alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Already an all-time-great shit talker, the Detroit rapper reaffirms his reputation as a fun-loving rapper who repurposes familiar topics in new forms. | Already an all-time-great shit talker, the Detroit rapper reaffirms his reputation as a fun-loving rapper who repurposes familiar topics in new forms. | Sada Baby: Bartier Bounty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sada-baby-bartier-bounty/ | Bartier Bounty | Sada Baby will pull his gun and get ignorant, and he will fuck the party up with his dance moves. He gyrates exuberantly in every music video he’s ever done, and even if he’s never bearing firearms in them, his bars at least suggest there’s always one within reach. The Detroit rapper has an affinity for bringing flair to his strong-arm tactics with absurd turns of phrase. “I will do a Harlem Shake with the Draco,” he raps in the waning moments of his thrilling new mixtape, Bartier Bounty. “I will shoot the investigator/Get the case closed.” By that point, he’s left a rampaged city in his wake.
Sada Baby is already an all-time-great shit talker, a charming scoundrel who makes the most debased jeers seem delightful, channeling a Bay Area bounce through Cash Money-era flamboyance. Bartier Bounty doubles down on fun-loving gangsta shit, at times problematic but perpetually irresistible. In the tape’s thumpers, accented by key-laced beats that are quintessential Detroit, he browbeats every single person that steps into his orbit. It’s substantial bully rap.
At just under an hour, Bartier Bounty is nearly seamless. There are 20 songs, though many are a single verse bookended by hooks. Still, Sada has a way of making one verse feel like an event. He seems under the thrall of his own mythology and entirely facetious at the same time. He raps about his .40 making someone do the Carlton Dance in a voice that is equal parts cartoonish and menacing, intentionally obscuring his exact mix of glibness and outrage. “Got my smart nigga with me, he aware of all apps/Pull up to a nigga crib fuckin’ with the Google Maps,” he quips on “Lunch Room,” casting an iPhone-using wingman as some black-hatted hacker in “CSI:Cyber.” The scenarios he presents and the ways he presents them become caricature.
Sada turns references about off-brand NBA players like DeMar DeRozan, Lonzo Ball, and Lauri Markkanen into gun punches. He’s masterful at flipping obscure similes into wisecracks (“Big brick of white look like Brock Lesnar/Got tester sliding everywhere ’cause I’m off-tether”), but he’s even better at presenting well-worn rap ideas in new forms. Doing Percocet and Actavis, wielding semi-auto pistols, and pinning the locations of crosstown rivals for future bad intentions: These are things you can hear in any Future song or Quavo verse, but Sada is constantly rearranging the context to euphoric ends. His sequences are simple but vivid: “FN turn the bar into a block party,” or “Got that chopper with the straps, look like I’m parachutin’.”
Keeping a relentless pace through Bartier Bounty, Sada slingshots through verses like the boys of SOB X RBE but syntactically follows Rakim’s grid philosophy, measuring each phrase perfectly to fit inside a given meter. His performances imply a measure of control that makes his writing that much more emphatic. The versatility is dizzying: His howled chants damn near jump out of the mix on “Mutombo,” yet he coos like a bare-chested R&B bad boy for “Aunty Melody.” He raps “Unkle Drew” with a gruff murmur that’s like an angry whisper: “Control the stage so good they comparin’ me to Elvis/But I ain’t like that nigga ’cause that nigga ain’t never sell shit,” he snarls with such insistence it seems plausible. Elvis, a hip-thrusting icon in his own right, was, of course, a great seller. But as with the rest of Bartier Bounty, it’s telling that Sada Baby can even make the joke, let alone sell it. In his songs, on his terms, on his turf, even a King can barely measure up against this gusto. | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Asylum | February 1, 2019 | 8 | 3f0066d8-b309-41f4-bbc5-b55cb8b1fedc | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The rap zeitgeist has mostly left Makonnen behind, but his first major-label release in years shows a taste of the pop star he could still become. | The rap zeitgeist has mostly left Makonnen behind, but his first major-label release in years shows a taste of the pop star he could still become. | iLoveMakonnen: M3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ilovemakonnen-m3/ | M3 | For a glorious moment in 2014, every other week seemed to bring a new viral hip-hop hit. It began with Bobby Shmurda, ended with Denzel Curry’s “Ultimate,” and O.T. Genasis and OG Maco happened somewhere in between. The songs themselves didn’t matter as much as the fact that everyone knew them, and everyone knew them because of the beloved six-second video app Vine (RIP).
Time hasn’t been kind to “Watch Me” or “Hit the Quan,” but if a one-hit wonder is remembered from this strange blip in time, let it be “Tuesday,” iLoveMakonnen’s anthem for service workers, freelance writers, and anybody else who hustles outside the confines of the normal 9-5. As hits go, it was unlikely, woozy and full of empty spaces, but it made perfect sense at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, when you and your friends were the last ones left in the club.
Makonnen was often associated with the “New Atlanta” of the mid-’00s, a wave of innovation that included everyone from Migos and Young Thug to EarthGang. Most of these artists had nothing in common with each other save for their city, but they became ambassadors for their hometown's cultural riches to the rest of the world. Atlanta is currently the fourth fastest-growing city in the country, with 600,000 new residents in the last decade, but Makonnen hasn’t quite benefited from his city’s gold rush; once the club goes up, it must come down. M3 is something of a reintroduction for Makonnen, who has not released a full-length project on a major label since 2016’s Drink More Water 6.
There’s a reason for that, one that goes beyond the normal label troubles that tend to plague rappers who seemingly emerge from nowhere. After he came out as gay on Twitter in early 2017, many of Makonnen’s previous collaborators went quiet; some, like Migos, were a little too vocal. In the lead-up to M3, Makonnen has said he feels unsupported by the hip-hop community at large due to his sexuality, even calling out Gucci Mane, the new EP’s lone guest, for not sufficiently promoting the record. At best, the industry hasn’t known what to do with Makonnen; at worst, it has actively hindered his career. It’s telling that fellow ATLien Young Thug has been celebrated for queering his wardrobe, while Makonnen has been shut out for actually being queer.
But Makonnen hasn’t been entirely absent. In the past year, he’s released two tracks with Lil Peep, “Sunlight on Your Skin” and “I’ve Been Waiting,” the latter of which features Fall Out Boy and is Makonnen’s first charting single since “Tuesday.” “I’ve Been Waiting” is perhaps the most conventional pop song of Makonnen’s career—I heard it playing a few weeks ago in a Best Buy while I considered buying AirPods—but it’s not representative of M3. “Liquid Supply Daily,” a chilled-out, guitar-driven love song, is the only other glimpse we get of this family-friendly version of Makonnen.
Elsewhere on the EP, he reverts to his more rap-intensive side, which was never his strongest. The only appearance from former comrade Drake is in the form of Tay Keith’s producer tag, which hangs uneasily over the EP’s worst track, “Money Fiend.” The song’s primary subject—flipping, selling, stacking, repeat—is one that Makonnen has put a distinctive twist on in the past. He even manages it elsewhere on this EP, like on “Shoot Shoot,” when he calls his AK-47 “cute” and compares it to a puppy sitting on his lap. But on “Money Fiend,” it feels tired and trite. Maybe it’s just Lil Peep’s influence rubbing off, but the best lines on M3 are about emotional anguish and getting fucked up to forget, like the mournfully turnt “Drunk on Saturday.” He is still a vital and strange voice, if only someone would make more room for it.
Makonnen helped reignite his city’s creative identity like few others and showed outsider artists a path to the mainstream. As repayment, he’s been left behind in the dust of condos and co-working spaces, exploited by the industry around him, and rejected by a genre that has much more work to do when it comes to sexuality and masculinity. M3 is somewhere between Straw-Ber-Rita dreams and champagne reality, but there’s a taste of the pop star Makonnen could be if the culture would only catch up to him. | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | June 26, 2019 | 6.3 | 3f03b331-9578-407a-bb82-401786175d0b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The interplay between Kaito U.K. vocalist Nikki Colk and her three bandmates-- who collectively tease out hyper, occasionally erratic ... | The interplay between Kaito U.K. vocalist Nikki Colk and her three bandmates-- who collectively tease out hyper, occasionally erratic ... | Kaito: Band Red | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4554-band-red/ | Band Red | The interplay between Kaito U.K. vocalist Nikki Colk and her three bandmates-- who collectively tease out hyper, occasionally erratic backbeats and loads of weird, crashing melodies-- is always playfully confrontational. Colk's nonsensical lyrics are more about their visceral, phonetic sounds than any potential narratives, and that kind of terse, internal tension can be both frustrating and exhilarating all at once. To amp up the semantic agitation, Colk's mumbled delivery is also been padded by a mess of extraneous yelps and growls that, while adding texture to her band's art-punk noisescapes, usually have little-to-no affiliation with the words she's hollering.
The result is Kaito U.K.'s sophomore effort, Band Red, a record full of disorientating (but mostly thrilling) bursts: Colk barks and warbles, each of her high-strung, shrieky proclamations practically indiscernible from Dave Lake's pinched guitar zaps. It's perpetually unclear as to whether the proper reaction is to patent a new, kicky dance move or to twitch and grimace, but that question's inherent to Kaito's game, and it's a big part of what makes this record so much fun to yap along with.
Opener "Enemyline" is full of energetic guitar jabbing and unintelligible vocals, Colt and Lake's joint poking augmented by what sounds like a layer of mixed-down screams; the song flip-flops between quiet and loud (as post-Pixies bands are prone to do), but even "Enemyline"'s sparser bits are heavy with the threat of total implosion. When Kaito U.K. slip away from their blustery noisemaking, like on the excellent, organ-filled "Nothin' New", they prove themselves capable of rolling out the kinds of foggy, wide-eyed laments that can sit perfectly alongside big punk blasts. Still, the band is at its best when indulging adrenaline: "A.S.A. to Accuracy" is the record's most aggressive track, with two vague, fuzzy guitar lines fighting for supremacy, blood splattering the amps.
What ultimately saves Band Red from been-there tedium (check the ground already covered by Liliput, Erase Errata, even Deerhoof) is Kaito U.K.'s instinctual bend toward sticky melodies-- their tendency to temper their noise with surprisingly sugary pop hooks and wormy choruses is what keeps these songs from becoming pretentious or tiresome. So even if jumpy, fitful art-punk isn't particularly groundbreaking right now, Kaito U.K. are still playing the shiny pop card with previously unseen flair-- no matter how delightfully splintered Band Red can seem, there are always solid tunes lurking beneath the spits and flutters. | 2003-09-08T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2003-09-08T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | spinART | September 8, 2003 | 7.8 | 3f042e3d-396e-4b3c-9774-bb57ea398a9a | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The debut solo LP from Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts finds him singing more intimately about love in quieter, more rustic settings. In its own peculiar way, it speaks to our current condition. | The debut solo LP from Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts finds him singing more intimately about love in quieter, more rustic settings. In its own peculiar way, it speaks to our current condition. | A. Savage: Thawing Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-savage-thawing-dawn/ | Thawing Dawn | On the cover of his debut solo album, Parquet Courts singer/guitarist Andrew Savage can be seen lounging on a bed, acoustic guitar in hand, bathed in sepia tone. Beside him is an open book—Modern Moral Philosophy—that’s nobody’s idea of a light read, and a dirty ashtray that suggests many hours spent trying to channel its ideas into song. At first glance, you could mistake it for a photo of pre-fame Bob Dylan from 1961, an intimate snapshot of a genius at work in the cozy, shabby-chic environs of an aged New York City apartment. If you asked a computer program to generate a photo for a solo singer/songwriter album, it would probably spit out something like this.
But if Thawing Dawn’s exterior presentation seems obvious compared to Parquet Courts’ gallery of cryptic collages, it proves to be no less obfuscating. As is the case with so many of his songs, nothing is ever really what it appears to be on the surface. With Parquet Courts, Savage has mastered the art of both oblique songs that prove deeply resonant, and songs that are so literal, they’re confounding. Certainly, Thawing Dawn finds Savage singing more openly and intimately about love and relationships in quieter, more rustic settings, his main band’s frantic post-punk pulse massaged into gentle piano rolls and gorgeous pedal-steel sweeps. (The smart money pegs his favorite Pavement song as “Father to a Sister of Thought.”) But it is at once the most traditional-sounding and sonically anarchic recording Savage has attempted, one that counters its countrypolitan serenades with meditative tone poems and dissonant sound-scraping. That acoustic guitar he’s holding on the cover? It’s nothing more than a photo prop.
Savage is the sort of songwriter who insulates himself from the chaos and indignities of the outside world by retreating into the comfort of his own neuroses. On Parquet Courts’ previous album, Human Performance, he wrote a song about the actual murder of two policemen in his Brooklyn neighborhood; he and co-songwriter Austin Brown also sung about the soul-crushing futility of household cleaning as if it were a Kafkaesque psychodrama. Thawing Dawn is likewise a deeply personal album that nonetheless absorbs the tremors of an unsettled, divided America—fitting for a record made by a Red State exile who lives in New York. A cavalry of Savage’s music-scene buds from Brooklyn and London (members of Woods, EZTV, Ultimate Painting, and the current iteration of Psychic TV) are charged with recreating the sounds of the South from a ruminative distance.
Savage even goes so far as to set the scene with a historical flashback that reverberates into the present. “Buffalo Calf Road” is a Southern-rock retelling of Custer’s Last Stand that reorients the narrative around Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior credited by her nation with striking the blow that knocked the U.S. army commander off his horse. But while the song is rife with period detail, the themes cataloged within—capitalist greed, resource exploitation, the displacement of Indigenous people—could very well be dispatches from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. And when the song’s heroic chorus recounts Custer’s fatal fall, it feels like a clarion call for the toppling of patriarchy. Call it the “Uncast Shadow of a Northern Myth.”
But from this widescreen, Oscar-worthy vantage, Thawing Dawn zeroes in on the minutiae and malcontent of modern life. There’s the bleary, bloodshot-visioned misfit of “Eyeballs” who’s afraid of losing his (presumably California-bound) girlfriend to “juicing” and “jogging,” or the downcast narrator of “Indian Style” who’s sending apologies by text message. On these winsome turns, Savage’s drawl works within a limited range of sing-speak, but it’s far from a blunt, deadpan instrument—it quavers with both charming self-deprecation and genuine ache. And the calmer he gets, the more heartfelt he sounds: the ambient electrical-storm crackle of the eerily still “Wild, Wild, Wild Horses” only makes his plainspoken declarations of devotion sound more resolute, like someone standing their ground in a windswept open field even as the flickers of lightning in the distance creep perilously closer.
In moments like these, Thawing Dawn, in its own peculiar way, speaks soundly to our current condition—that, in the face of all the unrelenting awfulness playing out in our newsfeeds on a daily basis (and the paralyzing sense of helplessness it engenders), all you can do is hold onto your loved ones a little tighter. Or, of course, there’s always drinking. On the epic “Ladies From Houston,” Savage slowly sashays through a series of party conversations with Leonard Cohen elegance, before talk eventually turns to a certain “televised demon” and “the sadness I feel when he pollutes the screen.” He opts to drown his despair in a discarded half-empty beer can “so it doesn’t get wasted.”
But Thawing Dawn doesn’t always navigate the world with such humility and grace: the bluesy grind “What Do I Do” alternates between existential koans and cathartic blasts of spark-shooting guitar squall, however, the song has already hammered its point three minutes into its eight-minute lurch. And the closing title track is less the album’s grand finale than its battle royale, with Savage’s mind bouncing between sentiments both personal (“I need you wildly as the blue jay needs a tune it can sing into the afternoon”) and political (“Most religion is as far from faith/As the sun is from the shadows it shapes”). Shifting abruptly between a downhome Harvest groove, solitary electric-folk serenades, a loopy piano-pounded reprise of “Eyeballs,” and a Wurlitzer-powered riff on “House of the Rising Sun,” the song is a would-be honky-prog Abbey Road suite, albeit with adjoining screws left purposely loose.
But just as the Beatles did on “The End,” Savage leaves us with a peaceful closing meta commentary: “Of all the pieces I’ve combined/Still the cruelest mixture yet/Is the softness of the thawing dawn and the hardness of regret.” Accordingly, in its wobbly balance of tender introspection and topical exposition, Thawing Dawn is a handy guide for keeping your cool as the world degenerates into a hot mess. | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dull Tools | October 23, 2017 | 7.2 | 3f0727d4-ca84-4c94-977a-fe9a327aaa45 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
In the Pitchfork tradition of groundbreaking review styles, I present you with the Always- Right Critomatic album review. Simply scroll ... | In the Pitchfork tradition of groundbreaking review styles, I present you with the Always- Right Critomatic album review. Simply scroll ... | Mogwai: Come On Die Young | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5369-come-on-die-young/ | Come On Die Young | In the Pitchfork tradition of groundbreaking review styles, I present you with the Always- Right Critomatic album review. Simply scroll to the review you want to read-- the opinion that you, the infallible reader, wants to hear-- and proceed. We here in the Pitchfork labs are always striving towards innovations for the future.
Pro-Mogwai:
You slip on your headphones... Guitar chords twist down from lavender skies in slithering fibers and attach to your goose- bumped skin. With each upward strum from the plaintive second album from Mogwai, these delicate cables tug you heavenward-- they're soft tugs, paced and patient. As you ascend further into the clouds you can make out the ground below you. The Scottish Highlands, God's golf course, bubbles in pillowy hills. Green grass hills filled with warm fat, feathers, and the carefully dug tunnels of fairies and elves roll to the sea, where they suddenly drop off in marble cliffs, wet from the spray of slapping waves. A storm is brewing in the distance. Thunder rumbles. Mogwai's music is weather. Its landscape, stunning in its simplicity and reduncancy. Come On Die Young develops in one long movement, a sparse symphony of indie. You can follow its pattern like a weatherman charts flows from high pressure to low pressure.
Unlike Mogwai's last album, which constantly shifted from loud loud to quiet quiet, Come On Die Young builds tension over eight and a half songs before erupting in the white noise of "Ex-Cowboy," "Chocky" and "Christmas Steps," the latter being the only respite from restraint for the riffheads. But it's the album's title track, carrying the record's only vocal, sung in soft sighs, that pulls apart your heart like string cheese, muscle fiber by muscle fiber.
Like a bottle of fine wine, Mogwai is not intended to be ingested on every humdrum day you live. It's not to be played as you drive to the Target to pick up some plastic adhesive hooks. Keep Come On Die Young on a cedar rack in a damp basement. Reserve it for thunderstorms and candlelight. Its open spaces and moments of silence are meant to be filled with raindrops and whispers of awe.
Con-Mogwai:
Fo'ckin bollocks! Where's the rock? Listening to Mogwai's Come On Die Young excites as much as toasting white bread with a magnifying glass in the sun on a partially- cloudy day. Here's the thing, if Mogwai weren't from the UK, no one would give a rat's arse about them.
I call this phenomenon the "3 Colours Red Effect," which states that any British band that plays a style of music that is completely overdone in America, but not particularly in the UK, they will achieve success in their native land. Would 3 Colours Red's brand of polished grunge sell any more than a new Gruntruck or Paw record? Call up Sony and find out. Likewise, would Mogwai's brand of third generation post- Slint instrumentals raise anyone's attention outside of those few Chicago college kids who still listen to Spiderland religiously? In the UK, Mogwai open for the Manic Street Preachers (who are amazingly big in the UK) and headline festivals. If they were from Urbana, Illinois they'd be on Quarterstick Records at best, opening for June of 44 at the Blind Pig.
Come On Die Young's most exciting track, "Christmas Steps," sounds like an unfinished Sweep the Leg Johnny song (i.e., minus the vocals, sax, more complex tempo changes, etc.), which, while pretty decent, is not enough to get you a spot opening for Everclear in the States. This is not to say that fame is an essential element to good music. I'm just pointing out that Mogwai could perhaps be the most over- hyped indie rock band in the world. There are much better bands doing the same thing from the back of vans across the US.
Young Team, Mogwai's last record, painted in bolder strokes. Feedback and riffs burst unexpectedly from beautiful melodies. I found myself hunching over the boombox waiting for Come On Die Young to develop. Then my back got sore. For an instrumental album, the playing is not mathy or complex enough to evoke interest. I mean, have you ever been to Scotland? It's constantly cloudy. Decaying industrial towns pop up in rusty clusters over barren hills. The locals drink to make their livers pop. It's not surprising Mogwai comes from this environment of incessant gloom and fog, where there's not much to do but fondly recall history and sulk.
Poorly Written, Ambiguous Indie Zine Review:
Mogwai are an instrumental band from Glasgow, Scotland. They play quiet indie rock. If you like Slint and its spin- offs, check them out. | 1999-03-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 1999-03-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 29, 1999 | 6.1 | 3f0e7487-f9ad-47cd-815c-cad7c3805d12 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
Australia-born, Iceland-based producer creates one of the most menacing-- and rewarding-- ambient records of the past year. | Australia-born, Iceland-based producer creates one of the most menacing-- and rewarding-- ambient records of the past year. | Ben Frost: By the Throat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13809-by-the-throat/ | By the Throat | Maybe it's By the Throat, the savagery-suggesting name of the fourth LP by Australia-born, Iceland-based producer Ben Frost, that gives the album its menacing reputation. Perhaps it's the three wolves stalking its cover, the threatening title appropriately scrawled above in a slanted, action-film font. Or it could simply be the music, which doles out new anxieties with each turn: The harsh noise and dissonant strings lashing above and around the beat of "Peter Venkman Pt. I". Or, on "Leo Needs a New Pair of Shoes", where howling wolves surround and overtake the rustle of a gentle chamber ensemble. Wolves again harmonize against the screech of a violin on "The Carpathians". From aggressive visage to animal vocals, By the Throat is, as another reviewer said, "dread-inducing music."
No equivocation necessary, By the Throat is a sinister album, full of moments that rattle cores with sound (play it loud) and sound effects (beware those wolves). But Frost's work is more than a hall of terrors: These vivid instrumentals, which seem menacing at first, also feel somehow triumphant when heard again-- new details becoming more crucial. By the Throat might frighten on the first listen, and it might shock by the 12th. But, somewhere in between, Frost-- both a compelling new musical dramaturge and arranger-- might just show you the silver lining of all these fears.
Blending musique concrète samples with exorbitant electronic production and the guest work of string quartet Amiina and composer Nico Muhly, Frost pulls ideas from sources far and wide-- his instrumental work bears traces of radio rock, heavy metal, rap. The closing triptych moves between metal, dark-wave, hip-hop, and harsh-noise influences, cycling them all through a bustle-and-collapse template that has as much to do with Aphex Twin as it does experimental composer Anton Webern. So, if "Through the Glass of the Roof" first sounds like a busted jungle track, it sounds more like black metal deliverance by the time "Through the Roof of Your Mouth" begins. That midsection, in turn, suggests Cluster, Radiohead, and Merzbow. And when it collapses into a sheet of harsh noise, Frost restores the bassline for the finale, "Through the Mouth of Your Eye". He isolates the bass, slows it down and eventually lets it drift away under cover of a few shrieking string parts, again deflecting the question of what matters most.
Nowhere is the push and pull between muted triumph and tempered menace more apparent than on "Peter Venkman Pts. I and II", named for Bill Murray's Ghostbusters character. During "Pt. I", a chorus of horns and voices rise and fall through that razing static, moving in uneven arcs through broken rhythms. In "Pt. II", though, the voices grow and overcome the noise. The horns stretch out like steady winds, sometimes foreboding and low; loops of dulcimers, banjos, and bells float over the long tones, battling through wolf growls and bass throbs to float, at last, above the horns. Frost leaves it to the audience to pick favorites and winners.
Listeners often relegate instrumental music into a series of intrinsic, reductive modifiers-- a drone is meditative, you know, and harsh noise is just mean. Post-rock is cinematic and sweeping, while finger-picked acoustic guitar music is nostalgic and ruminative. Unfairly, pop songs alone get the privilege of simultaneous juxtaposition. That is, Elliott Smith and Brian Wilson can sing heartbreaking words above bright, shining music, and we laud its bittersweet complexity. But when's the last time you heard someone argue for ecstatic noise (consider Fuck Buttons) or busy drones (see Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail)? Probably never. By the Throat demands those kinds of complex distinctions, though. Its radiance is a dark one, and its most sinister moments lead to deliberate calm. | 2010-01-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Bedroom Community | January 8, 2010 | 8.4 | 3f0fbe8d-0f41-4419-9bea-6f9b4705ffa7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Laura Mvula is a classically trained vocalist with an orchestral pop style all her own. Her second album is filled with her rich and moving voice and is laden with sonic surprises. | Laura Mvula is a classically trained vocalist with an orchestral pop style all her own. Her second album is filled with her rich and moving voice and is laden with sonic surprises. | Laura Mvula: The Dreaming Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21719-the-dreaming-room/ | The Dreaming Room | Laura Mvula, the soul singer from Birmingham, England, doesn’t really sound like anyone but herself. She’s often compared to other neo-soul artists, both those who shared her classical training, like Amy Winehouse, and those who don’t, like Jill Scott. The shoe that fits best doesn’t quite fit anyone: Mvula shares considerable DNA with Nina Simone, most obviously in her unyielding charisma, her musical virtuosity, and her profoundly central blackness. Mvula’s voice also shares some of Simone’s rawness, as well as its facility juxtaposing vulnerability and strength. She can sound supernaturally powerful, as on the wailed hook from “Green Garden,” off her first album, 2013’s Sing to the Moon; at other times she softens into nursery melodies, sung over a twinkle. And she recalls Simone’s era most, perhaps, in her epigrammatic lyrics: “Round the mountain all God’s children run,” she repeats, in “Overcome,” a song from her spectacular new album, The Dreaming Room, lyrics that indirectly reference Maya Angelou over the unmistakable funk guitar of Nile Rodgers.
But Mvula’s sound doesn’t scan retro or referential. Rather, it feels visionary, and somewhat out of time. The Dreaming Room is a consolidation of Mvula’s dramatic instincts, her ability to burnish alienation and longing and bravery into set pieces saturated with coolly psychedelic soul. She’s a mannered artist with a degree in composition, and she favors careful and narrative orchestral accompaniment—she released a live version of Sing to the Moon, backed up by Metropole Orkest, and the London Symphony Orchestra provides backing on this album—that’s arranged more minimally and efficiently than its occasionally staggering effect would suggest. On The Dreaming Room, she and producer Troy Miller frame her voice with a slate of odd instruments; upright bass, vibraphone, strings, a jazzy celeste, all faithfully recorded—on “Show Me Love,” memorably, you can hear the pedals on her piano.
Mvula’s reach is pop, but her form is classical. She expresses broad sentiments through abstract constructions; her melodies evolve at a clip, communicating directly but rarely giving you a hook you could repeat back. The result is most recognizable as theater, an impression heightened by the way Mvula hides in plain sight as a character, singing stage-play lines like “I will always remember/Our memories and journeys/And carry them always in my heart.” The penultimate song is actual theater: Mvula impersonates her grandmother to reconstruct a phone call between them—inspired, as she told Annie Mac, by skits on Kanye West albums, which she became acquainted with only recently. The skits felt “as important as the music,” she said. On “Nan,” both she and her grandmother are weary: as Nan, Mvula says, “Write a song I can lift me spirits, write a song I can jig me foot.”
Mvula maintains some character distance for most of the album. When she does flip to her most personal, the changes are subtle, but the difference is arresting. In “Show Me Love,” one of the best tracks, she comes in on a single note and a swung, sustained phrase: “Oh God I need to belong to someone I miss the breath and the kiss I miss to wonder the future with somebody oh god show me love.” She keeps going, cycling the lines back like she’s chanting in front of an altar, letting her voice scratch and tug. Throughout the song, she changes characters by adjusting her vocal delivery: you can hear her singing about herself, to herself, then as herself, moving through time. Mvula has recently talked about panic attacks that surrounded the breakup of her marriage: the song transposes that story into something beautiful, swelling to a chorus that booms with timpani and strings.
The Dreaming Room, as a whole, replicates this sequence: uncertainty, a fugue, transcendence. Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies. It begins with a question of worth, then an exhortation to strength, then a plea for help; the fourth song is encouragement, the fifth exhaustion, the sixth attraction, the seventh a desperate and divine love, the ninth a goodbye. The album zooms out, ending heavily and happily: there’s “People,” a soothsaying song about black resilience, then “Phenomenal Woman,” a loving collective flex. It’s a pat narrative, made nearly invisible by many abrupt switches and strange moments. Ideas glimmer and then disappear; floods of major and minor emotions brush up against each other, in conflict and in concert. Memories return, too: her last album’s title track is reprised on “Renaissance Moon,” and the funk of the album-opener bubbles through halfway on “Let Me Fall,” and then again at the end. There are many resolutions in the story, and none of them final.
The result is an album that feels much longer than the 36 minutes it takes up end to end. As with a stage play, *The Dreaming Room *requires a rigorous type of attention. It pays dividends, and yet Mvula’s artistry doesn’t require this particular type of staging to show through. In 2013, SOHN and Shlohmo remixed “Green Garden” and “She,” respectively—isolating and iterating single phrases to immensely suggestive effect. Any one of the many melodic ideas in any of these restlessly blooming songs could serve as the foundation for another song, and a magnificent one. But then again, why prune a garden when it’s so formidably beautiful as-is? | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony / RCA | June 24, 2016 | 7.8 | 3f153518-4c98-42f8-988e-815d61a62fa3 | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
Rhye is the project of singer/producer Mike Milosh and producer Robin Hannibal. Together, they make ethereal R&B focusing on world-tilting romantic experience, with gorgeous minimal production that leaves little space between the listener and the songs. | Rhye is the project of singer/producer Mike Milosh and producer Robin Hannibal. Together, they make ethereal R&B focusing on world-tilting romantic experience, with gorgeous minimal production that leaves little space between the listener and the songs. | Rhye: Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17693-rhye-woman/ | Woman | Rhye's short history is marked by serendipity and mystery. A couple of years ago, after being tapped by Hannibal's Copenhagen-based electronic group Quadron, producer/vocalist Mike Milosh flew to Denmark to work with the group and they hit it off. Eventually, Quadron producer Robin Hannibal moved to L.A. in pursuit of a woman, and Milosh coincidentally relocated there as well, and started his own serious relationship (which has since evolved into a marriage) before they reconnected musically.
From what Milosh has said, Rhye's primary goal is to pay tribute to this type of world-tilting romantic experience, but so far the pair have delivered their interpretations of this very personal phenomenon from behind a veil of secrecy. They released their first single, "Open", anonymously, and promoted it in a deliberately opaque fashion, like a YouTube video of Milosh serenading his wife with a solo piano rendition of the song, shot in a way where you can barely make him out in silhouette. Even after revealing their identities, the pair refuse to say where the group's name comes from or what it means, and their full names don't appear anywhere in the liner notes to their debut album, Woman.
Even without a face to attach it to, Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements-- each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts. Beats, basslines, and Milosh's voice are at the center of nearly all of them; although a majority of the tracks boast arrangements for horns and strings, most of these are so subtle that you might not even realize they're there until you read the liner notes afterward. The lean production leaves little space between the listener and the songs, and they feel almost touchably close.
And then of course there's Milosh's voice itself, a gorgeous and graceful countertenor that many listeners have mistaken for a woman's, especially in the days before the group unmasked themselves. He's a subtle performer, but also canny. The restraint that the pair shows in their arrangements also carries over to his singing, which rarely rises above the volume of a conversation. It's gentle, soothing, and easy to get lost in.
That voice has drawn a number of comparisons to Sade, and the music behind it only underlines those similarities. Woman offers few sounds or ways of deploying them that wouldn't be familiar to an R&B fan in the 90s, especially if they were into the British wing of the genre that at the time was focused on making gently bumping, slightly jazzy bedroom music.
And although Milosh is an outspoken critic of what he considers a trend of crass sexualization in pop music, the album still embraces the physical aspects of the romantic experience it intends to glorify. Its sensual aspects may share the same sense of self-control (it's sexy without being overtly sexual, erotic but not lascivious). As well-mannered as its carnal side may be, Woman is bound to become fodder for a tasteful boudoir soundtrack, something to be slotted next to the xx, another band Rhye's been frequently compared to.
The satin-sheets sensuality and Milosh's vocals are impressive enough that they could save an otherwise unremarkable album, but the pair are also gifted songwriters who seem even stronger as a pair than as they did separately. Woman has only one bad song on it, though it should be noted that it's seriously bad: "One of Those Summer Days" is boring and hook-free, and it not only dives face-first into the kind of sickly cloying sentimentality that they studiously avoid on the rest of the songs, but does so to the accompaniment of a drippy smooth-jazz alto sax solo.
But a good number of the remaining songs come breathtakingly close to their own kind of perfection, at least close enough that it's hard to imagine how anyone could improve them. "Open" may be so derivative of Sade that you may as well call it an homage, but considering that the closest point of comparison would be Sade's "By Your Side"-- one of the few truly perfect songs in pop history-- that's hardly a complaint. And I'd be surprised if Justin Timberlake and the members of Phoenix aren't holding their new singles up to the lithe, clean-lined modern disco sound of "The Fall" and frowning at the results.
Music about happy, successful relationships is always a tougher sell than music about romance gone bad, for the same reason that tragedies are more compelling than stories where everything works out fine for everyone. Bad fortune is naturally fascinating and contentment isn't, and unless you're in a happy, successful relationship you don't want to hear about someone else's. But Woman somehow gets to break those rules, in large part because the music itself is so easy to fall in love with. | 2013-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic / Innovative Leisure / Loma Vista | March 5, 2013 | 8.5 | 3f1b89b8-82f6-4fc8-8129-af53b5446d9c | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Slutever’s Rachel Gagliardi revs up big, glittery power-pop hooks for an album devoted to getting out of your own head and staying young at heart. | Slutever’s Rachel Gagliardi revs up big, glittery power-pop hooks for an album devoted to getting out of your own head and staying young at heart. | Pouty: Forgot About Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pouty-forgot-about-me/ | Forgot About Me | In 2013, Rachel Gagliardi felt something inside her shift. While the Slutever drummer and guitarist still believed in her bratpunk band’s motto—friends first, bands second—she was craving some creative self-discovery. Gagliardi made a pact with Michelle Zauner, then playing in Little Big League, to pursue song-a-day solo projects, publishing them to a joint Tumblr account alongside gifs of TV’s stifled women letting off steam: Marceline, Betty Draper, Chibi Moon. Zauner’s turn toward indie rock spawned Japanese Breakfast; Gagliardi’s power-pop songs birthed Pouty. While Zauner’s new band took off, Gagliardi held hers close to the chest, riding out Slutever and joining members of Hole and Vivian Girls in the grunge-pop group Upset.
A decade later, Pouty’s debut studio album has finally arrived. When Gagliardi poked her head out as Pouty with 2016’s Take Me to Honey Island and 2017’s Saint Mary of the Moods EPs, she embraced spacious, fuzzy pop songs akin to early Best Coast with a rough edge. On Forgot About Me, she’s laser-focused on glossy pop-rock, leaning into big production and bigger hooks with the confidence of someone who’s tried on enough pants to shop without hitting the dressing room. Instead of playing every instrument herself like before, Gagliardi calls the shots as bandleader, directing longtime collaborators including guitarist Evan Bernard, bassist Cat Park, and drummer Jarret Nathan. The wick of solo projects is determination—to prove your ideas are worthy, to uncover hidden parts of yourself—and Gagliardi proudly watches it burn. “Denial is a heavy drug,” she sings, as if addressing her bandlocked younger self.
Much of Forgot About Me is devoted to the teen girl aesthetic, and not simply because Gagliardi has ribbons in her hair or charms on her jewelry. She sings about astrological stereotypes, all-consuming infatuation, and crying in cafes. Her sugary voice is indulgent, but she’s quick to dissolve it in the noise-pop absinthe of songs like “Kill a Feeling.” Even her one-liners could’ve been sponsored by gel pens: “Life is no way to treat the living,” “I’m warning you right now that sometimes I’m insane.” Album opener “Salty” is a splash pool of power chords, cymbal crashes, and Wurlitzer with a delightfully catchy chorus. “I bet you almost forgot about me,” Gagliardi sings, before following up with a smirk: “I’m not embarrassed.”
Gagliardi is now 34, but Pouty recognize that rock’s teen girl aesthetic has no real expiration date. Olivia Rodrigo was 18 when she plastered her face with butterfly stickers, but Slutever were 23 when they doodled on a composition notebook and Courtney Love immortalized the crying beauty queen look at 30. Whether walking the hallways of Rookie or holding her baby daughter in a Pouty music video, Gagliardi is a trusted source because her themes are universal. More than a fashion trend, the teen girl aesthetic celebrates pursuing creativity, dreaming freely, and seizing your independence. It’s trading friendship bracelets inside football stadiums regardless of age or gender. It is, as Pouty posits on “The Big Stage,” staying young at heart, even when your newborn is a living measuring stick for your own age: “Now I’m allowing myself to dream/What if you stopped standing in your own way?”
As confident as she is with the language of youthful self-expression, Gagliardi uses Pouty to question age stereotypes anyway. There’s no arrested development or prolonged immaturity in her approach. With sharp power-pop melodies and radiant production, Forgot About Me draws a line between Pouty and that dog., even trying on the alt-rock fangs of Anna Waronker’s Yellowjackets theme during its scuzzier songs. “The way you look makes me feel sick/Because I realize I’m getting older, too,” Gagliardi croons over upright bass on album closer “Underwear.” The loungey atmosphere implies that isn’t an indictment; it’s just a fact. | 2024-02-12T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Get Better | February 12, 2024 | 7.5 | 3f1be8ad-4660-460d-9ab8-cbf5fea20138 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
This lost mixtape, which has been sitting around since 2009, features Lil Wayne rapping at his effortless peak and T-Pain straining to keep up. | This lost mixtape, which has been sitting around since 2009, features Lil Wayne rapping at his effortless peak and T-Pain straining to keep up. | T-Pain / Lil Wayne: T-Wayne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23322-t-wayne/ | T-Wayne | The extremely recent past can be disorienting. Often, it’s the photo of you from six months ago that feels distant and strange, not the one from six years ago. So it is with T-Wayne, a newly unearthed collaboration between Lil Wayne and T-Pain. T-Pain shared it last week in a fit of spontaneity, eight songs that he said had been sitting around since 2009. Released into the wild in 2017, they feel less like a “lost mixtape” than like an outdated tweet in the drafts folder, one you send out by accident after five or six drinks.
By 2009, Lil Wayne had already stormed the gates of the English language and basically negotiated the terms of its complete and total surrender. The concessions he extracted were shocking: It was agreed that “dwarf” and “barf” could rhyme; that “when I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins” was a feasible thing to say in a gangsta rap song, and that it was safe, even advantageous, for rappers to call themselves “pussy monsters.” He had gone on to sell a million copies in a week of this kind of stuff with 2008’s Tha Carter III, and in 2009, rap was basically a field he had terraformed to look like the inside of his mind.
T-Pain, meanwhile, was having a rougher go. Somehow, despite having ushered AutoTune into mainstream rap; despite having partially inspired 808s & Heartbreak, he had been singled out—by Jay Z, no less—as the one guy who wasn’t allowed to use it. It’s the kind of slight that makes it hard to know how to move forward, and T-Pain’s standing never quite recovered. No matter that he produced nearly every note of his debut record Rappa Ternt Sanga, and that he was an auteur in his own right. Clowned once by Jay Z, he was now a clown forever.
He needed Wayne at the time, then, and clung to his affiliation with zeal. You can hear this clammy energy coursing through the eight songs he’s given us from these sessions. T-Pain, it should be noted, has been a convincing rapper before: His coiled and tense performance on the intro to Rappa Ternt Sanga evokes Dungeon Family-era Cee Lo. But on T-Wayne, he says innumerable terrible and regrettable things, all with disturbing pride: “They call me MC Boom Box/Cuz when I grab a bitch I just boom box,” he bellows on “Oh Yeah,” and there is nowhere to hide from the clang the line makes upon landing. Just a few moments later, he promises to “bring the dick storm,” which seems like a reason to board up doors and tape down windows.
T-Pain’s verses are basically extended Neil Hamburger rap routines. He promises to leave a woman’s “belly button glistening” on “Listen to Me,” an image so unappealing it’s almost impressive. “Her head game sick like cancer” from “Breathe” turns two different played-out cliches into a singular car crash. On “Snap Ya Fangas,” he relaxes a little, doing the sort of thing he does best: weightless, bright-toned love songs. Wayne raps briefly, but it feels like T-Pain’s world, the place he doesn’t have to strain to prove himself.
Wayne, meanwhile, isn’t straining in any way, shape, or form: He is yawning almost audibly on these tracks. But this was during the blessed interval where Wayne’s on-record yawns were indelible, and even in these just-passing-through appearances, there are revelations. On the Oompa-Loompa sampling “Listen To Me,” he finds a spot just left of the beat to slip-side his flow, elevating a goofy song into giddy territory. This is the guy, we’re reminded, that ripped up verses into the little streaming bits of confetti, ones that are still falling around us in the shape of new guys like Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty. He doesn’t have too much else to say here, but even for a few unheard verses, we can thank T-Pain’s restlessness. | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 25, 2017 | 6.1 | 3f201620-3471-4e0f-b7d2-c06373742f78 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On a collaborative EP with the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, the former TikTok phenom devotes herself to the ambiance of late-’90s guitar-pop. | On a collaborative EP with the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, the former TikTok phenom devotes herself to the ambiance of late-’90s guitar-pop. | Beabadoobee: Our Extended Play EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beabadoobee-our-extended-play-ep/ | Our Extended Play EP | Like a Marvel origins film, beabadoobee’s 2020 debut Fake It Flowers moved its protagonist from Point A to Point B—in the London-based songwriter’s case, from TikTok phenom to album-rock revivalist—with a few genuinely thrilling moments along the way. And where many would-be star vehicles cede authorship in pursuit of big singles, Fake It Flowers was a cohesive statement, even if it established beabadoobee as a revival act. The crunchy rhythm guitar on “Charlie Brown,” the rubbery drumming on “Care,” and the dizzying open tunings of “Dye It Red” called back to a specific post-grunge window spanning 1993 through 1996; working with producer Pete Robertson, bea was Juliana Hatfield in a pair of Fila Disruptors, Glen Phillips espied through a filmy VSCO filter. It’s not a dig to say it was style over substance, because on Fake It Flowers, the style was the substance.
Unable to tour on their debuts, a number of beabadoobee’s class-of-2020 peers have already announced follow-up EPs, bolstering catalogs for 2021 festival dates. The winking title suggests a digressive escapade, but Our Extended Play feels like a minor landmark for bea as well as for the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, the project’s producers and co-writers. It’s a smart move for both parties: arena-rock gods of the 2010s find fresh context for their euphoric pop in beabadoobee, herself an eager student of MTV-era hits. Like its predecessor, Our Extended Play is a conscientious period piece, alighting on late-’90s guitar-pop. It’s slightly more British-sounding, a lot more jangly; for better or worse, any one of these songs would be at home in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.
The rapturous single “Last Day on Earth” sets the tone. The three-chord jangle bears strong whiffs of “There She Goes,” “She’s So High,” and “All You Wanted”; like those songs, it finds a hook within 60 seconds and never looks back. The lyrics (“I want to get fucked up at home/Be naked alone/And turn up my phone/’Cause this song I wrote is just so fuckin’ sick”) are proudly inane—to say nothing of the wordless chorus, which sounds like a reference track left intact for its sugary simplicity, an acknowledgement that overthinking it would kill the buzz. It leans so far into the aesthetic that it’s practically a parody, zooming past Halloween and landing on Scream.
Where Soccer Mommy and Snail Mail’s submersion in the sound of the late ’90s often contrasts with their delicate songwriting, beabadoobee is fully devoted to ambiance: the mid-August haze is the focus. Our Extended Play’s sparkly production complements bea’s blissed-out abstraction, particularly after Fake It Flowers’s more somber tone. It also redeems some of the EP’s goofier miscues. Healy’s delirious call-and-response bridge on “He Gets Me So High” is tonally inconsistent with bea’s earnest verses yet lends a trajectory to the buoyant arrangement; “Cologne” is so coy and syrupy that it could be a long-lost B-side to “Lovefool.” On occasion the music feels market-tested, straddling a few too many demographics at once—chords and vibes still take precedence over ideas. beabadoobee has all the time in the world to hone her writing chops, if she wants to. But for right now, it’s summer and everybody’s wearing giant jeans again.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | June 21, 2021 | 7.1 | 3f20e72e-88eb-4059-8a14-e7b572adb345 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The albums and EPs Nika Roza Danilova issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such a young artist. Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots. | The albums and EPs Nika Roza Danilova issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such a young artist. Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots. | Zola Jesus: Conatus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15897-conatus/ | Conatus | Nika Roza Danilova began her Zola Jesus project with a formidable arsenal already in place. She had a richly gothic perspective honed by a rural upbringing and studies in philosophy, a background in opera conjoined with a taste for industrial music, and a scarred-yet-commanding voice. The albums and EPs she issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such a young artist, but Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots. Most traces of obscuring murk have burned away, so that every pock and ridge in the rugged, elemental music stands out distinctly. It's new wave mounted on a geological scale, where Danilova's solipsistic spirit-- "I was able to communicate this universe that is my prison," she said of "Vessel"-- assumes epic proportions. Her bouts of nihilism feel nervier and more bracing in the unforgiving light of sonic clarity. The closer she gets, the more enigmatic she's revealed to be.
Conatus is mainly built from thundering toms, majestically revolving synthesizers, and warm courses of classical stringed instruments. "I kept having these primal images," she said of the music, "just quite strange landscapes and shapes I couldn't shake." That may sound like a meaningless gloss, but on "Swords", the minute-long opening track, you can hear exactly what she means. Concussive drums and scrolling mechanical textures vividly evoke a terrain. Whatever biosphere you choose to project on it (I get desert), Danilova's voice remains fixed on a faraway horizon, receding as you approach. When she bursts into the foreground on "Avalanche" and stays there for the remainder of the album, the impression of impassable distance lingers. This is partly because of the authority of Danilova's voice, and partly because the music gives nothing away, thrumming along with power that shades into ambivalence toward the shifting emotional register of the singing. The results are dramatic but never melodramatic, as Danilova maps the dimensions of her self-imprisonment with resolve.
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova's childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it's stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference.
She has said that she struggled with the psychological pressures of opera singing. You could regard her early run of Zola Jesus recordings as a direct reaction against intricate formality and classical perfection: an eruptive loosening of strictures and simultaneous retreat into shadow. Though some may miss the rough and raw approach of her last two EPs, it's refreshing and exciting to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery. There's a newfound sense of purpose, as if, having tested her abilities, Danilova now understands exactly what she's doing. | 2011-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | October 5, 2011 | 7.7 | 3f2aee26-59a9-4952-9ba2-058facd5b600 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
In spite of a few obligatory major label maneuvers, the Memphis rapper’s debut mixtape preserves her charisma with a rush of shit-talking and warning shots. | In spite of a few obligatory major label maneuvers, the Memphis rapper’s debut mixtape preserves her charisma with a rush of shit-talking and warning shots. | Gloss Up: Before the Gloss Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gloss-up-before-the-gloss-up/ | Before the Gloss Up | In 2021, Memphis rappers Aleza, Glorilla, K Carbon, Slimeroni, and Gloss Up dropped a string of Hitkidd-produced posse cuts that were sparks for the already thriving local rap circuit. They were addictive and electric, like trying to hang with that one tight-knit crew of women who have so many inside jokes and references that they might as well speak their own language—you know, an authentic shit-talking Southern clique that also happens to be one of the coldest rap crews out right now. In reality, it isn’t quite as organic as that (as individuals, they’re still trying to figure it out), but the chemistry is real. The one who has got it down for sure is Glorilla, who dropped two of the great rap singles of last year with “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and “Tomorrow.” Fellow Memphis rap darling Gloss Up is almost there as well. Unlike Glorilla’s mean-mugging gut-punches, Gloss has a Young Dolph-inspired way of laughing in the face of problems. “Wanna be an opp so bad, damn hoe get out the way,” she raps on last year’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” shooing away a potential rival like a gnat. (In the video, she even says this with her baby on her hip.) Gloss hands out dismissive tongue-lashings with a sweetly Southern smile on her face; this naturally unbothered attitude is what boosts her new mixtape Before the Gloss Up above the formulaic beats of a major label debut.
When it comes to molding new rap stars, the Atlanta-based imprint Quality Control, who signed Gloss Up last year, has got it down to a science. In Joe Coscarelli’s 2022 book Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story, the label’s co-founder Coach K talks about the process of star-making tactically, sometimes uncomfortably so. Prior to Before the Gloss Up, her freewheeling sensibility made it seem as if her songs were recorded on a whim, on days when she was in the mood to break a few spirits. That isn’t lost here, but the behind-the-scenes factors are apparent. From the obligatory piano-driven motivation rap outro that appears on mixtapes from every region to a sanitized version of the increasingly popular Detroit sound on “From Cross the Way,” record executives were clearly ticking boxes.
But label constraints don’t drown out her charisma. Even when certain songs are familiar, they don’t coast on it. For example, Babyface Ray’s “Sincerely Face” seemingly inspired “Lemon Peppa,” but the breezy sound becomes Gloss’ own with a flood of disrespectful takedowns. When they leave her mouth, they come across as feel-good barbs: “Yeah that’s my nigga, I still put him in the friend zone.” The ride-or-die anthem “Hold Me Down” feels like it would have fit on Peezy’s Only Built 4 Diamond Links; her booming voice has a warm edge, perfect for a little sentimentality. She even manages to do the impossible, elevating the generic Moneybagg Yo-core of “Revenge” with forceful and inspired jawing. The second time she snaps “Smackin’ bitches ’bout that nigga” in a pitch-shifted twist, it’s like the thought just makes her day.
Before the Gloss Up hits a stride when Quality Control’s involvement is muted; not cocincidentally, that’s when her troop and Hitkidd are in the orbit. On “Mad 304,” the Memphis producer’s roaring instrumental inspires Gloss Up to bring out a short burst of Gangsta Boo and La Chat-style smack talk. Aleza, K Carbon, and Slimeroni join Gloss in stomping on a couple playthings’ feelings on “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe.” And on “Bestfrenn,” Gloss and Glorilla throw warning shots at all grannies, cousins, and aunties with slick tongues. “Bestfrenn” is an ode to their friendship, one wild enough that the bank robbing (and ribbing) friends of the classic 1996 crime film Set It Off can probably relate. Despite some major label interference, at least Before the Gloss Up hangs onto the most important thing: Gloss Up talking shit with her friends. | 2023-01-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control | January 26, 2023 | 6.8 | 3f2c18a8-3fa1-41a2-817d-0093bbddfe99 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Alaska psych-pop group have embraced modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast, while trying to write an album that speaks to the times. But their attempts at topicality are clumsy. | The Alaska psych-pop group have embraced modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast, while trying to write an album that speaks to the times. But their attempts at topicality are clumsy. | Portugal. The Man: Woodstock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portugal-the-man-woodstock/ | Woodstock | “Can you say Sellout The Man?” griped one fan in a YouTube review of Portugal. The Man’s latest album, one of a handful compiled for posterity by the band themselves in a supercut of their own bad reviews. It’s a criticism the band had clearly braced for. Months before Woodstock’s release, they pre-butted that attack with shirts reading, in all caps, “I Liked Portugal. The Man Before They Sold Out.” Even without that caps-locked heads up, the band’s embrace of modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. The Alaska psych-pop group had been telegraphing their commercial ambitions for years, first by signing to Atlantic for 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud and then by partnering with Danger Mouse on 2013’s streamlined Evil Friends. Those aren’t things bands do when they’re hoping to stay under the radar.
Evil Friends was too little distinguished from any other album with Danger Mouse on it to move the needle much. With Woodstock, however, Portugal. The Man have finally made good on whatever latent commercial potential Atlantic saw in them. The band topped the alternative charts this summer with the single “Feel It Still,” a shimmying throwback built from borrowed pieces of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” with more than a little inspiration from Pharrell’s “Happy,” and that peppy breakout track is no fluke. Recorded with an expanded cast of studio hands including familiar faces like John Hill, one of Santigold’s ace producers, and Danger Mouse—who returns for three tracks, one of which features a Gorillaz-style cameo from Fat Lip of the Pharcyde—Woodstock is sharper, catchier, and craftier than its predecessor. If it’s a shameless sellout record, it’s an effective one.
Still, for fans who enjoyed the band’s messier edges, Woodstock’s origins make it hard not to fantasize about the album that might have been. In a significant departure for a band that fired off their first eight albums at a one-a-year clip without overthinking them, they spent years working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D on a sprawling, nearly completed record titled Gloomin + Doomin before scrapping it for this one. The inspiration for their course correction, frontman John Gourley has explained repeatedly, was a speed-it-up pep talk from his father and the discovery of his dad’s old Woodstock ticket stub, which he says triggered the band’s desire to make a more charged record that spoke to the times.
Maybe the album would have hung together better if he’d never found that stub, because it’s in the band’s often clumsy attempts at topicality that the record stumbles. There’s always been a disconnect between how Portugal. The Man seem to view themselves—as a fearless, boundary-defying psych band—and how the outside world sees them, as a kind of cute indie act that doesn’t usually demand very much of listeners. The disconnect between those perceptions has never been greater than when Woodstock strives for importance. “Number One” opens the album with an actual recording from the festival—and, uncomfortably, not just any recording, but Richie Havens’ impassioned riff on “Freedom.” Blues artist Son Little sings an interpolation of the chorus, which defuses a little of the queasiness of a white band appropriating a spiritual, but stripped of its context those pained words become just another slogan, one of many the band recites with little tact or consideration. Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.
That empty sloganeering weighs down even the album’s breeziest songs. Closer “Noise Pollution” is the only Mike D production that made Woodstock’s final cut, and between its nutty space-funk beat and spirited guest vocals from fellow honorary Handsome Boy Modeling School graduate Mary Elizabeth Winstead, it’s an animated homage to the post-genre bohemia of Grand Royal’s glory days. But Gourley pastes together his chorus almost entirely from bumper sticker catchphrases: “I know my rights, je t’aime Paris/Live or die like c’est la vie/With my fist in the air, Je suis Charlie/Can’t ya see I’m feeling magnifique?” That he glides past a reference to the Charlie Hebdo massacre and follows it with a line about feeling great shows how little he’s sweating the details with his righteous dissident act. “I’m a rebel just for kicks now,” Gourley sings on “Feel It Still.” He’s got the kicks part down, the rebellion part less so. | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | July 7, 2017 | 6.6 | 3f2c986b-55d1-42a2-b717-a999e452714c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The latest disappointing mixtape from one of the year’s most exciting rappers proves that the best way to encounter him is his YouTube channel. | The latest disappointing mixtape from one of the year’s most exciting rappers proves that the best way to encounter him is his YouTube channel. | RXK Nephew: Crack Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-crack-dreams/ | Crack Dreams | The loudmouthed, unhinged Rxk Nephew has been one of the most exciting rappers of the last year. He layers his colorful dope dealing fantasies (with recurring characters and hijinks) and conspiracy theories over beats that pull from Atlanta trap, Detroit funk rap, the L.A. beat scene, house, trance, and plugg (occasionally he ditches the instrumental altogether). Sometimes he’s screaming, other times he’s calm; sometimes he’s rambling, other times he’s extremely coherent; sometimes he’s motivated in the booth (or whatever broom closet he raps in), other times he sounds like he’s being forced to record against his will.
Yet because all this boundless energy has yet to be translated into a worthwhile mixtape, the best way to engage with the Rochester, New York rapper is by stumbling into a track on his YouTube channel, which is usually updated multiple times every week. There, you’ll find tracks like “Early Age Death,” which sounds being underground rave with a bunch of zombies, or “American Tterroristt,” which features theories that belong in a sketchy Reddit thread: “Explain to me why the fuck Benjamin Franklin stood his ass up on the roof/How he discover somethin’ out the sky/If that’s the case, T-Rex discovered it.” Even after one listen, these unexpected moments are often stuck in my mind the next day, but his mixtapes remain less notable because of their fairly uniform production. Both Listen Here Are You Here to Hear Me’s soul samples and Slitherman Activated’s strobe light club music surround his unpredictable lines with a bland regularity.
Likewise Nephew’s new mixtape Crack Dreams, which as of this writing already has a sequel, places tales of crack dealing more detailed than an episode of Snowfall mostly over funk beats equally indebted to contemporary Detroit rap and the heyday of No Limit and Cash Money. It’s akin to his best friend, turned mortal enemy, turned best friend again Rx Papi’s four-track EP Dope Deals and Record Sales, but it’s not as memorable, and on this tape a good chunk of the songs meld together. Songs like “Top Fire” and “Nephew Shiesty” contain the type of ominous piano riff often found on Detroit rapper Icewear Vezzo’s mixtapes, and they would be nearly indistinguishable if “Nephew Shiesty” didn’t include his finest Homer Simpson impersonation. Other records are built upon Beats by the Pound-influenced thick basslines, and though some work out (like the exasperated tone setting intro “Shooting Star”), Nephew goes through the motions on a handful of the others (like “52 Fourth St” and “Overbite Overnights”).
If this was Nephew’s YouTube channel, you could skip right by those misfires and never think about them again, but on a full project where every song matters, these disappointments linger. Still, the mixtape has fun highlights. On “31 Peck Street,” he robs someone in their neighborhood for their PPP loan, continues an ongoing obsession with his business car of choice (the Honda Accord), and sells work to someone who resembles Ed Sheeran. It’s just another day in the life of Nephew. The sing-song-like “Auto From Rocket Power” unexpectedly channels a No Limit mixtape deep cut, and “Suede Type Beat” puts his dope pushing chaos to the type of smooth West Coast beat that wouldn’t be out of place on a Shoreline Mafia record. Unfortunately, these peaks only further the urge to abandon the mixtape and go back to his YouTube page; he’s probably uploaded something better there already.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | New Breed Trapper | September 16, 2021 | 5.5 | 3f2e3ad1-25f0-43cf-9a92-5eca706adc81 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
null | The biggest tragedy concerning Joanna Newsom's brave, marvelous new album, *Ys*, would be if everyone sat there listening to it like bored middle-school kids at an amateur Shakespeare production. Newsom's copious, knotty verse is far removed from that of the old poet, but its effect on the crowd is similar: Yes, it's hard to follow without the lyric sheet, it takes a few passes to catch the nuances, and all that drama can seem like something of a history lesson. *Ys*\-- pronounced "ees" or if you prefer, "yeesh"-- is free of the jolts and heads-up hooks we expect from pop | Joanna Newsom: Ys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9616-ys/ | Ys | The biggest tragedy concerning Joanna Newsom's brave, marvelous new album, Ys, would be if everyone sat there listening to it like bored middle-school kids at an amateur Shakespeare production. Newsom's copious, knotty verse is far removed from that of the old poet, but its effect on the crowd is similar: Yes, it's hard to follow without the lyric sheet, it takes a few passes to catch the nuances, and all that drama can seem like something of a history lesson. Ys-- pronounced "ees" or if you prefer, "yeesh"-- is free of the jolts and heads-up hooks we expect from pop music. But while it's sure to suffer accusations of empty self-indulgence from some, many will find the contrary truer: Ys offers an endless wealth of substance, teeming with dense, well-mapped beauty.
Take one example: "Monkey and Bear". The song's title characters escape from the farm where they've lived safely all their lives, before one deviously cons the other into performing for frightened children in order to make a living. Listen to the greed the monkey conveys in degrading, insulting, and controlling the bear, and the tight grip he keeps on her dignity so as not to lose her-- which, of course, by the end, he does. Not bad for what starts out like a nursery rhyme.
Newsom has said that all five of the songs on this 55-minute album tell true stories. But to find them, you'll wade through lines and lines of fantastic allegories and arcane references. Early listeners have latched onto the folky-druid overtones as an excuse to dismiss the record. But nobody's going to reject a record this bold just because Newsom uses the word "thee" on occasion, or because she appears in promotional photos wearing a wolf pelt ass-up on her head. What we really can't handle is escapism. We instinctively balk at artists who hunker down in their own worlds-- especially when they force us to guess what they're thinking.
For someone who's been pegged as an "outsider artist," Newsom chose a presentation that's defiantly decorous. Van Dyke Parks' orchestration is polite, never intruding on her performance. And her voice, though less shrieky and childlike than on The Milk-Eyed Mender, is still a tough read. The way she creaks, wavers, and punches the lyrics is expressive but never in an obvious way; rather than just illuminating the lyrics, she's almost sticking another code on top of them.
But for all the exquisite melodies, arrangements, and production work, Newsom's lyrics make the performance. She crafts elaborate images but drives them with strong actions, and even the densest tangents keep pulling you along. An image like this one, from "Emily"--
"I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever,
in a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror"
-- is beautiful in its own right, but it's also full of movement. Every line of the record conveys some want or desire. This is easy to hear on "Only Skin", the most modern (and Kate Bush-like) cut, where she describes "being a woman"-- feeling fear, carrying candy like a mother, sharing her lover-- with language as vivid as she uses for a cloudy sky. Her eloquence starts to feel so natural that when she sings a line as blunt as, "Stay with me for a while/ That's an awfully real gun"-- it sticks out like a rend in fabric. And the centerpiece, "Sawdust and Diamonds", comes closest to a full release: While the strings take a smoke break, she performs an exhilarating rhapsody where striking verbs-- "cleft," "shook," "buckle," "crash"-- support sweeping allusions to death, love, and fear. Her heart's racing, and she doesn't stop it.
This isn't a great album because she owns a dog-eared encyclopedia, or because it stands above the cheap rewards or superficial freakiness we expected from her. It's great because Newsom confronts a mountain of conflicting feelings, and sifts through them for every nuance. It's intricate and crammed with information, but it's never bookish, and she never sits back in a spell and lets her heart flutter: She swoops into the sky and races across the ground, names every plant and every desire, and never feels less than real. The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it. | 2006-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | November 13, 2006 | 9.4 | 3f3040cc-ef14-41b4-bbdc-878b96dd4ab9 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
The rapper’s third album is an invitation into his domestic sphere in all of its messiness, controversies, and communal joy. | The rapper’s third album is an invitation into his domestic sphere in all of its messiness, controversies, and communal joy. | Smino: Luv 4 Rent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smino-luv-4-rent/ | Luv 4 Rent | An echo of the poet Warsan Shire’s warning runs through Smino’s latest album: “You can’t make homes out of human beings, someone should have already told you that.” Written at a time when the 31-year-old discovered that all the love he gave out was not making its way back to him, Luv 4 Rent is a meditation on the mind maze of romantic, platonic, self, and familial intimacy. Across two studio albums, Smino has mastered sultry falsettos, funkafied productions, and clever wordplay. His third album is an invitation into his domestic sphere in all of its messiness, controversies, and communal joy. It’s not particularly diaristic, but more of a scrapbook of mementos collected as he looks for and hides from love.
Coming from a long line of musical church folk—his grandfather played bass for Muddy Waters—the former Sunday service drummer is on his “bluesy shit” on Luv 4 Rent. Gospel was Smino’s entry point into music but the voices of Busta Rhymes, Lil Wayne, Stevie Wonder, and Aaliyah coming from the rooms of different family members diversified his palette as a youngster. These early influences pop up in Smino’s limber voice which can sound like many different people on one track, sometimes adopting the percussive cadences and contemplative delivery of André 3000 (“Pudgy”), hazy caramel vocals of George Clinton (“Settle Down”), and the rap-singing croons of Nelly (“Lee & Lovie”). On “90 Proof,” he tipsily confesses as a one-man choir over a Bola Johnson & His Easy Life Top Beats sample: “Not too great at relationships, at least I tryyyyyy.”
Smino’s playboy aloofness is central to his appeal, but at certain moments the album is best enjoyed when you’re bobbing your head without listening to the actual content of the lyrics. They can be humorously random (“Up in the woods, I feel like Clinton”) but also eyeroll-worthy (“Eat her with a spoon/Call her Reese”) and maybe offensive (“The people come greet me, my eyes on Konnichiwa”). He pulls together T.I.-level unnecessary vocab gymnastics to seemingly remind us that he’s a worthy MC (“get it?” he asks us in “Matinee”). On uncharacteristically somber tracks like “Louphoria” and “Modennaminute,” his seduction often reads as a thinly veiled attempt at human connection, especially on an outro skit when he tries to seduce a Kroger clerk after spending three minutes reminiscing on the mistakes he made with a past lover.
Moments of vulnerability are almost swept under his rapid-fire punchlines. There’s a tension of wanting a woman to hold him down, while grappling with the fleeting nature of romance and realizing that a human is not something that you can or should own. Still, he’s self-interrogative on this album: “Don’t blame yourself for all the shit you see me do/I’m gettin’ used to bein’ loved, girl, the right way.” Revealing his discomfort with this level of emotional availability, lines like this one slip out in his slurred speech. In the music video for “90 Proof,” Smino grimaces after downing a shot of alcohol after his partner begs him for transparency. Alcohol and marijuana are his vices and his muses.
In his “entrepenigga” era, on “Blu Billy” he compares the sometimes ruthless and selfish hustling he witnessed on the streets of Missouri as a young kid to what he feels he has to do to elevate himself in the industry and provide for his family. When he announced the upcoming release of his third studio album on the Bear Witness, Take Action 3 live stream, he spoke to the late comedian Teddy Ray about the unsustainability of putting everyone else’s needs before his own: “You go get the plate last and you like, ‘Damn, I’m hungrier than a bitch.” It’s not entirely clear if he’s critiquing systems of wealth inequality or going a bit JAY-Z to get a slice of the pie, perhaps the blurred lines are intentional: “Capitalistic, read through the lipstick/Shit that they make up/Make us forget shit,” he muses over a muted looping bassline.
Having spent the past couple of years featuring on other people’s albums, here he helms an all-star cast of collaborations. Smino’s ability to riff with many artists while allowing them to shine—a skill he finely tuned in his time spent as a member of various musical collectives early in his career—made stars like Lil Uzi hop on a track in a moment’s notice. Fellow Zero Fatigue crew member Ravyn Lenae lends her ethereal vocals on “Settle Down” and New Orleans singer Lucky Daye heightens the devastation on the surprisingly generic but reflective “Modennaminute.” Though these artists each maintain their distinct sound, they are Sminofied — even rappers like J. Cole can’t help but to sing. Out of all the rap features, Doechii’s stands out (“And you need her like Jolie” she raps, making it sound like she’s saying “Angelina”) and makes the bounce-inflected “Pro Freak” her own—assisted by Fatman Scoop’s horn-like ad-libs—with her double-time braggadocious flows.
As much as this Luv 4 Rent is introspective, it’s also a home video and a love letter to community—his hometown, St. Louis, and his Black musical collaborators and predecessors: “I’m the son of trees and moons and martyrs, authors.” Before the pandemic, Smino was working on an LP with the intention of appealing to a wider audience but decided to scrap that idea and look inward. His cousin opens the album singing a gospel-like ode to St. Louis through pitched-up vocals reminiscent of a Frank Ocean interlude and voicemails from Smino’s uncles and cousins showing him love and admiration are sprinkled across the album. Concert-like call and responses and a plethora of samples—an unconventional move for Smino—enhance the homespun communal feel of the album. Luv 4 Rent is a collection of sobering realizations amid porch-top ciphers, humid Midwestern summer block parties, Sunday after-service family gatherings, and late-night Backwoods-sponsored hookups—not fully fleshed out or universal but lively, raw, and a bit hectic. | 2022-11-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Zero Fatigue / Motown | November 2, 2022 | 7.7 | 3f351509-ebf7-46f8-acf6-9f6a2d7b4eeb | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
It’s a blast to remember how versatile Superchunk are on their newly-reissued 1990 debut. It features all the embryonic styles of their power-pop-punk at once, with awkward, utterly alive exuberance. | It’s a blast to remember how versatile Superchunk are on their newly-reissued 1990 debut. It features all the embryonic styles of their power-pop-punk at once, with awkward, utterly alive exuberance. | Superchunk: Superchunk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superchunk-superchunk/ | Superchunk | Merge Records has endured by staying the same. Founded in 1989 in Chapel Hill, N.C., by Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, the label always stuck to a simple philosophy: they signed bands they liked and tried not to spend unrealistic amounts of money. And sure, eventually, it helped that they happened to like Arcade Fire (whose debut Merge released in 2004). This strategy worked in the early 1990s, helping McCaughan and Ballance resist the major-label feeding frenzy set off by Nirvana, which felled so many of their peers. And it works in 2017, when an old-school label rooted in evenhanded curation has an undeniable appeal, both for listeners who grew up with indie music before the internet—when musical diets relied more heavily on competent stewards with broad but clearly defined tastes—and for many young bands whom Superchunk inspired, such as Merge signee Waxahatchee. Especially if you lived in Chapel Hill or an outpost-y town like it, it’s hard to overstate how important Superchunk was in indie rock’s self-reliant creation myth.
In a way, Superchunk has also weathered the past 28 years as a band by staying the same. After driving one industry sea change, they waited out the next, and stayed put in North Carolina issuing other people’s records. A nine-year gap preceded 2010’s Majesty Shredding, but then Superchunk reemerged fully formed into the digital era and never desperately reinvented itself. They never squandered goodwill on an aughties electro-pop reinvention. They’ve issued a new, age-shaded variation on their signature power-pop-punk every year or two. Given this long and steady arc, it’s easy to think of Superchunk in terms of workmanlike consistency. So it’s a blast to remember how versatile they are, hearing all their embryonic styles at once on their exuberant, awkward, and utterly alive 1990 debut LP, now being reissued on vinyl by Merge.
Even if your Superchunk knowledge goes as far back as 1995’s Here’s Where the Strings Come in, when they started becoming a long-hauling pop-rock band in earnest, you might not be prepared for the debut. If Merge and Superchunk populated a new cosmos, then Superchunk, recorded at Duck-Kee Studios in Raleigh and released on Matador in 1990, is the Big Bang. In one explosive half-hour, it trots out most of the styles and moods that Superchunk would then spend decades diligently exploring. The reissue’s supplement, Clambakes Vol. 9: Other Music From Unshowered Grumblers—Live in NYC 1990, a live set recorded at CBGB four days after the original album’s release, is for deep fans and archivists only—the sound and playing aren’t great. But the remastered original disc is only enriched by, not reliant on, historical context. In and of itself, it rips.
The one-two knockout of opening tracks “Sick to Move” and “My Noise” sets the poles of melodic hardcore and melodic noise-rock. The former, with SST Records-style sludge up to its buckling knees, starts with an electrifying cri de coeur: “Finger on my pulse/I’ve got my finger in the socket/Why build a cradle/If you don’t plan to rock it?” (That’s surely a sly reference to Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill’s testing ground for the new, weird rock.) The latter, chugging at a comfortable tempo and breaking down into lazy Pavement-like squiggles, is also contiguous with the shambolic post-rock of Slint. The lyrics anatomize the self-conscious jadedness then fashionable in Chapel Hill music circles—“It’s my life/It is my voice/It is stupid/It is my noise”—as well as the bursts of desperate conviction, with a ragged surge on the word “noise.”
“Swinging” introduces Superchunk’s pop-punk side, all basic bounce and elastic tempo, while “Slow” is a lofting, detuned dream-pop classic in which the band forgets it’s disaffected and exults in the sound. “Half a Life” could pass for Jawbreaker, a reminder of how much sonic crossover Superchunk at first had with West Coast emo-core bands, whose passionate ideology is thought of as so separate from indie rock’s slacker affectations. Of course, the flipside of a band exploring its capacities is a band still figuring out what it’s good at. The tuneless singing style of “Binding” would ultimately be better left to Archers of Loaf’s Eric Bachmann, whose gruff resonance carried it better than McCaughan’s high, thin sneer. Still, the licky little lead is the kind of perfect detail that distinguishes Superchunk from so many peers and followers.
Superchunk’s early influences were the classic rock of their childhoods, the all-ages punk shows of their teens, and the weird mishmash they were discovering on college radio. They entered music when the central North Carolina hype was just glimmering into being, when you might catch a writeup of a local band in SPIN, Rolling Stone, or even Entertainment Weekly. “It gave people around here some kind of pride in the ability of these small cities to produce a lot of great music,” McCaughan has said. Ballance had just learned to play bass when Superchunk coalesced from house party pick-up bands with names like Quit Shovin’. “I was basically having panic attacks up there,” she recalls. “I would have tunnel vision and feel like I was hyperventilating.”
Merge, with typical caution, warmed up by putting out seven-inch singles before venturing into LPs, which is why the band’s first three albums came out on Matador. But Superchunk did self-release their first official single, “Slack Motherfucker,” which anchors the debut LP, with original drummer Chuck Garrison and original guitarist Jack McCook (later replaced by the enduring roster of Jon Wurster and Jim Wilbur). “Slack Motherfucker” is a perfect time capsule of how it felt to be young and annoyingly comfortable in a sleepy college town before the internet. The riff is both urgent and plodding, almost stagnant, even as it blows up in your face. McCaughan sings in the persona of a budding workaholic who’s tired of seeing the same people everywhere, bored, smoking in bars, and looking at bands.
The alarm is sounded again on the ultra-snotty “Down the Hall”: “I don’t see anyone/Tying you down/There are no chains/So what’s keeping you around?” This tension between a tendency to stay and an anxiousness to move has guided Superchunk well through the past quarter-century. Here at the beginning, they had no sense that they were going to change the scope of what was possible for indie bands, no ambition to. It seems they just wanted to do more than the people lolling around them—do something. They were a kicky little college band that tried to strike a slack pose but accidentally played like their lives depended on it, which, in a meaningful way, turned out to be true. In 2017, Superchunk is inevitably an artifact, a voyager from another time. But the raw, frustrated energy of comfortable kids in uncomfortable skins, marooned after punk and before broadband, is undimmed. | 2017-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 5, 2017 | 8.3 | 3f3e3aeb-f8a0-412b-ab83-30b3225de854 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s latest release is playful and elliptical, as reverent of folk-pop as it is invested in experimenting with it. | The Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s latest release is playful and elliptical, as reverent of folk-pop as it is invested in experimenting with it. | Núria Graham: Cyclamen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nuria-graham-cyclamen/ | Cyclamen | Núria Graham’s homespun folk-pop carries a playful sensibility. A sense of wonder pervades the Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s breezy music: When Graham relays a laconic story or asks a lilting question in her velvety, laid-back voice, you lean in closer. On 2020’s Marjorie, Graham explored abstruse reflections about death, heritage, and memory, couched in pleasant, surfy guitar tones and keys that occasionally flattened out her personality. With her fourth album Cyclamen, Graham course-corrects toward a more intentional point of view, lighting up her delicate music with winding, jazzy vocal melodies and a sly sense of humor that brings her elliptical lyrics to life.
Named after a Mediterranean flower whose blooms resemble butterflies suspended in flight, Cyclamen draws on that naturalistic conceit through gossamer strings and horns, lending Graham’s sound a newly cinematic burnish. The album slips between surrealistic stories set on Italian isles populated by flora and fountains, but she keeps things grounded with a bedrock of closely mic’d piano and double bass. Graham always sounds in repose; her voice flits over twinkling chord progressions on “Yes It’s Me, the Goldfish!” as she compares the enclosure of a fishbowl to the mundanity of life. She experiences both comfort and distress as she peers out at the world, a perspective that endures across Cyclamen’s ruminations on home and memory. The music is vibrantly off-kilter, locking into different airy grooves to draw out her poetic tales, even in its more traditional moments. The delicate “Fire Mountain Oh Sacred Ancient Fountain” is pared down to basic elements—plucked strings, a striding guitar line—that briskly glide around each other, highlighting Graham’s skill with folk simplicity.
Cyclamen showcases Graham’s talent for hushed, reverent folk-pop while making room for experimentation. Two iterations of the dreamy interlude “Procida” bracket the album, both stripped-down tracks that layer Graham’s backing vocals into resounding instruments of their own. On the memorable outlier “Disaster in Napoli,” she adds further dimension: A grungy, feedback-loaded guitar, à la Sonic Youth, describes an unnamed catastrophe tearing apart the titular city. Smoky and agitated, the song is a tense detour that displays Graham’s far-reaching impulses.
Graham’s rambling vocal delivery lends itself well to the album’s occasionally dark stories, recalling Aldous Harding’s sardonic folk-pop or Destroyer’s fragmented philosophizing. Graham’s humor appears in surprising left turns, as on “Yes It’s Me, the Goldfish!” (After recalling a particularly disturbing incident about a woman who suffered burns in an accident, she simply murmurs, “How fucked up is that?”) The more offbeat lines don’t feel tossed off, instead giving her ornate music another dash of charisma. Over roving piano and double bass on the highlight “The Catalyst,” she sing-speaks a stream-of-consciousness rant that grows increasingly wistful, ranging from wanting a “party and a kiss” to seeing the devil in her room. “But I don’t really mind,” she says, at peace with death at her door. “As long as he’s just sitting here.” It’s a strange, fantastical moment that joins Graham’s whimsical lyrics with a crushing sense of reality.
Cyclamen’s ruminative moments work in tandem with its daydreamy instrumentation, a balancing act Graham extends to the album’s most transcendent songs. On “The Beginnings of Things,” the refrain of the song title becomes a pensive mantra aimed at her younger self. It culminates with fingerpicked guitar and grandiose strings: “It’s no secret that I like the beginnings of things,” she sings, slightly modulating the melody each time, leaving space for ambiguity around her feelings on starting anew. Like Graham’s best songs, it prods you to adopt the same kind of cockeyed curiosity about the world and its everyday uncertainties. | 2023-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Verve Forecast | January 20, 2023 | 7.6 | 3f402f61-e795-49e3-bed3-ed6bb8cf1345 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
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 Peter Gabriel’s 1986 art-pop masterpiece, a turning point in the commercial globalization of pop music. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Peter Gabriel’s 1986 art-pop masterpiece, a turning point in the commercial globalization of pop music. | Peter Gabriel: So | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-gabriel-so/ | So | On January 1, 1984, television stations around the world aired a program produced by video artist Nam June Paik titled “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.” Described by host George Plimpton as “a rather unusual event in live television” and “a global disco,” Paik’s special aimed to counter George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the dawning year, where mass media and fascism were to become inextricable. Instead, Plimpton announced, the program would feature “positive and interactive uses of electronic media, which Mr. Orwell, the fierce media prophet, never predicted.”
As the broadcast wound on, however, it was clear that Paik created it with tongue firmly in cheek: It was plagued with technical difficulties in satellite link-ups, multiple performances airing at the same time, and wildly overdone graphics manipulation. Befitting the year that would inaugurate the music video revolution, “Good Morning” was an irreverent, avant-garde MTV in miniature, with performances by Merce Cunningham, Oingo Boingo, Allen Ginsberg, Simply Red, and to open the program, a duet between Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
The two art-pop icons lip-synced “Excellent Birds,” which they’d co-written a week or so earlier at Paik’s request. The song’s aphoristic lyrics were aligned with Anderson’s 1982 debut Big Science, while the song’s funk-derived bassline and synthesized flute sample hewed much closer to Gabriel’s 1982 self-titled fourth solo album, dubbed Security by his American label Geffen. The green-screened visuals—cutting-edge for the time—staged the pair pensively gazing and spasmodically dancing over a series of dazzling and futuristic backdrops.
The “Birds” performance signified an important sonic and technological pivot point in Gabriel’s career. He split from UK art-rock titans Genesis nearly a decade earlier because he wanted fewer dissenting voices pushing back against his grand plans to more fully merge sound with visual images, and explore forms of music that didn’t emerge from the European canon. Like his avant-garde pop contemporaries Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, Gabriel moved out of a theatrical British art-rock group and into the ’80s with an eye towards non-Western composition and cutting-edge studio experimentation. Gabriel was an eager dilettante of Africa’s varied musical forms, soaking up South African film scores, Ethiopian folk music, and Senegalese drumming, often from dubbed cassettes. And like Eno and Fripp, Gabriel was not as interested in customs, habits, and beliefs, as much as he was dazzled by tones and rhythms and subject matter that, to him, expressed different emotions and alternate states of mind than European-rooted composition.
Gabriel’s obsession with the bleeding edge of digital studio technologies came from the same curiosity: How can I make noises and rhythms of my own that sound completely different than anything else? He was the first UK artist to purchase a programmable CMI Fairlight synthesizer—an early sampler—which he used on Security and its in 1980 predecessor (also self-titled, and popularly called Melt after its photo-manipulated cover image) to mutate his bizarre field recordings and smear the results through his music.
Security opener “The Rhythm of the Heat” is an early example of Gabriel’s studio-bound ethnographic pop experimentation. The song was inspired by psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s 1920s trip to Africa, to shed his modern European trappings and absorb the continent’s mystical power (the song’s working title was “Jung in Africa”). With similar colonialist naïvete, Gabriel wails that “the rhythm is inside me” and “the rhythm has my soul.” Unlike “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” there was no arch wink at the audience here—Gabriel was entirely sincere in his belief that he could technologically engineer a psychological transformation. In 1982, “Rhythm” sounded amazing, but even then, its cultural politics—Africa is where white Europeans go to find their “true” rhythmic soul—was laden with unexamined appropriation.
Two years earlier, Melt’s final track evinced a different side of Gabriel’s perspective on an artist’s role in African music and politics. Though he had proven his ability to sing as an earnest rock frontman on his 1977 hit “Solsbury Hill,” there was no real rock precedent for “Biko,” the epic seven-and-a-half minute power ballad about Steven Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who died in South African police custody in 1977. Gabriel set the song to a dirge tempo rooted in South African funeral music, slipped in and out of Xhosa in the lyrics, and added a synthesized bagpipe and Fripp’s distorted guitar for good measure. Others had experimented with African rhythms and guitar textures, but Gabriel had crafted a global anthem for a fallen African freedom fighter.
By 1984, Gabriel had been out of the industry’s spotlight for a couple of years, doing soundtrack work and getting his WOMAD festival—a combination of UK new wave acts and artists from around the world—off the ground. In his absence, the record business caught up to “Biko.” From late 1984 through 1985, the massive charity spectacles Band Aid, Live Aid, and “We Are the World” raised tens of millions for Ethiopian famine relief, while E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt organized the “Sun City” project to draw attention to the horrors of South African apartheid. In the liner notes for the album—to which Gabriel contributed a song—Van Zandt summed up the well-intentioned naïvete of rock’s white elite, thanking Gabriel for the “profound inspiration of his song ‘Biko,’ which is where my journey to Africa began.”
In 1986, Gabriel was invited to participate in Amnesty International’s “Conspiracy of Hope” stadium tour by Bono, who had used Live Aid’s global audience to cast himself as rock’s new messiah. For the June 1986 tour finale, Gabriel performed “Biko” to a stadium audience of 55,000 and an MTV television audience of millions more. His long-awaited fifth album, simply titled So, had been released a month earlier.
So was not an explicitly political album, but Gabriel’s outsized presence in 1986 and 1987 was synonymous with what might be called rock’s NGO phase: the moment when the world’s biggest superstars convinced themselves that doing their job bigger and more seriously could actually make the world a better place. So was released in the middle of pop’s most nakedly consumerist era, when the biggest artists were as unapologetic about their ambitions for global stardom as they were devoted to speaking out on global crises. The gap between superstar and everyone else was expanding exponentially. Advances in digital recording and mastering had clarified the sound of rock records, and the 74-minute capacity of the newly released compact disc encouraged sonic sprawl. Gabriel worked on So with one of the masters of rock’s new sonic frontier, Daniel Lanois, an Eno disciple who had just produced U2’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire.
In Gabriel’s choice of collaborators, So was a signpost for the future of the global record business. The disputed corporate genre “world music” doesn’t have a single origin point, of course, but it’s possible to hear in So’s musicians—French/Ivorian drummer Manu Katché, Senegalese vocalist Youssou N’Dour, Indian violinist L. Shankar, Brazilian percussionist Djalma Correa—a key moment when rock pivoted in its approach to the so-called “Third World,” from charity spectacle to studio collaboration.
The first 20 seconds of So’s first single “Sledgehammer”—a trilling, echo-laden bamboo flute created by an E-mu Emulator II synthesizer—is just a feint before the song explodes into a sharp left turn: a ’60s soul rave-up. Gabriel’s latest revelation wasn’t rooted in geopolitics, but his own libido (“I wanna be your sledgehammer” is a classic R&B double-entendre). And though he could have easily programmed the song’s brassy trumpet hook into his synthesizer, Gabriel was an R&B aficionado who valued cultural authenticity, so he flew in Otis Redding’s 1960s sideman Wayne Jackson to play the chart. In Gabriel’s global mindset, Jackson was every bit the bearer of a distinct musical tradition as Katché. He called the duo’s participation “a commanding blend of parallel heritages.”
Like art-punk turned R&B shouter David Byrne on 1978’s “Take Me to the River,” it was bracing to hear Gabriel, one of the most self-serious artists of his era, so at ease in a new idiom. For the first time in his recorded life, he actually seems to be having fun. Though it was a clear break with his earlier work, Gabriel knew exactly what he was doing. He crafted his first single in four years to fit perfectly into the era’s boomer-fueled R&B revival, a time when the radio and MTV were dominated by rejuvenated ’60s and ’70s icons Tina Turner, Kool and the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, and Lionel Richie, all of whom reinvigorated their careers with digitally gleaming updates on black pop’s golden age.
In late July, “Sledgehammer” hit No.1, coronating Gabriel as a bona fide pop star. While the song stood on its own, its music video took him to a world no artist had ever entered. Over a strenuous 100-hour week in April 1986, Gabriel and a team of animators—including Stephen Johnson, who produced the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and Aardman Animation, who would later create the claymation franchise “Wallace and Gromit”—produced the most innovative music video in the short history of the form. Eschewing cheesy digital visual effects for ostentatious stop-motion animation, claymation, and time-lapse videography, Gabriel was inserted into a series of dreamlike scenarios that occasionally mirrored the lyrics (a steam train, bumper cars, fruit), and were otherwise silly and bizarre (dancing raw chickens). “Sledgehammer” was an absolute sensation on MTV, winning 10 Video Music Awards and competing with “Thriller” in the network’s “best video of all time” countdowns. Not only was Gabriel a card-carrying member of rock’s diplomatic elite, but he was also now at the very forefront of its visual revolution.
“Big Time” borrows even more directly from Byrne, powered by Tony Levin’s fretless bassline and visualized by an animated video that opens with a tuxedo-clad Gabriel awkwardly dancing in front of video static. But while Byrne’s dialogue with modern life was one of quasi-religious self-realization, “Big Time” is a cheeky, self-referential bildungsroman, connecting Reagan-era bootstrapped corporate aspirationalism to Gabriel’s own desire for musical fame. Where the rest of So reaches solemnly outward to the non-Western world, “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time” insert Gabriel into a vivid, self-contained fantasy world; a sibling to the ’50s exotica-inspired wacky utopia of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which also debuted in 1986.
Gabriel tackled the opposite side of ballooning Western capitalism on “Don’t Give Up,” an emotional response to the growing sense of working-class British despair under the stifling austerity of the Margaret Thatcher era. Like Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher preached the gospel of free-market individual resilience in the face of the skyrocketing unemployment. While Gabriel sketches a despondent scenario about a man on the verge of losing everything, Kate Bush alights on the chorus, her empyrean voice offering sincere comfort: “Don’t give up/’Cause you have friends/Don’t give up/You’re not beaten yet.” Bush and Gabriel had collaborated before (she provided the eerie vocal counterpoint on “Games Without Frontiers”), and she had zoomed past him in his absence to the vanguard of experimental UK art-pop. Now, they held one another in a deep embrace for the length of the “Don’t Give Up” video, the perfect visualization of such a simple, compassionate sentiment, cradled by the gossamer chords of the CS-80 synthesizer. Though rooted in a very 1980s political reality, three-and-a-half decades later it is perhaps Gabriel’s most affecting song.
A simple dialogue of worry countered by encouragement, delivered while spinning in full embrace: “Don’t Give Up” seems drawn from Gabriel’s established interest in fringe science approaches to performative displays of extreme emotion. He had become close with the counterculture’s favorite psychotherapist R.D. Laing and had participated in Erhard Seminars Training (EST), the cultish late-’70s self-discovery fad started by a former car salesman. In his abiding belief that music should express a profound sense of emotional compassion and catharsis, his closest peers were Tears for Fears, whose titanic 1985 LP Songs from the Big Chair was inspired by the “primal scream” work of psychologist Arthur Janov.
Thanks to his deep engagement with Jung, Gabriel believed that dream interpretation was the most important key to personal emotional transformation. “I take dreams very seriously,” he told Spin in 1986. “I think everyone should.” Imagery drawn from the unconscious suffuses So from the first verse of the first song, the U2-sized “Red Rain”: “I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream/I cannot make a single sound as you scream.” Dreams are the subject of “Mercy Street,” as well, inspired by a posthumously published work by Pulitzer-winning poet Anne Sexton. Sexton started writing poetry while recovering from a breakdown, and her therapist encouraged her to pull subject matter from her dreams. Gabriel was drawn to her poem “45 Mercy Street,” where Sexton recounts wandering through a dreamscape, looking for the imaginary address through which she could access a fictional idyllic past. With misty synths muting Djalma Correa’s ululating percussion, Gabriel offers an exegesis of Sexton’s work and then expands her narrative universe, ending with the poet peacefully sailing on the ocean with her father.
The heady emotional state of So was further complicated by the fact that Gabriel’s 15-year marriage was on the verge of collapse. His side-relationship with Rosanna Arquette was an open secret, and the album’s lyric sheet is rife with references to fledgling attempts at personal communication. Though “That Voice Again” has the album’s most appealing non-“Sledgehammer” chorus, it also contains the album’s most biting lyric, which could have been drawn straight from a counseling session: “I want you close I want you near/I can’t help but listen/But I don't want to hear/Hear that voice again.” In this context, the album’s inclusion of longtime concert staple “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)”—named for the notorious psychological experiment that claimed to prove humans were innately predisposed to harm others—gains an added layer of resonance.
In the years after So’s release, it was revealed that Gabriel conceived its best and most enduring song while fully enamored of Arquette. Originally titled “Sagrada Familia” in tribute to Antonio Gaudi’s Barcelona basilica and reportedly inspired by the myth of rifle heiress Sarah Winchester’s delusional construction of a maze-like mansion, Gabriel’s lyrics for “In Your Eyes” equate romantic infatuation to getting lost in a beautiful, mysteriously constructed edifice. Though now beloved as much for its climactic use in 1989’s Say Anything..., wedding dances, and senior proms, in 1986 the song signaled a new turn in rock’s engagement with African music. The track’s production is its own marvel of sonic construction, Katché’s quietly complex rhythmic syncopations meshing with Jerry Marotta’s rock-derived drumming, leading to a transfixing coda belted out by N’Dour, who translated the refrain into his native Wolof.
“In Your Eyes” is the moment where Gabriel fully fuses the personal, spiritual, and global impulses in his music. “On two recent trips to Senegal,” he told Spin, “it was explained to me that many of their love songs are left ambiguous so that they could refer to the love between man and woman or the love between man and God.” But on a platinum-selling album circulating through a global, billion-dollar pop industry, the primary reference of any song is always the star, and “In Your Eyes” is, at root, about Gabriel’s global voyage of self-discovery.
In 1986, N’Dour was already a living legend in his own country. A decade earlier, he was a primary force driving the creation of Mbalax, of the first truly Senegalese pop music. More recently, he’d shown his own willingness to engage in a trans-Atlantic dialogue, adapting the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man” into his own voice. But outside of West African music aficionados, N’Dour was still unknown. After So, that changed: Gabriel saw himself as not just N’Dour’s musical collaborator, but his promoter. He took N’Dour on tour with him and they collaborated several more times. There is no question that Gabriel made N’Dour a bigger star. The thornier question is what did N’Dour do for Gabriel? Was their relationship another example of pop and rock’s long legacy of colonialist absorption? An instance of music business market expansion exemplified by Gabriel starting his Virgin-distributed Real World label/studio in 1989? A simple act of earnest musical dialogue between kindred spirits? Yes. “I’m pleased to see that in most record stores…you see an African section now,” Gabriel said in 1986. “Maybe in another decade there’ll be a world-music section.”
In the mid-1980s, the intertwined forces of rapidly advancing communication technologies and the ever-expanding interests of capital had ushered in the era of “globalization.” To optimists like Gabriel and his pop peers Byrne, Sting, and Paul Simon, it was the dawn of a borderless, utopian era of cultural creativity and fluid identity. To critics, world music forwarded a notion of increased cultural diversity as a garish cover for the increasing centralization of Western economic power and expansion of global economic inequality. Like any popular music form that seeks to make a political statement, world music was founded on a contradiction. It was at once a marketing category designed to sell non-Western music to Western audiences, that also, at its best, could function as a form of cross-cultural diplomacy.
Gabriel fully understood his limits he was working within. “I don’t think we can change the world as directly as many people thought was once possible,” he told Spin. “What we can do is provide information and then let people make up their minds.” Gabriel’s focus on the individual’s role in global change reflected So’s twin fixations: psychological transformation and global communication. So became a blueprint for pop music do-goodery, a political statement executed through self-reflection, collaboration, and the best audio-visual experience money can buy. | 2020-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | January 5, 2020 | 9.1 | 3f4c63bc-1360-46b6-9979-c672770cafb7 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
The oddball Phoenix rap trio traffic in wild, boundary-pushing production and playfully anarchic bars. | The oddball Phoenix rap trio traffic in wild, boundary-pushing production and playfully anarchic bars. | Injury Reserve: Injury Reserve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/injury-reserve-injury-reserve/ | Injury Reserve | The oddball Phoenix trio Injury Reserve seem more like a random selection of three customers at a Zumiez store than a rap group. Their true origin story isn’t that far off: rapper Ritchie With a T moved to the city with his mom so she could launch a Vans store there, and that’s where he met Stepa J. Groggs, who was an employee. Their imaginative 23-year-old producer Parker Corey, a swim-team captain who only got into beat-making when an injury kept him from competing, is so green that Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the first rap album he ever listened to in full. A tinkerer without limits, he’s sampled everything from K-pop idol group f(x) to bebop trailblazer Donald Byrd. Without a rap scene in Phoenix, they played house parties with punk bands, and their debut album is an attempt to make something uniquely modern of all this incongruity.
Their breakthrough mixtape, 2015’s Live From the Dentist Office, which was literally recorded in the office of Corey’s DDS grandfather, was a foray into jazzy alt-rap that threatened to define them, and they’ve subsequently pushed back hard against it. “I say this ain’t jazz-rap; this that spazz-rap/This that raised-by-the-internet, ain’t-had-no-dad rap,” Ritchie explains on “Oh Shit!!!” from the 2016 follow-up tape Floss. Since then, they’ve continued to move outward into weirder sounds without sacrificing their inherent smoothness. “There’s people that can make really accessible music, and there’s people who can make experimental music, but there’s only a handful of people who can do both,” Ritchie told Billboard. They aim to join this handful, making noise music that still scans as pop.
Despite their pursuit of the avant garde, neither Ritchie nor Stepa are particularly groundbreaking MCs. Both are straight-talk rappers that rap a lot about rapping. And yet they’re regularly shown up by their own guests, whether it’s Rico Nasty annihilating them on “Jawbreaker” or Freddie Gibbs slashing through “Wax On” with surgical precision. Neither rap anything as memorable across the entire album as Aminé’s bars on “Jailbreak the Tesla”: “Your engine go ‘Vroom’ and my engine go—/Elon on them shrooms/And Grimes voice gon’ be the GPS.” Ritchie and Stepa are best when playing off each other, and they both have a genuine feel for making the most out of Corey’s productions.
Much of their boundary pushing is reliant on Corey. He doesn’t know enough about hip-hop to be following any traditional producer blueprints; a child of white suburbia, his rap plug was YouTube. The beats he makes are the endgame of an alternate rap universe where MBDTF is the Big Bang. His productions put premiums on maximalism and feats of curation; he draws inspiration from Arca and follows bread crumb trails to bizarre landing places. This is the cornerstone of the Injury Reserve brand: rap music that isn’t beholden to rap conceits, or, put frankly, rap for people who don’t listen to much other rap. The group is signed to Loma Vista, a primarily indie rock-focused label, and Corey made a beat enthusiastically sampling Dory Previn’s Mythical Kings and Iguanas for Mass Appeal’s “Rhythm Roulette” series wearing Mitski merch from Bury Me at Makeout Creek.
When Corey is at his most inventive, Injury Reserve feels remarkably fresh and singular. On “Jailbreak the Tesla,” he scraps “Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious)” by the Teriyaki Boyz for parts and turns a supercar garage into a strobing nightclub. “Rap Song Tutorial” deconstructs one of their own songs only to reconstruct it as a primer for other would-be rappers. The guitar tune-up that opens “Best Spot in the House” becomes the crunch for a glitchy, wailing synth trance. His talent and vision can make Ritchie and Stepa seem like true originals. Too often, though, Injury Reserve gets stuck between its experimental urges and its pop ambitions. In searching for a happy medium, it’s never quite noisy enough or quite catchy enough. | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | May 22, 2019 | 6.8 | 3f4f3a63-1894-4f44-b79e-7c47ef05a27f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
A collection of stripped-down and unreleased tracks from the infamous folk singer's early days offers little clarity to his mercurial career, but these demos remain striking and emotional. | A collection of stripped-down and unreleased tracks from the infamous folk singer's early days offers little clarity to his mercurial career, but these demos remain striking and emotional. | Tim Buckley: Lady, Give Me Your Key: The Unissued 1967 Solo Acoustic Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22392-lady-give-me-your-key-the-unissued-1967-solo-acoustic-sessions/ | Lady, Give Me Your Key: The Unissued 1967 Solo Acoustic Sessions | While their recorded output was inversely proportional, the earthly fates for father and son Tim and Jeff Buckley were eerily similar. Whereas Tim released nine studio albums in his lifetime before a heroin overdose at the age of 28, his son Jeff released but one studio LP before drowning in the Mississippi River at the age of 30. And after their too young deaths, their posthumous fates have also been parallel, with a plethora of live recordings and outtakes swelling both Buckleys’ legacies. Since he had less material to draw upon, Jeff's discography and cult have sadly become the definition of barrel-scraping: a 2CD set of demos, a deluxe edition of Grace, three live albums, a live DVD, another album of soundboard tapes and demos, not to mention this year’s cash-in of covers. Jeff’s aura is lit by his unfulfilled potential, while Tim’s is shaped by the cautionary arc of an artist: from young fledgling to fully-realized artist to a man broken by the end of his life.
Father Tim’s legacy continues to fly under-the-radar, in part because he recorded and released records at a clip, toured constantly, and never amassed a big fanbase. From his baroque-pop self-titled debut in 1966 through his astonishing avant-garde primal scream Starsailor in 1970 to the B&D r&b of Greetings From L.A., Buckley evolved and molted so quickly that even the most dedicated fan wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.
Part of what makes Key a lukewarm listen is its relation to one of Buckley’s heavy-handed early albums, 1967’s Goodbye and Hello, right before he matured with his expert fusion of folk and improvised jazz on 1969’s spellbinding Happy Sad. While the excellent 1999 set Works in Progress found him making leaps and bounds towards his breakthrough with every take, Key finds him still on the other side of that discovery, near the cul-de-sac of an exclusively “folk” artist. Bob Dylan was pushing at every boundary of the genre with each new album, but Buckley’s own breakthrough was still a year off.
The unreleased title track is a sly play on the dual meanings of “key,” though it might be a red flag to begin a romantic relationship with anyone stashing a kilo of a controlled substance in their home. The demos of “Knight-Errant” and “Carnival Song” will land on modern ears like Ren Faire throwbacks, the heavy crackle of the acetate making them more of historical interest than listening pleasure. “Sixface,” another one of five unreleased songs included here, features the kind of lyrics that drastically age this particular era of Buckley’s songs with gobbledygook lines like, “Your seven seas and contraband on bluebird sun.” That said, you can hear how he trashed the rest of that quickly-strummed song, kept the opening plea of “Come here woman,” and later recast it as the central howl on Starsailor’s kinked and manic opening assault just a few years on.
Some of Goodbye and Hello’s better moments are presented here in stripped-down acoustic versions, peeling away some of their studio trappings. “Once I Was” gets pared back and slowed to a crawl, the lonesome prairie harmonica line that hounded the released version nowhere to be found. The powerful “Pleasant Street” retains its power even in this crackly version, before Buckley decided to soar into a higher key at the chorus. The driving congas are missing on “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” leaving just Buckley’s furious 12-string guitar and voice. It’s a striking early song, even if it reads now as a haphazard defense of being a deadbeat dad to his son: “The Flying Pisces sails for time/And tells me of my child/Wrapped in bitter tales and heartache/He begs for just a smile/O he never asked to be her mountain.”
When there was a concert paying tribute to his father in 1991, “Mountain” was the song that Jeff Buckley decided to tackle and make his own. For a man who was all but abandoned by his father during his lifetime, there’s a latent rage and rightful sense of indignation when Jeff recasts his father’s voice as his own. It’s a bittersweet irony that in taking on his father’s song, it became his own coming out party, establishing Jeff as an iconic new voice and setting him on a path that would tragically echo that of his father. But while Jeff didn’t live long enough to scale those same heights, just beyond the scope of Key, we can hear just how high Tim climbed. | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | November 9, 2016 | 6.3 | 3f51677a-28d3-4bb9-8941-7cca39da132e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Drawing on both his West Coast influences and Detroit hometown, the rapper’s third mixtape of the year ranges from hard-hitting and aggressive to chill and reflective. | Drawing on both his West Coast influences and Detroit hometown, the rapper’s third mixtape of the year ranges from hard-hitting and aggressive to chill and reflective. | Shaudy Kash: Game Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shaudy-kash-game-time/ | Game Time | Shaudy Kash is a byproduct of a kinship between Detroit and the Bay Area that dates back to the Great Migration and lives on through their respective rap scenes. With shared foundations in funk and soul, rappers in both regions have long spoken of a bond that extends beyond words. “Through spirit and through blood there is a connection through Oakland and Detroit,” Oakland legend Too $hort has said. Detroit’s FMB DZ agrees: “It’s like we cousins man.”
The 23-year-old Shaudy was raised around Detroit’s 6 Mile Road, but grew up on the music of Bay Area natives E-40, Spice 1, and Mac Mall. (One of his biggest songs to date is a 2021 remix of E-40’s 1995 classic “Dusted ’n’ Disgusted.”) Shaudy’s own casual and conversational rap flow is not unheard of out West, but it’s most directly influenced by hometown hero Babyface Ray. Similar to Ray, Shaudy is usually laid back, though he can up the energy when he needs to. What separates him from his Detroit inspirations is a lyrical perspective that wouldn’t be out of place on a mid-’90s West Coast posse cut: Darkness is in the air but the focus is on slice-of-life stories about fly women, fast money, and hanging out. His best moments recall the feeling of watching more lighthearted John Singleton fare, like the road trip scenes in 1993’s Poetic Justice.
Game Time is Shaudy Kash’s third mixtape of the year, and unlike the other two, its songs aren’t connected by theme or sound: February’s Ghetto Heartthrob featured eight songs about being such a ladies’ man that it’s a hassle and May’s On the Yeah Side was all calmly delivered rhymes over producer Topside’s smokiest grooves. The 12 tracks on this latest tape range from hard-hitting and aggressive to chill and reflective. Shaudy sounds most comfortable when he’s both engaged and distracted, as if you’re on a midday cruise with an old friend who is filling you in on what they’ve been up to.
His chronicles are small in scale and rarely sound exaggerated, which makes them feel genuine. “She like how I talk, how I speak/I’m a dog, she a freak/Give her a call, no two thoughts involved, she come to me,” he raps breezily about a sweet friends-with-benefits situation on mixtape highlight “You See Me.” Then, over the woozy melody and ticking hi-hats, he recounts how it went wrong. He kept sleeping around but she wanted more; he shrugs off the split with slightly performative indifference. It’s not quite emotionless, but the burnt-out monotone vocals add a wrinkle to his storytelling. On “No Stretch,” he plays it cool with a new fling, but every now and then a strain in his voice signals agitation or boredom. His ramblings about trust issues on “Real vs. Fake” would be basic out of context, but he delivers them so naturally that they sound thoughtful.
When the beats take on a darker edge, as on Game Time’s first half, they cloud Shaudy’s conversational style (except for “Matt Hardy,” where the flow is so sharp and easygoing that it works anyway). Still, the songs are short and the duds drift by innocuously, which isn’t always a good thing, because a lot of the better tracks don’t last long enough. They’re missing second verses, or at the very least extensions of existing ones, giving them the incomplete feel of snippets. On “The World Is Mines,” Shaudy smoothly rides a Nas sample, then throws in the towel not long after the one-minute mark. “Yes Yes Yall” combines signature Detroit shit talk with silky Bay Area wordplay, but if you wait for the intensity to ramp up, you’ll be waiting the whole minute and a half. A fleshed-out version of Game Time could have elevated the mixtape from a standout in the Shaudy Kash catalog to a potential spot on Detroit rap’s annual shortlist. | 2022-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The 4 | July 7, 2022 | 6.9 | 3f530b7f-9517-4d73-a99d-85093d58f360 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Matador's deluxe Pavement reissue campaign continues with Brighten the Corners, the underrated record that signaled the group's turn toward the serious and mature. Also included are 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts that more accurately reflect the loose, ramshackle feel of the group's early-to-mid 1990s work. | Matador's deluxe Pavement reissue campaign continues with Brighten the Corners, the underrated record that signaled the group's turn toward the serious and mature. Also included are 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts that more accurately reflect the loose, ramshackle feel of the group's early-to-mid 1990s work. | Pavement: Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12499-brighten-the-corners-nicene-creedence-ed/ | Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. | For a band that often seemed be on the verge of a commercial breakthrough, Pavement made all the right moves-- they just did them in the wrong order. With its crystalline production (courtesy of R.E.M. architect Mitch Easter and Bryce Goggin) and more refined songcraft, Pavement's 1997 release Brighten the Corners was the logical follow-up to 1994's indie hit Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. But of course, that move from A to B took a tangential turn back to Z with 1995's notoriously slapdash Wowee Zowee, an album beloved by the band's diehard fans, but one that effectively squandered any crossover potential Crooked Rain might have built up (and which would've made a lot more sense as Crooked Rain's predecessor than successor).
Brighten the Corners' more focused, melodic approach could thus be heard as the sound of Pavement making amends, but it arguably came too late-- by 1997, modern-rock radio was already tuning out brainy indie-rock in favour of pre-fab pop-punk and numbskull nu-metal. Pavement understood this shift all to well, which could be why Brighten the Corners sounds like their most self-aware and, by extension, honest album-- when Stephen Malkmus yells, "listen to me, I'm on the stereo!" on the album's excitable opening track, it's with the implicit knowledge that he'd have to settle for hearing himself on his home hi-fi rather than on KROQ.
Perhaps as an attempt to reconnect with their pre-Wowee Zowee catalogue, Brighten the Corners takes various structural cues from previous Pavement albums: as on 1992's Slanted and Enchanted, the second song fades into a brief instrumental; the slowly intensifying mid-song jam on third track "Transport Is Arranged" sounds like it was grafted from Crooked Rain's own third track "Stop Breathin"; and Malkmus still couldn't resist the glaring name-drop (though Crooked Rain's now-dated Stone Temple Pilots/Smashing Pumpkins swipes were replaced by more eternal ruminations about the peculiar oration of Geddy Lee). Consistent with this self-reflexivity, Malkmus cheekily addresses his own status as the most overanalyzed lyricist in 90s indie-rock, describing himself as "an island of such great complexity," declaring that "if my soul has a shape, well, then it is an ellipse," and even raging that he's "sick of being misread by men in dashikis and their leftist weeklies." (That said, it would take 11 years and one ridiculous Republican campaign to lend any significance to the line "there's no women in Alaska.")
The May 1997 Alex Ross New Yorker essay that accompanies this reissue-- the fourth in Matador's superlative series of Pavement packages-- focuses on Malkmus' lyrical gift for extracting substance out of nonsense, and the folly of trying to saddle it with literal interpretations. But on no other Pavement album do all those bon mots and non sequitirs form such a coherent picture of the band's emotional state. Even the album title-- the only one that doesn't rely on rhymes and/or alliteration-- is telling: Rather than re-ignite the band's commercial prospects, Brighten the Corners marked the beginning of Pavement's slow fade into the sunset, while shedding light on its principal songwriter's future course.
Not coincidentally, both Malkmus and co-founder Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg turned 30 during the album's recording, and both sound consumed by all the melancholy, anxiety, loaded significance, and renewed perspective that life-change carries. Malkmus' charming, chiming "Shady Lane" reasserts the "settle down" sentiment of Crooked Rain's "Range Life", and "Transport Is Arranged" seems to address the historically conflicted dynamic between relationships and life on the road ("a voice coach taught me to sing, he couldn't teach me to love"); Kannberg's two exemplary contributions-- the Big Starry-eyed power-pop rush "Date w/ Ikea" and the smooth Stonesy funk of "Passat Dream"-- equate responsibility and commitment with consumerism.
Easter and Goggin's luminous production casts this wistfulness in an appropriately soft-focus lens; in return, the band, so scatterbrained on Wowee Zowee, turn in their most pleasingly patient performances of their career, establishing a deeper sense of space through the use of mellotrons, drum-machine breaks and synths set on "swoosh." The dreamily drifty centerpiece track "Type Slowly" now sounds like a dry run for the sort of exploratory jams Malkmus would fashion in his post-Pavement band the Jicks (a point driven home by the extended, more volcanic live version included here), while the closing two jangle ballads, "Starlings of the Slipstream" and "Fin" are two of the most affecting songs in the Pavement canon, each appended with guitar solos that compensate for Malkmus' still-developing chops with genuinely pained expression. If "Fin" didn't prove to be the band's actual swan song, the track does sound like a farewell to Pavement's wiseacre persona.
But if Brighten the Corners signaled a turn to the serious, the 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts compiled here give Pavement plenty of room to, as one B-side aptly puts it, "fuck around." Which means indie-rock in-jokes (the Pussy Galore pastiche of "Neil Hagerty Meets Jon Spencer in a Non-Alcoholic Bar"), 1960s pop goofs ("Nigel"), cartoon themes (two stabs at "Space Ghost"), and kill-yr-idols covers of the Clean (Kannberg's electro-fried take on "Oddity"), Echo and the Bunnymen (a Crazy Horsed interpretation of "The Killing Moon"), and heroes-turned-nemeses the Fall (a gleeful desecration of the already blasphemous "The Classical"). And in the seven-minute rough cut of stoner-rock dirge "(And Then) The Hexx" and the freewheeling biker-bar boogie of "Roll With the Wind", you can hear Malkmus moving ever closer to adopting his future role as beardless-hippie guitar hero.
According to the liner notes, "(And Then) The Hexx" was originally intended to be Brighten the Corners' opener, but its sinister creep would've made an awkward introduction to the album's more winsome, mellowed-out material. (The song eventually surfaced on 1999's Terror Twilight.) However, that same rationale might also explain why the terrific "Harness Your Hopes" was demoted to B-side status, it being perhaps the most typically Pavementy Pavement song ever: the reductive, repetitive Velvet Underground riff; the rhyme-a-second wordplay ("nun is to church as the parrot is to perch"); and a line that seemingly sums up the band's conflicted, outsider relationship with the pop world-- "Show me/ A word that rhymes with Pavement." Given that Brighten the Corners captured Malkmus trying to break free from Pavement's established aesthetic-- and given that, two years later at London's Brixton Acadmey, he would famously sum up his feelings about the band by waving a pair of handcuffs-- the word he was looking for was under his nose along: enslavement. | 2008-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | December 10, 2008 | 8.7 | 3f5b5a5c-b04d-4b30-ba10-7f24f039cf2e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Built around wistful piano pieces that follow unexpected paths, the Chicago composer’s third album has far more personality and strangeness than its almost aggressively generic title suggests. | Built around wistful piano pieces that follow unexpected paths, the Chicago composer’s third album has far more personality and strangeness than its almost aggressively generic title suggests. | Gia Margaret: Romantic Piano | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gia-margaret-romantic-piano/ | Romantic Piano | It’s an audacious move to put a single song with vocals and lyrics in the middle of an otherwise instrumental album. There’s no avoiding the significance the words will take on, standing like a lone billboard in an otherwise empty landscape, inflecting and commenting upon their surroundings; whether intentionally or not, suggesting to the audience how they might interpret material that might be better off remaining abstract. You’d better have something good to say, and Gia Margaret does.
“I can’t really say where the memories fade/But some are burnt into my brain,” the Chicago composer nearly whispers in “City Song.” “I can’t really say what they meant to me/But now I’ll never be the same.” The lines come across like a mission statement for Romantic Piano, an album that often has the quality of wistful recollection: hazy outlines of melodies once heard, ideas left hanging unresolved, compositions that wind down just as they seem to be getting going. Sometimes, it sounds as though Margaret started with a full-fledged song, added ornamentation on piano and electronics, then stripped the song itself away, so that what’s left is like a frame without a picture. Or a lingering memory of a scene whose significance has since faded.
Romantic Piano has far more personality and strangeness than its almost aggressively generic title suggests. Margaret, who called her previous album Mia Gargaret, clearly has an appetite for impish absurdity. This album opens with “Hinoki Wood,” which practically dares you to slot it in with the sort of faceless playlist fodder that the album title suggests. The chords are simple; the recording is exquisitely close, with the softly tactile sound of felt hammers on piano strings nearly as present as the notes themselves. But the melody’s curlicues are too sprightly, too mischievous, to settle in the background for tuned-out, vibes-only listening.
Just when you think you’ve got the album’s sensibility figured out from the title and the opener—a charming piano miniature with more wit and vivacity than mood music requires—the second track pulls that assumption out from under you. Built around a flickering drone, with a field recording of soggy footfalls for percussion and no central tune to speak of, “Ways of Seeing” resembles a piano-centric version of Christian Fennesz’s gorgeous guitar-and-laptop abstractions. We’ve already gotten far afield from the surface sensibility of “Hinoki Wood,” though the placidly inquisitive mood hasn’t changed much.
These subtle reversals of expectation recur throughout Romantic Piano. The album’s instrumental and harmonic palettes are deliberately limited, and its emotional tenor is steady, but within these apparently tight quarters Margaret finds space for reinvention with every track. It’s a solo piano showcase—no, it’s electronic ambient music—no, it’s a singer songwriter album that happens to feature very little singing—no, it’s soaring post-rock, presented in miniature. At one point, it’s a guitar record, bringing to mind the meditative understatement of Windham Hill founder William Ackerman. (That track, which reveals Margaret’s remarkable sensitivity and rich tone on an entirely different instrument than the one she’s ostensibly here to play, is titled in typically deadpan style: “Guitar Piece.”) Small changes over the course of a single composition register as quietly monumental: a single chord from just outside the key in the otherwise purely diatonic “A Stretch”; a tweak to the EQ that edges the drums slightly closer to foreground partway through “La langue de l'amitié.” Each of these moments carries an emotional charge, though the particular emotion can be difficult to articulate.
Romantic Piano feels self-consciously minor despite its surplus of ideas: over in 30 minutes, with many of its tracks getting in and out in under two. One of them, “Sitting at the Piano,” sounds like just that: approaching the instrument, spinning out 30 seconds of delicate, possibly improvisatory figuration, and then moving on. The most ambitious track by far is “City Song,” which remains in keeping with the album’s overarching wispy atmosphere despite its more conventional song form and prominent vocals. Margaret’s first album, There’s Always Glimmer, was a straightforward singer-songwriter effort, and on “City Song,” she demonstrates how she might find new resonances within that mode, bringing it closer to the impressionistic ambiguity of Romantic Piano’s instrumentals—namely, by treating her voice with the same attention to timbre, arrangement, and silence that she treats every other sound; layering it, gently processing it, making it as malleable and expressive as she makes her primary instrument.
Besides the singing on “City Song,” there are a few other legible words on the album. At the end of “La langue de l'amitié,” a sampled speaker philosophizes: “While no one has ever successfully defined music, we can at least permit ourselves to say that it is a language of feeling.” At its best, the music of Romantic Piano approaches the promise of that sentiment, speaking the feelings that words cannot. | 2023-05-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 30, 2023 | 7.8 | 3f60ae6d-5775-474a-a155-4fed45034735 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Malaysian-born, L.A.-based musician moves away from folk-pop into simmering R&B, with features from Tyler, the Creator, Little Simz, and others. | The Malaysian-born, L.A.-based musician moves away from folk-pop into simmering R&B, with features from Tyler, the Creator, Little Simz, and others. | Yuna: Rouge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yuna-rouge/ | Rouge | Yuna has always made dreamer’s music: ethereal and achy, often centered on the gap between desire and reality. But on Rouge, the 32-year-old sounds clear-eyed, grounded, and sure of herself. Rouge is Yunalis Zara’ai’s fourth internationally released studio album since moving from her home country of Malaysia to L.A. eight years ago and, not inconsequentially, her first as a married person. On lead single “Forevermore,” she croons, “I’ve been dreaming of this light/ Piercing through the darkest night,” and one gets the sense she’s been waiting for this self-trust and certainty a long while. Her 2012 self-titled debut placed her within the world of Ingrid Michaelson-esque folk-pop, but on Rouge she’s making simmering R&B bops, pulling from disco and hip-hop along the way.
“Amy” drifts like incense, flush with the trappings of Sade-inspired smooth jazz and Masego’s shadowy backing vocals. “Pink Youth,” featuring Little Simz, is a girl-empowerment track that rides a hazy disco beat reminiscent of Beyoncé’s “Blow,” while “Castaway,” featuring Tyler, The Creator, is a soft-spoken yet indisputable middle finger to a former lover. Neither song contains their guest artists’ typically sharp bars (Tyler did not need to rhyme “Beer belly is on horizon” with “You really don’t have Verizon”), but texturally, they work. By contrast, on album highlight “Does She,” Yuna’s duet with Jay Park unfolds like actual dialogue, rather than just a requisite 16-bar insertion.
Not every track is so seamless. Album single “Blank Marquee” bumps along to a roller-rink-ready beat that recalls the break in Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” which then dovetails into a woozy Tame Impala synth groove, only to be interrupted by a grubby and unpleasant G-Eazy. On “Likes,” Yuna’s plum-sweet voice rides atop an aquatic wash of Rhodes piano chords with trumpet lines recalling Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s Surf. She sings of the double standards she faces as a Muslim woman in the American music industry; if people aren’t knocking her for dressing modestly or not drinking, they’re complaining that it isn’t a Muslim woman’s place to be singing on stage in public. It’s one of the more personal moments on the album—until KYLE enters, and his verse zaps the mood almost as effectively as J. Cole on Jeremih’s “Planez.”
These bumps in the road only underscore Yuna’s evolution: She’s broadened her palette, but she is still figuring out how to make these sounds feel like her own. There are some singular moments: her lilting, off-beat synths; the gentle instrumental stretches that feel more experimental than anything she’s done; a recurring motif—alternately framed by traditional Malay gendang-like percussion, meditative vocals, and raindrops—that haunts the corners of the album.
It is in the final track that we see Yuna most clearly. Inspired by syair, a form of Malay narrative poetry-singing, album closer “Tiada Akhir” lingers like a faded memory. Against a rainy, silver-gray backdrop, Yuna intones in Malay, “You were born, like a bright light [...] I thought you would save me/But you were the poison that stopped my heart.” It is a poem about loss—and yet, in its ashes, we come to witness the truth: that from its depths, Yunalis Zara’ai is rising.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Verve Forecast | July 15, 2019 | 6.8 | 3f6b8c61-57b7-4012-b1b4-6e37d860b71b | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
Further narrowing his focus from the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy, Matthew Herbert zeroes in on a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping a bomb, contorting and manipulating the sample to explore his feelings about a single act of terror. | Further narrowing his focus from the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy, Matthew Herbert zeroes in on a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping a bomb, contorting and manipulating the sample to explore his feelings about a single act of terror. | Matthew Herbert: The End of Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18039-matthew-herbert-the-end-of-silence/ | The End of Silence | Matthew Herbert just took the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy and further narrowed his focus. This time around, he zeroes in on a brief moment in time in order to explore his feelings about a single act of terror. The End of Silence uses one 5-second sample as its sole building block, which is contorted and manipulated by Herbert and a three-piece band he put together for this recording. That sample is a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping its deadly payload, prefigured by a whistle and a cry that hastily warn of the event. In a 2011 interview Herbert talked of how we now have "the capacity to listen to the world in a different way." This is his way of slowing the world down to make sense of it, in the process creating something that shares the weight of a blood-spattered historical snapshot that provokes an uncomfortably lingering gaze.
There are just three tracks here, the first of which is almost 25-minutes long, while the shortest is just over 10 minutes. Herbert's stated intent is to "freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound." The music works in direct inverse to the event itself, providing acres of time to stop and think and ponder the consequences. Herbert exploits the silence as much as the act itself, stretching out the sense of anxiety that leads up to the terrifying point of impact. The first part is often mixed so sounds are barely perceptible, forcing you to crank the volume. It's a trick that serves to emphasize the bomb drop when it comes, ripping and tearing through the sound, sometimes bolstered by a thick layer of distortion. The use of silence is transportative, triggering an evaluation of the actions of the people on the ground, posing impossible questions about the thoughts rushing through their heads.
What's striking about this work is how it's set up as the antithesis of 24-hour rolling news culture, where bombs sailing out of the sky are presented with a rote facade, then passed over for the next space-filler on the agenda. It's almost old-fashioned in a way, bringing a layer of meaning back to a singular event, pointing out how we're glazing over atrocities that may have caught the world's attention had they taken place in less media-saturated times. The processing through which Herbert and his band force the sample often make it unrecognizable, but they're careful to imbue their tinkering with feelings of fear, dread, and suffering. It's not exactly music as reportage, but when the pace picks up in the second part it often has the same sense of urgency as someone frantically typing up a report, sending an important dispatch outlining how a small part of the world just changed forever.
Distance plays an important part here, too, with Herbert working in sounds of the natural world, all captured on mics set up outside the barn in Wales where these tracks were recorded. It's a valuable reminder of how far outside the original sound he is, of how alien the whole process of exploring a bomb drop is to the average person. This is an approximation of terror, an artificial rendering of distress constructed in a relatively safe space, where shrapnel becomes a percussion instrument and human cries become neatly layered loops. It adds an air of surreality to the album, at times drawing on that sense of being anesthetized to events like this, where you feel so far removed that it's tough to find meaning amid the blizzard of information. The End of Silence is Herbert effectively tussling with what "significance" means at this particular moment in time, in a record that's as much a part of the gathering noise of the 21st century as it is a comment on the constant numbing we've wreaked upon ourselves. | 2013-06-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Accidental | June 26, 2013 | 7.1 | 3f6cfe98-aa20-4b9a-ac32-ee801843c6e9 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Charity album collects the Jersey band's spontaneous, by-request WFMU benefit covers performances, including takes on tracks from the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. | Charity album collects the Jersey band's spontaneous, by-request WFMU benefit covers performances, including takes on tracks from the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. | Yo La Tengo: Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8873-yo-la-tengo-is-murdering-the-classics/ | Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics | From the right angle, Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics is the funniest record in the world. At first the title only seems sarcastic-- when you listen to the album, it turns out it's just honest, if humorously so. The disc features Yo La Tengo and a few friends flat-out slaughtering other people's songs in on-air performances during WFMU fundraisers. It makes sense that this collection of bootleg-quality recordings of unrehearsed covers would be associated with WFMU, given the freeform radio station's legendary penchant for incorrect and outsider music, and the saving grace of the whole thing is that no one involved is taking it remotely seriously.
The deal is this: The members of Yo La Tengo were trying to think of a way they could help their favorite radio station (it, like the band, is located in Northeast New Jersey, although you can tune in from anywhere in the world via their website). Then it struck them that they could perform requests live on the air in exchange for pledges of support. The trick was that they had to play each request on the spot, with no rehearsal or time to remember little things like, say, lyrics. They did it first in 1996, and it's since become a hugely entertaining annual tradition. Gathering requested covers from 1996-2003, Murdering is temporarily charming and fun, but inevitably, its 30 tracks (over 76 minutes!) are a gruelling slog.
To be fair, the band members know music inside and out, as the well-rehearsed covers that populate their records (covers album Fakebook, in particular) and concerts demonstrate. Additionally, they have a jazzier sensibility than most rock bands, so interpretation isn't beyond them. But those hoping for anything even close to the ballpark of their studio albums clearly haven't read the warnings all over the band's own website, which kindly inform prospective listeners not to expect much. Besides, they do have a proper album planned for later this year.
What I'm getting at is, should you order the disc, you're not really buying a Yo La Tengo album. You're not even buying a live album. You're buying a comedy record, for all intents. The bit where Ira Kaplan forgets the second verse of Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)", and wisecracks about the band's singer, is great-- though not nearly as funny as the version of Archie Bell & the Drells' "Tighten Up" that opens the album. Kaplan's exhortations to "tighten up on the drums now, Georgia" are so hilariously geeky they actually sort of work, and both he and fellow guitarist Bruce Bennett (who joined the band for these fundraisers) accidentally come in when Kaplan calls for the bass. James McNew doesn't exactly know the bassline anyway, but he gives it his best shot.
There are a few songs Yo La Tengo really nail, like the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner", which Ira spikes with a blistering guitar solo. It's also fitting that they'd turn in a competent rendition of NRBQ's "Captain Lou", given that the cult band's cover-request shows were the inspiration for Yo La Tengo's own fundraising appearances. And I honestly cannot believe how well Kaplan remembers the verse lyrics to Huey "Piano" Smith's "Sea Cruise"-- never mind Doug Sahm's "Mendocino". On the opposite end of the spectrum, the band's take on Yes' "Roundabout" is side-splittingly inept, with someone basically leaning on an organ to approximate Rick Wakeman, while the version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" is just plain ghastly (and yet considerably less annoying than the original).
Unsurprisingly, the album's best moments are attributable to inspired listener requests. By far the most imaginative of these is the old promotional song "Meet the Mets", a jingle advertising New York's less appreciated baseball franchise. What's more impressive is that the band actually knows all the words to it. Later, recalling their Genius + Love collaboration with Daniel Johnston on his "Speeding Motorcycle", a young caller named Lela sings "Route 66" over the phone while the band plays softly in the background. It's so genuinely sweet that the band's uncertaintly over the chord sequence doesn't much matter. But again, while these are great moments on the air, they don't exactly translate to replay value, so the disc, packaged inside Adrian Tomine's fantastic artwork, becomes just a keepsake for fans of the band and WFMU (or anyone who ever wanted to hear the Knack, the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth, and Bonzo Dog Band in the same ramshackle medley).
In short, this is the kind of thing that would have been a fan-club disc back in the 90s. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but much as I love Yo La Tengo, WFMU (possibly the greatest radio station in existence, by the way), and the general idea, it's difficult to give this a genuine recommendation. Instead, save your money for next year's WFMU fundraiser: Tune in, make a pledge, request a song, and brace yourself. It's for a good cause. | 2006-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Egon | April 26, 2006 | 4.1 | 3f7004ed-3d5a-49d1-adec-5b6c0f4cbe65 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | 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 Ja Rule’s fleeting moment in the sun, a chart-topping 2001 album whose magnetic pop crossovers foreshadowed the future of melodic rap. | 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 Ja Rule’s fleeting moment in the sun, a chart-topping 2001 album whose magnetic pop crossovers foreshadowed the future of melodic rap. | Ja Rule: Pain Is Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ja-rule-pain-is-love/ | Pain Is Love | It was 2002 and Ja Rule was irate. DMX had recently appeared on DJ Kay Slay’s show to accuse Ja of biting his style; 50 Cent was taking to diss tracks and interviews to castigate Ja for imitating 2Pac. He’d had as much as he could take. He called into Hot 97. “Everybody wants to make comparisons to Pac and X and me,” Ja shouted through the receiver and across the airwaves. “Y’all niggas wanna see Pac come back? … It’s here, nigga. It’s here.”
It wasn’t. Because Ja Rule might seem like a relic of 2000s hip-hop whose career-ending beef with 50 Cent should probably be above the fold on his Wikipedia page, it’s easy to dismiss this bravado as posturing, a snarling burst of delusion from the co-founder of Fyre Festival. But in 2002, Ja tried with all his might to fashion himself as Pac’s rightful heir. Now the comparison is ridiculous, an example of Ja’s boundless self-regard, but back then it didn’t seem completely implausible that Ja could one day have an impact akin to Pac. It wasn’t just the bandana looped around his head, the manicured mustache, or the way he stretched his vowels and spit from the pit of his stomach. It was how his bluster contorted into anguish, how his arm-wheeling freneticism made him seem 10 feet tall, how he packaged brazen attitude into radio-ready rap hits. Emboldened by a string of chart-topping singles and a pair of No. 1 albums, Ja was on the Hot 97 airwaves that day battling for position as the biggest rapper on the planet, trying to bring down anyone who stood in his way. The Greek tragedy of Ja was already in motion.
A year earlier, from the height of his cultural ubiquity, Ja released his third studio album, Pain Is Love. His beefs were still inconsequential; his label, Murder Inc., was still a reputable force in mainstream music. Like his hero Pac, he leveraged his success to start acting, landing a supporting role in the first installment of the soon-to-be commercial behemoth Fast and the Furious franchise. His culture-dominating duet with Jennifer Lopez, “I’m Real,” made him such a household name that MTV, after 9/11, asked him to share his thoughts on the tragic events—a moment that Dave Chappelle memorialized for its absurdity.
Ja achieved massive popularity in part because his music appealed to female audiences, a demographic often ignored in ’90s and early ’00s hip-hop. His R&B-styled crossovers influenced his identity as a “sensitive thug,” someone whose loverman persona counteracted his hard-edged street side. Ja was one of the rare A-list rappers whose songs could pop off at a bar mitzvah or a block party, whose work elided clear distinctions between hip-hop, R&B, and pop. And considering the imminent Auto-Tune era and melodic rap boom, Ja’s stylistic choices now feel prescient, a forward-thinking maneuver that soon became standard across mainstream hip-hop. But back then 50 Cent and hip-hop writ large taunted Ja for his doe-eyed love songs, and he chafed against this archetype, not knowing it would help define rap for the next 20 years.
Ja, born Jeffrey Atkins, knew how to scrap for success. An up-and-coming rapper from Hollis, Queens, he got his first big break when, in 1994, he formed a trio named Cash Money Click with local rappers Chris Black and 0-1. Their first single, “Get Tha Fortune,” was produced by fellow Hollis native Irv Gotti, a DJ turned industry everyman with close connections to Jay-Z and DMX. Gotti helped Cash Money Click secure a one-album deal with TVT Records, and they made waves when their video “4 My Click” appeared on Yo! MTV Raps, catching the attention of Def Jam executive Lyor Cohen, who was reportedly struck by Ja’s tenacity. Rocking a thick down coat and a backward flat-brim, Ja hurtles himself across the frame, his boisterous, wide-eyed bars jolting the ambling song to life. It’s no wonder Cohen saw a star; Ja, the smallest guy in the video, carried himself like he already was one.
After Cash Money Click collapsed, Gotti brought Ja Rule to Mulford Gardens to meet DMX. The two freestyled for each other, Ja with his melodic barks and DMX with his mouth wired shut from a broken jaw. Gotti watched a mutual respect bloom between them and was eager to link them with an up-and-coming rapper named Jay-Z. The trio began working together soon after meeting, and their competitive spirit made for undeniable chemistry: Take 1998’s “Murdergram,” where Jay-Z’s slick, conversational flow sharpens into a growl, matching DMX’s literal growling and Ja’s gravelly timbre. Even though he’d guided Ja, Jay, and X to solo deals with Def Jam, Gotti sought to formally solidify the trio as a supergroup: Murder Inc., the same name as his new Def Jam imprint. Here were three of the most promising young MCs in the game, each seeking to fill the vacuum Pac and Biggie’s deaths had left in hip-hop. Gotti understood the magnitude of their collaboration: “[They] gonna go in the studio and compete—they all super competitive, which is gonna make the illest records…it would’ve been an immortal album.”
One problem: Jay-Z and DMX didn’t share Gotti’s vision. By 1999, Jay had three successful solo records under his belt, and X was fresh off two No. 1 albums. They didn’t need Murder Inc. like Gotti and Ja did; they were already the two hottest rappers out. “I was the low man on that totem pole,” Ja recalled in a 2020 interview with HipHopDX. “If I would’ve [recorded an album with Jay and X]...everybody would’ve always talked about how I came in on that and every hit record I would’ve made after that would’ve been, ‘Well, it’s because…he’s part of Murder Inc.’” Though his solo career was building momentum—he’d scored guest verses on songs with Nas, Method Man, and LL Cool J—Ja was desperate to prove he was more than a sidekick. In his eyes, as well as Gotti’s, he was a superstar: the East Coast reincarnation of Pac, the prodigal son the world didn’t know was coming.
His debut single, 1999’s “Holla Holla,” didn’t just announce Ja as a star—it shifted the direction of his music. When he turned in his first album, Venni Vetti Vecci, to Def Jam, they gave it back to him with a clear directive: Make a hit. “At the time, I’m just like, ‘What the fuck you talking about? They’re all hits!” Ja told Complex in 2013. “I didn’t [yet] grasp the idea of making a radio record.” Unlike the sinister beats and gritty verses that made up much of Venni Vetti Vecci, “Holla Holla” leaned into Ja’s scratchy singing and knack for crafting raunchy, rugged hooks. In the Hype Williams-directed video, he scours a beach shirtless, surrounded by a swarm of bikini-clad women, sneering into the camera and goofily dancing along a Brazilian boardwalk. The song peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and guided Venni Vetti Vecci to strong first week sales and, eventually, a platinum plaque.
Though he’d tasted success, Ja remained near the bottom of rap’s star hierarchy, a reality he began to resent. His debut wasn’t critically lauded like Reasonable Doubt, nor did it top the charts like It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot. Instead, as Kris Ex wrote for Rolling Stone at the time, Venni Vetti Vecci—and namely “Holla Holla”—“seemed more like a novelty tune from one of DMX’s buddies than a career-building smash.” Sensing this stigma, Ja knew he had to make music that set him apart. “Holla Holla” provided a template: big hooks, sex appeal, and a little bit of singing. While Jay and X made music for the streets, Ja found ways to integrate his tough-guy persona into pop crossovers. His next two singles, “Between Me & You” and “Put It on Me,” were, as Gotti said, “female friendly-driven…[all] while Ja is still spitting and being that raw nigga.” Both became massive hits, catapulting Ja into a new stratosphere of celebrity.
By 2001, Ja was an inescapable voice in pop music, a frog-throated firecracker who penned indelible hooks and rapped with an almost deranged ferocity. Pain Is Love basks in the spotlight, sprawling with glitzy, gimmicky production and horny punchlines. In a departure from his once menacing street raps, Ja sings or, more accurately, guffaws about thongs, ecstasy, and lavish trips abroad. The album’s lead single, “Livin’ It Up,” captures this spirit, interpolating Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” in an ode to excess and luxury. Throughout the song, Ja seems overwhelmed with good fortune, asking, “You think I got time to blow all this dough and do all these shows?” The answer then was a resounding of course not; he was pop’s most in-demand rapper and a budding actor just hitting the peak of his career. And, fittingly, the album’s best as a joyride, like on “Down Ass Bitch,” where Ja groans a string of mimicable lines (“Every thug needs a lady!”) over a glistening guitar lick.
But no song better captures the magic of Ja Rule than the Ashanti-featuring “Always on Time,” Ja’s only No. 1 song as a lead artist. Newly signed to Murder Inc., Ashanti was eager to catch a break; she’d been replaced by Jennifer Lopez as the lead vocalist on “Ain’t It Funny,” which she co-wrote with Ja, and had yet to release an official single of her own. She struck gold with successive features on “Always on Time” and Fat Joe’s “What’s Luv?” (which also features Ja), anointing her as a star who could elevate Ja’s excursions into pop. On “Always on Time,” her airy soprano perfectly compliments his gruff baritone, a back-and-forth formula the pair would fall back on again and again. While still spitting with intensity and fervor, Ja mostly waxes romantic, striking a healthy balance between belligerence and sensitivity. “Always on Time” remains his legacy-defining smash, a song so addictively catchy it’s hard not to wish he’d leaned further into his R&B instincts and away from his 2Pac impersonation.
About that 2Pac impersonation: He samples a Pac song and verse on “So Much Pain” (one of Ja’s best songs, with some of the strongest bars of his career: “I spits razors/Never been a stranger to homicide/My city’s full of tote-slangers and chalk lines”), but his Pac-inspired songs tend to be his weakest. On two Murder Inc. posse cuts, “The Inc.” and “Worldwide Gangsta,” Ja’s writing lacks the imagery and specificity needed to nurture a mafioso identity. When he raps, “Family orientated through guns, drugs, and good relations/Real conversations, we call it real talk/And that shit spreads all the way from L.A. to New York,” the character he’s portraying doesn’t align with the one he inhabits on his more sentimental songs. Pain Is Love fails to find balance between Ja’s conflicting identities, hedging his forays into R&B with constant reminders that he’s still not someone to mess with.
Still, Pain Is Love is Ja’s most pop-oriented album. This is largely due to Marcus Vest, who earns a production credit on nearly every song. His instrumentation is all stock sounds standing in the foreground, a bubble-rimmed artificiality heard often in early 2000s R&B: sweeps, fat synth plucks, the odd finger-picked bass, a melody so obvious no vocalist could veer away. When it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work, like on “Lost Little Girl,” where a whiny reversed synth clanks against beeps and overzealous drum programming. Sometimes, though, Vest’s production and Ja’s approximated singing synergizes into something meaningful, like on “Never Again,” where Ja offers harrowing insights into his past life: “Never again would I run down a road so dark/Hoped to die, cross my heart/But the streets keep calling.” He’s not shouting or shoehorning melody where it doesn’t belong; he’s tapping into a bluesy reflection suited well to his abrasive singing, and he’s never sounded more vulnerable or honest.
Pain Is Love was Ja’s second and final No. 1 album, and perhaps the last time you could mention his name without also mentioning 50 Cent’s. It’s unclear how the beef between the two Queens natives began. Ja claims it started when he didn’t greet 50 at the “Murda 4 Life” video shoot; 50 alleges it began when one of his friends robbed Ja at gunpoint and stole his chain. Regardless of its origins, the rivalry quickly escalated. After a physical altercation at a club in Atlanta, Ja’s Murder Inc. affiliates allegedly stabbed 50 at the Hit Factory, a recording studio in New York. 50 dropped a slew of diss tracks taking aim at Ja’s street cred, labeling him as “soft” for singing and lambasting him for imitating 2Pac. With some of hip-hop’s most dominant forces—Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes—backing up 50, Ja could hardly hope to compete. He trotted out Black Child and Caddillac Tah, undeveloped Murder Inc. artists without solo careers; Hussein Fatal, a former member of Pac’s Outlawz crew; and, for a brief time, Jadakiss and Fat Joe, whose paper-thin alliance with Ja couldn’t stack up against the Shady/Aftermath industrial complex. Meanwhile, Ja’s disses flailed with nonspecific insults and hollow threats. The narrative cemented itself across hip-hop: Ja was an overly emotional, Pac-derivative fraud.
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact song or situation that crowned 50 Cent and G-Unit winners of the beef. But by 2003, 50 Cent was the most popular rapper alive—his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, sold close to a million copies in its first week and pushed hip-hop’s mainstream further from crossover collaborations toward unrelenting gangsta rap. Ja’s credibility was so diminished that when Lyor Cohen tried to solicit Suge Knight and his rebranded Death Row Records to release Ja’s fifth album, Blood in My Eye, Knight declined. Upon its eventual release the album was a commercial and critical failure, and by its 2004 follow-up, R.U.L.E., Ja was barely hanging on to a career. He was up for more acting roles in Training Day and 2 Fast 2 Furious but lost them because, according to 2 Fast director John Singleton, “He was acting like he was too big to be in [it].” When federal agents raided the Murder Inc. offices and opened an investigation into the label’s involvement in drug trafficking, fraud, and money laundering, Def Jam opted not to renew Murder Inc.’s contract. Embroiled in drama and stained with shame, Ja took a hiatus from music, one from which he’d never fully return.
Ever since 50 superseded Ja in the hip-hop hierarchy and on the charts (“In Da Club” was exponentially more popular than any Ja Rule song ever was), Ja’s public reputation has continued to suffer. He served a two-year prison sentence for gun possession and tax evasion, co-founded the disastrous Fyre Fest, and went viral for an awkward halftime set at a Milwaukee Bucks game. While 50 has faded more profitably into post-rap entrepreneurship and celebrity, Ja’s remembered as if frozen in time—as a try-hard, a fake thug, a wannabe singer with little actual skill. 50 fueled and added to these narratives, but Ja’s hubris did him no favors. His dreams of being the next 2Pac thwarted his burgeoning legacy as a melodic rap icon, the natural precursor to genre-melders like Kanye West and Drake. But unlike Drake, Ja didn’t unabashedly commit to the bit, instead trying to compete with 50 in the gangsta rap arena, the chip on his shoulder ballooning with each failed diss. And, with time, his R&B-based songs began sounding cheeky rather than radical, like failed experiments from an artist still determining the scope of hip-hop’s sonic and emotional range.
In the 20 years since Pain Is Love dropped, hip-hop’s ethos has shifted. Street authenticity still matters, but it’s no longer an essential quality for a rapper to become commercially viable. The stigma that explicit emotionality and a dedicated female fanbase signaled weakness rather than savviness, or that singing and rapping broke some sacred social code, has waned. The modern male rap star can be multidimensional, his masculinity intact even when the music isn’t macho. You can see it in an artist like Lil Nas X, whose pop-rap fusion feels partially indebted to Ja. But Nas gleefully weaponizes controversy and subverts expectations of Black rap-adjacent performers; for Ja, during his prime, rejecting social attitudes about Black masculinity would have meant sacrificing everything: his pride, his past, his art, his career. As a result, Pain Is Love is an album trapped between sounds, genres, eras, and identities, a playful album that desperately wants to be taken seriously. It’s a shame: Playfulness flattered Ja far more than being a gangsta did, something none of us would realize until it was too late. | 2022-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Murder Inc. / Def Jam | July 17, 2022 | 7 | 3f71aaba-a40a-4005-a84a-ff84d1cc793c | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
With Youth Lagoon in the rear-view, Trevor Powers remains a sure-handed sculptor of sound. His voice here surges to the fore, newly exposed and digitally treated. | With Youth Lagoon in the rear-view, Trevor Powers remains a sure-handed sculptor of sound. His voice here surges to the fore, newly exposed and digitally treated. | Trevor Powers: Mulberry Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trevor-powers-mulberry-violence/ | Mulberry Violence | Trevor Powers used to be the smallest thing in his music. As Youth Lagoon, he whispered his doubts miles beneath massive, billowing guitars. He sounded both dwarfed and enveloped by the sounds he made, and you could pull his records around you like a blanket and huddle inside it with him.
Mulberry Violence, his first record under his own name, takes a rusty trowel to this sound and disembowels it. Indie rock, with its rounded edges and primary colors, is gone. The drums are broken, loud, and looped, and they splatter when they hit. The silences are thicker, they yawn wider, and the sounds they separate tend to clip out like shorting wires. The stylistic touchpoints seem to be the creeping dread of Portishead, the ragged voice manipulations of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, the weedy urban-ruin expanses of King Krule. Powers leaned this direction on 2015’s Savage Hills Ballroom and shortly afterward, he declared that Youth Lagoon was over. Mulberry Violence leaps with both feet: You get the sense that Powers wouldn’t rest until he looked over his shoulder and Youth Lagoon was nowhere to be seen.
In this new environment, Powers’ voice surges to the fore, like maybe we’ve never actually heard this guy at all. He still sounds small, maybe a little frightened, but he is exposed here, and what you hear has a menacing edge. On “Squelch,” he distorts and treats his voice until it bubbles from the bottom of the mix like a ghoul. On “Film It All,” he nearly melds with the screaming digital static bursting around him. The violence he does to his own singing feels personal, even vengeful, like watching someone scribble out a picture of their own face until the paper rips.
His lyrics, accordingly, only leak through in fragments. They hint at death, the mortification of the spirit, the fragility of the body: “Safety isn’t real anymore/It’s just a thing we say,” he sings on “Film It All,” with his voice needling in the red. On “Ache,” he shares a harrowing scene of helplessness and abuse. “Nobody watched you as you grabbed the serrated kitchen knife and threatened to take my life/Nobody watched you as you dragged me to the middle of the bed, to perform the acts you said.” It hurts to hear it, and the music he builds around it only deepens the mark: The song feels furtive and private, a series of scurrying plinks and far-off drum hits that puts the moment in unsparing relief. When it erupts, midway through, into a tempest of string pads, like Nine Inch Nails remixing Shostakovich, the catharsis is almost a relief.
Powers has always been sure-handed with sculpting sound like this—even before he worked with Ben Allen on Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse, his music sprawled commandingly across your headphone space. This skill serves him nicely now that everything around him is digital. There are still guitars, or at least hulking guitar-like Things, prowling through his arrangements, but nothing reaches your ears without submitting to some kind of manipulation or defacement. The pianos feel denatured, surreal, someone’s childhood memory of piano. The drums on “Plaster Saint” hit so hard against them that you wince, a handy microcosm for the record itself: brutality and tenderness locked in uneasy coexistence.
Mulberry Violence isn’t ugly music by any stretch—all of the bleeding, shrieking noises are undergirded by rich chords, and Powers drops little moments of untouched beauty for us to get our breath: “Playwright” gives us what sounds like a zither, a few notes of it, skipping across an echoing expanse. “Plaster Saint” and “Common Hoax” end the album on an eerily placid note. He sounds like someone who has withstood dehumanizing trauma and survived, if not intact, then at least upright; determined to persist, if thriving is no longer an option. | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Baby Halo | August 18, 2018 | 7.4 | 3f72f17b-6624-4b87-b097-8064dfdeea73 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Full of plinking synths, blown-out bass, and skittering beats, the Atlanta producer’s latest compilation sounds like the flyest rap video game never made. | Full of plinking synths, blown-out bass, and skittering beats, the Atlanta producer’s latest compilation sounds like the flyest rap video game never made. | Popstar Benny: University! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/popstar-benny-university/ | University! | Popstar Benny once said his music is “the soundtrack to a video game that doesn’t exist.” On the surface, that description only applies to the chirpy plugg beats and sound effects the Atlanta-based producer is most known for. But he’s remixed this deep-fried sensibility with several other subgenres: R&B, rage, drum’n’bass, underground boom-bap. His songs can be as saccharine as a wet wad of cotton candy, but sometimes, they can feel as prickly as a Brillo pad—a fitting spectrum for the collages of plinks, samples, and blown-out 808s coming from Benny’s mind. It’s easy to imagine every song as its own level in a game, digital worlds tethered together like a cable connecting a Game Boy Advance to a GameCube. University!, Benny’s latest album, isn’t his first time making a producer project, but by his cacophonous standards, it ranks among his darkest and most adventurous. These are beats for a mini-boss to thrash to.
From the project’s opening moments, it’s clear that Benny’s operating with a murkier, more spacious palette than before. His instrumentals are still jumpy, but there’s less going on all at once, with plenty of room for his rhythms and array of producer tags to stretch out. The melodies on “Snow Boots On” and “Kno Where 2 Start” are muted, like they’re being played in distant rooms. Synths and chimes on “Wildboy” and “Call Me!” flex the crisp atmospheric zen of Clams Casino-era cloud rap as much as they do MexikoDro-indebted plugg. His half-dozen producer tags still crowd the margins like a Trapaholics bootleg download from LimeWire, but overall, he inverts his process by scaling his walls of sound back slightly. The pieces he does focus on put a minimal spin on his maximalist style.
Just because University! is more stripped-back doesn’t mean it’s lacking for ideas. If anything, this newfound space has Benny feeling more experimental than usual. He has cited Pharrell Williams as an influence, and he shares the Virginia legend’s affinity for effortlessly recontextualizing every sound and style in his image. Peep the way he stitches the smooth guitars and melodies of two Gorillaz samples between warbling drums and verses from New York and Atlanta rappers Moh Baretta and Tony Shhnow on “feelbadcorps” and “Pack After Pack,” respectively. Or consider how his musical wanderlust pushes him to explore more sounds on the edges of rap. The most radical is “All the Girls <3,” a peppy, plugg-ified take on Jersey club fitting for a round of Dance Dance Revolution. Other tracks tinker with convention. “Glick” turns the bass on its drums down so Memphis rapper GUN40’s blaring verse floats above everything, while the keyboards and kick drum on “King of the Hill” are soothing and relaxed—two words rarely used to describe Benny’s music.
Half the fun of a producer compilation is seeing if the rappers and singers slot themselves into the beats well, and University! mostly delivers. The majority of its vocal cast is already a part of Benny’s world, and they’re eager to cut their way through his creations: 3AG Pilot’s mid-range voice fits seamlessly over the chipmunked choir in the background of “Sore Loser;” elsewhere, 4pooch’s flow matches the skittering crawl of “Wildboy.” The only two artists to show up multiple times are longtime collaborators Shhnow and Bear1Boss, and they consistently prove why Benny keeps them close. But he also gets mileage out of newer talent, like $pook on the astral “Club Spook” and Los Angeles’ Loso Hendrixx on the chiptune-adjacent “Cold Blood.” All of these vocalists have different ranges, flows, and perspectives, and outside of the bland “Duck Unlimited,” Benny corrals them into a diverse roster worthy of a well-balanced fighting game.
Coaxing rappers and singers onto beats as spacey and animated as these requires mutual trust. The MCs have to confide in the producers to come with music that’s interesting and open enough for them to do their thing, and the producers have to count on the rappers to handle whatever they can throw at them. This is a balance that Benny has maintained across a plethora of one-off collaborative tapes and beat placements for some years now, all stemming from a unique understanding of how every form of rap music ultimately feeds back into the whole. More than any of his other projects, University! feels like a home base in an adventure game—a welcoming hub that also prepares you to jet off into the unknown. | 2023-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | True Panther | February 7, 2023 | 7.6 | 3f76bf06-32f4-4821-98ee-78b1cb464e52 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Separated by a decade, the first two post-Beatles albums credited solely to Paul McCartney are a strange pair, but they shouldn't be overlooked. | Separated by a decade, the first two post-Beatles albums credited solely to Paul McCartney are a strange pair, but they shouldn't be overlooked. | Paul McCartney: McCartney / McCartney II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15536-mccartney-mccartney-ii/ | McCartney / McCartney II | Released 10 years apart, McCartney and McCartney II are the first two post-Beatles albums to be credited solely to Paul McCartney, without Wings or Linda McCartney. In that respect, it makes some sense to reissue the two simultaneously, but their original contexts could hardly be more different. In 1970, when advance copies of McCartney were sent to journalists, they included a press sheet announcing Paul's departure from the Beatles, which had the further effect of breaking up the band. McCartney was released a month before Let It Be, and it contained a fair amount of music that had been kicking around for some time. McCartney II, on the other hand, was released in 1980, about a year before the breakup of Wings, a band that was never much more than a vehicle for McCartney's solo songwriting efforts.
Wings had no John Lennon to play foil to McCartney. Lennon and McCartney, as everyone knows, were the songwriting partners who made the Beatles such a titanic force in the 1960s. By the time the band broke up, however, the partnership had been mostly dissolved for years. The two were almost always writing separately, and on those late Beatles albums, you can hear their personalities pulling apart. The separation is complete on the solo albums the two former Beatles released in 1970. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is rough, nasty, self-absorbed, not a little narcissistic, and devoted to laying bare the rawest of emotions and memories. It has overshadowed McCartney since its release.
McCartney is a different type of album. First, let's talk about that title. This is a name that had been paired with Lennon, separated by a slash, for years-- we weren't used to seeing it all by itself. When the media ran stories on McCartney, he was often just "Paul." He could have called his album Paul McCartney, but he pointedly did not. I think he wanted people to see his name out there as a songwriting credit, without the old prefix. And the album he made has some parallels to Lennon's, too. They share a rawness, a seeming desire to move away from the opulence of 1969's Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together. But where the rawness of Plastic Ono Band plays into anger, aggression, and disillusionment, the rawness of McCartney is only in the sound. The record has a homespun charm, and a feel that suggests McCartney wasn't putting too much pressure on himself to carry on the Beatles flame or make a statement.
Paul played everything on the record himself, apart from some backing vocals by Linda, recording much of it at home on a four-track. No singles were released, there are several instrumentals, and it's all a bit ramshackle, the type of album that in the hands of most musicians would lend itself to introspection. And yet McCartney doesn't really tell us much about McCartney. As a songwriter, he wasn't (and still isn't, really) the confessional type. To a degree, McCartney is an actor whose medium is his songs. His love for Linda, expressed so ebulliently on "Maybe I'm Amazed", was certainly genuine, but he wrote this eventual FM-radio staple as a classic, universal love song. When presented with the opportunity to let his guard down and show us his unvarnished self, Paul McCartney never did-- even in this intimate setting, his songs remain extroverted and devoted to achieving some measure of pop accessibility.
The highlights of McCartney's later solo albums were often uptempo rock songs, or big, show-stopping tunes, but here, apart from "Maybe I'm Amazed", the peaks include two versions of the same quiet song, "Junk". The sparse vocal version features McCartney accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and a bit of bass and percussion, ticking through a nostalgic inventory of disused objects. McCartney later reprises "Junk" in a "singalong" instrumental version, with mellotron and piano joining in for a pretty waltz. I'd be surprised if Elliott Smith didn't learn something from it. Much of the rest of the album was written and recorded off the cuff, and it shows-- McCartney plays with Latin rhythms ("The Lovely Linda"), a bit of blues ("That Would Be Something"), and some bounding, half-time country pop ("Man We Was Lonely"). "Teddy Boy" is sentimental storytelling, and closer "Kreen-Akrore" is McCartney experimenting in his weird, humorous way with oddball drum patterns and sound effects.
That sort of experimentation and lack of polish was something McCartney didn't often allow himself on later solo efforts. As the 70s moved on, he got back to consciously crafting big hits, and he scored quite a few. Ram, Venus and Mars, and Band on the Run rank among the best Beatles solo albums, and all exhibit the kind of studio perfectionism that was absent on McCartney. On McCartney II, the polish is there, but that's partly down to improvements in home recording technology-- McCartney did much of the recording on his own at his farm in Scotland, and there's a similar low-pressure, anything-goes vibe to the final product. That said, this album is likely to be jarring for an unsuspecting McCartney or Beatles fan. It's largely experimental, devoting most of its songs to eccentric synth-pop that's just as weird as anything from the early days of new wave, and not all of it is compelling.
McCartney II's opener and first single, "Coming Up", wastes no time getting right into this startling territory, with a guitar part that could have been lifted from a Talking Heads song, buzzy keyboard hooks, and vocals that find McCartney singing through a filter and backing himself up with quirky falsetto. McCartney's discography is actually filled with strange little one-offs and experiments, including late-period work with Super Furry Animals and Fireman, but this one is unusual for the way he presented it as a central part of his output rather than a side project.
Elsewhere on the album, McCartney remains similarly difficult to pigeonhole. If I told you the instrumental "Front Parlour", with its tinny drum machine and sunny keyboard melody, was a 2009 blog hit by a lo-fi synth act, you'd likely believe me. And then there's "Temporary Secretary", a frankly irritating but still interesting song that combines frenzied synth programming with a self-consciously bizarre vocal-- McCartney sings as nasally as possible on the refrain, and tweaks it to sound robotic. Other songs turn away from this type of maximalist approach. "Summer's Day Song" is pretty and sparse, featuring just McCartney and a few keyboards. TLC-presaging single "Waterfalls" is even more bare, only McCartney and an electric piano, with a tiny dollop of synth and acoustic guitar.
Two other songs stand out on McCartney II, and they're as distinct from each other as this record is from McCartney. Album closer "One of These Days" is simply great, benefiting from a rudimentary approach that strips away the synths and drum machines that dominate McCartney II. Bonus track "Secret Friend", included on the second disc of this reissue, is also pretty jaw-dropping-- a 10-minute, beat-driven synth opus that shares plenty in common aesthetically with dance music a decade its junior. Though relegated to the B-side of the "Temporary Secretary" single, "Secret Friend" is among the most forward-looking things McCartney has recorded in his post-Beatles career.
Those McCartney II extras stand in sharp contrast with the bonus material for McCartney, which is largely inconsequential-- the live tracks are 1979 performances with Wings, hardly illuminating where McCartney was as an artist at the time he made the album. Still, McCartney is a very good record and deserves another look. And this is just about the perfect time to take another look at McCartney II, despite its flaws. Parts of the album sound oddly current; it's difficult to gauge whether McCartney II had any real influence on the synth-pop of the 80s, but its diffuse and slightly wobbly atmosphere certainly aligns with a great deal of recent music made on synths and drum machines. Though an odd couple in many ways, these two albums represent often-overlooked corners of McCartney's music, and they're worth rediscovering. | 2011-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 15, 2011 | 7.9 | 3f7a1416-bbac-403b-828e-853a007bc1f9 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The new box set includes demos, a live show, and a fascinating, stripped-down remix of the band’s 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul that reveals an alternate history of one of their most divisive records. | The new box set includes demos, a live show, and a fascinating, stripped-down remix of the band’s 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul that reveals an alternate history of one of their most divisive records. | The Replacements: Dead Man’s Pop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-replacements-dead-mans-pop/ | Dead Man’s Pop | The Replacements story is filled with what-ifs and near misses. Their legend, essentially, is that if the chips had fallen differently, they might have become a popular band and had success into the 1990s, like their friends and rivals R.E.M. What if they had played ball with their label? What if they hadn’t made so many enemies? What if they hadn’t been so fucked up?
In 1989, the question of the hour had to do with the band’s sixth album, Don’t Tell a Soul, and it goes something like this: What if they hadn’t released a record full of slick, radio-friendly pop-rock? With proper production, could this have been another classic? The question is asked because Don’t Tell a Soul was, for many years, the most maligned Replacements album, even if its reputation has improved some since then.
Dead Man’s Pop attempts to answer these questions. Featuring extensive notes from Bob Mehr, some of which are adapted from his essential Replacements biography Trouble Boys, the box set documents just about everything to do with Don’t Tell a Soul except for the finished album itself (Rhino reissued an expanded configuration in 2008). It aims to complicate the story of the record and rescue Paul Westerberg’s songs from production compromises made in service of a theoretical audience that never materialized.
Don’t Tell a Soul had an unusually complicated genesis, involving a new band member (guitarist Bob “Slim” Dunlap), two periods of recording, each with a different producer (Tony Berg oversaw early dates that were ultimately scrapped but are presented here, while Matt Wallace helmed the sessions that led to the album), a surprise drop-in from Tom Waits at the height of his fame, and a great deal of confusion about what Sire Records wanted from the band and vice versa. Amid all this turmoil, Westerberg was writing some very good songs that built on the softer, gentler material from the last couple of albums.
The heart of Dead Man’s Pop is a new mix and sequence of Don’t Tell a Soul inspired by the one Matt Wallace made just before he exited the project. Wallace wanted to mix the record himself, but could see the writing on the wall and knew the label wanted someone with a better ear for radio for the job (Chris Lord-Alge ultimately gave the record its modern-rock sheen). This was a common practice—track with a producer the band likes, get a corporation-approved pro to give it the proper polish (see: Nirvana). But in this case, the final mix became the record’s fatal flaw, and Westerberg himself even bad-mouthed it (“It sounded good until the label brought in people to mix it to make it sound like everything else on the radio,” he told Magnet in 2002). The quickie mix Wallace knocked out was thought lost until it turned up in Slim Dunlap’s basement and, once discovered, it served as the anchor for this set, which was named after the working title for the album.
Many differences are subtle—it’s not like they turn Don’t Tell a Soul into Stink—and these are still the same songs and the same performances rendered with a simpler and more intimate tone. The opening “Talent Show” is perhaps the greatest improvement—Westerberg’s vocal is naked, the drums are reserved, and it comes over more like a studio jam than something assembled from individual parts. The guitars on “I’ll Be You” are more twangy and less cheesy, to use a common pejorative from the time of the album’s release. “I Won’t,” easily the worst song on Don’t Tell a Soul, sounds better here without the deeply corny isolated bassline and a better balance among the instruments. “Asking Me Lies” is newly airy and light, with the backing vocals more prominent.
The common thread is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface, like the banjo in “Talent Show.” The set also re-sequences the album according to the Wallace tape. It’s more front-loaded now: No waiting until the second side to hear “I’ll Be You” and “Darlin One” (they are in slots No. 2 and 5, respectively). And ending the set with “Rock and Roll Ghost” after opening with “Talent Show” gives it a nice thematic frame, an innocent band taking a stab at one end and a fading relic thinking about the past at the other.
The second disc of the box contains work from the disastrous aborted Berg sessions, recorded in Bearsville, New York. It’s hard to get a sense of where the record might have gone from the evidence here—they are basically full-band demos of unfinished songs. While it’s enjoyable to hear “Achin’ to Be,” “I’ll Be You,” and “We’ll Inherit the Earth” in these versions, they sound more like run-throughs. Westerberg delivers the lyrics offhandedly, with plenty of vocalese placeholders.
Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” The six tracks taken from a drunken late-night session with Tom Waits—he was a fan of the band, and Westerberg of him—are of historical interest only. The two sound completely trashed and can barely play or even speak—a reminder it’s not always a tragedy when songs stay in the vault.
That doesn’t apply to the live set included on the other two discs, which document a concert from June 1989 in Milwaukee. For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. They played faster and crunchier than on record but the hooks were intact and, unlike a few years earlier, Westerberg remembered most of the words. And the setlist is stunning—the number of anthems they had on tap at this moment is almost unbelievable, drawing from 1984’s Let It Be through their then-new record and throwing in a few covers, including their terrific version of the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet.” It gets a little ragged toward the end, by which time the band was probably plastered (“Here Comes a Regular” is a mess), but the set holds up to repeated listens.
A few months after, the Mats would tour with Tom Petty and continue to unravel as Westerberg’s alcoholism consumed his life. All Shook Down followed in 1991, and then the band called it a day right as alternative music was poised to take off. And that was pretty much it for the Replacements until their reunion gigs this decade. Don’t Tell a Soul wasn’t the breakthrough anyone hoped for, but it turned out to be their best-selling album, which might explain why many bands later accused of ripping off the Replacements (the Goo Goo Dolls, Ryan Adams) sounded the most like this era, when acoustic guitars and hushed vocals were prominent in the mix.
Whether the new mix and additional context improve Don’t Tell a Soul is hard to say—especially for me, since I bought the album the day it came out and loved it for 30 years. In its original form, I related to this stoic guy from the Midwest raised to stifle his feelings choosing to explore vulnerability. To some people, that meant that the songs occasionally tipped over into self-pity or sentimentality, but these excesses seemed part of the emotionally messy package. It was music you swallowed whole, the good stuff and bad—like a handful of pills. At a certain age, you want nothing more than to feel special, and in Westerberg’s best songs on Don’t Tell a Soul, he offers hope that someone out there just might see the specialness in you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | September 26, 2019 | 8.2 | 3f7ecf8d-eb0d-43e0-b691-6b8d5b3bc6a5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The character Scarlett Johansson plays in Under The Skin is a blank-eyed cipher, a predator without apparent motivation. There is no horror more visceral than the horror of the impersonal, so it makes sense that Mica Levi, who composed the film's score, would turn to György Ligeti's masterful sense of elemental horror. The score has the feel of a thought process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation to. | The character Scarlett Johansson plays in Under The Skin is a blank-eyed cipher, a predator without apparent motivation. There is no horror more visceral than the horror of the impersonal, so it makes sense that Mica Levi, who composed the film's score, would turn to György Ligeti's masterful sense of elemental horror. The score has the feel of a thought process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation to. | Mica Levi: Under the Skin OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19239-mica-levi-under-the-skin-ost/ | Under the Skin OST | The character Scarlett Johansson plays in Under the Skin is a blank-eyed cipher, a predator without apparent motivation. There is no horror more visceral than the horror of the impersonal, so it makes sense that Mica Levi, composing the film's score, would turn to the master of elemental horror:György Ligeti, whose ability to gather masses of semitones into translucent wisps without a center made The Shining, which relied heavily on his work Lontano, the scariest movie ever made. (Watch that film with the music off, I still maintain, and it becomes a particularly caustic domestic comedy.)
The score opens with a locust plague of dry tremolos, the strings pressing down until the sound has reached a roar. It's a sound with tremendous menace and weight. From there, the roar shrinks into a whine, and enters a hazy nexus between digitally processed and live sound. It's an indeterminacy Levi worked hard to cultivate: "We were looking at the natural sound of an instrument to try and find something identifiably human in it, then slowing things down or changing the pitch of it to make it feel uncomfortable," she told The Guardian. Insectile, near-vocal sounds erupt across the tense, arid space of "Lipstick to Void," evoking either the Knife's berserker Shaking the Habitual or the processed strings from Britney Spears' "Toxic". It's an appropriate cross-section for the film, which veers between menace and sexuality and brilliantly cross-wires high-brain and low-groin impulses.
That hovering dust-cloud of strings, which Levi referred to as "like a beehive" in her and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer's recent Pitchfork interview, pops up repeatedly throughout the score with minor additions and tweaks representing the journey of Johansson's character: in "Meat to Maths", there are clanging bell-like sounds behind it, while in "Mirror to Vortex" it's half-submerged in the amplified sound of its own echo. In the context of the film, these additions feel like the messiness of lived experience muddying Johansson's template, the imprint of the lives she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends. The hollow knock of a single drum, like a single dragging foot, is another repeating theme, giving the score a reiterative, hesitant quality. Inasmuch as you can be invited into Johansson's character's head in Under the Skin, the music does the heavy lifting. The score has the feel of a thought process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation to.
The music unfolds as deliberately and as unconsciously as the dreamlike film itself. Levi drops in an arching, three-pitch motif at various points, one that lingers on its highest pitch the longest, like a hanging doubt. In "Lonely Void", this figure is colored in briefly by a furtive patch of tonal harmony, a startling appearance of warmth that scrubs itself out as quickly but leaves a powerful impression. There are other brief hints of tenderness, particularly in the unearthly pairing of "Bedroom" and "Love", which lifts the score entirely free from anxiety and into something exalted and sorrowful. Here, Levi's work comes closer to Vangelis than to Ligeti, and completes the film's mysterious arc. Levi's commitment to the film's themes is all-consuming, and the score is so tightly woven into the film's DNA that it is difficult to detach and experience as an album. However, the gorgeousness of the quavering synths on "Love" ask nothing of you than to be enjoyed. | 2014-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | April 17, 2014 | 7.3 | 3f87f0dc-770c-4a4a-85df-42b88eee2503 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
This lo-fi opus from the young rapper/producer mixes Three 6 Mafia chanting, woozy Wu-Tang loops, DJ Screw wheeze, and Mortal Kombat sound effects. | This lo-fi opus from the young rapper/producer mixes Three 6 Mafia chanting, woozy Wu-Tang loops, DJ Screw wheeze, and Mortal Kombat sound effects. | SpaceGhostPurrp: Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15449-blvcklvnd-rvdix-666-1991/ | Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) | Though nobody's idea of the next big thing, Spaceghostpurrp, a 20-year-old from Miami who makes hypnagogic stripper anthems, received a strange co-sign from L.A. Weekly's blog: They called him "Odd Future's Cosmic Cousin." To be clear, Spaceghostpurrp will not make a game-changing appearance on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon", and outside of being another young skate kid fascinated by video games and Satan, he doesn't have much in common with Tyler and company. If a comparison must be drummed-up to sell this very weird, really good, but inarguably niche stuff, let's go with "Clam Casino's evil druggie drop-out cousin from the South."
Like last year's NASA: The Mixtape, Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) is obsessed with the earliest, ugliest Three 6 Mafia releases (particularly Underground, Vol. 1: 1991-1994) and follows that tradition of creepy club music while slyly updating it as well. "Possessed", Blvcklvnd's intro track, is lo-fi Lex Luger that tops the oppressive feeling of all those "B.M.F."-style beats, but toys with their pop appeal, thanks to a catchy, simple hook that is screamed like a black metal vocal.
Further separating his style from anything resembling conventional hip-hop, Spaceghostpurrp doesn't care for proper mixing (you might go insane listening to this on headphones) and he piles on video game sound effects and dub reggae-like noises. "Captain Planet" is a contemplative bouncing moan, like some lost Oval track; hypnotic synth blasts turn the ridiculously titled "Suck a Dick For 2011" and hazy stripper anthem "Grind on Me" into something transcendent. By the way, there is lots of stuff like "Suck a Dick For 2011" on here, which means Spaceghostpurrp is also very into 90s rap's misogyny (lots of strip club talk and "bitch" shouts), so be warned.
The last bunch of tracks climb out of the sizzurp murk and go for a 90s New York rap style. "Legend of the East Pyramyds" does moaning soul sample rap better than it has any right to, and then it piles on Halloween sound effects. ODB tribute "Osiris of the East Pyramids Blackland R.I.P. ODB" consists of synth tones floating ominously, merging the streetwise paranoia of New York and the verge-of-death doom of Houston. It's one of this year's most haunting songs even though it sounds like a mash-up of underground hip-hop from 15 years ago.
Born in 1991, Spaceghostpurrp's really just another one of those indie bedroom producers approaching the music of his earliest years, pairing it with very of-the-moment sonic decisions, and exposing the ways that once disparate arenas of sound mesh together. Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) is a mess of Three 6 Mafia-chanting, woozy Wu-Tang loops, DJ Screw wheeze, and Mortal Kombat and Godzilla sound effects, all paired with an off-the-dome rapping style that's equal parts Lil Wayne and Lil B. It's as if James Ferraro Lawnmower Man-ed his way into a rap rarity message board and soundtracked the journey. | 2011-06-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-06-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 2, 2011 | 7.1 | 3f894f15-9f1d-4dfc-9104-4925fd79cf36 | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
The UK producer’s debut album fashions a distinctive aesthetic out of asymmetrical machine beats and dabs of electronic melody, balancing academic concerns with rave-tested thrills. | The UK producer’s debut album fashions a distinctive aesthetic out of asymmetrical machine beats and dabs of electronic melody, balancing academic concerns with rave-tested thrills. | Rian Treanor: ATAXIA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rian-treanor-ataxia/ | ATAXIA | Rian Treanor’s musical M.O. might best be summed up by the title of his second EP, Pattern Damage. The young British producer and visual artist uses asymmetrical rhythms and pattern modulation to pry open the sounds of electro, bleep techno, and speed garage, scattering the components into new shapes that are dazzling and danceable. The results, as on the 2018 standout “Position_B1,” resemble dance music that has curled back in on itself, forming unsteady sequences that the human brain can just about process.
Treanor has said that the rhythmic structures on ATAXIA, his debut album, are stricter and more focused than his previous work, exploring apparently contradictory ideas such as “irregular symmetry.” For an artist who once smashed Whigfield’s Eurodance hit “Saturday Night” into an unlikely underground sensation, this shift seems puzzling, and ATAXIA’s weaker tracks suffer from a certain academic dryness. “ATAXIA A2” and “ATAXIA C1” combine fussily obtuse drum rhythms with sparse machine melodies that spin around in opaque, ever-changing circles, while “ATAXIA A1” wastes a wonderfully disjointed beat on a synth melody so understated that it might as well not exist.
Yet the line between success and failure here is cigarette-paper thin. Treanor’s production—a tightly coiled spring of asymmetrical machine beats and dabs of electronic melody—is so distinctive that, aesthetically, little separates the album’s weaker tracks from its out-and-out bangers. “ATAXIA B1” is a sonic sibling to “ATAXIA A2,” which precedes it. But on “B1” the rhythm is itchily intense, its polyrhythmic vigor playing off against the central synth riff like a murderous ballet that builds in an electrical frenzy.
At moments like these, ATAXIA feels wonderfully alive. For all the apparent studiousness in Treanor’s musical methods, he says his music is “intended to make people’s bodies move in unpredictable ways,” a goal reflected, perhaps a little insensitively, in the album’s title. (Common symptoms of ataxia include a lack of coordination and the deterioration of fine motor skills, according to the National Ataxia Foundation.) Certainly, you can imagine a track like “ATAXIA D1,” which pits distressed UK garage swing against a nagging riff in the vein of DJ Mujava’s “Township Funk,” working wonders among clubbers for whom irregular symmetry is less of a concern than the queue for the bar. Best of all, though, is “ATAXIA D3,” a track that dispenses with drums in favor of cut-up vocals and insouciant organ stabs that nod to New Jersey garage don (and Daft Punk collaborator) Todd Edwards. It’s here that the album finally comes up for air.
There is something rather noble about the way Treanor’s music flirts with failure. If human beings are essentially pattern-finding machines, as Michael Shermer argues in his book How We Believe, then messing with these structures has powerful effects, both positive and negative. Treanor told Resident Advisor that the human ability to recognize patterns in music “might be why we find some things funky or some things hysterical or some things boring.” ATAXIA has moments of all three, running the gamut across funk, feverish entertainment, and frustratingly dry-eyed experiments. Throughout, however, it remains startlingly original—a powerful piece of work from a sonic adventurer of rare intellectual clarity. | 2019-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | March 19, 2019 | 7.5 | 3f8e0415-07df-4e63-aee9-3280837c61e1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Vampire Weekend’s third album is a remarkable progression from a band that was already functioning at a high level. The songs are more spontaneous and dynamic and, along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires finds the group taking a leap forward into emotional directness. | Vampire Weekend’s third album is a remarkable progression from a band that was already functioning at a high level. The songs are more spontaneous and dynamic and, along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires finds the group taking a leap forward into emotional directness. | Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17963-vampire-weekend-modern-vampires-of-the-city/ | Modern Vampires of the City | “It’s really hard to even talk about the internet without seeming instantly corny,” Ezra Koenig told Pitchfork recently, “even the word ‘blog’ sounds a little grandma-y.” He should know. The Vampire Weekend singer and lyricist gave up on his own Blogspot site, Internet Vibes, seven years ago, as he finished up his English studies at Columbia University (the final post’s title: “I HATE BLOGGING”). But before he graduated from the ye olde blogosphere, Koenig held forth on a vast array of topics—from geography, to Wellington boots, to music writer Robert Christgau’s allegedly unfair critique of Billy Joel’s oeuvre—looking at everything from a incisively self-aware, curious, and optimistic angle. What's most impressive is the way he’s able to connect art and ideas from different eras and continents into a kind of ecstatic worldview. One particularly inspired ramble spins an analytic web from a friend’s visit to Morocco, the history of the Strait of Gibraltar, a 1984 interview between Bob Dylan and Bono, the film The Secret of Roan Inish, and National Geographic’s famed Afghan refugee cover—and not only does it make sense, it’s written in a way that’s funny and smart and completely inclusive. Pretty good for a 22-year-old kid from middle-class New Jersey. Now 28, Koenig’s creative medium has changed, but his omnivorous cultural appetite has not.
Take “Step,” the third song on Vampire Weekend’s third album, Modern Vampires of the City—the record that is already forcing one-time haters of this band to rethink their entire lives. At its core, the song reads like an ode to obsessive music fandom in which the object of Koenig’s affection is “entombed within boombox and walkman.” Modest Mouse are name-checked. But the sense of infatuation extends beyond a list of influences and is embedded into the music itself. The chorus and parts of the melody are borrowed from wordy Oakland rap act Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl”—which itself samples Grover Washington Jr.’s version of a Bread song called “Aubrey.” But “Step” avoids back-patting nostalgia and debunks bogus generational hierarchies while using the past to inspire the present. It’s also melancholy, with Vampire Weekend musical mastermind Rostam Batmanglij surrounding Koenig’s musings with lilting harpsichord ambience. Because, as we know, music is a young man’s pursuit. “Wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth,” Koenig sings.
Still, Vampire Weekend make a damn good case for wisdom all across Modern Vampires. Yes, this is a more grown-up album. It largely trades in the Africa-inspired giddiness of their first two records for a sound that’s distinctly innate and closer to the ear. There’s more air in these songs, more spontaneity, more dynamics. The overarching themes—death and a dubious sense of faith—are certainly Serious. But you never feel like you're being preached at while listening to this album. Koenig and company are probably more clever and gifted than you, sure—but they’re not rubbing your face in it or anything. Their message is one of collective understanding and betterment, and Modern Vampires is the kind of album that’ll have you googling for Buddhist temples and Old Testament allusions at 3 a.m. while listening to reggae great Ras Michael (who’s sampled on opener “Obvious Bicycle”). Now, you don’t have to get obsessed to enjoy this music, but it’s presented with such care that you can’t help but want to learn about its deeper meanings. So while Koenig gave up a potential teaching career to take his chances as a rock singer, he’s still doling out knowledge in his own way.
Though the record often traverses in darkness—the zipped-tight “Finger Back” alludes to historic atrocities and brutality while “Hudson,” easily the band’s bleakest track to date, imagines an apocalyptic Manhattan—there’s also hope here. Partly because Vampire Weekend seem to have internalized all of the positive traits of their internet-soaked generation while resisting the ugly ones: They’ll offer jokes and humanity on Twitter without navel-gazing; they’ll play a concert for a credit-card company while roping in Steve Buscemi for promo videos that are no-shit funny; they’ll use the tools of modernity to expand their universe rather than contract it. And then they’ll go ahead and crack your heart in two.
Along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires has the band taking a leap forward into emotional directness. Koenig and Batmanglij truly seem of one mind here, as the vocals and music interact with each other in an effortless flow. While skronks and snares pop on “Diane Young,” the singer matches the live-fast intensity hit-for-hit. The song is a dissection of the 27 Club rock’n’roll myth, where Koenig’s voice on the sly “baby, baby, baby” bridge is manipulated to intoxicating effect.
Then there’s “Hannah Hunt.” In some sense, it seems like Vampire Weekend’s entire career thus far has led to this one song. It begins with the hiss of wind and some vague background chatter—the sounds of the everyday—before it’s all quickly tuned out in favor of Batmanglij’s piano and bassist Chris Baio’s upright plucks. Koenig comes in soft, telling of a couple on a cross-country road trip. His details—crawling vines, mysterious men of faith, newspaper kindling—are sparse, delicate, perfect. And then, after two minutes and 40 seconds of quiet beauty, the song blooms, and Koenig lets it absolutely rip: “If I can’t trust you then damn it, Hannah/There’s no future/There’s no answer/Though we live on the U.S. dollar/You and me, we got our own sense of time.” On an album preoccupied with the ominous ticking of clocks, this is the moment that stops them cold.
Koenig has said in recent interviews that the band’s three albums make up a trilogy. “Hannah Hunt” could be a sobering continuation of Contra’s Springsteen-ian “Run,” where two people decide to up and leave their known lives in search of some sort of American transcendence. There’s also a perilous chandelier at the center of new track “Everlasting Arms,” perhaps a callback to the hanging lights that cover the band’s debut LP. And the Modern Vampires font is the same exact one used in a trailer for Koenig’s absurd-looking college-era werewolf movie, from which Vampire Weekend got its name. These little links are not only satisfying, but inevitable. After years of engaging with anything and everything in reach, Vampire Weekend are now a primary source in their own right. | 2013-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | May 13, 2013 | 9.3 | 3f98c436-fed1-4ca9-852f-5a6959ff5e89 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
New York City’s most consistent metallurgists offer a deliberate break from their past on their seventh and eighth albums. A decade into a prolific career, Krallice prove newly elusive. | New York City’s most consistent metallurgists offer a deliberate break from their past on their seventh and eighth albums. A decade into a prolific career, Krallice prove newly elusive. | Krallice: Loüm / Go Be Forgotten | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/krallice-loum-go-be-forgotten/ | Loüm / Go Be Forgotten | By now, Krallice feel like a known entity. For nearly a decade, New York City’s most consistent metallurgists have steadily defined and refined a grand approach to black metal reappraisal. Already veterans of a half-dozen ambitiously athletic instrumental acts, guitarists Mick Barr and Colin Marston use their guitars to stretch the basic shapes of primeval riffs into high-treble, high-tremolo spirals. Drummer Lev Weinstein and bassist Nicholas McMaster have long been more than a rhythm section, warping the shape and powering the stamina of Krallice’s early 18-minute monsters with a sense of time that seemed to contract and expand. For six albums (and the essential EP, Hyperion), Krallice have sharpened each of those elements, contouring them to fit one another with near-peerless precision. They seemed, by this point, a machine.
But on their seventh and eighth albums—released during the last six weeks, without fanfare and in quick succession—Krallice offers a deliberate break from what had become a predictive past. On the brief but powerful Loüm, Krallice links with its first-ever special guest, Neurosis co-founder and bassist Dave Edwardson. Though a steadfast backup vocalist with his main act, Edwardson steps up front here, his brusque and hoarse shout clearing the brambles ahead of Krallice’s coiled strikes. He adds careful layers of synthesizer, too, a harbinger for the sudden shift on Go Be Forgotten, Krallice’s most unexpected and revelatory album since very near its start. An unruly mix of vintage rippers and sidewinding explorations, Go Be Forgotten is a stream of surprises, from an opening cover of a black metal obscurity to a swoon-worthy instrumental farewell of chiming guitars and droning keys. In fact, on the masterfully adventurous title track, Marston steps away from the guitar entirely, using the synthesizer to add broad symphonic swells behind the band’s meticulous motion. Nearly a decade into a prolific career, Krallice proves newly elusive.
Separated by a generation or two of the American metal vanguard, Edwardson and Krallice certainly are odd bedfellows. Edwardson helped build the framework of modern doom, while Krallice emerged as arguably the most arduous element of the last decade’s U.S. black metal renaissance. But on Loüm, Edwardson lends a kind of blue-collar approachability to Krallice, which has historically used mystic abstraction and fantasy escapades for esoteric lyrics that fit their musical mazes. Edwardson instead arrives as a veteran punk here, lampooning the rich and powerful and grimly surveying a world that seems to be teetering on collapse. “Little man, you’re useless to me,” he stammers like Henry Rollins during “Rank Mankind,” an oligarch’s first-person screed for the commoner. “I hate you/You have no value.” During the fast and agile “Kronus Deposed,” his warnings about “the fear that permeates this world” are given weight by his booming voice, and tumble like loose rocks in a clothes dryer. The bulk of Loüm is prime Krallice, led by a reshaped edge.
The unlikely combination works best, however, on a track that sounds like little else in Krallice’s discography—“Loüm,” an entrancing vision of escaping enemy lines by climbing a seemingly insurmountable obelisk. Krallice packs a symphony’s worth of drama and suspense into these eight minutes, with distinct but connected sections that animate the narrative arc like a movie’s score. (And speaking of scores, there’s even a hint of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western twang in the bridge.) Edwardson plays perfectly the part of the calloused survivor, his voice as damaged and scarred as the body of the fleeing protagonist. On “Loüm,” experience and enthusiasm push one another ahead, with Krallice and Edwardson navigating new territory together.
Given that spirit, and the overall sense that Krallice has tired of its own black metal revisionism, the hint of nostalgia that first ripples through Go Be Forgotten may seem discordant. Both “Failed Visionary Cults” and “Chaos of the Living” are Krallice throwbacks, two- and three-minute romps that quickly show how much more expressive and intricate the band has become. Likewise, an opening interpretation of “This Forest for Which We Have Killed”—an exceptionally deep cut from early U.S. black metal band Beastlor—proves how much Krallice has developed its trademark sound. They lift the riff and the lyrics from the original but reshape the rest entirely until it plays like a vestige of their earliest, meanest work. It is a nod to history that overtakes heritage, recasting the past with the power of the present.
But the rest of Go Be Forgotten is squarely focused on imagining Krallice’s future, on recognizing that a band that’s focused on the same few elements for a decade can stand new input. There’s an engrossing synthesizer fantasy, a track that newly tests the limits of just how much Krallice can mess with time (“Ground Prayer”), and an epic that may just be the most adventurous thing the band has ever written. Like “Loüm,” “Go Be Forgotten” was written by Barr, and it’s every bit as involved. Opening with a clenched black metal tirade, it shifts gears again and again, from a high-flying guitar solo to a synth tangent and back to both again. You can feel the members recalibrating their highly nuanced instrumental interplay in real time, working their way into a new mold. “I sit and stare at the future/Stuck still,” he screams against the tumult. “Letting it all pass.” That’s an observation, mind you, not an admission: This is the sound of Krallice, suddenly and absolutely unstuck again. | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | null | December 2, 2017 | 7.6 | 3f9b1a70-f9f6-48c4-ac06-fa27e647d189 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On its promising debut full-length, this Portland outfit mixes catchy psych-pop with a surprising and convincing undercurrent of funk. | On its promising debut full-length, this Portland outfit mixes catchy psych-pop with a surprising and convincing undercurrent of funk. | Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Unknown Mortal Orchestra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15539-unknown-mortal-orchestra/ | Unknown Mortal Orchestra | Perhaps we'd all be better off if it was always "all about the music, man." But until recently, most discussion of Unknown Mortal Orchestra understandably went from lauding the unshakeable hooks of "Ffunny Ffriends" and "How Can You Luv Me?" to wondering why, true to their name, they remained anonymous. Protracted mystery can cause as much skepticism as the most overt press blitz, and information had been scarce since they popped up last year with a Bandcamp page of intriguing and untraceable songs. Some time after, those songs started being performed live by human beings who do mundane things like wear Baja drug rugs, live in Portland, and maintain an active Twitter feed. But there's still something eerily extraterrestrial about their debut LP, as if it were something that fell from the sky completely intact. You wonder if it might be an artifact from some psych-rock acid casualty, a long-forgotten Kiwi-popper, or an Elephant 6 offshoot. You want to poke at it, prod it, and try to carbon date it.
None of the ambiguity would matter if UMO didn't spring to life from the first happily bopping seconds of "Ffunny Ffriends" and provide a half hour of rich analog sizzle that extends far beyond its meager recording budget (seriously, try and find it on vinyl, if possible). Though obviously more camera shy than Sleigh Bells or Cults, UMO represents a similar merger of simple and catchy melodies lovingly marooned in a raw, buzzcut production that puts an emphasis on the beats. The major difference for UMO is that their grit radiates from the inside out. Funk too often comes off as a jittery affectation or genre exercise even for rock bands who are pretty good at it. But for bandleader Ruban Nielson, it feels like a natural songwriting mode. The tortured but deceptively joyous hook from "How Can You Luv Me?" does plenty to draw you in, to the point where it might take the fifth listen to focus on just how limber the rhythm section is. It's hardly alone in sounding like a readymade breakbeat, so it's not surprising that the cratedigging likes of El-P, ?uestlove, and Das Racist have all taken to tweeting UMO's praises.
But the sound wouldn't matter without songwriting. When a singer gets praised for incorporating his or her voice like another instrument in the mix, it's usually a reference to texture. And while Nielson often works in an androgynous, bristling tone that's certainly ingratiating on its own merits, it's more remarkable for its sophisticated approach to melody. Whether gripping the thrilling hairpin turns of "Bicycle", arranging complex lattices of syncopation on "Thought Ballune", or simply doubling down on his own leads on "Ffunny Ffriends", he converses with the inventive guitar playing like he's making a sales pitch. The riffs tell you what you're gonna hear, the vocals respond, and they link up in a way that makes everything so welcoming and familiar by the middle of the song itself. Combined with an expert use of space rare for such a lo-fi record, UMO manages a unique immersive and psychedelic quality without relying on the usual array of bong-ripping effects.
As with Treats or Cults, it's easy to view the band's ability to do just a few things very well as a potential liability. But many of UMO's charms come while they jab at their limitations. "Little Blu House" dots its airy landscape with harmonies that seem to change color with each stacked layer, and closer "Boy Witch" indulges in some intriguing post-punk guitar damage that could indicate a future direction. That said, the track stuffed with the most experimentation ends up being the weakest. "Nerve Damage" is part envelope filter-hotdogging and part goony thrash, but pretty much all filler, ultimately. But hell, being able to recognize Unknown Mortal Orchestra's imperfection, however minor, lends their debut some humanity. As does being able to see a press photo of the shaggy but high-functioning space cadets who made it. | 2011-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / True Panther | June 22, 2011 | 8.1 | 3fa44ee3-13b4-443b-adff-7b92a8e340f4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Mixtape mainstay issues his proper debut; it serves as a conduit between the commercially lucrative South and a lagging East Coast scene. | Mixtape mainstay issues his proper debut; it serves as a conduit between the commercially lucrative South and a lagging East Coast scene. | Jeezy: Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8916-lets-get-it-thug-motivation-101/ | Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 | Young Jeezy's proper debut has been a long time coming, though it's been a treat hearing his weathered, weezy rasp on mixtapes (most notably DJ Drama's Trap or Die). He is a conduit between the South, where most of today's commercially lucrative hip-hop originates, and a lagging East Coast scene. Let's Get It is not the best rap album of the year and Jeezy is hardly the world's greatest lyricist. But he slings a sometimes-creepy, sometimes-clever, sometimes-chaotic charisma and he rides that magnetism to a mostly brilliant solo entrance to the bigs.
On opener "Thug Motivation 101" Jeezy pounds his chest and growls, "I used to hit the kitchen lights, cockroaches er'where/ Now I hit the kitchen lights, there's marble floors er'where" over tense, eerie keyboards. It's a joyous moment but also the scariest album opener I've heard this year. He breathes hard on the track and stares down his microphone like it hates him. He punctuates the song with his calling card. By now Da Snowman's ad-libs are things of legend. Unbridled "Daaaayuums" and everlasting "Yeeeeaaahs" or "Thaaaaat's riiiiight"s punctuate each song. For most MCs this would weigh down their words. For Jeezy, it's the essence of his persona: maniacal shouting, catchphrases, euphoria, instant gratification. There's no parsing through flow and lyrics and drum machines. He hits hard and quickly.
"My Hood", while cheap, easy, and out of character for the steadily mean-mugged Jeezy, is blissful, thanks to a chintzy Casio beat and some sort of My Hood=Our Hood claptrap. "Get Ya Mind Right" runs on horror movie organ fuel, like a Goblin-Argento soundtrack redux. "And Then What" finds Mannie Fresh in fine, fat-faced form while Jeezy heads down to his "Auntie House" before he goes boom, boom clap. "Go Crazy" is the height of the Mason-Dixon bridge. It is also the best 1998 Roc-A-Fella drug rap song in some time, featuring producer Don Cannon's spare tom rolls, classy horns and a killer chorus. A recent remix featuring New York kings Jay-Z and Fat Joe was one of the more obvious (and thrilling) things to happen to hip-hop in recent months and confims Jeezy's universality.
All the fun shit aside, at 19 tracks and no skits, Let's Get It is long and can become a chore to wade through. Barring the Bun B-assisted classic "Trap or Die" and the soul-jockeying "Talk to Em" the album's second half really lags and Jeezy's allure ultimately wears. Why more artists don't follow the Illmatic code remains a mystery. We buy mixtapes for a reason, dudes. | 2005-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | August 14, 2005 | 7.7 | 3fa4c470-bb87-4a99-8a19-a2474937945f | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Minnesota-based musician Austin Lunn splits his love of black metal and Appalachian folk into two distinct halves on this double LP. | Minnesota-based musician Austin Lunn splits his love of black metal and Appalachian folk into two distinct halves on this double LP. | Panopticon: The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panopticon-the-scars-of-man-on-the-once-nameless-wilderness-i-and-ii/ | The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II) | When Austin Lunn seeks musical inspiration, he disappears into the wilderness: the rolling Kentucky hills where he learned the ropes of life and musicianship; the Norwegian mountain ranges where he pushed his earthly limits in adulthood; the perma-frosted Minnesota forests where he presently lives; and the music of Panopticon, his bluegrass-metal fusion band, where all the aforementioned scenes coalesce. “I live way out in the woods now and have really grown to love it and cherish the solitude,” Lunn told Invisible Oranges in 2014, distancing himself from the project’s radical roots. “I feel like in a lot of ways the music reflects that...I am ready to focus on what I think is right and beautiful in this world.”
In the Bandcamp description for Panopticon’s new double album, The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II), Lunn emphasizes his Luddite tendencies in earnest terms. He entreats us to avoid playing the album on laptops because “it will sound like shit,” warns us of its midway pivot to Appalachian folk, and suggests fans listen during a long hike or long evening by the campfire. Lest you misconstrue this as self-important nature-boy schtick (or, god forbid, “hipster metal”), know that Lunn isn’t particularly concerned with selling an image to the public. “NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON WAS ASKED TO REVIEW THIS ALBUM,” he vows on the same Bandcamp page. It’s an understandable note, considering that The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness features some of his riskiest, most intimate music to date.
Lunn has a tendency to speak black-metal’s praises sensually, and almost invariably in terms of the physical environments that spawned his forebears. He’s described Falls of Rauros as making music that “smells of ocean breeze,” and singled out Ulver’s iconic album Bergtatt for evoking the Norwegian wilderness he beheld so long ago. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness applies a similarly synesthetic approach, molding black metal into pastorals with vivid stories to match.
Following a relaxing introduction to the wild on “Watch the Lights Fade,” a sparse instrumental comprising accordion sighs, crackling fires, and little else, Lunn unleashes hell with “Blätimen,” a stunning, nearly seven-minute ode to a Norwegian black metal musician who froze to death walking home through the woods. Lunn conjures a Scandanavian blizzard with hollow, weeping riffs bursting into the sonic space like wind gusts as the blast-beats shatter around him. “The Moss Beneath the Snow” proves more literal in its naturalism, concealing the coming maelstrom beneath a burbling brook; the placid interlude “A Ridge Where the Tall Pines Once Stood” pairs loon laughs with a soothing reading of the late environmentalist Sigurd Olson (who also died alone in the forest, in this case, while snowshoeing). The only things missing from this heavy metal camping trip are the corpse paint and the cops.
As Lunn foretold, the second half of The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness marks a sudden stylistic shift, with a majority of its eight songs swapping leaden fury for simple, understated Americana. None of them come even remotely close to capturing the drama of the first half. That’s partly because Lunn’s homespun mix buries his hoarse melodies beneath squeaky bluegrass tracking on otherwise-solid songs like “The Wandering Ghost,” and partly because the merger of fury and folk (emphasis on the fury) is what makes Panopticon so compelling in the first place. To cleave his sound in half is to weaken it, at least temporarily. Black metal and blue-collar country might come from two different lineages, but they’ve got more in common than you’d expect: the ever-present pain, the untameable spirit, the tragic beauty, the freedom to feel both everything at once and nothing at all. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness works best when it stuns through synchronicity, rather than separation. | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Bindrune | April 24, 2018 | 7.3 | 3fb0f731-1900-4fc9-95a2-c660bef9c652 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
The Chicago singer-songwriter’s debut LP appears at first to be fairly straightforward, but it quietly eludes convention and expectation, creating its own hermetic world. | The Chicago singer-songwriter’s debut LP appears at first to be fairly straightforward, but it quietly eludes convention and expectation, creating its own hermetic world. | Tenci: My Heart Is an Open Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tenci-my-heart-is-an-open-field/ | My Heart Is An Open Field | Three scrapes on a guitar string. They arrive each time Jess Shoman finishes the chorus of “Blue Spring,” a song from My Heart Is an Open Field, the Chicago songwriter’s beguiling first album as Tenci. “If spring is green, then I am blue,” she sings, elongating and repeating the last word, twisting its pitch and inflection each time, sending it sailing like a paper plane on a gracefully turbulent journey toward the ground. And then the guitar scrapes, faint but forceful: chrk chrk chrk. The arrangement is minimal, the melodies oblique, placing these seemingly incidental sounds at the forefront of your attention, turning them into the song’s most immediate hook. The scrapes, and the circuitous vocal line they punctuate, express something foggy and difficult to verbalize, beyond the simple dichotomy of the refrain. “Blue Spring” is not about spring, or sadness, so much as it is about chrk chrk chrk.
My Heart Is an Open Field, which Shoman assembled with a loose crew of musicians from Chicago’s DIY scene, including guitarist Spencer Radcliffe and bassist Tina Scarpello, appears initially to be a fairly straightforward indie songwriter album. But it quietly eludes convention and expectation, creating its own hermetic world. At times the music’s minimalism recalls the hush of the Velvet Underground’s self-titled album, and at others it gives a small-scale approximation of post-rock. Shoman signals her sensibility with the first notes of opener “Earthquake,” sending crackly transmissions from one guitar to another, a moment of pointillistic interplay untethered to any particular rhythm. When the beat does arrive, it’s the familiar 6/8 of a sock hop slow dance, set to three chords that loop uninterrupted for several minutes. “Stay,” Shoman intones like a mantra, as the three chords reduce to one and the song sighs to a close.
The compositions throughout are similarly bareboned, combining stock gestures with patient repetition and moments of bracing originality. The instrumentation is sparse but endlessly inventive, forgoing any excess that might draw your ear away from the tiny details, which are paramount. A cello introduces “Blue Spring” with one repeated note. “Serpent” briefly unravels into noisy sprawl, then recomposes itself and continues as if undisturbed. A synthesizer arrives to double the central acoustic guitar figure of “Joy 2” and the effect is like sunshine appearing suddenly through a canopy of trees. Shoman and her collaborators exhibit a zen-like respect for silence and choose the sounds they use to fill it with great care, suggesting new possibilities with each palette.
Chief among these sounds is Shoman’s uncanny voice, high and reedy, with an unsteady vibrato that suggests someone very old or very young. (She took the name Tenci as a tribute to her grandmother Hortencia, who appears on My Heart Is an Open Field via a heartbreaking voicemail at the end of “Blue Spring.” Shoman says her own voice reminds her of Hortencia singing while doing chores, which is not hard to believe.) Sometimes, she uses her unconventional instrument in conventional ways, but the music is most exciting when she abandons naturalism in favor of a stranger, more expressionistic approach. “Fly fast, kiss fast, fight fast, gone gone,” she sings on “Joy,” slurring the consonants together until the words become nearly unintelligible, and the hisses of her breath and clicks of her tongue convey their own meaning. The idiosyncrasies of her singing, set to rudimentary musical ideas expressed on a small and motley collection of instruments, all work together toward a mysterious sustained atmosphere, frequently achieving something greater than the sum of their parts; My Heart Is an Open Field shares some unlikely commonalities with the junkyard blues of Tom Waits, though it rarely sounds similar on the surface.
Shoman’s lyrics are often surreal, offering resonant phrases strung together with ambiguous logic. Images repeat across songs, adding to the sense that the album is its own tiny universe: sweat, blood, skin being picked at. “You’re a dog in the window/I’m a loose piece of twine,” Shoman sings in “Hair Sticks.” Two songs later, she inverts the roles: “I can’t pretend I’m not a dog tied to a porch.” “Joy” contains a few of the best of these one-liners, which add up to a celebration of happiness as something ineffable, whose worth is inextricable from its difficulty to sustain: “The wind’s already brushed your hair”; “Make a cake, forget to eat it”; “I’m full of desire, don’t know if its mine.”
The two-part suite that begins with “Joy” is the most ambitious, moving, and fully realized passage of My Heart Is an Open Field. Other songs, like “Earthquake” and “Hair Sticks,” are fascinating, but they can also feel unfinished. There’s a tension between wanting more—the pleasant surprise of a new harmony, the power of a narrative to lead us from one line to the next—and recognizing that such concessions might rob the music of its power. “Joy” and “Joy 2” resolve that tension, tracing an incandescent arc that is neither incomplete nor conventional. The final line of “Joy” poignantly imagines an infant being carried off to bed by her mother: “Baby’s tired/Joy give her kiss goodbye.” After Shoman sings it a few times, the music dissolves into a wash of brushed cymbals and the album’s most important recurring motif: a single note, pulsing steadily.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Keeled Scales | June 9, 2020 | 7.3 | 3fb2b3b3-47d6-4180-8851-9d0c16997170 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Filled with muted vocals and no wave melodies, the Bay Area group’s debut album uses 1980s horror tropes and video games to reflect on contemporary alienation. | Filled with muted vocals and no wave melodies, the Bay Area group’s debut album uses 1980s horror tropes and video games to reflect on contemporary alienation. | Provoker: Body Jumper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/provoker-body-jumper/ | Body Jumper | By the time musician Jonathan Lopez and vocalist Christian Petty crossed paths at a screening of the 2016 black comedy horror film, The Greasy Strangler, Provoker was already Lopez’s side project—an outlet he conceived in hopes of composing film scores—and Petty had been making R&B music of his own. After bringing bassist Wil Palacios and drummer Kristian Moreno into the fold, and releasing the EP Dark Angel in 2018, Lopez and Petty built up a fanbase on Instagram from scratch. Once their online aesthetic was realized, and COVID-19 halted the band’s 2020 North American tour, the Bay Area distortion bros attempted to become modern translators of anguish and torment in the digital age. Filled with muted vocals and no wave melodies, their debut album, Body Jumper, uses 1980s horror tropes and video games to reflect on contemporary alienation.
Made up of Lopez’s cultural mementos and Petty’s sometimes overwrought collection of 1980s motifs, the record fortifies itself with the past in order to engage with the present. The cover art looks like a still pulled from Videodrome or The Fly, and each song summons an accompanying car chase across a glistening cityscape. When Petty introduces warped vocals to the sinister backing tracks (made up of an amalgam of metal, punk, and UK trip-hop), he conjures visions of Echo and the Bunnymen in a mosh pit full of E-boys.
The characters on the album are all projections of one person playing a video game, and each song is a new level with different faces but identical consequences. It’s jarring to see each transition accumulate torments that grow more sinister with each pop hook. “Blue Sheen” meditates on losing faith in one’s ability to love another person; “Bugs and Humans” oscillates between the perspective of a child and his adult self, mourning the mistakes that come with growing up. Both songs race slurring vocals across a blistering drum machine, creating the illusion that our narrator is tethered to the front seat of a sports car in Gran Turismo but can’t help looking back.
The album revolves around a set of back-to-back tracks. On “Rose in a Glass,” Petty tells the story of a detective combing a noir-soaked city for a missing person; there is no happy ending, only an unresolved swelling tension. We transition then to the slow dissociation of “Spell Strike,” where the character’s defeatism takes shape as an RPG in a final level fight with an evil fairy boss, lamenting a metaphorical unrequited love. The two protagonists are the same, in that they are fighting against emotional turmoil, each transition relaying the transgressions of Petty’s own apathy under the disguise of different skins.
By focusing on the plights of fictional characters—private investigators, Undertale lookalikes, elven warriors, NPCs—Petty interrogates the limits of technological immersion and how it affects our perception. “Still I can’t compute your love/An illogical surrender/For me I’m just a computer/I receive I’m not the sender,” he sings on “NPC,” pivoting the focus onto the private lives of non-player characters. By pinning inadequacy onto them, Petty’s lyricism evokes a devastation that is familiar to the players we control as well. He covers similar territory on “Spawn Kill,” growing despondent at the fatality of in-game, multiplayer rebirth. What’s the use of eternal return if you are only going back to die again? That torture is hidden behind the metaphors on Body Jumper, even in their redundancy. Once you’ve waded through the muck of familiar gaming buzzwords and imagery, you’ll find Petty’s songwriting cleverly taking aim at despair and self-flagellation through bodies with infinite lives.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Year0001 | August 23, 2021 | 7 | 3fb6bd2d-7059-47b9-8970-b722dfa1cc69 | Matt Mitchell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-mitchell/ | |
The new album from Yo Gotti—current ambassador of Memphis rap—digs deeper into his roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman, with a more pointed focus on betrayal. | The new album from Yo Gotti—current ambassador of Memphis rap—digs deeper into his roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman, with a more pointed focus on betrayal. | Yo Gotti: I Still Am | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-gotti-i-still-am/ | I Still Am | The cover for Yo Gotti’s 2013 album, I Am, references the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to the city. King was assassinated in Memphis during the strike, and both events had an impact on the city’s soul and (later) rap scenes. Many local artists, including Gotti, have maintained that there’s a throughline bonding the incidents in 1968, the sounds of Stax Records, and the dread in Memphis rap. “Soul is like—kinda like pain. You hear that even in the voice tone or the selection of music, and it just feel dark and painful, like the struggle,” he told NPR. And local legend Playa Fly once said, “There’s always been a dark cloud over the city. They killed the symbol for peace here.”
Gotti has emerged in recent years as the Memphis mouthpiece, a blue-collar MC channeling that same darkness. “I am the struggle/I am the hustle/I am the city,” he rapped on I Am’s title track. The album’s unofficial sequel, I Still Am, Gotti’s ninth, finds him digging deeper into roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman. This time the self-proclaimed reality rapper takes his Memphis pride global—from hometown shoutouts inside the Ridgecrest Apartments to jet-setting across Europe and Asia. As he expands his horizons, the enduring cracks in his writing resurface.
For years in Memphis rap, the buck stopped with Three 6 Mafia and Eightball & MJG, each act a tangent of the Memphis rap club culture. Gotti, who sounds unquestionably local in his language but panders more broadly to the sounds of the moment stylistically, has become the latest (and unlikeliest) flagship star in Memphis since the late Aughts. He buoys his more trap-angling deep cuts with surprise hits like “Down in the DM,” and his willingness to play ball has earned him national exposure and gold and platinum plaques. But still, there is very little separating him from his peers. He puts his scene on by emulating outsiders: He works mostly with Atlanta beatmakers like Mike WiLL Made-It, Southside, Zaytoven, and Drumma Boy, all of whom appear on I Still Am. The album also reunites Gotti with Miami producer and “Down in the DM” architect Ben Billion$. Inside their productions, he tackles all of the trap tropes. Yo Gotti is basically a Gucci Mane understudy, and his albums play out as if he’s been forced to replace the star last minute.
Gotti is a competent rapper who allows his voice to do much of the work, pressing into beats with repetitive phrases and rhyme schemes, single syllable rapping, and tottering slow flows. His raps get right to the point—usually at the expense of scene-setting with very little exposition. He’s either talking passed unidentified subjects, or thinking out loud about dealing, flexing, or defending his territory, or in the act of doing those things. He doesn’t have a particularly compelling point of view; some songs move in circles. There is a sense of tension in his raps, but there is rarely the activity necessary to make them gripping.
“Struggle” is a word that best describes most Gotti songs (sometimes as much in execution as in subject matter), but I Still Am has a more pointed focus on betrayal. The primary perpetrator is Gotti’s ex, but at different points on the album, he feels betrayed by close confidants, colleagues, snitches, and to a certain extent, God. On occasion, a faceless “they” are out to ruin all he’s worked for: “They had their hand out but I ain’t submissive/You tryin’ to extort a nigga, I’m from Memphis.” These betrayals open the door for deeply personal “reality raps” about small-time coke trafficking, life on the other side of dealing dope, and trying to balance hometown responsibility with world-conquering aspirations. Even as a rich man, Gotti’s struggle continues.
On “One on One,” after setting the premise—“If I could talk to God like a real nigga one on one, I’d tell him”—he poses several hypothetical questions about doing the right thing, his misdeeds, and the friends he lost to prison and the cemetery. There’s apprehension in his voice as he weighs safety measures. He’s sneaking his gun into church and worrying about his security. Most of the violence on I Still Am is a reply, in defense of comrades or his position atop the Memphis rap world. “Old lady in the neighborhood said I’m the devil, she a damn liar,” he raps. “See me bustin’ that fire, tryna protect the guys from the other side.”
The more poignant moments on I Still Am, like the stamping “2908” and “Don’t Wanna Go Back,” which laments time spent as a shooter and corner boy, are sometimes offset by the more unapologetic songs like “Brown Bag” and the chest-beating “Juice.” He can’t seem to decide which stance to take: proud street pharmacist or mournful, reformed peddler of toxins. But this conflict does produce songs like the understated and hypnotizing “Yellow Tape,” which finds Gotti at full tilt, leveraging his sandy caw for emphasis: “I’m bumpin’ slaughter gang, 21, back when I was 21/Drive-bys, homicides, switching sides, you were done/How we in the shootout four deep and I’m the only one/With an empty drum, where I’m from that’ll get you hung.” No matter how famous Gotti gets, you can’t take the hood out of him. On “Around the World,” backed by singing children, he travels to Dubai, the UK, and Japan, but always ends up back in the ‘Crest. It’s too bad that I Still Am has more to say about the city he represents than who he actually is. | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | November 2, 2017 | 6.1 | 3fb7336b-d45c-4e81-9989-1fdeaaa9156d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The drone-metal syndicate, who reformed as an elegant blues band seven years ago, follow Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 with an expansive, understated collection recorded during the same session as that 2011 album. | The drone-metal syndicate, who reformed as an elegant blues band seven years ago, follow Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 with an expansive, understated collection recorded during the same session as that 2011 album. | Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16283-angels-of-darkness-demons-of-light-ii/ | Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II | Aside from founder Dylan Carlson, drummer Adrienne Davies is the only member of Earth to play on each of the four studio albums the drone-metal syndicate has made since re-forming seven years ago as an elegant blues band. On last year's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, she added an immediate, omnipresent grace. She swung softly during opener "Old Black", commanding the music's slow shifts with a righteous thump. And she carefully triggered album apex "Descent to the Zenith" with a light-footed march that served as the swivel for the rest of the band's melodic swoops. For all the deserved talk of Carlson's refinement and control as a guitarist, Davies was arguably his superior, guiding the quartet along with an unspoken, perfect resolve. Without her steady presence, one assumed, all of those light tones and slight menace might wash into blur, like watercolors escaping a drain.
It's surprising if not discomfiting, then, that the second volume of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light opens mostly without Davies. For the first 12 minutes, she resigns to almost auxiliary roles. On opener "Sigil of Brass", Carlson explores elliptical snippets of a short guitar progression, a leader advancing with caution. Cellist Lori Goldston and bassist Karl Blau pick up his patterns, stretching the same sounds above and beneath his picking with long exhalations. But Davies plays only her cymbal, and barely, adding occasional clatters that seem mostly like reminders that she's still behind the kit. She's even less present on "His Teeth Did Brightly Shine", the sort of slow, shimmering strut that she's motored with Earth for the better part of a decade. Instead, Blau mostly thumbs the beat with his bass as Carlson teases out guitar-effects flotsam beneath the sidewinding lead line. Davies merely offers bits of shakers and shells, her percussion becoming an occasional footnote to its normal narrative thread.
Somehow, though, these tracks and their themes don't wash away or turn into seismic smears that would have suited Earth back when "Kurt Kobain" was offering up guest vocals. Recorded during the same sessions that yielded volume one of this series, they show the strong skeleton, sans distraction. More importantly, they confirm the suspicion that the crew Carlson gathered for the Angels of Darkness recordings is the most sympathetic, versatile, and unselfish group he's ever had. Without Davies, these first 12 minutes are some of the most muted in Earth's catalog, showcasing a band comfortable not only with its quiet but also with how a listener can hear clearly from one side of the mix to the other (compared especially to the impenetrable stuff of two decades ago). This is the epitome of cool, quiet confidence.
But it isn't lopsided growth, as Angels II isn't simply the softer side of its predecessor. "The Corascene Dog" is gentle but glinting, with Carlson and Goldston trading sinister dialogue between their strings. And despite its classically suggestive title, "Waltz (A Multiplicity of Doors)" is actually one of the most abrasive looks yet at Earth 2.0. Goldston wrenches astringent wails from her cello, while Davies trades her generally quiet thunder for a heavier foot and a relentless tide of cymbals. Blau lets every note linger with a little extra emphasis, and Carlson tucks a web of foreboding guitar effects beneath the serrated guitar line. Earth saves the most revelatory moment for last. "The Rakehell" generously infuses funk, with Davies' syncopated trot serving as the structure beneath a lysergic smear. Carlson plays bass, using the low notes mostly to state the melody so that his guitar can push beyond it. He refracts, multiplies, and manipulates the tone, using the guitar to find the midpoint between a Meters organ and a wailing, heavy-metal lead. In an unlikely move in a career full of them, Earth add much younger bands like Sun Araw and Eternal Tapestry to their list of contemporaries.
Indeed, for all the talk about this still-nascent phase of Earth versus that earlier frame-shifting phase, the twin Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light releases actually reveal a band with interests broader than such a binary might suggest. Earth aren't simply softening and separating their drone metal as if by centrifuge, or trying to be stately rather than beastly. These tracks are built on the brethren of blues, rock, and metal, but they wouldn't be compelling without pieces of bop buoyancy, minimalist restraint, classical consonance, and near-liturgical resolve. Oh, and believe it or not, funk. This version of Earth has simply given Carlson more room and more assistance to explore, well, darkness and light-- in his own time, of course. | 2012-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | February 14, 2012 | 7.9 | 3fc5c090-19f3-4c90-9bea-dbae127d6389 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
After several releases as Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett makes his debut under his own name, and it's his grandest and most assured statement to date. | After several releases as Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett makes his debut under his own name, and it's his grandest and most assured statement to date. | Owen Pallett: Heartland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13830-heartland/ | Heartland | If you're lucky, you might already know this guy as Final Fantasy. His reasons for dropping that name are probably boring and copyright-related, but still: The name change seems healthy on whole other extra-legal levels. I've never known anyone not to be wowed by Final Fantasy's live show, and Final Fantasy's live show is just Owen Pallett: the guy himself, a violin, and a loop pedal. It's about as solo as anything gets-- a performance, not a project. Stepping out under his own name feels like an acknowledgement of this, as if Pallett's ready to cast aside the modesty of having a "project"-- it's just this thing I've been working on-- and present himself, fully upright, as an artist.
And there are a lot of things about Heartland that feel like Pallett is presenting himself more and more fully as an artist; the scope of breadth and mood of it are all grander, more assured, making ever more of a case that the guy shouldn't be viewed as a side note (string arranger for the Arcade Fire, the Pet Shop Boys) or a minor interest (D&D enthusiast, guy who titled an album He Poos Clouds). After all, one of this album's closest cousins in the indie world is a notable, well-regarded one: Joanna Newsom's Ys. Both are ambitious, classicist, cleverly arranged, lyrically high-concept, dense with possible meaning-- and, yes, a little strange.
It's that density that separates them, though, and makes me regret having to review this record in any kind of timely fashion. I'm still smarting over having underrated Pallett's last full-length; I knew I loved it, but had no way of knowing it would stick with me for months, years. And this one is richer: Pallett has leaped beyond arranging for chambers and quartets, working now with electronics, with drums, with electric bass, with the Czech Philharmonic, with Nico Muhly. These are pop songs through and through-- lively, propulsive ones. But the wonder of them is in those arrangements, which are just ripe with motion and detail-- and they're not decorative (as was sometimes the case with Ys), but central. The most immediate track here, "Lewis Takes Action", has Pallett singing grand, anthemic hooks, but the parts you're most likely to wind up humming are the stately brass and woodwind figures between them-- the amount of care and pleasure in these arrangements is extremely generous.
If you're wondering who "Lewis" is and what sort of action he's taking, well, this is one of the things that's just singular and fascinating about Pallett, every bit as much as his music-school voice or the charmingly mannered way he approaches his melodies. On He Poos Clouds, Pallett seemed to be singing about real people, even ordinary ones; it was just that they tended to describe their emotional states in the grand terms of Dungeons & Dragons magic and conjuring. Since then, Pallett's jumped fully into fantasy: These twelve songs are monologues from Lewis, an "ultra-violent farmer" in a world called Spectrum, as he tries to come to grips with his own creator, Owen Pallett. Daunting as that might sound-- there may be hand-to-hand combat with a cockatrice involved-- all it really means is that these are songs about power and faith and control: songs that allow you to sing lines like, "the night is split by the whistle of my amber whip," and have it be about feeling your own power, or just repeat, "I'm never gonna give it to you," and have it be about rejecting someone else's.
You'll have to get back to me in a few months to see how it all unravels, but in the meantime these songs are steadily revealing ever more to love. Martial drums and strings rumbling tense in the foreground with clouds of strings overhead. The sly, soulful melody of "Oh Heartland, Up Yours!"-- something that feels new in Pallett's repertoire. A kind of orchestral motorik beat on "Tryst with Mephistopheles". The way something like an 808 kick drum loops its way darkly into "Red Sun No. 5". Hints of Kurt Weill. This stuff is rich with ideas, and they're offered in the kind of rich, warm sound that should be accessible to more fans than ever before. Those of you with the inclination to pick them up will find a lot to reward you. | 2010-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | January 15, 2010 | 8.6 | 3fcb4129-d9db-4250-8b22-cf329a7aedb8 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The composer behind Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be With You” also worked with David Bowie, the Walker Brothers, and Ian Dury. A new compilation reveals how he helped shape 1960s British pop. | The composer behind Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be With You” also worked with David Bowie, the Walker Brothers, and Ian Dury. A new compilation reveals how he helped shape 1960s British pop. | Various Artists: Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-paradise-the-sound-of-ivor-raymonde/ | Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde | “I Only Want to Be With You” is so perfectly suited for Dusty Springfield’s voice, it seems impossible that it wasn’t written specifically for her. But, in 1963, when a journeyman composer named Ivor Raymonde devised that racing melody and the songwriter Mike Hawker wrote the lyrics, their first stop was crooner Frankie Vaughan. When he passed on the song, the duo took it to Springfield, who was trying to launch a solo career after finding success with her trio the Springfields. It sounded like a perfect fit for her first single, so they recorded two-and-a-half minutes of pure pop ecstasy and released it a week later. “I Only Want to Be With You” shot up to No. 4 on the UK pop charts, not only establishing Springfield as a viable pop star, but taking its place one of the finest singles of the era.
Springfield is likely the only name many readers will recognize in that story (although some Brits may remember Vaughan). But hopefully the release of Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde—by Bella Union, a label run by Ivor’s son Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins—will change that. Simon has described the project as a labor of love: It’s taken him years of diligent research to reconstruct his father’s sprawling catalog, which starts in the late 1940s and ends in the 1980s. The task was complicated by the fact that Ivor was a hired gun, working any number of jobs: writing songs, scouting talent, producing sessions, devising and conducting string and orchestra arrangements. He even sings on one track, the dusky pop number “Mylene,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the forgotten 1959 sex romp Upstairs and Downstairs. “In those days it seemed from all the documentation he was the sort of guy who’d turn his hand to anything, he was happy to get paid, happy to be a session musician, happy to do an arrangement if asked and didn’t turn down work,” Simon recently told the Yorkshire Post.
Simon isn’t inflating his father’s importance with Paradise. Ivor Raymonde was a figure of no small significance in the 1960s UK pop scene, but because he worked mostly behind the scenes, his name is not especially well known. A product of big bands in the ’40s and jazz combos in the ’50s, Raymonde started working with eccentric producer Joe Meek in the early ’60s, signing on as an in-house producer for Decca Records later in the decade. During that time, he worked with major artists at the height of their careers (Billy Fury, the Walker Brothers), future stars (David Bowie, Tom Jones), and many musicians who never achieved celebrity. Taken together, his catalog forms an eccentric, not exactly representative but still incredibly enjoyable, history of a sophisticated era in British pop. When Ian “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” Dury wanted to evoke that heyday on 1980’s “Superman’s Big Sister,” he hired Raymonde to write the string arrangements, creating a song that mashes pop, punk, and novelty into three strident minutes.
Paradise portrays Raymonde as a composer with remarkable range, one who treated the stars and the nobodies, the cheeky novelties and the heartfelt ballads, with equal insight and consideration. Credited to Burr Bailey (an alias for Meek’s studio assistant Dave Adams), “Chahawki” is a frantic story-song about a Native American and his beloved dog—a B Western set to music. Raymonde gives the ridiculous story an epic quality, as well as real emotional heft, by adding cinematic strings and insistent backing vocals.
On the other end of the spectrum, his arrangement lends Helen Shapiro’s “He Knows How to Love Me” a soulful gravity that makes her transformation from independent woman to infatuated lover sound all the more persuasive and profound. Like a good film composer, his contributions succeed when they disappear into the song, when the music sounds less like the product of a hit-making committee and more like an extension of the artist credited on the 45 label.
For a concrete example of what he could do with an arrangement, compare the album version of David Bowie’s “Love You Till Tuesday” and the single version included here. The original, included on Bowie’s self-titled ’67 debut, features a fairly stripped-down arrangement with marimba and acoustic guitar. Raymonde’s, which was released on a subsequent 45, opens with a strange oboe riff and a heavy orchestral backing, pushing the song along at a quicker clip. The woodwinds wrap around the singer’s heavily accented vocals like a mod suit, emphasizing the oddity of his phrasing and making his weird laughter sound unrehearsed. Raymonde’s arrangement matches Bowie’s dandy self-regard so perfectly that you wonder what lessons the struggling singer-songwriter took from their one-off collaboration.
Songs like “I Only Want to Be With You” and the Walker Brothers’ magisterial “Make It Easy on Yourself” will be familiar to many listeners—perhaps overly familiar—but that’s the attraction of a compilation like Paradise: In addition to unearthing obscurities, it allows you to hear popular tunes with new ears. You listen for the parts you might otherwise ignore or fail to notice. I always loved the sublime strings of “Make It Easy on Yourself” but hadn’t considered how they do all the weeping and sobbing for Scott Walker, or how they grant him a determined dignity despite his heartache. I never considered how Raymonde’s arrangements for Springfield clear a path for her strong melodic lines, like bodyguards parting a crowd of adoring fans. He arranged the song as though she were already a star, a courtesy he extended to every artist who crossed his path. | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Bella Union | August 7, 2018 | 8.4 | 3fcbb884-916a-4f7f-88cc-c6a18bf403fb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On his heartfelt new album, R&B upstart Brent Faiyaz finds joy in the midst of struggle. He works through his pain without kowtowing to radio trends, offering a promising debut. | On his heartfelt new album, R&B upstart Brent Faiyaz finds joy in the midst of struggle. He works through his pain without kowtowing to radio trends, offering a promising debut. | Brent Faiyaz : Sonder Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brent-faiyaz-sonder-son/ | Sonder Son | The dreamy possibility of making it in Los Angeles still hasn’t lost its luster—but, for some, the city’s very present and unconscionable wealth disparity takes you out of the woozy haze of fame and into reality. R&B upstart Brent Faiyaz went out west from his hometown of Baltimore to pursue a singing career and found that, while wealth manifests in mansions and expensive cars, poverty is more present in L.A. than most East coast cities. It is an odd juxtaposition that becomes even more striking as Downtown Los Angeles develops, as condos are built alongside Skid Row. This kind of truth reigns on Faiyaz’s debut full-length Sonder Son, an album that is heartfelt when the prevailing genre trends still celebrate the bacchanal and the disposability of parties, lovers, and, really, the self.
Sonder Son is forthright about the fact that we need each other to survive. Early on the album is “First World Problemz/Nobody Carez,” where Faiyaz sings, “As long as I pay rent/I don’t even whine ’bout my paycheck/I know it is short, but I’ll make ends/’tCause it could be a worse situation.” Over a boom-bap-influenced drum machine and thick, distinct bass, he sings about finding joy with friends in the midst of struggle.
But there are layers here. Camaraderie isn’t enough without deeper emotional connections, or if materialism supersedes treating each other like real people. He begins “Nobody Carez” with fiery spoken word: “Shit is deeper than Neiman Marcus or your Hollywood starlets/Underneath there’s niggas starving, impoverished/People don’t give no fucks, nigga/Trump don’t give a fuck/Your niggas don’t give a fuck/Your favorite artists don’t give a motherfucking fuck.” The song then breaks into something lighter, hinging on Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-style acoustic guitar but with fewer of his lyrical platitudes. The interior explored on “First World Problemz” becomes an exterior on “Nobody Carez,” as he sings about the pain and uselessly cruel gossip that can come from being down and out.
This is the album’s high point and what should guide Faiyaz as he develops as a writer. Sonder Son has the same highly intimate, nothing-to-lose quality of Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra. but could use more of its experimental spirit. What is refreshing, however, is that it does not kowtow to radio trends, the dejected filth of a Ty Dolla $ign or PARTYNEXTDOOR, whose partying is often a coverup for pain. Here, current pain is lived in and past pain is just one small recollection away.
Sonder Son opens with a spoken sketch about bad grades. A mother yells at her son—“Please explain to me how the fuck you go to school every single day and then bring home all Fs?”—before the track flows into Faiyaz singing about how writing has always been a cure all for his mental anguish. If this is autobiography, then what unfolds on the album indicates that Faiyaz may have had other things on his mind at school—that generating stock of emotional literacy and a mastery of pop and R&B history may have been more important. The album is well-studied in the tones and textures of the past (tracks like “Stay Down” recall the yearnings of artists like 112 and Chico DeBarge, whose catalogs are are often uncited, but whose influence endures) and a Tumblr-like earnestness that is so rarely come by in popular music. The songs here may not be so sticky, but the promise of his potential is undeniable. | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Lost Kids | October 28, 2017 | 6.1 | 3fd1b138-2c80-44f0-9077-a338674ef5a5 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
After a foray into singer-songwriter territory, Rjd2 rediscovers mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals. | After a foray into singer-songwriter territory, Rjd2 rediscovers mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals. | RJD2: The Colossus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13801-the-colossus/ | The Colossus | Independence is thrilling, but after those first tentative or defiant steps towards freedom, the urge to look back and survey the situation you just left can be hard to resist. That seemingly contradictory perspective, looking both forward and backwards, was at play when Rjd2 wrote The Colossus. His fourth solo album arrives at a pivotal moment, and not just because it follows the lyrical trainwreck and one man-band overreach of The Third Hand. The producer is now more than a successful yet hungry talent; he's the boss, head of the new RJ's Electrical Connections imprint. Taken in tandem with the recent release of the vinyl-only career retrospective 2002-2010, it's unsurprising he's in a reflective mood.
The Colossus, as its name implies, strives for scale, but also strains a bit under a heavy burden. While Rjd2 excels at sonic collages, the mixed motives on this album-- a current spin on past techniques, a synthesis of old songs and a turn toward the future-- are difficult to balance. After years spent mastering instruments and recording techniques, he still finds a new way to overachieve, adding his own passable, if sometimes bland, live drumming to five tracks. But, as if admitting his DIY ethos and perfectionist tendencies on Third Hand went too far, he brought in a team of guest vocalists and instrumentalists to augment his own performances. Interlude "Salud", featuring a goofy British voice similar to the one on Deadringer, says as much: "I've [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| assembled a healthy bunch of folks who are much more talented than I am."
But more important to anyone put off by his unique foray into singer-songwriter territory, he rediscovers, or at least indulges in, some of the mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals that originally made him such a vital producer. "Let There be Horns" opens the album with stretched-out, Looney Tunes strings and a vaguely Latin beat, jumping between staccato breakdowns and guitar riffs. The applause during the song's conclusion might as well be the sound of some fans breathing a collective sigh of relief on a partial return to form, since the dust-heavy samples have long been replaced with more electrified melodies.
But just as quickly as he comes out of the gate, "Games Can Win" re-enters more shaky singer-songwriter territory. While his lyrical abilities, which still haven't caught up to his compositional skills, produce some clunkers ("Play your hand close/ Like you have a glass chin"), he takes a step forward in terms of balance with appropriately toned down percussion. The rest of the album trades off between rumbling tracks like "Small Plans" and a few songwriting efforts like the "The Glow", which --with it's smug focus on having "the glow," overseas accounts and living a life of leisure-- seems like the interior monologue of a bailed-out banker. It's still pretty creaky but better than the cringe-inducing moments from The Third Hand.
Rjd2 showcases a grasp of mood and a talent for arranging on The Colossus. His backing of Phonte Coleman's soulful vocal turn on "Shining Path" and the springy, triumphant synths on posse cut "A Son's Cycle" are both understated yet fitting. But on tracks like the eerie "The Stranger", rolling with punched-up drums and clipped guitars, or "Giant Squid", which bounces on a guttural beat, the career fusion concept pays off. His instrumental skills, and the synth-funk of Since We Last Spoke (in full overdrive on the movie theater sound check that is "A Spaceship for Now") help bring more string tones and textures to the mix, but he manages to capture some of that foreboding yet funky mood from his early work. He's spent the last few albums trying to go beyond sampling songs to creating them from scratch, and he still can sound like he's cramming tributes to half of his record collection on the same track. But when his relentless drive and sense of restraint match up, they make parts of this album a forward thinking look back. | 2010-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | RJ's Electrical Connections | January 18, 2010 | 6.8 | 3fd4249a-311d-42ce-a597-649346932360 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
The UK electronic-pop trio’s third album draws on a renewed sense of extroversion and energy, which can’t always overcome its lyrical and production missteps. | The UK electronic-pop trio’s third album draws on a renewed sense of extroversion and energy, which can’t always overcome its lyrical and production missteps. | London Grammar: Californian Soil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/london-grammar-californian-soil/ | Californian Soil | London Grammar never made a lot of noise. Even as singer Hannah Reid’s throaty alto garnered comparisons to Florence Welch, she and bandmates Dot Major and Dan Rothman rarely offered anything more surprising than the occasional end-of-song breakbeat. The huge proportions of Adele producers Greg Kurstin and Paul Epworth left 2017’s Truth Is a Beautiful Thing sounding slumberous, so London Grammar’s third full-length, Californian Soil, attempts instead to channel the energy of Reid’s past collaborations with Disclosure and Flume. Major and Rothman embrace harder-hitting instrumentals, matching Reid’s newfound lyrical ambition to explore femininity and relationship dynamics. If the new album isn’t as consistent as their 2013 debut If You Wait or as epic in scope as Truth, the trio still push themselves to keep it interesting.
Only four songs here don’t employ an orchestra, and the cinematic scale comes through just as intended. “Californian Soil” continues the band’s penchant for making songs that sound like Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” but the strings are so lush and Reid’s vocals so forceful that it’s easy to compartmentalize the resemblance. (That won’t help with the lyrics; what is “I am young, I am old/So you do what you’re told” supposed to mean?) “Baby It’s You,” a blissful, atmospheric love song courtesy of London electronic producer George FitzGerald, particularly benefits from the extroversion and quicker tempos.
Boosting the percussion offers more depth. The beat drops on “Lord It’s a Feeling” and “I Need the Night” hit with a confidence the band’s more restrained music never mustered. But the album’s biggest attempt at pop crossover is its greatest weakness: “How Does It Feel,” produced with Steve Mac (best known for Ed Sheeran’s inescapable “Shape of You”) doesn’t smooth out London Grammar’s quirks so much as place them in an entirely inappropriate context. Reid does her best, but her vocals clash against the stiff groove, the “Can’t Feel My Face”-style bassline, the sheer Rita Ora-ness of it all.
“Call Your Friends,” oddly also produced by Mac, represents the strongest evolution of the band’s sound. Reid’s lyrics sometimes struggle, like the reference to a “drama mama” that kills the tension of “Missing,” but on “Call Your Friends” she finds a way to assert independence while also begging for love: “Every time I tried/To make myself seem small/In the arms of others/Who never loved me better.” It’s desperate and affectionate, yet not needy. But it’s not always so easy to tell what she means to say. “There is a whisper that our God is a she,” Reid sings on “I Need the Night,” but the idea sits strangely in a song that’s mostly about drinking with friends. “America” sketches a more intriguing parallel between the false promises of a nation and those of the music industry: “All of our time chasing a dream/A dream that meant nothing to me.”
Despite missteps, California Soil expands the scope of London Grammar’s electronic-pop formula and the themes of their songwriting. There’s nothing as intimate as breakthrough single “Hey Now,” but in return, the greater variety avoids the sameness of past albums. While Soil doesn’t always fulfill their ambition, it still suggests that the more sound this group makes, the more they’re worth hearing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ministry of Sound / Columbia | April 16, 2021 | 6.2 | 3fd43944-2cb7-4c94-97b0-2375b8e592e6 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
On their third album of avant-garde synth pop, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay eschew protest language and the depressing status quo to conjure a vision of feminist utopia. | On their third album of avant-garde synth pop, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay eschew protest language and the depressing status quo to conjure a vision of feminist utopia. | Virginia Wing: Ecstatic Arrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/virginia-wing-ecstatic-arrow/ | Ecstatic Arrow | A recent tour supporting Hookworms pushed Virginia Wing over the edge. Frustrated by the progressive psychedelic band’s incongruously laddy crowds, the Manchester synth-pop duo performed the rest of their dates against a hot pink projection that read: “END RAPE CULTURE.” Unsurprisingly, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay’s message made some audiences bristle even more than the initial offenders had—and that message is in keeping with their third album, to a fashion. In a few barbed moments, Ecstatic Arrow skewers the failed promise of a supposedly enlightened independent music culture: “No half-baked program just for show,” Richards coolly declares, on “Pale Burnt Lake,” of bills that pay lip service to inclusion. But the pair generally eschews protest language and the depressing status quo, choosing instead to propose a captivating vision of utopia.
Ecstatic Arrow is an album of fresh starts. Richards and Pillay recorded in the Swiss Alps, and while the connection between location and sound is often spurious, there is a heady clarity to the album that you might describe as “alpine” if that word hadn’t been ruined by men’s shower gel. Koto sparkles; swathes of synthesizer mist descend, then break, allowing incandescent pop choruses to break through; and the pair create ashram lusciousness from icy machines. Virginia Wing’s is an understated but familiar scramble of mid-’80s pop at its most avant-garde—Laurie Anderson’s sprechgesang, Peter Gabriel and Japan’s chilly hauteur; Kate Bush’s imposing dynamic and Malcolm McLaren’s impish reinvention—so if Ecstatic Arrow doesn’t feel quite like stepping into a new world, it at least returns us to an unspoiled glade.
Especially since hype tends to peak early in an artist’s career and then tail off, it’s a pleasure to hear a band bloom on their third record. Virginia Wing’s earlier releases could be ornery and open-ended, but the songs on Ecstatic Arrow are full of the playful pop resolve that Phoenix pull off so handsomely. “The Female Genius” starts with Richards questioning the disconnect she feels as synthy twinkles with more than a passing resemblance to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” glint off the prowling bass. When she mocks perceptions that she is a pliant entity ready to “follow instruction disguised as suggestion,” the tone becomes robotic—which might be too on the nose if it didn’t break into such a luminous chorus, one that reaches defiantly for the future. “Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day” is similarly subversive. Its bucolic-milkmaid innocence is charming, but Virginia Wing use this puritan mode to dismiss the draining rigmarole of work and preconceived ideas about the right way to live. “There’s no tomorrow,” Richards sings. “Only today.”
There are carpe-diem moments on Ecstatic Arrow, like the punky polyrhythms of “Glorious Idea,” which lurch thrillingly between harsh, sparkling textures and degrees of intensity that oppress and release. But Virginia Wing aren’t interested in scorching the earth so much as changing the future. The first line on the album is, “Tell me, where do you go from here?”
As part of her immaculate vision, Richards attempts to divest herself of her gendered inheritance of silence and self-doubt, and she sketches the imbalance between men’s and women’s influence over public spaces in surreal, pin-sharp imagery. “I can’t provide a bench or sofa to recline/Soft furnishings feel hard when the space is confined,” she sings on “Glorious Idea.” She coins funny, surreal koans about how intentions can be misinterpreted (“You reach far with your hands/But the hands that you use are just flowers in bloom wearing gloves to confuse,” she sings on “Relativity”) but then disturbs her neat themes. On “Seasons Reversed,” Richards expresses surprise that she never noticed how conditioning had turned her into “a delicate object under a frame,” and proposes an brisk escape: “I don’t demand a violent scene/But blood in your mouth might feel like relief.” A stark bass thump highlights the pulse she might strike, and imagining the stain spread on their previously clean palette is a thrill.
Ecstatic Arrow is full of declarations delivered with such lucid certainty that they make a brighter future seem persuasively simple: “Just one full day and one perfect thought to begin again like nothing came before,” Richards sings on “Pale Burnt Lake,” amid a beautiful, looping melody. Of course, it’s not that simple. Nor is making a feminist synth-pop album that feels genuinely revelatory. But Virginia Wing make utopia feel within reach. | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fire | June 19, 2018 | 7.8 | 3fdf3b3d-f11f-4b4d-9cdf-45cccf8548dc | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
After a life-changing illness, the UK folk singer returns with a gentle, subtly experimental album that finds hard-won solace in motherhood and recovery. | After a life-changing illness, the UK folk singer returns with a gentle, subtly experimental album that finds hard-won solace in motherhood and recovery. | Lucy Rose: This Ain’t the Way You Go Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-rose-this-aint-the-way-you-go-out/ | This Ain’t the Way You Go Out | After giving birth to her first child, Otis, in 2021, UK songwriter Lucy Rose developed excruciating back pain. After an unpleasant encounter at the doctor’s office and months of Rose’s own research, she finally figured out that she had a rare, severe form of pregnancy-induced osteoporosis and eight fractured vertebrae. Already reeling from the depression and burnout that inspired her 2019 record, No Words Left, Rose endured months of recovery before she could again sit at the piano and write, now with Otis in her lap. Unlike the emotional intensity of No Words Left, her new music was surprisingly energetic and joyful. She would record these songs over two days with her longtime band, recruiting producer Kwes. to help her further embellish her sound. On This Ain’t the Way You Go Out, Rose expands her capabilities as a songwriter and musician while maintaining the warmth that’s made her a British folk staple for over a decade.
Listen past the smooth production of her previous work and you’ll hear sneaky time signature changes and sophisticated piano voicings. On the new album’s opener “Light as Grass” and the soaring jam session “Interlude I,” Rose displays her command of the piano, an instrument she’d increasingly adopted in her music and fully embraces here. Kwes., known for working with Solange as well as UK rapper Loyle Carner, applies his background in alternative hip-hop and R&B to pack every song with psychedelic vocal delays, disintegrating keyboards, and aggressive treatment of David Dyson’s drum kit. On “Dusty Frames,” a tribute to the late Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi, Kwes. doubles Rose’s piano with a warbly synth and looming synth bass; something devastating lurks beneath, even if the words don’t fully capture Hegazi’s impact.
Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage. “Could You Help Me” describes Rose’s search for medical professionals who would listen instead of dismissing her concerns as “hysterical” (really!): “Could I ever really feel it for you?” she asks, unable to communicate her experiences to dismissive GPs. Rose glides lightly across the track, but a distorted violin solo crashes in to express the frustration her voice disguises. The deceptively chipper “Life’s Too Short” and the sparse “No More” each touch on the loneliness of illness, the friends whose patience eventually wears thin. On “Whatever You Want,” Rose’s willingness to be awkwardly direct (“a miracle, a disaster, all in one foul swoop”) powers the song’s central question: What do idealistic phrases like “You can be whatever you want” mean to someone struggling to move? Beneath the instrumental experimentation, there’s both grief and a sense of hope inspired by raising Otis and by Rose’s own recovery. As she sings on the title track: “I blame myself for being so weak/But this brave body is still carrying me.”
After “No More” comes the biggest swing on the record, and one of Rose’s wildest songs to date. “The Racket” starts out with an oscillating chord loop, but with every chorus, the band piles on until the final minute becomes genuinely anarchic. Rose stands at the eye of the storm, sharing in plainspoken language what she’s learned: “Took it for granted/Life ain’t always what you were handed,” the chorus opines. Out of context, that might come across like the kind of unhelpful platitude Rose struggles with elsewhere on the record, but it’s clear she means every word. | 2024-04-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Communion | April 19, 2024 | 7.2 | 3fdf5c48-0733-4347-b4ff-322b9df7b83d | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Made for a Belgian coming-of-age tale, Home is the latest film soundtrack by Johnny Jewel. It features new Chromatics and Symmetry music, plus eight ambient tracks, but is strangely mild-mannered. | Made for a Belgian coming-of-age tale, Home is the latest film soundtrack by Johnny Jewel. It features new Chromatics and Symmetry music, plus eight ambient tracks, but is strangely mild-mannered. | Johnny Jewel: Home OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22490-home-ost/ | Home OST | Since Chromatics failed to release Dear Tommy on Valentine’s Day of 2014, the long-awaited follow up from Johnny Jewel and co. has become an elusive white whale for a particular fan of tastefully sleazy electronic music. It’s a genre that finds the sun slowly setting upon itself, and with every passing day, the audience for Jewel’s ribald mutant synth-pop gets older. Each hint that has emerged in the last two years—in the form of four songs all released without warning—has been tantalizing, yet tinged with bittersweet nostalgia. Two new videos have arrived since this summer alone, but Dear Tommy remains an enigma.
The release of Jewel’s latest film score, for Belgian director Fien Troch’s nihilist coming-of-age tale, Home, now feels overshadowed by the media cycle and speculation that Dear Tommy has produced by virtue of its absence. Nonetheless, filmmakers have recently seemed to swarm Jewel. The attention has come in the wake of 2012’s Chromatics LP Kill for Love and the larger profile it has helped Jewel cultivate, as well as his mostly-scrapped 2011 soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which still managed to contain Jewel’s spectral presence.
On the whole, though, Jewel’s film music has been hit or miss. In 2012, Themes For an Imaginary Film (his unused Drive music) was an engrossing and steamy soundscape. His 2015 Lost River soundtrack, meanwhile, was an overly luxuriant accessory to an otherwise comically bad film. This score for Home, by comparison, is strangely mild-mannered.
Due to its minimal distribution, U.S. audiences are not likely to see Torch’s film. In a way (and not unlike Jewel’s other filmic projects) this 41-minute, 14-track score stands alone as a musical experience, a whisper of new music from Jewel’s multiple projects, though a portion of it recycles old songs. Two of the Chromatics tracks, “Paradise” and “Running from the Sun,” originally appeared on Kill for Love. The former was lightly edited into a more dance oriented version, and the latter seems completely unchanged. Of the new music you do get: there is one new Chromatics song, three Symmetry songs, and eight ambient tracks credited to Jewel. These three different sides of Jewel are only diffusely connected. It creates a disjointed listen, as if two experiences are stacked on top of each other rather than organized for flow or logic.
“Magazine,” the sole new Chromatics track, is disappointingly one of their least interesting songs in a very long time. It lacks any of the sordid thrill, the noir funk, and essential sense of foreboding of their past releases. “Magazine” is surprisingly beige as far as Italo-disco goes. Even if the song unmistakably owns Chromatics’ sonic identity—slithering drum machine, glacial synths, greasy guitars—it comes off as hollow or caricatured. This is magnified in the film, where it is used early on to set the scene for groups of disaffected teenagers hanging out near a high school, making out, staring into the abyss of their iPhone screens.
The Symmetry songs are all instrumental genre exercises, with a slightly more focused mood. “The Alligator” is Jewel’s take on trap or EDM, and sounds like what Mike WiLL Made-It might produce if all he listened to was Giorgio Moroder. “The Magician” is perfectly melodramatic rave music, and “Countdown” is classic opiated fare from Jewel. Once the door closes on the Chromatics/Symmetry side of the soundtrack, and Jewel’s solo work takes over, the album suddenly swerves into agreeable and bland territory.
Jewel’s eight ambient works are mostly forgettable. They are all tightly constructed, brooding, atmospheric—the kind of music that is popular and ubiquitous for indie dramas of all stripes and colors. In that way, these utilitarian songs perfectly accomplish what they are supposed to do in the film: compliment, render, and foreground narrative. But any expectation of the shock of the new immediately fails to be met. That is not to say there aren’t highlights from this cluster of songs. “Remorse,” the best of these, is four minutes of gothic drums and gaseous hisses that that recall Ben Frost. Other moments, like “Trust,” favorably recall Stars of the Lid. Overall, the situation that this soundtrack generates is similar to the disappointment you might feel after opening up a pack of baseball cards. As you flip through the haul, there is the potential for something rare to pop up, but more likely than not, you’ll have seen it all before. | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Italians Do It Better | October 14, 2016 | 6 | 3fe302d1-0805-4a89-ba34-c8f4eef35caf | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Casady sisters’ first album in five years marks a return to their maximalist tendencies, piling on drum machines, chintzy synthesizers, over-the-top raps, and nu-metal guitars. | The Casady sisters’ first album in five years marks a return to their maximalist tendencies, piling on drum machines, chintzy synthesizers, over-the-top raps, and nu-metal guitars. | CocoRosie: Put the Shine On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cocorosie-put-the-shine-on/ | Put the Shine On | For most of their 16-year tenure as CocoRosie, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady have tried to untangle the complicated childhood history they share. Born in Iowa and Hawaii to a compulsively nomadic couple, they spent many of their early summers on Native reservations while their parents sat in on peyote circles. After a decade of estrangement, the sisters reunited as young adults in France, and began ruminating on their unusual family memories via a singular mix of twisted freak-folk and lo-fi hip-hop. Their catalog touts moments of sublime melody and atmosphere amid a lot of questionable artistic choices. Put the Shine On, their seventh album and first in five years, marks a return to CocoRosie’s more maximalist tendencies after a period of sparer work, piling on drum machines, chintzy synthesizers, over-the-top raps, and nu-metal guitars.
The Casady sisters recorded much of Put the Shine On in San Francisco, working on the record between visits to their mother, who died 11 days after she tracked backing vocals for “Ruby Red,” a song about her own life and death. Despite its closeness to mortality, “Ruby Red” is more a celebration of life than a dirge. But that complicated tone—praising a parent newly passed as you survey how they’ve made you who you are—gets blunted in the record’s production. Stock hip-hop beats and clumsy synth bass take up outsize space in the mix, dominating the sound with rhythmic elements to which the sisters’ vocals never quite adhere.
Generational trauma, mental illness, and sexual violence tumble through Shine’s lyrics, as they have on past CocoRosie albums, but the language used to approach these weighty themes tends towards the archetypal rather than the specific. Little girls sprint through the woods avoiding men and wolves; Biblical symbols of lamb and sheep populate multiple songs. When the images aren’t tired, they’re baffling. CocoRosie use “Britney Spears” as a verb on two different tracks, with little clarity about which aspect of that complicated figure they mean to deploy.
Bianca and Sierra’s voices, whose tight harmonies and curdled edges comprised the most striking aspect of earlier CocoRosie records, tend to get lost in the surfeit of production elements on this one. Saloon piano, fuzz bass, and a scuffling snare crowd out lyrics about a woman roaming the country without a home on “Restless.” On “Smash My Head,” distorted power chords straight out of early 2000s alternative radio blare over a jittery IDM beat. Harp loops and field recordings of animals and warbling synth leads all compete for attention in the album’s busy jumble, burying its narrative elements in an incoherent melange.
In a 2019 interview, CocoRosie admitted that they had never listened to Chance the Rapper before the Chicago artist approached them to contribute a feature to his album The Big Day. That a group who has availed itself of hip-hop elements for over a decade doesn’t keep up with some of its most ubiquitous players is maybe not all that surprising: CocoRosie tend to rap as if to highlight their own distance from the form, to play up its incongruousness with their position as white indie artists shielded by a heavy layer of quirk. On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit. | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Marathon Artists | March 18, 2020 | 5.1 | 3fe31200-2f37-4f5e-bb2e-3da4b8b7a0a5 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Jokes about the title aside, this payload of alternate takes presents a complex portrait of a complicated time for the singer-songwriter as he made a masterpiece. | Jokes about the title aside, this payload of alternate takes presents a complex portrait of a complicated time for the singer-songwriter as he made a masterpiece. | Bob Dylan: More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-more-blood-more-tracks-the-bootleg-series-vol-14/ | More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 | The lore has always been that there are two versions of Blood on the Tracks. There’s the one that got released in January 1975—the comeback album that reinvigorated Bob Dylan’s career after a stint in the shadows, the classic that begins with the low hurdy-gurdy of “Tangled Up in Blue” and saunters onward like a sad walk through autumn woods. And then there’s the version that Dylan scrapped—the widely bootlegged, mostly acoustic collection he recorded in four days in New York City but second-guessed weeks before its scheduled release. He rewrote and re-recorded half the songs with a full band at home in Minnesota, in two days just after Christmas 1974. A combination became the definitive Blood on the Tracks.
Anytime during the last 40 years, Sony could have simply released the record’s early version, long known to fans as the “New York Sessions,” and sold it as a simple, digestible lost classic. But that is not how Dylan’s Bootleg Series, now in its 14th volume, operates: Instead, we’ve got the charmingly titled More Blood, More Tracks which, across six discs and 87 recordings, documents every note of those New York sessions and the complete full-band renditions from Minnesota. For more casual fans, there’s a one-CD or double-LP set that features the best alternate take of each song, stripped of overdubs or production effects. And so, a third version of Blood on the Tracks emerges—one that illustrates the vulnerability of the scrapped release, the one-take intimacy of Dylan’s earliest work, and the grandness of the album proper.
Despite its nearly instant reception as a classic, Blood on the Tracks is not a world that Dylan inhabited for long. By the end of 1975, he was already a different person (in full costume) leading the crowd-pleasing Rolling Thunder Revue and working up the epic gypsy-folk ballads of 1976’s Desire. We can now wallow in the moment a little longer. This is not the first time the Dylan camp has offered a box set as an audio documentary. In 2015, The Cutting Edge covered every studio take from 14 months of sessions in the mid-1960s that led to three consecutive breakthroughs: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Put on any disc from that set, and you’ll hear Dylan at a moment of inspiration, fueled by relentless creativity (and endless amphetamines) as he searched for his—and, by extension, rock music’s—future.
A decade later, nearing his mid-30s, he worked with a different energy. More Blood, More Tracks is slow, largely solo, and set in its ways like a sullen dude reading Chekhov in the corner of the bar. There’s occasional piano, pedal steel, drums, and bass, but it’s mostly Dylan alone with his guitar and harmonica. Nearly any other presence seems to unsettle him. In one of the box’s most revealing moments, Mick Jagger visits the studio on the final day of the New York sessions. Clearly spent and unsatisfied, Dylan noodles away at the bluesy “Meet Me in the Morning.” Jagger suggests some slide guitar might liven things up. “No, I don’t want to play slide,” Dylan seethes before giving it a clumsy go to prove his point. When Jagger sheepishly concedes that the song is fine, Dylan gives a bratty little laugh—he wins again.
Unlike The Cutting Edge, Dylan does not rely on accompanists to push these tracks forward. A swooning, full-band “Simple Twist of Fate” is quickly discarded for the sparse, solo one. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is also a wonder of reduction, as Dylan slowly realizes it can only exist without a drum part. As he repeats its flowery narrative across half-a-dozen takes, it occurs to him that his words are the percussion: “Purple clover, Queen Anne lace/Crimson hair across your face.” The swinging country beat from Richard Crooks can’t help but clash against the consonants. For most of the box set, the creation of Blood on the Tracks seems like a process of refinement. Dylan’s lyrics—precise, constant, breathless—also settle early in the process, minus some pronoun and tense switches. His voice transforms the most, as he navigates these songs like dramatic monologues on the page.
While fans and critics were quick to draw a connection between Dylan’s new material and his private life, including his impending divorce, Dylan has long maintained that these songs are not autobiographical. As presented here, they do not feel memoiristic—at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, they paint a larger portrait of Dylan’s creative vision. “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room,” he famously said about his process during this era. More Blood, More Tracks brings that concept to life in surprisingly vivid ways. This was no desperate bloodletting; every drop was placed just so.
The single-disc edition of the album, featuring all acoustic solo takes, sounds excellent but embryonic: just the present, before the past and future showed up to fuck everything up. No matter where in the process you encounter these songs, it’s hard to go wrong. The very long outlier “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” is either your cup of tea or not; whether a band is trying to recreate its whirling circus atmosphere or Dylan is going it alone doesn’t make much difference. “Idiot Wind” sounds best in its original acoustic form, with all its open spaces and trepidation left in, before Dylan weaponized them against his blasphemers. “If You See Her, Say Hello,” on the other hand, comes alive when his Minnesota bandmates (who, in the liner notes, finally receive credit for their performances) flesh out its baroque, love-drunk daydream of a melody.
As for the outtakes, the only extra song that stood a chance for inclusion on the finished album is a weak spot here. When Dylan attempts “Up to Me,” he struggles with the rhythm of his verses, which are mostly jokes, self-pity, and self-mythology. Similarly, “Call Letter Blues”—likely scrapped in favor of the more abstract “Meet Me in the Morning”—is the only song that brings children into the picture, a call for empathy during a breakup. It rings hollow. Maybe Dylan felt it was too on-the-nose, blood better left between the lines.
Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect. Spend enough time inside the six-hour set, and you’ll hear Dylan sing over and over again, in a number of warring voices, “I’m goin’ out of my mind.” You’ll hear him curse himself as a “creature void of form.” You’ll hear him try—and eventually fail—to assert, “Somebody’s got to tell the tale/I guess it must be up to me.” At a certain point, you can’t help but believe him. | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | November 7, 2018 | 8.5 | 3fe473d5-3c82-4dd0-837d-8fe2bc91f4d7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On Air's first best-of collection, the early hits are all accounted for—but the band's quirks and ambitions get lost in the haze. | On Air's first best-of collection, the early hits are all accounted for—but the band's quirks and ambitions get lost in the haze. | Air: Twentyears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21990-twentyears/ | Twentyears | For many years, Air’s clever hybrid of downbeat electronic, 1960s pop, and Gallic kitsch served as a gateway to undiscovered worlds of cool. They brought their cachet to artists long out of fashion: the leather-voiced Serge Gainsbourg, the antic electronic experimenters Perrey and Kingsley, the easy-listening maestro Burt Bacharach, the mellifluous synth wizard Tomita. Long before yacht-rock made lite acceptable, Air spun effortless good taste into a form as frothy, weightless, and melt-on-your-tongue easy to consume as meringue.
However, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel are more than just hip foreign exchange students who lived with you in high school and left behind a bunch of really cool CD-Rs. Over the course of their two-decade career, the French duo expanded their dandelion-tuft pop sound across nine albums—among them groundbreaking film scores, Italian spoken-word collaborations, and, last year, a vinyl-only soundtrack to a museum exhibition. Still, in 2016, does anyone need a greatest-hits release from them—especially when you can sequence your favorites on the streaming services that have now replaced them as gateways to the obscure?
Even for those who answer “yes,” it's doubtful that Twentyears, the French duo’s first best-of and rarities collection, will be the one to satisfy. Diehard fans and more unfamiliar listeners alike will likely find its tracklist obvious, as it draws heavily from the band’s early material; if you really wanted to hear half of their debut, Moon Safari**, wouldn’t you just listen to it? The best-of disc includes five songs from Talkie Walkie, two from 10,000 Hz Legend, and then just one apiece from The Virgin Suicides, Pocket Symphony, and Le Voyage Dans la Lune. Consider this: 13 of the best-of disc’s 17 selections appear in Apple Music’s ranking of the duo's most popular songs.
The first eight tracks on the disc include “La Femme D'Argent,” “Cherry Blossom Girl,” “Playground Love,” and “Sexy Boy”—songs you've probably heard so many times, you scarcely even register them as they’re playing. The first half of the disc lulls you into such a stupor of viscous strings, vibraphone, soft-porn jazz flute, and similarly syrupy ingredients, poured on in motions as familiar as your own bleary-eyed matinal rituals, that you barely even notice when track nine, “Moon Fever”—from 2012’s Le Voyage Dans la Lune, and probably the first song here you haven’t heard more times than you can count—cuts through the daze with its otherworldly, breathtakingly spooky beauty.
But then that's followed by back-to-back songs from 10,000 Hz Legend—the mouth harp and motorik chug of “Don't Be Light” (Air does Suicide, essentially), followed by the gossamer gospel of “How Does It Make You Feel” (Air does Spiritualized?)—and you’re reminded that you’re listening to a playlist, not an album. “Once Upon a Time,” *Pocket Symphony’*s piano-driven echo of Stereolab, is a lovely tune. Then there are some more songs from Talkie Walkie and Moon Safari, just in case you'd forgotten those albums exist. Only by the penultimate track are we treated to a non-LP cut, “Le Soleil Est Près de Moi,” a slow drip of narcotic R&B that harkens back to their early connections to Mo Wax.
As for the rarities disc, three of its songs were already released on the Moon Safari tenth anniversary edition in 2008. Two more come from 2009's *Love 2**—*a release that doesn’t figure at all into the best-of disc—while another is from *Love 2’*s Japanese edition. (That one’s called “Indian Summer”—do you even need me to tell you it’s got a sitar in it?) “High Point” is just an instrumental version of “Once Upon a Time.” Fortunately, there are a few nice surprises, even if six of the “rarities” are songs fans have heard before. The Pocket Symphony bonus cut “The Duelist,” a breathy, Bowie-referencing duet between Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jarvis Cocker, is great, with a quirky melodic drift that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Cate Le Bon’s albums. The previously unreleased “Adis Abebah,” from the soundtrack to 2010’s Quartier Lointain, folds Ethio-jazz saxophones into Air’s velvety downbeat, to winsome effect. And the hushed, deadpan “The Way You Look Tonight” plays to their strengths as masters of style over substance: “I like the way you look tonight/No blood in your vein, what does it mean/Trashy art everywhere, on the screen/Slow-motion aftertaste, and love at first sight.” It’s seductive and ridiculous all at once.
But that's the rare instance on Twentyears where the band's ambitions are given their due. Where are the odd, wonky pop songs like “Missing the Light of the Day,” from Love 2? Or the bristling electronic textures of 10,000 Hz Legend? They hint at a more exciting compilation that might have been by including “Land Me,” a gorgeous, meditative sketch off last year’s unexpected Music for Museum, a minimalist ambient soundtrack for an art exhibition? Why not include more of that? Or, instead of a superfluous best-of collection, why not reissue the vinyl-only Music for Museum, which is currently selling for $130 and up on Discogs? Air have never been the most adventurous of bands, but as Music for Museum proved, they’re not afraid to experiment.
Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity. | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Parlophone / Aircheology | June 13, 2016 | 5.6 | 3feaab61-8e5e-4c02-adb8-d60af764a253 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their first album in 19 years finds them doing what they do best. | If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their first album in 19 years finds them doing what they do best. | The Chills: Silver Bullets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21055-silver-bullets/ | Silver Bullets | If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their best songs occur in soft focus, the vocals of frontman and sole consistent member Martin Phillipps hushed and controlled, his guitar lines sturdy and gleaming like gold thread. His best melodies arrive as easy a sigh—gliding steadily through the center of "Satin Doll", spinning through "Tied Up in Chain" between tumbling piano. Where their contemporaries in the New Zealand scene of the early '80s capitalized on shambling charm (the Clean) or loose, looping jangle-pop (the Bats), the Chills were gentler and—especially as their career progressed—more regal, the corners of their songs filled with almost baroque detail. They feel designed to soundtrack some storybook undersea kingdom, sumptuous and mystic.
This is remarkable, considering the group’s history is shot through with turmoil and darkness. Founding drummer Martyn Bull succumbed to leukemia shortly after recording "Pink Frost", the haunting meditation on death for which the group is best known. Forever tipped as the breakout band from the Dunedin indie scene, they cycled through as many as 15 different lineups, releasing an endless string of singles and EPs for New Zealand’s storied Flying Nun label, but always seemed to collapse when they were finally hitting their stride. Case in point: they inked a deal with Warner Bros. in 1990 and scored a modest success with the smart and self-aware "Heavenly Pop Hit" from the utterly immaculate Submarine Bells but they failed to capitalize on the momentum. The intervening years delivered more EPs, compilations, and even a box set of rarities, but nothing like actual forward movement, And then there was the darkness surrounding Phillipps himself: After grappling with immobilizing depression in the late-'90s, he turned to heroin, and contracted hepatitis C after sharing a needle with a fellow user who carried the disease.
So, it’s both a surprise and relief to hear Phillipps in full fighting form on the title track from Silver Bullets, the first Chills full-length in 19 years. The song—and the album that contains it—handily erases everything from 1990 forward and seems to pick up exactly where Submarine Bells left off: guitars wreathed in reverb, organs heaving, Phillipps’ voice, as quietly assured as ever—even if what he’s singing is tinged with militance. "And if it’s true they kill a heinous vampire/ Charged with magic charm/ If forced to fight your evil empire/ We have the means to harm." Much of Silver Bullets strikes this kind of oppositional stance, Phillipps positioning himself as a kind of kiwi pop Tom Joad, pushing back against larger forces that threaten to swallow the less-fortunate whole. Often, the political is personal: on the roaring "I Can’t Help You", Phillipps grapples with the knowledge that he’s done harm to others, working through his feelings as his guitar and a whistling keyboard turn somersaults in the foreground. On the elegiac "Underwater Wasteland", he uses environmental destruction as a metaphor for social Darwinism, describing plesiosaurs and sea serpents with a kind of awestruck wonder. The music that surrounds him is rich and whispering: guitars that spiral like paper streamers in a breeze, drums that seem smothered in feathers. Combining delicate grace with ornate detailing is no easy feat, but on Silver Bullets, Phillipps manages it again and again.
But the album is not without its missteps. Phillipps’ songs are most effective when his enemies are faceless and generalized—it’s better suited to the album’s storybook mystique. The leaden bromide "America Says Hello" comes off like a conspiracy theorist’s 3 a.m. Facebook rant. Ditto "Tomboy", a song about a girl who’s picked on by her classmates whose graceful melody and good intentions are undone by Phillipps’ numbing repetition of the title. And "Molten Gold", a tumbling number about the healing power of love, feels rote compared to the richness that surrounds it.
The album is best when it’s at its broadest, and it’s never more so than in the expansive, eight-minute "Pyramids / When the Poor Can Reach the Moon". It’s the most ambitious song in the group’s entire catalog, and one whose firm grasp of melody and dynamics more than justifies its length. The tension builds for a full five minutes, the rich getting richer and the poor getting smarter, until it arrives at its glorious, sun-drenched conclusion when, instead of violence and chaos, the gates to the mansion are flung open, guitars and pianos sparkle, the oppressed are liberated and, in Phillipps’ words, "the poor can reach the moon." The net effect is warm and rousing, speaking to the power of hope in the face of darkness. After three decades of near-misses and dark alleys, Phillipps has finally embraced his role as king of the underdogs. On Silver Bullets, he fights back the only way he knows how: with beauty. | 2015-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | October 23, 2015 | 6.9 | 3fefa8f2-6fc7-4e08-8e30-03bd3c69d186 | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
Production has always been as important to Gojira's attack as note choice, and the metal band's new album is an audiophile's wet dream. | Production has always been as important to Gojira's attack as note choice, and the metal band's new album is an audiophile's wet dream. | Gojira: The Way of All Flesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12452-the-way-of-all-flesh/ | The Way of All Flesh | Gojira are like Democratic Presidential candidates-- policy wonks who are smart but stiff. They combine the tunneling riffs of Morbid Angel with the steely precision of Strapping Young Lad and Meshuggah. But the resemblance ends there. Unlike Morbid Angel, Gojira have no occult concerns; unlike Strapping Young Lad, Gojira have no sense of humor; unlike Meshuggah, Gojira's lyrics are actually about something-- namely, the environment. The band's ecological fetish somehow seems appropriate for its French origins. No American or Scandinavian death metaller would sing about "Flying Whales" or proclaim, "I embrace the world!" "Death metal" best describes Gojira only because "life metal" hasn't caught on yet.
The band is aptly named for the Japanese pronunciation of "Godzilla." Over time, Gojira's sound has increasingly mirrored the terrestrial destruction in their lyrics. The sound peaked on 2006's From Mars to Sirius, which began with "Ocean Planet", ended with "Global Warming", and deployed riffs that could knock down buildings. Production is as important to Gojira's attack as note choice, and The Way of All Flesh is an audiophile's wet dream. Instruments are defined with pristine clarity; drums are crisp yet heavy; guitars and bass form a crystalline audio monolith. Gojira sing about the evils of modernity, yet they're the sonic embodiment of it.
Such contradiction characterizes The Way of All Flesh. Lyrically, it's downright soulful. Once again, environmental themes abound. "Toxic Garbage Island" turns "Plastic bag in the sea!" into an angry mantra. "Adoration for None" thunders, "Everyone is doing their best to destroy it/ Simplicity's forgotten/ And we all drill the ground." But in between the Greenpeace anthems now is a whole lotta death. The theme is a far cry from metal's usual necrotic obsession. Instead, death and life are a continuum. "Oroborus" could be the stuff of yoga classes: "Serpent of light, movement of the soul/ Crawling stately along the spine/ Mighty phoenix from the ashes arises/ Firebird cycle, life, regenerate the cell." Joe Duplantier's vocals are stronger than ever, employing a wide variety of growls and singing.
Unfortunately, this humanity doesn't translate to the music. The performances are flawless, but overly so. Everything is polished to a gleaming sheen. When the band tries to swing, like in "A Sight to Behold", it comes off as, well, white. Heaviness is in no short supply; "Vacuity" is a single-minded stomp, while the title track pounds chugging riffs into the ground. Without edges, heat, or blood, though, such punishment is joyless. To their credit, Gojira avoid metal's tonal clichés in favor of open-ended abstraction. But it's cold and distant, unbefitting of the passionate lyrics. Undoubtedly, this material is better live, where the band has a fearsome reputation. There, the images are of raised fists and flying hair. Here, the images are of plastic discs and 1's and 0's. | 2008-11-26T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2008-11-26T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Jazz / Metal | Listenable | November 26, 2008 | 6 | 3ff35309-55e3-4258-9469-85af4eca2dba | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
This collection compiles some of the EDM-oriented netlabel's finest cuts, and serves as a great introduction to one of Japan’s best outfits bubbling up from the Internet. | This collection compiles some of the EDM-oriented netlabel's finest cuts, and serves as a great introduction to one of Japan’s best outfits bubbling up from the Internet. | Various Artists: Trekkie Trax the Best 2012 - 2015 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21614-trekkie-trax-the-best-2012-2015/ | Trekkie Trax the Best 2012 - 2015 | Between social media streams delivering seemingly endless awful news and the creeping sense that we’ve entered content singularity, it’s pretty easy to feel cynical about the state of the Internet in 2016. That same sense of digital constriction extends to music, a place filled with lukewarm takes and fast food restaurants toddling towards relevance. It’s overwhelming, but not hopeless. Plenty of artists have carved out space online where they can create new communities and explore new sounds. They exist far from the regular churn of the Web, just waiting for like-minded people to find them.
Japan’s “netlabel” scene has offered this escape for nearly 15 years. Online imprints such as Maltine Records and Bunkai-Kei Records gave space for young producers with little way of entering the country’s mainstream music industry to experiment—not to mention provide an alternative to a club culture hampered by laws straight out of Footloose. One of the bigger names to emerge in the Japanese netlabel world recently is Trekkie Trax, a collective launched by a few 20-somethings in 2012 that has put out around 50 releases from a global roster of talent and developed a reputation for energetic in-real-life shows across Tokyo. Trekkie Trax the Best 2012-2015 compiles some of the label’s finest cuts, and serves as a great introduction to one of Japan’s best outfits bubbling up from the Internet.
Trekkie Trax’s emergence parallels the Japanese commercial boom in EDM, and many moments on this compilation feature elements of the genre. It’s natural for the young artists here to be attracted to hard-hitting sounds aimed at listeners their age, but the results end up mixed when they cling too closely to the style. The Best lags when simply trying to replicate a buzzy Skrillex drop or Middle-Eastern-tinged Diplo hook, but shines when a producer finds a new angle to the familiar. Masayashi Iimori’s “Break It” draws from the aggressive stylings of trap all the way down to the air horn samples, but offsets the hyped-up centers with longer passages that ramp up the drama significantly. AMUNOA's “Cinderella Song (VIP)” uses similarly clanging beats and vocal samples to get things going, but dusts them with wispy synthesizer that adds an emotional longing to the track.
Youthfulness ultimately helps the Trekkie Trax crew stand out, the artists appearing on The Best capturing the energy of early adulthood when anything seems possible. They are digital natives, producers who grew up with the Web and are eager to throw as many ideas as possible into their dance tracks. Snail’s House embraces elements evoking Japan’s “kawaii” culture—helium-injected vocals, big colorful keyboard notes—on “Kirara,” while matra magic plunks snippets of Lil Wayne between gloopy synth drips. Kyoto's In the Blue Shirt combines split-second vocal slices with breezy ocarina on “Free Will,” but he engineers this potentially twee patchwork into a bouncy blast of sunshine. These moments come off like personal details woven into high-BPM numbers, a chance to add character to numbers that function best as uptempo club cuts.
For all the wonkiness, the label is at their best when barreling forward. Tokyo’s Carpainter gives UK garage a spin on “Journey to the West,” delivering a woozy number propelled by tribal percussion and opting to slowly reveal new details over a consistently driving tempo rather than build up to a huge moment of release. Even better is duo Lolica Tonica’s “Make Me Feel,” a jittery electro-rush somewhere between breakcore and Jersey Club. On a collection full of songs featuring vocal samples tripping over themselves, “Make Me Feel” is a highlight thanks to pure exuberance, nailing the nervous excitement of just letting loose.
Trekkie Trax didn’t reinvent anything over the last three years—artists in the Maltine Records universe laid down this path years ago, and those in Trekkie Trax point to Maltine as a massive influence on them. Rather, they are shepherding the netlabel spirit to the next generation of Japanese listeners, while also making a greater push internationally by using the net as an amplifier to spread electronic music from artists hailing from places rarely getting the same attention as their Western equals. The Best offers a concise gateway into their world, highlighting the sonic diversity of their crew and their intensity. They found room online to share their energy, and are using the Internet to bring it to anyone looking for an alternative. | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Trekkie Trax | March 21, 2016 | 7.2 | 3ff5e4e7-e6f8-4635-9697-eccd8e5c5946 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
This culinary-themed Toronto supergroup crafts languorous jazz-pop grooves that capture the ambiance of a bistro dying down at closing time. | This culinary-themed Toronto supergroup crafts languorous jazz-pop grooves that capture the ambiance of a bistro dying down at closing time. | Fresh Pepper: Fresh Pepper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fresh-pepper-fresh-pepper/ | Fresh Pepper | Nobody has ever sung more smoothly and suavely about chopping onions than André Ethier, the de facto frontman of Canadian supergroup Fresh Pepper. This is among the first things you hear on Fresh Pepper’s gastronomically themed debut: Ethier’s musings about onions (there are, apparently, new ways of chopping them), delivered in a croon so sensual and deep you might wonder if “chopping onions” is some sort of innuendo. “Sous chef/Dry your eyes,” the singer mutters over gentle waves of quiet storm keys. Two decades ago, as vocalist for the scuzzy rock band the Deadly Snakes, Ethier sang in a nasally warble often compared to Bob Dylan. But his voice has deepened to an astonishing degree, now sounding somewhere between Barry White and Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples.
There is a lounginess, an air of decaying elegance, to this honeyed croon, which pairs well with the exploratory saxophone tangents of Fresh Pepper’s other founding member, Joseph Shabason. Both veterans of Canada’s indie scene—Shabason is known for his work with Destroyer—Ethier and Shabason formed Fresh Pepper as a way of processing memories and emotional scars from working in the Toronto food industry. Every musician they recruited for Fresh Pepper (whose seven-piece lineup includes several members of Toronto’s Bernice) has done time in the service industry, and the apron-clad baby pictured on the album cover consummates the culinary concept.
Yet this peculiar album is never stilted or constrained by its food focus. This isn’t MF DOOM’s Mm..Food or Weird Al’s Food Album; Fresh Pepper is less concerned with snack-based puns than with using the restaurant setting as a loose prompt for a dreamlike flow of kitchen vignettes. The vibe is jazzy and reflective; Ethier’s lyrics are rich with novelistic detail: mushrooms sizzling in a frying pan (“Congee Around Me”), a pair of flies landing on a clock, that all-powerful barometer of a service shift’s beginning and end (the jazz-funk standout “Prep Cook in the Woods”). Across eight alternately vocal and instrumental pieces, Fresh Pepper crafts languorous and slow jazz-pop grooves that capture the ambiance of a bistro dying down at closing time.
Fresh Pepper plays like an eclectic showcase for Canadian indie-scene lifers even before Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar himself shows up for a woozy cameo on “Seahorse Tranquilizer.” The indistinct murmur of restaurant patrons ushers in this six-minute centerpiece, which evokes the drifting, free-association majesty of a Kaputt outtake. Bejar winds his way through impressionistic imagery (“Guitars floating down the river”) and satirizes the flashy promises of fine dining establishments (“We harvest insane roses/We harvest insane roses”) before retiring to let a Greek chorus of backup singers ride out the groove.
Shabason once confessed that, before joining Destroyer, he was “a self-loathing sax player for so long.” His playing on Kaputt showed him that audiences “actually want to hear a saxophone solo.” Fresh Pepper relishes the thought. The album utterly teems with Shabason’s tasty sax stylings—dueling with wafty keys on “New Ways of Chopping Onions,” simmering softly around the edges of the sighing bliss of “Congee Around Me,” taking a more menacing and processed tone on “Dishpit.”
Like much of Destroyer’s work, the record flirts with smooth-jazz kitsch; sometimes it crosses over too far, as on the antiseptic “The Worm” with its full-on Richard Marx mid-’80s sheen, but there is never the faintest whiff of ironic detachment. Fresh Pepper was recorded in-person during a lull between COVID restrictions, and the musicians clearly revel in each other’s presence, playing jazz that’s gentle and light but never stagnant or settled.
At times, Fresh Pepper feels a little too lethargic, too gentle to summon the indignities of an industry known for grinding hours and rampant exploitation. Instrumental pieces like “Walkin’” and the avant-jazzy “Dishpit” (named after the menial corner of the kitchen where dishes are stacked) are the only tracks that capture that air of hustle and bustle, and the latter feels like it was orphaned from one of Shabason’s solo records.
At its best, though, Fresh Pepper evokes the calm after the storm, the camaraderie and sense memories that linger after a restaurant shift is over. Arguably the finest song on here, “Congee Around Me” finds our narrator frying mushrooms and onions, only to reveal that he’s been fired and is now on his own. Strangely, the track—with its sense of nourishment and care, of cooking for or with someone you love—reminds me of that wonderful scene in Big Night, the 1996 Stanley Tucci film, where the two brothers (Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) wordlessly share an omelet and reconcile after a fraught night in their floundering restaurant. Sometimes, the most meaningful balm after cooking for angry strangers is cooking for yourself, just the way you like it. | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Telephone Explosion | June 21, 2022 | 7.2 | 3ff6d677-9056-4466-bb74-65471c0b98c9 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The ever-ambitious Toronto composer tackles big themes on her environmentally minded song cycle, but keeps things refreshingly immediate and small-scale. | The ever-ambitious Toronto composer tackles big themes on her environmentally minded song cycle, but keeps things refreshingly immediate and small-scale. | Lydia Ainsworth: Phantom Forest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lydia-ainsworth-phantom-forest/ | Phantom Forest | Lydia Ainsworth’s third full-length hints continually at the bloated, convoluted record it could have been. An environmentally minded song cycle inspired by Greek tragedies and Italian Renaissance art and partially narrated from the perspective of Mother Nature, Phantom Forest nonetheless resists the pull towards grandiosity. Instead, Ainsworth opts for a compact and personable nine songs over a lean 30 minutes, prioritizing immediacy over maximalism.
Phantom Forest’s 2017 processor Darling of the Afterglow rarely missed a chance to go big. On that project, Ainsworth cast herself as a wide-tent experimentalist in the mold of Susanne Sundfør, spinning a Ferris wheel of showy, synthesized classical pop and bombastic EDM. Impressive as it could be, the project worked better as a showcase reel than a proper album, and sometimes Ainsworth’s personality got overshadowed by the gloss. Phantom Forest sacrifices a little wow factor in favor of more direct songs, a tradeoff that flatters her.
Ainsworth never sounds more beguiling than when she imagines the kind of records Kate Bush might have crafted if she had grown up on ‘90s R&B. Her voice takes on hues of T-Boz’s feathery croon as she imagines an endangered natural utopia on “Can You Find Her Place,” a slinky track with the pep of Tom Tom Club’s immortal “Genius of Love.” Over a trap-shaded beat on “Tell Me I Exist,” she casts a suspicious eye toward facial recognition technology, particularly the Google Arts and Culture app that had users racing to surrender their personal data in exchange for seeing which classic paintings they maybe kinda-sorta resembled. “In leverage of your comfort/To match a portrait’s face/That hangs inside of a museum/Now hangs a database,” she sings skeptically.
Ainsworth is aided on two standouts by S U R V I V E’s Kyle Dixon, one of the composers behind the Stranger Things soundtrack, and their visions prove especially complementary. On the call to action “The Time,” a mechanical strut with an undercurrent of menace, her bright, weightless voice cuts through the gloomy synths like blades of fresh grass on a muddy field, while the minimalist “Give It Back To You” provides her ample room to show off her agile, Tinashe-esque quiver. The more intimacy a track allows her, the more passionately her voice blossoms.
Phantom Forest closes with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Green is the Colour,” and while typically few moves signify ambition quite like a Pink Floyd cover, Ainsworth uses it as one final opportunity to go small. David Gilmour wrote that song about a natural wonder, the Spanish island Ibiza, but Ainsworth’s spectral rendition renders it even more elemental, turning it into a love letter to nature itself. The track offers a final moment of hope and tranquility on an album that, without overstating its case, outlines the threats to the planet’s most dependable source of those comforts. Like the record itself, it’s a big statement in a deceptively humble package. | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | May 13, 2019 | 7 | 3ffea336-0295-4859-a60c-9e8f0e2164f6 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
With its tinny mix, infectious chant raps, and Fruity Loops-style beats, this Texas dance rap king's debut has a refreshingly unforced charm. | With its tinny mix, infectious chant raps, and Fruity Loops-style beats, this Texas dance rap king's debut has a refreshingly unforced charm. | TisaKorean: A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tisakorean-a-guide-to-being-a-partying-freshman/ | null | Tisakorean’s A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman sounds made for a Myspace page in 2008. With its tinny mix and Fruity Loops-style finger snaps and steel drums, you can easily imagine the whole thing being made on a high school computer lab’s Dell desktop. His rushed vocals, meanwhile, sound recorded in a bedroom closet just before his mom forced him to do his homework. And yet the Texas rapper has established himself 2019’s king of dance rap.
His journey picked up momentum in late 2017, when he uploaded “WERKKK” to the YouTube page of Texas-based videographer and dance video host JMoney1041. The song served as a widespread introduction to Tisakorean’s startling screeches and sinister whispering, inspired by Texas dance rap staples like Yung Nation. He followed up “WERKKK” with “Dip,” a song that found success soundtracking a Dallas-Fort Worth area dance craze called “The Woah” on social media—eventually getting the Lil Uzi Vert remix treatment. But his social media ascent was solidified when he hollered, murmured, and danced his way into virality in an ongoing series of Instagram freestyles.
In the mold of a teenage Soulja Boy, Tisakorean’s A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman—featuring a mixtape cover influenced by the YA novel Diary of a Wimpy Kid—is packed with brief minimalist tracks about school, made to be danced to on social media apps like Triller, TikTok, and Instagram. The goal is virality, but there’s a refreshing innocence to the project. Nothing is polished and nothing feels forced. Tisakorean’s lyrics are mostly irrelevant. His voice is just another instrument in the mix—one that I’m not sure he always knows how to use—with constantly changing volumes and melodies as he falls in love in the school hallway on “Gabby (Booty in the Hallway).”
A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman’s issues are minimal. One is the Kenny Beats-produced “Apple Sauce” which feels too slick and sticks out. Another is “Where’s Ms. Juicy (Hamburger Booty)” in which Tisakorean takes the Soulja Boy influence too far, with horns that need to stay locked up in a mid-2000s Atlanta time capsule. But those moments don’t prevent Tisakorean from creating one of the first mixtapes that can be enjoyed on Instagram, TikTok, and Triller. So pick any song from A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman, download the Triller app, mimic Uzi, and experience Tisakorean the way you’re supposed to. | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 8Jency / Astroknot Sounds | April 2, 2019 | 7.4 | 4005479a-8567-4a33-881b-1336f4f7316c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, his music is hard to classify. | South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, his music is hard to classify. | Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21012-petite-noir-la-vie-est-belle-life-is-beautiful/ | La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful | South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, he still doesn’t quite fit in. There are elements of dance music, rap, and rock scattered throughout his debut album, La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful, but none of those labels quite describe his sound. And while Ilunga frequently incorporates elements of his half-Congolese, half-Angolan ancestry, his music shouldn’t be shoved off into that condescending, colonialist hangover, "world music." "Psychedelically-tinged baroque contemporary African pop with heavy goth undertones" is a mouthful, so "noirwave," a descriptor coined by Ilunga himself, works as well as anything.
Ilunga introduces us to his sound with a literal fanfare. Following an impressionistic, semi-abstract intro that sets up Ilunga’s predilections for complex rhythms and sensual modulated textures, La Vie Est Belle explodes with the chorus to his first single, "Best", which tops an achingly cathartic post-punk hook with an off-kilter brass arrangement that comes in from out of nowhere to flip the song’s buttoned-up synthpop mood on its head. The horns are jarring, bracing, and just dissonant enough to add a manic edge to the song. They sound like maybe they were inspired by Ennio Morricone, or maybe by Neutral Milk Hotel, or maybe by any number of brass bands you can find playing on streets from New Orleans to Kinshasa.
For listeners of a certain persuasion, trying to trace La Vie Est Belle’s sounds back to their influences can be a distractingly entertaining way to appreciate the record, especially when the trail gets as intriguingly ambiguous as that horn part. (Such as Ilunga’s supple, swooningly expressive baritone, which can sound a little like Dave Gahan and a little like David Bowie’s more lucid moments of the '80s.) It’s a tough game to keep up, though. All those different pieces come at you at a rapid pace, and it’s hard to keep an eye on the individual threads when Ilunga keeps pulling your attention back out to the entire tapestry.
In a pop music landscape where eclecticism has become the status quo, Ilunga’s not only pulling from a broader range of sounds than all but a few other players in the game, he’s able to synthesize them into a seamless sonic entity that stands entirely away from the pack. La Vie Est Belle is a gorgeous, complex trip, not just aesthetically but emotionally. By turns, it’s abysmally abject, bravely hopeful, unguarded, canny, sexy, and profound—the kind of richly, messily variegated album that only comes around a few times a year. Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future—borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable— and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants. | 2015-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | September 10, 2015 | 7.7 | 4006bea3-ed69-43fd-af28-a4585dba38dd | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Dominick Fernow's latest one-man recording is... pleasant, and not only by contrast with his old unholy racket. | Dominick Fernow's latest one-man recording is... pleasant, and not only by contrast with his old unholy racket. | Prurient: Bermuda Drain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15651-bermuda-drain/ | Bermuda Drain | This is not the plug-your-ears Prurient you've come to know and possibly love. In the world of 21st-century harsh noise, Dominick Fernow's one-man recordings have been among the harshest, the most physical, the least compromising. Earlier albums, like 2006's hellishly screeching Pleasure Ground, were overwhelming floods of feedback and heavy psychic ugliness. Like the earliest industrial music, Prurient's records were more than sonically off-putting. They felt pained, beyond urgent, the product of some need to loose inner turmoil into the world, coming as much from Fernow's body as his machines.
Bermuda Ground isn't just pleasant by contrast with Prurient's old unholy racket. It's often actively enjoyable, albeit in a decidedly creepy way, rooted as much in familiar retro-rock moves as formless face-eating noise. Perhaps it's down to Fernow's time playing in the decidedly more accessible and anthemic synth-pop/post-punk act Cold Cave, but Bermuda Drain is full of distortion-free keyboard, perverse disco beats, moments of beauty, even hooks. Especially for those who feel they get enough aural abuse just walking down city streets, it's the first Prurient record they might throw on for reasons other than testing their pain threshold.
Which isn't to say it's accessible, necessarily. It may owe more to the creeping dread of old synthesized horror flick scores than the splatterpunk intensity of exploitation gorefests, but Bermuda Drain still opens with the kind of scream and fried-circuit blast designed to clear the room of everyone but the hardcore. When he's not roaring like a metal frontman let loose on a rave tune ("A Meal Can Be Made"), Fernow's whispering in a way that feels intimate in a decidedly uncomfortable and icky way. And song titles like "Let's Make a Slave" should let you know that Fernow-the-songwriter isn't exactly penning happy-go-lucky new wave here.
Fernow's shrieking and quiet-loner monologues also give Bermuda Drain a real sicko intensity that's been lacking from the recent glut of "dark" early-1980s synth stuff. He has the sound down, somewhere between Factory Records sturm-und-drag and grotty old VHS-tape slasher soundtracks, but you could never accuse Bermuda Drain of being a slick or faceless attempt at mere nostalgia. Like the earlier Prurient records, it comes from a dark and personal place, less an exercise than an explusion. Fernow wants to shake you up, unnerve you, make you understand just how fragile "beautiful" music is, rather than simply make sure he gets the synth tones period-perfect. | 2011-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hydra Head | July 21, 2011 | 7 | 40182c70-196b-43fe-9008-b1d18c10ccb3 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
While kicking around the jangle-pop scene, Frankie Rose was a member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls. On her second solo album, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. | While kicking around the jangle-pop scene, Frankie Rose was a member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls. On her second solo album, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. | Frankie Rose: Interstellar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16304-frankie-rose-interstellar/ | Interstellar | Frankie Rose spent a few years kicking around the Brooklyn jangle-pop scene before striking out on her own: As the most charismatic member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, she was a reliable bolt of onstage electricity enlivening the often noncommittal presences around her. It was pretty clear, even then, that she was eventually destined for bigger things, but her first solo record, recorded under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs, still felt constrained by a reflexive sort of cool-kid slouch. Between that record and Interstellar, she has dropped the pretense of a backing band entirely, and is recording simply as "Frankie Rose." The implicit point is clear: This time around, she's going for it.
The first moments of "Interstellar" make this point immediately. The song opens on a cool-blue vista of synthesizers, a transportingly vast sound of the sort Frankie's never made before. When her voice enters the mix, cooing about interstellar highways and moon dust, it's piped from above, passed through a series of filters so until she slightly resembles the Laurie Anderson of "O Superman". A minute in, a massive, Valhalla-pound drum hit resounds, the synths explode sideways, and Frankie hurls us down a flume ride of descending vocal harmonies. It's the most colorful, thrilling music of her career, and as grand a pronouncement as one can make that we're not doing things the same way anymore.
Interstellar is a big, second-album leap of faith into deeper waters, a sparkling synth-pop record that wants very badly to mean something to dreamy, hyper-emotional twentysomethings. For her model, she's taken the impression of some of the dreamiest, most hyper-emotional records of her youth. The production on Interstellar is gorgeous, and clearly modeled on the Cure's big, panoramic pop records, like Disintegration: booming-canyon drums, acres of spannable horizon. The drum beat that opens up "Know Me" is virtually identical to that of "Close to Me", and the silvery guitar leads on "Gospel/Grace" are pretty much mimeographed from "Plainsong". But although Rose indulges pretty heavily in the Cure's primary colors, she paints something distinctly her own with them. The world of Interstellar is a vision of paradise as lifted from the front of a Trapper Keeper: air-brushed, pastel-hued, and gloriously vivid.
Interstellar is not a thematically rich experience-- it basically has one single invitation, and that is to swim with Frankie in the glorious bath of echoes she's drawn for herself. "All that I want is a pair of wings to fly/ Into the blue, a wide open sky/ Show me your scars, I'll show you mine/ Perched out of the city on a pair of power lines," she sings over and over on "Pair of Wings", and you can hear this yearning for escape echoed in the record's every upward-spiralling note. Her singing has always been breathy and modest, but on Interstellar, her voice seems to mist on contact, even when she's swirling herself into a prismatic mini-choir of Frankies. On her record, she's just another celestial body orbiting larger ones.
The resulting album isn't one you actively explore so much as bask in gratefully. The longer I spend immersed in it, the more I appreciate its details: the haunting, truncated piano chords that the melody of "Apples for the Sun" clumps around, or the way Frankie's voice melts into and becomes one with the bloom of synthesized strings in the last minute of "Gospel/Grace". Rose is tapping the same slightly shameless clear eyes/full hearts well of teen melodrama that sourced M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, and she demonstrates the same kind of focus and vision in carrying it off. On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. Amen to breaking free of sonic restrictions when they outlive their usefulness. | 2012-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Slumberland | February 21, 2012 | 8.4 | 401dcdf4-5a8a-4ca3-b332-34a08dd0d8a3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
French experimental artist Cécile Schott returns with a third LP of increasingly fewer electronics, here creating beautiful string-and-wind meditations that harken back 400 years, yet seem tailored for today. | French experimental artist Cécile Schott returns with a third LP of increasingly fewer electronics, here creating beautiful string-and-wind meditations that harken back 400 years, yet seem tailored for today. | Colleen: Les Ondes Silencieuses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11096-les-ondes-silencieuses/ | Les Ondes Silencieuses | After a 2006 EP, Colleen et les Boites à Musique, that featured music boxes, Colleen's third, largely string-based full-length, Les Ondes Silencieuses ("silent waves"), begins with a relative big bang. Opener "This Place in Time" kicks off with a panoramic cacophony of viola and cello that quickly fades out to a pretty, filmic harmony of long, drawn-out chords and tension-building silences. Colleen's usual urge to interweave loops of electronics with vocals and strings is absent here; instead, the opening track is so listless and chord-driven that it sounds like an exit-- either to an album or an Ang Lee film.
For much of the album, there's no palpable machinery at hand except a microphone. There are subtle effects lent to the classical guitar on "Le Labyrinthe", Colleen's seeming homage to Renaissance-era lyre ballads. Precise rhythms and ever-climbing scales between two guitars may suggest "computer," when in fact the song is simply a study of musical dialogue, and of polyphony. It's free of percussion and completely a relic of a distant past. Similarly, "Blue Sands" is breezy, inviting, and ancient. Slightly reverbed guitar plucks and windy strums recall Joni Mitchell at the dulcimer or Arthur Russell at the cello. Hollow harmonics on the viola reel and see-saw in the song's gorgeous climax, and the guitar remains in the background, adding a subtle counter-rhythm.
"Echoes and Coral", with its hints of watery field recordings and gong-inspired melody, sounds more like Mira Calix, to whom it's increasingly easy to compare Colleen since the latter relinquished the laptop in favor of a global range of strings and percussion. The song could easily be bells heard far off during a walk through a Buddhist courtyard, and yet there's a clear, traditional composition behind the seemingly random, relaxed taps of metal. "Le Bateau", also suggesting Calix's creeping, melody-free wanderings about strings and keys, knits itself into a cohesive, cognizant melody-- just the thick plucks of a viola shifting from mood to mood, relaxation to urgency.
The other star instrument here is the clarinet, which notably appears on "Sun Against My Eyes" and makes a pretty, but a little hokey, complement with the guitar. The tempo on this and most of the other tracks is so slow that it can be frustratingly lulling. But I can think of many situations when "Sun" could render a scene, a meditation, or a non-automobile TV commercial perfectly sad and memorable, and in fact it's one of few well-paced songs here. It's energetic in places, even urgent, and feels fully fleshed out, while many others here are sheer ruminations. Lovely as they are, many of these songs are little watercolors that might not find the same kind of audience as Colleen's electronics. However, they might find a new audience in those that dug Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood, classical string fans or players, and anyone with painterly patience to spare on a crisp winter afternoon. | 2008-02-13T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2008-02-13T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leaf | February 13, 2008 | 6.8 | 401fd351-c8ce-4312-849f-457621609605 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Like THEESatisfaction's breakthrough awE naturalE, EarthEE eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar. At its best, the album feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination. | Like THEESatisfaction's breakthrough awE naturalE, EarthEE eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar. At its best, the album feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination. | THEESatisfaction: EarthEE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20227-earthee/ | EarthEE | THEESatisfaction's Sub Pop debut awE naturalE featured few hooks and choruses, focusing instead on instrumental grooves and the atmospheric flows of Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons. The album produced a hit in "QueenS", however, and launched the duo into a career post-Black Up, where they first gained recognition singing with Shabazz Palaces. Their follow-up, EarthEE, once again eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar through its production and stream-of-consciousness verses. The album, at its best, feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination.
"Said the bird to the water: May I take a sip? May I dip my toes in it?" sings Harris-White in "Prophetic Perfection", the album’s first song. It is a short invitation—or induction—that prepares us for "No GMO", a relaxed, smooth house party track that recalls past offerings like "QueenS". Like the dream hampton-directed video for that song, or the Black Weirdo parties that THEESatisfaction host, "No GMO" exudes a blackness wedded to an exclusive coolness; an invite-only funk that can’t be faked. "The gods were watching our eyes, keep this shit on the low, so clandestine," Stas raps.
The title track, meanwhile, dripping in ankh platitudes via Shabazz Palaces and Porter Ray, is the least intelligent song here. Riddled with borrowed, hotep tropes—"Eritrean queen"; "Kush goddess"; "bitches"; "Nefertiti"—the song pushes simplistic ideas about black women in the service of something that ultimately isn’t that fun or afrocentric. Referencing head wraps, presenting dichotomies like the club vs. literally anywhere else ("Fuck a club, let’s make love in the bathtub"), the song poses as progressive but mostly reinforces gender roles. "My pretty moms was pro-black," though a great line, peddles sexism under the guise of respect for African Queens™.
Most of EarthEE scans like a friend’s spoken word poem read aloud so many times that their sheer conviction makes it stick, mnemonically, to the roof of your mouth. But you can’t simply will catchiness. Something—usually a feeling—needs to hold long after you’ve forgotten the lyrics, and EarthEE makes one think more than feel. Its intelligence—from the interestingly crafted, synthy, intergalactic-sounding beats to the rhymes waxing political and poetic—is unflinching. In terms of evoking deeper sensations, that feel like interstellar, communal prophecy, like Zora Neale Hurston and John Coltrane playing double dutch with Missy Elliott on the moon, there’s not much to grab on to. But perhaps that’s where EarthEE’s seductive energy—the meandering intonations, the sage chants—lies. There’s a power, take it or leave it, in music that functions like psychic holdovers until whatever futuristic soundscape comes next. | 2015-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 25, 2015 | 6.8 | 40203872-500a-4b77-872b-4eea51c571c9 | Safy-Hallan Farah | https://pitchfork.com/staff/safy-hallan-farah/ | null |
With an ambitious fusion of Hindustani classical, progressive rock, and jazz, the New York-based guitarist and composer offers an expansive, egalitarian vision of identity and belonging. | With an ambitious fusion of Hindustani classical, progressive rock, and jazz, the New York-based guitarist and composer offers an expansive, egalitarian vision of identity and belonging. | Shubh Saran: Inglish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shubh-saran-inglish/ | Inglish | The question “Where are you from?” is a fraught one for people of color, loaded as it often is with insidious subtext on race, ethnicity, and nationalism. For Shubh Saran, it’s positively vexatious. The son of Indian diplomats, Saran had already lived in four countries on three continents by the time he was in high school. The full list of cities he’s called home reads like an airport departures board: Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, Boston, and New York City, where he’s been based since 2014. This nomadic existence has understandably left Saran feeling a “little lost, culturally.” So, with time on his hands during the pandemic, the guitarist and composer decided to dig deeper into lingering questions about identity and belonging in a globalized world.
Saran documents that investigation in intimate detail on his second album, Inglish, disentangling the mess of experiences and biases that inform his identity and creative process. He started down this road on the 2020 EP Becoming, which brought his pop-punk guitar roots into conversation with the jazz and R&B idiom he adopted while studying at Berklee. Inglish is a much grander project of musical integration, gathering Hindustani classical, Rajasthani folk, Middle Eastern folk, pop-punk, progressive rock, industrial, neo-soul, and jazz fusion into tense and occasionally fractious harmony.
The result is a lovingly assembled bricolage of Saran’s musical influences and personal history. Opener “Enculture” lurches from serpentine desert folk-tinged guitar to freeform piano, while Joshua Bailey and Angelo Spampinato’s twin drum attack marches in lockstep with distorted bass and synths, sounding for all the world like a slightly anemic Tool jam. “Intra” features even more dizzying shifts in styles and tempos. Drums, tabla, and folk percussion dance an intricate waltz, moving from a meditative stutter to bhangra frenzy in the blink of an eye. Saran’s guitar-playing channels Damnation-era Opeth via Arabic folk, while a brief sax-and-trombone interlude brings to mind the short-lived Mumbai experimental jazz band Groove Suppa (led by Madagascar-born saxophonist Tala Faral, another artist with wide-ranging musical roots).
Saran fuses these disparate sounds into a compelling composite, each element retaining its own identity within a largely cohesive whole. The compositional juggling act takes the normative idea of assimilation—of immersing oneself in the dominant culture, erasing difference—and turns it on its head. In its place, Inglish offers a more egalitarian vision—one which celebrates difference, abolishes cultural hierarchies, and leans into awkward, messy, confusing heterogeneity. If it sometimes feels like the whole thing might collapse under the weight of its contradictions, that only adds to the thrill.
The album’s clearest statement of intent—also hinted in the title, which references the uniquely Indian dialects of the English language that emerged from the collision of colonialism, globalization, and post-colonial nation-building—is Indo-futuristic lead single “postradition.” Notes from Rasika Shekhar’s bansuri (bamboo flute) drape themselves over arpeggiated modular synths like folds of gossamer fabric, while Saran’s sinuous guitar plays tag with chromatic swells of tenor and alto saxophone. In imagining a world beyond tradition, “postradition” argues for an expansive, inclusive concept of what it means to “be Indian,” pushing back against the politics of difference. The conflict between utopian dream and not-quite-dystopian reality reaches its zenith on “the Other,” where the drums stomp and swagger with undisguised menace and saxophones blare out a discordant challenge. Saran’s lead guitar picks a circuitous path through the chaos; having found a measure of peace, he turns his attention to its emotional and psychic toll.
In the post-rock grandeur of “There Across the Ocean,” Inglish is also tinged with a profound sense of loss—for the security of a homeland, for the comfort of deep, unconflicted roots. On “remember to come home soon,” the album’s emotional anchor, Saran drops the genre-bending tightrope act in favor of pared-back sincerity. Finger-plucked guitar and minor-key piano whisper to each other like exiles in a distant land, lost in bittersweet remembrance of a home to which they can’t return. What do we lose when we no longer belong to one place, when our roots are scattered across the globe? Beyond its Indian specifics, Inglish is a heartfelt exploration of the ups and downs of being part of the world’s fastest-growing floating tribe—part global citizen, part cultural refugee.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | self-released | November 8, 2021 | 7.3 | 40221bf5-297c-4f72-b96f-f9ae153eacce | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The newly vulnerable Future and the hyper-expressive Zaytoven offer up a sequel that doesn’t just reprise the original’s magic but improves on it. | The newly vulnerable Future and the hyper-expressive Zaytoven offer up a sequel that doesn’t just reprise the original’s magic but improves on it. | Future: BEASTMODE 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-beastmode-2/ | BEASTMODE 2 | Even at the top of his game, Future said he was “halfway happy.” The story of his run from 2014-15 is the stuff of real-life legend—the four-project streak from Monster to DS2 that remains some of the most vital rap of the past decade. You could say the Dungeon Family heir had every reason to be thrilled, but that’s not how it works; I’ve yet to hear anyone make counting money sound so fucking depressing. In that same “halfway happy” interview, Future admitted he’d seen ghosts. Asked where, he answered simply: “Everywhere.”
Those ghosts haunted the periphery of the original Beast Mode tape—the early 2015 collaboration with trap virtuoso Zaytoven that sounded like nothing Future had released before. It felt like January: frozen, hungover. Where Monster before it was powered by red-eyed death drive, Beast Mode was elegant, deceptively unfazed. When I spoke to Zaytoven about the project recently, his mood turned tender, almost awed: “You listen to something like Beast Mode, and it's almost like looking at a pretty painting.” But in spite of its beauty, the tape’s most telling line—and the thesis, really, of that stretch of Future’s career—was tucked inside “No Basic”: “Took all the pain and I ran with it.” Literalists might say the tape glamorized drug abuse as a coping mechanism, but that would suggest any of it felt remotely glamorous. Mostly, it seemed, Future just wanted to forget who he was; nothing felt as good as feeling nothing at all.
The three years since have brought Future some of his highest highs, career-wise—last year’s duo of FUTURE and HNDRXX debuted with back-to-back Billboard No. 1s—but no full-length release has matched Beast Mode’s emotional tenor. With the surprise release of BEASTMODE 2, Future and Zay join the ranks of Raekwon and Francis Ford Coppola (and, well, Future’s own DS2) with a sequel that doesn’t just reprise the original’s magic, but improves on it. The 2015 tape may have felt more revolutionary as a shift no one saw coming, but musically, BEASTMODE 2 has the edge. And in its best moments, the unknowable rapper lays his cards on the table, vulnerable in a way he’s never been before.
Like its predecessor, BM2 takes a few tracks to warm up, retreading familiar territory before baring its soul. With its vaguely sinister orchestra of synth flutes and strings, “Wifi Lit” feels like a spiritual continuation of Beast Mode’s “Lay Up”; its opening reference to the recent “I’m good luv, enjoy” meme is a move few other than Future could pull off without sounding desperate to cash in their virality tokens. “Cuddle My Wrist” is one of those quintessential Future catchphrases, the kind that doesn’t look like much on paper but transforms, through his delivery, into something you catch yourself muttering at random—a turn of phrase that evades meaning and conveys feeling at the same time. Even the banger here—“31 Days,” a dead-hearted romance and solid anti-UTI PSA with bass that straddles the threshold of dubstep—head-fakes towards profundity before sinking back into decadence. “This is a moment of clarity,” Future opens, before it becomes clear he’s referring to the quality of his diamonds.
But with “Racks Blue,” Future starts to sink. The beat feels expansive and expressive, like Zaytoven is playing from the heart with Future following where he leads. And though its hook, typed out, reads as a flex—“What I’m supposed to do when these racks blue?”—it feels more like a sigh when Future sings it, or a corrective to Howlin’ Wolf’s definition of the blues as brokeness opening the door for evil. What Howlin’ Wolf didn’t account for is how that door never really shuts.
Which leaves us here: “Money got me hesitant, what I got to live for?/All this fame getting terrible,” Future croaks on “Red Light,” BM2’s heartbreaking centerpiece, which repurposes Zaytoven’s beat for Trouble’s “Ms. Cathy and Ms. Connie” to stunning effect. For the first time, Future introduces us to his father: “All the times he lied to me, gave up on my arteries/I was such a worried child, just wanted you to be a part of me.” He has sketched portraits of his childhood before, but never as plainly as this. And if “running through the red light, looking through your rear view” describes the his very real paranoia behind the wheel, it’s also the perfect metaphor for Future’s entire thing: barreling forward but never fast enough to shake his past, which clings to him in a way that almost makes his name feel cruel.
Everything—the album, and frankly, maybe Future’s entire catalog—builds to the final track, “Hate the Real Me.” Zaytoven’s gladiator horns scream “triumph,” the kind of beat over which Rick Ross or Drake might toast themselves without a second thought. Instead, Future takes the opportunity to lay bare the undercurrent of self-loathing that’s coursed through his music over the last four years. “Pouring up in public, damn I hate the real me,” he sings, his throat tight as he cracks the seal of the lean bottle. His mother’s worried about him. He’s hearing voices; they’re turning against him. “I’m trying to get high as I can,” the chorus repeats over and over—the only way a traumatized dirtbag who knows the devil is real can sleep at night. And suddenly, Future’s roster of alter egos is cast in a bleak new light—just another way to avoid himself. But the mask can’t stay on forever. | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | July 11, 2018 | 8 | 4023c3c9-42ec-4b79-82e8-941d57679df5 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
South London musician Benjy Keating is signed to the acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, where he makes a strange and subdued DIY bedroom-pop version of dancehall. | South London musician Benjy Keating is signed to the acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, where he makes a strange and subdued DIY bedroom-pop version of dancehall. | Palmistry: PAGAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22010-pagan/ | PAGAN | Benjy Keating started making music in a South London bedroom, spurred on by his roommate Dominik Dvorak (aka PC Music affiliated producer Felicita). At first he was making what he admitted to be “Burial rip-offs” but then, after hearing dancehall beats blare out of car windows, he drifted into a new style. The first taste of this came with a song called “Catch,” made in conjunction with SOPHIE. The song boasted a cool minimalism grafted onto the whisper of polyrhythmic Caribbean sounds. On top of it was Keating’s voice: British, introverted, mumbly, a painfully shy-sounding white kid singing in a sort of patois. It was hard to know what to make of it, but there was an undeniable magnetism to it: Why make a totally introverted, melancholic, and skeletal brand of dancehall? There's an argument that it could maybe work: His current labelmate Popcaan proved in 2014’s Where We Come From that without a doubt, the voice behind a mic in dancehall wasn’t the providence of the badman exclusively.
It’s taken six years of behind-the-scenes work and training for Keating to release a full-length debut. He’s produced and written every second of the 36 minutes of *PAGAN. *He’s signed to Dre Skull’s acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, has co-signs from PC Music producers, is featured favorably in respected magazines that span avant-garde art (DIS) and music (FACT, Fader, and others). In other words, he's enjoyed a light smattering of hype. The adjectives that seem to orbit around him—dreamy, romantic, intimate—aren’t necessarily wrong, but they don’t exactly say why he should be interesting. If anything, on a purely musical level, the 36 minutes that compose *PAGAN, *constitutes a bewilderingly long and shapeless journey into the heart of a sound that is truly lacking in depth.
Keating seems driven to explore how dancehall and soca rhythms might work in a vacuum. In PAGAN, he solely relies on looped synths, subdued drum machines, and the occasional sample, boiling down cultural signifiers so that only the essential components of those genre’s polyrhythmic patterns are recognizable. He then injects pop straight into the minimalism, making sure the selected synth loop twinkles nicely, and the drum beats happily shuffle. In the tiniest of doses, it can sound attractive but prolonged exposure (read: more than four or five minutes) is both irritating and bewildering. The songs themselves are so muddled, amorphous and repetitive that they become indistinguishable. It’s hard to know what the music is striving to make you feel, if anything: excitement is clearly not the goal, but modest DIY stuff is usually supposed to be fresh and wide-eyed, not clinical and sleepy. And “sleepy” is probably something dancehall should never be. In the brief instrumental interludes, like “Reekin” and “Comeragh Mountains” you can feel the limitations built into the very idea of making dancehall rhythms melancholic or atmospheric present themselves.
Then there are those vocals. It’s not necessarily insulting or offensive that Keating sings in a clunky patois. But it is mystifying that he chooses to deliver it in a lilting, high-pitched stage whisper. His lyrics are usually garbled, but when you do catch his words they’re throwaway statements about the modern condition (“I'm lost in the c/there's no remedy”) or generalized hot nonsense, like this one from “Beamer”: “Let the beat drop all night going back to back/back to back/slit my tummy good make a diamond suit.” Lyrics can be nonsense, of course, but a talented vocalist would make them bounce: Keating dashes through these ridiculous lines like a terrified kid reading at a middle school podium, elongating his delivery at strange sections and pitch-shifting his voice in arbitrary and irritating ways. Even in his most coherent song, “Club Aso,” his singing somehow comes off like a Chris Martin approximation of dancehall.
Keating has been quick to point out on Twitter that his relationship with dancehall is a tad more opaque and complicated than it might seem, writing back in May: “Just to clarify dancehall never died n also i don't make dancehall.” And then later in an interview with the *Fader *he said “I don’t make dancehall...Dancehall’s so pure as it is, it doesn’t need me to add anything to it."In both of these statements, it’s obvious that he’s grappling with the complications of his particular choices, but there is a certain quality of what he’s saying that feels half-hearted. It’s a rote statement of cultural sensitivity that doesn’t address the fact that his singing and cribbing of rhythms are at best poor impressions of nuanced and complicated linguistic and musical vernaculars. He name-checks the likes of Vybz Kartel and Alkaline as influences, when in a very real way he shares nothing with what they’re doing, considering his general attitude and actual sound. Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk. | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mixpak | June 20, 2016 | 5 | 40252708-85a8-4e3a-b1f3-333739bb1d49 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Weezer's overlooked second album eventually became a cult favorite and now it's received a deluxe 2xCD reissue; there's also this other new record... | Weezer's overlooked second album eventually became a cult favorite and now it's received a deluxe 2xCD reissue; there's also this other new record... | Weezer: Pinkerton [Deluxe Edition] / Death to False Metal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14817-weezer-pinkerton-deluxe-edition-death-to-false-metal/ | Pinkerton [Deluxe Edition] / Death to False Metal | At one point, there seemed as strong a chance of Weezer's making an album as good as Pinkerton as there was of their reissuing it. To say nothing of playing it live in its entirety. It's hard to think of a more fiercely beloved record a band has gone to great lengths to write out of its history. To recap: Weezer's self-titled Blue Album went multiplatinum on the strength of shiny power-pop and goofy videos anachronistic in the era of post-grunge. For the follow-up, Rivers Cuomo holed up at Harvard and made a disturbingly graphic, harshly recorded concept album that includes his sniffing the fanmail of an 18-year old Japanese girl while imagining her masturbating. Needless to say, it was not played for laughs. Pinkerton was poorly received by critics upon release and considered a flop after peaking at #19. Cuomo probably didn't care about the critics, but he took the public indifference very personally, soon retreating from view. But the cult that adored and passionately identified with Pinkerton became hard to ignore by the turn of the century, with the commercial breakthrough of confessional emo seen as its ultimate vindication. The record that killed Weezer's career ended up saving it.
It's a nice story, and one that's integral and damn near necessary to protect Pinkerton's legend: a popular misconception is that a Rolling Stone readers' poll named it the worst album of 1996 (it was actually third behind Bush and DJ Spooky), and as Rob Mitchum suggested in his review of Make Believe, it's something that people of a certain age might protect from re-evaluation for what it might say about their youth. In actuality, Pinkerton may initially have been the victim of a generation gap. It was hardly the first album to get this uncomfortably confessional, but it had some unusually bad timing. Self-laceration was in vogue during 1996, but as far as critical favorites went, it was often from a female perspective (Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love) that balanced boldness and raw vulnerability. In comparison, Pinkerton was hardly misunderstood, but instead seen for what it was: written from a juvenile, male, and incredibly needy perspective. It's a really tough album to go to bat for if you're an adult, particularly since enjoying it is so closely associated with relating to it.
And who would want to do that? On the very first song, Cuomo is Portnoy's Complaint on wax, disappointed with his inability to find true love in the midst of meaningless sex. And on the last one, he forsakes a chance at true love for... you guessed it, meaningless sex, giving an explanation that drips with insincerity: "I did what my body told me to/ I didn't mean to do you harm." In between, he lashes out at a woman for having the nerve to be a lesbian ("Pink Triangle") and for not devoting all of her attention to him ("No Other One"). He takes two failed relationships as concrete proof of romantic futility in "Why Bother?", and of course, the big reveal in "Across the Sea": "It's all your fault, mama."
And yet because of all of this emotional baggage, the cathartic power of Pinkerton is second to none. While it's often compared to the Blue Album, Pinkerton bears more similarity to In Utero, a record that also mixed relatively raw alt-rock production, undeniable pop smarts, and a lead singer absolutely freaked the fuck out by fame. But while many sickeningly thought Kurt Cobain's suicide somehow validated his art, Cuomo's self-destruction was more quotidian and relatable, struggling with an unbearable need to be loved but a complete inability to realize the need for it to be reciprocated. It's why Pinkerton isn't misogynistic so much as confused: "No Other One" classically mistakes hating yourself for loving someone else, and "El Scorcho" reminds that fictional RomCom behavior is actually borderline sociopathic in real life. In fact, the songs most likened to cuddly Blue Album Weezer are the darkest-- "The Good Life" is Cuomo at the end of his rope, hysterical at the ridiculousness of his self-loathing, while a single line in "El Scorcho" sums up the core of Pinkerton's pain: "I can't talk about it/ I gotta sing about it and make a record."
The influence of Pinkerton led to hundreds of mostly regrettable bands, but what ultimately distinguishes Weezer is how they sonically mirror the unhinged and private mental terror of its narrator. Weezer actually sound dangerous here in places, in part due to the recording of Dave Fridmann, who maintains a first-take intimacy even when every instrument competes to be the loudest thing in the mix. Weezer's rhythm section rarely gets much credit, but Matt Sharp and Pat Wilson maintain a savage low-end they'd never repeat-- the coda of "Tired of Sex" embodies overwhelming and impotent frustration, while the chorus of "Getchoo" isn't a hook, it's a fist repeatedly hitting a wall.
The supposedly juvenile feelings of Pinkerton still pack visceral power years after listeners would've supposedly outgrown them. It's a record that reaches well beyond a diaristic look at Cuomo's perversions, and instead asks something more universal: Do we really grow out of our teenage feelings, or do we need something like Pinkerton to expose them as merely being repressed to the point where they mutate? It's heavy stuff, and in the manner of Violent Femmes, you can argue about the sexual politics, the late-career parody, or the total uncoolness of it in retrospect, but even if Pinkerton is ultimately an album that gets one single shot at you, the mark it leaves is indelible.
Befitting a band for the diehards, Weezer's always had certain B-sides that are every bit as loved as the singles. Though this deluxe version contains 25 extra tracks, 16 are alternate versions of material that appeared on Pinkerton: If you need muddy-sounding live versions of "Why Bother?" and "Pink Triangle", or if "Across the Sea Piano Noodles" triggers an uncontrollable completist impulse, consider it an early Christmas. Me, I'm here for their acoustic performances of "El Scorcho" and "The Good Life" at Y100, the erstwhile alt-rock station I listened to in high school. Otherwise, most of the unreleased B-sides are demo-level in both sound and quality.
The more intriguing prospect is Death to False Metal, proudly touted as "Weezer's third release of the fourth quarter." Not really sticking to any concrete organizational principle, Weezer cull unreleased material dating back to the late 90s from a wide range of sources, including their own fans and Toni Braxton. But as a clearinghouse for an increasingly prolific band, False Metal isn't particularly generous. In fact, judging from its wacky title/cover combo, 10-song tracklist, and overall quality, it dubiously achieves Cuomo's stated goal of creating the logical follow-up to Hurley.
The power pop Weezer work with maintains its devotees in large part because of its adherence to a kind of strict formula, and having mastered it early in his career, Cuomo can churn it out effortlessly, for better or (mostly) worse. Verses are treated with merely custodial concern before the big hooks, there's the guitar solos that are flashy enough to be noticed but easy enough to learn, and the production glosses everything up to radio-ready ubiquity and anonymity. But once again, there's a laziness that's more annoying than any of Cuomo's "cool dad" humor. There's the song about turning up the radio, and it's called "Turning Up the Radio"-- the irony of its being the result of a YouTube contest is actually kinda fascinating. Cuomo's shown an almost frightening ability to tap into a certain generic teenage frustration, and "Losing My Mind" is the song to which you can grouse about your allowance.
Upon reviewing Hurley, I said that Weezer's songs feel more like single-packed sitcoms now, but nothing on that album can match "The Odd Couple", which boasts the sort of hack-joke opening line ("I got a PC, you got a Mac") that Fountains of Wayne wouldn't touch*.* "Blowin' My Stack" and "I'm a Robot" are the working-for-the-weekend anthems, and that both have blatantly similar lyrics ("I need cash to pay my bills" / "I have to earn money to pay my bills") suggests a general lack of curatorial oversight to False Metal.
At the very least, there's a sense of closure in the simultaneous release of Pinkerton and Death to False Metal: For the past decade, new Weezer albums have been unfavorably judged relative to Pinkerton, and hey, we finally get to do it in real time. But there's always been an underlying unease that, at least in more indie-leaning circles, we're becoming every bit as susceptible to the generation gap that led to the dismissal of Pinkerton in the first place. Even if Weezer were able to come up with something as potent as Pinkerton, would we recognize it?
I suppose that doesn't give the listener enough credit, but we can do away with the idea that Pinkerton is somehow "realer" than other Weezer records. Even if they're more Spike Jones than Spike Jonze these days, it exists on the same continuum as Raditude, Hurley, and yes, even Make Believe-- Cuomo's work has always been driven by a need for approval, and once the Green Album was seemingly spawned by popular demand, he's used his band as an embodiment of that. That their "Memories Tour" is financially backed by AXE appears terribly ironic, but in reality, Weezer are also a brand that realizes striking a chord with boys obsessed with sex gives you a license to print money. By the same token, it gives me comfort that Pinkerton will remain timeless-- its fanbase is the ultimate renewable resource. | 2010-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | November 3, 2010 | 10 | 403e45d8-e9b6-4a50-8a52-a261651cf9e1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
In the ‘90s, the heady, ethereal techno made by 7th Plain had no peers. The best of this out-of-print and previously unreleased material still sounds otherworldly, all these years later. | In the ‘90s, the heady, ethereal techno made by 7th Plain had no peers. The best of this out-of-print and previously unreleased material still sounds otherworldly, all these years later. | The 7th Plain: Chronicles 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22214-chronicles-1/ | Chronicles 1 | One Saturday in 1994, a pair of recent college graduates wandered into the Yohji Yamamoto store in SoHo, on the corner of Grand and Mercer. Neither was buying anything. One, who took inspiration from New York club kids, was drawn to the outlandish shapes and imaginative draping; the other was simply tagging along for the ride, and felt more than a little overwhelmed by the fields upon fields of black, not to mention the astronomical price tags hanging from the garments. I know this, because I was that cowed young man. The music in the store that day also reminded me of space, and when I inquired about the shimmering electronic soundtrack, a clerk told me it was something called the 7th Plain. Despite the fact that the name sounded more like a cult than a musician, I hightailed it to Mondo Kim’s, where I plunked down $24 for My Yellow Wise Rug, an import CD that looked unlike any other I had ever purchased, packaged in a wide, flat cardboard box and emblazoned with a yellow “magic eye” illustration that I have never, ever managed to decipher, all these years later.
I recount the story because it might be hard to imagine, 22 years later, how alien that kind of music once sounded, especially in the United States. It was techno, but it wasn't really made for dancing; it was ambient, but it definitely wasn’t made for spas. It sounded like the future, and you were unlikely to hear music of its ilk anywhere on the airwaves, save perhaps for a few broadcasts on the far left of the dial. And while Luke Slater, the British artist behind the project, had recorded plenty of the raw, pile-driving techno then in favor in the rave scenes on both sides of the Atlantic, the heady, ethereal bent of the 7th Plain remained a niche concern.
Slater only released two albums and a handful of EPs under his 7th Plain alias, all between 1993 and 1995 and all of it on General Production Recordings, an ambient techno label that was home to artists like the Black Dog and Beaumont Hannant. (A third 7th Plain album, 1996’s Playing With Fools, never made it past the test-pressing stage, and the label shut down the same year). Slater has continued to record, though most of his subsequent output has been sterner and steelier than his halcyon 7th Plain music. He released a string of albums under his own name on Mute and NovaMute around the turn of the millennium, and since 2009, he has focused largely on his aliases L.B. Dub Corp and Planetary Assault Systems, recording a number of records for Ostgut Ton, the label arm of Berlin’s Berghain club. Chronicles I kicks off a new sub-label, A-TON, and in keeping with the imprint’s archival bent, it concentrates on out-of-print and previously unreleased 7th Plain material.
The best of it still sounds as otherworldly as it did more than two decades ago. “Boundaries,” from My Yellow Wise Rug, has all the widescreen grandeur of a sci-fi blockbuster as it unfurls rippling synth leads over cymbal flashes and a quietly dramatic ostinato pulse. “Extra (the 7th Plain Remix)” is a rework of a Ken Ishii track from 1995 that was originally released under Slater‘s own name, and has apparently been grandfathered into the 7th Plain catalog; balancing eerie, mercurial chords with hammering hi-hats and snares, it sounds like a steel-girded fog bank, and it exemplifies how the 7th Plain often borrowed from harder strains of techno in creating otherwise atmospheric music. “Grace” and “Surface Bound” both come from 1994’s The 4 Cornered Room. Like “Boundaries,” their layers upon layers of synthesizers seem to vibrate in the air, luminous and metallic. They are largely beatless, and their vivid timbres go to the heart of the 7th Plain’s greatest quality: his incredibly rich, sumptuous chords, each one composed of so many discrete tones that they become almost impossible to parse.
The album’s four remaining tracks seem to be previously unreleased cuts. One, “the Super 8,” is sweeping ambient techno in the vein of My Yellow Wise Rug, all cycling arpeggios and choral pads. “T Funk States” is taut, squelchy techno that sounds more in keeping with Slater’s other aliases. “Slip 7 Sideways” is a drowsy stretch of slowed-down breakbeats that's reminiscent of DJ Shadow or Urban Tribe, and stands as a reminder of hip-hop’s influence on early techno. The final cut, “Chords Are Dirty,” is an impressionistic miniature for a single synthesizer; the background hum suggests that it might be a rough sketch. As an album, Chronicles I doesn’t hold up as well as either of the 7th Plain’s original albums, and it seems strange that it cherry-picks so sparingly from them. It would have been nice had A-TON simply reissued My Yellow Wise Rug and The 4 Cornered Room and included the unreleased material as bonus cuts. Still, as an introduction to one of ambient techno’s relatively unsung heroes, Chronicles I provides a valuable service. The best cuts here rank alongside contemporary material from Aphex Twin, the Black Dog, Sun Electric, and other pioneers of ambient techno. And while it might not sound as unprecedented today as it did in 1994, it’s still capable of opening a passageway to other worlds. | 2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | a-ton | August 13, 2016 | 7.2 | 4040931c-97e7-418c-8463-5f0bab551917 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
C**OW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, eschewing ambient house for ambient music, pure and simple. | C**OW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, eschewing ambient house for ambient music, pure and simple. | The Orb: COW / Chill Out, World! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22390-cow-chill-out-world/ | COW / Chill Out, World! | In his 1995 book Ocean of Sound, David Toop talked to Dr. Alex Peterson about the music he would go onto make with the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, the music that began chillout clubs and ambient house and eventually the Orb itself. “We’d build melodies up…we used to keep it very, very quiet,” Paterson said. “We never used to play any drums in there. It’d be just like…BBC sound effects, really.” By the next year, Bill Drummond and Cauty would release the beatless and blissed-out Chill Out while Paterson would venture off as the Orb, adding in some drums to “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the ambient house genre well afoot.
To hear Paterson spin it in advance of the Orb’s sixteenth album, “the idea was simply to make an ambient album.” But considering the KLF’s Chill Out (not to mention its iconic cover art of sheep lounging in the English countryside), there’s a telltale Orb cheekiness to naming this album Chill Out, World, or COW. Fittingly, both harken back to Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and that cover’s cow. But twenty-five years after making the classic ambient house record with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, why scrub off the “house” bit so as to render that kind of smooth ambient record now?
As the other half of the Orb, Thomas Fehlmann, puts it, “it seem[ed] like a good idea for people to sit back and chill the fuck out.” That said, it’s still a tad disarming to hear “The 10 Sultans Of Rudyard (Moo Moo Mix),” full of birdsong and Harold Budd-esque piano (courtesy of Roger Eno himself) with no Orb-y snickers or elbowed ribs thrown into the mix. Even more stunning are the seven minutes of “First, Consider The Lillys,” another track woven from field recording. There are crickets and water gurgles and a hazy bit of strings like sunrise breaking on the distant horizon and the duo are careful to mimic a landscape’s biorhythms, ever-so-slowly thickening the sounds into a stew of hand percussion and twinkling keys, before withdrawing back into an ambient haze of crickets and processed pedal steel guitar.
But after that early highlight, COW moves away from such overt pulses. “Siren 33 (Orphee Mirror)” nods to Jean Cocteau’s famous 1950 film and gets built from bowed cymbals, metallic drones and a looping Pop Ambient-style snatch of strings. Like that series, the track just pinwheels in space, content to not evolve. Lush pop-soul strings underpin “5th Dimensions,” but the Orb don’t do much with them aside from add and remove layers of crackle and noise. Smaller pieces like “Sex (Panoramic Sex Heal)” and “7 Oaks” are cut from similar cloth.
Trains roar in the distance, harps and bells sparkle, CB radio calls crackle and birds chirp on penultimate track “9 Elms Over River Eno (Channel 9),” in a way that feels like déjà vu. Considering the happenstance samples, the sounds of train travel, crickets and cows, the lush sounds of AM pop reconfigured and abstracted, and the travelogue order of the album (and yes, there apparently is an Eno River in North Carolina) it’s hard to not notice the parallels between this sound palette and the one that comprised Chill Out (which phased the sounds of passing trains and famously looped Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” to hallucinatory effect).
Only as Reich-ian pulses and heavier drums kick in near the end of “River Eno” does one feel the tingle of fluffy clouds arising. Where once 43 minutes into an album meant at most three Orb songs, the album abruptly stops here. COW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, but in eschewing their own classic album and instead oddly reflecting on one from their peers, they fail to get beyond the Ultraworld and the world of Chill Out, at times mimicking little more than some BBC sound effects. | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | October 15, 2016 | 6 | 4043e5cd-db24-4183-9ff5-04ae123927e5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Like the Cure’s *Disintegration or Depeche Mode’s Violator, *the Pet Shop Boys’ fourth album transitioned their creators into the ’90s by both refining and breaking from the past. | Like the Cure’s *Disintegration or Depeche Mode’s Violator, *the Pet Shop Boys’ fourth album transitioned their creators into the ’90s by both refining and breaking from the past. | Pet Shop Boys: Behaviour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22753-behaviour/ | Behaviour | Pet Shop Boys arrived in the second half of the ’80s to out-gay essentially everybody. Combining Oscar Wilde-ian wit, compositional and lyrical sophistication that harkened back to Cole Porter and Noël Coward, sartorial style that split the difference between uptown chic (singer Neil Tennant) and downtown rough trade (keyboardist Chris Lowe), and a command of ’80s club music that soon proved itself far more comprehensive than most of their contemporaries, this North England-raised/London-based synthpop duo aestheticized gay life long before Tennant came out in 1994. Every LGBT person knew exactly what the pair meant in the chorus of “It’s A Sin,” arguably the angriest and certainly most overtly anti-Catholic chorus ever to top the UK pop chart and reach the U.S. Top 10:
Everything I’ve ever done
Everything I ever do
Every place I’ve ever been
Everywhere I’m going to
It’s a sin
But after becoming one of the most internationally prominent acts of the ’80s with hits like their UK/U.S. #1 “West End Girls,” Tennant and Lowe entered the ’90s knowing their “imperial phase” of uninterrupted success was over: Setting “Ché Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat,” their quintessential manifesto “Left to My Own Devices” stalled at #84 on Billboard’s pop chart in late ’88; their ’89 collaboration with Liza Minnelli, Results, pretty much flopped in North America beyond gay dancefloors, and the ’90 comeback they helped helm for Dusty Springfield, Reputation, didn’t even get a U.S. release—despite all of them doing quite well in the UK.
Following these alternately sunny and frosty records, they released their decidedly autumnal fourth album Behaviour in the fall of 1990. Like the Cure’s Disintegration, Depeche Mode’s Violator, and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, it would transition their creators into the new decade by both refining and breaking from the past. The time was right, for the duo and indeed much of its following were now in mourning. Singer/lyricist Tennant’s longtime best friend had recently died of AIDS. So had Robert Mapplethorpe, who shot some of their Please-period publicity photos, and Keith Haring, who similarly intersected fine art and the club scene. Reported U.S. AIDS cases were well over 100,000, with millions on the way globally, and despite the earliest AIDS drugs like AZT, which in those days often made people sicker, an HIV-positive test result was still pretty much a death sentence. Created in resistance to a mainstream that treated LGBTs as subhuman, the queer culture of defiance and liberation that shaped ’70s disco and much of ’80s pop—particularly PSB’s hybrid of both—was literally dying.
Unfolding like an elegy for much of what had gone before, Behaviour shifted the Boys from sly commentators to reserved-but-pained participants, with its understated but devastating lead track, “Being Boring.” The first verse presents the singer looking through keepsakes, as one does after losing a loved one. He finds a party invite paraphrasing Zelda Fitzgerald’s “Eulogy on the Flapper,” specifically the line “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” Boredom was a prickly subject for the pair: Their early deadpan videos and TV appearances were routinely dismissed by clueless critics as generating it.
Set in the ’70s, the next verse depicts the singer leaving his hometown, a mandatory rite of LGBT passage. He softly declares, “I’d bolted through a closing door,” an image evoking both the end of his closeted adolescence and the beginning of fully realized adulthood. By the third verse, which is set in the ’90s, the singer is self-actualized, but reflective: “All the people I was kissing/Some are here, and some are missing.” That simple rhyme still reduces gay men who lived through this era to tears, for AIDS had sorted our intimates into these two categories—those who died young, and those who might soon follow suit, including ourselves. If you hadn’t seen your gay neighbors and friends and former sexual partners around town, chances were they were dead, had gone home to die, or were nursing the dying just like you. “But I thought in spite of dreams,” the survivor sings of his fallen pal, “you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”
Fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot the song’s lush B&W video, which features models enacting a fantasy version of the parties Tennant attended in the ’70s. The tension between the freedom of Weber’s imagery and the sadness of the third verse makes the eulogy even more devastating, but some fleeting nudity meant that MTV in America had an excuse not to show it. Still, “Being Boring”—ostensibly a dance track, but one featuring fluttering rhythms, a Larry Heard-style deep house bassline that appears only as the album version fades out, a subtle upward chorus modulation that adds sweetness to the sorrow, and a whirring plastic tube conjuring spectral cries—eventually earned its rightful acclaim. A fan site solely devoted to it dwarfs the official web presence of many bands, and on its 20th anniversary, a Guardian critic proclaimed it the greatest single of all time. Even Axl Rose allegedly bemoaned its non-appearance during the duo’s 1991 tour.
That tour, Performance, their first in North America, transformed the staginess of their videos into opulent theater just as Blonde Ambition did for Madonna the year before; in the Pets’ case, it was so over-budget that the well-attended trek still lost half-a-million dollars. And just as the autobiographical Like a Prayer fed Blonde Ambition, the personal nature of Behaviour lent Performance pathos. The dirge that opened the show, “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave,” affirmed that, like Madonna, Tennant suffered major Catholic damage. The tune is hummable, but the tone intersects opera and Joy Division as it evokes Catholic mass, freezing rain, and grey architecture. No wonder the Pets eschewed the church for wit and disco.
True to their queer sensibility, PSB are intrinsically contrary, even with themselves, and just as their previous release, 1988’s Introspective, is all 12”-length dance numbers, Behaviour is mostly ballads. Even on overt club cuts, its lead single “So Hard” and “The End of the World,” the dance grooves that defined the duo are muted: No more big ’80s drums, no electro rumble or hi-NRG clatter, even if “So Hard” ramps up the trademark orchestral blasts of their previous hits. Rather than the sample-heavy rave bleeps that ruled 1990 UK pop, the album favors analogue synths overseen by co-producer Harold Faltermeyer, the Munich synth whiz who’d been Giorgio Moroder’s key player and had scored with Beverly Hills Cop’s “Axel F.”
But though the instrumentation is mostly as synthetic as before, it’s less pointedly so; the future was no longer as inviting as it had been in the duo’s formative years, when they dreamt of man-machines and home computers. Embracing their humanism to mirror their messages, the pair often blur the boundaries between synthetic and natural sounds: Mirroring the instability of post-communist Russia, “My October Symphony” fuses banging Italo-house piano, “Funky Drummer” syncopation, Marvin Gaye-esque yearning, and the classical strings of Balanescu Quartet, which all blend with the Prophets and Rolands and Marr’s wah-wah guitar so seamlessly that the hybrid suggests Shostakovich going Blaxploitation. You certainly couldn't call it just “synthpop.”
In the booklet for the album’s 2001 deluxe reissue, Tennant paints the unabashed love aria “To Face the Truth” as the story of a man who cannot acknowledge his girlfriend’s infidelities. But like so many PSB songs, it makes more sense in an LGBT context; that his lover is a bisexual who dodges their emotional bond. Having same-gender sex dictates that you’re homosexual, but loving someone of your own gender makes you gay—a step too far for some. “I wonder if you care and cannot bear the proof/It hurts too much to face the truth,” Tennant croons at the top of his tenor. Having just worked with Liza and Dusty, he’d suddenly become a more expressive singer, one here as adept at conveying sincerity as he’d always been at generating irony. The programmed rhythms hail from ’80s R&B, but his vocal is ’70s Bee Gees; had this been on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, we’d all know it.
Lyrically the most old-school PSB-y song of the lot, “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” roasts sanctimonious rock stars who claim to hate fame’s machinations but nevertheless align themselves with the trendiest causes. There’d been plenty of those in the wake of Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, and “We Are the World,” and they pretty much wiped out the more subversive and often queer “New Pop” movement that spawned the Pets. The album version is set atypically to a New Jack Swing beat, the kind that gave even Boy George a US R&B radio hit with “Don’t Take My Mind on a Trip” the year before, but the seldom heard single/video version remixed it into a more flattering Soul II Soul-style shuffle. Back home, its critique was bolstered by appearing on the flipside of their newly recorded medley of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” and the Four Seasons’ “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” which echoed Boys Town Gang’s shamelessly camp disco-ization of the latter. Bono, who spotted the satirical finger being pointed in his direction, quipped, “What have we done to deserve this?”
As straightforward as “Seriously” is skewed, album closer “Jealousy” goes furthest in a quasi-symphonic direction. Played on keyboards but booming like a massive orchestra, it’s fraught with romantic angst like their earliest work, yet it suits their new phase of unfettered emotionality. The scene-setting opening conjures the outsized ardor of 19th-century art song: “At dead of night when strangers roam/The streets in search of anyone who’ll take them home/I lie alone…” And the rest similarly picks up where Scott Walker’s covers of Jacques Brel left off.
A crooner, not a belter, Tennant sets his vocal understatement against the over-the-top nature of his blinding passion for an unrequited love. This conflict mirrors the LGBT experience itself: You’ve got all this desire that must somehow be contained to a small percentage of the population, lest you find yourself making a pass at someone who might not share your sexuality and who might respond with condemnation or even violence. So you keep your outer voice small and whispery like Tennant’s, but that constant monitoring and muting only intensifies your inner life, and so you bear the burden of these feelings—here represented by the grandness of the orchestration, the despair of the descending vocal melody, the processional horns that bear a stubbornly regal retreat. There’s no apology implied—quite the opposite.
Simpatico women understand this proud juxtaposition: Liza Minnelli considers Tennant and Lowe geniuses akin to Broadway maestro Stephen Sondheim or her dad. Pet Shop Boys critique masculinity the way classic rock bands exude it, but rather than the flamboyance that’s intrinsic to the gay pop star from Little Richard onward, PSB offer the calm control of the outsider looking in, their noses pressed against the shop window.
Having experienced worldwide eminence exactly when their people fell into deeper crisis than ever, they rarely took the easy path, and on subsequent releases like Very’s “Dreaming of the Queen,” they imagined a world in which there were no more lovers left alive. Fortunately, people kept dancing, and Pet Shop Boys still supply their nocturnal soundtrack. Last month, Billboard announced PSB as the all-time top male act on its dance club chart: With last year’s “The Pop Kids,” they landed their 40th hit on that list in 30 years, and 11th No. 1. That they did so with a song as wistful as those on Behaviour makes this achievement truly singular. Embracing disposable pop, they’ve created lasting queer culture just as it was in danger of disappearing. They celebrate the melancholia of being gay. | 2017-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Parlophone | January 29, 2017 | 8.5 | 404595d5-3ad1-46f9-bca9-6e4421462aa2 | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | null |
Okkervil River’s Will Sheff approached Away like a solo record, collaborating with jazz, folk, and classical musicians. It contains the thrill of listening to a person take risks. | Okkervil River’s Will Sheff approached Away like a solo record, collaborating with jazz, folk, and classical musicians. It contains the thrill of listening to a person take risks. | Okkervil River: Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22288-away/ | Away | Away is the first Okkervil River album without Okkervil River on it. Will Sheff’s backing band has been a revolving door for a while now, yet even as new faces came and went, they’d always conducted themselves as a real band, especially on the road, where their live shows remained as feverish as ever. But after a tumultuous few years marked by loss and even more lineup changes than usual, Sheff was left questioning whether he even wanted to continue the group. The frontman approached Away like a solo project, writing it on his own and cherry-picking session players to help him record. And as part of that new approach, Sheff turned his back on the frothy rock‘n’roll that had previously driven the band’s finest moments.
To start, on Away, Sheff has said that he tried to avoid working with rock musicians. “I’m not as interested in rock‘n’roll as I used to be,” he said. “I don’t really think of this as rock.” And so for Away he went full Astral Weeks, stacking the deck with jazz, folk, and classical musicians, including members of the orchestral ensemble yMusic and Marissa Nadler, who lends harmony vocals throughout. Drummer Cully Symington is the only carryover from the last incarnation of Okkervil River, and from his featherlight, Connie Kay-esque brush work here, you’d never guess he’s the same guy who’s been drumming for Cursive for the last few years.
Sheff ratifies his fresh start by symbolically killing off the band on the album opener “Okkervil River R.I.P.” “They had some great songs/Must have been a great time so long ago,” he sings on the nearly seven-minute elegy to his past, his creaky voice rising to an early-Dylan sneer as the song is hugged by some familiar Wurlitzer organ. Those woozy organs have been an Okkervil River signature since the very first song of their first record, but here they serve as a callback to something lost, a little more kindling for the funeral pyre.
A nearly seven-minute opener could be an album’s flagship statement, but Away is packed with so many songs that approach or pass the seven-minute mark that none carries more weight than any other. A modestly fit listener could run a mile in the time it takes to get through the gentlest number, “Call Yourself Renee,” a soft parade of strings and woodwinds with the hushed quality of Nick Drake. The twinkling “Judey on a Street” is even longer and in less of hurry. Sheff frames it as a lesson about the virtues of patience: “I’m gonna wait for my girl to come,” he sings, “She always takes a little time.” And so do these songs.
Away’s unflashy, lyrics-first approach marks a correction from Okkervil River’s production-centric last couple of records, 2011’s prickly I Am Very Far and 2013’s openhearted The Silver Gymnasium. The latter album was pitched on a clever gimmick: Sheff took on the big pop aesthetics of his childhood, tapping the same vein of ’80s nostalgia that made Netflix’s “Stranger Things” such a sleeper hit this summer. It was a play for a wider audience, and a spirited one, but the public didn’t bite. Now, a songwriter who once passed himself off as so indifferent to the spotlight that he made an entire record about it—and then a sequel—fears being shut out. (“I’ve been up and down in my career, and I’ve spent time worrying about it,” Sheff admitted to NPR.) Those anxieties come across on “The Industry,” the closest Away comes to a rock song. “I thought that it was us against the world,” Sheff croons, “but now it’s me against something so big and abstract that I can’t tell what it is.”
Sheff isn’t really interested in sour grapes, though. Instead of griping about an industry that’s no longer working for him, he made a change and tested out a new direction. Away doesn’t aim for the rafters the way Okkervil River did on their best albums, when Sheff was unabashedly playing to the crowd. But there’s a sense that he’s making the record for himself, and an attendant thrill that comes from eavesdropping on that. Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you. | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 10, 2016 | 7 | 4046cc2e-7202-46e2-a79f-4f3dfca7b783 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Philadelphia Internaional auteurs Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff-- the primary architects of the 1970s' upwardly-mobile orchestral version of soul-- are celebrated on a pair of compilations. | Philadelphia Internaional auteurs Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff-- the primary architects of the 1970s' upwardly-mobile orchestral version of soul-- are celebrated on a pair of compilations. | Various Artists: The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits / Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11660-the-sound-of-philadelphia-gamble-huffs-greatest-hitsconquer-the-world-the-lost-soul-of-philadelphia-international-records/ | The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits / Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records | Philadelphia International was a purpose-driven appellation for a record label, the source and the destination both outlined in the name itself. Much like Motown in the 1960s declaring itself "The Sound of Young America", Philadelphia International aimed to conquer the world with a specific, auteur-driven sound steeped in the roots of one major American metropolis-- and the auteurs in question were Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who stood as the primary architects of the 1970s' upwardly-mobile orchestral version of soul. Their productions' opulence, smoothness, and chops-- abetted by MFSB, one of the great studio bands in music history-- paved the way for disco, sparked inspiration in Elton John and David Bowie, and acted as the soulful but crossover-friendly counterpart to the decade's wild-assed, post-Sly Stone funk much in the same way Berry Gordy's meticulous empire offset the grittiness of Stax and Atlantic. MFSB's "T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)" had only one line, "people all over the world"-- an echo of the underlying sentiment from one of the label's big early smashes, the O'Jays' "Love Train", but also a clear statement of who, exactly, they were aiming their music towards.
The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits is a not entirely thorough yet almost unfailingly great cross-section of singles focusing largely on the label's peak years in the early-mid 70s. Just about everything you need to know about the Gamble and Huff approach is covered in the comp's first two songs, both from the O'Jays' 1972 breakthrough LP Back Stabbers-- the optimistic idyll of global-peace dance number "Love Train", and the more cynical (and pragmatic) duplicity warnings of "Back Stabbers". They both feature the songwriting and production team's greatest strengths-- a simple, economic usage of lyricism that worked in both a rhythmic and melodic sense (listen to the way the chorus to "Back Stabbers" unfurls from the slow, sinister glide of "they smiiiiiile in your face" to the rapidfire finger-jabs of "all the time they wanna-take-your-place"), backed with a fine balance of punchy, out-front grooves and almost delicate orchestral ornamentation. All that, with the vocal interplay of lead singer Eddie Levert and backups Walter Williams and William Powell-- well, it's nothing short of world-beating.
The rest of the compilation is filled with songs that hit the top five on both the r&b and pop charts-- Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' elegiac, gorgeous "If You Don't Know Me By Now" (a career-making performance from the young singer Teddy Pendergrass); Billy Paul's sly yet guilt-wracked infidelity ballad "Me and Mrs. Jones"; the Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again", which made longing sound strangely peppy. It's telling that seven of the compilation's 14 tracks fall in a two-year span, and once it gets past 1972-1973 things get even more lush and orchestrated, until it flirts with adult contemporary sounds. But given the singers-- the velvety rumble of Lou Rawls in "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine", or the old-school street-corner doo-wop flourishes of the Intruders' "I'll Always Love My Mama"-- there's a sense that this sound of middle-class luxury was hard-achieved from the ground floor up. Throw in a couple late-period ballads by Pendergrass ("Close the Door") and Patti Labelle ("If Only You Knew", the only post-70s track in the collection) and McFadden & Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"-- disco's greatest moment of populist hubris-- and it's clear that Philadelphia International's peak didn't taper off much. Like many Greatest Hits albums, especially label-centered ones, The Sound of Philadelphia does have that ever-present Catch-22-- the only real weakness in the songs included here is an overwhelming (if comforting) familiarity, but it's also easy to wonder why some equally familiar songs were left out; there's plenty other places to hear the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money", but why not here, too? At least the gaps don't cut out too much context or history; it's a shame we don't get to hear Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes' rapturous lament "Bad Luck" or the euphoria of MFSB's disco blueprint "Love Is the Message" (dubbed by some discophiles and B-boys, in a bit of scene-traversing appropriation, as "Brooklyn's National Anthem"), but their absence doesn't alter the collection's disposition much. There's one regrettably missing track that could've underlined one of Philadelphia International's strongest characteristics-- 1977's "Let's Clean Up the Ghetto", an all-star neighborhood-revival benefit record featuring Rawls, Pendergrass, Paul, the O'Jays, & Dee Dee Sharp, was one of the label's many endeavors set up to give back to their city-- but the rest of the label's unique character is intact.
Or at least the unique character that the Top 40 listener knew. Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records is a counterpart to Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits-- Philadelphia without the international, a locally focused collection of bands and singers who could lay claim to contributing to the sound of Philadelphia while frequently sounding little like their chart-topping labelmates from the very same area code. Despite the presence of seven songs co-written by either Gamble or Huff (five involving both), their imprint isn't as obvious here, and some of the songs they did write aren't so easily identifiable as such. People's Choice-- also represented on The Sound of Philadelphia by the elastic disco-funk of "Do It Any Way You Wanna"-- deliver some bluesy, full-throated Southern-style soul belting on the Huff-penned "The Big Hurt", Ruth McFadden's "Ghetto Woman (Parts 1 & 2)" features a brassy, fuzz-guitar-drenched arrangement that sounds calculated to one-up every "Theme from Shaft"-geeked coattail rider on the r&b charts, and David "Bunny" Sigler & Dee Dee Sharp's "Conquer the World Together" is a great recapturing of the chemistry that Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell sparked in the studio together.
In fact, it's Sigler who makes his presence known in Conquer the World's most memorable and eccentric moments. As one of Gamble and Huff's longest and closest collaborators, Sigler proved himself to be a versatile lyricist and arranger, not to mention a helluva performer. Aside from "Conquer the World Together", he also delivers on "Everybody Needs Good Lovin' (Parts 1 & 2)", a fiery 1971 single that almost comes across like an answer to Wilson Pickett's 1970 Philly-recorded, Gamble & Huff-penned hit "Get Me Back on Time, Engine Number 9". And Bunny winds up beating Carl Douglas and his trail of kung-fu-alikes to the one-inch punch by a good year or so with 1973's "Theme for Five Fingers of Death", an unofficial title song to the Shaw Brothers classic, punctuated by twangy guitar and percussive backhand slaps and a ton of martial arts pontificating ("I've given you my secret technique for the Iron Fist. Always use it in the cause of justice. Never use it for personal glory"). It's a far cry from getting on board the Love Train. | 2008-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | April 10, 2008 | 8.5 | 4050c3d2-610c-4313-a25b-a7a02c1c6e3e | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman returns for his genre-conquering second album, encompassing baroque pop, Northern soul, and Swedish beach-party disco. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman constructs lush, romantic worlds from vinyl-crackling LP samples, while his wry, melancholic lyrics-- his sharpest and most endearing yet-- prove him the true successor to indie's ultimate lovesick cynics, Jonathan Richman and Stephin Merritt. | Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman returns for his genre-conquering second album, encompassing baroque pop, Northern soul, and Swedish beach-party disco. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman constructs lush, romantic worlds from vinyl-crackling LP samples, while his wry, melancholic lyrics-- his sharpest and most endearing yet-- prove him the true successor to indie's ultimate lovesick cynics, Jonathan Richman and Stephin Merritt. | Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10620-night-falls-over-kortedala/ | Night Falls Over Kortedala | Jens Lekman, the sample-happy Swedish singer-songwriter with the boyfriendable baritone, isn't an artist who changes much from record to record. On his second proper full-length, Night Falls Over Kortedala-- out in Sweden now, and in the U.S. on Secretly Canadian early next month-- Lekman's deadpan style of singing, sunny melodies, and wittily lovelorn lyrics are a lot like what he's been doing since 2004 debut LP When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog, and on the EPs compiled on 2005's Oh You're So Silent Jens. "So if you liked that, you'll love this," Jonathan Richman once wrote. Lekman quotes the phrase on his blog.
On the other hand, Jens Lekman isn't quite Jens Lekman anymore. He logged out of MySpace for the last time in February, dissatisfied with the impersonality of the medium. The new Lekman is a 23-year-old American who so far has only one friend; he joins impostor Lekmans already populating Facebook and Friendster. The actual Lekman apparently finds something beautiful in these false copies of himself, and he's come to embrace them. "Just like I've lately embraced all the misinterpretations in the media," he explains, again on his blog.
It all goes to show: Pop's true meaning is whatever we construct for it ourselves. Not just critics or obsessive music lovers, but you, me, and anyone to whom a song means anything. Lekman's stunning Night Falls Over Kortedala embraces this idea more fully than any release of the past few years-- more even than Girl Talk with his memory-pricking laptop references, Kanye West with his canny reuse of classic hooks from Curtis Mayfield and Daft Punk, or mash-up artists with their many one-trick tracks. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman borrows liberally from his memories and surroundings, then uses them to create a lush and romantic world worth misinterpreting again and again.
It's a world set mostly within the confines of a Gothenburg, Sweden neighborhood called Kortedala. For this, Lekman has called the album a failure; he'd intended to traverse more ambitious terrain. Whether through samples, stylistic appropriations, or simply lyrics, Kortedala is a globe-conquering record regardless. Its vinyl-crackling arrangements span the baroque pop of Scott Walker, the upbeat rhythms and bright harmonies of Northern soul, and the beach-party disco of fellow Swedish artists Air France, Studio, and the Tough Alliance. Along with wry, sometimes melancholic observations worthy of Richman or the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, these elements make for Lekman's best record, one likely to captivate even those who were skeptical of his previous releases.
The new album introduces Lekman draped in timpani, strings, and horns on "And I Remember Every Kiss", which samples classical violinist (and gatefold-sleeve inventor) Enoch Light. While recalling late-1960s Walker, the majestic opening also picks up where the Blueboy-sampled orchestration of When I Said... finale "A Higher Power" left off. "I would never kiss anyone/ Who doesn't burn me like the sun," Lekman proclaims here. A track later, though, he admits to sometimes nearly regretting his first kiss: "I see myself on my deathbed, saying, 'I wish I would have loved less.'" But that's when Willie Rosario's orchestral cover of Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix"-- also used by the Avalanches-- hits, in all its blissful glory. Love can lead to anguish and shame, but in "Sipping on the Sweet Nectar", the feeling is worth it.
With that, the voyage begins. Current single "The Opposite of Hallelujah" visits 1960s Motown by way of Glasgow chamber-pop; beats sampled from the Tough Alliance take the harp-twinkled melancholy of "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" to a club in the tropics. "Shirin" brings up the Iraq war as fact, not just political issue; it tells of an immigrant hairdresser at Kortedala Beauty Center (also the name of Lekman's home studio). On the slower "It Was a Strange Time in My Life", a portrait of the artist as a shy and self-loathing young man, a sample of an infant Lekman leads flute and chiming electric guitar into the not-so-distant past. "I had a good time at the party when everyone had left," Lekman sings; throughout the album, backing vocals by El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring and Frida Hyvönen ensure his loneliness never overwhelms his charms.
And these are considerable. If rock'n'roll is "the art of making the commonplace revelatory", as critic Greil Marcus once wrote, this fey crooner is a rock'n'roller on par with the Streets' Mike Skinner. Lekman can sing about asthma inhalers, avocados, and a heart "beating like Ringo"; on the aching standout "A Postcard to Nina", he describes an awkward conversation with a girl's stern father who makes clumsy jokes about lie detectors. All of it works. Over sampled a cappella doowop on "Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig" (Swedish for "Maybe I'm In Love With You"), Lekman just rambles for a while about something stupid he saw on TV. "This has of course nothing to do with anything/ I just get so nervous when talking with you," he finally admits.
Though not twee exactly, Kortedala may require an appetite for schmaltz-- another way Lekman makes "the commonplace revelatory." If his Four Seasons falsetto on "Shirin" sounds suddenly chic thanks to this year's great Pilooski re-edit of Frankie Valli's "Beggin'", then the unabashedly sentimental "Your Arms Around Me" might be the stumbling block for some listeners. (Its ukulele riff has already been compared to Hanson's "MMMBop".) It really doesn't matter; based on the Situationist concept of détournement, Lekman's song about an unfortunate kitchen mishap is a subversion of any bland source material. Besides, none of us can escape what's least cool about our past-- no matter what influences we list on our MySpace pages, it all informs our experience of pop. Or I could just be misinterpreting again.
Admittedly, no individual moment here quite rises to the heights of early single "Maple Leaves", which hinged on a mistake of its own: "She said that we were just make believe, but I thought she said maple leaves." As an album, however, Kortedala represents the most cohesive statement yet from an immensely talented artist whose early EPs once made him seem like a rebel against the LP form altogether. Like the Renaldo & the Loaf-sampling "Into Eternity", it's a record about moments (and kisses) we take with us-- moments that we (or Lekman) may never have experienced: Our own Kortedala.
So, is "Shirin" the true story of Lekman's hairdresser? Is jaunty "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo" really inspired by Lekman's time working what he's described as "the shittiest job in the world"? Did he even actually give up MySpace for good? Lekman takes great records down from their pedestal and reuses them in his art; it could be that he shows as little undue reverence for the facts of his own biography. Lekman follows an admonition from the Tough Alliance song sampled here, which they in turn lifted from 1980s UK left-wing skinhead band the Redskins: "Take no heroes, only inspiration." I can't wait until someone rips off this album. | 2007-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian / Service | September 5, 2007 | 9 | 40519476-4358-4b09-90fd-0764f18cdf0b | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's debut album is only four songs long, but it represents a monumental undertaking. She has described it as an exploration of Virginia's history as well as a meditation on brownness, on being Latina, and as a kind of geology. Her epiphanies feel hard-won, and they shine all the more brightly for it. | The Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's debut album is only four songs long, but it represents a monumental undertaking. She has described it as an exploration of Virginia's history as well as a meditation on brownness, on being Latina, and as a kind of geology. Her epiphanies feel hard-won, and they shine all the more brightly for it. | Elysia Crampton: American Drift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20871-american-drift/ | American Drift | Elysia Crampton's debut album is only four songs long, but it represents a monumental undertaking. She has described it as an exploration of Virginia's history as well as a meditation on brownness, on being Latina, as a kind of geology—"as mud, dirt and mineral, enmeshed in lithic, vast time scales." Those are big, provocative ideas, but anyone who has ever logged serious mileage crossing the continent will have devoted at least some thought to the bonds of landscape and identity, and Crampton has covered more ground than most. She grew up between Southern California and northern Mexico; these days, she makes her home in Weyers Cave, Va., a small town (pop. 2473) in the Shenandoah Valley.
Specific places and the vastness of the continent itself both give shape to American Drift, an album of luminous digital synths and jarring samples whose title suggests tectonic plates and manifest destiny and maybe even car racing (not impossible, given Crampton's interest in monster trucks and the culture of car stereos). "Axacan" gets its title from a 16th-century Spanish mission in present-day Virginia whose personnel were killed by the members of a native tribe (who were, in turn, massacred by Spanish reinforcements sent up from Florida). "American Drift", the album's meditative opening track, takes the form of an invocation: over tolling bells, a solemn voice rhetorically unites heaven and earth in unmistakably carnal terms—"O talus-sloped speared summit/ O earthwork and eyeball/ Varicose and branched…" It's heady stuff, complete with references to the 17th-century Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress.
But the encyclopedic references also work on a purely visceral level. Sonically, the album is like a hillside that's been worn away by erosion to reveal a sedimentary record of the millennia. "Petrichrist" is steeped in the chorused grunts of DJ Mustard and his trap imitators, and Lil Jon's trademark yelps are spread liberally across "Axacan". That song gets its loping triplet cadence from Andean huayño—a nod both to Crampton's Bolivian roots and to her time in Mexico, where she delved into huayño and cumbia via the local tribal guarachero—and its counter-rhythms come from the unsteady pulsing of crickets, suggesting a natural heartbeat beneath all those gleaming digital surfaces. And what a jagged gleam: all four tracks bristle with dissonant MIDI horns, speed-dial touch-tone bleeps, subwoofer-testing explosions, shell casings clattering to the ground, and all manner of FM radio special ef-ef-ef-ef-ects, like a morning show on steroids. As much as it is a record of the landscape of the Americas, American Drift is also, I think, a communion with the airwaves, an investigation of the ways that radio has contributed to the development of sonic dialects up and down the continent, shaping the way different communities hear not just sounds but frequencies, from the wash of white noise to the THX-worthy rumble of deepest sub-bass.
It is not easy listening. Crampton's music never has been. Previously, as E+E, she developed her voice as a collage artist, layering R&B vocals with cumbia beats and explosive digital effects in a way that suggested standing in the middle of a television showroom in which every flatscreen was tuned to a different channel and every 5.1 system pushed deeply into the red. Likewise, listening to American Drift requires work to make sense of it all; it can be physically fatiguing. But it can also be exhilarating. Turn up "Wing" loud enough, wrap yourself up in the woodblock rhythms and trap chants and coruscating organs and a melody that sneakily resembles Shannon's "Let the Music Play", and the effect is overwhelming in the best way. There is a deeply ecstatic spiritual dimension to Crampton's work, and it invests her futurism with much more power than the usual techno-futurist's pose. As a self-proclaimed "transevangelist," her concept of futurism is deeply invested in gender, in transformation, and in the process of becoming one's true self, and that, in turn, invests her music with an undeniable honesty and urgency. Her epiphanies feel hard-won, and they shine all the more brightly for it. | 2015-08-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Blueberry | August 12, 2015 | 8.1 | 405bd75a-b204-47e1-a002-2a39d054cba7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The audacious composer Max Richter has created an eight-hour piece meant to serve as a sleep aid. But it is more than that. For these 31 uninterrupted pieces, Richter accepts the extraordinary challenge of not only aiding sleep but also translating the act into art. If you listen while you’re awake, many of these pieces conjure dreamy states, where ideas seem fluid and flexible and the world around you seems somehow softer. | The audacious composer Max Richter has created an eight-hour piece meant to serve as a sleep aid. But it is more than that. For these 31 uninterrupted pieces, Richter accepts the extraordinary challenge of not only aiding sleep but also translating the act into art. If you listen while you’re awake, many of these pieces conjure dreamy states, where ideas seem fluid and flexible and the world around you seems somehow softer. | Max Richter: Sleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20987-sleep/ | Sleep | It is hard to know what to make of Sleep, the new eight-hour album and therapeutic project from the perennially audacious British composer Max Richter. On one hand, the purpose is simple: Richter intends for the listener to press "play" on the full-length digital version, nod off to sleep somewhere between the patient piano chords of "Dream 1" and the vocal-and-organ ululations of "Path 3," and re-emerge after eight hours of music to a gentle crescendo of stretching strings, wordless harmonies, and long-tone bass near the close of "Dream 0". By consulting with famed neuroscientist and past collaborator David Eagleman, Richter has created a slow-motion, electronics-and-chamber-ensemble hybrid meant to reinforce and reflect natural sleep cycles. "An invitation to dream," Richter has called it.
On the other hand, the third-of-a-day span between the beginning and the end isn’t some inert, sustained tone, simply meant to maintain a snooze. Instead, it’s an ever-shifting set of meticulously performed pieces that both affirm and expand Richter’s reach as a composer. He webs together string quartets and electronic drones, tense duets for piano and violin, and somnolent keyboard meditations. Richter brings most of his interests as a composer to bear here, too. He blends an Arvo Pärt-like sense of motion with deep, low notes and shimmering drones that reflect his past in electronica and adoration of Brian Eno. His love of high-minded concepts, previously reflected by the likes of his essential The Blue Notebooks, meets his exquisite, human touch as a pianist.
So should you use Sleep as directed, as "a landscape … where people could fall asleep"? Or should you sit upright and let the beguiling Richter ease your daylight hours? Can you actually do both?
Richter, of course, is not alone in his quest to help listeners rest better. Sleep is an active avenue of both art and commerce—in large part, it would seem, because we do not get enough of it. The ceaseless streams of social media feeds and on-demand entertainment have intensified that diagnosis. According to Sleepless in America, a National Institutes of Health-supported documentary aired last year by National Geographic, the average person now dozes thousands of hours less than they once would have, a condition that comes with profound physical and mental symptoms. Instead, we spend billions of dollars every year on ways to get more sleep, from medicines that induce it and conditions that foster it to beds that support it and systems that monitor it. We write books meant to reward children for falling asleep, and in a rather Orwellian twist, we weed out employees whose sleep disorders might disrupt productivity.
And when we do get it, we brandish it, whether bragging about how good it felt, analyzing our dreams, or funneling pieces of the experience into art. A recent show in New York sampled centuries of art inspired by hypnagogia, that surreal state of mind just between wake and sleep; in 2013, the hotel chain Ibis introduced a feature to guests that tracked their nocturnal movements and transformed them into a lysergic piece of "Sleep Art". Sleep fascinates exactly as it frustrates, creating a reflexive cycle that never actually ends.
For these 31 uninterrupted pieces, Richter accepts the extraordinary challenge of not only aiding sleep but also translating the act into art—that is, he scores a scene he sets himself. If you listen while you’re awake, many of these pieces conjure dreamy states, where ideas seem fluid and flexible and the world around you seems somehow softer. "Aria 2", which arrives in the piece’s final third, turns a sublime piano phrase into a seemingly infinite maze, as though you could follow it forever and never go anywhere. Strings and electronics wash around the melody in waves, oscillating glacially between a few glowing notes like Sigur Rós at their most romantic or Stars of the Lid at their most staid.
"If You Came This Way" suggests the sweeping, soaring motion of a symphony, though muted and slightly distant, as if it were being played in another room of the same building. The action grows grand only for an instant, testing the limits of your reverie only to galvanize it a moment later. And the gorgeous "Song / Echo" seems to do for chamber pop what Grouper has long done for folk rock—disassemble it and scatter the elements in a cloud, making something so wide and gentle that you think you might be able to live inside it. You can snooze in any of these songs. Just don't think about all you will miss.
In talking about this eight-hour nightlight of sound, Richter has often lamented the pace of the modern world and the torrent of information that many of us must face each day. "We have to curate our own information space and that’s quite a big deal to do," he told The Quietus. "You’ll still have to make tons and tons of choices and spend so much of the day reading all these different messages which will give you tons of reading. So sometimes a pause is a good thing."
That idea aligns Richter with the researchers and marketers trying to give people a chance to check out for eight consecutive, recuperative hours, yes. But his use of the word "pause" also reflects the way I’ve enjoyed Sleep the most—not as a sleep aid but instead as a relaxing agent. Most of this music is indeed calming not to the point of boredom, where I need to sleep through it, but so that I simply want to sit still and listen and ponder. And though Richter took considerable pains to make Sleep seamless, the payoff of hearing it as a whole (a rather exhausting proposition, ironically) versus the resources required to do so is incredibly low. The music shifts between and slowly recycles parts, so you consistently wind up at some place very close to the start. Instead, I like to push "play" in random places and listen for an hour or so, a move that allows me to hear Richter at glorious work and gives me the chance for the restorative "pause" for which he’d hoped. This music is absorbing. You'll want to pay attention, to shut out other concerns. The stretch between the narcotic "Chorale / Glow" and the twinkling "Non-eternal" is perhaps my favorite segment for this reason; it’s an immersive sampler of Richter’s past successes and some new ideas, blurring into one.
Sleep, then, is simply too didactic as a name. It’s a command that tells us how to enjoy something that clearly has other uses. That handle, combined with Richter’s conceit, has turned the record into a kind of clickbait story, too, which seems entirely antithetical to Richter’s point. ("That 8-Hour Sleep Album—Explained," offers the Time headline.) Pause and Rest come closer to Richter’s ultimate goal of simply taking some time out from the whirlwind around you. At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world. | 2015-09-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | September 21, 2015 | 7 | 406dc4b8-0210-40db-8fcd-e050c180457c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
A quarter-century on from its 1979 release, The Clash's London Calling remains one of punk's defining documents. Now it's been given its proper due from Epic, who today are releasing an expanded three-disc edition that covers the original LP, a set of 21 demos (including five previously unheard tracks), and a DVD containing The Last Testament, Clash documentarian Don Letts' film about the album's creation. And that's not even getting into the set's lavish fetishist packaging. | A quarter-century on from its 1979 release, The Clash's London Calling remains one of punk's defining documents. Now it's been given its proper due from Epic, who today are releasing an expanded three-disc edition that covers the original LP, a set of 21 demos (including five previously unheard tracks), and a DVD containing The Last Testament, Clash documentarian Don Letts' film about the album's creation. And that's not even getting into the set's lavish fetishist packaging. | The Clash: London Calling: 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1490-london-calling-25th-anniversary-legacy-edition/ | London Calling: 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition | The 25th anniversary reissue of The Clash's London Calling is satisfyingly thick and protected by a thin plastic sleeve. The package sits fat at three stories high; the spine is broad, smooth and silver. Pennie Smith's unfocused, emblematic cover shot remains intact, with Paul Simonon's bass hovering, vertical and doomed, between Elvis-baiting pink and green text. Stacked inside are three separate discs: the original 19-song album, a 21-track disc containing rehearsal sessions for the record ("the long lost Vanilla Tapes"), and a DVD of The Last Testament, Don Letts' 30-minute, after-the-fact documentary about the making of London Calling. Here, neatly lined up: preparation, realization, hindsight. Finally. This is how they did it.
For those who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, calling The Clash a punk band was (and remains) more a matter of affect than honesty-- in 2004, wholly and completely divorced from a context that never fully resonated with a global audience, The Clash are a rock band, and 1979's London Calling is their creative apex, a booming, infallible tribute to throbbing guitars and spacious ideology. By the late 70s, "punk" was more specifically linked with rusted safety pins, shit-covered Doc Martens, and tight pink sneers than any steadfast, organized philosophy; The Clash insisted on forefronting their politics. This album tackles topical issues with impressive gusto-- the band cocks their cowboy hats, assumes full outlaw position, and pillages the world market for sonic fodder and lyric-ready injustice. A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.
As always, London Calling's title track holds steady as the record's cosmic lynchpin: Horrifyingly apocalyptic, "London Calling" is riddled with weird werewolf howls and big, prophetic hollers, Mick Jones' punchy guitar bursts tapping little nails into our skulls, pushing hard for total lunacy. Empowered and unafraid, Strummer reveals self-skewering prophecies, panting hard about nuclear errors and impending ice ages. He also spitefully lodges some of the most unpleasantly convincing calls to arms ever committed to tape, commanding his followers-- now, then, future-- to storm the streets at full, leg-flailing sprints. Even if The Clash were more blatantly inspired by the musical tenets of dub and reggae, "London Calling" unapologetically cops the fury of punk's blind-and-obliterate full-body windmilling, bypassing the cerebral cortex to sink deep into our muscles. From "London Calling" on, The Clash do not let go; each track builds on the last, pummeling and laughing and slapping us into dumb submission.
And now, we get to watch how it fell together: Using only a Teac four-track tape recorder linked up to a portastudio, The Clash inadvertently immortalized their London Calling rehearsal sessions at Vanilla Studios (a former rubber factory-gone-rehearsal-space in Pimlico, London) in the summer of 1979, several weeks before the album sessions officially opened at Wessex Studios. One set of tapes got left on the Tube. Another got crammed into a box.
The intricate (and generally convoluted) mythology of the "long lost recording" is embarrassingly familiar to rock fans-- even non-completists are awkwardly prone to chasing down bits of buried tape with insane, eye-bulging intensity. With precious few exceptions, the anticipation of a hidden, indefinitely concealed secret generally supercedes the impact of the actual artifact. Still, the possibility of stumbling into transcendence keeps the search heated, and sometimes stupidly dramatic. Earlier this month, Mick Jones bravely explained to Mojo's Pat Gilbert exactly how he uncovered the tapes: "I sensed where they were and that took me to the right box. I opened it up and found them... It was pretty amazing."
Snicker all you want at the supernatural, sixth-sense implications, or at the idea of Jones' third eye blazing hot for misplaced Clash recordings-- the 21 tracks that the constitute The Vanilla Tapes are just revealing enough to justify all the smoky mysticism. The tapes feature five previously unheard cuts-- "Heart and Mind", "Where You Gonna Go (Soweto)", "Lonesome Me", the instrumental "Walking the Slidewalk", and a cover of Matumbi's version of Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me", plucked from Dylan's 1970 album New Morning and reproduced in full reggae glory-- and together they reveal producer Guy Stevens' influence on the final sound of London Calling: muddy, raw, and insistently vague, The Vanilla Tapes see The Clash working hard, but also grasping for a muse.
Professionally, Guy Stevens was best known for "discovering" The Who and producing a handful of Mott the Hoople records, but it was his recreational exploits that carved the deepest cut into Britain's collective pop memory. With a frenzied halo of tightly curled brown hair and a penchant for destroying property, Stevens came to rule Wessex Studios, hurling chairs and ladders, wrestling with engineers, and famously dumping a bottle of red wine into Strummer's Steinway piano. Fortunately, Guy was far more concerned with encouraging "real, honest emotion" than with achieving technical perfection (true to form, London Calling has its fair share of slipped fingers), and consequently, the band's determination at Vanilla, coupled with Stevens' shitstorming, led to London Calling's odd and glorious balance of studied dedication and absurd inspiration.
And if The Vanilla Tapes aren't enough to satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies, there's more. For The Last Testament, documentarian/DJ Don Letts (also responsible for Clash on Broadway and Westway to the World) weaves together bits of live footage, interviews with punk pundits and band members (they spout tiny clarifications between snickers and cigarette huffs), promotional videos, and a few small, grainy glimpses of the band recording at Wessex. The studio shots were culled from footage that, like The Vanilla Tapes, had been unknowingly cardboard boxed for years-- in early 2004, former manager Kosmo Vinyl up a crate containing 84 minutes of hand-held footage of the London Calling sessions. Most of the film turned out to be unusable, but Letts salvaged some revealing shots of Stevens in fine form, wrestling with ladders and banging around chairs, in a curious reversal of classic producer/band hijinx.
As an instruction manual, the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling offers up bits of helpful, ordinary wisdom (he who fucks nuns will later join the church, no one gets their shit for free-- and "Balls to you, big daddy!" is an infallible exit line), but the album's biggest lesson is still spiritual. Like a bit of good gossip or a dog-eared copy of On the Road, Clash tapes tend to get passed around, and wind up forming countless intimate, enduring, and cathartic bonds. That Joe Strummer's handwritten lyrics and modest scribblings have finally been tucked into the liner notes is only appropriate: London Calling is just as precious. | 2004-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | September 21, 2004 | 10 | 406f2df8-66b1-4fc6-bd7c-db3db72b95d2 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The British singer-songwriter’s debut fortifies her early promise as a confident young voice of country-charred rock | The British singer-songwriter’s debut fortifies her early promise as a confident young voice of country-charred rock | Jade Bird : Jade Bird | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jade-bird-jade-bird/ | Jade Bird | Jade Bird is hardly the first Brit to be smitten with America, but the 21-year-old singer-songwriter has her own agenda. As a teenager in Wales, she taught herself to play her grandmother’s guitar and found herself drawn to classic Americana storytellers, from Dolly Parton to indie-folk duo the Civil Wars. Near the end of her tutelage at the legendary BRIT School, she holed up in a pal’s bathroom to record a demo tape, which landed her a management deal and recording session with the Felice Brothers’ Simone Felice, producer for the Lumineers and Bat for Lashes. Bird emerged from the studio with an EP, 2017’s Something American, asserting herself as a confident young voice of country-charred rock. While she may not yet be a household name in the States, her 2018 single “Lottery” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Songs chart.
Jade Bird, her self-titled debut, fortifies that early promise. Again recorded with Felice, the album’s 12 tracks are all written by Bird and flit easily between country, folk, pop, rock, and blues. As Bird’s star has grown, she has made an admirably pointed effort to maintain authority on her musical identity. “I don’t want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings,” she told The Guardian. “It’s not gonna work for me.” As such, her songwriting often centers on a personal quest for clarity in the face of heartache. “And I mean it when I say that/I’m not sure who I am,” she tells a lover on opening number “Ruins.”
When Bird reveals that existential unease, she also divulges Jade Bird’s greatest asset: her gigantic and gravelly voice. She has named powerhouse singers like Patti Smith and Alanis Morissette as influences, but one might hear hints of Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan, whose prodigious rasp can wring epiphanies from single words. Bird busts out her pipes in anthemic bursts, as on “Lottery.” Opening with cutesy wordplay over a jaunty guitar, the song blooms into a guttural declaration of passion. Though the chorus metaphor is sophomoric (“Love is a game but/You got your numbers and you’re betting on me”), Bird sells it with infectious, playful vigor. The rollicking “I Get No Joy” follows a similar pattern, verses sailing by smoothly before Bird pulls the ripcord for the chorus.
Some of these big numbers, however, rely on cheesy tropes that lack a degree of empathy. On “Good at It,” a twangy appeal to a cheating lover, Bird wryly pits herself against a “goddess” of a rival. But she never quite reaches the desperation of “Jolene” or the venomous rage of “Before He Cheats,” instead lingering in an ambiguous middle ground. Barnburner “Uh Huh” does a better job at evoking other-woman cattiness, injecting Courtney Barnett cheek into Miranda Lambert fierceness (“Talk about the guys at work so you feel ego central/Like fancy cars and football teams is she, like, continental?”). The country-fried “Going Gone” relies on a hokey count-off refrain, and when Bird goes in for the kiss-off, it’s half-baked: “Acting big and talking shit, get over yourself… But I hate to inform you’re still living in your mother’s house.” After the overflowing confidence of “Lottery” and “Love Has All Been Done Before,” the two-dimensonality of her character on “Good at It” and “Going Gone” comes as a letdown.
That’s not to say that Bird isn’t powerful in more vulnerable moments. “Does Anybody Know” floats by on a barely-there guitar strum as she likens the loneliness of an unfamiliar city to romantic disconnect. On the melancholic “17,” she pleads with a lover for forgiveness, voice crumbling as she reveals that her tough exterior was merely a defense mechanism. “I have walls that have stood before you ever loved me,” she belts, spiraling into heartbreak. It’s a monumental moment that demonstrates the emotional depths Bird can plumb when she permits herself. In a sea of songwriters overshadowed by overshot production and forced authenticity, Bird stands out as a self-assured voice. | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Glassnote | April 25, 2019 | 7.4 | 4072e2dd-7f3b-4e22-a5f2-582c472373eb | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn towards perversity. His latest is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while. At its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness. | Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn towards perversity. His latest is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while. At its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness. | Lupe Fiasco: Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17148-food-liquor-ii-the-great-american-rap-album-pt-1/ | Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1 | Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn toward perversity, and despite his immense gifts-- a curious, darting mind, a silver tongue, a rich imagination-- his career has at times resembled a performance-art dare to see how far one can coast on unearned goodwill. By the time his fans had rallied to petition Atlantic Records to release what turned out to be 2011's transparently awful pop-rap debacle Lasers, Lupe was looking less like a savior than a charlatan.
So give Lupe credit when it's due: This time around, he's trying to give it to us straight. His new album is called Food & Liquor II, overtly promising a return to his first and still best-loved album, and most of its production comes courtesy of his old standbys (Soundtrakk, 1500 or Nothin'). Save for the usual nu-metal hard-rock vocalizing on many of the choruses, it is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while, and at its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness. At its worst, it's plagued by the same empty cleverness and strident moralizing that has always dragged down Lupe's music. The full title says it all: Lupe couldn't just leave it Food & Liquor II; he had to subtitle it The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1, rendering the album title so cumbersome and silly that only Lupe could have thought of it. It's like he can't help himself.
Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset, and he's at his best on songs like "Put Em Up", where his mind lights on unusual ideas and piles up surprising images: 80s babies get eaten by dingos while cars get flipped "like the ribs on the Flintstones." On "Around My Way", which controversially samples the same instantly recognizable sax line as Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "T.R.O.Y.", he hops from "emaciated models with cocaine and blood pourin' out they nostrils" to "human-body sandbags" to "the mixed girl in your math class" in the space of one verse. It's an exhilarating reminder of his sheer, unbounded ability.
It's when Lupe is pinned down by his subject matter that he starts fumbling. Thumping, strident beats like "Unforgivable Youth", "Audubon Ballroom", and "Ital (Roses)", resemble the most overwrought of Lasers' rafter-clanging productions, and they encourage his worst tendencies. The moral of "Ital (Roses)" is a sound one (don't buy what you can't afford), but Lupe can't get the point across with sounding didactic. "It's called being fiscally responsible," goes one especially difficult-to-swallow line. Big Boi, for contrast, hit this same message square on the head years ago on Outkast’s "Aquemini", with a single line that drew both blood and a guffaw: "Let your paper stack, instead of going into overkill/ Pay ya fuckin' beeper bill, bitch." Which one do you think gets through to more people?
Lupe's impulse to sermonize is inseparable from his music, but sermons that lack empathy or drift into condescension are useless. On "Bitch Bad", he mounts a from-all-angles investigation of the word "bitch" with a multipart character study that paints vivid images of a young girl whose self-image is skewed by internet rap videos, and a boy whose mother sings "bad bitch" song in front of him. But by the third verse, Lupe oversimplifies and figuratively pats the girl on the head, intentionally or no, with the moral: "He trapped in a reality, she trapped in a confusion." After all that skilled storytelling, the song winds up just another pitying, paternal "good girl lost" number. Conscious rap fans might protest that gangsta rappers' dubious messages never receive this kind of scrutiny, and it's true, there is an unfair double standard. But while Lupe remains admirably unafraid to wade into the hip-hop-and-cultural values discussions that usually lead to everyone screaming at everyone else, his touch is so shallow that it ends up feeling crass: cultural crusading as SEO tactic.
His most affecting moments remain his rare flashes of humility. "I don't know what really matters anymore," he admits early on, in "Strange Fruition". On "Hood Now", he celebrates hip-hop culture's ability to infiltrate and transform everything it touches, from fashion shows to professional sports, and offers this sly kicker: "Y'all know me, I don't vote/ But the White House? It's hood now." His admission touched off a small firestorm, but it's one of few places on the album where Lupe allows himself to seem truly human. | 2012-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / First & Fifteenth | September 27, 2012 | 6.8 | 407372fa-a649-40fe-8158-c999c537e428 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Gonjasufi's Callus is an album that's disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time. | Gonjasufi's Callus is an album that's disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time. | Gonjasufi: Callus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22245-callus/ | Callus | Ever since A Sufi and a Killer sent his scarred wail out into a wider world, Gonjasufi’s future has seemed pretty open-ended. What path would his hip-hop-influenced psych take? Subsequent releases—especially 2012’s *MU.ZZ.LE**—*veered closer to a series of confrontational wake-up calls than the inner voyage of the mind than “psychedelia” typically suggests. Jay Z’s “Nickels and Dimes” might have lifted the hook from the Gonjasufi cut of the (almost) same name, but its mournfully introspective spirit was something too bare-nerved to co-opt, the catharsis of *MU.ZZ.LE *pared it down to just the “psych-” and laid bare just how many far more unsettling things could be attached to it as a suffix.
*Callus *is deliberately abrasive proof of this: an album that’s disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time. Gonjasufi’s described this album as a document of his effort to embrace hate and pain, not out of nihilism or defeatism but as a way to endure what he sees as a surplus of the stuff getting dumped on everybody’s heads so he can return it as love. The album title says as much—it literally suggests growing a thicker skin—and the record’s mode feels like a much-needed endurance test in turn. It’s harsh and raucous and even oppressive, despite the fact that it ventures only rarely (and briefly) into uptempo trad-aggro turf. It’s both a call for confrontation and a search of positivity.
And there’s more “we” than “I” in that confrontation. Gonjasufi’s lyrics feel more than ever like they’re sung in his characteristic wobbly, mutating wail because that piercing tone is the best way to reach out to people. Entreaties like “Is anyone else tired/From working on a slave ship?” (from opening cut “Your Maker”), declarations that “Babylon hates me/And they want me killed” (“The Kill”), and demands to “Forget your story and fake glory/Get your devils off of me” (“The Conspiracy”) are the words of someone reckoning with his fears and traumas in public to feel less alone. “Everything’s fucked” isn’t exactly a rare sentiment this year, though, and some stress is better empathized with when it’s felt rather than spoken, so he’s still riding on a tendency to show-not-tell his through tone. There’s a lot of distortion and overblown, in-the-red bass smothering the clarity of his words—even as it boosts the intensity of the voice delivering them. (The way his breathless, fuzz-drenched repetition of “stay out” melts into a caustically dissolving analog synth is borderline horrifying.)
The mood of *Callus *comes off as embattled and mercurial as the mindstate of anyone trying to get their shit together and find a way through. And the music, filled with reverb and fuzz and gristle and the smell of ozone, demands both your attention and your resilience. Some fuss has been made about the appearance of former Cure guitarist Pearl Thompson, who shows up a few times (heard best on “The Kill”) to grind out some fuzz-toned squalls of noise. But it’s all of a piece, with the Special Guest Star moments subsumed into a bigger wall of noise. There’s King Tubby dub bleeps echoing into the distance (“Your Maker”), lo-fi guitar sludge lodged somewhere between Neu!’s “Super 16” and the murkier reaches of early Sub Pop (“Maniac Depressant”), industrial machine-gun synth-drums (“Afrikan Spaceship”), EWF kalimbas swamped by doom-metal bass/organ churns (“The Jinx”), and a bonafide modern-day goth dancefloor filler (“Vinaigrette”). The atmosphere might get oppressive, but it never feels stuck. Besides handily proving that it’s a fairly straight line from Gaslamp Killer-style acid-funk crate-digging to the grimier pages in Adrian Sherwood’s portfolio, *Callus *is also a healthy reminder that it takes some strikingly noisy stuff to actually hold up against his voice. Get used to it; even when it sandpapers your ears, it just makes the path to your mind that much clearer. | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | August 18, 2016 | 7.6 | 408051a0-833a-4bf9-9231-370828e46f0e | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The witch house poster band's brand of slowed-down, blown-out, culturally mishmashed electronic music has proven divisive, but it was always meant to be. | The witch house poster band's brand of slowed-down, blown-out, culturally mishmashed electronic music has proven divisive, but it was always meant to be. | Salem: King Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14718-king-night/ | King Night | Salem trade in apathy. In an article for Butt magazine last year, band member John Holland copped to a past lifestyle of heavy drug use and teenage prostitution-- then he offered the interviewer some speed. The band was featured in The New York Times Arts section's fall preview this year, but one member couldn't be bothered to wake up on time for the interview. When Times writer Ben Ratliff pressed the band on the lyrics to early single "Trapdoor", Holland replied, "It doesn't really matter to me whether people know what the lyrics are or not." Even when XLR8R's Brandon Ivers recently asked Salem about their much-blogged-about disaster of a FADER Fort appearance at last year's SXSW-- a performance that could be featured in the dictionary as the definition of "not giving a shit"-- band members Heather Marlatt and Jack Donoghue claimed not to have seen the video, while Holland later stated about the band's live presence, "I don't even care. I totally don't."
So it's safe to say that Salem aren't concerned that the slowed-down, culturally mishmashed electronic music on their debut, King Night-- referred to by some as witch house, drag, or haunted house-- has its share of supporters and detractors alike, and has inspired endless arguments about authenticity, cultural sensitivity, and whether "witch house" is a pretty stupid fucking name for a genre, anyway. But when you actually listen to King Night, it's easy to be amazed that these dickheads made a record so interesting and sonically detailed. Their early original material and Gucci Mane remixes spawned a legion of imitators who attempted to replicate the formula with shoddy craftsmanship; King Night, accordingly, finds Salem pushing their sound far enough to create artistic distance from the rest of the pack.
They pull this off mostly by way of increased fidelity, which, thanks to the mixing talents of Dave Sardy (Marilyn Manson, Oasis), teases the sonic depth out of these songs. The title track didn't need its "O Holy Night"-lifted melody to sound like it was recorded in an Austrian cathedral, but there's that chorus, their voices being abused by the debris launched in the air by the track's low-end explosions. Album centerpiece and highlight "Release Da Boar" starts out with a city-street pulse and midnight tones, and slowly opens to reveal a brutally beautiful void where Marlatt's dead-eyed vocals hover in an amniotic haze. Even "Redlights"-- aka the "FADER Fort YouTube Video Song"-- is lent a spacey atmosphere, its slow burn not too far off from vintage Slumberland noise pop.
Despite what some say, this is music, and it's music made by people with wide-ranging tastes. The aforementioned Slumberland similarity is only one of the genre signifiers employed during the course of King Night, as the band traffics in crawled-out rave-recalling synth lines ("Asia"), low-riding Houston lean ("Sick"), grime-flecked trip-hop ("Trapdoor"), and the hollow, thudding rhythms of juke and footwork ("Hound"), just to name a few. That they're able to incorporate these disparate sounds in a recognizable fashion proves their ability; the fact that, through it all, Salem still sound like themselves and no one else is a testament to their vision.
And if you don't think Salem have done something impressive here? That's okay. Honestly-- and this gets lost in the hype cycle that most fresh-sounding new acts get sucked into these days-- this music is not for everyone. Not because of its "Werewolf bar mitzvah" affectations, but because it's just not the easiest thing to bump in your headspace. Some will take issue with the EQ'd-to-shit click tracks, or the sheer noise that's being produced here. Personally, I'm not a fan of the pitched-down, chopped-and-screwed rapping that pops up periodically-- not because of the arguable minstrelsy, but because I just think it's an aesthetically ugly add-on this music could do without.
However, considering that snatches of decipherable lyrics reveal threats of rape and murder, as well as excessive use of the word "bitch," maybe we're better off not knowing what they're saying, regardless of how they go about it. These are the contradictions you run into when inhabiting the world of King Night. And while it's possible that discussion of these contradictions might end up outlasting the music itself, it's hard to deny that the group has carved out an original and compelling niche.
Editor's Note: This review contains a list of the various names that have been used to describe the music of SALEM and/or other similar artists, among them "drag" and "witch house." It originally also listed "rape gaze," a term coined by Michigan band CREEP, as formerly listed on their MySpace and reported in the New York Press. The band today disowned the phrase and will no longer be using it, expressing to The Village Voice, they "would never want to advocate sexual violence against any human being. It was a play on words which we never expected to be used as an actual genre." | 2010-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Metal | Iamsound | October 8, 2010 | 7.5 | 4089fe37-0962-49e8-8cba-233cd7cb8b59 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Montreal producer's latest release is built extra lush and cushiony, with heavy R&B inflections. | The Montreal producer's latest release is built extra lush and cushiony, with heavy R&B inflections. | Jacques Greene: Phantom Vibrate EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19292-jacques-greene-phantom-vibrate-ep/ | Phantom Vibrate EP | Jacques Greene makes house music for lovers. His latest release, Phantom Vibrate, is built extra lush and cushiony, inflected with R&B. But Greene has always been meticulous with his implementation of that genre into dance music. Various strands of dance music and R&B have been fraternizing almost forever, though, whether it’s the Aaliyah apparitions made popular by Burial’s “In McDonalds” and Usher’s big box EDM. But in 2014, R&B has become somewhat of a boutique concern in the indiesphere, despite the OGs still knocking it out of the park elsewhere. (See: Toni Braxton and Babyface’s phenomenal collaborative heart tour Love, Marriage, & Divorce, released earlier this year.) The commingling of R&B with indie has been a thing at least since Tom Krell’s bedroom-recording project How to Dress Well gained traction in 2010 and Frank Ocean went further on another track in 2011, and the influence hasn’t left the conversation. But few get the mix right.
Montreal’s Greene has always had a feel for R&B, whether it’s dropping Mya’s “Ponytail” in DJ sets or wistfully reimagining Ciara’s remix of “Deuces” on his track “Another Girl”. With Phantom Vibrate, he’s taken his interest to a delicate new level. The EP’s opener and first single, “No Excuse”, elevates “Favorite Girl” by Marques Houston (of Immature and annoying next-door neighbor Roger from "Sister, Sister"), with Greene taking the overwhelmingly sweet cut and flipping it into a celestial paean by way of crunchy percussion, ascendant synths, and intermittent sweeps of bells.
The emotional swell of “No Excuse”, the A-side, towers over the rest of the release. "Feel What” and “Night Tracking” have a willowy, less emphatic texture than “No Excuse”, but Greene has proven to have a strong grasp on how varied house music can embody the emotional weight of R&B. “Feel What” is a nimble collage of varied tempos, the vocal sample blending into the hodgepodge of skittering, revved, and staticky synths. On paper that sounds like a nightmare drafted on Ableton, but with Greene as the technician, it’s seamlessly meditative. “Night Tracking” is the closest to classic house and the EP’s quietest cut. It almost seems to fight with itself at points, different grooves trying to be the most dominant on the track, intertwining and acquiescing with tranquil aggression before zipping into silence.
Had “No Excuse” been the closer, it would have given the short collection a more substantial climax. Instead, the EP’s downward tonal slope plays out an emotional arc of a blossoming romance into its ultimate dissolution, down to the wielding of vocal samples. What’s clear and unruffled at the beginning becomes absent toward the end. Greene has done robust heartbreak before with last year’s ebulliently elastic “On Your Side” featuring the aforementioned How to Dress Well singing about loving desperation. Even when that song’s lonely lyrics are gutting, the beat never feels vacant. With Phantom Vibrate, Greene breaks it down further, separating feelings into their own parts, narrating with sound how you get from allure to familiarity to the void. | 2014-04-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-04-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | April 28, 2014 | 6.8 | 408daf72-a4f3-4f26-b3f2-4f697651c452 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
The Nigerian rapper and singer’s easygoing charm guides this lush and freewheeling collection. | The Nigerian rapper and singer’s easygoing charm guides this lush and freewheeling collection. | Olamide: UY Scuti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/olamide-uy-scuti/ | UY Scuti | In 2010, the Nigerian musician Olamide introduced himself with colorful, relatable rhymes, a breathless flow, and youthful swagger. His breakthrough single “Eni Duro” displayed his undeniable confidence, confirming the then-21-year-old artist, who raps in both Yoruba and English, as a star in the making. More than a decade and a dozen releases later, he has become an emblem of Nigerian hip-hop, a self-proclaimed “voice of the street” with introspective tales of struggle and loss that extend hope to a new generation of listeners.
When Olamide’s label YBNL, home to Fireboy DML, inked a deal last year with U.S. music franchise Empire, it was unclear how his foray into the international music space would unfold. Prior to that moment, he’d rarely seemed interested in collaborating with artists outside his native country or in seeking recognition beyond his tight-knit scene. He tested the waters with 2020’s experimental 999 EP, which swayed more toward his rap tendencies. He followed it with the more varied and successful Carpe Diem, featuring singles like “Infinity” and “Loading” that would soundtrack plenty of outdoor parties.
On Carpe Diem, Olamide’s sound underwent a reconstruction, moving from his gruff early style toward a more soothing tone, with mid-tempo beats accompanying his tales of love, hustle, and celebration. The project had an aura of freshness, suggesting a restart in his career. His latest album, UY Scuti, takes a simpler approach but furthers this evolution. In the past, he has alternated between love songs and pop bangers laced with street lingua. UY Scuti condenses his sensibility to a chill, moody flow. The 10-song project is rife with romantic tales and emotional honesty, softened by Olamide’s melodic voice and easygoing charm.
Reunited with producer Eskeez, who also worked on 999, Olamide’s shapeshifting vocals are supported by a dynamic array of beats, ranging from the solemn “Need for Speed” to the fiery “Jailer.” Beneath the grandeur of the music, however, there is a vagueness that is hard to ignore. These songs conjure a gentle current of lushness, but some tracks feel lukewarm, lacking a spark of creativity. The highlight “Rock” resonates because of Olamide’s heartfelt lyrics, but when he approaches similar subject matter on “Cup of Tea” and “Want,” the writing lacks depth.
The guest artists attempt to enliven the music but sometimes fail to hide its flaws. Rising Afrobeats talent Jaywillz lights up the bouncy “Jailer” with his energetic, unrestrained flow, and Olamide’s longtime collaborator Phyno—who has made appearances on each of Olamide’s past four projects—offers vivid imagery on “Somebody.” But the casual tone of Olamide’s writing rarely provides the energy required to make these songs stick. The soul-baring singer Fave slides in with some smooth lines about desire on the rambling “PonPon,” but the overall effect is bland.
“My priority is to express myself freely like a bird right now,” Olamide recently told The Guardian, and you can hear the freedom of his approach throughout the album. He hops on dancehall beats (“Rough Up,” “So Much More”) and stretches beyond his comfort zone (“Julie”), testing the waters of new genres. This freewheeling mode, however, deprives UY Scuti of a concrete identity. He’s not sticking to his usual themes of struggle and hustle, or the party-anthem templates of his previous hits, but it’s unclear what exactly he wants to replace them. With its thematic variety and creative freedom, UY Scuti finds Olamide in a transitional stage, with plenty of room for improvement.
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | YBNL Nation | July 14, 2021 | 6.3 | 409bde2e-1e8d-4d7a-8abf-1b52823abf6b | Otolorin Olabode | https://pitchfork.com/staff/otolorin-olabode/ | |
A hip-hop head’s presumptive fantasy, this compilation by the Gangster Doodles illustrator gathers loosies from cult favorites and a few new artists. | A hip-hop head’s presumptive fantasy, this compilation by the Gangster Doodles illustrator gathers loosies from cult favorites and a few new artists. | Various Artists: Gangster Music Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-gangster-music-vol-1/ | Gangster Music Vol. 1 | Marlon Sassy’s Gangster Doodles, drawn in Sharpie and highlighter on Post-It notes, are strikingly simple. It’s the former office manager’s ability to pick and choose what icons to caricature—whether it’s Detroit beatmaker J Dilla or neurotic “Seinfeld” schmuck George Costanza—and images to reference that’s earned him an online cult following, a hardcover book with a Shia LaBeouf foreword, and now his very own compilation on Dublin label All City. But his apparent knack for curation fails on Gangster Music Vol. 1, a hip-hop head’s presumptive fantasy. Its astounding tracklist encompasses beloved rappers and producers from multiple eras and scenes, from the early 2000s West Coast underground to Diplomats-era New York. The songs themselves are far less interesting—Vol. 1 is mostly the sound of talented artists clearing their MacBooks of stray files.
The project’s most disappointing efforts come from its most notable guests. While Montreal producer Kaytranada’s samples are sparkly and hard-hitting on the instrumental “Well I Bet Ya,” the track lacks the driving groove and rubbery bass of his best work. It’s a rough sketch of his talents, an approximation of the goods. Stones Throw Records alum Jonwayne, meanwhile, hits cruise control with his production on “Welch’s Grape,” built around mouth pops, bright keyboards, and an unchanging melody that has the feeling of hold music. And while it’s always exciting to hear beatmaking brothers Madlib and Oh No together, “Big Whips” is a boilerplate version of their blunted sound, seemingly using the string sample already heard on a 2014 Madlib track with Freddie Gibbs.
“Flash Dance,” from incarcerated Harlem rapper Max B, should be a highlight—its funky, organ-driven beat and sleek street boasts make it one of the more compelling compositions here. But by rap standards, it’s an archaeological find, having been issued on the mixtape circuit a decade ago. Max even shouts out Byrdgang, a group he left in 2008 after an infamous feud with leader Jim Jones. Its inclusion—along with “Cruel,” a 2017 loosie by Awful Records frontman Father—clouds the identity of the compilation, shifting it from a collection of original songs to something more akin to a video game soundtrack, meant mostly to invoke a mood.
And maybe that’s the purpose. The vinyl packaging, after all, is beautiful, with its record sleeves wrapped in hundreds of Sassy’s colorful characters. If there’s one thing Sassy has accomplished with Vol. 1, it’s cultivating a cozy aesthetic for rap nerds, like an old record store full of crates to dig. Placing cult heroes like Max B and Madlib alongside deep-cut favorites like Canadian rapper Madchild and Likwit Crew associate Defari on one project—pressed on hot-pink wax, no less—is candy for any listener whose early taste might have been informed by anything like the Stones Throw message board.
But Vol. 1 never really outperforms this nostalgia, except perhaps on “KCRW,” a small gem by Los Angeles group Dream Panther. Near the end of these 27 tracks, its four-on-the-floor drums, whirling guitars, and hazy vocals gradually crumble into a blob of amp hiss and saxophone wails. At barely two minutes, it’s somehow the most inventive track on here. Rather than seeking scraps from big-name artists, perhaps Sassy should have sought out more obscure talent like Dream Panther—not necessarily a quick sale, but a better record. | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | All City | March 1, 2019 | 6.2 | 40a0cf07-49c4-43a2-ad2c-3864f42c4dcf | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
His latest EP proves he’s still a master of melancholic detail, but thematically and sonically, the Atlanta superstar has hit a wall. | His latest EP proves he’s still a master of melancholic detail, but thematically and sonically, the Atlanta superstar has hit a wall. | Future: SAVE ME EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-save-me-ep/ | SAVE ME EP | For better or worse, Future has released the same album for nearly five years now. Whether it’s the slightly-more-romantic HNDRXX or the slightly-more-polished BEASTMODE 2. It’s all made from the same recipe, one for an enticing dish that’s slowly started to worsen with each forkful. SAVE ME, a quick seven-song EP, is no different. While it proves that he’s still a master of melancholic detail, dissecting his self-inflicted misery with little jewels of profundity, there’s nothing new or groundbreaking here. Sonically and thematically, he’s hit a wall.
Which is a shame considering the project’s single, “Love Thy Enemies,” contains some experimental elements. Over wispy guitar strums that sound like they were ripped straight off a hard drive from the Blonde sessions and woodblock clicks, Future’s pitch-corrected moan is left to fend for itself and, as a result, feels more vulnerable, with each cry, coo and choke (he audibly coughs at one point) given space to sink in. “You wasn’t considerate to my feelin’/How am I explain this to my children?” he gripes.
The rest of the project is less ambitious. “Please Tell Me” is anchored by the same hissing flutes heard on his 2017 hit “Mask Off,” as well as any number of sparse trap songs of the moment (“Effortless” by Chicago upstart Polo G comes to mind). On “St. Lucia,” clever lines about his vices—“Tried to talk to the pastor, found out he doin' the same thing/ Been havin' a secret relationship on his main thing”—are tarnished by cardboard instrumentation, a puddle of melodic layers that fail to stand out. And “Government Official,” with its garden-variety hi-hats, lack of hook and low-mixed vocals, could be swapped out with any of Future’s archetypal bangers on Spotify and no one would notice.
While pockets of his songwriting remain both brilliantly petty and self-deprecating, the ignorance shown in others is tiresome and, even worse, boring at times, like he’s playing a caricature of himself. On the aforementioned “St. Lucia,” for example, he starts the chorus by crowing brazenly, “I’m a big dawg, I can fuck a bitch out in France now,” and kicks off his first verse with the leaden “I got one that's Chinese, she a ten/I made my Hong Kong girls wear snakeskin.”
At other points, he comes off plain lazy: “My wifi lit, ten thousand feet off the ground,” and, “Ten thousand feet up, we get wifi,” are two separate lines delivered on different songs not far from each other on the track list. This is after he included a song called “WIFI LIT” on last year’s BEASTMODE 2.
But maybe the toughest moment comes on the opener, the predictably titled “XanaX Damage,” which sounds half-finished. Strange gaps of silence are sprinkled throughout the mix, with a hard fadeout arriving only a minute and a half in, ending the track abruptly. It’s an otherwise beautiful song, with a tender guitar riff, pitched-down vocals and the most original hook of the project, with Future gently muttering, “Baby, when the sun is out, it's like I'm not myself.” It’s a flash of greatness bogged down by poor execution, which could stand as a theme for the EP as a whole. | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | June 13, 2019 | 6.4 | 40a2e155-4d5a-45f6-b55c-9e7f4b2ced63 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
On her latest album, the eclectic Bay Area artist weaves introspective themes into frantic, experimental pop music. | On her latest album, the eclectic Bay Area artist weaves introspective themes into frantic, experimental pop music. | Flung: Apricot Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flung-apricot-angel/ | Apricot Angel | Blending skittering, sequenced percussion with jazzy chords and wonderfully bleary vocals, Kashika Kollaikal’s debut album as Flung, 2020’s Shaky But My Hair Is Grown, struck a psychedelic balance between the Books and Person Pitch-era Panda Bear. A split release from DIY labels Citrus City and Topshelf, it was a strong experimental pop record that flew under the radar. Since then, Kollaikal has kept busy, associating herself with a community of artists subverting the familiar indie pop tropes. She’s produced an album from fellow avant-pop up-and-comer Blue Toed, collaborated with percussionist Gabe Stout in the duo Honey Oat, and shared stages with Florist and Time Wharp. The 12 songs on Flung’s new record, Apricot Angel, reflect this restless creative energy. Fusing polyrhythmic arrangements and lyrics that grapple with themes of gender identity and placelessness, Flung further develops the distinctive sound that made Shaky But My Hair Is Grown approachable yet gripping.
The most immediately striking element of Apricot Angel is its ornate instrumentation. Kollaikal is a producer whose output feels equally suited for hippy communes and art school dance parties. On “Tress Thing,” featherweight chords drift over a clattering groove until the song bursts into a climax of cascading synth leads. The title track alternates between burbling lows and a wonky hook that calls to mind sentient robots trying to harmonize a number from a Broadway musical. “Froth” uses galloping drums to lay the framework for muted vocal samples, helping the song land in a universe inhabited by like-minded genre-benders Body Meat and draag me. Kollaikal’s work has never been predictable, but Apricot Angel is especially hard to pin down. With unplaceable tonalities and rapidly shifting structures, the tracks rarely stay in one place for long.
On Shaky But My Hair Is Grown, which came to life over three uncomfortable weeks at the start of the pandemic, inspiration from Black philosophers like Fred Moten and Nathaniel Mackey helped provide a wider sociopolitical context for the music. The tone of Apricot Angel is more intimate, as Kollaikal opens up about increasingly personal subject matter. The interplay between the vulnerable lyrics and the boisterous musical textures is tethered to Kollaikal’s experience as a queer person. These senses of both acceptance and empowerment are especially palpable on the propulsive, heady “Hands and a Carpet.” “Fluttering through/Sparkly things when you’re just not healing,” she sings in a descending melody. Due to the heavy processing that underlines Flung’s unique mixing style, you can’t always decipher the words, but her singular vocal patterns shine through even the most oblique moments.
Flung’s music is marked by a surreality that gives it a shimmering, almost mystical energy. Kollaikal’s writing can be vague, but contrasted with her frantic, maximalist composition style it can also be alluring. “We were early in the day, you were water gorgeous/Lay low, lay low, they got a new orbit, oh they got a new orbit,” she sings on “Ebb,” over hypnagogic synths and shuffling drums. The self-exploration that courses through Apricot Angel is not always easy to parse, and occasionally that’s the point. “That’s part of, for me, having a solo project: It is just so personal, and so much an extension of my life,” Kollaikal recently told Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio, when asked how her Bay Area home shaped this record. Apricot Angel flaunts both introspection and pride, a dichotomy that places Flung’s music in its own eclectic realm. | 2022-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Citrus City | August 17, 2022 | 7.4 | 40a96a8b-6674-4836-a124-3479d9e653ac | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith crafts a late-career highlight with pianist Vijay Iyer. Cosmic Rhythm is a frequently gorgeous, sometimes-roiling set that plays to both musicians' strengths. | Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith crafts a late-career highlight with pianist Vijay Iyer. Cosmic Rhythm is a frequently gorgeous, sometimes-roiling set that plays to both musicians' strengths. | Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21518-a-cosmic-rhythm-with-each-stroke/ | A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke | After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, the improvisational avant-garde found itself asking: Now what? Wadada Leo Smith’s discography stretches back to this critical moment in American experimentalism. As an early member of a Chicago collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), the trumpeter worked in a trio that included saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins—a group documented on the landmark 1968 release 3 Compositions of New Jazz.
On that album and other recordings from the period, Smith’s performance aesthetic signaled the arrival of a confident and original voice. He could craft mournful melodic lines that suggested the folk music of his Mississippi Delta youth, before quickly steering into rough-sounding yet controlled smears of notes. Then, in the midst of an improvisation, he would allow stretches of silence to enter his phrasing. In contrast to New York’s consistently in-the-red style of free-jazz, Smith and other AACM figures also experimented with world music instrumentation and modernist chamber composition in between passages of fiery blast.
In this scene, there was nothing strange about being a blues musician, a composer of classical music, and a free-improviser with a recognizable attack. And this example has proved a durable influence on younger jazz innovators like Vijay Iyer, a pianist who spent time in Smith’s early-21st century quartet (before his own career as a bandleader took off). In interviews, Iyer is often eager to credit the AACM as an inspiration behind his own mobility as a composer and soloist.
Since signing to ECM, the storied jazz-and-classical label, Iyer has continued to vary his creative practice. The album Mutations found him composing for a string quartet, while Break Stuff—the most recent set from Iyer’s celebrated jazz trio—included an acoustic tribute to Detroit techno innovator Robert Hood. On A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, Iyer reconnects with Smith in a studio for the first time since appearing as a sideman on the trumpeter’s 2009 album Spiritual Dimensions. Their meeting here results in a frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist’s catalog.
The opener, “Passage,” was composed by Iyer, and works well as a platform for Smith’s range of instrumental techniques—with wisps of balladry leading to harsh and piercing moments. Some of Smith’s more surprising exclamations may initially seem like unmusical provocations, just before he wrings a demonstration of magic from his trumpet—as when he keeps a seemingly unstable drone alive for seconds, or when he creates a winning melody from an unlikely opening intonation. Iyer’s performance on piano lends dramatic shape to the track, though he’s just getting started.
The set’s centerpiece is a seven-part suite that also provides the album’s title. Inspired by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi—her drawing graces the cover—this nearly hour-long stretch of music often finds Iyer switching seamlessly between acoustic piano and an electronic setup. “All Becomes Alive” begins with simmering traces of digital sound behind Smith’s high-register, incantatory playing. Near the track’s conclusion, Smith contributes tart, pointillistic figures as Iyer uses a laptop to produce a bass-heavy pulse (while keeping both hands on his piano). In the middle section, Smith responds to Iyer’s flowing, legato progressions with a mellow soulfulness.
The players occasionally push each other into less familiar zones. The first three minutes of “A Cold Fire” reveals Iyer playing more “out” than on his past ECM recordings, while on “Labyrinths,” his joint interest in Indian classical composition and American minimalism guides Smith into fixed-tempo riffing of a kind that is unusual in the trumpeter’s catalog. And when Iyer switches to Fender Rhodes for “Notes on Water,” the musicians mine the mood of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, while still sounding like themselves.
In conceiving such far-ranging explorations of texture, the risk for musicians is that the end result might wind up seeming like a catalog of possible approaches—a look-book to be skipped through by sound designers searching for film-music cues. But the rapport between Iyer and Smith ensures that this music always feels compositionally sure-footed, even when parts of the suite are being discovered as they play. No matter its track-to-track variance, Cosmic always sounds harmonious as an album-length statement. In doing this, it also recalls Smith’s early-career desire to integrate “all forms of music,” as stated in a 1969 interview with the French magazine Jazz Hot.
Appropriately, the closing track here is a Smith composition titled “Marian Anderson”—a dedication to the African-American contralto who broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. After the meditative theme, Smith’s conjuring of a historic opera singer’s legacy seemingly gives him license to reveal some of his most songful, pure-tone playing. “Everything and anything is valuable,” Smith told the European magazine in 1969, as the first wave of AACM players was capturing the imagination of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. More than four decades later, Smith is still demonstrating the wisdom of this approach—reaching back into American art-music history for inspiration while keeping himself open to the new sounds being proposed by the next generation. | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | March 23, 2016 | 8.5 | 40ae2f3e-02af-43fe-a7fa-0fd05d367ece | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
After he conquered the world with Purple Rain, Prince made a hard left turn into bright and sweet psychedelia. But the album had more going on beneath the surface. | After he conquered the world with Purple Rain, Prince made a hard left turn into bright and sweet psychedelia. But the album had more going on beneath the surface. | Prince / The Revolution: Around the World in a Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21847-around-the-world-in-a-day/ | Around the World in a Day | Prince had been to the mountaintop, and he didn’t like what he saw. He had spent a full year fine-tuning his sound, his band, his look, and his story for Purple Rain, with the explicit goal of conquering the world. And it had worked perfectly—repositioning himself as a badass guitar hero and fronting a band which included multiple genders and races had opened up new audiences for him, and made him the biggest rock star in the universe.
But as soon as he reached that peak, that rarefied altitude so few artists get to see, Prince realized what being a superstar required. He knew that to meet the demand for his music, to feed the beast of the celebrity he had attained, he would be expected to keep pushing Purple Rain for all it was worth—to tour the U.S., then go to Europe, maybe to Australia, then back for a bigger U.S. victory lap. But Prince was too restless for that. And so he did the only thing he always knew how to do: He made more music, which sounded different from anything he had done or anything his new fans might have expected.
Around the World in a Day was completed on Christmas Eve of 1984 and released in April 1985, just two weeks after the final date on the Purple Rain tour—which Prince cut short abruptly, after just six months. His breakthrough album was still riding high on the charts.
He had quietly been working on the new album in scattered sessions that had actually started prior to Purple Rain’s release, without the knowledge of his label, Warner Bros.; even members of his band, the Revolution, didn’t know that a new project was underway, much less completed. “I wasn’t totally aware that he had been tracking that album,” said keyboardist Matt Fink. “I was not involved in it…I was okay with it, but at the same time, you always want to be in there if you can.”
The most noticeable thing about Around the World in a Day was what it wasn’t: It wasn’t remotely a sequel to Purple Rain. On first listen, it was instantly clear that the album was a dramatic left-turn, with none of the flashy guitar and few of the pop hooks. The sound was bright and sweet, as opposed to low-end raunch. If Prince had streamlined and rocked up his approach for global domination, now he was creating something more intimate, cerebral, and challenging.
Though Around the World was released with no radio single or advance promotion—“This has got to be the easiest album I’ve ever worked on,” Warner Bros. creative marketing chief Jeff Ayeroff said—the first taste for most listeners wasn’t too shocking. The irresistibly playful “Raspberry Beret” was in fact the most pure pop Prince had ever delivered. (I clearly remember hearing him play the song alone at the piano during the Purple Rain show I attended that spring, and the crowd went nuts, singing along by the second chorus.)
But “Raspberry Beret” was actually a song he had written a few years earlier, and was a bit of an outlier on the album. The real linchpin for the project was a demo that Revolution members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman brought him, a track that had been recorded by their respective brothers, David Coleman and Jonathan Melvoin. It was a shimmery, winding instrumental with flutes and strings reminiscent of the Beatles circa Magical Mystery Tour. Prince loved its sound and feel, and he began to build the album around the psychedelic sensibility of this song, which would ultimately give the album its title.
The album cover—a painting depicting the Revolution in a trippy, candy-colored landscape—clearly evoked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first sounds you heard backed up this reference; the record kicked off with a keening Middle Eastern flute, and Prince’s first line is “Open your heart, open your mind.” This vision of a mystical journey for which “laughter is all you pay” was followed by “Paisley Park,” a depiction of Prince’s dream world (and, for those paying attention, the name of his new label imprint, for which Around the World was the first release) where “admission is easy/ Just say U believe,” and whose inhabitants feel only “profound inner peace.”
At the time, this utopian hippie bliss was the most obvious element of Around the World in a Day. “Prince goes psychedelic” was the common hot take, with all of the naïve optimism that implied. Several of the songs opened with fairy-tale introductions—“Once upon a time in the land of Sinaplenty” or “There was a girl in Paris.” Over time, though, what emerged was a much darker undertone running through the album. Even “Paisley Park” included a betrayed wife whose husband died “without knowing forgiveness” and a man crying as his house is condemned.
Over a loosely thudding drum sound, “Pop Life” (the album’s other Top 10 hit) was a skeptical meditation on the trappings of success, the lure of drugs and anti-intellectualism. “Everybody can’t be on top,” Prince sang with a hint of a sneer, “But life it ain’t real funky, unless it’s got that pop.” It was the moment that first articulated the creative tension that would play out over the rest of his career; was Prince more naturally a stadium-filling superstar or was he really the world’s biggest cult artist, with a dedicated following ready to follow him down which musical path he chose?
The album’s most conventional-sounding rock song was in some ways the oddest of all—was “America” a patriotic anthem without irony, an anti-communist manifesto written at the height of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” or a savage attack on that mentality? Prince sang about a girl “making minimum wage/ Living in a one-room jungle monkey cage…she may not be in the black/ But she’s happy she ain’t in the red.” Tougher to interpret than “Born in the USA,” the song also allowed Prince to indulge his fantasies of nuclear apocalypse that went back to “1999” and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia.”
Some of the most striking moments on Around the World were the most compositionally experimental. The jittery, sexually-charged funk of “Tamborine” never fully coheres into a complete song, stretching the tension almost unbearably thin. “Condition of the Heart,” its jazz chords unfolding over an impossibly slow tempo as Prince maintains an inhuman falsetto, is as delicate as a spider’s web, threatening to fall apart at any moment.
As the album nears its conclusion, things get genuinely mystifying, and we get the clearest sense of the issues Prince was grappling with in the aftermath of Purple Rain. “The Ladder” is a bewildering parable of a king “who didn’t deserve 2 B,” and who embarks on a spiritual quest. The reward he (and we all) receive for “looking for the ladder,” Prince sings, building up his testifying vocal screams over slow-swinging, traditional gospel chords, is that “a feeling of self-worth will caress U/ The size of the whole wide world will decrease.”
There’s a remarkable co-writing credit on this curious epic, as well as on the title cut—John L. Nelson, Prince’s father, whose conflict with his son was spun into the fictional emotional center of the Purple Rain movie. A jazz pianist, Nelson even attended Prince’s initial presentation of the album at the Warner Bros. offices, clad in a caftan. What could it possibly mean that this father-son reconciliation and collaboration resulted in such dense, almost coded lyrics, with such a desperate yearning for salvation?
The final track on Around the World took things even farther. At some of the Purple Rain shows, Prince stopped the music to engage in actual on-stage conversations with God. Unlike his R&B sex symbol predecessors like Al Green and Marvin Gaye, Prince had never seemed tortured by the relationship between sex and faith; rather than defining physical love as sin, he had embraced sex as an earthly manifestation of the divine spirit. But clearly there was some new guilt pulling at him, some reaction to his success or his lifestyle, and it is documented on the eight-minute-plus “Temptation.”
Reeling off spiky, fuzzed-out guitar licks, Prince practically drools his expressions of desire; “Working my body with a hot flash of animal lust,” he squeals, shrieks, leers. Eddie M.’s saxophone gives the song an almost comic burlesque strut as Prince works himself into a sexual frenzy. Until another voice comes down from the heavens: “Oh, silly man, that’s not how it works/ You have 2 want her 4 the right reasons/"I do!"/ U don’t, now die!”
Prince ends the album having learned his lesson—that “love is more important than sex”—and by saying goodbye to his audience. “I have 2 go now,” he whispers, “I don’t know when I’ll return.” And indeed, just a few weeks before the release of Around the World in a Day, Prince announced his “retirement” from live performance; it may have been sincere at the time, but it was barely a year later when he was back on tour, this time for the Parade album.
With the momentum of Purple Rain behind it—or, more precisely, with the momentum still going full tilt—Around the World sold over two million copies; no Prince record would ever be as commercially successful in his lifetime. But the album didn’t capture the public imagination to anywhere near the degree that Purple Rain had. If anything, its lilting textures and cryptic lyrics served to confuse a large portion of the fans attracted by the girls-and-guitars spirit of the motorcycle riding, Jimi Hendrix-meets-James Brown image the movie had cultivated. Which, of course, seemed to be his intention, his only possible way out of competing with a world-changing, life-changing phenomenon.
But it’s unfair to only consider the album as a defensive maneuver or a strategy to keep his future options open. It was also a brave and deeply personal project, exploring sounds and ideas that were almost shocking coming from a pop icon at his peak. “I sorta had an f-you attitude,” Prince told legendary Detroit DJ the Electrifying Mojo about his mood while recording Around the World in a Day, “meaning that I was making something for myself and my fans. And the people who supported me through the years—I wanted to give them something, and it was like my mental letter. And those people are the ones who wrote me back, telling me that they felt what I was feeling.” | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. / Paisley Park | April 29, 2016 | 8.8 | 40bca7dd-0d19-4206-a0c5-b5776ac29200 | Alan Light | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alan-light/ | null |
Uniform, a new Brooklyn duo composed of ex-The Men bassist Ben Greenberg and ex-Drunkdriver singer Michael Berdan, have an unremittingly bleak worldview. Perfect World's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that manages to slyly underminine its central thrust. | Uniform, a new Brooklyn duo composed of ex-The Men bassist Ben Greenberg and ex-Drunkdriver singer Michael Berdan, have an unremittingly bleak worldview. Perfect World's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that manages to slyly underminine its central thrust. | Uniform: Perfect World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20654-perfect-world/ | Perfect World | Uniform, a new Brooklyn duo composed of ex-The Men bassist Ben Greenberg and ex-Drunkdriver singer Michael Berdan, don't joke around when it comes to their dreary worldview. Perfect World is not meant as an optimistic title; it suggests the will to perfection choking the humanity out of the populace. The band name furthers that notion. World's cover, a sigil of a cross and death's sickle, is imposing and cryptic. But appearances can be deceiving: The album's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that slyly undermines its central thrust.
Let's get the only criticism, a fairly minor one at that, out of the way—the opener and title track is far and away the best song. Who would think that a stark industrial song, with a rhythm ready to break down and self-destruct at any moment, would be a summer jam? Over a sharp and thin Ministry-like attack, Greenberg programs a drum track suggestive of a metal drummer stuck in a blast-beat fugue state. His guitar grows increasingly paranoid as the song progresses, and Berdan's shrieks contribute to the tension, but "World" never loses its hook. Greenberg's pop instincts he cultivated during his tenure in The Men shine through Berdan's screeching voice and the brittle guitar. Thankfully, he's returned those talents to heavy music, not settling for bar rock. The Men were best when they simultaneously rode the lines of making clubs feel like stadiums and punk as destructive freedom, and Uniform might be, spiritually, the closest thing we'll get to their older works.
On "Buyer's Remorse", Uniform exhume '80s hardcore. Hardcore as a genre has explored dystopia plenty, but Uniform bob and swing with an urgency as if the stage-divers, instead of flailing about in the disorganization of their own lives, are out to specifically target you. "Indifference" moves toward a dark dance atmosphere, where Greenberg shifts his programming from metal purgatory to militaristic bass and snare. Feedback gets corralled into moaning riffs. Occasionally the guitar reaches blissful heights, contrasting and mocking the hell below. Dance music's utopian promise of one love and its undeniable undercurrent of sleaze all mix together, like Prurient's Through the Window with guitar in the mix.
World's last two songs, "Lost Causes", a collaboration with former Coil member Drew McDowall, and "Learning to Forget" are slower than the rest of the album, and would seem like Uniform's letting you coast off anesthetized. Not quite: "Causes" submerges the band's torment under unsettlingly pleasant drift, bringing Uniform's themes of suppression to their logical conclusion. Greenberg's guitar comes back roaring in "Learning", with Berdan, once the angry punk kid, rambling hushed and defeated. There's no pulse, and signs of life have been stamped out. The last two songs demonstrate how the spirit dies long before the flesh. | 2015-06-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-06-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | 12XU / Alter | June 9, 2015 | 7.6 | 40c928f9-90ce-46b9-9dde-aa88e1477f7e | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything, the first Violent Femmes record in 15 years, is that it's a back-to-basics record; a less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of their still-beloved self-titled record from 33 years ago. | The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything, the first Violent Femmes record in 15 years, is that it's a back-to-basics record; a less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of their still-beloved self-titled record from 33 years ago. | Violent Femmes: We Can Do Anything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21574-we-can-do-anything/ | We Can Do Anything | Imagine that you had made a great, enduring piece of art with a couple of your friends when you were barely out of your teens. Now imagine that it's more than 30 years later, you no longer have anything in common with your former comrades, and all anybody wants to hear from you is that one glorious burst of hormonal fury you came up with as alienated kids.
That's roughly the position in which Violent Femmes find themselves in 2016, as they release their first album of new material since 2000. Singer/guitarist Gordon Gano has recently noted that he and bassist Brian Ritchie "don't agree on most basic things", which is putting it mildly: Ritchie sued Gano in 2007, and snapped that "it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago". Original drummer Victor DeLorenzo rejoined the group when it reunited to play Coachella 2013, but quickly left, citing "disrespect, dishonesty and greed".
Somehow, though, Gano, Ritchie and DeLorenzo's replacement, Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione (who departed the group at the end of last year), managed to scrape together an album's worth of tunes. Some of them were resuscitated from demo tapes dating back to the era when that meant "cassettes"; three were co-written by Gano and a handful of song doctors; "What You Really Mean" is a cover of a song by Gano's sister.
The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything is that it's a back-to-basics record: ten brief songs in the band's most immediately recognizable idiom, with Gano singing and strumming with the twitchiness of a guilty teenager, Ritchie snapping strings like he's shooting rubber bands, and Viglione's brushes smacking the hell out of a single snare drum. A less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of Violent Femmes, with the vocal and instrumental tone reprised precisely from 33 years ago. It touches on all of the Femmes' familiar themes: masturbation ("Foothills"), Christian awe ("Holy Ghost"), lady troubles ("Big Car", which starts as leaden double-entendre and becomes a leaden murder ballad in its final line). The closest thing to a deviation from the formula here is "I Could Be Anything", a beer-kegger polka (with accordion!) about a dragon-slaying hero, which seems like it's heading toward a narrative twist but never comes up with one.
Violent Femmes have spent most of their career in the shadow of their debut album. (On their 2014 tour, they played it in its entirety, and last year's gigs inevitably began with "Blister in the Sun" and "Kiss Off" and ended with "Add It Up.") But they used to get some juice out of trying to get out from under it. The most memorable recordings of their subsequent career have been the biggest departures: the industrial fever-hallucination "Machine", the holy-rolling shock-skronk of "Black Girls", the in-your-face T. Rex cover "Children of the Revolution." They're not trying to pull off anything like that any more; instead, they're polishing up the durable façade of their signature sound, while the songwriting that it used to support has crumbled. | 2016-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | PIAS | March 3, 2016 | 4.6 | 40cbf6f9-4d0f-4549-8f4b-1c4cff791799 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
This domestic, stripped-down edition of Khruangbin has all the comforts of home, wherever in the world that may be. | This domestic, stripped-down edition of Khruangbin has all the comforts of home, wherever in the world that may be. | Khruangbin: A LA SALA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khruangbin-a-la-sala/ | A LA SALA | In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Khruangbin released their third studio album, Mordechai, a disco-funk reprieve with the unusual, yet welcome, addition of vocals from bassist Laura Lee. Four years later, the trio returns with the stripped-down A LA SALA, a stark change in direction and scale from their last few albums. Khruangbin have always drawn inspiration from genres that span the globe and transport the listener to its far-flung corners. This time around, they squeeze all those influences into a universally beloved place: home.
Woven together from collected pieces of unreleased recordings and beat loops, A LA SALA—which translates as “to the living room”—pulls the group back to their earliest days in Houston, where their early recordings were heavily inspired by ’70s psych rock and funk, embedded with modalities from Thailand to Niger. In the intervening years, Khruangbin have become a streaming behemoth and darling of the indie jam scene, which means there’s far less to prove. There is a lot less of everything in A LA SALA: less spacey synths, less vocals, and a less-is-more approach to their usual genre-bending approach. The band thrives when it sheds all of the frills, and creates a small world where anything is possible.
Breathing room is the big draw here. If Mordechai exhibited too many moving parts to focus on any one moment or feeling, A LA SALA gently guides you through the ebbs and flows of varying moods and personalities. “Fifteen Fifty-Three” welcomes us like a late-night conversation, as if guitarist Mark Speer is relaying a story of a past life with each long-decaying strum. “Hold Me Up (Thank You)” begins as a familiar Khruangbin psych-funk workout until midway through, when a few sharp tugs of the guitar bring the song into a traditional Congolese soukous rhythm. All the while, the subtle vocal work shines in the background, allowing the instruments room to breathe.
“Pon Pón” lives in a tropical paradise, transporting us to some oceanside boardwalk late in the afternoon with the sounds of old-school Brazilian funk and MPB. DJ Johnson’s deft, subtle drumming adds to the movement of the melody without distracting from the strings and soft vocals counting down in a variety of languages. The big standout is “Ada Jean,” a noirish composition anchored by Lee’s shadowy, suspicious bassline. As the song progresses, Speer’s fluttery guitar riffs soften the scene, which ends with the distant sounds of sirens and whimpers. Perhaps “Ada Jean” is an assassin who hit her mark and the weeper a bereaved loved one. Perhaps it’s a Wild West story of a bank robbery gone awry. Regardless, when the trio is humming like this, the catalog of mental imagery runs deep.
In 2022, Lee explained that the band creates each new track piecemeal. The process begins when Lee pulls a drum loop from her bank of beats and layers it with her bass riffs, followed by guitar, followed by another round of percussion. Through this process, each member creates an individual composition that makes a track feel like a living piece of work. In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie. Even the most confident travelers must sometimes rest; A LA SALA represents a relief from the uncertainty of experimentation. This domestic edition of Khruangbin has all the comforts of home, wherever in the world that may be. | 2024-04-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | April 10, 2024 | 7.1 | 40cd4a0d-eee6-4630-a865-f6f0431ec059 | Rosy Alvarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rosy-alvarez/ | |
Songs: Ohia's best and most pivotal album, 2003's The Magnolia Electric Co., showcased the late Jason Molina's strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. | Songs: Ohia's best and most pivotal album, 2003's The Magnolia Electric Co., showcased the late Jason Molina's strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. | Songs: Ohia: The Magnolia Electric Co. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18704-songs-ohia-the-magnolia-electric-co/ | The Magnolia Electric Co. | The late Jason Molina began his career by enduring constant comparisons to Will Oldham. The analogy became a lazy one, but its basis is understandable. Molina’s debut single under his Songs: Ohia moniker, 1996’s “Nor Cease Thou Never Now”, was released on Oldham’s own Palace Records, and his quivering, sing-speak cadence bears an unmistakable resemblance to Oldham’s. That association endured—up to and including a 2002 collaboration between Molina and Oldham (plus Appendix Out’s Alasdair Roberts) called Amalgamated Sons of Rest. But there are two other singing-songwriting contemporaries of Molina that make for equally apt comparisons: Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith. Adams’s Gold came out in 2001, and its unabashed ode to heartland-fueled classic rock emboldened a generation of punk-and-indie shitkickers to embrace their FM-radio roots. Smith had turned increasingly away from indie rock and toward a more organic classic-pop sound in the late 90s and early 00s—that is, until his suicide in 2003 cut that evolution short.
That year also marked the release of Molina’s best and most pivotal album: The Magnolia Electric Co., which showcased his own strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. Molina’s work on Magnolia wasn’t as cryptically oblique as Oldham, as stadium-sized as Adams, or as harmonically polished as Smith. It was, perhaps for the first time in his recording tenure, pure and full Molina. But the album installed itself into the American songwriter landscape circa '03 in a way that closed the circuit among his peers and secretly, quietly willed a pocket of the zeitgeist into being.
The 10th anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Co. is upon us, hence the obligatory 10th-anniversary reissue. The album would have called for the deluxe retrospective treatment even if Molina hadn’t died earlier this year, of organ failure related to his long struggle with alcohol. The respectful euphemisms have flown. The bottom line, however, is harsh: Molina drank himself to death. But Magnolia is not a drunk record, nor is it a drinking record. While legions of alt-country troubadours have drained the tear-in-my-beer song of much of its traditionalist proof, Magnolia is sharp, clear-eyed, and savagely focused.
Beginning the album with “Farewell Transmission” is more than an act of perversity. Molina lays out his blueprint not just for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the album*,* but for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the band. What once was jittery and hesitant in his delivery is now howlingly powerful; gone is Songs: Ohia’s push-and-pull between intimacy and stridency. In its place is red-blood, full-throated, post-hippie country rock, right down to a name that evokes both Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia”. Only this is Cosmic American Music scorched by the heat of reentry, space-cowboy romance for the year of the Columbia shuttle disaster. “Must be a big star about to fall,” Molina rasps in awestruck wonder over amber waves of twang and pedal-steel majesty. The sweetheart of the rodeo now works at a truck stop somewhere on Route 66, handing out the men’s room key and smiling crookedly to hide her missing teeth.
Route 66 is mentioned by name on “John Henry Split My Heart”, and it’s more than just an obvious stab at harnessing American mythology. But it is that—an homage to the folk archetypes of a relatively young nation, yet one that hauls around so much weight. Calling Molina a death-obsessed singer-songwriter would be as off the mark as calling him a drunk singer-songwriter. Still, the gravity of “John Henry”—especially its bruising distortion and spiraling chords—hits like a Dust Bowl twister. And on “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost”, a more hushed meditation on absence and regret builds into a stiff, inexorable shuffle toward death, complete with ghoulish backups by Molina’s frequent foil, Jennie Benford of Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops (the group with whom Molina recorded the sparse Didn’t It Rain in 2002). “Ghost” is almost Halloweenish in its spooky, oohing, voice-and-guitar refrain, but that dead-leaf brittleness raises gooseflesh. And when, on the churning threnody “Almost Was Good Enough”, Molina chants, “Almost no one makes it out,” it’s Crazy Horse galloping along the lip of a cliff.
For every act of negation—self- or otherwise—on Magnolia, there’s an imperative. “Just Be Simple” is Molina’s lone commandment, only he wields his Occam’s razor with a gentle subtlety, even as his arrangements are far more textured and complex than they let on. “Everything you hated me for/ Honey, there was so much more,” he sings softly and cleanly; meanwhile, what he doesn’t sing screams volumes. The obvious reference is to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”, only here there’s no external narrator, no motherly figure through which to filter homespun wisdom. This is a hard-earned, heart-damaged cautionary tale told far too late for caution to do any good, and Molina seems content to judge no one but himself. “Hold on Magnolia” also delivers an order, but again it’s directed inward. “You might be holding the last light I see/ Before the dark finally gets a hold of me,” he pleads over lonesome strums before adding doubtfully, “Hold on, Magnolia/ I know what a true friend you’ve been.” The eerie similarity between “Magnolia” and “Molina” isn’t lost on anyone.
The dark-horse tracks of Magnolia have only gotten better with age. Presented back-to-back in the middle of the album, “The Old Black Hen” and “Peoria Lunch Box Blues” feature guests vocalists—grizzled country singer Lawrence Peters on the former and British-born singer Scout Niblett on the latter. Both are excellent. On “Black Hen”, Peters drawls like molasses across a honky-tonk funeral waltz; “Peoria”, on the other hand, conjures a mystic, distorted-folk lope worthy of Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention. More than just being strong on their own, though, this one-two punch gives Molina a breather from all the turned-earth bleakness—plus it describes the entirety of the spectrum he draws from: orthodox Americana on one hand and otherworldly atmosphere on the other.
When it comes to the bonus tracks, not a moment is wasted. The complete set of guitar-plus-vocals demos—originally included in a limited-edition run of Magnolia upon its first release—shows the bones of “Black Hen” and “Peoria” with Molina himself supplying the vocals, studies in haunted restraint that recall the Songs: Ohia of old. “Just Be Simple” is given the most felicitous treatment as a skeleton of its full-band self. Every crevice and shiver of Molina’s voice is allowed to hang in empty space, naked and aching. The pair of newly restored outtakes, “The Big Game Is Every Night” and “Whip Poor Will”, are essential to the album; hearing them in the context of the established track listing, it’s hard to imagine how Magnolia ever did without them. “Whip Poor Will” is light and sweet, a melancholic confection in which Molina plucks at taut strings and duets with Benford, whom Molina begs to “Sing it, sister, one more time.” Their harmonies on the chorus are jagged, uneven, vinegary, perfect.
But it’s “The Big Game Is Every Night” that truly astounds: 10 glorious minutes long, the song pulses like a severed vein, its rhythm slowly ebbing out as Molina sings, “The last thing I see/ Let it be me helping/ Honestly, let it be me working/ On being a better me.” Only Molina knew if he fulfilled that promise to himself before he died. Ultimately, that’s all that matters about Magnolia, regardless of its maker’s deserved place in the pantheon alongside Oldham, Adams, and Smith: the way Molina sank his roots so deep, they took up more than they could bear. | 2013-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | November 12, 2013 | 9 | 40cfe019-6368-4d7d-9236-1bd009b0961a | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
On their second album, the wildly inventive art-rock band works harder than ever to unburden itself of the influences heard in its earlier work. | On their second album, the wildly inventive art-rock band works harder than ever to unburden itself of the influences heard in its earlier work. | Palm: Rock Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palm-rock-island/ | Rock Island | Listening to the first 30 seconds of Rock Island, it might surprise you that Palm never really learned to play their instruments in the classical sense. Singer-guitarists Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert, bass player Gerasimos Livitsanos, and drummer Hugo Stanley were all more or less amateurs when they converged at New York’s Bard College circa 2011, as you’ll learn from most writing about the Philadelphia-based band. This part of Palm’s backstory has trailed them for years, perhaps because it helps explain the wayward frenzy and exuberant sprawl of their music. On their 2015 full-length debut, Trading Basics, and last year’s Shadow Expert EP, they’ve continually pushed themselves to evolve at an accelerated pace—it’s as if they’re aspiring toward an identity they haven’t quite found. Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.
It’s a document of a band that’s too busy moving forward to be certain of the destination. Consider the scrappy jangle of opening track “Pearly,” with its riot of synthetic steel drums, looping vocals, and quaintly retro synth pads, or the smooth flourishes of fake brass toward the end of the album on “Swimmer,” like a robot’s approximation of yacht rock. These are not what you would call expressions of a carefully thought-out artistic vision; the turns are too chaotic, the decisions too turbulent. Though there are byzantine time signatures, rhythmic hiccups, and anti-pop musical modes all over the album, Palm’s wild energy still bears not a trace of convention. The songs feel like they’re still being invented and perfected even as you listen to them.
This tendency to follow every whim sometimes feels like an insurance policy—protection against the threat of boredom, both the listener’s and Palm’s own. Rock Island has a restless quality. When the band tires of steady plodding two minutes into “Bread,” the song pivots and erupts in an outburst of frantic percussion, before pivoting once again a minute later into a softer swirl of dreamy backing harmonies and prickly guitar. Of course, that twitchy songwriting can’t help but put one in mind of Deerhoof, one of Palm’s clearest philosophical forebears, even when they don’t exactly sound alike. Similarly, Kurt will likely always sound a little like Avey Tare (who, in turn, will always sound a little like Brian Wilson). For all their innovation, the piecemeal quality of Palm’s music never lets it cohere into something uniquely their own.
When they fight against those similarities most ardently, the music gains a compelling sense of tension. “Dog Milk,” the album’s strongest cut, is a dazzling blaze of anarchic inspiration that makes five-plus minutes of steel-pan drum loops and warring yawps feel like pure euphoria. It’s a vigorous song, animated by real imagination and brio. Not coincidentally, it’s the moment on Rock Island when Palm sound most comfortably themselves, bringing their gifts to bear less in hazy imitation of eccentric acts of old than in service of something startling and new. | 2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | February 9, 2018 | 6.8 | 40d0d725-fcc6-4d8b-ab21-7ddb43f44031 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Cave performed these 22 career-spanning songs alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking them into haunted piano sermons that glow with unnerving intimacy. | Cave performed these 22 career-spanning songs alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking them into haunted piano sermons that glow with unnerving intimacy. | Nick Cave: Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-cave-idiot-prayer-nick-cave-alone-at-alexandra-palace/ | Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace | Years ago, people asked Nick Cave questions at their peril. In 1988, one NME hack riled him so badly that Cave started swinging punches, tried to steal the interview tape, and screamed: “You’re nothing but a shite-eater!” Today, though, you can ask him anything—literally—and he’ll answer on his Red Hand Files website. How do I cope with losing someone I love? Should I bring children into this world’s Boschian hellscape? Do you enjoy stage magic? Every warm, generous response makes Cave seem more like a kindly agony uncle instead of the larger-than-life construct of yore. The man who once passed for some crazed netherworld shaman, as unearthly and sinister as the stranger from “Red Right Hand,” usually limits the supernatural grandeur to discussing his beloved dachshund, Nosferatu.
Other recent projects have made Cave the flesh-and-blood human more visible, too: chatty Q&A shows, candid documentaries, and a poignant Bad Seeds record, 2019’s Ghosteen, touched by the death of his son, Arthur. But none have been as eerily intimate as Idiot Prayer. A live film and LP recorded at London’s Alexandra Palace after Covid-19 waylaid a Bad Seeds tour, it finds him performing alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking 22 career-spanning songs into haunted piano sermons. The 84 minutes are filled almost entirely by melancholy keys and Cave’s rich croon. On the solitary new track, the longing ballad “Euthanasia,” he sings of spending a desperate evening roaming lonely landscapes, unmoored by grief and seeking salvation. “In looking for you, I lost myself,” he quivers over its elegant arrangement.
That contemplative approach means Cave doesn’t so much strip songs down as peel back the flesh and expose their skeletal beauty. “Sad Waters” is recast as a pretty, tumbling lament; “Stranger Than Kindness” is broken down into a ghostly hymn; an otherworldly “Girl in Amber” entrances. Nearly a third of the set is taken from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, a choice which forges a spiritual link between that record’s stately heartbreak and Ghosteen’s sublime ruminations on grief. In Alexandra Palace’s lavish, uncanny void, the lines between past and present start to blur, and compositions become unstuck in time. Twenty-year-old wounds are as tender as purpling bruises on “Brompton Oratory” and “Far From Me,” while Cave’s choked falsetto on the sparse, sumptuous “Black Hair” suggests the scent that an ex-lover left on his pillow still fills his nostrils. “Waiting For You,” on the other hand, emerged just last year, yet he purges the Ghosteen version’s gauzy electronic sheen until only a brittle prayer remains, and his voice cracks as if he’s spent an eternity in purgatory.
Inevitably, the spartan setup favors a certain vein of Cave’s songwriting. For the most part, he snubs the Bad Seeds’ priapic sleaze and fire-and-brimstone filth to embrace his softer side. When he sinks into heartbreak on “Nobody’s Baby Now,” it’s as wistful as the coda to a silver-screen romance; during Grinderman’s “Palaces of Montezuma,” which is reimagined as a jazzy lounge number, his grand pledges waver between bravado and bashfulness. As with many of the deconstructions, the unvarnished treatment allows a greater vulnerability to shine through.
And yet some of Idiot Prayer’s finest moments crackle with a more dangerous energy. On a handful of mesmerizing tracks, Cave sounds less like he’s revisiting his songbook than conducting a seance. “Higgs Boson Blues,” a sprawling surrealist odyssey on 2013’s Push the Sky Away, starts out hushed but slowly spirals into a fevered vision. “Driving my car, flame trees on fire,” he keens over its music-box melody; by the song’s end, as he riffs on Miley Cyrus, monkeys, and smallpox-carrying missionaries, his voice has broken into a howl and he’s hammering away at the keys. Old live favorite “The Mercy Seat,” meanwhile, has rarely had the kind of dark intensity that Cave summons here, transformed into a glowing murder ballad.
About 30-odd minutes in, just after he’s finished a forlorn “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?,” Cave lets slip a quick, disbelieving chuckle, as if suddenly snapping out of a reverie. Otherwise, there’s no talking, no wisecracking, no concession that anyone else might be listening in as he reckons with his life’s work. The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bad Seed | November 20, 2020 | 8 | 40de94e0-f5ed-4b55-b555-0f83f433ac80 | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
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 birth of jazz fusion, a combustive 1969 album led by a prodigious drummer striking it out on his own. | 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 birth of jazz fusion, a combustive 1969 album led by a prodigious drummer striking it out on his own. | The Tony Williams Lifetime: Emergency! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-tony-williams-lifetime-emergency/ | Emergency! | One night in the fall of 1969, at a Manhattan club called Ungano’s, Herbie Hancock willingly put his hearing at risk. He was there to catch Lifetime, a new trio led by Tony Williams, his former bandmate in Miles Davis’ revolutionary 1960s quintet. He didn’t know what to call the music being played that night by Williams, organist Larry Young, and guitarist John McLaughlin. But he sensed that the experience was worth the aural toll.
“It was loud,” Hancock later recalled of the gig. “It was the loudest stuff I ever heard in my life. It was louder than rock’n’roll. I said to myself, ‘This is something new.’ … It was exciting and very arresting. It snatched you. It yanked you out of your seat. A lot of the people couldn’t take the volume. They got up and left. I also knew that if I stayed, I would pay the price in later years with my hearing. I consciously made the bad decision to listen anyway.”
When Miles heard the trio amped-up and jamming at a Harlem club, he promptly recruited McLaughlin for the session that would produce the 1969 ambient-jazz landmark In a Silent Way. That album and its 1970 follow-up, Bitches Brew, would come to be known as foundational texts of jazz-rock fusion. But as startling as those Miles dispatches were, and as entrancing as each remains more than a half-century on, neither fully harnessed the volume and volatility of contemporary rock. The true big bang of fusion arrived right on the heels of In a Silent Way, and well before Bitches Brew: Emergency!, the Tony Williams Lifetime’s aptly named 1969 debut.
Crank up the opening title track, jeopardizing your ears as Hancock did, and you’ll hear, within the first minute, jazz-rock’s fiery inception. Williams plays a taut snare-roll crescendo and the band enters with a blaring four-chord vamp, McLaughlin’s guitar bathed in fuzz and wah and Young’s Hammond B-3 framed by ominous distortion. Williams rampages through the riff—hammering the bass-drum pedal, syncopating furiously on the snare, rolling on the toms, exploding across the cymbals—while still conveying seismic waves of groove. The collective sound suggests Jimi Hendrix, Keith Emerson, and Clyde Stubblefield jamming on the rim of an active volcano. Just when it seems like Williams’ kit might splinter, the band downshifts gracefully into simmering swing, with the drummer playing springy jazz time on the ride, McLaughlin picking out nimble lines and Young adding chugging chords.
As with every transition in the piece, Williams’ otherworldly dynamic control makes this abrupt shift seem as though it’s cushioned by velvet. Later, the band builds to a thrash-funk theme reprise, driven by Young’s muscular bassline, during which you can hear one of the musicians (McLaughlin, perhaps?) whooping at the outrageousness of it all.
“Here is where we take a giant step into the future,” Lester Bangs wrote of Emergency! in a Rolling Stone review. He went on to characterize Williams, McLaughlin, and Young as “jazz musicians who have seen through the smog of pop artifice and picked up on the very best that rock has to offer, making their music a totally unique entity.”
Before a 23-year-old Tony Williams essentially willed fusion into existence, he’d spent his first few years on the scene revitalizing the rhythmic vocabulary of jazz. Already a star drummer by the time he was a teenager, he gigged regularly in his hometown of Boston with organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith and saxophonist Sam Rivers. In December 1962, days after Williams’ 17th birthday, he shared a local bandstand with saxophonist Jackie McLean, who immediately invited him to move to New York. During the next several years, the drummer appeared on a staggering array of adventurous, now-classic jazz albums—including McLean’s One Step Beyond, trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution, multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, pianist Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure and Rivers’ Fuchsia Swing Song—goading musicians a decade or two older than him with a hyper-alert style built around crisp articulation, jutting accents, and the artful dilation and contraction of tempo. Meanwhile, Davis drafted him into the quintet—with Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and, eventually, saxophonist Wayne Shorter—that would come to be known as one of the greatest jazz groups ever. Williams was the band’s designated upsetter, adding an impulsive urgency that beautifully offset Shorter’s moody compositions.
Seemingly anytime Davis recalled his collaboration with Williams, a string of effusive expletives would flow. “I had heard this great little 17-year-old drummer…who just blew my fucking mind,” Davis wrote in his autobiography, adding that “I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums.” In a 1969 Miles interview in Rolling Stone, conducted after Williams had left his band and formed Lifetime, the trumpeter sounded like he was feeling the drummer’s absence. After avowing that “Tony can swing and play his ass off,” and again labeling him a “motherfucker,” Davis added, “I don’t think there’s a drummer alive can do what Tony Williams can do.”
Williams had idolized Miles, and both participants and observers viewed the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet as pivotal, but he knew the gig wasn’t his ultimate destiny. In the later years of his tenure with the trumpeter, as the drummer later explained to Down Beat, “I started living under a kind of cloud. Miles is a very strong personality. He has definite ideas about what he wants. There, you live in his world. Living in someone else’s world is not easy. I was subject to his whims and desires and caprices. It took me a long time to realize that and to get out of it.”
At the same time, he was brimming with fresh musical inspiration, drawn in part from voracious listening. In Herbie Hancock’s memoir, Possibilities, the pianist credits Williams as a constant source of new and challenging sounds during the ’60s, turning him on to radical composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. “I was always asking him, ‘What are you listening to?’ because I knew I’d learn something,” Hancock wrote.
While keeping up with the latest avant-garde developments, Williams also soaked in the pop music of the day. He’d grown up on doo-wop in the ’50s, even singing lead in a group called the Monticellos, and in the ’60s, to the dismay of some of his jazz peers, he became a proud Beatlemaniac, an enthusiasm that would endure for the rest of his life. As rock got progressively wilder, and louder, throughout the decade, the drummer was paying close attention. He would later characterize Turn It Over, the second Lifetime album, as “my version of Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5. For Emergency!, other rock luminaries like Cream, the Who, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience lit the spark.
In interviews conducted in the early Lifetime era, Williams spoke of amplified, overdriven rock as if it were a tractor beam, drawing him in. “I started hearing a lot of electricity,” he told Down Beat in 1970, citing Hendrix’s Are You Experienced as a touchstone, "…and that started to excite me, and I wanted to hear more of that.”
If Lifetime’s rock trappings were staunchly contemporary, the group’s basic makeup pointed backward roughly a decade, to Williams’ early days working alongside Johnny “Hammond” Smith. In that earlier era, the organ trio was seen as the pinnacle of swinging soulfulness, the instrument itself acting as a direct link between modern jazz and traditional gospel and blues. “I wanted an electric group, to have an organ trio which would go back to my roots in Boston, when I played in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he later reflected. “I figured why not do that but make it more aggressive, more rock-oriented than blues-oriented? That was the premise. There’s nothing new, it’s just how you use it and how you put it together.”
The format may have been retro, but the personnel was state-of-the-art, with two virtuosos that Williams handpicked from very different backgrounds. In the early-to-mid-’60s, Newark-born Larry Young had progressed from soul jazz—sometimes working in the classic organ/guitar/drums format that Williams revived with Lifetime—to forward-looking post-bop. McLaughlin had spent the prior decade as a guitarist for hire on the London scene, playing jazz, blues, and R&B with future members of Cream and Led Zeppelin, among many others, while keeping close tabs on the innovations of Miles and John Coltrane. Hearing a tape of McLaughlin playing at London jazz mecca Ronnie Scott’s, Willliams appreciated that the guitarist was playing, as the drummer later said, in “a very aggressive way, not so politely,” and quickly called and invited him to New York.
Emergency! is a sprawling statement, a double album lasting 70 minutes. But one of the fullest realizations of Williams’ Hendrix-meets-“Hammond” Smith concept is the relatively brief “Vashkar.” Pianist Paul Bley had previously recorded the tune, penned by his then-wife Carla, as a pensive mood piece; in Lifetime’s hands, it’s an uptempo prog-jazz burner. Driven by a tumbling Williams pulse, the trio dances through the complex stop-start theme, ending each iteration with a dramatic full-band rest. Then, in the middle of McLaughlin’s scrambling solo, Williams starts playing an embryonic version of an extreme-metal blastbeat, alternating snare and bass in rapid succession while rising precipitously in volume, as Young joins in with shuddering note clusters. During Young’s solo, the organist seems to incite Williams to repeat the move with his increasingly frenzied lines, and soon all three musicians are hurtling toward a supernova climax. In these heated exchanges, you hear the thunderous echo of Williams’ earlier acoustic playing, as though he’d found a way to extrapolate an entire group language out of the rambunctious charge he’d previously brought to Miles and other bandleaders. For the drummer, the Emergency! title itself underscored the way the record acted as a kind of manifesto: “It was an emergency for me to leave Miles and put that band together,” he later said. “And I wanted to play an emerging music that was my own.”
“Sangria for Three,” a kaleidoscopic 13-minute suite penned by Williams, is the album’s rangiest piece: an ideal showcase for the band’s genre-detonating approach. Cycling deftly through grinding acid-rock groove, scampering white-knuckle jams and freeform noise duets between McLaughlin and Young, the track could almost pass for a fragment of a Mars Volta bootleg. In a more just world, we’d have numerous live takes of “Sangria for Three” to pore over, à la better-known epics of the day like “Dark Star,” “Soul Sacrifice” or “21st Century Schizoid Man.” But the Emergency! version is enough to instantly debunk the notion, born out of later, slicker iterations of jazz-rock, that fusion was an inherently polite or calculatedly commercial movement. Don’t let the track’s breezy title fool you: As much as, say, “Sister Ray” the year before or “Fun House” the year after, this is punk before punk.
An instrumental album by this trio would have felt plenty provocative to both the jazz and rock establishments, especially one with the audaciously overdriven sound of Emergency! (Williams himself was unhappy with the album’s production: “It sounded distorted,” he said at the time, pejoratively.) But there was another facet of Emergency! that made it challenging even for sympathetic listeners: the drummer’s decision to include his own highly eccentric vocals on three prominent tracks. Easily the strangest is “Via the Spectrum Road,” co-credited to Williams and McLaughlin, which alternates a languid 11/8 funk groove with march-like improv interludes. On top, Williams speak-sings couplets seemingly drawn from the touring life (“Rain on the ground/In every town”; “Club owner’s wife/Causes strife”). The piece feels like an oddly casual tangent on an otherwise urgent album. The most convincing use of vocals on Emergency! comes on “Where,” a McLaughlin-penned piece on which Williams’ gently murmured inquiries (“Where are you going?/Where have you come from?”) enhance the intermittent mood of eerie stillness.
At the time, Melody Maker called the album’s vocal passages “almost indescribably awful,” while Bangs’ otherwise glowing Emergency! review described them as “preachy, pretentious vocalisms.” Discussing Lifetime’s use of vocals in a contemporary interview, Williams cited crooners like Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine as inspirations but then seemed to deflect the matter altogether, saying, “I’m just experimenting.” Driving home his insistence on keeping his creative options open, he added, “Five years from now I may just walk on stage and saw a chair in half.”
The quip seemed to foreshadow the restlessness that would mark the rest of Williams’ career. Other Miles alums established themselves as star fusion bandleaders after splitting from Davis, riding the jazz-rock wave all the way to arenas and impressive commercial success during the ’70s: McLaughlin with the proto-tech-metal Mahavishnu Orchestra, the germs of which are clearly audible on Emergency! tracks like “Where” and “Spectrum”; Hancock with the ultra-funky Headhunters; Chick Corea with the proggy, virtuosic Return to Forever; and Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Joe Zawinul with the colorful and eclectic Weather Report. Lifetime, meanwhile, never gained wide popularity, even with the addition of Cream’s Jack Bruce on bass and occasional vocals for Turn It Over, released in 1970. McLaughlin left after that album, and Young—whom Williams would later call “the heart of that original Lifetime band”—departed after 1971’s Ego. (The organist, too often overshadowed by Hancock, Corea, Zawinul, and Mahavishnu’s Jan Hammer as a pioneer of fusion keyboard, died in 1978 at age 37.) An entirely different lineup, dubbed New Lifetime, would craft another classic with 1975’s stylish, well-rounded Believe It, but the magnificent grit and spontaneity of Emergency! was mostly absent from later editions.
Williams would go on to play everything from driving hard rock alongside Ronnie Montrose to sparkling standards with the Great Jazz Trio. But in his sprawling discography, Emergency! stands out for its wired intensity and brash experimentation—and for the visionary way it unified the most vital sounds of its era. Electricity was in the air in 1969, but it took a musician of Williams’ conviction and imagination to harness it, to bring together two musical poles and allow them to spark rather than fizzle, to create something, in Herbie Hancock’s words, “louder than rock’n’roll,” but without sacrificing the dynamic range and microscopic conversational detail of jazz.
Late in his life, the drummer often recalled the chilly reception Lifetime received in its day, mainly from jazz purists. “The band was vilified,” he said in the ’90s, looking back on the original Lifetime. “But the audiences loved it…. We were the hot band for rock people like Janis Joplin, but most jazz people didn’t want to know.” Still, decades on from Emergency! he stood firmly by the project. “It was something that had to be done at the time,” he said in 1996, the year before his death from a heart attack at age 51.
In another ’90s interview, he elaborated on why the original Lifetime was a necessary step. “The music was a reaction to what happened then, the turmoil of the ’60s,” he said. “The ’60s was about making a statement.” Then, distinguishing his, McLaughlin, and Young’s bold emergence from later iterations of fusion with typical brashness, he added, “The jazz rock I hear now … it’s in restaurants … it’s yuppie music.” | 2023-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Rock | Verve | January 8, 2023 | 9 | 40e3df40-298a-4790-b45b-9a3ec8026c72 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | |
Aquaria is the full-length debut from the producer best known for his work with Beyoncé. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered, but Boots remains in his own shadow, his own music eclipsed by his production work. | Aquaria is the full-length debut from the producer best known for his work with Beyoncé. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered, but Boots remains in his own shadow, his own music eclipsed by his production work. | Boots: AQUARIA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21139-aquaria/ | AQUARIA | The fact that you still can't mention Boots without also mentioning Beyoncé teaches two mournful lessons: 1) It's a mixed bag to start your career with a zeitgeist-definitive icon re-recording your best songs, and 2) It's even harder when you struggle to find a distinctive voice on your own. Four-fifths of Beyoncé had Boots' stamp on it, and since then the artist and producer, whose real name is Jordan Asher, has been busy. He's brought his surly, gentle, unfurling darkness to a feature-heavy mixtape, a series of well-chosen collaborations—Run the Jewels and FKA twigs, most recently—and now a first album, Aquaria. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered; it's a ball of static electricity, its aesthetic distinct. And nevertheless, Boots remains in his own shadow, his debut album eclipsed by his debut.
As a musician, Boots has an ear for sweet melody and a percussive, subtle, muscular style. His instincts cleave to R&B easily, and innovate from inside the genre; you can hear this happy marriage clearly on "Haunted," the Beyoncé meditation that was originally a Boots track called "I'm Onto You." Aquaria recalls that track's sound world directly: the instrumentation that rattles and slaps, the vocal line narrow. Aquaria itself is a rock album cumulatively – its soul is Mad Max and Jesus' Son, as if someone pushed Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead underwater and made them kiss – but Boots's primary instinct is genre agnosticism. This is an enormous benefit to the artists who work with him, but it's often a detriment when he's left alone.
As a rule, Boots' instrumentals are much more persuasive and emotionally precise than his vocals. The slinky and rabble-rousing title track is a highlight, and not coincidentally because Angel Deradoorian is paired against a great, fat, delicate clap in the beat. "I Run Roulette," another standout, is hard-edged pop that rides the contrast between the pitch-black riot that serves as the backdrop and the verses, which come very close to bubble-grunge.
But Boots has an imprecise delivery as a vocalist. When he sings, or just as often sing-raps, you often forget what he's trying to say. Part of the difficulty lies in the lyrics. They're half-heartedly combative, noncommittally weird, full of half-clever neologisms: like the song title "Oraclies," for "oracle" and "lies." On "Bombs Away," Boots sings: "All the wolves are famous/ Hide the rich and shameless/ Thirsty like an addict/ Hope is for the tragic/ Sell me down a new stream/ New world has new dream." The same restless, idle soothsaying comes in on "C.U.R.E.," a track that aches for a Run the Jewels guest verse (El-P is a co-producer on Aquaria) but, with Boots at the helm, sounds almost, truly, like Crazytown. There's a slightness in his voice that he doesn't use well; there's a melodic whimsy in his aesthetic that's best matched either with formidable guest charisma or else with his own production, its taut anxiety left unverbalized, slicing and revving away.
As on WinterSpringSummerFall, snippets of melody are briefly mesmerizing here; on Aquaria, the old-fashioned slow-dance ballad "Only" is a beautiful lament. "I am the only one alive," he sings, then switches: "You are the only one alive." Those are your options, solipsism or fixation; the album whirls between the two poles to occasionally claustrophobic effect. Each song confines you to a small set of characters: a bassline, a beat knocking, a squidge of sonic interference, a melody.
For all of Boots' fluidity and technical proficience, his solo work seems hampered by his attachment to pop, which doesn't fit his elusive profile. Aquaria could explode live, with two drummers at Boots' back. But in speakers, the album feels just pop enough in intention that its pleasures seem noticeably absent; with a few strong exceptions, the album could be a folder of songs waiting for someone else to bring them to life. Boots has talent enough to make a star, or to elevate a star to a new realm. You wonder who his next one will be. | 2015-11-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | November 3, 2015 | 5.9 | 40e585bb-dd36-4c15-a9ff-3e643dcc5f87 | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
Two years after 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned turned dance-punk's brightest trio into impressionistic noise-rockers, Liars return with an even bigger surprise: Drum's Not Dead actually tops their groundbreaking, beat-heavy debut through an evolution of the sound that turned much of their fanbase against them. | Two years after 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned turned dance-punk's brightest trio into impressionistic noise-rockers, Liars return with an even bigger surprise: Drum's Not Dead actually tops their groundbreaking, beat-heavy debut through an evolution of the sound that turned much of their fanbase against them. | Liars: Drum's Not Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4767-drums-not-dead/ | Drum's Not Dead | Ditching Berliniamsburg for the real deal, Liars moved to Germany in late 2004 to replant their roots in fresh cultural soil and begin recording their third album in a studio that offered creative possibilities too fertile to resist: The acoustically rich radio facility in the former East Germany boasts a labyrinthine system of rooms, each with its own distinct acoustic advantages. The trio's relocation is sure to be cited as the impetus for the Krautrock-like propulsivity of the resulting LP, but prior to the change of scenery they were exploring this kind of dark percussiveness on 2004's They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Most listeners had shrugged that album off for its dissimilarity to the band's acclaimed dance-punk debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, but while hectic, less refined, and at times sloppy, the underrated They Were Wrong marked the shift in direction that would lead Liars to the ethereal gorgeousness of Drum's Not Dead.
Highlighted by taut improvisation and frontman Angus Andrew's mastery of falsetto, the record's resolute seamlessness may be attributable to growth through practice: Liars wrote and recorded one album, but, not wholly satisfied with the results, decided against releasing it. Instead, that material was used as a blueprint for what became Drum's Not Dead, and in the process, the band cast off They Were Wrong's witches and Walpurgisnacht. Granted, there is still a conceptual libretto, this time centered on the universal struggle between confidence and cowardice. These traits are represented by two characters: the instinctive and assertive Drum, and the pessimistic, apprehensive Mt. Heart Attack. Of course, as with They Were Wrong, any conceptual devices remain secondary to the sound and mood.
"Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!" perfectly sets the stage, as fractured guitar waves, opiate military percussion, and Andrew's windswept vocals careen into pitch-shifts which slightly deepen the shadows. Segueing into "Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack", Liars let forth a siren call that bears an uncanny resemblance to the first few seconds of Faust's "The Sad Skinhead", then plunge into bubbling floor-tom/cymbal madness that echoes both Liquid Liquid and This Heat. The percussion is corporeal, tapping into some inner biological timepiece, and as on the album's best tracks, guitar notes are employed only as simple pulsing behind layered, seraphic vocals. Completing the mood-setting opening triad, "A Visit From Drum" is linked again by a vocal gasp; a less treated kit accompanies a floor tom/snare and the clattering of sticks for a creepy, mystic sounding incantation. Here and elsewhere, the guitar is an ambient sidekick to high-pitched vocals and tribal drumming.
Those first three songs are the album's strongest grouping, yet the excellent push/pull sequencing of Drum's Not Dead creates a shivery cumulative effect that spans the entire length of the record: By its closing notes, you're likely to find yourself awed and emotionally spent. "Drum Gets a Glimpse" pairs a mournful Eno-esque melodic sense with cymbal washes, M83 guitar tones, crickets, and Andrew trading lines between the naive and melancholy falsetto of Mt. Heart Attack ("It seems like all our friends have gone"), and the deeper, more authoritative Drum ("You drove them out").
Later, there are a couple of abstract pieces-- fuzzier, looping canyon bliss-outs with left-channel acoustic guitar; a bit of swirling, Sister-era Sonic Youth shredding-- along with a pair of standouts. The first of these, "Drum and the Uncomfortable Can", is coated in reverb that amplifies the intensity of the cannibalistic double drumming: It's primal marching band music wrapped in guitar feedback and a howling voice singing about hiding a body. The second comes with the straightforward, closing ballad "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack", which resolves the album at its-- and the band's-- absolute peak. Like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps", its surprise sentimentality lends essential emotional weight, but does so with a dedicated restraint. Gentle guitar drifts accrue density alongside sighing vocals, warmed tom tom heartbeats, tiny instrumental accents (piano, tambourine, roughed-up strings), and Andrew's simple, sweet sentiments: "I won't run far, I can always be found"; "If you want me to stay, I will stay by your side."
For added value, Liars flesh things out with an accompanying DVD that presents three visual versions of the album: "Drum's Not Bread" by drummer Julian Gross, "The Helix Aspersa" by Andrew, and filmmaker Markus Wambsganss' "By Your Side". Due to its liberal use of live and studio footage (and farm animals, actually), Gross' best held my attention. More refined, Wambsganss creates effects with light and motion-- his three-channel video for "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack" is his portion's most compelling moment. Maintaining a stoic minimalism, Andrew fixates on a snail's ponderous adventures through Germany.
Of course, the music remains the greatest draw. Those who previously yearned for a career trajectory the band wisely ditched ought to listen to Drum and keep track of the epiphanies. In the coming weeks, its strengths will win converts, even among those who'd previously jumped ship. But my favorite detail of this feel-good story-- popular Brooklyn post-punk band falls out of favor by changing directions and ultimately produces an album that eclipses its debut-- is that Liars are still waltzing along on their own terms. This, their third LP, shows zero concessions to the criticisms they received from publications like Spin and Rolling Stone, who awarded They Were Wrong their lowest possible marks. Succeeding rather than regressing or retreating, Liars have had the last laugh: Drum's Not Dead is a majestic victory lap, and on all levels, a total fucking triumph. | 2006-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Mute | February 22, 2006 | 9 | 40ee0672-b7a9-4a01-b75f-f70ff4ca31f9 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.