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Balancing contemporary house and techno with detours into footwork, gqom, and more, the Canadian musician’s mix reveals the range of influences behind her own singular brand of synth pop. | Balancing contemporary house and techno with detours into footwork, gqom, and more, the Canadian musician’s mix reveals the range of influences behind her own singular brand of synth pop. | Jessy Lanza: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessy-lanza-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | In Jessy Lanza’s world, every dancefloor is a dancefloor for one, Janet Jackson’s “Empty” is the highest-selling pop song of all time, and the clock always reads 2 a.m.—the time of night that the quiet, heady dance music Lanza makes is best consumed. With each successive solo album, the contours of the Lanzaverse become more refined and the topography becomes a little more precise. After three albums—including, most recently, last year’s All the Time—Lanza’s sound feels unique and immediately identifiable. Lanza is so consistent, in fact, that it can be hard to identify her contemporaries. Her work is comparatively featherweight alongside the austere, forceful techno of her longtime collaborator Jeremy Greenspan, and although a song like “Begins,” from 2016’s Oh No, might nod to the dark, vocal-led electronic pop of FKA twigs, it’s far from her main mode. The closest fit might be someone like Doss, who, like Lanza, often seems to be making dance tracks that are just as good for daydreaming as dancing to.
Lanza’s installment in !K7’s long-running DJ-Kicks series acts like a decoder ring for the rest of her catalog. Composed largely of contemporary house and techno with occasional detours into footwork, gqom, and funk carioca, her selection offers welcome insight into the varied influences threaded through her work. Although it’s a decidedly more straight-shooting mix than recent standouts in the series—including memoir-ish sets by Jayda G and DJ Koze, and a rangy leftfield entry from Avalon Emerson—it’s a surprisingly vital complement to the rest of Lanza’s output, a clubby addendum for fans wanting to venture to the far reaches of her world.
A handful of inspired choices lend the mix the thrilling weightlessness of Lanza’s best solo music. As a selector, Lanza plays it admirably fast and loose, rarely letting something run for longer than two minutes. When she does grant a song extra space—as with the gorgeously chintzy house throwback “Freak Like U,” by Italian production duo Masarima—it feels euphoric, a natural release after a more fleet-footed patch. Built around undulating synth organs, an earworm bassline, and a sweet, breathy vocal sample—“Baby, you make me move/Like a freak like me needs a freak like you”—“Freak Like U” feels like something Lanza might have written, an anthemic heater whose key melodic components are nevertheless tinny and strung out, as if heard from the bathroom or balcony.
As “Freak Like U” begins to transition into Portland-based producer Golden Donna’s spectral tech-house cut “Foaming,” Lanza ad-libs the title of “Freak Like U,” further blurring the lines between her own music and the mix. The effect occurs again later, when Buckinghamshire grime producer G3’s “Drum 2 (Peanut)” gives way to “A Path of Weeds and Flowers,” from Inga Copeland’s 2018 album as Lolina, The Smoke. The latter song’s creeping, alienated synth work feels like a funhouse-mirror version of one of Lanza’s songs, and Lolina’s rhythmic meditations (“Your eyes are on me/Your voice around me/I want nothing to do with/Deceptive emotions”) recall Lanza’s own lyrics about communication and romantic conflict.
Lanza’s DJ-Kicks is filled with these kinds of callbacks to her own oeuvre; although three of her four original contributions, including collaborations with Hyperdub labelmate Loraine James and fellow Bay Area producer Taraval, are placed right at the start of the mix, it’s hard to forget whose house you’re in. The only lull is around halfway through, when a stretch of minimal house and techno tracks threatens to pull the set’s pleasantly eccentric mood down to stone-faced seriousness. Still, it’s a slight moment among an otherwise vibrant mix that offers an enlightening peek into Lanza’s singular world.
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. | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | !K7 | November 29, 2021 | 7.1 | 3db268dc-a31d-4a8f-9fa2-bd15befef621 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Roy Montgomery made some of the most innovative music to come out of New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s, exploring post-punk, drone, and solo guitar, but practically vanished at the turn of the century. He returns with a trebling, chiming score to an imaginary movie about 60s Britrockers, Badfinger. | Roy Montgomery made some of the most innovative music to come out of New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s, exploring post-punk, drone, and solo guitar, but practically vanished at the turn of the century. He returns with a trebling, chiming score to an imaginary movie about 60s Britrockers, Badfinger. | Roy Montgomery: Music from the Film Hey Badfinger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17424-music-from-the-film-hey-badfinger/ | Music from the Film Hey Badfinger | In the avant rock underground of the 1980s and 90s, New Zealander Roy Montgomery was as significant an artist as you could find. His work with vital post-punk outfit the Pin Group through his dronier trio Dadamah into his diverse solo guitar work overflowed with innovative sounds. But around the turn of the century, he practically disappeared. After 2001's Silver Wheel of Prayer, signs of musical life-- a few new tracks on a retrospective, a split with Grouper, an EP by his duo, Torlesse Super Group-- became small and rare.
So for Montgomery followers, Music from the Film Hey Badfinger, his first truly new solo album in over 10 years, is a big event. But it's also a mixed blessing. Its 23 short tunes, conceived as the score to an imaginary movie about 60s Britrockers Badfinger, are energetic and thoughtful. But he chose to play every one with the same chiming, trebly tone, presumably using a chorus effect pedal. The results can be evocative, but the narrow, low end-avoiding sound is also tiring.
It's an odd choice considering the sonic variety of Montgomery's previous work. Whether or not you find this new sound grating, it takes at least some suspension of disbelief to think it's the best mode for every one of his ideas. Montgomery's decision reminds me of a similar one made by John Fahey on his 1998 live album, Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts, and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites. That record also offered interesting ideas wrapped in tinny, ear-testing treble. But at that point, Fahey was pretty prolific, so the album could at least be seen as a tangent in the midst of a diverse oeuvre. Montgomery's decision after a decade-plus of relative silence is harder to figure.
Paradoxically, Montgomery's self-imposed sonic straitjacket makes Hey Badfinger impressive as an exercise. He manages to coax a good bit of creative variety from this deliberate monotony. In that sense, the album recalls another late 90s record by a guitar legend, Loren Connors' Airs. That record also focused on short pieces and simple, recurring ideas, producing a suite of motifs that felt less like repetitions than variations on a theme.
Montgomery catches a similar vibe on Hey Badfinger. Some of the songs rhyme with each other, sharing chords or structures that get subtly altered between tracks. And there are times when the album does feel like a soundtrack, albeit less to a band bio-pic than some kind of robotic Western. But where Connors' Airs was sonically rich and not beholden to a single mode, Montgomery's relentless tone flattens some of his ideas until they sound dull and identical.
Still, there are a lot of those ideas here, and Montgomery clearly has more to say. Hopefully he thinks of this album as a first step back (most of it was recorded several years ago), and plans to employ the rest of his sonic arsenal soon. That would make his approach this time around easier to accept, because taken solely on its own, Music From the Film Hey Badfinger can be tough to swallow. | 2013-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Yellow Electric | January 7, 2013 | 6.2 | 3db771f9-1775-4086-bc6a-163d8904a158 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Neil Young’s decision to prioritize immediacy over craft in his later years means these tunes arrive lovingly weathered, but rarely go anywhere in particular. | Neil Young’s decision to prioritize immediacy over craft in his later years means these tunes arrive lovingly weathered, but rarely go anywhere in particular. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Barn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-crazy-horse-barn/ | Barn | Neil Young is standing on the porch, smoking weed, waiting for somebody else to show up. That’s the basic premise of “They Might Be Lost,” the strangest, loosest—and thus, the quintessential—song from Barn, his latest album. (Young’s discography itself is strange and loose enough that contextualizing Barn in the usual ways seems futile, but if you must know, it’s his 41st studio effort, and the 14th to feature Crazy Horse, his trustiest backing band.) Young wrote “They Might Be Lost” quickly and intuitively and didn’t give the band much time to rehearse it, a first-thought-best-thought approach that pervades Barn.
You can hear it in the three-chord progression that repeats through the song’s entirety, a rickety scaffold even by the standards of 21st-Century Neil, and in his initial contentment to let whatever’s close at hand guide his subject matter: the headlights through the trees, the call announcing that the latecomers have only just now gotten off the highway. This all may be fascinating to those of us who have spent years of our lives invested in Young’s skewed and shaggy psyche, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage an outsider to check it out. Still, there’s a minor epiphany here, if you’re willing to follow the trail that emerges from the end of his joint: “The smoke that I burn keeps taking me to the old days/The jury’s out on the old days, you know/The judgement is soon coming down.”
“The jury’s out on the old days” is the closest thing Young offers to a thesis statement for Barn, an album that, like much of his later work, has a complicated relationship with nostalgia. “Heading West,” the warmly rousing second song, invokes “the good old days” explicitly and liberally in its remembrances of a first guitar and afternoons spent pulling a wagon through the neighborhood. “Change Ain’t Never Gonna,” addresses people who cling to an idealized history despite the desperate need for progress, imagining a “great conspiracy” to take away their freedom and “stop them from living as they’ve always been living.” Young is critical of these people, but as a guy who’s often wrapped up in his own journey through the past, he’s not entirely unsympathetic. The tonal balance reminds me of Greendale, his 2003 concept album about a young environmental activist whose radical visions drive her out of the idyllic but parochial small town where she grew up. Now, instead of assigning his conflicted views out to a cast of opinionated townspeople, he’s just saying how he feels, allowing the contradictions to speak for themselves.
Despite its elaborate narrative, or perhaps because of it, Greendale also marked a turn toward blunt simplicity over supple tunefulness in Young’s compositional approach, a sense that the urgency of the message meant more to him than the music that carried it. Over the two decades since, that turn has come to look more and more definitive. Young’s stylistic restlessness and commitment to in-the-moment rawness can sometimes overshadow the fact that at his best, he is a melodist in the realm of Carole King or Paul McCartney. But on Barn, as on many recent predecessors, the tunes meander along the most obvious routes of the chords that underpin them, rarely going anywhere in particular, and almost never taking the sorts of audacious twists that might lodge them in your heart and mind.
This doesn’t appear to be a case of Young losing his touch, but the result of a deliberate decision to prioritize immediacy over craft. “I don’t sit and play the guitar and sing the song. I might sing one verse, or think it while I’m playing, maybe humming or something. Then I write all the words out and I try to never do it again until it’s being recorded with the band,” he told Rolling Stone about “They Might Be Lost.” According to a Washington Post interview, he wrote “Human Race,” a wild-eyed rocker about climate change, while walking to the converted barn that served as Crazy Horse’s recording studio, and recorded the version that ended up on the album when he got there. Both songs gain something from the roughness of their presentation. “They Might Be Lost” has a dreamlike half-improvised quality akin to Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, the sense of a band reaching for something without quite knowing yet what it is. The frenzy of “Human Race” suits its dire lyrics, and could have been dulled with too much time spent working out kinks. But neither seems built to last. It would be pointless to ask Young of all artists to repeat himself—just ask David Geffen about that. Still, I will humbly suggest that great songs don’t come from scrawled diatribes and afternoon daydreams alone. You have to work at them.
Great songs are not exactly what Young is after on Barn. Roughness and sprawl have been as important to his music as beauty and concision, especially when he’s working with Crazy Horse, since at least as far back as 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first album with the band. (Nevermind that “Cinnamon Girl” had a sugary melody to go along with its famous one-note guitar solo.) And if you have any fondness for the particular racket that these four men make when they get together—Barn is the second Crazy Horse album with on-again-off-again Neil collaborator Nils Lofgren on second guitar, after the departure of longtime member Frank Sampedro—you’ll still find plenty to like about Barn. These sound like first or second takes, with few if any overdubs, a recording style well tailored to the band’s proudly unrefined groove. It’s still a thrill when Young’s fuzz-tone guitar scorches the surfaces of drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot’s pounding rhythms, even if you’ve heard them do it a million times before. And the casual setting brings some welcome humor out of Young, like when busts out a half-yodel on the chorus of “Shape of You,” or refers to a flock of geese as “honkers flying low above the waves” on “Song of the Seasons.” Though the songs occasionally grapple with heavy subjects, the whole thing has the tenor of a backyard reunion between beloved old friends.
Young’s new songs may be blunter instruments than his older ones, but he’s lost none of his grace or delicacy as a lead guitar player. If there’s one track from Barn that deserves canonization, it’s “Welcome Back,” whose eight-minute simmer gives him plenty of space to stretch out. Between verses delivered with the hushed intensity of a beat poet, he reaches a level of expressiveness on his instrument that’s far beyond what he mustered as a songwriter for Barn, rendering thunderous drama with small handfuls of notes, using subtleties of dynamics and articulation to tell stories where words fail. “Welcome Back” is also where the album’s deliberately half-formed aesthetic comes to its greatest fruition. We can hear Neil’s bandmates attuned to his musical direction, communicating without speaking about when to step forward and when to hunker back, dreaming up the shape of the performance together in real time. There’s not much of a chorus to speak of, but the sing-spoken refrain encapsulates Barn’s complicated relationship with the past, and its use of familiar sounds in dogged pursuit of something present and new: “Welcome back, welcome back/It’s not the same.”
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. | 2021-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner | December 27, 2021 | 6.8 | 3dba7885-225c-4776-aae4-d1713c8b8bb2 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Matthew Cooper crafts another record of ambient music that's music first and ambient second, with a good sense of pacing and structure. | Matthew Cooper crafts another record of ambient music that's music first and ambient second, with a good sense of pacing and structure. | Eluvium: Copia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9926-copia/ | Copia | As an ambient artist, Eluvium's Matthew Cooper is working in a pretty crowded field, but with a gradually evolving sound and distinctive approach to his genre, his profile continues to rise. Though his 2003 all-piano record An Accidental Memory in Case of Death might have seemed like a left turn in light of the guitar-based drone tracks that came before and after, his records all share an aesthetic: Eluvium's ambient music is music first and ambient second; it leans forward, asks for consideration, and has no desire to slip into the background. That thread continues on his newest full-length, even as his palette broadens considerably.
Incorporating strings, horns, woodwinds, and more piano, Copia is the grandest, most sweeping Eluvium record to date. The word that keeps coming to mind is "regal," perhaps because the lush opening fanfare "Amreik" sets the tone for the album so perfectly. Just over three minutes long, the rich blend of French horns, trumpets and trombones comes together to form a soundtrack for convocation. From there, the record dives headlong into the 10-minute "Indoor Swimming at the Space Station", which layers piano and strings (never quite clear throughout what is sampled, what is live, and what is synthetic) on his most filmic piece to date.
As "cinematic" music goes-- and the adjective is appropriate throughout Copia-- these pieces tend toward widescreen pictures with big budgets. It's grand movie music in the "Adagio With Strings" sense; we're not talking about exercises in subtle shading. With that in mind, Cooper has developed a good sense of pacing and structure, and some of these pieces are terrifically affecting. "Seeing You Off the Edges" is mostly a cluster of held cello notes, but those moments when the melody jumps an octave trigger an immediate pang of longing. "After Nature", a chamber piece that layers violins with heavy reverb, sounds like something that would waft out of the ballroom in The Shining during one of Jack Nicholson's breaks away from the typewriter. "Ostinato" is a gradually unwinding piece for pipe organ with a simple melody, but during the pattern's lowest ebb, when the bass pedal comes in and vibrates the room, it echoes a towering cathedral.
My issue with Copia-- the thing that keeps this record from greatness-- is Cooper's approach to piano. I know people who love Accidental Memory and the dabbling of acoustic keys on last year's When I Live By the Garden and the Sea EP, but this is where I always find myself tuning out. Copia is the first record where piano is fully integrated into other aspects of Cooper's sound; for my money, these tracks are the record's weakest, coming across as unpleasantly leading, sometimes bordering on manipulative. Any sense of mystery-- a quality essential to Eluvium's best music-- evaporates completely during "Prelude for Time Feelers" and "Radio Ballet", where piano dominates. The word "Satie" sometimes comes up when he goes in this direction, which is way off; "Winston" is more accurate. Coming from a guy who owned a few Windham Hill albums back in the day, I don't mean this as a dig; the piano-led tracks are enjoyable and pretty but almost defiantly surface-level.
The nine-minute finale "Repose in Blue", on the other hand, shows Cooper at his large-canvas best, where the on-the-nose emotional pointers work to his advantage. He discards the line between drama and melodrama as he bursts in halfway though a piece of brooding cello drone laced with horns and throws a recording of fireworks against the black sky. The explosions sound like bass and kettledrums as they burst at random without a discernible pattern, and it nicely completes the John Phillip Sousa Americana hinted at on the record's opener. If "Amreik" was a formal procession in June, this is Independence Day a month later, with bombs bursting in air as the orchestra beneath weaves a lament for the radio simulcast. It is, of course, over the top, but to a degree that strikes me as courageous. Eluvium's music isn't a web of possibilities to be explored, but a very specific path to be followed. When it works as well as it does on "Repose in Blue", it takes you to an exalted place. | 2007-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Temporary Residence Ltd. | February 22, 2007 | 7.7 | 3dc2e434-a0b3-472d-9234-c8e4bfba9d61 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
R.E.M.'s overlooked and transitional third album from 1985, produced by Joe Boyd, receives the deluxe reissue treatment. | R.E.M.'s overlooked and transitional third album from 1985, produced by Joe Boyd, receives the deluxe reissue treatment. | R.E.M.: Fables of the Reconstruction [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14446-fables-of-the-reconstruction-deluxe-edition/ | Fables of the Reconstruction [Deluxe Edition] | These days we tend to think of music culture as being almost unreasonably fast-moving. Musicians, however, are generally not as productive as they once were. When R.E.M. were burning through a non-stop cycle of writing, recording, and touring in the 1980s, it was the industry norm. By 1985, the group was midway through the most productive period of its career, and had already released two instant classic albums within the span of 24 months for IRS Records. R.E.M. thrived on this pressure, and critical success seemed only to embolden them, resulting in a series of distinct, increasingly ambitious records that nudged them ever closer to the mainstream without sacrificing their character.
Fables of the Reconstruction, the third release in this astonishing reissue blitz, is the first to show any sign of strain from the band's relentless schedule. It's a great and inspired album, but not quite as consistent as Murmur or Reckoning, or other R.E.M. works to come down the line. Aside from the oddball lead single "Can't Get There From Here", which approximated southern funk via Peter Buck's chiming Rickenbacker chords, Fables is a dark and murky set with a textural palette close to the muted earth tones of its packaging. As the title suggests, it is their most "Southern" album, with a sound that evokes images of railroads, small towns, eccentric locals, oppressive humidity, and a vague sense of time slowing to a crawl. For a bunch of guys who were still new to life on the road, the specificity of setting makes a lot of sense-- it's the homesick pride of people suddenly removed from their usual context.
Michael Stipe's lyrics, at this point just beginning to gel into deliberate themes after a few years of intuitive mumbling, are mainly concerned with imagining the inner lives of outsiders and recluses; men who have traded companionship for a life on their own terms. This fascination can tip into sentimentality-- "Wendell Gee" may be the most syrupy R.E.M. tune-- but the best of these songs bypass mawkishness and stress Stipe's identification with his subjects. "Life and How to Live It", an ecstatic rave-up based upon the life of a schizophrenic man who alternated his time between two sides of his house, showcases Stipe at his most spirited and unhinged.
Musically, Fables is a transitional work. Buck was still working within his jangle-pop style-- "Driver 8" is basically the ultimate archetype of this aesthetic-- but they'd begun to toy around with grander ambitions. "Feeling Gravity's Pull", the album's ominous opener, contrasts a grim, trebly lead guitar part reminiscent of Tom Verlaine with stately, cinematic strings and vivid lyrics detailing Stipe's dreamscape. "Can't Get There From Here" successfully integrates horns and funk grooves, and along with "Maps and Legends" further develops Mike Mills as a foil to Stipe on harmony vocals. Less ambitious cuts like "Green Grow the Rushes" and "Good Advices" are charming in their own right, straightforward in their simple, unfussy beauty. Fables is the end of the line for that particular strain of R.E.M. song-- within a year, these guys would move on to making their own brand of arena rock on Lifes Rich Pageant, never to return to more intimate affairs.
This reissue includes a bonus disc of demos recorded in Athens before heading to London to track the songs with producer Joe Boyd. At this stage in the process, the songs were written but not entirely fleshed out. Though it is nice to hear songs such as "Driver 8" and "Auctioneer (Another Engine)" in a raw state, these demos are mainly a curiosity for hardcore fans. That said, comparing and contrasting the demos with the finished recordings makes an excellent case for Boyd as a producer. Since the band has mentioned in past interviews that the Fables sessions were stressful and difficult, Boyd has received a fair amount of negative criticism for his work on the album. This is unwarranted. The band have worked with better and more simpatico producers in their time, but Boyd did a fine job of finessing and polishing these tunes without getting in the way of the album's peculiar earthy vibe. "Can't Get There From Here" is the most dramatic example of Boyd's positive influence. The demo sounds awkward and confused as Stipe and Mills stumble over one another in the chorus, whereas the finished version runs smoothly, carried along by Buck's exceptionally crisp chords.
In the context of R.E.M.'s career, it's hard not to damn Fables of the Reconstruction with faint praise. It's not an obvious classic, but it certainly doesn't fall into the category of "lesser works." Fables is a fine album that has aged very well, and the simple fact that it is not on par with its two predecessors or further landmark records like Document and Automatic for the People is not a comment on its quality on its own. Ultimately, Fables is best enjoyed as something slightly off the beaten path, with a proudly eccentric style befitting its offbeat subjects. | 2010-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol / IRS | July 14, 2010 | 8.5 | 3dcbcb5c-180a-46b9-8c51-ee0addf9f99a | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a fascinating outlier in Frank Sinatra’s catalog, an unsparing and bleak concept album from 1970. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a fascinating outlier in Frank Sinatra’s catalog, an unsparing and bleak concept album from 1970. | Frank Sinatra: Watertown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frank-sinatra-watertown/ | Watertown | Frank Sinatra always recorded his vocals the same way. He would stand at the mic in the center of the room, surrounded by a large ensemble, conducted by an arranger who’d written the score to suit Sinatra’s own voice and mood. In the 1940s and ’50s, his baritone emerged in slow, steady sweeps, reaching out and reeling you in. He sang about universal topics with such ease and charisma, attracting such a large audience and developing such a recognizable persona, that his role in the greater cultural consciousness now lands somewhere between myth and a cliché. But back then, it was based on these particular choices, tailored to the voice, the sound in his head and the story in the words.
If those predilections seemed out of fashion in the ’60s—when artists were moving away from singing the standards toward writing their own compositions, backed by music that jittered and quaked as opposed to swooning and swinging—Sinatra found a way to reposition himself. It was during this decade he began operating his own record label Reprise—where he assumed the enduring nickname “Chairman of the Board”— and bolstering his acting bona fides in films like The Manchurian Candidate and The Detective. This was also around the time he took up residency at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, where he gathered with crowds of like-minded performers and celebrities and refitted his music for an older audience, solidifying the image he would maintain in pop culture for the rest of time. “How did all these people get in my room?” he would ask the crowd at the start of his casino sets. More than half a century later, it can feel like we never left.
During the ’60s, Sinatra’s voice also began showing some wear—a little gravel at the end of a line, longer pauses between the words. This raggedness allowed his best performances to tell a different kind of story. “Now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs/From the brim to the dregs,” he sings as strings swell in his 1965 rendition of “It Was a Very Good Year,” a song whose lyrical conceit (“When I was 35…”) demands a performer at least capable of portraying a man with as much life behind as ahead. The wear and tear of Jack Daniels and unfiltered Camels and years of public agonies and stress all build toward a slightly wearied, self-preserving effect, pulling him back like concerned friends in the places he might have once caused a scene. But the drama is still there. Listen with your eyes closed, whether you know anything about Sinatra or not, and you can see him—the slender guy in a suit, cigarette in hand, shoulders swinging. Listen closer and the room fills up—the elbows of the orchestra swaying like waves, stage lights dimming as the audience applauds.
But who is the man on Watertown? By Sinatra’s standards—and by most standards—this was a strange project. It was the first of his records to feature all new compositions, written specifically for him. Moreover, it was a concept album. It was also the first time he overdubbed vocals separate from the music, tracked in isolation in a Los Angeles studio, in part because he was unhappy with his initial performances, in part to avoid being on the East Coast during an investigation into certain organized crime operations, and in part to meet the current standard of studio recordings as the ’60s drew to a close.
Sinatra’s career was, if not failing, then at least growing stagnant as the times changed. He was not a fan of rock music, and he even had taken to referring to the new generation of artists as “pukes.” To his credit, he still experimented. There was a brief, beautiful record with bossa nova guitarist Antônio Carlos Jobim. There was also a collection of poetry by trendy writer Rod McKuen set to music. He was trying new things, pushing himself out of the box.
This perhaps led him to the set of a dreadful Western called Dirty Dingus Magee, a box office flop that would prove to be his last film role for many years. By all accounts, it should have at least been an interesting failure. Sinatra—whose best performances were not far from his dignified public persona—playing a guy named Dirty Dingus Magee, a goofball outlaw, the butt of everyone’s jokes, scruffy and desperate and quick to make a self-deprecating joke. Novelist Joseph Heller contributed to the screenplay, and an organization called the IFTP (Indians for Truthful Portrayal) somehow offered their first endorsement for a Hollywood movie’s representation of Native American characters. (Roger Ebert, in a one-star review, notes that the IFTP’s president “talks amazingly like an MGM press agent.”)
The filming of Dingus took place just after Sinatra’s father, Antonino Martino “Marty” Sinatra, died of a heart attack. By this point, Sinatra had been divorced three times; he had killed and kickstarted his career enough times to feel like a ghost of himself; he had lost friends and collaborators, seen trends come and go. Due to an injury incurred on the set of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, the hand he used to hold a microphone was often in immense pain. But his father’s death, according to those who knew him, was what broke him. “He became a little more quiet, a little less ebullient,” his daughter Tina reflects in My Father’s Daughter: A Memoir. “He needed this silliness after Grandpa died,” Nancy Sinatra Jr. explained. After Watertown arrived to the worst sales of his career in March 1971, and after Dingus hit theaters to critical disdain that fall, he announced his retirement, and, for a short while, disappeared.
II
The story of Watertown goes like this: A man is left alone with his two sons after his wife, Elizabeth, leaves for the big city. He feels lonely, hopeless, lovesick, and bored. On a sunny day, he goes to the train station, hoping she will return. She does not. Then it rains. The End.
The songwriters, Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes, wrote all 10 songs with the ambition of stripping Sinatra of everything that had come to define his music, as if dictated by a series of prompts.
Where do Frank Sinatra songs usually take place? Somewhere luxurious and exciting, or if the mood strikes, a smoky bar, filled with familiar faces and commiserating drinkers. Watertown is set in a small town that may or may not be the one in upstate New York, some 30 miles from the Canadian border. “Nothing much happening down on Main,” Sinatra sings in the opening title track. “’Cept a little rain.”
Who is the usual narrator of Sinatra songs? It is a man in touch with his feelings, able to express himself with great passion and conviction, communicating even his lowest thoughts with the composure to suggest he’s on his way to better things—or at least a nicer bar. On Watertown, our narrator is nameless and listless, dwelling neither in pain nor in anger, circling the same subject over and over as the days blur together. “As far as anyone can tell,” he sings in what may be the album’s most hopeful line, “The sun will rise tomorrow.”
What do breakups usually sound like in Sinatra songs? They are elaborate, catastrophic events, narratives that demand to be orchestrated with the grand opulence of Christmas songs and film scores. On Watertown, the central breakup is a cold, empty thing that onlookers might ignore entirely if we didn’t have access to the protagonist’s internal monologue. “There is no string ensemble,” he tells us, “And she doesn’t even cry.”
These are, on the whole, the sparsest and saddest songs that Sinatra ever sang. The big swing for a single was “I Would Be in Love (Anyway),” which arrives early in the album to declare that this marriage was the peak of the narrator’s life, no matter how poorly it turned out. The second-to-last track, “She Said,” goes down in less than two minutes, consisting almost entirely of brief messages from Elizabeth, sung slowly and sternly over strange, clattering percussion and brief flourishes of strings. “She says she’s coming home,” it concludes. By the next song, you realize this was either a hallucination, a lie, or a cruel joke.
When Sinatra and his team enlisted Bob Gaudio for the project, it’s likely they were thinking about the hits that he wrote for the Four Seasons—pop morsels like “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” songs that share Sinatra’s penchant for romance and humor and swingin’ melodies. Or maybe he was thinking about the hits he co-wrote for other artists, like the Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a mini-opera that captured heartbreak at its eternal, elemental peak.
Instead, they got the Gaudio who had just come off The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, the Four Seasons’ bizarre and fascinating 1969 concept album, inspired by recent innovations like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album, which blended political satire with long-form symphonic song structures, was a failure, and it seems that Gaudio and his writing partner, Jake Holmes, learned a lesson to rein in their ambition this time around. The Watertown tracklist is brief; the mood is focused; the color palette is muted and sepia-toned. The songs don’t necessarily follow a linear narrative, but if you were to cut any of them, or listen in a slightly different order, it would ruin the effect.
Maybe it could have been a success. There’s a “Mrs. Robinson” jaunt to “The Train,” and a lonesome Glen Campbell twang to “What’s Now Is Now.” The magnificent, waltz-time chorus of “For a While”—“I forget that I’m not over you… for a while”—has a baroque charm, accompanied by French horns, muted piano, and gentle strums of acoustic guitar. “What a Funny Girl (You Used to Be),” with its memories of messy kitchens and tableaus of teddy bears, cuts through with much-needed lightness at just the right time. “Elizabeth” kicks off with an actual electric guitar solo. It’s all pretty hip, in an AM-radio-soft-rock-circa-1970 kind of way.
But then there’s Sinatra. With the disembodied effect that comes from a guy singing alone who’s used to singing with bands, his vocals elevate Watertown from merely a well-crafted left-turn into a downer classic. He’d sounded more polished before, and he would sound more confident later, but he never reached quite the same emotional tenor for the span of an entire record. No singer ever has sung the word “goodbye” quite like Sinatra, and here, he gets another song devoted entirely to it: “Goodbye (She Quietly Says)” is the only track on the record that involves both characters in a room together and it’s narrated in the past-tense, a descending chord putting its vision further in the rearview with each repetition of the chorus; the effect is so haunting and dejected that, placed so early in the record, it feels like an attempt to clear any casual listeners out of the room.
For those who stick around, you could lose yourself in the delivery of any individual line. For me it’s in “Michael & Peter,” a song written in the form of an unsent letter to Elizabeth, detailing how their kids have grown, always stopping short just before begging her to come back (“Maybe soon the words will come my way…”). The key moment arrives as Sinatra starts describing the guy who cuts their lawn, who continually asks where she is. “Can’t tell you all the times he’s been told,” he sings. “But he’s… so… old.”
It’s the kind of casual inside joke shared among people who’ve cohabitated for a long time, and in this telling, Sinatra exudes equal resentment and sympathy for the guy. You get the sense that what might have once been an annoying routine between the two has now become a kind of comfort: At least he has some company, and at least he gets to talk about her again. You see him hunched over the letter, underlining each word, laughing to himself a little, writing more quickly as he loses himself to the memory. It is maybe at this precise moment, delivered at the end of the final verse, that the narrator decides not to send the letter.
None of this, for what it’s worth, is in the lyrics. It’s all how Sinatra sings it, stringing the words together, taking a deep breath and lowering his voice, maybe even doubting himself a little as he summons the bravado to sing what might be the most banal observation ever to find itself at the climax of a Frank Sinatra song. And if he used to give these types of performances in banquet halls filled with musicians and friends, electric and buzzing with live music, in this telling, he takes off his headphones, exits the recording booth, and stands in a soundproof room somewhere in Los Angeles, at the precipice of even more quiet to come.
III
Frank Sinatra announced his retirement in March 1971, and he was back on stage and making records again by January 1974. But even before his self-induced exile from the industry, it never seemed like Watertown would play much of a role in his narrative. Just a few months after its release, during a radio interview, he seemed to have forgotten the names of the songwriters he worked with (“I think the two kids did a great job”), and rumors quickly died about a TV special where he’d play the lead. It’s hard to imagine what this would have even looked like: a guy sitting alone in his house, singing to himself while gazing wistfully out the window? A scene-stealing appearance from the old man cutting the lawn? In the context of the career-spanning 2015 documentary, Sinatra: All or Nothing At All, Watertown accounts for roughly 20 seconds of its four-hour runtime, all in the service of explaining how dire his commercial prospects were before retiring.
The only song from the sessions that ever made it into Sinatra’s concert setlists was “Lady Day,” a gentle, non-album single that seemed to have nothing to do with the larger concept. Sinatra would introduce the song as a tribute to Billie Holiday, who had died from liver damage about 10 years earlier. Even with its elegiac tone, the words are sweeter and softer than anything on the record. “Her morning came too fast, too soon,” Sinatra sings, “and died before the afternoon.” It’s sad, but, in his telling, it also sounds a little like relief.
A common line on Sinatra is that he could not sing what he did not feel, which, like a lot of inherited wisdom about Sinatra, seems to be about half-true. After all, he’s on record as having never enjoyed performing chestnuts like “Strangers in the Night” or “My Way,” and throughout the ’70s and ’80s, he recorded plenty of ill-fitting material that might have seemed like a stretch, even then—say, “Sweet Caroline” or “Just the Way You Are.”
When Gaudio and Holmes sent Sinatra their homemade demos of the material (“Who has the nerve, at 28 years old, to sing a demo for Frank Sinatra when you’re not a singer?” Gaudio reflected earlier this year), they were under the impression he would pick just a song or two. Instead, he was taken by the whole project. Maybe it was the recent death of his father and the songs’ sympathetic portrayal of parenthood from a man’s perspective. Maybe it was its depiction of a woman leaving her marriage to pursue life in the big city, as he had recently served Mia Farrow divorce papers while she was in Los Angeles on the set for Rosemary’s Baby. (Sinatra had demanded Farrow—his wife of two years, almost 30 years his junior—abandon the project and meet him in New York, where she would co-star in his own film, The Detective. “While she’s working for us, she’s Mia Farrow, not Mrs. Sinatra,” he was reportedly told by a producer. This was the last straw.)
In the decades to come, Sinatra had more hits ahead of him. His rendition of “New York, New York,” released in 1980, would finally replace “My Way” as the crowd-pleasing closer of his live sets. He’d also return to his saloon ballad comfort zone on 1981’s She Shot Me Down, reuniting for the last time with arranger Gordon Jenkins to follow the thread of his more characteristic breakup songs from the ’50s and ’60s. He even returned to film work, some seven years after Dirty Dingus. Which all leaves Watertown in a vulnerable position, documenting an artist at a personal low, released to widespread indifference, clearing the path for the first moment in a long career where he felt that nothing of any consequence lay ahead of him.
There is some irony in this set of songs—written specifically to avoid the common tropes of Sinatra’s image, already set in stone by 1970—aligning so closely with his personal life at the time. But any autobiographical symmetry dissolves when the music plays. Unlike “Lady Day,” which Sinatra could perform as his own remembrance of a lost colleague, there was no way to fold these songs into his greater body of work. A charming gentleman in an expensive tuxedo does not sing “Goodbye (She Quietly Says).” “Michael & Peter” would not make sense for the audience at a casino. Try telling the narrator of “For a While” that the best is yet to come. These songs stand apart, and so Sinatra kept them apart. In their words—full of anticlimaxes and dead-ends, solitude and longing, small towns and gray skies, empty trains and unsent letters—there was a story close to his heart, one as serious as life and death. It wasn’t the story he’d set out to tell, or the one the world wanted to hear from him. But it was the story, nonetheless. | 2022-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Reprise | December 11, 2022 | 8.9 | 3dcff3b7-6b52-405c-beb7-458c9d42c929 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On The Incredible True Story, the Gaithersburg, Md. rapper Logic assumes the role of screenwriter and director, claiming to have written a script for the album. It’s set 100 years in the future, as two narrators search for a planet named Paradise following Earth’s destruction. | On The Incredible True Story, the Gaithersburg, Md. rapper Logic assumes the role of screenwriter and director, claiming to have written a script for the album. It’s set 100 years in the future, as two narrators search for a planet named Paradise following Earth’s destruction. | Logic: The Incredible True Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21216-the-incredible-true-story/ | The Incredible True Story | New artists face intimidating challenges after signing to major labels. For starters, creating a debut that not only sees the light of day, but is successful enough to warrant a follow-up. In certain cases, that first album is everything they’ve been waiting to say for years, but the second album is the bigger test, as it proves that the artist has something to say beyond the cathartic release of emotions heard on their debut effort. For instance, Logic’s 2014 debut, Under Pressure, was a detailed account of his chaotic Gaithersburg, Md. origin layered with his method of coping with stress while trying to escape the situation before it consumed him. It was honest and, on occasion, impressive. The announcement of his second collection, The Incredible True Story, generated questions about how Logic could follow something as intricate and personal as Under Pressure. Where could he go? The answer: outer space.
Under Pressure was evidence of Logic’s attention to specifics, which he remains committed to on The Incredible True Story. You may have noticed him often wearing a NASA flight jacket leading up the album’s release, similar to a movie director wearing a t-shirt or hat emblazoned with the name of his latest film. On The Incredible True Story, he assumes the role of screenwriter and director, claiming to have written a script for the album. It’s set 100 years in the future, as the two narrators, Thomas and Kai, search for a planet named Paradise following Earth’s destruction. (Thalia, who served as the Midnight Marauders-inspired virtual guide on Under Pressure, returns as the computer for the ship driven by the narrators. Thankfully, she’s still more Siri than HAL 9000.) During their journey, the duo revisit the past through Logic’s music.
Because Logic’s catalog serves as an artifact in the album’s narrative, the early placement of "Fade Away" is calculated. Over a dreamy sample reminiscent of a doo-wop song, Logic reflects on death’s inevitability: everyone dies eventually, so strive to create something that lives on after you. "Upgrade" maintains the futuristic theme (The Fifth Element allusions and all) as Logic explains how success has altered both his day-to-day existence and his perspective.
Despite being set in the future, the album takes time to dip into the past. On "Young Jesus", Logic and guest Big Lenbo trade verses over producer 6ix’s recreation of '90s hip-hop ambiance. Its highest points come on the second and third verses, where Logic hands the song off to Big Lenbo like they’re performing live and sharing a mic. Logic’s introspective thoughts match the mellow calm of "Innermission", as he longs for the ability to revisit certain moments just to dwell in them again. It’s a moment of clarity most folks arrive at as they get older: you’ll never be present in your memories again.
This is another constant theme on The Incredible True Story—Logic’s evolution under the spotlight. "City of Stars" finds him at his most sincere. Once Logic’s harmonizing breaks, his and 6ix's production becomes more aggressive as Logic unloads his frustrations with hip-hop, including the fixation on the biracial MC’s appearance. "I didn’t talk about my race on the whole first album/ But black versus white bullshit was still the outcome," he rhymes, clearly exasperated. He then takes aim at critics, amateur and professional, who chide Drake for harping on "money and bitches" yet praise 2Pac for doing the same. Logic is at his best when getting shit off his chest, but even in the midst of these brazen admissions, there are still missteps.
From its off-kilter drag to his deployment of boast-riddled yells in the place of bars, "I Am the Greatest" reeks of Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Recycled flows and rhyme schemes are common in this era of hip-hop, but there’s a fine line between homage and imitation. Furthermore, while Logic has proven himself to be a talented MC who respects hip-hop culture and puts obvious effort into his work, there’s very little on The Incredible True Story that's worth constant replays. The music is enjoyable and Logic’s ambition is evident, but the final product just doesn’t attach itself to the memory.
The Incredible True Story is a pleasant voyage to Paradise orchestrated by an artist who’s earned the approval of legends from Rick Rubin to Big Daddy Kane. Logic has the tools to create music that has longevity, but has yet to unlock the characteristics that truly set him apart. If he’s able to tap into that, his subsequent releases will have the impact he aspires for. | 2015-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | November 18, 2015 | 6.1 | 3dd4c0ba-f7fc-47b1-8e3c-40b13921710d | Julian Kimble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julian-kimble/ | null |
For the past few weeks, I\x92ve had a crash course in No Wave: from CDR mixes to press packets ... | For the past few weeks, I\x92ve had a crash course in No Wave: from CDR mixes to press packets ... | Theoretical Girls: Theoretical Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7987-theoretical-girls/ | Theoretical Girls | For the past few weeks, I've had a crash course in No Wave: from CDR mixes to press packets, to an interview with the big daddy of it all, James Chance, I've been absolutely deluged in a movement all but kept secret on my own New York streets for over twenty years. The cherry on top is finally being able to hear this archival release of the Theoretical Girls, a band whose moniker treaded close to becoming an apt description of their turbid presence in the history books of the late 70s downtown scene. Hypothetically, what would a band featuring hundred guitar orchestrator Glenn Branca, visual artist Margaret De Wys, Sonic Youth producer/engineer Wharton Tiers, and theatre/dance composer Jeffrey Lohn sound like were they still in their mid-twenties, when the city was still up for grabs and there were many aspects of rock that had yet to be turned by their forefathers the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, and the others?
Surprisingly, they sound a lot more rock'n roll than their contemporary art credentials would lead you to surmise. And while the Glenn Branca reissue on Atavistic focused only on his singing contributions and the more avant leanings of the Girls, this set of songs descries the styling of Jeffrey Lohn, the more straightforward side of the group. Their theme song starts the disc off at full gallop, taking the thundering count-off numbers of the Ramones and stretching them to the limit, concentrating less on ideas and more on the mad tempo blast, straining to stay within the chords even as Tiers' drums thump relentlessly. "Computer Dating" foresees the advent of Nerve.com, and the faceless frenzy of the New York City hook-up infects every note of the song like a chancrous outbreak.
Perhaps their closest contemporary at the time would be the Step Forward-era Fall, matching their raw rock non-production with the profuse, sneering verbiage of "Europe Max," as well as embodying the lean, gleeful bounce from a few choice rhythmic elements, becoming the latter act's modus all the way through its Brix-era pop sensibilities. The unrefined keyboards of De Wys serve as link not only to the similarly primitive bleeps of pre-Eno Devo, but all the way through the spasmings of another Ohio group, Brainiac, nearly twenty years later. On "Lovin in the Red," her organ's throbs act as contrary motion to the rest of the band, speeding and slowing defiant to the rhythms of the spiky guitar riffs of Branca and Lohn.
The only track ever to see Carter-era light-- as the A-side of their lone single-- "U.S. Millie" runs together inane pop culture references to Howard Johnson hotel chains, Jews for Jesus pamphlets, yogurt health, and Scientology at a Taxi Driver pace, contorting the marquee barrage of Times Square through Lohn's catchy derisions and setting up the 3-card monte stand for Thurston Moore's street hustles circa Sister-era Sonic Youth. Equally powerful is the frustrated garage rage of "No More Sex," grunting and steaming like the nastiest of '77 punk. "Electronic Angie" howls secret constellations of blackened bubblegum on subway platforms, illuminating the preordained patterns of sidewalk cracks and black tar asphalt. Real street gospel.
Some of Lohn's experiments, like "Keyboard Etude" and "Polytonal," are too short and unformed to be effective, especially in light of Branca's buzzing behemoths. "Parlez-vous Francais" works despite their tendencies to shout lyrics in French, but even as redundant tracks appear on the second half of the disc, songs like "Theoretical Girls," "Electronic Angie," and "Chicita Bonita" are high voltage and variegated enough to warrant revising those old No Wave maps, which right now only include DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus, and the Contortions. | 2003-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Acute | April 14, 2003 | 7.5 | 3dd631d1-4bce-4d82-9e4f-22039dfa48ac | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. The dozens of untitled beats on Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts. | During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. The dozens of untitled beats on Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts. | J Dilla: Dillatronic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21156-dillatronic/ | Dillatronic | During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. As Erykah Badu, who worked with him on her Mama's Gun album, once said during a RBMA lecture, Dilla made "beats all day long." He collected many of them onto CDs, and handed them out to friends and colleagues. These "beat tapes" had begun circulating across the Internet by the time he passed in 2006 at the age of 32.
Dilla's work has since become fodder for dozens of compilations, posthumous "collaborations" like the 2013 album Sunset Blvd. with Frank Nitt and his brother Illa J, and unnecessary reissues like a "badge-shaped" Record Store Day 2015 version of his 2001 12-inch "Fuck the Police". The Yancey estate has also begun issuing his beats in raw form, without vocals. (Before, they were available as "instrumental" accompaniments to projects like Rebirth of Detroit, which paired Dilla's beats with newly recorded vocals by various rappers.) Last year's The King of Beats: Ma Dukes Collector's Box Set boasted some memorable packaging—it included four 10-inch records, a cassette, and a floppy disk formatted for an E-mu SP-1200 sampler keyboard—as well as an imposing $207.74 price tag.
The King of Beats, as well as 2013's Lost Tapes Reels + More, and now Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. On the latter, each track bears the spartan title "Dillatronic 01", et cetera. According to its promotional materials, Dillatronic represents his "electronic-influenced" material, but that's a loose theme at best. There is nothing here as gloriously techno as "Nothing Like This" from the 2003 EP Ruff Draft, or the Kraftwerk homage "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)" from his 2001 album as Jay Dee, Welcome 2 Detroit. If anything, many of these virtually unnamed and undated "beats batches" float along like the rudimentary, keyboards-and-bass-drums beats of late-'90s indie rap producers like Shawn J. Period and 88-Keys. Most have a running time of around two to three minutes, while a few last less than a minute. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts.
There are echoes of better-known productions here: the penetrating synth keyboard of "Dillatronic 10" is reminiscent of "E=MC2" from The Shining, and track 35 unfolds a neo-soul guitar groove that evokes his work on Phat Kat's "Dedication to the Suckers". With its enchanting yet disembodied chorus of "ooohs," "14" is like a distant cousin of Slum Village's "Get Dis Money". "29" whips a blaxploitation funk lick around a sample of M.O.P.'s "Ante Up", while a sample of Whodini's "Escape (I Need a Break)" girds the hallucinatory track 34. The latter is one of the more fully realized electronic instrumentals included here, but there are others, like the "Tetris"-like effects on "22", and the ghostly electro on "24" that cruelly ends in 45 seconds.
A few of these files suggest paths unexplored. "05", which only lasts a minute and three seconds, weds a bhangra-like melody to a drum kit. It's an avenue Dilla's close friend Madlib explored more fully on his Beat Konducta in India. "31" builds like a '70s horror cut (or perhaps a porno flick?) around an unnamed woman breathing "No" as a solitary keyboard sound throbs creepily. "33" weaves around a sped-up recording of a voices chirping as if out of The Wizard of Oz.
Dilla's familiar techniques are evident, like his frequent use of air sirens and hard, slapping percussion. He speaks only once, near the end of the minute-and-three-second track "39". "Yeah! Bounce with a nigga!" he commands to us over loping bass and spacey keyboard effects. This might be a data dump of studio experiments, not a cohesive Donuts-like experience that casual listeners might crave. But admirers of this brilliantly inventive musician will find much to rhyme over, get inspired by, or simply bounce to on Dillatronic. | 2015-10-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Vintage Vibez Music Group | October 27, 2015 | 7 | 3dd6631f-1468-420d-80ff-54b971523903 | Mosi Reeves | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mosi-reeves/ | null |
Paul McCartney's Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. What 2012's ears can find is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. | Paul McCartney's Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. What 2012's ears can find is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. | Paul McCartney / Linda McCartney: Ram | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16651-ram/ | Ram | Flipping through the booklet to Paul McCartney's Ram reissue, you'll find no scholarly liner-notes essay. This is odd. Usually the reissue-packaging gods demand the positioning of an eager critic between you and the product, dispensing wisdom on how you might experience the music they're standing in front of. What you find instead is a McCartney family-photo scrapbook: Paul draping himself playfully around monkey bars with his infant Stella. Mary, about three years old, hoisting fat headphones above her tiny head; on the opposite page, Linda nuzzling Paul, those same headphones ringed around his neck. In the photos, Paul looks dazed, as if he were smacked in the face with a pillow seconds before the shutter clicked. It drives the point home: Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. No wonder critics loathed it so passionately.
Or at least, some critics did. Sometimes an album gets a review so resoundingly negative that it lurks forever like a mournful spirit in its rear view mirror: Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone, claimed to hear in Ram "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far." Which is intense. But people wanted impossible things from Beatles solo albums-- closure, healing, apologies, explanations for what to do with their dashed expectations. John Lennon tried telling everyone outright "The dream is over" on Plastic Ono Band's "God", but that still wasn't a cold-water jet hard enough to prepare people, apparently, for the whimsical pastoral oddity that was Ram.
Landau was right, however, that it did spell the end of something, which might be a clue to the vitriol: If "60s rock" was defined, in large part, by the existence of the Beatles, then Ram made it clear in a new, and newly painful, way that there would be no Beatles ever again. To use a messy-divorce metaphor: When your parents are still screaming red-faced at each other, it's a nightmare, but you can still be assured they care. When one of them picks up and continues on living, it smarts in an entirely different way.
Ram, simply put, is the first Paul McCartney release completely devoid of John's musical influence. Of course, John wiggled his way into some of the album's lyrics-- in those fresh, post-breakup years, the two couldn't quite keep each other out of their music. But musically, Ram proposes an alternate universe where young Paul skipped church the morning of July 6, 1957, and the two never crossed paths. It's breezy, abstracted, completely hallucinogen-free, and utterly lacking grandiose ambitions. Its an album whistled to itself. It's purely Paul.
Or actually, "Paul and Linda." This was another one of Paul's chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record's spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo "Paul and Linda McCartney," and in the sense that Linda's enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost every song, it's entirely accurate. Some read Paul's decision as the ultimate insult to his former partner: I've got a new collaborator now! Her name is Linda, and she never makes me feel stupid. In the album's freewheeling spirit, however, the decision scans more like guilelessness and innocence. The songs don't feel collaborative so much as cooperative: little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling-- whatever it is you did, make sure you're back there doing it with gusto.
It is exactly this homemade charm that has caught on with generations of listeners as the initial furor around the album subsided. What 2012's ears can find on Ram is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. It had no trendy name here; it was just a disappointing Beatles solo album. But when Ben Stiller's fussy, pedantic "Greenberg" character painstakingly assembles a mix for Greta Gerwig intended to display the breadth and depth of his pop-culture appreciation, he slides Ram's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" on there. It's the song we see her singing along to enthusiastically in the following montage.
Critics hated "Uncle Albert". "A major annoyance," Christgau opined. Again, from the current moment we can only plead ignorance, assume that some serious shit had to be going down to clog everyone's ears. Because "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is not only Ram's centerpiece, it is clearly one of McCartney five greatest solo songs. As the slash in the title hints, it's a multi-part song, starring two characters. To put its accomplishments in an egg-headed way: It fuses the conversational joy listeners associated with McCartney's melodic gift to the compositional ambition everyone assumed was Lennon's. To put it a simpler way: Every single second of this song is joyously, deliriously catchy, and no two seconds are the same. Do you think early Of Montreal, the White Stripes at their most vaudevillian, or the Fiery Furnaces took any lessons from this song?
What a lot of people thought they heard on "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", and everywhere else on the album, is cloying cuteness. But it turns out you can say a lot of things-- things like "go fuck yourself" ("3 Legs"), "everything is fucked" ("Too Many People"), and even "let's go fuck, honey" ("Eat At Home)"-- with a big, dimpled grin on your face. "It's just the critics who say, 'Well, John was the biting tongue; Paul's the sentimental one,'" Linda observed shrewdly in a dual Playboy interview from 1984. "John was biting, but he was also sentimental. Paul was sentimental, but he could be very biting. They were more similar than they were different."
The joy of paying close attention to Ram is gradually discovering that Paul was humming darker things under his breath than it seemed. "Smile Away", for instance, is a messy, romping slab of Buddy Holly rock. Paul makes a joke about his stinky feet. The chorus goes "Smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away." But it's not just "smile," a brief, cost-free act that can last a second. It's "Smile Away", keeping a fixed grin as conversation grows unpleasant. In interviews of the period, Paul was asked repeatedly if he felt lost without his collaborating partner, if he was motivated solely by commercial success, how he felt about being "the cute Beatle." The backing vocal chant behind "Smile Away" goes, by turns, "Don't know how to do that" and "Learning how to do that." "Smile away horribly, now," Paul slurs over the song's fadeout. Yes, he's fine. No, he and Linda will not become the next "John and Yoko." But thanks so much for asking. If you tell a dog it's a brainless fleabag with the same tone of voice you use to say "Good boy," it will still wag its tail.
The album is riddled with dark grace notes like this: "Monkberry Moon Delight" has an absolutely unhinged vocal take, Paul gulping and sobbing right next to your inner ear. The imagery is surrealist, but anything but whimsical: "When a rattle of rats had awoken/ The sinews, the nerves, and the veins," he bellows. It could be a latter-day Tom Waits performance. "Too Many People" opens with Paul warbling "piece of cake," but the lyrics themselves wag their finger at societal injustices, former bandmates-- basically everybody. The lyrics to "3 Legs" are full of hobbling animals with missing limbs.
The almost-title song "Ram On", could serve as the album's redeeming spirit: A haunting, indelible little tune drifts past on ukulele as Paul croons, "Ram on, give your heart to somebody/ Soon, right away." The title is a play on his old stage name "Paul Ramon," which makes the song a private little prayer; a mirror image, perhaps, to John Lennon's "Hold On". The song is reprised, late in the record, functioning like a calming breeze. "I want a horse, I want a sheep/ Want to get me a good night's sleep," Paul jauntily sings on "Heart of the Country", a city boy's vision of the country if ever there was one, and another clue to the record's mindstate. For Paul, the country isn't just a place where crops grow; it's "a place where holy people grow." Now that American cities everywhere are having their Great Pastoral Moment, full of artisans churning goat's-milk yogurt and canning their own jams, Ram feels like particularly ripe fruit.
This reissue comes with a disc of extras from the period, which hardcore McCartney fans will already know well. They are lovely, an extension of the album's mood and world without interrupting it or diluting it. Songs like "Another Day" and "Hey Diddle" feel like a cracked-open door onto the kind of records Paul could have conceivably gone on making forever. A few years later, he had returned, presumably chastened, to crafting over-arching concept records about fictitious bands, the sort of thing he'd gotten a lot of applause for in the past. But the bracingly pure and simple air of Ram has resonated further. | 2012-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Hear Music | May 24, 2012 | 9.2 | 3dde7142-8ce6-40d2-a890-b552f3e83779 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On her debut album, the London-based cellist and composer explores her experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. Musically and conceptually, the record evokes hazy, in-between spaces. | On her debut album, the London-based cellist and composer explores her experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. Musically and conceptually, the record evokes hazy, in-between spaces. | Lucinda Chua : *YIAN * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucinda-chua-yian/ | YIAN | The word yian, or yàn (燕), refers to a swallow, the migratory harbinger of spring that in Chinese culture appears often in maobi paintings, children’s songs, girls’ names, and superstitions. In her largely self-produced debut full-length, YIAN, Lucinda Chua is both the swallow—the bird in flight, in search of home—and the swallowed, a body succumbing to something greater than itself.
The London-based cellist and producer has spent years excavating the delicate interiorities of melancholy and longing. Her previous EPs, 2019’s Antidotes 1 and 2021’s Antidotes 2, captured tender vignettes of shifting moods and moments in time. YIAN, by comparison, expands outward, offering not just vignettes but stories, often rooted in the artist’s own experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. Born to a Chinese-Malaysian father and white British mother, Chua seeks both a relationship to her roots and release from its inherited traumas. It follows that much of the album is spent navigating—and redefining her relationship to—hazy, in-between spaces.
Haunting these spaces is the classic diasporic question of home. On the elegiac “Autumn Leaves Don’t Come,” glassy strings played sul ponticello criss-cross like flocks of birds. Chua’s voice thickens like rope, and she casts it outward, as if in search of anchorage. Here, as throughout the album, Chua creates landscapes out of the hollow spaces within her. Each track becomes its own kind of home, or at least a safe harbor. The orchestral “Meditations on a Place” evokes both the impressionistic warmth of Ravel and the icy panoramas of Sibelius. A bass drone pulses gently; low strings swell; and the tremolo of violins shimmer like light on water. Meanwhile, “Grief Piece” drifts through the lonely expanses of its namesake. Digital distortion glitches the matrix like sorrow short-circuiting the brain.
Over the course of YIAN, Chua gathers the threads that link home, history, and their relationship to the body. Lead single “Echo” is a quiet declaration of independence from ancestral trauma. In the single’s cover art, she reaches out her hand in the shape of lánhuāzhǐ (兰花指)—a primary hand gesture in traditional Chinese dance, based on the lánhuā (兰花), or orchid. Yet the way she holds it (wrist barely bent, head and neck stock straight) is a departure from tradition. In dressing her wounds, Chua finds a need both to draw such boundaries and to reach across others. On “You,” aquatic backing vocals bloom and give way to a vibrating cello line. Chua’s voice arches like a bridge, seeking connection to a relationship rendered distant by time and past circumstances: “I want you to know/ That all of your kindness/ Is all of my kindness./ I hope that you find this.” The suggestion of a shared psychic space is also echoed on “Do You Know, You Know?” As a train-like whistle blows through a veil of synth reverb, the artist intones, “Help me […] I don’t want to hurt you/ It’s hurting me too.” The dissolving of personal borders hints at the possibility of new growth, even if a clear resolution is out of reach.
In a sense, by sublimating the self—by unlearning and unbecoming—Chua is able to return to herself. On album standout “An Ocean,” she finds freedom not in earthbound love, but in the tides that carry her away from its shores towards a home of her own. The sea between the two, once a source of hurt, churns instead into a site of power. A muted Rhodes figure bobs along an undulating piano line as violin strings like wings scythe through staticky rain; her voice emerges, a lighthouse: “The waves swallow me whole,” she intones. “Tides carry me home.” By allowing herself to experience loss and be lost, she invites the possibility of renewal, of spring. “I Promise” is also born of loss. Chua’s breathy vocals catch like cotton on splintered driftwood: “I, I, I promise under—,” she repeats, as if searching for the vow that will heal her. Over soft dissonance and unresolved chords, she articulates a desire not for an object of love but for love as an object, untethered to any human form. Of course, this produces a tension, as the idea of an objectless love is not unlike that of a placeless home. The creation of both necessitates imagination.
Yet it is precisely ephemeral and imaginary spaces, rather than any physical roost, that best hold the poet. And if imagination is a pathway to embodiment, then surrendering to the skies can also be a way back to one’s body, one’s original home. On album closer “Something Other Than Years,” Chua duets with the ethereal-voiced Yeule—two voices at once uprooted by and rooted in diaspora. Warm harmonies like thermals buoy the sparrow higher and higher, until in a crystalline blaze, she disappears once again into the fog whence she came. | 2023-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | 4AD | March 23, 2023 | 7.8 | 3de048bd-7fe3-4181-b74e-a05479f357da | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
Greg Gonzalez has a lovely voice and a convincingly atmospheric take on dream pop, neither of which is well served by his two-dimensional fantasies. | Greg Gonzalez has a lovely voice and a convincingly atmospheric take on dream pop, neither of which is well served by his two-dimensional fantasies. | Cigarettes After Sex: Cry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cigarettes-after-sex-cry/ | Cry | It feels almost like a novelty these days for a dude to write an album entirely about being extremely horny. Men don’t make music about sex the way they used to. We are far past the epoch of Serge Gainsbourg writing pop songs that involved Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot mimicking the sounds of orgasm. People have more or less collectively agreed that rendering women as pure sex objects in music doesn’t need to happen so much anymore. Greg Gonzalez, the frontman of the noir dream-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, must not have gotten the memo. He operates within a space of midcentury sexual anachronism. His second record, Cry, is a 41-minute dream about Penthouse pets and women in silken underthings, filtered through chiaroscuro and top-shelf whiskey. There is a universe where this raciness could conceivably offer a reprieve from indie rock’s occasional prudishness. Unfortunately, Gonzalez’s candor about his desire comes off as lifeless and borderline asinine.
This is clear from the first play of the record. The bleak textures, like those of the band’s debut, have been airlifted from the darkest corners of dream-pop music. There are notes of Violet Indiana and the Verve circa A Storm in Heaven, as well as more obvious tips of the hat to Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. “Kiss It Off Me,” the album’s second song, uses subterranean synth parts that are uncannily similar to the ones on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. The intrigue and Lynchian darkness pretty much stop once we meet the apple of Gonzalez’s eye, a protagonist as two-dimensional as a piece of paper peeling off a picnic table in a light breeze. “I could see you were walking slow/Drinking a Slurpee/In a peach baseball cap/Falling in my lap/You were so thirsty,” Gonzalez sings, with unearned wistfulness. He yearns to make her forget about “all of those rich fuckboys” she tends to date, and by the end of the song, she’s biting her lip and begging for it before she heads off to the gym in the morning. If there is anything romantic about this encounter, it is washed away by the song’s utter inability to deviate from overused ’90s pastiche—or, more importantly, to represent the woman in question as anything other than some chick who loves to work out and have sex.
Then there’s “Hentai,” a song that’s literally about anime porn. Specifically, about a hentai video he described to his paramour the first time they “made love,” about “a girl who as soon as she made you come/Could show you the future and tell you your fortune.” The scene setting could almost be funny, but there’s scant irony in Gonzalez’s delivery. The sound of the song is as delicate as an antique plate gathering dust on a shelf: High notes on electric guitars are languidly plucked, and the bassline is a slow IV drip that gives you goosebumps. Then there’s the question of Gonzalez’s voice, a truly lovely and androgynous tenor that’s wasted on lines like these. You could lose yourself in the sound, if losing yourself is akin to collapsing on an overly plush bed. “Pure” is an equally banal and pornographic sketch of a song. Here, Gonzalez’s woman wears a white bodysuit and has wet hair. Long story short, she goes down on him, and then they go stare out the window but all he can think about is how he got to see her naked. It’s the album’s closer, but it’s likely to leave you feeling nothing, other than perhaps blunted anger.
Cry doesn’t evoke much in the name of passion. Unless, of course, passion is the same thing as wafting through depression, and sex is the means to fill that void. There is nothing wry about the way Gonzalez writes about sex. The album has almost zero sense of humor and is deadly serious in its execution. It’s important to write about sex on one’s own terms, and there are plenty of compelling ways to explore sexuality in song. The problem here is that the narrative of this record is essentially one giant, dull, and gross fantasy plucked from adolescent male puberty. It presents a vision of sex that comes from surfing Pornhub after school before your parents get home from work, and from looking at pictures of minimally clad Instagram influencers while waiting in line to get a flu shot. Gonzalez’s attempt to be honest about his experiences is far removed from the reality of what it is like to be sexually vulnerable in front of another person. Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Partisan | October 28, 2019 | 4 | 3de361a8-ccc2-4d46-a654-bc724c018a0d | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Crisp and shiny as a compact disc, these 10 songs position the North Carolina upstarts as late-1990s alt-connoisseurs, unashamed of and unapologetic about their enthusiasms. | Crisp and shiny as a compact disc, these 10 songs position the North Carolina upstarts as late-1990s alt-connoisseurs, unashamed of and unapologetic about their enthusiasms. | Diva Sweetly: In the Living Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diva-sweetly-in-the-living-room/ | In the Living Room | The first thing you need to know about North Carolina’s Diva Sweetly is that they are a byproduct of the Fest, the annual weekend in Gainesville, Fla., where the most exuberant, communal, and wildly uncool forms of punk rock congregate. Some bands are looking to smash the patriarchy, others to smash a bunch of PBRs, and some to do both. Diva Sweetly are pretty much the Fest made flesh: Call Diva Sweetly pop-punk, emo, or merely note the dashes of ska or nu metal, and they’d be honored. Daniel Gorham’s snare is one of the tightest you’ll hear this side of a 311 record, and Nick “Scoops” Dardaris’ production is astoundingly hi-fi for a new band on an upstart label, crisp and shiny as a compact disc.
Diva Sweetly draw a thick border around their most formative and least fashionable influences; in doing so, they have managed to emerge as the rare rock act that sounds truly young. Their debut LP, In the Living Room, honors the track-stuffing alt-rock of the late 1990s, with instrumental flourishes that burst out like comic thought bubbles. “Cult” betrays the band’s Southern roots by throwing in a banjo non sequitur; the chorus of “Wax on My Candles” balloons into Broadway spectacle and gets a campfire reprise. Diva Sweetly also rig their lyrics with joy buzzers. “Wax on My Candles” contains what must be the first documented usage of “egg sando” in a song, and a screen door is broke “just like me after I dropped a grand” by going on tour. “We were sniffing glue from ’92,” Gorham howls during “Floor Caved In,” his anachronisms linked by rhyme. Friends dose their drinks to “postpone the millennium,” while they flip the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” to namedrop Third Eye Blind.
Diva Sweetly are late-’90s alt-connoisseurs born a decade too late, on trend for 2019. Their vocal dynamic should be familiar: Karly Hartzman is the one with the actual chops, sifting spun sugar over the loping groove of “Detox Island” and adding crystallized tartness to “Cult.” Gorham supplies the energy; when he steps away from the New Rock Revolution vocal filters, he strains and yelps, keeping In the Living Room close to its DIY roots.
They’re a unified, if not wholly confident, front against the ills that define modern indie punk songwriting: anxiety about dropping out of college, anxiety about cults, anxiety about weed. “You’re calling this your life/But it’s seeming like a slow suicide,” Hartzman sings on “Education,” which would be the most profoundly despairing song heard in an Urban Outfitters if shoppers ignored the lyrics. In the Living Room can breeze by like that. Its sweetness isn’t cloying, even though Diva Sweetly do slather an even glaze over the second half. That prevents it from ever becoming bigger than the sum of its parts—10 songs of ingratiating, hooky, state-of-the-art, communal indie rock.
The other thing you need to know about In the Living Room: It includes a skit—not a spoken-word reading, not a voicemail, not a field recording, or anything else that typically accounts for an interlude in indie rock. This is an actually scripted skit, putting In the Living Room within a small but surprisingly elite class that includes There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and Fevers and Mirrors. Diva Sweetly offer a fake infomercial for the “Tongue Knife,” a concept introduced in “Education,” like a “Bigmouth Strikes Again” for kids who discovered the Smiths and ska in middle school. It’s all done in an intentionally grating tone that no one really uses anymore in a format that went the way of public-access television. I started fast-forwarding after the second listen, but this record wouldn’t really exist without it. No throwaway gag, it is the spiritual core of the rare indie rock album willing to go to any lengths to be the life of the party before everyone’s crying in their beers. | 2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Seal Mountain | January 25, 2019 | 6.9 | 3de4441f-a902-4193-8568-237b4b3e7166 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Deeply invested in Americana aesthetics, the fourth solo album from James Jackson Toth-- the three previous ones flew under the Wooden Wand banner-- finds him abandoning his bizarre psych-folk for alt-country. Members of Wilco and Deerhoof make guest appearances. | Deeply invested in Americana aesthetics, the fourth solo album from James Jackson Toth-- the three previous ones flew under the Wooden Wand banner-- finds him abandoning his bizarre psych-folk for alt-country. Members of Wilco and Deerhoof make guest appearances. | James Jackson Toth: Waiting in Vain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12146-waiting-in-vain/ | Waiting in Vain | James Jackson Toth's solo work-- Waiting in Vain is ostensibly his fourth solo record, though the three prior all flew under the Wooden Wand banner-- has traced a linear path from the bizarre psych-folk of Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg to the layabout dust-rock of last year's James and the Quiet. Those albums, increasingly structured and tuneful, felt like a natural reaction to Wooden Wand's unstructured heathenism. Here, however, Toth transforms from hip(pie) priest to forlorn wanderer via a cocktail of Casanova-isms, armchair psychology, and alt-country. That Toth swung fully the other way was no surprise, but it was always a dicey proposition: Toth is neither an excellent vocal stylist nor a particularly clever wordsmith, and his intrigue has always been based on a mixture of homespun oddity and improvisational excess. To think that his world is now vying for a(nother) Bright Eyes opening gig-- see: "Beulah the Good"-- or hacking college radio playlists places that intrigue in the rearview.
Waiting in Vain is deeply invested in Americana aesthetics, positing Toth as the pose-able Kris Kristofferson action figure. Early on, it becomes apparent that given a lilting, slow-beat ballad, Toth will wind himself in knots being poetic: enter the detestable "Doreen", in which all of Toth's worst lyrical tendencies-- arrogance and vagary amid simple rhymes-- pop up. To wit: "I'm dreaming in a room with a complicated clown," "You tell me I ain't your dad/ But I'm better than the one you had," and, most vexing, "You're the water/ I'm the trace of lead inside." "Look in on Me" presents "Cocaine and bourbon, pinball and pool" as personal attributes, as if they represent a sense of despair or emotional investment. "Poison Oak" (NB: not the Oberst song of the same name) drags depressingly ("Your father oughta have his old head busted in/ For raising you up like he did"); "Do What You Can" is soggy and shapeless.
Too bad, because "Look in on Me" represents one of a handful of songs on Waiting in Vain that contain both competent hooks and a careful arrangement. Toth has always had really cool friends, and here Vetiver's Andy Cabic shows up. Nels Cline (Wilco, the Nels Cline Singers) and Deerhoof's John Dieterich take turns on guitar; the brilliant, harmonic squiggles on "The Dome" and "The Banquet Styx" are likely theirs. The beefy, uptempo rush of "Beulah the Good" and "Styx" help overcome Toth's missteps. On "Beulah", he momentarily discovers his inner Blonde on Blonde-- "I was miserable and bitter/ Life was easy," "I used to have seven wives/ I can't even count to six"-- and finally seems at ease in his druggy self-consciousness.
"The Dome" is particularly frustrating: Its seven minutes of doom-folk sound like someone bloodied R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" and as Toth drones ominously about "the telephone zone" it becomes clear that this displaced drudgery is a better fit for Toth's demeanor than jaunty, pretty country-rock. Wooden Wand more than proved Toth an idiosyncratic artist worthy of attention, but Waiting in Vain trades oddity for reasonably executed convention far too often. The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous. | 2008-09-03T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2008-09-03T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ryko | September 3, 2008 | 4.1 | 3de6b255-2e5e-4bd4-9eb7-641d083ce87e | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Best known for recordings for chamber ensemble or prepared piano, Haushcka here embraces house music. Members of múm and Calexico guest. | Best known for recordings for chamber ensemble or prepared piano, Haushcka here embraces house music. Members of múm and Calexico guest. | Hauschka: Salon des Amateurs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15306-salon-des-amateurs/ | Salon des Amateurs | Lately, there have been a number of acts making variations on house music, loosely speaking, using acoustic instruments and ensemble techniques. Brandt Brauer Frick is probably the best known in dance circles, performing thumping, techno-inspired grooves with lineup of harp, strings, mallets, and other acoustic instruments (as well as the requisite laptop and 808 handclap). But there are also Nicolas Jaar, Wareika, dOP, and Kadebostan, among others; Elektro Guzzi, signed to Stefan Goldmann's Macro imprint, splits the difference between minimal techno and math rock with just drums, electric guitar, and effects. Hauschka's Salon des Amateurs is the latest addition to the canon. It has been made primarily with prepared piano, with understated contributions from múm drummer Samuli Kosminen and Calexico's John Convertino and Joe Burns.
It might seem like a bold move coming from Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann), a musician who's best known for intimate, classically inspired recordings for chamber ensemble or prepared piano-- hushed, pretty, and sometimes bordering on precious. The point hasn't been lost on Hauschka himself, who spells out his status as an interloper in the self-effacing title. (It also refers to a club in the artist's native Düsseldorf where he presents an annual piano festival.) But he needn't have: Salon des Amateurs is an inspired reverse engineering of house and techno's fundamentals, replacing the music's familiar circuitry with steel wire and felt pads.
By design, it's not really house music: There's no rhythmic quantization or bottom-heavy kick drum to appease club DJs. Compositionally, too, these songs are more ambitious than most club tracks, given to the kinds of harmonic changes that don't lend themselves to DJ tools. But it's not not house music, either. Despite varied rhythms and tempos across the album, steady 4/4 grooves are the norm. All the songs share dance music's fondness for [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ring pedal tones and a [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| long, arcing shape, even if the mood and the style range from minor-key funk to steppy tango to all-out pastoral bliss. This is the kind of music you could imagine being played by DJs like Dixon, Âme, or Optimo-- DJs who know how to recognize dance music's essential thread, no matter how wooly the garment.
There are two main instruments here, Hauschka's piano and his computer. (Occasional percussion, horns, accordion, and bass synthesizer add color.) The piano he prepares, in the tradition of John Cage, with any number of small objects-- paper clips, clothespins, a packet of Tic-Tacs-- inserted between strings or laid across them in way that provokes strange, tinny timbres and harmonics. (You can watch him prepare his piano in a fascinating series of videos on NPR.org.) Thus the piano, or a few notes of it, anyway, can come to imitate growling synthesizer bass, congas, and spluttering ride cymbals.
The computer is used as a multitrack recorder, allowing him to build each song in a succession of parallel lines. There is very little evidence of digital post-processing; it sounds, for the most part, like he has played each part in full in real time, rather than cutting and pasting phrases and fragments into a post-hoc collage. (For anyone interested in a really close examination of his method, you can download all 20 multi-track parts to "Ping" from Juno.) It sounds, for lack of a better word, organic. I don't mean that in a loaded way; some great electronic dance music is radically inorganic, fit together out of tiny snippets of isolated sound in such a way that emphasizes disjuncture. But this album, in contrast, feels natural, artless. There are no evident seams.
The preparations give Hauschka an enormous range of timbres to work with, lending the music a wonderful sense of depth and texture, and tugging it closer to sounds normally thought possible only from electronic instruments. He also makes a good case for the piano as a percussive instrument, layering parts in short, repetitive bursts, indebted both to electronic music's syncopations and to the "pulse" minimalism of the 1960s and 70s. The influence of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Terry Riley's In C is all over Salon des Amateurs, particularly in Hauschka's method of daubing on tone color, even if his sense of structure owes more to popular music.
Ultimately, the album succeeds not in imitation, but interpretation, borrowing house music's rudiments and riffing on them until it takes the music somewhere else. Piano house is in vogue right now, but the vast majority of it sticks to a single sampled chord. This is something else. It isn't so much that it's a facsimile of house, with downbeats here and staggered chords there, but a way of assuming its voice, of learning its vocabulary and grammar, stumblingly, and embellishing along the way with ideas borrowed from jazz and pop and classical music. It's gleefully polyglot, confident even in its own clumsiness-- awed by the scope of its subject and humbled by its own limitations, but still bright-eyed and unstoppable. If you've ever, while learning a language, passed through a phase where every new discovery felt like a giddy eureka moment, you'll know what I'm talking about. Curious, constantly in motion, full of puzzle-like counterpoints and arresting chord changes, it's a joy to listen to, and one of the brightest, most invigorating records I've heard all year. | 2011-04-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-04-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | FatCat | April 14, 2011 | 8 | 3de73341-0412-43f7-a511-eaba49bfc962 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
If 1999's Us and Us Only was the UK vets' "Dylan album" and 2001's Wonderland their "Studio 54-era Stones album," this record could be called the band's "Jamaican album." | If 1999's Us and Us Only was the UK vets' "Dylan album" and 2001's Wonderland their "Studio 54-era Stones album," this record could be called the band's "Jamaican album." | The Charlatans: Simpatico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9029-simpatico/ | Simpatico | At March's SXSW festival, the Charlatans UK (as they've been known in the U.S. for more than a decade) were as ubiquitous as baked beans and tongue-staining energy drinks. While fellow Manchester vet Morrissey zipped in and out of town for a single showcase set, the Charlatans popped up on bill after bill and at party after party, like they had something to prove-- because, even after 16 years and nine albums, they do. The Charlatans survived Madchester, they've survived Britpop, and they've even survived their Madchester/Britpop-survivor phase. Now, with a whole new generation of north-country boys adopting Tim Burgess' streetwise sneer, it would appear to be high time to step up and kick those Monkeys back to the polar ice cap.
But then the Charlatans have always been a touch too well-behaved for such antagonistic displays. As impressive as their SXSW stamina was, on Simpatico, the Charlies just sound like they'd prefer to sit on their asses and listen to dub records all day. Like most Charlatans albums, Simpatico begins big: "Blackened Blue" is an IMAX-sized pomp-rocker that rides the sort of urgent piano riff used to introduce Olympic athletes in opening-ceremony telecasts. Burgess promises "there won't be a dry eye in the house," but the dramatic entrance is quickly undermined by the "Apache"-grooved "NYC (There's No Need to Stop)", which is regrettable for a) Being yet another song by a British band romanticizing Big Apple bustle, and b) Coming off like EMF having their way with the Clash's "Magnificent Seven".
"NYC" at least projects a youthful exuberance that's nowhere to be heard on the rest of the overly measured Simpatico, which could be called the Charlatans' "Jamaican" album, in as much as 1999's Us and Us Only was their "Dylan album" and 2001's Wonderland was their "Studio 54-era Stones album." Like My Morning Jacket on Z, the best moments here-- the dirty grind of "Dead Man's Eye", the late-night romanticism of "When the Lights Go Out in London"-- are more informed by reggae's clipped cadence and suggestion of open space than its regional accent. But far too many tracks here opt for atmosphere over impact: In particular, the interchangeable dubwise ballads-- "City of the Dead", "Road to Paradise", and "The Architect"-- veer perilously into a Club Med cocktail-hour circa 1984, with non-threatening staccato-guitar jabs, piano/synth lines clinking like champagne glasses and Burgess' usually endearing observations obscured by noncommittal attempts at patois and overuse of the word "paradise." It took the Charlies years to shake off the baggy-pants crowd-- do they really want to contend with the hacky-sackers? | 2006-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sanctuary | May 23, 2006 | 5.4 | 3dee8b40-507b-439c-913e-8657f9f5eccb | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The interwoven guitars, synths, and cymbal crashes of Amy Klein’s second solo album are gale-force, but its opaque lyrics and muted vocals are indirect and timid. | The interwoven guitars, synths, and cymbal crashes of Amy Klein’s second solo album are gale-force, but its opaque lyrics and muted vocals are indirect and timid. | Amy Klein: Winter/Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amy-klein-wintertime/ | Winter/Time | A “paracosm”—the literary term Amy Klein has said inspired her second solo album, Winter/Time—is an elaborate world of people and places formed in a child’s imagination. Klein, a punk veteran who’s toured with Titus Andronicus and performed as half of the band Hilly Eye, invites the listener into her own such fantasies on this record, offering dream logic and the occasional bewilderment. It can also feel like an escape from what she’s done so well before, its few instances of punk brashness ceding to soft, falsetto balladry.
Winter/Time’s cover art—an ethereal woman striding through a blurry, painted forest—suggests the LP’s tone and its motif of a hero’s journey. The album strikes a delicate balance throughout: Its interwoven guitars, synths, and cymbal crashes are gale-force, but its opaque lyrics and muted vocals are indirect and timid. “Come to You” begins soft and hesitant before revealing a percolating synth line, and Klein’s lyrics remain hardly discernible throughout, deployed in a near-whispered quaver that fails to suggest any emotional stakes. She sings of being chased by her past, but there’s no menace in that pursuit. On “Winter,” the opening rumble of electric chords and Cocteau Twins-style trills signal intensity, but even the crackling guitars—deep and dark like a storm front—don’t push Klein’s delivery above a shrug. “Can I see the light?” she wonders, not convincing us that she’s been on a shrouded path of any real consequence.
The album doesn’t stray from this vagueness with the exception of opener “Nothing,” the only track that finds Klein believably ferocious. Driving electric guitar jolts behind her as she wails, breathy and doused in reverb, about a snow-blindness so bright she nearly disappears within it. This urgency sets the song apart from the rest of the album; it sounds more like a psychedelic Dungeons and Dragons battle than the tentative questing heroine of later tracks. This directness—from the chorus’ imperative to the impatient guitars, their feedback underscoring urgency—serves Klein’s fevered electric riffs well.
Closer “One More Time” mirrors the savagery of “Nothing,” and is another glimpse at what Winter/Time might have been if its midsection had similar adrenaline. It offers a confident, backward glance at a former self whose “hands used to shake,” and it hums along like a ’80s radio punk anthem, synthesizers underscoring elemental mentions of fire and sparks. “I could burn right through you,” she vows, with compelling force. This is when Klein wields her axe like she’s ready for battle, a welcome departure from several songs less sure in their step. But what exactly is she fighting? Who is the “you” through whom she would blaze, triumphant? It’s frustratingly unclear. A fantasy world needs scaffolding, constraints that center us in time and place, to make it relatable. Without a glimpse of the horizon, we’re left snow-blind, too. | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Don Giovanni | January 11, 2020 | 5.9 | 3df126da-fe2e-4179-a6b5-a972f5200b09 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Wiz Khalifa smokes weed by the acre, but his career to date has been driven by his own shrewd vision for himself. O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is the first sign that this unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze. | Wiz Khalifa smokes weed by the acre, but his career to date has been driven by his own shrewd vision for himself. O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is the first sign that this unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze. | Wiz Khalifa: O.N.I.F.C. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17391-onifc/ | O.N.I.F.C. | Wiz Khalifa smokes weed by the acre, but his career thus far has been driven by his own shrewd vision for himself. He is not a rapper's rapper, but he helped push rap into its current fixation with doing drugs instead of selling them and has rightfully reaped the rewards of an entire genre following his lead. He also became a pop star with ease in 2010, sliding into the studio with pop titans like Stargate and Benny Blanco and emerging with a No. 1 single ("Black and Yellow") that was a pure rap banger and another pop smash ("Roll Up") that applied his airy, breezy aesthetic to the radio. O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.
Or maybe he couldn't bring himself to care about the fragile nature of crossover success any longer. O.N.I.F.C. will quickly be swept under the rug by anyone but his true diehards, yet Khalifa still had a successful year by displaying his malleability. His Taylor Allderdice mixtape from March was a nice stopgap release, steeped in the same foggy, washed out beats that helped elevate him to fame. Cabin Fever 2, from October, saw Khalifa dipping into L.A.'s ratchet scene to show just how much artists like Iamsu! owe to his own mix of nonsense rapping and soft, blissed-out singing. Both mixtapes were right in his lane, and they predicted the direction Khalifa would take with the album proper.
Khalifa has already more or less disowned his debut, telling his fans that "creatively [it] wasn't my best work." That regret is evident on O.N.I.F.C. which tosses a Blanco produced single to the dogs but then retracts further into his vaporized aesthetic. The album kicks off with a suite of tracks that are meant to wash over you, and they are undoubtedly effective-- "Paperbond" is steeped in the comforting draft of chillwave while "Bluffin'", produced by Drumma Boy no less, borders on balearic. The problem, though, is that both songs would work best as zone-out instrumentals. Khalifa doesn't say anything of note-- "riding in my ride" is crushingly emblematic -- and doesn't sound particular good from a technical standpoint. He is there because he has to be, not because he should be.
Everything from there on is just an unending succession of diminishing returns that questions the relevancy of Khalifa's artistic existence. He could-- and just may-- pump music out for the indefinite future that coasts on sound design and little else. Wiz has never exactly spit quotable 16s but his rapping on O.N.I.F.C. suggests ignorance regarding his own distance instead of a conscious desire to roll with the vibes. The album's acronym stands for "Only Nigga in First Class" and sports a dour looking photo of Khalifa on the cover, but it's difficult to find any significance in either-- he hints at fatigue, but doesn't illuminate the flipside of stardom in any way.
Maybe the album's most indicative track is "No Limit", which is nearly nine and a half minutes long thanks to a three-minute instrumental interlude. It sounds pointless except that the interlude is easily the most enjoyable moment of the record. After a verse from Wiz, the song slips into beachside ambience, ice-rattle drums, and plaintive pianos. It is legitimately as good as anything Air France ever did. Then Wiz starts rapping again. | 2012-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Rostrum | December 13, 2012 | 4.8 | 3df5e80d-e0bb-4b24-b720-914404f831a9 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The nine tracks on the Dodos' sixth album Individ make for a exhilarating, albeit fairly melancholy, listening experience. Individ plays like a companion piece to the band's 2008 breakthrough Visiter. | The nine tracks on the Dodos' sixth album Individ make for a exhilarating, albeit fairly melancholy, listening experience. Individ plays like a companion piece to the band's 2008 breakthrough Visiter. | The Dodos: Individ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20060-individ/ | Individ | Progress can be a hard thing to quantify. For bands, it’s often either measured by record sales, critical acclaim, or—as is the case with San Francisco band the Dodos—simple endurance. The twosome of Meric Long and Logan Kroeber have been making music together for the better part of a decade and by now they have honed their own distinct language. The records they make together as the Dodos are generally characterized by a kind of symbiotic back and forth—a balance composed of virtuoso playing, alternately-tuned guitar sounds, and insanely intricate drum patterns. That they have managed to create a sound that is instantly and distinctly recognizable as their own (and amass a devoted following) is no small feat, but figuring out how to push their sound forward without repeating themselves or abandoning their aesthetic has proven to be much trickier business.
After tinkering with their sound in a variety of ways over the past few years—employing additional musicians, sprinkling on layers of electric vibraphone, eschewing acoustic guitars for electric ones, sanding off the rough edges by hiring Phil Ek as a producer—the band seems to have come full-circle on Individ, their sixth album. Rather than look outside themselves, the duo rely instead on what has always been their greatest weapon—the sheer physicality of their playing.
Recorded hot on the heels of the sessions for 2013’s Carrier—an album seemingly haunted by the death of occasional contributing guitarist Christopher Reimer—Individ plays like a companion piece to the band's breakthrough Visiter. "Until now there was a reason/ Let go of it," Long sings on album opener "Precipitation". The song—a shape-shifting acoustic-and-drums affair—serves as a kind of primer for the rest of the album. What seems like a simple bit of repetition and melody grows increasingly more forceful before exploding into a stadium-size loop of riffs and pounding drums. "Let go of it/ And get out of here/ Let’s get out of here/ For good" sings Long in what seems less like a concession of defeat and more a statement of liberation. As album openers go, it’s a doozy—six minutes of triumphantly shaking off a lot of old baggage. "We’ll keep playing/ Till there is nothing," he promises elsewhere on "The Tide", further establishing what could be Individ’s most prevalent and endearing theme—a sense of acceptance paired with dogged resilience.
The Dodos began their career as avowed primitivists before eventually experimenting with ways to broaden their sound. Longtime fans of the band will appreciate Individ’s back-to-basics quality, which generally forgoes electric guitars in favor of Long’s maniacal strumming and dexterous, breakneck time changes. "Competition", the record’s first single, showcases the band at their most deceptively simple: dueling guitar lines playing against a staccato rhythm, all being tugged along by Long’s effortless vocal. In this case, the band’s reaction against perfection is what makes most of Individ so sublime. Both Long and Kroeber are virtuoso musicians, and while Long’s vocals rarely ever strain to be anything more than pleasantly plaintive, hearing he and Kroeber push themselves to the point of raggedness as musicians is what continues to make the Dodos’ music such a surprising and singular listen.
Clocking in at almost 40 minutes, the nine tracks on Individ make for an exhilarating, albeit fairly melancholy, listening experience. While the duo has not lost their youthful exuberance as players (listening to Long and Kroeber rip through "Retriever" is a potent reminder of what a thrillingly visceral band the Dodos actually are), Individ seems mostly wrapped up with very adult concerns. And while the band might never better the pop jubilance of Visiter’s "Fools", tracks like "The Tide" and the perfectly wistful "Bubble" come mighty close. On Individ’s closing track, the sprawling, seven-minute "Pattern Shadow", Long intones that "I cannot predict/ All your patterns/ You blew us away/ And I could not escape." It's unclear exactly to whom he is singing, but the shadow at the core of the song—mysterious, ever-present, ocean-sized—could be a fitting stand in for the band itself and the epic, mercurial nature of their songs. In the record’s press materials, Long explains, "This record is about accepting what is natural for you or even a part of you." Ten years deep into their career, the Dodos have never actually steered too far from their roots, but the loose, unselfconscious feel of Individ proves that there is something to be said for recognizing and playing to your strengths, trusting your chops, and simply feeling things as intensely as you possibly can. | 2015-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 19, 2015 | 7.2 | 3df7ab4c-8c71-483b-833f-796d43cf7a5f | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
On his bracing collaboration with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, woods gets painfully real about his fears, his doubts and irritations, and even his mortality. | On his bracing collaboration with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, woods gets painfully real about his fears, his doubts and irritations, and even his mortality. | billy woods / Kenny Segal: Hiding Places | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/woods-segal-hiding-places/ | Hiding Places | As a rapper, billy woods writes about everything: The agony of romantic distress, the fear of retreading the past, the unpleasantness of talking to others. Within the first few minutes of Hiding Places, his new album with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, he ponders the financial permanence of a full-time rap career (“Quit my job to kick raps instead/So family meeting everybody gotta start bringing in bread”) and “five-dollar calls from the corner store.” Then there’s this from “houthi”: “Cut my shadow off with a dull knife/Whispered in its ear then sent it off into the night.” And on “spider hole,” woods telegraphs his disdain for humans in general (“No man of the people, I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of y’all”) and remembers a certain Queensbridge rapper's suit-and-tie gig at a famed midtown Manhattan venue in 2012: “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.” That’s the hook.
It’s an odd choice, even awkward, but billy woods is fine if you are uncomfortable. Hiding Places lingers on discomfort as a form of catharsis: You feel it in the jarring cover art, which captures a condemned three-story home—all twisted and lopsided—on the verge of collapse, and in woods’ one-of-a-kind voice, a gruff yowl that conveys suffering and outrage in equal measure. The beats, provided by Kenny Segal, paint a tense and foreboding backdrop. Compared with Paraffin, woods’ New York-inflected 2018 album with Armand Hammer, Hiding Places feels positively haunted.
For the past 20 years, Segal has been a staple of an L.A.-based workshop called Project Blowed, home to the city’s alternative hip-hop scene, which includes artists like Aceyalone, Busdriver, and even film director Ava DuVernay in their orbit. Segal has compiled a robust collection of instrumental albums, including a recent set called happy little trees, the title of which was inspired by painter Bob Ross. Segal’s solo work is brighter and more pastoral; for Hiding Places, he darkens the canvas to match billy woods’ mix of bleakness and humor, two weapons uses to bemoan the bad ol’ days he once endured. Songs unfold like diary entries, and on “bigfakelaugh,” woods shrugs at death with a nonchalant fuck-it-all attitude. “I got a letter from my insurer the other day,” he recalls, “opened and read it, said the treatment wasn’t covered, turned to the family like ‘I guess just forget it.’”
In a way, Hiding Places plays like a complement to early-00s underground New York rap, and sits alongside early Definitive Jux records. There’s an edginess to the record, similar to Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, a feeling that the rapper will either self-destruct or nuke everything in his wake. In woods’ world, where Brooklyn dies slowly because of gentrification, and golden-age rap keeps losing to glossier, pop-focused hybrids, there’s a feeling that the old ways are fading out and his environment looks more and more foreign. Ultimately, Hiding Places is woods trying to reconcile his own history in the most direct way imaginable. Never has he been so honest about himself, his fears, and his own mortality. | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | April 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 3dfd86ed-2798-4abc-9467-4c830f874737 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
Ought’s third album straightens out their sound, offering a more refined new wave palette underneath their singular and compelling lyrical style. | Ought’s third album straightens out their sound, offering a more refined new wave palette underneath their singular and compelling lyrical style. | Ought: Room Inside the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ought-room-inside-the-world/ | Room Inside the World | The best songs from Montreal post-punk band Ought contain the rapture of humble truths you might chance upon while spacing out on the subway, staring at the stars, or communing with a cup of coffee. “I am no longer afraid to die because that is all that I have left,” singer Tim Darcy posited on their 2015 album Sun Coming Down, which was a fun way of saying “I am alive.” Ought’s feverish, live-wire sound said that, too. Since their 2014 debut More Than Any Other Day, they have sprawled with groove, life-force, and oceanic poeticism. The music was convincing because it felt scrappily human and Darcy could utter knotted word clusters about civilization or milk with a flair that somehow mimicked Mark E. Smith and also felt comforting. The band seemed to suggest, with a rare spark and radiant positivity, Mundanity can be a marvel. You will find the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything will be OK.
Ought’s third album, Room Inside the World, straightens out their sound. It offers a more refined and sophisticated new wave palette, redolent of the 1980s to an extreme, and it finds Darcy really singing—about isolation, tentative feelings, self-possession and lack thereof. Most of the record is cast in a newly muted and noirish hue with flourishes of vibraphone, sax, and clarinet. (The band has noted the influence of avant-garde film icon Kenneth Anger—the man who “tipped off the Rolling Stones to the joys of the devil.”) In its more compelling moments, Room Inside the World sounds like a young Scott Walker fronting the Gang of Four, a mix of grandeur and angular tension.
The album finds Ought making considerable changes, then, if not taking many risks. On “These 3 Things,” the singer preens in the glammy way you’d expect from a guy who legally changed his name to Darcy, while the droning closer, “Alice,” is named for cosmic jazz swamini Alice Coltrane. The best Room Inside the World songs still retain some post-punk fragmentation. One of the album’s most compelling moments occurs when “Disaffectation” methodically breaks apart after building itself into a deep trance, as Darcy sings of “some liberation” that “you can order [...] online.” “Take Everything” fares better when it moves away from swirling psychedelia and towards lovely, threadbare balladeering, with images of dreaming and “the soul’s indecision.” “When the feel of a flower/Keeps you home for an hour/Throw it away,” Darcy sings, a curious and charming bit of verse.
Ought first ignited their sound with what they once called the “revolutionary spirit of radicalism and adventure” that they witnessed at the massive Quebec student protests in 2012, and their songs pushed back with subtle comments on patriarchy, gentrification, and consent. Bits of Room Inside the World also have discernible political undertones or social critiques. The gentle “Brief Shield” flips gender scripts and comments on toxic masculinity. But where the title “Disgraced in America” seems like a bold gesture, any form of dissent therein is fairly oblique. At times, the album lends itself to superfluous jamming, and it can feel overwrought and opaque. Given Ought’s radical inklings, you wish they dared to make these lovely songs say or do something a little more righteous, to twist them into more adventurous shapes.
However, Ought achieve this spectacularly on the blue-eyed soul of “Desire.” It towers over Room Inside the World like the album’s lighthouse. It begins wide-open, all wonder and shimmering drone, before Darcy unspools an exquisitely vulnerable Boss-style narrative about someone that left. A former lover is “the moon in a basket of weeds.” Two imagined characters drive through the night smiling. They escape a “petty little town.” It is a moment of romance and joy at a dead-end. “Desire was never gonna stay,” Darcy repeats like a mantra, scaling new reaches of passion and resolve with each turn, as if he were reckoning old feelings right as he recorded. A 70-piece choir eventually joins him—and when they come in, the song’s architecture feels stitched to the sky.
“Desire” taps into a universal energy of persistence through life’s endless inquisition. It is at once the simplest and most ornate song Ought have done, but it feels in keeping with their essence. The power of Ought, and of many great artists, is an uncommon X-ray vision: to see things as they really are. | 2018-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 19, 2018 | 7.1 | 3e00840d-7c1f-41f3-910f-61310115e4ab | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The sizable talent and personalities of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus come together for a harmonious, confrontational, and all too brief EP. | The sizable talent and personalities of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus come together for a harmonious, confrontational, and all too brief EP. | Boygenius: Boygenius EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boygenius-boygenius-ep/ | Boygenius EP | In May, Richmond-based indie rock songwriter Lucy Dacus, fresh off the release of her second album, Historian, told Vogue that she, like all of us, was fatigued by the catchall genre of “women in indie rock.” “I think it’s great that people are noticing that their favorite music right now is made by women, but I just wish it wasn’t a surprise,” she explained. “The fact that we’re women is kind of the most boring that I could think of.” People were often comparing her music to that of other women singer-songwriters, including emo-tinged Tennessean and Dacus’ labelmate Julien Baker, not because their music was all that similar but simply because they were all women.
In a delightful twist on this binary categorizing, Dacus, Baker, and folk-rock songwriter Phoebe Bridgers announced in August that they’d made an EP under the name boygenius, a nod to the way we can carelessly lean on gender to telegraph meaning. A boy can be an individual genius, while women in indie rock are all the same. In advance of a tour they had coming up together, the trio of indie titans decided to record a 7" as a supergroup, and the result briefly winks at, then pulverizes the reductive labels we heap onto women musicians. With compatible interests but varied styles, the self-titled six-song EP is a blueprint for how to do a supergroup right: elevate each other’s individual talents, seamlessly blend your distinct-but-simpatico genres, and sing like hell together in lung-shattering harmony.
While the trio’s previous solo albums crossover frequently in lyrical themes, boygenius succeeds because their individual work doesn’t share one unified musical genre. Self-worth, the underlying humiliation in heartache, and confronting grief are all present in Bridgers’, Dacus’, and Baker’s songwriting—and on their collaborative EP—but each performs in distinct musical styles. For Bridgers, an intimate voice and shy guitar with a folkier bedroom softness; Baker, enormous emo minor tones and a voice that could blow down a building; Dacus, vocals that are clear and confrontational and a guitar shrouded in fuzz. When performed together, it yields an effective kind of magic.
The EP begins with “Bite the Hand,” a song infused with Dacus’ dense guitar tone and characteristic directness. “I can’t love you how you want me to,” she sings, as her collaborators sneak up behind her to harmonize, and Dacus’ guitar, innocent at first, grows to her signature forcefulness. Like half of the songs on the EP, “Bite the Hand” initially deceives as a standalone Dacus song—it would fit on Historian—but as it grows, nuance is added through Baker’s and Bridgers’ ghostly guitars, as well as vocals that twinkle in higher registers. It’s a Dacus song if it were supersized, and it almost collapses under the weight of the trio’s powerful collaboration. “I’ll bite the hand that feeds me,” Dacus sings, inflating into a confrontational voice she embodies easily, while Baker and Bridgers call back with “Bite the hand!”
Bridgers’ earnest lyrics and folkier songcraft are highlighted on “Me & My Dog,” a style that is more ballad-adjacent than Baker’s or Dacus’. “I cried at your show with the teenagers,” Bridgers sings, showcasing her talent for communicating the innocence in our emotions. “I’m fine now/It doesn’t matter,” she continues, aligning herself with a very teenage feeling. “I wish I was on a spaceship, just me and my dog and an impossible view.” Dreams and sleep and fantasy come up frequently throughout the EP, which lend the songs a generous intimacy as if eavesdropping on a group of friends as they share their deepest secrets. “Ketchum, ID” is a Bridgers-led meditation on wanting to move to Idaho, a beautiful and quiet place whose charms still fly under the radar, which was an actual fantasy that Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker all shared.
Baker is imprinted on the entire EP in protracted, cavernous melodies and crushingly clear guitar lines, but she commandeers “Stay Down,” a song in which she delivers the line “I look at you and you look at a screen” like a gut punch. (Conveniently, the song is also about learning how to fight, a spiritual companion to “Shadowboxing,” from Baker’s Turn Out the Lights.) Baker’s solo work is often defined by its literal solitude—listening to her music can feel as if you are alone in a room together—so it is a testament to her talent that she can seamlessly integrate such a lonely style of songwriting into a grander whole. It’s also a sign of the trio’s trust with one another on the EP, where individual styles are championed as often as a new collective sound is enabled to flourish.
The song that feels the most collaborative—and by extension the most emotionally affecting—is the lyrically direct “Salt in the Wound.” It is like the light that emits when the planeteers touch rings on “Captain Planet.” The trio dances on the edge of anger at a subject who repeatedly takes advantage of their willingness to please: “But you take and you take, like silks up my sleeve,” they sing. “Trick after trick, I’ll make the magic, and you unrelentingly ask for the secret.” It’s all indignation and grit, expressed by a collective of women who refuse to be fucked with.
It’s exciting to imagine the possibilities of the boygenius EP as a full-length album, and boygenius as more than just a side project. But there’s a sly message that comes baked into the short EP, a message that is better communicated briefly and then evaporated, and maybe only to those who are really listening. Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker are individual artists with individual tastes and individual styles. “Women in indie rock” isn’t a genre. For anyone still struggling to tell any woman with a guitar apart, the deft collaboration and complex collective songwriting on the boygenius EP is a great place to learn. | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 26, 2018 | 8.3 | 3e038ead-8524-4e2a-b4ec-1bcebf5ccbe7 | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
The second album from the Detroit hardcore collective is as ambitious as it is effective. Noise, art rock, and a surprising amount of hooks are knotted within their chaotic maximalism. | The second album from the Detroit hardcore collective is as ambitious as it is effective. Noise, art rock, and a surprising amount of hooks are knotted within their chaotic maximalism. | The Armed: Only Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-armed-only-love/ | Only Love | Part of the thrill of these 11 songs is that they often sound like they’re about to burst or implode, but they never lose their course. On repeat listens to the Armed’s second album Only Love, you start to realize just how finely woven it all is—chaos careens off chaos, using the tracks before them as last-second momentum pushes before disappearing again, infusing what comes next with an extra shot of energy. From opening synth line to closing noise implosion, it’s part relay race, part punk-rock opera.
This feels like a pop record, albeit one with rabies. The Armed create nihilistic hardcore anthems that’ll find you shouting “Everything dies!” “Nowhere to be found!” and “Kill your heroes where they sleep!” The unexpected hooks are courtesy of the conceptual framework they created for the collection: The definitively punk/metal/hardcore band sought to write these songs as if they had never heard punk, metal or hardcore before, just trying to conjure the pop music of their formative years. They’re a band who’s covered Smashing Pumpkins in the past, their debut album Untitled included plenty of slower bits, and their interest in those other zones feels very genuine—which is the only way you can pull something like this off.
As might be expected, it’s hard to pin down the Armed stylistically. They create raw-voiced music that mixes hardcore dynamics, experimental electronics, and a smeared sense of melody. They have three people handling guitar, three vocalists (two male, one female), and variety of synthesizers and electronics besides the airtight rhythm section. They bring to mind a revved-up arty Liars circa Drum’s Not Dead, or maybe ’90s eccentrics Brainiac, or a more playful Converge. It’s, of course, foolish to compare a band this specifically themselves to another band; it’s maybe best to think of Only Love as one of those moments where you have leaky headphones and the sounds of traffic, car alarms, someone’s stereo blasting Fuck Buttons, and a kid crying combine to create a momentary orchestra in your brain.
Careless name-checking aside, they do share a bloodline with Converge: The sextet recorded Only Love with Converge guitarist/studio guru Kurt Ballou, who recorded their debut three years ago, as well. They also twisted the arm of Converge’s Ben Koller—a masterful drummer more than capable of staying detailed and interesting at breakneck speeds—to sit behind the kit. So far, the Armed have collaborated with a few different drummers; hopefully Koller decides to stay put because he adds a sense of control and finesse to the implosions going off around him, and is their best walk-on to date.
Only Love is more ambitiously structured than the debut—the first four songs bleed and tie together like a mutant ball of silly string. It’s the same band, but they’ve cracked things open, and it feels tighter, despite being looser. Where the debut followed some specific punk patterns, and the experiments sometimes plodded into mid-tempo toss-offs, Only Love is beautifully all over the place without losing steam.
Undeniable opener “Witness” is their cathartic Deafheaven “Dream House” moment, albeit with a more negative spin. On it, main vocalist Randall Kupfer growls like he’s trying to dislodge his insides (a bit like John Brannon of fellow Michigan band Laughing Hyenas), and amid his meltdown, shadowy clean harmonies also emerge. In an unlikely twist, the calmer “Luxury Themes” finds a way to bury vocal harmonies in a wall of noise. Now and then, I think of sped-up Flaming Lips, or Pissed Jeans if they sang about starting communes, not dying in an office.
“Role Models” creates a noise-pop anthem with little more than the words “Everything dies.” Importantly, before they remind us that you’ll one day be dust, they also suggest, like a motivational anarchist speaker reminding you to make the most of your life: “You won’t break your stride/No you can’t break your stride.” And, on the eerie, catchy “Middle Homes,” the singers croon: “Breathe/Where’s that little fire?/Gone” That’s the key to this album—as dark as things may seem, we keep going. This kicks into action during the final third of “Fortune’s Daughter,” when the drums arrive after a sideways noise meld, and you want to start punching the floor.
To illustrate the extent of their maximal approach, they’ve released a booklet called “No Solutions” with the collection. Subtitled the “Only Love” issue, it’s reminiscent of a Crimethinc. tract, gathering images (anti-commercialism collages, fashion spreads) and often thoughtful words (“Empathy is not compassion. Empathy is weapon”). There are short essays, shorter record reviews (of St. Vincent, Zwan, Lou Reed & Metallica, Lou Reed himself), comics, reviews of Detroit-area staples by a person dressed like a lawn shrub, and diagrams for how to achieve Only Love’s guitar tone. There’s plenty of tongue in cheek here, something to also admire about the band—this music is vibrant and loud and angry, but they aren’t afraid to crack jokes. (The editor of the accompanying booklet is listed as Papa Johns Emeritus.)
The Armed started in 2009, ages ago in punk rock years. A new band wouldn’t have the arsenal or know-how to create something as anti-everything and complete in all aspects as Only Love; from the packaging to the storyline to the print publication to the “vibe,” it feels like the apotheosis of years of experiments. It’s a lesson in never settling. As the singers croon on “Heavily Lined,” a song that sounds like HEALTH, Negative Approach, and Youth of Today walking into a bar together: “This iteration bores me/Everyone gets older/Only you gave up.” As Only Love illustrates, these fuckers clearly haven’t. | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Throat Ruiner | May 1, 2018 | 8.1 | 3e059901-b5fa-49dd-a288-5e114152d513 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | |
The surprise album from an elite rapper-producer combo is lean and beautifully crafted. Both make excellent use of each other’s light and shadow. | The surprise album from an elite rapper-producer combo is lean and beautifully crafted. Both make excellent use of each other’s light and shadow. | Earl Sweatshirt / The Alchemist: VOIR DIRE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-the-alchemist-voir-dire/ | VOIR DIRE | Earl Sweatshirt, rap’s professor emeritus of dread, has inspired a whole subgenre of rusted, wavy, micro rap songs best absorbed on headphones with a hoodie pulled over. That Earl would become one of the many formidable artists to record a joint project with the Alchemist, an old-ways crate digger adored by traditionalists, once seemed as unlikely as Ice Cube teaming up with the Bomb Squad to make 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. But since 2019, Alchemist has been teasing his social media followers with claims that an album with Earl existed on YouTube under a fake name, just waiting to be discovered. Whether the beautifully crafted VOIR DIRE bears any resemblance to that project is unclear; it arrived via the unusual portal of the streaming website Gala Music, with NFT purchase options and animated artwork for each song. Accordingly, each cut feels individual, self-contained, and free from overarching themes or framework. As with most Alchemist sets, there’s no bloat, on either his uniformly excellent, laser-crafted beats or in the project’s tight 27-minute runtime.
In recent years, Alchemist has pivoted from some of the more concrete street-rap arrangements he served hardened vocalists like Prodigy, to fully indulging his eclectic ear for source material. On VOIR DIRE, samples are snatched, scrubbed, and transformed into dreamy ear candy. Opener “100 High Street” drops you right into a luxuriant string section that evokes images of sweeping island vistas. Alchemist continues to brighten the corners of Earl’s murky world with languid guitars, jazzy keys, smooth sophistipop, and vinyl-skipping vocal loops. But his sound is not so illuminating that Earl can’t find shadows.
Earl no longer hits his consonants with the rhythmic precision of his 16-year-old self—few have ever been that good that young. As he approaches 30, he lets his thickening voice meander outside the confines of a traditional rap bar. His flow whirls like it’s descending into a sinkhole, offering a gripping contrast to Alchemist’s sharp, repetitive beats. Rhyme schemes throughout VOIR DIRE are tenuous; choruses are either notional—like the lengthy repeated verse on “Vin Scully”—or nonexistent.
While Earl doesn’t spit bars in tight pockets here, his flows never feel sloppy or thoughtless. This is due in part to the gripping writing. Earl retains his taste for abstract wordplay and visceral metaphors: “Had a couple things on my chest/That’s where the demons would sit,” he raps gravely on “Sentry,” which features one of his most loyal stylistic acolytes, MIKE. On “Vin Scully,” Earl recalls “the ghost inside the crib” and his tactic to fight back these psychological demons: “Hosin’ down the problem with gin and tonic/How to stay afloat in a bottomless pit/The trick is to stop fallin’.”
Sometimes there’s a sense that the Alchemist’s cozy positivity is getting through to Earl. He echoes his stunning decade-old confessional “Chum” on the nostalgic soul of “All the Small Things” by looking backwards (“Feed the fam at 16, I wasn’t no seasoned chef”) while expressing a rare taste for life: “Cherish every moment, let it go/The cherry on top, the weight offa my heavy soul.” It’s like hearing his mood brighten in real time.
Although the structure of VOIR DIRE is freewheeling, it comes with a legitimate finale. Over a sample of pretty, fluttering vocal harmonies, “Free the Ruler” appears to be dedicated to Earl’s one-time collaborator Drakeo the Ruler, killed in a backstage stabbing in December 2021, a little over a year after being released from prison. The tragedy of Drakeo makes those old “Free Earl” shouts of yore seem kind of trivial, and maybe Earl feels that too. It’s not apparent when the song was recorded and the only obvious reference to Drakeo is the uttering of the song title on the final bar, but regardless, after a verse of Earl counting blessings and offering encouragement to those who need it, it’s a profound way to sign off.
It’s a little disappointing that Alchemist doesn’t push Earl even further out of his comfort zone. There isn’t that lift-your-head-in-surprise moment, like the first time you heard Earl rap over the prickly electronica of the Black Noi$e-produced “2010,” or the ethereal murk of his recent team-up with Clams Casino and Evilgiane, “Making the Band (Danity Kane).” But the chemistry between Earl and Alchemist comes from how naturally their styles blend together, as if VOIR DIRE is some kind of prophecy being fulfilled by the universe. It’s a record that was meant to be: simple, elegant, and always true. | 2023-08-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Tan Cressida / ALC / Warner | August 29, 2023 | 7.8 | 3e05b554-e324-420d-82c5-bf842db816de | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The idiosyncratic Australian band’s most streamlined album to date is risky only in that it is their first to be downright boring. | The idiosyncratic Australian band’s most streamlined album to date is risky only in that it is their first to be downright boring. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Fishing for Fishies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-fishing-for-fishies/ | Fishing for Fishies | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s fourteenth release since 2012, Fishing for Fishies, is vaguely about the environment, but mostly about goofing off with expensive equipment in service to the concept of “boogie oogie ooging.” While in the past, this highly prolific Australian band toyed with messy elements of garage, psych, and space rock, here, they attempt a soulless blues with the aid of unbridled harmonica. At first blush, the resulting album might be their riskiest endeavour yet: more streamlined than anything they’ve released before, it offers no wall of noise to hide behind. What actually manifests is a 43-minute slog, risky only in that it is the first King Gizzard record ever to be downright boring.
Fans worship this band for more or less for legitimate reasons: They’ve written music in an infinite loop, released five albums in one year, played with two drum sets, and crafted lyrics that are both hilarious and fun to dissect. Fishies has none of that. The title track is one such culprit: Taking up an “anti-fishing” agenda, King Gizz attempt to tackle conservationism, but a lazy Mellotron flute and seemingly endless swampy guitar make them sound like they’re auditioning to score a Shrek spin-off instead. “Boogieman Sam,” one of three songs with the word “boogie” in the title, is equally banal. Built around two foot-stomping, Led Zeppelin-indebted drum parts and a grating harmonica line, the song is about a Slenderman-type figure who “ate mumma’s babies, and shot the policeman.” Eventually you begin to feel that perhaps you have heard enough tailgating rock’n’roll scuzz, but the harmonica refuses to quit. “Yeah, yeah, boogie, boogie, boogie,” sings frontman Stuart Mackenzie, until your eyes roll into the back of your head.
Throughout, Fishing for Fishies pulls generously from the pantheon of classic rock. When done right, stacking an album with riffy guitar and proggy synthesizer can be compelling and enjoyable: Take the equally prolific Ty Segall, the decidedly less prolific Sheer Mag, or anything King Gizzard released prior to 2019. At its worst, culling sounds from the past can sound like paranoid, derivative vampirism. The band’s proclivity to the latter is most evident on “The Cruel Millennial,” about a millennial who feels prematurely old and washed up. “I was only born in ’92/Yet I rust the cruel millennial,” Ambrose Kenny-Smith laments over a noodling guitar that sounds a bit like a chicken squawk. He continues: “Berenstain Bears/Read to as kids/It’s a glitch in the matrix/Can’t relate face to face with the modern day youth.” One would hope there’s a degree of irony at work here, but with a sound so stubbornly entrenched in the past, perhaps a fear of being replaced by younger and more talented people is warranted.
While cynicism is undeniably Fishies’ operative mood, a couple of moments feel goofy in a good way. “Acarine” imagines a world where Giorgio Moroder became deeply invested in the Who’s “Baba O'Riley,” complete with a subterranean synthesizer warble and a variegated guitar part that flickers like a strobe light. “Reals Not Real,” meanwhile, breaks up mosh pit-inducing nu-metal guitar runs with major-key piano melodies. But these delightful little oddities are staunchly in the minority, and compared to other songs from King Gizzard’s discography, still qualify as some of their weakest offerings to date.
It’s a shame to see a band with such clear skill and experimental prowess release an album as doltish as Fishing for Fishies, especially considering that, not so long ago, they managed to release five good albums in a single year. There is very little joy involved in listening to these nine songs; they sound like a stoner’s tribute to the music of “Guitar Hero,” sprinkled with a dash of Baby Boomer complacency. After a remarkably weird and great run, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have gone fishing in murky waters and caught only an old shoe. | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO / Flightless | April 26, 2019 | 4.8 | 3e06baf7-bfe3-4c40-91dd-442b232c0d67 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
As part of an ongoing reassessment of pioneering composer Julius Eastman’s work, the London electronic musician presents originals loosely inspired by signature pieces like “Stay On It” and “Femenine.” | As part of an ongoing reassessment of pioneering composer Julius Eastman’s work, the London electronic musician presents originals loosely inspired by signature pieces like “Stay On It” and “Femenine.” | Loraine James: Building Something Beautiful for Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loraine-james-building-something-beautiful-for-me/ | Building Something Beautiful for Me | Within the canon of classical-music misfits, a formidable lineage including scruffy luminaries like Harry Partch, John Cage, and Lou Harrison, it’s possible no one has ever not belonged as fiercely, as pointedly—or, at this point, as famously—as Julius Eastman. A Black gay man with an astonishing array of musical gifts as a composer, singer, dancer, and pianist, Eastman gained admission to the prestigious Curtis Institute in 1959, five years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only nine years after Nina Simone herself had been rejected due to her race. Eastman spent the rest of his short, eventful life surfing turbulent sociopolitical cross-currents, earning a Grammy nomination in 1974 for his stunning vocal work on Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King while also performing his music at gay pride festivals, playing in jazz combos, and fighting against perpetual economic precarity. It was the kind of tortured duality out of which grand allegories are fashioned and dynamite biopics are made, but which mostly felt, for Eastman, like constant struggle: As anyone who knows Eastman’s name by now knows, he died homeless and alone at age 49 in a New York hospital.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a slow-dawning recognition of the singularity of Eastman’s voice, catalyzed by the restoration work done by composer Mary Jane Leach, without whom it’s conceivable Eastman’s music would still be forever lost, as well as committed patrons like Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture. In 2013, Clayton released a tribute album that concluded with a piece, called “Callback From the American Society of Eastman Supporters,” daring to imagine a world in which Eastman’s acolytes had grown so numerous they had to be turned away via a polite outgoing message (voiced, as it happens, by Arooj Aftab). It is both a testament to the efforts of people like Clayton and a bittersweet irony that, nearly a decade later, the world envisioned by “Callback” has been slowly taking shape, in the form of multi-part public radio tributes, studies, countless articles, and, most importantly, a fervent new crop of musicians, performers, and artists who found themselves enraptured by the spirit of Eastman’s music.
One such performer is Loraine James, a London-based experimental electronic musician and relative newcomer to Eastman’s music, a fact she writes about in a poignant Guardian editorial: “When the label Phantom Limb got in touch about me creating music inspired by the late New York avant garde composer and pianist Julius Eastman, I had barely heard of him,” she admits, noting that even with a modern-day syllabus that touched on his peers, “it felt like there was effort made to leave him out.”
James begins her album, a collection of originals loosely inspired by specific Eastman works, with one of two variations on Eastman’s signature piece, 1973’s “Stay On It.” Eastman’s score pairs a flirtatious little eight-note phrase with loosely contrasting motivic cells, each one stressing and striating the pulse until the entire piece starts to fall—pleasingly, maddeningly—apart. It’s a perfect piece of rhythmic DNA for a producer like James to play with; the repeated “stay on it” command already sounds like a chopped vocal loop fit for any manner of club track: hip-hop, footwork, house. James takes that skipping motif and plugs it directly into her machines, reproducing it as an arrhythmic heart blip, over which she sings in a confiding murmur. Where performances of “Stay On It” usually feel antic, mischievous, an invitation to swing your hips a little, James’ take is subdued and vulnerable, twisting the emphatic “stay on it” mantra to “maybe if I stay on it,” so that an exclamation shades into a melancholy question mark.
James’ work has drifted into moodier climes lately, away from the destabilized rhythmic propulsion of her 2021 album Reflection and into tone painting and texture. As a fan of both her work and Eastman’s, it’s hard not to see some missed opportunities in their meeting. Eastman made a life’s work out of exploring extremes—juxtaposing quasi-religious chanting with projected images of dog shit for his performance at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia; giving incendiary titles to beatific works and vice versa. But he staged these collisions in service to larger ideas, hoping to generate sparks through which his wholeness might become better illuminated, and his music was never so alive or engaged as when grappling with irreconcilable truths.
James has also mined opposing forces— communal uplift against introversion, club hedonism against cerebral experiments—for visceral and idea-rich music, but on Building Something Beautiful, she appears more interested in weightless washes of tone, often drifting and beat-free, which is a curious approach for Eastman‘s work, particularly because it fails to illuminate much about what James found in it. Her titles hint at a profound autobiographical identification: her piece based on Eastman’s incendiary “Crazy N*****” is called “The Perception of Me,” while the piece inspired by the 1971 piano work “Femenine” is called “Choose to Be Gay,” but the results are often strangely blank.
Take “The Perception of Me”: In the original “Crazy N*****,” four rumbling pianos surge and abate unpredictably, the gathering storms and wisps of Romantic tonalities suggesting all sorts of possibilities, some baleful, some potentially exhilarating; listening to it is like watching a shifting thunder cloud, unsure if you want it to blow over or burst open above your head. James’ piece does away with those shifting harmonic tensions, generating with her synth tones a cool, clean-lined space in which “contemplation” feels like a friction-free process.
Of all the works on Building Something Beautiful, “Femenine” undergoes the most compelling transformation, an extended improvisational meditation that James freezes in place and turns personal: “You say that I choose to/Let me say what I want.” The synths that wash in and out of headphone space, panning and fading and hiccuping slightly, call to mind the “organic” process of composition Eastman theorized about in his essays, but the result feels not at all like the work of tribute, homage, or acknowledgement. It feels, instead, like a partial map of James’ own complicated emotional terrain, one in which signposts of Eastman’s work—the incessant chiming sleigh bells indicated in Eastman’s original score pop up here, sounding smeary and distant—reappear like symbols in a dream. | 2022-10-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Phantom Limb | October 26, 2022 | 6.9 | 3e0b764b-40ed-4521-bd8c-31d03e797f68 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The pop heartthrob’s lovestruck fourth album comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored. | The pop heartthrob’s lovestruck fourth album comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored. | Shawn Mendes: Wonder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shawn-mendes-wonder/ | Wonder | Shawn Mendes wants the world to know: He is madly in love. As the 22-year-old singer explains in the recent Netflix documentary Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, every song he has ever written is about his pop star peer and girlfriend, Camila Cabello. Like all lovestruck wordsmiths, Mendes finds his true feelings too powerful to fully express. “I think it’s like when you see a moon or stars and you try and take a photo of it with your iPhone and then you just can’t, it just doesn’t look good,” he muses. “It’s not supposed to be captured, it’s just supposed to be for us.”
But bless his heart, because Mendes’ fourth record, Wonder, sure does try. Across 14 songs (on the non-deluxe edition), Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.” At one point he croons that he “heard that once a wise man said, ‘Only fools go rushing in,’” as if this is supposed to be a seismic revelation. Mendes comes across like your friend who just got into a relationship and won’t shut up about it: You’re happy for them and also tremendously bored.
According to In Wonder, Mendes and Cabello have been dating for a little over a year, but first met as teenagers—he was a guitarist who found fame covering pop songs on Vine, she was one-fifth of a girl group (can I make it any more obvious?). Mendes’ elevation of Cabello as his eternal muse is surely meant to be romantic, but it comes across as naive—and vaguely terrifying. It also reflects the biggest problem of Wonder: What’s stacked up to be the love of a lifetime feels a bit empty in presentation. All-consuming passion is reduced to familiar imagery of popping bottles, dancing on rooftops, and fantasizing about marriage; the sex scene is always safely off-screen. Yet Mendes’ desire to satisfy is as steadfast as his falsetto, which puts in the work on Wonder. On the somewhat funky “Teach Me How to Love,” featuring Anderson .Paak on drums, Mendes asks his partner to “draw a map” so he can properly pleasure her.
Even if the subject matter is more than a little vanilla, Wonder is Mendes’ most musically adventurous album, touching on hip-thrusting R&B-lite, Beach Boys harmonics, and the occasional Tame Impala synth line. But every song is plagued by the same problem: Production that attempts to compensate for lyrical blandness by forcibly inserting drama. The title track circles around compelling themes like authenticity, the influence of toxic masculinity, and how it would feel to “live inside a world that isn’t black and white,” but Mendes soon brushes these aside in favor of a more pressing quandary: “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by you!” Every time he repeats the line, it’s with startling intensity, like Benjamin Franklin getting struck by a bolt of lightning. Lest you miss the profound stakes of this reflection, the production smacks you in the face with massive drums and soaring choral vocals. Even Mendes’ dreams are scored like IMAX movies.
The beginning of “Call My Friends” offers a momentary reprieve from the onslaught: Over a melancholic piano, Mendes longs for the good times that have passed him by, mourning missed birthdays and yearning to put life on pause. Though his voice is undeniably beautiful, it’s quickly swallowed by a vortex of synths as he sings, “I should call my friends and go get hi-i-i-gh.” Wonder’s biggest swing-and-miss might be “Monster,” a duet with Mendes’ childhood inspiration, recovering-bad-boy-turned-wife-guy Justin Bieber. The two Canadian lads lament the psychic toll of fame, singing of pedestals, false confidence, and “sin,” achieving a level of insight so superficial that it’s entirely meaningless.
In a sea of wannabe Biebers and sad Brits with guitars, Mendes has always been the nice guy, the boy next door who also could be an Abercrombie model. But he has yet to make a statement that truly sets him apart. Wonder offers a few intriguing hints of something deeper—nods to depression, loneliness, and rejection. All are quickly bypassed in search of a silver lining, but sometimes it’s worth lingering in those heavier feelings, if only to develop perspective. Near the end of Wonder, Mendes refers to “the boy who’s really underneath/all the scars and insecurities.” Who is that?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | December 9, 2020 | 5 | 3e0bcbc0-1e70-4a12-9644-43d825816ca2 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The L.A. producer's head music, which pulls from jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM, and more, is more dense and rewarding than ever. | The L.A. producer's head music, which pulls from jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM, and more, is more dense and rewarding than ever. | Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14198-cosmogramma/ | Cosmogramma | Talking to us over the summer about his then-forthcoming album, Steven Ellison said he felt like he was progressing as a producer. "I'm finally getting to the point where I can make the kind of records... that I wanted to make when I was younger, things that I dreamed about making," he told us. That sounds modest-- he's been persistently pursuing a singular vision for years now-- but his first two albums did share common traits with his forebears. Even the excellent Los Angeles from 2008 took some of its cues from J Dilla, one of Ellison's idols. But with Cosmogramma, it's not enough anymore to talk about Ellison's sound as "post-Dilla" or even "post hip-hop." It's his sound now.
Indeed, Cosmogramma is an intricate, challenging record that fuses his loves-- jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM-- into something unique. It's an album in the truest sense. Even on Los Angeles, which hung together well as a full-length, there were moments you could pick out as singles or highlights-- the distorted pop of "Camel" or the maniacal electro-house of "Parisian Goldfish". But Cosmogramma is conceived as a movement-- bits of one song spill into the next, and its individual tracks make the most sense in the context of what surrounds them. In this sense, it feels almost like an avant-garde jazz piece, and so it takes more than a few listens to sink in-- one or two spins and you're still at the tip of the iceberg.
Jazz is a big influence on the record, and it's a good place to start talking about the individual sections that make up the whole. Ellison is, of course, the nephew of jazz great Alice Coltrane and has said in interviews that his albums are in part dedicated to her. That's clear on Cosmogramma, as there are distinct passages that pursue an elaborate kind of digital jazz and the album is constructed to move through different sections, as one of Coltrane's might. There are roughly three of these passages-- the first is an aggressive three-song suite based loosely on videogame sounds. On "Nose Art", FlyLo puts raygun squiggles alongside woozy synths, grinding mechanical noises, and about 10 other sonic elements. Like much of the album, it sounds almost frustratingly unstable until you hear it a few times and the pieces begin to interlock and congeal.
True to its title, Cosmogramma then moves through a heady astral stretch and finally a more downtempo jazz-heavy period. The latter partly serves as a necessary breather from the complicated sounds earlier on. FlyLo shows ridiculous talent in each section-- the things he can do with and to beats just aren't common. In "Zodiac Shit", he makes a heavy, loping bass thump sputter out on cue, creating a physical rumbling quality. The beat of "Computer Face // Pure Being" trips over itself again and again like clothes tumbling in a dryer. These aren't just tricks-- in each case they push the song toward a groove. And it's not just beats: "Satelllliiiiiiite" is as dreamy as anything FlyLo's done to date, its distorted vocal samples and steam-building arrangement not unlike something out of Burial's repertoire and frankly just as good.
The song that will likely get the most attention here is "...And the World Laughs With You", a collaboration with Thom Yorke. Obviously an electronic-music fan, Yorke has done these guest spots before (for Modeselektor and others) and with such a high-profile contributor it's easy to make the song all about him. But FlyLo doesn't pay Yorke any undue deference, just treats his vocals like another element to manipulate and weave into the mix. It's so subtle, in fact, that if you're not paying close attention you might miss his appearance altogether. It's this level of confidence and commitment to his vision that ultimately makes Cosmogramma so fascinating. FlyLo is working at the height of his creative powers right now, and the scary thing is it's reasonable to think he could get better. | 2010-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 6, 2010 | 8.8 | 3e0c678b-92a8-4a84-b424-989c203afcac | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
With her 10th album, Björk is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats. | With her 10th album, Björk is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats. | Björk: Fossora | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bjork-fossora/ | Fossora | Hope springs eternal in Björk’s fantastical world. Her optimism is one of the most spiritually nourishing things about her work, as if she’s dressing the emotional wounds of the world despite making increasingly avant-garde music and becoming the world’s first Animorph. At times her lyrics have urged the listener to accept a lack of control as an opportunity—the way there are “unthinkable surprises about to happen” on Vespertine’s “It’s Not Up to You,” or how Post imagines romantic hope through self-possession. You can always find the spark or glimmer of light in Björk’s music, whether it’s in the outlook or the instrumentation.
Of course, her emotionally complex canon, spanning nearly 30 years, also shows that unthinkable surprises can be catastrophic, most acutely on 2015’s Vulnicura, written about her painful divorce from the artist Matthew Barney. Without the lows, there would be no hero’s journey for Björk, no abyss, no transformation, no return. She embraced new love on 2017’s Utopia, a fantasia of flute and birdsong, and she has been embraced herself, as a blueprint of autonomy for women artists and as some kind of experimental-pop “mom” for young fans. With her 10th album, Fossora, she is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.
The most poignant songs on Fossora are the towering twin tributes to her mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018. The first, “Sorrowful Soil,” is Björk’s attempt to mimic Iceland’s traditional style of musical eulogy, consisting of melodramatic melodies delivering dry biography, but from a matriarchal POV. “In a woman’s lifetime she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests,” she sings, pausing for emphasis and buoyed by women’s voices from the Hamrahlid Choir. With a baroque choral arrangement and bass chords that function like a church organ, the song sounds solemn, to be sure, but there’s something strangely funny about boiling down a woman’s life to her menstrual cycles and prevailing worldview (Björk seems to recognize this, grinning over the lyrics’ oddness in our recent cover story). Certain phrases cut through and carry the melody: “emotional textile” (what a mother’s nest is made from, naturally), “self-sacrificial,” and “nihilism.” Björk’s mother was a nihilist, a fact that is dramatically emphasized in a vocal hook; despite her nature, the musician seems to say, she did her best to raise children, an act that disregards one’s own nihilism for the future.
“Sorrowful Soil” was written before Björk’s mother passed, and “Ancestress” was written after, as a more personal eulogy. Built from anthemic strings, sparse beats, a sprinkling of chimes and gongs, and vocals from Björk and her son Sindri, “Ancestress” is among the singer’s most striking songs about hope because it shows the limits of it. The lyrics reflect the arc of a mother and daughter’s love passed through decades: As childhood memories merge with scenes of hospitals and pacemakers, Björk steps into the role of valiant “hopekeeper” for her mother while the clock ticks down (literally, there is a ticking clock in the song). I love Björk’s generous articulations of her mother—that Hildur’s dyslexia made her the ultimate improviser, the way her “vibrant rebellion” requires trilled Rs—but the more cutting lines are the things left unsaid or hard to face: “Did you punish us for leaving? Are you sure we hurt you? Was it just not ‘living?’” and “You see with your own eyes/But hear with your mother’s/There’s fear of being absorbed by the other.” It’s that push and pull of not wanting to lose your mother’s voice in your head, combined with not wanting to make her same mistakes.
Life cycles are at the heart of Fossora, whose title translates to a Latin feminine form of the word “digger.” The abstract a cappella interlude “Mycelia,” named for fungal root systems, is a beguiling mix of calm and hyperspeed that could soundtrack a time-lapse video of moss and mushrooms overtaking a forest. “Fungal City” moves the record toward the light of new love—but not too bright—with techno beats, bemused bass clarinet lines, and the supporting coos of serpentwithfeet (something of a musical hopekeeper himself). At times, Fossora’s mushroom-centric imagery can feel a little like an overwrought metaphor. But the theme of personal growth is inextricable from her mycophilia: She finds so much nourishment and possibility in the dark, mossy understory of life.
One standout, “Victimhood” conjures, with its creeping industrial-orchestral pulse, the folk terror of Ari Aster’s horror films; the lyrics are part shadow work, part feminist thought. Which is to say, the scariest thing I’ve heard on a record this year might be a half-dozen clarinet players, an industrial beat, and Björk’s voice weaving out of each ear with familiar phrases like “took one for the team.” She’s referencing a trap of womanhood, wherein being treated poorly makes you feel entitled to compassion, respect, sympathy. “Rejection left a void that is never satisfied/Sunk into victimhood/Felt the world owed me love,” Björk sings, and the only solution to transcending this archetype is a bird’s eye view. This level of reflection—an inventory of personal wounds bleeds into psychological self-evaluation and cultural context of women’s lives—is impressive on its own, but she sculpts the sound to mimic the disorienting, walls-closing-in sensation of questioning the story you tell yourself about yourself. It becomes a masterpiece.
Fossora’s final song, “Her Mother’s House,” is a meditative coda, a shift from grieving daughter to empty-nester, sung with her own daughter Ísadóra. The tone is peaceful—muted keyboard chords, curls of falsetto, a cor anglais solo—as Björk maintains the role of hopekeeper from afar. “When a mother wishes to have a house/With space for each child/She is only describing the interior of her heart,” she sings. At the end of the song, when she returns to the metaphor—“Her most loved ones already live in the chambers of her heart, the four chambers of the heart”—you can imagine her reaching out towards her ancestress, Hildur, who died from heart conditions.
In the lyric book, the last lines of “Her Mother’s House” are “curved buildings, matriarch architecture,” which is hardly audible in the recording, but that phrase—“matriarch architecture” is a handy one for considering Fossora and Björk at this point in her career. Matriarchy is not synonymous with new motherhood so much as the act of losing one’s mother, of assuming her role in the family and carrying on a specific legacy. And so, Fossora is not her mushroom record, her grief/hope opus, or even her Iceland album as she put it. It’s the sound of Björk building her home as the mother of it all. | 2022-09-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | One Little Independent | September 30, 2022 | 8.4 | 3e11133d-4fde-43ce-bcad-eaa0fdf27743 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
The pop star teams with her brother Finneas for their third album together, expanding the cooly dark vision of their sound. It’s an honest and ambitious album when it’s not inert and repetitive. | The pop star teams with her brother Finneas for their third album together, expanding the cooly dark vision of their sound. It’s an honest and ambitious album when it’s not inert and repetitive. | Billie Eilish: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billie-eilish-hit-me-hard-and-soft/ | HIT ME HARD AND SOFT | This is the least we’ve known about Billie Eilish going into an album. For years, the star’s journey was documented in yearly Vanity Fair interviews and candid documentaries; even Carpool Karaoke visited Eilish’s childhood home, where she still lived until recently. That seeming lack of boundaries between the pop star and her audience is increasingly standard for megastars, but Eilish’s intimate music made her a particularly strong candidate for parasociality. Her 2021 album, Happier Than Ever, was largely a response to public scrutiny, more reserved and mature than her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In the ensuing years, Eilish kept a low profile, surfacing every now and then to soundtrack a Pixar film or win an Oscar before retreating to work on the next record.
To hear Eilish say it, the goal for HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was making an “album-ass album,” citing Coldplay’s Viva La Vida and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory as influences. Those records are also ambitious pop mini-epics where established artists show off their range, but there’s usually an outsider like Brian Eno or SOPHIE to get the musician out of their comfort zone. With Finneas once again at the helm, HMHAS is more of the same. For the first time, Eilish’s live drummer Andrew Marshall is on board, as well as the Attacca Quartet, playing arrangements orchestrated by Finneas and the prolific David Campbell. Never one to subscribe to a single genre, Eilish flits from minimalist trance to massive stadium rock, and the album has the same dense vocal layering and inventive percussion that make Finneas one of the most excessively documented producers in pop. But there’s no true swerve, just bigger versions of what they’ve already made—even Coldplay dabbled in shoegaze! What experimentation exists here demonstrates the siblings’ strengths and limitations as they enter their third project together, but it’s diminishing returns.
Thematically, HMHAS focuses mostly on falling out of love with a narcissist (as documented on “Blue”) and falling in love with a woman for the first time. Opener “Skinny” teases another record about the perils of fame, in the vein of Happier Than Ever, and it’s hard not to blame her: When Eilish casually confirmed her bisexuality in a larger Variety profile, that’s all the press wanted to talk about. When it’s addressed on the album, it’s on her own terms, as if the years of insensitive “queerbaiting” accusations never happened. It’s hard to stand out in the age of Spotify-sanctioned sapphic playlists, but “Lunch” is delightful for its matter-of-fact sexuality and the record’s best line deliveries: “I bought you something rare/And I left it under… Claire.” Though the syncopated piano and guitar riffs recall the most generic of 2010s alt-pop, Eilish maintains her irreverence with double entendres and zilch-entendres (“I just want to get her off,” she mumbles). The “Last Christmas” chord progression of “Birds of a Feather” feels engineered to soundtrack wistful coming-of-age stories, and sure enough, you’ll find it in the trailer for the wistful coming-of-age Netflix show Heartstopper. Both these songs are uniquely effervescent departures in her catalogue, but they never sound like a pop star playing catchup to pop radio—just the earnest enthusiasm of someone falling in love.
Other times Billie and Finneas might as well have switched on a large neon sign that says “this is a masterpiece.” Sometimes that big ambition works: The moody “Chihiro” revisits the uptempo sound of early single “Bellyache” but swaps the acoustic guitars for big, expensive synths, making up for the lack of real chorus with density. Several multi-part suites feel like they’re just retreading familiar territory. Despite a career-best belt from Eilish, “The Greatest” can’t escape the shadow of “Happier Than Ever”; “Bittersuite” devolves from its deep-sea dub intro into “Billie Bossa Nova 2” before timidly segueing to the closer. The nadir is “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a relatively standard breakup ballad with a second half marred by chintzy synths and production that tries for negative space and comes up empty: After years of reinventing bedroom pop for stadiums, Billie and Finneas finally made something that sounds thrown together in someone’s bedroom.
Eilish does stake out new ground in her storytelling, delving into relationship messiness with a newfound maturity. On “Wildflower,” she describes her burgeoning feelings for her current boyfriend’s ex: “You say no one knows you so well/But every time you touch me, I just wonder how she felt.” The album highlight also thrives on those ambiguous readings: “The Diner” is a stalker song from the point of view of someone breaking into her kitchen, as if one more creepy letter will finally win her heart. Yet lines like “you could be my wife,” out of context, recall the same-sex attraction explored elsewhere; how much of herself does Eilish see in the role of the obsessive romantic? This is, after all, the person who wrote in “Hostage” about wanting to crawl inside her lover’s veins. Text the phone number she whispers in the outro and you’ll get repeated automated texts saying “it’s billie, call me,” drawing a marketing gimmick into the world of the story.
Every song on this big album has some detail worth hearing, but the insistence on multipart epics and ballads kills the momentum. When “Wildflower” and “The Greatest” crescendo back to back, it gets aggravating. The much-hyped live instrumentation is more window dressing than it is integral to the artistry, and Jon Castelli’s brightly saturated mix leaves the extraneous elements to fight for space in the more crowded sections. All these enhancements cancel each other out until HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece. | 2024-05-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Darkroom / Interscope | May 21, 2024 | 6.8 | 3e1700f6-f36d-4d43-8161-745fc734cc08 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Chicago band leaves the math-rock musicianship of previous releases behind, turning their quirks into something diverse and accessible. | Chicago band leaves the math-rock musicianship of previous releases behind, turning their quirks into something diverse and accessible. | Maps & Atlases: Perch Patchwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14389-perch-patchwork/ | Perch Patchwork | Maps & Atlases released a few EPs before Perch Patchwork, their debut full-length, and the band has done a fair amount of growing up in the meantime. Those early releases were classic math-rock, typified by busy guitar lines borrowed from 90s bands like Don Caballero. Maps & Atlases are far from the only band from Chicago to use that sound as a starting point, but they're one of the few to try and move it forward and successfully translate it into pop songs. Perch Patchwork almost leaves the flashy musicianship entirely behind; when it is there, it puts it to good use-- here they turn their quirks into something diverse and accessible.
Foremost among those is Dave Davison's voice-- a reedy, almost froggy baritone. (Think Mark Morrison of "Return of the Mack" and you're not far off.) Yet he sings naturally and confidently, and even carries many of the songs here on the strength of his performance. "The Charm" builds to layered, clattering percussion with no melody at all save for Davison's vocal line-- the anchor and selling point of an affecting love song. Elsewhere, the band is at its best when it leaps furthest outside of its comfort zone: "Solid Ground" forgoes complicated instrumental lines in favor of layered production, where guitar, bass, and voice contribute only a fraction of the song's many earworms. The same goes for the bubbly power-pop of "Israeli Caves"; these are melodically busy tracks, but every addition is balanced and thoughtful, no performer stepping over another, all serving the song.
On the second half of Perch Patchwork, the fingers get a little more fleet and the math-rock woodshedding shows, and all those busy notes start to run into each other, making the beginning and end of each track less discernible. But taken on their own, many of those songs feature creative left turns, whether it's the Latin instrumentation that crashes the sparse, rubbery riff of "Pigeon" or the campfire strumming between the jagged acoustic licks of "Was". That track might remind you of the mellower moments on Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca, and the brief instrumentals that serve as interludes on Perch Patchwork have the gentle folksiness and thick atmosphere of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. But while Maps & Atlases are milder and less daring than either of those bands, Perch Patchwork is eclectic and consistent enough that each detour offers its own small reward. | 2010-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | June 28, 2010 | 7.4 | 3e17597b-7d70-4654-91f5-7db16072ff10 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Winston Cook-Wilson’s second album of sly, extravagant sophistipop is sleek music for a cursed place, and a heartfelt cry for lonely city strivers. | Winston Cook-Wilson’s second album of sly, extravagant sophistipop is sleek music for a cursed place, and a heartfelt cry for lonely city strivers. | Office Culture: A Life of Crime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/office-culture-a-life-of-crime/ | A Life of Crime | On their second album of sardonic soft rock, Office Culture stage a doomed venture into the big city. Deals are brokered, schemes devised, savings drained; love withers and melodies teeter; everything, it seems, is collapsing together. The title is A Life of Crime. Maybe the crime is stealing time back from the metropolis, or not scamming hard enough. The city sounds exhausting, the band thrilled to be there.
When Office Culture recorded their debut, I Did the Best I Could, in 2017, the Brooklyn outfit was building on the scrappy solo demos of Winston Cook-Wilson, a songwriter and journalist. (Full disclosure: Cook-Wilson is also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) The follow-up’s lavishness suits him: Office Culture at large sound clumsy yet suave, as if honoring the social imperative to project extravagance while scrambling to get by. A Life of Crime toys with this and other modern ironies, not least in its palette of schmoozey lounge jazz for jittery loners. Flirtatious licks sneak beyond the songs’ borders and into illicit fifth bars. Synths gouge space from under the vocals, Cook-Wilson crooning and pirouetting like a drunk trespasser in the Hamptons.
The vocals are theatrical, the sophistipop textures faintly ludicrous. But what might scan as faux sincerity transpires to be heartfelt affect, perhaps with an air of class performance. Money isn’t a theme of the record so much as the water in which its characters swim. Some of Cook-Wilson’s sharpest lyrics are relationship riddles that riff on the deceptions of the free market, like the whirlwind romance styled as a “Ponzi scheme for two” on “Monkey Bone.” His transactional wordplay gestures toward a millennial quandary: the way precarious living conditions and hyper-monetization test our faith in love, too. As received wisdom lets our industries fail and planet burn, why cling to any old myths at all?
Drift and instability trickle from the lyrics down into the music, tilting schmaltz into the realm of the uncanny. Hovering between Talk Talk bliss and the netherworld of Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter is “Diamonds,” a Silicon Valley satire over a morass of slap bass and brass. “A Sign” is so smooth it haunts, somehow suggesting a sax solo that isn’t there. It’s sleek music for a cursed place, opulent like a ritzy hotel lounge.
Given its soft-rock lineage, A Life of Crime could probably bluff through a shift on the strip-mall speakers, but it pitches to the nerds and crate-diggers, by turns summoning the Blue Nile, Gaucho-era Steely Dan, and the Destroyer of Kaputt. “Diamonds” delights in antic concepts and cadences (“Munching on that crudité…. pogo-sticking ’round the Valley”), though where a songwriter like Dan Bejar would exude playful self-assurance, Office Culture’s camp feels desperate to please, as if Cook-Wilson were a bumped-up understudy for some less florid singer. His vocal calligraphy might be overbearing were it not for the luminous backdrop, where no note is wasted and economy is king.
The result, a jaunt around the urban imagination, could scarcely be better company. Like cigar-jacket city pop or a penthouse Postcard Records, the music charms as it pontificates, swept up in the alchemy whereby songs redeem otherwise terrible places. On the right backstreet, a tune like “Hard Times in the City” could exorcise an abandoned building and make its ghosts sing, elevate the dive bars and the loneliness we take there. For all its intricacies, A Life of Crime plays like a half-remembered travelogue, comprising diary entries from the cities you passed through while finding your way home. How far we can drift, it muses, even when it feels like we’re sinking. | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Whatever’s Clever | November 7, 2019 | 7.6 | 3e1ef3e7-5e9f-4f0f-87b9-dc5507cce351 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
The Japanese avant-garde vocalist Phew got her start in O.G. punk band Aunt Sally before collaborating with members of Can in the ’80s. Her latest set of analog bedroom productions recalls Suicide. | The Japanese avant-garde vocalist Phew got her start in O.G. punk band Aunt Sally before collaborating with members of Can in the ’80s. Her latest set of analog bedroom productions recalls Suicide. | Phew: Light Sleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23160-light-sleep/ | Light Sleep | Like many British teens in the late 1970s, when Hiromi Moritani heard the Sex Pistols, she started her own punk band. But even by the standards of punk and post-punk, Japan’s Aunt Sally stood apart: dirge-y psychedelic rock, piano waltzes, spiky outbursts, a whistling take of “Heart and Soul.” And when Moritani struck off on her own in 1980 as Phew, she bushwhacked her own path. She had Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto produce her experimental first single. And for her debut album, she tapped a German dream team: producer Conny Plank and Can’s rhythm section of Holger Czuaky and Jaki Leibezeit, who cast a pulsing, harrowing sound. In the almost four decades since, she’s continued to carve out her own peculiar niche in rock, often working with legends who abet her vision, including Anton Fier, Otomo Yoshihide and members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten. You can hear Jim O’Rourke’s turn on bass on her 2010 album Five Finger Discount—covering Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” no less.
But since that time, Phew has taken to holing up in her own bedroom with an array of analog electronics and old drum machines, bending sine waves, screwing down drum sputters and warping her voice to add another layer to the din. Even within her own discography, it was a stranger and far more foreboding sound, but one only audible if you bought CD-Rs at her shows in Tokyo. Culled now into a six-track album, Light Sleep is the sound of a depopulated urban streetscape at 3 a.m., at times veering into the realm of nightmare. Through such clamor and darkness, Phew’s voice emerges as a brief bit of consolation.
“New World” starts off spare, its oscillators flatulent and bleating. A mechanized hi-hat hiss slowly gathers steam and a ghostly mist of electronics start to thicken, Moritani’s voice alternating between plainspoken and assuaging. The furious “CQ Tokyo” returns her to her early punk roots, barking against a deliriously fast cha-cha beat, as if Yoko Ono snuck into Suicide’s practice space and stole one of Martin Rev’s rejiggered drum machines back in 1974. Menacing snarls of electronics roar alongside her increasingly fraught yells, the drums lurching faster and faster until they lash like a whip.
On “Usui Kuki,” Phew sets up a snare roll on that old Ace Tone rhythm box that threatens to cohere into Sly Stone’s “In Time,” but Phew is deft enough to never let it settle into a steady beat. Ungrounded wire hum and other electromagnetic turbulence eddies around her, the components and her processed voice increasingly hard to differentiate. “Echo” returns to the strobing pummel of early Suicide as Phew overlays a flickering beat with one in double-time. But rather than intensify the track, Phew instead lets in more space and hum, her voice increasingly desolate as feedback and hiss slither in the background.
“Mata Aimasho” centers Phew’s calm speaking voice as metallic subway drones scrape all around her. As she moves through the song, pacing her words as if describing a dream, an incessant buzz begins to resemble black outer space around her. Phew suddenly whistles along like a mockingbird—which, rather than lighten the mood, turns it more menacing, like Robert Mitchum’s bellowed hymn in Night of the Hunter.
In the present moment, it’s no thing to hoard old analog gear and fetishize vintage-sounding equipment so as to give a sense of “warmth” to a recording. But in Phew’s hands, she roots in these components for a sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. Light Sleep signifies her coming back full circle to the kind of relentless music she made as a young punk. There’s something both harsh and hopeful in her latest, as exemplified by a performance she gave a week ago in New York City. With her devices she conjured a sound that roiled like an oil fire. But just when it seemed blackest, her voice would begin to emerge from such harsh noise, tempering it. On Light Sleep, Phew strikes an uncanny balance, in control of all the sounds around her, allowing them to slip from her hands. | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mesh-Key | April 17, 2017 | 7.4 | 3e1f9889-2c30-4481-a830-3c52b1991f97 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
This odds-and-ends compilation from the Finnish indie-pop band contains demos, B-sides, covers, and a couple of new tracks. | This odds-and-ends compilation from the Finnish indie-pop band contains demos, B-sides, covers, and a couple of new tracks. | Cats on Fire: Dealing in Antiques | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14485-dealing-in-antiques/ | Dealing in Antiques | In a typewritten note tucked within each copy of the first White Town 7", self-released in 1990, leader Jyoti Mishra is very specific about his aims. "We want to create music that will make you want to dance, cry, sing, laugh, music that elevates, depresses, and declaims," he wrote. "Not just some form of aural wallpaper or something to try and impress your friends, but something you understand and that understands you." Setting aside any questions about a record's powers of comprehension, that modest manifesto sounds a lot like the goals of plenty of indie pop today, too.
Cats on Fire cover White Town's fluke 1997 hit, "Your Woman", to open the 20-track odds-and-sods compilation Dealing in Antiques. By the time White Town released the track, Mishra was working solo, and his bedroom-produced gender-bender was recognizable in part by a horn sample that some people used to guess (wrongly) came from the Star Wars theme. These four Finns do it the way Mishra & co. might have a few years earlier, stripping the dancefloor-friendly arrangement down to sun-splashed post-C86 guitars, bass, and drums. Dapper Cats on Fire frontman Mattias Björkas' drowsy, eternally Mozzy warble barely resembles Mishra's field-mouse hush, and it's a deftly executed cover, but beyond that, it can't really do better than the original at making people dance, cry, sing, or laugh, at elevating, depressing, or declaiming. And that's the point, isn't it?
Dealing in Antiques is rewarding and disappointing in much the same ways as its first track. Coming after 2007 debut The Province Complains and 2009 follow-up Our Temperance Movement, each warmly received in indie-pop circles, the current collection reaches as far back as a 2002 demo, bringing together out-of-print B-sides and EP cuts as well as unreleased material from the intervening years. The tracks show that Cats on Fire's jangling style has been in place since early on, that the intimacy of a home recording suits their bedsit songwriting, and that they perform their songs with precision. If you like Felt, Orange Juice, or the Orchids, you'll probably like the sound of this. In that sense, it's a shame New York City Popfest had its The New York Times moment in 2010 rather than last year or the year before, when Cats on Fire were there.
On Dealing in Antiques, however, no matter how tasteful or well-played, the songs eventually start to blur together-- it'd make exquisite aural wallpaper, no kidding, but as indie pop, the compilation leaves some room for improvement. Björkas is prone to cramming ill-fitting syllables into his verses to make awkward rhymes work (see "Crooked Paper Clip", especially, or "Stars"). And the occasional jaunty uptempo number, piano part, or female backing vocal amid all the minor-key strums does little to separate the bookish-pop wheat from its chaff here. Then again, as with American contemporaries Pants Yell!, Cats on Fire are all about subtle understatement, and devotees will surely lose themselves in the ambiguities of like-not-love song "Never Land Here", the ironic twists of snob send-ups "On His Right Side" and "The Smell of an Artist", the shy neurosis of "Something Happened", the nuanced doublespeak of "Solid Work", the funny romantic near-miss of "Your Treasure".
Besides "Your Woman", the only other new recording here is "The Hague", and even that one originally appeared earlier this year on The Matinée Grand Prix label comp. "These are my ideals," Björkas croons, over a delicately pretty acoustic guitar with walking bass lines. "If you don't like them, I might have to change them." If Cats on Fire's ideals are at all like White Town's 20 years ago, Dealing in Antiques shows the group is well on its way to achieving them, but they'll have to move further beyond nostalgia-- and, dare I say, bring their charms higher up out of the 1980s-scented decor-- in order to get all the way there. | 2010-08-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-08-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Matinee | August 2, 2010 | 6.5 | 3e228e59-41e4-468c-b761-271585bf3141 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Inspired by true crime and accompanied by Mary Lattimore, Emma Ruth Rundle, and others, the gothic songwriter’s latest feels newly textured and symphonic. | Inspired by true crime and accompanied by Mary Lattimore, Emma Ruth Rundle, and others, the gothic songwriter’s latest feels newly textured and symphonic. | Marissa Nadler: The Path of the Clouds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marissa-nadler-the-path-of-the-clouds/ | The Path of the Clouds | Before there were true crime podcasts, there were murder ballads. The gothic singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler has long held a fascination with the form, populating her songs with characters who died lonely or unusual deaths. “I’d rather watch crime TV than see you again,” she sang on 2014’s July, a threat she’s now followed through with on her latest album, The Path of the Clouds. Following a move from Boston to Nashville, Nadler experienced writer’s block while locked down in her new home, watching Unsolved Mysteries instead of picking up her guitar. Eventually, she began taking notes, hoping the stories would spark inspiration.
On The Path of The Clouds, Nadler doesn’t parody the true crime form, but she replaces its sensationalism and conservative moralism with narratives of control, following the lineage of country songwriters like Dolly Parton and Patsy Montana. Whether singing about the only known escapees from Alcatraz prison (“Well Sometimes You Just Can’t Stay”) or the disappearance of wilderness explorers Bessie and Glen Hyde (“Bessie Did You Make It?”), Nadler projects both universality and specificity onto these stories, exploring what it means to shapeshift, vanish, and start life anew.
The Path of The Clouds is the first self-produced album in Nadler’s nearly 20-year career. Primarily written on piano—an instrument she learned to play during lockdown—the album doesn’t rely on muscle memory; it’s more purposely and musically constructed, as cerebral as it is intuitive. She enlisted a gothy all-star cast to help build the songs, including former Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde, harpist Mary Lattimore, doomy singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle, and multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, who adds a cinematic luster following his contribution to the score for Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic horror film Mandy. Each of the musicians recorded their parts remotely and without much instruction, emailing files back and forth. The album doesn’t suffer from the strewn approach, however, and the sound is newly textured and symphonic.
The music itself coheres to the subject matter. On “Bessie Did You Make It?,” Nadler fingerpicks two chords—one dour, one light—as though depicting the moods of Bessie and Glen Hyde themselves. On the dream-pop track “If I Could Breathe Underwater,” large and marauding waves of guitar shore up against Nadler’s light and flute-like voice, which sounds like a skidding cloud while carrying a heavy and anchoring resonance. Submerged within the mix, Lattimore’s harp glitters like sun-diamonds on waves, bringing the conceit in the song’s title to life.
True to the ballad form, the songs that explicitly reference true crime stories sound fit for oration, more like speech than poetry. While Nadler favors literalism over literary devices—she lifts details like “a bullet in the skull” straight from the stories themselves—she seems to possess a near-classical sensitivity to the sound and shape of words; she’s playful and precise with her assonance, letting each vowel augment and curl over into the next line. The thrills of The Path of the Clouds are far richer than most true crime fiction, but like the best examples of the genre, it leaves you breathless.
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. | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sacred Bones / Bella Union | November 3, 2021 | 7.5 | 3e23e6b4-f660-4ad1-9df5-b4e4ac76b334 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Although not without its inspired moments, Harley Streten’s third LP confirms that he’s most creatively free outside the album format. | Although not without its inspired moments, Harley Streten’s third LP confirms that he’s most creatively free outside the album format. | Flume: Palaces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flume-palaces/ | Palaces | At his best, Flume is chaotic, weird, and kind of naughty. His most memorable tracks feel a bit wrong: They sway against the beat and break into harsh noise when another producer of his stature would probably prefer to insert a euphoric hook or ecstatic drop. His biggest look in the press to date—the first time his profile as a celebrity seemed to match the astronomical popularity of his music—sprung from Burning Man 2019, where he pretended to eat his then-girlfriend’s ass during a DJ set. It was the rare moment in which the Australian producer, born Harley Streten, seemed to genuinely be living the Diplo-meets-Arca fantasy that his best music conjures.
Flume albums show off this puckish streak in fits and starts. 2012’s Flume and 2016’s Skin nestled jagged instrumental gems like “Helix” and “Wall Fuck” amid more forgettable, down-the-line producer/vocalist collabs; 2019’s Hi This Is Flume mixtape suggested that Streten feels most at home when working with artists like Slowthai, JPEGMAFIA, and SOPHIE, unpredictable pop tricksters able to meet him on his level. That mixtape, and a handful of one-off collaborations with Toro Y Moi, London Grammar, Vera Blue, and Reo Cragun released around the same time, indicated that, like Charli XCX or Lil Wayne, Streten is most creatively free outside the album format.
Palaces, the first Flume “album” in six years, confirms this unreservedly. Although not without its inspired moments, Streten’s third record most often feels like Skin 1.5—a collection of ideas that might have been novel before Hi This Is Flume, but which now feel stale in comparison to the more interesting fare that’s come since. With little penchant for bedlam, it’s an album that lacks the exact thing that makes Flume’s music exciting.
At its worst, Palaces feels downright formulaic. Three songs—“Highest Building,” featuring French vocalist and producer Oklou; “Escape,” with mainstay collaborator Kučka; and “I Can’t Tell,” with British musician Laurel—all use the same clash of vaporous vocals and fragmented synths that Streten has been leveraging since the start of his career. It’s a predictable kind of chaos, and, as ever, lyrics feel largely unimportant: Lines like “Help me elevate, I just wanted to escape” and “Where’ve you been, where did you go? How can you sleep knowing you don’t know?” loosely evoke pathos without coalescing into anything genuinely resonant. Streten still largely treats his non-rap vocalists like samples, a trick that’s fun on the first go-around and frustrating on the fourth or fifth.
These songs, along with hypnotic, sample-heavy instrumentals like “DHLC” and “Love Light,” attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Skin, contrasting intense tension with moments of relief and weightlessness to mimic the build/drop dynamic of an EDM track without sounding quite like EDM. But Palaces is most successful when Streten removes himself from this zone and instead puts his own spin on entirely different styles. “Say Nothing,” featuring the husky-voiced 20-year-old Sydney musician MAY-A, is built around a metallic baile funk beat that adds a rhythmic consistency uncommon to a Flume track. Although MAY-A’s lyrics still feel relatively lightweight—“It hurts to love and leave, I don’t love you lеss/I saw it on your sleeves, you made such a mess” goes one particularly word salad-y couplet—she glides over the track unencumbered; without Streten chopping and reshaping her vocals, she feels more like a genuine collaborator.
On the whole, these kinds of songs—where Streten chooses to leave a featured artist’s presence intact, building tracks around them rather than splicing them into the fabric of the song itself—fare best. “Only Fans,” a squelching sci-fi banger featuring the underrated Madrid techno artist Virgen María, is the most impishly fun song here, one that recaptures the lawless feeling of Hi This Is Flume’s Slowthai collaboration “High Beams.” Over a skeletal beat, María raps breathily about sex work and puritanical gatekeepers with invigorating glee (“Fucking censorship, oh my god!/A break to the sex shop/Only Fans, that’s my job!”) while Flume’s laser-like synths fire underneath. María rarely gets to be so wordy on her own songs, which mostly take the form of raucous techno tracks; “Only Fans” gives her the space to weave her idiosyncratic outlook into Flume’s more mainstream world.
“Only Fans” is one of two moments on Palaces that portends a more limber, sophisticated future for Flume, in which Streten feels more confident to mold himself to his collaborators as opposed to the other way around. The other is the lucent, beautiful Caroline Polachek collaboration “Sirens.” Over anxious, scraping synths, Polachek sings in her highest register about the early days of the pandemic, when ambulance sirens were all you could hear on the street: “And if I could/With just a sigh/I’d stop the tide/Of siren cries.” As Polachek’s wishes come crashing down (“No wand of mine/No end in sight”) so do Streten’s synths, splintering and refracting in an instant. On “Sirens,” Streten and Polachek work in perfect harmony: It’s an abstracted portrait of crisis that’s vivid in its evocations. On an album that often feels like it’s going through the motions, it offers a tantalizing glimpse into what could have been. | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Future Classic | May 24, 2022 | 6.5 | 3e264bd6-8e2b-4463-ba9c-c37e680f1f2e | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The New Jersey trio's latest EP may be half as long as their 2012 full-length, Ugly, but it's twice as musically diverse, taking its predecessor's psychedelic influences into more sophisticated emotional terrain for some of the hookiest, most melodic songs Screaming Females have ever recorded. | The New Jersey trio's latest EP may be half as long as their 2012 full-length, Ugly, but it's twice as musically diverse, taking its predecessor's psychedelic influences into more sophisticated emotional terrain for some of the hookiest, most melodic songs Screaming Females have ever recorded. | Screaming Females: Chalk Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17711-screaming-females-chalk-tape/ | Chalk Tape | Screaming Females compensate for one half of its moniker not being entirely accurate-- two-thirds of the New Jersey trio is male, after all-- by redoubling its efforts on the other half. Last year's Steve Albini-produced Ugly was a ferocious post-punk, post-90s, post-patience for your sorry ass guitar-rock record. It sprawled like a double gatefold classic rock LP, but the tone was intensely, if not narrowly, aggressive. The group's sole Screaming Female, singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster, tore through a series of loose songs spotlighting her unpredictable vocal and six-string contortions. Any bruises left in her wake were intentional.
The new Chalk Tape EP is half as long as Ugly, but twice as musically diverse. The record's short, economical songs expand on the psychedelic influences broached on Ugly, and take them into more sophisticated emotional terrain. Chalk Tape even subs in an acoustic guitar every now and then, and changes up the band's grunge/sludge template with Middle Eastern grooves and new wavey basslines. These subtle yet unmistakable musical flourishes accompany some of the hookiest, most melodic songs Screaming Females have ever recorded.
In a way, Chalk Tape feels like an act of reconnaissance, a cautious feeling-out to gauge whether fans will appreciate a relatively poppy follow-up to Ugly. Chalk Tape is composed of songs recorded throughout 2012 in a manner that deviated from the band's usual "jam it out in the studio" approach. These tracks started out as concepts written on a chalk board; the band then translated these ideas into songs, and laid them down quickly without further revisions. For the standout "Bad Men", the original concept could have been "Tusk-era Stevie Nicks ballad with a doom-folk twist"; that's what it ended up sounding like, anyway, thanks to Paternoster's surprisingly tender vocal and a demented, druggy coda that takes romantic desolation to a disquieting place. On the opposite end of Chalk Tape's spectrum is the brilliant "Crushing the Kingdom", a Dio-esque metal epic in 63 shred-filled seconds. In the middle is "Sick Bed"; a rubbery bassline gives the song an extra dose of sinister psych rock evilness, but it's Paternoster who nails you to the floor, double-tracking her voice on the verse and turning it into a duet between ghostly, undead witches.
Chalk Tape isn't completely removed from its predecessor; "Green Vapors" and the hellacious blast of white noise that is "Wrecking Ball" offer plenty of sudden, violent interruptions and skin-crawling rants. But now more than ever, Screaming Females can grab you with songs, rather than just an overpowering instrumental attack. "Poison Arrow" might be their best song yet-- Paternoster hangs back for the first part, letting the swinging rhythm section of Jarrett Dougherty and King Mike do most of the heavy lifting until slashing out some space for a choked, inverted guitar solo that stops just short of exploding. This is an exciting new direction for a very exciting rock band. Chalk Tape could wind up as an important transitional milestone on the way to a future breakthrough but for now, it's a very engaging record on its own. | 2013-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | February 15, 2013 | 7.9 | 3e2fbfe2-49f0-424a-8c4d-bb79a7fd3b14 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The Gainesville, Fla., quintet composes bewitching digital folk on its immersive debut. | The Gainesville, Fla., quintet composes bewitching digital folk on its immersive debut. | Hundred Waters: Hundred Waters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16415-hundred-waters/ | Hundred Waters | Chops have always been a touchy subject in indie rock circles, but at least it used to be fairly easy to know who had them before discussing whether or not they mattered. In 2012, it's rarer to find a band that doesn't incorporate button-pushing, vocal manipulation, or wholesale sampling as a primary compositional method-- how do you even begin to acknowledge the impact of technical proficiency outside of, say, AraabMuzik? On their gorgeous debut of bewitching digital folk, Hundred Waters find answers in a means similar to Braids' or Julia Holter's: Their stage setup might be a confounding tangle of cables and surge protectors, but there's a commitment to unapologetic, real-time virtuosity, compositional refinement, and vision that cuts through the nonchalant clutter of their peers. You can't pull of sounding this joyfully adventurous without being a serious musician.
The most obvious extension of that kind of serious musicianship is the Gainesville, Fla., quintet's confidence, and there are tangible ways in which it manifests here: Whether the pristine clarity of the production is the result of countless studio hours or just a monetary leap of faith (I'm more inclined to believe the former considering its tiny label), you immediately appreciate the investment of belief. And Hundred Waters streams for free on the band's website with the lyrics posted in plain sight, which might seem like a small gesture, but a heartening one if you think of how far out their way young bands go to obscure their words. If you have to shackle yourself to a computer, Hundred Waters allow and invite a more immersive listening experience in a terribly shallow format. Both make the same point: They're not afraid to ask for your full attention.
In a more abstract way, Hundred Waters plays out like a record unusually sure of itself despite having no obvious stylistic hook-- colleagues of mine have grasped at Broadcast and Dirty Projectors as comparisons, two bands who sound like hardly anyone else, let alone each other. I hesitate to use "folktronica" because I think the nomenclature can trigger more ill will than the music that was actually produced under that faux-genre, but that's really what you're getting here: Befitting a record with both "Sonnet" and "…---…" as song titles, Hundred Waters merges the digital and the antiquated sonically and lyrically. At their core, the songs are often in a folk tradition, albeit more towards the "freak-" than the coffee-shop type, vocalist Nicole Miglis heavily informed by pastoral England in terms of harmony and language. The lyrics to opener "Sonnet" are taken directly and entirely from a Percy Shelley verse of the same name, while the acoustic figures and woodwinds that vine upwards throughout it the suggest Espers' Ren Faire wake-and-bakes basking in sunshine rather than blacklights. Beyond the modal harmonies, there's an archaic poetry to these songs that some might find impossibly precious (note the spelling of "splendour" in the lyrics), but I find it congruent with the band's musical persona. "Boreal" and "Me & Anodyne" initially appear fantastical due to their purple wordplay, but they're stories grounded in the complexities of human relationships and the urge to opt out of modern mundanity. Likewise, focus on the ripeness of the lyrics, and you'll miss "Thistle" as an acrid sendoff written with a poisoned quill.
Occasionally, the faerie dust gets a little too thick (the free-time drum circle "Wonderboom" in particular), but even then you never get a sense that they're being overindulgent. More often, their playful side is where their virtuosity gets revealed: a nimble player piano roll that splits "Boreal" open, the expert deployment of syncopated kick drums accenting the chorus of "Me & Anodyne". "Visitor" starts off with the kind of half-melodic, half-percussive ripple of indistinct brass that's familiar in the wake of Animal Collective, yet it's a loop and a living thing, morphing into intriguing melodic shapes while the rhythm sections bustle skillfully. There are brief hat tips to glitch ("Thistle"), tUnE-yArDs' oblong rhythms ("Theia"), and the processor-spiked jazz of Four Tet ("Visitor"), but much of Hundred Waters is just love of pure sound. It's particularly evident on near-instrumental pieces like "Caverns", which layers a gorgeous backward loop over a heaving percussion for an effect that's similar to crystal stalactites described therein, both extremely dense and yet translucent, and meditative closer "Gather" features an ostinato piano line and rich cello acting out its hopeful epitaph ("We can crouch in sanctuary/ Or we can gather our threads into rope and pull.")
Throughout, it's evident how much of the hard work occurred in the planning stages, such is the simply staggering sophistication of these arrangements. Though mostly clocking in at under five minutes, no single track exposes its hooks too quickly and their tendency to explore phrases and shapes before locking into a groove evinces a foreground of both improvisation and skill that suggest Hundred Waters just might be an omnivorous jazz band. And above all, they're the kind of discovery it's easy to get excited about: Their debut does more than enough to stand on its own, not only ambitious in its own right, but leaving little doubt about Hundred Waters' capability of handling wherever their ambition takes them from here. | 2012-03-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Elestial Sound | March 30, 2012 | 8.1 | 3e30b9a8-19a8-419a-80b5-2fb0e9704039 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The actress’ full-length debut is firm in its influences but lacking in variety. | The actress’ full-length debut is firm in its influences but lacking in variety. | Lola Kirke: Heart Head West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lola-kirke-heart-head-west/ | Heart Head West | Cutting a debut record is tough enough without a day job, but despite her expanding presence in television and film, actress Lola Kirke makes it look fairly easy. Following a 2016 self-titled EP, Heart Head West is Kirke’s first long player, and its lilting, laid-back posture allows her to plant one foot in confessional country music and the other in the weightless folk of Laurel Canyon. But regardless of Heart Head West’s stretch of sweet-and-sour ballads, its lack of textural and rhythmic variety leaves you hungry for something heartier.
Kirke’s music is most effective when she combines candied melodies with prudent lyrics that go down like a bitter pill. Opening track “Monster” is a prime example; Kirke plumbs the murky depths of her register before floating to its peaks. “What if nothing’s wrong?” she asks, “What if it was all just a song?” Kirke’s question poses a makeshift solution for one of the record’s most complex problems: How do you fuse dignity and the need for social acceptance? The song’s slide guitar and flourishes of harmonium form an elegant scaffold for Kirke’s smoke-cured vocals, and though her questions are never answered, she explores a relatable dilemma with grace.
One of Heart Head West’s primary flaws lies in its sequencing. “Monster” is a strong start, but the nine subsequent tracks are weaker by comparison. “Born to Die” dilutes “Monster”’s formula, cutting it with the boho nihilism of Lana Del Rey (“Baby you were born to die” Kirke sings) and the breathy lull of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. The mood evoked is not a shortcoming, per se, but it registers as a little forced and musically thin. The unfortunately titled “Sexy Song” exhibits a similar lack in spark. Lingering in the same mid-tempo limbo as most of the record, it’s a lounge ballad from the perspective of a romantically neglected woman who’s this close to downright begging for sex—a welcome twist on the clichéd dynamics between men and women in rock music. Sadly, Kirke’s plea sounds more like an elegy for erections past rather than an empowered command.
Things pick up when “Supposed To” hurls the record’s sauntering tempo out the saloon doors with a boisterous rockabilly number. It isn’t the star of the album, but its scrappy guitar and Loretta Lynn sass make it a fun reprieve from the soft, grazed plains of Heart Head West. “Simon Says,” meanwhile, finds Kirke stepping to a doo-wop groove and crooning her catchiest line: “They all said it wouldn’t hurt anymore/Least not the way that it did before, but it does.” The crack in her voice cuts deep, making me wish she sang this raw more often.
“Point of No Return,” Kirke’s version of Jim Ford’s downtrodden classic, brings things home. Here, the production is simple and the delivery straightforward—but it’s the source material that truly shines at the end of the day. It was Ford, after all who wrote one of the greatest opening lines in country history: “Baby, if the cake ain't missing/How’d that icing get all over you?” While she does it justice, Kirke’s homage summarizes the core issue of her record: It is firm in its influences, but could benefit from growing beyond them. | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | August 15, 2018 | 6.2 | 3e356fcf-e0ab-4b25-989c-faef4576a8be | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
This ensemble performance from 2018 offers an ideal introduction to the Swedish songwriter’s work, showcasing her vocal virtuosity and gothic drama. | This ensemble performance from 2018 offers an ideal introduction to the Swedish songwriter’s work, showcasing her vocal virtuosity and gothic drama. | Anna von Hausswolff: Live at Montreux Jazz Festival | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-von-hausswolff-live-at-montreux-jazz-festival/ | Live at Montreux Jazz Festival | Last month, two scheduled appearances in Paris by the Swedish organist and singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff were canceled for a reason that, in our era of pandemic closures and right-wing hysteria about censorship, seems quaint: satanic panic. Von Hausswolff brings a religious sense of ceremony to her operatically heavy music, whether she’s pummeling a single distorted chord into oblivion, swaggering and soaring through gothic rock songs, or spinning long passages of ominous drone. She often performs and records in churches, on room-filling pipe organs. The Paris gigs had drawn a crowd of fundamentalist Catholic protesters to block the doors of the Notre-Dame de Bon-Port church, evidently riled up by a lyric from Von Hausswolff’s 2010 song “Pills”: “I made love with the devil.”
Yves Trocheris, the priest who made the decision to cancel, admirably defended von Hausswolff, making clear that he was acting out of concern for public safety and not because he agreed with the fundamentalists. Still, his straight-faced denial of her supposed satanism carried some unintentional humor. Listening to von Hausswolff’s new live album, you might not disagree with the protesters about the wild and dark forces swirling within this music. There is something threateningly subversive about performing it in institutions with histories of rigidness and repression—but maybe raising a little hell isn’t such a bad thing.
Live at Montreux Jazz Festival was recorded in 2018, during an electrifying ensemble performance of material drawn from Dead Magic and The Miraculous, von Hausswolff’s two latest records at the time. The setlist makes Live at Montreux an ideal introduction to her work for anyone drawn in by 2020’s breakthrough All Thoughts Fly, her fifth album and first for Southern Lord, which set aside her commanding vocals and backing band in favor of stormy solo organ instrumentals. Like Nick Cave, for whom she was opening that night in Montreux, von Hausswolff is a rakishly charismatic singer, with an air of menace that seems sincere and playful at once. She pairs this theatrical expressiveness with old-school vocal virtuosity, as likely to stun you with a melodic leap as she is with a turn from pristine bel canto to rock’n’roll growl.
Live at Montreux charts a rough trajectory from one pole of von Hausswolf’s songwriting style to the other. Opener “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall” is the closest thing to pop, a tale of a doomed relationship set to a deceptively bubbly organ ostinato. Closer “Come Wander With Me/Deliverance” is a 15-minute barrage, with doom metal riffs and passages of noisy free improv downshifting suddenly into chord changes that would sound at home in a Romantic-era symphony. The misty tunefulness of the former mode splits the difference between Cave's murder ballads and Kate Bush's art-pop fantasias; the Wagnerian rumble of the latter is more akin to Swans or Neurosis. Von Hausswolff and her band—guitars, bass, drums, percussion, synth, pipe organ—deliver both sides of their music with thrilling high drama and careful attunement to subtleties of harmony and arrangement. Even the ambient-leaning sections move purposefully, with each new layer added or subtracted pushing the whole somewhere new.
Von Hausswolff is no nostalgist, but there is a throwback appeal to her treatment of the rock concert as an ambitious and occasionally solemn spectacle. In addition to the more direct reference points, Live at Montreux also recalls, in a roundabout way, recordings like Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet and Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii, weed-scented live totems of the 1970s that gave the sense of the musicians as wizards and the stage as their conjuring ground. There’s nothing ironic about the music’s foreboding heaviness, but it does have a sense of mischief. You can practically hear von Hausswolff smiling as she slips into a vaguely demonic register during the opening section of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” turning an otherwise mundane line—“My feet are not enough”—into an unholy incantation. The climax of “Ugly and Vengeful” involves passages of overwhelming density and dissonance juxtaposed with largely unaccompanied vocal runs. The band gears up for a moment before slamming back in each time, like a supervillain gleefully brandishing torture devices before administering them.
Though Live at Montreux is an inviting survey for newcomers, it's also worth hearing if you’re already familiar with the source material. Some songs, like “Pomperipossa,” are reworked for maximum force, but the greatest rewards are subtler: the delicacy of the drum fills in “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall,” the way the band pauses for breath before the coda of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” or shifts the harmonies of its chorus by changing a single note. Next time von Hausswolff rolls through Paris, those angry Catholics should give her a chance. Her music may be devilish, but it isn’t without grace.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Southern Lord | January 15, 2022 | 7.5 | 3e388a19-3b31-42d7-a360-ec2c7f80dedb | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
A decade ago, Lady Gaga created an enormous, bravura flex of electronic pop. An anniversary edition arrives with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies. | A decade ago, Lady Gaga created an enormous, bravura flex of electronic pop. An anniversary edition arrives with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies. | Lady Gaga: Born This Way the Tenth Anniversary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-gaga-born-this-way-the-tenth-anniversary/ | Born This Way the Tenth Anniversary | Lady Gaga was wrapped in raw beef when she announced her third album at 2010’s MTV VMAs. The meat dress was only a warm-up. Born This Way, first released in May 2011, is a bravura flex of electronic pop as big as a Bosch canvas that charges between hair metal riffs, taint-tightening bass, and synths that crackle like hot coals. On her best front-to-back album, Gaga belts each crushing hook with every fiber of her chest, with personal pain turned into placard-ready manifestos. She sings like she’s making a blood pact.
In a way she was. On Born This Way, Gaga, who is bisexual, made pop her pulpit and pledged her fight for LGBTQ+ rights in alliance with her young, queer fanbase. In February 2011, the album’s bright, brash title track became the first U.S. No. 1 hit to directly reference the trans community, with the lyrics, “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I’m on the right track, baby/I was born to survive.”
As if to reinforce that these songs are for everyone, Gaga now marks 10 years of Born This Way with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies. It works best when they scorch the earth. Big Freedia, who was supposed to be part of the album back in 2011, turns “Judas” into exuberant New Orleans bounce with drumline snares, squealing sax, and a gospel choir; The Highwomen’s “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is inviting folk-rock that could be an early Heart treasure. The faithful covers from Years & Years, Orville Peck, and Kylie Minogue are less distinctive; most unforgivable is Ben Platt’s mawkish take of “Yoü and I,” which already has two wonderful, and very different, remixes from Mark Taylor and Metronomy.
A decade ago, Born This Way was mostly co-produced by Gaga with RedOne, DJ White Shadow, and her then-musical director Garibay. The “Banditos,” as Gaga called the crew, made the record over 18 months on her 2009-2011 tour. They worked around her erratic schedule—Gaga claimed to hardly sleep, subsisting on “music and coffee”—and set up laptops backstage and a makeshift vocal booth in her tour bus. On-the-road recording isn’t uncommon for a busy pop star—Rihanna recorded 2011’s Talk That Talk in a similar fashion—but the time crunch distills the kinetic energy of Gaga’s stadium-sized life straight into music. If it sounds like she’s singing every phrase with an exclamation point, well, it’s likely because she was due on stage in 10. There was also a practical reason for urgency: Incredibly, given the commercial success of The Fame and its sibling EP The Fame Monster, Gaga’s Monster Ball live dates had put her three million dollars in debt, and she needed the next record to get her back on the road and out of the red.
She called the album “a giant musical-opus theater piece.” It was made to be performed on a stage set up like a Transylvanian castle, and is laced with enjoyably over-the-top gothic flourishes: Gregorian chants on “Bloody Mary,” echoey organ on “Highway Unicorn.” Created in arenas, for arenas, Born This Way’s Vatican-sized ambitions imbue the album with a holistic sense of scale. With the exception of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, mainstream pop hasn’t sounded this big since. And it set a bar for promo excess in the iTunes era too, with stunts that dropped a spider-silk blanket across pop culture. Gaga arrived at the Grammys in an egg, wore prosthetic horns, and partnered with corporations like Google, Starbucks, and Zynga, the tech company whose popular FarmVille app offered in-game album previews and motorbike-riding sheep.
Gaga often sounds like she has gazed into the depths of hell and is back to tell the tale. (“I have been for three years baking cakes, and now I’m going to bake a cake that has a bitter jelly,” she said of her music’s evolution). “Government Hooker” is a sneering dance stormer that sends up powerful creeps and, with DJ White Shadow’s aircraft hangar-sized techno, takes her pointed polemic to the rave. Amid the airtight industrial pop of “Scheiße,” the best non-single of Gaga’s career, she rebukes the dumb shit that trailed her—the sexism, the transphobia—with a monster hook sung in pseudo-German and vulcanized synths that squeal like a Formula 1 starting grid. Caustic messages make Born This Way’s triumphant moments feel alluringly sweet. The fist-pumping album closer “The Edge of Glory” soars with self-belief, as Gaga’s repetitions of “I’m on the edge/The edge/The edge” build momentum like an athlete spinning the hammer throw.
She switches vocal styles like she changes satellite-dish-sized hats. On the scuzzy disco-pop “Heavy Metal Lover,” she coos coquettishly before flipping to Auto-Tuned camp. “Dirty pony, I can’t wait to hose you down,” she growls. The wonderfully blasphemous “Judas” is pop-house whiplash with the drama of Mosaic law. You can guarantee that some gay bar, somewhere in the world, is blasting it right now, with or without the video starring Norman Reedus as the sleazy daddy love interest. “Hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind,” she sings, as if catching darts in her teeth and spitting them back.
Gaga described Born This Way’s title track as a “magical message song” for the Prop 8 era, and, she wrote on Instagram recently, it was inspired by disco artist Carl Bean’s fabulous 1977 cover of the gay liberation classic “I Was Born This Way.” Of the whole record, it’s the song that has aged least well, both for its essentialist message and dated electropop. As Owen Pallett recognized in a 2014 article for Slate, its major-key composition was a departure from the “sexy, spooky” minor-key songwriting of Gaga’s biggest hits. In an aim to reach everyone, she broke from her own winning formula. In 2011, the unsubtle “Born This Way” may have been what the world needed, and it’s intensely meaningful to many queer people—including Gaga, who has the phrase tattooed on her left thigh. Still, you wish a better song had become the de facto soundtrack to LGBTQ+ rights in the Obama era. Ten years on, it’s a weak link in an album that has so much more to say about freedom and autonomy, and, elsewhere, embraces being an outsider while pausing to question the social norms that push some of us to the fringes.
These days, it’s cool for pop stars to play the bad guy or the vengeful ex. But it was less so in the early ’10s, when the charts were cluttered with party-rocking rubbish and self-affirmative dreck. It’s hard to rankle at Gaga’s version of outsider empowerment, perhaps because it’s rooted in something real. On the joyful “Bad Kids,” a song inspired by hearing fans’ stories while on the road, Gaga makes high school jibes sound like phrases you’d want to wear on a badge: a “degenerate young rebel,” a “bitch,” a “jerk,” a “brat,” “a selfish punk [who] really should be smacked.” At other times, she looks unflinchingly inwards. “Marry the Night,” a song about Gaga’s pre-fame years on the Lower East Side, puts a megaphone to a bruised mind racing with survival instinct. A cinematic video seems to reference the sexual assaults she suffered at 19, which, she said in a 2019 interview, led to hospitalization and a “psychotic break.” These details, which she didn’t share at the time of Born This Way’s initial release, cast a starker shadow on this hustler’s anthem. It was always a fantastic soundtrack for stomping down the street; it’s also a solemn vow to “marry the dark” despite the violence that can lurk in its shadows.
Born This Way’s reclaimed confidence goes down to the half-woman, half-machine composite on its cover, a mutant gynoid that screams with the fury of a saint. It’s ridiculous, ugly. People hate it. It’s also a perfectly punkish match for this scrappy colossus of an album, an apex of off-the-leash creativity and unapologetic commerce. It still makes you want to live without the Scheiße—but is just as suited for a world full of it. For an hour it makes you feel like you are made of steel.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | July 2, 2021 | 7.9 | 3e3937df-d285-465a-a8b6-879570f81dcd | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
Balancing broad comedy with pointed political satire, the Detroit rapper continues his evolution from skilled MC to producer polymath on his latest album. | Balancing broad comedy with pointed political satire, the Detroit rapper continues his evolution from skilled MC to producer polymath on his latest album. | Quelle Chris: Deathfame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quelle-chris-deathfame/ | Deathfame | Quelle Chris has carved a niche for himself at the edges of alternative hip-hop. His music is as distinctive as it is capacious, and he’s probably one of the only rappers whose discography contains a verse from Roc Marciano and a hook from the Tune-Yards. As he approaches 40, Quelle Chris has deepened his ability to write perceptive lyrics and developed his skills as a beatmaker. Recent work on the score for Judas and the Black Messiah has shown the effort he’s made to stretch his wings, and he’s evolved from a very skilled MC to a producer polymath. While he’s rarely shied away from humor, on his new album DEATHFAME, he balances broad comedy with pointed satire, providing direct political address with a looseness that keeps it all from sounding like mere cant.
Collaboration brings Chris down to earth (long-time producing partner Chris Keys appears on several piano-driven tracks and Knxwledge provides a boom-bap beat) but isolation suits him. By creatively overdubbing his vocals, he reflects the uncertain world around him. Though there’s long been a dubby texture to Chris’ production, DEATHFAME turns the reverb and echo up to the point of pure abstraction. His words still carry weight and specific meaning, but this album is his 808s & Heartbreak, a piece defined as much by its ambience and vocal timbre as its lyrics.
While Chris has never been afraid to crack jokes, his flow here is considerably more deadpan, carrying a sense of solemnity. He sounds sincere when he sings that he’s grateful to be alive on “Alive Ain’t Always Living,” but his voice slows down to a stroll by the track’s conclusion, as if life’s exhaustion has caught up to him. His flow similarly captures the duality of life reflected in the beat, a calming soul keyboard melody cloaked in static and unsettling distortion. The album’s title, repeated by Quelle Chris himself and disembodied voices, hints at a painful recognition of the unstated purpose of the rap industry, where tragedy is so often intertwined with commercial success: “Let these corporations sink their fangs in my legacy’s neck before I dip,” he declares on the title track.
With a distortion-heavy and almost vaporwave-like approach to sound, the production on DEATHFAME recalls Actress as much as it does Madlib. You can hear the bones of a backpacker-friendly jazz rap palette, but they’ve been scrambled and reassembled here. The drums on “King In Black” bang like sheets of metal in a thunderstorm, clanging and slowed, less chopped and screwed and more dragged through the mud. A fat double-bass line and free-form piano join in, forming a robotic jazz combo, and Chris pitch-shifts and manipulates his own voice into a hundred different directions. Nevertheless, DEATHFAME never loses touch with rap—as twisted and filtered as his voice might become, Chris still spits bars over what generally sounds like beats. These futuristic environs match the inventiveness of collaborators like Navy Blue and Pink Siifu—it’s like Chris is cosigning the experimental tendencies of a new generation.
The techno of Chris’ native Detroit has often been connected to the city’s history of machinery and industry, and while DEATHFAME doesn’t sound much like Underground Resistance, it’s hard not to place the album’s distinctly metallic sound in that context. Voices are weathered and eroded, and the percussion sounds oxidized; the production embraces the rust and decay of industrial neglect, lending a concrete weight to the abstract heaviness of the lyrics. While it may sound like a transmission from a distant universe, there’s no reality DEATHFAME could come from but our own. | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | May 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 3e3b9650-9b1c-40e7-8d29-f3663a4de730 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
For this 88rising showcase, Joji, Rich Brian, AUGUST 08, and the rest of the label all act like promising pop stars but are often overshadowed by the outside talent they bring along. | For this 88rising showcase, Joji, Rich Brian, AUGUST 08, and the rest of the label all act like promising pop stars but are often overshadowed by the outside talent they bring along. | 88rising: Head in the Clouds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-head-in-the-clouds/ | Head in the Clouds | 88rising is half media brand and half label. Their goal is to build a platform for Asian rappers and singers who’ve adopted the sound of contemporary American hip-hop and reinterpreted it through the lens of their own lives, often to massive viral success. While not all of its roster is from abroad—singer AUGUST 08 is from Los Angeles—most of it is made of young artists from China, Indonesia, and Japan who initially took it upon themselves to create videos and songs that blended mischievous humor and chest-thumping braggadocio in the hopes of maybe one day falling into pop stardom. Head in the Clouds is the final push to that dream, pairing 88’s roster with some of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop right now for a collection of trap anthems, poolside bops, and starry-eyed ballads aimed to infiltrate the Top 100. Unfortunately, only a handful of the album’s 17 tracks stand on their own as singular works; the rest are stiff, boilerplate copies of songs by other artists currently racking up streams.
The ones that do succeed sound like they were written purely for top-down twilight rides in the summertime. “Peach Jam,” a collab between oddball YouTube personality turned singer Joji and Memphis’ BlocBoy JB is a pulpy ode to sex built around a recurring “Hey-ya!” chant. It acts as one long bridge, the kind of morsel that inspires VIP sections to jump on couches and collectively sing out of tune. And “History,” a solo cut by the droll MC Rich Brian, is further proof of the Jarkata rapper’s knack for melding his low huff of a voice with playful production to build understated hits, as he wistfully looks back on a past fling over bright flute synths and tinkering hi-hats. The lyricism displayed here is nothing special—BlocBoy may take the crown for the most senselessly evocative line when he raps, “You my baby like fetus,” on “Peach”—but the songs are breezy and fun without overextending their reach.
The same can’t be said for the syrupy R&B tracks, primarily handled by AUGUST 08 and 19-year-old singer NIKI. Woozy opener “La Cienega,” named for the major thoroughfare in L.A., is a cliché take on the tedium of fame, erected on blasé lyrics about the “glitz” of “la la land” and a hulking synth line that aims for sensuousness but instead comes off hammy. Later on, “I Want In,” a dedication to willingly losing sight of a lover’s imperfections in a haze of lust, sees AUGUST 08 and NIKI trying to embrace the sounds of caribana and soca to listless results, a duller version of one of PARTYNEXTDOOR’s dancehall-tinged melodies.
That’s the issue at the core of Clouds: Most of its songs sound too familiar. For an album that was created by 88rising as a means of promoting its talent, it provides very little opportunity for the label’s artists to have their own voice. The big-name features compound this problem, as they dictate the tone of the songs they appear on. The Playboi Carti-led “Beam,” for example, is a lo-fi Murda Beatz-produced banger that would fit in seamlessly on the Atlanta rapper’s latest album, Die Lit, but then Rich Brian shows up and more or less repeats Carti’s opening verse.
But if there’s one 88-signed act that does stand out on the compilation, it’s Higher Brothers, a quartet of rappers from Chengdu, China. Members MasiWei, DZknow, Psy. P, and Melo have been building a dedicated following in their home country for years now and they get to flex their muscles on tracks “Let It Go” and “Disrespectin,” which both feature the kind of rampageous, hard-hitting production that suits their kinetic brand of hip-hop. “I never look at the past, higher we go,” Psy. P belts on “Let It Go” in a mix of Mandarin and English. Here, Clouds briefly snaps out of its role as a playlist of serviceable summer jams and shows us what makes these artists special—and what the West has been missing out on. | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | 88rising | August 1, 2018 | 6.8 | 3e45121c-3eef-4ddf-965c-e79228194223 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
The troubled outfit's latest album bitterly recounts the Decline of Foxygen. | The troubled outfit's latest album bitterly recounts the Decline of Foxygen. | Foxygen: Seeing Other People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foxygen-seeing-other-people/ | Seeing Other People | Foxygen ascended swiftly to indie-rock fame and descended just as quickly into glam-rock tragicomedy. The years following their 2013 breakthrough We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic felt like watching Nadia approach the deadly staircase in the TV series “Russian Doll.“ Each time they face-planted, they returned with a hard reset: The 24-song behemoth ...And Star Power and tighter 40-minute follow-up Hang were both comparable to any number of coked-out comedown albums meant to demoralize label accountants and chase off casual fans before getting reassessed as cult classics. Seeing Other People is overtly about the Decline of Foxygen and little else, and sadly, it’s their most convincing performance in years.
In an open letter announcing Seeing Other People, Sam France wrote, “Goodbye to the drugs, to the partying. Goodbye to my twenties now, Goodbye to my Saint Laurent-model-body.” The last line is a piercing timestamp on Foxygen’s success— France bore a striking physical and artistic resemblance to early Hedi Slimane it-boys like Zachary Cole Smith, Ariel Pink, and Chris Owens, runway Cobains whose supposed subversion of rock-star cliches started to look more like the real thing. “Well I have got this work/But I’d rather powder my nose instead,” France croons on the album’s opening line. The song dramatizes France’s writer’s block, a hoary fourth-wall-smashing trick that nonetheless makes for the album’s best song. “Work” is the one time where Foxygen’s center holds—legendary session drummer Jim Keltner shows up to play a kit made of trash, embodying their competing impulses towards acerbic yacht-rock excess and eccentric lo-fi ingenuity.
When the hooks or musical trick shots on Seeing Other People go missing, the bitterness persists. On “Livin’ a Lie,” France scolds a namedropping, clothes-stealing industry flunkie in a wispy cadence resembling any number of breezy album-stuffers on Views or Scorpion. He plays a delusional stoner on “The Thing Is,” the most brazen Bruce Springsteen ripoff this side of the Gaslight Anthem and indicative of Seeing Other People’s all-encompassing, aimless acidity—maybe they’re mocking the Boss or the critics and fans that misinterpret The River or Born in the USA as documents of American exceptionalism, or maybe it’s just a Ween-style goof meant to antagonize for its own sake. In the world of Foxygen, nothing is more honorable than a batshit idea taken to its illogical conclusion.
It’s a testament to Jonathan Rado’s retro-futuristic production that a band with such obvious reference points still always sound like Foxygen, and maybe France is saving the specifics for his upcoming memoir Sam Francisco: Confessions of an Indie Rock Star. But whether their disengagement is a conscious decision or a byproduct of their malaise, it's a moot point: They’ve mostly abandoned the sturdy songcraft that made them a resilient option for TV and film syncs. “News,” “Flag at Half-Mast” or “The Conclusion” could have all served as their farewell address. Instead, they’re stuffed consecutively into the album’s final third, each belaboring their point (“No, we ain’t got news,” “Fly my flag at half mast,” “I think we should just be friends”). It's like watching a high school senior trying to fill a word count just to get out of this semester with a passing grade.
As a pivot towards candor from a firmly tongue-in-cheek band, Seeing Other People had the potential for newfound pathos. But while they’ve proven adept at replicating the most granular sonic details of their heroes, introspection isn’t something Foxygen can learn on the fly. They spent the last decade offering soul-glam cosplay shrouded with scarfs and irony, and the bitter aftertaste of this act comes through most clearly in Seeing Other People’s rock-bottom moment: “I’m never gonna dance like James Brown/I’m never gonna be black/and I’m never gonna get you back,” he sings on “Face the Facts,” an honest appraisal of bygone glory days ruined by a supremely tone-deaf joke. Like any act that communicates primarily through pastiche, Foxygen have perpetually raised the question: Do they really mean it? On Seeing Other People, they drop the act and give it to you straight: If you are getting tired of Foxygen, well, they are, too. | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 27, 2019 | 5 | 3e46ea19-1961-4062-9d2d-b34138bf7d70 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
It's been a long time since you've heard a band pull off this sort of southern-fried slop-pop with such charm, craftiness, and self-deprecating wit. | It's been a long time since you've heard a band pull off this sort of southern-fried slop-pop with such charm, craftiness, and self-deprecating wit. | Spider Bags: Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13650-goodbye-cruel-world-hello-crueler-world/ | Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World | "Everyone's heart gets broken some time/ Just not like mine." If North Carolina (via New Jersey) drunk-rockers Spider Bags ever want to sell bumper stickers at their merch table, let this line-- taken from the teary, beery ballad "Lord Please"-- be the slogan. It's a lyric that perfectly sums up the band's place in a venerable tradition of country-rock hurtin' songs and their singular status within it.
Sure, you've heard bands like Spider Bags before; on first contact, you'd swear they were some half-remembered mid-1990s band that got lost in the college-radio shuffle among the Silver Jews, the Grifters, and Ass Ponys. But it's been an awful long time since you've heard a band pull off this sort of southern-fried slop-pop with such charm, craftiness, and self-deprecating wit. On their second album, Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, Spider Bags re-imagine Neil Young's Tonight's the Night as a Saturday-night party album: They're bleary eyed and wobbly kneed, but they're going down on swinging (or, at least, swigging).
Spider Bags' ragged but resilient spirit has made them heroes to Titus Andronicus, who have covered the Bags' signature song "Waking Up Drunk", though Bags don't share their New Jersey successors' penchant for burn-it-down drama. But the songs on Goodbye Cruel World twist and turn more than you'd expect from a country-rock album, riffing on standard verse-chorus-verse templates before introducing an even more rewarding, final-act change-up, whether it's the poignant pedal-steeled finale to the front-porch picker "Swimmer on a String" or the giddy stream of "na na na na na"s appended to the early-Replacements trash-pop of "Dishrag". Even the typical juke-joint rave-up "Long White Desert Rose" upends the formula, revealing its chorus only during a sustained build-up in the final 90 seconds, and sending it aloft on a bed of "ooh ooh ooh" backing harmonies.
Though Spider Bags have just two albums and a handful of 7"s to the their name so far, the band's MySpace bio is quick to point out that its members have been playing in bands for 15 years, and Cruel World's best songs ruminate on their refusal to grow up, albeit with a wisdom and clarity that you acquire only in your mid-30s: on the corroded jangle-pop of "Hey Delinquents", frontman Dan McGee plays an advisory big-brother role to a younger generation of misfits, while "Que Viva El Rocanroll" is a sloshed, shoulder-to-shoulder last-call waltz for those who really should know better than to stay out past 3 a.m. on a weeknight. And then there's the seven-minute colossus "Trouble", on which McGee owns up to a lifetime of deviancy before his mantric chorus line yields to a surprisingly nasty bout of wah-wah-pedal abuse. If there's a problem with Cruel World, it's that it never regains its proper footing after this monster jam; for an album that routinely inspires a certain raised-fist perseverance, the somber, Califoned pastorale "Here Now" is a bit of a bummer note to go out on. Sure, that album title sets you up for life's great letdowns, but Spider Bags' greatest attribute is making you believe you can rise above them. | 2009-11-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2009-11-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Birdman | November 4, 2009 | 7.6 | 3e4cf54e-0587-4fef-8369-c86d5afc438b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This box packages most of Meshuggah’s recorded work—7 studio albums and 3 EPs—and offers an overview of how this extreme metal band pushed the entire genre head-first into the future. | This box packages most of Meshuggah’s recorded work—7 studio albums and 3 EPs—and offers an overview of how this extreme metal band pushed the entire genre head-first into the future. | Meshuggah: 25 Years of Musical Deviance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22142-25-years-of-musical-deviance/ | 25 Years of Musical Deviance | It’s always unmistakable when you hear it: the sound of a genre being thrust head-first into its future. Even 20-plus years later, the first two tracks from Meshuggah’s 1995 sophomore album Destroy Erase Improve still induce that goosebump-y feeling of a chapter in music history being written in real time. On these two tracks alone, “Future Breed Machine” and “Beneath,” the Swedish quintet singlehandedly revolutionized metal by creating a startlingly fresh rhythmic template that's been widely imitated but never duplicated. This box packages most of Meshuggah’s recorded work—7 studio albums and 3 EPs. Completists and casual consumers alike should be aware: None of the music on this set is remastered, nor does it contain any live material. It also lacks much of the bonus material that was included on previous reissues of the individual albums. It is what it says it is: A box with albums in it. But taken together, it allows listeners to chart the band’s course prior to its gargantuan footprint on metal and, perhaps more importantly, its drive to continue exploring ever since.
To put it in layperson's terms, Meshuggah significantly upped the “math” factor in metal by overlaying time signatures in such complex and absorbing patterns that listening too intently can throw off your breathing and make you too conscious of your heart rate. Like metal’s answer to Steve Reich, Meshuggah’s music consists of a meshwork of phrases playing out in lengthy cycles which intersect in ways that initially sound unnatural and even arrhythmic to the human ear. Trying to follow drummer Tomas Haake’s snare hits in relation to the accents in guitarists’ Mårten Hagström and Fredrik Thordendal’s sliding riffs is akin to watching windshield wipers slide in and out of alignment.
Such is the band’s impact outside of metal that it has inspired formal musical analysis from the conservatory sphere. For stunning visual graphs of Meshuggah’s rhythmic “deviance,” you can consult pages 4, 6, and 9 of UNC Greensboro music theory professor Guy Capuzzo’s 2014 paper A Cyclic Approach to Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah. Seven years prior, CUNY professor Jonathan Pieslak (who, in addition to composition studies the intersection of music and radical/extremist culture) wrote Re-Casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah for Music Theory Spectrum. When the band released obZen in 2008, Nuclear Blast included a printout of Pieslak’s paper in the presskit.
It’s amusing to note that the members of Meshuggah have minimal musical training and as such don’t interpret their music the same as a theoretician would. In an interview (that I conducted) that same year, Haake basically shrugged-off Pieslak’s analysis and countered that he feels the music as if it were all laid-out over a basic 4/4 platform—which seems absurd but offers a peek into how the band sees its own style. “The 4/4 that we write and play around is the most important aspect,” he said at the time. “I usually play eighth notes on the hi hat all the time. So everyone in the band can headbang.”
For better or worse, there are few other clues as to how Meshuggah found its signature groove. In the same interview, Haake denied Reich as an influence and went so far as to claim that he couldn’t trace Meshuggah’s style to any outside influences at all. While hard to believe, Haake’s claim suggests that the band is only dimly conscious of the depth of its own music and is in fact blindly following a muse of unknown origin—a sign of the most pure form of creation. When you listen to the first four titles in this set—the 1989 Meshuggah EP (widely known as Psykisk Testbild), the band’s 1991 full-length debut Contradictions Collapse, the 1994 None EP, and the aforementioned Destroy Erase Improve, the transformation from an unremarkable death metal band nursing a Metallica influence to world-dominating game changer appears inexplicably swift.
None, the first of the band’s releases to include Hagström and set the band’s four-person creative core in place, shows the first stirrings of what make Meshuggah so unique. Thordendal begins to come into his own, with glimpses of spacey Allan Holdsworth/Wayne Krantz-inspired leads that add a splash of the inverted new-age jazz fusion that became so integral to Meshuggah’s sound. Hints of Haake’s headbanging groove and tricky snare placement appear as well, but even then None documents a band clumsily bumping around to define itself. Released just 8 months later, Destroy Erase Improve captures Meshuggah striding forward with breathtaking authority and leaving its early work—and the rest of the metal pack—in the dust.
By the time the band returned in 1998 with Chaosphere, it was clear that Meshuggah was working from a position of confidence. Clearly, the elements that defined its vocabulary had gelled into a new language no one had ever spoken before. Paced more evenly than Destroy Erase Improve, the hard-thrashing Chaosphere offers a snapshot of Meshuggah at their most fluid, as an unrelenting procession of uptempo riffs swirls in a rhythmic vortex. The uniform attack of the songs might suggest that Meshuggah had taken a step backwards, but the opposite is true.
Even amidst the Ritalin-fueled technical death metal bonanza of the mid-90s, Meshuggah’s brand of mathematical precision stood out. Where the typical approach at the time was to overwhelm listeners by cramming as many ideas as possible into a tune or even a single measure, Meshuggah exercised an unprecedented level of patience. By sustaining its technical prowess over elongated passages, the band showed that it had more control than its peers. Of course, pushing boundaries ultimately spells trouble for just about any artist with the nerve to do it, so it’s no surprise that Meshuggah ran up against the limits of their own innovations on their next album, 2002’s Nothing.
At this stage, Hagström and Thordendal made a significant change by switching from 7-string guitars to 8-string guitars. Most bands get “heavier” by tuning-down, but with Meshuggah the opposite happened. Where the breakneck tempos of the previous two albums highlighted the band’s unparalleled dexterity, the lower tuning lent itself to slower tempos that simply plod. As a case in point, “Rational Gaze” sounds like a re-hash of the Chaosphere track “New Millennium Cyanide Christ,” only without the drive and passion. Haake, the band’s principal lyricist, fashioned Nothing as a cold stare into the all-encompassing emptiness that fuels the music’s existential dread. You’d expect that the newly-adopted doom-y approach would suit the material well, but instead of an invigorating experience contemplating bleakness, Nothing feels more like the sound of Meshuggah trying to pull their van out of a swamp.
Especially after a four-year wait, Nothing appeared to slam the brakes on Meshuggah’s forward progress, and it would take the band a few more releases to recalibrate its sense of direction. An engaging side detour, the 2004 EP I consisted of a single 20-minute piece of music stitched together out of random ideas. After the stultifying Nothing, the meandering I cast the band as both looser/more free to experiment but also somewhat creatively lost. And the chances it took on I, some of which verge on free noise, would turn out not to bear fruit when the band released its next proper full-length, Catch Thirtythree, the following year. As an indication of the holding pattern Meshuggah was in at the time, Catch Thirtythree begins with “Autonomy Lost,” yet another rehash of the groove from “New Millennium Cyanide Christ.”
When Meshuggah returned three years later with obZen, however, the band had somehow hit on a magic combination of its earlier freneticism and its later affinity for brooding reflection. When bands opt to mash their approaches from previous records into a hybrid sound, it usually signals a kind of creative surrender, a waving of the white flag that they’re done pushing for modes of expression. Not so here, as obZen showcases a once-again strident Meshuggah moving through the things they do best with confidence and—more importantly—with renewed vigor. The variation in tempos works wonders, and even when the music slinks along at a sludgy crawl, obZen never fails to engage with its layers of subtlety.
It’s been four years—a typical break—since the last Meshuggah album, 2012’s Koloss. On Koloss, once again the band shifts down to a slower, groove-oriented approach, but this time it sounds more limber and less encumbered by its own muscularity. As a result, the space in the arrangements leaves room for something approaching a tribal-percussion feel. Meanwhile, a shift towards a slightly more raw production style allows for the band’s energy to shine through in ways that Nothing and Catch Thirtythree lacked. There’s no telling where Meshuggah will go next, but if Koloss is any indication we shouldn’t be surprised if the band still has a few curveballs up its sleeve. Wherever its music goes from here, though, its impact on its home genre remains unassailable—and unforgettable. | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | null | August 1, 2016 | 4 | 3e51f3ac-08bd-46f9-8d21-0ce89061005a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Even among the glut of bands currently exploring the first-wave strain of post-punk, East Berlin’s Diät stand out. Positive Energy is a dark punk record, but the title isn't an ironic pose: they use sarcasm as a way to get to the heart of the matter. | Even among the glut of bands currently exploring the first-wave strain of post-punk, East Berlin’s Diät stand out. Positive Energy is a dark punk record, but the title isn't an ironic pose: they use sarcasm as a way to get to the heart of the matter. | Diät: Positive Energy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20994-positive-energy/ | Positive Energy | It’s easy, even facile, to compare post-punk bands with a monotone baritone vocalist to Joy Division. In a world of unending and presently meaningless commercial riffs on the infamous Unknown Pleasures artwork (look, you can get it printed on leggings!), the Manchester quartet are the first reference for people who don’t know much about the subgenre—that’s not a slight, simply a fact.
Post-punk is rich and expansive territory, though, and there have been bands mining it consistently from 1978 onward. Even among the glut of bands currently exploring the first-wave strain of post-punk, East Berlin’s Diät stand out, much like their labelmates Total Control. Their song structures are playful and unique, their riffs memorable, their lyrics sly and clever, and their rhythm section unbelievably taut (check the drum solo that opens "Toonie"). While there will doubtless be comparisons to Joy Division, I hear more Blitz circa Second Empire Justice in the guitar lines (bless Diät’s hearts for using the chorus pedal to genuine effect rather than just applying it flat across the entire record), more Crisis in the politic, more Bauhaus in the unfettered energy of the playing, more Modern English circa Mesh and Lace in the song structures.
Diät are more than the sum of their influences, and they prove what I suspected from their first two 7"s, released in 2012 and 2013: their debut LP was worth the several-year wait. These songs were worked to the smallest detail. "Young and Successful" is wry commentary on how we internalize the capitalist work ethic, and on the line "Write a manifesto, write a shopping list," the song ends abruptly, hanging, grasping, as it should. "Hurricane", with its slow percussive build and sharp riff, is about Chris Dorner and the inherent tensions of policing, and the subject fits perfectly with the ominous instrumentation. "Nightmares" is fast and meaty and propulsive, more punk than post-.
There’s also a Cannanes cover on this record, of all things, and it is a really good one: that is to say, it does right by the well-loved original while putting Diät's own powerful spin on it. This brings me to the title of the album—Positive Energy might seem like a misnomer upon first bleak recognizance, but it’s not. Look no further than a cover of a song by a well-loved Australian indie pop band (some say they were among the '80s twee originators) on a dark punk record for the truth: "positive energy" isn’t an ironic pose for Diät. It’s not the kind of sarcasm that goes nowhere. It’s in their approach to music—sarcasm as a way to get to the heart of the matter, with the beating heart still going despite the outside world’s many attempts to still it, that heartbeat being the most important thing, the only thing. | 2015-09-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Iron Lung | September 18, 2015 | 7 | 3e52632b-6761-45fd-a47d-086b418d3c1c | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The “Alaska” star’s second album, which shares its title with her Harvard Divinity School thesis, asks big questions about life through confident pop anthems. | The “Alaska” star’s second album, which shares its title with her Harvard Divinity School thesis, asks big questions about life through confident pop anthems. | Maggie Rogers: Surrender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maggie-rogers-surrender/ | Surrender | After emerging in 2016 with “Alaska,” a folksy electronica song that went viral after impressing Pharrell Williams, Maggie Rogers started checking off the boxes to become a pop star: a debut SNL performance, a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, sets at every festival under the sun. When the pandemic began, she decamped to her family’s home in Maine, where she reconnected with nature and wrote a collection of songs called Surrender—which is also the name of her 2022 Harvard Divinity School thesis. Oh yeah: While working on the follow-up to her 2019 debut Heard It in a Past Life, Rogers was enrolled in a year-long masters program focused on the presence of religion in public life. For the 28-year-old singer-scholar that meant considering questions like: Does an artist hold a responsibility to their audience? And how can performance be a conduit for a transcendental experience?
If it sounds a little Ivy League Hannah Montana—finals by day, Met Gala by night—Rogers’ return to academia served her well. On Surrender, she sounds renewed, submitting to the pull of her heart without apology. She plays hooky from adulthood on the upbeat “Be Cool” and gives into her carnal instincts on “Want Want”; she’s turning off the radio and listening to the wind instead of suffering through “that song I’m supposed to know/By some fucking bro,” as she teases on “Anywhere With You.” She’s still processing her whirlwind rise to fame, and learning what to prioritize: “Took me all this long to figure out/It’s not worth it/If I can’t touch the ground,” she sings on the ballad “Horses,” which uses the titular animals as a symbol for the freedom she so badly desires.
The album itself reflects Rogers’ newfound autonomy: She’s trimmed back on her debut’s stable of producers, co-producing Surrender herself alongside Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Shawn Mendes). One of the best moments, the escapist fantasy “Anywhere With You,” was co-written with an old friend, Holden Jaffe, who makes music under the name Del Water Gap (Rogers performed in an earlier version of the project while in college). On the song, Rogers lifts a companion out of their existential malaise before the pair hit the road in search of something bigger than themselves. Like so many road songs, it’s also a declaration of devotion, a commitment to journeying forward together even as their thoughts on forever differ: “You tell me you want everything you want it fast,” Rogers bellows atop a cathartic crescendo that would not sound out of place on an early Arcade Fire record. “But all I’ve ever wanted is to make something/Fucking last.”
Rogers’ hunger is matched by her physical voice. Her once breathy tone has deepened into a register that sounds right at home alongside a singer like Florence Welch, who contributes backing vocals to “Shatter.” And on the opener “Overdrive,” Rogers sounds absolutely gigantic as she laments a crumbling relationship atop a wistful piano melody. When she lives in this range, her guttural voice grounds the idiosyncratic production flourishes—wiggly synth squiggles, playful beats, whimsical samples—that have occasionally overcrowded her songwriting. She’s still inclined to make unexpected choices, like on the state of the union “That’s Where I Am,” a sleek and confident pop anthem built atop waves of distortion and wobbly effects. The flourishes are more subtle on the sprawling “Begging for Rain,” even with the barely-contained jazz extrovert Jon Batiste on melodica, lending a softness to Rogers’ reflections on futility: “You work all day to find religion/And end up standing in your kitchen/Wondering ’bout the way its always been.”
While Rogers has certainly grown as a songwriter, there’s still the odd moment in need of some fine tuning. On “I’ve Got a Friend,” Rogers pays tribute to a pal with a cornucopia of complexities—she’s “been there through it all/Masturbates to Rob Pattinson staring at the wall.” It’s the type of feel-good acoustic number meant to inspire appreciation for one’s own chosen family (and their weird sexual proclivities) but the simplicity of lyrical structure alongside the overflowing earnestness comes off as juvenile in the context of Rogers’ more ambitious or poetic swings. “Shatter”’s fervor is fueled by a relentless onslaught of heavy-handed ’80s new wave, and that’s before a clunky line like, “I know there’s people everywhere with injustice on their lips/And there’s this open wound bleeding between my hips.”
But then there’s a song like “Symphony,” which underlines that Rogers is at her best when she’s given a challenge. Co-written with Gabe Goodman, the five-minute pseudo-lullaby gradually builds into a constellation of swirling electric guitars and huffy breathwork until there’s a natural exhale. “Can you live like nothing’s left,” she murmurs. “Forget your emptiness/Take a breath.” When Surrender follows this advice, it suggests that Rogers has grasped something like transcendence, a release worth chasing. | 2022-07-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | July 29, 2022 | 7.3 | 3e54af95-3a5f-4e12-8ee4-167ada14d29d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Intriguing debut by composer Ryan Lott is an unusual blend of approaches, especially for a release on Anticon: the lyrical concerns of Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, sonic techniques from Massive Attack, and the classical habits of Nico Muhly. | Intriguing debut by composer Ryan Lott is an unusual blend of approaches, especially for a release on Anticon: the lyrical concerns of Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, sonic techniques from Massive Attack, and the classical habits of Nico Muhly. | Son Lux: At War With Walls & Mazes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11178-at-war-with-walls-mazes/ | At War With Walls & Mazes | Son Lux's debut, At War With Walls & Mazes, resembles the classical concerto. Electronic composer and Son Lux leader Ryan Lott is the soloist, with gentle, sparse vocals, against a backdrop of classical instruments. Occasionally a single organic sound rises behind Lott's utterances, like the bass guitar peeling away from the timberline drum creaks and overlapping whispers on "Raise". These are rarities; for the lion's share of the album's 45 minutes the mood is severe. Son Lux perches over a digital wilderness-- a wilderness of recreated crowd noise, cracked samples, and mutated loops. Laid out as a narrative (beginning with "Prologue" and tidying up with "Epilogue"), with sharp, direct titles ("Wither", "Stand", "War"), Walls & Mazes has a coarseness, a fatalism, between Lott and the landscapes he creates. It's a heaviness of heart relieved only when those interceding instruments (cello on "Stay", the supple, measured piano on "Break") twine with the vocals against the molded chaos.
But there are lights in the darkness and a holy ghost in the Son Lux machine. At War With Walls & Mazes is an album infused with a religiosity that's at times humble and unnamed and at times romantic. "Where have all the holy gone?/ Is there no one to condemn you?/ Where have all the wicked gone?/ Is there no one left to beat you down?", he asks on "Break". The imagery is clear, the sentiment classic, and the delivery hushed and awed. It's the sonic background that's so affecting. That twist in the combination produces odd troikas of comparison: the lyrical concerns of Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, production techniques from Massive Attack, and the classical habits of Nico Muhly.
And even when Lott is playing for us here on Earth, the album's concerns are stained. "Will you love me/ Like he loves me?" Son Lux mews on the clinging, almost uncomfortably sensuous "Stay". That "He" should probably be capitalized. Later, on "Betray": "You will betray me baby/ And I will be true." (Sucks to be "You"). Lott is a performance artist at heart-- he's had his multimedia projects featured in the Guggenheim and produces as much music for choreography as he does for just listeners. As an album, Walls & Mazes may have moments of gauzy, near-inert tinkering-- "Stand" and "Tell"-- and it's no doubt an emotionally draining listen, but as a project, as an aesthetic, there's a resonant, engaging conflict. A good friend of mine once said there were only three proper subjects for rock songs: God, Girls, and Growing Up. Ryan Lott proves with Walls & Mazes that he's got the first one down. How orthodox will the next ones sound? | 2008-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2008-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Anticon | March 3, 2008 | 7 | 3e56392c-4211-40ae-a971-7885cdd9fee7 | Evan McGarvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-mcgarvey/ | null |
The London rapper’s third album extends his carnal and philosophical investigation of masculinity against lush, robust beats that evoke a distinctly Black British take on G-funk. | The London rapper’s third album extends his carnal and philosophical investigation of masculinity against lush, robust beats that evoke a distinctly Black British take on G-funk. | J Hus: Beautiful and Brutal Yard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-hus-beautiful-and-brutal-yard/ | Beautiful and Brutal Yard | Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s best-known revelation after a decade of exile and imprisonment was that “the line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” J Hus seems to have had a similar epiphany after 27 years of London, and eight or so navigating the music industry. On the cover of his third album, Beautiful and Brutal Yard, there are two houses: one engulfed in flames, the other smothered in bright blooms. Smoke and petals intermingle, and the whole thing takes the shape of a human heart.
Like Solzhenitsyn, J Hus is just as concerned with unpicking the knots of his own humanity as he is the societal structures and injustices that have shaped it. Where a contemporary like Dave trained his focus on the meta structures, Stormzy on the spiritual, Hus is utterly physical: in his comic posturing, in the way he rolls words on his tongue like hot food, in his juvenile descriptions of sex, and—more so than perhaps any other rapper working in the UK at the moment—his ability to make even the stiffest listener move. More specifically, he’s interested in what it means to be a man. Driven by this inquiry, Beautiful and Brutal Yard ends up a sprawling tome on the nuances and pressures of Black masculinity. The album’s intro implores Hus to show people the real him; the rest of BABY is the sound of him figuring out what exactly that means.
After 2020’s Big Conspiracy was mired by leaks and a forced rush release, Hus effectively disappeared from public life. (The fact it still hit No. 1 in the UK spoke to his unique influence.) He wrote off live shows and sequestered himself in the studio, emerging sporadically as a featured artist. It was around this time, you sensed, that Hus started wondering where he truly belonged. “I was in my home but I was feeling like a foreigner,” he raps over a tumbling bassline on “Comeback.” In BABY’s album trailer we see him pulled between country estate and social housing. But more than what or where you call home, it’s love, pain, and power—and how men can express them—that form the binding concerns of BABY. So we hear Hus operating in different modes: walking guns into nightclubs, robbing watches over palm wine guitars; curling up with Jorja Smith on “Nice Body,” while she begs him to open up. Wanting to flirt, on “My Baby,” he downs drinks for Dutch courage.
Hus has always contained these multitudes. The one bounding out of prison and onto Drake’s stage at the O2 in 2019, and the one—hot-headed, with PTSD—that put him behind bars in the first place. The one obsessed with willies and the one with weapons; the one obsessed with calling his willy a weapon. He rhymes in patois, MLE, pidgin, and Wolof. Musically, BABY slides effortlessly between moods too: horns and slinky drums here, plucked G-Unit strings and sliding 808 basslines there. Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox. Thumbed, hall party highlife basslines are refigured for a new generation—though some of the more choice lyrics about “the finger blaster” and sticking a “thumb in your anus” might raise more than blushes among the aunties and uncles. The instrumentation is plush and organic: Drums slap and rumble, skin on skin; guitars glisten. If 2019’s “Must Be”—all sex-groove sax and murderous threats—was Hus experimenting with a distinctly Black British take on G-funk, then those trials have reached maturation here.
All this opens up pockets for Hus to explore and subvert the clichés of modern masculinity. He’s endlessly playful with language, toying with his vowels on “Massacre.” He channels the ironic East End gangsterism of Guy Ritchie movies and grime MCs on “Come Look,” where intimate descriptions of violence play off against threats to whack someone’s “noggin.” The charisma with which he carries it off only emphasizes how awkward Drake is droning on about “your backside” being “so fit” on summer front-runner “Who Told You.” Other guests to the Hus house fare better. Naira Marley is pure arm’s-length cool on “Militerian”; Villz reprises his road-rap sidekick role from a 2015 Crib Session on “Comeback”; and Burna Boy delivers a hook for the ages on thematic centerpiece “Masculine”—splitting the word “balaclava” into an exquisite couplet. It’s the kind of touch that would seem simplistic if it didn’t come dripping with so much charm.
Back in 2017, Hus clammed up with shyness at a mention of the Wolof nickname, “baba,” that his mum gave him. “I think it means baby or something in my language,” he said. Six years later, as BABY draws on (it does lack some of the compactness of Big Conspiracy), Hus raps a whole song in his mother tongue. Even laying aside the technical feat, “Come Gully Bun (Gambian President)” feels revelatory as he figures out how to piece all the bits of himself together. “Avoid all the bullshit and the nonsense,” he soothes on the final track “Playing Chess”—a whole world away from the gun-waving opener. “I know how it feels but I can’t really say,” goes the chorus, at a loss for words. “I did let myself go,” he re-roots himself, “but never again.” Welcome home, Momodou. | 2023-07-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Butter | July 17, 2023 | 8.1 | 3e56a03e-54e7-4fb4-a925-4d65b5879ff0 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Although it’s neither as purposeful nor as prescient as many of his earlier EPs, Sam Beam’s latest release carries far more weight than its self-deprecating title implies. | Although it’s neither as purposeful nor as prescient as many of his earlier EPs, Sam Beam’s latest release carries far more weight than its self-deprecating title implies. | Iron & Wine: Weed Garden EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iron-and-wine-weed-garden-ep/ | Weed Garden EP | Let’s start at the end of Iron & Wine’s new EP, Weed Garden. As the final verse of the final song, “Talking to Fog,” reaches its climax, Sam Beam offers a vivid description of happiness. It’s a place “where our memories of singing fill the air above our heads” and “the faces of our family and friends go on and on.” With each line, his delivery grows faster and more insistent, until the words spill out of his mouth and he sounds more like a soothsayer than a folk singer. It’s one of the most jarring moments Iron & Wine has conjured in quite some time, particularly when the instruments fall away and Beam, singing a cappella, admits: “But it’s hard to find.” In a song about sorrow and depression, he’s hopeful enough to dream up a beautiful space of healing and nourishment, but realistic enough to know that it’s almost impossible to get there. Nothing is ever certain in these songs, nothing guaranteed.
Such realizations lend Weed Garden more weight than the odds-and-ends collection its title implies. Beam penned these songs for last year’s Beast Epic but didn’t complete them in time. For fans, “Waves of Galveston” may be the standout, a favorite of live audiences that dates back five years. With its loping verses and buoyant chorus, it mingles the mundane with the fantastical: “There’s a graveyard by the pizza parlor,” Beam sings, as though pointing out local landmarks to a visitor. “Snowbirds fly away like secrets no one really wants to know.” It’s impossible to tell if he’s observing the real place or imagining some mythical Galveston; either way, he’s playing up the Texas city’s history of destruction—most famously in 1900, most recently in 2017—in a way that doesn’t feel fully earned. The metaphor dwarfs the song.
Perhaps that’s why it's on an EP instead of an LP. Beam has used the abbreviated format strategically throughout his career. 2003’s The Sea & the Rhythm quickly followed his full-length debut, enlarging his frame of reference to prove he was no fluke. Two years later, the excellent Woman King and the Calexico collaboration In the Reins introduced electric textures that predicted the twisting paths he would take on 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog. Weed Garden is never quite so purposeful or prescient. We do get to glimpse novel facets of Iron & Wine, like “Milkweed,” whose melody seems to dissipate even as the words leave Beam’s mouth. On the other hand, we also get songs like “Last of Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Heroes,” whose folk-funk groove is an ungainly as its flippancy toward its titular subject.
Perhaps that’s why “What Hurts Worse” stands out: Rather than offering a new trick by this old shepherd’s dog, it reinforces what makes Iron & Wine so distinctive. Beam excavates everyday truths, writing about relationships with a directness that can be disarming: “Let’s become the lovers we need,” he sings, forcefully. “Who knew we’d be needing so much?” And yet, there’s something celebratory in the melody, something that suggests our needs and our pains can define us in positive rather than negative ways. It’s a song that recalls Iron & Wine’s early albums, when Beam seemed like the scout we had sent ahead to report back on our final moments, to show us the fate that awaits us all. While his music has grown more ornate, both musically and lyrically, the idea of you and me and him and everybody else in the world as finite beings continues to inform every strum of his guitar and every softly uttered syllable. | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | August 31, 2018 | 7 | 3e5bc520-ad4e-4971-836c-8d21ce84f19c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
*Brokenlegged *is a rich and multifaceted emo record, exploring not only the expected moments of catharsis, but the hangovers that arise in their aftermath. | *Brokenlegged *is a rich and multifaceted emo record, exploring not only the expected moments of catharsis, but the hangovers that arise in their aftermath. | Sinai Vessel: Brokenlegged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22793-brokenlegged/ | Brokenlegged | The title of Labor Pains was wasted on Sinai Vessel’s debut. Frontman Caleb Cordes joked that the process of making the follow-up had become a full-blown “DIY Frank Ocean sort of thing”—writing, recording, ditching the original mixes and re-recording has put five and a half years worth of distance between Brokenlegged and its predecessor (three and change if you include the Profanity EP). It’s an odd position for an emo band to be in—perfectionism is about the exact opposite of what its devotees ask for. After all, this music thrives on unsteady vocals, careening aggression and the immediacy of desperation and epiphany. Listeners and artists tend to age fast, distancing themselves from their dearly beheld truths of two years prior. When Labor Pains dropped in 2011, today’s conscientious scene leaders Modern Baseball and the Hotelier were still teenage pop-punk bands. Fortunately, Cordes has made the most out of the protracted wait: Brokenlegged is a rich and multifaceted emo record, exploring not only the expected moments of catharsis, but the complicated hangovers that arise in their aftermath.
It makes for a logical follow-up to the gnarled, strident Profanity, which used mewithoutYou and Pedro the Lion as both sonic and lyrical guidance in how to extricate oneself from an evangelical upbringing. Reaffirming North Carolina as home after college, Cordes described the main theme of Brokenlegged as, “trying to figure out how to live among people who haven’t come to the same realizations of truth as you...who just take the status quo as being the truth.” Whatever that meant for him during the creation of Brokenlegged, it’s a loaded statement that’s going to be interpreted a very specific way in January of 2017. Red-state living isn’t addressed all that much in indie rock (or any genre) and as we’ve all seen on our Facebook feeds and family gatherings in the past few months, even well-intentioned attempts to breach this topic easily fall victim to either barely concealed anger or condescension.
Lead single “Dogs” (a presumptive sequel to Profanity’s “Cats”) could have fell victim to both, as a loftily-worded worded indictment of religious zealots. The general theme is familiar, exposing the hypocrisy of fundamentalists othering those who live in their same community in the name of love, and Cordes doesn’t fall into the same trap. There’s a “write what you know”/“know your enemy” wisdom in “Dogs” that puts it in a league with Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash” or the Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee, rare examples of indie rock that look directly at this kind of pathology rather than simply looking down on it.
“Dogs” is something of an outlier; most of Brokenlegged isn’t as overt about its spiritual and political leanings. The few immediately understandable lyrics—“It gets better every day, move along,” “I used to be scared/I used to be just like you”—are crucial guideposts through Cordes’ occasionally impenetrable thickets of allusive imagery.
Often times, it's easier and just as rewarding to derive the meaning from the clenched intensity of Sinai Vessel's hardworking and exceedingly dense arrangements. The songs have sturdy, solid cores, and intriguing details at the edges justifying the band's exacting craftsmanship. Grace notes, like the vibraphone ringing through the pregnant atmosphere of “Ramekin” or the caustic yells that interrupt “Laughlin,” push Sinai Vessel outside of the swaying, ocean-sprayed sound that defines the bulk of Brokenlegged. Though the eight songs here barely take up a half hour, they assume the heft of a record twice its length.
Ironically, Cordes’ painstaking songwriting only comes off as ostentatious on the album's sparest song. “Died on My Birthday” is a solo acoustic number performed as grave and solemnly as it’s titled, its immediacy sapped by counterintuitive word choices: cacophonous phrases like “rattles our lentil bowls” and “cruel lunch” land like sprained ankles, while “arbiter” and “fortnight” become distractions in the way “judge” or “two weeks” wouldn’t. Some might hear it as Brokenlegged’s answer to the Hotelier’s “Housebroken,” a brief tailspin on a record with an otherwise masterfully controlled trajectory. It just also just as easily have an “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”-like life outside of Brokenlegged, the breakout on an otherwise glistening, depressive and cohesive record. Either way, the manner in which Cordes puts himself out there with his superhumanly earnest delivery ensures it truly belongs. Brokenlegged isn't perfection—could it be trusted if it was?—but every second sounds like it earned its right to exist. | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | January 25, 2017 | 7.7 | 3e5cc233-a157-414d-85f9-b6b48da342bf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their sixth studio LP, the Walkmen use mariachi horns and echoes of 1950s production styles to realize their wounded, anxious, and affecting songs. | On their sixth studio LP, the Walkmen use mariachi horns and echoes of 1950s production styles to realize their wounded, anxious, and affecting songs. | The Walkmen: Lisbon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14605-lisbon/ | Lisbon | The Walkmen are kings of dejection. For about a decade now, they've turned their albums into symphonies of disappointment and resentment and regret. Their proudest moments, then, are also their most down-and-out. Their best song, "The Rat", is a world-weary, old-before-its-time rager, a song from a young guy seeing that he's already falling out of step with the universe and feeling pissed about it. Their second-best song, "In the New Year", sounds triumphant and optimistic at first, but on further listens it reveals itself to be as much a plea as anything else, a secular prayer that shit just please start working out right. The specific brand of desperation that the band conjures is miles away from, say, the throbbing, dread-laced depression of fellow dapper New Yorkers the National. The Walkmen are more theatrical and unwound than that-- they're the guys out in the middle of the street, screaming up at the sky, begging to know why everything always falls apart.
In that elegantly disheveled mutter-wail thing of his, frontman Hamilton Leithauser starts new album Lisbon off by singing: "You're with someone else tomorrow night/ Doesn't matter to me/ 'Cause as the sun dies into the hill/ You got all I need." He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance. The band's specific style of indie rock is very rooted in a scrappy, scratchy New York tradition that dates back to the Velvet Underground or Bob Dylan, but their take on it is theirs and theirs alone. You know one of their songs right away when those winding, circular guitars and surging drums and gargling vocals kick in. They're so performative in their sadness, but that stuff never rankles or comes off tantrumy, since the band is just so good at this stuff. There's a song on Lisbon called "Woe Is Me", and it's not even remotely a joke. Great song, too.
This is a band that cares deeply about things like microphone placement, and so everything sounds just unbelievably crisp and warm-- except when it's not supposed to, as on the purposefully weird, strangulated two-minute panic attack "Follow the Leader". And even though they sound very much like themselves throughout, there are some great variations in here. "Stranded" uses beaten-down mariachi horns to massively graceful effect. "Victory" (which, naturally, is about never achieving victory) has the same sort of blood-pounding chorus that "The Rat" does. "Torch Song" is a song about a song, about not knowing the right song to "calm down all the madness," but the amber Twin Peaks Angelo Badalamenti fuzz on the track is just heart-stopping gorgeous. The Walkmen know what they're doing here.
In early interviews, Leithauser claimed that Lisbon got its sonic inspiration from ancestral Sun Records rockabilly. That influence never makes itself overtly known, but there are a few slick little old-school nods here and there, like the relentless Tennessee Three train-chug rhythm on "Blue as Your Blood", or the ahh-ahh backing vocals on "All My Great Designs". More than that, there's an economic speed and simplicity at work here; the songs might be reflective self-lacerating wallows, but they're fast wallows. Drummer Matt Barrick tends to play just off the beat, but he hits his drums just incredibly hard, with the sort of crisp wallop you feel in your teeth fillings. On the album's big, transcendent, loud moments, his crash cymbals sound like fists raining down on you from heaven, and he's still very much a force even on the quieter songs.
And that brings us to "Angela Surf City", the song on this album that deserves a place alongside "The Rat" and "In the New Year". It starts off tense and withdrawn, Leithauser singing about some relationship without ever letting us in on what, exactly, is going on. Underneath, there's a tense, withdrawn surf-rock beat. And when the chorus starts to well up, the music underneath keeps surging upward, becoming huger than anything the song should be able to handle, then getting even huger from there, as Barrick lets off relentless Bonham-level thundercracks. Leithauser sings guarded, terse stuff that I don't necessarily understand, but he wails it so hard that it comes out anthemic: "You took the high road! I couldn't find you!" The Walkmen play with restraint, and they don't usually allow themselves earth-shaking moments like that. But when those moments come, they're enough to send you spinning. | 2010-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | September 13, 2010 | 8.6 | 3e5e7cd9-ebe4-4e99-bbea-77be5dcfa3ed | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
Though they’ve been releasing music since the late ’80s, the New Zealand noise trio remain as vital, corrosive, and challenging as ever. | Though they’ve been releasing music since the late ’80s, the New Zealand noise trio remain as vital, corrosive, and challenging as ever. | The Dead C: Trouble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22320-trouble/ | Trouble | Age, according to conventional wisdom, is supposed to bring some measure of contentment. Edges have been worn off, battles have been won (or forfeited), and the prickly dissatisfaction of youth has given way to a philosophical cultivation of stability. Real life seldom turns out that way, of course. But with age, our impulse to see everything as an all-or-nothing binary means real life’s messy mix of war and peace becomes, at least, embraceable. It’s a familiar perspective for the Dead C. Formed thirty years ago in Dunedin, New Zealand, the trio of Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats has spent the overwhelming majority of their lives carving a cruel, transcendent path through the tangle of the noise-rock underground. Sometimes corrosive, sometimes constructive, the band’s output has remained as steady as it is volatile.
*Trouble *is the Dead C’s first full-length since 2013’s Armed Courage, and while the band has only aged three years since then, the accumulated weight of decades is everywhere. That weight, though, is no hindrance. Instead, it’s wielded like an industrial machine on “One,” the first of the album’s five, number-titled tracks. Extrusions of static and microaggressive twitches of dissonance, courtesy of the guitars of Russell and Morley, dot a minefield rife with Yeats’ percussive skitter. Halfway through its twenty-minute sprawl, the song splits open just wide enough to hear Morley’s ghost-moaned vocals, a sound halfway between a mumble and a hymn. Similarly long, “Four” is more taut—a strangulated barrage of wah-pedal feedback washed in jazzy, impressionistic cymbal-work. As it picks up steam, it collapses spectacularly under its own mass.
Though Trouble is nimble and fluid, the Dead C draw mainly on the gravity of their years. There’s a mournful air to “Two” after the opening drumbeat crawls to a momentary halt. The guitars helix around a sour melody, curling in the empty space where something used to be. Here, the album’s utilitarian non-titles make sense, as if to avoid conferring any context or intent. Likewise, a vague sense of loss howls through “Three,” which is also the record’s only true interval of fragility; the ten-minute middle of the song lapses into unhinged, human-like cries of confusion, weariness, surrender, and ultimately rage. It’s an uncanny-valley effect that captures a primordial eeriness, ancient and unsettling.
“I think of myself as the Jimi Hendrix of no technique,” Russell told *Wire *in a 2013 interview. As self-deprecating as he was, his offhand comment is as true now as it was then. And it applies to the Dead C as a whole. At just over five minutes, “Four” is the briefest track on Trouble, but it’s also the album’s heaviest and most conventionally accessible. Motifs, if not outright riffs, abound; the song’s play of rhythm, texture, and dynamic borders on the metallic. It’s enough to make you imagine the Dead C, men in their fifties, embarking on a new career as a doom band. Not that they’d need to. With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave. | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ba Da Bing | August 31, 2016 | 7.3 | 3e602b4c-2062-4ab4-8441-f92ffec091a6 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The composer turns to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 for inspiration in his bittersweet new orchestral work. | The composer turns to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 for inspiration in his bittersweet new orchestral work. | Max Richter: Voices | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-richter-voices/ | Voices | Deemed humanity’s Magna Carta by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 established a baseline for human rights around the world in the wake of the devastation of WWII. Its 30 articles respect the dignity of every human being and commit to nondiscrimination, while also guaranteeing rights to education, nationality, marriage, and leisure. It was an ambitious, wholly idealistic document then, and now—with the declining trend of democracy around the world—the goalposts of the UDHR feel even further away.
Which may be one of the reasons why composer Max Richter based his latest work, Voices, on this profound piece of legislation. Richter brings together recordings of people in over 70 countries reading the document with a massive, peculiarly assembled orchestra. Emphasizing the lower timbres of the ensemble, there are credits for 13 double bassists and 23 cellists, an inversion of most philharmonic rosters that Richter deems an “upside down” orchestra. Since his emergence in 2004 with The Blue Notebooks, Richter has proven adept at couching 19th-century romanticism in 21st-century pessimism, often using the human voice as conduit.
On “All Human Beings,” it’s fitting that one of the document’s main architects, Eleanor Roosevelt, appears first, her voice wrapped in crackle as she reads the preamble to the UDHR. But then the album’s principal voice, that of actor KiKi Layne, emerges to narrate the first two articles, before giving way to a solemn theme and a mournful violin solo. Already it feels like an insurmountable chasm between the words and the music, the hopeful ideal of the declaration offset by melancholy, Richter’s lament accentuating our failure as a global society to enact even a few of these guiding principles.
More voices arise and overlap (the album credits 32 Declaration readers), some reading the text in their native tongues, others lingering at the periphery, with Layne’s voice reappearing to demarcate sections. In the brief “Journey Piece,” Layne recites an article over a chatter of voices, which then mix with birdsong and a passing car. The unadorned piano at the heart of “Prelude 6” also stands apart for its spareness. Fascinating as it is to hear the full text of these articles aloud, the prose doesn’t have quite the same supple musicality as previous Richter sources like Franz Kafka’s journals or the letters of Virginia Woolf. After a few times through, the primary text of Voices starts to take on the rigidity of an employee conduct handbook from HR.
Voices’ most transportive moment comes during the 11-minute centerpiece “Chorale.” At first, Layne oddly recites the opening articles of the UDHR again, but when she recedes, a wordless choir takes her place. Their assembled voices eschew language altogether yet speak to the lofty themes of the Declaration. They present the curious entity that is humanity joined as one, stronger together yet always at risk of splintering. Such a beatific sound speaks to our angelic aspects, even when the music of Richter also suggests human fragility and our fallible nature.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Decca | August 5, 2020 | 6.6 | 3e612dbf-620f-4b68-8ad6-244e0687cab5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Talking Heads’ third album revealed a band to be relentless interrogators of music and its place in culture. It is a landmark album for the past and present of art-rock, an undisputed masterpiece. | Talking Heads’ third album revealed a band to be relentless interrogators of music and its place in culture. It is a landmark album for the past and present of art-rock, an undisputed masterpiece. | Talking Heads: Fear of Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-fear-of-music/ | Fear of Music | Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, begins at maximum velocity and minimum warmth. Congas, funk guitar, chirping synths: Everything is in motion, and yet curiously, nothing seems to be moving. A guitar figure like a crying baby keeps tripping the song’s downbeat, and in the closing seconds, a phased guitar line comes in played by Robert Fripp, layering 5/4 over 4/4 and effectively erasing whatever forward momentum this blank, pistoning thing was creating to begin with. The groove feels uncanny, a little inhuman, like a flag rippling in no wind.
The words, meanwhile, consist of barked nonsense syllables from Hugo Ball, a German poet of the Dada School. Dadaism mocked the very idea that words could convey meaning, that speakers could carry authority; for a band so devoted to verbal communication they named themselves after it, it was a forbidding gesture. And for fans of the New York band in the late ’70s, hearing “I Zimbra” might have felt like watching their hero obliterated in the first frame of the movie.
It was exactly this sort of hero’s-journey narrative into which Fear of Music seemed to cast a wrench. The band’s popularity and acclaim had been gathering heat; “Take Me to the River,” their stiff-legged cover version of the Al Green standard, peaked at No. 26 on the Hot 100. They’d appeared on Saturday Night Live and American Bandstand, and they’d been touring to steadily bigger crowds. Already the quintessential New York band to New Yorkers, now they risked becoming the quintessential New York band to everyone else—maybe even to the sorts of folks who lived in the “Big Country,” the places about which Byrne had already admitted, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”
Fear of Music can be read, in part, as an attempt to throw buckets of conceptual cold water on everything that had made the Talking Heads beloved, or to at least submit it to rigorous forensic testing. They experimented with their songwriting process; instead of working from Byrne’s compositions, they entered the studio cold, jamming together until the shape of something promising emerged. As they did on More Songs About Buildings and Food, they enlisted Brian Eno as producer, but this time Eno played a much bigger role: It was Eno who suggested a Table of Contents approach to the tracklist, which turned the song titles into a litany of proper nouns, and it was he who furnished the Hugo Ball poem for inspiration when Byrne was struggling with writer’s block.
As a band of former design students, the Talking Heads thought harder than most about presentation, about the telling power of surfaces. On Fear of Music, they repeatedly drew attention away from the picture to gesture at the frame: The radio announcement for the album was a simple, stilted intonation—“Talking Heads have a new album/It’s called Fear of Music”—repeated over and over. The album cover was a black obelisk, alternately bumpy and smooth but admitting no light and emitting no clues. There was a song called “Electric Guitar,” and the refrain, as the electric guitars gnashed their teeth in every available space, was “Never listen to electric guitar.” The bittersweet futility of this command neatly encapsulated a band that was a tangle of conflicting impulses in 1979. They shunned every method that had worked for them before, attempting perhaps to become a different version of themselves, and yet they only purified their essence. In jettisoning old methods and throwing themselves into new ones, they embraced the only true underlying force of their music: relentless interrogation.
The album plays out like a series of mini-stand up routines about the absurdity, or the pointlessness, of human observation. Each song contains at least one declaration of seeming authority (“Hold on, because it’s been taken care of”; “Find myself a city to live in”), which Byrne goes on to repeat with increasing mania and decreasing confidence. As the music subdivides itself into a million tiny repeating phrases, you feel a grasping mind trying and failing to find purchase.
“Everything seems to be up in the air at this time," Byrne observed mildly on “Mind,” with deadpan irony. On Fear of Music, he became our metaphysical straight man, able to defamiliarize the world, object by object, with his through-a-telescope gaze and his curious tone. He describes his “Mind” like some peculiar object that has crash-landed in his living room. “Drugs won’t change you/Religion won’t change you/What’s the matter with you?/I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Byrne mutters. Imagine a multi-tentacled alien attempting to put on a pair of pants; this was Byrne trying to make sense of reality.
The album is almost heroically funny, each song a fit of pique aimed at the broadest and most pervasive targets imaginable: paper (things never fit on it), electric guitars (you should never listen to it), and air—for god’s sake, air. “Air can hurt you, too,” Byrne reminds us—a hell of a retort to the patronizing suggestion to “get some air.” He agonizes over the existence of “Animals”; “They’re never there when you need them/They’re never there when you call them.” He sounds incensed, deranged, his voice going guttural and squeaky—the performance is a hair’s breadth away from shtick. His voice rises to an indignant peak at the biggest insult: Animals “don’t even know what a joke is.”
The music seems to know exactly what a joke is, and there are points where it seems to be laughing directly at you. There’s the “nyah-nyah” keyboard refrain on “I Zimbra,” the chittering keyboard on “Mind” like a bird that won’t shut up outside your window, undermined by Tina Weymouth’s banana-peel bassline. Like any good joke, the music seems to be constantly retelling itself, circling back on the first thought before the second thought even begins. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, stop me if you’ve heard this, stop me, stop me. It’s the sound of propulsive uncertainty. “Still might be a chance that it might work out,” Byrne squeaks on “Paper,” which is what you say just before everything falls apart.
The scratching sound on “Cities” mimic pencils blackening every inch of a paper’s free space, and the keyboards, the vocals, strike with the force of a typewriter hammer smacking paper. This was writing and thinking as a percussive act, each note a small panicked violence on reality, the force and insistence belying the foreknowledge that all this would disappear eventually. Cities would fall to war, the good times would end, were always ending—if Byrne wasn’t going to break his bug-eyed poker face to spell all this out to you, Jerry Harrison’s guitars and keyboards were going to scream it. The guitar that intrudes at the end of “Mind” is like a pained groan, begging Byrne to shut up. The ratcheting sound ringing throughout “Cities” sounds like a scythe trying to sever the talking head from its body, once and for all.
At the center of Fear of Music is “Life During Wartime,” inarguably one of their five most iconic songs. The lyrics ratchet paranoia all the way to the top: We open with a van loaded with weapons, rumored but not seen, and a gravesite “where nobody knows.” A triumph consists of finding some peanut butter to last you “a couple of days.” Everything else—records to play, letters to write, identity crises to have (“I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times now…”) is just quaint, a reminder of better times when we were allowed to be miserable for our own little reasons. Significantly, it’s the calmest that Byrne had ever sounded on record to that point—all the quavers in that reedy voice were suddenly smoothed out. The panic is always in the anticipation; when the disaster hits, we’re oddly calm. “The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.” I’m getting used to it now—is there any proclamation of success bleaker?
The song, and Byrne’s vocal performance, offered a premonition of the shellacked hair and hard angles of his big-suit, early-’80s Stop Making Sense era, which would begin in earnest with 1980’s masterpiece Remain in Light. There was an incipient pitilessness to the American air; the country had just elected Reagan. New York City was a pyre of burning tenements and a city teetering on the brink of financial ruin. When chaos descends, talk is the first thing deemed cheap. So Byrne burned his notebooks, as the lyrics went, and all that was left was the burning in his chest that kept him alive. Civilization is a privilege; anxiety is a privilege; worrying about paper and minds and dogs and drugs are privileges, and they might constitute the best and sweetest moments of your life. That’s the joke, that’s both the setup and the punchline: You think you’re miserable now? This misery is the good part.
And that would be the epigraph of Fear of Music if it weren’t for “Heaven.” It’s a song that Byrne almost didn’t write, based on a melody he nearly threw away. Eno heard Byrne humming it to himself and drew the song out of him, like a forced confession. The band in heaven plays your favorite song, plays it all night long. It’s a place where nothing ever happens; everyone leaves the party at the same time, and every kiss begins again exactly the same. The song is a prayer for order, a cessation of observation. When the act of observation, which grants us our humanity and fuels our neurosis, falls away—what’s left? Pure experience, untouched by anything else. “There’s a party in my mind, and I hope it never stops,” Byrne says on “Memories Can’t Wait.” Maybe the best moment happens when everyone leaves.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | April 23, 2020 | 10 | 3e644034-e845-48b9-a6b9-908a01d452cd | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Across four short volumes, the Montreal singer-songwriter introduces a lonely and diverse set of songs written with an exceptional eye for melody and texture. | Across four short volumes, the Montreal singer-songwriter introduces a lonely and diverse set of songs written with an exceptional eye for melody and texture. | Helena Deland: From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helena-deland-from-the-series-of-songs-altogether-unaccompanied/ | From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” | Helena Deland’s From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” bears an unusual title: Exactly what kind of thing is this? And its format is unusual, too. So far, there are four volumes to the “series,” and the most obvious interpretation would be to call it a set of singles. But volumes one and two appeared simultaneously, back in March, as a single EP: two songs on each side, with different covers on the front and back of the sleeve. Now volumes three and four follow a similar conceit, this time with five songs total.
On Spotify, Deland has created a playlist that bundles them all up in a single, album-like package. Somewhat confusingly, both of volume four’s tracks trickled onto the streaming service, and the playlist, in July and August, followed by volume three’s “Lean on You” in September. But that jumbled quality seems inherent to the project. “The songs are to be considered as their own little things,” says Deland, a Montreal singer-songwriter. “They are part of something larger, yes, but they live on their own.”
Despite the name “Altogether Unaccompanied,” these are not for the most part unplugged or acoustic versions. In fact, the set bundles together a set of sounds rarely found under the same roof: Americana-tinged indie rock, yacht pop, folk, woozy synth balladry. “Take It All” is a simmering trip-hop song that steams like rainy pavement in the summer heat; “A Stone Is a Stone,” a waltz, wouldn’t sound out of place on a jukebox sandwiched between Angel Olsen and Cat Power. “Two Queries” is just acoustic guitar and voice, clear as a moonlight revelation: The guitar has the small, thin tone of an answering-machine message, while Deland’s multi-tracked vocals swim in chilly reverb. “Wait, what do you love/About the way/They move around you?” she sings in a breathy vibrato, and then she answers: “They circle you the most.” It could be a song of wonderment—I imagine a diver watching colorful fish swirl—or a reproach to a lover who aspires always to be the center of attention. The second stanza doesn’t clear things up—“Wait, what did you say/About your mom/And how she had to/Get used to/Being alone?”—but her tone is radiant, practically beatific. In 54 words, and less than two minutes, she has spun out a short story that refuses to yield its secrets.
Deland has a knack for sketching in broad strokes, just enough to capture the imagination without filling in too much detail and closing off possibilities. “Claudion,” a gorgeous, billowing synth-pop tune, sounds like it might be about a divorce, but it turns out to be inspired, she says, by taking acid with a friend. What stands out, again and again, is a fundamental tension between desire and ambivalence, tenderness and regret. In “Body Language,” wanting to stay and needing to get out are all tangled up in a kind of quiet desperation; “A Stone Is a Stone” frames mixed feelings about leave-taking in the lilting motion and reverberant guitars of a roadhouse slow dance. “Perfect Weather for a Crime” sounds like it’s about an affair she knows is a bad idea, and it’s positively electrifying: strutting and trembling, nerves jangling with anticipation.
Deland has said that her reluctance to put out a typical long-player is what led to the novel structure of these releases, but all nine songs actually make for a remarkably satisfying album—surprisingly so, given the range of styles. But the mood is pretty uniformly blue, and having top-notch players doesn’t hurt—bassist Jesse Mac Cormack’s agile but understated playing is particularly notable. And the production, handled by Deland and Mac Cormack, also helps everything hang together: The guitars have a delicious sizzle, the drums just the right amount of bite, and the keyboards and reverb soak up empty space like sponges. Her melodies and arrangements are almost unfailingly captivating: Just listen to the way “Lean On You” builds and builds and then unexpectedly slips into a middle section you never saw coming, like a cyclist cresting a hill and discovering the mother of all mountain views. Even when her writing doesn’t quite reach those heights—the melody on “Body Language” is a little more humdrum, the groove less relaxed than simply lackadaisical—the nuance of her voice helps carry things forward. Beneath her often wispy tone, she’s a powerful presence.
“Rise” makes for a gorgeous finale. The acoustic guitar faintly echoes the filliping figures of Nick Drake’s “Which Will”; Deland’s husky lower register recalls Rebecca Gates, just as the song’s skeletal arrangement does Gates’ band the Spinanes. Once again, she’s singing about reluctant farewells, and the song’s central image—two people sharing a bed, the arm’s distance between them narrowing—is drawn in a way that suggests volumes without ever revealing too much. It’s as lovely a song about loneliness as anyone could ask for. “Altogether Unaccompanied” might not quite be right: With Deland’s songs as a companion, solitude becomes its own reward. | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Luminelle | October 23, 2018 | 7.8 | 3e649f30-612e-45cd-9879-5c45e73aa09e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
With intricate layers of field recordings, the New Mexico-based artist lets small details become the pillars of her patient folk songs. | With intricate layers of field recordings, the New Mexico-based artist lets small details become the pillars of her patient folk songs. | Diatom Deli: Time~Lapse Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diatom-deli-timelapse-nature/ | Time~Lapse Nature | Diatom Deli’s Time~Lapse Nature tips its hand in the first minute with a speed-run of sonic folds taking shape like an origami crane. The first thing we hear is a field recording of lapping ocean waves. Then, Deli’s mom quickly checks in with a voicemail, imploring her to “give me a call when you can.” She rings back with a melody on her acoustic guitar, following the current of the rolling tide rather than breaking against its waves. Before she even sings a note, it feels as though the song has already begun and she’s arrived fashionably late. Deli isn’t simply using nature sounds as embellishment; she’s communing with them as if on a spiritual journey.
With her third album, Time~Lapse Nature, the Taos, New Mexico-based artist lets these small details become foundational pillars of her songs, wrapping her spectral voice and classical guitar around their slender frames like a cloak. The rumble of thunder and wash of rainfall weave in and out at regular intervals on “Massive Headships of Centering Tiles,” keeping time like a backing band as her guitar skips along the surface. She’s accompanied by the twitter of birdsong on “False Alarm.” The chirruping becomes almost percussive, propelling the track as her guitar shifts and shimmers like sunlight through a canopy of trees. On “Disarray,” her own voice feels incidental, breaking into a breathy shiver that gradually disappears as the melodic threads unwind.
Deli’s strength lies in layering intricate tapestries so her music seems to evolve in slow motion; as a result, the moments when those contours are missing can feel a bit lacking. The penultimate track “Deandre” is the most spartan folk number, leaning on Deli’s voice and guitar to build up its ambience. It’s pleasant, but it feels unadventurous compared to what came before. The similarly straightforward “Sonrisa” nearly suffers the same pitfall, but the raucous sample of cheering children that steadily creeps to the fore provides a much-needed wrinkle that gives the track some fun texture.
As Time~Lapse Nature draws to a close with “Thank You, Maya,” it feels like a reverse of its opening moments. “Now I breathe love into my life,” Deli chants repeatedly as she plucks a refrain like she’s trying to cast a spell. The incantation succeeds, and a miniature diorama of singing birds and buzzing bugs rings out in the final moments; she cedes the stage to the found sound that shaped the record as a show of thanks. It’s fitting that Deli takes her name from diatoms, the microscopic algae that produce nearly a third of the air we breathe. She knows that the smallest, sometimes imperceptible things can do a lot of heavy lifting. | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | June 14, 2022 | 7.2 | 3e6ee65e-8440-4a0f-a756-8ae71f942fa1 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
On his fourth album, the Afro-fusion giant drops his guard and invites listeners into his chaotic inner world, with mixed results. | On his fourth album, the Afro-fusion giant drops his guard and invites listeners into his chaotic inner world, with mixed results. | Burna Boy: Love, Damini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burna-boy-love-damini/ | Burna Boy: Love, Damini | Throughout his decade-long career, Burna Boy has spun doubts, controversy, and slights to his ego into an undeniable body of work. Each successive album has propelled him farther along on his journey from Afro-fusion innovator to global pop star. Charting his path from the boisterous pride of 2018’s Outside, his major-label debut, to the regal posturing that frames 2019’s African Giant and then the brash overconfidence of 2020’s Twice as Tall, it was only a matter of time before Burna realized that he no longer had anything to prove.
So it’s refreshing to see him put his guard down on Love, Damini. His most personal project to date, the album invites listeners into his chaotic and imperfect inner world. Across a marathon 19 tracks, heartbreak, grief, anxiety, politics, sex, and love all take their places on the stage, to varying effect. The singer’s emotional motivations feel genuine, and his shortcomings movingly human, but they can’t disguise the album’s painful flaws.
Never one to shy away from genre leaps, Burna has insisted on labeling his sound Afro-fusion, but he shows his most intriguing vocal and emotional range on productions that more traditionally hew to the modern Afrobeats sound. On “Jagele,” he adopts a strained falsetto to communicate his deep yearning for a love interest who remains just out of reach. On “Whiskey,” he skillfully drops back down an octave, his tone sober and measured, to convey the devastating impact of environmental pollution in his hometown. Elsewhere, on “Science,” over uncharacteristically dark production from Wizkid go-to P2J, Burna Boy leans into the song’s menacing tones with his voice, mimicking an oncoming siren at the end of a twisted tale of seduction.
An exceptional host, Burna plays to the strengths of his features, at times letting them steal the show. Victony, of “Holy Father” fame, sounds immaculate on “Different Size,” a doozy of a track that uses an amapiano remix of a Squid Game sound bite (from TikTok, of course) to wax foolishly about surgically enhanced asses. But the clear standout is “Cloak & Dagger,” which brings J Hus out of hibernation to remind us of his endlessly innovative rhyme schemes.
After an energizing first half that includes the standout singles “Last Last” and “Kilometre,” the squarely Afrobeats songs start to lose steam dramatically. “Common Person” sounds like a B-rate version of “Dangote,” without the inherent class tension that gave the latter heft. Burna loses all distinguishing features on “Vanilla,” which in its flat repetitiveness feels like Afrobeats on autopilot. When the music video, presented by Ray-Ban and Meta, appeared, I couldn’t help but wonder if the song or the brand deal came first.
The rest of the production veers into Afro-inflected, radio-engineered, tragically boring emo-pop. While he shows more vulnerability here, moving away from club bangers into slower examinations of anxiety, anger, and grief, it becomes clear that one of Burna Boy’s weaknesses includes a disinclination to edit himself.
The most confusing misstep comes on the Khalid-assisted “Wild Dreams.” Coasting on the singer’s tender vocals, the song desperately wants to be an anthem, and it might have resonated in a hotboxed studio with the volume turned up. But the feeling of yearning is contrived, and it’s undercut by the confounding closing line: “Martin Luther King had a dream, and then he got shot.” The attempt to bolster such a lackluster pop song by extracting associative value from the civil-rights icon isn’t just reckless, it’s outright disrespectful. As if that weren’t enough, “How Bad Could It Be” unwittingly lives up to its title, as celebrity friends like Naomi Campbell, Swizz Beatz, and Jorja Smith offer tips on how to deal with a bad mood. What might have been inspiring instead gives real rich people, they’re just like us! energy, which is a shame—particularly given that Burna’s reflections on the song are, for the most part, candid and self-aware.
These glaring errors keep Love, Damini from reaching the heights of Burna Boy’s prior work, but his intentions are admirable, even when the execution goes awry. Modern Afropop is the poster kid for good times, but with this ambitious yet flawed album, he reminds us that it can be a space to work out much messier emotions. Whatever its failings, Love, Damini paves the way for other artists in the scene to take bigger emotional risks. | 2022-07-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | July 13, 2022 | 6.7 | 3e6f4739-3e29-425b-925d-ab5f22f5f34b | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
Kneedelus is a collaboration between the Cali beat scientist Daedelus and the Grammy nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody. It's a powerful fusion of abstract hip-hop and modern jazz, and at its highest points you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins. | Kneedelus is a collaboration between the Cali beat scientist Daedelus and the Grammy nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody. It's a powerful fusion of abstract hip-hop and modern jazz, and at its highest points you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins. | Kneebody and Daedelus: Kneedelus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21240-kneedelus/ | Kneedelus | Under his Flying Lotus codename, Steven Ellison continues to push his distinctive strain of abstract hip-hop into the direction paved by his Great Aunt Alice and Great Uncle John. You could hear the family history coursing through the interstellar spaces he explored with his cousin Ravi on 2010's Cosmogramma and that Herbie Hancock jam on last year's You're Dead!. But Ellison's advancement of creative jazz has been more crucial as curator of the Brainfeeder label, which he founded in 2008 as an outlet for himself and his buddies down at Low End Theory in Los Angeles.
Kamasi Washington's The Epic hinted at FlyLo's A&R prowess, and Kneedelus puts an exclamation point on the imprint's new direction. The relationship between exploratory, Grammy-nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody and pioneering Cali beat scientist Daedelus (born Alfred Darlington) goes back almost a decade, evidenced by remixes on Bandcamp and a stage collaboration at the Jazz à Vienne Festival in 2009. Kneebody saxophonist Ben Wendel and Darlington are high school friends, while Darlington and Flying Lotus go back to 1983, Ellison's debut, and Darlington's indelible remix of the title track.
What all of this six-degrees business adds up to is this supernova of a record, rounded out by Adam Benjamin on keyboard, Shane Endsley on treated trumpet, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and drummer Nate Wood. As a collaborative unit, the friendship between the parties undoubtedly lends itself to the fluidity of these 10 original compositions. In some cases, as on tracks like the rugged "The Hole" and the hypnotic "Move", you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins. Darlington's deft rhythmic impulses come to the fore on "Drum Battle", but in other moments, the invincible horn section of Kneebody runs the show. On "Loops", Endsley's trumpet is cat-like and cool, as the group takes the scrambled-signal breakbeat Daedelus delivers to the snapping point around the horn's calm center like a hurricane eye. On "Platforming", meanwhile, Wendel's fantastic Art Pepper-esque tenor work is transformed into a wild, distorted-violin sound. Elsewhere, its Benjamin who is leading the charge on the seven-minute *Mwandishi-*flavored space-out "Thought Not", and the haunting processed upright piano he plays on "Not Love".
Yet its when Kneebody and Daedelus fuse that Kneedelus achieves its potential. And perhaps no other track really embodies that idea more than "Home", the album's deep modal center that simmers together Tubby dub, TNT-era Tortoise, and Lalo Schifrin. It's no matter of happenstance the cover of Kneedelus is a shameless emulation of the design format of another game-changing jazz record label, ECM. This album exists in a very similar atmosphere to some of Manfred Eicher's bolder production moves throughout the last 40-odd years (dig that Jack DeJohnette box set for proof). And above all, it's a vision offering one last reminder before the year is out that Brainfeeder is very serious about its place in the jazz world. | 2015-11-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | November 23, 2015 | 8 | 3e73392f-4ba7-4865-a33d-b5620514f068 | Ron Hart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ron-hart/ | null |
The Montreal band grows up on their third album, crafting well-made, emo-adjacent songs all while trying to summon enough energy to stare down looming adulthood. | The Montreal band grows up on their third album, crafting well-made, emo-adjacent songs all while trying to summon enough energy to stare down looming adulthood. | Gulfer: Gulfer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gulfer-gulfer/ | Gulfer | When lead singer and guitarist Vincent Ford swore, “I'll stay the same old man,” on Gulfer’s 2018 album Dog Bless, it sounded like a tongue-in-cheek salve for being anti-social. He’s making good on that promise. Instead of clinging onto their youth—the oft-chosen path for emo-adjacent guitar bands of their ilk—the Montreal quartet face the realities of entering your late-20s on their new self-titled album, from the dissolution of underwhelming friendships to the comfortable cadence of self-doubt. There’s no listing off of complaints or self-pitying displays of narcissism. In its place, Gulfer use the album as a sounding board for the quotidian fears of adulthood while grounding themselves in musical and lyrical maturity.
Ford, singer-guitarist Joe Therriault, singer-bassist David Mitchell, and drummer Julien Daoust collaborate in a way that makes the moral quandaries on Gulfer sound communal. There’s the omnipresent weight of a college-dropout inferiority complex, generational disagreements about the effects of climate change, and nostalgia for the naivety of childhood. In “Heat Wave,” Therriault recounts the uptick in performative conversations with friends that turn prosaic, as if prevaricating due to ego as opposed to masking imposter syndrome. “Biking home I wonder why/You say you’re working class when it feels right,” he repeats, his deadpan lilt verging on dejection. Scattered throughout are the type of declarative statements that increasingly ring true throughout adulthood: “You go out of your way to stay the same,” “It’s easy to say it should have been better in the end,” and, most bleak of all, “I belong in my house.”
Gulfer raise a bunch of these questions across the album but never really offer an answer. It’s refreshing, particularly because that humility prevents their “issues” from being blown out of proportion, like on“Forget (Friendly),” when Therriault develops a crush on someone while in a monogamous relationship. Wracked by guilt, he ping-pongs ideas about how to ethically support both people while riff after riff crashes into the downbeat. These are the moments that define Gulfer; when the melodrama of teenagerdom and the pessimism of young adulthood subside, and resignation guides the long run ahead. To really draw that emotion out, Gulfer turn to their most impressive skill: dexterous finger-tapping and complex drum shuffles. Something as simple as a stringy guitar melody on “Flashing” or syncopated rhythms on “Trips and Falls” distill math-rock elements into digestible pop hooks that punch up their stories. On “Letters,” a restless sugar-rush of a song, the four-piece nod to fellow Canadians the Most Serene Republic with indie-rock-indebted drum rolls, a musical mirror of its lyrics about the temptation to upend your life altogether.
Gulfer’s maturity shines in the album’s mixing, too, in part thanks to Great Grandpa’s Dylan Hanwright manning the boards. It recreates a dialed-in basement show, a fitting stereo setup for a genre that’s best experienced when you can hear kids screaming along over the vocalist. Across the album, the band is more certain of their uncertainty, and consequently more bummed out than ever before in their eight-year career. They’ve entered adulthood, and they’re already more level-headed about what that means than most of emo’s forebearers were.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | October 15, 2020 | 7.4 | 3e781413-75e2-4faa-9513-54c385a83df2 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
On his latest record, Will Oldham enlists the help of Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy to create a record that presents the humor, dread, and resignation that inform his best music in blissfully unfiltered form. | On his latest record, Will Oldham enlists the help of Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy to create a record that presents the humor, dread, and resignation that inform his best music in blissfully unfiltered form. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: The Letting Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9419-the-letting-go/ | The Letting Go | Though Will Oldham began his musical career while in his early twenties, he's never exactly sounded young. From his first releases as Palace Music, Oldham's whiskey-soaked vocals and lyrical obsessions with death, sex, and religion have made "maturity" something of a non-issue. And yet, with his most recent couple of releases as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the aesthetic antiquity of his earliest recordings seems to have slowly given way to a more mundane sense of age. On The Letting Go, the humor, dread, and resignation that inform Oldham's music are presented in blissfully unfiltered form, and whether the proximity one feels is to person or persona is ultimately irrelevant; either way, The Letting Go feels close.
With its pristine recording and prominent female backing vocals, opener "Love Comes to Me" evokes Oldham's 2003 album Master and Everyone. Thankfully, the sound of The Letting Go proves to be more inviting and striking than that of its predecessor, as Oldham and Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy invariably find their way to beautiful moments-- even when the songs themselves aren't particularly engrossing. A late autumn stroll through the woods might not be the most exciting metaphor for an album, but it's a rare treat to hear something this organic and cozy.
In fact, The Letting Go is so confident that its strangeness could easily go unnoticed. But this is, in many ways, one of the weirdest records Oldham has ever released. McCarthy's vocals never really coalesce into a distinct relationship with Oldham's-- she slips in and out of harmonies, backing parts, doubles, and absences. The album's arrangements are similarly elusive-- the string swells and ominous drums on "The Seedling" wash incongruously against McCarthy's vocals. And yet, nothing ever seems jarringly out of place.
Generally speaking, this is true of the album's sequencing as well. Though the more lo-fi and bluesy "Cold & Wet" is a noticeable shift from the rest of the record, it's by no means unwelcome after the perhaps-too-understated "No Bad News". On the whole, The Letting Go is amazingly consistent, Oldham and McCarthy meandering tunefully through subtle but effective changes in texture and tone. Unlike Oldham's best work, The Letting Go doesn't pull you into its own emotional world; it doesn't ask much, and you're free to take as much from it as you'd like. The beauty and eccentricity of The Letting Go doesn't provoke deep absorption or self-reflection so much as a kind of fond familiarity. | 2006-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Palace / Drag City | September 18, 2006 | 8.2 | 3e829211-7bdb-4ab4-98a9-4494de09fbdf | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Four albums released between 1994 and 1996 showcase the Cantopop icon (and Cocteau Twins collaborator) confidently moving beyond adult-contemporary and toward her own singular voice. | Four albums released between 1994 and 1996 showcase the Cantopop icon (and Cocteau Twins collaborator) confidently moving beyond adult-contemporary and toward her own singular voice. | Faye Wong: Faye Wong: 讨好自己 Please Myself / 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye / Di-Dar / 浮躁 Fuzao | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faye-wong-please-myself-decadent-sound-of-faye-di-dar-fuzao/ | 讨好自己 Please Myself / 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye / Di-Dar / 浮躁 Restless | Wong Kar-wai’s feverish and charming 1994 romantic drama Chungking Express features the director’s greatest needle drop: The vibrant guitar riff of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” leads into a Cantonese cover by singer and actor Faye Wong that spills open over a montage of her character, a snack-bar worker who daydreams of escape, replacing every memento of a love interest’s ex with tokens of herself. The line between Wong, the performer, and Faye, the character, is already shaky—both possess a boyish, offbeat cool—but the former’s cover version mirrors the latter’s intention to assume another’s place. The guitars burn a bit brighter and the drums fold a little flatter, and though Wong adjusts to a convincing echo of Dolores O’Riordan’s warble and yodel, her voice sounds a touch more refined—her delivery similar, yet never quite identical.
Wong, who would later become heralded as the “queen of Cantopop” and also establish a noteworthy Mandarin discography, frequently reimagined other artists’ work in the early period of her career. After she signed to Cinepoly in 1989, the label held her to the standards of Hong Kong’s Cantopop; her early albums sandwiched uninspired renditions of Japanese and American hits between treacly adult-contemporary ballads. Adapting foreign hits in Cantonese had become a reliable method of generating mainstream success in Hong Kong, yet hints of a more innovative approach were audible in covers like Wong’s take on “Dreams.” Wong’s final four albums for Cinepoly, newly reissued on vinyl, showcase the maturation of her voice as well as her deepening desire for artistic freedom as she embraced idiosyncratic sounds and themes of escapism; they trace her evolution from competent copyist to singular talent.
In an interview, Wong pointed to the malleable nature of the voice as an instrument, and hers constantly morphed alongside her changing interests. After becoming dissatisfied with the direction of her career, she traveled to the U.S. for vocal lessons and demanded greater creative control upon returning. Subsequent releases between 1992 and 1993 showcased a heavy flair for R&B, with full and brassy tones, before she pivoted into pop-rock, her voice strained and willowy on covers of the Police and Tori Amos. In 1994, Wong embraced a more alternative sound with 胡思亂想 Random Thoughts—the parent album for her popular Cantonese “Dreams” cover—and ventured further afield with a pair of covers of Scottish dream-pop pioneers Cocteau Twins that closely recreated their style, Wong bending to match Elizabeth Fraser’s rolling trills.
While those records emulated Wong’s wide-reaching influences, 討好自己 Please Myself, her final album of 1994, sharpened her artistic identity. Up to that point, her covers had been faithful to the point of imitation, but here, Wong’s version of the Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” offers a glimpse of her own vision. More dream than jangle, the cover flips the specificity of the original’s bittersweet narrative into a relatable lovesick sigh, and as Wong’s voice rises over the rattle and shimmer of the guitars, it sounds clear, bright, and full of infatuation. The rest of the album dresses Wong in a similar palette of dazzling dream pop and fond adoration.
The pair of songs Wong wrote for 討好自己 Please Myself suggest an artist growing weary of the Hong Kong entertainment industry. The slippery title track hints at future themes of escapism, but outlier “出路” (“Exit”), a weird one-off spoken-word experiment, and the only track in Mandarin, is one of Wong’s most direct statements: “I’m impatient, nothing satisfies me… I hate being a star, but I want to attract attention,” she mutters over its clomping bassline. Arranged by Dou Wei, then-boyfriend and former member of the influential Chinese band Black Panther, these tracks were ripe with apprehension and coincided with her increasingly frequent contact with Beijing’s rock scene along with her shift toward the Mandarin market.
Wong’s next albums are more self-assured, and, as a result, more captivating. 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye, from 1995, is a tribute album to Taiwanese legend Teresa Teng, who died midway through the album’s recording. One of Asia’s most eminent vocalists, Teng possessed a voice that was dulcet yet robust and resonant. Wong emulates her sweetness, but does away with much of the grandeur of Teng’s tradition-bound performances; Wong’s voice is instead airy, lofty, and lithe. Contrasted with Teng’s originals, 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye takes a more modernized and Westernized approach. Wong flips weighty arrangements into string-led chamber-pop pieces, like her take on the standard “但願人長久” (“Wishing We Last Forever”), shaping them to be lighter and livelier. Elsewhere, on tracks like “初戀的地方” (“Place of First Love”), her voice gallavants as electronic ornamentation swirls and prances. Wong’s renditions come alive with motion.
In contrast, Di-Dar, her second album of the year—as well as Wong’s final (and finest) Cantonese album—is more atmospheric, almost psychedelic. The spectral dream pop of “假期” (“Vacation”) pairs flickering synths with gothic guitar licks, while “(無題)” (“Untitled”) is a burbling trip-hop ballad that layers Wong’s gossamer falsetto over a sputtering electronic beat and tabla-like percussion. Even its most radio-friendly songs, like the radiant commercial success “曖昧” (“Ambiguous”), adopt orchestral arrangements that give them similarly vivid and sumptuous textures. Di-Dar coheres like an extended dream, yet beneath its haze are vignettes that sketch a deteriorating relationship. The album’s lyrics (with the exception of the Mandarin closer) were written by close collaborator Albert Leung, who fixates on the unease Wong presented on 討好自己 Please Myself, suffusing the album’s romanticism with a sense of anxiety and the burning desire to disappear.
These themes feature heavily on Wong’s last album for Cinepoly, 1996’s insular 浮躁 Fuzao—which best translates to “restless” or “impetuous.” Making no concessions to mainstream tastes, she was more creatively involved on this album than anywhere else in her career. For 浮躁 Fuzao, she pulled away from her frequent Hong Kong-based collaborators, instead turning to Dou and another Beijing rock musician, Zhang Yadong, for arrangements. Despite his lack of involvement for the record, her longtime producer, Alvin Leong, facilitated a working relationship between her and the Cocteau Twins, who had become interested in collaborating after hearing her faithful renditions of their work. They contribute two original tracks that land at the wispier end of the spectrum of their work. While the songs still fit firmly within the group’s oeuvre—the resplendent highlight “分裂” (“Divide”) floats over a bed of gentle synths and dainty coos, while the ghostly “掃興” (“Spoilsport”) staggers atop murky guitar textures—Wong makes them her own, her clearer enunciation lending substantive meaning to a band famous for its cryptic lyrics. Wong composed the rest of the album’s songs, often borrowing liberally from the Scottish group’s style. On “哪兒” (“Where”), she hums, coos, and babbles in incoherent syllables, her voice an extraordinary instrument that imbues each note with joy amid the turmoil.
Yet 浮躁 Fuzao isn’t simply a pastiche of the Cocteau Twins; the album’s producers steep the music in the sounds of Beijing’s nascent rock scene. Dou condenses a decade’s worth of styles into the miniature world of its opener as the song weaves from shimmering guitar to sharp, probing downtempo synths. Zhang’s lighthearted production on the title track is a sweet callback to Wong’s brief infatuation with jangle pop. Her voice bounds between jubilant shouts and apprehensive coos, ripping the song apart until it dissolves into electronic froth. It’s not just those outside influences that set her apart—her reserved yet playfully mischievous nature permeates the album.
Wong would never be afforded the opportunity to do another 浮躁 Fuzao. On her later blockbuster albums, she was forced to balance her idiosyncratic tastes with her label’s commercial objectives. But on these four records, she resists easy categorization, at once ethereal and eccentric, and refreshingly free of the straightforward romanticism of her period peers. Wong pulled the unfamiliar to the surface by highlighting sounds rarely explored and anxieties frequently left untouched, yet her elegant voice offered soothing, intimate comfort. Wong’s music of this period represents a welcome embrace of the undefined. | 2023-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | October 28, 2023 | 7.4 | 3e8cdf06-1a12-462b-ade6-bd520b32d14d | Michael Hong | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hong/ | |
Tapping his background in industrial and EBM, the Berghain resident delivers a steely set of cuts tailored for maximum impact inside the club. | Tapping his background in industrial and EBM, the Berghain resident delivers a steely set of cuts tailored for maximum impact inside the club. | Phase Fatale: Scanning Backwards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phase-fatale-scanning-backwards/ | Scanning Backwards | Few techno institutions are more celebrated than Berghain. First opened in 2004, the vaunted Berlin club has since become the effective gold standard for international nightlife, not to mention a bucket-list destination for even casual clubbers—assuming they can actually get in. There’s a mythology around the place, and while it’s been exaggerated over the years (sometimes to the point of cliché), there’s no denying Berghain’s influence on electronic music, fashion, visual art, sound systems, door policies and all kinds of how-to-run-a-club-properly minutiae. In short, it’s reshaped the idea of what nightlife can—and should—be.
Berghain is at the center of Scanning Backwards, the second full-length from New York-reared, Berlin-based artist Phase Fatale (aka Hayden Payne). A resident DJ at the club who specializes in mixing techno with industrial, EBM, and post-punk, he has said that every track on the new LP was specifically tailored to sound a certain way inside Berghain’s walls. Dark, heavy, and impeccably engineered, the record can’t be described as minimal, but it’s certainly been stripped down to the essentials. Where Payne’s last album, 2017’s Redeemer, ladled thick layers of noise and distortion atop a techno foundation, here he’s left unnecessary flourishes behind in favor of maximum potency. Upping the impact is his decision to keep the tempo relatively slow (the fastest track on the record clocks in at 123 BPM, and Payne frequently dips well below that); the extra breathing room makes each beat hit that much harder. In terms of its utility, the album is an unqualified success.
Musically, though, Scanning Backwards is entering a crowded field. Although Phase Fatale’s own industrial and post-punk bona fides are impeccable—he played in several post-punk and cold wave groups after first cutting his teeth at NYC’s long-running Wierd parties in the late 2000s—he’s also releasing his highest-profile album to date at a time when the latest industrial techno boom has arguably crested.
You can’t fault Payne for sticking to his creative guns; he’s not someone who hopped onto the industrial techno bandwagon after hearing a few Blawan tracks in 2012. At the same time, there just isn’t much room for Scanning Backwards to say something new, particularly following a decade in which artists like Silent Servant, Helena Hauff, Broken English Club, Paula Temple, Perc, Regis, Vatican Shadow, Veronica Vasicka, and so many others have all been such a prominent part of the techno landscape. Those artists’ success has contributed to a surge of interest in prior generations of industrial techno experimenters, such as Surgeon, Sandwell District, Adam X, and British Murder Boys, not to mention industrial and EBM originators like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Throbbing Gristle, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire, and others too numerous to list. Techno has become inundated with industrial sounds, especially at clubs like Berghain, and Scanning Backwards, which might have sounded more impressive two years ago, doesn’t do quite enough to innovate or build upon that style.
Scanning Backwards does include one track which is truly transcendent. Album closer “Splintered Heels” is a raw, powerful cut led by a sinister bassline and the sort of blunt, hard-hitting percussion that powered old Wax Trax records. Yet this is no simple dancefloor stormer; a haunting, shoegaze-esque melody lends the track a spooky, cinematic feel and a subtle (albeit dark) pop vibe. The contrast reflects a newfound elegance in Payne’s work.
Other highlights include the ominously churning “De-patterning,” the sludgy metal haze of “Polystyrene,” and the thundering stomp of “Binding by Oath.” Scanning Backwards is by no means a friendly album—Payne has said the LP is conceptually rooted in weaponized sound and psychological manipulation—but there’s something invigorating about its menacing nature. For fans of industrial techno, it's a solid album, better than most, even. It’s not difficult to imagine just about any track from the record tearing the roof off at Berghain. But outside of that environment, the music loses some of its magic, largely because so many of its notes—even its strongest ones—have been heard before. | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ostgut Ton | January 24, 2020 | 6.7 | 3e8e95e0-06ac-4fb1-ac9c-68f254a26125 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The lavish In the Loop 6x7” box set collects A-Trak’s remix work. Listening to all of them at once reveals that he often tried to please everyone, and also that he intermittently succeeded. | The lavish In the Loop 6x7” box set collects A-Trak’s remix work. Listening to all of them at once reveals that he often tried to please everyone, and also that he intermittently succeeded. | A-Trak: In the Loop: A Decade of Remixes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22685-in-the-loop-a-decade-of-remixes/ | In the Loop: A Decade of Remixes | “Making a song from alpha to omega is challenging,” A-Trak told Forbes last November. “It's from a song that has already worked in some capacity. You're taking a piece of something that is already catchy at in some way and you are decorating it with your production.” Perceiving the art of the remix as mere decoration might be anathema for its finest practitioners—be they François K., Ricardo Villalobos, or Puff— but in ’00s dance culture, A-Trak’s work and sensibilities served as an amped-up gateway for a new generation. Whether they checked his Soundcloud because of his connection to Kanye, because they loved southern hip-hop but not Ed Banger (or vice versa), or because of festival-friendly remixes of big indie rock acts, A-Trak’s work ethic blurred genre lines.
Culling a decade of remixes (with over 180 remix credits to his name), the lavish In the Loop 6x7” box set marks the first time that many of these digital-only remixes have been available in a physical format rather than Beatport-only download. The opening remix of Architecture in Helsinki’s “Heart It Races” (back when A-Trak still used the handle Trizzy) showed that from the start A-Trak had a knack for tearing down the mid-’00s walls between indie rock, mainstream hip-hop and electronic dance music. He takes Neptunes-type drum stutters, adds hip-hop backspins, a touch of steel pan and keeps the noxious yip of vocals intact, yet it all winds up sticking together.
Listening to all these remixes at once reveals that A-Trak often tried to please everyone, and his knack for picking over myriad genres often meant he felt the need to shoehorn everything in with each remix opportunity. His remix of Scanners’ “Bombs” is the equivalent of a dogpile: compressed rock guitar stabs, multiple sped-up vocal samples saying “drop,” rave synth swoops, voices minced until they become hiccups and then—why the hell not?—some cowbell dumped on for good measure, as if to make sure every box gets ticked.
His remix of Sébastian Tellier’s “Kilometer” seems similarly intent on touching on every trend in French dance music. A-Trak filters the kick down to a muffled throb redolent of “Around the World,” before bringing in a swell of disco symphonic strings and electro squelch, ranging from Ed Banger filter house to Daft Punk then back to Québécois disco. Similar sensibilities get applied to Phoenix’s “Trying to Be Cool” as he builds the opening keyboard figure into something bombastic. Visit a section of the song that doesn't have Thomas Mars’ telltale voice and one would be hard-pressed to distinguish it from any other track of the past decade.
What A-Trak delivers in spades is big, simple pleasures. For Boys Noize’s “Oh!,” he devastates with little more than that titular shout, vocodered growls, dancehall sirens and a feverish beat. He wasn’t the first one to have a go at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs late-period dance move of “Heads Will Roll,” but his remix is undeniable. Jacking up Nick Zinner’s tepid goth synth stabs until it’s brawny enough to fill a Coachella tent, he cuts away the band’s ineffective rock moves and instead replaces it all with leaner electronic components. A-Trak remakes Karen O into an icy electro queen, surrounding her with only the finest fromage: lasers, claps, 303 squelches and gaudy builds.
Give him the keys to another Brooklyn dancepunk band though—in this instance the Rapture— and the same tricks don’t pan out. On the piano-house-meets-gospel glory of “How Deep is Your Love,” A-Trak doesn't have the patience to give the song time to unfurl, shortening the song by a third, getting right to the dramatic build and then adding heaps of neon and rave lights. For the remarkable range of artists that In the Loop displays, A-Trak’s ability to mash together different genres and sounds into a crowd-pleasing amalgam also means that—much like a great night out—the distinguishing characteristics blur together into an undifferentiated mass. | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rap | Fool’s Gold | December 17, 2016 | 6.4 | 3e8ecb91-e72d-4523-9e51-a0eddf3668a0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Toronto-based composer and her wonderfully dynamic voice sail into poppier waters on her second album with huge, lush arrangements that have a tendency to weigh down the songs. | The Toronto-based composer and her wonderfully dynamic voice sail into poppier waters on her second album with huge, lush arrangements that have a tendency to weigh down the songs. | Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23144-darling-of-the-afterglow/ | Darling of the Afterglow | It’s difficult to parse the myriad influences of Toronto-based composer Lydia Ainsworth. At the time of the release of her Juno-nominated 2014 debut Right From Real, she was as likely to pay tribute to the three-part harmonies of Bulgarian folk singers as she was to the Spice Girls. As if challenging herself to come up with an even more disparate set of touchstones to describe her new LP Darling of the Afterglow, Ainsworth offered up her most mystifying set of references yet, characterizing the album’s lead single “The Road” as “a marriage of Enya and the Weeknd.”
This unholy matrimony is, surprisingly, an apt descriptor for many of the 11 songs on Afterglow. While Right From Real showcased her taste for baroque orchestration with a minimal electronic backbone, they were all a bit too off-kilter to be described as bona fide pop songs; “Malachite” and “White Shadows” were far too mystical and ethereal to draw comparisons to Max Martin’s pop. Although Ainsworth has said that some of the songs on Afterglow were in gestation around the same time that she was writing her debut, she composed others during a brief stint in L.A. while writing pop songs for other artists. Her embrace of more mainstream songwriting is evident even in the first few seconds of opener “The Road,” as dramatic piano chords sustain over dark synths that phase beneath her newly confident voice.
Ainsworth’s more traditional vocal performance is one of the most striking evolutions of her sound. Whether heavily processed on “Hologram” or spliced into sharp daggers on “Moonstone,” Ainsworth’s voice sounded interwoven into Right From Real’s ornate symphonic textures. On Afterglow, she centers her voice to sound more expressive and lucid than ever. On “Ricochet” Ainsworth stretches her voice to its limits, ascending to a soaring falsetto, luxuriating over the softness of her consonants, and in a more familiar vein, pitching it down to harmonize with itself. While this would seem to be an unequivocal step forward, Ainsworth can succumb to melodrama; the twinkling guitar and whispered double-track vocal that composes the first half of “Open Doors” evokes the broad, histrionic effect of a band like Evanescence perhaps more than Ainsworth would like.
While the appeal of Ainsworth’s debut existed in its refined hybrid of orchestral synthpop, here Ainsworth confoundingly falls back on cheesy banjos (“What Is It?”) and crunchy guitars (“I Can Feel It All”) to embellish her already fussy arrangements. The latter song, another one of the album’s high points and one of its more strictly synthpop numbers, seems to reach a climax in the last quarter when she unleashes blaring, rich synthesizers that rumble beneath her coos. The arrangement is already over the top, but Ainsworth’s stadium-ready guitars overload the song entirely.
When the so-called “left-of-center pop” album is executed well, it’s exhilarating (see Ainsworth’s Arbutus labelmate Mozart’s Sister or fellow synthpop seductress Jessy Lanza for recent examples). Ainsworth’s tightened up her songwriting, emoting more profoundly than ever before, but she’s abandoned the more restrained instincts that once made her spectral music so lustrous. She hasn’t yet sorted out the particular combination of influences that fit her strengths, and few of the songs’ melodies are compelling enough to overcome the album’s strangely stale take on alternative pop. Ainsworth is clearly a knowledgeable composer with endless sources of inspiration to work with, but Afterglow proves that finding the perfect formula is sometimes more complicated than one might imagine. | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Bella Union / Arbutus | April 15, 2017 | 6.6 | 3e8f9661-63d1-4884-910e-4fd755ff9a33 | Rachel Hahn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-hahn/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album, a blueprint for how to exist as an aging, internationally famous rock band. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album, a blueprint for how to exist as an aging, internationally famous rock band. | The Rolling Stones: Tattoo You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-rolling-stones-tattoo-you/ | Tattoo You | The Cockroaches arrived in Toronto at the end of February 1977, in need of a quick break from being the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. They’d been together for a decade and a half, their masterpiece album was five years behind them, and the three LPs they’d released since were not quite as spectacular. But they were richer and more famous than ever. Their most recent tour of North America, in 1975, had helped set the era’s standard for silliness and excess. There were six straight nights at Madison Square Garden, and five at the Forum; a flying trapeze for the singer, a confetti-breathing dragon, and an inflatable penis that stood as tall as two men when it wasn’t suffering from chronic mechanical dysfunction.
The band was planning on releasing a live album culled from these concerts, but there wasn’t enough worthy material. This is where Toronto came in: two secret shows booked at a tiny venue, under a fake band name, for a crowd of 300 unsuspecting fans, with a recording truck parked outside to capture the sort of energy that only arises when those fans are smashed into close contact with their idols. These would be the band’s first club gigs since they rocketed to worldwide stardom shortly after forming in the early ’60s. After all that glitz and decadence, perhaps becoming the Cockroaches was a way to get back to being the Rolling Stones.
It didn’t quite work. Typically for the era, the spectacle of the March 4th and 5th shows at Toronto’s El Mocambo tended to overshadow the music. Keith Richards, whose ever-deepening heroin addiction probably had something to do with the declining quality of the recent records, was arrested with about an ounce of it almost as soon as he arrived in Canada. Margaret Trudeau, the young and newly estranged wife of the Canadian prime minister, was seen cavorting backstage with the band, leading to slobbering speculative coverage from international tabloids. Love You Live, the resulting live album, wasn’t very good. But onstage, the Stones were finding their spark again, providing at least one glimpse at the unlikely musical resurgence they’d make over the next several years.
The Mocambo shows included the live debut of a neon-lit R&B vigil called “Worried About You,” marking the first public performance of any song from 1981’s Tattoo You, the last great Rolling Stones album. Each of its two sides presents an aesthetically distinct vision of the Stones. The first, led by “Start Me Up,” finds them settling into their role as a legacy-oriented stadium rock band, grabbing the essence of the sleazy blues-based music they’d perfected a decade before and blowing it up to Jumbotron proportions.
The second side, opening with “Worried About You,” briefly drops the world-conquering posture and allows them to appear as weary and middle-aged as they actually were at the time, with a stretch of bedraggled late-night soul music that’s both distinctly Stonesy and also not quite like anything else in their catalog—or anyone else’s. The production, in some liminal zone between ’70s analog warmth and ‘80s digital chill, only heightens the elegance of the performances. Tattoo You’s first side guaranteed the Rolling Stones’ sinecure as a hugely profitable enterprise for decades to come; the second side is their final gasp of brilliance before those profits became more important than anything else.
By the early ’80s, some of the fissures of the previous years had closed for the Rolling Stones, but new ones were beginning to open. Richards was (mostly) off heroin, prompted in part by his narrow avoidance of a long potential jail sentence after the Toronto bust. His (relative) sobriety allowed him to take a renewed presence in the Stones’ music and business affairs around the time of their hit 1978 album Some Girls, and according to Richards, Jagger wasn’t happy about that. The camaraderie at the center of the band they’d started as teenagers in 1962 would sour considerably in the coming years, eventually prompting a handful of ill-advised solo projects and a seven-year hiatus from performing live. But for now, they had a massive tour booked for the end of 1981, with no new album to promote and hardly any new material to record.
That Tattoo You exists at all is largely thanks to Chris Kimsey, an audio engineer who’d begun working with the band on 1971’s Sticky Fingers. “Tattoo You really came about because Mick and Keith were going through a period of not getting on,” Kimsey told an interviewer years later. “There was a need to have an album out, and I told everyone I could make an album from what I knew was still there.”
Kimsey and Jagger spent three months searching the band’s archives for recordings of rejected and forgotten songs, jams, and sketches from previous sessions, going as far back as 1973’s Goats Head Soup and as recent as 1980’s Emotional Rescue. They took the compiled instrumental tracks to a warehouse on the edge of Paris and recorded vocals and a few additional overdubs there—a process that could have been finished in a few days, according to Kimsey, but instead took six weeks due to Jagger’s extensive social commitments in the city. Assembled for commercial reasons, from a backlog of unused material, at a time when the players involved were beginning to hate each other and the singer often couldn’t be bothered to come to work, Tattoo You didn’t have any reason to be particularly special.
“Start Me Up” is the first track, and the last of the Rolling Stones’ signature songs. The thwack of its backbeat and strut of its opening riff are so familiar today that it’s difficult to fathom its earliest iteration as a reggae song, a product of the Stones’ extended flirtation with Jamaican music in the mid-’70s. They labored over “Start Me Up” unsuccessfully for years, trying something like 70 cumulative takes at multiple different studios before landing almost accidentally on the final version, playing it as a charged-up rocker on a lark for the first time ever. Richards hated it. According to Kimsey, the guitarist went as far as ordering him to wipe the recording from the tape. “So of course,” Kimsey remembers, “I didn’t wipe it.”
The final version was recorded on the same day the Stones also nailed Some Girls opener “Miss You,” and there are echoes of that discofied hit in “Start Me Up”’s piston-pumping rhythmic drive. But “Start Me Up” belongs to the stadium, not the dancefloor. It’s the first Stones song that seems specifically designed to reach the highest bleachers and get tens of thousands of people clapping along in time. Fittingly, it became a sports arena staple. It frequently opens setlists on the band’s ultra-professional latter-day tours, where even the cheap seats are pretty expensive. It soundtracked the launch of Microsoft Windows 95, netting the Stones several millions of dollars in fees and providing the groove for a few of the world’s richest people to execute a few of the worst dance moves ever captured on video.
If “Start Me Up” is a real-time document of a feral band of outsiders mutating into a bloodless big business, it’s also one of the most undeniable rock’n’roll songs ever recorded. Scrape away decades of overexposure and it’s still possible to hear the improvisatory rawness of those early demos in the finished version, especially in Bill Wyman’s bass playing, which still carries the faintest whiff of subterranean dub, and in the frenzy of yelps, grunts, and wheezes that constitutes Jagger’s vocal take. The tension between the off-the-cuff source recordings and their glossy final presentation is part of Tattoo You’s distinct charm. For an album with such muddled origins, it has a consistent sonic quality, with crisp echoes that are distinctly of its early-’80s era. Even that effect is stranger and more human than it seems, achieved not with any fancy technology, but by playing the tracks back in a studio bathroom and capturing the echoes from the tiles.
“Slave,” rides a slow-motion blues-funk groove that sounds like it could go on forever, and nearly does: a bootleg of the raw take runs to 11 minutes, cut down to five for the album. Its chanted and spoken vocals surely had something to do with Jagger’s newfound love of disco as a frequent patron of Studio 54, and its swaggering rhythm is a reminder that Richards spent his time off from the Stones in this era jamming with reggae and funk heavy-hitters like Sly & Robbie and Zigaboo Modeliste. Though their paths were diverging, 20 years after they initially bonded over a mutual love of Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker, both Mick and Keith were still devoted students of black music.
Recorded at a time after guitarist Mick Taylor had left the Stones, but before Ronnie Wood formally replaced him, the initial “Slave” session featured marquee guests like Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, and frequent Stones collaborator Billy Preston on keys. Beck’s contributions were likely scrubbed from the final version, and no one seems to agree whether Townshend was playing guitar or just adding backing vocals. The unlikeliest contributor is Sonny Rollins, the master tenor saxophonist, whom Jagger invited to overdub solos on “Slave” and several other songs after seeing him play at a New York City jazz club in 1981.
Rollins’ phrasing is carefree and conversational throughout Tattoo You, sounding perfectly pleased to be playing circles around these guys. His participation is a poignant image of human connection from the otherwise fractured process of adding isolated new takes to previously existing recordings. Jagger remembers: “I said, ‘Would you like me to stay out there in the studio?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you tell me where you want me to play and dance the part out. So I did that. And that's very important: communication in hand, dance, whatever. ” But the pairing was too brilliant to last. Rollins never collaborated with the Stones again, leaving drummer and jazz aficionado Charlie Watts lamenting that he was on a record backing up one of his heroes without ever having actually played with him.
On Tattoo You’s flickeringly transcendent second side, the Stones sometimes sound like they’re shooting for Al Green or Prince (who opened a couple of gigs on the subsequent tour and got booed offstage at least once), and always like they’re a little too sad, loaded, and British to pull it off. Blues and country are here too, but only as shadows and reflections. The guitars are airy and transparent; the rhythm section softly works the pocket; Jagger whispers and convulses, using plenty of falsetto. It’s like the disarrayed intimacy of the classic Some Girls ballad “Beast of Burden” has been expanded into a five-song suite; only now, the burden has become much too heavy to bear.
In bootlegs from the Cockroaches’ Toronto ’77 shows, “Worried About You” is loose and jammy, nearly formless, stretching out to about eight minutes, with Mick Jagger audibly cueing the band through a sparse set of changes. In the studio version the public heard four years later, the changes were essentially the same, but the compositional arc had become clearer, and the bleary 5 a.m. atmosphere more vivid: Jagger channeling the spirit of past hedonism while reckoning with its effects in the present; tension building through ticking hi-hats and glowing electric piano toward a chorus that’s over almost as soon as it begins. “I’m worried, and I just can’t seem to find my way,” Jagger admits as the band sighs back into the verse behind him. That very moment captures the feeling of a halcyon period reaching its close.
The languor reaches a peak with “Heaven,” one of two entirely new compositions on Tattoo You, recorded by a skeleton crew version of the band—just Jagger, Watts, possibly Wyman, and Kimsey helping out—on a late night in Paris during the particularly cold winter of 1980. Kimsey recalls being able to see Jagger’s breath as they worked. The music is likewise swirling and vaporous, barely even there, far more psychedelic in its way than anything recorded during the band’s brief acid rock period of the late ’60s, and at least as erotic as any of their more openly hip-thrusting material. Jagger mumbles half-intelligibly, as if entranced, in the throes of sexual or religious ecstasy or both. Kimsey has been quoted as saying he “played alleged piano” on “Heaven,” which may be the result of a journalist’s bad transcription—there is some electric piano audible at the edges—but the odd phrasing is nonetheless appropriate for the rare Stones song that works by suggestion rather than demonstration, a half-formed memory or fantasy of events that may never have transpired at all.
Tattoo You closes with “Waiting on a Friend,” an ode to platonic companionship that’s among the most purely sweet songs the Rolling Stones ever wrote. From today’s vantage, it looks like one final expression of boyhood love between Jagger and Richards before the years of business-driven bitterness that would follow. As it fades into the mist with some Jagger falsetto and a beautiful sax solo from Rollins, it’s possible to close your eyes and imagine the Rolling Stones chose to wrap it up here, allowing the entire ’60s rock era to draw gracefully and finally to a close.
But they didn’t. After Tattoo You, there were bigger and more remunerative tours and public spats between Mick and Keith about music and money and penis size. Many albums took the backward-looking approach of Tattoo You as a figurative starting point, but without any of the sweat or ingenuity. “It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom,” Richards wrote scathingly in his 2010 memoir Life about his old friend during the post-Tattoo You ’80s. If you were feeling equally uncharitable, you could say the same about the band as a whole.
Shortly after the album’s release, a Rolling Stone interviewer expressed to Keith that he hoped the band would continue to exist and create music for another 20 years. “So do I, because nobody else has done it, you know?” Richards answered. “It’s kind of interesting to find out how rock & roll can grow up.” According to Billboard, the Stones’ 2019 “No Filter” tour grossed $415.6 million, placing it high on the list of the most profitable tours of all time. Their latest album, 2016’s Blue and Lonesome, is a collection of classic blues songs of the sort the Stones began their career by covering, another trip into the past.
And despite everything, on a good night, it’s still possible to catch the spark and recognize the Rolling Stones are still the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. It’s no wonder they once chose to rename themselves after a famously persistent prehistoric household pest for a few shows, intent on getting back to basics and recapturing the old glory. Cockroaches can live through anything. | 2019-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rolling Stones | December 1, 2019 | 8.1 | 3e8fb79d-ab0a-4e9b-99f6-da87497bd11d | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Mackenzie Scott's voice conveys raw, urgent desperation. Veering between rangy indie rock and hushed folk, the 22-year old Nashville vocalist and guitarist's self-recorded debut conjures the hypnotic hurt of the earliest, best Songs:Ohia or Cat Power. | Mackenzie Scott's voice conveys raw, urgent desperation. Veering between rangy indie rock and hushed folk, the 22-year old Nashville vocalist and guitarist's self-recorded debut conjures the hypnotic hurt of the earliest, best Songs:Ohia or Cat Power. | Torres: Torres | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17558-torres/ | Torres | Mackenzie Scott's voice conveys raw, urgent desperation, the sort we flinch from instinctually and are attuned, on a primal level, to heed. It is an "I haven't eaten in three days" sound, pitched between stray-dog growl, moan, and sigh. If this voice appeared on a 3am voicemail, your blood would freeze. Like its owner, it fairly lunges to be heard.
Scott, a 22-year-old from Nashville, records as Torres. This is her first album. She recorded it mostly in single live-band takes, close-mic'ed, and many of the album's 10 stark, stunning songs are set for nothing more than a single electric guitar. The lyrics are full of tricky, messy subject matter-- loaded poses of female need, abjection, subjugation, dominance-- and Scott handles it deftly, furtively, like hot stones slipped from palm to palm, or a lighter flicked under a wrist. Her sure touch with these explosive subjects immediately puts her in the league of artists like PJ Harvey or EMA. Like them, she paints in whole-hand smears when the moment calls for it. Her ability to capture and sustain a single a spellbinding mood conjures the hypnotic hurt of the earliest, best Songs:Ohia or Cat Power. Her record is an overwhelming rush of feeling, and it connects with throat-seizing immediacy.
"Honey, while you were ashing in your coffee/ I was thinking of telling you've what you done to me," she murmurs on "Honey", over three muted implications of power chords. It feels like a depiction of a long-unhappily married couple, maybe, confined to a pair of armchairs, the woman silently glaring a hole in the man's oblivious head. The bass in Scott's voice deepens as the guitar flares, but the song never crosses over from "thinking of telling" to catharsis. "Everything hurts, but its fine, it's fine/ it happens all the time," she mutters; the woman remains rigid in her chair, teeth clenched, leaving claw marks on the arm rests. Often on Torres, Scott plays a coiled, hurt figure willing herself to find the courage to transform into a 50 Ft Queenie, and not quite succeeding.
The songs on Torres, accordingly, are not anthems. Scott recorded the album with minimal resources-- a touch of keyboard here, a cello stab there-- and the skeletal backing band feels less like an unfortunate imitation than the album's single best decision. Songs build and build and build and then die, gazing longingly at exhilarating emotional peaks just outside their reach. Like the woman in "Honey", they would explode, if only they had a little help.
The feeling is echoed everywhere in the lyrics, which take baleful stock of emotional wreckage like so many groceries strewn open on the lawn. "Moon & Back” is addressed from a mother to a baby she gave up: "I'm writing to you from 1991, the year I gave you to a mama with a girl and a son," she croons. Check the year and do the math; this isn't Scott’s baby, but this feels like her story nonetheless. "Little baby, if you're reading this/ You're probably all grown, the way most babies do/ I'm sure your eyes are still that pretty blue," she sings, and by the time the song reaches its emotional center-- "Your new family knows/ I did this all for you/ maybe one day, you'll believe them too"-- the song has has joined the Pretenders' "Kid" in a devastating lineage of songs: in which beleaguered moms sadly explain the inexplicable to their children.
The songs veer between rangy indie rock and hushed folk, unspooling in unhurried five and -six-minute lengths. They never insist on their structure, but eventually it becomes clear that they dip and surge at odd, intuitive moments, suggesting a creative songwriting mind. The music on "Chains" is little more than a single, baleful groan of cello, while scraped guitar strings that feel like ligaments tearing ratchets up tension in the background. The song drops off into a muffled-heartbeat blankness of a drum thud; Scott murmurs "Don't give up on me just yet," her voice hooded. The moment hangs, and you wait for the curtain to drop. It doesn't; the end comes two minutes later in a rude snip of the tape that startles me even at the tenth hearing. The mesmerizing lamp-glow of finger-picked guitar that opens "November Baby" could have shown up on an early Modest Mouse record. It is supported by nothing more than a handful of bass guitar notes, and each one hits at a moment of such breath-held sustained tension that it taps you in the solar plexus.
Corralling all of this is Scott's jugular-direct, impressionistic writing. She reels off gorgeous images like this one, which opens "November Baby": "His skin hangs on me like a lampshade/ keeping all my light at bay." Natural images fill her lyrics-- trees, rocks, seasons-- but they are subject to the same disappointments and rejections as the human world: on "When Winter's Over", leaves drop wearily off of sorrowful trees. On the closer "Waterfall", Scott eyes the ceaselessly tumbling water and sees suicide: "The rocks beneath they bare their teeth/ They all conspire to set me free/ I set my teeth and contemplate/ All the possibilities," she sings. The album fades out right before a Big Leap, fading out in a hum rather than a burst. As the tremolo'd guitar behind her dissolves into a fine mist, she either has or hasn't jumped, permamently suspended between doubt and release: "Do you ever make it halfway down and think 'god, I never meant to jump at all'?" | 2013-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 24, 2013 | 8.1 | 3e9024e4-f8ef-4bc3-afe3-dc30e3041ae0 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The carefree California rapper’s debut is an exceedingly joyous and self-aware slice of pop rap. | The carefree California rapper’s debut is an exceedingly joyous and self-aware slice of pop rap. | KYLE: Light of Mine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kyle-light-of-mine/ | Light of Mine | Seventeen months have passed since KYLE launched his exuberant single “iSpy” into orbit. A bouncy portrayal of online flirting, it rocketed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, earning the Ventura rapper his first and, so far, only smash hit. It cemented his place in the happy-rap ranks—a world inhabited by Aminé, Chance the Rapper, and DRAM where songs are made of cartoon nostalgia and cheerfulness is a commodity. But with his debut album Light of Mine, KYLE peels back another corner of his rose-colored veil to expose the obstacles to his joy.
On “Ups & Downs,” he raps about his big breakout year, how he “nearly had a mental breakdown and eight months later I had a hit.” His cadence flutters like a nursery rhyme and, combined with his lisp and nasally tones (his “soccer mom voice” he called it), make even his most dour lyrics sound caked in hope. The message is clear from the outset: He’s going to smile anyway, even if it’s forced. Lil Yachty, his “iSpy” co-conspirator, reprises his role as a Jiminy Cricket-esque conscience who aims to keep KYLE from wallowing as he embarks on his glo-up. With his cards on the table early, KYLE spends the rest of his debut foraying into buoyant pop rap.
“Playinwitme,” with its piano-driven production more fit for Nickelodeon theme than a love song, creates the perfect space for his personality. Kehlani makes for an ideal complement as the two riff about their lady interests wasting precious time. Even the hardships of courting sound like sugar when KYLE is serving them. Similarly, “iMissMe” is a fluorescent break-up anthem which finds him crooning alongside the ubiquitous Khalid. He has one of the stronger singing voices of his peppy peers, and he deploys it liberally across the album. Despite assists from formidable vocalists like acclaimed gospel sextet Take 6 or former “The Voice” contestant Avery Wilson, KYLE does much of the heavy lifting himself.
But it isn’t the ability to snake between singing and rap or between rap and pop that anchors him. It’s his self-awareness. Whatever you think of KYLE, he’s already beat you to it and is somewhere figuring out a way to play it up in a song. “Games” features an on-the-nose production that is quite literally made of arcade sound effects as he likens his success to, well, games. “It's Yours” is a woozy narrative lifted by his fizzy rhymes about his first time having sex with a girl. It comes out like a whimsical version of J. Cole’s “Wet Dreamz,” complete with references to himself as a “loser” and a so-ridiculous-it’s-funny victory speech to close out the track. That’s how his weapon works: KYLE is so confidently corny it eventually morphs into charm.
He is the sun and breeze peeking through the darkened haze of drug-addicted SoundCloud raps and hood politicians burdened by an eternal cynicism—entertainment that is free of collateral damage. It can be hard to take this brand of over-the-top mirth seriously when it’s coming from someone who grew up in a beach community, as if happiness is something to be earned only by hardship. But tragedy has never considered zip codes, and a genuine smile is contagious no matter where it comes from. KYLE is peddling joy because he knows the world needs it—because he, himself, needs it. Almost like a cautionary tale, he exists in a land of giddy synths and animated piano and syrupy melodies, but he’ll always remind you none of it is real. One-liners about how he almost lost himself in the façade of it all are sprinkled throughout the album. On the sleepy “ShipTrip,” he waxes about the pressures of his life while the dreamy “Clouds” is his own optimistic reminder to breathe it all in and offer himself as much love as he offers the world.
With the bubbliness somewhat dialed back compared to his 2015 mixtape SMYLE or 2013's Beautiful Loser, Light of Mine is still more carefree than most current rap. It’s far too pop for fans who like their lyrics with edge, but how else can such an inoffensive disposition, such unabashed levity thrive? More than a few of us could use a page from KYLE’s book on finding your own light and then refusing to dim it for anyone. | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Independently Popular | May 24, 2018 | 6.9 | 3e9968f0-6599-4a95-8db8-4916a2d1387b | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Subtitled "Songs for Kids of All Ages", this Paper Bag compilation features indie artists such as Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, and Junior Boys performing children's songs. | Subtitled "Songs for Kids of All Ages", this Paper Bag compilation features indie artists such as Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, and Junior Boys performing children's songs. | Various Artists: See You on the Moon!: Songs for Kids of All Ages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2118-see-you-on-the-moon-songs-for-kids-of-all-ages/ | See You on the Moon!: Songs for Kids of All Ages | It's hard to keep up with the kids these days. They're getting so...old. Finding a job and having a mewling child or two used to mean saying goodbye to the days of obsessive-compulsive music snobbery. Now the internet cuts out the conventional legwork and here's a clever compilation of kiddie pop for aging indie-yuppies, with more reportedly on the way.
Yes, folks, See You on the Moon!: Song for Kids of All Ages leaves Raffi in the deep blue sea and lets Kidz Bop float on, all right, already. It's definitely better than the old For Our Children disc-- featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Debbie Gibson-- I remember hearing once or twice in the parental Toyota Previa. But as that effort showed, merely hiring A-list talent (and Debbie Gibson) doesn't guarantee success when trying to rock the cradle. Paper Bag's compilation enlists some Pitchfork darlings-- most notably Broken Social Scene and Sufjan Stevens-- and a few lesser-knowns for a brilliant marketing gambit that actually turns out not to suck.
The best entries on See You on the Moon! are steeped with a sense of practical-minded wonderment. Great Lake Swimmers' "See You on the Moon" runs eagerly through a list of possible careers, indulging a child's attention to detail ("I'll drive my tractor in the sun/ While the chickens go bawk, bawk, bawk/ and the cows go moo, moo, moo"), while catchy acoustic guitars ring, ring, ring. "Be Nice to People With Lice", Low's Alan Sparhawk's solo acoustic opener, similarly features an easy sing-along melody and adult-friendly one-liners (cf. the title), but it's marred by the sounds of grown-up laughter and "best-song-ever" half-sarcasm. Lice are deadly serious, dudes. Parents just don't understand.
Broken Social Scene's spacey, subtly psychedelic "Puff the Magic Dragon" cover is a cause for Honah-Lee frolicking. Meanwhile, Sufjan Stevens does his usual Jesus thing (but seriously, stop asking him about it, you vultures), turning in a toy-orchestra take on French carol "The Friendly Beasts"-- also featured on his Christmas album triad. Mark Kozelek's "Leo and Luna" is a slow, Red House Painters-like lullaby that also makes for a nice two-minute subway oasis, but Hot Chip's uncharacteristically boring "I Can't Wake Up" forgets that kids have awesome bullshit detectors. And heck, FemBots' growly Waits/Beefheart polka on "Under the Bed" gives me nightmares.
As with any children's compilation, See You on the Moon! has a few tracks parents will want to skip. The kids' shouty chanting on space-age double-dutch "24 Robbers", by BSS member Apostle of Hustle, is cute but gets old even faster than children do-- try the Go! Team instead. Kid Koala's "Fruit Bat", featuring Lederhosen Lucil, gets nicely cartoon-like, but be warned I'll step on any toddler I hear repeating its chorus of "I 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ate you".
Montag's three brief instrumentals, though, are soothing, culminating in the glistening "Bonne Nuit Etienne". Rosie Thomas' lovely, dream-like "Faith's Silver Elephant" is a real children's song, tucking an achingly sung story of a girl and her magical mammal pals into a bed of softest down. It also evokes the weird, unspoken fantasy behind buying an indie kid's-music comp in this age of ubiquitous over-parenting: "Wait and see/ I'll be the coolest kid around." | 2006-03-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-03-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Paper Bag | March 22, 2006 | 6.6 | 3e9b947d-b2a5-49ce-a47f-637efbc90d98 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On this expressive and singular new album, Chuck Johnson gives his steel pedal guitar the starring role, and creates a kind of country post-rock. It feels like a universe unto itself. | On this expressive and singular new album, Chuck Johnson gives his steel pedal guitar the starring role, and creates a kind of country post-rock. It feels like a universe unto itself. | Chuck Johnson: Balsams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23275-chuck-johnson-balsams/ | Balsams | Pedal steel guitar is such an evocative instrument that just one chord emanating from its strings can suggest entire worlds. Often that’s exactly how it is used: one chord at a time, doled out sparingly to enhance moods already established by other instruments. But what if you give pedal steel guitar the starring role? That’s what Chuck Johnson does on Balsams, an album that’s drowning in waves of pedal steel, accompanied only by sparse, time-marking bass tones. It’s a simple formula, but Johnson mines it for rich music that feels infinitely expressive.
This isn’t exactly a shock, given that Johnson was already pretty great at creating moods with a guitar. He’s made three previous albums of subtle finger-picked acoustic work, as well as a full-band effort—last year’s Velvet Arc—that used pedal steel more traditionally. But there’s something singular about what he’s done on Balsams. It feels like a universe unto itself, one where each slow, patient strain of pedal steel builds on the previous one. Individually, none of the album’s six tracks sounds very different from each other, but as a whole they create a three-dimensional sonic space that expands and evolves.
In that sense, Balsams is more an ambient album than a folk-based guitar record. Think of it as country post-rock: Johnson’s hypnotic music conjures cinematic landscapes as strong as those evoked by Stars of the Lid or Flying Saucer Attack, but his guitar’s gentle twang sounds more like a desert with wafting tumbleweeds than a sky with drifting clouds. Whatever images the album might inspire, there is definitely a lot of weather happening in Balsams’ widescreen scenes. You can feel air moving, sand sifting, and sun baking as Johnson’s guitar chords gradually stretch across the horizon.
In the album’s best moments, those chords regenerate and deepen, making it hard to tell where one sound begins and another ends. During “Riga Black,” guitar tones continually emerge and fade in overlapping circles; in “Moonstone,” rising chords spawn textures that trail each other. At times, Johnson’s sounds transcend standard associations with the pedal steel guitar, as on opener “Calamus,” whose long echoes resemble a bowed violin or a soaring synth as much as metal sliding across strings.
Within this guitar-heavy environment, Johnson’s bass notes at first feel like afterthoughts, but they turn out to be crucial. Often they provide steps for the pedal steel to climb, their short durations propelling longer atmospherics that climb higher with each passing tone. This recalls the way Labradford often used simple notes to carve a path for grander tones, and Johnson proves just as adept at that move. His approach shines most vividly during “Labrodite Eye,” where the up-and-down crests of pedal steel are pulled by bass like gravity tugging at tides. It’s a supporting role, akin to the reassuring tick of a clock, but once you’ve let Balsams fully mesmerize you, it’s hard to imagine any of Johnson’s songs without that transfixing metronome.
It seems that Johnson’s main goal here is to transfix—perhaps not just the listener but himself as well. It must have been tempting for him to swerve from his devout sonic path, adding a drumbeat here or a voice there, or even just a three-note guitar solo somewhere. But part of the beauty of Balsams is that it entrances not in spite of its homogeneity, but because of it. In one sense, it’s an experiment to see what pedal steel guitar can do when it’s asked to do it all. But the results make Balsams more than that: a fully realized sonic world, and one worth visiting for a long time. | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | VDSQ | June 5, 2017 | 8.1 | 3e9c2444-dac9-48f0-9d98-0755f90ac186 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
John Lydon’s public persona remains as contrarian as ever. But on PiL’s first album in eight years, his voice remains captivating—and, occasionally, surprisingly moving. | John Lydon’s public persona remains as contrarian as ever. But on PiL’s first album in eight years, his voice remains captivating—and, occasionally, surprisingly moving. | Public Image Ltd: End of World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/public-image-ltd-end-of-world/ | End of World | John Lydon has made a career out of being contrarian, so it seems less surprising that some fans had written him off as a frustrated old reactionary tarnished by his pro-Trump and pro-Brexit views than that he should follow up with something as moving as this year’s “Hawaii,” a tender ode to his wife Nora Forster and her struggle with Alzheimer’s. Just as strikingly, Public Image Ltd, the group Lydon has fronted on and off since 1978, entered the song in Ireland’s national selections for Eurovision 2023, placing fourth behind simpering pop band Wild Youth—a further bizarre twist in the often frustrating, always captivating path of the former Sex Pistol.
“Hawaii,” released in January, was the first taste of End of World, PiL’s first album since 2015’s solid, if underwhelming, What the World Needs Now…. You might assume Lydon’s attention would have been elsewhere during the new album’s protracted recording process. It’s been in gestation since 2019, a time in which Forster’s condition worsened (she died in April 2023) and Lydon became embroiled in a court case against the other former Sex Pistols. Remarkably, this situation seems to have concentrated Lydon’s mind. “Hawaii” is one of his best songs in a long while, combining the desperate pain of PiL’s 1979 song “Death Disco”—inspired by watching his mother die of cancer—with a melodic, wistful edge that evokes life slipping away in a fog of morphine and sunshine.
Crucially, Lydon’s bandmates are also at their best on “Hawaii,” which serves as the album’s moving conclusion. The song was birthed from Lu Edmonds’ mournful Hawaiian guitar licks, while Bruce Smith’s drums roll like waves against the shore, making it the rare PiL song since their 2009 reunion where the music lives up to the vocals’ ingenuity and character. The same could be said for “End of the World,” which combines stentorian singing with a semi-disco beat, sauntering bassline, and a screeching guitar riff that hits like a splash of cold water to the face. The song is obtuse, lovely, and swaggering: the apocalypse on poppers, like classic early PiL. “The Do That,” seems to have borrowed from swing jazz, an unexpectedly jaunty turn from a band that sounds liberated from what people might expect from them. “Being Stupid Again” would have been better as an instrumental, with Lydon’s strawmannish and wearisome caricaturization of student politics—“All maths is racist,” etc.—distracting from a menacingly nebulous guitar effect that swirls and contracts like a toxic cloud.
A disappointing vocal is a rarity, though. In his nearly five decades as a singer, Lydon has rarely been less than compelling. His performances have balanced fury, drama, compassion, and pain, with the intensity and sheer belief dialed up to 10. And he is largely in snarling, triumphant form on End of World: The acrid intensity of his voice on “Penge,” delivered with the berserker fury of a raiding Viking, elevates the song above its rather mundane riff, while the multi-tracked payoff to “L F C F” (“Liars, Fakes, Cheats, and Frauds”) is a masterclass in theatrical shade, ripping through the speaker like an explosion of street preachers.
Lydon has always sung because he has to; his singular voice couples acute distress with an almost physical sense of relief. But he is at his best when he meets his match, be it in the thuggish intensity of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, the hypnotic low-end power of bassist Jah Wobble, or Keith Levene’s spidery anti-blues guitar. End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama. Lydon could put his voice to almost anything, musically, and it would be worth a listen; but it’s far better when it’s like this. | 2023-08-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PiL Official | August 10, 2023 | 6.7 | 3ea367cf-7e4a-4913-b125-35fd4e64b70c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Toning down some of the experimentation of Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket return with an album that touches on highlights from their earlier work. | Toning down some of the experimentation of Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket return with an album that touches on highlights from their earlier work. | My Morning Jacket: Circuital | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15471-circuital/ | Circuital | My Morning Jacket have always been something of a mythic outfit. Back in 1999, when the band released its debut LP, The Tennessee Fire (and again in 2001, after the release of At Dawn), its legend was whispered quietly, like a ghost story: Kentucky, grain silos, reverb, that high, liquid voice. As 2001 was the apex of a certain kind of dark, New York City cool-- with the Strokes and Interpol slouching around the Lower East Side in threadbare t-shirts and tiny ties-- My Morning Jacket were steeped in a warm, eerie other-ness that culminated, cathartically, with Jim James howling "All your life/ Is obscene." Well, sure.
In the ensuing decade, the band became legendary for its heroic live show (in 2008, they stormed through a near-four-hour set at Bonnaroo), but its studio work has always been a little less triumphant. On record, My Morning Jacket can sometimes sound like a band struggling against its own best interests, purposefully eschewing the exact thing-- huge, ghostly, terrifying rock'n'roll-- it does so disarmingly well. Accordingly, the reigning press narrative surrounding Circuital, MMJ's sixth LP, has been focused on the band's supposed "return to form," a response that feels like a direct reaction to its title (or, more likely, to 2008's falsetto-addled Evil Urges, easily the band's most divisive record).
But what are they returning to, exactly? My Morning Jacket’s early discography is rooted in oddball experimentation: Despite the open-mouthed riffing, impenetrable reverb, and whipping hair, they’ve never really been a straightforward rock band, especially on record. Jim James' penchant for psychedelic soul is constantly manifesting in new ways, and while Circuital is closer, certainly, to 2005's Z than Evil Urges, it doesn’t feel like a step backwards, or even like a lateral hop.
The record opens with James tooting a half-serious introductory "horn" riff that belies a goofy sense of humor. James has always been something of a jokester (cue the whispered "Shaaa!" at the end of "Circuital" or the line, "They told me not to smoke drugs, but I wouldn't listen/ Never thought I'd get caught and wind up in prison," from "Outta My System"), but his voice is so naturally dramatic that even silly bits can sound like earnest proclamations. That's why-- and this is unique to MMJ-- he often sounds best when he's delivering vague platitudes.
Still, anyone who's ever heard James wail in concert is likely to be frustrated by the eternal underuse of his voice in the studio, even when the songs were ostensibly recorded live. There are a few tracks here where producer Tucker Martine captures it in all its intoxicating splendor-- the acoustic lament "Wonderful (The Way I Feel)" especially-- but most only hint at what James is capable of delivering in person. His falsetto (contentious since the days of "Highly Suspicious") comes back for "Holdin on to Black Metal", a bizarre bit of jam-funk that alternates between pleasantly spirited and genuinely stupid (it's a cautionary tale about not growing out of black metal fandom, and ends with a shout of "Let's rock!"). On "Slow Slow Tune", James sounds remarkably vulnerable, singing to his future progeny over a barely there, bubblegum guitar figure that recalls the Everly Brothers before transitioning into a Flaming Lips-style burnout.
Like nearly all of their studio albums, Circuital may not reach the heights of the band's live show-- a good MMJ concert can recalibrate your gut, it can change you-- but it’s a remarkably solid step for a band that's never stopped evolving. | 2011-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | May 31, 2011 | 7.2 | 3ea8a8b8-b900-419e-b7fe-a74ea0cd709a | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The English art-rock duo’s concept album about history post-World War I isn’t worth taking half as seriously as it takes itself. | The English art-rock duo’s concept album about history post-World War I isn’t worth taking half as seriously as it takes itself. | Field Music: Making a New World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/field-music-making-a-new-world/ | Making a New World | For their eighth record, the English art-rock band Field Music have made a concept album about the aftermath of World War I, aka the 20th century. Originating at London’s Imperial War Museum, Making a New World begins with a song based on a graphical recording of the last shots fired in the war and goes on to cover everything from women’s suffrage and Tiananmen Square to the invention of the sanitary napkin. “A Change of Heir” is about Dr. Harold Gillies, who pioneered skin grafts for injured soldiers, while “Money Is a Memory” is about a German treasury officer preparing documents for—
You know what, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Who listens to pop music and thinks about stuff like this? How do they do it? True, World War I is a hot topic, with historical relevance to current nationalist successions and Russian shenanigans, not to mention 1917 storming the Oscars. It is interesting that Gillies performed one of the first gender affirmation surgeries, and that Germany paid its last WWI reparations in 2010. But I only know this from reading about the album, which I only did in order to write about it.
Music is the best way to learn about emotions, but the worst way to learn about facts. Without context, which Field Music’s medium can’t provide, you’re left perplexed by the obscure narrative perspectives and wondering why on earth these guys are singing about menstruation. The music, though lively enough, feels distant in its concerns. The album’s fussy construction, with lots of small instrumentals and half-songs, is tiresome. By the end, it’s hard to remember much of what happened.
To be fair, there are some good ideas here. Opener “Sound Ranging,” an interesting blend of beauty and terror, is one of the best instrumentals, with a beat like distant artillery fire. But there’s still the desultory throat-clearing of “Silence” before the record finally gets going with “Coffee and Wine,” which tenses and glides through a bouncy groove, sparkling politely, like the Clientele trying to be Franz Ferdinand. There’s plenty of slinky, string-bendy rock and junkyard percussion to come, much of it tinted with lemony vocal harmonies redolent of Africa, or at least of David Byrne. And when the Brewis brothers aren’t funking it up, they like to climb high into incomprehensible almost-falsetto regions, in prog rock’s “maybe this is a melody?” tradition.
Near the end, the short tracks almost take over: There’s a little synth interlude, a little piano, someone practicing a guitar scale for 30 seconds; it’s as if the album is crumbling away. Then, speeding out of the tuneless electro-rock of “Nikon, Pt. 2,” comes “Only in a Man’s World,” a big Peter Gabriel moment. “Why should a woman feel ashamed? Why, why, why?” David Brewis wails. “What kind of civilization/Has made the necessary/Conditions for procreation/A luxury?” He goes on to conclude, “Things would be different if the boys bled, too.”
This is patently ridiculous—not the idea itself, but him singing it, in this setting. This is a product of the gap between what the album purports to say and what it could possibly say about its subject matter, and here ridiculousness breeds. There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | January 16, 2020 | 5.3 | 3ea9175d-ea59-44fc-81a4-be643b0a6dc7 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
For five years, PC Worship have been the sort of amorphous New York ensemble that can only be defined by a series of question marks. Social Rust finds the band evolving into their most realized semblance of a "rock band" yet, collaging decades of downtown New York dissonance while sludging into the future. | For five years, PC Worship have been the sort of amorphous New York ensemble that can only be defined by a series of question marks. Social Rust finds the band evolving into their most realized semblance of a "rock band" yet, collaging decades of downtown New York dissonance while sludging into the future. | PC Worship: Social Rust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19845-pc-worship-social-rust/ | Social Rust | For five years, PC Worship have been the sort of amorphous New York ensemble that can only be defined by a series of question marks. Is this an improv noise collective? A "mutant soul band"? A casual experiment in home-recording? If so, why is their loft called Le Wallet? Did they really all meet as New School jazz majors? Is it true they build their own instruments? And why is one called "the shitar"? PC Worship is, in essence, a twisted, low-pitched vision of subterranean psychedelia—variously made of bad-moon-lit trash-punk, droning minimalism, prepared pianos, and Albert Ayler-worshipping sax freak-outs—as imagined by one Justin Frye, who handled vocals, guitars, tape manipulations, and keys as the writer, recorder, and producer of this latest behemoth, Social Rust. Frye has played back-up for experimental synth-cyborg Gary War as well as Baltimore weirdos Teeth Mountain, both of which offer only a surface idea of PC Worship's frayed, pummeling avant-gardism. The questions have no direct answers—though who would want them?
Social Rust sees PC Worship evolving into their most realized semblance of a "rock band" yet, collaging decades of downtown New York dissonance while sludging into the future. Along with Frye, the core group is guitarist Michael Etten (also credited for "sax?" parts), bassist Jordan Bernstein of the Dreebs, and drummer Shannon Sigley, as well as numerous contributors of backwards violin lines learned from John Cale, homemade noise generators, circuit-bent tape players, creative piano solos (in other words, running one's hand across the keys lawlessly), bass clarinet, and organ. Frye, along with another PC guy named "Bongo Dan" (credited here for adding percussive flourishes "on something, somewhere"), have both worked at NYC museum MoMA PS1—and perhaps they took notes on the cut-and-paste junk sculptures by contemporary artists who carry Dada forward. PC Worship's adventurous style of art-punk is spiritually not dissimilar to that of Butthole Surfers, though it seems more interesting to draw connections to PC's peers: Andrew Savage, of studious New York traditionalists Parquet Courts, is co-releasing Rust on his label, Dull Tools, and the two bands just announced that a supergroup called PCPC will tour with a godfather of similarly Beat-obsessed bohemian punk-noise, Thurston Moore.
PC Worship's journey from tin-can-recorded live jams of squalling feedback, free jazz exploration, and meditative cello to the more formally-realized Social Rust is not unexpected—as early as 2010's Millenial Kreephaus tape on Night-People, they've incorporated heavier punk riffs and conventional drum/vocal structures, despite the tendencies for crackling radio hiss and a gurgling, ghostly, cinematic distance. The organization of sound has been gradual over 2011's Dread Head, 2012's Toxic Love, and 2013's Beat Punk, the ideas all crystallizing to a hyper-present maelstrom on Social Rust. The music of PC Worship's past pulled and pinched at your brain, requiring patience, and now it is more immediate, but no less weird. Instead of collapsing into one another, ideas are given proper canvases.
Social Rust is a masterful act of trickery. The first half works through PC Worship's most accessible material to date—"Odd" and "Behind the Picture" have heavy, visceral, hummable grooves with valleys and explosive swells. The hooks have a throbbing backbone; you could do a stoned headbang to them. "I'm feeling odd," Frye and co. sing, in unison, over—relatively speaking—a thick, soaring grunge riff. The layered vocals are possessed by an otherness in their deranged multiplicity. "Odd" opens with caterwauling, terrifying shrieks, which sound ripped from a horror film, and most of the song glides through a calmly sinister, low-tone poem: "Smoke dripping, heat seaking, dust breathing." "Picture" features a peculiar tempo change at its midpoint, racing off to an endless, kraut-shaped contortion. A lit, dragged cigarette opens the air-tight, claustrophobic highlight, "Rust", which dirges with monotone, free-associating lyrics, capturing all of PC Worship's best ideas in four minutes. (Amusingly, "Rust" features a hypnotizing swarm of atonal violin drones by the Dreebs' Adam Markiewicz, who—on the other side of the dim-lit New York spectrum—also put down some of the sophisticated strings on Mr Twin Sister's recent clubby, cosmpolitan night-crawl.)
The mystical tape mutation of "Gypsy" opens with a creepy cackle, before summoning clouds of patchouli-scented incense smoke, and it paces Social Rust for the dusty strummer, "Baby in the Backroom". "I look at everybody and think about hell/ I wonder if hell's bad?" Frye subtly taunts over his most directly pleasing, wearied, and clear-sounding chorus, which still sounds like it ought to be blaring from a shitty boombox. And just then, this melodious side of Rust ducks out: a 44-second attack clears the way for a heavily-saturated closing trio of monolithic exercises in Swans-like endurance, ecstasy, venom, and dread. PC Worship ease listeners in with hooks, then whip them to a pulp.
There's always humor in purposefully derailing a conventionally good thing, especially when it comes by way of quaking no-wave monsters. As such, PC Worship are committed to their ideas—or the perpetual destruction and rebirth of them—but they do not take themselves too seriously. When I saw them last, at the soon-defunct Williamsburg venue Death by Audio, cymbals were pushed over, pointillist sax blurts were mixed with manic cassette fuckery, and an acoustic guitar with at least one broken string was "prepared" using a crushed plastic cup.
Among PC Worship's dizzying smatter of tapes and CD-Rs, Social Rust appears to be their fifth LP, but who knows? Their prolificacy seems intended to confuse. PC Worship are analog rock eccentrics who visibly enjoy skewing information—even basic details on their website can take the form of abstracted poetry, and it wouldn't be surprising if they secretly released a whole unknown album on VHS tape with carrier-pigeon distribution. For a band so keen on obfuscation, the notion of making complex musical ideas more palatable isn't just an aesthetic shift, but also an ideological one. Nonetheless, Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn. Referencing Meat Puppets, Frye writes in the credits, "I bought Too High to Die on CD from a thrift store and listened to it while I drove across the desert, then someone spilled Cherry Coke on it, which dried, sticky to the CD and I frisbeed it into a thunderstorm sunset outside of Phoenix." Music is everywhere, and the expanses are chaotic, and understanding the cocophony of sound (and life) is futile. Now, though, freaks of all-ages and places can hear Social Rust and feel that giddy sense of hope crawling in their skin—these out-sounds are being twisted from someplace new. | 2014-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Northern Spy / Dull Tools | October 3, 2014 | 7.8 | 3eaa2df4-1115-4346-b9e7-1601ded9954a | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On violin, guitar, saxophone, percussion, and keys, the quartet pieces together a carefully arranged mixture of jazz, ambient, folk, and classical minimalism. | On violin, guitar, saxophone, percussion, and keys, the quartet pieces together a carefully arranged mixture of jazz, ambient, folk, and classical minimalism. | Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi: Fuubutsushi (風物詩) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jusell-prymek-sage-shiroishi-fuubutsushi/ | Fuubutsushi (風物詩) | Seasons change in the mind and the body before they change in the world. Anyone who has felt spring bloom in their hearts on the first false day of sunshine, or been transported to autumns past by the crunch of a stray brown leaf on a late-summer afternoon, knows that climatological reality is not always in sync with our perception of how things should be. The Japanese word “fuubutsushi” refers to this gap, capturing the feeling of longing for a new season at the first signs of its emergence. After months of life looking like one thing, fuubutsushi marks the moment when you believe it may begin to look like something else.
That feeling—not the out-of-time displacement of hope, so much, or the rush of anticipation, but the embodied understanding that things are about to change—suffuses this collaboration between violinist Chris Jusell, guitarist Chaz Prymek, percussionist and keyboardist Matthew Sage, and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi. All four are prolific composers who have hooked up in various configurations in the past, often playing challenging takes on jazz and ambient music. For Fuubutsushi (風物詩), which was recorded remotely with each musician in a different U.S. state, they piece together soothing bits of jazz, ambient, folk, and classical minimalism with the ease and grace of a group of pals working on a jigsaw puzzle over warm cider. Listening to it can feel a little like relaxing in the home you imagine as you unpack your belongings in a new apartment: Everything is expertly placed and arranged with care.
Fuubutsushi’s spacious production highlights the performances of the individual players, which in turn makes their interactions ring more clearly. In “Along the Causeway,” Sage’s piano rolls forward like a ball losing momentum uphill, falling back into a figure that recalls both the clipped phrases of Ethiopian classical music and the good cheer of Joe Hisaishi. Shiroishi takes the cue and flits alongside at the same pace, the early-morning hoarseness of his tone matched by Jusell’s violin. This focus on clarity recalls the famed production style of ECM Records, but Fuubutsushi is almost entirely lacking the high-minded stakes that underlie so much of that label’s work. This is less a conscious shot for posterity than a conversation among intimates.
Still, that conversation frequently touches on the profound. On album opener “Bolted Orange,” whose kindheartedness recalls Sam Wilkes’ WILKES, they patiently fill space with the softest of interactions, as if they’re passing around a Fabergé egg. Jusell’s melodic sense reaches a peak in “Hayao’s Garden,” bringing to mind the stark drama of Björk, while flickering backmasked samples light up and are gone in a flash of poignance. Even “Watch the Time,” a “Hallogallo”-esque krautrocker that’s easily the album’s most upbeat song, evolves into something like Steve Reich’s Different Trains scaled down to living-room size. True to its title, nostalgia and longing permeate the album, along with a prevailing remembrance of how thin the present moment can be.
In the hands of lesser artists, all this focus on the fleeting nature of beauty and the quiet erasure of time could easily drift into the saccharine, carried along on a stream of sentiment like a plastic bag on the wind. Jusell, Prymek, Sage, and Shiroishi seem to know it, and they willingly puncture any potential fragility with good humor, excellent pacing, and reminders of the world outside, an approach that reaches its apotheosis on album centerpiece “Freedom and Crap.” While the quartet tinkers with a miniature, two unidentified people speak about their experiences in some kind of prison. “I was kinda wistful for what was outside of the fence,” a female voice remarks, while a male voice concludes his story by saying, “I can’t imagine anybody liking it or having positive images of being locked up.” While the group treats this material with the reverence it deserves, they never slip into the po-faced. Without being avoidant, they create a soundscape that’s playful and loose; it’s like visiting Ernest Hoods’s Neighborhoods on a drizzly day. Rather than sensationalize the stories, the subdued mood highlights how tragically common they are.
At this stage in our year of quarantine, it seems impossible not to empathize with those who are subject to incarceration. The need for true human connection has never been more obvious, and the intimacies we can achieve with one another have rarely felt so precious. Recorded a few months into lockdown, Fuubutsushi glows with this awareness: that even in our present darkness, there’s something beautiful, mysterious, and vital that’s generated when old friends find new ways to come together again, against all odds and as natural as can be.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Cached | December 9, 2020 | 7.4 | 3eab62e9-1d96-4b2f-b7a6-3f39908b0959 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Mysterious Italo-disco singer returns with the follow-up to the exquisite isolation of her debut, Disco Romance. | Mysterious Italo-disco singer returns with the follow-up to the exquisite isolation of her debut, Disco Romance. | Sally Shapiro: My Guilty Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13377-my-guilty-pleasure/ | My Guilty Pleasure | Sally Shapiro's wilting-wallflower persona has always been as central to her appeal as the actual music that carries her (fake) name is, and that's okay. It's okay because this is one of those situations where the story and the music feed into each other and complement each other beautifully. The persona, whether it was ever really real or not, wasn't part of the noise that kept us from hearing the music; it was as central to the music as her actual voice. And anyway, her actual voice told her story better than any press bio.
So here's the story: Sally Shapiro is the stage name of a Swedish woman whose real name we don't know. We don't know her name either because she's painfully shy or because she just doesn't want us to know. Before Disco Romance, her incandescent debut album, she wouldn't let strangers photograph her, and she wouldn't sing her songs with her producer in the room. And yet she and her producer, Swedish Italo-disco dude Johan Agebjörn, got each other perfectly. He fed her airy, delicate minimal dance tracks, and she cooed over them in her barely there wisp of a voice. That voice implied so much: Sadness, nostalgia, devotion.
And now the follow-up. When Disco Romance came out, I compared Shapiro to Belle and Sebastian, whose early-on reticence similarly defined them and gave their music context and weight. Shapiro's in a little bit of a Boy With the Arab Strap situation now. There's still an air of mystery surrounding her, but it's been depleted a bit. She's done some interviews, she's let dance producers manipulate her songs on a pair of remix albums, and she's even gone on a quick DJ tour. Since that tour, Shapiro and Agebjörn have announced that touring just ain't her thing, but it's done. She's out there. She's got a Twitter, for fuck's sake.
I'm not sure if I should read the general watered-down quality of My Guilty Pleasure as a symptom of Shapiro being out in the world or what, but that sense of exquisite isolation from Disco Romance is gone now. The songs are shorter and packed with more activity. The tempos are faster. Shapiro's voice is still slight and sometimes wounded, but it doesn't fully give into titanic emotion the way it did on Disco Romance [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . Instead, it's an album of vaguely slight dance-pop songs. That's fine, but it's not great. Disco Romance was great.
The good news: These dance-pop songs, slight as they are, are sometimes very good. Agebjorn is mostly working with the same materials as on the last album-- twinkly synths, vintage 4/4 drums, Moroder bass oscillations-- but he's using them to fill more space, not letting them fade into the background the same way. "Moonlight Dance" has slap-bass, which is weird. The pitched-up "Save Your Love" track is fast and bubbly enough that it could almost be Latin freestyle. These tracks gleam, but they don't necessarily sound perfectly suited to Shapiro. Often, it's easy to imagine someone her opposite (like mid-decade Madonna, say) singing over them.
As for Shapiro, her voice still has a perfectly evocative quality, and so, sometimes do her lyrics. She's looking at the stars tonight and only thinking of you. Someone she loves turned her down, and she didn't feel her head touch the ground. That kind of thing. You get some of the weirdly poetic sentence-structure that only seems to come from people who aren't native English speakers: "I walk the streets I used to live upon with you." "Dying in Africa" seems to just be about being dumped, and then she drops this tiny bombshell: "I won't get over you, even if I died in Africa." Huh? She never tells. Well played.
But My Guilty Pleasure doesn't have the same sense of character and place that Disco Romance had, and it also doesn't succeed as the straight-up dance-pop record it seemingly wants to be because the melodies aren't there. (Disco Romance would've made a much better straight-up pop record if they'd sped it up a bit.) It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead. | 2009-08-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Paper Bag | August 27, 2009 | 6.6 | 3eae2e7f-bdc0-41d0-800f-2fb7eb90bccb | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Like his best music, Gucci Mane's release with noted mixtape curator DJ Holiday is colorful, interesting, flagrantly dumb, and sneakily clever. | Like his best music, Gucci Mane's release with noted mixtape curator DJ Holiday is colorful, interesting, flagrantly dumb, and sneakily clever. | Gucci Mane: Trap Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16280-gucci-mane-trap-back/ | Trap Back | Even back in 2009, when Gucci Mane seemed momentarily poised to conquer the known rap universe, there was something combustible about him. His career trajectory felt grease-slicked and frightening, like he was in a car fish-tailing across a major highway, and Gucci did his best, in his music, to reinforce this sensation: Two of his most-repeated ad-libs ("nyyyyyaooooowwww", "SKRRT! SKRRT!") are the sounds of high-speed vehicles spinning out of control. Everything that has happened to him since then-- arrests, jail time, abuse cases-- illustrates the sad difference between the artist who courts chaos and the artist who succumbs to it. Everyone loves a live wire when they're sparking, but the flip side of "live wire" is, of course, "perpetual fuck-up." Gucci fans and rubberneckers alike have had more than enough of both sides to last them a few years.
To have fallen in love with Gucci's drunken-carnival rendering of gangsta rap, then, is to have learned to take what you can get from him, when and where you can get it. I may be alone on the internet in admitting it, but I enjoyed BAYTL, his inexplicable, internet-baiting team-up with Kreayshawn associate and deeply lamentable human being V-Nasty, simply because it provided several solid-to-great Gucci verses alongside production by frequent collaborator Zaytoven, whose best beats sound like they're built entirely from Dippin' Dots. Gucci never conquered the rap world-- sales figures for The State vs. Radric Davis, his best shot, roughly equalled that of the Game's last studio album. But nothing has been able to quite stop him and, every once in a while, he still surprises us with something great.
Trap Back, his latest release with noted mixtape curator and professional loud person DJ Holiday, is just that: great. It isn't as great as The Movie 3-D or the first Writing on the Wall mixtape. Or Gucci Sosa or even the 10-track Gucciamerica throwaway or The Gooch Man or any number of his past classics. But like all his best music, it is colorful and interesting and flagrantly dumb and sneakily clever, all at once. His mush-mouth buries the details of his writing so deep that you'd have to spend ages picking them out, but on a good Gucci verse, you can feel them flying by on first pass, content in the knowledge that you will be able to revisit and explore them later. In the dope-sales reminiscence of "Back in 95", details like "Smokers didn't know my name, so they used to call me Black" and "Dope-fiend Willie used to finger-fuck my rims" leap out and instantly signify a great rapper firing on all cylinders.
Gucci's best verses are also insanely memorable; it's very hard to walk away from his music without at least two or three phrases doing the dryer-cycle tumble through your mind. His voice is a difficult instrument to describe: Pitched somewhere between whine and blare, he sometimes sounds like a huge, overgrown baby who's bumped his head on a table corner. But the way he uses it to take apart words and put them back together with strange new emphases-- "Ghett-O, a-LASK-a, ghett-O, neBRASKa"; "I'm in the trap house, with SHOES on"-- is a brain-teasing pleasure. The phrasing in his best raps feels sticky, like a filthy movie theater floor under sneakers: "I drop the top like 'fuck it'/ I'm not in no lil' Cutlass/ I pull up in the 'What the?'/ Fuck, I don't know was it" he teases on "Plain Jane". On "Thank You", he unleashes this thick, transcription-worthy run: "Count a hundred in Syria/ Peanut-butter interior/ My jewelry game on Frigidaire, my watch game cold as Siberia/ Gucci Mane, is you serious? Hell yeah, I'm serious/ Red watch with a red chain, my diamonds on they period."
The other reason Trap Back is great is the increasingly prominent Atlanta producer Mike Will Made It, who continues to demonstrate that he has an ear for the smallest details that make a simple rap song a great rap song. His sound is like a Flubberized blending of Zaytoven's 8-bit pings and Drumma Boy's funeral marches: it's menacing and playful all at once, which means its a perfect match for Gucci's style. In a development that really shouldn't have taken this long, he flips the Tetris theme into trap music for Gucci to rap on for "Get It Back". The instrumental could serve as a neatly boiled-down synopsis of Gucci's style: simple, deceptively absorbing, maddeningly addictive, frantically paced. Drumma Boy also swings by, and Zaytoven contributes some of his gangsta tinker-toy productions. The result isn't a revelation exactly, but it's the most recognizably Gucci-ish Gucci release in some time. | 2012-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | 1017 Brick Squad | February 16, 2012 | 7.8 | 3eaf1a7b-a0a5-468f-a179-9b22aedea8ad | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Ever the innovator, Janelle Monáe has crafted a singular, youthful pop record that is the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free. | Ever the innovator, Janelle Monáe has crafted a singular, youthful pop record that is the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free. | Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janelle-monae-dirty-computer/ | Dirty Computer | “They call us dirty ’cause we break all your rules now,” Janelle Monáe asserted in 2013 on The Electric Lady’s “Q.U.E.E.N.,” a song that was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.” Five years later, during an interview with Hot 97’s Ebro Darden, the newly out Monáe, who identifies as pansexual, broke her latest album down into three acts. “Songs one, two, three, four—that’s the reckoning. That’s you feeling the sting of being called nigger for the first time by a white person. Feeling the sting of being called bitch by a man for the first time. Feeling the sting of being called queer or a faggot by homophobic people. It’s reckoning and dealing with what it means to be called a Dirty Computer.”
Nevertheless, Dirty Computer’s opening act is harmonically lush, filled with bright synthesizers and rhythm guitars that refuse to linger in the melancholy found in the lower frets—their realm is one of tentative exhilaration, of becoming. The album’s following two acts celebrate the unabashed ownership of one’s otherness (“Django Jane”) and speak to the fear that comes from such visible vulnerability (“So Afraid”). The story has no end in sight, in part because Monáe is one of its first authors.
As a queer, dark-skinned Black woman in an industry historically inclined to value her opposite, Monáe knows that the narrative behind the content matters just as much as the content itself, despite its exceptional quality. Which is perhaps why, from a distance, her career looks like an exercise in freedom by accretion, something amassed over time. Nearly 10 years have passed between Monáe first asking us if we’re “bold enough to reach for love” on Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and the bisexual lighting, tongue clicks, and aching sexuality of Dirty Computer’s “Make Me Feel.” “For the culture, I kamikaze” she proclaims on “Django Jane,” a rap song full of trap hi-hats that dunks on the patriarchy and her haters. Monáe understands how much she’s risking even today by being out. “I knew that I was supposed to make this album before I made [2010’s] The ArchAndroid,” she told Darden. The relief of Dirty Computer is palpable, the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free.
The album is crucially accompanied by an “emotion picture” also called Dirty Computer that depicts a surveillance state where queer people and people of color are hunted down for noncompliance. They’re stopped while driving by the police. They’re beaten and arrested at their own parties. The music videos for the songs act as an allusive, visually stunning novel-in-stories, intentionally paralleling our own reality in judgment. Monáe’s love for her influences far exceeds the artistic and sartorial nods to Keith Haring and David Bowie within her film. In Dirty Computer, Monáe is undercover passion on the run. She is bad. She is part of the rhythm nation. She no longer needs to ask if she’s a freak because she loves watching Mary. In Dirty Computer, she wants Mary Apple 53, played by Tessa Thompson, to take a bite.
As for the musical component of Dirty Computer, Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless. The reckless and joyful “Screwed” embodies the occasional, devil-may-care nihilism experienced by queer people of color living under a surveillance state. It also contains one of the funkiest and technically impressive basslines you’ll hear on an album already in awe of Chic and George Clinton.
Still, to listen to Dirty Computer and look at Monáe’s pallid chart history is to ask whether this is an industry willing to make room for Black women who don’t belt their wounds, those with slightly smaller, albeit gorgeous voices. What does it mean to be a newly out queer Black woman of Monáe’s stature making a pop album in 2018 when there is no precedent? And how does that affect how we interpret her music and her willingness to inhabit spaces currently dominated by white acts? As an album, Dirty Computer is what happens when a prism is held to the blinding light of a free Janelle Monáe. Her status as an acolyte of Prince dovetails with her modern pop sensibilities uniquely, which is how we get a queer anthem like “Pynk,” and its video brimming with defiant Black women, saddled with a chorus that could slide neatly into most Taylor Swift records. It is why “Screwed” sounds like a hedonistic Haim track.
But as with her queerness, her pop inclinations are a feature, not a bug, and it is difficult to separate Dirty Computer from the larger narrative of resistance across the arts today; from A Wrinkle in Time, a film dedicated above all else to instilling wonder and empowering young viewers; from Gabby Rivera’s (now sadly discontinued) America comic book series, one centering a young, queer Latina, America Chavez, who repeatedly declares she is America; from An American Marriage, Tayari Jones’ latest novel that emphasizes to be Black is to be American. While this is Monáe’s most personal record to date, there is an inherent distancing that takes place with songs largely speaking to the we instead of explicitly about the I—even when the we (i.e, queer folks) includes the I (i.e., Monáe).
But this royal, all-encompassing we is a part of Monáe’s larger aim. “I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you,” Monáe told Rolling Stone. “This album is for you. Be proud.” Dirty Computer affirms that we are never more naked than when we stand in our joy. The whole of it is a testament to inclusivity both verbally and sonically. And Monáe’s love is liberation, for her and for us. | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wondaland Arts Society / Bad Boy / Atlantic | May 1, 2018 | 7.7 | 3eaf47be-1797-4278-8b11-94c1c1641d59 | Rahawa Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rahawa-haile/ | |
Jacob Long’s vaporous, lo-fi ambient tracks feel like snapshots of stillness made of moving parts. | Jacob Long’s vaporous, lo-fi ambient tracks feel like snapshots of stillness made of moving parts. | Earthen Sea: Grass and Trees | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earthen-sea-grass-and-trees/ | Grass and Trees | As Earthen Sea, Jacob Long spent more than a decade pulling his music gradually into focus. The erstwhile post-hardcore bassist began recording under the alias sometime after the turn of the millennium, but the project hit its stride in the early years of the 2010s, when the dissolution of the D.C. scene veteran’s groups Black Eyes and Mi Ami led him to concentrate his energies on a foggy, idiosyncratic take on lo-fi ambient. At first, it was a vaporous, secretive sound. “He had two Casio keyboards with the preset beats run through a bunch of pedals so it made these rhythmic rumbling textures,” Long’s former bandmate Daniel Martin-McCormick (aka Ital and Relaxer, and a Pitchfork contributor) recalled of an Earthen Sea live show. “It felt really private, but just with one more step that could go into this whole other area.”
Long began taking those steps on 2014’s Mirage and 2015’s Ink, both for Martin-McCormick’s Lovers Rock label, crafting airy, spacious ambient tracks that warily circled the reassuring pulse of dub-techno. With 2016’s The Sun Will Rise, for Nicolas Jaar’s Other People, and 2017’s An Act of Love, on Kranky, his beats continued to assume shape and gather strength. To follow the arc of those records was to trace a slow but unmistakable coming into being. But Grass and Trees, his first album in more than two and a half years, takes a step back into vapor. His music is beginning to dissolve again.
All seven of the album’s tracks have similar contours. Most songs consist of just one or two chords run through dub delay until the echoes flicker like a candle in the half-breeze of a humid night. Long’s synthesizers are unfussy, little more than a metallic glint in the darkness. Minor triads predominate, standard for dub techno, but occasionally he strays into unexpected major keys, adding extra color to his dusky sound. Sometimes he drifts outside conventional tonality altogether with synths more like church bells or wind chimes wrapped in muggy, muffled dissonance.
If there’s a barely there quality to Long’s tonal register, that goes double for his rhythms. Dub techno’s grounding pulse is largely notional—it seems to exist as a kind of muscle memory, connecting scattered drum hits and glancing chords. He traces a number of different pulses across the course of the album. The opener, “Existing Closer or Deeper in Space,” is propelled by a bassy, deep-diving downbeat; “Window, Skin, and Mirror” is fluid and easy moving, with faint hi-hats run through rapid-fire delay. “Spatial Ambiguity” and “Living Space” have almost no pulse at all—synths and isolated drum hits eddy in place, aimless and uninterested in moving forward. Never does Long indulge the straight-ahead boom-tick of his heaviest tunes, and sometimes his rhythms play tricks on you. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to parse the cadence of “A Blank Slate,” which feels like a normal 4/4 groove until you begin counting it out; some black magic seems to govern the relationship between synths and hi-hats.
Even at just 34 minutes long, Grass and Trees can get a little samey. There’s not much variation in the tonal palette or sound design, and there’s very little development within any given song—just synths, drums, filters, and delay tumbling in circles, like pebbles in the tide. And the production lacks the fullness of previous albums. These are snapshots of stillness made of moving parts; they are shallow pools reflecting pewter skies. But there is one sound that cuts through the murk of several tracks, providing a surprising through-line to the album: a simple handclap, seemingly human, rather than machine-made. It’s as though you were sitting alongside Long in his studio, listening to this nebulous, otherworldly music hissing from the speakers while he clapped along absent-mindedly. The sound is dry and close in the intimacy of the room.
The claps assume a particularly important role on the closing track, “Less and Less.” In the absence of any discernible downbeat, these loose, unquantized claps do their best to provide an anchor, a center of gravity. Gradually, they are met with other claps; the overarching feel is almost but not quite haphazard, like a rhythm unraveled. Eventually, the chords fade out, leaving just a smattering of smacked palms keeping precarious time against a backdrop of silence. Grass and Trees is an exercise in reduction, and eventually, it bumps up against minimalism’s limits. But “Less and Less” is a potent reminder of how much can be burned away without losing the distilled essence of a groove. | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | June 12, 2019 | 7.1 | 3eb2563a-e3d5-4d76-9c11-a9a7e3229631 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Frank, honest, and irreverent, the songwriter’s fourth album attempts to subvert the should-bes of a woman making a country record. | Frank, honest, and irreverent, the songwriter’s fourth album attempts to subvert the should-bes of a woman making a country record. | Nikki Lane: Denim & Diamonds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nikki-lane-denim-and-diamonds/ | Denim & Diamonds | On her fourth album, Nikki Lane operates under the assumption of a Cher quip: “Mom, I am a rich man.” Lane quotes these words in the title track to Denim & Diamonds, the latest in a series of assured strides beyond the country-adjacent stables of 2017’s Highway Queen. Earlier this year, the South Carolina-born singer-songwriter backed Spiritualized on Everything Was Beautiful’s “Crazy.” Last year, she co-wrote and joined Lana Del Rey on “Breaking Up Slowly,” and Lana name-checked her in “Blue Banisters.” With her latest set of originals, Lane catalogs mistakes made and lessons learned, framing her smoky vocals with driving electric guitars. From the opening tour of Americana tropes in “First High”—including jeans “tighter than goddamn Springsteen”—Lane delivers songs that subvert the should-bes of a woman making a country record, for better and, occasionally, for worse.
Lane is sharpest when she leans all the way into irreverence. She sings with the authority and weariness of someone who’s been through the wringer, the cool insistence of her voice giving her an air of earned wisdom. “Born Tough” is punchy and confident, matching the audacity of “Denim & Diamonds” as Lane outlines her efforts at building a life for herself after being “let down all around, discouraged by life.” It’s clear that Lane has a soft spot for the bad girls, a point emphasized in the irresistible crackle of “Black Widow.” She warns against the temptations of this femme fatale, but a thrill takes over as the song hops into a Pentecostal double time.
Lane has her tender side, too, and in the more introspective forays of Denim & Diamonds, she examines her efforts at overcoming disappointment and heartbreak. “Try Harder” is a dose of big-sisterly encouragement, and the humble love at the heart of “Good Enough” makes for a sunny break as the track rides on a soft patter of drums. With Alain Johannes’ nylon-string guitar lead, album closer “Chimayo” takes a left turn into somber panache. It’s pretty as a standalone cut, but it feels vague and open-ended as a concluding number, its poetic flourishes at odds with Lane’s more characteristic frankness.
An uncomfortable supporting presence sours Lane’s raucous good time: Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme—who in 2017 apologized for kicking a female photographer in the face, and whose ex-wife more recently testified that he headbutted her so hard she blacked out—produced, mixed, and co-engineered the record, and occasionally plays guitar and drums. It’s a perplexing choice for a project defined by a woman’s independent spirit. The overall twangy mix is straightforward enough that listeners might not clock Homme’s involvement at all—so why choose him, right now?
Lane’s most compelling songs come out of her acknowledgements of imperfection and her impertinence toward the status quo. Her honest, reflective songwriting would be well-suited to a wide array of not-just-country producers who could abet her creative vision without threatening to undercut the triumph of being a “big-hearted girl” who’s “living in a man’s world,” as she sings on “Born Tough.” With her sense of wit and comfort, Lane often echoes another sage diva aphorism: the Dolly Parton-attributed truism that it’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world. Lane has the kind of sharp perspectives and inherent sparkle that might make her one of the former, if she can resist the false promises of the latter. | 2022-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | New West | September 26, 2022 | 7.2 | 3eb5fa7c-b6df-4af7-b4d5-8d90ff756b34 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
After four years of releasing pioneering and transcendent techno, the UK label offers a new comp full of charm that looks ahead to its promising future. | After four years of releasing pioneering and transcendent techno, the UK label offers a new comp full of charm that looks ahead to its promising future. | Various Artists: Shall Not Fade - 4 Years of Service | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-shall-not-fade-4-years-of-service/ | Shall Not Fade - 4 Years of Service | At the end of 2015, Bristol’s Kieran Williams launched Shall Not Fade with Alone, a four-track EP by the Australian producer Mall Grab comprising definitive takes on the lo-fi house aesthetic. Labels like Lobster Theremin, Cactus Traxx, 1080p, and Opal Tapes were also exploring and refining the sound, which typically uses the thump of deep house as a vehicle for wooziness, and depends upon melodic dexterity, swing, and the almost occult ability to conjure vibe in order to push through the murk. Over the years, Shall Not Fade has transcended over and over, with superlative 12"s from heads like DJ Boring, Adryiano, Steve Murphy, Lake Haze, and LK which gently fold disco, French house, Detroit techno, and electro ingredients into the mix.
The new Four Years of Service compilation is more of a look ahead, and the label’s fresh voices prove themselves more than welcome. Harry Griffiths, in what seems to be only the second track ever released by him, offers the wistful “Since We’re Here,” which tosses a crisp break over warm pads like a windbreaker over a soft hoodie; by the time a space-funk synth line joins a bubbly arpeggiator, all seems right with the world. New signee Soela conjures a similar mood with “Sensual,” and it works just as well, particularly if you listen to it just a little too loud, a little too late, on the way home after a little too much, and sink into its gurgling echoes.
Before that, though, shake a tail feather to Black Loops & Ruff Stuff’s “La Progressive,” which recreates the metallic structures of Basic Channel-style dub techno in tubular steel. Harrison BDP’s “Interference” glistens like the rainbow in an oil slick; a pitched-down vocal intones “it’s all the same, just noise,” and somehow that sounds reassuring. And 1-800 GIRLS goes downright beatific, if not Balearic, with a slow-and-low house cut called, well, “My Speedos.” This ensemble of faux congas and electric piano might come off either sexy or cheesy depending on your taste, but it’s in keeping with the beachy spirit of Big Miz’s electro gem “Sun” and Kettama’s “Sundaze,” like smuggling a beach ball into Berghain.
The label’s big stars are mostly absent, as are—“Sundaze” apart—bangers. But two exceptions to this are exceptional indeed: Adryiano’s “U Used 2 Know Me” is a hi-hat-forward delight, with a bit of disco constantly filtering and shape-shifting as if the past, present, and future of the dancefloor all at once. And LK’s “Unified Love Machine” is exactly that, a device for dancing that’s well-oiled with Italo charisma and Teutonic efficiency. It’s a highlight of this compilation that doesn’t stretch the boundaries of genre as much as convincingly argue these forms are still fun. It might sometimes narcotize with comfort, or shy from explicit political engagement. But it has charm, and charm is an underrated way to connect. | 2020-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Shall Not Fade | January 18, 2020 | 7.4 | 3eb803f9-a437-4ec8-9831-d4a094774d9b | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
I should get one thing out of the way before this review gets too long: Leonard Cohen's charm, for ... | I should get one thing out of the way before this review gets too long: Leonard Cohen's charm, for ... | Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1527-ten-new-songs/ | Ten New Songs | I should get one thing out of the way before this review gets too long: Leonard Cohen's charm, for me, lies mostly in his words and the way he says them. This is perhaps something he picked up from the poets, or maybe imbedded from his years as a writer, before he ever recorded a note. It's not that his music is easily dismissed, or even that his legacy isn't being closely guarded by dark, genius songwriters hidden somewhere in the corners between Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and probably anyone worth their ink everywhere. Cohen's music is often the coolest part about what never immediately strikes me with his songs. It's just always seemed a little secondary to his words.
It could be that you just don't write phrases like, "May the lights in the Land of Plenty/ Shine on the truth someday," when making catchy tunes is your primary objective. It seems to me Cohen's songs come more from a hope that he'll hit on an answer, or maybe if he's feeling generous, that he would be able translate some of the truth he already understands, more than from any kind of songwriting tradition. I just read he was in a Buddhist monastery for the last few years. His new words could be more prophetic than usual, or maybe just a little morbid, in the most humane way possible. But they're his, and I suppose even the best people are obliged to listen.
Ten New Songs is Cohen's first release of new material since 1992's The Future. He often finds a partner to share the weight (usually on the musical end), and this time he's found Sharon Robinson. Robinson (best known as a session vocalist, and pop songwriter), while certainly leaving her stamp on the proceedings as producer, arranger, performer, and co-writer on every tune, hasn't muffled Cohen's artistic voice any more than his previous collaborators. Of course, her kind of soft rock-- closer to "I Want to Know What Love Is" by Foreigner than I'm comfortable with-- probably isn't going to score many points with the indie crowd, but it's not going to throw off your concentration for very long.
Tunes like "In My Secret Life" and "Alexandra Leaving" actually end up in a far more soulful world because of Robinson than if they had been purely Cohen efforts. These tunes, with Cohen's immensely weighty vocal, lower and possibly darker than ever before, shine with a peculiar optimism even as they betray his resolve with just about every corporeal sensation imaginable. And his passion is still there: "I'd die for the truth/ In my secret life," he sings in the opening track, and where there's a marked distaste for the material world all over the album, he still admits to buying "what I'm told" just like any other conditioned consumer species. Maybe it's indecision, or maybe it's a realization of the hopelessness of running against the grain, but Cohen never stops to consider his own insights or stoop to self-pity. Or, maybe I'm missing his point entirely. He's such a good writer that I wouldn't feel bad for having heard him speak/sing the stuff.
Elsewhere, though Robinson's slick backdrop relentlessly attempts to disguise it, Cohen unleashes harsher demons. In "By the Rivers Dark," he admits the constant threat to spirituality (in whatever form) in the modern world: "And I did forget/ My holy song/ And I had no strength in Babylon." And, per his willingness to let it be, "By the rivers dark/ Where it all goes on/ By the rivers dark in Babylon." There are perhaps correlations I could make to Cohen's recent immersion in Buddhism, and its doctrines of allowing one's self to flow with the river of life and to accept that we simply cannot know what we are not. But the truth is, Cohen has always been as perceptive, and has found his way seemingly by a mix of keen insight and passive discovery.
There are moments where I wonder if he hasn't gone over the edge into helplessness, letting his inner conflicts have their way with him. "Boogie Street" (I know, terrible title, and let me say that Robinson's uber-lame Skin-emax sex scene atmospherics don't exactly do the tune any favors) opens with a joyful reunion with the "Darkened One." "A sip of wine, a cigarette," and Cohen's ready to take a trip to other side, meeting any number of transient pleasures on an avenue where "all the maps of blood and flesh are posted on the door." And the song never brings you back to the safe neighborhoods. Maybe this isn't the kind of thing that goes over well as a conversation piece, and if I had one request, it would be to listen to the album after a shot of something very hard (but very smooth), and just take it in alone.
The album ends with "The Land of Plenty," and suitably, Cohen picks the last song to raise the layered curtain a little. The tenth new song features reminders of forgotten promises ("I know I said I'd meet you... I can't buy it anymore") and faiths long since given up ("For the Christ who has not risen"), but then it lets me down gently. He says, "May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth some day." And this is where I remember why I listen to him: Cohen says these words as if he heard them on top of a mountain. Maybe he heard them from some Zen master who doesn't have to live in our world, and must have realized their meaning while meditating, transcended from pain, but soaked in wisdom. But this is not where the words came from; Cohen said them, and he wrote them, and whether it's nice music or just amazing prose, I can only tell you what I heard. | 2001-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2001-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 4, 2001 | 8 | 3ebc39f9-0499-4561-96b3-55778a5f6f65 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The legendary singer has lost little expressiveness with age, but these songs are about the small, quiet spaces where she can catch her breath and steel her nerves. | The legendary singer has lost little expressiveness with age, but these songs are about the small, quiet spaces where she can catch her breath and steel her nerves. | Mavis Staples: We Get By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavis-staples-we-get-by/ | We Get By | Mavis Staples carves out a little space for herself on “Heavy on My Mind,” a time-stopping song on her fifth album of the 2010s. The mood is dark, the music spare: just a steely electric guitar, a distant tambourine that sounds like rattling chains, and Staples’ mighty voice. She’s mic’d so close you can hear the breath catch in her throat between words, subtle exhalations that reveal her sincerity as well as her age. She turns 80 this year, and she doesn’t mind showing her experience and wisdom. “Heavy on My Mind” grapples with the devastation of loss and the confusion that accompanies grief: “Sometimes I wish, sometimes I fall in the well,” she sighs. “We can wait out the storm or we can stand in the rain/Gonna have to mourn or hide from some pain.” It’s a remarkable vocal performance by an artist who specializes in them, and a reminder of just how easy it is to take Staples for granted.
Staples has sung quietly before, in particular on some of the more prayerful songs from her recent trilogy of albums with producer Jeff Tweedy, but “Heavy on My Mind” is a little different, in that it allows her to escape her own legacy and sing for herself. For 70 years—ever since she started singing with her family’s gospel group in the late 1940s—she has conveyed a sense of moral authority, drawing from the faithful certitude of gospel as well as the populist activism of folk. Her voice is so powerful and her disposition so joyful and generous that she sings for every American, as the first-person-plural title We Get By implies: We are all in this together. Her music has a communal glow and a steely determination, but “Heavy on My Mind” shows how hard her walk has been.
Perhaps through divine intervention, Staples launched a comeback right when we needed her: celebrating a hopeful new era in American politics in the late 2000s and commiserating the seemingly hopeless era that followed. We Get By is about the strength and determination required to weather these storms, to sing for so many people without losing focus or hope. She and producer Ben Harper don’t shy away from big, public statements about the direction of the country, and songs like opener “Change” (“things gotta change around here”) and “Brothers and Sisters” (“not too far down the wrong road to turn around”) don’t venture far from her recent albums in sound or sentiment. Harper gently harkens back to the Staple Singers with raw, rolling guitar licks that recall Pops’ innovative style and a genially funky rhythm section that would be at home in the concert hall or the church sanctuary.
Because Staples has lost little expressiveness with age, We Get By sounds surprisingly raucous and admirably rough around the edges, especially on the percolating “Anytime.” But these songs are more about the small, quiet spaces where Staples can catch her breath and steel her nerves. Weighing particularly heavy on her mind is the idea of change, both the change she’d like to see in our country and the change she’s going through as she outlives beloved friends and family. The recent passing of sister Yvonne Staples looms large over these songs, so much so that Mavis dedicates the album to her. “Grab hold of the days, before the days grab hold of you,” she advises on “Hard to Leave,” which traces the distance between herself and home. Written by Harper, the song might be just another sad tale about the trials a touring musician faces during a life on the road, but Staples lends it extra gravity, as though aware she’s reached an age when each goodbye might be the last. The tone, however, is wistful rather than grim: “I’m passing through time like a warm summer breeze,” she sings. “It’s always hard, so hard to leave.” It’s a heavy burden, but she gets by. | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | May 24, 2019 | 7.5 | 3ec078b7-11ed-49f6-b6c0-eb5bd4442594 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Husband/wife indie pop duo follow a string of well-liked blog mp3s with their nostalgia-soaked, Brill Building-referencing LP. | Husband/wife indie pop duo follow a string of well-liked blog mp3s with their nostalgia-soaked, Brill Building-referencing LP. | Tennis: Cape Dory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15020-cape-dory/ | Cape Dory | In May 2010, when homemade indie pop of every stripe was deep in the throes of its baffling obsession with the beach, a new band was taking the music to the next logical place: the open sea. Tennis, we learned, were a married boy-girl duo from Denver, and their earliest circulated mp3s came with an odd story. After finishing college in Colorado, the couple sold their possessions, bought a sailboat, and embarked on an extended trip along the Eastern Seaboard. After returning to land, they began to write and record songs based on their experiences. Their music, as heard here on their full-length debut, touches on tide patterns and shifting winds and sandbars scraping beneath hulls; it also emphasizes the essential romance of the whole adventure-- that they went through it all together. Above all, Tennis strive to evoke an unnamed but certainly more innocent past.
Everything about the project comes to us through a thick, triple-folded blanket of nostalgia. From the band's name (a sport that had its peak popularity in the 1970s and 80s) to the overall sound (girl-group pop is the basic template) to the record's cover to the choice of font, it all seems to yearn for one bygone day or another-- the 60s, the 80s, those seven months they spent on the water. The musical structures are straightforward, led by simple guitar lines and rhythms that are either waltz-time invitations to slow dance or more upbeat numbers with the familiar 1-2-pause-3 beat (think the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the Chiffons' "One Fine Day", etc.) so evocative of when Brill Building songwriters ruled the airwaves. The muffled recording, on the other hand, might be an attempt to capture the feel of a cheap AM radio spilling out of a bungalow, but it mostly serves to make the music sound distant and indistinct.
Tennis have a good ear for a tune and a solid understanding of how pop songs in this style fit together. The finger-snap-and-voice opening of "Marathon" has an appealingly peppy hook, the guitar twang in "Long Boat Pass" is of the proper vintage, and the melody on "South Carolina" has a nice build to the chorus break. Alaina Moore sings lead and has a likable voice, though her way of stretching vowels, when combined with the dull recording, sometimes makes the words hard to follow. Still, in single-song doses, the music on Cape Dory is pleasant, if not particularly memorable or expressive of anything in particular.
The problem comes when the music is taken at album length. Even though these 10 songs clock in at less than 30 minutes, their cumulative effect is weirdly numbing. Part of it is up to the central conceit: An extended getaway on a sloop is nice enough image, but is the allure of this one fantasy enough to sustain a record? Not when there is so little personality emanating from the songs themselves. Say what you will about Jimmy Buffett, an artist most people I know consider to be among the most loathsome of the modern popular era, but his tales of island hopping and boat drinks have a sense of humor and an identifiable point of view. Tennis, conversely, seem content to hit their marks, replicate an established style, and let the associations that come with a familiar sound do the emotional work. Bizarrely, considering the detailed and unique backstory, which describes something these two went through and which most of us will never experience even if we wanted to, Cape Dory comes over as a depersonalized exercise. It seems too concerned about transmitting a very specific sound and getting all the nautical details right. So while the record is pretty and intermittently enjoyable, it feels one-note and ultimately flat. | 2011-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | January 20, 2011 | 6.2 | 3ec165aa-ac00-4f9a-9ddc-f1e2db36d64e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Chicago guitarist and sound artist tucks worlds of deep feelings into these four immersive pieces, which seem to shift with your own mood. | The Chicago guitarist and sound artist tucks worlds of deep feelings into these four immersive pieces, which seem to shift with your own mood. | Michael Vallera: Window In | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-vallera-window-in/ | Window In | Michael Vallera’s Window In is the ambient-music equivalent of a mood ring. The Chicago guitarist tucks microcosms of disparate sounds inside each of these four amorphous pieces—warm drones that unravel like deep sighs, creepy clicks that haunt like ghosts, curdled riffs that rush like dangerous rivers. They reflect what you bring to them, whether anxiety or hope. As menacing or majestic as you like, Window In is a timely reminder that it’s OK if your feelings are complicated, confounding, and subject to change. They’re all right here, bound inside 43 mesmerizing minutes.
In one form or another, Vallera has been pursuing a single idea—electric guitar processed to the point of oblivion—for at least a decade. He played on Rhys Chatham’s guitar-symphony masterpiece, A Crimson Grail, and formed the excellent duo Cleared with drummer Steven Hess, a fellow Chicago instrumentalist who fosters a sense of formless wonder. On his three previous solo albums, each more intriguing than the last, Vallera suspended bits of piano chords or broken beats inside clouds of brittle or beautiful guitar, shaping an unstable horizon that seemed always to inch nearer.
For Window In, Vallera limits himself to the electric guitar and anything he can use to interrupt, augment, warp, or otherwise ruin its output. The restriction is a boon, as Vallera has never before elicited such a wealth of sophisticated and ingenious sounds—or found such novel uses for old ones. “Hours” opens with a high-end hiss and a low-end growl, the extreme registers of his guitar simultaneously pushed to their limits. “Blue Mind” peaks when Vallera interrupts a resplendent tone over and over, so it constantly collapses only to rise again. It’s as if, by casually flipping a switch, he’s accidentally stumbled upon the idea of rhythm itself. In the past, Vallera has followed a distinguished tradition of guitarists reimagining their instrument’s textural edges; with these discoveries, he becomes part of the vanguard, like Keith Rowe or Christian Fennesz before him.
More important, though, is how Vallera nests, layers, and intertwines these elements, like Grouper or Kara-Lis Coverdale, so that they unspool in an emotionally rich listen; otherwise, they might remain arcane elements of mere sound design. During “Blue Mind,” Vallera conjures the pop of a guitar cable that refuses to stay plugged in, a mundane noise familiar to anyone who’s ever played an electric instrument. He surrounds those tiny jolts with coruscant notes and a purring hum. The effect is like staring out at a splendid ocean scene while reeling from seasickness. And midway through “Deep Sleeping Exit,” his guitar wafts like the smell of springtime lavender, at least until the amplifier seems to crumble beneath the signal’s power. It’s like watching a thunderhead cut short a picture-perfect picnic.
Outside of music, Vallera is a photographer whose frames capture a subtly altered reality, recalling both the astute framing of Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures and the backyard surrealism of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings in one shot. Stare at one of his exquisite stills long enough, and you’ll finally notice the distant threat of an approaching cloud, or the way shapes that seem orderly slowly reveal an underlying chaos. Window In captures the same essence—a seemingly simple image that asks more questions the longer you sit with it. There are times when Window In suspends you at the edge of an abyss, others when it lifts you skyward. Mostly, though, those states linger here together, ready to remind you that one feeling won’t last forever. | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Denovali | April 7, 2020 | 7.8 | 3ec21c40-1dec-4260-a8ab-b351ab182fe9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a 1993 comedy album full of dick and fart jokes, and the brilliant, self-effacing man who made them work. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a 1993 comedy album full of dick and fart jokes, and the brilliant, self-effacing man who made them work. | Adam Sandler: They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adam-sandler-theyre-all-gonna-laugh-at-you/ | They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! | If comedy’s eternal wellsprings are shame and humiliation, consider the possibility the form has seen no purer practitioner than Adam Sandler. Even now, as a 56-year-old multimillionaire, he looks as nervous and furtive in front of a microphone as he did at 28 when he starred in Billy Madison, the 1995 breakout hit about a contemptible man-child forced to repeat school from kindergarten onward. Even in the year 2022, when the search string “adam sandler oscar snub” returns credible results, he still enters every room armed only with the unshakeable conviction that he, himself, should not be in it, a conviction written on his squinting face, weighing down on his hunched shoulders. The ancient Groucho Marx dictum—“I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member”—isn’t even self-immolating enough for the profound sense of unworthiness that seems to consume Sandler like some kind of existential indigestion, and it’s possible no one has twisted himself into more pitiable shapes, abased himself more thoroughly onscreen, than he has over the course of his career.
If there is any deeper reason that Adam Sandler’s filthy and juvenile comedy has endured—and it has endured, proving so influential that entire movies have been made around the idea of his fame—then it is in this coursing root of self-loathing. Perhaps this is also why Sandler achieved his comic apotheosis in a medium even more lowly, if possible, than the Saturday Night Live skit: the comedy album, a loner’s medium even within comedy’s low-lit environs. You don’t even have to venture out to a basement venue, risking eye contact with others, to experience it. All you needed for They’re All Gonna Laugh At You! was a CD player, headphones, maybe one conspiratorial listener, and your own invincible sense of shame. You needed, in short, to be in seventh grade.
That’s how old I was the first time someone—it may have been the kid named Dave, but more likely it was was my neighbor Brad—plugged a set of headphones into a Discman, finding my eyes the way Natalie Portman would one day gaze into Zach Braff’s in Garden State, and waited for my life to be changed by the immortal words, “Now, take that shampoo bottle and stick it up my ass.”
The song—given the bland brown-paper-bag title “At a Medium Pace” and set to midtempo acoustic-ballad guitars—described a series of ritualized abasements and humiliations that only started with the shampoo bottle. Listening as an adult, it’s at least technically imaginable—if you are looking for the most charitable possible interpretation—to hear “At a Medium Pace” as something like a sub’s sincere bedroom wishlist, maybe a funny but no-longer-horrifying actual love song. But as seventh graders, we were no more prepared to imagine that than we were to go cliff jumping. We had only known our bodies as sites of disgust, and out of the hazy leap towards imagining them as sites of mutual pleasure, we got something like “At a Medium Pace,” which felt like a dispatch from a frightening adult world of shooting fluids, inexplicable desires, and unspeakable creativities. We listened to “At a Medium Pace” and laughed loudly with wide eyes, briefly and harmlessly exorcizing the terrors surrounding the act we could neither get our minds around nor stop ourselves from trying to envision. It was sort of an anti-porn, shared in the same furtive spirit.
If this is your frame of mind, then They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! is the Magna Carta, a document pressed with clammy fingers into equally clammy palms. They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! functioned almost like a rite of passage, its title confirming and granting communion with our very worst fears. As a 12-year-old, the only rule of human society you’ve internalized is its boundless capacity for cruelty and humiliation; the world seems custom-built to annihilate your budding and fragile sense of self, and yet you’re asked to step into it, daily. If you were lucky, you had well-meaning adults around you to help you, but to feel truly understood, you might have turned to something like, say, “The Severe Beating of a High School Janitor.”
These recurring bits—in which a series of low-level authority figures are subjected to ruthless beatings, with their whimpering cries and cracking bones providing the punchlines—were evidence to some critics of a hopeless nihilism. But what they might have missed is that in each one, the person enduring the beating was Sandler himself. They were his yelps (“My sideburns!”), his pleas, and the implicit invitation was to imagine ourselves receiving the beating, not doling it out. This wasn’t some Clockwork Orange–style exercise in cheerful sociopathy; this was self-loathing, creatively realized via some excellent foley work.
They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! was released in 1993, two years before Billy Madison went straight to No. 1 at the box office, prompting the unified disdain and mortification of a generation of film critics (“One of the most execrable movies ever made,” Richard Schickel wrote in Time, a review I still remember for teaching me a new word) and cementing Adam Sandler movies in the cultural landscape. But if Billy Madison birthed the Sandler Industrial Complex, They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! functioned like a shadow recruitment tool. Written and recorded with a cast that would help shape the next two decades of comedy—Robert Smigel, Bob Odenkirk, Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien—the album snuck out into the world to near-total indifference, only building momentum as word spread, pre-internet, of its puerility. “We didn’t see the album budging on the charts for a while,” remembered producer Brooks Arthur, whose credits, besides helping Sandler record convincing farts, included Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” “Then little by little, we started to see it come alive.” By the end of the year, Sandler was noticing people shouting lines at him from the “Toll Booth Willie” skit during his concerts. Eventually, the album went double platinum.
The critical reception to They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!, insofar as one existed, agreed on one thing: Sandler’s sketches were “terminally unfunny,” he went on “ad nauseam about bodily functions and the futile pursuit of kinky sex,” and it was all “embarrassingly adolescent.” “This man needs help—not a microphone,” concluded one newspaper columnist, who went on to contrast Sandler’s album unfavorably to the recently released Jeff Foxworthy tract, “You Might Be a Redneck If…” Another summed up the appeal even more succinctly: “Stupid, but young boys like it.”
Stupid, but young boys like it. Even if young boys as a purchasing bloc were largely unacquainted with the opinions of local newspaper columnists, we nonetheless reveled in our awareness that Sandler’s humor struck many sentient beings north of 15 as indefensible, mystifying, barely classifiable even as “humor.” Indeed, it was central to its appeal. Sandler was our guy, someone whose very introduction onscreen on SNL seemed to contain an apology, and a tacit acknowledgment that someone more talented, with better ideas, should almost certainly be in his place.
He had distinguished himself on SNL with a series of “bits” that redefined just how slight something could be and still make it to air. If an older generation of comics like Steve Martin or Andy Kaufman embodied something of the punk-rock promise—that even without honing your chops, you could get onstage and express yourself to a willing audience—then middle and elementary school kids saw something similar in Sandler, a big brother to us and a little brother to the cast who was somehow allowed to go on national television, squish his face together, and yell “gimme some candy” to laughter and adulation. In actor Jim Downy’s famous speech delivered two years later in Billy Madison—“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard…. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul”—kids sensed the shocked proxy of every adult in our vicinity, and we giggled in delight. We knew this stuff was ruthlessly, remorselessly dumb, and that its very existence in the public sphere was an affront, a burp on the intercom during the morning announcements.
And yet, even in comedy swamps as choked and fetid as this one, peculiar ideas could take shape and linger. “The Longest Pee” might be the stupidest two minutes of audio to which I’ve ever purposefully listened—it’s just the sound of a pee that goes on longer than it’s supposed to, that’s it—but the mounting concern in Sandler’s voice (“Oh man,” he wails, as the sound, supervised by super-producer Arthur—in whose studio Bruce Springsteen recorded his first three albums—grows to impossible levels of water pressure and velocity) is funny, goddamn it. There is something lurking in his voice—despair tinged with hysteria, or maybe the other way around—that makes it oddly more discomfiting than, say, the roughly contemporaneous bathroom scene in Dumb and Dumber. If Sandler’s comedy has aggravated so many critics so profoundly, perhaps it’s because his detractors, too, sensed that there was something deeper, and not entirely dismissable, swimming around in the bowels of his work. “Adam doesn’t have much interest in being cool or hipper than the room,” Judd Apatow told Spin in an oral history of the album. “He’s not a smartass. He’s not cynical. He just loves being funny. He’s a Rodney Dangerfield guy.”
Inside Apatow’s invocation of “Rodney Dangerfield guy,” of course, was some subtextual cultural coding. Dangerfield, particularly in film roles like Caddyshack, made comedic hay out of a very particular loaded cultural trope—the American Jew crashing the party of the horrified WASPs—and Sandler, from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore and beyond, threw himself into the same role: the self-designated turd in the punch bowl, the foul smell spoiling the dinner party. Unlike his Borscht Belt forefathers, Sandler didn’t usually play up the mannerisms associated with the stereotype of the American Jew. Hunched over in basketball shorts rather than pulling anxiously at his too-tight starched shirt, Sandler wrapped himself in his internalized self-loathing like a bathrobe instead of straining against it like a straitjacket. In his sneaky version of assimilation, he allowed every American kid, whether they had a bar mitzvah or not, safe passage for their suspicions that they, too, were the turd in the punch bowl. If Sandler’s comedy wavers between the more collegiate environs of The State and Mr. Show and the gutter of the Jerky Boys and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, never claiming allegiance to one camp or the other, then it’s because he knows that somewhere in this indeterminate region is the precise locus of his appeal, the reason that entire generations have not been able to get his voice out of their heads.
I am not so depraved or insane as to suggest that everything on They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! is still as funny to me now, a 41-year-old father, as it was when I was a 12-year-old in the era of JNCOs and Sun-In. A handful of the 22 tracks now strike me as boring and pointless as they must have seemed to those regional newspaper critics. But I can still hear some of that darkness squirming around in here. There is no laughing on this album that is not done queasily—all his characters, even his sympathetic ones, are mush-mouths, screechers, or quaverers. Take, for example, the “Oh, Mom…” sketch, from which the album takes its name. Like every Sandler bit, the gag reveals itself within the first few seconds: Here, the joke is the mom who won’t stop shrieking “No! No!!! They’re all gonna laugh at you!” in response to even her children’s most mundane requests. On the surface, it’s a one-note riff on a scene from the movie Carrie. But then there is that screech itself, which digs a little deeper every time Sandler unleashes it. As the skit gets more ridiculous (“Mom, will you please pass the salad dressing?” “No!!!!”), something else happens, something that keys into his best work. It’s not much of a leap to envision the skit as a portrayal of Sandler’s own psyche, gathered around the dinner table. The next time you see him slouching in front of some paparazzi lens, imagine this is the voice he is blocking out.
Over the years, a great many people who would otherwise not eagerly throw themselves into dick and fart jokes with Sandler’s enthusiasm have thought about this voice, quite a lot, and they have attempted to put some of their thinking on screen. If there by now exists, in the cultural imagination, anything close to an idea of a “serious” Adam Sandler role, that is because Paul Thomas Anderson was unable to rid himself of the character that Adam Sandler plays—the frightened creature sidling out of the dark, wracked equally by mind-obliterating fear and self-loathing and bursts of annihilating rage. Flush with cultural capital after the massive success of 1997’s Boogie Nights and 1999’s Magnolia, Anderson wrote Punch-Drunk Love, the first-ever “thinking person’s Adam Sandler movie.” To the astonishment and dismay of many interviewers, Anderson recalled how he had visited the set of Sandler’s 2000 movie Little Nicky to discuss the possibility of collaboration. He had seen Happy Gilmore, he explained, and was entranced. Thus were we treated to our first sight of Adam Sandler, singer of “Lunch Lady Land,” sitting with a shit-eating grin across the table from PTA and Charlie Rose. When Rose reports, gravely, to the camera that critics have called it “the best performance of [Sandler’s] career,” his nervous whinnying giggle is audible in the background.
There was an implicit offer at that moment, one that Sandler refused. Lots of comedians have reached the stage when they tire of falling on their faces for the amusement of the public: Think of Steve Martin, who has by now styled himself as a sort of in-house humorist for The New Yorker, provoker of urbane smiles, and then remember the character he played in 1979’s The Jerk, which is not so far off from the buffoon Sandler himself plays; or Bill Murray, who starred in low-rent films like 1981’s Stripes just to have a chance to perform his cosmic-idiot schtick before striding into the embrace of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch. If Sandler had gone this route, as a great many critics of the era expected him to, he would have embarked on a much more typical, and far less volatile, career—the comedian who made raucous and generally disdained entertainments that he would go on to recall fondly in his autumnal years, fondly but dismissively. Jamie Foxx took this road with the Ray biopic and never looked back, saying of his early comedies, like Booty Call: “Horrible…. There was no art in it.”
But not Sandler, who has never wanted to choose between making films like Jack and Jill or Hubie Halloween or starring in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems. The production company that was born from his massive run of late-’90s hits, Happy Madison, continues to churn out films, and while everyone agrees many are transparently terrible, the conversation gets interesting when you notice how little agreement there is on which ones are the terriblest: For years, 2011’s Jack and Jill was shorthand for “the worst film ever made,” and yet it has acquired an admiring cult following for scenes like this, which contains the best and most dialed-in line readings I’ve seen from Al Pacino in decades.
Sandler has continued writing silly songs, which he performs on concert tours to rhapsodic audiences, and he continues to mock the very idea of critical respect at any podium he reads from: Upon accepting his Best Male Lead award at the Independent Spirit Awards for 2020’s Uncut Gems, he gave “a shoutout to my fellow nominees, who will now and forever be known as the guys who lost to fuckin’ Adam Sandler,” in his best Sandman voice. In his mind, he’s still the buffoon on the date with the valedictorian, shouting pointless obscenities at an uncomprehending world attempting to smooth over or ignore him. Sandler has remained loyal to the buffoon, in part because he knows the buffoon helped get him where he is—when The New York Times asked Josh and Benny Safdie about the autobiographical roots of Sandler’s Howard Ratner character in Uncut Gems, they pointed to their own haggard, put-upon father and recalled the time he bought each of them a disastrously inappropriate comedy CD called They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!, which the two of them, aged 7 and 9, listened to on headphones for hours on end. “They’re not just comedy records,” Benny said, the awe palpable in his voice. “They’re worlds.” | 2022-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | November 13, 2022 | 6.9 | 3ec66253-8eb3-47f0-a153-a2a6c53f2619 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Pittsburgh-based Girl Talk absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up, cramming this 40-minute mix with layered samples from more than 150 uncleared top 40 pop bangers, electro anthems, indie classics, yacht rock flashbacks, 80s metal cuts, and more. | Pittsburgh-based Girl Talk absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up, cramming this 40-minute mix with layered samples from more than 150 uncleared top 40 pop bangers, electro anthems, indie classics, yacht rock flashbacks, 80s metal cuts, and more. | Girl Talk: Night Ripper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9208-night-ripper/ | Night Ripper | The element of surprise is gone from the mash-up. Hollertronix and 2 Many DJs mastered the technique, made it a staple of their sets, and next, everyone on the block was mix-matching hip-hop to electro and indie rock. The idea that two songs blender-ized can recombine to create something wholly new is thrilling in theory, but the execution is usually sloppy or samey, either simply aligning two similar beat structures or pairing up two completely disparate tracks for the slapstick novelty of a jokey title.
Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up on his third album, the violently joyous Night Ripper. Rather than squeeze two songs that sorta make sense together into a small box, Gillis crams six or eight or 14 or 20 songs into frenetic rows, slicing fragments off 1980s pop, Dirty South rap, booty bass, and grunge, among countless other genres. Then he pieces together the voracious music fan's dream: a hulking hyper-mix designed to make you dance, wear out predictable ideas, and defy hopeless record-reviewing.
Night Ripper* doesn't stretch the boundaries of mash-ups because there were no boundaries to begin with. As an illegal art form, it's surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner. Still, it's doubtful they'd have the sturdy, meticulous hand that Gillis flaunts here. The record's pacing is astonishing-- with more than 150 sample sources (all thanked in the liner notes), it ricochets from Top 40 hits to obscure gems and back again like a cool breeze, clocking in at less than 42 minutes. The sampling is pure precision, slotting razor-thin (but highly recognizable) guitar stabs on top of blaring synths on top of anthemic rap couplets and so on, all at breakneck speed.
Part of the fun of listening is trying to figure out the source of each fragment used on these tracks. Familiar as they may be, you'll never place every sample. But at the risk of getting sucked into Gillis' name-game vortex, an example speaks to the power. "Smash Your Head" glides into the siren keyboards of Lil Wayne's "Fireman" less than a minute in, then abruptly shifts into the crushingly dense riffs of Nirvana's "Scentless Apprentice" while Young Jeezy spits the familiar flames of "Soul Survivor", before it all tumbles into a Pharcyde-Elton John-Biggie somersault. On "Minute by Minute", Gillis even slots Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" up next to Juelz Santana's "There It Go (The Whisper Song)". There are no ties, other than the miracle of chopping and looping.
Due to its overwhelming number of unlicensed sources, Night Ripper is practically begging for court drama. In the event of litigation, Gillis' label has armed themselves with a Fair Use argument, citing artists' rights to liberally sample in the creation of new works. Whether that'll hold any water in a courtroom remains to be seen, but for listeners it's an afterthought. Some may dock him points for lack of originality, but Gillis' schizophrenic attitude toward pop music is so novel it's impossible to stay mad at. Time will tell whether it's still fresh in 12 months, when the very recent samples (M.I.A., Gwen Stefani, Webbie) lose their chic appeal next to Smokey Robinson, the Pixies, and Public Enemy-- but for 2006, Night Ripper is the soundtrack of the summer. | 2006-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Illegal Art | July 17, 2006 | 8.4 | 3ec8897b-bf56-4ff7-8914-38b73f388b74 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
The acclaimed avant-metal outfit Gojira’s sixth full-length LP is their most accessible release yet, melodically immediate and charged with emotion. | The acclaimed avant-metal outfit Gojira’s sixth full-length LP is their most accessible release yet, melodically immediate and charged with emotion. | Gojira: Magma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22015-magma/ | Magma | Gojira’s Joe Duplantier didn’t ask to be a heavy metal auteur. Before taking up arms as the singer, vocalist, and principal songwriter of the acclaimed French avant-metal outfit, the Frenchman had dreams of becoming a fireman–a career path that shifted drastically following his childhood exposure to Metallica and Voivod, which inspired him to pick up an axe and start composing his own music. “I don’t decide to do this,” he recently told Rolling Stone, “It’s bigger than me; I can’t help it.” (He’s not the only member of the Duplantier family to adopt that mindset; Joe’s brother Mario is Gojira’s drummer.) Although Duplantier’s remarks suggest a primal, intuitive musical approach, the band’s discography thus far suggests the opposite: A decade into their career, Gojira have earned a reputation as one of the genre’s most studious acts, combining intricate, highly-technical arrangements with abstract, recurringly-political lyrics, most recently on 2012’s excellent L’Enfant Sauvage.
That narrative’s shifted dramatically with the arrival of Magma, Gojira’s sixth full-length LP and their most accessible release yet. In a departure from the sprawling, progressive frameworks of albums past, the Bayonne-based band deliver a taut, catchy crossover effort that inoculates their heady metal with equal parts melodic immediacy and emotional intimacy, while retaining the pillars of their caustic panoply: mathy riffs, uncommon time signatures, ferocious, death-metal-styled vocals, and above all, overpowering anxiety. The new sound’s largely a consequence of the Duplantiers’ grief; their mother passed away during the album’s gestation, forcing the brothers to get out of their own heads and revisit the material they had so far–often fighting back tears during the sessions.
Accordingly, Magma’s most intense moments center around personal anguish, rather than political musings. Thanks to the group’s usual tech wizardry (in this case, vocal multi-tracking), the majestic “The Shooting Star” expands Duplantier’s eerie chants into a mournful chorus 16 tracks deep, which teeters over a hollow, cavernous groove: an impressive display of courage in the face of untenable bleakness. “Only Pain” doubles down on the despair, incorporating manic drum patterns and wailing guitars (the same, eerie squeal, which resembles the sound of a hellcat getting its tail yanked, resurfaces on the irresistible single “Stranded.”)
Magma’s not nearly as esoteric as the albums that preceded it—and considering how Gojira’s progressive tendencies have distinguished them from the get-go, the catchiest tracks on the record arguably take the biggest risks. With its growled melodies and groovy, nü-metal-tinged choruses, “Stranded” and “Silvera” are well-positioned to wreak havoc on mainstream rock radio, much to the ire of purists. The album’s atmospheric interludes, “Yellow Stone” and closer “Liberation,” comprise another source of contention, wholly skippable outside of the context of a full listening session (although the latter’s seamless transition into brutal opener “The Cell” offers one of the album’s most dynamic moments). Such deviations will undoubtedly draw comparisons to similarly-streamlined crossover efforts like Mastodon’s The Hunter and Baroness’ Yellow & Green, but to write off Magma as a mere bid for audience expansion is to ignore its overarching aims: the album’s universality is a testament to its emotional heft, and some tragedies can’t be expressed through labyrinthine musical proofs. Loss is bigger than Gojira. The guys can’t help it—and keep in mind, they were named for a giant, monstrous lizard. | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | Roadrunner | July 8, 2016 | 7.6 | 3ecf9b83-5eee-4fe7-b8c6-ee4372e2a8ba | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The gloomy new album from British rapper, DJ, and now filmmaker Mike Skinner echoes but doesn’t equal the narrative force of the Streets’ classic material. | The gloomy new album from British rapper, DJ, and now filmmaker Mike Skinner echoes but doesn’t equal the narrative force of the Streets’ classic material. | The Streets: The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-streets-the-darker-the-shadow-the-brighter-the-light/ | The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light | If the rave life hadn’t claimed him, Mike Skinner would have made a pretty good screenwriter. There’s always been a filmic quality to the Streets’ music: laddish but insightful rap that paints slice-of-life tales so vivid and relatable they made Skinner a folk hero for a certain breed of sensitive geezer. But The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is an actual movie. Though there’s been a smattering of Streets activity over the last few years—a handful of releases, a guest-packed mixtape—Skinner calls this the project’s first official full-length since 2011’s Computers and Blues. It only exists, he says, because of a feature-length film of the same name out now in UK cinemas—a “noir murder mystery” set in London clubland that Skinner wrote, directed, produced, funded, edited, and even acted in himself.
After putting the Streets on ice in 2011, Skinner set out to explore other musical avenues, plying his trade as a club DJ and putting his name to collaborative projects like the D.O.T. and Tonga Balloon Gang. Even the title The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light began as an alias, used to release a string of fresh tracks on SoundCloud from 2016 onward. For all this creative restlessness, all roads ultimately led back to the Streets, and perhaps that’s not surprising. Skinner’s voice is immediately recognizable and remains singular: a softly monotone English drawl that plays subtle tricks with rhythm and assonance as it weaves its tales of rickety love affairs and late-night misadventure.
Intentionally or not, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light points to past Streets landmarks. The laggy synths of “Troubled Waters” feel like a queasy flashback to “Blinded by the Lights.” “Too Much Yayo” trembles with the post-bender anxiety that powered The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living. Longtime collaborators Kevin Mark Trail and Robert Harvey pop up to croon the hooks. At times the callbacks feel deliberately self-referential, but over the long haul they give the sense of a project that has long since staked out its boundaries.
Skinner’s penmanship remains intermittently fantastic. He still has a talent for a good one-liner (“Behind every great man a girl rolls her eyes,” he deadpans on “Funny Dream”) as well as deeper meditations on the human condition, told from the perspective of a mid-40s hedonist who’s burned through more serotonin that most. “Troubled Waters” is the key track. Its nocturnal feel and occasional surge of d’n’b rhythm locate it in the club. But the mood is grim as Skinner muses on sin and redemption: “Is it nature or nurture when you hurt your bredrins?/We pray in church for our personal heaven.”
Existential gloom is a key flavor of The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, and while that title implies duality, darkness often has the upper hand. Familiar tropes of depression get a thorough workout: “The black dog follows me as I walk,” he raps on “Each Day Gives.” “The walk of shame is my daily commute,” goes “Walk of Shame.” “Bright Sunny Day” is anything but, three-and-a-half minutes of stormy thoughts and self-recrimination that closes its curtains to the world. Skinner at his best has a knack for spinning tales and drawing characters, but here he seems more interested in picking over his own midlife crisis. While the decision to avoid narrative exposition appears intentional, the songs can lose momentum, drifting off into lyrical non sequitur and navel-gazing.
Some daring musical choices keep things moving, even when the storyline flags. “Gonna Hurt When This Is Over” unfurls lazily opiated raps over droning sitar, while the title track loops a dusty sample of ragtime jazz. A couple songs summon the magic of yore: “Shake Hands With Shadows” captures the sensation of clubbing as darkness gives way to dawn, Skinner’s elegiac nightlife poetry unfolding over punchy kicks and dancehall zaps. The closing “Good Old Daze,” meanwhile, adds to the growing catalog of songs designed to evoke the experience of riding a London night bus. Most music on this topic is rooted in rainy Burial-esque melancholy, but Skinner’s take is a celebration of the night bus as a multicultural melting pot, a microcosm of the city at large. “The night bus home is like a night bus club,” he muses over gospel sighs, and it’s the album’s warmest, most communal moment.
As for the film this music accompanies, it’s ambitious and full of ideas but let down by wooden acting and a convoluted plot. Skinner’s high-water mark of narrative fiction remains 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free, an album that worked both as a set of standalone tracks and as a broader story arc—with a twist that felt genuinely redemptive. By comparison, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell. | 2023-10-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 679 | October 23, 2023 | 6 | 3ed04ba4-b461-47ef-adec-b0d105776672 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The ambient-jazz saxophonist offers unpredictable, impressionistic takes on R&B hits from the ’90s and early ’00s, tackling songs by Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Erykah Badu. | The ambient-jazz saxophonist offers unpredictable, impressionistic takes on R&B hits from the ’90s and early ’00s, tackling songs by Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Erykah Badu. | Sam Gendel: Cookup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-cookup/ | Cookup | Sam Gendel’s ascension to beloved ambient-jazz savant has been fueled, in part, by the inexhaustibility of his output. His prolific catalog foams with free-improv sessions, bedroom recordings, a three-and-a-half-hour archive dump, and a bevy of collaborative projects showcasing his stuttering guitar playing and wistful, narcotic approach to the saxophone. A limber, unselfconscious sense of intuition runs through his many detours and discursions, and his work consistently blurs the line between conception and completion. In Gendel’s world, meaning emerges amid limitless swells of sound. “Putting out a ‘normal’ album just doesn’t work for me,” he said recently. “I’m more interested in throwing ideas out and seeing where the ceiling is.”
Gendel’s newest release is a covers album in which he reimagines R&B hits from the ’90s and early ’00s, a framework that provides him and collaborators Phil Melanson and Gabe Noel a remarkable amount of freedom inside seemingly fixed structures. With his woozy, wandering saxophone anchoring the record’s soothing soundscapes, Gendel interprets songs by Aaliyah, Erykah Badu, Boyz II Men, and others with a lucid and improvisational touch, bending them into almost unrecognizable shapes. It’s an engaging albeit low-stakes effort from an artist unafraid to splatter fresh paint across a familiar canvas.
Gendel’s no stranger to putting his own spin on classic songs. In 2020 he released Satin Doll, an album where he repurposed jazz standards in his own upside-down fashion. He treats the tracks on Cookup in a similar way, maintaining the melodic integrity of his source material while also revealing foreign tones and textures. On “Differences,” his insouciant horn takes liberties refashioning Ginuwine’s vocal runs as Noel’s bass undergirds the rhythm and Melanson’s electronic percussion squeezes into tight pockets. Another highlight is his impressionistic take on Mario’s “Let Me Love You,” where Gendel’s dazzling sax work stretches the track’s melodic core to its furthest limits.
The album is less persuasive when songs adhere too closely to their original forms. There’s a rush of gratification when “Crazy in Love” and “Didn’t Cha Know” appear, but the cleanness of the renditions makes them feel like your average, capable cover song, ones you might hear while walking past a street performance or scrolling through TikTok. Gendel’s virtuosity announces itself more forcefully when he veers into weirdness, like on a deranged, sputtering take of Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain,” or when eerie forest sounds surround his celestial playing on “In Those Jeans.” This messy fingerpainting suits Gendel’s loose and instinctual style better than mimesis. Cookup soars when the players’ interpretations converge into new creations, and the source material becomes a portal to a new dimension. The vestiges of old melody may remain, but Gendel’s best reimaginings illuminate subtle resonances and hidden pleasures. | 2023-03-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Nonesuch | March 1, 2023 | 7 | 3ed8f8da-954b-4d44-9686-b8a8ba1ccddc | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Fred Thomas is a Michigan indie rock lifer best known for his time in the throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good To Me. He's also released eight solo albums, and his latest, All Are Saved, is devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of him. | Fred Thomas is a Michigan indie rock lifer best known for his time in the throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good To Me. He's also released eight solo albums, and his latest, All Are Saved, is devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of him. | Fred Thomas: All Are Saved | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20357-all-are-saved/ | All Are Saved | Talk to anyone who’s seen an indie rock show in Michigan during the 21st century and you’ll probably get a Fred Thomas story within the first thirty minutes or so. Maybe it was the time their band played with one of Thomas' 156 (give or take) musical projects at a warehouse in Ypsilanti. Or maybe they crossed paths at a demonstration in Detroit. To quote a colleague, "Fred Thomas is always standing right behind you at a basement show in Ann Arbor." Which is to say that Thomas is a "lifer", that mainstay of the local scene usually viewed with some combination of admiration and concern. Their commitment is cool even if they’re pushing 40 and clearly not in it for the money, but what are their alternatives? Do they have any marketable job skills?
Thomas' most well-known project, the lo-fi throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good to Me, developed a cult following, but was always on the verge of a mainstream-indie breakthrough that never happened. He's also released eight albums under his own name, but All Are Saved is the first to see widespread release. From the sound of things, Fred Thomas would be at peace if it was his last. It's in the tradition of a very specific kind of record, including Father John Misty’s Fear Fun, Sun Kil Moon’s Among the Leaves and the Wrens’ The Meadowlands—artists reinventing themselves as their actual self, lifers tired of watching their life pass by, tired of public indifference. With nothing to lose, Thomas ditches any pretense of metaphor to speak on every embarrassment and sleep-depriving doubt. And the results are devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of Fred Thomas until the previous paragraph.
This is a record of epiphany, but there are no easy resolutions and false triumph. Despite its title, All Are Saved does not wrestle with mortality and arise with The Truth About What it All Means. It does not glorify the preciousness of our short existence. Most of it is derived from the realization that life, as it’s keenly described on "Cops Don’t Care Pt. II", "is so incredibly long/ Like a kiss on a bridge between two nervous ass kids/ Terrified of doing everything wrong." The image of teenage lip-locking pops up on two different songs: on "When They Built the Schools", Thomas recognizes the "jelly legs and awkward elbows" of first-timers who have no time for the "burden of nostalgia" that clings to him like a wetsuit and essentially translates to "regret".
Most of the memories Thomas processes on All Are Saved aren’t even good ones, and yet they’re revived with piercing clarity—drunkenly smashing his flip phone in a Baltimore basement in 2003; watching a girl get embarrassed by her dad’s use of slang on an airplane; the role reversal of going to a free dental clinic and having his dentist turn out to be a drummer he produced eight years ago. These are the types of situations that fill up an impossibly long life, so when Thomas opens the album asking his dog in its dying days whether trading 13 years of "walking in a clear straight line" for a human’s eight potential decades of fumbling is a "shitty deal", well... the answer is obvious, right?
The album at least sounds uplifting, adding layer after layer while Thomas spins desperately in place. The aesthetic reflects the two cities in which this album was created, honoring Athens' indie rock lineage by its Elephant 6-style thrift shop orchestration. If you’ve followed Thomas over the past two decades, this is a culminating work: the contrast of peppy horn blasts and foul-mouthed misanthropy on "Expo '87" recall Saturday Looks Good to Me; the spindly arpeggios of "When They Built the Schools" nod towards his emo-ish offshoot Lovesick; and the aquatic gurgling and electronic interludes make a case for reappreciation of his Type Records outlier City Center (namechecked in "Unfading Flower").
But otherwise, this is an idiosyncratic "singer-songwriter" record, filled with surprises and unorthodox percussion choices—a soupy tabla sample on "Unfading Flower", an erratic pound of a floor tom guiding the drunken amble of "When They Built the Schools". Vocally, Thomas largely abandons conventional song structure and melodies, taking on a quasi spoken-word approach that allows him the maximum word count and lends a sarcastic edge to his sly note on"Bedbugs": "If I seem too entertaining, I’m not singing, I’m just talking to you."
The most entertaining songs on All Are Saved are generally the cruelest: Both "Bedbugs" and "Bad Blood" speak in a language simultaneously more truthful and cutting than most of us allow ourselves. These rambling, bilious one-sided conversations might be mislabeled as "rants"; more accurately, they’re the kind of righteously angry emails you spend all night honing to a fine point, and then sleep on, waking up relieved you never hit "Send." Thomas provides us vicarious catharsis, but during the toxic airing of grievances of "Bedbugs", he makes the risks of such an approach perfectly clear—"You can’t tell everybody to fuck off forever.../ And be mortified when they finally do."
Thomas trudges through difficult relationships like most of us, being "so stilted and silent, not awkward, just angry." That’s how he describes his presumable run-in with a more successful artist on "Bad Blood", whose music he likens to "a pile of brown sweaters." All at once, he wishes he could go beyond their brief exchange and express his envy and resentments, that it could be Thomas on TV in 2015 had things worked out just a little bit differently for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Instead, he blasts through the fourth wall, summarizing the futility of his past decade with a gut punch—"This ‘first day of school’ shit just seems to keep happening...the smiles are so big and there’s no one at the gig." The most painful lines are Thomas quoting other people—"Hey I gotta go, but I’ll see you at the show!", "Man, it’s so cool, we’re glad you’re doing your own thing." It's the sound of Thomas realizing that most of his interactions are compromised by his own self-pity and dishonesty.
And yet, this realization is the strange source of hope in All Are Saved: Thomas seems inspired, even moved, by the possibility that the sharp, overwhelming and temporary pain of being forthright with someone can be a breakthrough after years and years of silence and half-truths. It ties back to that line about those kids on the bridge and how Thomas sets an example throughout *All Are Saved—*life is incredibly long when you’re terrified of doing anything wrong, and in the process of connecting with another person, it’s best to just go for it as directly as possible. | 2015-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 9, 2015 | 8 | 3eda5ce8-6e20-43c3-be5c-295049505a65 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The elusive Detroit producer returns after a years-long mysterious absence with a burning, urgent, and immersive new LP. | The elusive Detroit producer returns after a years-long mysterious absence with a burning, urgent, and immersive new LP. | Moodymann: Sinner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moodymann-sinner/ | Sinner | Last spring, a new Moodymann album popped up on dance music sites listed only as “coming soon.” A single dropped and vanished, but June came and went with no full-length follow-up to his 2014 self-titled album. At that point, the Detroit producer also known as Kenny Dixon, Jr. had begun showing up in places far outside the dance music underground. Even in his years-long absence, he could be heard purring “fuck dat shit” on Drake’s “Passionfruit” and DJing Prince obscurities around the world. With little effort on his end, his woozy, soul-rooted take on house music had infiltrated everyone from Channel Tres and Motor City Drum Ensemble to Caribou’s Daphni alias.
In January, a rumor spread that he had handed out a few copies of his lost album, which subsequently wound up selling for upwards of $500. As of now, it still has not been officially released. Deep in the Ring-esque video for “I’ll Provide,” the lead-off track on Sinner, the fate of that original album is finally revealed, as Dixon dumps entire bags of them into a garbage can.
Sinner now arrives with little explanation. Does it replace the lost album? Is it a stopgap? The double vinyl has five tracks, while the Bandcamp version gets fleshed out with last year’s single and a few other goodies. Song by song—even moment by moment—it shows Dixon pulling in multiple directions. The music teems with small details, but it doesn’t feel dense, just more diffuse, harder than ever to grasp. It is also some of the most immersive he’s ever made.
“I’ll Provide” is seductive and menacing, driving and aching, his most claustrophobic track since “Freeki Mutha F cker.” But where that track was sleek and seductive, “I’ll Provide” is hurt, forlorn, desperate. Heaving synth strings, pulsing in-the-red bass, overdriven acid lines, digital glitching, crowd noise, a relentless kick—they all jostle for space on the track without affecting its aerodynamics one iota. Atop it all, Moodymann slots in killer couplets—“I got something/For all your dirty, nasty needs,” “Drunk and high/I’ll provide”—that evoke the backing tracks of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Sometimes whispered, other times whooped from across the room, they make the track feels rowdy and confessional at once.
“Got Me Coming Back Rite Now” barely tops 100 bpm, but the house track bustles with sound, from Moody’s vocal scats and crisp hi-hats to dramatic strings and the whoosh of passing traffic. Relaxed as it sounds, there’s an unsettled, on-edge quality to it. As it shuffles towards its inevitable climax, Moody again growls like a man in conflict, offering to do the chores as well as “tie you down on this here floor.”
There isn’t really a weak moment: “I Think of Saturday” already feels like a peak-time classic, erected atop a Linn drum sample worthy of the Purple One. Dixon’s utterance of the word “church” alone can make you a believer. Again, Moody roves between nonchalance and urgency, rattling off the days of the week as if he’s merely waiting for the weekend. But another pass through the song reveals that for each day, he hasn’t heard from his crush, so that rather than the weekend offering release, it only increases the desperation. A perfectly placed drop into Joe Simon’s “With You in Mind” instead accentuates that mind in the throes of such an unrequited obsession.
“If I Gave U My Love” is more audacious with the source material, interweaving legends like Camille Yarbrough and Al Green into a mosaic. They are both iconic voices—Yarbrough’s will be most familiar to listeners as the source material for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”—and Moody even samples the same moment. But as church organ swirls, Moody manages to twist the overly familiar into something newly strange and ecstatic. Even for longtime fans of Moodymann that know his penchant with an MPC, these tracks find him pushing towards new ground.
The back half of the set gets stranger, slower. “Downtown” is a noodly smooth jazz jam that first appeared as “Pitch Black City Reunion” last year. “Deeper Shadow” is neo-soul with a bit of razorous psychedelic guitar added to darken the mood. “8 Mile D Boy” is a rare bit of fidgety electro from the man, but paired with the admission “I’m so sorry,” it’s a party track with a conflicted emotion at its core. The title track finds Moody at his simmering, neo-soul best, flickering in and out of focus and drawing everything down by singing about a “lonely winner” who “sat in your lonely dark room listening to Dilla/ hoping they would remember.” Knowing his own deep connection with the fellow Detroiter, one wonders if Moody is not singing about an object of his affection, but rather his own self? Like the man himself, he is in no rush to dispel that mystery. | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | KDJ | July 1, 2019 | 8.4 | 3edf04bd-9c04-4a92-91d7-f7c8d367bad9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On her debut LP, the young Atlanta rapper and singer avoids guests and try-hard hits while embracing a voice that runs like water. | On her debut LP, the young Atlanta rapper and singer avoids guests and try-hard hits while embracing a voice that runs like water. | Kodie Shane: Young HeartThrob | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kodie-shane-young-heartthrob/ | Young HeartThrob | These days, so many major-label rap and rap-adjacent records depend on vibes—musical moods that feel just out of reach, though they frame sonic environments meant for immersion. Kodie Shane is the latest Atlantan whose music embodies this contradiction, as she steadily rides the line between “singer” and “rapper” over beats and melodies that possess a purply, psychedelic drift. “She like it when I rap, but love it when I sing to her/She can’t get enough,” Shane brags on “Sing to Her,” a standout of her debut LP for Epic, Young HeartThrob. Her voice often sounds like running water, an unbroken melodic stream flowing above production that radiates a low-level glow. “I was thinkin’ about you last night/But now the sun’s up,” she emotes over a fluttering guitar loop on “Thinking Bout U,” a lovelorn lyric that captures this music’s nocturnal warmth.
Young HeartThrob is the purest and most effective distillation yet of Shane’s hybrid aesthetic. Despite her affiliation with the Sailing Team of mush-mouthed cavity-rap impresario Lil Yachty, her album is refreshingly devoid of features aside from fellow genre-blenders Trippie Redd and TK Kravitz. Otherwise, Young HeartThrob showcases her unabashed romanticism and elastic approach to melody. “High Speeds” frames her voice with barely there echo, its chorus hovering over wavy synths and a knocking hi-hat/kick-drum combo that seems to create three dimensions. On “Hiatus,” she ruminates on dreams of Vegas weddings and a relationship put on pause, breaking into a pleasing “Ooh, ooh” over squishy bass and warped chimes.
Much of Young HeartThrob focuses on lost love and unrequited pining; women are lusted after, visited in secret. (“Queer as fuck, by the way, and happy about it,” she defined her sexuality in a Red Bull documentary.) They are the object of Shane’s affection to the point that, when she starts discussing the size of watch faces during “High Speeds,” she cuts herself off, declaring “Fuck it.” By embracing her own perspective, Shane sidesteps the miserabilia that’s accompanied so much lovelorn hip-hop and R&B over the past few years. Over the glistening theme and stuttering drums of “Pulling Up,” she asks a potential paramour if she should drop by “when nobody’s home,” later confiding, “She just want me all on her body/Promise me that you won’t tell nobody.” She flips the woman-on-my-arm conceit that anchors “Party” by flatly stating, “Let’s run some errands.”
These mostly romantic musings play out over wispy beats provided by longtime collaborator and Atlanta fixture Matty P. He adds an occasional extra element—the muted bombast of “End Like That,” a vague move toward tropical pop on “Long Time”—to shift the scenery. Though the production trends toward contemporary hip-hop’s druggier-sounding side, Shane cuts through the melodic fog with her flickering voice.
If there’s one thing Young HeartThrob lacks, it’s obviousness—a big, distinctive single or a roiling party-starter that would reach beyond late-night drives and home listening. Given the record’s atmosphere, it’s unclear if that’s what Shane even wants, anyway. The murky flow and subtle sounds of Young HeartThrob fit her voice and romantic perspective like a big, fluffy coat: soft, comfortable, and enveloping in a way that makes it hard to envision anything more. | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | December 6, 2018 | 7.8 | 3ee1a72c-ae70-432a-a434-2a5120a29579 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The patron saint of sneering, disaffected poets releases a collection of classic Christmas songs for Feeding America, a leading hunger-relief nonprofit. | The patron saint of sneering, disaffected poets releases a collection of classic Christmas songs for Feeding America, a leading hunger-relief nonprofit. | Bob Dylan: Christmas in the Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13615-christmas-in-the-heart/ | Christmas in the Heart | When Bob Dylan-- the patron saint of sneering, disaffected poets-- announced he was releasing a collection of classic Christmas songs for charity, smirkers got smirkier: What, after all, is more absurd than a beloved iconoclast embracing the schmaltziest, most achingly commercial genre of all? It sounded insane. And it is insane, sort of.
The goal of Christmas in the Heart (all domestic proceeds go to Feeding America, one of the nation's leading hunger-relief nonprofits) is hardly reinvention. These are mostly traditional renderings, and even Dylan's craggy, get-off-my-lawn snarl-- the inadvertent template for decades of idiosyncratic vocalists-- is topped with a shiny red bow (is that a hint of prim, finger-snapping croon on "Do You Hear What I Hear?"). Still: There's something silly about Christmas music, there's something silly about Bob Dylan singing "Christmas Island" ("How'd ya like to hang a stocking on a great big coconut tree?"), and there's a lot silly about the cheesecake portrait of Bettie Page in a Santa suit and garters that graces the inside CD booklet (a companion piece, perhaps, to the Hallmark card-aspiring sleigh ride on the cover). Ergo: How seriously are we supposed to take Christmas in the Heart? And moreover: How seriously are we supposed to take Bob Dylan in 2009?
It's not hard to presuppose that Dylan-- who has an entire encyclopedia, dozens of nonfiction treatises, and at least a handful of college courses dedicated to parsing his lyrics and intent-- is either deeply irritated or deeply bemused by his anointment, and is responding to over-the-top canonization by doing deliberately oddball stuff (see also: leering at underwear models in a Victoria's Secret commercial). Even the title-- eerily reminiscent of Kenny Rogers' 1998 turd, Christmas From the Heart-- feels tongue-in-cheek. But maybe that's a trap, too-- maybe, like zillions of red-blooded, religiously ambiguous American dudes, Bob Dylan just likes Christmastime and Adriana Lima. And we're stupid for presuming anything more.
Regardless of intent, Christmas in the Heart is a surreal and occasionally rousing collection of gooey holiday ballads, complete with animatronic backing vocals and Nashville-smooth arrangements. Produced by Dylan-pseudonym Jack Frost and featuring David Hidalgo of Los Lobos (who contributed some memorable accordion to Together Through Life), it's a nice assortment of hymns and popular carols. Like any good gospel singer (or stand-up comic), Dylan is fully committed: On "O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis)", he crows the first few verses in Latin, and on the dizzying, Tom Waits-evoking "Must Be Santa", he chirps Santa Facts with frantic, seizure-inducing certainty. And some tracks-- "Silver Bells" and "The First Noel", in particular-- already feel familiar, like they've been a part of the holiday vernacular for years.
Dylan's thing has never been palatability, and he's clearly enamored with contrast-- in this case, between his worn, gravel-gargle voice and everything else. And it's his unhinged vocals that make Christmas in the Heart interesting, and, in some ways, appropriate to its subject: In practice if not in theory, Christmas songs aren't about perfect pitch and studied harmonies, they're about slouching around an out-of-tune piano with your relatives, sloshing back store-bought eggnog, and hollering songs you learned in kindergarten and have been singing-- with abandon, without training, without self-consciousness-- nearly all of your life. It's Christmas: Even Bob Dylan's allowed that. | 2009-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | October 26, 2009 | 6.8 | 3ee9b66b-dd07-4011-9c79-2c8c29009f04 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Fusing toy piano, minimalist improvisation, children’s voices, modular synthesizers, and a purring cat, among other fanciful sounds, the American composer’s 1978 album revels in the accidental music of everyday life. | Fusing toy piano, minimalist improvisation, children’s voices, modular synthesizers, and a purring cat, among other fanciful sounds, the American composer’s 1978 album revels in the accidental music of everyday life. | Alvin Curran: Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alvin-curran-fiori-chiari-fiori-oscuri/ | Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri | In the mid 1960s, the American composer Alvin Curran experienced what he called “a compelling need to toss my bourgeois ambitions and 12-tone music training in the trash and re-embrace music-making in an uncorrupted innocent way—a conceptual re-boot to an imagined primeval state.” He would henceforth commit to simplicity by employing monophony, simple strumming patterns, and the octave interval. In 1969, with his improvisational group Musica Elettronica Viva, he wrote a score in the form of a recipe that involved one toy xylophone, two large resonant glass plates, three or four old cow or goat bells, and several ping-pong balls, along with dozens of other instruments. The instructions were minimal; “The best soups usually just happen,” he declared. When the collective toured Europe and the U.S. during this period, they’d perform “Soundpool,” a piece inviting professional musicians and amateurs alike to join. Curran estimates that thousands participated, and in reminiscing about the time, he recalls, “Music was said to belong to the people.”
Such egalitarian music-making also coincides with another aspect of his personal philosophy: that all the world is “a real and imaginary concert hall which has a nonstop music.” Curran would obsessively record the cries of animals, the “empty” sounds of abandoned locales, even himself having sex: Nothing was off limits, because everything was beautiful. This culminated in his solo debut masterpiece in 1975, the intimate and otherworldly Canti e Vedute del Giardino Magnetico. Replete with field recordings and dreamy synth curlicues, it also features his voice, something which hadn’t been presented in a public musical context since his Bar Mitzvah. He understood how monumental the piece was, so the follow-up—his inimitable 1978 LP Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri—necessitated a deeper embrace of his musical capabilities and the sounds available to him.
Much like Canti, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri is a longform piece whose distinct parts meld into a seamless tapestry. It begins softly, with a cat’s purring. This introduction is reminiscent of Annea Lockwood’s Tiger Balm, but the subsequent toy-piano plinks suffuse Curran’s piece with comforting naivety. An actual piano soon arrives, complementing that guileless charm to form an arresting lullaby. These initial 100 seconds are crucial table-setting: Other musique concrète pieces from the time were dark, discordant, and alien, but everything here is homey and eminently familiar. Even stylistically adjacent works offer inadequate comparisons: It’s less austere than Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien or Henning Christiansen’s Fluxyl (Musik Essayistik), but more academic than Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods. The balance that Curran strikes is the result of an incisive one-two punch: disarm the listener’s expectations about avant-garde music, and create childlike appreciation for everyday experiences.
Literal children appear, too. Alexis, the five-year-old son of Curran’s close friend Frederic Rzewski, describes building a spaceship, going to the moon, and finding a massive spider before coming home to eat cake. Another kid explains events involving the mythological city of Troy. These inclusions are reminders of the power of imaginative storytelling, and the voiceless passages on Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri are similarly free-flowing. Serge Modular drones and wispy ocarina flutters are woven into passages with chirping birds and looping yelps. The convergence of all these sounds into such a dizzying and nostalgic flurry feels like magic.
Later, Curran brings out his piano to improvise. It mutates from repetitive, minimalist motifs into a raucous take on the jazz standard “Georgia on My Mind,” but the piece’s sentimental spirit remains. When Curran was an adolescent, his father gave him his first fake book, and it contained so much music that he considered it a sacred text. Decades later he’d compile his own, called The Alvin Curran Fakebook. In a sense, Curran’s music serves as a guide to playing music, too. With Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, he leads you by hand through a wide expanse of sounds and emotions. All of it remains as down-home as it is ambitious, as if a reminder that music is both infinite in its scope and, more importantly, readily accessible. Music belongs to everyone who seeks it out.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | August 13, 2021 | 7.9 | 3eec8af0-a9b1-4256-88fc-5d2b1153003b | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The reissue of Julee Cruise’s second album, featuring David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, follows the singer on her dizzying dream-pop trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the same coin. | The reissue of Julee Cruise’s second album, featuring David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, follows the singer on her dizzying dream-pop trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the same coin. | Julee Cruise: The Voice of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julee-cruise-the-voice-of-love/ | The Voice of Love | Julee Cruise may not have gotten famous exactly, but in the nearly three decades since her debut, she’s heard traces of herself in other female singers: “They sing like sexy baby girls,” she noted in a 2014 interview. Cruise didn’t always sing that way. Before meeting David Lynch through his go-to composer, Angelo Badalamenti, the Iowa-born singer had a big, belting musical theater voice; Badalamenti, who’d met Cruise on the set of a Greenwich Village production he’d written, doubted she could fit the bill when Lynch needed an airy, Elizabeth-Fraser-of-Cocteau-Twins kind of voice for Blue Velvet’s main theme. But Cruise surprised him, restraining her delivery by imagining she was the soloist in a boy’s choir. Lynch directed her to sing like an angel; later in their collaborative relationship, he advised her to sing as though she were on the brink of orgasm.
And so, alongside Lynch and Badalamenti, Cruise was creatively reborn, seeming to arrive Birth of Venus-style by an otherworldly spotlight onto a dark stage. Her first album, Floating Into the Night, arrived in 1989, with lyrics written by Lynch and arrangements by Badalamenti. But her breakthrough came the following year with the premiere of “Twin Peaks”; on stage at the Roadhouse near the end of the pilot episode, Cruise performed “Falling” and “The Nightingale,” two weightless, transportive dream pop songs from her debut album. In black leather with cherry-red lips and nails, she gave the impression of an angel who’d awoken on earth on the back of a stranger’s Harley Davidson. In the rare moments she opened her eyes, her gaze drifted longingly above the audience towards somewhere unreachable in the distance.
Cruise’s best-known songs appear on that first album; “Falling” even cracked the Billboard charts, a rarity for a song from a television soundtrack. Its follow-up, 1993’s The Voice of Love, never quite achieved the same cult status. But its 25-year anniversary reissue via Sacred Bones makes a case for the album as, if not as vital as her debut, a captivating chapter in her beguiling and sometimes confusing catalog. (Cruise’s subsequent albums—2002’s The Art of Being a Girl and 2011’s My Secret Life—depart from Badalamenti’s jukebox noir to venture into some of the strangest trip-hop I have ever heard.) Floating Into the Night dealt mostly with love’s power to stun, sending Cruise down a rabbit hole of desire. The Voice of Love follows this dizzying trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the coin—in Cruise’s world, it is love’s fleeting nature that gives it meaning.
The Voice of Love is filled with these sorts of doomed Cinderella moments, where romantic connections burn brightly for a night and then fade into memories. “This Is Our Night,” with its loping reggae guitar chords, is one of the least-expected diversions in Cruise’s early career: picture a David Lynch interpretation of “The Tide Is High” and you’re halfway there. But where the title suggests a triumphant love story, Cruise wonders in her haunted falsetto: “When all my days are wanting you/When all your days are wanting me/Why can’t it ever be?” Love is a space to drift through, a prelude to mourning. On “Until the End of the World,” a sedated, droning take on ’50s rock with dramatic, lurching drums, it’s not the love itself that is made to last, Cruise sings, but the lingering dream of it.
There are moments of levity, too. On the narcotic doo-wop of “Movin’ in on You,” Cruise’s deliriously overdubbed vocals warn a love interest that she’s going to steal him from his current girlfriend, and “Kool Kat Walk” is a hilariously weird cat-and-mouse game between Cruise, two women named Betsy and Susan, and a mysterious character called Kool Kat who appears to be fucking everyone involved. But for the most part, the mood is dark and disorienting: “She Would Die For Love,” which samples the main theme of “Twin Peaks”’ prequel film Fire Walk With Me, features Cruise singing as if lost in the deep woods. “Up in Flames” turns the tiptoeing-down-the-stairs jazz of Badalamenti’s “Freshly Squeezed” into haunted drone, with distant police sirens and quick sprays of gunfire. It’s a bit of a queasy listen, but it suits the mood: “I feel for you, baby, like a bomb,” Cruise whimpers. “Now my love’s gone up in flames.”
The Voice of Love’s most transcendent moment is something of a spiritual follow-up to “Mysteries of Love,” the Blue Velvet theme that first brought Cruise and Lynch and Badalamenti together. But where that song was lit by the clarifying glow of love, “Questions in a World of Blue” deals with its aftermath: “How can love die? Was it me? Was it you?” Cruise pleads to someone who isn’t there. Badalamenti’s arrangement feels unbearably weightless in contrast, a funeral song that drifts towards heaven. Cruise performs the song, eyes closed, during Fire Walk With Me, illuminated in the dark Roadhouse by an unearthly blue light. As Laura Palmer—whose days we know are numbered, as she herself knows—witnesses the scene, she begins to sob, as though she’s just heard a voice from another world. | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sacred Bones | August 15, 2018 | 7.7 | 3ef643c2-350c-425a-9e01-992ce9e27c80 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
The San Diego artist incorporates a grungy alt-rock influence into his grinding industrial music, revealing a tuneful, human side to his work. | The San Diego artist incorporates a grungy alt-rock influence into his grinding industrial music, revealing a tuneful, human side to his work. | Author & Punisher: Krüller | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/author-and-punisher-kruller/ | Krüller | Though his riffy, theatrical drone music is admired by many noise and experimental music fans, Tristan Shone, aka Author & Punisher, is by all rights a metal act. His songs grind with industry and groan with doom; he chestily shrieks while torturing raw signals until they sound like an electric guitar’s night terrors. The addition of actual guitars to Stone’s abstract electronics on his latest album, Krüller, should only strengthen the metal vibe. But friends, as Shone’s fellow teen of the 1990s, I know an alt-rock record when I hear one, and this toweringly tuneful, neurologically thrilling, and, once in a while, just slightly corny music sounds as much like Alice in Chains as it does Godflesh, Throbbing Gristle, or even Nine Inch Nails.
Shone hardly ever discusses his influences, though. The interview time usually runs out while he’s still trying to describe how his music works. At root, he uses the same instruments as other electronic musicians: MIDI signals, frequency oscillators, Ableton Live. But, drawing on a professional and academic background in mechanical engineering and sculpture, he designs and builds his own unique controllers, which he calls drone and dub machines and which look a bit like heavy-duty metal torture devices. (His first commercial line of bespoke audio gear appears with Krüller.)
Many of Shone’s machines are wearable, encumbering his limbs or hindering his efforts in some way, such as a pair of motorized throttles that, when pushed, can push back against him. With masks and trachea microphones capturing his desperate vocalizations, he portrays the plight of the individual against overwhelming forces. It makes for unforgettable stagecraft, like a noise drama in which a man struggling to become a cyborg plays a cyborg struggling to remain a man. But it’s also inextricable from the recorded music and how it gets such rough hands on abstractions like resistance, struggle, exhaustion, and transcendence.
Tuneful vocals and traditional structures have always lurked in Shone’s music, moments of order ruffling the chaos of heavy textures and combustive dynamics. They started to grow pronounced on 2018’s Beastland, and they come to a head on Krüller. The first and best song, “Drone Carrying Dread,” has a rather deceptive title, being an eight-minute anthem of slow, tattered joy. Shone winds a silver staircase of guitar sustain around endlessly rising columns of gleaming shoegaze. It sounds at first like My Bloody Valentine but soon intensifies with violently pounding snares and multi-tracked vocals that switch from a sneer to a growl in the span of a leapt octave. A fine old grunge device, it occurs frequently on a record that seems to take the exact moment when Layne Staley bites into the chorus of “Would?” as its guiding light.
It’s true that doom and grunge have the same roots in Black Sabbath, and the ’90s rock connection might seem overstated when you’re listening to something like “Incinerator,” an industrial sludge furnace with metal screams and countless detours, but even that song admits a perfectly Stone Temple Pilots bit of wasted pastoralia. (It starts just before 5:00, if you’re curious.) And did I mention that the rhythm section of Tool shows up on the marauding “Centurion,” which perhaps sounds a little too late-’90s, a hair too close to a nu-metal Chad Kroeger, for total comfort? That’s the dangerous allure of this big-lunged, palate-pinching style of singing; there’s a fine line between Eddie Vedder and the legions of anodyne imitators.
One the best songs, “Maiden Star,” shares a more vulnerable, natural vocal timbre with “Drone Carrying Dread.” The overriding aggression of the rhythm relaxes into more graceful drapes and swags, with shades of Sunny Day Real Estate, yet the tempo is whipped around by unseen rotors. It’s an example of the uncanny effects Shone’s interface wreaks upon his music, which is also perceptible in the embalmed soul of “Glorybox” and the infernal EDM of “Blacksmith.” If Krüller is warmed by a nostalgic human past, it also bears the chill of a posthuman future where the machines grind on without us, an intimation that seeps from his music like a corrosive fluid and lends these songs a bitter, heroic weight.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 16, 2022 | 7.4 | 3ef7a858-0112-4e81-95dd-b186cc34c1ef | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
This is a relatively low-key offering, compared to the prolific synth musician’s psychedelic standards, but it still abounds with a wealth of crunchy textures and trippy atmospheres. | This is a relatively low-key offering, compared to the prolific synth musician’s psychedelic standards, but it still abounds with a wealth of crunchy textures and trippy atmospheres. | M. Geddes Gengras: Expressed, I Noticed Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-geddes-gengras-expressed-i-noticed-silence/ | Expressed, I Noticed Silence | A whiff of incense, if not something skunkier, seems to emanate from every piece of music M. Geddes Gengras makes. The prolific synth artist came up as a collaborator of acts like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, and Robedoor, then spent 11 years amassing a vast solo discography that touches on everything from heady dub to shimmering drone. After spending a good chunk of his career living in Los Angeles, he recently relocated to the upstate town of Hudson, New York. The comparatively low-key vibes of Gengras’ new home are palpable on his latest album, Expressed, I Noticed Silence, but Gengras’ music still abounds with a wealth of crunchy textures and trippy atmospheres.
A tie-dyed sensibility consistently attaches itself to Gengras’ sound, but the colors of his metaphorical splotches change considerably with each record. If the hues of 2020’s Time Makes Nothing Happen seemed to be applied in murky purple and green ink, Expressed, I Noticed Silence’s palette is much crisper. As a whole, the album dwells in the space between blissed-out new age and an especially celestial strain of krautrock. On opener “Discovered Endstate Always,” Gengras embraces a few simple chords, peppering in some soggy pseudo-woodwinds and electric-guitar flourishes to keep things diverse. “The Harmony and Also I Became Square Movement” features minimal fluorescent leads that peek out from behind overcast yet angelic pads. Meanwhile, on “Give as Proportion,” FM synth melodies and pristine arpeggios are underlined by phased-out washes of sound and subtle, bendy string work.
The list of instrumental tones Gengras has employed over the course of his career is robust and not without its share of oddities, from dissonant modular synthesizers to warbled samples of bagpipes. His brother Cyrus (who has played with Jessica Pratt, Kevin Morby, and Amen Dunes) contributes guitar and bass, but otherwise, the inventory of gear used to bring this one to life is surprisingly concise: just a Moog Sub Phatty, Elektron drum machine, and a few modular gizmos. You can hear the effect of Gengras’ tightly contained rig in the music’s stripped-back qualities. It’s especially apparent on chilly closer “Deadly, Holy, Rough,” which is carried by eerie clacking noises and the esoteric twinkle of cascading metal. The album’s arrangements are more compact than many of those on previous records, but he still managed to keep things otherworldly when laying the album to tape.
Gengras’ cuts tend to be pretty long—Light Pipe, from 2018, stretches its 10 tracks across nearly two and a half hours—which makes Expressed, I Noticed Silence’s brevity unusual. The most drawn-out piece, “A Rhythmic Stillness as Root Had I,” barely exceeds the seven-minute mark. The fact that someone could comfortably digest the entirety of this 38-minute release in a single sitting is a welcome change of pace, and one that keeps this among his most approachable records. Expressed, I Noticed Silence might not be Gengras’ most puzzling or formidable album. But these polished soundscapes make a good place to start exploring the treasures in his daunting catalog. | 2022-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | July 22, 2022 | 7.4 | 3efddad8-0df7-4806-9ed4-ca1376e9ee29 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
The South Carolina vocalist and producer presents an attainable vision of R&B on his latest EP, an unpretentious suite of pure bedroom music greater than the sum of its vibes. | The South Carolina vocalist and producer presents an attainable vision of R&B on his latest EP, an unpretentious suite of pure bedroom music greater than the sum of its vibes. | Contour: Love Suite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/contour-love-suite/ | Love Suite | For years, R&B was the most aspirational of American music. Unlike the ardent family men of ‘70s and ‘80s soul, the leading male voices of ‘90s and ‘00s R&B were at once doting monogamists and incorrigible philanderers, forever vacillating between intimate ballads and sheepish apologies. In their lusty accounts, sex was a feat of Olympian athleticism; even the d-listers had abs like Jaheim and hairlines like Ginuwine. By 2012, the proliferation of home recording equipment and Frank Ocean’s more unassuming sound had helped lower the barriers to entry, but where Ocean’s music brimmed with piercing details, his chill-’n-B descendants modeled ambivalent restraint. Sure, every The-Dream album sounded like a penthouse with a waterbed on a rotating platform, but at least he went for it—Leven Kali and dvsn mostly sound like they have better things to do.
On his latest EP Love Suite, the South Carolina vocalist and producer Contour aims to split the difference with unpretentious R&B that’s greater than the sum of its vibes. On past outings, the Charleston native has tinkered with everything from claustrophobic psych-pop to instrumental hip-hop, but Love Suite is pure bedroom music built around spare instrumentation and single-tracked vocal melodies. Contour’s keyboard synths provide a jazzy sparkle, but the EP’s warmth lies in its juxtaposition of lively stand-up basslines with programmed drum patterns. On “Pour,” the upbeat bass and chopped vocal sample make for a Brown Sugar-flavored looseness, and “Song for Me” features a bright vocal layered over a murky rhythm arrangement. The percussion lends structure without any of the 808’s domineering heft—it all goes down pretty smooth.
Contour sings with a throaty inflection somewhere in the neighborhood of Khalid and Ty Dolla $ign, and his coolly poetic lyrics are written for Love Suite’s audience of one. On the highlight “Labor Of,” he poses some big-picture questions (“Will the labor of love save us? Or will the current of hearts take us?”), but Blue November’s well-placed rap verse maintains the song’s relaxed aplomb. In a few instances, soupy vocal effects reduce Contour’s voice to just another instrument in the mix, and his performance isn’t animated enough to seize back the spotlight. Although the EP is well-sequenced, its moments of confession and conflict are few and fleeting.
Part of the reason is that the songs themselves lack trajectory, Contour prioritizing roomy grooves over verse-hook-bridge framework. Love Suite’s songs range from one to five minutes in length, but the effect is largely the same—the tracks quickly establish static moods without any climaxes or comedowns to speak of. Still, the moods are intricate and richly evoked, and although Contour’s reserved deportment can make his ballads somewhat enigmatic, it also ensures that they never lapse into bitterness. On the penultimate song “Outmyface,” the jittery drum pattern and pulsing keys are matched by the vocal’s heavy reverb, and the disconsolate opening verse builds toward a dramatic string interlude. Even at its most laidback, Love Suite’s sparks are dizzying, its shadows suggestive of tantalizing possibility, and Contour’s vision of love feels, well, attainable.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Good Question | May 18, 2021 | 6.8 | 3efdfbba-45e3-400a-bd1c-64d69ea58512 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ |
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