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Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited. | Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited. | The Weather Station: Loyalty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20330-loyalty/ | Loyalty | Tamara Lindeman is no longer singing about white lilacs, wild columbine, rhubarb pie and big jars of honey. On two previous albums as the Weather Station, Lindeman used acoustic guitars, banjos and a lexicon of bucolic imagery to write graceful, generous folk songs. The material wasn’t simple so much as vernacular, so that even the Toronto songwriter’s most intense reflections on love and lust espoused a downhome familiarity.
But Loyalty, Lindeman’s third and best LP, continues the inward pull of last year’s incisive EP, What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know. Her once-plaintive confessionals have morphed into intimate but impressionistic character studies, where the songwriter spares neither herself nor her subjects an analytical eye. And the acoustic instruments that once galloped or crept behind her have morphed into abstract backdrops—sophisticated but understated settings that accent the expressive voice above them. Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited.
To make Loyalty, Lindeman and a minimal crew decamped to a deteriorating French mansion for a long wintertime recording session. Collaboration has long been integral to the Weather Station’s records, from a set of duets released in 2013 to the way in which Everything was recorded by two different bands in two different countries. But only Bahamas leader and multi-instrumentalist Afie Jurvanen and accomplished engineer Robbie Lackritz joined Lindeman along the Seine. They shared production duties, while Lindeman and Jurvanen split a dozen instruments evenly. These 11 songs often suggest you’re sitting with the trio in some small parlor as they play. The drums shuffle or canter quietly. The guitars stay hushed. The only real instrumental break, the smoldering electric coda at the end of "Tapes", remains gentle, hinting at an outburst but never delivering it. And whether hitting the brassy highs of "I Could Only Stand By" or the diffident lows of "Personal Eclipse", Lindeman’s voice rarely rises above an elegant whisper. It’s as if she’s trusting these revelations only to the people in the room.
All of this material indeed seems confidential, like a list of life problems that Lindeman is still trying to sort out for herself. Opener "Way It Is, Way It Could Be" sets the stage for this exacting ambiguity, where the uncertainty of the future unspools from a discrete, difficult present. Here, a relationship is good but neither as honest nor forgiving as she hopes. The partnership’s survival suggests a Schrödinger’s cat scenario, where Lindeman can simultaneously envision success and failure. During "Personal Eclipse", she takes stock of her general discomfort with society—its catcalling men, her introversion amid others’ extroversion, the loneliness such tension can induce—and tries to tease out its source. It’s an open-ended self-evaluation, with more lingering questions than actual answers. And "Like Sisters" questions the limits of friendship and choosing sides, even when it imperils your own happiness. "Sometimes you give, you’re giving all you have," she offers, stretching those last words with what sounds like regret. "And sometimes you’re the taker."
The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty. Mesas are "strange and red and snowy." Rivers are "serpentine, glinting." The low sunlight of November is "impossibly bright." Paired with the external turmoil and internal debate of these lyrics and the private way Lindeman and Jurvanen deliver them, such observations give Loyalty the feeling of fastidiously edited old journal entries—too lean and evocative to be a first draft, but still true to experience. It’s an approach that puts Lindeman in the company of Bill Callahan and Joni Mitchell, songwriters whose careful combinations of pedestrian details and profound insights also created secret, self-sovereign worlds. And like both of those songwriters, she’s a singer with an unmistakable and communicative voice, able to convey hope and hurt with equal clarity.
During standout "I Mined", Lindeman admits she is stuck: There’s a fundamental but indiscernible flaw in her current relationship. It’s the pea beneath the mattress that keeps her up at night, even as the seasons come and go. She alternately wants to find and fix it or just forget it and carry on. But she knows that’s impossible. "Your trouble is like a lens through which the whole world bends," she confides over prismatic piano, her voice suddenly harmonizing with itself as if to emphasize that this is the record’s thesis. "And you can’t set it straight again." These 11 tunes are expressions of woes that you can’t quite correct but can’t let go, either, worries that plague you but push you onward, too. These are public folk songs about the private problems—breakups and makeups, depressions and deaths—we’ve all suffered. | 2015-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | May 5, 2015 | 7.8 | 3c2abf73-c3c8-4e69-a53d-596a69d91202 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The National’s sixth album is their leanest and most aerodynamic, easily accessible and self-assured by virtue of focusing on the visceral power of Matt Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s taut, inventive drumming. It’s also their funniest and most self-referential. | The National’s sixth album is their leanest and most aerodynamic, easily accessible and self-assured by virtue of focusing on the visceral power of Matt Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s taut, inventive drumming. It’s also their funniest and most self-referential. | The National: Trouble Will Find Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18030-the-national-trouble-will-find-me/ | Trouble Will Find Me | Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?
The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship—the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens—can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It’s a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.
It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National’s dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they're part of the same song.
“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love,” which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.
That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn't contain his sharpest writing—in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma—but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons,” hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up... FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons,” revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.
As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay— natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All the Wine,” he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer,” and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”
Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits,” LA Woman and Guns N’ Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation.”
Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms his medium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him—“There’s a lot that I’ve not forgotten/But I let go of other things.” As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement. | 2013-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 21, 2013 | 8.4 | 3c2d8952-a31d-4977-af70-a7581bfa6f70 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
This instrumental companion to the San Francisco electronic musician’s 2019 album Weather is unfailingly mood-stabilizing and office-friendly, like a desktop screensaver of an ocean. | This instrumental companion to the San Francisco electronic musician’s 2019 album Weather is unfailingly mood-stabilizing and office-friendly, like a desktop screensaver of an ocean. | Tycho: Simulcast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tycho-simulcast/ | Simulcast | “Morale, like anything, is just another problem to be solved,” begins a chewy chapter in Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir about the author’s time spent working in the neo-capitalist Platonic cave of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. Heavy with the weight of corporate hubris, unchecked male ambition, and free nut mix, Wiener’s writing is an otherwise zippy babe-in-the-(Muir)-woods account, partway between a tell-all and a long piece of gonzo journalism, describing the dawn of the start-up bubble. Aside from detailing the morally ugly and aesthetically corny consequences of the Valley’s quick rise to becoming a living diorama of late-stage gentrification, the thrill of the book lies in watching a mass cultural movement assume a near-spiritual reverence for work. This is work as eternal pursuit of validation, work as shorthand for identity, work as a means for self-actualization and self-escape—work as a (if not the) justification for being alive at all. “They talked about achieving flow,” writes Wiener of her superiors, who RipStik gently around the office while taking conference calls and making insulting amounts of money, “a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner’s high.”
The idea of flow, a key tenet of corporate garbagespeak, is a fulcrum of the San Francisco-based musician Scott Hansen’s latest and most explicitly San Franciscan album, Simulcast. Operating under the Tycho banner, Hansen’s project—or, depending on your proximity to the creative class, entire brand identity—has become synonymous with a style of electronic patter so easily digestible that it approaches a degree of utility. Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.
Part of the pleasure of determining the breadth and scale of an artist’s hugeness is in scouting where their music proliferates and who it’s for. In Tycho’s universe, there are listeners, and there are use-cases. He exists in perfect symbiosis with streaming services’ mood-based offerings: Whether on a bevy of ready-made playlists from Spotify (“Chilled Vibes,” “Atmospheric Calm”) or across hundreds of user-made playlists titled with terms like “chill,” “study,” or, beautifully, “Adderall,” Tycho’s music has reached a state of ubiquity for the way that it softens or amplifies the blows of a daily rhythm. Much like the inescapable 24/7 streams by a YouTube channel titled ChilledCow, who owns the “lofi hip-hop radio” multiverse, Tycho’s work makes its implicit purpose to support, sustain, or beautify a brainspace. “I like how this music accompanies your mood, rather than strongly impose some emotions,” reads a top-upvoted comment on a YouTube upload of 2011’s Dive, whose viewership currently clocks 33 million views.
But Tycho’s music lies just this side of the utter artistic facelessness baked into the “beats to relax/study to” or “beats to sleep/chill to” streams; there will always be a small fistful of flags that alert you to the fact that you’re experiencing a Tycho song. There will be soft exhalations, pillowy radar loopings, cottony breakbeats, and extremely liberal inspiration from Boards of Canada. There will be album art with high-contrast sunsets. There will be warm electro-acoustic mist. There will be tabletop synth patterning that bobs harmlessly up and down a scale.
Simulcast blankets all of these suggestives under a weighted duvet: The album is an instrumental companion to 2019’s Grammy-nominated Weather in which each track carries the satisfying airtightness of a meditation app with deluxe features. (Cannily, the album announcement for Weather was accompanied by a literal web app.) Simulcast—a portmanteau of “simultaneous” and “broadcast,” like a live feed of a presentation played on several screens across a multi-bureau organization, is actively inspired by Hansen’s three-fold vision to strip the vocals from his last album, find peace in a chaotic world, and honor San Francisco’s beaches. As a result, the whole thing is not unlike finding yourself transfixed by a desktop screensaver of an ocean.
The work provides brief moments of happy fizz that unquestionably belong to Hansen’s hand. Tracks crescendo and decrescendo with peak points at equidistance on nearly every track. “PCH,” named after the sinewy highway that crescents California, is like easy-listening IDM; “Alright,” with its dilating snare buildups, is post-rock-on-the-sea; “Stress,” whose title suggests the thing one is dodging, is a beautifully limp exercise in motivational drum progressions that seem calibrated for the cubicle. As Hansen notes on a post of his handmade artwork for the track, “if you’re going to be stuck in a room, might as well put up some nice wallpaper.”
That Tycho’s music functions as a mental masseuse for the 21st century open-office drone, or a mood stabilizer for the nervous, is a fundamentally benevolent thing. Hansen, who has spoken with gravity, candor, and self-awareness about his music as an aid—whether of concentration or attitude—offers, in his own way, a mildly noble service. Here, it’s difficult not to summon the mother of all sound-as-motivational-mechanisms—the much-maligned Muzak Corporation, founded in 1934—and their Stimulus Progression series: fifteen-minute tracks of background instrumentals meant to give the listener a boost of productivity over the course of an hour. Early emissions of Muzak were billed as “functional music,” responding to the need to “fill the deadly silences” of the office, there to drown out human complexity for the sake of getting something done.
But human complexity often demands volume. Simulcast, in contrast, could be confused for interstitial podcast filler tagged “uplifting” and “electronic.” It might be background music for prescription drug commercials or a public university’s sizzle reel; music to soundtrack health food emporia, CBD dispensaries, entire theatres of retail operations with target audiences of Instagram users between the ages of 20 and 35. Tycho suggests a host of signifiers that spool into one another like a lorem ipsum of a certain type of contemporary aesthetics: kaleidoscopes, foliage, triangles; hand-lettered typography, galaxy prints, stickered Nalgenes, new bars in newly named neighborhoods. These things are not inherently bad, but they proliferate, at this point, almost to a point of unmeaning. I fear—as Wiener writes of San Francisco, smoothed by all that flow—that it is “all beginning to look like a generic idea.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mom+Pop / Ninja Tune | March 4, 2020 | 5 | 3c2e275b-9f0b-49aa-b13c-d903fdc89432 | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
Chicago’s local heroes grow up a little on their fourth album and lose some of their live-wire charm in the process. | Chicago’s local heroes grow up a little on their fourth album and lose some of their live-wire charm in the process. | Twin Peaks: Lookout Low | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/twin-peaks-lookout-low/ | Lookout Low | Twin Peaks are one of the most prominent Chicago rock bands of the past decade. If you’re not convinced, scroll through the subreddit dedicated to the quintet, who are lovingly nicknamed “the dudes” by many a Peakshead. For much of the band’s career, the loyalty to Cadien Lake James, Clay Frankel, Jack Dolan, Colin Croom, and Connor Brodner was justified; since their 2013 debut mini-LP Sunken, the band have crafted bustling garage rock that was typically at least pretty good. Like their peers in Whitney and Post Animal (and even their old high school buddy Chance the Rapper), they owe a great deal of their success to the propitious Chicago scene, which builds a safety net from the devotion of their city’s audience. “You want to play well [at hometown shows], but if you play like shit, you know no one’s gonna care,” Frankel told Vice. In a live setting, the band’s music was a catalyst for those rowdy gigs that fans embraced—but on Twin Peaks’ fourth album, Lookout Low, it sounds like they’re finally tired of crowd surfing.
Considering Twin Peaks have been at this since they were 19, signs of them growing older were inevitable, but much of Lookout Low sounds more fatigued than mature. This album brings piano and a Croom-arranged horn ensemble to the forefront, invoking classic rock touchstones like the Grateful Dead and the Hollies. Old rock’n’roll influences are nothing new to the band; usually, they’ve been able to manipulate cues from their predecessors into an aesthetic that still felt contemporary. But this time around, like the Dr. Dogs and Edward Sharpes before them, Twin Peaks rely too heavily on these retro methods and often sound blatantly borrowed. As a result, there isn’t a fresh moment throughout the album’s 43 minutes. “Ferry Song,” inspired by Croom’s daily commute into the city during his stay in New Orleans, is about as invigorating as such a commute itself. Opener “Casey’s Groove” is too lethargic to earn its name, and the closing “Sunken II” only reaffirms the record’s monotony.
Lyrically, the album doesn’t do too much to redeem itself, and the platitudinal references to “the ice within my heart” and “sing[ing] our favorite songs” feel even more stale amid the tedious instrumentation. Lead single “Dance Through It”—which the band joked recalled Sheryl Crow—lived a short life as a Twitter meme, but it doesn’t leave a lasting memory otherwise. “Got a problem everywhere she goes/But she doesn’t pay mind to it,” James sings, although the stakes must not be so high: All she has to do is “dance through it,” as we’re reminded over 20 times throughout the song. “You’ve been bummin’ around/The bitter heart of December/Blame it all on the weather/Needless to say, I’m glad it exists,” Dolan sings on “Unfamiliar Sun,” as if to say he’s relieved to be able to attribute his laziness to the calendar alone. And then there’s “Better Than Stoned,” where Frankel howls gleefully about finding a love that gets him even higher than marijuana does.
There are fleeting moment on Lookout Low, like the rollicking “Oh Mama,” where some of the band’s old charm starts to poke through. There’s a reason local press dubbed Twin Peaks Chicago’s “Next Big Rock Band” in their early days, and for a while, that prediction seemed quite viable. But here, they mostly sound exhausted—like they’ve run out of ideas or motivation. When Dolan sings “I really run my mouth/I hardly use my brain,” he and his bandmates make it difficult to disagree.
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 | Rock | Grand Jury | September 13, 2019 | 5.9 | 3c363dcd-cb73-40a2-a372-22cb6eac6494 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
This rough and potent offering from rural Washington State combines black metal ferocity with operatic post-rock. | This rough and potent offering from rural Washington State combines black metal ferocity with operatic post-rock. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Two Hunters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10956-two-hunters/ | Two Hunters | Most of the arguments I've heard in the past three months about Two Hunters, the excellent and sprawling second album from Olympia, Wash., metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, have been divergent echoes of extremism. Those who take Burzum's best black metal as an unholy grail argue that Wolves' black-metal half-- characterized by impenetrably fast drums, focused guitars and ferocious, muffled vocals-- is competent enough, if somewhat standard. Meanwhile, those who've heard of the record's operatic, post-rock menace-- serpentine female vocals where most bands would put keyboards and gauzy keyboards where most bands would be countering guitar arpeggios-- find Two Hunters compositionally imperfect, lined with missed opportunities a smarter band would have recognized. And those eager for a successful post-rock/black-metal merger find that Two Hunters-- which more often bleeds one dichotomous idea into the next rather than stack them into one dense moment-- isn't that album.
But none of this really matters, whether you're trying to understand Wolves in the Throne Room as a band or enjoy one of the best-paced post-rock or most well-tempered black metal albums you've ever heard. Wolves in the Throne Room-- two brothers and a friend who share a sylvan dwelling and a plot of self-sustaining land outside of Olympia-- aren't really into compromise or expectations. In interviews, they've said they're "not black metal, or, more accurately we play black metal on our own terms" and "I don't know what post-rock is." They've declared that they don't think of themselves as a progression in the grand black metal scheme, so post-black metal labels need not apply. They've publicly damned their need to tour in a van, to maintain a MySpace page, to sign to a record label. "We'll see how long we can keep it up before we retire to our farm," the trio told Ultimate Metal's Jason Jordan in a surprisingly candid 2006 interview. "A loud voice in my head tells me that we should only play this music on the winter solstice, drunk on mead and cider, burning torches to remind us of the long-forgotten sun." Like the band's polytheistic sound, such a Cincinnatian attitude could be seen as ambivalent or even irreverent: Do you want to be a band or a bunch of farmers? Do you want to nod at black metal or do you want to play it? Do you really want your guitar player to ignore the obvious chord change on the beautiful "Cleansing", or do you want to perfect your umpteen-minute broods?
Actually, that's about right: Two Hunters is mostly indifferent to conventions, or at least their corollaries. The black metal portions of "Vastness and Sorrow" indeed sound like U.S. black metal, and the instrumental middle third of the same track sounds like Pelican with sharper talons, bigger wings, and a pacemaker. But the record's real power emerges from the subtle bleeding between the memes, not to mention their stark juxtaposition. The metal moments come in long, grand, ferocious sweeps that keep everything in motion, and the instrumental moments often seem truncated or incomplete because they're interested in the same sort of motion, always seeking the next stop. Nothing's precious or perfected on Two Hunters. It's rough and potent, even when guest vocalist Jessica Kinney delivers its most beautiful moment with her lullaby aria on "Cleansing". After all, it's a record about the world ending so it can begin anew. If the world's ending-- and Wolves in the Throne Room believes it is-- that missed chord on "Cleansing" is trivial.
And there's no better example than closer "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots". It uses the rest of the record as its prototype, its dynamics serving as catapults and its pace implying wars and fires and rescues and rebirths. It eases in, guitar notes hanging over zephyr synthesizers that are effective if trite. One chord stops short, and the pounding drums and roaring guitars doze everything. Five minutes in, the double bass drum pushes the envelope, then disappears, sheets of guitar feedback intertwining. The moment is broken by another surge, all militaristic march and tortured yowls. It melts away, returns and melts away again. Only the guitars are left to slink around Kinney's voice. She fades, too, leaving field recordings of birdsong and wind. Its work done on one of the year's most singular, unflinching records, Wolves in the Throne Room return to the farm, expecting fire and floods, with the wars of extremists raging at their backs. | 2007-12-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2007-12-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | December 14, 2007 | 7.9 | 3c383e82-ca3b-46c6-9b79-3f63081c38cb | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Continuing his recent forays into more literal storytelling, Spencer Krug's collaboration with Finnish prog-rockers Siinai is a swirly, molten rumination on heartbreak. | Continuing his recent forays into more literal storytelling, Spencer Krug's collaboration with Finnish prog-rockers Siinai is a swirly, molten rumination on heartbreak. | Moonface / Siinai: With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16495-moonface-with-siinai-heartbreaking-bravery/ | With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery | The first record where Spencer Krug really let his imagination run wild was called, fittingly, Shut Up, I Am Dreaming. Since then, the grand theme of his catalog has been the tension between the world in his head-- which is peopled by dragons, courtesans, and kings-- and the persistent, alarm-clock nag of the world around him. In his work with prog-pop juggernauts Wolf Parade and his more fanciful onetime solo project Sunset Rubdown, Krug has fashioned himself a kind of indie rock Don Quixote: a raving, good-natured lunatic more comfortable in the realm of metaphor and myth than physical world. And for the same reason that Don Quixote would have been a shitty boyfriend, a Krug song very often ends in heartbreak. In an early Wolf Parade track, his companion complains about the din of city buses, and he tells her to "pretend [they're] whales, keeping their voices down." She will do no such thing. Yelps our hero, "Such were the grounds for divorce."
The title doesn't lie: Heartbreak is once again the main preoccupation on Krug's latest record as Moonface, but With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery continues the recent forays he's made into more literal, brick-and-mortar storytelling. "Fast Peter", the strongest track on Moonface's largely lackluster 2011 release, Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, told a story about a friend's long-distance romance in brutally clear language. (The opening couplet: "So Peter loves a girl/ The way that only Peter does/ He told me all about it on the balcony when we were high on drugs.") "I would like to be able to do more of that sort of writing," Krug said about the Spartan approach of "Fast Peter" in a recent interview. And most of the time, Heartbreaking Bravery makes good on that promise: There's a purposeful simplicity to its narrative approach and a concreteness to its imagery-- even when our narrator sounds less than engaged. "The bed looked like a butcher's block/ And you liked it better when I was on top," he drones on "Yesterday's Fire", his indifference backlit by a swirling, sky-on-fire soundscape, "And I thought about nothing at all."
The Siinai of the title is a Finnish band that sounds like Tangerine Dream meets Explosions in the Sky atop a mountain that is particularly prone to lightning strikes. As their name implies, these guys rarely hit a note that's not epic (their most recent album was a grandiose, kraut-indebted affair called Olympic Games), and their chugging, apocalyptic compositions mostly provide a nice undercurrent to Krug's brooding wordplay on hypnotic slow-burners like "Heartbreaking Bravery" and "Quickfire, I Tried". Krug's arrangements with Sunset Rubdown in particular married the arty ambitions of prog rock with the crayon-bright, glockenspiel-dappled aesthetic of mid-2000s indie rock, but Siinai are more about swirly, molten swaths of gray. It's a decidedly more mature sound for Krug, which echoes the record's thematic concerns with aging. "I'm too old for you, anyway," he sings to the love interest on "Yesterday's Fire". A few songs later he seems to have learned his lesson: "She was only 23, or she was only 24/ I headed for the door."
Krug's retreat from flowery metaphor is occasionally too extreme: The chorus of "Shitty City" actually goes, "And it's a shitty city now/ It's a shitty/ City/ Now." That track in particular finds the Moonface and Siinai symbiosis to be a little disjointed: The instrumentation is fiery and volatile, but Krug's efforts there feel perfunctory and a little uninspired. Thankfully, those tracks are few and far between, and overall this collaboration with Siinai proves to be one of the more compelling Moonface records to date.
Though Heartbreaking Bravery is an improvement on Organ Music, it's a little misleading to speak of Moonface in linear, progress-oriented terms. The project is amorphous on purpose, a sort of open-ended mantle for whoever Krug feels like collaborating with in the future. "I want to make it impossible to get stuck in a rut," he's said, "wherein any one sound or image is expected by anyone from Moonface." Still, given how inside his own head Krug can seem, his inclination towards collaboration-- and letting other people into his dreamworld-- seems like a progression in and of itself. "I'm not the phoenix yet," he howls in clipped syllables on the album's titular track. Maybe so, but given the guy's prolific output, it's only a matter of time before he burns this particular sound to ash and revives Moonface as something completely new. | 2012-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 16, 2012 | 7.1 | 3c3d8394-5633-47bf-9213-3933e5218014 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
His new album with the 400 Unit feels a little one-note, but Jason Isbell can still rouse with an anthem show off his gritty country and even breezy pop skills. | His new album with the 400 Unit feels a little one-note, but Jason Isbell can still rouse with an anthem show off his gritty country and even breezy pop skills. | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jason-isbell-and-the-400-unit-the-nashville-sound/ | The Nashville Sound | The last time we heard from Jason Isbell, he was mid-revelation. “To a Band That I Loved,” the closing track on 2015’s Something More Than Free, eschewed his usual topics—the south, sobriety, self-acceptance—in favor of something simpler: the healing power of live music. Finding its center at another band’s concert, “To a Band That I Loved” was a new kind of song for Isbell, showcasing the maturing perspective of a songwriter who could summon wisdom from every corner of his psyche. Unlike Southeastern’s rock-bottom ruminations, most of the tracks on Something More Than Free came from a place of contentment, narrated by characters who bounced back from hard times with newfound serenity. “I don’t think on why I’m here or where it hurts,” Isbell sang in the title track, “I’m just lucky to have the work.”
The Nashville Sound, Isbell and the 400 Unit’s full-band follow-up, is, in many ways, a step backward. For one thing, he’s thinking about where it hurts again—and he doesn’t have much to say about it. A lumbering seven-minute song called "Anxiety" all but stops the momentum of the record, hammering in a few platitudes about what it’s like to be anxious along with an unimaginative variation on the melody from “Yesterday.” “Anxiety, how do you always get the best of me,” he sings, “I can’t enjoy a goddamn thing.” While Isbell’s best lamentations often placed you alongside him—riding the same roads, nursing the same hangovers—this one asks you to do little more than feel sorry for him. It’s indicative of an album that feels sadly one-note, with some of Isbell’s least distinctive songwriting to date.
Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments. “Hope the High Road,” with its heartfelt instructions for living a better life, is rousing enough to earn a place on future setlists, even if it’s a good deal less nuanced than his previous anthems: a song that’s all moral and no story, from an artist who made his name crafting exactly the opposite. “Cumberland Gap” is another highlight, but it gains its momentum entirely from the 400 Unit’s mighty performance, with Isbell’s pat narrative doing little to raise the stakes. The song’s best lyric, about a nondescript bar where “if you don't sit facing the window you could be in any town,” feels all too symbolic of Isbell’s own lack of direction.
While the album’s most ambitious songs are often its least effective (like the needlessly epic "Anxiety" or the well-intentioned but flat political song “White Man’s World”), its best moments are when Isbell keeps it simple. “If We Were Vampires” is a stirring duet from Isbell and Amanda Shires, the 400 Unit’s fiddle player and Isbell’s wife. It’s a standard in the making, as earnest and luminescent as any ballad he’s composed, and the couple’s best collaborative performance to date. “Chaos and Clothes” is equally intimate, capturing a double-tracked solo performance in the vein of Elliott Smith’s late-‘90s work. It stands as one of the album’s only effective experiments: one that makes you hear Isbell’s voice differently and illustrates his growth as a breezy pop songwriter while his grittier work with Drive-By Truckers fades further in the rear view.
Opening number “Last of My Kind” tellingly picks up a few steps behind where Something More Than Free left off. While “To a Band That I Loved” peaked with a stirring realization of Isbell’s place in the world (“I thought everyone like me was dead”), “Last of My Kind” finds him on his own again, unsuccessfully trying to fit in with college students and city-dwellers. The resentment is mutual. They mock his lack of refinement, he critiques their lack of empathy; they laugh at his clothes, he snivels at their poor rhythm. All the while, Isbell laments that the world he knows is “an old and faded picture in my mind.” It’s a funny and moving song, as its lingering question (“Am I the last of my kind?”) grows more poignant with each chorus. As powerful as it is, you can’t help but wonder why one of our most capable songwriters is lingering in the doubt of his past, when he’s learned the answers better than any of us. | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Southeastern | June 17, 2017 | 6.3 | 3c407824-a482-4c07-a8ec-33ab54c78eab | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Fifteen years into their career, the duo are still finding ways to make discord feel utopian. | Fifteen years into their career, the duo are still finding ways to make discord feel utopian. | No Age: Goons Be Gone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-age-goons-be-gone/ | Goons Be Gone | No Age is less a rock band than a lenticular 3-D image of one—your perception of them is liable to shift depending on your vantage point. From one angle, singer-drummer Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall are a punk duo capable of making the noise of a band five times their size; from another, they’re meticulous sound designers, applying just as much attention to subliminal details as the actual songs blaring over them. But on their last couple of records, the perspective shifts have been whiplash-inducing: where 2013’s An Object stripped out their engine to play around with the scrap parts, 2018’s Snares Like a Haircut found them fully reinvigorated and ready to rejoin the circle pit.
With Goons Be Gone, they opt to let the pendulum gently sway between these two poles. Now 15 years into their career, No Age have reached the point where they could easily settle into a dad-punk comfort zone, a fate suggested by the opening “Sandalwood,” which sounds like Thurston Moore covering the Velvets covering “Gloria.” Their lifelong Hüsker Dü worship continues, but “Feeler” pivots away from their buddy Bob Mould’s gale-force aggression to embrace the more melodic graces of the Grant Hart songbook. Overall, they’re still too restless to settle into familiar archetypes—when, on the latter song, Spunt kindly invites us to “board onto the rhythm of my astroplane, and find out where I’ve been,” the duo make good on that cosmic promise by unleashing an ominous textural whoosh where most bands would just drop the guitar solo.
In moments like these, Goons Be Gone feels like two wildly different albums dubbed atop each another, where late-’80s-style indie-rock songs are perpetually fending off strange ambient undercurrents that threaten to consume them. The album’s highlights revel in that dichotomy: the frantic “War Dance” tries to outrun its own ray-gun squiggles as if dodging battlefield bullets, while the brisk “Turned to String”—which exhibits the sort of post-hardcore Tom Pettyisms that The Men mastered circa New Moon—feels liable to launch itself from the heartland and into space at any moment. And those two tracks are linked by the rapturous “Toes in the Water,” a tremolo-soaked lo-fi instrumental that gradually builds into a cyclone of distortion, like a Glenn Branca noise symphony trapped in a suburban garage.
Spunt’s lyrics tend to deal in cryptic directives and enigmatic romanticism—on the twangy dream-pop of “Smoothie,” he addresses the subject of his affection as “my tambourine.” But when you consider Goons Be Gone’s title, alongside lines like “I’m astonished by your ignorance today,” a subterranean theme emerges: Spunt and Randall are two family men trying to ward off the bad vibes as their country descends into chaos.
But that tension dissipates when No Age let their experimental impulses completely take over: “Working Stiff Takes a Break” strands a Minutemen-style rant inside a shapeless pawn-shop synth doodle, while the sputtering “A Sigh Clicks” sounds like the duo found a cool, siren-like sound effect to base a song around, but failed to come up with one. But maybe these are the sort of whiteboard exercises that are necessary to arrive at a charming oddity like “Head Sport Full Face,” whose locomotive riff and melodic guitar hook could almost pass for Room on Fire-era Strokes, but whose detuned-radio frequencies and convulsive rhythm honor No Age’s art-damaged pedigree. Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 8, 2020 | 7.3 | 3c47cf20-408a-4d00-b258-98517308942d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
More intimate and less reverential than a traditional remix album, collaborator Richard Barratt’s full-length rework casts Róisín Machine in deeper shades of modern house and techno. | More intimate and less reverential than a traditional remix album, collaborator Richard Barratt’s full-length rework casts Róisín Machine in deeper shades of modern house and techno. | Róisín Murphy: Crooked Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roisin-murphy-crooked-machine/ | Crooked Machine | Along with the release of her sublime fifth record Róisín Machine, Róisín Murphy spent 2020 bestowing fans with remixes, extended cuts, and alternate versions with the drunken benevolence of someone throwing dollar bills off a club balcony. These new edits—which included extended disco cuts; truncated pop edits; wonky, late-night remakes by album collaborator DJ Parrot, aka Richard Barratt; and one squelching, completely essential Soulwax remix—weren’t just streaming-optimized cash grabs or irrelevant leftovers. They made good on the album’s avowed philosophy of “I’ll make my own happy ending”—ways for listeners, who, for the most part, had to engage with the album’s paean to nightlife from their homes, to craft perfect nights to suit their own needs, handed over by a diva with enough dancefloor experience to know that sometimes, more is more.
Less than a year later, Murphy presents another gift: Crooked Machine, a Róisín Machine companion album featuring remixes by Barratt under his alter ego Crooked Man. As a member of bleep techno progenitors Sweet Exorcist, Barratt is a UK underground legend; Murphy, who met him in early-’90s Sheffield, describes Barratt as “an inspiration all my life,” and has said that Róisín Machine represents a rose-tinted reflection on their memories of the time. That Barratt was such a significant part of both Róisín Machine and the ’90s Sheffield electronic scene gives him a unique authority to undertake a project like this. Crooked Machine is more intimate and less reverential than a traditional remix album, and Barratt plays more boldly with structure and tone than would someone from outside the fold.
Crooked Machine presents a new embodiment of the Róisín Machine ethos—a testament to the transformative power of the dancefloor, redone in shades of house and techno altogether darker and a touch more modern than its predecessor. If the original record typified the intellectual, glamorous buzz of the club, as well as the way personhood is remade and redefined in nightlife settings, Crooked Machine is a more kinetic piece of work, slightly more accessible in its palette and more consistent in its tone. Róisín Machine was a memoir, and Crooked Machine is a blank journal and pen, ready for one’s own stories of debauchery.
Where many remix albums strike as fodder for completists, Crooked Machine feels designed to work independently of Róisín Machine, with appealing, well-defined entry points. As if to prove its ease of use, album opener “Kingdom of Machines” takes on one of Róisín Machine’s densest songs, “Kingdom of Ends,” giving it the floor-filling treatment it always deserved. The original was a masterful exercise in tension and release that never actually developed into a dance track; nearly a year later, “Kingdom of Machines” finally provides a drop. The album’s closer, the electro house barnstormer “Hardcore Jealousy,” simultaneously manages to feel modern and classic, its piquant buzzsaw synth and, later, the introduction of a breakbeat, recalling both late-aughts Ministry of Sound compilations and the recent revival in breakbeat-heavy dance music.
Murphy’s first album with the electronic duo and romantic partnership Moloko famously took its title from a pick-up line she delivered to her eventual bandmate at a party: “Do you like my tight sweater?” Like an inversion of that legacy, Barratt’s retelling rids Crooked Machine of any easy-to-follow lyrical lines or hooks. Instead, song titles and distinctive phrases get slathered in echo and thrown back into the mix seemingly at random, making the most memorable moments of Róisín Machine sound like snippets of conversation yelled on the dancefloor. Sometimes, this is straightforward—the hook of “Game Changer” placed straight into its dubby remake “Name Change”—but other times, Barratt gets cute with it, as on “We Are the Law,” where the titles of “We Got Together” and “Murphy’s Law” ricochet off each other without context over a spacey tech-house track. It’s a moment of strange levity that brings Róisín Machine’s self-conscious myth-making into Barratt’s goofier, more liminal world.
Like sitting for a portrait, giving up the entirety of an album to a single collaborator for remixing is a uniquely revealing experience. Far from removing her from the record, Barratt highlights the durability and versatility of Murphy’s art—placing her in contexts both more modern and more abstract, and still letting her come out on top. Dance legends are made and broken on the strength of their remixes, and here, as on last year’s stack of tracks, Murphy proves she can rule not only festival stages and stadiums, but sweaty nights at home or in clubs, too. Her voice itself is less present, but she is felt in every second, and even that element of Crooked Machine lends itself to Murphy’s brand of dancefloor wisdom: Sometimes, as on Róisín Machine, you need to speak your dreams into existence—and at others, you need to just shut up and dance.
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. | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Skint | April 29, 2021 | 7.7 | 3c48d2b4-6f32-447c-bf2a-84ae20c76c6b | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The London producer’s third album tests the boundaries of dance music not just for the sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge. | The London producer’s third album tests the boundaries of dance music not just for the sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge. | Loraine James: Reflection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loraine-james-reflection/ | Reflection | For what is ostensibly club music, Loraine James’ productions can feel fiercely guarded. Many dancers and DJs favor smoothly paved superhighways to bliss; James’ zig-zagging tracks are filled with potholes, speed bumps, and the occasional vertiginous bridge to nowhere. The London musician likes her beats jagged and her melodies slippery, and there’s an abrasiveness to her work—club bangers and sofa chillers alike—that seems to warn: Don’t get too comfortable.
But about halfway through Reflection, her third album, James breaks the fourth wall and makes an unexpected overture to her doubters. “I know you may not like this one/But it’s just fun, you know, it’s just fun,” she murmurs, as music-box chimes and video-game chirps tussle over erratic kicks and snares. “I know you might not like this one/So press the skip button.” As the song lumbers on, drawing us deeper into its murky swirl of 8-bit bleeps and percussive shards, she shifts her address from the incurious streamer to the frustrated punter. “Hate the music that I’m playing/That is why you’re not staying/That is why there’s no dancing,” she intones, actually singing now, with surprising gentleness. “You are in a hurry/Leaving the club early.” It’s hurt, accusatory, and apprehensive all at once. And despite the brooding beat, it’s also slyly funny, underscoring the irreverence that runs through her subversive approach.
James has often insisted that she makes not just club or bass music, but experimental music, full stop. “Self Doubt (Leaving the Club Early)” is a good reminder that she’s right. Like the entirety of Reflection, the song demonstrates a degree of risk-taking that’s all too rare in dance-adjacent music. James’ work often explores the tension between club music and listening music, and between community and solitude. “I’m a shy person,” she has said; “I just like playing a dark, smoky room, not giving a shit what people think.” Reflection neatly encapsulates both sides of that seeming contradiction: It is both as restive as her music has ever been and as reflective as its title suggests. It tests the boundaries of dance music not for the mere sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge.
James’ beats are as tough as ever on Reflection. Hi-hats explode in rat-a-tat bursts. Staggering kick drums bounce like a boxer against the ropes. Blasts of sub-bass threaten to topple anything in their path. But where drum’n’bass wields powerful sounds in the interest of steely efficiency, there’s something cavalier about James’ grooves, as though they could happily fall apart at any moment. That refusal to satisfy expectations is a big part of what’s so compelling about them.
Lyrically, the album’s ruminative tone is far from the beats’ scrappy, devil-may-care attitude. Like last fall’s Nothing EP, much of the record is spent collaborating with guest vocalists, and despite their considerable range, virtually all of them focus on questions of identity and purpose. The opening “Built to Last” runs Zürich singer’s Xzavier Stone’s determined couplets—“Mountain top, what I aim for/Work hard til that day come”—through thick vocal processing, rendering self-actualization with the consistency of buckwheat honey. In “Black Ting,” London drill artist Le3 bLACK raps in soft-spoken triplets over a cat-footed beat, juggling knotty rhymes with the occasional declarative statement: “There’s a lot on the line/We must prove this.” Nova matches the floating synths of “Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery” with free-associative verses that build to an unexpected climax, juxtaposing a Thelma & Louise-inspired cliff jump with Drexciyan Afro-futurism. The Baths collaboration “On the Lake Outside” feels at once like a stylistic outlier and the album’s thematic heart. Draping languid synthesizers over a beat like a stick being dragged across a metal fence, James fractures Baths’ voice into multi-part harmonies as he sets the scene in boldly imagistic terms: a lake, a rowboat, the sky reflected in water. Then he cuts to the chase: “I was always a little off/But I get up and get on.” It’s an elegant way to frame Reflection’s abiding interest in struggle and perseverance.
The album’s best and most revealing tracks are those where James herself takes the mic, though she’s careful never to give away too much. In “Simple Stuff,” she ponders a private question, muttering along to a deconstructed UK garage groove: “I like the simple stuff/You like the simple things/What does that bring?” Is she talking about a relationship? The vagaries of taste? The cryptic lines fit the trickiness of her beatmaking, whose odd angles suggest impossible spaces where normal laws of physics do not apply. In “Change,” the album’s longest track, she pursues a similarly interior line of inquiry. “What are you gonna do about it? Huh? What? What are you gonna do about it?” she asks, her voice pitched high and childlike in the fashion of the Knife or Fever Ray, giving her interior monologue an otherworldly presence.
James is most direct on “Reflection,” essentially a spoken-word piece set to ambient bells and syn-flutes. “Haven’t seen family or friends/From Rugby to Essex,” she muses, almost whispering. “Feels like the walls are closing in.” Written, presumably, in the depths of lockdown, it’s a meditation on isolation that will resonate with many who lived through the claustrophobic doldrums of 2020. “Everything will be fine, I think,” she says; then she changes her mind: “Feel like my head will explode.” Despite the song’s relatability, there’s a sense that we’re eavesdropping on private thoughts. James comes right out and says as much: “This is a reflection/Just mine not yours.” It’s a moment of intimacy that, in turn, engenders a powerful feeling of trust. Her music may sound as guarded as ever. But on Reflection, Loraine James has invited us in.
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. | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | June 7, 2021 | 7.9 | 3c4ee6b6-d66c-4f87-ade7-be8cc818fa66 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The former Smiths guitarist absorbs the political shocks of 2016 on a characteristically polished album that imagines life in an alternate universe that values kindness, curiosity, and intelligence. | The former Smiths guitarist absorbs the political shocks of 2016 on a characteristically polished album that imagines life in an alternate universe that values kindness, curiosity, and intelligence. | Johnny Marr: Call the Comet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-marr-call-the-comet/ | Call the Comet | Like many citizens of Earth in the year 2018, Johnny Marr wishes he could live in a different world. Sorting through the political wreckage of 2016 and its twin seismic shocks, Brexit and Donald J. Trump winning the American presidency, the former Smiths guitarist wondered what it would be like to reside in an alternate universe, one that valued kindness, curiosity, and intelligence instead of crassness and cash. Marr channeled that thought experiment into Call the Comet, his third and most thematically ambitious solo album.
Despite its sci-fi framing, Call the Comet isn’t a concept record, nor does it sound especially futuristic. The album comes into focus, on opening track “Rise,” via a pulsating guitar line that faintly echoes the tremolo riff that fueled “How Soon Is Now?”—and that isn’t the only moment that plays on the legacy of the Smiths. “Hi Hello,” one of three pre-release singles, threatens to slide into the comforting confines of the melody to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” But these feints at the past aren’t self-aware nostalgia; they’re signs that the ever-restless Marr—a rock star who chose to spend a quarter-century as a hired gun, roaming from project to project—is starting to slow down in his middle age.
Some of this settling is literal. After an extended sojourn in Portland, Oregon, Marr relocated to his native Manchester early in the current decade. The move coincided with the launch of his solo career via 2013’s The Messenger. (A decade prior, he’d released Boomslang with his short-lived band the Healers.) The album fused the muscular aspects of the Smiths with remnants of the sleek synths of his Bernard Sumner collaboration, Electronic, resulting in a signature sound that existed comfortably out of time. Evocative of pre-Nirvana, pre-Britpop college rock, the music was nonetheless too accomplished and too comfortable in its own skin to access the hunger of a young indie act desperate to prove itself.
Marr stuck to this template on 2014’s Playland, and he doesn’t really shake things up on Call the Comet, either. Like its two predecessors, the album was produced by the guitarist in conjunction with James Doviak, who has been in Marr’s orbit since he joined the Boomslang tour in 2003, and their comfortable chemistry is evident in the album’s cozy familiarity. Even the electronic accents that could be characterized as left turns, like the ping-pong rhythmic loop that runs throughout “New Dominions” or the chilly New Romantic bounce of “My Eternal,” belong within Marr’s carefully cultivated lineage. However forward-thinking its lyrical content may be, Call the Comet remains anchored by his well-appointed traditionalism. That conservative approach to songwriting is buttressed by Marr’s estimable studio skills: Every harmony, riff, and cymbal splash is in its right place.
Such consummate craft has its allure. Call the Comet is a towering aural monolith: It glistens and gleams, its parts so delicately fused they can be hard to untangle. The album is so densely packed that it’s easy to miss Marr’s overarching themes, a shame exacerbated by his habitual neglect to draw attention to his lyrics. A pleasantly flat, unassuming singer, he functions mostly as a conduit for his melodies, which is only a detriment on an album with so much potential thematic resonance.
Only a close listen—preferably with a lyric sheet in hand—reveals the social consciousness of Call the Comet. Marr kicks off the album with “Rise,” a warning that “it’s the dawn of the dogs” delivered to a pulse that’s not a far cry from The The’s roiling Dusk. This darkness extends into “Bug,” whose shimmering, insistent surface obscures Marr’s assertion, “Everybody feels the aching/Population is sick and shaking.” The illness is cured by the titular heroes of “The Tracers,” otherworldly empaths who come to Earth because “they know we’ve lost the way.” Marr doesn’t follow a precise narrative, but his ultimate destination is “Spiral Cities,” a utopia where all the residents are united by open, observant eyes and a desire to get lost in the glow of love.
Once you dig through the layers of musical gloss to unearth Marr’s message, his mild vocal performance jibes with his idealism. He’s writing with compassion, not anger on Call the Comet; this isn’t protest music so much as a plea to our better angels. Such an open heart is uncommon in these combative times, and Marr’s sincerity gives his flawed album some appeal. | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New Voodoo | June 21, 2018 | 6 | 3c56a8df-e5f7-43c6-bd4e-0389fd82b768 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The former Dead Confederate frontman surveys his tangled personal history and uncertain future on a Southern glam rock album that is the highlight of a frustrating career. | The former Dead Confederate frontman surveys his tangled personal history and uncertain future on a Southern glam rock album that is the highlight of a frustrating career. | T. Hardy Morris: Dude, the Obscure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/t-hardy-morris-dude-the-obscure/ | Dude, the Obscure | T. Hardy Morris may have chosen the title of his new album simply for the pun, but perhaps he really did recognize himself in Jude Fawley, the doomed protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. Both men are products of the provinces, Jude hailing from the fictional English county of Wessex and T. Hardy from the Deep South. Just as his fictional counterpart dreamed of fame as a scholar, the musician strove to invade the rock mainstream with his band Dead Confederate. Jude went through marriages the way T. Hardy goes through musical acts, including the super-ish-group Diamond Rugs and his recent backing band the Hard Knocks. However it was intended, the title evokes long and futile toil toward an unrealized dream.
Fortunately, Dude, the Obscure is neither a book report nor a history lesson, neither a concept album about professional disappointment nor a literary song cycle. Rather, it plays like a meditation on rock’n’roll in midlife, by an artist who might be nursing lowered expectations or even gaping emotional wounds but not diminished artistic ambitions. This may be Morris’ best record; it’s certainly his most complex and compelling statement, surveying his tangled personal history and the uncertain future that awaits. “I have only death ahead of me, I have only life behind,” he muses on the opener “Be.” “My one and only certainly, and the feeling is sublime.”
Considering its subject matter, Dude could be a real downer. What light breaks through the darkness comes from the music itself, which generally avoids the Southern rock riffs of Dead Confederate in favor of a more distinctive and wide-ranging sound—call it Southern glam rock. Morris doesn’t rely on the guitar as much as he has in the past; it’s there, of course, strumming solemnly on “Cheating Life, Living Death” and stabbing relentlessly on “When the Record Skips.” More often, it provides texture and fanfare, leaving ample room for other instruments. On “The Night Everything Changed,” a travelogue of wasted and forgotten nights, the pedal steel sounds like a synth. The rhythm section borrows a drum-and-fife snare beat to give “Be” the feel of a procession through harsh territory, then adds a queasy pulse to the redemption-seeking closer, “Purple House Blues.”
It’s a quiet album that inhabits the weird headspace of a person who’s just waking up or has begun to nod off—a space where memory gets dodgy and submerged worries bubble up to the surface. Morris’ reedy twang sounds comfortable in this strange territory, even when he’s facing down hard truths about marriage, music, life, death, and obscurity. “Homemade Bliss” is an unabashed love song (“Wherever it is that you are standing, that is the center of the earth”), but even its cries of devotion are freighted with a sense that these bonds are only temporary, that they’re fading even as he sings. That undertone makes the song’s hook—a sharp, shouted “And I love you!”—come across as desperate and triumphal at once, the battle cry of the romantic as well as the skeptic.
Especially after 2015’s Drownin on a Mountaintop, with its hurried production, meta asides, and half-baked lyrics, the sharp focus of Dude is refreshing. If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs. | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Normaltown Records | July 10, 2018 | 7.6 | 3c56f132-3445-4bc7-949c-7840ea016d13 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On his ninth album, Anthony Gonzalez is still trying to recapture childhood’s pangs of wonderment. This time, his nostalgia leads him back to the youthful drama of his own Before the Dawn Heals Us. | On his ninth album, Anthony Gonzalez is still trying to recapture childhood’s pangs of wonderment. This time, his nostalgia leads him back to the youthful drama of his own Before the Dawn Heals Us. | M83: *Fantasy * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m83-fantasy/ | Fantasy | Many people have a defining moment of their childhood; for M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, childhood seems like the defining moment of his life. Each album since 2008’s John Hughes-inspired Saturdays=Youth has communed with a specific set of nostalgic keepsakes, whether that be Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming), classic Nintendo scores (DSVII), or Punky Brewster (Junk). While Gonzalez has been uncharacteristically mum on the subject of the ’80s and ’90s ephemera that inform M83’s new album, its wide-eyed zeal signals the band’s continued interest in reliving those early pangs of wonderment that adulthood cruelly snuffs out. It’s called Fantasy because of course it is. The first (and only) words on lead single “Oceans Niagara” are “Beyond adventure!” because of course they are.
Fantasy represents a course correction after Junk’s more playful vibe, but it’s also a slight reclamation of that album’s bright, garish elements. In a classic “return to form”-baiting move, Gonzalez delicately throws Junk under the bus in the press release: He says he let “negative things,” namely his distaste for “the world going too fast,” influence that album, while this time, he yearned to recapture the “energy” of 2005’s youthfully dramatic Before the Dawn Heals Us. The timing for his return to that album makes perfect sense: M83 have always been inspired by 20-year-old aesthetics, and now their early material is old enough to fit the bill.
The big emotions of songs like “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” and “Teen Angst” are back, but, befitting Fantasy’s name, they’re harder to pin to real-world concerns like car crashes or hormones. The patient build and bottomless vocal harmonies of the cavernous ballad “Us and the Rest” tug at heartstrings, but the lyrics contrast all that pathos with sci-fi absurdity. Here is the second verse in its entirety: “Hello freak!/Can you see the sky ladder/By the limbo café/Leading to the green ray?/Sometimes it fades…” Sure, you could argue that listening to M83 for the lyrics is like watching Terrence Malick films for the dialogue, but Fantasy is by far the once-mostly-instrumental band’s most verbose offering to date.
Gonzalez has said that he wanted to be more “present” this time, in the interest of achieving a more “personal” album, and at times, like the 10cc’d-out closer “Dismemberment Bureau,” we get a clearer picture of the balance between his long-standing reverence for bygone media and his creeping sense of dread about what’s replaced it. “Do you miss the day/Of human revolution,” he and Kaela Sinclair ask, invoking one of the 20th century’s biggest cultural game-changers: “Television/What a good way to learn/About us, and the heirs of our land.” Those moments of clarity are fleeting. Fantasy is certainly wordier than its predecessors, but if anything, the added syllables muddy up the message for a band that’s been defined by snappy, fantastical one-liners—“The city is my church”; “We own the sky”; “I’ll travel in your dreams.” Instead, songs are dominated by phrases better suited to advertise Mountain Dew: Dune Edition: “cosmic adrenaline,” “immortal energy,” “limitless star,” and “metal rapture.” Though they sometimes aid, or at least complement, M83’s head-in-the-clouds world-building, the writing on this album doesn’t reflect Gonzalez’s professed interest in revealing more of his own psyche. To be fair, it’s hard to envision what deeply personal M83 lyrics would even look like at this stage in their career. The high-wire drama of Before the Dawn Heals Us and Saturdays=Youth are the closest they’ve ever come to relatable, but even that felt like an extension of the band’s exaggerated and intensified vision of late 20th-century adolescence.
The music offers a much more legible roadmap for understanding where M83 are today, 20-plus years into their lifespan. Gonzalez might seem to be following a familiar trajectory: from unexpected breakout hit to lukewarmly received reaction to, now, an attempt to console day-one fans. But that narrative’s a bit too neat. It ignores the merits of the risks that Gonzalez took on Junk, and the unexpected left turns of that album that carry over to Fantasy. There’s nothing quite as knowingly unhip as a Steve Vai guitar solo (“Go!”) or a reanimation of the corpse of Taco’s chintzy 1983 synth-pop cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (“Bibi the Dog”), but every hint of krautrock cool is paired with unabashed camp. If I had to guess what’s on Fantasy’s moodboard, I’d go with the Giorgio Moroder-produced NeverEnding Story theme song and the iconic, pan-flute-led intro to the ’90s educational children’s show Eyewitness.
The interplay between sounds that read as retro chic and those that sound impossibly dated is fascinating, an ever-shifting conflict within M83’s work that reveals larger truths about pop culture’s arbitrary nostalgia-recycling complex. At one point in the early 2010s, “Baker Street”-style wailing saxophones couldn’t have been more uncool, yet they helped turn “Midnight City” into an inescapable hit. The main battlefields here are the songs “Deceiver” and “Sunny Boy,” both of which begin with distant, solemn intros but then morph into more playful shapes when the beats drop. The M83 of old would’ve piled on massive drums and melodrama, but here, Gonzalez opts for an Avalon strut and a “Major Tom” boogie, respectively. M83 was once maligned for its dramatic ’80s pomp, but today, that’s precisely what tempers the impact of Junk’s brasher sonics.
Gonzalez and producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen pulled out all the stops on Fantasy’s sound design—the album credits list 37 different synths or keyboards and include an “effects and treatments” section that reads like the entire pedal department of your city’s largest Guitar Center. In its opulence, pursuit of writerly sci-fi imagery, and obsession with the band’s legacy, this album feels even more labored over than the ambitious Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (which, despite having nearly twice as many tracks, is only seven minutes longer).
What Fantasy is missing isn’t any one synth preset, or a cultural reference for the next season of Stranger Things to popularize. It just lacks urgency. The best M83 songs aren’t necessarily complex, multi-movement epics, but they go up, taking us skyward and sparing no gut-punches along the way. The cascading “Oceans Niagara” has some of that going for it, and “Earth to Sea” offers some much-needed catharsis in the middle of an album otherwise split between midtempo plodders and peppy boppers. But otherwise it feels like Gonzalez has held onto teenage aesthetics while stripping them of the theatricality that is the true source of their power. Without the emotional stakes, Fantasy is just a narcotized Neverland. | 2023-03-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | March 20, 2023 | 6.6 | 3c594e17-1f73-427e-a80f-1dd8c31c7c01 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
On her lush and captivating third album, the pop star looks to the heavens, summoning the cosmic power of love and the divine feminine. | On her lush and captivating third album, the pop star looks to the heavens, summoning the cosmic power of love and the divine feminine. | Kali Uchis: Red Moon in Venus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kali-uchis-red-moon-in-venus/ | Red Moon in Venus | According to astrologers and ancient mythology, a blood moon, or red moon, is a bad omen, a portent of natural disasters, economic catastrophes, or the death of a great patron. Luckily, a red moon is an infrequent occurrence: a full moon in total lunar eclipse, its deep, rusty glow reminding us that perfect alignments are rare. It’s this emblem of burning intensity and divinity that guides the genre-defying Colombian-American pop star Kali Uchis through Red Moon in Venus, her third studio album, and second sung mostly in English.
Uchis has spent the better part of the last decade redefining the boundaries of Latin pop music. She perfected a blend of R&B and pop on her acclaimed debut Isolation, then took that expansive versatility to the left on the Spanish-language album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, where she prescribed love as a powerful anti-anxiety medication. Watching her loungey psychedelic spirit evolve into confident, shapeshifting pop has been fascinating; a generation of fans have fallen under the spell of her experimental nostalgia music. She is like a modern day La Lupe: channeling music across cultures with a timeless aesthetic that allows her to fit any idea into her singular vision.
Red Moon in Venus luxuriates in the most sublime sounds of Uchis’ career. It’s a fantastical record, illustrating lush, lovesick vignettes and high-femme escapism without relinquishing control. Chirping birds, blooming flowers, and professions of love pepper “In My Garden” and lead single “I Wish you Roses,” two tender devotionals that set the album’s faithful vision of love ablaze. The album’s first half progresses like the early stages of a relationship: endless, saccharine, all-consuming. “Wanna spoil me in every way/It’s Valentine’s like every day,” she sings at the top of the pop-funk highlight “Endlessly.” Rose-tinted glasses? On. But only for a while.
Even at the album’s most picturesque, Uchis never loses her grip on reality, intent on exploring despair with equal intensity. “Fantasy,” featuring R&B star and Uchis’ romantic partner Don Toliver, is an Afropop dance number that ends the infatuation seen in the first half of the record. The song explores love at its most sensual and carefree: “On my body/Don’t let go of me/I just want the fantasy,” Uchis begs. But then she abruptly interrupts: “That’s it, that’s the end of the song—come on baby, let’s go home,” declaring the honeymoon phase over. R&B kiss-off “Deserve Me” is grounded by the realization that it’s better to be alone than to remain in a toxic situation. The undulating, Tame Impala-esque psychedelia of “Moral Conscience” rests on a wise and scornful foretelling: “When you’re all alone/You’ll know you were wrong.” Uchis maintains her sultry alto composure throughout, allowing the idyllic production to support what should be moments of deep rage. She’s cool and collected because she knows a better love awaits.
Uchis’ serenades are a warning to lovers everywhere, a way of owning her femininity in a culture that would cast it in a subordinate role. One moment she’s interpolating soul trio the Temprees (“Love Between”) and the next she’s taunting an ex that their new girl would eat her pussy if she let her (“Hasta Cuando”). Her confidence is reminiscent of others who often straddle the line between bad bitch and dedicated lover, like Beyoncé or Tinashe. In the video for “I Wish you Roses,” Uchis poses in a bed of pink flowers, making symbolic reference to a scene from the 1999 film American Beauty that explores a middle-aged man’s fatal obsession with a girl. Instead of focusing on demoralizing depictions of femmes fatales, “I Wish you Roses” emphasizes the desire to heal: “With pretty flowers can come the bee sting/But I wish you love,” she sings, reaffirming a soft yet firm hold over her lover and their destiny. Uchis knows the power of her sex appeal; instead of reifying it in the patriarchy, she finds reclamation and release in femininity.
Red Moon in Venus makes a case for allowing love’s every phase to wash over you like a powerful tarot reading. Uchis’ blissful melodies often call on the universe’s cosmic energies to deliver divine intervention and feeling. “See I’m praying God will send me an angel/Will the angels bring me back to you?” she coos over the smooth jazz-pop of “Blue.” In its shades of grief and desire, Red Moon in Venus asks us to feel the force of love’s power, whether for good or ill. One of its best moments, the gently spangled “Moonlight,” uses a principle of astrology—the moon as the center of inner emotional wisdom and divine femininity—as a space to relinquish love’s brutish gravity and give into the transcendence of possession. “I just wanna get high with my lover/Veo una muñeca cuando miro en el espejo kiss kiss,” she playfully asserts, more featherlight, liberated, and Cancer sun than ever. Kali Uchis’ music is a path towards a kind of spiritual enlightenment, but only if you open yourself to life’s most feminine energy. | 2023-03-03T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-03T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | March 3, 2023 | 8.2 | 3c61902c-dbf8-4b1b-8ced-c41898db6a44 | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
Real Ting is the first project of the impressive rising young London MC Stefanie Allen (aka Stefflon Don). The mixtape is a slightly rocky intro, but her raw talent shines through. | Real Ting is the first project of the impressive rising young London MC Stefanie Allen (aka Stefflon Don). The mixtape is a slightly rocky intro, but her raw talent shines through. | Stefflon Don: Real Ting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22806-real-ting/ | Real Ting | In late 2015, then-ascendant South London rappers Section Boyz made their presence felt with “Lock Arff,” the breakout single that netted them a place on BBC’s Sound of 2016 longlist at the end of that year. It’s usually an indicator of success when a song gets remixed—“Lock Arff,” a sprawling opus that boasts contributions from each member of the six-person crew, left little room for anyone else to get a look-in between verses. But a version with two new verses by Stefanie Allen (aka Stefflon Don), stripped of everything but the original beat and chorus, impressed the Section Boyz enough that they cosigned its official video treatment. The remix and video in turn raised Stefflon Don’s profile enough to land her on the 2017 Sound of… longlist at the end of last year.
In between, the young London MC stayed busy—churning out more remixes or hopping on songs by compatriots like Angel and grime veteran Lethal Bizzle. All of that that momentum culminated in Real Ting, her first full length solo project, released just before 2016 drew to a close.
With a running time of under 40 minutes, the tape’s rocky start is acutely felt, taking up more space than it should in proportion to the remaining nine tracks. “Intro” is a somewhat cartoonish announcement of Allen’s formal arrival on the scene (“Look to the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Don!”) set to an excerpt from Nile Rodgers’ Coming To America score. The melody plays during the scene in which King Jaffe Joffer tracks Prince Akeem down in Queens; from the eastern borough Allen bears south for inspiration on “Real Ting.” It’s startlingly derivative of Brooklynite Young M.A’s “OOOUUU”—from the punchline delivery to the ad libs.
Comparison to established artists can be a boon or a blight for an emerging talent, foreshadowing similar levels of success in the former case or inviting dismissal in the latter. Since “Lock Arff” went viral, discussion of Stefflon Don has often touched on the parallels between her and Nicki Minaj: owing to her cadence, a penchant for brightly-colored hairstyles and a tendency to slip back in and out of Jamaican patois, which can resemble Minaj’s Trinidadian Creole to the untrained ear. Thankfully in Allen’s case the similarities seem both incidental and positive; no rapper could or should corner the market for bravado, and Stefflon Don clearly possesses a lot of it.
Real Ting picks up steam by track three “Tight Nooki,” an upbeat dancehall jaunt featuring Jeremih. It capitalizes on the unstoppable “Bam Bam” riddim, made famous by Chaka Demus & Pliers in the early ’90s, and complements the pair’s previous collaboration on Jeremih’s Late Nights: Europe mixtape. “Family Ties” is deeply personal, touching on a childhood marked by violence and her mother’s legal troubles (“She was looking at ten but the lawyer beat the case/By the grace and the power or the mercy of the state.”) The family affair is rounded out by her brother Dutch, who goes into detail about his own run-ins with the law, and UK House star Donae’o. “Envy Us,” another dancehall-tinged standout with an assist from Tottenham upstart Abra Cadabra, is a good example of the rhythmic space for which Stefflon Don’s voice is well-suited. But the tape’s overall scattered quality positions it as a teaser of things to come rather than a cohesive collection.
It’s hard to tell if or where the line between a mixtape and an album should be drawn—in 2017 a mixtape can be the vehicle for an artist’s unpolished experiments, or be in with a serious chance of winning a Grammy. On *Real Ting, *listeners get a proper introduction to Stefflon Don and a fuller understanding of her artistry. She sings as well as she raps, is a scholar of many genres (trap, dancehall, house and more) and has wide-ranging influences; the outtake from a Margaret Thatcher interview on “Lik Down” and even the antics of “Intro” are revelatory of her cultural interests beyond the music. So if Real Ting is her CV, it’ll be fun to watch her find her footing at work. | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 54 London | January 21, 2017 | 6 | 3c61b4b0-6ae8-44a0-8143-e5b879aaf52f | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
Father's I'm A Piece of Shit finds the Awful Records head trying to forswear his debauched lifestyle, reckoning with the morning after way too many morning afters. | Father's I'm A Piece of Shit finds the Awful Records head trying to forswear his debauched lifestyle, reckoning with the morning after way too many morning afters. | Father: I'm a Piece of Shit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21664-im-a-piece-of-shit/ | I'm a Piece of Shit | The SoundCloud description for Atlanta rapper Father's last project, Who's Gonna Get Fucked First, makes no excuses: "32-mins of pure, unfiltered debauchery." His note on its follow-up, I'm a Piece of Shit, is similarly candid, but this is the morning after way too many morning afters and he's full of regrets: "The melancholy result to all my fucked-up decisions."
Molly tracers are still visible on "Up Still," but the party is definitely over. "Everything dies, everything's a lie," he sighs. Only a hater or a sociopath doesn't feel a tweak in his chest when somebody else plops his heart on the table, and the fact that the Awful Records patriarch is not only fully shouldering the blame for the shambles his love life is in, but also shrinking back into self-doubt, elicits even more empathy. That the album is almost chock-full of bangers lends credence to the theory that you create your best art when you're emotionally wrecked.
Accepting responsibility for his actions aside, I'm a Piece of Shit is generally a more mature record than Who's Gonna Get Fucked First. Who's Gonna Get … is druggy and dripping with sex, but the sex is consensual and the attitudes progressive, with Father and friends eschewing tired old slut-shaming in favor of sexual liberty and justice for all. "You call her ass a ho? Please let a player know why you’re such a square, bro," Richposlim asks on "BET Uncut."
I'm a Piece of Shit continues that narrative, but it's "mature" in a more literal way. Even though Father's only in his mid-twenties, he seems to crave the sort of relationship someone a decade older does. And why not? Fame ages you. "I'm tired of looking for love as much as I'm tired of looking for drugs … Been grew tired of all these bitches on my dick like broomsticks," he says on album opener "Why Don't U." This is the kind of record made when the thrill of having a Baskin-Robbins variety of women waiting after every show has dulled and monogamy seems so much sweeter. There's lots of talk about staying the night and wanting a "bitch to come hold me."
In fact, Father's sexual appetites increasingly are Prince-like (as are some of his sounds: the drums on "Spit or Swallow" sound a lot like the Linn LM-1 Drum pattern on "Raspberry Beret"). Both artists are insatiable, and Father, just like the Purple One, knows that real freakery is about diving into the deep end physically and emotionally—and you can only wade so far with a one-night stand. As the production on "Slow Dance 2 [Interlude]" morphs from twinkly to trippy Father murmurs "Until the brink just to see how close it brings us," and it's a disarmingly intimate moment.
On "Party On Me," the tables have turned. "When I'm not around, do you even long for me?" Father asks, wistful. It's one of the album's standout tracks, thanks to iLoveMakonnen's pleading chorus and a longing beat, and the juxtaposition of nursery-rhyme singsong cadences, a tinkly marimba and such despairing, vulnerable lyrics deepen the ache. "Startin' to think these bitches slept with me just for amusement … I wanna die a little, cry a little, get a little high right now," he raps in "Y U Make It Hurt Like This." His nakedness on I'm a Piece of Shit is more shocking than any stripper orgy at the Sheraton, mostly because it refutes the carefree, no-strings-attached clichés that litter rap—after awhile, crew love just ain't no fun. | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Awful | March 24, 2016 | 7.7 | 3c62dd95-e2cd-4d05-8a2a-ae3419d0e423 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
The latest album from the Toronto saxophonist, best known for his work with Destroyer, is an inventive work of auditory storytelling exploring his own fraught religious background. | The latest album from the Toronto saxophonist, best known for his work with Destroyer, is an inventive work of auditory storytelling exploring his own fraught religious background. | Joseph Shabason: The Fellowship | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joseph-shabason-the-fellowship/ | The Fellowship | Joseph Shabason is a Toronto saxophonist best known for performing with Destroyer, memorably serving up those transportive sax licks that graced Kaputt a decade ago. But in his parallel career as a composer and solo artist, Shabason takes a different tack, minimizing the instrument’s potential as a vehicle for scene-stealing solos and disguising it into what he has called a “dense chordal instrument”—a sound that, like much of Shabason’s music, feels curiously suspended between ’80s new age nostalgia and a more processed, alien cadence.
Yet there is nothing alien about the emotional core of Shabason’s music. Shabason creates instrumental music with richly personal, unabashedly human underpinnings, and his previous albums, 2017’s Aytche and 2018’s Anne, both used field recordings and snatches of interview chatter to investigate intergenerational trauma. His latest work, The Fellowship, focuses on Shabason’s own past, examining his fraught religious upbringing within—and eventual need to walk away from—an insular Islamic community called The Fellowship, which his parents joined before he was born. The result is an undeniably inventive work of auditory storytelling—even if it requires an accompanying CliffsNotes of sorts for listeners to grasp its thematic weight.
Shabason’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and their lingering trauma apparently inspired his parents’ decision to leave Judaism and raise Shabason in a fellowship led by the teachings of a Sufi sheik named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. “Life With My Grandparents” uses a chilly template of fretless bass and heavily processed sax murmurings to convey his parents’ troubled childhoods, and features the record’s only trace of a human voice (a faint cassette sample of a child’s babbling). The title track, with its fluttering birdcall and yearning pan flute, could soundtrack a movie montage of a young family seeking out a new beginning. It is airy and optimistic, a glimpse of daylight in a drab room.
As a teenager, Shabason wrestled with the implications of the dogmatic teachings he’d been raised to believe. “By 13, I had smoked weed and I was terrified about what God was going to do to me,” the musician recalled in a Talkhouse piece. This album’s thorny midsection is a musical suite of songs titled after age ranges in Shabason’s youth, which use nonconventional instrumental choices to illustrate that spiritual tumult. If the gentle new age sheen of “0–13” suggests the innocence of Shabason’s early childhood, the more unsettled unravelings of the track’s final minute represent his growing unease.
This turmoil explodes into full view on “13–15,” which recruits a barrage of marimba and flute squawks to illustrate Shabason’s pained questionings. If the composition sounds distressing, so is a crisis of faith. Equally turbulent is “Comparative World Religions,” a piece that takes its title from a college course that inspired Shabason’s self-reckoning and eventual renunciation. With its unsteady gamelan convulsions, the track is among several that reflect Shabason’s attempts to channel the composer and interdisciplinary artist Maggi Payne. “So Long” is the narrative culmination, a soft-focus coda that luxuriates in loungey textures yet subverts the artificiality of smooth-jazz timbres to convey the very real emotional relief of letting go.
You could easily slot The Fellowship alongside a recent string of albums from talented, nonreligious songwriters reckoning with complicated relationships to faith. There was last year’s Youth Pastoral from New York musician Ben Seretan, whose songwriting expressed unresolved feelings on an evangelical upbringing, and Kevin Morby’s Oh My God, a secular album shot through an impassioned gospel prism. Each of these records approaches religion with more empathy and nuance than, say, XTC’s “Dear God.” (As Shabason himself has put it, “I have a lot of anger towards religion, but this was a way to approach it with curiosity.")
What separates The Fellowship is that it confronts these themes as a wholly instrumental work. The downside of such an approach is that it’s impossible to fully grasp the album’s narrative arc without the aid of a written guide—detailed promotional materials, for instance, or any of the highly personal interviews Shabason has given. Without such thematic grounding, The Fellowship still delivers rich and emotionally engaging ambient-jazz, but some of the more abrasive passages (“13–15,” “Escape from North York”) wind up feeling more like fragmented narrative transitions than satisfying compositions. This is an album that demands more than passive listenership, but also rewards it. On its own cathartic terms, The Fellowship is a fiercely creative record that offers nothing less than an auditory document of private liberation.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Western Vinyl | May 3, 2021 | 7.3 | 3c649097-6c95-4bb1-b348-53357178bd7e | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Composer/performer/improviser David Toop’s latest release traces the seam between sound and music, paying attention to the hidden sounds that surround us and turning silence inside out. | Composer/performer/improviser David Toop’s latest release traces the seam between sound and music, paying attention to the hidden sounds that surround us and turning silence inside out. | David Toop: Entities Inertias Faint Beings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22022-entities-inertias-faint-beings/ | Entities Inertias Faint Beings | “In a lot of ways I’ve come to dislike music,” David Toop told The Wire in 2003. “I love sound, I love silence, but music as a whole I don’t like anymore.” You might assume that would have troubled him, given that Toop, then 54, had been deeply involved with music for most of his life, in virtually every role imaginable: performer, improviser, composer, critic, theorist, archivist, curator, and label owner. But if it represented any sort of crisis for him—six years before, burnout and “indifference to contemporary music” had led Toop to hang up his hat as a music journalist—it didn’t hold back his output. Since making the statement, Toop has continued to perform and lecture, released a half-dozen albums, and written two books, including the recently published Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation, and the Dream of Freedom.
But Toop’s turn away from music, that complicated category of organized sound, has been crucial in one very important aspect: It has allowed him to ask probing questions about the nature of listening. Those questions come to a head on Entities Inertias Faint Beings, his first studio album since 2007’s Sound Body. Offering a vibrant array of rustle and hum, the new album traces the seam between sound and music, between the intentional and the incidental, between expression and mute abstraction. A partial index of its sounds would include the whine of rubbed wineglass rims; shortwave radios on the fritz; the electric buzz of the forest canopy at night; the languid click of fingernails across guitar strings; the whirr and flap of a 16mm film projector’s take-up reel. It is an album about paying attention to the hidden sounds that surround us, about turning silence inside out. And it is an album about using sound to find one's own bearings.
Entities Inertias Faint Beings got its start as an autobiography—or, more precisely, it is the result of what turned out to be an abortive case of writer’s block. Its genesis lies in three periods of solitude: first a stay on Tamborine Mountain in subtropical Queensland, Australia (“so silent at night that I listened to recorded music—Japanese gagaku, Buddhist ritual from Bhutan, Korean Confucian music—as if drifting into cavernous black space,” Toop writes in his introduction to the album), and then on Queensland’s Gold Coast, where cicadas harmonized with helicopters. Back in Cornwall, trying and failing to write his life’s story, he began sifting through several years' worth of personal recordings he had stored on his computer: small, percussive thunks; filament-like drones; the crinkling of paper. Shuffling, layering, and arranging—not so much composing as feeling his way through the material, as if improvising—he added new sounds to the mix, like a quiet passage of acoustic guitar from one of his daily practice sessions, and a hydrophone recording from his garden pond. And in London, he fleshed out the pieces with the help of musician friends. The improvising saxophonist John Butcher lends trilling, bird-like sounds to two tracks; Rie Nakajima's battery-powered motorized objects rattle and whirr, suggesting insect colonies in upheaval.
The overall result—thematically, anyway—is something like one of W.G. Sebald’s literary peregrinations: a palimpsest of place, memory, and accident, although its precise route is unknown to all but its creator. There is little to tell us what any of these clicks and pings might actually be. Several of the album’s track titles suggest cryptic headings scrawled on notecards in dusty filing cabinets: “dry keys echo in the dark and humid early hours”; “pieces of wood and iron, phials of odours”; “sea slug.” They function as indices of possible experiences, and if they explain little—do the bassy gurgles of “sea slug” really come from a gastropod mollusk?—they offer unusual and inviting travelogues consisting of little more than white noise and feral throb.
But Toop can’t quite resist sneaking music—that most elegantly ordered aspect of organized noise—back into the equation. Again and again, understated wisps of melody, harmony, and rhythm surface briefly and disappear just as quickly, sending out ripples that supercharge every corner of this lovely, engrossing album. In the album’s centerpiece, “ancestral beings, sightless by their own dust,” Sylvia Hallett’s sarangi, a bowed string instrument from Hindustani classical music, weaves an eerie, mournful air over slow, methodical pulses. Then, at the track’s end, a jungle’s worth of growling, chirping, buzzing sounds swells and is swallowed in turn by the steady gush of a tropical rainstorm. Toop has compared his compositional processes to traditional Japanese stone gardens—one track, “setting stones,” quotes a thousand-year-old passage on the subject—and at its most engrossing, Entities captures the uncanny qualities of inanimate objects in conversation with one another. It is a way of suggesting that the music exists independently even of its creator; it is a product of the act of listening itself. By the act of focusing our ears, we bring it to life—and vice versa. | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | July 1, 2016 | 7.5 | 3c64b043-80ec-4cb8-96b3-e2c2e9f918a4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The sleepiest rapper in Odd Future teams up with an old-school mentor for a short, low-stakes mixtape. | The sleepiest rapper in Odd Future teams up with an old-school mentor for a short, low-stakes mixtape. | Domo Genesis: Aren’t U Glad You’re U? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/domo-genesis-arent-u-glad-youre-u/ | Aren’t U Glad You’re U? | Domo Genesis never tried to match the anarchic intensity of some of the larger personalities in Odd Future. Forget “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school”; Domo mostly seemed to care about killing time and burning joints. After holding his own but rarely turning heads as a member of MellowHigh, he revealed on his 2016 solo debut, Genesis, that his true talents may be curatorial. With its dapper, late-night production and spirited guest turns from far flashier weed enthusiasts like Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J, it was one of the more stylish recent Odd Future releases, even if Domo himself was usually the least interesting thing about it. To the extent that the album failed as an effort to brand Domo as a marquee rapper, it’s simply because he isn’t one.
His output since then suggests that he’s come to terms with his place in Odd Future’s second tier. Domo didn’t rope in any major outside star power for 2017’s Red Corolla, a mixtape as humble and workmanlike as the car it celebrated, and on his new Aren’t U Glad You’re U?, he seems even less interested in wooing the masses. Save for perpetually underrated Little Brother veteran Phonte, who delivers one of the tape’s standout verses without trying all that hard over some bumping, blunted soul on “Shaq Carried Kobe” (“This ain’t no shit for the ascots/This is for the galaxies and planets of Asgard”), the 20-minute tape’s only guest is executive producer Evidence, of yesteryear backpack-rap idealists Dilated Peoples.
In 2018, there may be no more efficient way for a rapper to lower the stakes on their latest project than by recruiting a guy like Evidence to produce the whole thing. Yet as throwback collaborators go, you could do far worse. Especially for those who used to rock “Worst Comes to Worst” back in the day, it’s nice to hear him working with a younger artist—albeit in a way that’s less “catching up with an old friend,” more “exchanging a respectful nod with someone you used to bump into at parties as you pass each other on the street, then keeping it moving.” No, it’s not going to make your day, but it’s a net positive.
A low ceiling hangs over the entire mixtape, which never aspires to anything more than serviceable raps over serviceable beats, most of which are the kind of no-frills loops and scraps that some producers would save for beat tapes. There are flickers of heat, but they’re rare. Domo shares some of his sharpest raps for “Free Krik,” over a staticky beat with shades of “Scenario”—the kind of trim, focused track that Vince Staples used to hit out of the park in his mixtape days, before his artistic ambitions scaled up. Unlike Staples, though, Domo can only sustain that kind of intensity in short bursts. On “Brake,” he sounds unconvincing casting himself as a menace to society: “If I don’t get mines, I’m gon’ break shit…Try to knock my hustle, you gon’ end with a break wrist.”
Domo’s rapping is such a place-holding exercise that even when Evidence takes the mic for a short solo spotlight, “Fuck a Co-Sign,” it barely registers as a change in tone. Both rappers seem to understand that a project like this only needs to be good enough, not great—and, in fact, that anything significantly more memorable might just call attention to how flat the rest of the tape is. These kinds of stripped-down beats-and-raps exercises will always hold some appeal, but there’s no need to glamorize the unremarkable. This is boring music from two artists who’ve set the bar so low you almost wonder why they even bothered. | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Odd Future | January 31, 2018 | 4.9 | 3c68f505-75bb-4035-a06d-8cd655d9e512 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
When I picked up Pole's first CD (humorlessly titled CD 1) there was a little sticker on it with ... | When I picked up Pole's first CD (humorlessly titled CD 1) there was a little sticker on it with ... | Pole: CD 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6372-cd-2/ | CD 2 | When I picked up Pole's first CD (humorlessly titled CD 1) there was a little sticker on it with a quote extolling the virtues of Pole's experimental electronic update on dub. I got the record home and heard nothing of the kind. Yeah, it had some deep bass here and there, but I couldn't see how the sterile electronic production or the random, buzzing sonic excursions could be compared to the sticky, free- flowing ambience of dub. I mean, I still liked it, but I found myself confused by the comparison. Now, with Pole's latest offering, the EP CD 2, I understand.
CD 2 brings to the forefront the catchier, more rhythm- oriented side of Pole's (somewhat limited) musical personality. Or, as the electronic eggheads of the European continent from whence Pole sprang would probably describe it, the music on CD 2 is "Sound with a bit more organization." There are very clear patterns, choruses even (well, kind of...), that bring a little funk to the table. A little bid-a-boom to go with that digital sshhh...
Now, this is ambient electronic minimalism I'm talking about, so I mean it when I say "a little" funk. But that small bit makes a big difference. And when combined with the dry, yet spacious production environment that brings to mind a microprocessor's idea of what comes out of a Jamaican mixing board, these patterns make for a fun EP. And the "pure sine waves, hold the overtones please" kind of bottom end is the clincher. So, I'm sold-- a cold electronic version of dub. They nailed it. | 1999-02-01T01:01:40.000-05:00 | 1999-02-01T01:01:40.000-05:00 | Electronic | Matador | February 1, 1999 | 7.2 | 3c6e5bd0-4165-4bb8-a5b0-f87ea19289df | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The restless UK electronic musician sets aside prior experiments in spliced soul and finger-picking folk-glitch in favor of foggy ambient atmospheres that are both soothing and haunting. | The restless UK electronic musician sets aside prior experiments in spliced soul and finger-picking folk-glitch in favor of foggy ambient atmospheres that are both soothing and haunting. | Bibio: Phantom Brickworks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bibio-phantom-brickworks/ | Phantom Brickworks | As the past 12 years have made clear, Stephen James Wilkinson is a restless explorer of musical styles. There seem to be few genres that Wilkinson, better known as Bibio, hasn’t turned over and scrutinized intently: odes to R&B and Boards of Canada; finger-picking folk-glitch; spliced soul and downtempo pastiche. The results have ranged from charming to competent to maddening. Surprisingly, one area that Bibio hasn’t properly explored until now is ambient music.
But don’t think of Phantom Brickworks as the ticking of a box. The cumulative effect of these nine pieces makes it his most fully realized album to date, one that avoids the fidgety eclecticism of his previous work. Rather than racing from one thing to the next, Wilkinson sounds as if he’s come to a state of rest; the album’s carefully developing tracks resulted from improvisation, but it sounds almost as though he channeled them. Wilkinson has described them as “a mental portal into places and times—some real, some imaginary, some both.” Many of the album’s titles allude to various points around the United Kingdom, adding to the suggestion that the album represents a kind of sonic road trip where every landmark is cloaked in that famous English fog, their outlines blurred beyond recognition.
“Capel Celyn” is named for a rural, Welsh-speaking community tucked away in Gwynedd, North Wales, that was flooded and turned into a reservoir to supply Liverpool in 1965. It would be pat to say that Wilkinson’s eight-minute tribute sounds like it was recorded underwater. But there is a sense of bobbing in place, a slow stillness to its handful of somber notes, that is reminiscent of some of William Basinski’s archival tape loops. The blurred, halting melodic fragment slowly drifts and changes shape before fading completely away two-thirds of the way through, when it enters even darker territory, like the bowed undercarriage of a submarine slicing through deep water.
The elegiac “9:13” brings to mind some of Wolfgang Voigt’s work as GAS. The sounds are masked and smudged to the point where the timbres are unidentifiable: Is that a brass or woodwind instrument? Wilkinson gently elongates the tones and lets them turn slowly in space. As they continue, tape saturation and distortion alter their sound, blurring its edges, like an image seen from behind rain-dappled glass.
Running nearly 14 minutes, the title track is so sublimely murky, with its plangent piano and lo-fi haze, that one expects Liz Harris’ voice to emerge at any moment. But as “Phantom Brickworks” unfurls, new little details emerge: Bits of fuzzy feedback and a sound like thrummed metal spindles keep Bibio from merely approximating Harris’ work as Grouper. An even longer piece, “Phantom Brickworks II,” continues to wade through the ambience of sustained, slightly detuned piano notes, accompanied by what might be field recordings of distant cars passing in the rain, while the sound of children at play peeks out from the hiss. But rather than go down the path of his label-mates Boards of Canada, Wilkinson’s noises here more closely resemble electronic voice phenomena, recordings that purport to capture the voices of the dead. Something ghostly begins to arise from the dark corners of this music, which comes to seem like anything but a soothing balm of ambient sound.
In his review of Bibio’s Silver Wilkinson, Ian Cohen noted that Wilkinson’s “accumulative” approach, piling loops upon loops, tended to eclipse his actual songwriting. But here, that technique proves to be Bibio’s untapped strength, as hazy overtones, muffled field recordings, tape hiss, and decaying drones create a gorgeous effect. The album’s release is well-timed: The autumn chill and gray light that accompany the end of the year are conducive to ambient music and self-reflection. In a year in need of centering and a sense of calm, Phantom Brickworks lives up to its name; it feels haunted while also offering up a hope to rebuild. | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 4, 2017 | 8.2 | 3c78ba7d-7674-408a-9f1a-f2251d0d8ea9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Second solo LP from Broken Social Scene vocalist Leslie Feist ("Almost Crimes"), produced by Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales, finds Feist in a radically different state of mind. | Second solo LP from Broken Social Scene vocalist Leslie Feist ("Almost Crimes"), produced by Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales, finds Feist in a radically different state of mind. | Feist: Let It Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3314-let-it-die/ | Let It Die | Anyone who has ever seen Broken Social Scene perform in their A1 configuration knows that Leslie Feist (singer of You Forgot It in People's "Almost Crimes") has roughly six backrooms worth of charisma stockpiled in her lighter pocket alone. Yet, despite that her tenure in the scene-stealing department extends back to her days with the middling indie rock outfit By Divine Right, Feist has always approached her solo career with agonizing apprehension. Her solo debut, Monarch, appeared in 1999, and while a serviceable indie rock record, it did little to communicate the swaggery gleam of her stage persona.
Nearly five years removed from that debut, Let It Die finds Feist in a radically different state of mind, completely abandoning her guitars-and-strings indie rock shorthand in favor of folk, jazz, French pop, and disco accoutrements. While her propensity for serial genre-hopping makes it difficult for the album to congeal into a whole (Let It Die's scattered closing trilogy comprises covers of songs by Ron Sexsmith, The Bee Gees and 1940s vocalist Dick Haymes), it is nonetheless held together by her wistful song selection and an airy, summery aesthetic.
Although many of its originals were sparked in Toronto, where Feist first cut them as four-track demos, the bulk of Let It Die was realized and recorded in Paris with the assistance of fellow Canadian expat Jason Beck, better known as Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales. Emblazoned with jazzy guitar shapes, droning vibes, crisp percussion, toothless synths, smoothed-out samples and Feist's slippery vocals, the music sloshes around the stereo channel like liquid in a canister. It's no wonder that, despite her protestation, reviewers have quite reasonably taken to calling it Feist's French pop album; whether intentional or not, Let It Die shares all sorts of characteristics with our archetypal vision of Paris. "Whimsical," "romantic" and "adventurous" are all adjectives that apply.
With five original songs followed by six covers, Let It Die intimates its own Side A/B divide, of which the former is undoubtedly the stronger half. We begin with "Gatekeeper", a sparse, jazzy lament on love's inconstancy that at once establishes the album's central theme; namely, the juggling act involved in reconciling boundless romanticism and optimism for the future with the soured relationships and broken hearts of the past. One of the summer's gentlest, most natural pop melodies follows with first single "Mushaboom", from which we're gently airlifted into the title track. Featuring a funereal organ line and a weak pulse of a drum beat, "Let It Die" yields one of the album's stillest moments. Equal parts relationship swansong, a reproach to a former lover, and a hardening act (chorus: "The saddest part of a broken heart isn't the ending so much as the start"), it is also the album's emotional centerpiece.
Comprising covers of material by FraxE7oise Hardy, Sexsmith and others, Side B is decidedly less rewarding. Among Feist's least essential readings is her version of Sexsmith's "Secret Heart", which, although lovingly rendered, betrays the original's vulnerability to a tangle of cutesy string plucks and whiz-bang synth sounds. When things work, as they do on her softly lit, glossy rendition of The Bee Gees' "Inside Out" and her black-and-white take on Haynes' black-and-white piano ballad "Now at Last", they verge on inspired, but I too often found myself willfully ignoring the implications of her aggregate five original songs over the last four years and stubbornly unwishing some of the more extraneous covers in favor of more of her own material.
Ultimately, however, Feist's charm is such that it doesn't matter all that much who writes the songs so long as they're the right ones. Indeed, one of the major reasons Let It Die hits is because Feist finally knows precisely what she's aiming at. For that quantum leap in wisdom, we'll grant her the aforementioned five-year hiatus, but after this record, we're not likely to be as patient again. | 2004-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | July 13, 2004 | 8.1 | 3c841a32-e28a-449e-b5c5-21c851100880 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On her solo debut, the Detroit singer-songwriter cuts with her folk-rock past and turns to 1960s-indebted indie pop and 1990s-schooled alt-rock hooks. | On her solo debut, the Detroit singer-songwriter cuts with her folk-rock past and turns to 1960s-indebted indie pop and 1990s-schooled alt-rock hooks. | Anna Burch: Quit the Curse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-burch-quit-the-curse/ | Quit the Curse | The indie-pop musician Anna Burch was born for the spotlight; it just took several attempts to get there. After singing in the folk-rock band Frontier Ruckus, co-fronting the indie-rock act Failed Flowers, and joining other Michigan projects in her spare time, the Detroit singer-songwriter makes her solo debut with Quit the Curse, a record of wry one-liners and moody indie pop. Every track on the record is marked by fuzzy guitar hooks and 1960s-flavored girl-group harmonies—a bold step forward from her folk background.
The years Burch spent performing in bands—learning to complement a fellow guitarist’s melody, blending her voice with other singers, and other quintessential hive-mind tricks—have clearly guided her along the way to becoming her own bandleader. A song like “Tea-Soaked Letter” gives the illusion that she’s a naturally gifted songwriter: Guitar strums descend in a satisfying progression, vocal harmonies never falter, and every melody feels familiar yet fresh. According to Burch, however, it’s been a process of revision and relearning, as she never properly studied songwriting until her late twenties.
Burch is at her best when she tries her hand at what sound like alt-rock singles from the 1990s. Like Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair, Burch has a knack for complex chord changes and personable delivery, the kind that tempts you to blast her music in the car as an inexpensive form of therapy. That’s particularly true of the malaise-ridden “Asking 4 a Friend,” a drug-dealer love story that nods to the Lemonheads’ “My Drug Buddy.” The snarky annoyance and dissonant guitar give her deadpan delivery an extra push. On opener “2 Cool 2 Care” and closing ballad “With You Every Day,” Burch tackles vintage beach-pop in the vein of Alvvays. Even as she doubles down on guitar and vocal tricks, Burch avoids over-saturating her carefree pop songs.
Even as Burch reinvents herself, she doesn’t entirely let go of her folk-rock past, particularly on the album’s second half. Though soothing, a half-baked guitar chord progression in “What I Want” and the ambling pedal-steel whine in “Belle Isle” sound dull when compared to her sharper hooks. Burch has admitted that a handful of the songs felt “stiff and stilted” when she demoed them. That’s why she sent them to engineer Collin Dupuis—his work with Angel Olsen and Lana Del Rey got Burch's attention—who gave her tips for re-recording them. But some songs, like the title track, still don't sound particularly lively.
Come the end, Quit the Curse reveals itself to be a window to watching a songwriter grow. Singing about unfulfilled romantic desires, she packs in enough self-awareness to mock the melodramatic format. Distinguished by her sure-footed stride, Quit the Curse sounds like an album by an artist who at last knows where she’s going. | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 3, 2018 | 6.8 | 3c847790-69dd-49d3-96aa-3998f41f2e2b | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Shaking off the brooding insularity that clouded his previous records, Patrick Wolf goes upbeat, taking theatrical cues from Kate Bush, Antony, and Current 93 while finally overcoming his tendency toward sullen, adolescent introspection. | Shaking off the brooding insularity that clouded his previous records, Patrick Wolf goes upbeat, taking theatrical cues from Kate Bush, Antony, and Current 93 while finally overcoming his tendency toward sullen, adolescent introspection. | Patrick Wolf: The Magic Position | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9965-the-magic-position/ | The Magic Position | Patrick Wolf is growing up. The classically trained, left-of-center indie star's colorful adolescence and early twenties were unusually productive, resulting in two charming albums (2003's Lycanthropy and 2005's Wind in the Wires) that found delicate string-and-piano pop pieces laced with guttural electronics. Both were charismatic but maudlin efforts, full of bittersweet montages, percussion-heavy compositions, and pissy, spit-out vocals that documented search after fruitless search for enlightenment or joy-- but if it all seemed a bit self-absorbed, there was no denying Wolf had a way with a melody.
With The Magic Position, though, Wolf shakes off much of the brooding insularity that clouded his previous records, refining his melodic strengths and overcoming his tendency toward sullen introspection. Album opener "Overture" has an energetic, marching pulse, its ascending violin line providing a lilting and confident backbone as Wolf announces his newly discovered positivity. He's "found the major key," as he states in the title cut, and it's in that key that Wolf affirms his growth not just as a songwriter, but as an entertainer. Where Wind in the Wires' musical potency was sometimes overshadowed by Wolf's penchant for melodrama, The Magic Position takes cues from Kate Bush, Antony, and Current 93 (and, okay, sometimes just a little Adam Ant) to turn his natural theatricality into an asset: Here, it's used to lend a sense of ethereal drama, to set scenes, tell stories, and imbue the record with a sort of campy, reverent mysticism.
But what still stands out most is the songs themselves: These tracks-- especially the upbeat springtime romp "Get Lost", the danceable, triumphant "Accident and Emergency", and the celebratory title track-- show an entirely new side of Wolf: one that finally puts impeccable pop songcraft ahead of lachrymose keening. The title track, in particular, is a stunner, riding a cantering violin riff to a soaring, staccato pop anthem. The keyboard's playful, ascending scale acts as a cheerful motif as the song twists off in unexpected directions with sudden melodic breaks and interludes, and juxtaposes Wolf's lyrical darkness with sonic brightness.
Of course, it's worth noting that, for all the frolicking glee, Wolf's melancholy hasn't entirely vanished-- it's just that it's no longer quite so cheerless. Granted, for Wolf to have discovered optimism may seem like an ominous transformation to fans content to be swaddled in cryptic early gems like "The Libertine", but the distinctive, ornate qualities of his first two records remain. And what's taken the place of all that narcissistic grief-- a crucial sense of self-awareness and the resolution of some very elementary identity issues-- has allowed him an artistic and lyrical progression that results in refined and concentrated updates like "The Stars", which insightfully links family and nature, or the virtuosic ballad "Augustine", while retaining a spirited, anthemic quality that puts them confidently at home in the same body of work. | 2007-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-03-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Loog | March 8, 2007 | 8.3 | 3c88ed7f-6cd0-4207-b815-7949ab55d581 | Pitchfork | null |
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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 blink-182’s third album, a defining moment in both pop-punk and immaturity writ large. | 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 blink-182’s third album, a defining moment in both pop-punk and immaturity writ large. | Blink-182: Enema of the State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blink-182-enema-of-the-state/ | Enema of the State | On the weekend of the infamously disastrous Woodstock ’99, which symbolized rock radio’s id-fueled descent into aggro dipshittery, a snottier kind of teenage angst was manifesting 200 miles to the west in Buffalo, New York. Then in its fifth year, the Vans Warped Tour had crisscrossed the country bringing affordable revelry to the green-haired masses. If Woodstock was for the shirtless jocks, Warped Tour was for the skaters, losers, and wannabes who still sometimes needed a ride from mom. No one was there for the revolution; they were just teenagers drunk on community and tongue-kissing, blissfully alive during the final summer of what had been a relatively idyllic American decade. And that summer, no act on the bill was bigger than blink-182.
While the concept of pop-punk dates back to ’70s bands like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones, pop-punk didn’t become actual popular music until 1994, when Green Day’s Dookie sold more than 12 million copies and set off a never-ending debate about selling out that persists in DIY spaces today. Sure, Green Day sang more about masturbation than anarchy, but that simply did not matter to all the young kids who, apart from lapping up the music, constituted a new customer base for the record industry to serve.
These market conditions had lifted blink-182 to festival superstardom just five years into their recording career. In 1992, Mark Hoppus met Tom Delonge through Hoppus’ sister Anne, and they immediately connected through their obsession with punk rock and middle-school humor—two foundational elements for a new pop-punk band. But while they loved conceptual predecessors like the similarly Californian and cheeky Descendents, they were serious about owning a suburban home. “I’d like to make a lot of money and fuck credibility,” Hoppus said in 1998 to i-Zine. “People make so much out of something that’s just the band trying to get ahead and get its music to as many fans as possible.”
They weren’t selling out; they were buying in. Part of that was Hoppus and Delonge’s exurban SoCal upbringing, which encouraged a sunny prankishness at odds with the urban despair of the big cities. “The Californian middle-class suburbs have nothing to be that bummed about,” Delonge told music journalist John Robb in 2000. (He might have added “white,” too.) Two decades earlier, the teenaged Ramones were social outcasts in New York, but Delonge was named homecoming king his senior year of high school (he was also expelled for showing up drunk to a basketball game). What they began doing quite well and to excess was simple: record the pouty concerns of middle-class kids in a plainspoken language they could understand, set to addictive melodies and played at moshing speed.
That largely meant singing about women. “I guess this is growing up,” Hoppus had declared on 1997’s “Dammit,” a cynical dispatch about a collapsed relationship; two years later they were hardly more considerate about the opposite sex. As Warped Tour kicked off in 1999, they released Enema of the State, their third studio album, first with a real budget, and first solely for a major label (1997’s Dude Ranch was released in tandem between MCA and early patrons Cargo). Nine of its 12 tracks were directly about women, with a tenth—the anti-suicide “Adam’s Song”—inspired by the loneliness Hoppus felt on tour as the crowds got bigger and the schedule more demanding.
“What’s My Age Again?,” their first single to hit the Billboard Hot 100, summed up blink’s entire emotional purview: sexual failure, exes, and developmentally arrested existential despair. (The initial title, rejected by the label, was “Peter Pan Complex.”) The song was boosted immensely by the accompanying video, in which the band sprinted nude through Los Angeles, a stunt that landed them on MTV’s Total Request Live, then the gold standard for artists hoping to break into mainstream America. The nudity didn’t have much to do with the song, but juxtaposing earnest sentiment with love of their own dicks would become the band’s default approach for the next few years.
Nice guy misogyny, practiced by men who claim to love and respect women, but also think they know what’s best for them, was rampant in ’90s culture and music, and blink-182 were not an exception. Gasoline-powered opener “Dumpweed” is catchy as hell; it also has a chorus where Delonge yells, “I need a girl that I can train,” an attitude made abundantly clear throughout the album. (Reviewing it in The New York Times, Ann Powers called “Dumpweed” a “nasty idea, but the rest of the song makes it obvious he is the one at heel.”) The moral record doesn’t need to be retroactively corrected, as plenty of critics and adults despised their act: A 2000 SPIN piece threw them into the rising tide of sexist rock bands, alongside frat-rap acts like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock; a profile from the year before highlighted the animosity from ethically-minded punks concerned about the implications of blink-182’s waggish bullshit.
The music publicist Tristin Laughter, who was then employed by prominent punk label Lookout! (home to a pre-stardom Green Day), wrote in the influential fanzine Punk Planet, “Boys who go to see the punk bands on the Warped Tour may be inspired to start their own rock bands. Girls may be inspired to think they could actually be pretty enough to be cheered on when they remove their shirts.” The band treated the accusations with little credence: “I love all those criticisms, because fuck all those magazines!” Delonge told SPIN. “I hate with a passion Maximumrockandroll and all those zines that think they know what punk is supposed to be. I think it’s so much more punk to piss people off than to conform to all those veganistic views.” This brand of assholishness didn’t negate the fact of their wrongness, which the band could occasionally recognize with the slightest concessions; after all, as their audience began skewing younger, they did stop asking the women in attendance to remove their shirts.
They may have been stuck at the emotional age of 23, but the 1998 addition of Travis Barker had given their collective musical ability a quantum leap forward. Citing burnout, original drummer Scott Raynor had left the band mid-tour, and Barker was recruited on short notice from costumed punks the Aquabats, one of their tourmates. He learned the entire setlist in about 45 minutes, which Delonge later remarked was both a testament to his skill and the band’s lack of refinement. Not long after, Raynor was formally kicked out, and Barker was hired on full-time.
Barker’s two drumming heroes were jazz legend Buddy Rich and Animal from the Muppets. In contrast to Hoppus and Delonge, he’d grown up working class, and carried himself with a seriousness they did not share. (For years, he’d be regarded by fans as “the quiet one.”) Full-body tattoos and a stylish mohawk belied a monkish devotion to his craft—he practiced obsessively, and played so forcefully he once fractured his arm during a video shoot. Though he didn’t receive songwriting credits (and wouldn’t be inducted as an official member of the band until the recording of 2001’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket), Barker arranged all of the songs on Enema, selecting the tempos and organizing the flow of verses, choruses, and breaks.
Given new power thanks to producer Jerry Finn’s arsenal of pedals and amps, Delonge’s guitar-playing bounced against Barker’s hard-nosed drumming, with Hoppus’ bass lines as the connective tissue. Barker’s versatility meant they could settle into a twinkling ballad, or approach the tempo of hardcore. Often he did everything in the same song, like on “Dysentery Gary,” where a start-stop lockstep with the riff flows into a samba groove before achieving rocket-fueled liftoff on the chorus. Aquabats singer Christian Jacobs assessed the value of Barker’s contributions more bluntly: “Without Travis, Mark and Tom would have been, at best, a lukewarm poser pop-punk band. A couple of hot dogs wiggling around in a bucket.”
The full-throttle catchiness of a song titled “Dysentery Gary” (which is about a slimy guy who steals Delonge’s girlfriend) sums up why fans loved blink-182, and why critics often rolled their eyes. Their punk forebears offered clever critiques of capitalism; they came up with, “Work sucks/I know.” They were lifestyle music for kids radicalized by the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, empowered by their self-assigned right to rebel.
Even so, they could be surprisingly sensitive, like on “All the Small Things,” which Delonge wrote about his then-girlfriend and future wife Jennifer. The lyrics aren’t profound, and the Fisher-Price rhyme scheme led to syntax that sounds spat up by a Babelfish translation (“Always I know/You’ll be at my show”). But it was engineered to provoke a physical reaction: leaping out of the speakers like a Van Halen song before slowing down to build momentum for another eruptive chorus buttressed by Delonge’s adenoidal harmonizing, his na-na coming out as a nasally faux-British naw-naw. The fizzy pleasure of the melody captures the Hallmark simplicity of young love, and though the instantly iconic video mocked the boy bands of their era, any amateur critic could point out they were just doing “As Long As You Love Me” for the lip-ring set.
Considering how easily the band defaulted to juvenilia—even the sweet “All the Small Things” got a goofy video—it’s relatively stunning how straight they played it on “Adam’s Song,” which became the most impactful anti-suicide song of the ’90s due to its vivid first-person perspective and empathetic narrator, a depressed teenager whose feelings of anguish and alienation were proximate to a lot of blink-182’s young fans. “Adam’s Song” read like something a teenager might have written, which is why millions of them loved it. The experience of navigating suicidal feelings rarely sounded so anthemic, and Hoppus’ somber delivery, heartbreaking details (“Please tell mom this is not her fault”), and eventual hopeful turn even closed out with a tender piano outro. It was capital-M Mature; it was also named after a Mr. Show sketch about a band who visits a fan after his suicide attempt, further heightening their push and pull between emotional development and the easy joke.
Then again, what do you expect a band that would call their next album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket? They were just close enough to their youth to instantly relive it, which may have given their therapists heartburn, but made for amazingly effective pop music: Hoppus was 27 years old when he wrote, “Nobody likes you when you’re 23,” and DeLonge actually was 23 years old when he insisted on being unlikeable.
But blink-182 eventually did grow up, sort of. The darker textures and increasingly sophisticated songwriting made 2003’s self-titled album, recorded just before their eight-year hiatus, a predecessor to the moody emo-pop bands that would soon dominate the charts (it even included a duet with the Cure’s Robert Smith, one of Hoppus’ heroes). They still write silly songs like 2016’s “Built This Pool” (complete lyrics: “I wanna see some naked dudes/That’s why I built this pool”), but their reunion records are studded with moments of emotional reflection and compositional elegance that, 20 years ago, would’ve been impossible to anticipate. Particularly good is 2011’s “Up All Night,” in which they grapple with the night terrors that set in after the money has been made, the suburban home has been purchased, the family life and personal development have been secured, but life nonetheless remains unresolvable.
In a meta bit of casting, Delonge was replaced by Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio, who’d often stood in contrast to blink as a “serious” pop-punk band. Hoppus morphed into a sage, wry presence on Twitter, and a vocal advocate of the younger groups blink-182 inspired; Barker became canonized as drummer to the stars, and garnered an unyielding wave of goodwill after barely surviving a plane crash in 2008. Whispers abound that Delonge will eventually rejoin the band when he’s finished proving that aliens are real, and by the way, you are not alone in being overwhelmed by the fact that the guy from blink-182 might prove that aliens are real.
Through all these encroachments into adulthood, Enema remains the album that defined them. Nothing they released after had the same immediacy or cultural connection, and they’re now performing the record in full, the surest sign that a band has finally embraced its status as a legacy act. In blink’s case, their once-teenaged fans are now full-fledged adults with nostalgia for their less responsible years, and the money to emotionally regress for a night. They were slated to headline Fyre Festival, a disaster of Woodstock ’99 proportions mostly attended by monied urbanites whose artistic interests top out at “stuff I recognize.”
Even so, the appeals of puerile insouciance are evergreen, and their celebrity status allowed them to stretch across generations in a way that most pop-punk bands have not, with the exception of Green Day. When I finally saw them perform for the first time, at 2013’s Riot Fest, their audience was filled with hundreds of teens, some of whom weren’t even born when Enema came out. At that age, reacting stupidly in front of your crush is a forgone conclusion, because nothing ever feels as hurtful or as confusing as one’s first experiences with torments of romance. Immaturity is a type of rebellion—a stupid one, but transparently so, and though the band is now in its 40s, they can still faithfully evoke a specific pose of solipsistic juvenile rebellion that hasn’t been anywhere near as culturally omniscient or validated since 1999, at least not by a guitar band. No wonder they were still an inspiration for the kids not yet ready to grow up, even if they should’ve been acting their age.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | MCA | January 12, 2020 | 7.5 | 3c8ac0e7-7c39-46eb-8fea-c2d7e8a4ef1c | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | |
"There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough ... | "There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough ... | David Bowie: Reality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/880-reality/ | Reality | "There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough to know what that reason is, but I believe that statement to be true, regardless. The evidence is plain in just about anyone beyond a certain age, the all-consuming, epic oldness where a person can say "when I was your age" without a trace of irony. It hits some people as early as twenty or so, when they suddenly find themselves on the downhill side of life, confronted with a bleak realization that things were a whole lot greener back when they were still climbing (or before they knew any better, at least). Some people, they just never stop climbing; it's rare, but it happens.
A great many of David Bowie's fans, with each successive year, slowly but surely creep into the former category even as Bowie himself manages to still act like a card-carrying member of the latter. "I'm never never gonna get old," he proclaims on the Toys 'R' Us-inspired "Never Get Old", and to his credit, he makes yet another convincing argument. With one exception (the hokey, one-foot-in-the-grave Hours), Bowie-- even in his advanced age (by fresh-faced rock standards), even after almost a trillion records-- has never dwelled unduly on his past. If anything, while people will always hold him up to his past accomplishments, his career has floundered more than once out of his desire for self-conscious avant-gardism and an almost schizophrenic need to reinvent his persona. What last year's Heathen implied, and what Reality seems to prove, is that those days are over; never looking back, and no longer focusing ahead, Bowie has finally joined us all in the present, mind-young as ever but old enough not to make a show of it.
And then, if you'll grant this indulgence, there's me, the one who's supposed to be writing about him: "Plain Ol' 'Dave'" baffles me. Bowie's work is traditionally seen in a terrifically damaging binary-- common law states that if his work isn't brilliant, it's terrible; that's obviously wrong, since there're plenty of gray areas to be found in Bowie's oeuvre, but it's easy as hell to fall into the trap. Not much can stack up to Hunky Dory or Scary Monsters, after all. But then he goes and releases, consecutively, the two most earnest, unpretentious albums he's ever dreamed up, and the Pocket Dichotomy that had been used so frequently to dismiss Outside, Earthling, and others, is now terminally, irrevocably broken. Heathen looked like it might've been a holding pattern on the way to greater heights, but only for rising from the ashes of Hours; Reality shows that instead, Bowie is not aiming for an unattainable Ziggy-caliber alien classic, but is simply going to rock like any other human, in a pleasantly mild, non-conformist manner.
This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career. A zealous few will say that he's just further ahead of the curve than anyone can see, but if that's so, then what lies ahead is MOR rock and roll, with producer Tony Visconti's unobtrusive, light-handed electronic flourishes as gloss; no way-- he's too talented to be overtly influenced or obviously faddish, but that doesn't mean he's breaking ground. That's not an insult. I feel the biggest strength of this album is how relaxed it is, how well this anti-pose suits Bowie. It's freed him to craft some of the finest original material he's done in quite a while; Heathen best expressed his singular vision through the compositions of others, but Reality's original material easily overshadows its covers.
In particular, the George Harrison-penned "Try Some, Buy Some", though a kind tribute to Bowie's recently deceased contemporary, might be the album's only real mistake. Sappy, vacant lyrics and plodding, waltz-timed orchestration give a feel similar to a more fleshed-out version of the Morrissey cover "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday", but without any the self-referential poignancy invested in the latter. The deep-space broadcast of "Pablo Picasso" is a substantial improvement, in terms of covers, with its echoing trills and white-funk syncopation and the intense surrealism of hearing the words "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole/ Not like you," come from Bowie's mouth, but David promised that Reality would "rock", and he proceeds to do so even more effectively elsewhere.
Hard-edged dynamics are supplied to direct, aggressive rhythms on numerous tracks like the supremely nervous, desperate "Looking for Water" and less obviously on the epic jazz kick "Bring Me the Disco King", but only "New Killer Star" feels like more than an exercise with slightly dusty rock standbys. It opens the album with a bassline etched indelibly within our genetic make-up, instantly recognizable and irresistible, and once the hook is set, a deluge of static-hazed background singers, weird robo-choruses, and a shaky treble riff that easily marks the album's finest moment simply spew forth from the speakers, overwhelming all but the most cynical of Bowie's detractors. At least, that's what I predict.
Also worthy of mention is the stark contrast provided by "The Loneliest Guy". It sounds like the title to a forgotten Dudley Moore flick, and may sound somewhat like disingenuous fame lament coming from Bowie, but the song itself will dispel those thoughts. Nearly a cappella, with bare hints of strings and stray piano chords fading in from other rooms, Bowie instead offers that he's "the luckiest guy/ Not the loneliest guy/ In the world/ Not me," but does so with such mournful uncertainty that no easy reading of the song is possible; it seems surprisingly human, bittersweet, and altogether far more real than its name implies. It's startlingly out of place, sandwiched between "Never Get Old" and "Looking for Water", so much so that it almost implies sarcasm, but that's fitting, as this is as eclectic and puzzling album as Bowie's ever made. He's not always at the top of his game, but Bowie's musical ideas, not filtered through any sort of trend-grab, are unfailingly unique, and that alone should cement his continued role as vibrant, modern artist for years to come. | 2003-09-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-09-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | September 16, 2003 | 7.3 | 3c9136b4-1db9-4da1-b2dc-06c57b0ccc0e | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Mixed by Jim O’Rourke, the duo’s debut is a progression of left turns and interruptions—drone blasts, electronic spasms, lyrical cello—whose unpredictability mimics the rhythms of city life. | Mixed by Jim O’Rourke, the duo’s debut is a progression of left turns and interruptions—drone blasts, electronic spasms, lyrical cello—whose unpredictability mimics the rhythms of city life. | Michael Beharie / Teddy Rankin-Parker: A Heart From Your Shadow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-beharie-teddy-rankin-parker-a-heart-from-your-shadow/ | A Heart From Your Shadow | The names of multi-instrumentalist Michael Beharie and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker probably won’t ring bells for many people, but their list of accomplishments is long: Their genre-spanning CVs would make for a pretty unusual playlist, with credits ranging from Primus to Iron & Wine, Au Revoir Simone to Laurel Halo, Pauline Oliveros to Father John Misty. The two met a decade ago, when both were students at Oberlin, before Beharie headed to New York and Rankin-Parker lit out for Chicago. After carving out a presence on their respective scenes, they finally came together for their first record as a duo, A Heart From Your Shadow, spending time at Beharie’s living-room studio in Bed-Stuy and at a proper studio in Greenpoint; Jim O’Rourke handled mixing duties. Across 10 fractured pieces, Beharie and Rankin-Parker flit through a number of modes: gorgeous strings, drone blasts, polyrhythmic din, spoken-word études, electronic spasms, and more, never feeling the need to settle on any one for long. Like being elbowed on a crowded subway by a good-looking stranger, you come away feeling at once jostled and besotted by the results.
The album’s concise opener, “Intro,” presents both extremes of the duo’s approach. Elongated cello tones and celestial voices that emerge like a mirage from the vibrating strings make for an enchanting two minutes. But at precisely 2:01, the vibrato turns malicious and dark and the angelic voices suddenly become shrieking sirens—a bewildering trick if you’re walking on the sidewalk with earbuds in. The maneuver encapsulates the urban experience as soundtracked by your own personal playlist, with real life breaking noisily in every few feet. On “Smooth Face,” the wailing sirens return, but this time, Rankin-Parker’s cello moves in tandem with them: an echo rather than a rupture.
“Paper Tiger” finds the duo evoking the shape-shifting surprises of Oneohtrix Point Never, solemn and sparse for a span, glitching and overdriven the next, gossamer melodies turning into deep growls. There are moments of deep-space darkness, of traversing junkyard mounds, of breathing in rarefied air; it becomes increasingly hard to discern just which parts have been written and which ones improvised. Depending on where you dip into “Roses,” you might find it a mournful cello solo, impenetrable feedback, keyboard noodling, near-silent scraping, or an alien chorale.
The set’s most fascinating moments come when the duo folds polyrhythmic patterns into spliced sonic textures. Clanging highlight “Gully” draws from Beharie’s Jamaican heritage, its beat reminiscent of the strange yet visceral riddims of Equiknoxx and the metal-on-metal scrape of This Heat. “Fake Money” immerses us in lo-fi beats that sound submerged in a lake. Lose track of the muffled rhythms and you soon find yourself amid plucked and buzzing strings. Heard from beginning to end, the album can cause whiplash, while adding tracks to a playlist can scramble the mood in the best way. It’s one of Beharie and Rankin-Parker’s neat tricks: expertly sliding sounds all around you, continually leaving you bewildered and in unfamiliar new spaces. | 2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mondoj | July 30, 2018 | 7.2 | 3c931074-dec0-47ab-8d67-a3b25ddd3f21 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The classic soft-rock band returns with its first album in a decade, and it still seems wholly unique and oddly captivating. | The classic soft-rock band returns with its first album in a decade, and it still seems wholly unique and oddly captivating. | Sade: Soldier of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13920-soldier-of-love/ | Soldier of Love | "Inimitable" isn't the first word that comes to mind when discussing Sade, but it's next to impossible to name another millions-selling pop act that sounds anything like them. (And, yes, Sade are a band.) In the mid-1980s, before hip-hop and R&B became inexplicably twinned, the band helped to define the quiet storm era, when smooth grooves aimed at grown-ups were still a legitimate mainstream phenomenon. In 2010, Sade seems wholly unique.
Music this tasteful and even-keeled can be wearying in large doses, and when the radio was chock full of impossibly slick Vandross-alikes, it was easy to take Sade for granted. But the new Soldier of Love feels soothing after a few hours spent in the company of Ke$ha and Lady Gaga. Soldier of Love offers listeners a rather narrow range of interest-- songs that (at their best) suggest strong feeling restrained by a fierce dignity-- but Sade remain the best at what they do.
And so Soldier of Love is unsurprisingly of a piece with the five previous Sade albums. Songwriting-wise, it could have been released at any point in the band's career. The production only occasionally draws attention to itself-- the dub-esque snare crashes on "Babyfather" are a bit of a surprise-- and you can forget any gauche stabs at currently hip sonic tricks. The idea of singer Sade Adu robo-warbling through Auto-Tune would be laughable if it weren't impossible even to conceive. Even the album's curveball first single, title track "Soldier of Love", with its strident marching band snare rolls, doesn't so much deviate from Sade's core sound as cast it in a new light: What better to emphasize Adu's sense of control than a rhythm with the stiffly regimented forward momentum of a parade ground drill? And if "Soldier of Love" seems "hard," it's only because the surrounding tunes are once again delicate to the point where nuance is all.
The music often gets the short shrift when discussing Sade, because the band is so purposefully unobtrusive. Theirs isn't the kind of minimalism designed to draw attention to itself, merely to capture a mood (usually longing or the gentlest of joy) in as few moves as possible. It's a tricky thing to praise, the kind of competency that's always just a few steps from blandness. Musically, Soldier of Love has plenty of deft touches, like the way "Morning Bird" suggests desolation with a piano motif paired back to as few notes as possible. The band knows its job is to provide as unfussy a backdrop for its singer as possible.
And Adu is one of the odder candidates for modern soul-singer canonization. While she's got one of the warmest tones in modern pop, she'll never, ever lose herself in the moment, let her voice run wild. She always seems to be pulling her emotional punches. So if your interest in modern R&B is limited to dance music-- that lineage that runs from new jack swing through Timbaland and beyond-- you may be surprised to learn that the heartbeat-steady "Skin" is what Sade calls ecstasy. But Adu's voice has to be one of the most calming sounds on planet Earth. Not for everyone, or every mood, but perfect for working out the kinks caused by pop's mile-a-minute barrage of capital-p Pleasure.
That unwavering sense of understatement has also left Sade strangely underrated, especially by listeners who get antsy when an act makes a virtue of restraint. For decades, pop fans have been mistaking reserve for repression, and composure for lack of soul. In 2010, though, things seem to be changing, at least a little. Describing something as "smooth" no longer sets off the same alarms for younger listeners, or younger critics. And Sade's Soldier of Love is kind of a litmus test in that regard. Sade hasn't changed, and Soldier of Love will likely be the year's most relaxing album. But will listeners reared to expect the immediate gratification of rock or rap go for music that hovers tremulously on the edge of both pleasure and pain? | 2010-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | February 12, 2010 | 7 | 3c983d59-7753-413b-8ee0-bd00b949f29b | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Kurt Vile's fourth full-length may also be his best, as it distills classic American guitar music into one singular and sublime vision. | Kurt Vile's fourth full-length may also be his best, as it distills classic American guitar music into one singular and sublime vision. | Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring For My Halo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15174-smoke-ring-for-my-halo/ | Smoke Ring For My Halo | "On tour, Lord of the Flies. Aw, hey, who cares? What's a guuuii-taaaaar?" So begins the sharply titled "On Tour", a spacious, diary-like explosion nestled just a few minutes into Smoke Ring for My Halo, Kurt Vile's fourth and finest full-length to date. Strings buzz, strummed patterns double back on themselves and from up above it all, the Philadelphia-native showers everything with cosmic, harp-like harmonics. It's a song that's both monastic and vast all at once, the kind of curiously rich work that seems like it was crafted by forty longhairs instead of just one. But Vile has gone great lengths in answering his own question in recent years, finding a way to distill thousands of hours spent with classic American guitar music into one very singular and sublime vision. Whether he's channeling the energies of John Fahey or Tom Petty or even Bob Seger, Smoke Ring makes clear that the end result is his alone.
But to listen to Kurt Vile is to hear him in conversation with himself: That can be said of his ultra-wry lyrical observations just as much as the elliptical, brick-by-brick architecture of his songwriting. In the past, though, Vile's words have been written off as mumbled, unintelligible, and listless-- a criticism made all the more reasonable given the crude recording techniques he employed. But 2009's Childish Prodigy, his Matador debut, found Vile wiping off some of the grimy, decidedly "lo-fi" film that had fenced off much of his work up until that point. (Additionally, he brought his sometime touring band, the Violators, into the studio to help fill out those songs that required more brawn. They also appear here.) It was a jump to the relative big leagues that, despite its cleaner approach, offered more in the way of promise than focus. That's not at all the case here. As hinted at by last year's Square Shells EP, a "stepping stone" to where we are now, the sonics and vocals have been spit-polished to shimmer-- every sonorous detail can now be heard in full, and Vile's voice has taken on a new, mountainous presence in the center of each song. The conversation's grown far more engaging.
What we learn is that Kurt Vile has a lot to say. He can be quick, as on the strong-jawed, electric groove of "Puppet to the Man", when he opens, "I bet by now you probably think I'm a puppet to the man. Well I'll tell you right now, you best believe that I am." And he can yank your heart out, as he does a number of times here, perhaps most memorably amid the celestial fingerpicking of "Baby's Arms", when he tries convincing himself that, he'll "never ever, ever be alone." But he's actually always alone here. Vile's lonesome brand of melancholia is still communicated both plainly and unassumingly enough to be missed, but its that sense that he seems to be talking only to himself that lends these songs such magnetic pull. Between the two seismic chords of "Ghost Town" this album's bulldozing climax, Vile wonders aloud, "think I'll never leave my couch again, because when I'm out, I'm away in my mind. Christ was born, I was there. You know me, I'm around. I got friends, hey wait, where was I, well, I am trying." Although he stretches those last two or three notes, it doesn't feel like he's singing. We're eavesdropping on the most private of dialogs.
Sonically and compositionally, Vile allows us the space to do that. He's still cycling between strummers and fingerpicked mazework, but the battery of pedal effects is mostly gone. Rather than stitch loop to loop to loop, Vile's given every marvelous, carefully placed layer all kinds of room to aerate. In the past, "Peeping Tomboy" may have sunk halfway through its bridge, while single "In My Time" probably would have lost its way mid-jam. But here, Vile has acknowledged limits in length for the sake of depth. It makes for a full-blown journey. Though there isn't an earworm like "Freeway"-- that endlessly replayable, interstate love song from Vile's 2008 Constant Hitmaker LP-- Smoke Rings isn't that kind of listen. This feels like a family of songs, one whose complexion and course changes as a whole with every spin. In the closing moments of "Ghost Town", Vile leaves us with, "Raindrops might fall on my head sometimes, but I don't pay 'em any mind. Then again, I guess it ain't always that way." He knows exactly what he's trying to say. | 2011-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 7, 2011 | 8.4 | 3c99447f-bff0-44df-8f31-ed6be5d222b8 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Fernando Almeida and Benke Ferraz of Brazilian psych pop duo Boogarins spent the duration of their debut album lightly teasing every record in their collections. Their new As Plantas Que Curam is packed with melody, wit, and memorably referential music. | Fernando Almeida and Benke Ferraz of Brazilian psych pop duo Boogarins spent the duration of their debut album lightly teasing every record in their collections. Their new As Plantas Que Curam is packed with melody, wit, and memorably referential music. | Boogarins: As Plantas Que Curam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18652-boogarins-as-plantas-que-curam/ | As Plantas Que Curam | When you mock something, it's because you love it, helplessly and truly: No one understands this truth better than teenagers, particularly teenage boys. Fernando Almeida and Benke Ferraz of Boogarins were in high school when they recorded their debut, and they spend its duration lightly teasing every record in their collections, reproducing it note-perfect faithfully while tweaking its nose. Every stumbling drum fill, fuzz blurt, vocal affectation, and slightly detuned guitar chord on As Plantas Que Curam is the sound of two boys punching psych-pop in the arm, tipping its chair back with their feet because they're mad they can't stop thinking about it.
Their spirit remind you of another breakout 2013 band with a goofy name: The currently-beleaguered, possibly-shipwrecked Foxygen, whose still-great We Are The 21 Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic did a similar pirouette between mockery, pastiche, and loving tribute. Like Foxygen, the kids in Boogarins have spent several years in thrall to the sounds of 50-year-old records, and they have also self-recorded their efforts, paying close attention to how they might achieve the just-right abraded sounds.
That they assembled an album that sounds this good while working in their parent's basements says a lot about their talent. They have good taste in other people's records, but they also have the innate musical smarts to pull similar sounds out of their own: Boogarins is rich, heavy, and sonorous, the guitar tones sensually warm and the vocals and drums sent through several treatments to blur them and lift them off the ground. On "Eu Vou", the vocals swim through liquid silence, tiny rippling mouth pops and a faraway synth the vocal track's only distant companions. It might be their tribute to Marble Index-era Nico; it channels a similar empty vastness.
Almeida and Ferraz are Brazilian, and it is impossible to listen to the album' opening track, from its title of "Lucifernandis" to its gonzo, slightly out-of-time opening riff and not think "Os Mutantes." That group's gently antic spirit, and their secret sweet-tooth genius with pop melodies, presides over Boogarins like a loony-uncle figure who won't ever quite leave the garage. There are a million other little touches of songwriterly wit and grace on the album, imported from other sources: the quote of the Kinks' "Lazy Old Sun" that strings together "Hoje Aprendi de Verdade", the lift of what appears to be the guitar line for Wilco's "I'll Fight" on "Doce." Almeida and Ferraz know good melodies when they hear them.
Even when they borrow material, though, they use the quotes like jumping-off points, self-imposed challenges to craft their own memorable songs around them. Their ear for melody is much stronger and more sophisticated than most bands their age—the sleepy guitar line winding through "Erre" has been restarting itself endlessly in my mind ever since I heard it. Even their one-minute-long, doodled sound experiments, like "Canção Perdida", float by on a pretty melody. There is a sense that the classic-rock heritage they are wading around in is a big, thrilling game to them, each song a Sudoku puzzle for their songwriting. There is a goofy, loose feel to As Plantas Que Curam, but it's a feint. Almeida and Ferraz aren't goofs; they're connoisseurs. | 2013-11-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-11-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Other Music | November 14, 2013 | 7.1 | 3c9a7bc6-33a8-44ea-9248-02d127d3efb6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Brighton-based singer’s second album exquisitely recreates the sound of early ’70s AOR, with songs that go straight to the despondent heart. | The Brighton-based singer’s second album exquisitely recreates the sound of early ’70s AOR, with songs that go straight to the despondent heart. | Holly Macve: Not the Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holly-macve-not-the-girl/ | Not the Girl | Holly Macve’s second album is like the bobbly touch of your favorite sweater when you're feeling down: warm, comforting and organically familiar, a sensation of melancholic succor that bypasses logic for emotional instinct. There is nothing particularly new about Not the Girl, the new album from the Brighton, England-based singer; its influences—Bobbie Gentry, Carole King and Mazzy Star—are comfortingly well worn. But Macve wields familiar tools with compassion and a deft musical touch, crafting an album that calls back to the golden Valium bubble of late ’60s/early ’70s pop in the lineage of Tapestry, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” or sad Abba. Its message may be impossibly glum, yet its construction is improbably comforting.
“Daddy’s Gone”, Not the Girl’s centerpiece and stand-out track, reinvigorates well-worn motifs. Its title raises the time-honored creative theme of parental abandon, and the song kicks off with the “Be My Baby” beat, a musical trope too often wheeled out as a signifier of pop grandeur. But, in an act of canny songwriting, Macve subverts expectations by establishing a message of apparent ambivalence—“I never needed him like I should have done/There was nothing to let go of, there was nothing to keep hold of”—only for the sadness to creep in quietly via a series of nagging doubts: “Everything’s fine, everything’s alright /But I just can’t help but wonder what it would have been like.” Delivered in Macve’s broody, world-weary voice, these devastating lines culminate in a teary masterpiece.
Macve’s classically-inclined songwriting and deathless voice were present on her 2017 debut, Golden Eagle, a promising album of bluegrass balladry that never quite escaped its influences. What elevates Not The Girl is its production, which adds sweeping violins, swaggering rock backbeat, noir-inflected electric guitar and the nebulous glide of a pedal steel to Macve’s already potent songs, infusing them with variety and depth. “Little Lonely Heart” and its follow-up “Sweet Marie” are not that distinct melodically (both feature solemn verses leading into swooping choruses), but their productions pull them in entirely different directions. The former is a tainted cotton-candy waltz of violins and brushed drums, while the latter is a darkly dramatic work of heavy guitars and offsetting drones.
Though her musical nostalgia is generally rewarding, there are moments on Not The Girl when Macve’s reverence for rock classicism goes a bit too far. There’s the rather obvious reference to “heaven’s door” on “Eye of the Storm,” which lies in the song’s lyrics, unchallenged, like a ponderous callback to Bob Dylan’s classic songwriting. But Macve doesn’t always take the obvious route: “Daddy’s Gone” ends with a smart left-turn; its melancholy swoon of echoing guitars and sparse piano chords mutate into a classic rock and roll chug, and the insistent piano rhythm that drives the song to climax brings to mind the Velvet Underground’s narcotic urgency.
To dislike Not The Girl for being indebted to the past is like hating summer rain for being wet. Holly Macve is a master of immaculate pop finesse, who shows exquisite control over a certain strand of musical history, with songs that go straight to the wretched heart. | 2021-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Modern Sky | May 24, 2021 | 7.2 | 3c9af80c-a66a-4064-8c8a-27d69396cfeb | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
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 Stevie Wonder’s sprawling, misunderstood double album about the interconnections of ecology and the black experience. | 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 Stevie Wonder’s sprawling, misunderstood double album about the interconnections of ecology and the black experience. | Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stevie-wonder-stevie-wonders-journey-through-the-secret-life-of-plants/ | Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants | A journalist might have found themselves one autumn morning in 1976 eating a luxurious breakfast at Essex House before boarding a private jet to a farmhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, to have a first-listen to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life. Wonder himself introduced the album, decked out in a cream-colored cowboy suit and hat, with a leather gun belt whose holsters were festooned with the cover art and the message “#1 WITH A BULLET.” Universally beloved, it shipped gold, entered the charts at No. 1, and stayed there until January of 1977.
When a journalist could next chat with Wonder, it was nearly three years later. They could just take the 2 train uptown to the New York Botanical Garden, where critics were instead served vegetarian fare as they listened to another double album, the follow-up to his magnum opus. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was years in the making, a soundtrack based on Walon Green’s documentary based on the bestselling book about how plants can be lie-detector tests, how the fern in your house reacts to your emotions, and how mustard seeds can communicate with distant galaxies.
October 1979 was a particularly auspicious month for double albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and the Who’s Quadrophenia soundtrack (Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Clash’s London Calling would soon follow). Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts its first week but quickly plummeted. After Wonder collected 12 Grammys in a four-year span, Secret Life of Plants only garnered one measly nomination. An incredibly ambitious tour—boasting over 60 musicians, singers, sound crew, staff, a computer to synchronize his synthesizers, a screen projecting scenes from the film, and a recording truck—hemorrhaged money and was truncated to six dates. Stevie couldn’t even sell out his hometown of Detroit.
Motown Record executives and fans alike did not know where to begin this Journey and critics were merciless. “May Be His Worst Yet,” read one headline. “More than being awful pieces of music, [they] reek of automation and transmit no sincerity,” went a review. Rolling Stone likened it to Karo syrup and called it “a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals,” while Robert Christgau equated it to “[an] anonymous Hollywood hack at their worst...ardently schmaltzy instead of depressingly schlocky.” The Village Voice equated it to “the painful awkwardness of a barely literate sidewalk sermon.”
It’s a reversal of fortune without equal in pop music. In nearly any appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s profound run of music, Secret Life of Plants serves as a page break, a bookend, the arid valley after the vertiginous peak of the beloved Songs in the Key of Life. In almost every assessment, it marks the end of the greatest run in pop music history. “If Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer,” critic Jack Hamilton said when Slate ran their “Wonder Week” feature, “Stevie happily composed 90 minutes of largely instrumental music for the soundtrack to a documentary about botany.”
Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, it’s a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse. The best insight into Plants may lie in the original Times review, where, in the midst of meditating on self-indulgence and Wonder’s sentimental mysticism, John Rockwell notes: “He has also managed to make an album that in its own idiosyncratic way may seem an oasis of peace and calm amid the bustle of the rest of the pop-music business.”
When Wonder accepted the challenge of providing a soundtrack for the documentary, even he was surprised: “I’d always figured if I did one it would be for a film that raised society’s consciousness about black people.” Originally, the film was to use a soundtrack made in part from plants with Wonder contributing “Tree” for the end of the picture. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film, but producer Michael Braun asked Wonder to instead score the entire film. So Wonder would go in with a four-track recorder and headphones. In the left channel was Braun explaining what was happening on-screen while engineer Gary Olazbal would count down the number of frames in the sequence in his right, leaving Wonder to sketch out the score.
Six studios would ultimately be used. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.
Its scope is difficult to convey, not just because a blind musician provided a soundtrack for a film that he himself could not see. Wonder probably saw about as much of the film as the general populace did, as The Secret Life of Plants never got a wide release in theaters and was never put out on VHS, DVD, or made available on streaming services. The opening movement of “Earth’s Creation” is ludicrously bombastic all on its own, full of Phantom of the Opera-style high-frequency shredding and chord-bludgeoning. With the film though, it pairs perfectly with intensely dramatic images of spuming lava, crashing tsunami waves, flapping seaweed, and dancing plankton. The first side of the album remains wildly uneven, but how else to convey the Godlike act of creation without being by turns chaotic, messy, lovely, whimsical, and a little cruel?
“The First Garden”—with its lullaby chimes, sampled bird songs and crickets, acoustic bass, and harmonica line (all played by Wonder)—provides the underlying motif of The Secret Life of Plants and it works magically with the time-lapse images of sprouting acorns, spores, and new shoots. And while “Voyage to India” might seem willfully exotic on the album, mixing together themes that appear later into an array of wineglass drones, symphonic strings, and sitar, it works with the film and its introduction of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian polymath and botanist. Later on, Wonder folds in a Japanese children’s choir and a crackling duo of African kora and djembe drum.
It’s nearly 15 minutes into the album before Stevie Wonder’s voice appears, telling the story of both Bose and George Washington Carver on the plaintive “Same Old Story.” It scans as the first of many songs overtly about plants, as well as one of Wonder’s most forced biographical efforts. But the stories of Bose and Carver are far more painful than that. Bose was an Indian subject of the Queen, his work discovering the electrical nature of plants largely ignored by the Royal Society in London during his time. Across the ocean, the slave-born botanist Carver struggled most of his life to rise to the descriptor of “Black Leonardo.” But as brown- and black-skinned men—“Born of slaves who died,” as Wonder puts it—their genius was discounted and dismissed outright in white society. There’s a tactile resignation in the chorus: “It’s that same old story again.”
In exploring the neglected, ignored, seemingly inhuman aspects that society affixes to the plant kingdom, Wonder finds resonance between his botanical subject matter and the black experience. “A Seed’s a Star” states in its first line: “We’re a people black as is your night/Born to spread Amma’s eternal light.” Reaching back to the Dogon tribe of Africa and their worship of the distant star Sirius B, also referred to as “Po Tolo,” that name in their language signifies at once the immensity of that heavenly body as well as the smallest seed, a paradox that encompasses the interconnectedness of all life.
Stevie introduces many voices other than his own. Children’s voices and overheard conversations hover at the periphery of several songs. Wonder deepens the dimensions of the album with these intimate, everyday sounds, drawing correlations to childhood, memories, and the connections between people, not just between plants. It suggests that the album could seemingly arise out of anyone’s daily life. While the book and film could be esoteric, Wonder insisted that the album was in part about down-to-earth black life and love, telling The Washington Post that year that this music “comes just from my life.” Perhaps that’s why he had his ex-wife, Syreeta Wright, come to lend her soft vocals to the indelible piano ballad, “Come Back as a Flower,” wishing to spread the sweetness of love and envisioning “that with everything I was one.”
Human as it can be, The Secret Life of Plants is big and wide enough to be decidedly other, too, as when Wonder warps his platinum voice with a wide array of electronics. There’s the Brainfeeder funk of “Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug,” maybe the closest he ever got to the sound of his contemporary, George Clinton. And then there’s the femme falsetto he adopts to sing as Pan for one of Journey’s sweet delights, “Power Flower.” A woozy, low-key gem in the Stevie Wonder songbook (check the stretched taffy of his coos-and-drums solo 3:30 into the song) and one of Janet Jackson’s favorites, Wonder utilizes his synths to make himself sound something other than human.
That strange, neutered, warbling, alien voice that arises on the astonishing “Race Babbling” is as visionary a sound as anything Stevie ever created. It’s a techno odyssey that resembles the likes of Carl Craig and Juan Atkins and the hazy, ethereal feel of Solange’s When I Get Home (she explicitly credited this album’s influence on her own approach). In the context of the film’s collage of sped-up urban scenes, it even anticipates Philip Glass’ groundbreaking score for another nature documentary, Koyaanisqatsi. Unfurling, clenching, spiraling, and mutating across its nine minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and approaches the sort of gender destabilization of something like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. Wonder’s voice morphs and merges with the timbres of trumpet and saxophone (his manically high-pitched vocal hook is a freakish delight), and later blurs into the harmonies of Josie James until it’s hard to parse who is who. It’s a disorienting effect in more ways than one, a queering of the biggest African-American male pop star of the era that’s still without precedent.
Rather than attempt to carry on with Key of Life’s trajectory and his own heritage, Stevie had the rare cache to wander down every path, in effect making Motown his own private press label. No longer rooted to the traditions of soul, gospel or the sound of Motown that he built his legacy upon, Wonder literally branched out, reaching upward towards an undetermined new destination, exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Tamla | August 4, 2019 | 7.7 | 3c9ba895-e41d-470f-80b2-5f67bac0ac5f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Influential label's latest 2xCD comp mixes tracks from Ricardo Villalobos, Melchior Productions, and Shackleton into two hours of vibrant techno. | Influential label's latest 2xCD comp mixes tracks from Ricardo Villalobos, Melchior Productions, and Shackleton into two hours of vibrant techno. | Various Artists: Superlongevity 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15056-superlongevity-5/ | Superlongevity 5 | The Berlin-based Perlon label is one of the titans of the last decade of electronic music, but if their name doesn't ring out like Kompakt or Warp (or Hyperdub), it's mostly because they don't want it to. The label has a strictly-for-aficionados air about it, not least because their idea of how to present a big release constitutes "releasing a CD version" (the label's wares are often vinyl-only and they mostly stay away from digital). As of this writing, the label's website is still a giant Flash animation alerting you that Perlon.com is "Opening Imminently." Breath: bated.
Perlon's Superlongevity series has served as a clearinghouse for the label in the past, often collecting bushels of their 12"-only singles. The middle volumes can stand tall next to Kompakt's Total 3 and Total 4 as essential documents of 2000s techno-- specifically minimal, the hypnotic, spare house offshoot that dominated DJ decks and established Germany as the center of the electronic music world. Perlon's relative obscurity is due partly as well to prolonged silences from some of its bigger artists: Ricardo Villalobos, Melchior Productions, and STL have all quieted down or moved their releases elsewhere. (Shackleton's Three EPs was the label's last release to gain any traction outside dance circles.) So Superlongevity 5 represents a pretty substantial release for the label, not just because it revives a dormant brand name, but because it offers new music from the artists above as well as from standbys like Baby Ford, Kalabrese, and Shackleton.
Keeping to form, Superlongevity 5 is offered as a mix of new or unreleased material spread across two CDs (a limited seven-record vinyl box set was also made available). As a mix, it differs substantially from a stone-skipping DJ set: the tracks are presented in large chunks, usually between five and six minutes, which not only gives each track plenty of room to breathe and develop but also obviates the need to hear "full" versions for all but the compulsive. Always the slightly sillier cousin to the starker Kompakt, Perlon has only gotten wilier since their heyday. Superlongevity 5 is bursting with weird mantras ("Just being tape!" from Matt John's "The Tapedeckers"), tropical horns (Kalabrese's "The 2010 Kitchen Session"), and rubbery rhythms (everything, really). Dandy Jack's lounge disco "Show You My Tent" actually chuckles at itself throughout (or at me?). San Proper's "Lady Cop" is a funky noir that features samples of dialogue from "The Wire"'s beloved Kima Greggs.
Coming for the headliners-- Villalobos, Shackleton, and Melchior arguably have the most cachet here-- is a mistake. Superlongevity 5 is a place where everyone wilds out; at times it feels like a group of goofball college buddies meeting up years later. Matthew Dear takes his Jabberjaw moniker out of mothballs; "Pop Bottle" features sampled baby nonsense and someone shouting "I need help!" Label co-founder Zip teams with Sammy Dee on their Pantytec project and offer the detuned, jazzy "Zwölvis".
Nothing here settles too heavily. Zip mixes an imposing 28 tracks of carbonated oddities into two hours of vibrant techno. When it's through, it's hard not to compare Perlon's stubborn vinyl adherence and low visibility to the colorful, clever music of its artists. But this is the context in which Perlon has always thrived: mixed among friends and peers. It's techno music for techno fans, but it never makes the mistake of being too serious or exclusive. | 2011-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Perlon | February 2, 2011 | 7.8 | 3c9cac07-7af8-4ac7-8a3d-43ae87131f80 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
In the latest soundtrack from his long partnership with director Hayao Miyazaki, the composer pares down to a minimalist palette that reflects the film’s nostalgic mood. | In the latest soundtrack from his long partnership with director Hayao Miyazaki, the composer pares down to a minimalist palette that reflects the film’s nostalgic mood. | Joe Hisaishi: The Boy and the Heron (Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-hisaishi-the-boy-and-the-heron-original-soundtrack/ | The Boy and the Heron (Original Soundtrack) | It’s impossible to consider composer Joe Hisaishi without also thinking of his lifelong collaborator, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. Their creative partnership began with 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film that would lead to the inception of the legendary Studio Ghibli, and they have gone on to make nearly a dozen films together. Miyazaki is known for magical realist narratives that effortlessly blend the fantastical with the everyday, and Hisaishi has created a diverse body of work to evoke the filmmaker’s imagined worlds. He complements the fast-paced thrills of Princess Mononoke with booming war anthems and conjures the sleepy seaside feeling of Kiki’s Delivery Service with gentle, breezy waltzes.
For nearly 30 years, Miyazaki turned out films at a steady pace, working intensely for two years at a time and taking the next two to recuperate. Then, following 2013’s The Wind Rises, he announced his retirement—something he’d done in the past, but this time it seemed like he meant it. Inevitably, several years later, he announced that he’d begun work on a new film, The Boy and the Heron. The longer gap between productions brought changes to Miyazaki’s workflow. Where the director was once deeply involved in the process of creating music for his films, energetically pointing to storyboards as Hishaishi composed, this time he summoned his friend to the studio only once the film was almost done. After viewing the nearly completed feature, sans dialogue, Hisaishi received no instruction from the director. “I just leave it up to you,” Miyazaki said.
Hisaishi chose restraint. He had done everything for Ghibli from the otherworldly electronics of Nausicaä to the triumphant symphonic sweeps of My Neighbor Totoro, but he had never explored his first musical love: classical minimalism. Inspired by artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, he abandoned past productions’ grandiose orchestrations in favor of piano and spare accompaniment. This intimate change, Hisaishi said recently, “would be a chance for me to move myself close to what Miyazaki had intended.”
Heron is structured as two distinct chapters, and Hisaishi’s score mirrors its narrative arc. The film’s first hour, which depicts post-World War II Japan as Miyazaki remembers it, is primarily backed by Hisaishi’s piano and sparse arrangements. He plays with a stately grace on “White Wall” as the opening scenes unfold, bringing to mind the gentle lilt of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. When tension builds between the young boy and the titular gray heron, strings build to a sudden crest and fall away just as quickly. “A Feather in the Dusk” conveys mounting anxiety and temporary relief as man and beast lock in a standoff. The plucky strings of “Feather Fletching” bring a moment of levity before the oppressive threnody “A Trap” propels the action to its climactic turning point.
As the film transitions to its second act, the music opens up along with the scope of Miyazaki’s fantasy world. On “Ark,” Hisaishi adds wobbly pitched percussion to communicate the liveliness of the heron’s domain, while “Warawara” uses synthesized voices to underscore the whimsy of an eye-catching set piece. The main theme, “Ask Me Why,” is the strongest example of the way Hisaishi builds up musical motifs. The tender ballad—originally composed as a birthday gift for Miyazaki—appears on three occasions, accumulating momentum with each reappearance. By the time credits are ready to roll, the lightly accompanied piano composition has transformed into a celebratory orchestral swell, punctuating the decisive moment the protagonist gains his resolve.
The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s most personal work. It’s an unusually vulnerable window into the filmmaker’s life, featuring abstracted depictions of himself, his closest friend, and his late mentor at Studio Ghibli. Though his decades-long friendship with Hisaishi isn’t visible in the film, the score communicates it clearly. “What is most important to me is to compose music,” Hisaishi said in an interview. “The most important thing in life to Mr. Miyazaki is to draw pictures. We are both focused on those most important things in our lives.” Hisaishi pays respect to Miyazaki’s vision by creating his leanest work to date, giving those pictures plenty of room to move. | 2024-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Studio Ghibli | January 27, 2024 | 7.8 | 3c9deb89-3e9b-4ae2-93cf-abc511ca4db2 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Having taken a pleasurable detour toward grinding synth pop on his 2011 releases Bermuda Drain and Time's Arrow, with Through the Window, Dominick Fernow convincingly throws himself to the growling hounds of techno. | Having taken a pleasurable detour toward grinding synth pop on his 2011 releases Bermuda Drain and Time's Arrow, with Through the Window, Dominick Fernow convincingly throws himself to the growling hounds of techno. | Prurient: Through the Window | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17665-prurient-through-the-window/ | Through the Window | The path from black metal to techno via noise is so well-travelled these days that you could, if you were feeling melodramatic, call it an exodus. It's a trip the now L.A.-based Dominick Fernow has been prolifically and prophetically plugging away at for well over a decade, carving out a reputation for ferociously uncompromising sonics with an inquisitive air. Having taken a pleasurable detour toward grinding synth pop on his 2011 releases Bermuda Drain and Time's Arrow, with Through the Window, Fernow convincingly throws himself to the growling hounds of techno.
Through The Window is an overtly theatrical body of work even by the standards of the worlds it straddles: the high camp of metal, the existential roar of noise, and techno's ritualism. Its three tracks even function like the three acts of the archetypal quest tale, spanning the journey, the obstacle, and the reward. "Through the Window" sets the scene for Prurient's techno rebirth before "Terracotta Spine" issues a blood-curdling screech of noisy resistance, which we're gratefully delivered from by the still-ominous yet tonally triumphant "You Show Great Spirit": our reward for endurance though, of course, there's joy to be found in the enduring itself. That final act builds seductively in waves, a delicious drowning that leaves the sharp tang of aluminum on the lips. While each track could be enjoyed on its own merits, the three tracks need one another, requiring the other's context and contrast.
Fernow's command of texture is in full, swaggering flow throughout. Underneath the pummeling rhythms of "Through the Window" lies a sea of writhing life-- adrenaline-laden breathing, static clicks, the prickling of erect hairs-- while, later, in the final moments of "You Show Great Spirit", we're left with the chip-chip-chink of metal against metal, fragments dropping to a stone floor. These are loose ends, sure, but all the more intriguing for it. There's a similar approach to melody too. It comes and goes, weaving in and out with a gently shifting intricacy yet refuses to submit to convention.
Unlike the aforementioned Time's Arrow and Bermuda Drain, which featured foregrounded vocals (somewhat controversially to noise purists), Fernow's voice drops to a barely discernible, deathly whisper on Through the Window. "Big things grow much bigger/ And need bigger things inside them," he intones archly, which could be read as a clue to his own evolution, and that of the wider noise scene. When sonics themselves have lost their power to shock and excite-- or when we are too comfortable with the old ways of feeling uncomfortable-- we look elsewhere to revive the sensation. Little wonder contemporary techno's diametric binding of ritualistic rhythms and elastic form appealed.
"Noise used to be a place that was devoid of expectations," Fernow told Tiny Mix Tapes in 2011. "But there are people who have been working 24 hours a day to make it into a genre of music like any other with a set of rules and regulations, which to me is the antithesis of noise ideology. So I have no problems with not being categorized as such, because that word has come to mean the opposite of what it should." Some 15 years on from his first Prurient album, it is thrilling to still hear the vigor in his searching; in his questioning of restrictions and extending of freedoms. This gripping chapter in his exploration might not quite be his definitive statement, but then definitive has never been of interest to Fernow. | 2013-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Blackest Ever Black | February 26, 2013 | 7.4 | 3ca48dad-f90c-4cdd-95c8-31572bef56e8 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
The second album from the Brooklyn synth-pop revivalists explores a broader emotional palette while hitting familiar pleasure points. | The second album from the Brooklyn synth-pop revivalists explores a broader emotional palette while hitting familiar pleasure points. | Nation of Language: A Way Forward | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nation-of-language-a-way-forward/ | A Way Forward | As of last year’s Introduction, Presence, the Jersey-to-Brooklyn synth-pop trio Nation of Language seemed engineered for a certain type of indie fan. Singer Ian Devaney sounded uncannily comfortable in a familiar register of pure melancholy, murmuring self-indulgent sweet nothings with the brassy ice of the best New Romantics: Start with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, add one part Robert Smith, two parts Depeche Mode, stir in Kraftwerk-flavored sprinkles. On their latest album, A Way Forward, Nation of Language start to shed some of the trappings of synth-pop comfort food, foregrounding their melodic elasticity and narrative charm to explore a broader emotional palette than the formal polish of their debut.
Throughout A Way Forward, the band’s renewed focus on the low-end teases a groovier sound. It offers a subtle reminder that these art-school Brooklynites might have equally fond memories of 2000s indie-dance artists like Cut Copy, Bloc Party, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as their ’80s luminaries. “Every day we’re circling, never closing in on what we want,” Devaney sings on “Across That Fine Line,” with a gently ascending groove that skates across a cool synthesizer background. The Strokes loom large here in particular, not just in the timbre of the drum machine and asymmetrical riffs, but also in the lyrics, which manage a near-Casablancas level of slickness.
Other songs, according to the band, explicitly draw from ’70s synth auteurs like Laurie Spiegel and Cluster. Some of these experiments hit harder than others, but all indicate a genuine willingness to push beyond revivalist repetition. A song like “Former Self” works in a way that the weepy “Wounds of Love” doesn’t quite: The synth arpeggios pair more explicitly with the stoic reflexivity of lyrics like “My former self says I could ask for more.” At their best, these tracks make the band’s connection to Kraftwerk something more than a sonic affinity—classics like “The Hall of Mirrors” on 1977’s Trans-Europe Express draw on the same ghostly, existential lens that Nation of Language is mining on their own robo-cabaret excursions. However, the band also comes up against the emotional limitations of early synth pop’s chunky retro gloss, which smothers some moments of genuine compositional panache. Such is the outcome of the grand piano sentimentality on a song like “Miranda,” which aims for Simple Minds but lands somewhere closer to Styx.
In moments like these, Nation of Language suggest a level of emotional breadth that is occasionally belied by coloring within the lines. Perfunctory anti-capitalism bop “The Grey Commute” and neurotic autocritique “This Fractured Mind,” while undeniably inspired, hit the same pleasure centers that Nation of Language have been targeting for a few years now, bolstered only by Devaney’s slightly more idiosyncratic vocal chops. The band’s decision to expand their swagger and invest in more complex synth work pushes them to new territory, and the most remarkable digressions from their comfort zone point towards a future beyond pastiche—but it feels like this is a half-step, not a full leap.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | PIAS | November 17, 2021 | 7 | 3cace4f9-a89e-411a-9c9b-e0778338da85 | Austin Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-brown/ | |
Bombay Bicycle Club's latest So Long, See You Tomorrow is an often dazzling, euphoric electronic-pop record where the band has decided to depart from their jangly indie pop roots. | Bombay Bicycle Club's latest So Long, See You Tomorrow is an often dazzling, euphoric electronic-pop record where the band has decided to depart from their jangly indie pop roots. | Bombay Bicycle Club: So Long, See You Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18862-bombay-bicycle-club-so-long-see-you-tomorrow/ | So Long, See You Tomorrow | It’s inappropriate to talk about Bombay Bicycle Club’s “evolution," since that word assumes some kind of logical progression. Between 2009 and 2011, the London group released three albums—one as an affable post-punk-pop Arctic Vampires hybrid, another as a “quiet is the new loud” retread and, on the surprisingly vigorous, Ben H. Allen-helmed A Different Kind of Fix, a third that was sleek and streamlined Urban Outfitters mixtape filler. It secured them a sizable fanbase and not much respect as a rock band: it’s hard to get taken seriously when your first big break involves winning a Battle of the Bands, and even as their music improved significantly, this was often credited to their producers. But that all happened in the span of two years, about six months less than it took just to make their fourth LP. Another radical change and a wonder of cosmetic surgery, So Long, See You Tomorrow is an often dazzling, euphoric electronic-pop record where Bombay Bicycle Club have decided they don’t want to be seen as a rock band anyway.
Who knew that Bombay Bicycle Club's ultimate destiny would involve finally figuring out a way where TNGHT and the greatest hits of Alexandra Patsavas can coexist? On a musical level, it’s pretty much what most upstart “indie rock” (read: synth-pop) acts are trying in vain to suss out—how to make syncable, meet-cute songs conversant in maximalist, omnivorous R&B and hip-hop production. Compared to damn near every band trying to do the same thing, Bombay Bicycle Club are exceedingly well-prepared, having started as a hooky, if indistinct pop band and learning about crowd-pleasing electronic production by playing actual festivals. They’re operating with a broad scope and an eagerness to please, so every time they go overboard with the ProTools, it’s in the service of adding fundamental pleasures of melody or rhythm rather than dull atmosphere. The band recorded and produced So Long in their own studio, and wisely enlisted Mark Rankin as an engineer and mixer—he worked on the most recent Queens of the Stone Age and AlunaGeorge albums and that’s adequate preparation for band who likely asked him, “help us sound like both.”
In particular, first single “Carry Me” and opener “Overdone” show Bombay Bicycle Club getting newly aggressive, where they just want to express their joy in discovering different forms of sonic expression. The pummeling drum track of “Overdone” would’ve been ear-turning enough, but the title becomes a wink as the band piles on battling countermelodies, percussive synths, staggered drops and octave-shifted guitars. Meanwhile, “Carry Me” boasts the closest thing to a guitar riff, but it sounds more like a trombone over an impossibly jerky, inhuman rhythm, imagining Hidden-era These New Puritans as flower children rather than warmongers.
As fun as it is to hear Bombay Bicycle Club get all RoboCop, surrounding Steadman’s all-too-human vocals with rock ‘em, sock ‘em machinery, they’re even better at demonstrating how these bold new sounds can augment their charming, heart-on-sleeve wimpiness. The crucial thing here is that Steadman wants to show you what he’s learned from pop radio, not merely how much he likes Aaliyah. The marching band percussion lent to “It’s Alright Now” shows a band that’s smart about their pilfering from pop and R&B—they probably love Destiny’s Child’s “Lose My Breath” and decided to take the parts that could best compliment their burst-and-bloom, gushing hooks, while “Home By Now” teases with a bit of radio killa production before shifting towards a gorgeous, crushed-out heavenly duet between Steadman and Lucy Rose.
All of this happens within the first six songs and perhaps if Bombay Bicycle Club was more judicious about its pacing, So Long might be a total triumph instead of a very good LP adhering to a pop albums' tendency to frontload. Almost everything at least has its charms, though the cacophony of layered drums that eventually brings “Eyes Off You” and the title track to a climax feel like knowing apologies for the pretty, if a bit limpid piano balladry that precedes it. So Long’s dizzying array of percussion and instrumentation was meant to be a sonic passport of sorts, as Steadman spent the past couple of years globetrotting around Asia and Africa, but “Feel” is the one time where things get a little too Eat, Pray, Love.
Even still, it's hard to use Bombay Bicycle Club's enthusiasm against them. Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn. As with everything on So Long, it’s really the thought that counts and the hook on “Feel” lets you know what they’re trying to get at—“just one feeling,” repeated over and over. | 2014-02-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | February 4, 2014 | 7.7 | 3cb5274c-08b1-43dd-9a73-a39a3756176e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
null | I. Exposition: Time and a Word
Odds are you already have an opinion on Yes, and since you're reading this website, there's a good chance that your view of them isn't a favorable one. Despite the fact that a formidable portion of the music we love (anyone from Radiohead and Super Furry Animals to Hella) is directly influenced by Yes and their prog-rock peers, we tend to look at the early 70s through punk's distorting lens, and that lens shows us images of dinosaur muso wankers lumbering from stadium to stadium with comically oversized light shows and Victorian clothing (never mind | Yes: The Yes Album / Fragile / Close to the Edge / Tales from Topographic Oceans / Relayer / Going for the One / Tormato / Drama / 90125 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11869-the-yes-album-fragile-close-to-the-edge-tales-from-topographic-oceans-relayer-going-for-the-one-tormato-drama-90125/ | The Yes Album / Fragile / Close to the Edge / Tales from Topographic Oceans / Relayer / Going for the One / Tormato / Drama / 90125 | I. Exposition: Time and a Word
Odds are you already have an opinion on Yes, and since you're reading this website, there's a good chance that your view of them isn't a favorable one. Despite the fact that a formidable portion of the music we love (anyone from Radiohead and Super Furry Animals to Hella) is directly influenced by Yes and their prog-rock peers, we tend to look at the early 70s through punk's distorting lens, and that lens shows us images of dinosaur muso wankers lumbering from stadium to stadium with comically oversized light shows and Victorian clothing (never mind that punk itself became a mill of convention and spectacle in only a few short years).
Of course, there's quite a nugget of truth to that image; on-again-off-again Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman staging his Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table album as an ice show alone demonstrates how out of hand things could get when the budget was too big and judgment was lacking. When you move beyond the pageantry and pomp, though, you're left with some pretty interesting music. Yes were the most popular and longest lasting of the quartet of bands that defined progressive rock in the early 70s. Genesis, ELP, and King Crimson were the others, and listening back to them, it's easy to see why Yes won out. For all their lengthy songs, virtuoso musicianship and softheaded philosophical musings, Yes were fundamentally approachable, even radio-friendly. Try listening to "Roundabout" or "I've Seen All Good People" without getting them stuck in your head. Of course, there's a certain ridiculousness to the grandiose Roger Dean artwork, would-be poetic lyrics (random sample: "Battleships, confide in me and tell me where you are!"), and multi-part suite naming formulas-- but then, that's part of why Yes got listened to in the first place.
Nevertheless, a past penchant for prog is a major skeleton in the closet for a lot of people, but as Rhino reissues the first eleven Yes studio albums, it feels as good a time as any to let the bones rattle in public. Feel free to forgo the band's first two albums with guitarist Peter Banks (we did), records that feature a band still finding its feet and occasionally hitting on something great, like "Astral Traveler", but often stumbling.
II. The Albums: The Solid Time of Change
Yes had already released two albums, but 1971's The Yes Album was the record that put them on American FM radio and into millions of living rooms around the world. With guitarist Steve Howe on board for the first time, it also established the classic Yes sound, where essentially any instrument could take the lead at any time. Drummer Bill Bruford and bassist Chris Squire (the only member to appear on every Yes album) were a tight and angular, almost funky rhythm section by this point, while Howe's slashing guitar parts fit nicely into that mix. The two-part "I've Seen All Good People" is one of the band's best singles, while Howe's slow, spacey guitar build at the end of "Starship Trooper" is one of the great Yes moments. Howe also shows off his acoustic chops on "The Clap", a rollicking rag that bears little resemblance to anything else in the band's catalog (the original album version was a live recording, the reissue also appends a slightly crisper studio version). This album showcases Yes at their most concise, and is probably the best starting point.
1972's Fragile introduced Yes' highest-powered line-up, as the silver-cape wearing, 12-keyboard-hauling Rick Wakeman replaced the mediocre Tony Kaye. But the question is, what was "fragile?" Their egos? The battle between the perfectly balanced arrangements-- as on classic rock radio staples "Roundabout" and "Long Distance Runaround"-- and each virtuoso's need to grandstand, vented through five solo interludes (most memorably Steve Howe's "Mood for a Day")? All that firepower could have ruined the band, yet on Fragile, they put songcraft firmly over indulgence. The intriguing middle section of "South Side of the Sky" might've blown up like a laser light show had they recorded it in the late 70s, and even though the band had a knack for crescendos and flighty, eagle-centric lyrics, they were more likely to get high through chugging guitars and Bruford's precise drumwork than outright bombast. "Heart of the Sunrise" still holds up as a deftly constructed proto math-rock epic, and Jon Anderson would never sing a lyric as plainly as "I feel lost in the city" again.
The band's crowning achievement, Close to the Edge, contains only three lengthy "songs," but each one is an absolute epic. The title track dominates all of side one of the original LP, rushing in with a burbling, dissonant intro, Howe's jagged riffing and Wakeman's fluttering fingers building a dense, overpowering texture. Squire's bass in the majestic "Total Mass Retain" section could liquefy solid tissue at the right volume; it's almost impossible to believe it hasn't been made into a hip-hop sample yet. Most importantly, the title track has a sense of coherent progression, tension and release that most of the band's other side-filling epics lack. "And You and I" is arguably the ten most gorgeous minutes Yes ever laid to tape. It begins humbly, with twelve-string acoustic guitar, rises through mellotron-soaked crescendos, and then does it all again, building to a huge closing climax called "Apocalypse", essentially laying out the blueprint for Sigur Rós. That leaves "Siberian Khatru" to close out the album with nine minutes of hook-stuffed organ and guitar interplay, understated harmony vocals and more of Squire's chunky, front-and-center bass playing. This record is an essential document of just how powerful prog could be when focused.
It couldn't last. On 1974's Tales from Topographic Oceans, they simply took things too far. Anderson's lyrics (supposedly based on Japanese "shastrick" scriptures, wtf?) are pure astral hogwash, and even worse, they're printed so you can read them. The band seems totally disinterested in communicating musically, and each of the four twenty-minute compositions (that's right, a double LP with four songs on it) squanders its few inspired moments. "The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)" is the most promising, opening with what should be an exhilarating passage of rushing keyboards topped by a blistering solo from Howe, but new drummer Alan White can't keep up the intensity like Bruford (by then defected to King Crimson) had, and it collapses under its own weight. Likewise, a pretty choral verse intervenes toward the end of "The Remembering (High the Memory)", but comes too late to salvage the listless keyboard washes and lame noodling. It was exactly this type of excess that had fans saying "no" to Yes for the first time in their career. Even Wakeman was so disgusted that he quit after the album's completion.
Possibly to recoup their rep, Yes quickly made for the studio in the hopes of turning out another masterwork. However, in spite of the flashy musicianship that made Relayer a fan-favorite, the record is all but unlistenable to the rest of the world. Noisy and grotesque, it betrays some of the most atrocious taste of any Yes record. Temporary member Patrick Moraz shows up with his own bank of keyboards that sound even more tweaked than Wakeman's, and he pushes the band to garish new soundworlds; "Gates of Delirium" is a kind of nightmare children's book story about men (or elves? hobbits??) going to war. The band recreates the battle in a jaw-droppingly over-the-top instrumental that fades into a longing, eerie finale. That's followed by "Soundchaser", a vomit stew of jarring rhythms and bastardized funk climaxing with Anderson's infamous "cha cha cha" section. And "To Be Over" would've been pretty if they hadn't jammed it with instrumentals. Someone once told me that this is what they should have blasted at Noriega to drive him out of that nunnery; casual listeners turned their backs on this mess, while fans that could appreciate its dissonant, virtuosic extremes hid under their headphones and just kept basking.
After an extended hiatus following Relayer, Yes regrouped for 1977's Going for the One, bringing grand old ham Wakeman back to record an album of much fewer pretensions than anything they'd done since Fragile. Of course, that really meant only one 15-minute epic instead of four, but right down to the non-Roger Dean cover art, it signaled a new start for Yes. The title track, with Howe's great steel-guitar opening riff, did indeed reveal a band that still knew how to rock even if lyrics like, "Get the idea cross around the track, underneath the flank of a thoroughbred racing chaser," exposed their hippie-mystic trappings. However, Squire's "Parallels" and the Beatlesque "Wonderous Stories" forecast the band's 80s rebirth as pop stars. Furthermore, the album's lone concession to headier days and side-length symphonettes, "Awaken", was a fairly amazing example of how Yes could fuse new age sentiments and reverb-drenched tinker-bell soliloquies, yet somehow come out unscathed. Sure, it went on a bit too long, but in retrospect, it was a fine last gasp for a band concerned with "progress" in the 70s.
Perhaps inspired by the fact they didn't all hate each other after finishing Going for the One, Yes took the same lineup in for 1978's Tormato. However, even as streamlined song-lengths and a couple of attempts at pop crossover appeared, the band sounded desperate rather than invigorated. Primary offenders on an album among the most hated of all hated Yes records include the flat, rigid "Don't Kill the Whale", in which Wakeman managed to insert ridiculously baroque synth stylings into a would-be Greenpeace disco protest anthem, while Anderson pleads with us to "dig it." And whomever thought it was a good idea to invite Anderson's kid to twee it up on "Circus of Heaven" should probably have been fired on the spot. Oh right: it was Anderson, and he left right after this record. It's too bad, because relatively aggressive, driving numbers like "Future Times" and the fusion-tinged "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" weren't bad, even if the album's lack of punch throughout sucked the life out of most of the music.
With Anderson's and Wakemen's defections, Yes recognized that they could no longer continue in the same lackluster manner as on Tormato. At the end of the 1970s, the band finally felt ready to embrace a new era. A Buggles era! Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, possessing neat new synthesizers and actual MTV experience, joined for 1980's Drama, and paved the way for a decade of Yes at their most pop-friendly. The transition, however, was not an easy one. For starters, longtime fans weren't fooled for a minute by Horn's vocals, which didn't quite hit those high notes as easily as Anderson. Also, songs like "White Car" and "Into the Lens" just didn't sound like Yes, rather like Yes-influenced, overblown AOR fare. However, "Machine Messiah", "Does It Really Happen?" and especially the new-wave-meets-prog of "Tempus Fugit" were better than anything the band had done in years and, doubtlessly due to the Buggle-presence, sparkled with state-of-the-art production sheen. Of course, this lineup would disband shortly after the record, but lessons were learned and the next time Yes graced the world with an album, the world listened.
On Drama, Horn had simply attempted to emulate Jon Anderson, but by the time he produced 1983's 90125 for the (yet again) newly reformed and reconfigured Yes, he had become the synth-pop genius behind ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Zang Tuum Tumb label, and gets no small share of credit for reinventing Yes as a hit 80s pop band. The extensive drum and horn samples on "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and the glowing a capella on "Leave It" turned those songs into radio hits; but just when you think they've sold out, they write elaborate pop songs like "It Can Happen" or characteristically bizarre lyrics like, "This world I like/ We architects of life," or, "Your heart is inside your head." This line-up formed practically from scratch, bringing Squire and White back together with Anderson and the long-lost Tony Kaye; Trevor Rabin-- the only one who didn't bleach his hair-- completed the band with an 80s hard rock guitar sound that's the most dated thing about the record. Still, if you can handle the style-disconnect, 90125's songcraft makes it one of their tightest records.
III. Recapitulation: High the Memory
Yes may have disappeared commercially after 90125, but they're still active today in varying lineups, and have a full nine subsequent studio albums that Rhino has wisely chosen not to reissue. The much-delayed follow-up to 90125, Big Generator, was a dud of spectacular proportions (in all seriousness: 0.0), and few of their subsequent releases are much better. For all intents and purposes, the band that tours now is something of a traveling history lesson, so it'll be interesting to see how hindsight treats them in another twenty or so years, when they've finally hung it up and rested on their laurels. For now, don't surround yourself with yourself and move on back a square. Yes would love to meet you. | 2004-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 8, 2004 | 8.1 | 3cb61f67-da6e-4bd1-92d0-11552d95f37c | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Viet Cong's impressive full-length debut consists of dark, simmering post-punk. Their mission is not altogether different from that of Women, the short-lived and sorely missed indie deconstructionists in which half of Viet Cong previously served. | Viet Cong's impressive full-length debut consists of dark, simmering post-punk. Their mission is not altogether different from that of Women, the short-lived and sorely missed indie deconstructionists in which half of Viet Cong previously served. | Viet Cong: Viet Cong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20086-viet-cong/ | Viet Cong | Starting a band is easy; an actual career in indie rock is a much tougher proposition these days. Financial success seems harder and harder to come by and saying something new within the context of guitar based music might be even more difficult. Maybe you get to express yourself, but what if you think music should aspire to something other than being a vehicle for your feelings? You’ll probably just get compared to bands who ceased to exist two decades ago. Viet Cong have clearly thought about this a lot in their brief period of existence, most of which has been spent relentlessly touring in support of last year’s introductory EP "Cassette". But don’t let the deadpan song titles like "Pointless Experience" and "March of Progress" throw you: the Calgary band’s self-titled debut projects unbridled passion, creativity, and possibilities while speaking in a presumably dead language of post-punk.
Their mission is not altogether different from that of Women, the short-lived and sorely missed indie deconstructionists in which half of Viet Cong previously served. Women existed as a band that knew its impending expiration date, operating in secrecy and driven by entropy. Their albums felt like black boxes, reports of turbulence and panic captured on grimy tape in Chad VanGaalen’s basement. They were statues during live performances, with the exception of their final show, which ended in a violent fist fight. If not necessarily a pop band on "**Cassette", Viet Cong initially distinguished themselves with more extroverted, less intriguing impulses—there were snappy radio rock songs and Bauhaus covers amongst the typically stonefaced gestures, things that would lead you to believe that the death of guitarist Chris Reimer at 26 might have dissuaded them from trying to carry the same heft of Women.
A year later, Viet Cong are a cohesive and confident unit that goes even further into inaccessibility than Women, confrontational in a way that reaches out to an audience rather than turning inward. The sound that begins Viet Cong most closely resembles someone trying to punch their way out of a coffin. The record ends with an 11-minute song called "Death". It is also a self-titled debut from a band named Viet Cong. So whether you’re familiar with their past or you’re just here because you’ve been hearing things about this band, everyone is getting the same first impression: That of a very serious rock record that won’t offer too many cuddly points of self-disclosure. So, in the moments where Viet Cong do reveal themselves, you might want to pay attention.
Two important instances occur during "March of Progress", Viet Cong’s astonishing six-minute centerpiece. Matt Flegel could be mocking the speculative nature of music criticism and predictable, tiresome process of "proving" one’s self in dazed, layered harmony: "Your reputation is preceding you/ We’re all sufficiently impressed/ And this incessant march of progress/ Can guarantee our sure success." It proves Viet Cong are self-aware, have a subzero sense of humor to match their environs, and recognize those two qualities might combine to give the impression that this isn’t music that is meant to be enjoyed. That’s when the double-time beat kicks in, and Viet Cong make a sprightly, major-key sprint towards a dead halt. There’s mastery of form, instrumental prowess, and on a record that thrives on unpredictability, "March of Progress" elicits the most unexpected response—that was fun.
Viet Cong is full of knowing moments and reference points—the fact that it could pass for Guided by Voices ("Continental Shelf"), Wolf Parade ("Silhouettes"), and This Heat (take your pick) is enough of an accomplishment. It is not exactly a meta work, however. Viet Cong are just a band that’s unusually obsessed with the mechanics and process of their given trade. While their ashen sonics and rigid demeanor is liable to have them labeled as post-punk, they’re also industrial in a literal sense. Flegel’s vocals are those of a foreman, authoritative, commanding and prodding. Guitars often sound dissolved in caustic chemicals; instruments contort themselves and interlock to achieve forward momentum. It’s music that works very, very hard to express a perverse hometown pride you often see used to sell spring water or thermal outerwear —you might not want to brave Calgary’s bleak winters, but the way Viet Cong captures its forbidding chill and placid, sprawling beauty sure make it seem like a good place to be a post-punk band.
Most of all, this is a record of exertion, where the physical investment in live performance is meant to stimulate creativity, those demoralizing tours inspiring smarter use of the studio. Viet Cong’s favorite tactic of disorientation is inversion—laying high-register, melodic bass patterns over rhythmic, disassociated six string rubble, EQ’ing percussion so it sounds like a drum machine being run through a guitar amp. And Flegel’s most passionate vocal performances deliver his most disillusioned lyrics. Viet Cong has only seven tracks and more than half don’t pass the five minute mark. Yet all are heavy, ingenious contraptions.
This is also a record of conflict and contrast, in particular, a winter war. The sensations of Viet Cong are specific to being bundled up in the arctic, where one’s body feels suffocating warmth and blistering cold all at once. During "Newspaper Spoons", shrieking guitars morph into woozy synths, the effect is like watching a bloodied hand sink into a bucket of ice. There are many times when Viet Cong reveal psych-pop as their true north—clean guitars chime, harmonies are stacked in odd, almost madrigal-like forms, and Flegel’s lyrics favor surreal imagery of liquid gold, radiated primates and telepathically "bending newspaper spoons." But it’s psychedelia rendered in black and white; after three minutes of vertiginous percussion, a section of stereo-panned, autoharp-like riffs and stoned folk harmonies recall a grayscale Animal Collective ca. Feels. Meanwhile, "Continental Shelf" flips Echo and the Bunnymen’s "big music", attempting to have the sky crash down to earth rather than reaching for it.
These are the kind of pleasures of which Viet Cong is composed; its emotions are otherwise proprietary to Flegel. Viet Cong do not write love songs, their politics are a mystery. They have no commentary on what it means to be alive in 2015. But to hear this kind of commitment to craft, particularly rock music that maintains the vibrancy and tension of four musicians playing instruments in the same room while testing its boundaries, Viet Cong questions what it means to care about the creation of art, if not necessarily its effect on its audience. Most of Viet Cong was written during a brutal tour across what the band described as "shit earth" that tested their resolve and was liable to make the same old question the center of discussion—why do this, again?
Viet Cong is filled with moments that tap into the primal impulses of true post-punk—think of the first time someone puts together a couple of effects pedals and tries to make a guitar sound like something other than a guitar, of falling out with the sonic strictures of punk rock by embracing the philosophical freedom. Towards the end of "March of Progress", Flegel yelps, "What is the difference between love and hate?", and it can be taken as an allusion to the metaphysical conflict at its center; Viet Cong pits the romanticism of a newly enrolled philosophy major against the cynicism of the dropout who still hangs around the library to tell the fresh-faced youngsters it’s all bullshit. The album doesn't settle the argument, it's still as volatile and spirited as it was 30 years ago. The important thing is that people are still willing to have the conversation. | 2015-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / Flemish Eye | January 22, 2015 | 8.5 | 3cb784c7-457f-45fd-b695-cfeb94fda028 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Diplo's globally-minded dancehall fusion project soliders on without Switch and Skerrit Bwoy. This time out, there's a very long list of guests including Ezra Koenig, Wyclef Jean, Santigold, Tyga, Shaggy, Amber Coffman, and many more. | Diplo's globally-minded dancehall fusion project soliders on without Switch and Skerrit Bwoy. This time out, there's a very long list of guests including Ezra Koenig, Wyclef Jean, Santigold, Tyga, Shaggy, Amber Coffman, and many more. | Major Lazer: Free the Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17627-major-lazer-free-the-universe/ | Free the Universe | For the longest time, Diplo’s role as a producer has been steeped in importing, curating, and reconfiguring global dance sounds from favelas to shantytowns to the projects. That approach has been depicted as everything from transcendent, no-borders futurism to an exploitative colonialist ripoff, but most of his fans seem most interested in how much a given track bumps. The critical narrative shifted from Diplo as hipster scavenger to Diplo as arena-ready body-mover on the basis of a pop breakthrough that came through Major Lazer’s “Pon de Floor”. In its original context, it was the centerpiece of an album cross-examined for appropriating dancehall culture and West Indian identity for a dayglo cartoon caricature. Then Beyoncé got ahold of it for “Run the World (Girls)”, Diplo’s name started showing up in the credits of Chris Brown and Snoop Lion albums, the appropriation concerns shifted towards the trap scene, and the authenticity questions gradually quieted down.
There's still something at stake here, however, especially with the delayed, fine-tuned and much-awaited second Major Lazer album finally arriving. At this point, the project name is based more around the elaboration on one producer's vision than a group of familiar collaborators, as Switch and Skerrit Bwoy haven't made the transition from Guns Don't Kill People -- Lazers Do to Free the Universe for the respective reasons of creative differences and religious epiphany. So it's largely Diplo's statement, albeit with a new set of cohorts in Trinidad-born Jillionaire and Black Chiney's Miami-via-Jamaica sound system member Walshy Fire. So Major Lazer's fusion of club music scenes from both Europe and the Caribbean gains a couple new critical sources of firsthand input, and there's more of an opportunity for that sound to be directly informed by artists closer to the source.
The production's by far the strongest link on Free the Universe. Maybe it's not as up-front and audacious as it was on the all-stops overload of Guns Don't Kill People. But it's to-the-point and danceable when it's inclined to aim that way, and most of it's bound to sound commanding through massive stacks of amps. Percussion clatters through on jam-packed snare-clap-kick-hat drum patterns even before the ankle-breaking bass kicks in, while trilling digital chords inevitably steer towards all-caps siren blares. Not all of it's so energetic and frenetic; the foggy, calliope-and-guitar rocksteady underpinnings of "Get Free" and the sweet Studio One haze of "Jessica" calm the proceedings without killing momentum. A few moments feel like gratuitous, instantly-dated trend-grabs, like when the trance-jungle feints of Flux Pavilion collaboration "Jah No Partial" displaces the mood with pro forma arenastep and DROPS THE BASS directly into a puddle of sludge. Yet there's enough here to satisfy the who-cares-crank-that-shit impulse that aptly soundtracks good times with recreational substances.
But there's a different set of problems here -- just look at everybody who shows up with a "ft." attached. Fittingly enough, there are a bunch of tracks featuring dancehall icons ranging from Beenie Man to Shaggy to Johnny Osborne. But there are also sincere, zero-slackness ballads featuring indie stars like Ezra Koenig and Amber Coffman. There is also a guest spot from Peaches. And Wyclef. And a teamup that includes Bruno Mars and Tyga. The biggest digression from the dancehall-indebted singer/toaster lineup on Guns Don't Kill People was Santigold, far from a sore thumb considering her definition-ducking versatility as a singer. This time around, she's the closest there is to a direct link from that last album's indie-electro soundclash to this one's omnidirectional crossover bid. And her voice kicks off what turns out to be a sadly disjointed experience: there's an awkward fake patois on what seems like every other track, and the overstuffed lineup dislodges any hopes of a unified musical statement.
All that there's left to do is examine the components and try to figure out what went haywire. "Wind Up", "Watch Out for This", and "Mashup the Dance" deliver the goods when the likes of Elephant Man, Busy Signal or Ward 21 put in their work and keep the energy levels up. But splitting the difference between dancehall and moombahton doesn't always create a distinct new whole that plays up both genres' bounce-ready qualities. The indie names fare OK, even if they sometimes veer towards caricature -- Coffman's dippy Tarzan yells and Koenig's wobbly attempt at Junior Murvin-gone-lover's rock falsetto on the aforementioned "Get Free" and "Jessica" make them seem a little more arch than they actually mean to be. And a few cuts that stray away from either of those categories turn out laughable: Peaches undercutting an authoritatively cocky Timberlee on the new wavey "Scare Me" by dropping a twerp-twerk verse that tries to make a sex-fluids double-entendre based around WikiLeaks, Wyclef's motivational-poster platitudes trying to pass for a hook on (yes) "Reach for the Stars" (eesh), and Tyga chortling out maybe the most shut-the-fuck-up verse of the year on "Bubble Butt" ("Damn, bitch, talk much?/I don't want interviews/Ha! I'm tryin' ta get into you/then make you my enemy").
All those hitches, gaffes and odd little diversions add up. A no-brainer, easy-to-enjoy production slate gets knocked around by its flaws just enough that even the minor, acquired-taste touches seem like just another bad decision. (I don't know whether the filter that briefly makes Shaggy's voice sound like Meatwad on "Keep Cool" would sound iconoclastic and funny on a better album, rather than just a baffling flash of annoyance on this one, but there's no point wondering now.) If anybody actually expected this to stink before hearing it, even considering the odd assemblage of cameos here, they're probably more cynical than I am. But it's a bringdown that what should've been a more faithful yet adventurous transition into a new phase for Major Lazer winds up sounding like so much less than the sum of its parts. | 2013-04-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian / Mad Decent | April 16, 2013 | 5.7 | 3cbcb3bf-1b51-4a44-91d7-2fcddb57c6b7 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
One of the 20th century's greatest singer/songwriters makes his annual comeback-- this time with two albums, released simultaneously. The Delivery Man is a Southern barnburner with backing band The Imposters; Il Sogno is a classical work based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed by The London Symphony Orchestra. | One of the 20th century's greatest singer/songwriters makes his annual comeback-- this time with two albums, released simultaneously. The Delivery Man is a Southern barnburner with backing band The Imposters; Il Sogno is a classical work based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed by The London Symphony Orchestra. | Elvis Costello / The Imposters: The Delivery Man / Il Sogno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11704-the-delivery-man-with-the-impostersil-sogno/ | The Delivery Man / Il Sogno | Over the past decade and a half, the man who calls himself Elvis Costello has proudly displayed a musical restlessness that borders on promiscuity: In between "proper" albums like Brutal Youth and When I Was Cruel, he has collaborated with an array of musicians whose own releases are rarely shelved in the rock section of your local record store. Often these pairings are one-album stands, as with The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters), Anne Sofie Von Otter (For the Stars), or smoky barroom jazz (North). Only occasionally has Costello allowed a collaboration to blossom into a creative relationship. He's recorded two records with Burt Bacharach (Painted from Memory and The Sweetest Punch, with Bill Frisell), and laid a foundation for continued collaborative songwriting with his wife, Diana Krall.
There is, admittedly, an integrity to this ambitious quest: After more than 25 years, Costello's still trying to rouse some rabble, albeit through different means and towards different ends than on early albums like My Aim Is True and This Year's Model. On one hand, he's obviously following his own muse as he avoids the inevitable standards album that always seems to signals the creative death of aging stars like Rod Stewart and Cyndi Lauper (though he did cover Cole Porter earlier this year on the DeLovely soundtrack), and aside from a few missteps, he's succeeded in crafting a very diverse catalog. On the other, there's a hint of insecurity in Costello's ramblin' ways-- what, in relationship-speak, might be called a fear of commitment.
The Delivery Man presents itself as a proper follow-up to 2002's When I Was Cruel (and its odds-and-ends companion Cruel Smile), as an album in the vein of Almost Blue or King of America. Regardless of its rock sound and the presence of his band, The Imposters, The Delivery Man is more or less just another collaboration-- the particulars of its creation are emphasized over its music. This time, however, Costello's collaborator is a place rather than a person. For The Delivery Man, he and The Imposters traveled to Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, Mississippi-- not just the middle of the Delta but also directly between the birthplace and deathplace of Costello's namesake: Tupelo and Memphis. And though the disc began life as a concept album about a Southern delivery man seducing his female customers, Costello willfully worked away from that idea as the project progressed, and little of those origins remain in the final product, save the album title and the dilapidated truck on the album cover.
Not that Costello has made an album of Delta blues or Sun Studio rockabilly: The Delivery Man is his idea of Southern music, a blend of pedal steel-drenched country and Dusty in Memphis professionalism. But it sounds best when it's at its most casual. The Imposters flex their muscles on barnburners like "Bedlam" and "Needle Time", proving themselves a dynamic band-- fierce but always controlled, musically inventive but never slick. While bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas kick up dust on the opener, "Button My Lip", Steve Nieve sneaks in a piano line from West Side Story, offsetting the rock rhythms with a self-consciously referential melody. Likewise, Costello's guest musicians add a distinctly Southern flair to the proceedings. Emmylou Harris sings on "Nothing Clings Like Ivy" and "Heart-Shaped Bruise", but Costello's best foil is Lucinda Williams, whose throaty, punkish snarl on "There's a Story in Your Voice" is a dynamic match for The Imposters' barroom ruckus, which only underscores how smooth and rehearsed Costello's own vocals sound.
It's clear what The Imposters got out of this sojourn down South-- they sound like they're truly enjoying themselves-- but less so what Costello did. For starters, it sounds like he overpacked for the trip, toting along the polished lyrics and pristine melodies that sound so much more at home in New York. This can make for some dramatic juxtapositions of traditions, as on "Country Darkness", but often, Costello just sounds prissy and uptight in these more relaxed environs. Even his stuttering delivery on "Button My Lip" feels rehearsed and academic, as though he hasn't fully committed himself to the spirit of the endeavor.
If The Delivery Man isn't enough of a departure for Costello, the classical Il Sogno, released simultaneously, at first sounds like perhaps too much of one: It's the score to a ballet adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, commissioned by the Italian troupe Aterballetto and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. With such a highfalutin' pedigree, it could be a parody of rock-star respectability, right down to the self-serious, auratic Deutsche Grammophon album cover and the "Mystery Dance" joke that's hidden in there somewhere. While there's something potentially zany about someone like Costello scoring a ballet, it seems too easy to decry a rock musician's pretensions to serious art. On some level, it makes sense to allow seasoned, adventurous rockers this kind of opportunity.
So maybe it's Costello who's having the last laugh at rock critics who find themselves suddenly out of their element reviewing a "classical" album and who must struggle to form some sort of opinion that reads as more informed than "it sounds like the hunchbacked love child of Copeland and Bernstein robbing Puccini's grave for leftover libretti," or, "It put me to sleep." However, Costello is still Costello (or at least still Declan MacManus), so there are passages that sound more rock- and jazz-informed, like "Oberon and Titania" and "Puck 2". The saxophones and drum sets create a jazzy, North-ern tone that sits comfortably among the more traditional orchestration. While this approach does break the score's airiness with some earthier sounds, it's still a risky decision that doesn't entirely pay off, and sometimes carries a whiff of novelty. Ultimately, on Il Sogno-- as on The Delivery Man-- Costello seems like a musical tourist, sending out snapshot postcards from exotic locales but never making his home there. | 2004-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 26, 2004 | 6.8 | 3cc31265-8e34-4728-983f-d6d4f9801af3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his latest project, the Chicago MC deftly explores self-affirmation and paper-chasing without really finding the tension between the two. | On his latest project, the Chicago MC deftly explores self-affirmation and paper-chasing without really finding the tension between the two. | Taylor Bennett: Be Yourself EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-bennett-be-yourself-ep/ | Be Yourself EP | Thanks to the gene pool, Taylor Bennett shares the same sort of amiable brogue and sing-song lyrical style as his brother, Chance the Rapper. But the Chicago MC seems intent on furrowing his own independent path rather than riding on Chance’s now very long coattails. Bennett runs his own label, Tay Bennett Entertainment, which hosts his new six-song EP, Be Yourself—an album, incidentally, about finding your own way. Bennett’s coming out as bisexual directly influenced the concept behind the project, as he explained during an interview with Time: “Something that I want for not just children but all my listeners—no matter if you’re gay, straight, white, black, rich or poor—is understanding the power of being yourself. As children, very early we’re pressured into automatically being a part of groups.”
The cover art to Be Yourself reinforces this way of thinking. The photograph shows the rapper slouched on a stool wearing nothing more than a pair of tight rainbow-patterned swimming trunks, a party hat, and a morose look on his face. Its message echoes that of the title track: Be happy in your own body and at peace with your own soul. Over poppy, piano-based production that just about avoids coming off as twee, Bennett raps about growing up in a poor environment, embracing a spirited work ethic, and succeeding in music to the point where he’s comfortable enough to present his true self and sexuality to the world.
“It’s Taylor Bennett your superhero!/The answer’s been spoken/I told ’em be yourself fast/You gotta scream to the masses,” he proclaims jubilantly. Then comes the punchline: “And niggas still call me faggot/But bitch my shit looking fabulous.” It’s a philosophy Bennett repeats a few lines later: “I’m an outstanding Afro-American bisexual having shit/Change your dreams if they average.” Striking back against prejudice is a righteous move, but the way Bennett does it champions the same pursuit of fame and capitalism as cure-alls that we’ve heard within hip-hop for decades. Making money and buying material possessions—“having shit”—will gloss over your flaws and insecurities. It’s a conformist idea that betrays the grander notions of embracing your true self.
This tension between the Taylor Bennett who wants to be naked and honest and the Taylor Bennett who endorses paper-chasing should be the central conflict of Be Yourself. Instead, the next three tracks largely forget about exploring any duality in favor of rolling out underwhelming get-the-girl tracks. “Baby girl you looking bad as fuck/But your friends want me,” he spits on “Better Than You Ever Been,” which features a showed-up Young Thug. By this point, the EP’s production has committed to a slick and saccharine funk style that plays it safe when a little sonic grit and dirt would go a long way towards deepening the impact of these songs.
The most revealing moment—“Everything I Can’t Handle”—comes closest to exploring the contradiction at the heart of Be Yourself. The song begins as a shopping list of fanciful desires: skyscrapers, mink sweaters, a personal Gucci connection. Switching up the tone of his voice, Bennett begins to question his desires, rooting their value back to a single-parent upbringing on Chicago’s South Side. He even has flashbacks where he wonders if he’d still be alive had a stray bullet “found its way.”
But out of this soul-searching emerges the same familiar conservative hip-hop life stance: “I want everything that’s granted/I want money, I want cameras.” It’s a longer-winded way of saying what JAY-Z told us all those years ago: “The streets school us to spend our money foolish.” Life’s ups and downs, hits and near-misses, acceptances and rejections all come down to having things. This infuses Be Yourself with an unsatisfying aftertaste: Despite seeming to urge us to embrace our individuality, it ultimately wants to be part of a similar group after all. | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Tay Bennett Entertainment | July 25, 2018 | 6.2 | 3cc4937e-6de9-4bb5-b575-34b354b2ef41 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The band’s third full-length is an easier and more melodic entry into their spindly post-punk. Here, their defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. | The band’s third full-length is an easier and more melodic entry into their spindly post-punk. Here, their defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. | Preoccupations: New Material | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/preoccupations-new-material/ | New Material | Preoccupations walk a high wire. On the one hand, the Canadian post-punk quartet, who originally took their name from the brutal insurgent group the Viet Cong and only changed it three years into their career after extended protests, tend to come off casually apolitical. “We’re just playing music,” frontman Matt Flegel said regarding the name’s backlash in a 2016 interview. On the other hand, their music often concerns the political sphere and the toll it takes on the psyche. They’ve written songs about the deadening effects of mass media and songs satirizing capitalism’s ethos of progress at any cost. Theirs is dark, paranoid music; Flegel sings as if he’s keeping one eye trained over his shoulder while the world around him drops deeper into chaos.
The contrast between the hapless stance they take in interviews and the tough subjects they tackle sincerely in their lyrics can make Preoccupations feel like two bands at once: one that doesn’t want to be taken too seriously, and one that does. That paradox has lent them an aura of poisoned irony, an air they manage to shake off, somewhat, with their third album, New Material. In a statement, Flegel called the LP an “ode [to] depression and self-sabotage, and looking inward at yourself with extreme hatred.” All of the above are states in which contradictory statements can simultaneously seem true (you have friends but not real friends; drugs are both killing you and keeping you alive), and could also explain how wounded, serious art that urgently wants to be heard comes wrapped up in a name like New Material.
Written collaboratively in the studio, the record furthers the band’s dual focus on moody, industrial atmospheres, and warmly melodic vocal lines. While on their first two albums—2015’s Viet Cong and 2016’s Preoccupations—Flegel often sang against the grain of each song, as if he were competing with the clamor of the instruments, he opts instead to settle into their flow here. On “Doubt” and “Disarray,” his voice sways along with his bandmate Scott Munro’s synth chords, like he’s being carried by a slow, hot breeze. Even as he continues to sing about hopelessness and disillusionment (”It’s easy to see why everything you’ve ever been told is a lie,” he murmurs on “Disarray”), the new arrangements supply an easier entry point into Preoccupations’ music than their earlier works. The band’s defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. That may mean that New Material lacks the punch of their feisty debut, but it also lends these songs a soothing quality. They’re so heavy they’ve curled up in a ball on the ground.
In addition to adopting a new melodic strategy, Flegel also seems to have narrowed the focus of his lyrics. While Viet Cong and Preoccupations saddled their songs with abstract, worldly woes, *New Material’*s angst is more interpersonal; the lyric sheet is dotted with the word “you” and one of the record’s high points, “Manipulation,” even sees Flegel crying out in romantic torment: “Please don’t remember me like I’ll always remember you,” he sings. The plea comes at the song’s energetic climax, after a towering drum roll, which only deepens its abjection. Instead of asking to be held fondly in someone’s memory, Flegel begs to be forgotten, an artful rendering of the depressive desire to disappear completely.
By staging the album on the battleground of the self, and the self’s relationship to other people instead of society writ large, Preoccupations have made their most intimate album to date. Flegel still goes into a few word-salad tailspins—the “information overdose” and “uneven ratios under a microscope” at the end of “Antidote” sound like someone obliquely complaining about Twitter—but the soft production of his voice, and its holistic integration into the rest of the band’s sound, makes him sound more earnest than before. With New Material, Preoccupations wrestle with a conundrum that’s plagued many denizens of this data-numbed era: how to let yourself be vulnerable when all you want to do is make a joke of your suffering. | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | March 22, 2018 | 7.6 | 3cc718e4-7ff3-4fc8-8608-b5cc42befa51 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
After the critical and commercial disappointment of the adventurous Beautiful Garbage, Shirley Manson and co. return to their more basic, early template. | After the critical and commercial disappointment of the adventurous Beautiful Garbage, Shirley Manson and co. return to their more basic, early template. | Garbage: Bleed Like Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3397-bleed-like-me/ | Bleed Like Me | On the band's first three albums, Garbage snuck an enlivened libertinism into the mainstream through surprisingly melodic dance-rock songs that referenced, among other things, bondage and unisex bathrooms to comment on larger issues of control, desire, love, and even personal freedoms. Alongside Polly Jean Harvey, Garbage singer Shirley Manson was one of the most complicated and charismatic women in 90s mainstream rock, balancing power and pliability, mercurial sexuality and fears and emotions.
After the commercial disappointment of the musically adventurous Beautiful Garbage, they sound like they're trying very hard to reassert themselves into our collective consciousness. Despite being billed as a guitar album, Bleed Like Me more or less reworks their successful Version 2.0 template, combining slick studio elements with ostensibly live-band instrumentation. This is, however, no comeback: The album is full of big rock guitars anchored to big rock effects, but it somehow never manages either to sound big enough or to rock hard enough.
Part of the problem is the band itself, which consists of producers Butch Vig, Doug "Duke" Erikson, and Steve Marker. Vig's drums are, as usual, pretty much redundant, buried with the bass beneath layers of programmed beats. And all the guitars are so fastidiously sculpted that they don't even sound like guitars anymore. In the past, those previous two sentences would have been mere descriptions rather than complaints, but on Bleed Like Me, the rhythms rarely lock into a formidable groove and too often the guitars-that-don't-sound-like-guitars don't sound like anything else very interesting either.
Despite its hammering riffs, "Bad Boyfriend", about a boyfriend who's bad but in a good way, is a surprisingly timid opener, and even Dave Grohl's drums can't liven up it up. Singing ostensibly in character, the most moxie Manson can muster is "I've got something special for my bad boyfriend." "Why Don't You Come Over" and "Right Between the Eyes" take shots at haters and critics, sounding defensive and distant even as Manson belts "Stay alive my love" Bono-style over a strangled guitar line. Whatever conflict she's describing remains merely an abstract notion, never an immediate reality.
That sonic blandness makes Manson the focus of Bleed Like Me, and while her vocals retain their forceful determination, her lyrics sound uninspired and awkward. "True love is like gold/ There's not enough to go around," she sings on "Sex Is Not the Enemy", a generic post-Janetgate call to arms. "But then there's god and doesn't god love everyone?" It's doubtful even the chorus-- "A revolution is the solution"-- will change anyone's mind or even preach to the perverted. The album's nadir, "Sex Is Not the Enemy" is a surprisingly naïve track, unimaginative and silly, and it works better as a parody of a protest song than as an actual protest song.
The disappointments color even some of the album's better moments. The first single, "Why Do You Love Me", is heavy and frenetic with a feverishly stomping chorus, but the verses and the whispered bridge recall Tragic Kingdom-era "Just a Girl" power and the song, despite its undeniable energy, ends up sounding dated. Likewise, Manson's catchy chorus and dancing-queen delivery on "Boys Wanna Fight" are marred by the song's predictable gender roles; with a little of the androgyny of "Androgyny", the song could easily fade into Franz Ferdinand's "Michael" on any dancefloor mix.
The saving grace of Bleed Like Me may be the band's deep knowledge of rock history, which they have gleefully plundered in the past and which gives the album its only subversive spark. "Bad Boyfriend" cribs Foreignor's "Hot Blooded" almost note for note, twisting its words into a new meaning. And the propulsive "Run Baby Run"-- the album's best track-- builds off the Crystals' "Da Do Ron Ron", adding an almost playful edge to Manson's dark lyrics.
But it's just not enough. Despite attempts at audacity, Bleed Like Me sounds overly willing to please, which is all the more damning because it so rarely does. | 2005-04-10T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-04-10T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | April 10, 2005 | 4.5 | 3cc74622-3dfd-4195-8fa3-4b04f4d265ba | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Stephan Jenkins puts a modern-rock spin on Bon Iver, Chastity Belt, “Song to the Siren,” and more on this intentionally earnest but unintentionally tragic covers album. | Stephan Jenkins puts a modern-rock spin on Bon Iver, Chastity Belt, “Song to the Siren,” and more on this intentionally earnest but unintentionally tragic covers album. | Third Eye Blind: Thanks for Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/third-eye-blind-thanks-for-everything/ | Thanks for Everything | Third Eye Blind reserve their rendition of Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank” until the end of Thanks for Everything, their intentionally earnest but unintentionally tragic set of seven covers. Justin Vernon’s most exquisite song, the original was a readymade finale, with the arching guitars and mewling vocals of its climax igniting the narrator’s lovesick innocence to fill the sky with phosphorescence. For their faithful take, Third Eye Blind charge from its ruminative core into the coda with cranked amplifiers and walloped drums, turning Vernon’s wistful haze into a melodramatic fit. It’s certainly a conclusive exit. But its position on the tracklist is an implicit acknowledgement of listeners’ morbid curiosity: If you’re going to listen to Thanks for Everything simply to hear what the “Semi-Charmed Life” dude does with a song by the “Skinny Love” guy, Third Eye Blind are going to make you wait, as if you’re sticking around till the end of their set just to hear “Jumper” in the encore. Except the “Blood Bank” cover isn’t worth it.
Thanks for Everything is, at the very least, a noble endeavor. Recorded at scattered tour-stop sessions over the last year, it collects the band’s interpretations of “mostly little-known” songs (as a press release describes them) by the likes of Santigold, Tim Buckley, Chastity Belt, and Queens of the Stone Age. These are songs that inspire singer Stephan Jenkins. What’s more, proceeds go to Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, a band favorite; the EP’s cover is a cover, if you will, of Warhol’s iconic Skulls, splashed with graffiti by stencil-and-spray-paint artist Uncutt. “It’s a visual version of what we’re doing with these artists’ songs... In both cases, I hope it will yield renewed interest in the originals,” Jenkins has said, both aspirationally and condescendingly.
Without exception, Third Eye Blind are out of their league here, trying to render sophisticated and involved songs through the big, blundering vernacular of modern rock. Jenkins’ voice—a brusque, inflexible instrument better suited to declarations and exclamations than to deep questions—is the heart of the problem. During “Blood Bank,” he enunciates each word as if he’s reading from a teleprompter, stripping the song of its wintry intrigue. He can’t play it cool like Chastity Belt’s Julia Shapiro or maintain the mystery Santigold embodies on her recording of “This Isn’t Our Parade.” Happy Diving frontman Matt Berry often sounds lost amid and overpowered by his raging rock band, but Third Eye Blind’s take on “10,” which epitomizes Happy Diving’s aesthetic, always pushes Jenkins above the surface to float inside his own rock halo.
The same curse afflicts his bandmates, who move with the confidence and decisiveness of a polished, professional rock machine. With their surging guitars and meticulous rhythm section, one might say that Third Eye Blind in 2018 have real chops. But they’re tackling idiosyncratic music on Thanks for Everything, and they seem hidebound to 20 years of precedent dictating what their band should be and which standards of production it should uphold. Their quality-control mechanism strips these songs of the character that makes them interesting.
Take Third Eye Blind’s cover of the Babyshambles single “Fuck Forever.” Pete Doherty’s belligerent reflection on the choice between rock’n’roll martyrdom and real-life contentment. The original is an anthem in, well, shambles, with slurred vocals and skeletal drums and a closing kiss-off to the DJs who will “never play this on the radio.” But Third Eye Blind’s slick delivery feels custom made for the FM dial. It’s as if Jenkins is making a case for Doherty the songwriter as something more than a madman. But “Fuck Forever” is Doherty’s gleeful assertion that he doesn’t care; in his quest to sound gigantic, Jenkins gets the meaning all wrong.
These missed messages sound most embarrassing in a cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” a gentle rush of vexing questions. (At the risk of nitpicking, Third Eye Blind even insist it’s called “Song of the Siren.”) The centerpiece of Buckley’s audacious 1970 folk-and-electronics fusion experiment, Starsailor, “Siren” wonders about the doom and destiny inherent in love, about turning yourself over to something that may destroy you. But above a simple acoustic guitar arrangement that imparts none of the original’s oddness, Jenkins sings like he knows the answers, as though he’s solved humanity’s riddles of life and love.
He does the same with “In the Fade,” an irascible Queens of the Stone Age creeper about life’s seemingly endless mix of sadness and madness—a fate that cannot be fought, only endured. When Mark Lanegan delivered the song during one of his sporadic stints in QOTSA, the former Screaming Trees singer seemed to push against that burden with his hulking baritone. But Jenkins and his band sound as though they delight in it, as though misery were a gift. Rather than digging into Lanegan’s soul blues, they dig out until the song’s colossal weight is diminished to a mere wisp.
Jenkins has spent the last quarter-century striving to be more than a hitmaker—to be a misfit making weird but weirdly popular rock. He’s never gotten there. Still, Third Eye Blind’s earliest albums betray genuine art-rock ambitions, with intricate structures and flourishes of dub, post-rock, and even IDM. In more recent years, Jenkins has written candid tunes about the price of fame, his personal failures, and America’s ruinous inequality. (To wit, Third Eye Blind even released a somewhat endearing Black Lives Matter ode in 2016.) On Thanks for Everything, he is shoehorning his voice into the kind of music he wishes he could have made, daydreaming about his career had the major-label system not drained him of his best ideas and then ejected him, like so many of his peers, when his band no longer made financial sense. It is a little heartbreaking, hearing this successful 53-year-old man striving to be anything besides what he has become but getting pinned yet again inside a structure of his own design, unable to make a musical break. At least he has excellent taste. | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mega Collider | August 29, 2018 | 4 | 3ccafbcc-98b5-409f-b0af-8582e7ece5dc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On their latest release, which is two whole albums long, Deer Tick offer an acoustic set and an electric one. The discs both contain a more settled outlook from bandleader John McCauley than usual. | On their latest release, which is two whole albums long, Deer Tick offer an acoustic set and an electric one. The discs both contain a more settled outlook from bandleader John McCauley than usual. | Deer Tick: Deer Tick Vol. 1 / Deer Tick Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deer-tick-deer-tick-vol-1-deer-tick-vol-2/ | Deer Tick Vol. 1 / Deer Tick Vol. 2 | In spirit, Deer Tick aren’t much removed from the perennial weekend warrior bands you can always find at frat parties and local bars in college towns across the country. In fact, that’s always been part of Deer Tick’s charm. For better or worse, the Providence, R.I. quartet has remained about as unpretentious as rock bands come, even as it’s gotten tighter and more seasoned. Over the years, under the leadership of bandleader John McCauley, Deer Tick have been able to delve into acoustic stylings (as well as feedback- and beer-drenched Nirvana covers under the name Deervana) without sacrificing their straightforwardness or their scruff.
There’s something to be said for not trying to be anything other than what you are. But it’s still pretty gutsy of McCauley and company to try and hold an audience’s attention for two whole albums in one shot. With Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Deer Tick Vol. 2, the band releases its first new material in four years via two separate companion discs that differ stylistically but are meant to go together, as their album artwork depicts, like ketchup and mustard. They intended to make a third album (would that have been the relish?), but the fact that they visualize their music as a condiment rack lets you know off the bat that they didn’t get carried away trying to do too much.
At 10 songs apiece, the albums are sorted so that you can easily identify them as “the acoustic one” (Vol. 1) or “the electric one” (Vol. 2). That decision comes as no surprise given that Deer Tick have spent much of their career dumbing themselves down on several levels. And while it makes sense to group the songs that way for the sake of the individual listener’s preference, keeping the two modes separate prevents Deer Tick from delivering what could have been their answer to Wilco’s Being There. To be clear, Deer Tick don’t aspire to the same grandeur as Wilco, but taken as a whole this new body of work certainly isn’t lacking in texture.
Both albums include songs that lean in the direction of the other album. It’s easy to imagine the acoustic number “Card House,” for example, as a blustering electric guitar stomp, its boozy cadence balanced precariously between swagger and stagger—that crucial hinge point, perhaps, where the evening tips over into one drink too many. With its mandolin part locked in a kind of tango with an acoustic guitar on the other side of the stereo field, “Card House” reveals that somewhere along the way Deer Tick crossed over from a millennial version of the Replacements to something far more nimble in spite of themselves.
On the flipside, the electric instrumental “Pulse” features departed keyboard player Robbie Crowell, whose bittersweet piano, organ, and saxophone lines fill the song with a tenderness so complete it requires no vocal to get its feeling across. In the past, Deer Tick extolled the virtues of drinking and drugging to the point where they came across as caricatures, but there was always a sad-clown’s kind of sorrow in McCauley’s voice—even before real life hit him like a ton of bricks, a set of personal woes he channeled into song on the band’s last album, Negativity.
Since then, McCauley cleaned up, got married, and became a father—life changes that actually zapped his motivation to be in a band. Thankfully, he still has a lot to say, and his outlook, though more settled, still exudes the same uncertainty and fragility that, in a sense, rescued Deer Tick from themselves. If he’d never shown us who he really was, Deer Tick’s party schtick would’ve gotten old (if it wasn’t already old from day one). But with Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, McCauley solidifies his status as a modern-day barstool poet. “Somewhere in a fog/Of a million pleasantries/I kept my secret safe inside,” he sings on the acoustic ballad “Sea of Clouds.”
McCauley’s raspy crow often overwhelms the more delicate material, but throughout both albums, the band varies its rhythms and arrangements with surprising agility. “Sloppy,” for instance, re-imagines Nirvana as Southern-fried blues rock, while “Hope Is Big” allows us to picture what Billy Joel might have sounded like had he been born south of the Mason-Dixon line. Which is not to say that Deer Tick pretend to play country. Their music is, in fact, refreshingly devoid of twangy affectation. Apparently, Deer Tick still know who they are as they gently push against their limits. In the face of those limits, Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 never fail to be engaging. | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 14, 2017 | 6.6 | 3ccd07af-756a-48c4-87e6-7a93d72622b3 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
Nick Cave has always played with death. Now, he confronts it. | Nick Cave has always played with death. Now, he confronts it. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Skeleton Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22336-skeleton-tree/ | Skeleton Tree | People die in Nick Cave songs. They get wiped out in floods, zapped in electric chairs, and mowed down en masse in saloon shoot-outs. For Cave, death serves as both a dramatic and rhetorical device—it’s great theater, but it’s also swift justice for those who have done wrong, be it in the eyes of a lover or the Lord. As I once heard him quip in concert: “This next one’s a morality tale… they’re all morality tales, really. It’s what I do.”
But despite amassing a songbook that needs its own morgue, on their 16th album together, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds must contend with something that is not so easily depicted: the sound of mourning. In July 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur—one of his twin sons with wife Susie Bick—died when he accidentally fell from a cliff near the family’s current home in Brighton, England. The writing and recording of Skeleton Tree had commenced before the tragic incident, but the album was completed in its aftermath, and its specter hangs over it like a black fog.
This is a record that exists in the headspace and guts of someone who’s endured an unspeakable, inconsolable trauma. And though the songs are not explicitly about Arthur they are uncannily about coming to terms with loss and the realization that things will never be the same again. As if to reinforce Skeleton Tree’s therapeutic quality, the notoriously taciturn Cave opened the studio door to director Andrew Dominik, who documented the album’s completion—in 3D, no less—for the companion film One More Time With Feeling. It’s almost as if by thrusting himself into the spotlight during his darkest hour, Cave was issuing a form of karmic payback, penance for the pain and reckoning he’s inflicted on so many characters in his songs.
If you try to listen to Skeleton Tree removed from its somber context, the album feels very much like a natural step from 2013’s Push the Sky Away, whose premium on disquieting, ambient textures and wandering-mind lyricism now seems like less like a momentary detour than the gateway into an intriguing new phase for the Bad Seeds. But where that record rallied for show-stopping epics like “Jubilee Street” and “Higgs Boson Blues,” Skeleton Tree’s drones and jitters offer no such moments of release. The skies, seas, and mermaids that previously dominated Cave’s thoughts are still very much present here. But on the opening “Jesus Alone,” he’s wading deeper into the chop, the safety of the shoreline fading further out of view as he gets swept up by pattering drum drifts, humming organs, and swelling orchestration. The song was among the first Cave wrote for the record, yet its opening image—“You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur”—feels unbearably prescient. It isn’t so much about the finality of death as the ambiguity of the afterlife: Cave’s orator welcomes a litany of souls into purgatory, but his stern proclamation—“With my voice, I am calling you”—makes it unclear whether they’ll be redeemed in heaven or damned to hell.
This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done. In one of the album’s most harrowing moments, he closes the bleak, grief-stricken ballad “Girl in Amber” by repeating the words, “Don’t touch me,” as if a consoling hug would only exacerbate the pain. Not every song is infused with such omens, but their restlessness is emblematic of the album’s fraught recording process. By Bad Seeds’ standards, “Rings of Saturn” is practically a chillwave song, its dusty drum loop smothered in a soft-focus synth gauze. But Cave’s numbed, sing-speak delivery is laid bare above the smooth texture—not even a cooing chorus of millennial whoops can rouse him. And as surprising as it is to hear a dogged non-conformist like Cave embrace some au courant pop device, here it functions as a faded reminder of a more carefree time—like how, in our most helpless moments, a sentimental song can turn you into a mess.
“Rings of Saturn” is one of several tracks on Skeleton Tree where Cave sings about or through an enigmatic female character. Like one of those “Sopranos” episodes where Tony is trapped in his dreams, nothing makes sense on the surface, but every hallucinatory image and mysterious gesture is loaded with circuitous significance. The “woman in a yellow dress surrounded by a charm of hummingbirds” awaiting her call to the pearly gates in “Jesus Alone” could very well be the one at the center of “Magneto,” whose quivering atmospherics and panting delivery suggest a goth Astral Weeks. “It was the year I officially became the bride of Jesus,” Cave intones, before blithely revealing, “The urge to kill somebody was basically overwhelming/I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues.” But that prosaic setting is revisited from a different vantage in the parched-throat synth-pop serenade “I Need You,” where the crestfallen narrator sings, “I saw you standing there in the supermarket with your red dress, falling, and your eyes are to the ground,” as if observing a woman he once loved but no longer recognizes in her current distressed state.
And yet even the relentless ache of “I Need You”—the closest Cave has come to actually crying on record—hardly prepares you for a pair of closing tracks that will reduce the most hardened hearts to puddles. “Distant Sky” may initially come on like a simple invitation to escape (“Let us go now, my one true love/Call the gasman, cut the power off!”), but once the divine Danish vocalist Else Torp emerges, the song elevates to a form of secular last rites. Musically, “Distant Sky” is all soothing organ tones and celestial orchestration, but the song’s weightlessness is utterly crushing, as Cave crystallizes the mood of Skeleton Tree in one trembling, devastating line: “They told us our gods would outlive us/But they lied.”
By contrast, the lilting gospel sway of the final title track feels more earthbound. It’s an attempt to step out of the void and reconnect with the waking world while recognizing that grieving doesn’t happen on a standard timeline—you don’t just hole yourself up for three months of weeping and then emerge fully recovered. Grief is a wraith of love that haunts your soul, emerging when you least expect it from the most mundane triggers and surroundings. “I call out, right across the sea,” Cave sings, “but the echo comes back empty.” However, the darkness has at least acquired enough definition for Cave to make out a path forward. The last line Cave sings on the album is “It’s all right now,” less a declaration of closure than an acceptance it may never come. | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bad Seed Ltd. | September 14, 2016 | 9 | 3cd02130-2303-4b7f-9c87-ede7fc79dd41 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Steve Gunn and John Truscinski’s third album of low-key, abstract jams is their most varied and narratively absorbing to date. | Steve Gunn and John Truscinski’s third album of low-key, abstract jams is their most varied and narratively absorbing to date. | Gunn-Truscinski Duo: Bay Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunn-truscinski-duo-bay-head/ | Bay Head | The instrumentals that guitarist Steve Gunn and drummer John Truscinski make together usually start with pretty simple ideas: a couple of chords, a small hook, a solid 4/4 beat. As their music progresses, they play with casual, unhurried confidence. Yet eventually, each song becomes rich and dense, encompassing moods and ideas far more complex than a few string plucks or drum slaps normally can muster.
The duo’s ways of moving from simplicity to complexity are often pretty simple, too. Sometimes it’s a matter of repetition, as Gunn replays his initial notes with increasing intensity and Truscinski ramps up his sturdy rhythm. A few of the tracks on their third album, Bay Head, are masterful exercises in single-minded devotion. Take the one-eyed hypnotism of “Flood and Fire,” which opens with Gunn jangling two chords and Truscinski pounding out a matching beat. As the duo swerves into excited tangents, they never lose sight of their launching points.
There are times, too, when Bay Head’s depth comes from actual musical complexity. Gunn is capable of thick note clusters and nimble runs, especially when he plays acoustic, and Truscinski can reel off polyrhythmic swirls. The pair often intertwines many reference points (damaged blues, modal jazz, Eastern melody, classic rock riffs) so tightly that it’s tough to isolate each strand. This time around, they’re also more interested in abstraction—take the sparkling drone of opener “Road Bells,” or the slow feedback cloud in “EIP”—prioritizing texture over structure.
That sonic variety makes Bay Head the duo’s most narratively interesting record so far. Moving at varied levels of speed and intensity, they concoct a kind of wordless road trip, driving a sonic highway whose surface and surroundings slowly change as the album progresses. On “Seagull for Chuck Berry,” the ride is smooth and gently curvy, with the pair gliding as if caught up in a dream. Bumps appear during “Sugar,” which is slashed with chopped riffs and puncturing beats. The acoustic curls of “Shell” kick up desert dust, while the subtle strains of “Coral” suggest a pit stop at a campfire.
Bay Head’s road journey climbs highest near the end, during the seven-and-a-half minute “Gunter.” Starting with Gunn’s tick-tock strums and escalating notes, the tune constantly ascends, gathering momentum with every bar and beat. At last, his playing expands from raindrops into an ocean, as he spends the last minute-plus of the song swimming in his own feedback. In other hands, this kind of musical star-chasing might sound indulgent, but the simple foundations of Bay Head warrant such diversions. It’s grounded music that’s pointed toward the sky. | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Three Lobed | November 4, 2017 | 7.5 | 3cd4ada5-6e94-41c3-b501-c6f63d487851 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Using their dance music alter ego, former Ava Luna vocalist Becca Kauffman gets more personal and philosophical while maintaining their whimsical sense of humor. | Using their dance music alter ego, former Ava Luna vocalist Becca Kauffman gets more personal and philosophical while maintaining their whimsical sense of humor. | Jennifer Vanilla: Castle in the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jennifer-vanilla-castle-in-the-sky/ | Castle in the Sky | As a vocalist for the cult-favorite Brooklyn group Ava Luna, Becca Kauffman always reveled in their kookiness. From their whoops in “Sears Roebuck M&Ms” to the whimsical spoken-word of “Steve Polyester,” Kauffman’s unpredictable personality helped push the group’s wildest songs over the finish line. Kauffman has further explored this potential under the alter ego Jennifer Vanilla, an alias under which they have made tongue-in-cheek electronic music that parodies the campy advertisements and fitness classes that once dominated pop culture.
On their 2017 compilation This Is Jennifer, the music itself reflected this time period: disco, house, a track built almost entirely from a slo-mo “Heart of Glass” sample. If that collection was a comic pastiche, then 2019’s J.E.N.N.I.F.E.R. EP showed a more serious reverence for dance music—and now their debut album, Castle in the Sky, picks up where the EP left off. “Dancing is an expression of emotion/Often a kind of aspiration/Toward complete physical wellbeing and fulfillment,” they recite breathlessly over a piano-house beat in “Body Music.” With production from longtime collaborator Brian Abelson, who co-produced and co-wrote the album, they push beyond their comfort zone, experimenting with jazzy saxophone solos and genres like dance-punk and R&B.
When Castle in the Sky brings the fun, it’s largely due to Kauffman’s production choices and their vocal inflections. Instead of sanding over the rough edges, they leave these songs just a tad herky-jerky. Synth pads echo lopsidedly; drum machines thwack goofily. They never take anything too seriously, even when they sound like they’re reciting mantras. When they exclaim “We’re going down in the wrong direction!” atop the midnight dancefloor throb of “Take Me for a Ride,” they snarl and over-emphasize their words. “Consider this an invitation/I’ll be your guide,” they sing in a nasal trill before a repeated chorus of “on and on” distorts and bends in every direction.
Over Castle in the Sky’s four-year genesis, Kauffman came to realize they are gender-fluid and nonbinary, and that Jennifer Vanilla has always been an outlet to explore their queer identity. Castle in the Sky’s personal moments feel tethered to this journey, albeit indirectly. “Humility’s Disease,” a janky venture into dance-punk, explores internalized shame and the difficult process of outgrowing it: “Was I built with a born sense of wrongness?” they ask. “Are you rigid, are you open to learning?” On the R&B ballad “Cool Loneliness,” they navigate the dissonance between how they feel on and off stage. In these songs, you can hear Kauffman letting their guard down as the trappings of their persona mostly recede to the background. It’s a compelling glimpse into the internal strife beneath the glossy veneer of the music.
Castle in the Sky is at once Kauffman’s most vulnerable project and their most confident. This self-assurance is clearest on “Jennifer Pastoral,” a track so slapstick that, in lesser hands, it might have been a mess. Instead, Kauffman structures it as a grasp toward utopia, its tropics-infused, brass-flanked shuffle never dimming in catchiness over its five-minute runtime. “I’m a sandman/I’m a night butterfly,” they sing sweetly during the chorus, and sure, it sounds ludicrous. But you just know they mean it. | 2022-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Sinderlyn | August 8, 2022 | 7 | 3cd864c7-6c2f-4c5a-ade4-f5fee499d6c9 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Ghost Stories is unmistakably Coldplay's "breakup album," a subdued work that finds Chris Martin and his band crisply moping through mid-tempo soundscapes and fuzzy electronic touches that have the visceral impact of a down comforter tumbling down a flight of stairs. | Ghost Stories is unmistakably Coldplay's "breakup album," a subdued work that finds Chris Martin and his band crisply moping through mid-tempo soundscapes and fuzzy electronic touches that have the visceral impact of a down comforter tumbling down a flight of stairs. | Coldplay: Ghost Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19344-coldplay-ghost-stories/ | Ghost Stories | "If you could see it, then you'd understand." That glistening anti-koan punctuates the chorus of Coldplay's skyscraping 2005 single "Speed of Sound", and the lyric's profound meaninglessness has doubled as a mission statement for the mega-band's career thus far. They've established a reputation as mainstream rock's koi pond architects, designing music that's deceptively shallow but, if caught at the right moment, shimmeringly beautiful, to the point that you could focus on it for hours.
Impossibly indulgent on a sonic level while retaining the intellectual depth of a cell phone commercial, Coldplay's catalog is largely experiential—a reflecting pool for the hopes, dreams, and heartaches that listeners wish to apply to the music. This pliability has meant that Coldplay can come off as impersonal, a gaseous giant of anonymity in rock music's solar system; nearly 10 years ago, the stultifyingly dense third album X&Y threatened to swallow the band completely, as Coldplay refined the post-post-punk affectations of 2002's A Rush of Blood to the Head until they were left with an immobile monolith.
On the verge of overreaching, Coldplay doubled down with 2008's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, a world-beating document of giddy experimentation and costume-rock bathos that stands as their most thrilling, impressionistic work. Mylo Xyloto followed three years later, which took its predecessor's widescreen template and enlarged it to IMAX-size, indulging in rave-y piano stabs and night-flight flourishes with the color-filled exuberance of a child that can't stop eating crayons.
Mylo Xyloto was further proof that Coldplay are at their best when they embrace their corniest impulses; their sixth album, Ghost Stories, finds them taking a sharp left turn. Preceded by the non-single "Midnight", a watery electro-folk Bon Iver facsimile accompanied with a video reminiscent of an iTunes visualizer, nearly everything about the arrival of Ghost Stories has seemed small: the nine-song tracklist, the spartan, deep-blue angel's-wings cover, the disappointing lack of costumes. The absence of grandiosity signaled to eager fans and sneering bystanders alike that, this time around, something might be a little off.
That something can be traced to Martin's marriage to actress and $600-hand-cream guru Gwyneth Paltrow, which quietly imploded in March of this year. More a separation than an outright divorce, recent court documents revealed that the couple are still living together, and in a 2008 SPIN profile, the only subject that the otherwise affable Martin bristled against discussing was his personal life with Paltrow. As long as the world's known him, Chris Martin has also proved impossible to truly know, so whether his recent familial troubles would seep into his band's latest was anyone's guess.
And yet, Ghost Stories is unmistakably Coldplay's "breakup album," a subdued work that finds Martin and his band crisply moping through mid-tempo soundscapes and fuzzy electronic touches that have the visceral impact of a down comforter tumbling down a flight of stairs. Featuring production from longtime collaborators Daniel Green and Rik Simpson, along with behind-the-boards pro Paul Epworth, drone-techno auteur Jon Hopkins, and Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean, the record is serene and weightless to a fault. Coldplay abandon the musical tourism and extroverted strides of their last few albums and find themselves adrift.
The closest the record comes to a bona fide anthem is the moderately enjoyable "A Sky Full of Stars", a rocket-fueled single on the level of "Clocks" and "Speed of Sound" tainted by Swedish dance producer AVICII's cheap-sounding drum presets and boilerplate synth motifs. "I don't care/ If you tear me apart," Martin wails at the peak of the song's endless chorus, a passionate exclamation that doubles one of the most nakedly personal admissions he's made on record.
Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?". Coldplay's catalog has plenty of examples where Martin's words have failed him, but his diaristic reflections on Ghost Stories are abnormally painful. "Tell me you love me/ If you don't, then lie," he coos on the Spandau Ballet-gone-Disney ballad "True Love"; during the plodding "Another's Arms", he ruminates on lost domestic bliss watching TV with a loved one, "Your body on my body." If the expression of carnal closeness-via-TiVo makes you cringe, imagine how he feels.
"Ink" is the album's most indefensible moment, musically and lyrically, and the song handily snatches the title of Worst Coldplay Song from X&Y's impossibly leaden, fuckin'-magnets stinker "What If". "Got a tattoo/ And the pain's alright," Martin cries while running through a series of love-as-permanence metaphors, over rippling guitar and burbling atmospherics ripped from Phil Collins' Tarzan soundtrack. The last time Coldplay indulged in "rainforest rock," it was Viva La Vida's transcendent, gorgeous "Strawberry Swing", which featured Martin exclaiming beatifically, "It's such a perfect day"; on "Ink", he moves from vine to vine until swinging in solitude at the track's end, exclaiming with a sigh, "All I know is that I love you so/ So much that it hurts."
Fittingly, "Ink" is one of the few tracks on Ghost Stories that leaves a mark, and that's partially due to Martin's lovely-as-ever vocals; when not chronicling his own pain, he occasionally breaks into appealing birdsong, a wordless pitter-patter that marks the chorus of the record's pleasant-enough lead single, "Magic". Otherwise, Ghost Stories is a collection of unmemorable songs from a band that's made enough memories to last a lifetime. Everything sounds pristine—this is a Coldplay album, and instrumentally the band is as exacting as ever—but by the dreary piano-led closer "O", you're left with a series of songs that are fragile, plain, and forgettable.
Conventional wisdom says X&Y is Coldplay's worst album, but amidst that record's shiftless bloat, there were real-deal highlights that hit with blunt impact and have since stood the test of time. Ghost Stories contains no such moments, and thus threatens to rob X&Y of its dubious title. Its intimate nature shares the most kinship with Coldplay's first album, 2000's peerless Parachutes. Twelve years later, that album sounds like the work of a different band, and that's because it is; Coldplay have become one of the biggest acts in the world since their comparatively modest debut, and as a result Ghost Stories' attempts to return to close-mic'd intimacy come across as out-of-touch as Lucille Bluth asking how much a banana costs.
The callback to Parachutes' hushed whispers also means that Ghost Stories is the first time Coldplay has sounded explicitly self-referential. They're a band that's withstood enough comparisons to U2 over the years, and the warmed-over leftovers that have marked Bono and Co.'s last decade as a creative entity are enough to suggest that, if Coldplay continue to head down the path of addressing their own legacy, their best moments are truly behind them. | 2014-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Parlophone | May 20, 2014 | 4.4 | 3cd88717-6ea6-4b36-a932-079069f38df5 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
This 28-track collection of lo-fi home recordings-- many of which have been available on bootlegs for years-- was produced on a reel-to-reel at Drake's parent's estate, recorded on cassette while Drake was studying in Aix En Provence, France, or made in conjunction with other members of the late singer-songwriter's family. | This 28-track collection of lo-fi home recordings-- many of which have been available on bootlegs for years-- was produced on a reel-to-reel at Drake's parent's estate, recorded on cassette while Drake was studying in Aix En Provence, France, or made in conjunction with other members of the late singer-songwriter's family. | Nick Drake: Family Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10391-family-tree/ | Family Tree | In a 1994 interview with Mojo magazine, Nick Drake's longtime producer, Joe Boyd, assured fans that "Everything releasable has been released." Boyd's pledge seems almost laughable now: As Drake's tombstone famously, presciently reads, "Now we rise and we are everywhere."
The bulk of the material on the 28-track Family Tree-- a new collection of lo-fi home recordings produced on a reel-to-reel at Drake's parent's estate, Far Leys, plus eight tracks recorded on cassette while Drake was studying in Aix En Provence, France, one duet with his sister, Gabrielle, and two songs written and performed by his mother, Molly-- has already circulated widely on bootlegs, traded, and cherished by Drake completists, many of whom acquired the cuts by making a pilgrimage to Far Leys and requesting music from Drake's parents, who once welcomed their son's grieving fans.
Even though some of these tracks have been around for years, posthumously publicizing Drake's private home recordings still feels a bit like an ethical landmine-- already, a glut of releases (compilations, unreleased recordings, greatest hits) is marring an otherwise-pristine three LP legacy, and dipping into something as personal and unfinished as home demos can seem a bit opportunistic, vaguely unnecessary, and maybe even a tiny bit cruel: Although his music is eerily ubiquitous in 2007, Nick Drake was a commercial failure in his lifetime, selling only a middling number of records before overdosing in 1974, at age 26.
Still: Compiled by Drake's sister, Gabrielle, produced by his estate manager, Cally, and mixed by beloved engineer John Wood (who also produced Pink Moon, and recorded Drake's first two records), it seems likely that Family Tree was created and realized with the very best intentions. In the liner notes, Gabrielle, addressing her brother in an open-ended letter, is cautious, apologetic: "Up till now, every decision I have taken-- I have been allowed to take-- on your behalf about your music has been guided by what I believe might have met with your approval...But now, I am endorsing the publication of an album that I am not at all sure you would have sanctioned."
Most cuts feel unfinished-- four are clearly sketches, clocking in at under one minute – and nothing here is particularly revelatory, but Family Tree is still worth snatching up if you're interested in hearing how Drake's patented coo-and-strum developed: All tracks pre-date Drake's 1969 debut, Five Leaves Left (early versions of "Way to Blue" and "Day Is Done" both appear here), and it's not difficult to hear the budding folksinger's style build and expand.
Nick and Gabrielle pair up for a cover of traditional cut "All My Trials"; based on a Bahamian lullaby, the cut was an omnipresent protest song in the early 1960s, and its closing couplet-- "All my trials, Lord/ Soon be over"-- is typically read as optimistic, but given the gruesome ending of Nick Drake's story, the line (and Drake's muted delivery) suddenly seems ominous, foreboding. "All My Trials" is arguably the most riveting track here: Drake strums gently, and he and his sister harmonize (in the otherworldly way only siblings can), their voices naturally congruent, curling together, building on shared DNA.
Drake covers a handful of Jackson C. Frank songs ("Here Come The Blues", "Blues Run the Game", "Milk and Honey"), Robin Frederick's "Been Smoking Too Long" (which also appears on Time of No Reply), the traditional "My Baby's So Sweet", Bert Jansch's "Strolling Down the Highway", and Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow is a Long Time", but it's ultimately his own work that shines brightest-- now and, in all likelihood, forever. | 2007-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tsunami | July 12, 2007 | 7.1 | 3cddc183-c590-431d-b639-74ebb0115539 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner's densely layered debut (co-produced with Flying Lotus) mixes the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz | Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner's densely layered debut (co-produced with Flying Lotus) mixes the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz | Thundercat: The Golden Age of Apocalypse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15758-the-golden-age-of-apocalypse/ | The Golden Age of Apocalypse | As far as debut albums go, the The Golden Age of Apocalypse is definitely a head-spinner, precisely the sort of improbable hybrid from an almost-unknown artist that the Brainfeeder crew has come to specialize in over the last couple years. After all, it's not every day that you find a record that simultaneously recalls the laid-back sprawl of Erykah Badu's Return of the Ankh and the bustling mania of Mouse on Mars' Iaora Tahiti, the slick jazz futurism of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and the gentle homespun soul of Bill Withers' Just As I Am. This is the sort of densely layered, expertly played, genre-crossing marvel that could easily turn bloated or excessive, or come off like a display of pure skill with little heart behind it. But Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner seems more interested in using his well-honed chops to turn out sunny (if bogglingly detailed) ear-candy than he is in crafting big statements (despite the album's portentous title).
Co-produced with Brainfeeder major domo (and Thundercat pal) Flying Lotus, Apocalypse has the digital sheen of many FlyLo productions. But Bruner’s experience as an in-demand rock and soul bassist gives the album a live band's freedom of movement, one that's closer to the fusion records that reared him than the sequenced rhythms that have come to define dance music, even at its most out-there. After a silly and nostalgia-inducing sample from the 1980s cartoon that gave Bruner his pseudonym, "Daylight" is the album's true opener, another in Brainfeeder’s line of shouldn't-work-but-does experimental beat confections. It merges the bustling energy of 21st-century left-field electronic music (crunchy mutant techno rhythms, a mix saturated with whimsical sound effects) with the floating-on-a-cloud airiness of 1970s soul (vaporous falsetto vocals, bright-but-wistful melodies). It really does feel like a long lost Mouse on Mars track, as if that most playful of German electronic acts had called up a member of the Soulquarians camp at the same time that Common decided to collaborate with Stereolab.
That's all a bit of bait-and-switch, though. There's no doubt plenty of Brainfeeder's psychedelic and IDM-like attention to sonic detail at various points on Apocalypse, along with nods to the fractured rhythms of London's broken beat scene and the earlier West Coast post-rap experimentation of Stones Throw. But like the latter L.A. pioneers, Thundercat takes avant electronic music's futuristic sound-sculpting and reconnects it with the history of African-American pop. He's particularly smitten with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song. Bruner's not beholden to the days of fusion past, of course. He takes detours into smoothly gliding 80s synth-funk ("Walkin'") and queasy prog ambience ("Mystery Machine [The Golden Age of Apocalypse]"). But still, know that this is more of a jazz album than an electronic music album, and more of a soul album than either.
And it's on the third track, "Fleer Ultra", that Bruner's true loves finally leaps to the fore, because that's the first time the bass really goes bananas. Bruner is undoubtedly what was once called a "musician's musician," a practice-space hound who reveres good playing. He's unashamed of his talent, but he also knows it's better put to use making hooks. And throughout Apocalypse it's Bruner’s exceptionally fluid bass work that ties together the new millennium computer madness and the cuts that feel like they could have been laid down in the analog days of 1974. Even the drowsiest songs here pop with super-animated basslines. His already justly lauded cover of George Duke’s "For Love I Come" turns the tempo of the original down a few notches, letting most the of song play out as an amorphous but silky swirl of electric keyboard and his echo-warped voice-- he makes sure to bring out those bass chops for the climax. As a singer, Bruner is much better than he has to be, considering his musical inventiveness is already plenty attention-grabbing, but while his fluttery, heartsick vocals lend Apocalypse much of its charm and memorability, it's those basslines that are the real earworms.
So this isn't really a song album, at least not in the sense that it’ll give rock or even R&B fans looking for verse-chorus-verse much to chew on. As with FlyLo, it's still best to approach Apocalypse as instrumental head-trip, albeit one that's occasionally got tunes you can hum. But like his fusion heroes, Bruner wants it all: the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz. The fact that he's mostly pulled it off, with a record that's serious in intent while playful in execution, is pretty astounding. | 2011-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | September 2, 2011 | 8.1 | 3cde9f50-559b-4ac4-9e84-c863ef62e90c | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
This dynamic, captivating 1972 performance featuring Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel is the most important shot in the arm to the composer and violinist’s legacy in over a decade. | This dynamic, captivating 1972 performance featuring Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel is the most important shot in the arm to the composer and violinist’s legacy in over a decade. | Tony Conrad: Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23155-ten-years-alive-on-the-infinite-plain/ | Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain | For half a century, Tony Conrad was anonymous by association. The composer, violinist, filmmaker, mathematician, teacher, and playful provocateur at large made essential contributions to half-dozen vital American art movements. Conrad, who died last year, helped organize the principals of the Velvet Underground, a band he named but then declined to join. He made experimental films that challenged the technical and textural boundaries of the form and inspired Andy Warhol, but his diverse enthusiasms and staunch anti-authoritarian ideals virtually sealed his status as a mere cinematic footnote. And as a musician and theorist, he made records and played in projects that helped to jumpstart American musical minimalism, harsh noise, and homespun drone, though his reputation still pales in comparison to those of contemporaries such as La Monte Young and Steve Reich or descendants like Thurston Moore. As many of Conrad’s interests moved from the edge toward the center, he remained for decades on the fringes, an avuncular professor with a wit as sharp as his violin tone and an intriguing past.
But during the last quarter-century, several batches of archival releases, reissues, and performances slowly pulled Conrad from the wings, putting him in front of new audiences and extending the influence of both his sound and spirit. In the early ’90s, Table of the Elements—a sorely missed bastion of avant garde Americana—made a case study of sorts with Conrad, releasing old and new recordings to help launch a revisionist history of experimental music. Table of the Elements smartly positioned Conrad at an intersection of classical music’s high-mindedness and indie rock’s DIY spirit.
This new currency established him as a countercultural antidote, an iconoclast who connected with a new generation in order to pull minimalism out of the concert hall or classroom and into the rock club. He opened for Sunn O))), palled around with Jim O’Rourke, and collaborated on the stage and in the studio with abandon and intensity. Since Conrad’s death after a prolonged battle with prostate cancer, his esteem has grown. He got a Rolling Stone listicle, a long-in-the-works documentary, and even the bold New York Times headline “Tony Conrad Was Such a Good Minimalist, He Was Almost Forgotten.” But the music isn’t finished just yet.
A newly unearthed recording of an audacious but somewhat overlooked Conrad masterwork for a small droning ensemble and black-and-white film, Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, is the most important shot in the arm to Conrad’s legacy to arrive in more than a decade. Recorded at the seminal New York art space the Kitchen in 1972, *Ten Years Alive *backs Conrad’s microtonal arcs of precise violin with a rhythm section of sorts. Laurie Spiegel plunks along on a bass, keeping a barely there beat, while Rhys Chatham plucks a one-stringed instrument Conrad built in a kind of countrified counterpoint. As they played for nearly 90 minutes, projections of vertical lines converged and diverged, creating a visual corollary to an entirely absorbing and rapturous listen. In 1972, Steve Reich had just finished Drumming, and Philip Glass was in the midst of composing Music in Twelve Parts. *Ten Years Alive *is another overdue reminder that Conrad’s music belongs in the canon. For someone who extolled prolificacy while occasionally sneering at publicity, its complete release is more meaningful than any newspaper’s breathless reappraisal.
With rare exceptions, Conrad’s most captivating music is at once magnetic and repellent. He privately lamented that his fabled recordings with Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, were too soft, the dampened sound of hippies who didn’t quite get the ecstatic astringency of his tone. His brilliant Four Violins, an early document of his explorations with just intonation and layers of looped sound, unspools across a tormented, tantalizing half-hour. When it ends, you’re torn between feelings of relief and mercy and the masochism of instantly wanting to hear it again. His wobbly solo organ score for Joan of Arc is at once vertiginous and comforting. Likewise, his canonical strobe-like experimental film, the Flicker, is devilishly disorienting and yet somehow hard to turn off.
Ten Years Alive, though, is oddly accessible, with moments of Conrad’s razor-sharp playing sheathed in more gentle passages. The tiny harmonies of his tuning system are clear, so you can trace the lines of thought much more readily than on the more aggressive Four Violins. Together, Chatham and Spiegel provide simpatico support, their barely prepared accompaniment adding a touch of exotica to Conrad’s fixed aesthetic. They listen closely but play casually, their every move emboldening the violin without distracting from it. Ten Years Alive is academic, to an extent, but it feels deeply psychedelic, too, a cosmic vamp built around an eternal groove.
The presence of Chatham and Spiegel, who arguably achieved levels of attention Conrad is attaining only posthumously, is an obvious selling point, a built-in marketing hook for an esoteric archival release. Still, Conrad is clearly at the center of Ten Years Alive, his mesmerizing but sometimes hairsplitting violin bleat pulled taut from one end to the other, just as it animated and connected the ends of his fifty-year career.
To listen to it is to get lost in it, to enter a slipstream of sound where notes seem to self-replicate as if they were always there and will forever remain. It’s like watching an army of tossed stones create so many ripples on a pond that the commotion becomes the accepted state of being, or like meeting a new friend who instantly feels as if he or she has been a lifelong companion. Twenty minutes in, you stop caring about personnel or context or even revisionist histories and simply notice the minuscule variations in sound, the way a fraction of a musical interval can make your hair stand on end. Conrad, then, becomes anonymous yet again—this time, by design of his art, not association of his friends. | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Superior Viaduct | June 3, 2017 | 8.4 | 3ce0ba8f-42a1-494a-8eed-5fb3404624ab | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The rapper and former Edmonton poet laureate’s first album in six years unpacks his history as a hip-hop advocate and explores the inner workings of Canadian beat communities. | The rapper and former Edmonton poet laureate’s first album in six years unpacks his history as a hip-hop advocate and explores the inner workings of Canadian beat communities. | Cadence Weapon: Cadence Weapon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cadence-weapon-cadence-weapon/ | Cadence Weapon | As Cadence Weapon, the former Edmonton, Alta., poet laureate and ex-Pitchfork contributor Rollie Pemberton helped bring the Canadian rap underground to light, and in the process, he was twice shortlisted for the Polaris Prize. His new, self-titled album, and first since 2012’s Hope in Dirt City, is his most dynamic since his 2005 debut, Breaking Kayfabe, and his most well-written to date: an electro-rap record that, in part, explores the inner workings of Canadian beat communities. The album is full of the brainy dance rap he made his name on. But more than any other Cadence Weapon album, this record unpacks his rap persona and his history as a hip-hop advocate in a rap-averse country that begrudgingly came to embrace the form, thus forcing him to reevaluate his place in the culture. By extension, it weighs his ambitions against his reality.
Cadence Weapon has always been an ambitious project. Coming up on the Canadian rap scene in its infancy years before Drake, it could be a downright subversive act, intent on producing the “freakiest” dance-infused songs Pemberton could come up with. This time around, decisions are made more purposefully. That doesn’t mean the music isn’t still way out in left field. Pemberton has said he was influenced by both Harry Nilsson and Future, and the album is awash in overdubbed vocals and woozy, half-croaked melodies. His singing and his songcraft have noticeably improved since his last record. Progress is a focus on the album (as evidenced on songs like “Destination” and “Don’t Talk to Me”), and his growth as an MC and song maker is palpable.
Despite his credentials as a writer and poet, Pemberton’s raps can be mechanical and long-winded, and they’re sometimes rickety in their construction. Occasionally his delivery is so dry he comes off as impassive. But he is also capable of eloquence and even virtuosity. Cadence Weapon is his most fluid and revealing work. It’s full of detail-oriented portraiture, like the wannabe DJ sketched out in “The Host” who doesn’t know how to work his gear (and thinks that makes it “sound sicker”). Then there are spells of deft wordplay: “Tinted windows, seats filled with leather/Scented incense, eucalyptus pepper/Got a crew of bad bitches like this was Heathers/I’m Rollie, homie, my wrist is metal/Got a mean strap and a vicious bezel,” he raps on “My Crew (Woooo).” It’s sharp and visual but, more importantly, it’s fun to listen to. He adjusts his flows to fit production shifts in songs like “Destination” and “Five Roses,” exhibiting his dexterity and finesse. His choruses are often still underdeveloped, but his workaround is to get other artists to sing some for him. Where the hooks once actively impeded the enjoyment of his songs, they’re now mostly workable segues into verses.
Not only are the lyrics better executed on Cadence Weapon, they have more to say. Aside from stringing together personal digressions, on macro and micro scales, that reveal his dreams and anxieties, he entertains a wider variety of perspectives. “High Rise” tackles classism and gentrification through a winding series of fragmenting ideas (“More consumption, mass defection/Soul disrupted, disconnected/Cast reduction/Ask them why, get interrupted/More distractions, low production/More corruption”). “System” addresses racism and sexism, patriarchy and the gig economy, using two separate third-person accounts; both subjects find themselves trying to get “saved by the rhythm” but feeling “trapped in the system.” The verses on these songs are less dense than on albums past yet they carry in them more information and better storytelling, even when those stories aren’t particularly engaging on their own.
Cadence Weapon builds to its closer, “The Afterparty,” where Pemberton can’t get into a venue despite being on the guest list. Caught in an awkward position, he threads together ideas that loosely fit—musings about the escapism of partying and theories about nihilism and mortality, all while retracing his path as an artist. In the end, he still can’t get in. “Might be under my artist name/Can you check another page?” he asks reluctantly, bringing the album to a close. It’s some of the smartest writing of his career, heady and self-aware, summing up a lifetime spent thanklessly searching for the perfect words. These are the moments that make him a hip-hop force. Even as the Canadian rap scene has become crowded with upstarts and his sound has been picked over for parts, Cadence Weapon remains one of its most crucial voices. | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | eOne | January 22, 2018 | 7.3 | 3ce3ecd9-ecc0-4045-a884-2eac066a200c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Backed by a prodigious jazz combo, the poet’s debut album possesses a profound and forceful clarity. | Backed by a prodigious jazz combo, the poet’s debut album possesses a profound and forceful clarity. | Aja Monet: When the Poems Do What They Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aja-monet-when-the-poems-do-what-they-do/ | When the Poems Do What They Do | In her 1977 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde provided a profound reinterpretation of the literary form. “I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience,” she writes, “not the sterile wordplay that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word ‘poetry’ to mean.” Here, Lorde argues that a poem is not necessarily impressive for its clever construction, or its adherence to age-old conventions, but rather for the emotional honesty and power it conveys. On her debut album, when the poems do what they do, poet Aja Monet gloriously inhabits Lorde’s vision as she reflects on the scars of social injustice, the strength of love, and her own multiplicity.
In her previous collections, such as My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter and The Black Unicorn Sings, Monet explored themes of childhood, race, and the rhythms of New York City with a rare gentleness and precise eye. Her new record expands upon these subjects, taking us through storm-battered homes and jump rope competitions as she explores Black joy and the blight of capitalism. The unhurried and gentle arrangements that accompany her words—provided by Grammy-winning trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and other acclaimed musicians—only add to the gravitas and wonder.
On opening track “I Am,” tapped rhythms land like errant raindrops on a windowpane; Monet begins describing herself in all her contradictions and complexities, painting herself as, simultaneously, “a kiss that quivers, a machete that bleeds … a brown liquor flirt.” The drumming then ramps up to a crescendo, loud and erratic like a stampede as she pivots to recognize the role others have played in her life. When Monet cries, “I am because of you, we are here together, there’s no me without you” at the end of the song, the percussion sounds like a chorus of affirmation.
When Monet speaks her work aloud alongside curls of percussion and jazzy instrumentation, she creates a unique kind of musical intimacy. “Weathering” begins with a long, languid jazz intro consisting mainly of a muted trumpet over brushed drums and piano. It’s slow and sensual, underscoring Monet’s rapturous lyrics about a lover who “kisses wounds and sets free tornadoes down my spine.” While she frequently invokes the grandeur of the natural world in her writing, she can also inhabit a more colloquial mode; on “Why My Love,” Monet describes an affection for her community that is “Indigenous, ocean-wide, sky-deep” and then “ass-whooping, accountable.” An airy flute flies gracefully overhead, serving as a reminder of the lightness love can provide even in times of darkness.
The record’s highlight is “Black Joy,” which tenderly describes the beauty and vibrancy of Monet’s locale, even when it’s struggling with violence. She notices “twerks and taps, jooks and jives, Harlem shakes, electric slides” as well as neighbors rocking on their porch and barbecuing in their backyards. In the background, there is the echo of street chatter: faint sounds of laughter, a “whoop!” When Monet states that “joy is righteous and ratchet,” we don’t have to wonder what she means; instead we experience it along with her. Here is a glimpse into her desires, fears, and dreams, offered with unflinching honesty. | 2023-06-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Drink Sum Wtr | June 13, 2023 | 7.4 | 3ceb99ce-612f-4a86-8612-3f59a225b41e | Mary Retta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mary-retta/ | |
The D.C. native takes a chip on his shoulder into the catchiest music of his career. In every Glizzy rap boast, you can hear in his voice all that was sacrificed to achieve it. | The D.C. native takes a chip on his shoulder into the catchiest music of his career. In every Glizzy rap boast, you can hear in his voice all that was sacrificed to achieve it. | Shy Glizzy: Fully Loaded | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shy-glizzy-fully-loaded/ | Fully Loaded | Shy Glizzy enthusiastically (and formally) introduced himself to the world outside the nation’s capital on GoldLink’s unlikely 2016 smash “Crew.” His show-stealing verse, performed with a carefree springiness, seemed to be the moment he’d been waiting for, the bridge he constantly searched for in his verses from street soldier to celebrity rap phenom. A platinum plaque and a Grammy nomination later and Glizzy is still seeking that breakthrough.
In the opening seconds of Fully Loaded, his sweeping debut album, he reaffirms that he is still being overlooked, and toward the end, he’s still in his hood. “They think I made it out, bitch, I ain’t famous,” he snaps on “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” “Just came from my cousin’s house, still eating ramens.” The album finds the D.C. native taking his snub in stride and turning a chip on his shoulder into the catchiest music of his career. Shy Glizzy zeroes in on what makes his songs so captivating: their balance. His war stories are recalled from the lap of luxury, but he’s never more than a few blocks away from the action.
Of course, that doesn’t mean these songs don’t grapple with shootouts and the toll violence takes on one’s mental health. The best Glizzy songs always do. These are tales of a hustler whose triumphs were born from lessons learned through struggle. And now that the struggle is reaping rewards, he has secured a better future for his next generation. “Damn look at me, I blowed up, I done had a fuckin’ son/He’s a trust fund baby, he don’t gotta hold a gun,” he raps on “Gimme A Hit.” It’s a redistribution of power—trap babies ending a cycle of poverty and violence by leaving their kids a nest egg—but at what cost? In every Glizzy rap boast, you can hear in his voice all that was sacrificed to achieve it; his unshakable resolve is occasionally betrayed by his bittersweet tone. He remembers those nights trappin’ hard, when he had to rob, when he used to starve. But those same experiences give breadth to his remarkable trap sagas. As he puts it: “I’m a real fuckin’ trapper and I carry that shit with pride.”
Glizzy raps about pain and promise through a taut whine that can flatten out or float away. His flows are easygoing but deliberate in where and how they move. He can convey profound grief and extreme comfort over the course of only a few bars. Raps about swimming in newfound wealth slot in almost seamlessly with vows to rain down vengeance upon killers who’ve taken close friends from him. He relishes the numbing power of ice (“Diamonds”) and the security his gun affords him (“Rich Shooters”), but he is never truly at ease and his relentless pursuit of relief amid chaos is tension-filled and stirring.
His last mixtape, 2017’s Quiet Storm, an unofficial homage to DC DJ Melvin Lindsey’s pacifying R&B radio format, shifted away from the exhilarated energy of his “Crew” verse and into a hushed trap style of soft synths and eased melodies. While Fully Loaded does deepen that sound in spots, on songs like “Mafia” and “Live Up to the Hype,” Glizzy also drifts out into NBA YoungBoy’s country rap blues (“Where We Come From”) and spaced-out 808 Mafia-esque chimes (“Super Freak”). With “Do You Understand?,” a team-up with Gunna and Tory Lanez, he delivers a pop rap bauble that is more pleasing to the ear than large swathes of what has dominated Top 40 radio this year. Throughout Fully Loaded, Shy Glizzy once again turns his underdog story into a triumph. | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Glizzy Gang | October 17, 2018 | 7.6 | 3cedb53e-cef5-4c82-9496-07064358f910 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Occam XXV sustains a single organ drone for nearly 45 minutes, tracing a long, gradual arc of fluttering harmonics and microtonal pulses, sounding as alien as the French composer’s synthesizer work. | Occam XXV sustains a single organ drone for nearly 45 minutes, tracing a long, gradual arc of fluttering harmonics and microtonal pulses, sounding as alien as the French composer’s synthesizer work. | Éliane Radigue / Frédéric Blondy: Occam XXV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eliane-radigue-frederic-blondy-occam-xxv/ | Occam XXV | “We live in a universe filled with waves” says Éliane Radigue, the revered French composer. “Not only between the Earth and the Sun but all the way down to the tiniest microwaves, and inside… is the minuscule band that our ears turn into sound. We… come into contact with [them] physically, mentally and spiritually.”
She should know. An early apprenticeship in the mid-1950s with composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry led to her induction into their nascent Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, an organization deeply invested in the role of sound in everyday life. But Radigue soon went her own way. Throughout the 1960s, she began to experiment with extended feedback drones and microtunings, to the disapproval of her former mentors. An encounter with the ARP 2500—the customizable modular synthesizer whose stable tuning and rich timbral possibilities set it apart from the competition at Moog—set her on a path that would continue for the next 25 years, exploring the potential the instrument afforded to sculpt sound.
Radigue released only a handful of LPs in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, but a younger generation began championing her works around the turn of the millennium. The three-plus-hour Adnos I, II y III, composed at Mills College in the early 1980s and considered one of her landmark works, didn’t hit shelves until Table of the Elements put it out in 2002. Since then, her catalog has grown by a degree or two. This slow build matches the unwavering patience of her music; today, Radigue is hailed as a landmark artist whose pieces set a high-water mark for the evocative and sensual potential of drones. To engage with her work requires close engagement with what her contemporary Pauline Oliveros termed “deep listening.” Her music is dynamically flat but endlessly supple, and one submits to the gentle force of the oscillations and the mesmerizing undulations of waves within waves.
If Radigue had stuck with the ARP, she could have enjoyed a much-deserved victory lap in the 2000s as a synth pioneer. Instead, as the world caught up with her vast archive, she made a hard pivot to composing for acoustic instruments, from solo harp to full orchestra. The Occam series is a body of work made in close collaboration with select players—her “knights of the Occam.” Just as Radigue doubled down on the ARP for a quarter century, these musicians’ technical input and ongoing relationship with the composer mean the pieces are theirs alone to play. Named after the 14th century Franciscan friar William of Ockham, whose rule of simplicity is today known as Occam’s Razor, the series prizes reduction and clarity. What can be illuminating when encountering these works is how alien the traditional instruments can sound. Radigue strips away the classical signifiers of expressiveness and musicality to tap into raw sound. Where her works for synthesizer never felt synth-y, her works for soloists, ensembles, and orchestras could convincingly stand in for her beloved ARP.
Occam XXV was commissioned by Organ Reframed, the festival founded and curated by Claire M. Singer devoted exclusively to organ works. Performed by Frédéric Blondy, Occam XXV is quintessential Radigue, with a single long drone gradually accumulating mass before it falls away, bit by bit, into silence. Clocking in at a sprightly 44:30, it’s manageable enough that a more casual listener can take it out for a spin without feeling overburdened.
Radigue never rushes—one of the most common descriptions of her music is that its changes come so slowly they are imperceptible in the moment, and only registered in hindsight. Occam XXV doesn’t quite get there; across the span of the piece, it’s easy to track the development from elemental sub frequencies through a magisterial, full-spectrum sound to the thin, ethereal outro. This is an asset. The joy of the music is hearing this gradual arc unfold and basking in the richly entwined moments along the way.
A major component of the sound is the psychoacoustic beating that results from Radigue and Blondy’s careful mixing of frequencies. Tones flutter and vibrate, shimmering with a gentle vibrato that comes from layering slightly detuned adjacent pitches. It’s a sound familiar to us—we hear it when tuning a guitar, but also as airplane engines are readied on the tarmac, or in the glistening harmonics of a singing bowl. These pulsations retain a surprising gravity, focusing the ear and the mind. The shifting drones seem both utterly still and yet in constant motion. This dual nature gently facilitates a state of meditative stillness.
Such gentleness is one of the key qualities that makes Radigue’s music so timeless. Overlooked for the better part of her career, she committed fully to her esoteric practice and brokered zero compromises along the way. On the surface, her works can seem impenetrable and severe, lacking any hint of new-age warmth or ambient chill, despite her deep devotion to Tibetan Buddhism. Yet Occam XXV is a testament to the generosity at the heart of Radigue’s practice. The single drone that extends throughout could go twice as long—or more. It feels like breathing, sounds radiant, and leaves the attentive listener in a space of attuned grace. | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Organ Reframed | March 16, 2022 | 8 | 3ceea317-bac6-4402-9770-34ac3edb40b5 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Whilst recent Deerhoof albums have occasionally tilted toward sonic exhaustion, Breakup Song is a nice swing in the other direction. It's a quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. | Whilst recent Deerhoof albums have occasionally tilted toward sonic exhaustion, Breakup Song is a nice swing in the other direction. It's a quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. | Deerhoof: Breakup Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16993-breakup-song/ | Breakup Song | Deerhoof have put so much blood and sweat into not repeating themselves, it's become part of their DNA. They labor to sound fresh not just from album to album or track to track, but within songs, measures, and even from one note to another. When I first heard the title Breakup Song, I guessed that it might refer not to the end of a relationship, but to the band's relentless drive to fracture its tunes-- to chop hooks and split beats in hopes of dodging expectations.
It's a risky tactic, because when surprise is this constant, it can create its own predictability. And while the shock of the new is often exciting, the whiplash of endless novelty can also wear you down. For me, the last few Deerhoof albums have tilted toward sonic exhaustion. But Breakup Song is a nice swing in the other direction. It's a quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.
Many of those moments come in an opening four-song head-rush. There's a lot of nervy sound going on in these tunes, with chords, rhythms, and electronic blips and whirrs darting around the stereo space. But the tone is breezy and fun, with beats that are oddly danceable ("Now I am going dancing/ If you would care to join me," sings Satomi Matsuzaki at one point) and synths that hint at 1980s pop. On the bouncing "There's That Grin", Matsuzaki repeatedly begs, "Not all at once," and the band obeys for a bit. But they happily rebel on the next track, "Bad Kids to the Front", a mini-tornado of ping-pong bleeps and pop-up riffs.
When Deerhoof dip down from those peaks, it's usually due to lulls in energy. Songs that attempt longer grooves sometimes settle into them rather than pushing or pulling at them. Still, the music is rarely formulaic. The occasional flatness comes from Matsuzaki's singing style. Her tendency to stick to a narrow set of colors and patterns-- the same sunny notes, staccato breaths, and see-saw cadences-- can be perfect when the band is swirling frantically around her. But when the music needs a starker counterpoint, her consistency is a drawback. Take "Flower", in which her up-down chant of the empty "Let it go/ Leave it all behind" sounds stale. Or "The Trouble with Candyhands", where yet another up-down chant, "Then you bring me flowers," pales next to a marimba-like synth riding the same melodic line. It makes me wonder if someone with a looser, more impulsive style-- say the Fall's Mark E. Smith or Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio-- might fare better with Deerhoof's more repetitive jams.
Luckily, there are many times on Breakup Song where only Matsuzaki will do. My favorite is a three-minute sprint with the telling title "We Do Parties". Here, drummer Greg Saunier's spindly beat--always the spine of any Deerhoof tune-- weaves a breakneck hybrid of post-punk blast, off-kilter prog, and guitars that evoke the soundtrack of an old Nintendo game. In the middle of it all, Matsuzaki sings about jangletrons, love machines, and something called an "Autojubilator." It's fitting imagery for Breakup Song's charms: hard-working mechanics programmed to entertain. | 2012-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Polyvinyl | September 4, 2012 | 7.2 | 3cf428f3-c7d4-42d7-b107-579c02bbed5a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Angel Olsen's latest is her best record yet, a bracing mix of sounds and styles congealing around songs of pain, sadness, and hope. | Angel Olsen's latest is her best record yet, a bracing mix of sounds and styles congealing around songs of pain, sadness, and hope. | Angel Olsen: My Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22282-my-woman/ | My Woman | In 2010, Angel Olsen was a folk singer. Her first great song, “If It’s Alive, It Will,” sounded radically spare, like it had been recorded inside of a closet, or perhaps in another world. It contained some three-dozen epiphanies—one for each line. “Know your own heart well/It’s the one that’s worth most of your time,” Olsen sang, a mantra so disarming and wise it could cut through the thickest lo-fi fog. “If It’s Alive, It Will” was pure empathy. You might implant it in your brain as a reminder of how to live. You could never forget, then, that solitude begets possibility, or that loving a person can transform your mind, or that someone in the universe is currently as lonely as you. “If It’s Alive, It Will” embodied the poised philosophy of Olsen’s songbook to come. Introverted dreamers—people who are quiet on the outside while the world rages so loudly within them—always live by this loner logic. Olsen gave it a melody.
Modern noises vanish when Olsen sings. From the bracing incantations of 2012’s Half Way Home to Olsen’s folk-rock opus, 2014’s *Burn Your Fire for No Witness**, *her name is now synonymous with a voice. Each note tells a story. Hers are tales of absolute yearning and resilience. They honor the romance of being alone in your head. Olsen has perfected the idea that it is still possible—if language is precise enough, if the truth of your music is as elemental as color or blood—to write oneself out of time. Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming.
My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before. If Burn Your Fire was Olsen’s poetic manifesto, then My Woman lives freely within its world. Together, the two albums remind me of something Patti Smith once said, in 1976, distinguishing the literary Horses from its follow-up, Radio Ethiopia, by calling the latter “total physical energy” and also more implicitly feminine. My Woman walks a tightrope of love to figure out what it is—how to find it, how to allow it in, how to feel it, how to fight for it, how to let it go—by a person who does not lose herself in the process.
The upbeat A-side ranges from the sun-kissed to the blindingly bright. In the final moments of Burn Your Fire, Olsen asked, “Won’t you open a window sometime/What’s so wrong with the light?” and here she responds. She offers witty and taunting rhinestone-cowgirl come-ons that would make Dolly and Loretta proud. She lets loose a piercing, guttural, King-sized *“Baby!” *that shoots fire into the red. She shrieks “I’m still yours!” with sublime vivacity. My Woman contains soda-pop rippers as pained and distraught and irreducible as any girl-group classic: “Heaven hits me when I see your face,” Olsen sings with wide-eyed optimism that wilts on arrival, “But you’ll never be mine.” So much of *My Woman *is rock‘n’roll in the traditional sense, from a ’50s or ’60s jukebox, and it is positively electric, a total blast.
“Intern,” the synth meditation of an opener, is all shivers, a borderless dream-pop song that never quite begins or ends. It’s about the inescapable necessity, for all people, of figuring out who you are: “Still gotta wake up and be someone.” The winding synth melody has a surreal, Lynchian, merry-go-round shine. “I just wanna be alive/Make something real,” Olsen sings, a surprisingly conversational and sensible proposition. “Shut Up Kiss Me” has all the rapture of a black-and-white stop-action movie, with slapstick country humor: “Stop pretending I’m not there/When it’s clear that I’m not going anywhere,” Olsen sings. “If I’m out of sight then take another look around!” In the videos for both songs, Olsen donned a synthetic silver wig, bringing to mind the makeup of her beloved Dolly Parton: “I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world,” Dolly has said. “I knew that there was wisdom and naturalness in me. The way I looked so false and was so real made a nice combination. It’s my fun.”
But Olsen’s fun songs—bright and sweet as they are—are a bit deceiving. The arrangements carry the levity and mania of infatuation, the feeling of total flight, but even here, Olsen’s writing is heavy as ever. (The poet Frank O’Hara once wrote, “each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous,” which is a fine synopsis of My Woman and the glitter that tempers its aching.) “Never Be Mine” sounds like the ’60s in Caetano Veloso’s Brazil, or Spanish guitar music. “Give It Up” puts a pure “Cathy’s Clown” melody over open Nirvana strums. They’re love songs, but it can never last, and inside all of them, there seems to be a message about the impossibility of ownership, which “Not Gonna Kill You” sings: “A love that never seems to curse or to confine/Will be forever never lost or too defined... However painful let it break down all of me/’Til I am nothing else but the feeling.” Like all of My Woman, it’s tough and tender at once, a bold rumination on how love and autonomy require one another.
And then the record slows. As “Woman” and “Sister” sprawl defiantly towards their eight-minute marks, Olsen’s warble stretches into impressionistic waves. The command of Olsen’s vibrato is wild but controlled—which is to say anarchic—and as the songs get longer, they communicate molecularly, contain more feeling, a haunted drama. The twilight jazz of “Those Were the Days” sparkles like city lights in water at night. On the ecstatic and feverish rave-up “Sister,” the guitar arrangement is enthralling, putting the starry tone of Marquee Moon inside a scorched Crazy Horse jam. “I dare you to understand,” Olsen later boils, “What makes me a woman.” The answer is in the nonlinear alchemy of her corporeal song.
The closer is a raw piano ballad called “Pops.” It is impossibly stark. Olsen’s voice sounds like it is pressed up against glass. “If you want the rainbow,” Dolly Parton once philosophized, “you have to put up with the rain.” “Pops” is all blurred raindrops, recalling Cat Power on *You Are Free *with the wonder of Judy Garland. Olsen sounds like she’s just been emptied of every tear in her body. The salt makes “Pops” glisten. It’s so filmic and classic-sounding that you can practically see a sole red balloon floating against the grey of a cityscape. “Pops” is Olsen’s heaviest song; it’s exhausting. But if ever there were proof that it is possible for life to be gorgeous and fucked-up in equal measure, at the same time, this song is it.
Burn Your Fire was Olsen’s detailed film treatment, but My Woman goes big-screen; it’s Olsen as auteur. “Know your own heart well,” she sang in 2010, “You could be surprised at what you find.” But part of following your heart, of knowing yourself, is understanding that it’s not a fixed muscle. The heart changes; it grows. Its beat speeds and slows as a symptom of life. Here, on “Pops,” Olsen asks, “What is it a heart’s made of?” Maybe you never find out for sure; maybe it’s the unending search itself that becomes the compass of our being. Love is a maze with no way out. But My Woman suggests that the way in is through self-possession. | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 2, 2016 | 8.8 | 3cf46c74-ee2d-4f94-a9c6-7f244f32e8fc | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The lead singer for the barn-burning punk act Camp Cope shifts into synth-pop and romantic love for her solo debut. | The lead singer for the barn-burning punk act Camp Cope shifts into synth-pop and romantic love for her solo debut. | Georgia Maq: Pleaser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/georgia-maq-pleaser/ | Pleaser | Not long after recording Camp Cope’s 2018 barn-burning second album How to Socialise and Make Friends, lead singer Georgia McDonald decided to stop screaming. Her rousing delivery elevated the Melbourne band’s songs to fevered peaks; on tracks like “The Opener,” McDonald bemoaned the misogynist music industry with irony and venom dripping from her voice. Before recording her solo debut, the singer took voice lessons to soften her singing and sound more like she’d always wanted to sound. “Instead of just yelling, I’m trying to actually make something that sounds beautiful to me,” she said in a recent interview. “There’s no angry screaming about anything anymore.”
Pleaser, the first record McDonald has released on her own as Georgia Maq, strays far from Camp Cope. She places her voice in an almost entirely synthesized milieu, a dramatic shift facilitated by producers Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis. The album’s subject matter suits its new dressings: Instead of singing about politics or family, or the complex and sometimes destructive bonds between friends, McDonald focuses on romantic love and self-love, romance’s quiet counterpart. She aims for pop bliss, but her melodies, which tend to be simple and reiterative, don’t let her lift off.
Most of the production fine-tunes ’80s pop techniques to 21st-century ends. The pearly leads and bright, expressive snare on “Driving Blind” sound siphoned from Body Talk-era Robyn, while “You’ll Be Singing My Name,” one of the record’s livelier cuts, adopts a bouncy piano backdrop that echoes the instrumentation on Lorde’s “Green Light.” With its binaural synth strobe and melancholy vocal lines, “Like a Shadow” could be mistaken at first listen for one of the moodier tracks off Caroline Polachek’s recent solo debut. McDonald has no regrets about leaving her punk roots in the dust, but her voice can sound slack against its newly airless environment. She’s ironed out the particulars of the singular and commanding voice she cultivated with Camp Cope and hasn’t tailored herself a new set of idiosyncrasies, leaving a blankness at the center of her singing.
Many of the best pop songs begin with a familiar backdrop and then electrify it with a surprising twist, eliciting joy from the shock of the unexpected. Robyn’s chorus melodies begin simply and then surge away from their starting points; Lorde’s Melodrama lives and dies on its often jarring chord progressions; and Carly Rae Jepsen sings herself into a breathless frenzy by the end of every track. McDonald’s first foray into synth-pop sets its sights on similar highs, but rarely takes the risks needed to achieve them. Compositionally, there’s more setup than payoff; choruses tend to consist of just a few notes, with little development and even less surprise.
Camp Cope’s albums established McDonald as a powerful frontperson and lyricist, and while her presence does often feel blunted on Pleaser, her knack for clever lines still surfaces. “At least I built the hill on which I’ll die,” she sings on “Away From Love.” On the scuttling closer “Big Embarrassing Heart,” she overturns a romantic cliche: “I will run to you with open arms and only hold myself.” She belts the line with enough conviction to make it sound like a happy ending, a testament to self-sufficiency. In moments like these, where McDonald loosens her reservations and surrenders to the full impact of her voice, the spark she’s always nurtured shines through. | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | December 11, 2019 | 6.1 | 3cfabe26-c30e-4e47-bac6-9ed369aa03eb | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
A collaboration between Bay Area rapper/producer Droop-E and L.A. songwriter Nite Jewel, Euphoria revels in the distance between two musicians and styles. | A collaboration between Bay Area rapper/producer Droop-E and L.A. songwriter Nite Jewel, Euphoria revels in the distance between two musicians and styles. | AMTHST: Euphoria EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21608-euphoria-ep/ | Euphoria EP | While the boundary between hip-hop and electronic music has always been permeable, in recent years it’s begun to show signs of dissolving completely. Trap-influenced drum patterns dominate electro-pop, spaced-out synths are de rigueur in rap, and hybrid producers have become some of electronic music's biggest stars. As what’s left of the wall crumbles, we’re seeing more extended collaborations between rappers and electro-pop artists, like Danny Brown’s work with Purity Ring or Big Boi and Phantogram’s Big Grams.
AMTHST is the latest partnership in this mold. It finds Bay Area rapper and producer Droop-E teaming up with Ramona Gonzalez, the singer/songwriter behind L.A. synth-pop act Nite Jewel. This isn’t the first time the pair have linked up--Droop-E’s 2013 song "N the Traffic" featured Gonzales on the hook—though this time around, they’re working together more closely, collaborating on the production as well as the songwriting. Euphoria, their debut EP under the name AMTHST, is a record that revels in distance: the distance between hip-hop and electro-pop, the distance between men and women, the distance between L.A. and the Bay.
Droop-E and Gonzales do have plenty in common musically, though, and they quickly find a sonic middle ground on Euphoria, marrying the laid-back bounce of Bay-Area rap to the gauzy atmospherics of Nite Jewel’s early work. This is nocturnal music, built from layers of synths, wet snare hits, and plenty of echo. The songs unfurl at a languid, practically chopped-and-screwed pace, and both Droop-E and Gonzalez luxuriate in the production, trading off verses and choruses with an easy cadence.
While Droop-E and Gonzalez are a natural fit as musicians, Euphoria’s most compelling moments leverage their divergent vocal approaches. "Thug Passion," a smoldering trip-hop number, casts the pair as two lovers talking past one another. "You don’t call me back," Gonzales sighs. "You don’t know me." Droop-E, meanwhile, mutters noncomittally in the background, suggesting, "We can just chill out, relax." "I Wonder" flips this script: Droop-E is in full pursuit, thirstily spitting game, while Gonzales eludes his advances. "You tell me lots of things/ What do they really mean?/ The more I wonder," she chirps back. Both of these songs feel like nuanced counterpoints to the one-sided narratives that drive most hip-hop and pop songs—they’re conversations, not accusations.
"Over Zone," a meditation on intoxication and its consequences, goes further yet, digging into the ways that gender mediates our pursuit of euphoria. On first listen, the song recalls a similar anthem—its pitched-down call-and-reponse refrain is pretty similar to that of Kendrick Lamar’s "Swimming Pools (Drank)"—but merits a closer reading. During a set piece in the song’s midsection, Gonzales drunkenly attempts to leave a club—when she’s stopped, she insists that she just needs some fresh air. "Nah, I saw you stumbling out there, you’re not fooling anyone," a sinister voice responds, as water-logged synths close in around the track. The scene then switches to Droop-E, who finds himself in a similar predicament, careening down a hallway in search of a place to vomit. "Give me some bread and some spring water and I’ll be cool, shit," he raps—a bit of bravado, perhaps, but also a tacit acknowledgement that his safety isn’t in question despite his drunkenness.
For a five-song EP, Euphoria packs quite a bit of depth. Both Droop-E and Gonzalez have managed to preserve what makes them distinctive while working in tandem; the reward here lies in examining the seams where two very different approaches collide. Admittedly, there is a background music quality to these songs—the consistently drowsy pace holds the EP back from fully engaging the listener at times—though that slow simmer suits the subject matter well. Nonetheless, Euphoria’s five songs effectively evoke the distance of a strained conversation, even if they are clearly the product of a deep mutual understanding. | 2016-02-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Sick Wid It | February 24, 2016 | 7.1 | 3d032910-aad8-4333-90f4-3b5177921907 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Three shows recorded at Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn between 1979 and 1980 capture a raw snapshot of a young band in flux, brimming with confidence and hopped up on speed. | Three shows recorded at Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn between 1979 and 1980 capture a raw snapshot of a young band in flux, brimming with confidence and hopped up on speed. | Hüsker Dü: Tonite Longhorn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/husker-du-tonite-longhorn/ | Tonite Longhorn | By the end of the 1970s, disco was dying, and the Twin Cities were at the dawn of a renaissance. Freeform radio had given way to commercial programming, but in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a punk and new wave scene was taking shape, growing by word of mouth and metastasizing in record shops like Oar Folkjokeopus and clubs like Jay’s Longhorn. When the young trio of Bob Mould, Grant Hart, and Greg Norton played there for the first time, the scene was nascent—First Avenue’s hallowed 7th Street Entry was still the coat closet for the disco club Uncle Sam’s. But those early Hüsker Dü sets at the Longhorn revealed a group quickly becoming fluent in punk and hardcore, foreshadowing a future in which their mastery of hooks and harmonies would transcend genre. It was the first time they’d felt like the real thing.
Tonite Longhorn collects three of those early shows recorded between July 1979 and September 1980, as the band immersed itself in the breakneck thrash that would become the foundation of its sound. They were recorded by engineer and archivist Terry Katzman, who co-founded Reflex Records with Hüsker Dü after their first single was rejected by Jay’s Longhorn DJ Peter Jesperson’s label Twin/Tone. Katzman’s massive trove of Hüsker Dü recordings made up the bulk of the 2017 box set Savage Young Dü, a 69-track collection of mostly live and previously unreleased music from ’79-’82. Alternate versions of most of the songs on Tonite Longhorn can also be found on Savage Young Dü, rendering this collection largely inessential for all but the most obsessive fans. But while the 2017 set serves as a completist’s document of their early years, Tonite Longhorn is more focused, an even rawer snapshot of the young band in flux, brimming with confidence and hopped up on speed.
Much like the Savage Young Dü recordings, the tapes are a bit rough; Norton’s bass often gets lost in the mix, and the vocals sound very much like they were recorded in a makeshift rock club in the ’70s. But the drums and cymbals cut through like gunshots and lightning, and the deeper you get the more the lo-fi analog aesthetic becomes transportive, making it easier to picture a 20-year-old Mould spewing vitriol into a mic from the stage of a former steakhouse that once hosted progressive jazz. The only exact duplicate that Norton—who produced Tonite Longhorn—included from Savage Young Dü is the opener “Insects Rule the World,” the first song from their first set at the Longhorn, and arguably the moment that defines their POV in this era. “We’re not the most professional band in the Twin Cities,” Hart admits as the song comes to a close, before Mould chimes in: “...but we have fun though.”
And for the most part, these shows do sound like fun, whether they’re taking potshots at Reagan (“Uncle Ron”) or getting drugs from the professor and fucking Ginger “underneath a big palm tree” on “Gilligan’s Island.” They’re spraying jet fuel on sounds they had already heard (their amped-up cover of Dee Dee Ramone’s ode to heroin “Chinese Rocks” offers a clue to their proclivities), but they flash glimpses of how they would later transform those sounds, like when Mould turbocharges the MC5’s proto-punk fuzz box on “Sexual Economics.” This is clearly not the same band that moved to California and cut the double LP concept album Zen Arcade—but these shows offer the first part to the roadmap of how they got there.
With the exception of the prescient improvisation “Ode to Bode,” which Hart would later rework for Zen Arcade’s “Hare Krsna,” all of the songs on Tonite Longhorn appear elsewhere. But despite the redundancy, the record is an important piece of the Twin Cities’ musical archive, a rare slice of life from a short-lived heyday that fizzled out by the end of the ’80s. The Jay’s Longhorn era was brief but influential—some called it the Minneapolis CBGB—and it was one of the few places in the Midwest booking punk and new wave acts. When doors opened in summer 1977, most clubs in town booked cover bands. The Longhorn played host to the likes of Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Police, and the B-52’s well before they became household names. The Ramones, the Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, and Gang of Four played there; after the Replacements played an early show at the club in July 1980, Jesperson promptly signed them. By the time the venue closed in the spring of ’82, the Mats and Hüsker Dü were stalwart members of a thriving scene, and the crowd had moved downtown to 7th Street Entry. But much of it started at the Longhorn.
The recordings of the shows on Tonite Longhorn capture Hüsker Dü as they merge punk and hardcore, but before they moved out west and eclipsed it with a stunning run of albums—Zen Arcade (1984), New Day Rising (1985), Flip Your Wig (1985), and Candy Apple Grey (1986)—that rewrote the rules of what a hardcore punk band could be. For Mould, at least, that July 6, 1979 show marked the band’s true beginning: “Hüsker Dü was now an actual band, and we’d played a show at the Longhorn," he recounted in his 2011 autobiography. This particular moment of the band’s infancy is unlikely to mint many new fans, but as a document of perhaps the most fertile period in Twin Cities music history, its significance is undeniable. These shows were foundational to the band’s view of its own legitimacy, a statement of arrival from a bunch of kids with a lot more to say. | 2023-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reflex | October 10, 2023 | 7.3 | 3d0452e9-ff8a-4665-b768-8568fa2b2459 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
null | In my mind Brian Eno's ambient music is completely separate from his vocal work-- so much so that I can in hazier moments forget that one man was responsible for both "Lantern Marsh" and "Third Uncle". It's not difficult to hear how Eno's ideas find their way into whatever he's working on, but when you're debating what to play it's always either "I'm in the mood for vocal Eno" or "I'm in the mood for ambient Eno." The twin box sets he released in the early 90s were split along the same line, so obviously the man himself draws a | Brian Eno: Another Day on Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2808-another-day-on-earth/ | Another Day on Earth | In my mind Brian Eno's ambient music is completely separate from his vocal work-- so much so that I can in hazier moments forget that one man was responsible for both "Lantern Marsh" and "Third Uncle". It's not difficult to hear how Eno's ideas find their way into whatever he's working on, but when you're debating what to play it's always either "I'm in the mood for vocal Eno" or "I'm in the mood for ambient Eno." The twin box sets he released in the early 90s were split along the same line, so obviously the man himself draws a similar distinction.
Though he's steadily produced instrumental music over the past 20 years, Eno's only pop release during this time has been the 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. Good album, and it was particularly fun to hear him apply to his own music all the production tricks (bass guitar high in the mix, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled vocals, etc.) he'd been using with other bands over the previous decade. Now, 15 years and a clutch of instrumental albums later, Eno returns to songs with Another Day on Earth. The record starts beautifully with "This", a mantra-like melody with a vaguely West African rhythm that sounds very much along the lines of Wrong Way Up's "Spinning Away". It's an ideal first song-- catchy, relaxed, and expansive-- with Eno in fine voice and multi-tracked to the point where it seems almost rude not to sing along. It's not a stage-setting opener, however, and as the album wears on it becomes clear that "This" is by far the best track.
One problem is that the sound on Another Day on Earth is lush to the point of distraction. It's almost as though Eno is hampered by his undeniable studio mastery -- he knows how to make so many beautiful sounds it would be a shame not to include them. Though he has in the past relied on chance operations to give his music an unpredictable and organic quality ("Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention," reads one of his Oblique Strategy cards) Another Day on Earth is produced to within an inch of its life, with layers of intricate detail and the most ethereal synth washes imaginable.
Still, overproduced or not, there is pleasure in sitting back and letting Eno's sound wash over you. One highlight is "How Many Worlds", which begins and with a simple acoustic guitar strum that Eno sings over and then adds is a plaintive string arrangement that weaves around wafts of electronic drone and builds to a powerful climax. The chord stabs on "Going Unconscious" (which is essentially instrumental, with bits of female vocals vaguely reminiscent of Laurie Anderson) remind me a lot of the palette from Thursday Afternoon, and the bells that tinkle throughout add an effective tension.
The melodies throughout Another Day on Earth are simple, which only occasionally works to the record's advantage. "And Then So Clear" is basic but true, though it will alienate some because Eno pitches his voice up an octave with what may be the same robotic AutoTune Cher used on "Believe". Leaving aside for a moment my affection for Cher's biggest hit, Eno's choice of processing suits both his voice and the song, turning what could have been nothing more than new age drift into a moving and fragile robotic lullaby. As if to illustrate the point about the vocal processing, the later song "Under" has the exact same melody as "And Then So Clear", this time sung by a small multracked chorus of Enos, and it's not nearly as powerful.
"This" is the album's only track that isn't either a ballad or an amorphous moodscape that happens to have vocals. In terms of overall feel Another Day on Earth sounds like Eno's 90s ambient work bent slightly to fit into a song-oriented format. The dualistic vocal/ambient Eno filing scheme doesn't work with this one, which is refreshing in its way. But unfortunately Another Day on Earth is a decent album at best. | 2005-06-13T02:00:43.000-04:00 | 2005-06-13T02:00:43.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hannibal | June 13, 2005 | 6.1 | 3d13bf8c-c436-48bf-997d-09b318f5000d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Brian Wilson has spoken bluntly about his retirement, which means his new solo album No Pier Pressure may be his last. It largely cedes the floor to duets with young singers like Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., and Zooey Deschanel, a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson. | Brian Wilson has spoken bluntly about his retirement, which means his new solo album No Pier Pressure may be his last. It largely cedes the floor to duets with young singers like Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., and Zooey Deschanel, a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson. | Brian Wilson: No Pier Pressure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20367-brian-wilson-no-pier-pressure/ | No Pier Pressure | It’s very possible that we’ve heard the last of Brian Wilson. Not because the opulent pop of the Beach Boys, or his rich and tortured personal mythology, are showing any fade in ubiquity—a movie about both, with Paul Dano and John Cusack playing younger and current-day versions of him, respectively, comes out this summer—but because the man himself is speaking bluntly of his possible retirement from music this year.
So for anyone who grew up with a reverence for Wilson’s brilliant work—which, especially if you’re from California, can veer into a fanatic sort of transposed paternal empathy—his new and eleventh solo album No Pier Pressure carries the burden of serving as his gold watch. Yet the record largely cedes the floor to duets with trendy young singers (Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., Zooey Deschanel, all audibly rhapsodic), a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson. The album’s clearest predecessor is Santana’s Supernatural (1999), from which sprang the malevolent radio hydra "Smooth", and other forays into May-September duet hinterland. (There’s been an upswing of the latter in the past year, from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga fluttering their jazz hands all hither and thither to Barry Manilow’s gauche, grave-digging extreme of shoving his voice into dusty audio of Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe.)
Unlike Carlos Santana, though, who could just wedge in a noodling guitar break and shuffle back to his inexplicable stiletto empire, Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized—the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant—or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma. It’s apparent throughout that this album was originally intended as a reunited Beach Boys effort, as their songwriting staples are faithfully represented: the orchestrations are lush and swooning, the lyrics set in beatific seaside tableaus and brimming with sepia wistfulness. Wilson sounds most confident with his former band cohorts; several tracks feature amiable turns from Al Jardine and David Marks. Of the whippersnapper duets, Wilson’s coziest harmonizing with Ruess, whose high, earnest keening could’ve been plucked from the Beach Boys’ Sunflower era.
In listening to No Pier Pressure, uneasy questions rise about base motives. Wilson freely admits that he doesn’t listen to modern music, and was so surprised to hear Frank Ocean rap that he dismissed him from the album. That likely means that these duet artists were pitched to him for the project, with the hopes that some of those younger fanbases would follow along. It’s a pretty farfetched expectation: are Zooey Deschanel’s fans now really going to stampede en masse to the nearest Urban Outfitters and demand Orange Crate Art?
But to speculate this project was foisted whole on Wilson would infantilize him, a casual disservice done all too readily in the press (what other 72-year-old Grammy winner’s collaborations would prompt the caveat "whether he’s aware of it or not," despite his ability to still deliver an incisive interview?). And there’s a warm timbre to all these artists’ voices that could surely appeal to Wilson. Whatever the cause, this is new territory for him: He’s sat in with young bucks here and there (Mini Mansions, Emile Haynie, the adulatory Brian Fest concert last month in Los Angeles) but he’s never been gregarious with his own material. His most recent album collaborators have been old friends returned to the fold, from a reunion with Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks to the global Beach Boys reunion of 2012.
There’s a happy accident in disunion, though: the closing track "The Last Song", which was originally intended for Lana Del Rey before she sulked off into the sunset. It’s the autonomous note Wilson deserves to end on, a lovely, bittersweet swath of the elegiac strings and gilded harmonies he perfected in his youth with "The Warmth of the Sun" and "Caroline, No". Wilson sighs, "Don’t be sad/ There was a time and place for what we had/ If there was just another chance for me to sing to you." It’s a worthy, prideful summation of a gorgeous life’s work, both innocent and wizened at once. And he didn’t need any young blood to get there. | 2015-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | April 9, 2015 | 5.6 | 3d13f782-c387-415d-a2db-4b4dd85e1727 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
On its most cohesive album to date, the improvisatory jazz trio finds new power in silence and restraint. | On its most cohesive album to date, the improvisatory jazz trio finds new power in silence and restraint. | Szun Waves: Earth Patterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/szun-waves-earth-patterns/ | Earth Patterns | On the search for transcendence, Szun Waves are perfectly content traveling without a map. The London-formed trio—comprising electronic producer Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wyllie, and drummer Laurence Pike—has performed improvisational jazz with a shared reverence for the vast possibilities of winging it. Ecstatic and off-the-cuff, their performances often sound like three virtuosos pushing each other to outrun their individual musical wanderlust. But on their third album, Earth Patterns—a seven-song set with additional production by David Pye and James Holden—the group slows its heady pursuits to a near halt, discovering new power in restraint.
From the beginning, Szun Waves have resisted being boxed in. Taking inspiration from free jazz as well as avant-garde rock bands like Can, their 2016 debut, At Sacred Walls, was culled from six hours of freeform exploration. Recorded without any edits, 2018’s New Hymn to Freedom evolved their process, filtering ambient and electronic music through the lens of spiritual jazz. Earth Patterns, the result of three days of recording at the end of a 2019 European tour, deliberately takes several steps back from those all-in experiences. It’s their most cohesive record to date, exploring a still, prayerful tone.
On Earth Patterns, Szun Waves foreground their subtle, intuitive approach by dialing down the tension of their debut and the more utopian tone of New Hymn to Freedom. Near silence is prized, and each member holds space for the faintest motifs to emerge. A newfound sense of discipline guides the pining melodies and Pike’s downy rhythms. Evoking Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ Promises, “Exploding Upwards” weaves slo-mo sorcery via simmering soprano saxophone lines and a synth with the honeyed lower registers of a pipe organ. On “Garden,” the group takes a less discrete approach and the shiny whiplash of Abbot’s modular arpeggios hit like solar flares.
Compared to the galactic forays of New Hymn to Freedom, the searching but sedate performances on Earth Patterns feel much more grounded. (Abbot himself has said he views it as “a journey from the outer reaches of the universe down onto the earth.”) Ushered in with a gossamer web of shakers, chimes, and faint bird calls, “In the Moon House” offers a Talk Talk-like sanctuary, finding inspiration in the precious nature of the moment. “New Universe” spotlights Pike’s tumbling grooves before folding feverish saxophone into swelling synths, like the opening sequence of an ’80s thriller. Throughout Earth Patterns, these disparate touchstones feel like the result of each member’s career-long exercise in making room—for closer collaboration, deeper concentration, and greater space between every note. | 2022-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | The Leaf Label | August 26, 2022 | 7 | 3d18c689-864c-4af3-89e2-83e8a8a17d9a | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
The Bay Area rock band refines its chaotic energy on its concise, catchy, and semi-ridiculous debut. | The Bay Area rock band refines its chaotic energy on its concise, catchy, and semi-ridiculous debut. | Spiritual Cramp: Spiritual Cramp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spiritual-cramp-spiritual-cramp/ | Spiritual Cramp | Spiritual Cramp have their very own Bez. Jose-Luna Gonzalez is the Bay Area band’s tambourine-playing mascot, popping up at their shows to provide auxiliary percussion and an extra sense of chaos to a group, usually outfitted in Fred Perry, who look like they could beat the shit out of you. Spiritual Cramp haven’t entirely carried this anarchic energy to their self-titled debut. Clear-cut and wound tight, there’s nothing here that could be considered auxiliary or chaotic. Across 10 tracks, the band packs in precise, hook-centered anthems with inspiring choruses: music made for people with a tried-and-tested vinegar solution for wiping the blood off their Brentham bombers.
Taking their name from a Christian Death song, Spiritual Cramp are among a wave of bands, including MSPAINT, Militarie Gun and Turnstile, who emerged from hardcore backgrounds and broadened their palettes to include softer, artsier flourishes. While those bands take their primary influences from the East Coast, Spiritual Cramp are proud anglophiles. Spiritual Cramp plays like a callback to 1977, when the Clash realized the natural alliances between punk and reggae, filtered through a hard-sashwaying garage rock lens. Spiritual Cramp integrate dub, spiky guitars, and oi-like crowd-starters, all with a kitschy wink rather than flatly imitating their predecessors. The music is ecstatic rather than enraged, semi-ridiculous rather than self-serious.
As a frontman, Michael Bingham sounds like the kind of guy who insists on snuffing out a candle with his fingers. You can practically hear the pressure of his clenched-fists in the steady burble of his rabble-rousing voice. Across Spiritual Cramp, he switches between hubristic pomposity and a less mannered call for help. The album’s sequencing is buttressed on this swing: the pendulum ride between the imperious coke come-up and the humbling consequences of the come-down. “I wanna fly everywhere and put the miles on my credit card,” Bingham sings on “Slick Rick” like Iggy Pop at his puffed-up peak, before beginning the next song, “Talkin’ on the Internet,” with his tail between his legs: “Another day/Another credit card declined,” he whines.
Bingham connects the political with the personal in the most on-the-nose way possible. “There’s a war on the TV and a war in my head,” he sings on “City on Fire” over a prickly guitar line. Bingham makes no attempt to be coy or subversive. His antiauthoritarianism scans gleefully teenage, his gestures deliberately vague. This isn’t to the band’s discredit: They’re striving for London Calling universality while knowing that cultural commentary isn’t their strong suit. Luckily, the songs are catchy enough to get away with it.
What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates. It’s a smart move, and one that plays surprisingly well to their anthemic tendencies. Slick and indelible, Spiritual Cramp inspires the same kind of fist-pumping and pogo-ing as the band’s unhinged live shows. | 2023-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Blue Grape | November 15, 2023 | 7 | 3d1a1ff2-7565-47ab-82d8-19ec356e584d | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Recorded in 2000 and newly reissued, the sprawling title track and its B-side are a defining precursor to the contemplative works Jason Molina would soon create and release under his own name. | Recorded in 2000 and newly reissued, the sprawling title track and its B-side are a defining precursor to the contemplative works Jason Molina would soon create and release under his own name. | Songs: Ohia: Travels in Constants EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/songs-ohia-travels-in-constants-ep/ | Travels in Constants EP | Jason Molina’s prolificacy is at once extraordinary and anxiety-inducing. The leader of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. created an immense and unexampled body of work in his 39 years, teeming with an assemblage of images drawn from nature, travel, his relationships, and his experiences as a boy on the banks of Lake Erie—the moons, magnolias, owls, and big cats he so deftly positioned as a reflections of his heart and psyche, over autodidactic acoustic guitar meditations and explosive electric roots rock. In the ’90s and early ’00s, Molina’s sensibility and pace were unrivaled, and today he stands among the greatest songwriters of the era.
For newcomers, finding an entry point into his massive catalog can feel intimidating. For fans, the exercise of knowing Molina through his work becomes a labor of love, an act of hard work that the singer-songwriter, who religiously punched his personal songwriting clock like a 9-to-5 job, would have no doubt appreciated. It’s especially true because he almost never explained himself, or his songs. It’s an elusive quality I’ve become intimately familiar with as his biographer. Almost five years after his untimely death related to alcohol abuse, new work from Molina’s busy mind and dedicated output continues to emerge, and it’s an exhilarating thing when the songs recall a period of Molina that is particularly precious to fans, and can stand on their own as fully realized reflections of Molina’s style. Such is the case with a pair of tunes now available through the Temporary Residence label.
With the turn of the new millennium emerged two distinct sides of Jason Molina. In 2000, he recorded and released the contemplative and meandering meditations of Ghost Tropic, written and performed largely off the cuff with friend and collaborator Alasdair Roberts in Lincoln, Neb. The following year, Molina drove a rented jet-black Crown Victoria to Philadelphia to record Didn’t It Rain, an earthy song-set rooted in the ethos of blue-collar workers in the industrial landscapes of Chicagoland. Sonically disparate as they seem, the recordings endure as the earliest representations of each side of Molina’s coin, a binary quality that became increasingly acute through his solo works and collaborations with his band Magnolia Electric Co.
Between those two albums, Molina created a handful of lesser-known works in the apartment he rented in Chicago, a space adorned with only a 4-track recorder, a vocal mic recommended by Steve Albini, a collection of vintage guitars, and some auxiliary keyboards and percussion. Among the songs he wrote there was a one-off single for the Temporary Residence label. At the time, the 18-minute untitled track Molina submitted was his entry into the label’s Travels in Constants series, where artists would record an EP that centered on the theme of distance. Newly reissued, the sprawling track is a defining precursor to the contemplative works Molina would soon create and release under his own name. For the purposes of the reissue, the label christened the formerly untitled track “Travels in Constants,” and included as a B-side the song “Howler,” a lyrical theme not unfamiliar among the many metaphorical wolves Molina sang of in his short life.
There’s a classical flare in the acoustic guitar picking of the title track, reminiscent of “The Body Burned Away” from Ghost Tropic. The quality is so similar that it’s plausible that the riff was either intended for, or inspired by, the session. But like so much with the elusive late songwriter, he never explained the work. “We were talking a lot back then and he used to joke that the ‘Travels in Constants’ track was ‘probably too out-there’ for his proper albums,” Temporary Residence’s Jeremy DeVine explains via email. But that’s the extent of the exposition Molina provided.
The track is canonical in its use of time-honored Molina imagery, including the moon, the owl, and the black versions of those two things, holding fort beside them. “The moon’s above like a sickle,” Molina insists, as if any moment it’ll drop and reap harvest. Its palpable intimacy and hushed posture peel back the curtain on Molina’s home studio, the sacred space that served as an incubator for his most beloved works, including Didn’t It Rain and what is widely considered his opus, 2003’s The Magnolia Electric Co. It’s as if he’s inviting the listener to spy on him.
”Howler” has an intro that’s similarly pensive, filling the recesses of Molina’s music room and 4-track with guitar reverb and programming from a primitive keyboard, a lower fidelity take on the driving line behind “Being in Love” from The Lioness. Molina sings in his stirring tenor that he’ll write his shadows and his echoes out in blood, presumably a pact with his muses. That if there is nothing else there is a being, a howler, that will both drive and haunt him.
Both sides of the “Travels in Constants” single foreshadow 2004’s Pyramid Electric Co. and other future solo works. While perhaps not the easiest entry point for the uninitiated, for Molina fans, the two songs are an invaluable glance into his divine spaces. The single’s cover, too, is personal—one in an endless string of abstract drawings Molina created throughout his life, traced from a credit card and filled with oil crayon gestures. It’s a profound chance to know him, without explanation. | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | February 15, 2018 | 8 | 3d1f012d-42e4-4d65-a299-9c3498aac206 | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
Elvis Costello and the Roots' collaborative album, Wise Up Ghost, is one of the most densely referential works in Costello's catalogue. The grooves, from the Roots, are loose, muted, and murky, but the music glows with an attention to detail and sense of history. | Elvis Costello and the Roots' collaborative album, Wise Up Ghost, is one of the most densely referential works in Costello's catalogue. The grooves, from the Roots, are loose, muted, and murky, but the music glows with an attention to detail and sense of history. | Elvis Costello / The Roots: Wise Up Ghost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18497-elvis-costello-the-roots-wise-up-ghost/ | Wise Up Ghost | A small outburst of tie-loosening sounds scurry across the opening seconds of "Walk Us Uptown", the first song on Elvis Costello and the Roots' Wise Up Ghost: We hear a few warm-up blurts, studio cross-chatter, and someone bringing up the volume on a laptop. When artists with historical baggage collaborate, sometimes these little expectation-defusing gestures pop up, a way to subtly prod reverent audiences into listening with new ears. Bear with us, we're just putting this together on the fly, they say.
For Wise Up Ghost, it's a bit of a feint. Elvis Costello and the Roots are known for many things, but neither are noted for "relaxing." And Wise Up Ghost, the more you poke at it, turns out to be one of the densely referential works in Costello's catalogue, its lyrics a series of nested self-quotes that build a Chinese box out of his old records. The grooves, from the Roots, are loose, muted, and murky, but the music glows with the unmistakable attention to detail and sense of history that the group can't help but bring to everything they touch. This isn't the sound of old masters getting loose, in other words, as much as lifelong A-students coasting a bit.
Although the name on the sleeve is "Elvis Costello and The Roots", Blackthought doesn't show up to rap, even on the lean, snapping "Come the Meantimes". No one raps at any point, in fact, which seems like a missed opportunity to make something unusual happen. The only real link to hip-hop comes from Costello's reflexive, self-quoting urge: "Wake Me Up" and "(She Might Be A) Grenade" both reset lyrics from his 2004 album The Delivery Man, while echoes of Punch the Clock's "Pills & Soap" flicker across "Stick Out Your Tongue". On the title track, Costello's backup vocals call back to the earlier track "Grenade", effectively creating an Escher staircase of himself. For Costello diehards, the multiple callbacks trigger the same "wait, how many places do I know this lyric from?" half-déjà vu that has always been one of hip-hop's deepest pleasures.
At the record's low points, though, the "legends spitballing" vibe works against the material. Some of the songs are undercooked, or at least they begin to feel that way as the grooves stretch out past five minutes. "Stick Out Your Tongue", "Come the Meantimes", and "Wake Me Up" linger longer than their thematic materials deserve, and "Can You Hear Me" meanders through six minutes but feels nearly twice that length, a collection of slapdash ideas with no audible commitment behind them.
At their best, both artists are great listeners, capable of soaking up something they can use from new collaborators. On the slower, quieter tracks, you can hear Wise Up Ghost shade into something that sounds genuinely like a product of both sensibilities: "Tripwire" is a delicate 6/8 shuffle that Costello sings in his lovely high head voice, the only time his voice sounds conventionally beautiful. "If I Could Believe" is one of those stunning, rafter-reaching ballads Costello unfurls out of his dry, unsentimental soul every few albums, to remind us he can. On the left-field "Cinco Minutos Con Vos", a series of disparate parts click together: Questlove's patient, freakishly exact snare snaps, horns punch soft notes, strings churn, Costello trades vocals with La Marisoul of La Santa Cecilia, and boom-- Elvis Costello and the Roots. It's not the kind of moment that will knock the long-since-formed careers of either out their deep, geologic grooves, but it's a minor revelation nonetheless. | 2013-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Rap | Blue Note | September 19, 2013 | 6.5 | 3d2087dc-12ee-4d38-95ef-311bbcd578f6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Fusing early music, ambient, and folk, the Czech couple’s work has entranced fans like Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner for decades. This collection is an enchanting portal into their furtive soundworld. | Fusing early music, ambient, and folk, the Czech couple’s work has entranced fans like Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner for decades. This collection is an enchanting portal into their furtive soundworld. | Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi: Melodies in the Sand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/irena-and-vojtech-havlovi-melodies-in-the-sand/ | Melodies in the Sand | From the 16th through the 18th century, the viol, or viola da gamba, was so common that many affluent homes kept multiple specimens in varying sizes in a dedicated chest. The viol was eventually supplanted by other members of the violin family, although in the past half century, early-music specialists like Jordi Savall have contributed to a revival of the instrument. And in the 1980s, Czechoslovakian couple Irena Havlová and Vojtěch Havel also dusted off the viol to reconsider its long history within a modern context.
The Havlovis were members of the Capella Antiqua e Moderna collective, itself a curious ensemble seemingly situated outside of time. Under communism, Western sounds were being smuggled into the country, yet the group’s repertoire drew from the Renaissance, along with their own minimal compositions. The couple’s work spans decades, and while they are beloved in their own country, their music has slowly seeped toward the West. La Blogothèque director Vincent Moon tracked down the pair for his 2009 film Little Blue Nothing. Sufjan Stevens is an avowed fan, as is the National’s Bryce Dessner, who composed a piece for the Kronos Quartet based on their music. Now ambient musician Jonny Nash compiles Melodies in the Sand, an immaculate, enchanting portal into the couple’s furtive soundworld. Not as sprawling as their out-of-print 2005 compilation Světelné kruhy, Melodies in the Sand emphasizes shorter works rather than their longform compositions.
“It took us years to realize we arrived on earth with a serene mind,” Havlová murmurs in Moon’s film. That might sound hokey if overheard at a yoga retreat. But seeing as the two grew up under totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia, it sounds like a coping mechanism—a way to find inner peace inside music, against a backdrop of repression. You can hear that sense of serenity in 1990’s Háta H., their first release as a duo. “She Is Dissolving” is an étude derived from the Harold Budd school of sustain-pedal piano: gentle, unhurried, yet also melodic and memorable in under three minutes. “That Which Glitters” keeps those shimmering keyboard figures intact, but gently layers Havlová’s whispered exhalations atop it. Even when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, paving the way for Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, followed by the flood of Western capitalism, the couple remained steadfast in their musical approach, as if outside the flow of time.
Braiding strands of ambient, experimental folk, early music, and modern classical, the couple’s compositions are resonant and deeply stirring. The instrumentation is primarily limited to piano and viol, but it all sounds so delicate that you could be forgiven for thinking the Havlovis work instead with 19th century lace, hoarfrost, and sighs. “Velvet Wings of Serenity” pairs an undulating piano with shadowy accompaniment from the viol, its hushed bow strokes revealed only amid the piano’s decay. “Light Circles” dates from their time in Capella Antiqua e Moderna in the late ’80s, striking a careful balance between minimalist restraint and dramatic release. Curlicues of woodwind garland the piece, and the coiled piano lines move in ever-widening circles until it reaches its zenith, buoyed by orchestral brass.
“Our desire to play is a desire of freedom,” says Havel in Little Blue Nothing. Across their discography, Havlová and Havel share an attuned and almost enviable telepathy, no matter their chosen instrumentation, which can feel spare and luxurious. But their viol duets—deep, empathetic, and also toe-curling—stand apart. The two race as one luxury sedan through the contours of “In the Garden” and “Vanity of Wings.” At times, you might wonder if their music emanates from yellowed sheet music or perhaps some distant point in the 21st century, before shrugging and letting it just fill the room. That curious feeling of suspended time arises throughout Melodies in the Sand, in which three serene minutes can bring the entire modern world to a standstill.
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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. | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Melody As Truth | March 15, 2021 | 8 | 3d24c253-0c2e-42a8-9321-31351839a203 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
With an unpredictable, amorphous shoegaze sound, the Indigenous Canadian musician crafts their most opaque and open-hearted work. | With an unpredictable, amorphous shoegaze sound, the Indigenous Canadian musician crafts their most opaque and open-hearted work. | Zoon: Bekka Ma’iingan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zoon-bekka-maiingan/ | Bekka Ma’iingan | In their brief yet prolific tenure as Zoon, the Toronto-based composer Daniel Monkman has reoriented shoegaze away from an insular, obfuscating aesthetic into a modern form of folk music—a vehicle through which they can tell their story, commune with friends, and catalog the human condition. It’s just that instead of gathering everyone around the campfire, Monkman invites you to float away with them up in the clouds. Raised on the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation reservation near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Monkman made his initial Beck-inspired forays into music with stoner-folk act the Blisters, before falling into the vicious cycle of poverty, transience, and addiction that entraps so many young Indigenous people in Canada. After getting sober, they reemerged with a bolder musical vision, fueled by a newfound pride in their heritage.
Adopting the name Zoon—short for “zoongide’ewin,” an Ojibway term signifying bravery—Monkman made their proper debut in 2020 with Bleached Wavves, showcasing a revamped sound that they cheekily dubbed “moccassin-gaze.” On that record, Monkman augmented the trippy textures and dazed melodies of My Bloody Valentine and the Brian Jonestown Massacre with traditional Ojibway percussion and spiritual chants. But Bleached Wavves was more than a novel cross-genre fusion: Its rupture of splendor and sorrow allowed Monkman to soothe emotional wounds and preserve a cultural history imperiled by Canada’s legacy of colonization.
Those same themes have found a more vocal, visceral outlet in Monkman’s concurrent project Ombiigizi, the punchier outfit they co-founded with fellow Indigenous indie-rocker Adam Sturgeon (a.k.a. Status/Not Status). Meanwhile, a pair of Zoon EPs released last year confirmed what Bleached Wavves only hinted at—buried beneath the sonic overload were the sort of candid addresses that easily translated to acoustic guitar. However, on Zoon’s exquisite second album, Bekka Ma’iingan, Monkman frequently sidesteps conventional songcraft altogether and surrenders to the impressionistic power of sound. Bekka Ma’iingan is at once his most opaque and most open-hearted work, less interested in explicit storytelling than in making you feel the deep-seated ache and hard-won euphoria coursing through Monkman’s veins.
On the surface, Bekka Ma’iingan is Monkman’s pandemic record—the words in the title translate to “slow down” and “wolf,” a reference to both the unhurried pace of lockdown living and the recent revelation that Monkman’s deceased father was a member of his nation’s wolf clan. At the outset, the album seems content to marinate in a beatific stasis, oblivious to the laws of time and space: The opening “All Around You” instantly submerges us in aqueous, Animal Collective-styled psychedelia, with Monkman’s one-note acoustic strums chiming like an alarm clock. And while an encroaching rumble of drums braces us for lift-off, they ultimately recede into the track’s infinity-pool ripples, introducing the record’s unpredictable, amorphous essence. Even when Monkman attempts something resembling a proper, guitar-driven rock song, they’re just as liable to zone out into a daydream: “Care” lays its misty melodies atop a slow-motion grungy grind that’s more m b v than Loveless, but partway through, an electronic beat pokes through the mix and redirects us toward the light, transforming the song from a doomy dirge into an expansive, liberating dronescape.
Structurally speaking, Bekka Ma’iingan is like an old building where you have to chisel away at layers of fading façade to expose the pristine brick preserved underneath—and the divine “Dodem” marks the moment when the true riches are revealed. The song’s elegiac space-rock sway ushers in a mesmerizing mid-album stretch where Owen Pallett’s regal string arrangements assume a central role, harnessing Monkman’s mercurial sound design into high-definition dream-pop symphonettes. Bekka Ma’iingan hits its emotional peaks with “Awesiinh (A-Way-See)” and “Manitou,” back-to-back acoustic-based ballads that nonetheless acquire a staggering sense of grandeur through their dramatic surges of strings and harmonies. The latter song in particular—a requiem for lost youth and the friends who didn’t make out alive—is as unsettling as it is breathtaking, like a Ditch Trilogy-era Neil Young eulogy adapted by Sigur Rós.
Unlike Bleached Wavves, Bekka Ma’iingan doesn’t attempt any overt fusions of shoegaze and Ojibway motifs; rather, at this point, Monkman’s two worlds are thoroughly enmeshed on both a musical and ideological level. On “A Language Disappears,” Monkman and regular collaborator Andrew McLeod (a.k.a. Sunnsetter) lay down a hazy-headed shuffle that nods firmly in the direction of My Bloody Valentine’s dance-rock dalliances, while shrewdly using shoegaze’s penchant for vaporous vocals as a sonic metaphor for the colonial erasure of Indigenous oral traditions. But Bekka Ma’iingan finds its clearest articulation of identity in its most abstract track. Featuring guest sound-sculpting from Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, “Niizh Manidoowig (2 Spirit)” pits flutes and horn melodies against sunrise-summoning electric-guitar drones to produce an exultant, wordless expression of Monkman’s gender nonconformity. Here Monkman reminds us of the implicit radicalism of shoegaze: After all, more than any other subgenre, it has always been about blurring binaries, by dissolving the distinctions between the male and female voice, between rock formalism and avant-garde experimentation, between noise and tranquility. | 2023-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Paper Bag | May 8, 2023 | 7.7 | 3d289c5d-f34b-46b3-bf68-4d131ab3518a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
With an emphasis on the sublime, the Nashville funeral doom band Loss have made one of the year’s most beautiful metal records. | With an emphasis on the sublime, the Nashville funeral doom band Loss have made one of the year’s most beautiful metal records. | Loss: Horizonless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23240-horizonless/ | Horizonless | Judas Priests’ 1978 take of “Better by You, Better Than Me” landed them in court on allegations that it caused two young men to shoot themselves. But the album it came from, Stained Class, also had “Beyond the Realms of Death”—a song that actually dealt with suicide. There, death was a cosmic journey, as Rob Halford, a jaded but wise psychedelic sage, guided us through a process of mental anguish and eventual peace. Nashville’s Loss don’t sound anything like Priest, but they similarly dedicate their music to death’s journey and the ways suicide occupies our brains—in a way no other metal band has since “Realms.”
Loss are on the bleaker end of funeral doom, already the most grief-stricken form of doom metal with nearly nonexistent tempos and depressing lyrics. Few bands have recorded songs that defined their own aesthetic as well as Loss did with “Cut Up, Depressed, and Alone,” from their 2011 debut LP Despond. On their follow-up, Horizonless, Loss move beyond suicide (though it’s still a prominent theme) and broaden not only their approach to discussing death but their sound in general. The result is one of the year’s most beautiful metal records.
Across Horizonless, Loss distinguish themselves from other funeral doom bands by cutting back on gothic trappings, leaving a death metal husk to fill with despair. There is an emphasis on the sublime that Despond lacked. A brief moment of radiance opens “All Grows on Tears,” and when vocalist and guitarist Mike Meacham comes slamming in, the riff grows to superhuman strength, growing brighter amid the overwhelming darkness. That is just one of the many flourishes in Loss’ most moving song yet.
They’ve taken the bleak harmonies of melodic death metal bands—in particular, the Maiden-gone-gloom of early At the Gates and Dissection’s more black metal side—and brought them to their absolute slowest. Those particular influences are all over Horizonless. As “When Death Is All” concludes, a lead spirals towards the end, withering without losing poignancy. Horizonless is a record that romanticizes death, where thorns are petals, and it couldn’t have ended more appropriately.
Meacham is still the main presence on this record, and his subterranean growling itself seems to move in and out of life and death. His voice has a gravity that plunges riffs lower, no matter how drenched in melody they may be. Even so, Horizonless is a more collaborative album. Bassist John Anderson contributes piano to “Naught,” and he is also the sole performer on “The End Steps Forth,” a short piano, organ, and drum piece that deconstructs the gothic doom of My Dying Bride. In both, he brings the band closer to funeral doom’s more conventional archaic beauty while abstracting it. Guitarist Tim Lewis wrote and performed “Banishment,” Loss’ most death metal-leaning track yet. “The Joy of All Who Sorrow” is the first Loss song to feature vocals from all four of its members. Funeral doom is characterized by its lethargic pace; in that context, “Sorrow” has bountiful dynamics. It feels much faster than it actually is, with progressive death metal stylings chained to their doom anchor.
Horizonless is a study of how great modern metal records have all gone beyond genre exercises. Metal’s various styles have long been codified, and strident worship is now rarely enough of a statement. Despond contained songs from Loss’ demo and previous splits, but the band began anew with Horizonless, and it shows. If most doom is death closing in, this is opening a coffin and conversing with death head on. There’s an openness to *Horizonless—*even as Meacham sings about wanting the earth to consume him, about not just facing death but becoming it, about how death robs us. Through it all, Horizonless evokes metal’s most important message: in confronting death, we are freer in life. | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | June 3, 2017 | 8 | 3d2b1867-ecff-41ae-8ca9-7cd9375537b2 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
It’s been a sad year for these early-2000s indie-rock heroes, but this reissue of their cult-classic 1997 debut is a reminder that Grandaddy was a special band from the start. | It’s been a sad year for these early-2000s indie-rock heroes, but this reissue of their cult-classic 1997 debut is a reminder that Grandaddy was a special band from the start. | Grandaddy: Under the Western Freeway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grandaddy-under-the-western-freeway/ | Under the Western Freeway | 2017 was supposed to be a year of celebration for Modesto, California indie rockers Grandaddy. After breaking up in 2006 and reuniting for a few shows in 2012, the group was preparing to mount a full-fledged comeback with their first new LP in 11 years, Last Place. But just two months after that album’s release this spring, bassist and founding member Kevin Garcia died following a massive stroke. All tour dates were scrapped, and the future of the band was suddenly back in flux.
These circumstances make a deluxe reissue of Grandaddy’s cult-classic 1997 debut, Under the Western Freeway, feel bittersweet. Then again, that’s not an unusual mood for this band of underdogs. The history of Grandaddy, who were once hailed as an American answer to Radiohead, is a story of almosts and what-could-have-beens. When they split for the first time, it seemed that the business of being a band was the main factor that sank a group of friends who excelled at most aspects except the financial.
From the start, Under the Western Freeway established Grandaddy’s deft ability to intertwine warm melodies and wry insights, opening a curtain on their corner of the world. Modesto is known as much for its high pollution levels as it is for its proximity to the dramatic natural beauty of the Sierras, and that contrast makes its way into Grandaddy’s music. Songwriter Jason Lytle sings about drinking beer and playing his guitar out in the country on the serene “Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance,” and moments later, laments the changing environment around him: “They paint the moon today/Some brand-new future color,” he sings on the elegiac “Go Progress Chrome.” Viewing a sunset past the smokestacks might make for a vibrant view, but Lytle’s delivery underlines the point that it’s also a troubling one.
The band wore their working-class roots as a badge of honor, finding beauty in the everyday experiences they wrote about on songs like the album’s aptly titled opener, “Nonphenomenal Lineage.” A questionable dining experience provides the narrative of “Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food"; on “A.M. 180,” romance comes from from something as simple as “just doing nothing” together. Beyond these mundane details, Under the Western Freeway suggests a fully-formed worldview that combined low-key technological angst with an appreciation for the ever-shrinking wild, all served up through a filter that sounds like it was purchased from the Radio Shack sale rack. There isn’t a shred of cosmopolitan cool on this album—particularly when they close it out with five solid minutes of chirping crickets.
One of the things that makes this album special is how well that sound matches Lytle’s lyrical insights. Grandaddy aren’t just talking about looking out from a back porch and seeing city lights glow bright on the horizon, they’re showing you how it feels. By combining cheap electronic instruments with an organic rock band setup, Under the Western Freeway feels futuristic in a quaint way, like a space shuttle stitched together from dumpster diving and junkyards. It’s not long into the opening notes of “Nonphenomenal Lineage” before the low-frequency hisses and hums of the studio become as recognizable as Lytle’s hard-fought falsetto and drummer Aaron Burtch’s garbage-can percussion. You can almost hear the sparks shooting off the exposed wiring.
The disc of extras that come with this reissue are mostly of interest to Grandaddy obsessives. Demos of songs that would appear on this album or on later ones—including rough sketches of highwater marks “Dying Brains” and “Bjork ELO Xanadu and The Birth of Chartsengrafs”—offer only the basic DNA patterns for the greatness that would follow. Often the effect is to underscore Lytle’s meticulous studio-rat capabilities: Hearing the off-key vocals and tempo struggles of an early “Summer Here Kids” demo, you get a sense of his commitment to fulfilling a vision, even if the recording itself pales in comparison to the final product. The shiniest treasure comes in the form of the never-before-released “Hawaiian Island Wranglers,” whose tone shifts on a dime from ferocious yelping to peaceful meditation—it’s a song that soars even without any studio polish.
If this reissue arrives at a time of sadness for Grandaddy and their fans, the music within is a lasting source of comfort. Under the Western Freeway is a melancholy album that doesn’t mope; it’s rooted in the kind of gradual losses that fade into the fabric of a life. Lytle’s reassuring melodies take influence from Jeff Lynne and Neil Young, for a style that still feels wiser than most indie-rock debuts. And the contradictions at this band’s heart—nature vs. technology, electronic vs. organic—have hardly become obsolete over the last 20 years, even if it has arguably become harder to make a career singing about them. On “A.M. 180,” which would become one of the band’s best-known songs a few years later thanks to a sync in the Danny Boyle zombie film 28 Days Later, Lytle sums up the large and the small of it all: “We’ll defuse bombs, walk marathons, and take on whatever together.” When those last couple words—“whatever, together”—are repeated over an explosion of guitars and keys near the track’s end, they ring out like an understated mantra. | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Friendship Fever | November 2, 2017 | 8.1 | 3d2c6ad3-3cc4-4913-b256-8a11738bc1b9 | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | |
On her second album, Valerie Teicher explores the nuances of her voice, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess over spacious, immaculately produced R&B. | On her second album, Valerie Teicher explores the nuances of her voice, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess over spacious, immaculately produced R&B. | Tei Shi: La Linda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tei-shi-la-linda/ | La Linda | Valerie Teicher’s debut full-length as Tei Shi, 2017’s Crawl Space, was an album of transformation, of surmounting fears. The record rested on a base of ’80s-inspired synth pop and the natural flexibility of Teicher’s voice, setting a course away from the indie pop of her first EPs. La Linda is also a record of change, the product of a move to Los Angeles from New York, where she was troubled by stifling relationships and her guarded state of mind. The album’s pared-down R&B matches Teicher’s newfound clarity and further centers her voice. “I wanted this whole project to reflect the feeling of stepping into another world that’s almost surreal or fantastical in its beauty,” she says. But the beauty she discovers is almost claustrophobic, simmering in romantic pain more often than it embraces the freedom that exists beyond it.
Appearing last year on Blood Orange’s “Hope,” on Negro Swan, she sang from the perspective of someone continually let down by their lover, and she slips into the same mode of disappointment for the majority of La Linda, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess. Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes returns on “Even If It Hurts,” in which Teicher begs for honesty from her partner, admitting that she doesn’t want to “feel crazy” anymore. The Spanish-language “Matando” also addresses the relationship between love and emotional wear. But if before she was willing to wait for her partner to change, here Teicher is about to walk away. “Mi amor, tu amor me está matando” (“My love, your love is killing me”) she sings; “Está llegando el fin” (“The end is coming”). The album often feels like her last look back—a drawn-out kiss goodbye—before she moves on to something better.
On her earlier records, Teicher occasionally strained with the effort of expressing herself, her voice breaking into a yell. But La Linda exchanges that roughness for immaculate ballads performed in Teicher’s high, whispery register. The album operates largely in the same style of sultry pop that Ariana Grande has perfected: The languid beat and bouncing chorus of “Red Light,” a track about time wasted on a dead relationship, are cut from similar cloth as thank u, next, and on “Alone in the Universe,” when Teicher confesses, “I don’t know if there is a god/But if she is a woman/I would say that she’s dropping the ball,” it’s difficult not to hear an echo of Grande’s “God is a woman,” from last year’s Sweetener. The album’s more subdued cuts, like “Thief” and closer “We,” counter that high gloss, pointing back to a time when Teicher’s music consisted of little more than her voice looped over a bassline.
When Teicher gives herself over entirely to the wreckage of heartache, her songwriting floods the album’s lean production with its emotional force. Two tracks offer contrasting takes on obsession’s ruin, with Teicher brandishing her feelings like offerings to be burned and discarded. The country-tinged “When He’s Done” sounds like someone who knows they’re going to crash but still pumps the pedal because acceleration feels good. Teicher lengthens each word, helpless in the face of a love that she knows is destined to hurt her: “I believe whatever, I guess.” It’s a heartbreaking account of placing someone else before your own well-being. And on “No Juegues,” she commands, “Don’t play with my love,” but her confidence falters by the end, as she repeats, “Mi amor no vale nada” (“My love is worth nothing”). They’re songs that self-destructively consume pain in order to transcend it, leaving Teicher to rebuild herself from the debris. | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Downtown | November 26, 2019 | 7.3 | 3d38611b-0a90-41b0-9a87-72a0235ab8e5 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
After surviving his runaway viral hit "Harlem Shake," Baauer returns with a full-length on which appearances by Future, Pusha T, M.I.A. and others function like power-ups, allowing the album to ratchet up in excitement. | After surviving his runaway viral hit "Harlem Shake," Baauer returns with a full-length on which appearances by Future, Pusha T, M.I.A. and others function like power-ups, allowing the album to ratchet up in excitement. | Baauer: Aa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21738-aa/ | Aa | The path is so well charted that it's practically a ritual. Young artist creates track; track becomes hit; hit becomes phenomenon, artist becomes famous. The track is undeniable and thus, ubiquitous. Your parents are aware of it. Fans start to hate it, though nowhere close to as much as the artist does. And then, when the artist goes ahead and decides to make new music, everything he does, from the promotion to the concerts, looks like a Sisyphean attempt to escape its shadow.
The Brooklyn producer Baauer is observing the rites. He has called his Billboard-topping, YouTube-dominating 2013 craze "Harlem Shake" "corny and annoying as fuck" and his new album Aa represents his "defiant" new beginning. For Baauer, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that he had less to do with his own song's rise than strangers on the Internet. They were the ones who performed the alchemy that changed it from a jam, to an Essential Mix standout to a viral soundtrack. "I birthed it, it was raised by others, and now it's like my weird, fucked-up adopted teenage kid coming back to me," he said at the time.
Sometimes, talented career artists become one-hit wonders (Carly Rae Jepsen) and sometimes, clowns who have stumbled upon, or stolen, something infectious do the same (Vanilla Ice.) The experience can be particularly difficult for an artist like Baauer, a raw, young musician with interesting ideas who has yet to fully develop. Following "Harlem Shake," Aa might feel to some like an undercooked, scattershot album, experimental to its own detriment. But if Baauer were an unknown musician —which, artistically speaking, he still essentially is — it'd be a rimshot of a debut, crackling with energy and humor, well-paced, with no dud tracks and more than a few infectious ones.
Aa is devoted to the block-party spirit of hip-hop, in keeping with most of Baauer's work, and at a time when various genres of electronic music are downplaying the black sources of their sound, it's refreshingly willing to share both its influences and the limelight. Many of the tracks in its adrenaline-spiked back half are dominated by other artists, as Baauer took advantage of the connections afforded him by "Harlem Shake" to collaborate with M.I.A., Pusha T, Future and Rustie. Their appearances aren't wasted. Features function like power-ups on Aa, allowing the album to ascend in excitement, leveling up to an almighty peak. (Baauer's clear love of collaboration and respect for the sounds he incorporates might also serve as a balm to those who were irritated by the way that the mainstream "Harlem Shake" dance craze completely ignored the original, Cam'ron-approved dance.)
The album's melting pot feel is consistent with that of Baauer's less-famous releases, the EPs Dum Dum (2012) and ß (2014). His methodology is consistent: He excavates the undergirdings of genres like hip-hop, R&B and dancehall, and swaps in a new foundation, often composed of wobbling, thundering bass. After a couple of exploratory warning shots at the outset of Aa — the Rustie-inspired opener, "Church," the drum n' bass n' trap banger "GoGo!" — the album settles into a groove on the explosive R&B of "Body," its first inescapable track, which splits the difference between the producer's past work with AlunaGeorge and the soiled romanticism of electronic artists like Giraffage.
From there, it's a steady climb with stops along the way in Discovery-era Daft Punk soundalike ("Pinku") and peace councils between back-alley grime and Bonecrusher-style mob music. ("Day Ones.") On songs like these, Baauer demonstrates his ability to identify and recontextualize bite-size melodic candy, and "Harlem Shake's" rise starts to look less like an Internet accident and more like inevitability. Check out the way he plays the Tetris theme song into the back end of "Sow." It's a goofy, addictive gimmick that loses none of its melodic power for being so.
In the tradition of many of the best electronic releases of the decade, Aa is a collage. But its patchwork of influences isn't a way for the producer to avoid pressure. Instead, Baauer and the other artists meet the heavyweight expectations head-on. "Temple," the M.I.A. feature here, is vintage Mathangi: She sounds as fresh and London-cocky as she did on Arular. And "Kung Fu" doesn't dare to waste Pusha T or Future. Pusha and Future have two of the most iconic voices in contemporary hip-hop, and Baauer clearly understands the appeal of placing them as foils on the same track, the brick-hard snarl and the ecstatic lament.
If you want a file to show up at the top of an alphabetically-organized folder, you can throw a bunch of A's at the front of its name, and ensure that it will be there. But as much as Baauer may want Aa to define a new beginning, to crowd out everything else he's done so far, there's no easy way for him to erase "Harlem Shake." He's doomed to be evaluated in the context of what will likely represent the peak of a certain kind of career success. The best he can do is what he's done here: rectify the wrongs of the craze that the track spawned while building on what it did right. Take advantage of the opportunities it's granted, throw an album-length party and encourage the dancers to come correct. | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | March 23, 2016 | 7.3 | 3d45dec4-0371-4c2f-bad7-492db334684e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Read Philip Sherburne’s review of the album. | Read Philip Sherburne’s review of the album. | Ana Roxanne: Because of a Flower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ana-roxanne-because-of-a-flower/ | Because of a Flower | When the California ambient musician Ana Roxanne reinterpreted “I’m Every Woman”—a Chaka Khan disco classic famously covered by Whitney Houston in 1992—as “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” on her debut EP in 2015, there were multiple levels of meaning nestled inside its rippling oscillations. Most immediately, the song nodded to the ’90s R&B that Roxanne’s mother and aunts sang at family karaoke sessions after moving from the Philippines to the U.S. Her selection also suggested something about the way Roxanne hears the world: The swirling textures of Roxanne’s song echoed the atmospheric introduction to Houston’s version, as though Roxanne were finding commonalities between genres seldom mentioned in the same breath. Roxanne had more personal motives, too. When she was writing “I’m Every Sparkly Woman,” she told Bandcamp Daily, “I saw [it] as a testament to my femininity and empowerment as a woman.” But a few years later, after coming out as intersex, the meaning changed for her. “Now, I am not sure how I identify, but at least now I feel confident in that unknown,” she admitted. “When I perform that song now, it feels as though I am calling upon the confidence and beauty of the divas, and exclaiming that I love myself, whatever gender I may be.”
Questions of gender, identity, and self-love frame Roxanne’s Because of a Flower, the follow-up to her debut. On a short, untitled spoken-word piece that opens the album, she envisions transcending binaries: “Yin, the female principle, and yang, the male principle… have joined, and out of their junction has come a third: harmony.” Her multi-tracked voice is split and processed into higher and lower registers, and she layers overlapping phrases as though reciting a round. Against this kaleidoscopic backdrop, she offers an elemental truth: “The spirit of harmony, as it condenses, produces all beings.” Drawing upon ambient, new age, dream pop, Medieval European choral music, and Hindustani singing, the album that follows feels like an emanation of that same spirit.
As on her debut, Roxanne’s cool, clear soprano provides the centerpiece of most of these songs. Where “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” sketched lines between ambient and R&B, “A Study in Vastness” draws out the ambient quality inherent in choral music. The song is composed entirely of layers of her own voice; over a looping pedal tone that extends from start to finish, she wordlessly sings a descending figure in a minor key, adding soft microtonal counterpoints that slip between the lines of the stave. The resulting drone sounds faintly like the ethereal airs of the 12-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen; it feels like bathing in moonlight.
Even when Roxanne adds more elements to her music, it sounds just as pure. In “Suite Pour L’invisible,” she sings wistful, wordless tones over patiently braided guitars before returning to the idea of duality: “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.” But lyrics are rarely the focus here; her singing is so slow, the patient arrangement so hypnotic, it’s easy to be swept away by the sound of her voice alone. Her music’s plaintive qualities often evoke Grouper (“Suite Pour L’invisible” sounds like a hi-def cousin to Ruins’ “Holding” or “Call Across Rooms”), and her billowing textures often recall Julianna Barwick. There are also affinities with the goth-adjacent dream pop of Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and Dead Can Dance, refracted through a new-age lens. “Venus,” a quietly ecstatic hymn to the constancy of the self, pairs radiant vocal harmonies with splashing waves and a reading from an astrological text; it sounds like vintage 4AD reimagined for sound-healing therapy.
Roxanne changes gears with “Camille,” whose muted vocal tone and pitter-pat drum machine are reminiscent of Portishead and Everything But the Girl, while the instrumental “- - -,” a sparkling assemblage of DX7 chimes, shows that Roxanne doesn’t need her voice to enchant. She closes the album with another wordless piece, “Take the Thorn, Leave the Rose,” where her voice is close to a sigh. The album’s darkest song, built around brooding electric bass and guitar, it nods both to classic slowcore and also doom metal, while sounding not quite like either—evidence of a remarkable ability to fuse disparate influences into a unique form.
Halfway through the song’s six-minute run time, it shifts: The guitars fade out, and in their place we hear Bach’s Prelude in C Major, BWV 846, from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, joined by Roxanne’s voice, sounding ghostly and far away. Swathed in hiss, the piano comes from a slowed-down recording of Alessandro Moreschi—one of the last of the castrati, and the only one known to have been captured on wax—singing Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria” early in the 20th century, more than 100 years ago. In his day, Moreschi’s heavenly voice supposedly inspired audiences to shout, “Long live the knife!”—a cry of adulation shot through with an intimation of violence. Today, threats of violence are familiar to many intersex people, and Roxanne has spoken of her determination to be an advocate for intersex kids and teens, many of them subject to nonconsensual surgeries in childhood. Inspired by both the trauma of the castrati and the transcendent beauty of their singing, “Take the Thorn, Leave the Rose” ends the album on a note both melancholy and tender—a gorgeous distillation of the empathy that guides Roxanne’s music.
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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. | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kranky | November 16, 2020 | 8 | 3d525a89-da55-4eec-823d-c759473a9dea | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Vulnicura Strings is a remake of Björk's album from earlier this year that uses only strings as accompaniment, jettisoning the electronic elements. Even without the jagged beats, it isn't an easier listen. | Vulnicura Strings is a remake of Björk's album from earlier this year that uses only strings as accompaniment, jettisoning the electronic elements. Even without the jagged beats, it isn't an easier listen. | Björk: Vulnicura Strings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21232-vulnicura-strings/ | Vulnicura Strings | As a remix evangelist, Björk has always celebrated the mutable quality of her work. "To me it goes all the way back to being in the Sugarcubes and Kukl before," she told Britain's Independent. She described how Iceland's half-arsed indie scene was suddenly electrified by the arrival of acid house: "Going to all those first raves, it was really obvious that there wasn't really one correct way of doing a song." That notion reached a peak on 2011's Biophilia, where, if the mood struck, Björk could have dispatched endless revisions of the record to the corresponding app (which always sounded more like a Synecdoche, New York-style nightmare than a healthy creative impulse). At home, her audience could tinker with the music at will.
Even though its predecessor was rooted in ideas around organic matter and mutation, this year's Vulnicura felt more like a living process than any of Björk's previous records. The tracklist was a linear path through the collapse of her 13-year relationship, and its devastating fallout. The liner notes dated the songs according to their distance from the emotional chasm at its center, embodied by the 10-minute "Black Lake". Its length reflected the difficult process of trying to articulate and move on from abstract, muddled pain, she explained, and her elongated vowels seemed to massage out that meaning.
Vulnicura Strings takes the record back to the very beginning of the process, where Björk threw herself into writing complex arrangements for strings as a way of coping after the split. The addition of subtly powerful beats added to the record's sense of rupture, evoking an arrhythmic heart and blowing circuits that left darkness in their sputtering wake. Removing them should result in a rawer incarnation of Vulnicura, but this sounds more like a suturing. The original's broken-ness is gone, in its place an undisturbed tragic whole.
Although some listeners may have found the electronic instrumentation distracting, *Vulnicura Strings—*a remake of the album using only strings, and jettisoning electronics—isn't necessarily an easier listen. It's more intense for the sense of space, which enhances Björk's cavernous, anguished vowels and sometimes accusatory tone. The ensemble's queasy, acidic qualities also stand out. These aren't always the original recordings, but closer mic'd takes, a subtle difference that gives the record a slightly uncanny quality, aided by the rearranged tracklist. The vast, trembling edifice of "Atom Dance" is stunning in isolation, while the spaces in "Black Lake" seem to linger even longer, with a kind of awkward tranquility. The lyrics are stripped out of "Family" in favor of highlighting its two piercing, frantic crescendos.
A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless. A second version of "Black Lake" was performed in Krakow, Poland, on the world's only viola organista, an instrument designed by Leonardo da Vinci but not built until after his death. On a technical level, it's intriguing: a friction belt vibrates individual strings, which are selected by pressing keys on a keyboard. But as a listening experience, it's a bit arduous. The instrument has a rasping, atonal quality, and the spaces in the song drone on forever without offering much.
It's unlikely that Vulnicura Strings will replace anyone's original copy of the record—its existence feels more symbolic than anything else. Last week, NASA observed the supermassive black hole Markarian 335 emitting energy for the first time. "This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe," said astrophysicist Dan Wilkins. For Björk to return to the disintegration of her family once again and make something new from it, however successful it is, is further proof of the life that can be found in destruction. | 2015-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | self-released | November 9, 2015 | 6.8 | 3d5479f8-3ac9-4481-ac01-cf6630842552 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On her new album, the Texas rapper ditches ready-made strip-club anthems for no-hook freestyles that flaunt her verbal dexterity. | On her new album, the Texas rapper ditches ready-made strip-club anthems for no-hook freestyles that flaunt her verbal dexterity. | Big Jade: I Can’t Help It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-jade-i-cant-help-it/ | I Can’t Help It | The finer points of regional rap geography are sometimes lost on listeners outside those places. Due to their tight affiliation with the Screwed-Up Click, UGK became honorary Houston heroes, but the duo was actually from Port Arthur, a coastal city over an hour away. Similarly, Big Jade has worked closely with Houston legends like BeatKing and DJ Michael Watts, but she’s a genuine product of the Third Coast; her hometown of Beaumont is technically closer to the Louisiana border than it is to Houston. Over time, the Texas rapper has carved her own place outside the currents of the industry, no longer content to be overpowered by the bright lights of the Houston metropolis.
While Big Jade’s early freestyles were lightning-fast sparring sessions that flaunted her verbal dexterity, her major label debut, Pressure, often felt more like a BeatKing project than one of her own. The self-styled “Club God” is a lynchpin of contemporary Texas rap, but the assembly-line rate at which he churns out bouncy, bass-heavy beats resulted in ready-made strip club rhythms. Jade’s 2021 EP, Jade Wins, was a soft reboot. It relied on uncleared samples of established classics—Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck,” Z-Ro’s “Mo City Don”—the familiar instrumentals putting more emphasis on her voice. It was as much of a throwback to woozy Screwed Up-Click cyphers as to DatPiff-era mixtapes like Nicki Minaj’s Playtime Is Over. Now, instead of succumbing to the Hot Girl Industrial Complex’s demand for TikTok-ready viral hits, Jade operates more like NBA YoungBoy, favoring no-hook freestyles and breakneck flows over shiny pop choruses.
From the opening shots of her new album, I Can’t Help It, Jade hardly stops to take a breath. On “Gangsta Activity,” she describes her attitude as “militant,” and it’s a fitting word for her rapping itself: dominant and unrelenting, never betraying a sign of weakness. Across the album, there are bills to pay, children to raise, and hair to braid, but there’s plenty of pleasure to be had too. Jade finds time amidst the grind for a much-needed dick appointment on the gleefully raunchy “Lick.” It opens with a sample of Sharon Stone in Paul Verhoeven’s infamous Basic Instinct—“Have you ever fucked on cocaine?”—positioning Jade as the cunning and cutting femme fatale in her own erotic thriller.
Even if Jade’s production has its roots in Houston, you can feel the in-betweenness of Beaumont in her flow; her accelerated delivery recalls the out-of-this-world intensity of Louisiana rappers from the heyday of Cash Money and No Limit, as opposed to the slowed-down, melodic drawl often associated with Texas rap. There’s even a little Louisiana flavor to the production, like in the light bounce of “Real Street'” and “Lick,” and the triumphant MIDI horns on “Reloaded.” Despite her kinship with rappers over the state line, the project’s only appearance from a Louisiana rapper, Baton Rouge’s Fredo Bang, on “Soulmate,” is one of the few tracks that feel a little forced. It’s a rare slow number that trades exuberant eroticism for excessively Auto-Tuned wooing.
Jade finds a much more evenly-matched duet partner in Detroit’s Sada Baby on “What She Said,” and her tip-toeing flow feels right at home in the fast and furious Michigan style. Like Detroit rappers from Babyface Ray to 42 Dugg, Jade showcases an enterprising hustle and sly humor, informed by an environment that demands you fight to survive. Swishahouse-affiliated producer DJ Chose compliments Sada Baby’s raspy voice with a menacing synthesizer line straight out of an Icewear Vezzo track.
On “Dollas,” Jade pays tribute to the late Gangsta Boo with a sample of 1998’s “Where Dem Dollas At.” Instead of merely recreating the original, the flip is more of a shout-out; where Gangsta Boo’s track is laid-back and funky, Jade’s interpretation is up-tempo and in your face, rapping like she’s still got something to prove. Much like her idol, Big Jade is a furious tongue-twister who can scrap and spit with the boys but still have a good time with her girls—not quite a pop rapper, but not a strict lyricist either. She has the same unapologetic spirit, crafting a flow all her own regardless of expectations for who she is or where she’s from. | 2023-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | July 13, 2023 | 7.2 | 3d5f880e-4fab-48be-934d-5349c05ee2f3 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
On their sophomore album, the Los Angeles rock trio fronted by Clementine Creevy have offered their fiercest recordings yet, full of shredding jams, furious howls, and self-aware swagger. | On their sophomore album, the Los Angeles rock trio fronted by Clementine Creevy have offered their fiercest recordings yet, full of shredding jams, furious howls, and self-aware swagger. | Cherry Glazerr: Apocalipstick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22775-cherry-glazerr-apocalipstick/ | Apocalipstick | Four years ago, Los Angeles rock outfit Cherry Glazerr began with then-15-year-old singer/guitarist Clementine Creevy recording bedroom demos under the name Clembutt. These tracks were soon discovered on Soundcloud by Burger Records co-founder Sean Bohrman, who released them as a tape titled Papa Cremp in 2013. Cherry Glazerr’s lineup soon solidified with the addition of bassist Sean Redman and drummer Hannah Uribe. Around this time, Cherry Glazerr caught the eye of Saint Laurent’s ex-creative director Hedi Slimane, who embraced Creevy as a model and muse, and enlisted the band to soundtrack his debut film and a Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear show. Then there’s Creevy’s work in the Amazon series “Transparent,” in which she performs in a band called Glitterish (and later Fussy Puss). By the time Cherry Glazerr released their debut LP, 2014’s Haxel Princess, Creevy’s reputation preceded them. All of this was done while she was in high school.
But Creevy has been clear that Cherry Glazerr is her primary passion and the group’s sophomore record (and Secretly Canadian debut), Apocalipstick, confirms this more fiercely than ever. While Haxel Princess was full of goofy and relatable teenage dispatches, Apocalipstick shoots daggers. Now 19, Creevy sounds wizened and ready for battle—and it’s not just because she recorded “Giving Bad People Good Ideas” for Death Grips’ Bottomless Pit. Thanks in part to the production of Joe Chiccarelli (the Strokes) and Carlos De La Garza (Bleached), Creevy and new bandmates Sasami Ashworth (keys/guitar) and Tabor Allen (drums) are a powerful rock trio. But for all this swagger, there’s still the acknowledgement that Cherry Glazerr are “Acting professional/When I’m nothing but a self-conscious child.”
Opener “Told You I’d Be With the Guys” recounts Creevy’s shift from lone wolf to supportive sister, but rather than being an anthem of empowerment, the track feels mournful as it recounts lost time. “I told you, I told you I’d be with the guys,” she howls before doubling back into murmured regret, “But I know better now/Than to be with the guys.” Cherry Glazerr tend to see-saw between extremes of expression: Moments of softness quickly give way to fiery yowls, and one can imagine a packed house of beer-swigging fans losing their minds to it. “Sip O’ Poison” has all the furious drums of No Age. Creevy’s voice, combined with Ashworth’s keys, create a piercing effect like Avey Tare’s clipped yelps on Animal Collective’s “Grass.”
Even the lighter tracks remain rollicking. The re-recorded “Nurse Ratched” offers a brief respite after “Sip O’ Poison” with a steady, shredding jam. “Trash People” and “Moon Dust” are all bubbly synths and incessant drumming, presenting an idea of what the Go-Go’s could have sounded like if Kim Gordon joined their ranks. “Nuclear Bomb” is perhaps Apocalipstick’s mellowest track (you might expect it to be the more appropriately titled “Lucid Dreams”). Creevy takes the sadness from “Told You I’d...” and opens the wound even deeper, digging into the pain of loss with a scalpel and a smile.
It’s been over 30 years since Cherie Currie of the Runaways boasted, “Hello, world! I’m your wild girl/I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!,” giving young women control of a provocative firecracker: themselves. All fruit-related similarities aside, Cherry Glazerr are here to offer a 2017 version of the same energy, one that is sexy, juvenile, catchy, and above all, simply great rock’n’roll. While some argue that guitar music is passé, Cherry Glazerr promise to make you remember how awesome a sick riff can be, how nostalgia can be captured in a single shred, and how anyone can start a band. Always. | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | January 25, 2017 | 7.4 | 3d6470be-dd06-4e6e-89ba-ac68b02490dd | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
A self-consciously minor work, this collection of spoken-word pieces is a brief but beatific respite during a particularly rewarding era of the songwriter’s long career. | A self-consciously minor work, this collection of spoken-word pieces is a brief but beatific respite during a particularly rewarding era of the songwriter’s long career. | Nick Cave: Seven Psalms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-cave-seven-psalms/ | Seven Psalms | Four decades after emerging as the seething frontman of the Birthday Party, Nick Cave has lately been making some of the most challenging and rewarding music of his long career. His recent albums, both with the Bad Seeds and as a duo with his right-hand Seed Warren Ellis, unfold in long contemplative stretches, slashed through occasionally with Cave’s old menace. The song forms have become progressively more open-ended; the narratives more diffuse and dreamlike; the instrumental arrangements softer and blurrier; the subject matter more openly preoccupied with questions of love and death. With each successive release, Cave’s work grows more distant from rock’n’roll and closer to religious music. The religion, admittedly, is an idiosyncratic one, whose high priest may also be its sole practitioner—a songwriter-mystic for whom sex, monsters, and bloodshed are as important as everlasting grace.
In contrast to the grand statements that Cave has produced in this vein, Seven Psalms is a self-consciously minor work. It consists of seven spoken-word pieces of one to two minutes each, with vaporous musical accompaniment from Cave and Ellis, and ends with one longer instrumental that is essentially a medley of the previous backing tracks, incorporating elements from each. The format and release strategy also encourage listeners to think of it as something other than the new Nick Cave album: a limited-edition 10” EP sold via Cave Things, a webstore that Cave has set up to sell art prints, Polaroid photos, T-shirts, and the like—what he calls the “incidental residue” of his creative practice. If he were a visual artist primarily, you might imagine these seven pieces hanging in a small and rushed-through anteroom to an exhibition of this distinct period in his work, included as interesting but inessential context for masterworks like 2021’s Carnage and 2016’s Skeleton Tree.
Cave flirted with spoken word on Carnage, in performances that were rich with drama and irony, taking breaks from his more traditional singing to cajole, plead, and intimidate. On Seven Psalms, the speeches are the main event: The fact there is music playing at all seems largely incidental. Cave is a much more reliable narrator this time around, ditching the previous album’s flashes of mania and hilarity in favor of solemnity and sobriety. You get the sense that this is the real Nick Cave delivering these lines, not some mad-eyed character he’s inhabiting. The music—a blend of synthesizers, gospel-inflected piano, and occasional wordless vocal harmonies, all swathed in heavy reverb—establishes a stately and ceremonious mood and never wavers from it, reinforcing the notion that Cave means what he says.
What he says usually has something to do with God, who seems a benevolent presence, with almost none of the Old Testament wrath that has often characterized His earlier appearances on Cave albums. “And though I have nothing but this prayer/That all will be revealed by and by/I pray someday my Lord you will appear/And lead me to your mansion in the sky,” Cave intones in one representative passage from “I Have Wandered All My Unending Days.” In another, from “I Come Alone and to You”: “I have nowhere left to go but to you, Lord/Breathless, but to you.” And from “I Have Trembled My Way Deep”: “I have stood at the threshold of your wonder/Bid me enter, Lord, allow me to unfold.”
Evaluating Seven Psalms as a pop record is likely beside the point; Cave seems to intend it straightforwardly as a sort of devotional aid. (The physical release comes with a prayer card.) But even if you lack the conviction in a higher power that animates it, you may find yourself moved by the strange beauty of his imagery—God as a stag whose antlers “rake lightning ’cross the sphere,” or a face in the morning mist held in place by the force of the narrator’s prayer—and by his unflagging belief in a goodness that transcends earthly horrors. He addresses the horrors most directly on “Such Things Should Never Happen,” which sketches out two mothers, a human woman and a sparrow, who lose their babies to early death, an unavoidable parallel to the deaths of Cave’s own sons in 2015 and 2022. “Such things should never happen,” goes the grave titular line. “But they do.”
As a Cave fan, it’s easy to miss the sex and monsters and bloodshed—not to mention the songs themselves—when playing Seven Psalms. It’s hard to imagine even the most devoted listeners returning to it regularly. But if anyone has earned the right to a brief and beatific respite, it’s Cave. And for the rest of the faithful: The man has a big catalog. If you want less God and more fucking, you can always listen to Grinderman. | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cave Things | June 23, 2022 | 6.4 | 3d65cbd3-b798-4410-8c5d-c58b8999b339 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Recorded on a four-track over a weekend, Shamir's sophomore album is the definition of a departure, moving from effervescent pop into a bracing new lo-fi world. | Recorded on a four-track over a weekend, Shamir's sophomore album is the definition of a departure, moving from effervescent pop into a bracing new lo-fi world. | Shamir: Hope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23208-hope/ | Hope | Shamir is at a crossroads. On the latitude runs Ratchet, released in 2015 to almost universal acclaim, an effervescent and even brooding pop record with monumental hooks and the kind of electronic beats that should be bottled and sold as anti-depressants. On the longitude is his sophomore album Hope, an album he recorded over just one weekend and released for free on Soundcloud, something between an unapologetic creative manifesto and a collection of tossed-off lo-fi bedroom demos.
About this new project, Shamir explains that “from day one, it was clear I was an accidental pop star,” which, in hindsight, rings painfully true. When looking at the video for Ratchet’s lead single, “On the Regular,” what once seemed like an exuberant introduction to a fresh-faced artist now feels slightly uncomfortable—Shamir dances without really acknowledging the camera, and when he does, there's a bashful awkwardness to his movements. It could just be a nervous kid shooting his first video, but Hope’s complete 180-degree turn in sound and mood make his persona in the video seem like a reflection of something deeper.
The album begins with a harsh burst of feedback from a guitar amp, a deliberate signal to check any notions at the door. Before long, Shamir's familiar vocals begin to peek through the mix, raw and brushed with static. The lo-fi direction of Hope isn’t necessarily a surprise for those that have been following Shamir’s career recently. In 2016, he released “Tryna Survive,” a three-minute sun-bleached pop song that sounded, somewhat astonishingly, like something Sheryl Crow would have dropped circa “Soak Up the Sun” only glossed-over with Shamir’s countertenor vocals. It absolutely worked, and pointed towards exciting developments in Shamir’s sound. Unfortunately, “Tryna Survive,” or anything resembling it, is absent from Hope and the album suffers from its few pop hooks being buried under its muddy, un-production. Shamir is not the first artist to fall prey to the trappings of lo-fi—like all “less-is-more” creative strategies, it's deceptively difficult to perfect, and the line between ruggedly effective and amateurishly basic is razor-thin. More often than not, Hope skews toward the latter.
From Larry Levan to Le1f and beyond, electronic dance music has been part of the queer black experience for decades, and it was very easy to slot Shamir and Ratchet into that narrative. It takes nerve to release something like Hope when the weight of your community’s expectations lies on your shoulders, and cheers to Shamir for taking the undeniable risk, even if its product is neither sterling nor altogether listenable. But there’s “Like a Bird,” which glows with a subtle beauty, shiny electro-pop for insomniacs, and makes amazing use of Shamir’s plaintive and untreated vocals. Unlike some of the album’s more experimental tracks, its soft meandering feels apt. “I Fuckin Hate U” has a purposefully Shaggs-like quality, with a skittish drumbeat slip-sliding under an idly plucked guitar. Where certain tracks like the tepid “What Else” peter out after a few minutes, Hope has enough good ideas in it to conceivably pave the way for the new chapter, should that be the road Shamir chooses.
For further context, Hope was recorded on a four-track in a Philadelphia bedroom by someone who played every instrument and produced it themselves. It is the fear of the sophomore album realized as music, released both as a statement of process and purpose. If pop music demands perfection and following a regiment of rules, Hope runs screaming away from all of that, perhaps freeing Shamir to travel uncharted waters. | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | April 20, 2017 | 6 | 3d68f453-8902-48c8-a03a-91df19adda95 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Spirit is Depeche Mode’s most pointedly topical album, but the synth giants still write universal, stadium-sized music. These songs make you feel like singing in response to today’s headlines. | Spirit is Depeche Mode’s most pointedly topical album, but the synth giants still write universal, stadium-sized music. These songs make you feel like singing in response to today’s headlines. | Depeche Mode: Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22997-spirit/ | Spirit | The 14th studio album from synth giants Depeche Mode begins with frontman Dave Gahan declaring that “We are not there yet/We have not evolved.” It’s the first of many admonitions Gahan issues on what turns out to be the most pointedly topical and compassionate effort in the band’s career. Over solemn piano chords and a lockstep electro groove that hints at the cadence of a protest march, Gahan laments how “we feel nothing inside” as we “track it all with satellites” and “watch men die in real time.” By track two, “Where’s the Revolution,” Gahan begins calling for out-and-out revolt, chiding the audience: “Come on people/You’re letting me down.” In his golden-throated baritone, Gahan reminds us that we’ve been “pissed on/For too long,” our “rights abused” by governments who “Manipulate and threaten/With terror as a weapon.”
Apparently, principal lyricist and songwriter Martin Gore is no longer content to focus all his attention on the spiritual searching that has defined Depeche Mode’s music for more than 30 years. Over that time, few artists have so artfully portrayed the inner dialogue between redemption and indulgence. By the band’s 1990 breakout Violator, Gore had basically invented his own syntax for the human condition as a purgatorial struggle between sinful pleasures and a yearning for higher peace. And Gahan, with his ability to invest urgency, soul, and a feeling of debauched weariness into subjects like S&M and tortured love, has never failed to translate Gore’s restless malaise to the throngs who fill stadiums to connect with it. Gahan turns despair into sex appeal unlike no other. But this time, he’s tasked with looking up from his satin, regret-stained sheets and making us believe that an aging rock star really cares about civil unrest.
Gahan delivers Gore’s state-of-world address for three songs in a row before going back to the band’s bread-and-butter obsessions. Later, though, on “Poorman”—which self-consciously references the spartan electronic gurgle of the Violator hit “Policy of Truth”—Gore and Gahan risk coming off as oblivious to the irony when they observe that “corporations get the breaks/Keeping almost everything they make” and ask, “When will it trickle down?” But Depeche Mode deliver anthems with such proficiency that sincerity barely matters. A song like “Where’s the Revolution” makes you feel like singing in response to today’s headlines. Depeche Mode still make universal, stadium-sized music that’s limber enough to fit through your bedroom doorframe, as if it had been conceived with your life in mind.
In some respects, though, their consistency works against them. The sixth album since the departure of multi-instrumentalist/arranger Alan Wilder, Spirit sees Depeche Mode once again shuffling through the most quintessential components of their sound. On “Cover Me,” Gore’s haunting Lanois-esque guitar twang allows you to close your eyes and picture yourself under the Northern lights Gahan sings about. But aside from “Cover Me,” Spirit lacks the ambience of Depeche Mode’s most atmospheric material. If only producer/mixer James Ford (Florence and the Machine, Foals, Arctic Monkeys) had disheveled the sounds a bit, Spirit could have better asserted its place in Depeche Mode’s body of work.
Instead, Ford—who is also one half of the electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco—mimics the vibe of the band’s iconic work with producer Flood. But even Flood didn’t imitate himself when he mixed the last DM album, 2013’s far more creatively resolute Delta Machine. Nevertheless, this is a band whose effortlessness can misguide you into thinking they’re not trying. Don’t be fooled. In the bridge of “Where’s the Revolution,” Gahan repeats the line “the train is coming, the train is coming... get on board.” You can draw inspiration from that lyric whether or not you take to the streets or petition your elected officials. Gore’s directive is less about activism and more about opening your heart so that it guides your conscience. For him, the term “spirit” has come to encompass politics, but it’s fueled by the same eros that’s driven the band’s music since day one. Which is why Spirit is so convincing in spite of its radical shift in tenor. For both the band and audience, that shift couldn’t have come at a better time. | 2017-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | March 18, 2017 | 6.8 | 3d698548-382c-4316-894f-c11780b3f65e | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Ruban Nielson’s mildew-covered fourth record continues UMO’s long journey inward, pinballing between love and indifference, bops and dirges, pop and its opposite. | Ruban Nielson’s mildew-covered fourth record continues UMO’s long journey inward, pinballing between love and indifference, bops and dirges, pop and its opposite. | Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Sex & Food | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/unknown-mortal-orchestra-sex-and-food/ | Sex & Food | When he founded Unknown Mortal Orchestra in 2010, Ruban Nielson declared his intention to “hatch a new musical dimension,” using the language of psychedelia as a cover for old-fashioned solipsism. UMO’s insomniac psych-rock has an escapist quality, but it is the inward escape of burrowing so deeply into solitude that one’s own misery becomes abstract. In the half-ruins of Nielson’s songs, loneliness is so pervasive you forget it’s there. This commitment to interiority is part of his outsider charm, which stretches far beyond the Portland, Oregon basement where he often records. Just as Tame Impala use solitude to springboard into kaleidoscopic wonderlands, Nielson maps inward frustrations to make his home in the psychic gutter.
That he remains morbidly internal on Sex & Food, UMO’s mildew-covered fourth record, is hardly surprising. On its predecessor, 2015’s Multi-Love, Nielson documented the true story of his and his wife’s entanglement with a shared third lover, somehow coming away with the breeziest music of his solo career. That record’s spiritual uplift was a relief—both in musical terms and as a window into Nielson’s psychiatric health, often grimly portrayed in his nihilistic lyrics. On some level, it’s a relief again to see Nielson discover new territory on Sex & Food. The record’s otherworldly folk, shellshocked R&B, and emaciated soul drift closer than ever to that “new musical dimension” of his. But it can be an exhausting trip.
Where Multi-Love upped UMO’s mainstream- and sex-appeal, here we have a more radical reinvention—one that dials down both qualities to a freezing point. These minimal songs sound ready to give up the ghost altogether and sink back into the fabric of the universe. This was always a danger, that Nielson’s antique obsessions—his compression of rock history into pedals, fog-machine filters, and other vintage affects—would finally land him in a creative black hole. But the black hole, it turns out, sounds pretty good: bleak, austere, kind of creepy, but possessed of something admirably deranged, pinballing between love and indifference, bops and dirges, pop and its opposite.
Hidden in this chilly world is an assortment of oddities: “How Many Zeros” projects Nielson’s falsetto onto ghostly funk, like Thundercat master tapes fished from a river, while “Hunnybee,” a love song to his young daughter, sleepwalks between disco and R&B with eerie calm. Even “Not in Love We’re Just High,” a gorgeous declaration of romantic incapacity, sounds washed-out and strangled, like a downbeat Prince rarity recorded on a dictaphone in Arthur Russell’s pocket.
At times, you begin to feel like a prisoner in the “hostile wasteland” described in “Ministry of Alienation.” Full of oblique nods to modern disaffection—“No one will fuck the ugly robot,” Nielson wheezes—the psych-folk curio meanders inconclusively and ends with a miniature, mortally wounded sax solo. Much of Sex & Food sounds like work in progress, ideas toward a more inviting fusion of insular sounds and soulful alienation. If these are indeed building blocks, the completed music might sound something like “If You’re Going to Break Yourself,” weird-era Sly Stone feel and lyrics about friendships lost in a drug wilderness. While still rooted in Nielson’s desires and frustrations, this human moment hints at a UMO enriched by looking to the outside world once in a while.
Sex & Food is best in this spaced-out zone, where alienation sounds genuinely alien. The record’s disembodiment is precisely what makes it intriguing and, occasionally, unlistenable. The songs often sound reluctant to be heard at all and have none of the lysergic flair that makes gear-driven rock music indulgent. Sex & Food goes the opposite way, draining away all empathy and worldly color until you are cocooned, for better or worse, in Ruban Nielson’s tiny, claustrophobic psyche. | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 9, 2018 | 7 | 3d6c0427-8579-4304-b571-ddbd7a019c68 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
The Toronto rapper's debut shows off his ridiculously catchy melodies and distinct persona, even as it moves within bigger stars' shadows. | The Toronto rapper's debut shows off his ridiculously catchy melodies and distinct persona, even as it moves within bigger stars' shadows. | Killy: Surrender Your Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/killy-surrender-your-soul/ | Killy: Surrender Your Soul | Last year, Toronto rapper Killy took his last paycheck from working a sales job at Nordstrom and spent it on the video for his breakout hit, “Killamonjaro.” In the song, his whispery sing-song floats over an eerie, bass-heavy beat, as the 20-year-old beckons: “I can introduce you to this life we live forever.” Killy most obviously belongs to the Travis Scott camp of trap music, in which creating a dark mood through sound design and vocal manipulation almost always takes priority over lyrical depth or melodic complexity. Nor is that the only resemblance to be found in his style: His nasally voice and goofy ad-libs recall Lil Uzi Vert, while the re-looping of hooks mirrors Trippie Redd’s approach. With his debut album, Surrender Your Soul, Killy shows that he’s adept at following a template already established by his peers, while also suggesting—with his knack for ridiculously catchy melodies and his distinct persona—that he could soon pull away from the pack.
Raised in a Filipino and Bajan household, Killy has described being the only non-French student at his Francophone school, where his classmates would mispronounce his given name, Khalil. This led to the alias Kill Ill, which later morphed into the stage name he uses today. As a performer, he has stepped into the role of a menacing antihero, sprinkling in fantasy imagery and lyrics about fighting for your legacy throughout the album. “I’m the only worthy opposition… See me as a hero or a villain,” he croons on “Distance.” Later, he compares himself to a notoriously cold-blooded “Dragon Ball Z” prince in “Live Your Last”: “Screw face lookin’ like Vegeta/I’m a demon with the divas.” And on “Doomsday,” Killy seems to challenge fate itself, as he claims he’ll “come alive” at the end of the world.
The music on Surrender Your Soul, too, fits within Killy’s vision. Crafted by Torontonian hitmakers like WondaGurl, Boi-1da, and Daxz (all of whom have worked with both Drake and Travis Scott), the beats ring with dramatic synths and guitars and mysteriously twinkling piano. This album sounds like it could soundtrack the moment in a first-person adventure game when your character first enters a new, dark, and scary world.
Killy generally steers clear of the common melodramatic or disaffected vocal tropes of his SoundCloud and emo rap counterparts. Instead, he sounds like he’s having fun—like he perpetually has a mischievous smirk on his face. The only instance where he leans heavily into the emo rap aesthetic is the album’s closer, “Fireflies (Outro).” Essentially a slowed-down Blink-182 song with trap drums, the sunset of a track opens with Killy’s Auto-Tune-drenched voice, evoking Rebirth-era Lil Wayne: “Lately I’ve been searching for my purpose/Will you show me where the Earth ends?”
With the majority of its tracks clocking in under the three-minute mark, Surrender Your Soul is a lean offering. In many ways, it seems designed for quickly bored listeners who are eager to move onto the next hype artist. As enjoyable as they often are, the tracks largely conclude without transitioning to a bridge section or reaching a climax, resulting in bite-sized songs that are easy to consume but ultimately unsatiating. Killy clearly has killer natural instincts, but his debut shows that he has ample room for more complexity. He once said that the name “Killamonjaro” represents his “ultimate form.” If he wants to fulfill his potential, he’s going to need to keep evolving. | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Secret Sound Club | March 17, 2018 | 6.8 | 3d6c3472-df8f-41eb-bb6a-6ea27027ddeb | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The Texas singer-songwriter’s fourth album sounds older and wiser, casting her mystical interests as a foil to the bittersweet, ordinary moments that add up to earthly life. | The Texas singer-songwriter’s fourth album sounds older and wiser, casting her mystical interests as a foil to the bittersweet, ordinary moments that add up to earthly life. | Jess Williamson: Sorceress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jess-williamson-sorceress/ | Sorceress | For around $38, or the price of three cheese raviolis at Olive Garden, you can buy a 1.5-ounce jar of “Sex Dust” at Urban Outfitters. Sex Dust is an “aphrodesical warming potion” sold by the wellness brand Moon Juice, one of many witchy, New Age-y remedies endorsed by Gwenyth Paltrow, whose GOOP empire helped bring psychics and Tarot to the mainstream. You might also pick up some quartz crystals and zodiac tapestries, or a “survival mist” to tide you through Mercury’s retrograde. Nowadays, the occult is crudely commonplace, which poses a problem: In 2020, a folk singer with a collection of songs titled Sorceress and a passion for books on “spirituality, new age weirdness, and ... witchy woman 101” might be a little passé.
But Texas singer-songwriter Jess Williamson’s fourth album is not breathlessly absorbed in the cosmos; it’s thoroughly grounded on earth. Whereas 2018’s Cosmic Wink was, in her words, about “naively trusting in synchronisticity and magical thinking,” Sorceress discards utopianism. The word “sorceress” emerges as a refusal, an acknowledgement of mortal limitations: “Yes, there’s a little magic in my hat/But I’m no sorceress,” she tells a skittish lover on the title track. Wistful observations like “you ain’t a tourist here no more” signal the time that’s passed; her body, she repeats, is aging. The moments Williamson documents are bittersweet and ordinary: having enough money to buy the expensive eggs, or losing a pregnancy, or getting invited to an ex’s wedding but wisely choosing not to go. The overarching sense is of someone who’s wised up; she’s too old for turbulence. “Can we put the coffee and our favorite record on?” she asks, fatigued, on “Love’s Not Hard to Find.”
Williamson has a fluttery, plaintive voice reminiscent of Angel Olsen or Faye Webster, and the mood of these songs is that of watching an old friend pack their belongings and disappear down the road. “As the Birds Are” is especially forlorn and cinematic, like a classic film heroine taking one last glance at the wreckage before she goes. “Oh, to live in some photograph,” Williamson cries, apologizing for her past cruelty. “Wind on a Tin” was inspired by a revelation at a friend’s memorial service, when she heard an angelic, flute-like noise blown by the wind. “I heard God,” she murmurs, and you understand how someone can be moved by such a simple sound.
The best cuts on Sorceress are effortlessly golden, glimmering with pedal steel, tambourine, and the occasional sliver of saxophone. The swelling disco-folk lament “Infinite Scroll” glows like a desert sunset. But Williamson missteps when she adds too many embellishments: cicada chirps and a whipping sound on “Sorceress,” meant to emphasize the line “I can’t tame a lion,” or choir-like harmonies on “Ponies in Town” that feel as kitschy as Christmas at Hobby Lobby. And the album trails off with a set of slower, dustier compositions, like “Rosaries at the Border,” an immigration ballad with the well-meaning but florid Jesus rhetoric of a “thoughts and prayers” statement.
But these are small sins in the grand scheme. Sorceress is a mature and freeing record, one that celebrates meager triumphs of womanhood even as it mourns a loss of innocence. “Should we give up on Tarot? Maybe it’s a waste of time,” Williamson wonders. Of course, the magic was never in the cards, but in piecing together your own faith.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mexican Summer | May 16, 2020 | 7 | 3d713b44-5bff-4e85-bbd0-6143e8172f88 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
On her third album, the English singer/songwriter vividly captures a love both intimate and powerful. | On her third album, the English singer/songwriter vividly captures a love both intimate and powerful. | Jessie Ware: Glasshouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessie-ware-glasshouse/ | Glasshouse | On the front cover of Glasshouse, Jessie Ware is pictured emerging from the courtyard of the Neuendorf House on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. The modernist villa, designed by architects John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin, is less a house than a series of walls that give shape to different kinds of space: long hallways that open out onto a tennis court and a rectangular pool, the ceilings in the interior partially deleted to let long rhombuses of light in. The photo is not exclusively focused on Ware and the shadows pooling around her; the eye is drawn as much to the soft, ruddy brown of the walls or the blue sky packed into a crisp rectangle above her. Ware wanted the cover to emphasize architecture; as she explained in an interview the week before the image was shot, “I want it to be a beautiful image that maybe I’m a small part of.”
Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album. Here, tracks are discrete entities, seemingly designed and assembled by its own team of architects, whether it’s Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, and Happy Perez embroidering “Selfish Love” with weightless, rippling flamenco guitar or Stint forming the spine of “Your Domino” entirely out of soft synthetic pulses. It almost feels like Ware is trying to divert attention from herself, but she is positioned directly at the center of the album’s trembling choreography. She connects each of these unrelated environments—shaping them, in the tradition of singers like Anita Baker, into slippery vacuums of desire. They’re songs about how feelings tend not to map onto reality, and how reality tends to be undisturbed by the weight of our feelings. And Glasshouse came at a deepy emotional time for Ware; she wrote much of its lyrics after giving birth to her daughter, while immersed in the exhaustion of early parenthood.
The intimacy that exists at the margins of sleep isn’t ordinarily a subject of pop music; in the last 10 years, it can be mostly located in R&B songs like Janet Jackson’s “No Sleeep,” Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings,” and Miguel’s “Coffee,” among others. But this is precisely the feeling that Ware is trying to draw to the surface of her record, the idle moments that initially seem to have little universal importance but people tend to find themselves in, anyway. As if imitating the Neuendorf villa, on Glasshouse, Ware longs to partially delete the ceiling of her own house, in order to zoom in on the private warmth of domesticity. In the closing track “Sam,” which Ware co-wrote with Ed Sheeran, she drinks a cup of coffee at a train station and seems to lose herself in someone else’s conversation—but even as her thoughts scatter, they always circle back to her husband and her child and the ways in which they both rerouted her life. “And I hope I’m as brave as my mother, wondering what kind of mother will I be,” she sings in the chorus. “I hope she knows that I found a man far from my father/Sam, my baby, and me.” The acoustic guitar, Pino Palladino’s bass, and Ware’s voice seem to disappear into a humming cloud of synths and cymbals, through which Nico Segal plays a trumpet solo; his individual notes cluster, separate, and pulse faintly through the membrane of smoke.
Ware feels especially at home in the more organic arrangements on Glasshouse. “Selfish Love” and “Sam” are supported by the rhythm section of bassist Palladino and drummer Chris Dave, both of whom accompanied D’Angelo on his 2014 album Black Messiah, and whose playing shapeshifted according to the liquid design of that album’s funk and soul songs. Dave and Palladino are extraordinary, dexterous players; on Ware’s songs, which aren’t necessarily detached from either funk or soul, they express themselves primarily through restraint—Dave barely plays on the verses of “Selfish Love,” and his interlocking rhythms in the chorus make it sound as if the track is being pushed by whispers. Stint supplies live drums to the slow jam “Stay Awake, Wait for Me,” and the delay between each snare hit adds a stretchy emptiness between Ware’s shivering musical sighs. The song itself sounds drowsy, only half-awake to its own desires, formed in a language that repeats itself and digresses, as if it were composed just after Ware surfaced from a deep dream. “We could be a perfect picture,” Ware sings. “Picture this/An endless kiss/You’re hanging on my lips.”
On the album’s best song, “Last of the True Believers,” Ware sketches another intimate scene: a couple (possibly a family) driving through mist, abandoning a vast city behind them. The details stop evolving there and begin to evaporate as Ware’s attention drifts toward more abstract but enveloping images. “Let’s be alone together, where the sky falls through the river,” she sings, and the family, the car, and the city are absorbed into this greater feeling. The instruments behind her gently flicker and glow. This is Ware’s particular talent: her ability to seamlessly flow from the specific to the general, from complicated to clear, her songs gradually including you. “Let’s get lost forever/Are you hearing me?” she sings; her words are echoed by Paul Buchanan, frontman of the glacial Scottish band the Blue Nile, who developed the form of immersive romanticism which Ware inhabits here. “Last of the True Believers” brings to mind a reel of discrete images of longing: thickets of illuminated buildings, streetlamps glowing through a thick fog, a love so intimate and powerful it not only maps onto the environment seamlessly but it changes it. It’s architecture. Ware is just a small part of the beautiful image, but she’s also the reason for it. | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Universal | October 23, 2017 | 8 | 3d77bdee-ad5f-495a-bd8b-a4deb7ab73ee | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
The Boston-based, Brazil-born Ricardo Donoso eschews percussion to create rhythm through timing and momentum. His second album takes roots in dance and techno as well as the minimalism of Terry Riley, Cluster's trance, and Oneohtrix Point Never's spaced-out arpeggios. | The Boston-based, Brazil-born Ricardo Donoso eschews percussion to create rhythm through timing and momentum. His second album takes roots in dance and techno as well as the minimalism of Terry Riley, Cluster's trance, and Oneohtrix Point Never's spaced-out arpeggios. | Ricardo Donoso: Assimilating the Shadow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17241-assimilating-the-shadow/ | Assimilating the Shadow | "My favorite time was around when the sun came up," Boston-based musician Ricardo Donoso recently recalled when discussing the dance parties he attended as a youth in Brazil. "The music got slower... the floor would be much emptier and, more often than not, you were surrounded by amazing landscapes." Those memories serve as a good description of Donoso's solo synth work. It's a kind of dream-state dance music, filled with rippling light and vivid atmospheres, and devoid of hard, four-on-the-floor beats. In fact, there are no drums in Donoso's pulsing tunes. All the rhythm-- and there's a lot of it-- is created through timing and momentum.
The resulting sound on Assimilating the Shadow, Donoso's second solo album, has roots in his dance/techno background, but stretches toward the minimalist flights of Terry Riley, the Kraut trance of Cluster, the spaced-out arpeggios of early Oneohtrix Point Never, and film scores like John Carpenter's horror themes or Tangerine Dream's bubbling soundtracks. Donoso is familiar with genre-crossing-- he's played drums in improv-jazz and avant-metal groups, and his duo Perispirit veers toward all-out noise. But he melds these strains naturally, never jamming them together or grasping for superficial variety.
In fact, the 10 songs spread over these two LPs are pretty simple. Each starts with a basic, insistent synth figure, which slowly overlaps with similar lines while simultaneously gathering chords and accents. But as active as these tracks are, they are rarely dense and never blurry. Donoso uses space and staccato to maintain clarity; everything he's doing is always out in the open. And though he's into repetition, he also has a knack for song structure. Each tune progresses with discernible shifts that create drama in loops of tension and release.
In the best tracks, those loops intertwine with looser abstraction. On "Chemical Structures", a reflecting synth riff spawns crescendos without wavering from its solid cycle. Similar waves course through "The Bow and the Lyre", but Donoso continually adds rippling echoes, the sonic equivalent of pelting a lake with different-sized pebbles. Most remarkable is closer "Renunciation", whose swarm of small sounds creates a bright buzz, like a symphony of crickets coaxing a sunrise.
Which again suggests that Donoso's music evokes the morning end of an all-night party. The title, Assimilating the Shadow, itself seems to allude to that surreal time when the sun fades in, swallowing the darkness as it rises. But according to press notes, it's a reference to Carl Jung's claim that "everyone carries a shadow." That works too-- there's an undercurrent of foreboding in these compositions, an ominous sense that danger lurks on the horizon of Donoso's rolling sounds. Yet nearly every moment is also calm and soothing, as easy to zone out to as it is to get chills from. Perhaps that's the strength of his music-- as simple as it sounds at first, repeat listens reveal something wider and deeper going on. | 2012-10-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Digitalis | October 9, 2012 | 7.6 | 3d7eba67-00ee-4282-9fa0-4d6a6dea245e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Guerilla Toss make a "Donkey Kong"*-*soundtrack version of punk, with synthesizers ping-ponging against screeching guitars. It's brainy music that feels immediate and visceral. | Guerilla Toss make a "Donkey Kong"*-*soundtrack version of punk, with synthesizers ping-ponging against screeching guitars. It's brainy music that feels immediate and visceral. | Guerilla Toss: Eraser Stargazer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21572-eraser-stargazer/ | Eraser Stargazer | Guerilla Toss may project themselves as deeply weeded hippie-punks, but they are not slackers. In just the last three years, the group has checked a number of boxes on the avant-rock bucket list: Releases on Digitalis Limited, NNA Tapes, Feeding Tube, and a CD on composer John Zorn’s Tzadik label, where they appeared as part of the Spotlight Series, a sub-imprint meant to highlight young and emerging weirdo talent. That honor is well earned. In concert, the band is wild and disorienting—a kind of punk rock "Donkey Kong" soundtrack with synthesizers ping-ponging against screeching guitars, the rhythm section halting and then churning in dialog with singer Kassie Carlson's animalistic yelps. They make brainy music that feels mmediate and visceral.
Now signed to New York's DFA, Guerilla Toss have simmered down a little. The band’s first full-length for the label, Eraser Stargazer, finds them less manic and more zoned-out, augmenting pulsing repetition with heaps of gurgling psychedelic jewelry and elastic basslines. In terms of DFA’s classic catalog, they skew closer to the gonzo tradition embodied by Black Dice than the streamlined dance-punk of the Rapture. The later favored minimalism and poise, embodying a fluid and streamlined rhythmic sensibility. Guerilla Toss' music is more like the burbling glop at the top of the Slurpee machine—viscous and messy. Think Chocolate Synthesizer-era Boredoms spliced with The Uplift Mofo Party Plan-era Red Hot Chili Peppers. No, don't laugh. That's not a takedown. On Eraser Stargazer, Guerilla Toss suggests funkiness without channeling the grody and ultra-masculine energy that seems forever sewn to punk-funk. Not exactly an easy thing to do.
In a way, their closest contemporary kin might be Baltimore's Dope Body—another band that has thrived on deconstructing '90s dude-rock into heady mulch. Though, Guerilla Toss’ alternative-era source material is not so much MTV as the jam band world. Which shouldn’t suggest that they are given to jamming. That kinship comes more through a lack of musical self-consciousness—the willingness to seek transcendence via improvisation and weirdo genre bending. On Eraser Stargazer, Guerilla Toss captures that crowd’s yin and yang—the blissed-out hippie vibe and also the druggy parking lot creep-out factor.
But like the jam bands of yesteryear, Guerilla Toss’ on-stage appeal is not easily consumed through the thin reed of a SoundCloud single, a YouTube video, or even a LP. In concert, the band can survive on sheer intensity. But as a record, Eraser Stargazer is sometimes weirdly hookless and ponderous. There’s plenty of stoner fog, but not always much to grip. It is a forward move for the band, though. Where Guerilla Toss’ music was once driven by the push and pull between abrasive elements, Eraser Stargazer glides by in a dreamlike gonzo haze. Gentler, but no less strange. | 2016-02-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | DFA | February 26, 2016 | 6.9 | 3d832dc6-119d-4854-a109-816b33522177 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Singer and composer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden collaborate for an EP of two extended, lucid, and intimate pieces of art-punk. | Singer and composer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden collaborate for an EP of two extended, lucid, and intimate pieces of art-punk. | Lost Girls: Feeling EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lost-girls-feeling-ep/ | Feeling EP | For a certain set of listeners—feminist pop fans, post-punk philosophers, people who like to feel as much as they like to think—Jenny Hval has become ever more heroic with each album. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m complex and intellectual,” the Norwegian avant-gardist sang on her fifth full-length, 2015’s Apocalypse, girl. Hval, now 37, has made her name on slyly affirming moments like this: self-reflexive, conceptual, at once serious and fun. She consistently extends the boundaries of herself. Hval’s most recent LP, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was inspired by vampire movies, Chris Kraus’ book I Love Dick, and period blood; it won the prestigious Nordic Music Prize. There is no doubt that Hval is complex and intellectual. But that lyric, from a song called “Why This,” was moving because it sounded like Hval needed to convince herself in order to keep going. We all do sometimes.
Lost Girls is Hval’s latest collaboration with the multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, who also plays in her live band. Hval and Volden previously recorded under the name Nude on Sand, releasing a more organic-sounding 2012 record of Volden’s acoustic guitar experiments and Hval’s feather-light singing. The new Feeling EP is a stark and welcomed turn. Its two extended compositions center on Hval’s spoken word, deep rhythms, and a feeling of dislocation. “Accept,” the largely instrumental B-side, is an 11-minute hybrid of wide-open free jazz drumming, blown-out blast beats, and B-movie horror vocalizations. Hval repeats “accept the risk” with a bracing intimacy; she audibly does.
But the 14-minute monologue “Drive” is Feeling’s main concern—like a lucid sonic essay, an episodic mix of synth-pop, tablas, and criticism at once. What begins with Hval observing her surroundings while in the van on tour (and musing on her destination: the gig) soon grows heavier. “Drive” comes to feel like some innocuous daydream that sneaks up on you and sucks you into the void.
If Feeling is a footnote to Hval’s primary work, then it’s an essential one. For Hval is the best kind of punk thinker: a natural skeptic whose curiosity about the world remains boundless, from anarchism and porn to religion and romcoms. She sees through everything. On “Drive,” simply by describing what’s around her, she covers the creature-comforts of capitalism, patriarchy, performer-audience dynamics, and the similarities between underground and mainstream culture. It is hard to imagine another artist who could make such a heady undertaking transmit so much emotion—melancholy, power, care, and joy.
Hval and Varden have said that “Drive” was initially inspired by the blustering hardcore aggression of Black Flag, before they got into the late opera composer Robert Ashley and it changed. But watching Ashley’s dreamlike, absurdist operas for television, such as 1978’s “Perfect Lives” (Ashley preferred not to wait for the permission and space of the opera establishment) there are parallels to 1980s SST punk. Both antagonized convention with an audacious and uncompromised outsider perspective; they were based in raw language and personal transformation. These qualities take shape on Feeling as well.
Hval bears her process on “Drive”—she confesses to watching herself on YouTube, to listening to her own music—and it all comes to a potent conclusion as she states her ultimate goal: “I want us all to cry together… in the empty clubs.” But then she catches herself. “What am I saying? I want you all to cry with me? Isn’t that just manipulation?” Hval lets the seams of her thinking show and she wonders if what she’s doing isn’t just as evil as the “arena concerts” or “mainstream movies” that plunder our base emotions, warping our expectations of reality when they introduce violence or violins or “kissing in the rain.”
But what Hval shows here is empathy. She knows how confusing it is to just live. As her logic deepens, the music grows more wrenching and intense; the drums hit harder and crisper; her voice melodically twirls for emphasis. “Feeling something and you don’t know why,” Hval grapples, before fine-tuning it: “Let me rephrase that/Feeling something/But you don’t know who you are.” Hval’s work, though, has an opposite effect: It makes lost girls feel seen. | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | March 8, 2018 | 7.6 | 3d8d5c53-37a0-4ba8-875c-cf78048cf67f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Queens-raised rapper’s fourth album is an inconsistent letdown, swaying between soul-baring R&B, cookie-cutter flexes, and empty posturing. | The Queens-raised rapper’s fourth album is an inconsistent letdown, swaying between soul-baring R&B, cookie-cutter flexes, and empty posturing. | Bas: We Only Talk About Real Shit When We’re Fucked Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bas-we-only-talk-about-real-shit-when-were-fucked-up/ | We Only Talk About Real Shit When We’re Fucked Up | Bas is one of a few Dreamville delegates who has yet to experience a true breakout moment. The Paris-born, Queens-raised artist, who has also lived in Qatar and briefly went to college in Virginia, is the son of a Sudanese diplomat. That recipe should make for an interesting perspective; in practice, he combines a flexible New York-cool rap style with beats that blend trap, boom-bap, and dashes of Afrobeats and R&B. It has led him to decent success, with four studio albums and two RIAA-certified platinum releases to his name. But his highest-streamed song on Spotify, a 2018 J. Cole collaboration called “Tribe,” stands out more for his guest’s electrifying verse and producer Childish Major’s peppy, guitar-led beat than his own contributions. He’s certainly come a long way from near-death shoot-outs on Hillside Avenue and helping his brother—Cole’s manager and Dreamville co-founder Ibrahim Hamad—pass out mixtapes at the North Carolina rapper’s early release parties. Still, he has yet to cross over like fellow Dreamville signees JID and Ari Lennox have. Though he’s a competent rapper with a good ear for beats and a distinct background, he hasn’t quite cracked how to translate those unique traits into a full project.
His fourth album, We Only Talk About Real Shit When We’re Fucked Up, attempts to split the difference, with more R&B melodies and heartfelt vulnerability than ever. The general idea—finding the courage to be open about your life and struggles while sober—is a ripe one, but Bas only occasionally transcends the hokey weedism of the album’s title. Startling revelations, like stories of friends stealing money from Dreamville artists and reflections on his life before fame, bring new depth to his writing: a heartbeat to back up the flashy flows and shit talk. But these thoughts are only explored in fits and starts; Bas often defaults to the boilerplate posturing and jet-setting flings of his earlier work. It’s a naked attempt to open up to fans on a more personal level, and the inconsistency makes it even harder to connect with.
Opener “Light of My Soul” is at least a promising start. The first verse rides in on a mournful vocal sample, its melancholy accentuating his tales of strained friendships and drunken nights. By the time the drums thud into place, he’s completely baring his soul, delivering lines about wearing sunglasses to hide behind his pain and working through his people-pleasing tendencies: “Mama told me ‘Treat ’em to the light of my soul/The light of my soul, and don’t expect nothing back’/The light of my soul, but shit, I want something back.” Exasperation is uncommon on a Bas song, and hearing him navigate this emotion over such a forlorn beat is as uncomfortable as it is gripping.
For every white-knuckle storytelling display or reflection on his Sudanese heritage and self-destructive drug use, there are a handful of songs that either fall back on old habits or redress them in surface-level ways. Singsong ballads make up the bulk of the tracklist—a first for Bas. Though his harmonies are smooth, they’re occasionally monotonous; at the very least, it’s somewhat of a risk. If several of these songs didn’t revolve around the same bland relationship stories he’s been rapping about since 2014’s “Fiji Water in My Iron,” it’d feel even more adventurous. “Choppas” seems to compare a fraught romance to the spin of helicopter blades, an awkward conceit that muddies an otherwise gorgeous FKJ and Christo beat. “Black Jedi” and “Decent” abandon the specificity of his writing, coming off more like faceless BET rom-coms than relatable or vulnerable admissions. No one is asking him for an entire album of Ab-Soul-style introspection, but it’s undeniable that the soul-baring tracks stick more than the rest.
Because this is a solo album, it’s ironic that outside of Real Shit’s confessionals, Bas sounds most comfortable and self-assured when rapping next to Cole, who appears here on three songs. On “Home Alone,” he adopts Cole’s sputtering flow, trading traumatic anecdotes and flexes over bouncy synths and drum work from producers T Minus and Cubeatz. “Passport Bros” comes across like a more leisurely version of their previous track “Tribe,” with its bright guitars and drum shuffle sauntering underneath stories of lovestruck, boozy boat rides. On a more structured album, a song like this would welcome a sunny moment after intense reflection. But here, it feels far removed from the album’s concept and speaks to where Bas’ interests and talents are best suited. Once hailed by The FADER as Dreamville’s heir apparent, Bas wants to be all things to all people. But as a solo artist, he winds up doing the one thing he feared most: spreading himself too thin. | 2023-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope | December 20, 2023 | 6.3 | 3d917d6a-9cba-47c2-b8a3-5687dd8e137c | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On her debut album, the Iranian-born Netherlands-based singer and multidisciplinary artist Sevdaliza establishes herself as a provocateur with a sense of global mission. | On her debut album, the Iranian-born Netherlands-based singer and multidisciplinary artist Sevdaliza establishes herself as a provocateur with a sense of global mission. | Sevdaliza: ISON | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23231-ison/ | ISON | At the top of the insert for ISON, the debut full-length from Iranian-born Netherlands-based singer and multi-platform artist Sevdaliza, there’s a modified quote from a love letter that author Franz Kafka wrote to Czech journalist Milena Jesenská: “In this life, you are the knife with which I explore myself.” Though not Sevdaliza’s own words (and Kafka originally wrote “love” not “life”), the quote encapsulates the artist’s way of being both grandiose and explosive with simple, compact phrases. And while Kafka’s tortured correspondence certainly makes for an appropriate window into the mindset of ISON, a more fitting manifesto for Sevdaliza’s work might be: “I am the knife by which you explore life”—the “you” being us, the audience.
Some artists, it seems, have an irrepressible drive to ride the razor’s edge, to go places the world isn’t necessarily ready or willing to explore. For that type of artist, creation alone isn’t enough. ISON establishes Sevdaliza as an artist-provocateur with a sense of global mission. Provocative in the most generous sense, ISON’s messages both jar and invite. Sevdaliza is also blessed with a huckster’s knack for hyping her efforts via high-minded concepts. The album cover, for instance, frames Sevdaliza as mother to herself, to her past lives, and to the album’s 16 songs.
Originally on track towards a career as a basketball player, Sevdaliza abandoned athletics to pursue art. Like FKA Twigs, it’s clear that music represents just one dimension of her creative being, as she guides its visual and filmic presentations. And when you watch the lavish videos for ISON songs like “Human,” “Marilyn Monroe,” and “That Other Girl,” you might get the impression that the music doesn’t stand up quite as well without the visuals. On ISON, though, Sevdaliza and co-producer Mucky create an aural world so rich in detail and ambience that the music almost functions as a film set all on its own.
ISON is a modern-day trip hop album built on minimal breakbeats and heavy layers of orchestration courtesy of string arranger Mihai Puscoiu. Sevdaliza and Mucky take a rather frugal approach in their choice of sounds, and yet the sum total of the soundscape is massive and enveloping (thanks, in part, to masterful use of reverb). At the center of it all is Sevdaliza’s voice. As an entirely self-taught vocalist, she shows a startling level of agility and command as she switches between the stately inflection of a classic jazz singer backed by strings and the brassy nerve of a digital-age R&B artist flexing and cooing over the beat.
Impressively, she provokes thought and discomfort more with the emotion in her voice than through the stories her songs tell, like an actor emphasizing facial expressions over lines. In her videos, Sevdaliza tends to spell out her central themes (i.e: the conflicted interplay between womanhood and the constraints of motherhood, societal expectations, the male gaze, etc). Search for those subjects in the actual music, however, and they prove to be somewhat elusive, if ever-present. ISON is fraught with the push-pull dynamic between vulnerability and power, confidence and grace—dichotomies that Sevdaliza seeks to challenge.
There are too many eye-popping turns of phrase to list, but for Sevdaliza, even the simple, deadpan phrasing of the line “I am human” bursts with meaning. If there’s one knock on ISON, it’s that it stretches out to an hour-plus, which is a lot to take at the same crawling tempo. While Mucky’s beats can be nimble, some songs barely seem to move. Still, ISON is an album that gets under your skin and lingers in your thoughts. As warm and inviting as it gets at times, Sevdaliza was right not to make it too easy on the listener. | 2017-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Twisted Elegance | May 13, 2017 | 7.7 | 3d980376-f14c-4319-ba0c-02d4e02c10eb | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Ferreira’s newest album doesn’t stray from his core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music. | Ferreira’s newest album doesn’t stray from his core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music. | R.A.P. Ferreira: 5 to the Eye With Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rap-ferreira-5-to-the-eye-with-stars/ | 5 to the Eye With Stars | The cover of R.A.P. Ferreira’s 10th album depicts a vintage car parked on the shore of a psychedelic stream. People, perhaps the owners of the vehicle, float face-up in the water as if taking a break, but the car looks ready to move along. Its headlights beam into the borders of the image as if seeking the unknown. That mix of repose and anticipation captures the spirit of 5 to the Eye With Stars, where Ferreira takes stock of his journey while plotting its next leg. The record doesn’t stray from Ferreira’s core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music.
He’s always been a stargazer and maverick prone to obfuscation and evasion. “Yo milo, why you always rap in passcodes?” he asked himself on 2015’s so the flies don’t come. The answer: “’Cause they assholes/Who don’t deserve the whole.” He still shuns legibility, but since 2021’s Bob’s Son, his album-length ode to beat poet Bob Kaufman, he has prioritized finding himself rather than eluding the listener. Arcane allusions to pop culture and continental philosophy have decreased, supplanted by autobiography and pointed interactions with his surroundings. “Negro, I’m on the World Wide Web/Slandering Eugene V. Debs, and I’m having fun with it/My mindset is on an abundance/These muhfuckas is Wakanda pundits,” he raps on “boot knife.” Even his flexes foreground his pleasure and curiosity.
Ferreira does a lot of shit-talking and stunting on this record. Opener “fighting back” sets the tone with rhymes about making his first million off cassette sales and powering the cosmos with epic poetry. On “ark doors,” he hits the electric slide while holding his scrotum in Cashville (Nashville), where he relocated after a stint helming a record store in Biddeford, Maine. Single “ours” finds him colonizing the stars and dunking like Kareem Abdul-Jabar over a jingly Rose Noir beat. The production feels muted compared to the rutted beats on Purple Moonlight Pages and Bob’s Son, where the textures brought out the swing in Ferreira’s loping cadences, but his boosted confidence emboldens him. His lines land like blows.
That sense of weight extends to his frequent soul-searching, which ballasts his boasts. “This chapter of my life is called almost,” he says on “fighting back.” On “consolation,” a track inspired by the poem “Butter Sunday,” he offers a Pyrrhic victory chant. “Well fed, my consolation,” he murmurs for the hook, embracing his minor success as an indie rap act while acknowledging its meager rewards. Ferreira has always paired the poetic with the prosaic, but here there’s no whiplash or provocation. He simply unspools, “a being, being honest,” as he puts it on “ours.”
On the elegiac “mythsysizer instinct,” which features one of the neatest hooks in his catalog, he pivots from plaintive disclosures (“There are days I only get to see my son on FaceTime”) to imagistic couplets (“Stained white Ts, Delilah delights me/Ronda Rousey type beat”) while building to a haymaker in the second verse. “You know, rappin’ get people killed,” he raps, the deliberate pause underscoring the gravity of the statement. He neither editorializes nor mythologizes. He just observes, and steadies his pen for whatever comes next.
Earlier this year, Ferreira tweeted that he no longer found “the idea of genre useful,” and that he is “operating in a Black cultural, historical tradition spanning many vocal techniques, instruments, forms, electricities.” In September, he followed that announcement with an EP of scrappy blues songs under the name Crow Billiken. 5 to the Eye With Stars is a more conventional and accomplished set, but it’s just as interested in evolution. In its most inspired and unmoored moments, even doubt feels clarifying.
Correction: The description of the car depicted on the album cover has been updated. | 2022-11-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | November 15, 2022 | 7.5 | 3d98128c-59e6-4f99-b165-ad4028fd2cce | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's second album, demonstrates newfound assurance, marking her as a new songwriting voice to reckon with. | Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's second album, demonstrates newfound assurance, marking her as a new songwriting voice to reckon with. | Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17688-waxahatchee-cerulean-salt/ | Cerulean Salt | Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. On the surface, it was a modest record-- 11 lo-fi acoustic songs written and recorded in the span of a week while snowed in at her parents' neighborless Alabama home near the body of water from which the project takes its name. Chronicling missed connections and cell phones smashed in moments of frustration, it was an album-length meditation on the modern allure of going off the grid (the first song was called "Catfish", but it wasn't about that). But what gutted you was a voice that cut through the murk like infomercial shower cleaner. Crutchfield sang frankly ("I think I love you, but you'll never find out") and without inhibition, as if she desperately wanted but didn't expect to be heard.
Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's new album, is going to be heard. But from its opening moments, you get the sense that she's ready for it, the newfound assurance, steadiness, and clarity of her voice immediately obvious. "We are late, we are loud, we remain connected as you're reading out loud," she sings on the smolderingly evocative opener, "Hollow Bedroom". Like American Weekend, it begins with just a guitar and a voice, though this time the instrument's plugged in and the recording sounds more professional. (It was still recorded at home, this time in the Philadelphia house she shares with her sister and bandmates.) But it's no less intimate-- if anything, the clean recording only brings you in tighter. Crutchfield's voice rises to be heard over the distortion that kicks in during the song's final minute. "And I don't believe that I care at all," she sings with quiet defiance. "What they hear through these walls."
Since her early teens, Crutchfield has been a precocious, prolific songwriter, and now that she's in her early 20s, she's already a veteran of a number of short-lived projects: an early solo act called King Everything, plus a few melodic punk bands she played in with her twin sister, Swearin' frontwoman Allison, including Bad Banana, the Ackleys, and P.S. Eliot. Crutchfield hails from Alabama-- a fact that's stamped all over her voice's twangy swagger-- but her songs have a drifter's perspective that suggest that, in a sense, she's also come from everywhere. Her music is partially about being young and on the road, what happens in those rare cases when teenage wanderlust is not a suburban daydream, but an everyday reality.
Cerulean Salt is full of vagrant wisdom and people who might once have hitchhiked across the country but were born into a moment when they could just join a punk band instead. They crash on shitty group house floors, cram their gear and bodies into vans with questionable, unexplained "blood on the back seat," and shirk from commitment whenever feelings are anything more than fleeting. "I'll try to embrace the lows," she sings on "Coast to Coast", a song whose buoyant static makes the most of her new band members (Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer from Swearin' add bass and drums).
Crutchfield has a way of delivering a line so casually that it takes a half-dozen listens to fully realize how devastating it is. "I had a dream last night, we had hit separate bottoms," she sings, a brilliant, crushing line hidden in the middle of the gently strummed "Lively". Her songs paint scenes in quick, deft strokes thanks to her knack for knowing exactly which physical details will carry emotional resonance. There's something almost unbearably poignant about the wedding reception she describes where "make-up sets on [the bride's] face like tar" and "the champagne flutes poorly engineered, employ dixie cups and jars."
Marriage, tradition, and lineage are all sources of great anxiety in a Waxahatchee song. There was a track on American Weekend about a grandmother, with the repeated refrain, "You got married when you were 15," uttered with disbelief, as though Crutchfield were trying to imagine how different her own life would be had the same been true for her. These themes are explored in more depth on Cerulean Salt; in "Swan Dive" she confesses that "dreams about loveless marriage and regret" keep her up at night, while she presents a peer's wedding as more of a "tragic epilogue" than a celebration on "Dixie Cups and Jars" (which feels like a slightly more harrowing take on Built to Spill's "Twin Falls"). "You’ll remain," she says to her, "I will find a way to leave gracefully, or I'll escape." Where she'll go isn't clear, but it's these free-floating desires and unanswered questions that give Crutchfield's songs their haunting power.
"This place is vile, and I'm vile too," Crutchfield howls on the stunning closer, "You're Damaged". In the hands of a lesser singer, a line like that might feel too exposed. But Crutchfield's characters can't help but be exactly who they say they are: they're catfish in a Catfish world. And as they squirm, flop, and clumsily make their way through their lives, their specific experiences become something universal. "For me, the only way to write lyrics is not to think about other people at all," Crutchfield said in a recent interview. "You just have to write stuff for you and only you, and not worry about how people are going to take it. It'll be inevitably relatable because it's true to you." It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes-- the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous. | 2013-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Don Giovanni | March 7, 2013 | 8.4 | 3d9c8a34-b4ce-47c6-ac57-d462841d0bd6 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
On the L.A. band's debut, their influences floated incredibly close to the surface. But Hummingbird is a record of lateral growth, a clear move towards the band establishing their own footing among their contemporaries. | On the L.A. band's debut, their influences floated incredibly close to the surface. But Hummingbird is a record of lateral growth, a clear move towards the band establishing their own footing among their contemporaries. | Local Natives: Hummingbird | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17537-hummingbird/ | Hummingbird | Local Natives' 2010 debut, Gorilla Manor, was fully-formed and immediately pleasing, functioning at a level that lesser acts spend entire careers trying to reach. But it had a certain youthful scrappiness, too. Alongside expansive tracks like "Shape Shifter" and "Wide Eyes", there were the silly howls that introduced "Airplanes" and the shouty breakdown of "Sun Hands", both of which brought comparisons to Animal Collective. All told, it was very of-the-moment with influences to match. Guitarist/singer Taylor Rice cited Broken Social Scene in an interview around the time of the album's release, and anyone following along with big-tent indie rock could pick up on other borrowed elements: Grizzly Bear's choirboy sway, the National's starched-shirt seriousness, Fleet Foxes' rolling melodicism. But while the songwriting was strong, you had to wonder if the band would prove to be more than the sum of their influences.
Hummingbird, Local Natives' second album, offers a tricky answer to that question. They're still on the same path-- no fashionable synths or newfound fixation with 1990s R&B here-- but innovation seems beside the point. This is a record of lateral growth, one that finds the band establishing their own place among their contemporaries. Ironically, they've found their sound with the assistance of one of their major forebears: the National's Aaron Dessner performs and contributes songwriting on Hummingbird, and shares production credit with the band while recording with them in his Brooklyn studio. (His brother and bandmate, Bryce, contributed horn arrangements to several songs, too.)
As with member-cum-producers Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla and TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Dessner's production style isn't terribly distinctive. But he knows how to make things sound good, and there's plenty of richness and depth to these songs. Bassist Andy Hamm left Local Natives in 2011, leaving Local Natives as a quartet; on Hummingbird, Aaron Dessner acts as fifth band member of the group.
In our interview with the band last year, they described the split with Hamm as "heartbreaking," and it wasn't the only loss suffered following Gorilla Manor's release: lead vocalist Kelcey Ayer's mother passed away last summer. Accordingly, the brightness and boisterousness of Gorilla Manor is mostly absent. Advance track "Breakers" is a pulsating rush of drum fills and "ooh"s that deflates to nearly nothing just as the wordless hook begins to sink in. There are other ominous touches: the tangled vocal ascent of "You & I", "Black Spot"'s closing instrumental tumble, the static laden "Wooly Mammoth", one of many cuts that showcases drummer Matt Frazier's knack for creating expressive, overwhelming washes of rhythm. Lyrics convey the anxiety and depressed confusion. Where Gorilla Manor tried to capture the feeling of twentysomething malaise ("Water's in the clouds/ Is my life about to change?/ Who knows?/ Who cares?"); here words are more vivid, conveying scenes of hopelessness and the feeling that everyone you know around you is slowly becoming a stranger.
Lyrically, they're best when they're at their most direct. "Colombia"'s beautiful swell takes syncopated bass and stately piano and grows into something warm and emotionally cathartic. Vocally, Ayer takes a lilting upper register, leaning into it more and more as his lonely voice turns pleading while addressing his deceased mother: "If you never felt all of my love/ I pray now you do". On an album that spans a wide range of emotions, "Colombia" is Hummingbird's most affecting moment; it's also one of the best songs the band's ever written.
Although there are a number of fine uptempo songs, Hummingbird's strongest moments are the quiet, elegiac cuts similar to "Colombia": the brief, sweetly sung "Ceilings", the skyward wails of "Three Months", Ayer's simmering solo take on the verses of "Heavy Feet". Subtlety is key, and Hummingbird is nothing if not subtle. There's nothing as melodic as "Airplanes" or "World News" on here, but this isn't a bad thing. With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards. | 2013-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss / Infectious | January 28, 2013 | 8.1 | 3d9e5684-4e3a-4a1e-92f9-232b665b6bfe | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Chicago artist’s first posthumous release doesn’t feel like a final goodbye, but instead a continued look inside his world. It’s bleak and beautiful. | The Chicago artist’s first posthumous release doesn’t feel like a final goodbye, but instead a continued look inside his world. It’s bleak and beautiful. | Juice WRLD: Legends Never Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juice-wrld-legends-never-die/ | Legends Never Die | At 21, Juice WRLD had begun to master the world around him. He could wed the sounds of influences like Billy Idol and Chief Keef and create something entirely different. As a songwriter, he could pair an airy melody with lyrics about heartbreak or drugs, and given the chance, fire off marathon freestyle sessions on a whim. A wunderkind with many imitators on SoundCloud, he sounded far more polished, far beyond whatever his closest peer was attempting to accomplish. When he died in December 2019, days removed from celebrating his 21st birthday, it opened up yet another wound for a generation of rap fans struggling to hold on to the new voices that spoke for them.
Juice WRLD brought people from outside the margins into his crystalized world of vulnerability in a dash towards mental freedom. His most fervently repeated lines doubled as yearbook quotes or quickly deleted tweets. His closest supporters, such as producer and longtime collaborator Nick Mira, have kept his legacy close to them, maybe more so than any other group of fans who recently lost their champion. Juice asked those fans to trust him—and the people who supported him—as if they were family. Legends Never Die, the Chicago artist’s first posthumous release, doesn’t feel like a final goodbye from Juice but instead a continued look inside his world.
Across three major releases—Goodbye & Good Riddance, WRLD on Drugs, and Death Race for Love—Juice proudly kept himself at a distance while pining for love, bringing fans closer to his truth while still keeping his guard up. The bulk of Legends Never Die sifts through his thoughts as he battled anxiety in the face of stardom. He understood the game he played and how it kept him centered: “If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here,” he sings on “Wishing Well.” It’s a bleak and beautiful world he’s created, one where the most poignant moments are buried in candor and honesty.
Throughout Legends Never Die’s 56 minutes, Juice’s delivery is conversational and evocative as he checks off the perks of success and the lingering doubts (“Just got a new house, gotta hide the skeletons in the closet”). The emo-heavy sounds that blossomed on Death Race’s “Robbery” and “Empty” have now morphed into a fully developed ecosystem where all of the sounds and keys are built around Juice’s frame of mind. Mira’s touches on Legends Never Die don’t appear until the harrowing “Righteous,” where sparse guitar plays underneath Juice’s confessional: “Taking medicine to fix all of the damage/My anxiety the size of a planet,” he sings. Pop heavyweights such Dr. Luke and Marshmello grab the mantle on “Wishing Well” and the pop-rock ready anthem “Come & Go,” where Juice thanks God for allowing him grace and support.
Juice writes a great hook like no other, but it’s a fine line between being catchy and being repetitive. The themes of despair and downing pills to mask problems carry over to many songs and make for an uneasy listen that doesn’t really reveal more about him in the process. As high as Juice was in creating watershed moments, his self-awareness about those highs eventually betraying him became evident. Even when he shifts into a tough sneer, he steps into knotty one-liners about gunplay (“Let my gun bust a nut”) that fall flat.
There are moments when Juice’s peers take the wheel to eulogize him. “The Man, The Myth, The Legend” captures anecdotes and unpretentious thoughts on his life from the likes of G Herbo and others. Stories about Juice’s freestyle skills and triumphs are peppered with colossal heapings of praise and zero mention of what ultimately robbed his life. Even without that added dimension, it’s the intent that’s paramount. Herbo and company—like many who struggle with how best to remember family when they pass—choose to be protective and highlight Juice’s greater deeds and accomplishments, rather than to relive a tragic final act.
The gripping parts of Legends Never Die come when Juice is speaking from the heart. With a casual flex in his voice, he points out his guiding ethos: Regardless of how destructive his path was, he sought to save those who listened to him. He found those same sentiments in peers like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, both of whom captured raw material from the id to establish cult-like fanbases and died just months apart. (In 2018, Juice released “Legends,” a tribute song to both men, singing, “What’s the 27 Club?/We ain’t making it past 21.”) Legends Never Die becomes another way for Juice WRLD to keep saving people from their demons. He wanted to help fans who were also enduring his pain—he never wanted to be alone in the process.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grade A Productions / Interscope | July 16, 2020 | 7.1 | 3d9f0b7a-e6d3-4200-bccf-ded6ac4caacb | Brandon Caldwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-caldwell/ | |
Three invaluable reissues showcase a young bandleader and his top-tier players as they create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once. | Three invaluable reissues showcase a young bandleader and his top-tier players as they create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once. | Pharoah Sanders: Tauhid/Jewels of Thought/Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pharoah-sanders-tauhidjewels-of-thoughtdeaf-dumb-blind-summun-bukmun-umyun/ | Tauhid/Jewels of Thought/Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) | On June 28, 1965, four months after the assassination of Malcolm X and just a few weeks before the Voting Rights Act became law, John Coltrane assembled his largest-ever ensemble to record Ascension. A beautiful and harrowing listen, the album’s sole piece extends across 40 minutes of thundering, screaming, and meandering free jazz, radically breaking from the formal elegance and tight group interplay he had epitomized with his “classic quartet” on A Love Supreme, released earlier that year. The album also marked a changing of the guard, with Coltrane welcoming into the spotlight a scrappy, untested generation of iconoclastic players, many of whom were beginning to embrace emergent strains of black-power philosophy in their music. Among them were such soon-to-be luminaries as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and a young, unknown tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders.
Sanders had arrived in New York a few years prior, struggling to get work and often living on the streets. Early collaborations with Sun Ra and Don Cherry helped him find his footing in the burgeoning free-jazz community; it was Sun Ra that suggested changing his name from Farrell to Pharoah. But it was his work alongside Coltrane that set him on the course he would follow for the rest of his career. Starting with Ascension, Sanders became an invaluable foil for Coltrane’s virtuosic, divisive deconstructions. “Sometimes I didn’t know whether Pharoah was doing the growling or John,” said Frank Lowe, a contemporary of Sanders who played alongside Alice Coltrane. “You know, you don’t stand next to a man and copy him—so Pharoah was pushed into other areas.”
Despite the prestigious alliance, with Coltrane publically praising him as a man of “tremendous spiritual reservoir,” many critics balked at the viscera of Sanders’ solos. Whitney Balliett, writing for The New Yorker, decried his playing as “elephant shrieks... [which] appeared to have little in common with music,” while the San Francisco Chronicle dismissed him as “primitive.” As the 1960s wore on, with the Vietnam War entering its second decade, the Black Panther Party forming in 1966, and the rise of a “turn on, tune in, drop out” youth culture, the beloved post-bop of only a few years prior seemed trampled underfoot by a disorderly new generation of squawking, honking interlopers.
What’s astonishing is how rapidly Sanders developed from a wildcard sideman into a confident bandleader after his mentor’s untimely passing, in 1967. Albert Ayler famously declared, “‘Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost”; Sanders’ seven-year, 11-album run for Impulse! Records directly builds on the core premise of Ascension, stretching Coltrane’s templates across a string of masterpieces. These three invaluable reissues showcase the young Sanders confidently guiding a steadily growing panoply of “fire music” MVPs, uniting their disparate voices and egos to create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.
Tauhid, from 1967, is his debut for the label, and it plays like a mission statement. At the helm of an all-star sextet that includes Henry Grimes on bass, Dave Burrell on piano, and Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Sanders leads the group through three pieces that transcend the traditional “head/solo/head” structure (where, following a quick introductory melody, each player gets a turn in the spotlight before the piece returns to the “head”). On Tauhid, the pieces are suites that play like seances, with movements billowing and unfolding of their own accord. The group’s unity is powerful, creating a spiritual atmosphere that casts a spell from the opening bars.
Opener “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” takes the “Acknowledgement” section from A Love Supreme as a starting point before Sanders launches his group into the stratosphere. Where Coltrane kicked off his album with a quick 30 seconds of fanfare before diving in, Sanders lets Burrell and Sharrock lead with almost five minutes of roiling piano and guitar, backed by bells, thrumming bass, and cinematic tom rolls. It doesn’t take much to imagine a sacred rite of initiation performed in a darkened room filled with the scent of frankincense. This gives way to a bowed bass-and-piccolo duet between Grimes and Sanders that owes more to Toru Takemitsu’s fusion of European modernism and traditional Japanese music than New York’s jazz nightclubs. Nine minutes in, Grimes finally settles into a groove and the group falls into place, vamping on two breezy chords. When Sanders eventually joins in, just shy of the 12:30 mark, his opening notes tweak Coltrane’s introductory solo on A Love Supreme; it’s half homage, half breadcrumb trail, giving wary jazz heads enough of a reference point to stick things out while Sanders breaks bold new ground.
Less than four minutes in length, “Japan” follows, a lovely pentatonic march with Sanders on the mic. A gently swaying hymn with no particular flash (and no solos), it reinforces the group-hug friendliness that defines Tauhid’s softest moments and tempers its most aggressive. The album closes with the three-part “Aum / Venus / Capricorn Rising,” a suite that flexes the ensemble’s avant credentials. In the first minutes, Sanders makes good on his reputation, ripping through the foreground while Sharrock darts in and out of the fray, carving proto-punk shapes that anticipate no wave by almost a decade. Soon, though, he’s wrenching yearning melodies out with an undeniable expressive force. The group pivots right with him, tapping into a sound that’s as sophisticated as it is primal.
Jewels of Thought develops this dichotomy further, with a benevolent love-in on the A-side and a somber, dissonant astral voyage worthy of Sun Ra’s Arkestra on the flip. Leon Thomas’ vocal contributions are, for many, an acquired taste. With his earnest monologue on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah”—about a “universal prayer for peace” where “all you have to do is clap your hands, 1-2-3”—and his propensity to yodel, he has about as much gravitas as a summer-camp counselor. If you liked what you heard on Tauhid and were hoping for more, this addition may blindside you—it’s no surprise jazz yodeling failed to catch on. Yet despite the lingering dweebiness of Thomas’ performance, the piece soars. By allowing soulful prettiness alongside more vicious passages, Sanders opens the album up, connecting the dots between joyful communion and unflinching catharsis. A squalling solo toward the end of the side sounds like a cry from the deepest, most tortured part of his soul, but it’s supported by an unerringly mellow piano accompaniment (and answered by still more yodeling, now comfortably chilled out in the back of the mix). It’s a moment of deep vulnerability in a genre can often devolve into macho blowing contests.
If “Hum-Allah” is the sugar, then “Sun in Aquarius” is the medicine it helps get down. After an intro of reedy, North African-cribbing winds, thumb piano, and gongs, it yawns out like a terrifying chasm before letting Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano boil over for the better part of five minutes. Sanders is in devastating form, screaming through his tenor. Even after a mid-side comedown and a breathtaking bass duet from Cecil McBee and Richard Davis, he leaps back in undeterred, firing out one of his heaviest solos like a machine gun.
His fourth release for Impulse!, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) may be Sanders’ finest work from this era. The album is split into two side-long sessions, and the group, now an octet, breathes as one like never before. Coming off of a busy touring schedule, the players were locked in, often building songs out of loose ideas or hints of an arrangement. If the title track finds the players in a joyous, near-telepathic groove, “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is simply spiritual jazz of the highest order. Aching with emotion, it stands alongside Alice Coltrane’s “Prema” and Albert Ayler’s “Our Prayer” as a devotional masterpiece and a fulfillment of free jazz’s promise. Many of the same musicians from Jewels of Thought remain, and you can hear how subsumed they are in the music. They play on top of, around, and in between each other without ever making a wrong move. The song’s title couldn’t be more apt; the music exudes so much sorrow, hope, compassion, joy, and humanity it seems to truly reach for a home beyond our world.
The decades that followed saw Sanders’ career take different turns, never quite reaching the ecstatic highs of this era, and much of his early work fell out of print. What’s remarkable about these reissues is not only how timeless the music is, but how relevant it feels today. Many of his contemporaries seemed to be pushing forward to see how far out they could go and who could get there fastest. Sanders went straight for the source. By pursuing a spiritual approach, he created a body of work that responded to its own historical moment without being time-stamped by it. Shortly after Coltrane and his group recorded Ascension, LA was engulfed in the flames of the Watts riots; by the time Jewels was released, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered. This turmoil and anguish is clearly audible in Sanders’ playing, and today, as the nation once again feels like it’s splitting at the seams, Sanders’ agonized cries resonate, as expressive and important as ever. | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | null | November 10, 2017 | 8.2 | 3da289d3-f8b7-4661-a108-6beb580a832c | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
The uneven but fascinating sixth album by the Lemonheads gets a new reissue that explores the moment when Evan Dando was everything everyone said he was, all at once. | The uneven but fascinating sixth album by the Lemonheads gets a new reissue that explores the moment when Evan Dando was everything everyone said he was, all at once. | The Lemonheads: Come on Feel (30th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-lemonheads-come-on-feel-30th-anniversary-edition/ | Come on Feel (30th Anniversary Edition) | In and out of the Lemonheads, Evan Dando has occupied conflicting personae over the past 30 years: himbo bubblehead and underappreciated power-pop savant, a privileged prep playacting as Gram Parsons, wannabe Gallagher brother, and tragicomic, troubled survivor. While Dando’s public appearances of late have tended toward the former descriptions, the ongoing reissue of the Lemonheads’ major label output has attempted to shift the focus toward the latter, a just reward for a band that now serves as a model for much of what’s left of classic indie rock. The campaign now reaches 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, the last album that stood between alt-rock fame and tabloid infamy, the one where Dando was everything everyone ever said he was, all at once.
Though the album title reflects early ’90s irony, there’s an underlying truth in its intentions: Come on Feel the Lemonheads was a charm offensive by a band that was still largely known for a kitschy cover song, a nod to their ascending star and desire to capitalize on it. The videos for “Into Your Arms” and “It’s About Time” are careful to reiterate that we are meant to see the Lemonheads as a band, one that’s still having a wonderful time together. Bassist Nic Dalton and drummer David Ryan get plenty of camera time, and each of them probably would’ve been the “cute” one in 99 percent of the bands with whom they shared Buzz Bin space. But if the viewer is supposed to get familiar with the Lemonheads, they’re getting intimate with Dando, who’s framed in a variety of settings where one can imagine falling in love—in a forest, cuddled up on a couch, at an impromptu street concert, in a bathtub.
And, of course, only Dando’s face is shown in full on the album cover, gazing wistfully into some uncertain future where someone of his talents will probably end up just fine. But after a brief spell of time when the Lemonheads were a fixture on MTV, I mostly remember seeing that face staring back at me from cluttered racks at Disc Go Round, Wherehouse, Plan 9, and wherever else I shopped for used CDs in the ’90s. The album’s cut-out bin status isn’t necessarily indicative of its quality—there were also quite a few copies of Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, Last Splash, Star, and File Under: Easy Listening, records by indie darlings who’d scored an unexpected hit that didn’t quite prepare mall-walkers for their weirdness.
But there were plenty of examples of sophomore slumps, time capsules from alt-rock’s flop era, and general letdowns coasting off the goodwill from a previous hit. The Lemonheads somehow managed to fit both categories. Less than a year after Dando pinched his nose and covered a song he “hated” for the 25th anniversary of The Graduate, Come on Feel the Lemonheads had enough juice to peak at No. 56 on Billboard. Though nowhere near as crass as the autopilot pop-punk of “Mrs. Robinson,” or even 1989’s take on Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” the band’s biggest hit was a cover all the same, albeit one from someone in the Lemonheads. Dalton replaced Juliana Hatfield on bass following It’s a Shame About Ray and contributed a curio from his previous band, the Love Positions. In its original form, “Into Your Arms” was 100 seconds of state-of-the-art K Records worship: no drums, gooey, pitch-shifted lyrics, on an album called Billiepeebup with a bunch of pink hearts on the cover. The red-blooded, full-bodied version that ended up on radio proved that Dando was no Kurt Cobain in terms of comportment, but still a valuable interpreter for Alternative Nation and its financiers: someone who could smuggle Boston college rock and Australian twee into places they couldn’t get to on their own.
The ensuing singles continue to shine outside of their original context as songs that couldn’t sustain the momentum of “Into Your Arms.” “The Great Big No” pivots from their standard, strummy college rock jangle to an uneasy, dissonant chorus, almost like a purified version of shoegaze, heavier than anything the Lemonheads had done even when they were a Dinosaur Jr. worship band. “It’s About Time” and “Down About It” reiterate the strengths of It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando’s shopworn voice and gnomic hooks suggesting vast experience if not deep thoughts—that there are stories here, if you’re willing to wait for them. Fittingly, the last great song the Lemonheads would write would be called “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You.”
These highlights all occur within the first 10 or so minutes of Come on Feel the Lemonheads, creating the illusory effect of an album that always seems to be better than you remember it, or at least better than the critics thought then. “Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl,” Robert Christgau wrote in his 1993 “Turkey Shoot,” a cascade of assumptions that didn’t need to be scrutinized because the first claim was clearly true. But this gets to an irony that’s made reassessment of the Lemonheads so compelling: Dando was the rare male musician subject to the standards by which many female alt-rock artists were judged, wherein the art made their appearance, romantic relationships, and drug use fair game for gossip and assumption. And unlike Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, or other male, alt-rock sex symbols of the era, Dando didn’t outwardly shy away from that gaze. When he acknowledges the obvious on “Paid to Smile,” he’s more bemused than anything (“I can work the handle on any car/It’s really not that hard”), empathizing with anyone in the same position. Someone’s gonna do it, why not him?
It’s just as likely that Dando wasn’t taken particularly seriously because he didn’t take himself all that seriously either; as Come on Feel the Lemonheads progresses, he marvels at the Coriolis Effect, reads the labels on his spice rack, and calls out the chords he’s playing on “Dawn Can’t Decide.” Among my few middle school peers aware of the Lemonheads’ existence, “Big Gay Heart” was the most transgressive thing imaginable at the time, not even so much for its hook, but its earnest embrace of country music—we were still three years away from Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats. But at that point “Big Gay Heart” was only the second Lemonheads song longer than four minutes (1990’s “[The] Door” was about 75 percent guitar solo) and still lasted twice as long as it should have. The same fate awaited “Style,” which shrugs at Dando’s spiraling substance abuse (“Don’t wanna get stoned/But I don’t wanna not get stoned”) that was later reprised as “Rick James Style,” a murky, zombie-funk jam that, in an icky bit of stunt casting, actually featured Rick James.
The remainder is mostly unremarkable: Hüsker Dü worship tamped down by the Robb Brothers’ dated production, an alt-country throwaway featuring a Flying Burrito Brother, swapping Hatfield for Belinda Carlisle on backing vocals during the cloying “I’ll Do It Anyway.” Shaggy where It’s a Shame About Ray was succinct and sharp, Come on Feel the Lemonheads feels about twice as long as its predecessor, and that’s before “Jello Fund.” It would’ve been more fashionable to make the 15-minute studio jam a hidden track, but “Jello Fund” feels like apt metacriticism of a band with too many ideas and not enough follow-through.
Revisiting Come on Feel the Lemonheads can be revelatory in spite of its unevenness—with some scruffier production, the jumbled mix of ZooMass revivalism, power-pop sparkle, and complementary co-ed vocals could’ve been passed around the Run for Cover office at any point in the past 10 years; latter day Tigers Jaw was more or less invented when Hatfield came in to steal the last chorus of “Down About It.” I wish I’d had someone in my teenage ear to put this band in proper context, as a gateway to the Pixies or Throwing Muses or 4AD rather than a cuter Cracker or Soul Asylum. As with the reissues of Lovey and It’s a Shame About Ray, the deluxe version offers demos and outtakes that justify a physical reissue in 2023 and not much else; perhaps the more authentic experience would be copping a $2 used copy. But the cover has changed, and the image feels far more accurate now: Dando’s no longer the center, but slumped off in the top left corner, at the top of his game and well aware he’s about to hit bottom. | 2023-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | May 20, 2023 | 7.1 | 3daa63ec-74c7-4e5e-a209-c3d5644db4d9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On Angels & Devils, the Bug's Kevin Martin bifurcates his interests, offering six songs of muddy dirges and six tracks of raucous, MC-aided bangers that will be familiar to fans of London Zoo. Grouper, Gonjasufi, Death Grips, and others contribute. | On Angels & Devils, the Bug's Kevin Martin bifurcates his interests, offering six songs of muddy dirges and six tracks of raucous, MC-aided bangers that will be familiar to fans of London Zoo. Grouper, Gonjasufi, Death Grips, and others contribute. | The Bug: Angels & Devils | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19742-the-bug-angels-devils/ | Angels & Devils | Kevin Martin has been re-interpreting street musics—mostly dancehall, but also grime and dubstep—for nearly 17 years as the Bug, one of many aliases he’s worked under in a long career in underground music. He’s proved himself the rare artist capable of placing these sounds into more outre contexts without sacrificing any of their ferociousness. His last album, 2008's London Zoo, was full of menacing, fevered ragga that helped make explicit the connections between dancehall, grime, and the still-burgeoning dubstep scene. It was an album that proved especially enlightening to non-UK audiences, putting a point on several elusive trends. He returns here with Angels & Devils, an album that retains the precise brutality of London Zoo but feels labored in comparison.
Martin works slowly in genres that move quickly, and Angels & Devils arrives as grime has once again taken root as both a commercial and underground force: London Zoo all-star Flowdan can now be heard regularly on stations like Rinse FM toasting over mixes by DJs like Elijah & Skilliam, while newcomers like My Nu Leng offer potent blasts. Dubstep is...well, no one really knows what dubstep is in 2014. Dancehall persists, perhaps juiced a little by a generation of adoring rappers. Martin is unconcerned. Angels & Devils, an uneven collection, continues to skew dancehall toward the vanguard of British electronic music, extending an artistic handshake that’s been in effect for more than 20 years (and longer, should you want to move past electronic music).
On Angels & Devils, Martin bifurcates his interests, offering six songs of muddy dirges and six tracks of raucous, MC-aided bangers that will be familiar to fans of London Zoo. Presenting oneself as two competing forces is an artistic gambit that runs roughly from Ancient Greek theatre through Nelly's Sweat/Suit, and Angels & Devils slides comfortably between those poles. The problem is that Martin divides the album exactly, offering first six slow cuts—"angels", presumably—and then the ruffneck "devil" cuts. As a conceit, it fails, stultifying the album's flow and condescending to listeners regarding Martin's range: of course he's capable of slower, foggier productions, but did anyone think London Zoo needed more ambient passages?
Of course, slo-mo, waterlogged ephemera—be it dusty takes on R&B or traipsing down dub’s ever-expanding wormhole—is a pervasive trend in current British electronic music, leading to a lot of limp-wristed trip-hop variations. Grouper’s Liz Harris opens the album with “Void”, her airy, tip-toeing vowels as far as you can get stylistically from Flowdan without phoning Josh Groban. Martin’s lurching bass and gunmetal snares threaten, and Harris proceeds unaffected, as neither artist knows what to do with the other. Gonjasufi, meanwhile, sounds all too comfortable on “Save Me”, offering up the kind of moaning, industrial balladry you might find on a Liars album. It's not all bad: avant-chanteuse Copeland's lemon-sucking croon is fine foil for Martin’s bass rattle, and Miss Red proves that even on softer material, a Jamaican patois bests offsets Martin’s bouts of heavy, as she turns “Mi Lost” into a sonorous sendup.
The album’s second half is more familiar, and better. We’re treated again to three Flowdan cuts, and once again the combination of Martin’s fury and Flowdan’s resonant basso proves potent. Flowdan sounds good saying almost literally anything, and he delivers the occasional quotidian detail—“Why don’t my wife even like me?”—in the same confident bluster as his threats, which is both sneaky and funny. Manga, a bit more histrionic, turns the wild, splintering square waves of “Function” into the record’s best banging-on-the-dash party. In this context, Death Grips, who growl menacingly on “Fuck a Bitch”, sound stiff (and they always sound atonal).
Still, these tracks surge, bleeding adrenaline: Martin sows chaos and his collaborators keep things just under control. When the tempo and aggression are dialed back, the dynamic turns; Martin’s still a talented sound designer, but the whipping, centrifugal force that binds his tracks together is missing. That force is largely absent for the first six songs of Angels & Devils, and the album is trying as a result. The ruff cuts that close the album are your reward, and they are as rattled and rattling as ever, proving Martin still has a deft touch with the underground, provided the underground gives him something to work with. | 2014-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | August 26, 2014 | 6.7 | 3dab1994-6f4e-41d9-827c-b5e172648fd0 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Katy Davidson’s indie-folk project returns on an album that mines philosophical poetry from moments when ancient natural wonders meet modern technology. | Katy Davidson’s indie-folk project returns on an album that mines philosophical poetry from moments when ancient natural wonders meet modern technology. | Dear Nora: Skulls Example | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dear-nora-skulls-example/ | Skulls Example | Katy Davidson retreats into the wilderness to find inspiration. But the Dear Nora songwriter and frontperson doesn’t seem to seek solace as much as perspective in nature. In their songs, physical distance from civilization becomes a way of discerning the absurdity of day-to-day life.
On one such sojourn, in 2003, the band returned to a childhood home of Davidson’s in the Arizona desert and made a masterpiece, Mountain Rock, that reshaped the landscape of their songs. An indie-pop group founded by a trio of college classmates in late-‘90s Portland, Dear Nora were suddenly issuing heavy folk ruminations from the middle of nowhere, instead of drowsy sing-alongs recorded in a dorm room. After a few more releases, Davidson retired the band. In the intervening decade, they recorded as Key Losers, played in other bands, and launched a career as a commercial music producer. But a 2017 reissue of Mountain Rock generated so much interest in Dear Nora that Davidson revived the act and released Skulls Example, a collection of songs written over the course of nearly eight years.
The album is of a piece with Mountain Rock in the sense that it feels out-there both in place and in mindset; Skulls Example is a Mexican travelogue filled with philosophical poetry about the natural world. Davidson favors surprising juxtapositions, images of transformation, and snapshots that highlight the absurdity of scenes, places, and contemporary existence in general, often considering the ancient and timeless within the same songs that capture the technology-driven frenzy of 2018. On the title track, they’re struck by the blasphemy of a modern church built atop ancient ruins; then, they move on to recounting a trivial faux pas in which they were reprimanded for taking a picture of a picture. The album is rich with observations of nature’s majesty—there are glaciers, cacti, thunderstorms, sunsets—but punctuated by nagging dread of the technology that comes along on these journeys: cell-phone cameras, WiFi, GPS. “I always know the time/Because I belong to the grid,” Davidson sings on “Black Truck.”
Skulls Example floats the tantalizing promise of a road trip, then weighs down the getaway car with the strange details of late capitalism. “Sponsored by PT Cruiser, and I’m driving to who knows where,” Davidson sings with a dreamy sigh on the psychedelic surf-rock track “Sunset on Humanity,” in which they watch the cacti breeze by while casually contemplating death and human extinction. On “Ancient Plain,” they flee the city but find that the empty road is a treadmill more than an escape route. Out of obligation or loneliness, they strike up a conversation with the staff at a strip-mall Starbucks and dip into a small-town bar where TVs no one is watching are all playing “Friends.” Davidson’s awareness of geologic time enhances the song’s sense of absurdism; they watch “thunder crash” on an “ancient plain” as technology crashes the serenity of nature. “Worship the Cactus” sounds both goofy and existential, a chronicle of mezcal, privileged guilt, and natural wonder. Davidson invokes the hazy romanticism of a vacation, then washes it away with a cynical shrug: “Expensive experience/We could leave home less.”
Dear Nora’s music remains as minimal as ever, even as the project’s new incarnation trades Davidson’s original bandmates for three studio musicians who help them stretch the limits of their sound. Although many tracks hover within their old, reverb-drenched wheelhouse, there are also a few playful pop experiments in the mix. “Antidote for Mindlessness” is like a slow-burning Prince song, complete with dramatic guitar noodling and stoner revelations: “All this everything in one world/All this world in every detail.”
While that innovation is welcome, some of the prettiest songs on Skulls Example stick to the old Dear Nora formula: short, urgent odes to love and relationships that brim with observational non sequiturs. Shrouded in electric-guitar flutters and little else, “New to Me” is an airy tale of falling in love over the course of a weekend, with Davidson feeling giddy enough in new-found intimacy to hole up indoors while the summer hums along outside. The track harkens back to the gushing emotions of Dear Nora’s earliest songs, its intensity a counterpoint to the position of philosophical—and technological—distance Davidson assumes elsewhere on the album. Now that they’re older, the empty page is luring them into ancient places more often than impulsive trysts. It’s as though Davidson has led us into Plato’s Cave, activated the flashlight app on their phone, elbowed us in the ribs, and said, “Hey, get a load of this.” | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | June 1, 2018 | 7.5 | 3dad72e2-9d75-4957-9b8f-e4688006b769 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
In a departure from the spatial concerns of his site-specific pieces, the composer’s new album explores the physicality of sound itself. | In a departure from the spatial concerns of his site-specific pieces, the composer’s new album explores the physicality of sound itself. | Byron Westbrook: Body Consonance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/byron-westbrook-body-consonance/ | Body Consonance | Byron Westbrook’s music has always been physical. But over a near-decade of his work as a sound artist and composer, “physical” has mostly meant “spatial.” He’s devoted much of his time to installations and site-specific pieces, exploring the way sound can fill and interact with three-dimensional spaces. On previous releases (under his own name and as Corridors), he has tried to replicate the experience of those projects, perfecting that goal on 2015’s Precipice. Its extended tracks are so rich and textured, they seem to carve out their own virtual environments.
To make his new record, Body Consonance, Westbrook turned his focus to the physicality of the listener. His goal was, he says, “to explore working with sounds that project into the listener’s space as opposed to acting as a window to another place.” He makes this intention clear in the album’s titles, which are filled with references to bodies, movement, and dance. Westbrook’s music matches this corporeal theme, taking on shapes that stretch like muscles and bend like joints. The result is a kind of “body music” that is as much about making sound incarnate as it is about moving and affecting the listener.
Westbrook achieves his body-centric mode through a diverse tool kit. Repetitive sounds and persistent rhythms are a major part of his arsenal, but he also uses drone, texture, stasis, and volume to help forge music that can ring through your bones as if they were tuning forks. At times it feels like he’s actually translating physical substances into sound—or turning aural vibrations into tangible objects. The viscerality of his rhythms and tones adds extra layers of meaning to a track title like, “What We Mean When We Say Body Language.”
The wordless language Westbrook speaks on Body Consonance uses a pretty simple vocabulary. With electronics, guitar, tape, and some computer-based manipulation, he sets up basic parameters for each track, usually a few sounds repeated in loops, and then patiently massages the space between those parameters until it begins to feel infinite. His song structures can seem mathematical; one track title, “Ritual Geometry/Sympathetic Bodies,” could also describe the album’s obsession with patterns. But Westbrook’s melding of sounds—the way he injects thick layers and subtle pulses into every track—puts flesh and blood on his compositional skeletons.
The most exciting demonstrations of Westbrook’s physical alchemy come when he mixes clearly-defined rhythms with enveloping ambience. The best example is “What We Mean When We Say Body Language,” which starts with an insistent, bassy rumble that quickly merges with soaring tones and gliding atmosphere, landing somewhere between dissonant techno (echoing the bristly beats of Fuck Buttons) and post-rock drama. Everything on Body Consonance is a thoughtful mixture of rhythm and abstraction. The rhythms may be more subtle in the rising drone of “Fireworks Choreography” or the Terry Riley-like electronic blips of “Levitation Game.” But ultimately Westbrook is always playing with time and texture, probing the ways that reality’s ticking clock can intersect with illusions of permanence. It’s a heady tack for such physical music to take. Westbrook understands that there’s more to bodies than just skin and bone, and with Body Consonance his sounds cut to the marrow. | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hands in the Dark | October 18, 2017 | 7.7 | 3daf7df4-b281-463b-af05-7f7d44f5ece9 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The resulting EP sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years. | Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The resulting EP sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years. | Squarepusher / Z-Machines: Music For Robots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19242-squarepusher-z-machines-music-for-robots/ | Music For Robots | Tom Jenkinson’s work as Squarepusher lacks any real center, instead firing off in multiple directions to dizzying effect. His best tracks are vibrant in their nutty, wild-eyed ways, such as Go Plastic's ultra-precise “My Red Hot Car”, or when they sound like a refined version of his rubbery, bass-driven puzzles (Just a Souvenir's “The Coathanger”). Sometimes, his work seems designed to provoke fatigue, with the sheer density of sound violently throwing up multiple barriers to entry, to the point where his listeners are left skirting on an infinite loop somewhere outside the process. Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell described Squarepusher’s last full-length album, Ufabulum, as having an “angry-jazz-droids-run-amok” feel—a useful summation of his sound that now reads as oddly prescient: on Music for Robots, Jenkinson hands the keys to the car to some actual droids.
This five-track EP was conceived after Jenkinson and a number of Japanese composers received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The robots are programmed to play somewhere beyond the human realm—there's a guitarist with 78 fingers, and a drummer with 22 arms. Naturally, the corporate world quickly zoomed in on this phenomenon, as Coors’ alcopop offshoot Zima sponsored a rather dispiriting-looking debut show by Z-Robots in 2013. “When [the robots] see the audience raise up their bottles of Zima, they jam harder,” reads a caption in this YouTube clip.
Watching a dreadlocked robot shredding in proportion to how enthusiastic an audience is about promoting a drinks company—with its eyes lit up in a message from its sponsor, no less—may put a damper on any “New robot overlords” thoughts. But enlisting Jenkinson to see just how far out they can push the concept means that at least someone in the Z-Robots team has been dreaming creatively. Regardless, for anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Squarepusher back catalog, the results on Music for Robots are unsurprising. This is no brave new world Jenkinson is entering; instead, it sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years.
Although Jenkinson seems like an adventurous choice to test out this type of composition, in a sense he’s not the right guy for the job. His bass playing—so fluid, so knotty, but so often a triumph of technique over feeling—already has an un-human remove to it. So when EP highlight “Sad Robot Goes Funny” enters into the realm of blur-of-fingers playing, it doesn’t feel like there’s much going on that we haven’t heard in prior Squarepusher records, especially as it’s tied to berserk drum patterns that carry a whiff of jazz. Anyone wondering whether genuine machine music can provoke an emotional response won’t find any answers here because it’s all wrapped up in the work of someone who has spent much of his career retreating from feeling. There’s no combat to this music—as strange as it sounds, this feels like a collaboration between like-minded peers.
That Jenkinson's involved in work of this type shouldn’t be a surprise, and to criticize it for being something it was never trying to be is an easy stumbling block to encounter when discussing Squarepusher. But there's still questions about the validity of Music for Robots beyond its status as a musical exercise. Most of it dips into detached terrain; the manic piano runs of “World Three” are rendered without drums, and the layered buildup on “Dissolver” is executed in such a precise manner that it’s positively suffocating in its rigidity. It leaves Z-Robots feeling somewhat pointless beyond the novelty status afforded to a group of machines performing on stage. But this is an album released on Warp with a notable contributor on board, which triggers wider questions about what it brings to the conversation—that is, a daring vision of the future that turns into a humdrum training session at the office. | 2014-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 9, 2014 | 5.7 | 3db24e3e-9111-4312-9ed8-0c24a2333c22 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
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