysteria is the result of a collaboration with Aaron Dessner, the National multi-instrumentalist who has also worked with Taylor Swift. With support from Dessner, Sparke sings defiantly over full-bodied instrumentation. But the newfound spaciousness isn’t only expressed in the music: her songwriting, too, stretches further, running as far as the eye can see.
Sparke wrote the majority of this album during the early months of 2020, when she was struggling under the weight of a collapsing relationship at the same time that society seemed to be falling apart, too. “The grief opened a doorway to the past I thought I had made peace with,” she explained in a press release. “But there were days where I just couldn’t get off the floor. It felt like everything was falling through this hole in my chest.” The emotions of Hysteria are elemental forces: a red moon sinking (“Time Gets Eaten”) or a cypress tree growing from your abdomen (“Infinity Honey”). They refuse to stay put inside the individual body: Instead, they reach outward through generations, society, and the earth itself.
The album is bracketed by two of its best songs, which both use a sweeping, montage-style approach to storytelling. On the opening “Blue,” the layering of Sparke’s vocal creates a forlorn and restless choir, as she repeats the same melodic motif over insistent, driving guitar strums. The song moves relentlessly while Sparke offers glimpses at emergency after emergency: domestic abuse, relationship breakdowns, desperate phone calls in the dead of night. The details are spare yet searing; it’s both a deeply personal catharsis and something seen distantly. “Burn,” the closing track, sways loosely, Sparke’s voice gliding over jangling acoustic chords as she delves into cobwebbed childhood nightmares and the long shadow of familial trauma. The lineage Sparke evokes in these songs is a specifically female-coded one: Hysteria, after all, takes its root from the Greek “hystera,” meaning “uterus,” and it’s a word loaded with patriarchal history. Sparke reclaims it on this album, using imagery of tides, moons, and wombs to depict heavy emotions with solemnity.
Hysteria showcases Sparke’s ability to glide between minimalism and more forceful storms. While the surface of this album is glossier and broader than its predecessor, the most stunning moments are still ones of hushed reverence: “Real” is an earthy ballad with Sparke singing alone over fingerpicking as she evokes a feeling of ghostly hunger. This quiet moment feels more poignant placed near the rousing, ember-stoking drama of “Set Your Fire on Me.” On the lustrous highlight “God Is a Woman’s Name,” Sparke blends both extremes of her sound, with soft blush verses and strident choruses that focus on her pleading ritualistic chant: “Pray, pray, pray.”
At 14 tracks, Hysteria is a longer album than Echo, and it doesn’t always maintain its intensity. The push and pull between ballads and bolder songs sometimes sacrifices the momentum. But the wider lens, which allows Sparke to dial up both her indie-rock sound and sweeping songwriting, is still impressive. During the bluesy swoon of “Time Gets Eaten,” she shines in her upper register, half-rhyming “love is a lie” with “love is still alive,” leaving an unresolved tension between the two as she sighs, “Love is.” It’s as though the song is a Rorschach test, checking how hopeful you’re feeling that day. Despite the darkly personal themes, Sparke’s sprawling horizons always create space for you inside. | 2022-10-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sacred Bones | October 7, 2022 | 7.4 | 38365036-9307-4279-a792-36a0d681d285 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The exceptional avant-pop group combines with the Ghost Box records founder for a mini-LP that highlights their differences as much as their shared vision. | The exceptional avant-pop group combines with the Ghost Box records founder for a mini-LP that highlights their differences as much as their shared vision. | Broadcast and the Focus Group: Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13560-investigate-witch-cults-of-the-radio-age/ | Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age | Broadcast and the Focus Group form a likely pair: Both groups make warped psychedelic music rooted in jazz, Euro-pop, and 1960s BBC interludes instead of rock or blues; both conjure a bookshelf's worth of cultural blasts from the nocturnal side of the world-- Satanic texts, Czech horror films, pulpy science fiction lit; both are-- as if there were any doubt after hearing their records-- acutely British. Julian House-- the man behind the Focus Group and the co-founder of Ghost Box records-- has designed Broadcast's album sleeves for years (in addition to work for Primal Scream, Stereolab, and others). The specificity of their aesthetic projects-- and yes, these are bands with "aesthetic projects"-- is so pronounced that calling them kindred spirits implies too much accident: they're more like co-conspirators.
So Witch Cults of the Radio Age is predictable-- actually, it's surprising that they didn't decide to record something like it earlier. But for all their similarities, Broadcast and the Focus Group approach their peaks in very different ways. Broadcast's music is sensual and chic; it has poise, groove, and sex; it's black eyeliner. Nitsuh Abebe, writing on this site about the band's outtakes collection The Future Crayon, pointed out that they'd become almost expert in mapping weird onto what were ostensibly pop songs. I'd agree, but almost to their discredit. Broadcast wear their idiosyncrasies like bangles-- even when I like their music, it feels like it could change shape at any time. By contrast, the Focus Group's native tongue is the stutter; the music's imbalance is in its DNA. Rarely does it ever coalesce into something intelligible, and when it does, there's usually something smeared overtop to throw it off-course.
Though the album is a collaboration, it's obvious which side anchors which tracks: "The Be Colony", sung by Broadcast's Trish Keenan, plays like a nursery rhyme trapped in amber; "Mr. Beard, You Chatterbox" is 80 seconds of disjointed harpsichord and flute that flares out into static and echo. Broadcast's contributions are intoxicating and lovely; the Focus Group's sound like a three-legged kitten knocking over teacups. It's refreshing to hear two seemingly similar bands highlight each others' differences, but it's also why their collaboration isn't as impacting as the albums the bands make alone. Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.
"For me, the paranormal is most powerful when it's unassuming," Trish from Broadcast recently told The Wire-- "not obviously spooky or dark." She went on to talk about how when she and Broadcast bassist James Cargill moved houses, familiar names and places took on new forms-- for example, their new downstairs neighbor looked exactly like their former roommate's girlfriend. "Even my mom was replaced by an old toothless poodle." It's a benign sense of horror and disorientation-- compare it, for example, to Animal Collective's professed interest in slasher movies and all the gross, visceral sounds they integrate into their songs (squish, guts, screams). Europe breeds romantic monsters like Dracula; America breeds disturbed children who grow up to disembody teenagers with mass-market appliances, like Leatherface or Michael Myers. Broadcast and the Focus Group -- together and apart-- offer something a little more prim than the image of someone getting a wooden spike through their eye, but I think the intent is roughly the same: To create a space where, for a second, there's no sense to be made. | 2009-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | October 27, 2009 | 7.2 | 3836cf15-cd47-4840-8545-c6d84b2f0591 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Indie aesthetics have changed considerably in the past two decades, but the UK group is still throwing block parties for a utopia where time and genre collapse. | Indie aesthetics have changed considerably in the past two decades, but the UK group is still throwing block parties for a utopia where time and genre collapse. | The Go! Team: Get Up Sequences Part One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-go-team-get-up-sequences-part-one/ | Get Up Sequences Part One | Midway through a podcast interview late last year, the Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton raised a tantalizing counterfactual. What if the groundswell around the collage-pop project’s brilliant debut album, 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, had been a bit less deafening? “It happened too quickly,” Parton said of the Go! Team’s initial flush of success. Noting that there will be a “a certain contingent” for whom the UK six-piece will always be associated with the era of mp3 blogs and Iraq War protests, he added, “I prefer to be a slow-burn band.”
Hell, I’ll admit it: It’s not easy for me to separate the Go! Team from fond memories of listening to their debut as a newbie critic for this website (thankfully, my Muppet-themed review wasn’t the one we ran), or from tales of neighborhood kids joining the band onstage during the 2005 incarnation of what is now Pitchfork Music Festival. But Parton may have belatedly gotten his wish, as the Go! Team’s next several solid-to-great albums generally received more muted praise, leaving room for listeners to find the group at their own pace. Whether crossing paths with Public Enemy or Best Coast, hunkering down as a solo act or getting the band back together, the Go! Team demonstrated a remarkably consistent vision. Their sixth album, Get Up Sequences Part One, completed as Parton was battling the debilitating auditory effects of Ménière’s disease, is another intermittently thrilling block party from a utopia where time and genre collapse.
The Go! Team’s signature admixture of old-school raps, car-chase horns, noise-rock guitar, Motown hooks, Sesame Street positivity, and relentless drum barrages may no longer be novel, but it can still be pretty damn charming. London rapper Ninja (real name: Nkechi Ka Egenamba) has long been the energetic focal point of the Go! Team’s live performances, and her main showcase here, “Pow,” is a sunshine-funk romp that earns its lyrical nods to James Brown. Opener “Let the Seasons” serves as a fine reintroduction to a universe where shoegaze, electro, and ’80s TV action themes coexist with a spirit of twee-pop whimsy.
In fact, the farther Parton ranges in search of new elements, the more it all ends up sounding like the same old Go! Team. The Detroit Youth Choir lent a giddy irrepressibility to 2018’s Semicircle, and the choir’s former member Indigo Yaj shouts out “the DYC” here on “Cookie Scene,” but the song’s flute-centric jauntiness would’ve made just as much sense back when blogs were discovering the Boy Least Likely To and Architecture in Helsinki. Along those same lines, “A Bee Without Its Sting” has a subtle protest message and endearing vocals by two more Detroit teenagers, Jessie Miller and Rian Woods, but its peppy Northern soul, with a theremin-like wobble, wouldn’t have been out of place in an iPod commercial.
Reminding a geriatric-millennial music journalist of favorite recordings from their misspent early twenties is No Bad Thing, of course, and it’s exciting how much potential best-of material the Go! Team have surreptitiously built up over the years. Finale “World Remember Me Now,” which features members of the Kansas City Girls Choir and extends Semicircle’s love affair with calypso, is a celebration of everyday life that elevates pouring orange juice and popping toast into a transcendent ideal. Another calypso-tinged track, “We Do It But Never Know Why,” with vocal duties shared between Indigo Yaj and the Go! Team singer-guitarist Niadzi Muzira, sounds like instant mixtape fodder (“Say the word and we’ll never be lonely,” Muzira lilts).
One small but perceptible step backward is in the wordless tracks. Thunder, Lighting, Strike instrumental “Junior Kickstart” was a self-contained journey that still sounds like nothing much else: Think Deerhoof reinventing the theme from Hawaii Five-0, maybe? On Get Up Sequences Part One, the dreamy harmonica of “A Memo for Maceo” or queasy organ of “Freedom Now” mostly leave me wondering why an album of only 10 songs needs three lyric-free interludes.
As much as Parton may want the Go! Team to be judged apart from historical context, the project’s style arose out of a very specific cultural moment. As discussed in the podcast interview last year, Parton honed his “channel hopping” approach at a time when mix-and-match production was yielding sample-based touchstones like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and the Avalanches’ Since I Left You—and right before mash-up artists like 2ManyDJs and Girl Talk knocked down the walls between musical styles for good. But the notion of genre has diminished potency today. And plenty of mysterious magpies have followed in the Go! Team’s footsteps. It turns out that being a savvy curator of sounds, by itself, typically falls short. What’s really needed is enough sense of purpose to give these disparate sounds meaning, to make us feel them. Like “A Bee Without Its Sting,” Get Up Sequences Part One is often sweet, but it only rarely breaks the skin.
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Back to home | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | July 2, 2021 | 6.8 | 3837e213-9dbb-435a-9105-53f0bc2305a6 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Fourteen years since their last full-length, The Sebadoh, Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein return with a new album. It's home-recorded and far less slick than its 1999 predecessor and shows how much has changed for the band since their 90s heyday. | Fourteen years since their last full-length, The Sebadoh, Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein return with a new album. It's home-recorded and far less slick than its 1999 predecessor and shows how much has changed for the band since their 90s heyday. | Sebadoh: Defend Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18482-sebadoh-defend-yourself/ | Defend Yourself | Lou Barlow's best work comes after break-ups, or when he's yearning for something he doesn't have. III, the classic record he released in 1991 after being dismissed from Dinosaur Jr., remains his band's most intriguing balance of heartache, anger, gentleness, and noise. That's partly because longtime co-pilot Jason Loewenstein had just joined the group and charismatic founding drummer Eric Gaffney was still in the fold, but also because Barlow was fuming at J Mascis ("The Freed Pig") and nurturing a brand new love with Kathleen Billus ("Perverted World," "Kath"). "Kath" in particular is one of Barlow's true classics, and shows how heartache can inspire him. It's a fragile, tense, warped lo-fi love ballad for his then girlfriend, whom he went on to marry.
That marriage has since ended, and Barlow's been living with a new girlfriend for almost a year. Perhaps the new relationship has something to do with the general calm and upbeat happiness of the self-recorded/self-produced Defend Yourself, the first Sebadoh full-length in 14 years and, outside of the five-song Secret EP released earlier in 2013, the follow-up to the overproduced The Sebadoh. In the years since that record, Barlow's been active with post-reunion Dinosaur Jr.'s awesome run, but Sebadoh has always been his place to shine and sulk. For Defend Yourself, he's joined again by Loewenstein and ex-Fiery Furnaces drummer Bob D'Amico, who came on board in 2012, replacing replacement drummer Russ Pollard.
As on past Sebadoh records, Barlow's material remains the real focus, though he seems oddly distant. Even when he's singing about subject matter as intimate as the fear and pain of watching kids grow up and say goodbye on the catchy "State of Mine", there's not much of a spark beyond the bounce of the backing music. Something he was great at during the band's stellar 90s run was wearing emotion in his vocal tone: you could feel the pain or elation in his voice, even if you weren't paying attention to the words. On III's "Renaissance Man", he sang, "Violence is cool/ One of two things real," and you could tell he meant it. Here, there are no jarring moments-- the collection lacks fight. Across the board, the vocal lines are mostly forgettable, and the singing's flat.
Barlow once had a knack for tossing off instant indie rock classics, like Bubble & Scrape's "Soul and Fire" and "Cliché", Bakesale's "Magnet's Coil", "Not a Friend", and "Skull", or Harmacy's "On Fire". On first listen, you knew these were special, even when they were understated. Loewenstein, on the other hand, though he's lodged memorable songs over the years, has never been as consistent a songwriter. His primary contribution, similar to Barlow on the Dinosaur records, has been to serve as a dynamic and textural contrast. But on Defend Yourself, outside of the ballads, Barlow and Loewenstein's work tends to bleed together with little to distinguish them, which makes the record feel longer than it is. Loewenstein's songs like the angular, plodding "Beat" and "Defend Yr Self" are bland 90s college rock at best; his countrified rockers ("Final Days", "Inquiries") come off like neutered Drive-By Truckers.
Barlow manages a few strong moments, like opener "I Will", a song that feels like it could last. It resonates in part because of its directness; this time it's Barlow who's leaving, and he's proud of finally taking charge: "Someone else/ Has found her way into my soul/ Things have changed/ No longer need to be with you." The fear of leaving he's shown on past Sebadoh (and Dinosaur) albums is replaced with resolve; it's kind of like seeing Hamlet finally take action, and it's a satisfying, bloody moment. But it's also an exception. On the whole, Barlow's songs on Defend Yourself sound self-satisfied, with an almost embarrassing "I'm doing this for me" gloat to them.
When I saw Sebadoh live in 1991 at Maxwell's, in support of III, Barlow was in rare form, playing taped gags on a boombox between songs: bits that made fun of Dinosaur, J Mascis, indie rock, Sebadoh themselves. It felt like therapy and catharsis. It felt punk. Most importantly, it felt necessary. Naturally, Sebadoh grew up and calmed down a little during their Sub Pop years, but that progression made sense (especially after Gaffney left in 1994), and they were rarely boring. The best that can be said of Defend Yourself is that it isn't embarrassing; they didn't lose the plot like the Pixies, and it's better than The Sebadoh simply because they got out of that L.A. studio and back to their roots. But it also doesn't add anything to the story or feel like it needs to exist, which is just about the worst thing you can say about this band. | 2013-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Joyful Noise | September 20, 2013 | 6 | 38386c18-6b0f-4d1d-bd03-bb540f9605b0 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Frightened Rabbit's third studio LP finds them with a bigger, more sophisticated sound to match their newly-expanded band and a slightly sunnier outlook. | Frightened Rabbit's third studio LP finds them with a bigger, more sophisticated sound to match their newly-expanded band and a slightly sunnier outlook. | Frightened Rabbit: The Winter of Mixed Drinks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13983-the-winter-of-mixed-drinks/ | The Winter of Mixed Drinks | Though it has only been two years since Frightened Rabbit released their breakout sophomore album, Midnight Organ Fight, a lot has changed. The Scottish group began as a trio featuring brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison and their friend Billy Kennedy, but they blossomed into a quartet during their last tour and are now a five-piece with the addition of Make Model's Gordon Skene. The band's sound has also expanded. Having made a name for themselves with raw, confessional folk-rock driven by urgent guitar interplay and brutal percussion, Frightened Rabbit have left behind their folky beginnings and given in to their loudest, most blustery impulses for their third full-length.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks is definitely more sophisticated than its predecessors. From the reverberating electronic buzz that swathes album opener "Things" to the spoken-word samples that lie underneath the droning "Man/Bag of Sand", Frightened Rabbit have muddled their simple melodies with arty effects, washes of shoegaze guitars, and baroque orchestrations. Tunes meander instead of galloping ahead toward a climactic chorus. Many songs are obsessed with oceanic motifs-- starting with the escapist maritime metaphors of the shuffling single "Swim Until You Can't See Land" and continuing through the sailing and floating imagery of the stomping "Living in Colour"-- and the album is likewise murky and vast. The Hutchison brothers still write rousing anthems, but the slickness of their production or the tarting-up of their simple setup makes them sound a little more like other bombastic bands from the British Isles (like Muse) and a little less like the band that made those first two albums.
One of the collection's best tracks, "Not Miserable", does manage to capture the dramatic crescendos of Midnight Organ Fight, but perhaps its title is a clue to Mixed Drinks' new sound. Frontman Scott Hutchison is, as he sings, not miserable anymore. Midnight Organ Fight was an account of his own terrible breakup, and though he doesn't necessarily sound happy throughout Mixed Drinks, he is definitely more optimistic and less heartbroken. "I am not put-upon, I am free from disease, no grays, no liver spots, most of the misery's gone," he sings of his newly earned glass-is-half-full outlook. But it was more viscerally affecting to hear Scott's hangdog tales of how it's OK with him if you call out the wrong name during sex or how it takes more than fucking someone to keep warm than it is to hear him detail the frustration, purpose, or assurance of moving on and growing up. Midnight Organ Fight announced with its title that its underlying concern was sex (not getting it, not getting it from who you want, being unfulfilled by it), and the songs on this new album, though more lyrically complex, seem neutered by comparison.
"Majestic," "grand," and "arena-worthy" are all words that could be used to describe this record. And when Frightened Rabbit play to their strengths and a song's chorus is sailing or Grant is pounding out stomping rhythms, it's hard to resist getting swept up in their pop fantasia. But the band's sound was always big, and their songs were always bursting with oversized emotion. The difference is that Midnight Organ Fight, recorded in two weeks, seemed spontaneous, and with its devastated post-breakup themes, it earned its aural space with its outsized emotional content. The glossy production of The Winter of Mixed Drinks coupled with its less personal/more universal storytelling, makes its songs seem bigger musically than their content deserves. | 2010-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | FatCat | March 8, 2010 | 6.6 | 383a56eb-a8cf-448e-9073-c41ef3c899eb | Pitchfork | null |
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The latest in the band’s series of expanded editions focuses on their second major-label record, the moment in which Paul Westerberg’s punk impulses, pop instincts, and poetic soul came into focus as never before. | The latest in the band’s series of expanded editions focuses on their second major-label record, the moment in which Paul Westerberg’s punk impulses, pop instincts, and poetic soul came into focus as never before. | The Replacements: Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-replacements-pleased-to-meet-me-deluxe-edition/ | Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition) | Following a decade of epic reissues, a fraught-but-celebrated reunion tour, and even a planned biopic based on Bob Mehr’s monumentally entertaining and deeply depressing 2016 band history Trouble Boys, the robust lore around the Replacements has, at long last, finally threatened to overwhelm the music itself. Rock’s most melodramatic American act never failed to devalue their achievements with enough bad behavior and shenanigans to all but guarantee that the massive success which should have been theirs would never materialize. More than four decades after their formation, the mythology keeps on expanding, with an ever-growing cottage industry surrounding it.
The latest in the band’s series of expanded and repackaged editions comes in the form of the group's 1987 fifth LP, Pleased To Meet Me, the moment in which Paul Westerberg’s punk impulses, pop instincts, and poetic soul came into focus as never before. Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton. Recorded by hard-scrabble music lifer Jim Dickinson at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the album was a conscious attempt to attach the band’s legacy to the wellspring city that lay 800 miles down the Mississippi River from their hometown of Minneapolis. As with Dusty Springfield before them, the pilgrimage was an act of communion with the music that had shaped their identity.
By 1986, the group’s quixotic determination to both ironically comment upon and simultaneously up the ante on every rock-star-excess cliché had created its first victims. Founding member and lead guitarist Bob Stinson—a musical wildcard with debilitating psychological and addiction issues—was summarily fired from a group that included his younger brother Tommy on bass. This followed the dismissal of longtime manager Peter Jesperson, who carefully nurtured a young Westerberg’s evolving gifts. Such were the emotional contours for the Replacements’ second major-label record, and the one that Warner Brothers badly hoped would break them into the mainstream the way that the band’s friends R.E.M. had done in the previous year. The great, Faces-set-on-fire opener “I.O.U.” simmers with sublimated guilt and explicit anger: “Want it in writing/I owe you nothing.”
A lyrical and engaging player long drowned out by Bob Stinson, Paul Westerberg handles the majority of the guitars on Pleased To Meet Me. He offers a killer Johnny Thunders-style solo on the powertrash-classic “Red Red Wine” (decidedly not the Neil Diamond song), chimes away like Roger McGuinn on “Never Mind,”. Some fans lamented the absence of Stinson’s anarchic playing, and future Replacements releases would indeed suffer from a lack of spontaneity. But on Pleased To Meet Me the cleaner playing does nothing to derail the manic energy.
Dickinson turned out to be a perfect choice as a producer—unmoved by their antics, perceptive of their strengths, and imbued with vision and patience. Having helmed the hectic sessions for Big Star’s Third and played tack piano on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” he knew a thing or two about wringing the best out of self-destructive geniuses. After an episode in which Westerberg’s vomit supposedly hit the wall, Dickinson kept the tapes rolling. There was no fresh hell that they could show him, although they certainly tried. The net result of his stewardship is a best-practices onslaught of hooks and aphorisms which arrived in time to inspire Nirvana and Green Day but too soon to capitalize on the mainstream’s growing appetite for aggressive, melodic rock.
Highlights abound: “I Don’t Know,” abetted by Steve Douglas’ honking baritone sax, evokes the degenerate strut of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot while hitting upon the unofficial band mantra: “One foot in the door/The other foot in the gutter.” Mood pieces like the endearingly self-effacing barfly vignette “Nightclub Jitters” and the ominous teen-suicide narrative “The Ledge” demonstrate Westerberg pushing himself out of his comfort zone to excellent effect. Meanwhile the album’s two explicit Big Star tributes—the beautifully self-explanatory power-pop confection “Alex Chilton” and the stunning twelve-string ballad “Skyway”—both rank amongst his greatest songs.
The expanded edition provides further evidence of the kind of songwriting roll that Westerberg was on in the mid-1980s, a hot streak to rival Bob Dylan in the ’60s or Joni Mitchell in the ’70s. The Replacements’ two previous LPs—1984’s Let It Be and 1985’s Tim—were tour-de-forces that would leave many an artist’s creative coffers barren. The new Pleased To Meet Me set makes it evident that the band arrived in Memphis with inspiration to spare.
The unused outtakes are a riot. There are horny burlesque gems like “Lift Your Skirt” and “‘Til We’re Nude,” Slade-style party anthems with names like “Beer for Breakfast” and “Trouble on the Way,” and a polka tune called “All He Wants To Do Is Fish.” On the quieter side, the closely drawn character study “Birthday Gal” and the ruminative “Run for the Country” are Westerberg at his most compellingly tranquil and sentimental. He even conjures the Smiths on the haltingly gorgeous “Learn How To Fail.” Best of all might be the early Tommy Stinson original “Hey Shadow,” on which Westerberg’s understudy lays bare the rock-star-in-his-own-right talents that would later emerge on his solo records.
The album’s irresistible closer and coulda-shoulda-been hit single “Can’t Hardly Wait” is a lonely hotel letter sent to a desperately desired lover, set to an ebullient riff which missed the charts at the time but has aged into something like a bona-fide standard. But in 1987, no one had the key to unlocking commercial viability. No less an industry titan than longtime blockbuster producer Jimmy Iovine took a stab at remixing the tune. It was a letter never sent. Everyone at Sire tried. The band added crackerjack guitarist Bob “Slim” Dunlap and toured relentlessly, a weird comet-sighting for everyone who witnessed it, but not enough did. None of the four singles released gained meaningful traction.
Pleased To Meet Me sold roughly 300,000 copies, well short of expectations. Warner Brothers didn’t have the platinum hit they had hoped for. But they did have an instant classic. And maybe, in their Russian Roulette way, the Replacements were always playing the long game. As any number of their more commercially successful peers slide ever more into the gaping maw of cultural obsolescence, now it’s all Replacements all the time. Against all odds, they’ve got both feet in the door.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | October 15, 2020 | 9.3 | 383d54a9-e5b7-45f5-ac79-ea0b655cf33b | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s pillowy guitar pop comforts on the surface but pulses with nightmarish visions beneath. | The singer-songwriter’s pillowy guitar pop comforts on the surface but pulses with nightmarish visions beneath. | Dylan Moon: Only the Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dylan-moon-only-the-blues/ | Only the Blues | Dylan Moon is a dreamer. On his debut Only the Blues, he sings that “sleepwalking days have found [him] now,” an explicit acknowledgement that he’s got his head in the clouds. But even if he hadn’t outright said so, you’d guess it soon enough from the pillowy arrangements, from the way his voice rises from silky baritone to his whispery upper register, from the sparkle in his voice when he sings about reaching “Xanadu’s shore” or when he pleads to Jerry Garcia for guidance. This is not music concerned with the mundane; Moon is floating somewhere above the everyday.
Moon certainly isn’t the first to apply a turn-off-your-mind-and-float-downstream approach to guitar pop, nor is he ignorant of his forebears. In an interview with Aquarium Drunkard, he explicitly cites “’60s psych, shoegaze, and ’90s indie” as well younger songwriters like Emily Yacina as reference points for his music. Tracks like “Lines” recall the work of Felt, while others evoke the grayscale ambience of '80s 4AD. The overall mood—creeping, misty, and kinda sad—recalls a fair amount of slowcore bands. Texturally at least, it’s pleasant stuff.
But Moon's songwriting is stranger than those influences suggest. His music moves with the fragmented imagery and broken logic of dreams and memory; melodies and sections bleed and blur into one another until it’s hard to remember where one part starts and another ends. There are no anthemic choruses or even especially repetitive melodies—Moon moves fast, picking out a memorable riff then immediately twisting it into gnarled new shapes. This makes the music feel slippery and unsettling, in spite of the comforting arrangements.
Moon sings of fantasy worlds and deep trips, but an undercurrent of anxiety and loss pulses underneath. On “Mind Troubles,” he lays out his concerns most explicitly, grappling with “the fight against a constant mind.” But elsewhere his worries communicate themselves in oblique whispers and clipped moans. He sings things like “Wish me away, blank hollow husk,” and even if you aren't sure exactly what he means, his desperation and despair are palpable.
There are moments of fleeting whimsy; he gestures at the existence of characters named Midnight the Cat and Wednesday the Rat on “Analog,” and a few old Hanna-Barbera cartoons get shoutouts on “Mind Troubles.” It's unclear exactly what they're doing here, but that's how dreams work, isn't it? You can't control what ominous figures or childhood memories might haunt you, what unpredictable twists and turns your mind takes. You can only turn yourself over to it, then surrender your waking hours to unpacking the mysteries.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rvng Intl. | September 25, 2019 | 7.1 | 383e8cb8-43e7-44b3-8140-acddba2f4c8c | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
After a pair of impossibly huge, overpowering records, M83's Anthony Gonzalez changes up his sound, ditching maximalism for beauty and drama. His new album is dense with 1980s new wave tropes and teenage memories, reflecting the soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love. | After a pair of impossibly huge, overpowering records, M83's Anthony Gonzalez changes up his sound, ditching maximalism for beauty and drama. His new album is dense with 1980s new wave tropes and teenage memories, reflecting the soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love. | M83: Saturdays=Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11406-saturdaysyouth/ | Saturdays=Youth | Saturdays=Youth-- the new album from French musician M83 (aka Anthony Gonzalez)-- opens with a stately piano phrase. Synths gradually overtake the piano and Gonzalez sings concise lyrics in falsetto-- "It's your face/ Where are we?/ Save me"-- amid billowing harmonies. It's the sort of big, beatless slow-burn he often uses to dramatize an impending pivot, a moment when the percussion gallops in and the song takes off for the stratosphere. But on this track, "You, Appearing", that pivot never arrives. Instead, the music tapers off into the booming overture of "Kim & Jessie".
Saturdays=Youth is still huge music, with three players in addition to Gonzalez-- but it has a different kind of heft from previous M83 records. On Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 was all about the vertical push-- layer after layer of synths and drums piled up in a vertiginous tower. But these new songs disperse in all directions: Producers Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas spread the melodies and beats into a sound world of uncommon vibrancy and pristine clarity, mounted on a massive yet now more proportionate scale.
Not only does the music move differently, it offers a different take on M83's favorite decade, the 1980s. Where previous albums saluted the doomed grandeur of the Cure and the retro-futurism of Blade Runner, Saturdays=Youth pays homage to Cocteau Twins (whom Thomas has also produced) and the teen dramas of filmmaker John Hughes. It's dense with new wave tropes: the chrome-plated guitars and aqueous keyboards on "Kim & Jessie", the decadent synthetic toms on the otherwise cloudy "Skin of the Night", the funk guitars and shivering cymbals of the masterful "Couleurs". Many modern bands have appropriated these iconic touchstones with a wink, a revision, or both. M83's reverent take is less common, bringing to mind Lansing-Dreiden's underappreciated 80s throwback The Dividing Island.
The album has the same nostalgic sparkle as Hughes' films, a soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love. In the liner notes, Gonzalez dedicates it to "all the friends, music, movies, joints, and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!" At 26, Gonzalez is just the right age to look back on this era with rose-tinted glasses, forgetting the alienation and anxiety, remembering only the sweetness. Whenever the darker side of teenhood rears its head, it's heroically battled back: On the shoegaze-thick "Dark Moves of Love", "everything is wrecked and grey," but the song ends on a poignant note: "I will fight the time and bring you back!" On the album's cover, heartbreakingly radiant youths (one of them a dead ringer for Molly Ringwald) strike poses in a gold and russet pasture-- the same kind of beautiful misfits that Hughes arranged in after-school detention. In lyrics filled with lusty eruptions ("They are Gods! They are lightning!"), archetypal teens invent themselves with innocent fervor: A love-struck young couple in "Kim & Jessie"; a goth with a crown of black roses and a heart of bubblegum in "Graveyard Girl".
In the context of teen drama, how perfect is it that Gonzalez met Morgan Kibby, whose dovelike vocals enrich "Skin of the Night" and "Up!", on MySpace? In the context of a band whose music is both literally and metaphorically cinematic, how perfect is it that Kibby has done voiceover work on the trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water? These symmetries make Saturdays=Youth feel like an unaccountably alive, complete album. While some fans might be disappointed by the lack of a "Don't Save Us From the Flames"-style anthem, the change in M83's sound arrives just as Gonzalez has pushed the maximal thing to its limits and risks diminishing returns. On its first two studio albums, M83 did one thing very, very well: create compact doses of tension and adrenaline. Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint. Like his recent ambient foray, Digital Shades Vol. 1, it finds a guy who's known for painting gigantic horizons figuring out how to broaden them even more. | 2008-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | April 15, 2008 | 8.5 | 383f2843-b25d-44f9-a7e3-28110e51e234 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On her fifth and best full-length album, the Ohio singer-songwriter follows the rangy contours of her electric guitar playing with heartbreak stories and searching questions. | On her fifth and best full-length album, the Ohio singer-songwriter follows the rangy contours of her electric guitar playing with heartbreak stories and searching questions. | Lydia Loveless: Daughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lydia-loveless-daughter/ | Daughter | Ambition sharpens Lydia Loveless’s songwriting. When she boasts, “I am on the verge of brilliance,” on “Don’t Bother Mountain,” she follows it with, “or on the verge of death.” On her fifth and best full-length album, Daughter, the Ohio singer-songwriter masters a music that follows the contours of her electric guitar playing: rangy and gnarled. It’s tempting to think of Jason Isbell and Patty Loveless (no relation) as confreres, but the scrappy rock’n’roll of her earlier albums and the absence of self-pity moves her closer to Scarecrow-era John Mellencamp or mid-period Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Falling out of love with jerks, hitting the bottle hoping it doesn’t hit back, Loveless positions herself not as a survivor but a fighter. She expects tough times and no breaks, not even from herself.
Loveless’s instrumental commitment makes the difference on Daughter, urging the material onward with her piano and synth. She also plays bass on a few tracks, filling in for Ben Lamb, whom she divorced around the time she released 2016’s Real. She and guitarist Todd May merge into the kind of unit whose filigrees tickle and surprise. The jangle of “Love Is Not Enough” complements a lyric about accepting romantic devastation; she pulls one way and the cheerful arrangement goes another. Even better is “Wringer,” an exercise in finding delightful rhymes for the title that seems to take a cue from Loveless and May’s call-and-response riffing. Switching to bass, May and drummer George Hondroulis work up a lissome groove for “Never,” home of the bumper sticker manifesto, “I’m not a liberated woman/Just a country bumpkin dilettante.” Had a country singer tackled “Never,” the wink would be seen from here to Appalachia. Loveless, though, rarely kids.
Blessed with a high, seared, unpretty voice that suggests hard living, Loveless inhabits these characters free of the affect that, say, Lucinda Williams leans on for her truth. If Daughter is her best album, then the title track is her best song. With Hondroulis punching each verse, Loveless asks her lover, “If I gave you a daughter, would you open up?” And: “Why can’t I show you another side of me?” They’re trenchant questions, not because she doesn’t know the answer, but because she knows too well and prefers interrogation to admissions.
Connecting self-worth to the health of a relationship, and to success as a mother, is a phenomenon no less grim than when Loretta Lynn described an exhausted Kansas housewife in “One’s on the Way” almost 50 years ago. Perhaps grimmer—songwriting, like therapy, has its limits. Loveless understands. With a sober approach to its less-than-sober characters, Daughter takes life one song at a time. She can’t do more but prepare to accept less.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Honey, You're Gonna Be Late | September 29, 2020 | 7.7 | 38417f46-2494-4552-b13e-ce23a8459bb6 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Third studio album from the ambitious brit-rock band is more of the same: big choruses, slightly off-kilter sonics, and gruff vocals. | Third studio album from the ambitious brit-rock band is more of the same: big choruses, slightly off-kilter sonics, and gruff vocals. | Doves: Some Cities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2432-some-cities/ | Some Cities | Doves' frontman Jimi Goodwin can't sing. His voice, often derided for its slovenliness and liberality with pitch, lends the Manchester trio's songs a coarseness for which they're left to compensate, or not, with more adventurous instrumentals. The band's previous albums, Lost Souls and The Last Broadcast, generally managed to cover the difference, but at times sounded like Doves were trying too hard to be something they're not: Both albums featured their share of anthemic hooks, but it seemed as if the band were struggling to turn in something as aseptically beatific-- and as popular-- as fellow Brit-rock bands such as Coldplay and Travis.
In the three years since Last Broadcast, Doves have cultivated a better understanding of their strengths and limitations, and Some Cities beams with a revivified looseness. Like its predecessors, the album arrives just in time for Spring and comes bearing more than a few certifiable vernal jams. Last Broadcast's "There Goes the Fear", one of the bouncin-est seven-minute verse/chorus/verse brit-rock epics with a jungle-percussive outro Radio 1 has ever spun, finds its match in "Black and White Town", this album's lead single, which channels Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" with a plump four-on-the-floor beat and steady-struttin' piano line. But as tender and prissy as they can be, strands of angst and pessimism course through Doves' music, and Some Cities hones this aesthetic push-and-pull, featuring some of the band's darkest and prettiest music to date. Furthermore, those two stylistic extremes aren't always mutually exclusive.
The record's first four tracks are downright impregnable. Opener "Some Cities" is urgent and yearning. The song is surprisingly tactful in forging a composite order, wedding Bruce Springsteen's arena boot-stomp to the Velvet Underground's driveling, soot-caked guitar yowls. "Almost Forgot Myself" is more classic Motown than its rippling atmospherics and surf-echo guitar let on, laying down a rubbery bass line and sturdy boom-chick drumming. It's difficult to tell if "Snowden"'s deeply cooed, wordless chorus is the work of voice or oscillated guitar or both, but it's sure as hell beautiful.
Rounding out the chart-eyeing material is "One of These Days", which pegs the platinum-selling populism that has eluded the band. The guitar melody is Some Cities' most chipper, but the song is beefy with details-- a tangential doppler-synth intro and a tasteful effects-laden trim, among them. Again, the drum/bass interplay suggests a Motown affinity-- a dauntingly generic yet fickle ingredient that Doves incorporate pleasantly and organically.
It's frustrating when an album feels like it consciously has to embark on some kind of journey-- for instance, the descent from energetic, single-worthy material to slow introspective ballads that's so often just a cover for frontloading. Some Cities traces a similar arc, but Doves aren't pulling the wool over our eyes; the album's second half is nearly as well-executed as its first, if lacking the same galvanizing momentum. "Shadows of Salford" is a muffled, herb-slowed piano dirge that sends Magical Mystery Tour its regards. From there, the album acquiesces, staking one last bopper ("Sky Starts Falling") before bowing out gracefully with the huge, sweeping "Ambition", a dignified snares-off dirge. Like many great brit-rock records, Some Cities is plucky and resilient-- it wants badly to show you its hurt but wouldn't dare spill its guts straight; that would be impudent. Doves know better: They hold their breath to the end, until, wheezing and transparent, their hearts shine clear. | 2005-02-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | February 28, 2005 | 7.8 | 38492688-4503-436e-87c9-39882e2a6ade | Pitchfork | null |
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The third volume in Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series spotlights a Nigerian musician who fuses traditional rhythms and pan-Nigerian highlife with the teachings of Islam. | The third volume in Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series spotlights a Nigerian musician who fuses traditional rhythms and pan-Nigerian highlife with the teachings of Islam. | Alhaji Waziri Oshomah: World Spirituality Classics 3: The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alhaji-waziri-oshomah-world-spirituality-classics-3-the-muslim-highlife-of-alhaji-waziri-oshomah/ | World Spirituality Classics 3: The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah | The concept of religion as a realm separate from secular life does not exist in many sub-Saharan African cultures. Spirituality is to be considered intrinsic to the material world, and all aspects of life are infused with ritual and belief. Holiness can be found in nature, prayer, medicine, and song. Dance, in particular, is a way to channel the divine and communicate with spiritual forces. It’s therapy, worship, ecstasy.
Alhaji Waziri Oshomah’s music is all of these things. A devout Muslim and pillar of his community, he fuses traditional rhythms, pan-Nigerian highlife, and elements of Western pop with the teachings of Islam, playing frenzied concerts where provocative dancing is soundtracked by his religious and philosophical musings. The mix of the sacred and the apparently unholy is no contradiction in Waziri’s hometown of Auchi, a majority Muslim city in Nigeria’s largely Christian Edo State, where over time Islam has become interwoven with the culture and traditions of the Afenmai and Etsakọ people.
Seven of Waziri’s dance tracks are collected on The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah, the third volume in Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series, following 2017’s The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda and 2019’s The Time For Peace Is Now. Each compilation explores the ways in which music can lead people closer to God. For Alice Coltrane it was through gentle spirituality, calm, and reflection; for the likes of the Floyd Family Singers or the Religious Souls, religious preaching went hand in hand with funky rhythms and soulful grooves.
For Waziri, enlightenment happens on the dancefloor. He was born in 1947 into a deeply religious Afenmai/Etsakọ family, and as a child he discovered the Nigerian highlife that was sweeping across Lagos at the time. When he began sneaking into clubs and eventually playing in his own band, his family disowned him, convinced their Muslim faith was diametrically opposed to popular music and the lifestyles associated with it.
But Waziri stayed firm in his belief that music could be a way of spreading positive messages and the teachings of Islam. He crafted his own idiosyncratic style of dance music, emphasizing the region’s mellow palm-wine rhythms over the horn-heavy, big-band highlife that was exported from Ghana to Nigeria by musicians like E.T. Mensah in the 1950s. The horns on “Forgive Them Oh God Amin – Amin’’ are reminiscent of Ebo Taylor, but rather than supplying extra punch to the funk-heavy sound that Taylor pioneered, they provide a counterpoint to unfurling, languorous guitar lines and unhurried rhythms. With a steady, almost spoken delivery, Waziri asks God to forgive those who gossip, descending into a hypnotic call-and-response chant with his backing singers.
It’s not hard to draw comparisons with Fela Kuti, who was exploding onto the scene in those same years. While Kuti’s Afrobeat did have an undeniable impact on Waziri—at one point he even said his music was “the Afenmai brand of Afro Beat”—their approach to politics and power couldn’t have been more different. Where Kuti challenged and rebelled, Waziri praised and celebrated, writing several songs in honor of the important people of Auchi. On the sprawling, 17-minute-long “Alhaji Yesufu Sado Managing Director,” for example, he pays homage to a local village chief over breezy guitars, a light, bouncing bassline, and bubbling electric organ.
It was a different Nigerian legend who had the biggest impact on Waziri. Victor Uwaifo was a fellow Edo State musician known for a unique style that blended modern instrumentation with traditional rhythms, soul, and funk, even experimenting with electronics. While remaining rooted in traditional styles, Waziri also incorporates electronic effects into his music. On “Jealousy,” a siren-like synthesizer announces the beginning of Waziri’s sermon, a warning against the perils of jealous feelings (“You that is entangled in envy/You will be killed by hypertension”) over warbling electronics and percussive shakers. As in many of Waziri’s songs, the lyrics’ ethical emphasis—preaching living according to one’s values and respecting other people—transcend any one particular religious sect.
As religious divisions increase in other parts of Nigeria, the people of Auchi—irrespective of creed, age, or gender—still come together to listen to the teachings of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah, finding catharsis and community in the Etsako Super Star’s spiritual highlife. With its sprawling grooves, strutting rhythms, and joyful atmospheres, Waziri’s music conveys a lesson that is not bound by language or local context. Rather than searching for pathways to enlightenment in a higher realm, it preaches the possibility of finding God in the here and now: in togetherness, pleasure, music, and dance. | 2022-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luaka Bop | October 7, 2022 | 7.2 | 38525ab5-00fe-4ba7-b911-3642f9b920d7 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
The legendary New Jack Swing trio reunites for a new album, right as fellow alumni New Edition hit the charts for the first time in over a decade. | The legendary New Jack Swing trio reunites for a new album, right as fellow alumni New Edition hit the charts for the first time in over a decade. | Bell Biv Devoe: Three Stripes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22820-three-stripes/ | Three Stripes | Few anticipated the trio Bell Biv Devoe’s sensational 1990 debut. All three members were in the important and longstanding R&B vocal group New Edition, but none were ever a central focus of the ensemble. They were consistently overshadowed by Ralph Tresvant, who provided lead vocals on most New Edition tracks; Johnny Gill, who joined the group in 1988 for their most fully realized album, Heart Break, but already had hits of his own; and even by former member Bobby Brown, who left New Edition in 1985 and hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 three years later. While Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie Devoe were essential to the success of the group as a whole, they almost always served to support their more prominent co-stars.
Until they didn't: heeding advice from the world-class production duo Jam & Lewis, Bell Biv Devoe formed a trio and released an album that was eventually certified quadruple platinum. Of the New Edition diaspora, Brown enjoyed the most sales and notoriety, Tresvant approached one-note perfection with “Sensitivity,” and Gill built an enviable collection of ballads, but it was the underdogs in Bell Biv Devoe who came up with that elusive thing, a crossover standard which everyone will know for eternity: “Poison.” President Obama recently invited the group to the White House to perform the track, confirming its designation as a piece of universal American pop culture.
That honor makes it a fine time for Bell Biv Devoe to reemerge with Three Stripes. They're also likely to benefit from New Edition’s high level of visibility at the moment: the group returned to the radio for the first time in over a decade last year, credited as featured vocalists on Johnny Gill’s No. 1 R&B hit “This One’s For Me And You,” and a three-part New Edition biopic is slated to air on BET the same week that Three Stripes hits the shelves.
This is the first Bell Biv Devoe album in 16 years, and early on, it feels like the trio is stepping gingerly, with continuity in mind above all else. Despite their time away from the studio, Bivins and Devoe still rap in the end-rhyme-heavy style of the late ’80s. And since the majority of the group's early hits were smutty accounts of the group's interactions with the opposite sex, similar narratives guide several songs on Three Stripes. “I’ll say a bunch of slick shit to get between your thighs,” Devoe promises in “I’m Betta,” a pushy, hurry-up-and-leave-him-number which reminds listeners that 49 year-olds have the right to be juvenile, too.
But despite these allusions, Three Stripes rarely crackles in the manner of early Bell Biv Devoe—the Poison album is resiliently pesky, like an especially pugnacious welterweight, but there's little of that scrappy spirit here. As they did in 1990, the trio calls on hip-hop producers for help: Erick Sermon of the famous New York hip-hop duo EPMD crafted “Run,” and other beat makers here include DJ Battlecat (Snoop Dogg, Xzibit) and Doug E. Fresh. But the tracks are mostly either pedestrian and unmemorable, or memorable for the wrong reasons. This is exemplified by the lead single, “Run,” which redundantly interpolates Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” a song too molded to Biggie to provide a favorable look for anyone else.
It’s a pair of the least energetic moments, though, which turn out to be the richest on the record. While Bell Biv Devoe classics mostly eschewed harmony, a New Edition hallmark, in favor of skeletal thwack, the trio embraces the full-group approach on the back half of Three Stripes. When Bell trades verses with SWV’s scene-stealing Coko on the ballad “Finally,” her full, trembling tone nourishes his lancing falsetto. And Boyz II Men, who owe their name to a New Edition song, appear on “One More Try,” helping create a benign, slender number based around Jerry Butler’s “I Could Write A Book” from 1970.
Plummy as these tracks are, they make you wonder why Bell Biv Devoe didn’t recruit from the crack platoon of contemporary songwriters most adept at balancing R&B tradition with the requirements of today's production practices. This coterie includes Babyface, who writes nearly as well as he did two decades ago (see 2015’s “Love and Devotion”); Gregg Pagani, who helped pen Gill’s No. 1 last year; and the duo of Pop & Oak, who gifted the world with Usher’s “Good Kisser” and Tamia’s “Sandwich and a Soda.” But Bell Biv Devoe aren’t looking for that kind of help, and who says they need it? “Run” is currently a top ten record at Urban AC radio: once again, this underdog trio is enjoying unexpected success. | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Entertainment One / The Triangle | January 23, 2017 | 5.5 | 38626557-b4bb-4312-a1dd-fd986e55cadb | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
The latest album from the child star turned Star Child can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, but her psychedelic soul music is no closer to showing us who she really is. | The latest album from the child star turned Star Child can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, but her psychedelic soul music is no closer to showing us who she really is. | Willow: Willow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willow-willow/ | Willow | Things happened quickly for Willow, as they tend to do for children of celebrities. At 9, she scored a platinum hit and signed to Roc Nation just as the song went viral. At 10, she was cast as the lead in a movie remake of the musical Annie. Just as the Smith family career plan had seemingly taken hold, she rebuked it: She quit Annie, withdrew from the pop sphere, and started releasing music with titles like Interdimensional Tesseract. She has called having famous parents “excruciatingly terrible” and has been in overdrive forging her own path. On “Boy,” the opener to her 2017 album, The 1st, released on her 17th birthday, she was as honest about how the outside world sees her as she’s ever been, looking through the eyes of a new lover: “I come from a cluster of super bright stars/And probably to him it feels scary to reach that far,” she sang. She’s been trying to be more down to earth her whole life.
Willow, a child star turned self-professed Star Child, has had a different kind of coming-of-age Hollywood story since. She has been in a perpetually transitional state searching for her own identity, a ghost haunting the Smith family celebrity legacy. That journey has largely manifested as bohemian, third-eye musings in search of absolute truth. But, more often than not, Willow’s vision quests haven’t produced impressionable music. She sounds like if SZA suddenly retreated from the limelight, got really into Alanis Morissette and junk science, and was noncommittal about songcraft. It may be a lack of practice or it may be a lack of interest, but her brand of psychedelic soul and blurry dream-pop can be so immaterial it’s as if it’s trapped in the astral plane. Her self-titled album can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, if you let it wash over you like a gentle current of #vibes, but she is no closer to showing us who she really is.
Willow co-produced the album with musician Tyler Cole, half of the duo Sol Prophet, who (both solo and in tandem) makes music aimlessly searching for something, anything, to say. He is a member of the MSFTSrep “art collective” Willow founded with her brother, the now full-time inventor Jaden. Two of their previous collaborations, “Afraid” and “Sorrow,” feel like entry points into this nebulous headspace—light on music, powered mostly by hums and incantations. Both Willow and Cole would consider genre an insult. They want their music to transcend the limits of classification to a higher level of consciousness.
Willow was already getting into guitars on The 1st, but Cole’s influence is clear. He has driven her toward a more atmospheric sound. The music here is competent enough to pass for enlightened but it’s actually illusory. There is nothing tangible to latch onto. Listening closely feels like trying to identify solid objects when wandering through a fog, particularly on “Like a Bird” and “U KNOW,” which both seem to blur until they’re out of focus.
The 1st was rangier and explored who Willow was as a young woman, thinker, and artist, delving into the personal in a way she hadn’t before in her music. The songs on Willow just bleed together at the edges into a composite of wokeness. Cole tweeted that Willow was the official album of the Area 51 raid. Across its 22 minutes, Willow’s “falling into the arms of naked truth” and singing about Annunaki and sacred geometry. She still writes about love, but primarily in the philosophical sense. In the search for deeper meaning, her songs lose all sight of what’s right there on the surface. There’s a song called “Overthinking IT” where she warbles, “I know that sometimes/I’m crippled by my mind/I don’t wanna be.” It’s the realest, closest, most truthful thing she says.
On “Time Machine,” she longs to live her life out among a previous generation, so she can rub shoulders with the visionaries of the past with whom she feels kinship—predictably, Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 and Kurt Cobain in 1993, two of the most mainstream icons to represent artistic license among teenage misfits. She’s nostalgic for MTV. Her message—things were better any time before now—feels poorly justified and unearned. “I don’t care what anyone says/Everyone is disconnected these days/’Cause everyone is looking at their phone/Tryna feel like they are less alone/And I’m here to tell them that they’re wrong,” she sings, drawing a ham-fisted beeline from technology to despondency.
The new age tropes are exhausting, and the means of expression are narrow, but Willow is clearly striving to be something more. She is obviously both talented and ambitious but she still hasn’t translated those qualities into the caliber of music JAY-Z projected onto her all those years ago. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe, with its far-out-ness, Willow is subverting those expectations even now. But in an effort to avoid being the Willow Smith everyone seemed to think she’d become, the pop culture polyglot, Willow seems to have lost sight of what makes her interesting. | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | MSFTS MUSIC / Roc Nation / Republic | July 25, 2019 | 6.2 | 3866d62f-d369-48c9-ae81-282bef080a77 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Couching politically brazen lyrics about police repression and state hypocrisy in a highly stylized goth maximalism, the high-concept Moscow duo is one of Russia’s most exciting bands. | Couching politically brazen lyrics about police repression and state hypocrisy in a highly stylized goth maximalism, the high-concept Moscow duo is one of Russia’s most exciting bands. | IC3PEAK: До Свидания / Goodbye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ic3peak-do-svidaniya-goodbye/ | До Свидания / Goodbye | In the 2018 mini-documentary Let It All Burn, the Moscow duo IC3PEAK are about to play a show in the Russian city of Voronezh when health inspectors and police arrive to shut the venue down on suspicion of food poisoning. Although the alleged incident has taken place the day before the band’s arrival in town, the officers demand to speak to the band and their manager. This is the latest obstacle on a tour where every stop has been plagued by interference from government officials. As the club director is interrogated, the sound engineer and the duo’s manager sneak fans through a backdoor into the dimly lit room where IC3PEAK members Nastya Kreslina and Nikolay Kostylev launch into their song “Сказка” (“Fairytale”): “I come from a Russian horror fairy tale/It doesn’t matter where you come from,” Kreslina spits. “I do not play your games/Someday you will die.” At the end of their short set, a sizable crowd, most of whom didn’t even make it into the venue, lingers in the cold outside, singing along to their favorite IC3PEAK songs. Kreslina and Kostylev join them to sing the controversial hit “Смерти Больше Нет” (“Death No More”), which may have set off the government’s ire to begin with: “I fill my eyes with kerosene/Let it all burn, let it all burn/All of Russia is watching me/Let it all burn, let it all burn.” With their politically brazen lyrics about police repression and state hypocrisy, as well as a fierce, highly stylized goth maximalism, IC3PEAK is one of the most exciting bands to come out of Russia in a while—and Russia’s youth and officials both know it.
The duo’s latest album, До Свидания (Goodbye) was released with the tagline, “It’s going to get darker.” That’s a hefty challenge for a band whose first major hit was called “Sad Bitch.” But До Свидания delivers. Sounding at times like a cross between Eartheater and Deli Girls, IC3PEAK’s music oscillates between pitch-black hymnals and twisted club bangers, often in the same song. Kreslina is indeed something out of a gothic fairy tale—sometimes a ghostly child reciting a menacing nursery rhyme, sometimes a vengeful banshee. Her vocal toolkit incorporates seething whispers, operatic flourishes, chilling high falsetto, and melodic, radio-friendly toplines. It is important that the band sings in Russian, but Kreslina emotes so effusively that their message touches even those who don’t speak the language. “[In our early tracks] there was this idea of the universal language, which is the language of the scream,” Kreslina told sports journalist Yury Dud in an interview for his pop-culture YouTube talk show, vDud. Kreslina’s screams are balanced perfectly by Kostylev’s impeccable production: restrained soundscapes always ready to attack with a well-timed drop, danceable wobbling trap beats, and abrasive industrial screeching—a natural evolution from performing at underground bunker raves in Moscow in their early years. Once upon a time IC3PEAK would have fit neatly under the witch-house umbrella, but they set themselves apart by wedding its aesthetic to a sharp political consciousness. Postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe coined the term “necropolitics” to discuss how state power renders some lives disposable, thus creating “death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” With a mouthful of dirt and blood, IC3PEAK weaponizes this already-dead positionality, conjuring the silenced, repressed, and murdered subjectivities that haunt the autocratic patriarchal regime.
On До Свидания, IC3PEAK continue to touch on political themes. In “TRRST,” featuring former 6ix9ine songwriter ZillaKami, they address censorship (“Mama, they say I’m a terrorist (what?) I did nothing wrong but I got on a blacklist”). “Марш” (“Marching”) deals with the suppression of democracy (“Without an invitation they come into my house/[With] a new word and a new law”). And “Плак-Плак” (“Boo Hoo”) deals with domestic violence, decriminalized in Russia in 2017: “I was always good, I was never bad/All my life like a good girl I obeyed the rules/I’m tired of crying, tired of suffering/Either way I won’t be able to predict my own death.” In the video for “Плак-Плак,” a somber child with Kreslina’s iconic braids opens a blood-red diorama and mimes her parents (played by Kreslina and Kostylev in doll form) fighting, only to frighten when the Kreslina doll comes to life and takes vengeance into her own hands by murdering her husband with a butcher knife. But the record is full of more universal subjects as well: loneliness, betrayal, love, death. Each is handled with the same heavy-handed melodrama, to various degrees of effectiveness. There’s a wealth of necro imagery and sinister voltas (“I kiss your corpse/I thought you were my friend”; “I want to hug these mountains/I want to lick the sky/I will kiss the water/I will cover my head with earth”) which can feel both mall-goth maudlin and archetypically black metal. When Kostylev really lets rip, it sounds as deliciously apocalyptic as the Body, and though the heavier songs can feel eclipsed by the focus on the ballads, they are definite highlights.
The metal affinities are not just in the lyrics but also in the aesthetic: desaturated photos emphasizing pale skin, black formalwear, and red accents (lipstick, blood) set against the Russian forest or dystopian brutalist cityscapes. IC3PEAK have always envisioned themselves as an audiovisual project, directing and producing high-concept, relatively high-budget music videos that give their music dimension and expand their audience to millions. Thanks in part to multi-platform exposure, their reach has expanded internationally: They have played Berlin’s CTM festival; toured through the U.S., China, and Brazil; and even caught the ear of Skrillex, who has dropped a remix of “Sad Bitch” in his sets. On До Свидания, an unprecedented number of features suggest the extent of their growing reach. ZillaKami’s unmistakably gravel-voiced verse is the biggest surprise, but the record also includes contributions from Russian rapper Husky (who has also experienced show cancellations and even imprisonment for his music) and horrorcore Florida rapper GHOSTEMANE, a former affiliate of Lil Peep in Schemaposse.
Throughout Let It All Burn, both IC3PEAK and their fans seem unflustered by the police interference: This is just how things are. But the weight of it lingers—after all, it is one thing to sing abstractly about state violence and another to be personally targeted by it—giving До Свидания a more vulnerable and forlorn tone than previous albums. Still, amidst the record’s mortal desperation and corpse worship lies a vehement refusal to accept the psychic death implied by total resignation, further proving to IC3PEAK’s commitment to fearlessness at a time when state power feeds on fear and silence. “You buried me beyond the MKAD/Fed me dirt/But I crawled out of hell/And came back for you,” oozes Kreslina on the swerving “мкАД” (“Moscow Automobile Ring Road”). Even necropower can’t keep the undead down.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | July 17, 2020 | 7.2 | 386c758b-6509-4b2b-8fca-798a28f98e7b | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
Terry Reid turned down offers to front Led Zeppelin and recorded some flawless folk-rock albums but never escaped obscurity. This comprehensive reissue rounds out his untold story. | Terry Reid turned down offers to front Led Zeppelin and recorded some flawless folk-rock albums but never escaped obscurity. This comprehensive reissue rounds out his untold story. | Terry Reid: The Other Side of the River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21722-terry-reid-the-other-side-of-the-river/ | The Other Side of the River | In 1968, Aretha Franklin reportedly said: “There are only three things happening in England: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Terry Reid.” And the deeper you delve into Reid's music, the more astonishing it becomes that he has lived out the past half-century in relative obscurity, while so many of his contemporaries have been enshrined as rock music royalty for decades. Due to his uncanny ability to channel raw emotion through his bombastic voice, Reid picked up the nickname Superlungs at the beginning of his career, turned down the opportunity to front Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and set out for a uncompromising solo career. In 1973, at the age of 24, he released River, a near-flawless album of roots, blues, rock 'n' roll, folk and jazz that quickly became a collector's item as it revolved in and out of print for years. The Other Side of the River is a new collection of 11 tracks from River's session, six of which are previously unheard, and the stunning part is, had they been released with the original LP, it would probably be even more coveted than it is today.
Take, for example, “Avenue (F# Boogie),” a rambling and rollicking number that lazily directs you into the heart of the album. The newly unearthed version has a lived-in, worn-out feel: you can easily picture a gang of long-haired dudes with mutton chop sideburns lounging around a studio, cracking off riff after riff. Ike and Tina Turner's Ikettes are featured on backing vocals on the track, and their infusion of lush R&B warmth ties the chorus together with spine-tingling effect. It's gorgeous, and in a way improves on the already-fantastic, tighter studio version.
Clearly, having ready access to the talents of the Ikettes never hurt anyone, but the main star in virtually everything Terry Reid ever released is his otherworldly voice. On every song, it bursts forth with equal parts gravel and honey; his soulful belting is effortless and at the same time, sounds almost painful. On “Let's Go Down,” his vocals ride crescendoing blasts of brass up and down the chorus, alternating from a surly talk-sing to chest-bursting wails. The song is a perfect introduction to Reid as Superlungs – even setting aside his virtuoso guitar playing, he's an artist defined by an incredible natural instrument.
The sound on The Other Side of the River is impeccable, but the tracks themselves are obvious rescues from a very deep vault (“Let's Go Down” finishes with Reid cutting the track short, quipping: “Do you want to have another go, or shall we end it here?”), which makes the fact that it sounds like a well-rounded and complete record all the more impressive. Title track “River” is probably the closest to its original, Reid's jazzy phrasings mimicking the languid semi-tones of Nina Simone, skipping atop plucked guitars and minimal bossa nova percussion. It's a quiet moment that demands your attention, and an admirable palette cleanser from the album's more raucous moments.
The record's only major fault is that a few of the tracks are truly just studio noodling – “Celtic Melody,” while still an interesting listen due to Reid's inherent charm, peters out before it really starts, and “Late Night Idea” is basically just that. But given that the bulk of the album manages to rival its original incarnation, these transgressions are excusable, and even the few mostly improvisational outtakes, like the sweet and lilting “Anyway,” prove to be well worth salvaging from the cutting room floor. Light years from a mere slap-dash rarities compilation, The Other Side of the River takes some of a seminal rock musician's most interesting sketchworks and reimagines them as his magnum opus. | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Future Days | June 9, 2016 | 8.4 | 3876c7d6-6d40-4bcf-ac43-aabffbb811df | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Wednesday’s noisy, rangy sound finds a home in the quiet, lonely corners of America. Their outstanding new album is why they’re one of the best indie rock bands around. | Wednesday’s noisy, rangy sound finds a home in the quiet, lonely corners of America. Their outstanding new album is why they’re one of the best indie rock bands around. | Wednesday: Rat Saw God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wednesday-rat-saw-god/ | Rat Saw God | When Karly Hartzman tells you “there’s a place where the kids go to kiss,” it’s just one stop on a long, weird tour. The line arrives in the closing verse of a song called “Handsome Man” from Wednesday’s 2021 album Twin Plagues, right after she points out how the wallpaper in the bathroom seems to “wince” while you piss. You get the sense she’s mentioning this place less as a starry-eyed invitation than for the sake of being comprehensive: It’s another spot to revisit, and plenty of people have written songs about it. There’s much more to see.
How about, for example, the Planet Fitness where someone died in the parking lot? Or the fridge with the crickets behind it? Have you seen the sex shop with the biblical name? Or how about the house that turned out to be a mob front? You will find all these hidden, unloved locales scattered through Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s lightning bolt of a fifth album. So much writing about the quiet, lonely corners of America spends its time longing to break free, aching for something big to happen. Hartzman’s characters have no great plans and nowhere to go, so they wind up luxuriating in the quiet and the loneliness as Hartzman traffics in the casual poetry of people who share enough in common to skip the pleasantries. “We always started by telling our best stories first,” she sings. “So now that it’s been a while I’ll get to tellin’ you all my worst.”
The same way Hartzman can guide you through a landscape that subtly grows as familiar as the one where you grew up, she sometimes gives the sense that you’re poring through her books and record collection, sitting beside her as she recites the underlined passages. In her lyrics, there are quotes from fiction writers George Saunders and Richard Brautigan; shout-outs to Bill Callahan and Drive-By Truckers. These are lofty comparisons, but Wednesday have the ambition to make these masters feel not only like peers but also like neighbors in their mythological hometown.
As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances. Listen casually and you will hear a killer rock band raised on alternative landmarks from the ’90s and early ’00s; listen closer and the woozy, grainy performances speak a language all their own. Some songs play like nonstop crescendos, starting at a steady rumble and only gaining speed, like the eight-minute “Bull Believer.” Others take you on a journey from twinkly ambience to reckless, pile-driving rock, as in the awestruck “Turkey Vultures.” This dynamic sound, propelled by the gnarly interplay of guitarist MJ Lenderman and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, allows Hartzman’s details to reveal themselves in surprising ways over the course of a single track: buried in cozy blankets of indie-rock fuzz, peering through rusty layers of noise-rock sheet metal, or burbling atop grinding alt-country that sputters like a stalled motor.
Even at their most crowd-pleasing, these modes always complement the stark realism and gothic humor in Hartzman’s words. “Chosen to Deserve” is, in theory, a love song. Centered on an undeniable Southern rock riff that would sound at home on FM radio between, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger, Hartzman winds through verses that pledge her devotion through a series of confessions about her messier, scrappier teen years: an ode to reaching the giddy point in a relationship when it’s impossible to overshare. “If you’re lookin’ for me/I’m in the back of an SUV,” she sings, “Doin’ it in some cul-de-sac/Underneath a dogwood tree.”
The real way Hartzman shows her love, however, is by refusing to cover up the ugly parts. In the second verse, she sings about a friend who nearly overdosed and the doctor who told him he was “lucky to survive.” But listen to the way she sings that last word, her voice dipping and cracking and falling out of key. Filtered through the perspective of a kid who doesn’t see life as some rare gift to cherish, she makes “survival” sound a little pathetic, kinda humiliating—not something to celebrate, just another slog to get through.
If this seems like challenging material—and indeed, Wednesday are likely the first rock band to rhyme “sedan” with “Narcan”—then the approachable, communal feel of Rat Saw God is a breakthrough. The music seems designed to draw people in, aided in part by producer Alex Farrar, who’s worked on similarly commanding records from Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen, and Snail Mail. These introspective outsider anthems could very well be the songs that bring Wednesday to their biggest stages, and they navigate this transition with newfound melodic pull—it only takes five seconds before “Quarry” lodges in your head—and increased confidence as storytellers. Like the characters she sings about, Hartzman might seem at first like she’s rambling, narrating the view as she circles the block, before you realize she’s actually baring her soul.
So much of this magic can be heard in her delivery of the words “finish him” at the end of “Bull Believer.” First, there’s the lyrical context: She’s at a New Year’s party; she has a nosebleed; someone is on the couch playing Mortal Kombat. Then there’s the way she sings it as her band thrashes and swells: first a murmur, then a wail, then a cry, then a shredded, unintelligible shriek. It goes on for a long time, and it’s difficult to imagine her replicating it every night on tour. Hartzman has explained in interviews she didn’t rehearse this moment, and she considered driving to the middle of nowhere to try it out, alone, in a wide open space. Still, the recorded version—a first take in the studio while her bandmates were downstairs playing video games—is the one. By now she’s learned there’s plenty of escape to be found in the wild, uncharted country within. | 2023-04-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | April 7, 2023 | 8.8 | 38771d9f-0550-44aa-8c52-2598f8ac76f4 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On the latest of the Toronto band's experimental zodiac EPs, Fucked Up continue to break and rebuild the definition of hardcore, venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia. | On the latest of the Toronto band's experimental zodiac EPs, Fucked Up continue to break and rebuild the definition of hardcore, venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia. | Fucked Up: Year of the Snake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23017-year-of-the-snake/ | Year of the Snake | Over the band’s 16-year career, Fucked Up has alternated between more straight-ahead hardcore on its proper albums and a parallel lane of experimental releases named after the Chinese zodiac. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the dichotomy between the two modes is still intact enough where it’s fair to say Fucked Up has operated as two different bands. For perspective, compare how 2014’s Glass Boys featured Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, while 2012’s Year of the Tiger featured Jim Jarmusch.
Like last year’s two-track, 45-minute release, This Mother Forever, Year of the Snake sees Fucked Up venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia with shades of prog and fusion thrown in for good measure. In fact, the two releases work as companion pieces and make the most sense as a pair. Both feature epic-length songs in the 15-to-30-minute range. But it’s their differences that reveal the full breadth of Fucked Up’s ambitions.
Where This Mother Forever sticks to a uniform structure of slow building—its two songs are basically single ideas stretched about as far as they can go—Year of the Snake flows in a less linear fashion, its ideas materializing and de-materializing as if the band could have turned them into separate songs but chose instead to let them bleed into one another. Over its 24-minute span, the title track encompasses simplistic riffing that verges on stoner metal, pastoral new-age psychedelia (complete with pan flute, recorder, and prayer bowl), epic hard rock, and a violin section that lands convincingly close to post-rock. Each section has ample time to simmer and it never feels like the band sacrifices flow for the sake of experimentation.
About halfway through the title track, when Fucked Up are going full bore channeling 2112-era Rush at their most majestic, the song transitions so that a synth figure bubbles up from underneath. The two parts initially clash, like someone bumping loud music in a car not far away. For that moment, Year of the Snake sounds almost like a mashup, but it’s short-lived. It also exemplifies how carefully considered all of the decisions on Year of the Snake are.
On the other hand, nothing feels especially careful about the voice of Damian Abraham, whose bark sounds so large and forceful it's like listening to King Kong next to an orchestra. That contrast gives Year of the Snake its distinct character. And as Fucked Up have delved into ever more delicate forms of expression, it’s been interesting to see how the band addresses the discrepancy between Abraham's style and the rest of the instrumentation. Abraham doesn’t appear on the second track, drummer Jonah Falco’s six-minute instrumental “Passacaglia,” and guitarist Mike Haliechuk composed the title track in a way that employs Abraham as an intermittent texture rather than a focal point. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of Abraham to go around, but only that if his voice was a dealbreaker for you before, Year of the Snake might be your best shot at appreciating everything that Fucked Up have to offer. (Guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook do not appear on the EP.)
At the beginning of “Passacaglia,” which functions as a kind of denouement for the title track, the guitars (played by Falco) contain echoes of Killing Joke’s groundbreaking 1980 self-titled debut. As revolutionary as Killing Joke sounded at the time, they approached their music as if it was a given that punk’s rules were there to be shattered. Likewise, even after decades’ worth of relaxing boundaries, Fucked Up bastardize hardcore in a way that gives off the thrill of creative heresy. As a creative insurgency waged from within its own ranks, Year of the Snake makes the genre sound more pliable than ever. | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Tankcrimes | March 24, 2017 | 7.4 | 387df18d-5533-49c0-ab80-136e717194a1 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper makes some of his most intimate, introspective tracks yet and proves why he’s one of his city’s most dependable. | The Atlanta rapper makes some of his most intimate, introspective tracks yet and proves why he’s one of his city’s most dependable. | Peewee Longway / Cassius Jay: Longway Sinatra 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peewee-longway-cassius-jay-longway-sinatra-2/ | Longway Sinatra 2 | Peewee Longway emerged as one of the last new members of the old 1017 before Gucci Mane’s last period of incarceration, popping up in 2013 and 2014 on early Young Thug tracks. Since the boss Mane’s release from prison in 2016—followed by Gucci’s crossover success, healthier rebrand, and Master P-type pivot to mentor of “The New 1017”—Peewee has mostly struck out on his own, orbiting Atlanta’s rap scene as a perpetual, determined independent, the head of his own MPA Bandcamp label.
He’s cited by peers as something of a mover and shaker behind the scenes, even as mainstream momentum has slightly eluded him—he helped facilitate Migos’ original deal with Quality Control, and Gucci Mane credits Peewee with introducing him to the enigma and icon that is Thugger, one of the most fruitful and paradigm-shifting creative relationships of rap’s last decade. Most recently, Peewee has positioned himself as part of a tag team with fellow Georgia self-starter and crypto-entrepreneur Money Man; together the two are a classic opposites-attract odd couple pairing, Money Man like a more menacing Red Power Ranger to Peewee’s goofier “Blue M&M.”
The first Longway Sinatra might have had the swagger, but it lacked close-to-the-mic crooning. On Longway Sinatra 2, Peewee pulls the listener closer for some of his most intimate and introspective tracks yet—call it In the Peewee Small Hours. He’s now something of a link between multiple eras of regional hip-hop history—the rap game Rat Pack of Longway Sinatra 2 is made up of everyone from legendary Memphis producer Jazze Pha, to new stars in the Southern constellation like Lil Baby and Blac Youngsta, to similarly underrated Atlanta workhouse Hoodrich Pablo Juan.
Peewee has long leaned into the cartoonishness suggested by his name, rapping with a playful candor. It’s an image enhanced by his delightfully absurdist mixtape covers, usually designed by surrealist mixtape visionary KD Designz, casting Peewee as pieces of candy or bowls of spaghetti. Even his play on Ol’ Blue Eyes feels more like a Dick Tracy comic book character than a signification of slickness or timeless cool, as Sinatra is for perpetual cornball Logic. There’s a kind of cheeky self-deprecation to Peewee’s lyricism; not many rappers would dare compare the itchiness of their trigger finger to their struggles with chronic premature ejaculation and then make a hook out of it, as he does on “Anxious.”
Cassius Jay displays a malleable hand when it comes to production, backing up Peewee’s various vibes like Sinatra conducting a spectrum of colors. Grinding tracks like “White Horse” and “Takeoff” recall Jay’s work on Future’s DS2 with growling drums, laser blast synths, and icy bells. But he’s equally adept at soundtracking the softer and sweeter side of Peewee’s playboy persona, draping “Pink Salmon” in bright keys and bringing “Blue Benjamins” to a decadent MBDTF-like climax with a shredding guitar solo.
In the past, Peewee has rapped from the perspective of a non-stop hustler at the frontline of various illicit industries, but on Longway Sinatra 2 he occasionally zooms out to the bird’s eye perspective and reflects on the emotions and memories behind him. “Heaven Got a Ghetto” is the kind of track you can only make once you’re nearing middle age, a thoughtful and almost gentle reflection on the vast changes decades can bring.
Over a clean electric guitar line on “Skydiving,” Peewee reminds us that Atlanta, despite having become a new money media metropolis, is still deep in the heart of the country. He effortlessly slides into a Southern sing-song drawl for an authentic country-rap fusion, with few novelty signifiers beyond some bars about riding horses. It’s not exactly a melodic interpolation, but the chorus—“Skydiving/Now she on Rocky Mountain climbing”—gestures toward Tim McGraw’s bleeding heart power ballad “Live Like You Were Dying” (from the album of the same name, a raw and self-hating pop reflection on the loss of a parent that’s like the 808s & Heartbreak of radio country).
“Blue Benjamins” flips “I Would Die 4 U” for a tribute to the love of the game—“I will die for these blues”—that would have been right at home during Southern rap’s golden age of mixtapes, next to the shelf alongside Yo Gotti and Gucci Mane’s “Pure Cocaine.” It’s fitting that a Prince riff is a prime showcase for the flexibility of Peewee’s voice, slipping between his usual delivery, a deeper rumbling mumble, and stretches of Thug-like falsetto. Peewee has long been one of Atlanta’s most dependable and essential emcees, even if he never acquired the national stature of some of his comrades, but Longway Sinatra 2 suggests an artist who, just like the chairman of the board, will only develop and complicate with age.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | MPA Bandcamp / Empire | January 27, 2021 | 6.9 | 387ef9cf-b0a3-44db-947a-442e22191e5e | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The hapless solo debut from the Vampire Weekend drummer is excruciatingly self-reflexive. | The hapless solo debut from the Vampire Weekend drummer is excruciatingly self-reflexive. | Dams of the West: Youngish American | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22979-youngish-american/ | Youngish American | This solo debut of Vampire Weekend drummer Chris Tomson was born three years ago, when the band took a break after touring behind 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City. Tomson, who had just turned 30, got married and got a mortgage. Less typically for someone his age, Tomson was also staring at what he called “a fairly large amount of time off.” He had his childhood piano moved from his parents’ house in New Jersey to his basement in Brooklyn, and—after “probably two months watching sports and then two months staring blankly”—started writing these songs.
He went with the name Dams of the West because of an article debating whether the dams in western America have outlived their usefulness and, “as a straight, white man playing generally rock’n’roll music” in 2017, “felt a certain camaraderie with the crumbling infrastructure from the middle of the last century.” He uses this acute awareness of his place in life as a vehicle to muse about the droll scenes that play out in his narrow range of vision. Its effect on almost every level—political, social, artistic—is essentially useless.
The muddle of Youngish American begins with the music. As the rhythmic force on three of the most critically adored albums of the past decade, Tomson knows his way around the drum kit. He also deftly plays almost all of the instruments on Youngish American. But his mellow voice is affectless, even with Black Keys’ Patrick Carney as producer. Carney’s touch on the record is serviceable, keeping the reverb gauzy and the percussion brawny, similar to his work with bands like Tennis and Black Lips. However, at some point, it was mistakenly suggested these songs should include swooping violin runs behind Tomson’s showy, clumsy lyrics.
Those lyrics dream oh so big of mixing Courtney Barnett’s knack for detail with Father John Misty’s ironic self-awareness. As a rule, the less comically winking they are, the better Tomson comes off. It’s charming when he sings “I don’t care where your heart is at/Even if it’s right where Sinatra sat,” on the slower, statelier “Polo Grounds,” named after the long-gone home of baseball’s New York Giants.
But other mundanities are delivered with such a dearth of meaning or poetry that they simply become mundane. “The Inerrancy of You and Me” hops from cooking “pasta with the red sauce/When I know you’re PMSing” to using the titular word Tomson says he recently just learned. The woozy ballad “Flag on the Can” repeats a half-baked question about Bud Light packaging, then adds, after what could only be a rip from some comically oversized bong, “What is philosophy, anyway?” Wine and personal finance are actually recurring themes across the album.
Like the least charming aspects of Father John Misty or late-career Sun Kil Moon, Tomson’s self-reflexiveness is exhausting. The fuzzed-out “Pretty Good WiFi” describes noticing a person’s legs and then having to realize, “Oh, shit, the male gaze!” A fairly representative track lyrically is the spaciously arranged “Perfect Wave,” which mostly involves the protagonist talking about vintage Pittsburgh Pirates baseball with his father-in-law, but then realizing he doesn’t need “the coldest fridge in the city” because the grocery store is so close. Tomson has said the line was inspired by a radio story that “made me feel like I took both my fridge and proximity to infinite foodstuffs for granted.” It just goes on like this.
The real pathos comes from how affable and intelligent Tomson comes across in interviews, and the real tragedy is that he simply might’ve benefited from testing the waters on a couple of EPs. The anxiety Tomson has acknowledged about becoming the last Vampire Weekend-er to go solo is understandable: VW frontman Ezra Koenig parlayed a Yeah Yeah Yeahs in-joke into a Beyoncé songwriting credit; Rostam, who officially quit the group early last year, left his bold stamp on songs by Solange and Frank Ocean when he wasn’t collaborating with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. Bassist Chris Baio was releasing glinting synth-pop under his own surname for several years before he delivered his debut album, 2015’s The Names.
Vampire Weekend have been working on a fourth album. When Tomson returns as a solo artist, it’d be better if he first had something he felt an urgent need to say, and then decided to make a record of it. Youngish American is a hapless vanity album, sad for all the wrong reasons, and all the more frustrating because it couches wokeness in songs about the extra advantages afforded to Tomson’s demographic. Issues of privilege and identity are complicated no matter your tax bracket, but it’s better to seek inspiration from without rather than from within. | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / 30th Century | March 3, 2017 | 4.6 | 3884d370-13e0-4863-90c0-dfde2f1e1114 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Brooklyn noise musician Will Kraus makes one person sound like a fully staffed shoegaze band, adding new personality to a storied genre. | The Brooklyn noise musician Will Kraus makes one person sound like a fully staffed shoegaze band, adding new personality to a storied genre. | Kraus: Path | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kraus-path/ | Path | Shoegaze is an isolating artform whose defining stylistic tropes have hardly shifted at all in the past 25 years from when it first bubbled up in the UK with bands like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and Ride, to name the best. As such, the innovations have typically come from people like Brooklyn electronic noise artist Will Kraus, solo acts who reconstruct the long and lonely overtones through a non-guitar idiom. And while Path is one of the more intriguing entries into shoegaze of recent vintage, Kraus takes an unconventional approach to conventionality—he tries to make one person sound like a fully staffed rock band.
Kraus’ thin, prickly vocals are the only musical element that doesn’t sound like a synthesized version of the real thing, and they don’t mesh with the mix so much as get stuck in it like short-bristled comb trying to navigate a Tibetan Mastiff. But if the neon plasticity serves as a reminder that Kraus is going it alone, all the better. For a subgenre obsessed with pedalboard geekery, shoegaze is typically defined by standoffish, leather-clad chic or an obsession with burying “perfect pop” in static—timeless definitions of cool. Odds are if Kraus was a full-band operation, someone might’ve vetoed Path’s straight-up ’90s alt-rock feel, the most unique aspect of the album.
There’s an invigorating need coursing through Path that maybe honors Kraus’ adolescent obsession with Linkin Park, a crucial distinction in a genre that usually has a real problem with establishing stakes. The yearning is all in the rhythmic tics—the double-clutching muted chords, pulsing progressions that leave the major 7ths to drone for a few extra bars, and so about 70 percent of Path could be mistaken for the heaviest instrumental sections of Siamese Dream. Meanwhile, “Bum” collapses Hum’s “Stars” so every part is the one where the distortion pedals kick in. Kraus is a drummer by trade, and he also takes after the likes of Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin and Battles’ John Stanier, punk-jazz fusionists almost made their hulking bands almost funky at times; the booming intro of “Games” falls somewhere between the Big Pink and “Give It Away.”
The collating of arena-rock volume, nu-metal digital dreams, and bedroom-artist claustrophobia is a cool trick, enough to sustain Path for most of its 35 minutes even though it’s the only trick. But whether it happens on “Reach,” “Follow,” “See,” or any of the other functionally and forgettably titled songs, the general trajectory reveals why the album title isn’t plural. Nearly all begin with a reminder that this is one guy in Bushwick: the errant sound of a guitar plugging in, some lightly strummed chords, and a brief bit of yawning silence before it collapses in its own burnt-socket exhaust about three minutes later.
Path is bookended by two pieces where Kraus’ coos are enveloped by gritty, spun-sugar drones, but these wordless songs feel just as evocative as anything in between. The real outliers on Path are the songs that could be scoured for meaning if you’re the intrepid soul reading the lyrics sheet—“See” delivers a bedside elegy as a narcotized singsong (“She leaves on the TV/so it feels like you’re home”) and “Games” crossbreeds chillwave and Clintonian nostalgia by referencing a VHS recording of the “X Games” surrounded by Surge-guzzling guitar work that could’ve fit on its original soundtrack. Shoegaze doesn’t need ego, but Path shows it’s always better with personality. | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Terrible | March 12, 2018 | 7.3 | 3887bd2d-7b8b-4839-8fa9-5b3f282fc474 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Jawbox's final album receives a welcome reissue. If it doesn't match the heights of its predecessor For Your Own Special Sweetheart, it still captures a powerful band in top form. | Jawbox's final album receives a welcome reissue. If it doesn't match the heights of its predecessor For Your Own Special Sweetheart, it still captures a powerful band in top form. | Jawbox: Jawbox | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20892-jawbox/ | Jawbox | Two of the best Dischord albums didn't actually come out on the legendary punk imprint. In 1994, Atlantic released Jawbox's For Your Own Special Sweetheart and that same year Epic issued Shudder to Think's Pony Express Record. Both groups had made their names on Dischord, and "selling out" was a fraught move for anyone from that world. While neither record made much of a mainstream impact, they were masterpieces that used a major label's resources to magnify, not dilute, an innovative sound formed in a close-knit Washington, D.C. punk scene. Jawbox had a unique approach to that aesthetic with their jazzy time signatures and noise-rock textures, and their major label debut arguably represents the pinnacle of D.C. post-hardcore, catching it just as it made its way into the alt-rock era.
But if Jawbox reasonably fit into the mainstream three years after Nirvana broke, it wasn't meant to last. Beck's Mellow Gold also came out in 1994, leading the way for the stoned, sample-happy kitchen-sink pop that was about to push ideological punk-derived music aside. In the twilight of grunge, Sweetheart could get away with being defiantly noisy and raw. Two years later, Jawbox's self-titled finale, which is now being reissued, showed some signs of capitulation to an omnipresent college-radio sound. A certain passively disaffected mien creeps in here and there, an awkward fit for a famously earnest, intense, and hardworking band. But a few dated details detract little from the songwriting, where rampaging fury is tempered by calculating musicianship, pitch-conscious singing, and precise ethics disguised as cut-up squawks of code.
Jawbox signed with Atlantic in order to play music full-time, not necessarily to become famous, and their contract wasn't onerous. They had a lot of freedom on Sweetheart and anatomized their sound on its greatest song, the angelically bruising "Savory". Nothing about it is hard-charging in the manner of classic hardcore punk; everything coils and squirms in an ominous quiet punctuated by deafening detonations. All of this is still true on Jawbox: J. Robbins' warm, chesty voice oscillates between an ominous croon and an octave-leaping peal. His guitar's spidery treble clashes against Bill Barbot's gnarled, almost bluesy licks, bent out of shape by a high-pressure rhythm section. Zach Barocas lays a volatile foundation, drumming around the beats at a slant, and Kim Coletta's bass embeds more zooms and fillips in outwardly brawny, inwardly delicate masses of sound.
But "preserved" is an apt term, as the record sounds more canned than its predecessor, losing some of its palpable danger. Though the guitar attack can be ferocious, the former dynamic range is squeezed in. Barbot's guitar work is perhaps more inventive than ever before, but instead of exploding into being, it more often sidewinds in and out of the mix. Relaxed, almost boho passages on "Mirrorful", "Desert Sea", and "Livid" sound more like the Breeders and Pavement than Embrace and Rites of Spring, early emo-core bands that influenced Jawbox. My favorite song on the album is also their prettiest ever, "Iodine", a sleepy, melancholy ballad where Robbins sings, with unusual tenderness, over a limpid melody painted in liquid trails of guitar. There's even a hidden song, an unironic (if not overly reverent) cover of Tori Amos' "Cornflake Girl". You can't get much more "120 Minutes" than that.
Signs of the times aside, there is plenty of peak Jawbox to be found. "His Only Trade" churns as thrillingly as "Jackpot Plus!" from Sweetheart, with Robbins' fiery vocal performance matching the urgent lyrics: "Someday he's gonna wake up in a burning house and wonder what to save and wonder who to blame." "Empire of One" finds a deep, exhilarating pocket in jungle drums and terse call-and-response vocals. "Capillary Life" is notably grand and subtle, with a multi-staged depth and scope elapsing in the usual three-or-so minutes. J. Robbins chants and spits like he means it.
But what did he mean? "Best of all," as he sings, "it's open-ended." You'd call the lyrics stream-of-consciousness if they weren't so focused, the phrases and delivery so sharply wrought. Robbins' cryptic tirades have a moral dimension and an aesthetic one; they accuse and self-lacerate; they are wary of systems and alert to betrayals of trust. Two frames in particular stand out. On "Won't Come Off", Robbins sings, "One second cut from the arc of a swan dive, pulled out tight to the pitch of a taut line," as if encapsulating his band's situation and style: An arc of force that has been pulled straight, thrumming with the strength of its own will to bend back. "At the bottom, they all want proof, and at the top, no one's making room," Robbins adds on "Chinese Fork Tie", as if diagnosing his position between an equally restive underground and mainstream.
After their self-titled album, Jawbox's Atlantic sub-label disintegrated and mainstream music moved on from cleaning up punk bands. In their relatively brief existence, they made made a lasting impression on incoming waves of math-rock and post-punk bands with dissonant textures, awkward stop-start dynamics, and knotty instrumental phrasing. And if it's not their best album, their self-titled swan song, frequently cutting through its temporal trappings with that old desperation and drive, still holds up. | 2015-09-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Dischord / DeSoto | September 23, 2015 | 7.6 | 3889d62a-d9ff-4e35-8ea9-3f698216304c | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
K Records reissues Phil Elvrum's quiet masterpiece, a record of intuitive music and esoteric flights of the imagination. The set also features bonus material recorded in 2007 specifically to accompany this release. | K Records reissues Phil Elvrum's quiet masterpiece, a record of intuitive music and esoteric flights of the imagination. The set also features bonus material recorded in 2007 specifically to accompany this release. | The Microphones: The Glow Pt. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11352-the-glow-pt-2/ | The Glow Pt. 2 | In the latter half of the 1990s, as the grunge and riot-grrrl movements of the Pacific Northwest petered out, a young record store clerk in Anacortes quietly dreamed up a world that was entirely his own. Working in private, with analog tape, Phil Elvrum remade the twee-pop of Olympia, Washington's K Records into something broader in scope, proving that intimacy and opulence were not mutually exclusive by forging sweet tunes, childlike vocals, solar noise, and enigmatic tape collages into one molten mass. His speciality was reconciling extreme orders of magnitude, casting mountains and planets and stars as items hanging from a baby's mobile. The Glow Pt. 2, which remains his crowning achievement, is being reissued by K just as Elvrum says "it threatened to go out of print." Seven years of imitation have done nothing to dull its impact-- it sounds as unaccountably grand now as it did in 2001.
The Glow Pt. 2 wasn't conceptualized, then recorded; Elvrum figured out where it was going even as he committed it to tape. He strived to document the esoteric flights of his imagination, and produced appropriately intuitive music: Vocal harmonies blur, disappear, return as ragged organs. Creaky percussion sounds like it might give way at any moment, and sometimes does. Staticky thumps that could level forests give way to calm acoustic expanses. The bum notes peppering the acoustic riff of "Headless Horseman" are reminders that Elvrum was lunging impulsively from one idea to the next. In this, it's a perfect mirror of Xiu Xiu: While Jamie Stewart's music fumbles in pitch darkness, Elvrum's gropes through blinding light.
That easy but deliberate rhythm, along with Elvrum's mossy production, makes The Glow Pt. 2 feel uncommonly organic. Many of his songs move with the naturalistic but formalized cadence of an iambic meter. "I Want Wind to Blow" is cut by a heartbeat, plunked out on an acoustic guitar's low E string. The hardier pulse of "The Gleam Pt. 2" turns pitch-shifted guitars into a stately march. These could have been average indie pop tunes were they not shaped by Elvrum's unique sense of non-linear arrangement and space: He often gives us a few moments to acclimate ourselves to the Dub Narcotic studio's seething room tone before, with a sudden flourish, flooding it with energy, as he does on "Map" and "My Roots are Strong and Deep". Therefore, everything he records sounds huge and hollowed out, a little bigger on the inside than on the outside. Death Cab for Cutie would have written the frilly arpeggios of "You'll Be in the Air" and stopped there, but Microphones fans wait on tenterhooks for the moment when it inevitably shudders and begins to pile up on itself.
Bonus discs are typically the province of demos and remixes. Because of The Glow Pt. 2's piecemeal construction, Elvrum has none of the former-- everything was taped over or went on the album. As something of an artistic hermit, he's constitutionally inclined against the latter. But, wanting to give fans something in addition to the existing songs, Elvrum spent some time in 2007 recording bonus material for the reissue. These additions range from the obvious (like the acoustic version of "I Felt My Size") to the arcane (like a vaguely dub-influenced version of "I Want Wind to Blow"). There are also essential sketches of new material such as "I'm Like You, Tree", which expand the album's already-deep relationship to nature. Of course, none of the new lyrics clarify the overarching story; they're further snapshots of Elvrum feeling small and serene in a big, scary universe. But these snippets are thrilling for Microphones fans-- they reveal a few more glimpses of a distant, haunting world that's all the more alluring for its incompleteness. | 2008-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | K | April 4, 2008 | 9.3 | 388a21ba-39ec-4a60-a5a7-ec862bedd069 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Boston rock trio’s latest attempts to reconnect with the songwriting focus of their early demos, pushing beyond slowcore in search of something more direct. | The Boston rock trio’s latest attempts to reconnect with the songwriting focus of their early demos, pushing beyond slowcore in search of something more direct. | Horse Jumper of Love: Natural Part | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horse-jumper-of-love-natural-part/ | Natural Part | Before they were a hazy slowcore band, Horse Jumper of Love wrote folk songs. A look back at the trio’s 2016 Demo Anthology reveals a softer side to frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos’ songwriting, one as influenced by acoustic indie-folk acts like Fleet Foxes and Dirty Projectors as it was by anything from Duster. Yet somewhere between their acclaim on the Boston house show circuit, the release of their first two albums, and the relentless touring that accompanied each, the band became known for a sound altogether different from those somber early demos: one that emphasized dense chords and crushing distortion over a conscious focus on narrative. Their latest album, Natural Part, is both a return to the songwriting mode of their demos and something altogether new, pushing beyond the tempos and textures of slowcore in search of something more direct.
Horse Jumper of Love songs have long felt like band-centric affairs. The opening notes of their self-titled debut set the tone: steady chords with simple changes and vocal melodies that mirrored riffs clearly written out on the guitar. Lyrical meaning came second to the emotional impact of each melody, with entire songs constructed around serpentine guitar riffs and the vocal lines they inspired. This approach situated the band’s first two albums within a larger alt-rock lineage; comparisons to slowcore pioneers like Duster and Low have followed, but the group’s sound has always had as much in common with Smashing Pumpkins or Silversun Pickups as it did with anything to come from the short-lived slowcore moment.
Natural Part is an ambitious attempt to reconnect with the songwriting focus of the band’s early demos. The album opens with just Giannopoulos’ barren voice, unaccompanied by the heavy riffs that were once so prevalent. “I can’t control the urge to keep healing myself through you,” he sings on “Snakeskin.” Despite the clarity and force of his vocals, Giannopoulos remains committed to lyrical abstraction, building heady, dream-like images that resist clear explanation. Like many other songs on the album, “Snakeskin” aspires to something larger and more impactful than the noisy repetition of the band’s early basement shows, even as the trio struggle to present a single, unified statement.
Still, multiple songs benefit from the band’s renewed interest in narrative. “I Poured Sugar in Your Shoes” is a charming mid-tempo ballad about the early stages of a relationship, using imagery inspired by Giannopoulos’ time as a prep chef to explore how feelings can grow and change with time. It’s a glimpse of what effective songwriting looks like in this mode, drawing together tighter verses and cleaner production coming into a semblance of a pop song. The title track might be the band’s single strongest song so far, finding warmth and comfort that cuts through abstraction. Psychedelic images give way to humor, grief, and epiphany as Giannopoulos sings about getting drunk, reading A People’s History of the United States, and ultimately reaching a stoned realization: “Deciding that romance does not exist with you/Was so romantic to me,” he murmurs over chorus-drenched arpeggios. It’s a rare moment when the trio’s drug-induced impressionism fits naturally into a larger storytelling gesture.
These songwriting breakthroughs are rare exceptions on an album that feels strained and inconsistent in the context of the band’s catalog. Where their first two albums were charming, unambitious statements held together with a lo-fi glue, Natural Part aspires to new heights, attempting the requisite evolution into a band with greater range. But this expectation—that an early-career indie band must grow and evolve in ambition—misses just how much of the trio’s appeal was always bound up in feel-good shows and unassuming recordings. Despite occasional moments of beauty, what’s left in this progressive push feels stiff and labored over, betraying the warm, bleary-eyed feeling that made the band’s first two albums so beloved. | 2022-06-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | June 30, 2022 | 6.6 | 388d9799-14a9-4d9e-a07e-367392bad6b0 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The most extreme thing about Deafheaven’s remarkable fourth album is how subdued it sounds. It suggests devastation without placing you at the center of it. | The most extreme thing about Deafheaven’s remarkable fourth album is how subdued it sounds. It suggests devastation without placing you at the center of it. | Deafheaven: Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deafheaven-ordinary-corrupt-human-love/ | Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | Deafheaven’s music is not made for the everyday. No two of their four records sound quite alike, but their mood is immediately identifiable. It’s a place where serious subjects—love and loss, emotional apocalypse, existence—are amplified like sunlight through a magnifying glass. They make a kaleidoscope out of heavy music’s most introspective corners: The tortured shrieks and blast beats of black metal ripple through shoegaze’s immersive guitar tones, all building with the skyward patience of starry-eyed post-rock. You don’t put these records on casually.
Given their penchant for grand gestures, the most extreme thing about Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is how subdued it sounds. It’s the first release from the Los Angeles-based quintet that feels more like a collection of songs than one unbroken piece, and it exposes shades of their work that have primarily been kept to the peripheries. The slow, dramatic opener “You Without End” blooms from muted piano and slide guitar, instruments that lend a mournful touch to their typically explosive melodies. Other songs incorporate clean singing in contrast to vocalist George Clarke’s characteristic howl. “Night People,” with lead vocals from goth-folk singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm, is their most spectral and fragile recording to date. This music suggests devastation without placing you at the center of it.
Over the past few years, Deafheaven have discussed hitting various personal lows in the wake of 2015’s restless and intense New Bermuda, citing depression, creative fatigue, and substance abuse. Bassist Stephen Clark quit the band once the tour was over. Guitarist Kerry McCoy got sober. Taking a more metaphorical refuge, Clarke became interested in candid photography, collaborating with artist Nick Steinhardt to create stark portraits like Sean Stout’s photograph that graces Human Love’s cover. “I told him I didn’t want anything extraordinary,” he explained about the collaborative visual project. “Just people in their everyday routine.”
This shift in perspective, from the vast to the ordinary, is the point. On Human Love, Deafheaven tell unglamorous stories, examining intimate scenes that go down when no one is watching. “I’m reluctant to stay sad” goes an early lyric, and the record follows suit, as dark moods roll by like faraway clouds. Clarke’s piercing voice continues to evoke the highest reaches of human pain, yet he’s grown more adept at exposing subtler melancholy. In the surging, dreamlike “Honeycomb,” he writes like a goth beat poet surveying the city: Words like “geese,” “mariachi,” and “Cortázar” have never been sung with such brutality.
The band matches Clarke in all his passing visions. They’ve become as expressive in their slowcore balladry (“Near”) as their more bracing epics (the duel-guitar-laden second half of “Worthless Animal”). Their best songs, like centerpiece “Canary Yellow,” explore all these various modes in ragged, epiphanic cycles. While peers like Sannhet have grown more airtight with each new album, Deafheaven still love letting their seams show: Drop the needle at any point on Human Love, and you might hear a completely different band—one aiming for arenas, or mosh pits, or the soundtrack of a climactic makeout scene in a prestige television show. Five years removed from their landmark Sunbather, Deafheaven have never seemed less interested in being fashionable—as a result, they sound newly content.
In its hour-long runtime, Human Love unfolds as an even-handed showing of Deafheaven’s strengths. Like Sunbather and New Bermuda, it’s marked by fleeting moments of sheer beauty. Many of these arrive thanks to McCoy’s guitar playing, a direct and intuitive line of communication that complements Clarke’s illegible emotion. Some of his best riffs are scattered throughout “Glint,” a song that evolves magnificently as Clarke intertwines visions of marital bliss with fantasies of self-destruction. It’s an instant addition to their canon of showstoppers, walking the tightrope of extreme music and radio-friendly ’90s alt-rock without sinking into the cheesy, histrionic center of that Venn diagram. That they sound less interested in risking that fate only makes their successes feel more triumphant.
There have always been two ways to hear Deafheaven’s music. There’s the micro approach, which involves dissecting the band’s influences and navigating their records like a mixtape without a tracklist. (What’s that familiar melody? What emotion are they trying to express? What genre is this?) On Human Love, they recall the atmospheres of a wide variety of bands without explicitly copping their styles: Touchstones like Slowdive, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the Smiths are all suggested at various points within this music. Like watching a magic show backstage, looking for these references can draw admiration as much as disillusionment at how it all comes together.
The other angle to admire Deafheaven is more macro—which particularly benefits this album—as you stand back and surrender to the squall. Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band. The record’s title is taken from Graham Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair, words spoken by a narrator who is uncommonly torn between love and hate. In the place of his all-consuming obsessions, he longs for something benign and ignorable to ponder on the way to work—the type of fantasies he imagines occupying the mind of more contented people. It’s a common dream, though, for some of us, it’s unrealistic. Human Love thrives in the moments where the extraordinary and the commonplace collide and become indistinguishable. In search of something quietly universal, Deafheaven can’t help but notice the tiny miracle in each breath. | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Anti- | July 13, 2018 | 8.5 | 389073d2-28de-4130-af6e-c39513934d81 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
null | Charlie Louvin has been singing about the extremes of country music-- salvation and damnation-- throughout his long life. He and his brother Ira began harmonizing at home as kids in the 1930s and playing their first public shows as teenagers in the early 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s, they had hits with secular and nonsecular songs alike, which cemented their legacy as one of country's most conflicted acts: On guitar, Charlie was sensible and earnest, but Ira, playing mandolin, was temperamental and worldly. The brothers' differences illuminate the morals in every song, whether it's a churchly number like "The | Charlie Louvin: Steps to Heaven / Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12534-steps-to-heaven-charlie-louvin-sings-murder-ballads-and-disaster-songs/ | Steps to Heaven / Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs | Charlie Louvin has been singing about the extremes of country music-- salvation and damnation-- throughout his long life. He and his brother Ira began harmonizing at home as kids in the 1930s and playing their first public shows as teenagers in the early 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s, they had hits with secular and nonsecular songs alike, which cemented their legacy as one of country's most conflicted acts: On guitar, Charlie was sensible and earnest, but Ira, playing mandolin, was temperamental and worldly. The brothers' differences illuminate the morals in every song, whether it's a churchly number like "The Family Who Prays" or a grisly narrative like "Knoxville Girl". Ira died in a car crash in 1965; Charlie continues to make music, but has no one to harmonize with him.
After his strong self-titled comeback in 2007, the 81-year-old Louvin has released two follow-ups, each exploring a starkly different theme. Steps to Heaven is an uplifting collection of old hymns; Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs is pretty self-explanatory. One is about glory and redemption, the other tragedy and tribulation. While he's not nearly as vocally agile as he was decades ago, he does sound better-- stronger, clearer-- than he did on last year's Charlie Louvin. On Steps to Heaven, he sounds plucky and rejuvenated, tearing into these ten hymns with spirited reverence and hitting even the high notes confidently and happily. Producer Mark Nevers (best known for his work with Lambchop) sets him in a casual church service setting, backed primarily by Lee Derrick's rollicking piano and a bold backing choir that occasionally intrudes on Louvin's leads. His lively "There's a Higher Power" and intensely testimonial "I Am Bound for the Promised Land" are sincerely moving. He conveys belief and contentment with every note.
Steps to Heaven may be the more spiritually rewarding of these two albums, but Murder Ballads is much more fun. These grim accounts of mine collapses, shootings, train wrecks, and dead babies-- some of which appeared on the Louvin Brothers' 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life-- have an almost tabloid aplomb in their matter-of-fact details. Louvin sounds spry on opener "Darling Corey" (featuring Andrew Bird on fiddle) and "Dixie Boll Weevil", on which he voices both the farmer and the destructive beetle. Most of the album, however, is much more somber and often elegant, with Louvin relating these stories with an easy, earthy gravity, as if he's singing about people he has known personally. "The Little Grave in Georgia" sets the mournful story of a dead teenager against a soft two-step, and "Mary of the Wild Moor", which was among the first songs Charlie and his brother performed as teenager, sounds especially stately in this arrangement. Still, it's impossible to ignore the gruesome details, like the conductor scalded to death by a steam engine on "Wreck of the Old 97". What a way to go.
Of course, there is some thematic and musical overlap between these two releases. Steps to Heaven, as its title makes clear, has death on its mind, albeit as a reward for a forthright life rather than as punishment or tragedy. Similarly, the characters on Murder Ballads yearn for the redemption they soon realize will never come. Happiness and grief inform every life, and Louvin inhabits the songs like he's experienced his share of both. As he sings on "Down with the Old Canoe", "The hand of God was in it all." | 2009-01-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2009-01-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 13, 2009 | 7.3 | 3890a9e9-2a63-43bc-b152-85dead6fe9a3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Boredoms drummer YoshimiO returns to the long-running, shape-shifting project that represents the other major pillar of her career, consolidating the strengths the band has developed over the years. | Boredoms drummer YoshimiO returns to the long-running, shape-shifting project that represents the other major pillar of her career, consolidating the strengths the band has developed over the years. | OOIOO: nijimusi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ooioo-nijimusi/ | nijimusi | Though YoshimiO is probably still best known as Yoshimi P-We, the longtime drummer for the avant-rock group Boredoms, it’s time to stop calling OOIOO her side project. Eight albums into a discography that stretches over nearly a quarter century, the band she co-founded isn’t just one among her numerous collaborations; it represents a pillar of YoshimiO’s long and impressive career.
The group’s punky late-’90s debut merely hinted at YoshimiO’s ambitions as a bandleader. Before long, OOIOO’s sound expanded to incorporate drum-circle groove, ritualistic chanting, and psychedelic tendrils of melody. Individual motifs could seem sectional, or even jarring, in isolation. Some of these same traits could be found in Boredoms’ turn-of-the-century work. But the way OOIOO approached similar postures has long felt distinct. By the time of 2000’s Gold & Green, the band landed on a method of stirring its influences into a style that could prove unexpectedly approachable.
In order to keep some sense of surprise afloat, balances between the band’s aesthetic ingredients have changed in worthy ways over the years, with the starker percussive attack of 2006’s Taiga giving way to lustrous shimmers of gamelan on 2013’s Gamel. Looming over it all is YoshimiO’s playful editorial hand. In a recent interview with band’s stateside label, Thrill Jockey, YoshimiO described her freeform approach in the studio. “When we record those songs, we play them as if we’re playing a live show. After all the other members go home, I add my parts to the songs... I record the same parts that I play when we perform the songs live, but I also add phrases that I come up with spontaneously, using instruments that I’m not used to playing. It’s like having a conversation with the song.”
A good conversation requires inspiration as well as a stable language. Now, with a couple decades in the rearview, it’s easier to see that YoshimiO’s drive to find this balance between the chaotic and the familiar has long been one of OOIOO’s goals. Over time, the overdubs and shifts in arrangement style have tipped listeners to the fact that the band is not on auto-pilot. But YoshimiO isn’t out to overthrow all of her prior work, either; the band’s albums frequently delight with singalong pop pleasures. It all adds up to a satisfyingly well-rounded quality that isn’t terribly common in the world of experimental rock.
nijimusi doesn’t do much to mess with this underlying approach. The subtle change, this time around, has to do with the debut of the group’s newest drummer, MISHINA. (According to YoshimiO, she had to edit this drummer’s tracks less extensively than those of prior percussionists.) And despite a culminating victory lap in which riffs from the group’s past albums come back for a curtain call, the album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a consolidation of the strengths that this band has been amassing over its long life.
The opener gives just a hint of OOIOO’s chaotic energies: In 50 seconds, a wash of cymbals is put through a whirling, tape-like effect, leading in turn to squalling vocals and a brief hint of hardcore. A hard cut to the next track, “nijimu,” reestablishes the band’s more hypnotic quality, thanks to an attractive, descending bass motif. Throughout, there is a winning tension between the experimental touches and jammy meditations. The lightly swinging percussion in “jibun” helps root the song’s first half, when the melodic performances have a quality of purposeful wandering; the second half lurches into OOIOO rock mode, which might remind Boredoms fans of Vision Creation Newsun.
Tracks like “asozan5” and “tisou”—the latter of which features striated vocals, minimalist patterns, and funk—operate as mini-suites that draw on textures the band has explored previously. But this time, the pieces are all strung together with a veteran group’s poise. That next-level group mastery also lends merit to the band’s decision to reprise some past material, as they do in a track with a mouthful of a title (but one that’s beautiful to read, as a sort of conceptual-art command): “walk for ‘345’ minutes, while saying ‘Ah Yeah!’ with a ‘Mountain Book’ in one hand, until a shower of light pours down.”
If you’re fan of the group, you know “Ah Yeah!” from the album Feather Float, and “Mountain Book” from Gold & Green. But even if you don’t know the back catalog, this 11-minute opus is an excellent way to encounter some of those themes for the first time; the track’s patient ebb and flow has the feel of a mini-concert. When a band works the way OOIOO does—popping up a couple times per decade, while delivering subtle but interesting updates to a pre-established style—it’s easy to take it for granted. But that doesn’t mean we should. Certain kinds of conversations are only possible with friends of long standing.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Thrill Jockey | January 21, 2020 | 7.7 | 389b83e6-5eee-449f-ac78-d4e190400159 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
At his best, the stalwart Memphis rapper excels at heart-on-sleeve, bluesy songwriting, and his new album shows him deepening and opening up. | At his best, the stalwart Memphis rapper excels at heart-on-sleeve, bluesy songwriting, and his new album shows him deepening and opening up. | Moneybagg Yo: A Gangsta’s Pain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moneybagg-yo-a-gangstas-pain/ | A Gangsta’s Pain | Among the current crop of rising Memphis rap stars, Moneybagg Yo stands apart. Unlike Duke Deuce, who pulls from the region’s crunk tradition, or Key Glock, who is now Young Dolph’s right-hand man, Demario DeWayne White Jr. feels indebted to cities beyond his home. Despite his distinctive Memphis drawl, his music draws more from Chicago drill and Atlanta trap than his hometown. Alongside his compatriot Blac Youngsta and under the tutelage of their shared mentor Yo Gotti, they’ve developed a weathered sound that feels isolated from the rest of Memphis.
The title of his latest album, A Gangsta’s Pain, suggests opening up and deepening. But Moneybagg has rapped about trauma before: The cover to his 2019 album 43VA Heartless depicted him undergoing open heart surgery, a graphic visual metaphor for the way pain sometimes bleeds out from his tough exterior. Chicago rap breakouts Lil Durk and Polo G join him for “Free Promo,” and Moneybagg’s wearied rasp fits right into their full-throated, emotional approach. Before their falling out, Moneybagg collaborated with Baton Rouge’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and at his best, Moneybagg demonstrates a similar penchant for heart-on-his-sleeve, bluesy songwriting. That soulfulness comes through in the well-loved R&B samples as well: “Wockesha” revisits Debarge’s frequently flipped “Stay With Me”; “Hard for the Next” pulls from Ginuwine’s “Differences,” and “If Pain Was A Person” is built from Luther Ingram’s classic hit “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right.”
Moneybagg Yo explores duality with the contrasting “Hate It Here” and “Love It Here,” the former a dark slice of self-reflection about the fallout of a relationship, the latter a lighter pop number driven by acoustic guitar and chipmunk cooing. But even in the more luxurious, yacht rap vibe pieces, there are still clouds on the horizon and an edge of paranoia: “Trouble in paradise,” as he puts it on “Love It Here.” Moneybagg seems more comfortable working than relaxing—“Hard for the Next” recruits Future for a slice of HNDRXX-like pop, complete with electric guitar and seagull-like sound effects, but it feels at odds with Moneybagg’s strengths and is largely carried by Future. He can work with a smooth beat, but sounds a little out-of-place serenading Jhené Aiko on “One of Dem Night”—the album’s most sincere romantic intentions are expressed toward his double cup.
The beats on A Gangsta’s Pain often contain stray melodic details, glittering tones or ornate strings, but they’re usually buried under layers of preset hi-hats and pounding keys. With a Pharrell feature and Neptunes production to boot, “Certified Neptunes” is the only of the album’s tracks to fully embrace an off-kilter and unsettling sound, constructed from a distorted shard of noise. Moneybagg Yo’s assertive and chiseled flow is right at home atop a futuristic beat that would have fit in on Eternal Atake. Though Pharrell might be as big as pop gets, this collaboration is one of the album’s least overt attempts at pop, and it’s in these more experimental edges that Moneybagg finds most success. These high-profile features indicate a major bid for stardom, a process not without growing pains, but Moneybagg Yo seems most energized when he’s in the trenches.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CMG / N-Less / Interscope | April 29, 2021 | 6.8 | 389d1718-f683-4a9c-aebb-6841dd26dac1 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
One of the best access points to Cameron Stallones’ eclectic discography, Rock Sutra imagines his act as a band playing together, reacting to the instincts of its members in real time. | One of the best access points to Cameron Stallones’ eclectic discography, Rock Sutra imagines his act as a band playing together, reacting to the instincts of its members in real time. | Sun Araw: Rock Sutra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-araw-rock-sutra/ | Rock Sutra | At the age of 36, Cameron Stallones has released more than 20 albums—with Magic Lantern, Duppy Gun, and the Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group—but mostly under the name Sun Araw. A shockingly consistent electronic craftsman and guitar noodler who loves improvisation, Stallones’ songs are funny, rhythmic, never too danceable, and most obviously psychedelic, the first label to stick when the California-based artist arrived on the scene a decade ago. Now that he’s distanced himself from the reverb-heavy loops that marked his breakout, 2010’s On Patrol, it’s easier to understand Stallones in a wider world of spontaneous experimentation, one that extends to the adventurousness of mid-to-late century jazz and the heady treatments of technology-embracing classical composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
Still, Stallones remains a beguiling figure because of just how eclectic his discography and persona have become. Often photographed with a mustache and trucker hat, he presents like an indie rocker, and his relationship with the label Drag City adds to his cred in the genre. Perhaps his most beloved album, Icon Give Thank, is a collaboration with reggae legends the Congos, and while his production style borrows from the Jamaican dub tradition, the fluid shifts in his dense arrangements suggest West African pop music of the 1970s. With Sun Araw, Stallones gives these transcontinental musical voyages an idiosyncratic vessel. His vocals sound canned and generic, as though sampled from non-musical sources. His lyrics have a sense of humor, a disarming quality in an artist who once described himself as a “recovering academic.”
Stallones’ latest, Rock Sutra, is one of the best access points to his discography. While previous highlights On Patrol, Belomancie, and his recent The Saddle of the Increate stretched out over an hour-plus, Rock Sutra clocks in at a concise 40 minutes. Musically, the album picks up where Increate left off, with exclamatory vocals and swirling polyrhythms indebted to afrobeat. Yet for the first time, Stallones’ African influences sound doubly filtered through the western exposures of David Byrne and Brian Eno; the guitar on the rousing “Arrambe” functions as a bass, while the stormy basslines on “78 Sutra” and “Catalina” part in the middle to reveal soaring, short-lived melodies.
On Sutra, Stallones is thinking in terms of instruments and how they relate to one another. His set-up now includes synthesizer player Marc Riordan and percussionist Jon Leland, and their interplay is unprecedentedly groovy. On opener “Roomboe,” Stallones commands “Half-step!” like a Bar Mitzvah DJ encouraging reluctant kids to dance. The live-to-MIDI recording process, too, shows that Stallones wants listeners to imagine this iteration of his act as a band playing together, reacting to the instincts of its members in real time—even if he ultimately exerts a perfectionist’s control over each pitch.
Electronic music often sounds like the painstaking product of time in isolation. Mediated as it is by technology, Stallones’ experimentation acknowledges a social universe. The attentive way that he reacts to his collaborators, his influences, and his own ego indicates that he wants to talk to listeners, bygone musicians and—he would be the first to say—the cosmos. In these lonesome times, Rock Sutra captures Sun Araw at its most chatty: speaking to much that came before itself, and a whole galaxy outside.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sun Ark | April 11, 2020 | 7.3 | 38a2cf61-f410-4e04-a05f-99e29eae9830 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Yesterday’s Active Rock playlist gets ransacked and reconfigured on the debut full-length from a Boston hardcore quintet whose influences range from Converge to Korn. | Yesterday’s Active Rock playlist gets ransacked and reconfigured on the debut full-length from a Boston hardcore quintet whose influences range from Converge to Korn. | Vein.fm: Errorzone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vein-errorzone/ | Errorzone | In hardcore, no sound is beyond reinvention or exploitation. If a strain of commercial rock or underground metal existed at one point, the question is when—not if—a younger generation will retool it in some cramped, dank basement. Boston hardcore quintet Vein are another band of interpreters, though they don’t draw from just one source. Their early material harkened back to the chaotic, pre-Jane Doe Converge, spazzing in technical bursts. Errorzone, their first full-length, adds vintage nu-metal fragments to that base, distorting them through the prism of technocratic dystopia. This approach makes Vein the most ambitious of their 1990s-infatuated cohort, using well-worn styles to unlock a hidden terror instead of settling for nostalgia.
Vein’s appropriation of nu-metal is effective because it’s irreverent. Errorzone acknowledges that the genre reigned supreme for a time, and that it wasn’t an aberration so much as a gateway to better heavy music. But the band isn’t trying to convince you that Life Is Peachy is a secret gem, even if the minute-long track “Rebirth Protocol” clearly draws from the higher register of Korn’s seven-string guitar parts, bleeding them out so that they sound more dissociated than ever. “Doomtech,” “Untitled,” and the title track confine Slipknot’s most radio-friendly choruses to a serene prison, isolating the band’s archetypal lost-Iowa-kid listener in another dimension. For hardcore bands, clean vocals usually signal a turn toward melody, accessibility, and so-called maturity; in Vein’s case, they’re another whiplash in a series of sudden jerks, confounding expectations but providing no relief. Yesterday’s Active Rock playlist is ripe to ransack and reconfigure as a vaguely familiar agent of disorder, transforming aggression that once soothed teen angst into something more destructive.
Nu metal and ’90s hardcore don’t quite speak a common language, but blocky rhythms comprise their shared root words and enable communication. Errorzone’s breakdowns muscle up as formidably as anything by Harm’s Way or Code Orange, the two acts closest to Vein’s space. It’s in these passages that Vein reassert themselves as a hardcore band, justifying their tinkering with history. “Broken Glass Complexion” concludes by merging brawn with scattershot drums and skronky guitar blasts, while “Old Data in a Dead Machine” ends with hammering downstrokes that are divorced from groove yet brimming with their own determination.
“Virus://vibrance” shifts, not even two seconds into its runtime, to breakbeats, in Vein’s most unexpected ’90s excavation. Breakbeats in hardcore would have been game-changing 20 years ago, and they still sound subversive here. Like so many elements of the album, they too exist primarily to agitate, sharp turns on a proudly nonlinear collection of songs. This is the sound of retro-futurism finally reaching the turn of the last millennium.
More than a particular sound, Errorzone evokes the late-’90s era when technology collided with rock and metal, as electronics crept in to threaten the dominance of guitar music and distribution models loosened. As artistic barriers crashed down, rock traditionalists put up new, higher walls and tightened their borders. Those years were tumultuous, and the dust hasn’t come close to settling; we’re still figuring out how placing the internet at the center of our lives fucked with our brains. Errorzone surfs this ongoing uncertainty: One of the most jarring sounds on the album is the sterile “goodbye” at the end of “End Eternal,” as if a rogue AOL free trial CD were shepherding you through a dystopian alternate reality. It’s terrifying, sure, but that unease sets the tone for one of the year’s most exhilarating heavy records. | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Closed Casket Activities | June 30, 2018 | 7.8 | 38a3c195-9fb7-463a-a2ba-ac8a7b6dea93 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The British psych-rock provocateur pens an album-length ode to the fragile euphoria of clawing yourself back from the brink. | The British psych-rock provocateur pens an album-length ode to the fragile euphoria of clawing yourself back from the brink. | Nancy: The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nancy-the-seven-foot-tall-post-suicidal-feel-good-blues/ | The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues | Note: This review discusses self-harm and suicidal ideation.
In her 2018 poem “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” the lesbian poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi describes “the days I don’t want to kill myself” as “extraordinary.” She goes on to compare such fleeting moments to:
the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.
Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who am I kidding,
it was nothing like a scarab! It was like
bright. blue. fucking. sneakers!
The title track of British psych-rock provocateur Nancy’s 7 Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues is a surging, scuzzy ode to that “bright. blue. fucking. sneakers!” feeling. Nancy, known also as Jamie Hall, singer and guitarist in the Brighton noise-pop trio Tigercub, wants us to know how hard he had it, growing up bullied in public housing. At seven feet tall, with a predilection for wearing women’s clothing, Nancy didn’t and couldn’t fit in. “I used to think about suicide every week,” he sings, but not anymore. Now, he’s “the king of this city,” celebrating his survival with this big, brash kick in the ass of a rock record.
If you listen closely, though, you’ll hear a subtle twist in Nancy’s march from victim to victor. His anti-suicide anthem samples the melody of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” When he sings “I used to think about suicide every week,” he’s using the exact tune Andrew VanWyngarden deployed on “move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.” It’s a quiet but unmistakable signpost: Nancy’s hard-won happiness is, actually, the transient, illusory kind. He’s setting the stage for an album that will boomerang from grey to bright blue and back again.
Actually, a boomerang may be too simplistic; there are so many peaks and valleys on this record that the emotional arc looks like an EKG reading. Said peaks, like “Pleasure Pen” and “Leave Your Cares Behind,” are full of seductive, false cheer, like an extended party sequence in one of those British TV shows where Thatcher’s in power, everyone’s unemployed, and they’re ready to do anything, no matter how dangerous or self-destructive, to feel good for a minute. Drunkenness, debauchery, the two in combination in a moving vehicle—it’s all here, in Nancy’s lyrics, and in the delicious irony of his instrumental choices.
“Pleasure Pen,” a song about going for anything, opens with a distorted shimmer of synth that echoes “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do).” The whiff of lounge and chintz gives a nightmarish undertow to the party songs, as if Hall is admitting all this behavior is hurtful rater than helpful. He pulls off the same trick in “Leave Your Cares Behind,” rhyming “cruising on the motorway” with “might just float away” in dreamy falsetto over feisty finger-snapping and whistling, like if Mowgli and Baloo descended to hell to perform “Bare Necessities.”
Nancy pairs these ironic, winking highs with lows of great sincerity. He’s adept at wiping away the grunge and psych-rock distortion when he wants to connect. After threatening suicide on the jittery “Never Gonna Wake (Up),” he recovers with a stunning, yearning ballad: “Dear Life Give Me A Sign That I Am Not Alone.” His dark night of the soul is not over, but he can, at least, dare to ask, “Is there light within the endless dark?” Most of the album calls to mind the endearing weirdness of the Nuggets compilation, but “Dear Life” is gentler, more like a Stephin Merritt ballad.
Nancy’s got a gift for rendering the compulsively undercutting of his own happiness. “Happy Happy Happy” is a harrowing portrait of a guy who can’t keep himself from doomscrolling: “Click through to a page/Written on climate change/And it starts up all over again.” Later on, the narrator craves the chance to destroy something on his own terms. After mourning break-ups throughout the album, Nancy pivots, on “Psycho Vision,” to “looking for a wife I can divorce.” It’s a sharp line, and it’s not the only one—his humor often keeps his disturbing material from descending into the maudlin. The titular sound of “Clic Clac,” we’re told, comes from the bony feet of the Grim Reaper, creeping up when you least expect him. “Deathmarch” deploys the organ-heavy Halloween music of a Vincent Price special—or, at least, a Bill Hader impression of one—and lends some levity to the album’s heaviest contemplation of death.
This album was clearly born of a dark place. Its narrator, mired in darkness, doesn’t seem to know what enduring happiness or survival would even look like. Some listeners may enjoy and relate to Nancy’s rollicking ride through all this turmoil; others may find themselves triggered. At any rate, Nancy sounds grateful, more than anything, that he lives to fight another day. The album’s bleak points make his moments of genuine gratitude shine all the brighter. His ecstasy at waking up and deciding that, yes, he wants to go on living today—it’s palpable. If you don’t know this feeling, this anti-suicide, “then you’re lucky,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “but also you poor thing.”
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-TALK (8255)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | B3SCI | January 20, 2021 | 6.6 | 38a57c2a-dce0-4497-9056-d2a708cac3e6 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
On his fourth album, the French producer plunges headfirst into camp, embracing overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll. | On his fourth album, the French producer plunges headfirst into camp, embracing overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll. | Gesaffelstein: GAMMA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gesaffelstein-gamma/ | GAMMA | In the beginning, Gesaffelstein exuded cool. His synths oozed menace; his German-sounding alias was steeped in the perfume of Teutonic techno cred. Like Rick Owens’ slouchy draping, the French producer’s shadowy, slo-mo techno felt elegantly seedy, like a runway show in a back alley. But success has a way of defanging danger. After his work on Kanye West’s Yeezus boosted his profile, Gesaffelstein’s sophomore album, 2019’s Hyperion, came front-loaded with features like Pharrell, the sort of A-list cosign that the industry requires of a rising star. The louche swagger stumbled.
It’s hard to stick to your dungeon-techno guns with Haim on the track; it’s hard to remain stone-faced with the Weeknd singing about fucking with the lights on. Where Gesaffelstein’s debut felt effortless, Hyperion scanned like the work of a guy who was trying too hard to fit in at the big kids’ table. (Turned out Gesaffelstein, real name Mike Lévy, was not immune to corniness: His alias was meant to shoehorn “Gesamtkunstwerk” into “Einstein,” as in Alfred—overstuffed references stretched by juvenile overreach into the portentous portmanteau.)
GAMMA, then, comes as a happy surprise. Instead of trying to be cool, Gesaffelstein has plunged headfirst into camp. Glowering, industrial-grade techno is largely a thing of the past. In its place, he gives us a winking amalgam of overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll. Seventies electro-punks Suicide and their French contemporaries Doctor Mix & the Remix, as well as synthabilly acolytes like the Jesus and Mary Chain and Love and Rockets, are obvious influences on Gesaffelstein’s distorted circuits, throbbing arpeggios, and motorik grooves. Lévy’s analog-rooted sound design has always been one of his strong points, and his synths have never buzzed as vigorously as they do here. Filters howl, lasers zap, and distortion builds like a tea kettle about to blow. The whole album’s a riot of squelch and clang.
Depeche Mode—an act that knows a thing or two about turning high camp into stadium-filling pop music—cast an even longer shadow. That’s thanks in part to the Some Great Reward-esque accents that litter the record like so many tarnished lug nuts, glassy FM tones suggesting the steely clank of chains. (Idea for a great safe word: “Yamaha DX7.”) But it’s due even more to singer Yan Wagner, GAMMA’s lone vocalist, whose oily baritone lubricates six of the record’s 11 tracks. In “Hard Dreams,” his leering, bluesy singsong sounds like an armored-up homage to Dave Gahan at his leather-trousered toughest. In “The Perfect,” which does for AI what “Behind the Wheel” did for B&D, he actually sings the phrase “behind the wheel.” Much of the Depeche Mode worship is equally Lévy’s doing: The instrumental “Tyranny” taps into the same 6/8 shuffle that “Personal Jesus” borrowed from T. Rex.
But Wagner is never reducible to a mere Gahan impersonator—he’s too funny for that, too unpredictable. Some of the eccentricity comes down to his lyrics. In the opening “Digital Slaves,” he ties his vocal cords up in elastic knots as he sings deranged lines like “Bring out the fun jump in the void…I’m gonna have fun with the digital scums,” or speak-shouts a chorus of “Cars! Coolers! Color! TV!” In “Your Share of the Night,” he groans, “Grunting in euphoria/This place is like a big mouth/Wading in the mire/The field roams with million diseases,” like Cronenberg and Google Translate gone horribly wrong. Such zany moments are the album’s best. “The Urge” pivots in its final 30 seconds from a Liars-esque industrial pogo to a Phil Spector slow dance; the way that Wagner purrs “Yeeeeeah” over the Moogy doo-wop of “Lost Love” is a sinister chef’s kiss atop a towering swirl of poisoned whipped cream. And “Hysteria,” a white-knuckled instrumental, is a perfect miniature of thrashy ersatz punk. At less than two minutes long, it’s one of GAMMA’s two shortest tracks, but nothing here runs much longer, which contributes to the album’s considerable charm. In place of some inflated falderal about total artworks and the life of the mind, Gesaffelstein has whittled his music down to a much simpler essence: thrusting hips, sharpened hooks, and a tongue pointedly in cheek. It ain’t E=MC2—and that’s the whole point. | 2024-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 5, 2024 | 7.2 | 38a5faa5-1dfb-498b-9a18-8a88acce36b7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Swedish prog-metal greats unexpectedly fly their freak flag on their ninth full-length. | Swedish prog-metal greats unexpectedly fly their freak flag on their ninth full-length. | Opeth: Watershed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11575-watershed/ | Watershed | Not all prog is created equal. Take prog metal, for instance. In one corner are Mastodon, who are prog to the core: long songs, lots of noodling, worship of 1970s Genesis (at least on the part of drummer Brann Dailor, an avowed Phil Collins acolyte). In the other corner are Dream Theater, who are equally prog: long songs, lots of noodling, worship of 1970s Rush (at least on the part of drummer Mike Portnoy, an avowed Neil Peart acolyte). Hipsters love Mastodon, but they won't go near Dream Theater. Dream Theater fans are equally unlikely to sport Mastodon t-shirts.
Perhaps this split is due to friction (in the musical sense). Mastodon are closer to prog as it was in the 70s-- self-indulgent, yes, but also earthy and analog. Dream Theater are the apex of prog's, um, progression since then. They're digitally clean and hyper-precise, poster boys for Pro Tools. For whatever reason, the white belt set gravitates towards prog's older aesthetic (see also the Mars Volta), while men with ponytails discuss kick drum pedals in Dream Theater forums. If "indie" is an aesthetic, it stops at certain thresholds of precision and heaviness.
Opeth, interestingly, have straddled both prog aesthetics. The Swedish band's first record, 1995's Orchid, was wonderfully raw. It was half death metal and half "other stuff"-- folk, prog, blues, jazz. The rawness came from a low budget and nascent songwriting, but it conveyed an atmosphere that Opeth never regained. Their records afterwards decreased in friction as their chops improved. In 2002, the band became practically frictionless. It split its heavy and light sides into two records, Deliverance and Damnation; the latter was gorgeously intimate. 2005's Ghost Reveries likewise went down smoothly, like a rich hot chocolate.
Watershed is an intriguing exercise in discontinuity. Unlike Orchid, which was jagged because the band didn't know how to do otherwise, Watershed finds Opeth willfully flying their freak flag. An acoustic intro with pleasant male/female singing leads straight into barreling death metal. A piano wanders into "Hessian Peel" apropos of nothing. "Burden" has an acoustic outro in which one guitarist detunes the other's pegs. It's delightfully horrible-sounding; such goofiness is refreshing for a band that's almost offensively virtuosic.
"The Lotus Eater" offers the greatest jolts. An intro of quiet humming drops into what seems like the middle of a death metal song-- but with disarmingly sunny vocal harmonies. Three minutes in, dissonant guitar lines spiral downwards like DNA strands. Later, a downright funky vamp appears, complete with chattering clavinet, as if Stevie Wonder had dropped by the studio. Aiding such absurdity are Opeth's two new members. Fredrik Åkesson brings lead guitar flash to a band that's prided itself on restraint, while drummer Martin Axenrot swings with verve. (Near "Hessian Peel"'s end is a monstrous groove that's like Meshuggah dancing a jig.)
Despite these hijinks, Watershed won't convert Mastodon fans en masse. It still has too many renaissance faire moments; its death metal is as aggressive as ever. After 18 years, Opeth's trademarks are well-established-- sinuous riffs, retro 70s keyboards, Mikael Åkerfeldt's Jekyll/Hyde act of death growls and mellifluous singing. (He sounds like your lovable Swedish uncle who once recorded a folk album.) But Watershed has friction, and friction brings heat. Those left cold by metal's po-faced tendencies might well warm up to it. | 2008-06-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | June 4, 2008 | 7.5 | 38a777a8-40cf-4da1-868d-48556068c8c1 | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
Silver Spring, Md.'s Two Inch Astronaut is a deft, bristling post-punk act whose energy stems from the uneasy suturing of uplifting, persistent melodies to an overactive rhythm section that threatens to dismantle it—and the lopsided pop hooks that result. | Silver Spring, Md.'s Two Inch Astronaut is a deft, bristling post-punk act whose energy stems from the uneasy suturing of uplifting, persistent melodies to an overactive rhythm section that threatens to dismantle it—and the lopsided pop hooks that result. | Two Inch Astronaut: Personal Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21531-personal-life/ | Personal Life | Dischord Records may not be slinging post-punk upstarts with the frequency of its heyday, but from an influence standpoint, Ian MacKaye’s accomplishing more than ever, particularly in his home turf: Washington, D.C. Even now, if you attend a local show within a 30-mile radius of the city, you’re bound to hear a band who've memorized Dischord's knotty, clever post-punk paradigms, usually the work of Fugazi or Rites of Spring. Silver Spring, Md.'s Two Inch Astronaut certainly fit the bill: a deft, bristling act whose energy stems from the uneasy suturing of uplifting, persistent melodies to an overactive rhythm section that threatens to dismantle it—and the lopsided pop hooks that result. The band’s first two albums, 2013’s Bad Brother and 2014’s Foulbrood, belie a curious magnetism, not unlike that of their heroes, Jawbox. Perhaps that’s why that band’s mastermind, J. Robbins, signed on to man the boards for Two Inch Astronaut’s latest and best record, Personal Life.
Up until recently, Two Inch Astronaut have operated as a duo: Sam Rosenberg did triple duty as a bassist, guitarist, and vocalist, recording the melodic parts individually and later tethering them to Matt Gatwood’s oscillating tempos. Between Foulbrood and Personal Life, the band became a trio, adding former Grass Is Green bassist Andy Chervenak to their ranks: an adept, aggressive arpeggiator with grooves that refuse to be ignored, not to mention a capable background vocalist, armed with a full-throated tenor. Suddenly, the cramped, crunchy sound has expanded to include more melodic counterpoints across all fronts (vocals, guitars, etc.), not to mention some much-needed embellishment. Accordingly, tracks like "At Risk Student" and "Woodstock ’99" offer a welcome respite from their peers' murky chug, as well as a departure from the preceding albums’ occasionally rote arrangements.
They may be a fuller unit than ever before, but compared to their previous works, Personal Life is the band’s most restrained album to date. The trio depends on beats, breaks, and pauses as much as any riff, and Rosenberg’s vocals rarely careen off-track like that of, say, Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles. What’s more, Robbins frequently submerges them in the mix—on the ballad-ish "Andy’s Progress Report" and "Good Companion," natch—so as to render them smooth textural complements to the jagged acoustic strums and burbling basslines. Despite their frequent reticence, the band entertain their rambunctious past on more than a few occasions: Gatwood and Chervenak throw a syncopated temper tantrum on the sardonic "Sexual Prince of the Universe," while the title track nips the jam sessions in the bud in favor some straightforward screaming.
Every song on Personal Life has its unique quirks, usually lyrical: Consider the endearing resignation of the opening track, where Rosenberg mumbles "I did good/ But it weren’t good enough," his self-aware grammar-botching the equivalent of a smug shrug. Equally clever is "A Happy Song," where the frontman manages to turn an unflattering comparison to a dog getting scratched behind the ears into a couplet that sounds strangely sweet. But from a musical perspective, the band’s more formulaic than they let on: by the time "Andy’s Progress Report" rolls around, the rhythmic games of Red Light, Green Light grows wearisome, as do the jumpy, post-coda digressions, ripped from the pages of the first Pinback record. "Topper Shutt," meanwhile, traces over Weezer’s "Undone (The Sweater Song)," right down to the serpentine central riff and reliance on two-syllable phrases. Nevertheless, Personal Life legitimizes Two Inch Astronaut as a respectable alternative to the regurgitated grunge that threatens to define rock’s '90s revival. | 2016-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | February 12, 2016 | 6.9 | 38a9641b-8aea-44c2-a68d-2d1f67a2dd7a | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Berlin duo’s debut album balances club music’s repetitive cadences with all-out chaos—an end-of-the-world soundtrack shot through with fierce, defiant rage. | The Berlin duo’s debut album balances club music’s repetitive cadences with all-out chaos—an end-of-the-world soundtrack shot through with fierce, defiant rage. | Amnesia Scanner: Another Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amnesia-scanner-another-life/ | Another Life | The Berlin experimental duo Amnesia Scanner renders club music as pure chaos, but producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala are just as interested in equilibrium. It’s a quality best captured in the “AS Crust” video, from their 2016 EP AS, and its looping visual of a robot dog stumbling to regain balance after receiving a swift kick. The robot saves itself with eerily human flails, movements straight from the uncanny valley, just in time to catch another boot once the loop cruelly resets. Amnesia Scanner’s music follows a similarly Sisyphean loop, knocking you askew and letting you adjust to the fractured groove before delivering the next blow. Their early records blurred the line between human and machine, mincing up human voices with hyperreal and grotesque sound design as synths wheeze, screech, and slam. On their first full-length release, Another Life, Amnesia Scanner now carry the steely confidence of a replicant as they assimilate into popular club-music forms.
Even in its most ecstatic moments, a tragic quality runs through Another Life. It’s the duo’s tradition to preface every track with “AS,” which can be read as either an abbreviation or a word, but the album title also offers its own double meaning. The phrase “another life” can be taken as an optimistic delusion or the desensitized tick of the death toll in a world where pain and suffering seem increasingly overwhelming. By colliding those two ideas, Another Life stands as Amnesia Scanner’s most accessible and impactful release to date, a fitting soundtrack to a time when reality is constantly at risk of being reframed and distorted. Much of the album’s power lies in their use of vocals, both human and non-human, which flesh out their dystopian soundscapes, both thematically and texturally, into thrilling and terrifying new shapes.
Another Life doesn’t feel apocalyptic so much as it suggests the end is already happening. After the introductory “AS Symmetriba,” Pan Daijing looks back at the wreckage on “AS Unlinear,” one of two collaborations with the noise artist that make up Another Life’s highest peaks. She echoes the wry cynicism of This Heat’s doomsday classic Deceit, delivering the line “Last year was a public change of character” like a press statement, but making every syllable strike as hard as the blunt percussion thudding around her. Reaching the concluding line, “Last year was not linear/Not linear,” she repeats the last phrase, dissecting it in a digitally treated scream as the song crashes into its chorus.
The album’s other key vocalist, credited as Oracle, is described as “a disembodied voice... which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner.” Whatever that is supposed to mean, it takes a highly fluid synthetic form that slides effortlessly between ghoulish lows and chipmunk highs, delivering lyrics far more compelling than its sci-fi backstory. “AS A.W.O.L.” is a simultaneously hellish and luxurious club track where deeply pitch-shifted vocals express pain and paranoia before spiking into the sharp, ecstatic call, “I’m going A.W.O.L”. A delicately twinkling melody, practically a lullaby, dances over the rattling, blasted-out beat like a Xanax dissolving over a tongue. It numbs the track into a shell-shocked banger, framing the titular phrase as much as a mental state as a physical one.
While previous EP releases like AS and AS Truth found Amnesia Scanner working in short, brutally effective bursts, Another Life paces its wider range with softer moments. “AS Daemon” offers a brief respite, showing a rare tenderness without sacrificing any abstraction. The album doesn’t master this flow until its final stretch as the somber, spacious “AS Chain” clears the smog for the methodically building “AS Securitaz,” which is all controlled explosions, aching synths, and spindly strings. Those tracks and the tense closing comedown of “AS Rewild” all serve to lift up the penultimate song, “AS Chaos,” the second Pan Daijing track. Here lies the key to Another Life’s doomed ecstasy and possibly all of Amnesia Scanner’s music. Melting between Mandarin and English, the lyrics’ message is universal (“All around you it’s just chaos, chaos, chaos”) and so is Daijing’s fierce, defiant rage, never letting up even as the song slows and crumbles. The world might be an unrelentingly bleak place right now, but Amnesia Scanner find new strengths under pressure on Another Life. In more ways than one, they’re only just finding their voice. | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | September 11, 2018 | 7.5 | 38ae8418-d5ff-43a0-9941-902b872c711d | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Icelandic lore tells of the Hidden People who live in the crags and lava of jagged mountains.\n\ Descended from ... | Icelandic lore tells of the Hidden People who live in the crags and lava of jagged mountains.\n\ Descended from ... | Sigur Rós: Agaetis Byrjun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7151-agaetis-byrjun/ | Agaetis Byrjun | Icelandic lore tells of the Hidden People who live in the crags and lava of jagged mountains. Descended from the ancient guardian spirit, the Hidden People come in many forms. The tiny blómaálfar dwell in flower blossoms while the common búaálfar reside on farms. Even in this modern age of cellphones and helicopters, Icelanders continue to believe that the Hidden People are still out there somewhere. Construction workers even curve roads around rumored dwellings of the Hidden People. How can a modern people find faith in such fantasy? A heavy cloud of Norse mythology and a breathtaking raw landscape explains much of it. The indigenous music of Sigur Rós can only perpetuate such a religion.
The album begins submerged. Sonar pings echo from liquid feedback, invisible in a handful, but crushing you like an ocean in its volume. A cathedral organ moans. Wire brushes drum in a sinking pace. A violin bow saws open the maw of massive guitar, spreading noise in clouds of blood. Siren Jón Thór Birgisson sings through every orifice-- including gills, perhaps-- creating the most inhuman vocals ever heard in rock (though Skywalker Sound could attempt a Chewbacca-esque approximation by blending whales, Jeremy Enigk, cherubs, Björk, and the blue alien from The Fifth Element). The song ends in an accelerating heartbeat that breaks into palpitations. Sound fizzles out. You've died.
A string section waxes as the album moves from "Svefn-G-Englar" to "Starálfur". The chamber instruments flutter around skeletal drums and sepulchral bass. This music tethers to touchstones in classical as much as Radiohead, like Orff composing "Carmina Burana" for e-bow at absolute zero. The song breaks into brittle acoustic interludes where Birgisson's vocals frost through your speaker. Yet like Icarus triumphant, the album keeps taking you higher (or deeper, depending on your perspective).
"N\xFD Batterí" opens with a disjointed band of muted horns. They deliquesce into chrome swirls of tinnitus and massaging bass. Eventually, the song erupts in flaking layers of hissing drums. Subtle bebop drums and Kjarten Sveinsson's fatty rhodes pianos kick up dust on "Hjartað Hamast" while Birgisson rubs the sleep from his eyes. "Olson Olson" is simply the most soul-crushingly beautiful piece. This elfin masterpiece unveils Mogwai's troll-rock for its soulless academics.
To term this music "post-rock" would be an insult; Sigur Rós are pre-whatever comes this century. Piano, flutes, tremolo, horns, feedback, and that godly amazing voice scrubs souls pure with the black volcanic sands from the beaches of Vík. Birgisson's invented lyrical language of Hopelandish may be crying in tongues or even plain gibberish, but sheer emotions like this cleanse as universally as sodium laureth sulfate.
Sigur Rós make this bombastic claim on their website: "We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music. And don't think we can't do it, we will." The fact that they've scored hits in Iceland with this spectacular orchestrated soul speaks of both their power and the credibility of the natives. The alien angel fetus pressed in blue ink on the cover serves as the perfect logo. Sigur Rós effortlessly make music that is massive, glacial, and sparse. They are Hidden People. Children will be conceived, wrists will be slashed, scars will be healed, and tears will be wrenched by this group. They are the first vital band of the 21st Century. | 1999-06-01T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 1999-06-01T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Smekkleysa | June 1, 1999 | 9.4 | 38b06463-bd8d-45f8-8f4a-b049f5775a1c | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
The indie pop band's reissue of loosies and cover songs captures their story in thoughtful strokes and further cements Katy Davidson’s role as an influential songwriter. | The indie pop band's reissue of loosies and cover songs captures their story in thoughtful strokes and further cements Katy Davidson’s role as an influential songwriter. | Dear Nora: Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dear-nora-three-states-rarities-1997-2007/ | Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 | Katy Davidson was in a rut. It was 2008, and after releasing three full-lengths and several EPs under the name Dear Nora, Davidson had retired the indie pop project and grown disenchanted with music. As they recall, their then-label, Portland’s Magic Marker, encouraged them to gather all their stray one-offs, covers, and song drafts into one collection, which was to be named Three States: Rarities 1997-2007. As Dear Nora waited in hibernation, the anthology of 60-ish simple and heartfelt songs became a fan favorite.
Twelve years after its original release, Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 is now receiving the reissue treatment from Orindal. Featuring a slightly expanded tracklist, the triple LP box set essentially tells the story of Dear Nora, which Davidson began in 1999 while studying at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College. As they write in the reissue’s liner notes, the project was initially less inspired by their K Records peers than by hook-heavy, kinda dweeby indie rockers like Weezer, Guided by Voices, and They Might Be Giants. Full of bouncy melodies and scrappy energy, Dear Nora’s first efforts channel the pure exhilaration of making music with your friends. But even these early sketches reveal the thoughtfulness that would define Dear Nora. On “Second Hand,” Davidson expresses astonishment at the neverending passage of time and uses the double meaning of the title to convey uncertainty. “Make You Smile” struggles with confrontation while “Up on the Roof” announces a plan to escape to a better life.
While Dear Nora features an evolving troupe of players, Davidson has always been the primary songwriter and sole permanent member, so their location and general state of being guides the project. In mid-1999, Davidson moved into a house alongside some Magic Marker labelmates. From an upstairs bedroom overlooking a cherry tree and a public park filled with squirrels, Davidson wrote and recorded eight short songs that would become 2000’s Dreaming Out Loud 7-inch. Featuring just Davidson, an acoustic guitar, and overdubs, these songs may be elementary, but they capture Dear Nora’s capacity to let a thought unravel into a miniature dissertation about their place in the world. Take “My Guitar,” which begins as an index of material objects and transforms into a philosophical mission statement: “’Cause how I want to live is effortless/And all I want to feel is not distressed/’Cause all I ever need is less and less every day.” And much like the Beach Boys song of the same name, “In My Room” pays tribute to solitude. As Davidson describes how the moonlight pouring in through a window pulls them into dreamland, “In My Room” feels comforting like a well-loved stuffed animal.
Beyond the bedroom were ample opportunities for inspiration, and as Davidson toured more, the scope of their observations expanded. The barely-there “Fargo” (written during a 2002 tour with Mates of State) envisions the titular city as a beacon of warmth amidst Midwestern sprawl and desolation. “Cheap liquor and cigarettes/Neon signs and off-track bets/Old Grand-Dad in the supermarket aisle/And all the kids in old Cadillacs,” Davidson sings, pulling a page from Springsteen. Meanwhile, a cover of “Girl From the North Country” transforms Dylan’s classic into a queer anthem of longing and nostalgia. But even as songs stretched their legs and experimented with lusher compositions, the themes remained familiar: transience, an appreciation for the natural world, and sincere awe at the world around them.
In 2004, Dear Nora released their opus, Mountain Rock. For that record, Davidson decamped to a geodesic dome in their home state of Arizona and recorded a series of windswept songs about the pleasures and pains of the sublime. Around the same time, Davidson, Jake Longstreth and Marianna Ritchey convened in a San Francisco basement to work on a series of songs that came to be part of what they referred to as “The Lost Album.” Several moments are siblings to songs that appeared on Mountain Rock, like “The Lonesome Border, Pt. 2.” In the Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 liner notes, Longstreth describes this as “a very Abbey Road kind of jam,” which is spot-on, from the familiar piano intro to the multi-tracked vocal harmonies. Though it features the same coyotes and jackrabbits as the understated version that made it onto the album, “The Original Mountain Rock” goes further in its search for meaning in the desert. “Down under clouds of thunder/My mind begins to wonder/If this night/Is a symbol or an end,” Davidson asks.
In 2017, after making music under other names, Davidson resurrected Dear Nora for a reissue of Mountain Rock. The reception to the record and tour was so positive that Davidson was inspired to release an album of new Dear Nora material, 2018’s Skulls Example. Though Davidson’s influence on a new generation has been well-documented, the reissue of Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 further cements Davidson’s role as a prolific and profound songwriter.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | October 28, 2020 | 7.6 | 38b3284f-be06-420f-a58f-0683009bbdee | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
With adventurous production and revealing writing, Charli XCX’s third studio album reflects an artist ready to commit to self-examination. | With adventurous production and revealing writing, Charli XCX’s third studio album reflects an artist ready to commit to self-examination. | Charli XCX: Charli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-charli/ | Charli | Long before she had firsthand experience with pop music’s star-making assembly line, songwriting camps, and royalty splits, 14-year-old Charli XCX thought that people made music because they were brainwashed by robots. “Who writes the songs/The machines do,” she sings with bug-eyed terror on her unreleased 2008 debut, 14. The lyrics are a little ridiculous, but Charli wasn’t exactly wrong in the assumption that there are complex mechanisms lurking behind most chart-topping songs. She witnessed them in the 2010s, after she signed to a major label and began penning hits for Icona Pop and Iggy Azalea, content to give her most straightforward pop songs to others. On her own albums, whether the gothic True Romance, the punky Sucker, or the avant-garde Pop 2, she subverted mainstream pop conventions, projecting the image of a rave-happy club kid. Always at Charli’s core was the contradiction of loving pop music, yet needing to rebel against the pop machine.
Her third studio album, Charli, invites back many of Pop 2’s contributors, as if hoping to recapture its predecessor’s magic. But the record feels conflicted about its intentions. Take Lizzo-featuring “Blame It On Your Love,” a reworking of Pop 2’s transcendent “Track 10” that loses its impact by trading dial-up screeches for a widely appealing, Stargate-produced EDM drop and a dembow-inflected groove. This and the frivolous yet fun chart-pop song “1999” (featuring Troye Sivan) don’t jell with the rest of Charli’s warped club tracks and intimate ballads. Like many self-titled albums, it’s a reflection of the artist: in Charli’s case, one who wants to veer down experimental, transgressive, and queer pathways but constantly contemplates what it would be like to fully enter the mainstream.
Much of Charli’s sound is an extension of the corrosive electronics on Pop 2, with producer A. G. Cook at the helm of both. He and his PC Music cohorts (Planet 1999, umru) embrace the synthetic and shiny: Glossy, arena-sized ’80s rock drums, rippling power synths, squeaky J-pop arrangements, and the relentlessly positive sound of Swedish Eurodance are repurposed and exaggerated, evoking the eerie sheen of a hyper-realistic 3D render. On “Shake It,” Charli’s voice is manipulated to sound like bubbling water, before the track is infiltrated by a small army of collaborators including Big Freedia, CupcakKe, Pabllo Vittar, and Brooke Candy, like a futuristic remake of Busta Rhymes’ infamous posse cut “Touch It (Remix).” The beat sounds like someone furiously clanging on boiler room pipes, transforming a nasty strip club track into a soundtrack for mutiny. The credits for “Click,” which ends with a montage of jagged and distorted SOPHIE-like sounds not dissimilar to farts, name 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady as responsible for “harsh noise.” Compared to the bouncy electro-pop of “1999” or the trop-pop production of “Warm” (featuring Haim), these moments provide a thrilling adrenaline rush.
Charli’s crisp writing mirrors the vivid production. On “Click,” she turns herself into an onomatopoeic sound effect. The sensory details of “Next Level Charli” establish a scene in seconds: “I go speeding on the highway/Flame burning/Tire screech.” Charli credits Max Martin with teaching her the technique, commonly used by Swedish songwriters, of using words’ natural melody to create catchiness, instead of intentionally rhyming. Lifting the most effective ideas from different schools of production, she’s able to construct her own mutant strain of pop.
The album’s most potent song is the synth-pop anthem “Gone,” which blends vulnerability with outré sound. Through gritted teeth, Charli describes a party full of people who make her feel alone: “I feel so unstable/Fucking hate these people,” she sings, using the image of ice melting in her fist to illustrate her sense of panic-inducing isolation. In response, Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens poses questions that are somehow relatable in their absurdity: “Am I a smoke?/Am I the sun?/Who decides?” Letissier’s abstractions are the foil to Charli’s concrete lyrics: The former evokes the spiraling crisis of the mind, the latter the blood-boiling anger that rises in the body.
Together, Charli and Letissier reach a cathartic breaking point, a rattling breakdown filled with frosty percussion, dramatic synth stabs, and stuttering vocal chops. In a recent i-D interview, Letissier asserts that Charli’s musical aesthetic, which she describes as a “hybrid” of club experimentation and earworm pop, is “deeply queer.” But in “Gone,” Charli invites another hypothesis for why her music has become so beloved by the LGBTQ+ community: Her ability to evocate a profound sense of unbelonging. When “Gone” explodes, it sounds like two people shattering the box that confined them.
Charli’s goal is self-examination—a new step for Charli, who’s better known for her up-tempo hedonistic bangers than her emotional deep cuts. Throughout the album, she pinpoints the source of her anxieties, investigating her relationships with substances, with her romantic partner, and with herself. She does this with heart-wrenching specificity on the ballad “Thoughts,” when, in a drugged-out stupor, she wonders if her friends are genuine. And on the electro-bop “February 2017,” featuring Clairo and Yaeji, she recaptures “Track 10”’s candor. “Sorry ’bout Grammy night/Was lying on my mind/Was in a different place/Tortured and drifting by,” she sings to her partner. So when “Official” arrives, it feels breathtakingly hopeful, as Charli sings of the little details (breakfast in bed, a magical kiss) that make her love real. Charli uncovers a singer-songwriter unafraid to display the cracks in her facade, crafting a striking portrait of what happens when a robot glitches.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | September 13, 2019 | 7.8 | 38b36d81-6013-4784-880c-bb9dd2a0778e | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The London band’s thrillingly seedy 2002 debut receives a reissue, accompanied by a stack of demos and studio outtakes that illuminate its sprawling, chaotic romance. | The London band’s thrillingly seedy 2002 debut receives a reissue, accompanied by a stack of demos and studio outtakes that illuminate its sprawling, chaotic romance. | The Libertines: Up the Bracket (20th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-libertines-up-the-bracket-20th-anniversary-edition/ | Up the Bracket [20th Anniversary Edition] | The Libertines were one of the most divisive bands of their generation. For some the murky London four-piece was the guitar group of the early 2000s; for others, a shambling imitation of the Strokes whose guttersnipe rock demonstrated how far British guitar music had fallen post Britpop. The Libertines never exactly shied away from the Strokes comparisons, deliberately styling themselves on New York’s finest in an early bid for attention. But a couple of important differences separated the two bands. Most obviously, the Libertines were steeped in the Anglophile tradition of the Jam and the Smiths to the Strokes’ New York punk-isms; just as importantly, the Libertines knew how to jam, letting their musical hair hang loose in a way the Strokes never did.
Both traits are evident on the Libertines’ thrillingly seedy debut, Up the Bracket, which is receiving the 20th-anniversary box set treatment. Alternately hailed as the future of rock and an overly sloppy cut-and-paste of influences upon its 2002 release, Up the Bracket today sounds like a fine record at the intersection of British rock tradition and dark romanticism, from “I Get Along”’s rollicking Clash-scrabble sound to “Tell the King”’s wistful take on Kinks-style ’60s Britpop. “Radio America” resembles the less frenetic, more tender work of the early Beatles (think: “If I Fell” or “And I Love Her”), all acoustic shuffle and girl-band harmonies. The album sounds slightly cleaned up in its remastered form but there remains something endearingly shaggy about Up the Bracket, as if the Libertines were too excited about being in the studio with the actual Mick Jones to bother with finesse.
On a psychological level, too, Up the Bracket is fascinating, with the early Libertines coming as close as any band has ever got to representing the id and the superego in music. Dual frontmen and songwriters Carl Barât and Peter Doherty were so close, musically and physically, that they felt like two parts of one troubled soul, their voices like those of a disjoined personality violently at war with itself (see the “So baby please kill me/Oh baby don’t kill me” couplet from “Death on the Stairs”). For all its garage swagger, Up the Bracket played like a musical psychodrama, driven by buzzsaw guitars and Gary Powell’s muscular drum lines.
The box set’s extra tracks—the super-deluxe edition has 65 previously unreleased recordings, including demos, radio sessions, and live recordings, as well as contemporary B-sides—prove intermittently fascinating. The live tracks, nine songs recorded at London’s 100 Club, plus recordings from the ICA, Nottingham Rock City, and Paris’ Divan du Monde, are fun but inessential, given that Up the Bracket largely succeeded in capturing the band’s live energy. It is great to have “What a Waster,” the band’s splendidly snarky debut single, included alongside Up the Bracket, albeit in studio outtake and live form; and the demo “All at Sea (Misty)” has a wobbly legged swoon that could have soothed some of the album’s jittery edges. On the other hand, no one really needs two early takes of a song as basic as “Horrorshow.”
The real interest lies in the studio outtakes, many of which have never seen the light of day—or never officially, given Libertines fans’ predilections during the early days of file-sharing. “7 Deadly Sins” (which appears twice on the box set, once as a demo released as the B-side of “Time for Heroes” and once as a studio outtake) and “Sweets - Take 4” show a dreamy, jazzy, and surprisingly lovable side to the band, one that owes more to Django Reinhardt than the Jam. The demo version of “Plan A” has the mesmeric, rather sinister feel of a film score, with prominent bass and skeletal guitar situating it somewhere between the Clash’s dub excursions and a Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album track. “Mockingbird - Take 6” doubles down on the band’s folky ways, with brushed drums, flying acoustic guitar flourishes, and what sounds like a double bass; it could easily date from the British skiffle boom of the 1950s.
Like London itself, the Libertines of Up the Bracket are sprawling, dirty, romantic, somewhat indiscriminate, and full of chaotic life. This impression is reinforced by “Don’t Talk to Me,” a song freshly unearthed for this box set, which they appear to basically make up on the spot, probing their way through two minutes of endearingly shambling lo-fi pop à la early Pavement. Those accustomed to seeing Doherty through the prism of tabloid fame, drugs, and reliably terrible Babyshambles singles may be surprised by the fresh-faced balladeer who sings on “Breck Road Lover,” a winsome and sweetly nostalgic song said to be one of the band’s earliest. The Libertines themselves—and Doherty in particular—are hardly blameless in the band’s descent into rock’n’roll caricature, becoming better known for misbehavior than musical ability before their troubled (but occasionally inspired) second album in 2004. Up the Bracket remains their high-water mark, and this box set gives enough context to understand the original album’s motley musical inspiration, bohemian spirit, and anarchic ethos. | 2022-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 22, 2022 | 8.5 | 38b45c00-1443-4f6a-9038-da21ddb63dfa | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Originally released as a murky collection on Bandcamp last year, Exile's newly mixed and mastered take on Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them imbues the kinetic, syllable-twisting rapper Blu's LP with a sweet, contemplative sound. | Originally released as a murky collection on Bandcamp last year, Exile's newly mixed and mastered take on Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them imbues the kinetic, syllable-twisting rapper Blu's LP with a sweet, contemplative sound. | Blu & Exile: Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17017-give-me-my-flowers-while-i-can-still-smell-them/ | Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them | Blu's No York! was one of the most slept-on rap records of last year, a collection of songs so forward-thinking they helped listeners soothe the retromanic paranoia that abounded in 2011. Provided with difficult beats by a group of futuristic producers that included Flying Lotus, Diaba$e, and Daedelus, Blu dissected the most complicated sounds, seamlessly slicing through cuts on which most rappers would stumble to land a bar. It was an exciting, esoteric collection. And, for those of us who took Simon Reynolds' fear of future-past seriously, it helped to remind us that there will always be something brand new coming around the corner.
Now it's 2012, and if I weren't over my fear of NOTHING NEW HAPPENING IN MUSIC EVER AGAIN, Blu's Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them would be a cause for concern. The album was originally put out on bandcamp in December of last year and was marred, as many of Blu's promising records are, by a murk of fuzz and bad mixing so complete that it was basically unlistenable. Now it's back, being released officially by Dirty Science and Fat Beats and while it's newly intelligible, thanks to mastering and mixing, the songs also sound a whole lot like five years ago.
That's partly due to Blu's re-teaming with Exile, who produced the entirety of his classic underground debut Below the Heavens. By reuniting with Exile (who we can thank for the mixing, mastering, and some scratching), Blu makes a return of the sound of his ground floor, to the sweet, contemplative organic soul that had fans embracing him before he started to get really and truly strange in all of the best ways*.* And though it's tough to criticize a rhymer as fluid as Blu, I can't help but to be disappointed in a release that sounds so much like what came before.
The third track, "Maybe One Day", is an example of what's wrong. It's, as always, a showcase for immaculate rapping, as Blu unwinds lines deftly, internal rhymes building and switching on each other with extreme sophistication. But the message of the song is pedantic and reductive as Blu plays the scold, "I pity them fools, zipping through the city in jewels…/ In it for the Benjamins too, and so am I/ But why would I use it on fool's gold, when you know your true soul shines." This sentiment, the kneejerk scorn for the heavy flaunting of wealth, is straight out of the mid-naughts backpack rapper's cliché list of complaints. What's more, Blu already flipped the idea on its head a year ago with the half-satirical track "Everything OK", on which he both mocks materialism and wishes for more. And he did so over a crazy beat.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Blu's step backwards is the way it jars against his newly evolved style. The contemplative beauty of Exile's beats fits Blu's soul-searching perfectly on Below the Heavens. But the rapper has become more versatile and more jagged, stringing individually crafted phrases together so fast that their edges sometimes feel like they're cutting through the headphones. On the devout "More Out of Life", what could be a wrathful rant against a squad following false fathers, and looking to "Malcoms, Martins, Pacs, Chris Wallaces" is dulled by the elegance of Exile's beat. Blu's anger tamed, the song doesn't have the impact it should and he comes off like a jaded, weary teacher, rolling his eyes at pupils who refuse to absorb a lesson. He even gets lazy at the end, just listing off the things we're dealing with, "censorship, sponsorship, friendships, relationships, slave ships, minimum wages," which is nearly as bad as moaning random words, "relations, creation, incarceration, determination," à la Citizen Cope.
With a rapper like Blu, though, there are always going to be songs that demand repeat listens. One of the best on the album is "Growing Pains", and it's here that Exile unleashes with something a little more dangerous, a heavy beat with a steady melody for cruising downtown avenues. Blu comes through with a minute left and just goes, torrents of syllables coming forward in service of rapid-fire storytelling about pursuing girls, hanging out with his pops, wanting a Casio and riding around in Cadillacs. On "The Great Escape" the rapper sounds rejuvenated by the presence of Adad and Homeboy Sandman, the latter of whom is perhaps the only person in independent rap who can twist syllables with the same precision as Blu.
Or take "The Only One", on which the man himself relaxes and, still rapping fast as hell, relays explorations of his ancestors and past lives, in between insights into his everyday life. It's his gift for these details, for storytelling and poetry at Wachowski speed that makes Blu such a great rapper. But when you remove bullet time, though he's still formidable, Blu can't hold on to the kinetic excitement that animated No York!.
I've always been conflicted about the critical instinct to ask our favorite artists for constant evolution, and it seems particularly unfair to pull out one of Blu's three 2011 releases, point to it as being representative of "the future," and beg for more. But Blu has a loyal legion of fans who will stick up for him, and he could stand to be called out. Making albums like Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them is child's play for two guys as talented as he and Exile are. And though this album is a beautiful, well-executed listen, Blu will only really be fulfilling his potential when he starts looking toward the future again. | 2012-08-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-08-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Beats | August 30, 2012 | 6.8 | 38b5b620-8c10-4f75-bd9c-c5b8f6784ec6 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Atlanta band seems to have found the ideal context for their brash, loud, and sloppy garage rock: live onstage in Tijuana, recorded by John Reis of Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu. | Atlanta band seems to have found the ideal context for their brash, loud, and sloppy garage rock: live onstage in Tijuana, recorded by John Reis of Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu. | Black Lips: Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9939-los-valientes-del-mundo-nuevo/ | Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo | Somewhere in the 1930s, guitarist Les Paul began taking a 4x4 plank of wood with stings and a pickup to his club performances to get the volume he desired. When he attached the wings of another guitar to each side of "the log," as he called it, he solved his feedback problem and the funny looks from the audience dissipated. In 1957, Sam Cooke made the difficult decision to move away from gospel and record a secular song, "You Send Me", under his own name. In 1964, Eric Burdon took the oft-covered standard "House of the Rising Sun"-- cut by Bob Dylan just two years earlier-- and recorded a more dramatic version with his own band, the Animals, resulting in what was arguably the first folk-rock hit. Sometimes, there's a watershed "Eureka!" moment in an artists' career where they find their ideal context, as if it had been waiting for them all along. For the Black Lips, the live Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo is it: they should always be recorded by John Reis (Hot Snakes, Drive Like Jehu), always be drunk, and always be in Tijuana.
"This is gonna be the best live record of all time!" assures singer Cole Alexander, like a hopeful dad taking his family on a shithole vacation. And then the band launches into a particularly flame-footed version of "Not A Problem" in front of a roomful of noisy and likely inebriated Tijuana visitors. From the very first track, "M.I.A.", the songs here are sped up to their breaking point, with woozy, haphazard guitar-string bends that flail desperately to catch up with the rhythm section's pace. The jagged, vaguely Eastern riff on "Hippy Hippy Hurrah" is particularly singeing, as the song flips between mumbled French and Alexander's wails. This and the anxious drum fills and windmill chords of "Boone" are some of the finest garage-bred surf-punk the band has to offer.
John Reis' recording of the show doesn't sacrifice an ounce of their energy or tone, nor does he clean up any warts, retaining the awkward banter, out-of-tune vocals, and frazzled connections. Los Valientes always sounds on the verge of breaking down-- not surprising to those who have seen the band's shambolic early shows-- but it never does. Fans will recognize eight of the twelve tracks from Let it Bloom, and the low fidelity and raucous nature of that record makes this rough recording sound familiar. But Bloom doesn't have a roomful of maniacs egging the band on, nor full-band sing-alongs on every possible note; these touches underline both the punk spirit of Black Lips and their unpolished performance style. Whether it's creative editing or just catching the band on a lucky night, it's only on the closing "Juvenile" that the band goes completely off the rails, as they ditch the song's manic two-chord riff for a finale of piercing, rhythmless noise.
I don't buy into it, but for some the romance of decadence and the fascination of the Behind-the-Music lifestyle makes this kind of music more authentic. Black Lips, or at least whoever is writing their press, sure as hell see things that way. They believe that you bleed and sweat and abuse yourself for rock and roll, and the most fucked-up band wins the prize. It's not important whether or not they actually live the myth offstage, just that they channel the spirit into their music with an intensity few bands could try for, much less attain. This quality is what makes Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo that rare live album that's not just different enough from the studio records to justify its release, but possibly all that beginners and dilettantes need from the band. The Black Lips nearly destroy their songs here, but out of an earnest, palpable love for the material. | 2007-02-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-02-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Vice | February 27, 2007 | 7.8 | 38b6318d-1da4-45e0-b818-3260dbe8d6ce | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | 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 story around the ’90s boom of Contemporary Christian Music and one of its biggest records. | 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 story around the ’90s boom of Contemporary Christian Music and one of its biggest records. | DC Talk: Jesus Freak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dc-talk-jesus-freak/ | Jesus Freak | At the Caffè Greco in downtown San Francisco, three young men sit around a table with a stranger. The trio mention that they’re musicians, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s in the biz himself. Helped master All Things Must Pass, in fact—did some arrangements on the first couple Police records, working on a tour for Dick Clark’s people. The young men start to squirm. Then, a reprieve: a couple enters the café, camera crew in orbit. It’s March 1994, and MTV is shooting the third season of The Real World.
The musicians are amused, and—if they can be honest—a little annoyed. They too are being followed by a camera crew, gathering material for a documentary that they hope to show in theaters. The film is intended to do that which MTV, to this point, has declined: introduce the trio to a secular audience. They are DC Talk: the biggest thing in Christian rap, the hottest thing in Christian music, and that is not enough.
Four years earlier, the head of their label had to beg festivals to give DC Talk 15 minutes out of his band’s own set. Now they were filling arenas on their first headlining tour. Their resources were commensurate with their ambition: to put on their hyperkinetic set, they employed a crack band and a team of hip-hop dancers. They performed on The Tonight Show and got a video in rotation on BET. They sang something called “Two Honks and a Negro” for Arsenio Hall and got invited back. Watching MTV attempt to make stars out of nobodies was frustrating, especially when they were just a couple tables away. In the mid-’90s, the record industry was a boom town, and DC Talk felt that they were claimants with a strong case.
In buses and hotels and dressing rooms, the three young men hashed out how to make a record that would succeed on their terms, as well as the terms of the culture they felt was excluding them. The result was Jesus Freak: an album that sold more in its first week than any Contemporary Christian Music release in history. It was the high water mark for a particular kind of evangelical pop, and DC Talk’s success accelerated the transformation of CCM from a commercial backwater to an essential corporate asset. But for the trio’s Christian fanbase, the most astounding thing about Jesus Freak was that it wasn’t a rap album.
Back in the mid-’80s, when the three young men of DC Talk—Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait, and Kevin Max—were students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Christian rap was barely a concept. While minister MCs like Stephen Wiley and Michael Peace were beginning to wed hip-hop to a message of salvation through Jesus Christ, McKeehan aspired to be a golfer. He’d been a hip-hop head since the Sugarhill Gang: In 1986, he even helped the Beastie Boys find a decent ice cream shop after a soundcheck at the 9:30 Club. He was a yappy private-school jock from suburban Virginia whose early raps mainly dissed his ex-girlfriend, but no matter: at Liberty, he was DC Talk.
His trajectory changed when he met Michael Tait, a native Washingtonian. Tait was a glee-clubber in high school; at Liberty, he landed a regular spot on Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour radio show. (On a 2012 return to campus, Tait visited Jerry’s grave. “I always would joke with him,” he told the student paper, “calling him my white daddy.”) In those early days, Tait and McKeehan ran a bait-and-switch. Tait booked a string of church gigs. He’d lead everyone in the old-time favorites, then he’d pause. I have a friend here in the audience who’s running my sound. His name is Toby. He and I do something different together that probably wouldn’t be right for the service... unless you guys think it would be? As McKeehan remembered it, the pastor would usually agree. “Then we’d turn that into a DC Talk concert.”
In 1987, the duo recorded a two-song demo titled Christian Rhymes to a Rhythm. Tait was singing from his sinuses; the beats sounded like breaking-news library music; the tapes sold out. To expand their sound, they recruited a second singer: Kevin Max. On campus, Max—a native Michigander—claimed his stepfather was Rod Stewart. He had a malleable tenor and something akin to professional experience: He’d once fronted a band that played at Jim Bakker’s waterpark. Max had been a rock guy ever since a neighbor kid played him Queen’s The Game, but he was down with DC Talk. The trio’s early press kit contained a ringing endorsement from Falwell (“God has great plans for these three young men and their powerful program”), designed to open up the church performance circuit. But DC Talk was dreaming of bigger venues.
After college, the three—billed as ”DC Talk and the One Way Crew”—signed with the Christian indie label ForeFront. They were the only label to show interest in DC Talk, but they considered the signing a coup. Hip-hop’s golden age was underway, and a host of new Christian rappers were sampling its fruits: End Time Warriors, D-Boy, Soldiers for Christ, JC & the Boyz, P.I.D., Dynamic Twins. Within this brotherhood of gospel rap, DC Talk was a double anomaly: a rap group with only one MC, and a white MC at that. In no time, they were labeled CCM’s New Kids on the Block. “Maybe as far as the way people look at us from an image standpoint,” McKeehan conceded, “but the New Kids don’t rap on one song, and our songs are 50 percent rap.”
But that other 50 percent unlocked McKeehan’s—and ForeFront’s—pop ambitions. While Toby hammered his pipsqueak delivery into something resembling the tough bark of his New York rap heroes, Michael and Kevin were adapting their talents to any number of Top 40 styles: hip-house, New Jack Swing, Rick Rubinesque rock/rap hybrids. Their first record was marred by nursery-school rhymes and rhythmic malpractice, but quickly sold 100,000 copies. The second went gold. By 1992’s Free at Last, they were a force. The songs were tighter, fuller—dare I say sensual: no small feat for an album featuring a pro-chastity response to George Michael. Even the ballads strutted. For the first time, Tait and Max sounded like full partners. The former’s Southern gospel intonations were gone; the latter had figured out how to approach R&B hooks like a rocker. They were doing fluid work in complex emotional registers. And they wanted a bigger role in songwriting.
Despite their group’s success, neither singer had developed any loyalty to hip-hop. Tait was getting deeper into rock. And Max—who was now being referred to as a “bad boy” for venialities like wearing eyeliner and being photographed holding a beer—had long been ready for DC Talk’s artistic ambition to match his. But McKeehan was keeping the powder dry. During the Free at Last sessions, he and programmer/backing vocalist Todd Collins would geek out over buzzy mainstream rap acts. One day, Collins started pushing him about updating DC Talk’s sound. As Collins recalled in a Jesus Freak retrospective, McKeehan set him straight. “We have to earn the right from our audience to make whatever records we want down the road.”
During the Free at Last tour, at a show in South Africa, he debuted a rap-rock song he’d just put together. It got a massive pop, and in August 1995, the “Jesus Freak” single hit stores. The riff, the loud/quiet dynamic, the bass that drops out during the breath-catching bridge: there was no mistaking the song’s provenance. “[A] radical change for the boys,” mused CCM Magazine at the time, “but it sounded an awful lot like... teen spirit.” Unusually, the song was pitched up a half-step, as if reaching for bubblegrunge higher ground. McKeehan’s bars—hollering about tattooed street preachers and John the Baptist’s nappy hair—took on a goonish glint. Tait and Max dove with him into the sour sea of the chorus: “What will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus freak?/What will people do when they find that it’s true?”
God’s people went bonkers. For untold numbers of mainline Protestant and evangelical teens, the song was inescapable. ForeFront mailed promotional CD singles to 4,000 youth pastors, who dutifully employed it as a sort of jock jam, propelling kids from Sunday-night youth gatherings into the hostile territory of Monday homerooms. The day after wrapping the album, DC Talk flew to Los Angeles to film the “Jesus Freak” video; McKeehan had tabbed Simon Maxwell after catching his work for Nine Inch Nails. The director cooked up a voguish mash of vintage newsreels, overexposing strobe flashes, and blurry foregrounds. MTV accepted the clip, which was fortunate for the group because their documentary was, by that point, dead in the water. Christian bookstore sales pushed the single to No. 10 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under chart, but without more secular support, that would be its peak.
“We have not gone down the road to alternative grunge as much as they think we have,” Max assured CCM, a month before the album dropped. His warning went unheeded. The popularity of “Jesus Freak” cast the album that followed as a late jump on grunge’s long tail: the redeemed version of Live or Bush. It certainly didn’t help that the album itself was cloaked in self-serious esoterica. For the first time, the group wasn’t on the cover. In their place was a brand-new logo that recalled the Eye of Providence, embossed on a sepia background lifted from a toxicology text in Max’s antique book collection. Even their typography changed: from here on, they were “dc Talk.” But Max was right. DC Talk was a vocal trio—by the letter of the law, a boy band—and thus disqualified from grunge.
In truth, Jesus Freak was a Nashville pop-rock record: impeccably performed and results-oriented. As with so many Music City productions, the collective CV of its players is boggling: Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, Jerry Jeff Walker, Scritti Politti. They employed the drummer from “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and the teenage guitarist from Johnny Q. Public. Everyone from CCM lifers to one-time apostates popped in for a spell.
Overseeing it all was Mark Heimermann, McKeehan’s writing and production partner since DC Talk’s second album. Heimermann had no lead guitarist to please, no bassist angling to cut through the mix. He was free to stack the pieces as they suited him. As on Free at Last, he went for density. Opener “So Help Me God” was the step-down converter from New Jack to adult alternative: between two dust-dry funk-rock riffs, Tait receives the pre-chorus from a host of Kevins—harmonizing, overlapping—like an anchor leg breaking from a crowded backstretch. Wanting to record the definitive version of Charlie Peacock’s 1991 CCM smash “In the Light,” DC Talk swapped Peacock’s synthpop hook—an homage to a multi-racial crossover pop act—for a full complement of strings and a crisp, palm-muted rhythm guitar. (Peacock, bearing witness, cameos on the outro.)
McKeehan had one more change: He excised Peacock’s bridge devoted to the greatest love and inserted his own Ecclesiastical lyric: “Pride has no position/As riches have no worth/The fame that once did cover me/Has been sentenced to this earth.” It wasn’t the only time on this album he’d touch on the temptations of stardom. It wasn’t even the only time he did it on a cover. He and Max retrofit the Godspell number “Day by Day” (itself a crossover pop hit) with new verses, turning the placid hippie artifact into a bleary shuffle that alternates professions of faith with gripes at Satan’s tactics. “Blinded by distractions,” Tait groans, “lost in matterless affairs.” On the glumly paddling ballad “What If I Stumble,” Tait doubts his very motivation to create. “Is this one for the people?/Is this one for the Lord?” he muses, circled by a slow-exhaling accordion. “Or do I simply serenade for things I must afford?”
Each of these songs, to some degree, resolves into trust or triumph. Even so, it was startling for a mainstream Christian pop act—especially one gunning to cross over—to be this frank about the pitfalls of success. (In CCM, as in wrestling, you’d often have to go underground to catch the real grappling.) A typical CCM album was programmatic: a couple praise songs, a few genial pep talks, a lament about America’s moral decline vis-à-vis abortion or the teaching of evolution. For that last one, DC Talk substituted “Colored People,” a jangle-pop anti-racism anthem that botched the diagnosis and the cure (“Ignorance has wronged some races/And vengeance is the Lord’s”). Jesus Freak didn’t skimp on the condemnation, but its makers shared in the malaise. For a generation of evangelical listeners, hearing Christian music’s biggest stars acknowledge their struggle to live a holy life was, paradoxically, profound encouragement.
On some level, of course, this is the evangelist’s tack: descending to your perceived spiritual depth. But in reaching the pinnacle of CCM, DC Talk was both ministry and moneymaker. They’d tear up an ecstatic arena, then take turns playing video baseball with the kids hanging outside the tour bus. In the spring of 1996, at a Christian-music symposium, McKeehan detailed his unease with fame: “[A] gentleman came up to me and said, ‘Can I have your signature for my son? He totally idolizes you, Toby.’ That’s scary. I don’t mind telling you, that makes me want to run from this industry. Wealth makes me want to run from this industry. I shake when I think about those things because wealth does not draw you to God—it doesn’t.” That year, DC Talk would gross $4.7 million on tour.
The industry couldn’t ignore that kind of number. The year before Jesus Freak dropped, CCM and gospel accounted for half a billion dollars in sales. The vast majority of these purchases, though, were rung up at Christian retailers, making them ineligible for Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, and keeping them from DC Talk’s dream audience. The big-box retailers weren’t stocking CCM, and the smaller Christian labels either lacked the personnel or didn’t see the need to get their artists onto secular shelves. But multinational labels had both the staff and the vision. Majors and massive indies started snapping up CCM labels: Sparrow, Reunion, Brentwood, Star Song. By the end of the 1990s, acts as disparate as Jars of Clay, MxPx, and Sixpence None the Richer were notching hit singles and albums. For ardent enthusiasts of Christian rock, it felt like overdue recognition.
In September 1995, point-of-sale purchases from the Christian Booksellers Association began counting toward the Billboard 200. Two months later, Jesus Freak debuted at No. 16, selling 85,000 copies, 90 percent from Christian retailers. Not even Amy Grant—CCM’s original crossover queen—had matched those first-week numbers. Four years after Billboard’s switch to SoundScan, DC Talk’s feat was less revelatory, perhaps, than Garth Brooks or N.W.A. topping the chart. But it emphasized how big Christian pop had become. In July 1996, EMI announced their purchase of ForeFront, whose ownership recognized they had taken DC Talk as far as they could on their own. In the fall, the trio signed a deal with Virgin to market Jesus Freak to mainstream North American audiences. Virgin had the perfect single in mind.
”Between You and Me” was gorgeous adult alternative in Seal’s mode: a downcast ballad urged onward by funky sixteenths and chunky wah. The radio edit removed the song’s explicitly Christian bridge. To some, the single clearly depicted a spiritual rapprochement: an application of the apostle Paul’s directive about anger. To others, it was a love song between friends, the kind of homosocial pledge (“We’ve got a love that’s worth preserving/And a bond I will defend”) rare in pop. Wunderkind director Ramaa Mosley shot the enigmatic video. which entered rotation at MTV and VH1. The song—likely the only hit single to use the word recompense—cracked Billboard’s Top 30. It would be DC Talk’s only appearance on the Hot 100.
Just for a moment, the band had reached the audience they had always sought. It took a ton of money, three labels, and an overhaul of their sound, but they did it. Jesus Freak would go on to sell two million copies. CCM journalists had already taken to calling DC Talk the Christian Beatles. Now they called Jesus Freak the group’s Sgt. Pepper’s: a generational work that suggested new possibilities for the genre. But, like the Beatles, DC Talk would cease to be a functional group within five years. 1998’s Supernatural was their next and final album, a turgid effort (there was a five-minute pop-punk song, which shouldn’t be possible) delivered with the assurance of stars. It debuted at No. 4 on the Top 200, moved a million units, and lodged itself as a footnote in CCM’s attempted pop takeover.
There would be no repeat of Jesus Freak’s achievement: not from DC Talk, nor anyone else. They were ambitious men who leveraged their claim on a particular patch of rap to reach a mass audience. Convinced that they possessed the needed gifts—spiritual, sure, but also compositional—they translated the distractions of stardom into testimony. They were aided by an industry anxious to preserve the alt-rock bubble, and to drive early returns on its investments in Christian music. At the dawn of the new century, though, CCM was looking inward and upward. Rather than take risky bets on aspiring crossover stars, it focused on praise and worship music: easier to produce and readymade for licensing to churches. Having built such a peculiar path to stardom, the members of DC Talk would have to find new lanes.
It’s October 1996. DC Talk is filming again. This time, it’s the European leg of the Welcome to the Freak Show tour. Tait and McKeehan stroll the streets of London, taking in the sights. A girl approaches Tait. “Are you a pop star?” The camera apprehends her, and she retreats. The camera pans back to him. He laughs, and shrugs.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ForeFront | August 1, 2021 | 6.7 | 38baeb08-0e0a-4b6e-9582-424100f61bdd | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
This is, without a doubt, Kevin Barnes' most fragmented record since the tail end of the project's Elephant 6 days. | This is, without a doubt, Kevin Barnes' most fragmented record since the tail end of the project's Elephant 6 days. | Of Montreal: Paralytic Stalks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16250-paralytic-stalks/ | Paralytic Stalks | of Montreal are not a band. Or, at least, they haven't been for quite some time: Since 2004's breakthrough sixth full-length, Satanic Panic in the Attic, Kevin Barnes has largely written, recorded, and performed every album on his own, occasionally calling on outside collaborators (Janelle Monaé, Solange Knowles, Jon Brion) to add flourishes. He made the decision to shift toward creative solitude nearly eight years into a career that has now spanned 16, and the decision made sense. Since Satanic Panic, Barnes has treated the LP form as a highly personal forum exploration, a place to indulge his every whim without regard for his audience.
In that sense, of Montreal's latest, Paralytic Stalks, is more of the same: Barnes recorded it in his own Sunlandic Studios with the assistance of strings arranger/performer Kishi Bashi and a smattering of session musicians, and has stated that the album is meant to be taken whole. But even for a songwriter as sonically adventurous as Barnes, something feels different this time around. He's always been fond of concepts (2008's alter-ego-happy Skeletal Lamping, the funk freakouts of 2010's False Priest), but on Paralytic Stalks, he sounds completely adrift, as if his thousand-synapses-firing-all-at-once approach finally blew a massive fuse.
When I spoke with Barnes this past fall about the influences driving the creation of Paralytic Stalks, he cited difficult 20th-century composers such as Charles Ives and Krzysztof Penderecki, predicting it'd be a hard sell for most listeners before doubling back and referring to it as a "colorful pop record." The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is, without a doubt, his most fragmented album since the tail end of the project's Elephant 6 days, which is saying a lot considering the tiny stitched-together segments made Skeletal Lamping such a challenging, divisive album. To me, that record sounded like a pleasurably jumbled mess of endless possibilities; Paralytic Stalks just sounds like a mess.
The seam in Paralytic Stalks' patchwork comes at the midpoint of "Ye, Renew the Plaintiff", which delineates the album's two halves. The front half plays to strengths Barnes' has honed over the last eight years-- stuffed production on the brink of exploding, melodies that constantly change direction, and unhinged vocal performances. The hooks just aren't there, though, and that's a big problem, considering that even Barnes' most esoteric records have had their share of memorable take-aways (Skeletal Lamping's "An Eluardian Instance", False Priest's "Our Riotous Defects"). With the possible exception of "Malefic Dowery", which is surprisingly lush, little here sticks.
The "20th-century classical music" influence comes during the album's second half: Its songs run longer, and they're packed with dissonant drones, screeching noise, and, in the case of "Exorcismic Breeding Knife", a surging orchestral cacophony. It's challenging stuff, a distant cousin to the kind of abstractions that Barnes flirted with on last year's thecontrollersphere EP. Barnes doesn't go all-in, but rather, pastes bits of psychedelia, stuttering synth-funk, and hushed piano balladry on the ends of "Wintered Debts" and "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission", which all feels utterly wasted given the shapeless and indistinct surroundings.
The most disappointing aspect of Paralytic Stalks is that lack of personality behind the music. Barnes has treated songwriting as a personal therapy session, and the recording studio as a psychologist's couch under mirrored ceilings. On 2007's brilliant Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, he faced off with his super-ego amidst infidelity, depression, and self-destruction; the following year's Skeletal Lamping contained so much him that he needed an alter-ego, the glammy sexpot Georgie Fruit, to get it all out there.
The words "personal" and "dark" have been referenced in Paralytic's promotional lead-up, but without a lyric sheet, it's nearly impossible to tell that Barnes is singing about anything, save for the surprisingly straightforward "Malefic Dowery", which goes back to the the subject of infidelity. I don't doubt that this is a personal album for Barnes, but on Hissing Fauna, that was obvious-- all you had to do was listen. Here, we're left sorting through lyrics like, "True love never mattered/ The two donkey jaws that were removed from our hearing."
It's hard to blame Barnes for being tired. Since the project's 1997 debut, Cherry Peel, of Montreal haven't gone a year without issuing some sort of new material. By now, he's akin to a Steven Soderbergh, an artist so driven to follow his muse that, even in the face of exhaustion, the thought of retirement only spurs him to work more. The thoroughly unenjoyable Paralytic Stalks might be a sign that Barnes should take some time off and let the inspiration come to him. | 2012-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 6, 2012 | 4.6 | 38bf80e4-ed5b-4bd9-85c7-27930c4dadec | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Swedish producer in charge of bringing capital-F Fun back to the dance floor succeeds in a multitude flying colors across his ebullient and wildly dynamic debut album. | The Swedish producer in charge of bringing capital-F Fun back to the dance floor succeeds in a multitude flying colors across his ebullient and wildly dynamic debut album. | Kornél Kovács: The Bells | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22252-the-bells/ | The Bells | In techno, few records are more iconic than “The Bells,” a 1996 track by Jeff Mills. Relentless and reduced, it exemplifies the building-block nature of Mills’ art as something meant to be layered across three or four turntables. Thanks to its queasy, carnivalesque melody, it also stands easily and proudly on its own. Kornél Kovács’ “The Bells,” the title track of his debut album, doesn’t sound anything like Mills’ version: Where the minimalist classic is stern and hard-angled, Kovács’ is cheerful and easygoing, flecked with chimes, warm strings, and peppy vocal samples. But I would be surprised if the precedent for his choice of title didn't at least cross Kovács’ mind. Given his fondness for sampling vintage disco, he’s cleary a guy who knows his music history. Someone coming from underground dance music, like he does, can’t title a record “The Bells” and *not *be reminded of the original. Which makes it something of a cheeky maneuver—a shot across the bow that leaves a rainbow tracer in its wake.
Kovács likes to have fun with references: His 2015 track “Space Jam” was a tribute to Quad City DJs’ theme to the 1996 Michael Jordan/Bugs Bunny film, for crying out loud. He likes to have fun, period. As a co-founder of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label, he’s spent the past six years developing a quirky aesthetic that draws freely from disco, Italo, freestyle, and easy listening. But his idea of fun is different from the kind of “fun” that you tend to find in dance music. In fact, there isn’t a lot of fun in dance music right now. Stone-faced cool rules the underground, while the antics prevalent in commercial EDM—marshmallow masks, cakes to the face, garish pyrotechnics—are too cynical, too calculated, to qualify as innocent or carefree. But once upon a time, when disco ruled, a single could reasonably be expected to elicit smiles on the dance floor, and that’s the impulse driving Kovács’ debut album.
The record opens with a beatless, 98-second snippet of Kovács’ 2014 single “Szikra” that glows like a cotton-candy lamp, but after that it’s all about dizzy rug-cutting, darting through loopy disco bass lines, spongy funk keys, and oohing-and-ahhing choral pads. “Gex” is conga-line mayhem on a heaving cruise ship, all flushed cheeks, flailing arms, and lifejackets lodged in chandeliers. “Dance… While the Record Spins” stacks staccato harmonies into brittle configurations, yielding something like Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” on laughing gas. And “Pop” evokes childlike innocence from pastel squiggles over a skipping, jacking drum groove, like an Akufen track smeared in color crayons.
Not everything is so chipper. “BB,” one of the album's highlights, exemplifies one of The Bells’ key contradictions. The beat is a cracking disco break broadcasting basement-party vibes at their most unhinged. But a more sorrowful undercurrent flows beneath its cathartic rush. “Szív Utca”—Hungarian for “Heart Street”—is equally bittersweet, and the slinky “Dollar Club,” tugged between crisp drums and weepy keys, balances a playful spirit with more melancholy vibes. You could imagine any of these tunes getting played by DJs like DJ Koze, Michael Mayer, Superpitcher, or any other selector with a winking sense of humor and a bleeding heart. But while it is music made first and foremost for club play, there’s enough variety here to make The Bells a satisfying listen on the headphones. The loping, dem-bow-patterned “Josey’s Tune” sounds like Kovács’ take on DJ Mujava’s “Township Funk.” Not only is his rhythmic sensibility is far more nuanced than most of his peers’, he is a master of both texture and empty space. His sound breathes even as it giggles.
Even the saddest, slowest song here, the closing “Urszusz,” comes off like something from a children’s cartoon, rendering a watery, Harold Budd-like piano melody with wide-eyed wonder. It’s followed by a moment of silence and a bizarre hidden track that sounds like a voicemail message chanted in sing-songy, heavily accented English. “What’s his name, Kornél Kovács!” sings his exuberant and quite possibly inebriated caller, over and over, with great gusto. It’s the kind of thing you might wake up to on your phone after a long, blurry, and indescribably fun night, and it’s the coup de grace for an album that brings good times back to dance music. | 2016-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Studio Barnhus | August 27, 2016 | 7.7 | 38c12ba6-4891-4103-bb5a-0b5c053280a7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
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