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
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Prince's new effort, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), is billed as being an "experimental" effort. But the reality is something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot. | Prince's new effort, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), is billed as being an "experimental" effort. But the reality is something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot. | Prince: HITNRUN Phase One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21026-hitnrun-phase-one/ | HITNRUN Phase One | Prince's hype-man instincts defy categorization every bit as much as his vocal and instrumental talents beggar description. Though he's fallen off since the 1980s—who, in his shoes, wouldn't?—it's this artist's strange and frequent urge to over-promise that helps keep everyone harping on Sign 'O' the Times as his apogee. Yet here we are again. An album title like HITNRUN Phase One promises a fair amount, not least the possibility of a concept worth serializing. And that's before the album is announced by its creators as being "experimental" in construction. Though after stripping away the promotional language from this streaming-only platter, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), one finds something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.
To get to that very good song—at least in the manner that Prince and his young co-composer, producer, and mixer Joshua Welton intend—you'll plug through a half-hour sequence that contains a throwaway intro, a trio of putative party-starters cluttered with the confetti of modern-dancefloor production-debris, two reworked (as opposed to improved) songs from 2014's superior Art Official Age, and a tweaked version of the "Fallinlove2nite" standalone single that failed to make that prior album. (Ditching Zooey Deschanel's backing vocals doesn't much elevate that breezy tune's mild charm.)
Among the remains, "Hardrocklover" would seem to be an opportunity for one of pop's most reliably sensuous guitarists to make up ground. But the song seems strangely subdued and bored with itself. While the lyrics ("Turn my guitar up so I can make this woman scream") suggest that the inevitable appearance of guitar-heroism will be climactic, Prince's unfurling of his distorto-wail cape feels rote. The loopy-but-hard-hitting funk of "X's Face" is initially promising, though it too is thin on development. Elsewhere, the (mostly) instrumental "Mr. Nelson" riffs with a modicum of inspiration on remnants from Art Official Age standout "Clouds".
On a first listen, you might suspect that the album's opening sequence of not-disastrous (but not-terribly-memorable) EDM-influenced jams is going to be the focus of HITNRUN Phase One. Though this, too, is part of a formula: compare Prince's almost-rap flow on "Shut This Down" to that of 1992's "My Name Is Prince", and it's easy to see that the artist has a template for approaching ascendant pop trends. There are stray, tasty touches in this opening salvo—a brief electric-bass clinic in "Shut This Down", the integration of saxophone, rhythm guitar, and digitally programmed curlicues in the last minute of "Like a Mack"—but experimental this ain't. Not for the artist who wrote and recorded "Crystal Ball", anyway. (By point of comparison: Prince has also made newly available some truly chancy and obscure work from the late 1990s—like the extended paranoid-freakout "The War" and the mostly-acoustic album The Truth—on Tidal.)
Disappointments and missed opportunities aside, it's still great to have an official, Prince-sung version of "1000 X's & O's" (an old composition once intended for Rosie Gaines). When Prince sings in an environment unmolested by contemporary cliche, he gives us more than at any other point on HITNRUN Phase One—including that iconic, multi-tracked one-man choir, in addition to lyrics that, while they might not be much on the page, snap with a seductive pull when placed in his mouth ("Every drop of sweat on your brow/ Is well-earned/ So you best believe"). Even if, this time around, you can forget the familiar discographical parlor game of comparing each new Prince record to earlier triumphs—this one isn't his best album in the last twelve months, let alone years—songs and performances like that one show why it remains unwise to count him out. | 2015-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | NPG | September 10, 2015 | 4.5 | 42949911-d3a7-44a3-b872-aaa8f57fe956 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Prince’s first fully actualized album is an unrelenting dance party, its kinky ambiguities blurring lines between genres and genders and pretty much everything else. | Prince’s first fully actualized album is an unrelenting dance party, its kinky ambiguities blurring lines between genres and genders and pretty much everything else. | Prince: Dirty Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21866-dirty-mind/ | Dirty Mind | At the dawn of the 1980s, young black musicians were pretty much doomed. After disco brought forth the most racially integrated moment popular music had seen since Kennedy was shot, the ensuing backlash was fierce, and radio finally got fed up with the club scene telling it what to play. So once the airwaves declared dance music dead at the very tail end of the ’70s, African-American stars who didn’t have hits that predated disco—which was just about all of them, besides Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Kool & the Gang—had to either drastically change their game, face instant obsolesce, or only play to black audiences.
Prince wasn’t about to take option two or three. When he signed to Warner Bros. in 1977 , he told A&R head Lenny Waronker: “Don’t make me black.” Then the multi-instrumentalist proved his hard rock bona-fides on the guitar-shredding “I’m Yours,” from his 1978 debut For You, and “Bambi,” from 1979’s Prince, just as surely as he served notice of his disco cred with that self-titled album’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a major pop and chart-topping R&B hit. But still, his vibe on those early wailing solos wasn’t any hipper than that of any other geek who spent his lonely teen years mastering byzantine jazz-fusion wankery.
Prince’s Dirty Mind, his first fully actualized album, changed all that in 1980—though it isn’t the thorough break from his brief past that it’s generally made out to be. It starts with the most blatant disco throb in his entire discography on the title cut, and his second-heaviest thump pounds through “Uptown,” which opens Side B. At 30 ultra-tight minutes, a length that allowed for more walloping vinyl, Prince’s sole slow-jam-deficient album is pretty much an unrelenting dance party that pointedly invited New Wavers to boogie down alongside funk bunnies and dancefloor fashionistas. It’s one of the key records that truly initiated the ’80s.
It’s all there in what’s not. Whereas Prince’s ’70s albums proclaimed his virtuosity, here he achieves much more by confining himself to the simplest, boldest strokes. Like Krautrock’s motorik beat, Prince’s opening “Dirty Mind” rhythms are just about as close a human can get to a metronome; no tom-tom fills, no accents on the high-hat, just an occasional syncopation on cheaply recorded cymbals that suggest a drum machine’s hiss. Like Chic or the Cars, Prince makes the album’s inaugural guitar so staccato it’s nearly a percussion instrument, and much of the arrangement’s tension and release is located in just how much he lets its nearly solitary chord ring out. Halfway through, “Dirty Mind” breaks down in quintessential disco fashion, but right after it builds back up, four descending key changes are offset by ascending, churchy organ: a particularly Prince-like juxtaposition that offers a peek-a-boo glimpse into the convolutions—sexual and otherwise—of his psyche. The composition denies consummation in favor of suspended anticipation.
Because so much of Dirty Mind’s instrumentation is expressed in prickly masculine terms, Prince’s vocals feel that much more free and startlingly girly. His generation grew up with falsetto soul men—Motown’s Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks in the ’60s, Philly’s Stylistics and other harmony acts of the ’70s—and it can be argued that they scored with white audiences because their higher, more ecstatically female frequencies made their race and sexuality less threatening. But it can’t be underestimated how much Prince quite threateningly set off gaydar—particularly with this positively giddy album. Later on, he’d become a superstar singing in his regular range on most hits from 1999 and Purple Rain, but here he establishes his confrontational persona by ramping up the sighs and squeals. Although Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman—LGBT members of Prince’s peak-era band the Revolution—pretty much nailed it when they deemed Prince a “fancy lesbian,” folks of every persuasion still argue about his sexual identity to this day.
That ambiguity is played to the hilt on the track that cemented Prince’s New Wave connection, “When You Were Mine.” The music evokes Elvis Costello’s bitter rigidity, but the lyric wanders way beyond that songwriter’s cuckold comfort zone: There’s the sharing of the clothes and the voyeuristic, nearly-bi way his post-breakup attention shifts from the gender-indeterminate object of his affection to his ex and her/his current steady guy. And, of course, the zinger: “I never was the kind to make a fuss/When he was there, sleeping in-between the two of us.” Whether it was sung by Prince or Cyndi Lauper, who memorably covered the song without changing its nouns on 1983’s She’s So Unusual, that line caught everyone’s attention. Only a new kind of person could do it justice.
Dirty Mind’s second side is unquestionably Prince’s most propulsive suite. It begins with “Uptown,” which ranks alongside Vanity 6’s Prince-penned-and-produced “Nasty Girl” among the most daring R&B radio hits of the ’80s. But its topic is even more singular—how homophobia constricts even heterosexuals. The song celebrates a boho utopia where fag-bashing, racism, misogyny, and all other trifling shit doesn’t exist: While minding his own business, a passing hottie asks him point blank, “Are you gay?” But instead of blowing his cool, Prince reasons, “She’s just a victim of society and all its games.” To school the dame, he takes her to Uptown, a real-life Minneapolis counterculture haven back in 1980 that’s subsequently been gentrified. There, she loses her uptight ways as the track’s grinding disco-funk gains momentum; the overwhelming freedom acts as an aphrodisiac, and the once-scorned weirdo gets “the best night I ever had.” Everybody’s happy.
The tempo downshifts slightly but significantly on “Head,” one of the earliest fully realized manifestations of Prince’s quintessential style. The song features another scenario perfectly archetypal of The Purple One: He meets a virgin (played with drawling deadpan glee by Coleman) on the way to her wedding, and she gives him what the song celebrates. This results in a Bill Clinton maneuver on her gown, so she dumps her plans and marries him instead. As suggested by his thorniest, most authoritative early groove, this isn’t necessarily a wise choice; Prince vows, with not a small amount of matrimonial menace, to “love you till you’re dead.”
Right before the onslaught of AIDS, “Head” was mighty strong stuff, but even it couldn’t compare to the next track: a 93-second punkabilly ditty that abruptly cuts off right as its bridge peaks, as if caught in flagrante. “Sister” celebrates incest like the rest of the record toys with sexual identity; it’s blatantly performative, yet Prince invests so much into it that it’s impossible to definitively conclude whether he fucked his sister or is merely fucking with us. The music matches this instability; his trebly guitar chords may be fast and furious like the Ramones, but the time signature keeps flipping to trip up ears and feet.
The final kiss-off, “Partyup,” denounces President Carter’s 1980 reinstatement of draft registration. Prince’s fury is both straightforward (“How you gonna make me kill somebody I don’t even know?)” and efficiently metaphorical (“Because of their half-baked mistakes/We get ice cream, no cake”). Meanwhile, the track—in-the-pocket on the bottom but liberatingly loose on top—finds the pleasure in getting thoroughly pissed off, especially during its ’60s-worthy closing chant: “You’re gonna hafta fight your own damn war/ ’Cause we don’t wanna fight no more.”
“Partyup” earns its “revolutionary rock‘n’roll” self-proclamation even though it, like most everything else on the album, is pretty much uncut funk with louder guitars and tunes so catchy you can’t deny the pop. Yet the attitude on this homemade landmark album, which was originally intended as a demo, couldn’t be purer punk: Dirty Mind rejects labels, restrictions, and authority. That’s why, despite its many colors, the music comes across so gloriously black; why Prince’s aura is so righteously flaming; why the singing wraps its pervy purple raincoat around what’s feminine. Prince was the kind of guy who couldn’t be boxed in by anything, so Dirty Mind has him rebelling against even his relatively ordinary and modest early success.
That may have lost him a few fans. The album never went platinum in the U.S. like its predecessor or 11 of the albums that followed, and even “Uptown” narrowly missed the Hot 100. But his willful aberrance also earned him a new kind of audience, one that would also support the Clash, Grace Jones, Culture Club, Rick James, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, Frankie Knuckles, and all the other super freaks of ’80s rock, soul, pop, and dance music. Disco’s so-called death resurrected and radicalized Prince’s already restless definition of self. Here, he becomes everything. | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | April 29, 2016 | 10 | 4295232f-efbd-4657-a9ad-d9aafce8ba81 | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | null |
The film director John Carpenter became an icon of the first synthesizer age just as he lost interest in making films. His minimal works have influenced a generation of acolytes, and earlier this year Carpenter tried his hand at a standalone album with Lost Themes. Here, remixers from Prurient and Zola Jesus to Blanck Mass tackle the master's works. | The film director John Carpenter became an icon of the first synthesizer age just as he lost interest in making films. His minimal works have influenced a generation of acolytes, and earlier this year Carpenter tried his hand at a standalone album with Lost Themes. Here, remixers from Prurient and Zola Jesus to Blanck Mass tackle the master's works. | John Carpenter: Lost Themes Remixed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21126-lost-themes-remixed/ | Lost Themes Remixed | As John Carpenter began to lose interest in making films, he entered into an unexpected renaissance as one of the most influential icons of the synthesizer age. Carpenter himself will tell you how accidental that status is: He only began composing and recording the scores to his films—starting with his first one, 1974’s Dark Star—in order to avoid having to pay someone else to do it. His use of electronic instruments, even his signature minimalist style—all of it sprang from budgetary concerns.
But Carpenter’s scores—specifically the ones for Halloween and *The Fog—*developed a cult following among synth geeks, and this burgeoning fan base has inspired him to try his hand at making music without a movie to compose it for. Encouraged by his musician son and his discovery of modern digital recording software, he released his first solo album, Lost Themes, earlier this year. Although the tracks are smoothed out by bland Logic plugins, it was a pretty decent evocation of his soundtrack work.
If Lost Themes provided an opportunity to reflect on Carpenter’s influence on several generations of electronic musicians, the selection of remixes by other artists tacked on as bonus tracks makes that influence explicit. Now, Sacred Bones has fleshed out the set out with a couple more tracks and Lost Themes Remixed stands as a companion volume to the original record.
Remix albums are tricky things, and the ones that fail (and most of them do) do so for the same few reasons: too many stylistically disparate remixers, too much reverence for the the source material, remixers who are clearly in it for the easy paycheck. Lost Themes Remixed avoids all three. Carpenter’s status seems to have inspired the nine remixers to bring their A game, and Sacred Bones selected committed experimentalists like Prurient, Zola Jesus, and Blanck Mass (aka Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power) who wouldn’t play too nice with Carpenter’s recordings.
Stylistically, pretty much any artist who’s going to want to remix John Carpenter is going to have a few things in common, including a pervasive gloominess and an affection for throbbing, single-note bass lines played on analog synthesizers. As a result, LTR manages to hold together as a unified stylistic statement in a way that isn’t common for remix collections.
Despite the project’s singular focus, LTR doesn’t just reflect Carpenter’s influence on contemporary musicians, but the range of artists that he’s inspired. Prurient transforms Carpenter’s New Age-leaning "Purgatory" into a harsh, icy soundscape. The Blanck Mass reworking of "Fallen" sounds like slasher-movie music from some grimy, glitched-up cyberpunk future. Zola Jesus and Dean Hurley reconfigure Lost Themes’ most classically Carpenteresque track "Night" into vocal house for vampires.
Interestingly, some of the remixers seem to be correcting Lost Themes’ deviations from Carpenter’s signature formula. In its original form, "Abyss" highlights both Carpenter’s knack for building complex arrangements out of deceptively simple parts and his weakness for really corny synth patches. Foetus mastermind J.G. Thirlwell swaps them out for the kind of assaultive analog sounds that set the tense mood of Carpenter’s early films (and which themselves were considered corny at the time). One one hand there’s something offensive about the idea of somebody trying to fix an artist’s new work by making it sound more like his old stuff. On the other hand, I have to admit I like the remix more. | 2015-10-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 20, 2015 | 6.9 | 42982812-3369-44cb-97b9-d44d5d10bf2d | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The complex, referential new album from the New York-based composer responds to historical crises with sprawling orchestral pop. | The complex, referential new album from the New York-based composer responds to historical crises with sprawling orchestral pop. | Emily Wells: Regards to the End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-wells-regards-to-the-end/ | Regards to the End | Midway through Regards to the End, composer Emily Wells zooms in on a hand scattering grass seed. The image is summoned with a whisper, rustling against soft piano on the lullaby “David’s Got a Problem.” “Throw a little grass out,” she sings in a hazy drawl. “Then go lie among the weeds.” The line nods to late multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who used to wander Manhattan’s piers planting abstract meadows in this manner. Wells cites a 1983 photo of Wojnarowicz as inspiration; he lies back in a dilapidated building carpeted with fresh green turf, peeled paint and graffiti splashed against the walls. It’s an instant metaphor: beauty extracted from waste, organic versus manmade matter, the ultimate supremacy of nature. Wells was interested in all of these themes as she wrote Regards to the End, the New York-based polymath’s latest work of textured orchestral pop.
Wells turned to Wojnarowicz’s work during a two year reflection on the AIDS crisis. She marveled at the activist community that sprouted from the tragedy. Their demand for treatment and government recognition, which often fell on deaf ears, reminded Wells of the ongoing climate emergency. Wells grappled with these colossal disasters, poring through pieces by artists and advocates like Kiki Smith, Félix González-Torres, and others. In their complex, weighty structures, the 10 songs on Regards to the End consider the despair they lived through and mimic the catharsis sown from their work.
Lead single “Love Saves the Day” signifies the alchemy of siphoning art from anguish. As she wrote it, Wells thought of David Buckel, the LGBT rights lawyer and environmental activist who self-immolated in Prospect Park four years ago. The moody classical intro hints at grief, but the song is no funeral dirge. Wells’ compact orchestra—upright bass, cello, clarinet, French horn, violin—creeps in with long, nauseous notes before she truncates their phrasing and ups the tempo. Wells shakes the piece into a rousing march; bass clarinet bounces like a Second Line tuba, and patches of synthesizer echo Wells’ vocals as if she’s singing in a tiled underpass. Unexpected details sneak in, like a peppery hi-hat and rapidly plucked violin. Surprise and precision are Wells’ greatest assets as a composer, and Regards to the End is filled with both.
A classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Wells composes in movements, and it is thrilling to trace the slopes of her songs on Regards to the End. Opener “I’m Numbers” unfurls with seasick bowed strings that dissipate in her progressively lush arrangement. She layers slight, clacking percussion, spry keys, and harsh bursts of breath. Her voice, hushed and low, examines a simple but crippling concept: “I’m numbers ’til I’m not.” The phrase suggests mortality and the cold, accountant’s view of marginalized people, who are often referred to as statistics.
Wells is an efficient lyricist. Her compositions sprawl out and swirl, invigorating the few words she offers. On “Love Saves the Day,” she laments vanishing plots of land: “All of my acres, the wet ones, the dry ones,” she sings. “They’ve all been devoured.” The image functions as a metaphor for a sick body, or a dying planet. On the relaxed “Come on Kiki,” she sums up incessant human desire effortlessly: “You don’t stop wanting/You just want differently.” The phrase is followed by velvety, rippling clarinet—an act of restraint framing Wells’ pleas for “more.”
Wells is occasionally too restrained: the latter half of Regards to the End is a sustained lull. “Arnie and Bill to the Rescue” and “The Dress Rehearsal” glide along mid-tempo to sleepy drones, Wells’ voice drenched in reverb. The songs are lovely in a safe way but suffer from sequencing more than anything else. They may have been better suited between the album’s livelier pieces, rather than stacked at the end in an elongated fadeout. Wells’ most exciting music is vibrant and dynamic, throwing the listener into unexpected hairpin turns. In the final third of “Two Dogs Tethered Inside,” Wells’ brooding synth arpeggios swell and fall as a shimmering clarinet bursts through the surface. It’s as if a rugged stone has been cracked open to reveal the sparkling angles of a geode—beauty erupting through the toughest planes. | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Thesis & Instinct | March 2, 2022 | 7.2 | 429a15d1-752a-4cd1-b72d-b44352531fab | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On his latest LP, the rapper Brother Ali rekindles his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant. They’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound. | On his latest LP, the rapper Brother Ali rekindles his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant. They’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound. | Brother Ali: All the Beauty in This Whole Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23228-all-the-beauty-in-this-whole-life/ | All the Beauty in This Whole Life | Over a career that has spanned almost two decades, rapper and producer Brother Ali has consistently entwined and then unbraided his personal life and his politics. His catalog has oscillated inwards and outwards accordingly. He’s never ditched social commentary, but there are certain Brother Ali records that feel like deliberate self-care. At one point on his new album, he concedes, “If I’m trying to get out here and protest/Let me first save the world from my foolishness.” Five years after the emcee turned in a record that felt like an active duty report from the front lines, he’s flipped the spotlight back on himself, thumbing through his life in intimate detail.
All the Beauty in This Whole Life finds Ali rekindling his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant, and together they’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound. Throughout, Ali focuses on familiar topics: his family, his religion, his travels. Ant’s production is sparse but effective, dovetailing a few instruments at a time into basic soul and boom-bap numbers. At worst, the music sounds painted by numbers, but Ant still has plenty capacity for inventive, funky simplicity. It’s a style that fits Ali, who raps from his belly and puffs his voice up and out of his chest, stringing together sneakily sing-song couplets.
“Own Light (What Hearts Are For)” brims with direct but triumphant turns of phrase: “I know who I am, I know whose I am/On your wings I fly, in your shoes I stand,” he raps. Other songs reach for the same effect and miss the mark, like the mundane “Can’t Take That Away.” Ali’s poeticism snowballs into corniness, as he spills, “I love you and there’s nothing you can do it about it/I love you right through all your human problems.”
Other songs leverage a darker edge in sound and subject matter. For all his dramatic catharsis, Ali rarely laments his own existence, but on “Pray for Me,” he recounts his tormented childhood struggle with Albinism in depressing detail—from the trips to the salon his mother arranged to dye his hair to the specifics of the schoolyard taunts he endured. On “Dear Black Son,” he speaks directly to his son Faheem over a murmuring piano beat. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing diary Ali has dedicated to his firstborn, providing explicit guidance as much as lovingly hoping for the best. “I can’t protect you like I want to,” he raps.
There’s an occasional return to proselytizing that can run dry. On “The Bitten Apple,” Ali preaches about the damages of pornography, and on “Before They Called You White,” he breaks down the social construct of whiteness in America. Sometimes his lucidity can feel like a lesson plan, and once his point is made, it’s hard to reason returning to the track. The opposite is true of a song like “Uncle Usi Taught Me,” in which Ali finds himself stranded in Iran after speaking at a conference, only to return home to suspicious TSA agents (“Imagine my exhausted embarrassment/Got back to America, they interrogate me like a terrorist”).
Ali is at his best when he doesn’t have all the answers, and nothing draws out the uncertainty more than his most self-reflective songs. On “Out of Here,” he sounds lost, trying to come to terms with his own life in the context of the suicides of both his father and grandfather. “Every man before me in my fam/Died by his own hand/How am I supposed to understand my own role in the plan?” he wonders. This kind of raw humanity, which is sometimes eclipsed by his political ambitions, is much welcomed on All the Beauty. “I’m a man not a brand,” he raps at one point, seemingly reminding himself as much as listeners. *All the Beauty *jolts that sentiment into perspective. It’s both sharp-tongued and warm hearted, an LP-length memoir that dabbles in political manifesto. But it comes over like an album Ali made for himself, and he sounds better off because of it. | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | May 12, 2017 | 7.4 | 429e2c95-f07f-4e23-a97b-e16d8bc36491 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Jumping from Sub Pop to a major-- and featuring a revamped lineup around linchpin Ben Bridwell-- Band of Horses return for album No. 3 | Jumping from Sub Pop to a major-- and featuring a revamped lineup around linchpin Ben Bridwell-- Band of Horses return for album No. 3 | Band of Horses: Infinite Arms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14243-infinite-arms/ | Infinite Arms | Band of Horses' first two efforts-- 2006's grandiose, heart-on-sleeve Everything All the Time and 2007's Cease to Begin-- are practically of a piece. More of a good thing's not usually a bad thing, but even fans of Cease admitted it was a merely lateral move, one Ben Bridwell and his Band have seemingly taken great strides to correct since. Infinite Arms, their third record, took some 16 months to record and was compiled from dozens of tracks. Ryan Monroe, Tyler Ramsey, and Bill Reynolds joined the fold-- Bridwell is now the only member of the band who featured on Everything-- and each of the Horses lent a hand to the songwriting this time around. Hell, Bridwell's even going around saying stuff like "in many ways, this is the first Band of Horses record." And the result of all this new blood, a year-plus of hard work? More of the same, yet somehow much less.
It seemed clear Band of Horses knew their strengths; gigantic, unabashedly earnest choruses, flittery verse melodies, and that honeypot in Ben Bridwell's throat. They are not, and never have been, the most musically dexterous or lyrically sophisticated band around, but when they're on, a dorky-when-you-say-it line like "the world is such a wonderful place" could really hit you below the neck. But Infinite Arms rarely seems to just go for it in the way Everything All the Time and Cease to Begin did, lyrically or musically. Despite a few minor and largely unobtrusive additions to the instrumental palette, the playing feels tentative, reviving old melodies ("Laredo" is practically more "Weed Party" than "Weed Party") and putting a softer focus on the new ones. The aw-shucks naïvety and brash overstatement is dialed down; there are precious few heart-tugging, glass-in-air moments. And Bridwell pulls his formidable voice back, often mewling in a kind of Seals and Crofts-style close harmony or occasionally offering his bandmates the mic without him. Despite all the additions and subtractions, it's decidedly the work of the same band, but if Infinite Arms were, as Bridwell suggests, the first Band of Horses record, I doubt we'd be this curious about the third one.
True to form, there are some lovely moments that would've sat nicely on their previous records: The Brian Wilson-indebted highlight "Bluebeard"; the familiar yet spirited "Laredo"; the knotty melodies of lead single "Compliments" and "Dilly", which will knock around your head for a while. Infinite's got a nice, leisurely way about it, and while a few moments exhibit more flash, Phil Ek's crystalline production once again does a nice job staying out of the way. But their slowpoke anthems and sunburnt rave-ups feel so worn-in, they're growing shapeless. A few well-placed lyrical potboilers could've really spruced up the drabber numbers, but the words here mostly range from the mundane ("oh, my love, is that you on the phone?") to the goofy ("I was thinking it over by the snack machine/ I thought about you in a candy bar") to cringe-inducing nonsense (the album-ending chorus of "if Bartles & Jaymes didn't need no first names, we could live by our own laws and favor.")
Most frustrating about Infinite Arms, though, is that what it's really missing seems almost intangible; it's tough to quantify "heart," but that's not far off. Could be all the months in the studio, might be just plucking the wrong dozen from their tunes, but Infinite Arms just feels less tender, less personal, more twang-by-numbers than the last couple, despite its familiar sound and many of the same principals. There's much less of that sky-spanning, obtuseness-be-damned freedom that characterized their biggest (and, generally, best) moments in the past, and worst of all, that tug in Bridwell's throat feels muted, like even he's not really feeling it. Which is up there with Infinite Arms' most relatable sentiments. | 2010-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / Columbia / Brown | May 18, 2010 | 5.3 | 429f1769-ffeb-459c-9c79-472eba9e8d3f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The London quartet moves beyond the sardonic post-punk of its debut, exploring new sounds and moods while Florence Shaw reveals hitherto unheard subtleties in her famously low-key delivery. | The London quartet moves beyond the sardonic post-punk of its debut, exploring new sounds and moods while Florence Shaw reveals hitherto unheard subtleties in her famously low-key delivery. | Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dry-cleaning-stumpwork/ | Stumpwork | The past few years have been bad enough—but what if your tortoise also ran away? On “Gary Ashby,” a single from Dry Cleaning’s new album, Florence Shaw mourns a lost family pet while poignant guitar tramps and twirls like the animal itself trotting off. Shaw offers few details about Gary or his fateful flight; all we’re left with is a tragic image of the stumpy-legged critter trapped somewhere upside down, unable to move. It’s a goofy, sad-sweet curveball for this band, whose debut album last year was full of sardonic, barbed-wire post-punk.
Stumpwork was written immediately after New Long Leg came out, but it’s a whole different world, vibrantly expanding Dry Cleaning’s core sound. It’s post-punk but also incandescent slow rock; it’s hardcore vandalized with Dadaist-diary meditations; it’s cold and moody but also lush and friendly, alternately borderline industrial noise or dream pop. Shaw’s delivery is elastic; she’s not just talking here, but sighing, scowling, humming, even singing, although she does it in a solitary, half-aware way, as though dazed in reverie. Sometimes she steps out of the way of the instruments, as on the second half of “Conservative Hell,” an aurora skyline of foghorns, wispy guitar, and slow-motion synth ripples. If “do everything and feel nothing” was the last record’s motto, this one’s could be “do everything and feel wondrously, woozily alive.”
The jump from weary and exasperated to bright and (mildly) optimistic isn’t over the top. It’s more like someone drew back a curtain and let a thin ray of light flood the surface of Dry Cleaning’s music. The sunniest track, “Anna Calls From the Arctic,” is practically hypnagogic rock; Nick Buxton’s drums, Lewis Maynard’s bass, and Tom Dowse’s guitar fall into such gentle lockstep it’s like they’re lifting you to heaven, where you’re met by yawning horns and needling vibrations that seem to unspool for eternity. Even some of the album’s more aggressive cuts, like “Don’t Press Me,” emanate a kind of raw coziness; the video for the song has cartoon versions of the band’s faces rolling around like bouncy balls.
For all the pretty textures, there’s nothing as immediately infectious as the mirroring guitar-bass hook of “Scratchcard Lanyard,” though the soothing gallop of the title track comes close. What distinguishes Stumpwork is the way these songs are built out like landscapes, with micro-climaxes and instrumental passages that pop. There are so many mini-moments of glee: Maynard’s deviously sinewy bass opening up “Hot Penny Day,” or the drums falling away and Shaw crying out, “Is it still okay to call you my disco pickle?” The crushing “No Decent Shoes for Rain” slowly mounts tension until the last minute, when everything explodes in a rush before a shrill chord slashes it into silence. Dry Cleaning’s chief allure isn’t thrashing hooks or show-off vocal prowess, it’s the way these four London friends take cues from each other’s rhythms like they’re brainstorming riffs in real time.
The most electrifying and emotionally resonant rock made right now is often by musicians who aren’t actually steeped in the genre; they work on the fringes, conducting experiments in asphyxiating distortion and running one-person bands from their bedrooms, warping their guitars into shards of gleaming noise over convulsive digital beats. Perhaps that’s one reason Dry Cleaning’s music hits so hard: While the band is highly skilled and grounded in traditional rock scenes, Shaw’s vocals hew toward anti-rock, even though they’re shaped to the instrumental and have a conversational musicality. Their sharpness gives the band’s sound a distinctly visual quality, her voice high in the mix like a backdrop-blurred close-up of someone’s face. In a way, it reminds me of some of the most exciting rap of the last few years, which often use otherworldly vocal styles like snarling, sibilating, and whispering to make more traditional drum presets and patterns feel new again.
Dry Cleaning weren’t the first to do talk-rock, but no one else has Shaw’s enchanting simplicity. Her spoken-word delivery has often been described as stony or blank, an idea she seems to mock at least once on this record: “What I really love is to not use something to its full capacity,” she professes on the title track. There’s an abundance of silliness and emotional subtlety in her minute tone shifts and observational lyrics about everyday life. You can see it conveyed in her low-key facial movements when she performs: eyerolls, a disdainful nose scrunch, the quick flick of an eyebrow. Part of the thrill is the sheer unpredictability of her monologues, where a gaming mouse can stoke interpersonal chaos and flickers of joy suddenly shrivel into disgust: “I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby, but it was a bundle of trash and food.” Even on the most disorienting song, “Liberty Log,” there’s a jolt of levity: “I will risk slow death for Chinese spring roll,” she promises, like a warrior taking a fatal oath.
So much of Dry Cleaning’s emotional pulse rests in Shaw’s words that when they’re forgettable, the music feels declawed. “Driver’s Story,” for example, is lyrically as diffuse and subdued as the slow-grooving instruments. Then again, it would be difficult to follow up New Long Leg with another vault of instantly memorable quotes about bouncy-ball filters and hot-dog daydreams without making it feel gimmicky. Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.
Deep in the final track, right before the end, Shaw offers a manifesto for living: “For a happy and exciting life… stay interested in the world around you.” Her poised tranquility makes it difficult to tell whether she’s serious or reading off a Live-Laugh-Love aphorism generator, as she adds, “Keep the curiosity of a child if you can.” These lines felt especially poetic the other night, when Dry Cleaning held an album listening party at a roller-skating rink. After a long workday, I expected to be too exhausted to really enjoy it. But I found myself grinning madly as first-time skaters careened into walls and tiny kids clung to each other for safety while Gary Ashbies and disco pickles flew overhead. Dry Cleaning is all about these glimmers: jaded torpor pierced by genuine smiles and little flashes of human oddity that make wading through all the shit that is life worth it. | 2022-10-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 25, 2022 | 7.8 | 42ab0c7d-b1fb-42f2-9dd8-3d2168572f42 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
On his debut solo album, the guitarist James Elkington—a sideman for Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson—reemerges with an elegant and assured collection of acoustic fingerpicking and smart songwriting. | On his debut solo album, the guitarist James Elkington—a sideman for Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson—reemerges with an elegant and assured collection of acoustic fingerpicking and smart songwriting. | James Elkington: Wintres Woma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-elkington-wintres-woma/ | Wintres Woma | On Wintres Woma, guitarist James Elkington reemerges at age 46 as an acoustic fingerpicking hero with a proper solo debut—an album that is at once beautiful, complex, and assured. Where plenty of guitarists have rediscovered themselves in the transition from electric bands to acoustic-minded singledom, such as Pelt’s Jack Rose and Cul de Sac’s Glenn Jones, Elkington stands apart among the wave of 21st century guitar soloists. This kind of reinvention has typically involved an embrace of John Fahey’s school of American Primitivism. But the British-born Elkington is neither American nor primitive. And while some of Elkington’s peers have evolved by jumping to singing and songwriting, he was already writing smart songs with his rock band the Zincs. Since that band dissolved a decade ago, Elkington has been an instrumental sideman for Steve Gunn, Jeff Tweedy, and Richard Thompson.
So it’s perhaps little surprise that Wintres Woma arrives with an instant elegance, occasionally akin to Brit-folk godfather Bert Jansch or Thompson, especially on wry, sad songs like “Grief Is Not Coming.” What is a surprise is how skillfully Elkington balances songs and his high-flying fingerpicking. The music is dotted with tasteful arrangement choices. A harmonica passes through (“Sister of Mine”), a pedal steel swells (“Hollow in Your House”), and strings swirl (“My Trade in Sun Tears”). But the spotlight stays on Elkington throughout: his songs, his voice, and his guitar, the latter of which seems to expand on the lyrics with small details and asides. On the traditional instrumental “The Parting Glass,” Elkington’s imagistic playing carries the performance easily.
The newfound rigor of Elkington’s fingerpicking provides a gravitas that both recalls the seriousness of the traditionalists in the so-called neo-ethnic folk movement of the early 1960s, and connects him to other contemporary fingerpickers. At the same time, Elkington’s indie pop roots show through everywhere, too, and to great effect. On “The Hermit Census,” a few cello swells and banjo parts go a long way—concessions to what the neo-ethnics might’ve sneeringly called “city folk.” As the song progresses and Elkington’s lyric follows the guitar down a melodic lane, he suddenly pulls out a series of Brechtian turns that Colin Meloy of the Decemberists might pen if he was a more agile guitarist and less precious songwriter.
The results reward close listening, and the close listening is a pleasure. The aching closer “Any Afternoon” offers charms for a psych-pop loving Beatlemaniac, a guitar soli connoisseur, or just an unaffiliated casual listener looking for new music. Recorded at Wilco’s studio in Chicago, Wintres Woma is an album that makes itself easy to like, its album title translating from Old English to mean “the sound of winter,” and it’s that, too.
On “Sister of Mine,” Elkington switches over to a more straightforward strum, plus upright bass. The sound is more city-folky and less flashy than anything that surrounds it, but it’s also just as appealing. It is a reminder that Wintres Woma came so fully formed only because of how many places Elkington has already been as a musician, sometimes hidden under his obvious virtuosity. Even the most jaded neo-ethnic (like, say, Llewyn Davis) could dig on the folk-blues work-out of “Greatness Yet to Come,” though the same person might be puzzled by the string-abetted middle section, which sounds like it could stretch into raga-folk infinitude. Despite his acoustic guitar, Elkington is no folkie, and the road seems as open as it’s ever been. | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | July 6, 2017 | 7.8 | 42b0830b-8f63-412f-a6db-645ce4614c67 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Saâda Bonaire, the model-esque non-singers Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld, released their lone single in 1984. This unexpected reissue from Captured Tracks under their Fantasy Memory subsidiary reveals that the project was the concoction of Ralph “Von” Richtoven, a Bremen club DJ, and produced by dubmaster Dennis Bovell in Kraftwerk’s Cologne studios. | Saâda Bonaire, the model-esque non-singers Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld, released their lone single in 1984. This unexpected reissue from Captured Tracks under their Fantasy Memory subsidiary reveals that the project was the concoction of Ralph “Von” Richtoven, a Bremen club DJ, and produced by dubmaster Dennis Bovell in Kraftwerk’s Cologne studios. | Saâda Bonaire: Saâda Bonaire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18804-saada-bonaire-saada-bonaire/ | Saâda Bonaire | In 1984, one of EMI’s A&R men—notorious for going over budget on recordings—went well over schedule with singles from two of his artists. One was Tina Turner, on her way to 80s multi-platinum success with “Private Dancer”, which the company was willing to forgive. But the other act, Saâda Bonaire, which featured two model-esque non-singers Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld, had their lone single released, only to be immediately dropped from the label, never to be heard from again.
As this unexpected reissue from Captured Tracks (released under their new Fantasy Memory subsidiary) reveals though, Saâda Bonaire was the concoction of Ralph “Von” Richtoven, a Bremen club DJ who fancied himself a Svengali, never mind that his vision for the group included upwards of 20 musicians at any one time who didn’t speak the same language—much less played the same musical scale—backing up his non-musical fiancée, Stefanie Lange and her friend, both women clad in Bedouin wear. For a group that had one single, this reissue unearths an entire album’s worth of material, produced by dubmaster Dennis Bovell in Kraftwerk’s Cologne studios. As the aforementioned names might attest, it makes for a curious early 80s mutant sound.
When Richtoven first conceived of the group, he had a local German reggae band he managed enter a studio to cover both J.J. Cale’s “Ride Me High” and James Brown’s “It’s a Man World” (unfortunately these covers were left off this reissue). He then set about overdubbing some Kurdish folk musicians he met via a Turkish Communist community center, adding his fiancée and her friend last. Trainwreck though it might scan, the results were intriguing to say the least, convincing EMI to let them record some more.
Enter that none-hit wonder, “You Could Be More As You Are”, which remains a curious beast: rubbery reggae bass, growling gong hits, synth stabs and jerky rhythms from hand drum and drum machine, featuring an assortment of whistles, saxophones, Turkish saz, and ney flute, all of it topped by the icy monotones of Lange and Hossfeld, who recall their memories of a German friend who sold her body for money at a young age, hit every club every night, and died too soon. It was idiosyncratic in their native Germany in the age of Neu Deautsche Welle groups, yet somehow became a club hit in Greece, and soon after became a holy grail for Balearic DJs around the world, where it fetches upwards of $170 a copy online.
It’s unfortunate that the album never saw the light of day back in the early 80s, as Saâda Bonaire had plenty of kindred spirits from that era. Over the percolating congas, pliant basslines, upstroked guitar, and saz licks of “More Women”, they sound a bit like Tom Tom Club. The snappy and spare “Heart Over Head” finds a middle ground between the Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money” and Soft Cell’s take on “Tainted Love”. The synth bass on “Invitation” emulates Imagination’s dancefloor smash “Just An Illusion”, though it’s shot through with ney flute and a vocal delivered as if Lange and Hossfeld were instead auditioning for that notorious Calvin Klein Obsession commercial.
The presence of Bovell, the Barbados-born, yet London-based dub producer who produced Linton Kwesi Johnson’s iconic 70s reggae albums as well as post-punk classics like the Slits’ Cut and the Pop Group’s Y, helps tie together what should have been a total mess. It’s easy to hear post-punk’s DNA here and from the vantage point of 30 years, one can imagine how Saâda Bonaire might have been an influence on the icy minimal wave sound, the talk-sing grooves of Peaking Lights, not to mention the vocals of Glass Candy’s Ida No. In another dimension, maybe Saâda Bonaire’s multi-culti dancepunk tracks would have influenced someone like M.I.A., or else their gender-bending lyrics could have been behind the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. Alas, this rescued album can only show that Saâda Bonaire could have been more than they were. | 2013-12-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-12-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Captured Tracks / Fantasy Memory | December 13, 2013 | 7.4 | 42b94583-0f12-497c-a961-d7718d77a85b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Born Edward Larry Gordon, the new-age musician Laraaji first gained first wider notice when Brian Eno heard him playing in Washington Square Park and asked if he wanted to record an album as part of Eno's Ambient series. He went on to record a series of cosmic new age releases, situated at an intersection of drone and Terry Riley-style minimalism, several of which are being released as cassette tapes on Leaving Records, an imprint of Stones Throw. | Born Edward Larry Gordon, the new-age musician Laraaji first gained first wider notice when Brian Eno heard him playing in Washington Square Park and asked if he wanted to record an album as part of Eno's Ambient series. He went on to record a series of cosmic new age releases, situated at an intersection of drone and Terry Riley-style minimalism, several of which are being released as cassette tapes on Leaving Records, an imprint of Stones Throw. | Laraaji: All In One Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20839-all-in-one-peace/ | All In One Peace | Why has new age music floated back into the musical conversation? The answer is complicated. Reissue culture in general has kicked into overdrive, as music across the spectrum gets rediscovered and re-packaged at a pace we've never seen before. The line between ambient music with cultural cache (Eno, spacey krautrock) and relaxation tapes for the bourgeoisie has grown blurrier, not to mention the mainstreaming of yoga, locavore eating, and sustainable culture, all of which focus on the body and the senses as a ballast for data-driven digital reality. And there's also the fact that the idea of "functional music" in the playlist era has become so widely accepted. In this climate, it makes sense that mellow music designed for meditation and relaxation would wind its way back around.
Into this context, enter Laraaji. Born Edward Larry Gordon, he knocked around several creative spheres in New York in the 1960s and '70s, working as an actor, comedian, and musician. Always a spiritual seeker, he had an epiphany in the '70s that caused him to trade in his acoustic guitar for a zither, and in the latter part of the decade he began busking in Brooklyn and Manhattan and releasing some of his home-recorded improvisations on small-run tapes. Laraaji's first wider notice came when Brian Eno heard him playing in Washington Square Park and asked if he wanted to record an album as part of Eno's Ambient series. Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, released in 1980, has always been a bit of an outlier in terms of Eno's ambient discography, because it sounds like no other music he was ever involved with (Eno produced, but it's a Laraaji album all the way). The intense energy of the hammered dulcimer on the record's first side could be trance-inducing, but it in no sense slips into the background.
For many observers, Ambient 3 was Laraaji's big moment, but he has released many dozens of albums since, most of which were not marketed to the broader music-buying public. For many years, if you walked into a new age shop anywhere in the United States, from Santa Cruz to Burlington, Vt., you'd find a rack of tapes for meditation and relaxation that you'd never find in a regular record shop. And among these you might find a release from Laraaji. Only recently, with several reissues and the release of an excellent collaboration with Blues Control, has Laraaji's work started to reach beyond those origins. This history is part of what makes this particular set interesting: three early Laraaji releases are being put out, on tape, by Leaving Records, a Stones Throw subsidiary co-run by L.A. beatmaker Matthewdavid. Where they were once presented as music for a specific purpose and offered for sale to those heavily invested in new age culture, they are now re-presented to an audience who hears them mostly as strange and obscure music to be collected.
The earliest tape in the set, Lotus Collage, which Laraaji issued himself in 1978, situates his music at an intersection of drone and Terry Riley-style minimalism, with a bent-note attack that draws in the music of India. Laraaji described his musical epiphany in terms of a universal vibration, and his music seems especially attuned to the feeling of matter moving rapidly in space. It has an elemental quality and the textures are metallic (his zither is outfitted with a pickup, and tuned to favor open strums and drone), bringing to mind oud, harp, guitar, dulcimer, bells, mbira, chimes, and singing bowls. At points on Lotus Collage he'll break into a strummed rhythm with damping that almost sounds funky, but these more propulsive moments are gradually subsumed into the drift. The overall feeling is one of relaxed contemplation, but Lotus Collage is ultimately a dynamic set, with intense peaks and lulling valleys. Like the other pieces here, it was clearly designed with tape in mind—two pieces, each just under 30 minutes, perfect for a C–60.
Unicorns in Paradise, from 1981, was presumably issued on a C–90. Over two 40-plus minute tracks, Laraaji makes use of a Casio keyboard to flesh out the buzzing zither with softer, rounder tones. The sharp attacks of Lotus Collage are nowhere to be found, and instead, aside from some repetitive keyboard parts deep into the second side, the record as a whole is very open-ended and free, as if it's a seed being blown along by a gentle breeze. It's a less cosmic sound than the earlier release, more atmospheric and diffuse, and it seems designed to give a room a certain tint rather than being a vehicle for close listening. You could isolate any two-minute section of the whole and have no idea whether it comes early or late on the album, but in this case that doesn't seem like a negative.
Connecting With the Inner Healer Through Music gathers two very different pieces that have never appeared on the same tape. The first side, a multi-part piece called "Trance Celestial", is a gorgeous collection of drones that feel richer and more fully formed than his earlier work. Here the divisions between individual instruments all but disappear, and everything feels integrated and focused. At times, the effect is close to the blissed-out post-shoegaze of Windy & Carl. The second side is a 35-minute piece with Laraaji on vocals offering a kind of guided meditation over plings and trails of synth.
The sound of Laraaji's voice, intoning over wisps, underlines just how differently we listen to this music today, in contrast to the the spiritual seekers who presumably bought it in 1983. Bad-vibes films and television shows from "True Detective" to Inherent Vice have cast this kind of calm, echo-laden speech in a very different light, highlighting the creepiness and cultish aspects over the presumed search for spiritual enlightenment. It's also a reminder of how new age spirituality is so easily twisted into something dark, since it does, after all, involve people at their most open and vulnerable. But none of this speaks to Laraaji's intentions; 30 years later, he is still making the rounds of yoga and meditation centers, putting on workshops that emphasize the healing power of laughter. This is not an artist who takes himself too seriously. And the fact that his music is returning 30 years later into a new world to reach people in a new way is an inspiring tribute to our highly cyclical world. | 2015-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | August 7, 2015 | 8 | 42c62e56-c25e-4aba-9fda-5a5246053614 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Completing the move from hard club music to phantom ambient music, the producer escapes pixel-pocked logic for something more like nature. | Completing the move from hard club music to phantom ambient music, the producer escapes pixel-pocked logic for something more like nature. | Celestial Trax: Serpent Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/celestial-trax-serpent-power/ | Serpent Power | Only a few years ago, Finland’s Celestial Trax, or Joni Judén, produced stark, screw-faced club music. He had a brittle, capably menacing take on the sound, full of icy synths and spring-loaded drums, but it didn’t stand out from scads of like-minded producers making grime-inspired beats with samples of cocking pistols and breaking glass. All those staccato snares and crystalline edges dissolve on Serpent Power, an album of ambient music so diffuse, there’s little to grasp, like tightening one’s grip on a cloud of smoke. This formlessness is the source of Serpent Power’s enigmatic allure.
Celestial Trax made steps in this direction with 2017’s Nothing Is Real, where Judén fleshed out percussive club constructions with pensive synths and eerily processed voices and juggled dancefloor cuts with beatless ones. But those forays into abstraction are nothing compared to the amoebic flux of Serpent Power. Here, there are no beats, no melodies, and very little in the way of a pulse; at most, a cycling synth pattern might tentatively poke its head through the murk before getting swallowed up in the depths.
Judén favors sounds with imperceptible attacks and seemingly infinite decays. Reverb and delay cover everything to the point that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the provenance of many of his sounds. Synthesizers shape the jellied bedrock, while watery piano casts a wistful glance back at Harold Budd’s liquid tone. There are ghostly flutes, dissonant string scrapings, and possibly the doleful cry of whales or seagulls.
If the outlines of the music are blurred, so is its lineage. The faintest hint of new age is audible in airy shakuhachi and the emotion-tugging sounds of rainfall, but it’s not all so pastoral. The atonal plucks and glassy timbres of a track like “Offline Offscreen” suggest a scrap of a Morton Feldman score that’s been scribbled on wax paper and wadded into a ball. The classical overtones of “Peace” are more consonant, reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS at its most weightless. More than anything, Serpent Power recalls the spongy, low-key psychedelia of early-1990s ambient as formulated by Biosphere, Tetsu Inoue, and Pete Namlook, all artists who knew that an abiding sense of mystery was far more important than simple mood-setting.
Most of these 10 tracks flow from one to the next, only increasing the album’s stickiness. At times, contrasting chords will wash into one another in a kind of brackish swirl; at others, a low hum, like the throb of a submarine, blurs the seams between two distinct sets of sounds. Near the end, though, the shimmering “Blossoms in the Blue Sky” fades out and allows for a moment of silence before “In the End We Ascend” swells forth, beatifically triumphant.
Judén has described the album as a kind of “digital detox,” an attempt to escape the pixel-pocked logic of life online for something more like nature. (A limited edition of the album comes on a USB stick housed in a capsule carved out of juniper and birch branches.) That kind of epiphany might be a tall order for an album that consists of suggestively dreamy sound design, but there is an undeniable solace in these pieces, if you’re looking for it. In moving from club productions to ambient music, Judén has traded one crowded field for another, but Serpent Power doesn’t feel the slightest bit derivative. By melting down his sounds and starting over, Judén has managed a remarkable feat of alchemy. | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | True Aether | February 23, 2019 | 7.7 | 42cb3706-0438-4062-b1e5-61d2460f2e7b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Beneath the hazy sonics from this bedroom electro-pop project are well-structured and highly addictive songs, resulting in one of the year's nicest surprises. | Beneath the hazy sonics from this bedroom electro-pop project are well-structured and highly addictive songs, resulting in one of the year's nicest surprises. | Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13510-psychic-chasms/ | Psychic Chasms | "Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.
Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.
For Alan Palomo, reflecting on the music of the Reagan era has a personal component. The Texas-reared Mexico native's dad, Jorge, was a bit of a Spanish-language pop star in the late 1970s and early 80s. The analog electronics of that bygone period echo throughout the younger Palomo's increasingly promising previous recordings, whether with former band Ghosthustler (he wore the Power Glove in the video for their "Parking Lot Nights") or, more recently, on VEGA's Well Known Pleasures EP. Finally, working with Brooklyn-based visual collaborator Alicia Scardetta as Neon Indian, Palomo has brought all the best of 2009's summer sounds-- bedroom production, borrowed nostalgia, unresolved sadness, deceptively agile popcraft-- together on a single album.
Whatever they owe to the past, the memories on Psychic Chasms are Palomo's and ours. Soft vocals recalling You Made Me Realise-era Kevin Shields. Italo-disco synth arpeggios. Hall & Oates drum sounds. Divebombing video-game effects. Brittle guitar distortion. Manipulated tapes that bend the notes the way Shields' "glide guitar" did, the way bluesmen's fret fingers did. Field recordings of birds. Oohing and ahhing backing vocals. And samples, on at least two songs, of the elder Palomo, whose electro-rock approach was quite similar. All combine on eight or nine unforgettable songs and a few tantalizingly brief interludes, indelibly capturing the glamor and bleary malaise of being young and horny as an empire devours itself.
Like a low-rent Daft Punk, Palomo takes what 1990s rock fans probably would've considered cheesy-- LinnDrum and Oberheim rhythms, Chromeo-plated electro-funk Korg riffs, processed party-vocal samples-- and not only makes them part of a distinct artistic vision, but also keeps them fun. Quick opener "(AM)" is rife with detail, as an indecipherable tenor floats over a mock-dramatic drum fill and 8-bit star cruisers do battle against twinkling fairy dust. Another sub-minute interstitial track, "(If I Knew, I'd Tell You)", keeps its secrets to itself, letting multiple melodic synth lines hint at a gulf-sized pool of melancholy over a tape-altered rhythm track. "Laughing Gas", at slightly more than a lyric-less minute and a half, is the one that ruins my attempted distinction between songs and interludes, with bongo drums, robot vocal samples, and euphoric giggles straight out of those Air France kids' dreams. The cumulative result is a meltdown-deadened but deliriously inventive perspective on pop.
"I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it," Palomo told our own Ryan Dombal in a recent interview. With Psychic Chasms, Palomo doesn't need to worry. "Deadbeat Summer" and "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are two views of the same non-endless season-- one mind-expandingly lazy and the other too lazy for mind expansion, both undeniably catchy, both earning doctorates in The Graduate school of coming-of-age ennui. The Italo-alluding title track, the New Order-throbbing "Local Joke", and the visceral funk alarums of "Ephemeral Artery" are beautiful bummers, tracks with lyrics the faithful are sure to puzzle out the way kids used to with the first couple of Weezer CDs. "Living this way held by a single strand/ But you wouldn't understand," worries "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)", which comes back, refracted again, as 56-second finale "7000 (Reprise)". If you want to destroy his sweater, hold this thread as he walks away.
Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs. After barely a half hour, the whole thing is over, but there's enough going on in the layered electronics and enigmatic longing to make this one of the year's most replayable albums. Consider "Terminally Chill", which has more vocal and instrumental hooks than the average Top 40 song, but also the immediately recognizable stamp of an impressive young talent. Palomo's gear was stolen last month while on tour with VEGA, but a recent FADER video suggests he could launch a decently credible alternate "career" as an acoustic troubadour doing Mexican traditional songs. For various mundane personal reasons, this cassette-focused album is one of the actual CDs I've listened to most since I actually listened to CDs. A new generation's borrowed nostalgia? High time. | 2009-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lefse | October 13, 2009 | 8.6 | 42cc3cbc-9dc9-4813-81fc-3f5d2bd2c16c | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Elliott Smith's first and last albums are reissued, highlighting the remarkable progression of his sadly brief career. | Elliott Smith's first and last albums are reissued, highlighting the remarkable progression of his sadly brief career. | Elliott Smith: Roman Candle / From a Basement on the Hill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14070-roman-candle-from-a-basement-on-the-hill/ | Roman Candle / From a Basement on the Hill | When Elliott Smith's final studio record, From a Basement on the Hill, was released in 2004, some people wanted to avert their eyes. It emerged in the aftermath of his stabbing death the year before, during which the shock over his gruesome death was compounded by troubling revelations. We were hearing about spiraling drug problems, ambiguities in his autopsy, and his fraught relationship with his family. For Smith's hardcore fans, the album's very existence was charged. Smith's family had assumed the task of completing the record and several contentious artistic decisions were made, including bringing in longtime producer Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme to finish a number of Elliott's songs that had been recorded as demos. At the time, the final result felt too hot to touch, and it remains the uneasy outlier in Smith's discography to this day.
It was a sad fate for what had been shaping up to be the most sprawling, ambitious record of Smith's career. Whatever troubles may have been plaguing his personal life at the time, Smith seemed thrilled at the direction his music was taking. In interviews, he exulted in having discovered a "big" sound that made sense for him-- one that squared his expanding ambitions with his demand for pin-drop intimacy. His previous record, Figure 8, coated his songs in a blinding sheen that suited him as poorly as the rumpled all-white tux he'd worn to the Oscars. Basement saw him recoiling from that polish without abandoning his dream of a bigger sound, and whatever else it might be, it's the most complete document we have of the music he was hearing in his head those final years.
The opening of "Coast to Coast" immediately gives us an idea of the changes Smith had in mind. After 40 seconds of haunted carnival music, a brambled wall of guitars presses in from all sides, with Smith's wounded tenor emanating weakly from the center. Everything feels uncomfortably, purposefully too-close; with mics pressed up against the instruments, every twitch and scrape is crystalized. The mix is startlingly vivid: When the first guitar is strummed on "Pretty (Ugly Before)", the chord doesn't ring so much as bloom, suffusing the song with soft light. "Strung Out Again" is a lurching waltz, with Smith's guitar lines creaking and stumbling into wrong notes. Elliott's voice, in this context, has never sounded lovelier or more ruined. No beautiful sound escapes without scars.
Smith wrote with painful economy and eloquence about his own shortcomings, and his words cleaved through bullshit with bracing force. During the Basement on the Hill sessions, he began writing about his drug problems and depression with an unprecedented clarity. It seemed like an implicit rise to the challenge he posed himself in "Strung Out Again", where "Just looking in the mirror/ Will make you a brave man." He sings calmly and directly about terrifying scenarios. After years of rehabilitation and relapse, he had boiled the exhausting cycle of lifelong addiction down to eleven brutal words: "Took a long time to stand/ Took an hour to fall."
The context is part of the reason listening to From a Basement on the Hill felt somewhat indecent in 2004. Now, Kill Rock Stars is re-releasing the album alongside a remastered reissue of his 1994 debut, Roman Candle, situating the two records as bookends to an extraordinarily fertile career that may even help the volatile Basement on the Hill settle in more comfortably alongside the rest of Elliott's work.
Roman Candle, for its part, remains a fan favorite, and it contains some classic Smith songs: "Condor Ave", the title track, and "Last Call", in particular. And yet it mostly serves to point to all that Elliott would later become. It's wispier and more diffuse than his self-titled or Either/Or, and nothing here is as indelible as "Needle in the Hay", "The Biggest Lie" or "Ballad of Big Nothing". A few of the "No Name" song sketches drift in and out without leaving much of a mark-- Smith's music would become fuller, and his harmonic language more confident, on subsequent albums. The sound is there, though, unmistakable from the first note: the defeated whisper of the vocals, the deceptively intricate guitar work, and the angry little mantras ("leave alone, leave alone, 'cause you know you don't belong here"). From these beginnings, Smith would experiment with how much he could add to this framework without crushing it; on From a Basement on the Hill, he found a thrilling new plateau. Sadly, we can now only imagine where he would have gone from here. | 2010-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | March 29, 2010 | 7.8 | 42d0d6ef-7cd7-4239-b3e0-0201ac2f7d2d | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Monuments to an Elegy, Smashing Pumpkins’ ninth studio album and the second in the band's Teargarden by Kaleidyscope cycle, is Billy Corgan’s first savvy artistic move in nearly 15 years: a Smashing Pumpkins album that has no precedent in his catalog. | Monuments to an Elegy, Smashing Pumpkins’ ninth studio album and the second in the band's Teargarden by Kaleidyscope cycle, is Billy Corgan’s first savvy artistic move in nearly 15 years: a Smashing Pumpkins album that has no precedent in his catalog. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Monuments to an Elegy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20030-monuments-to-an-elegy/ | Monuments to an Elegy | Since the turn of the century, the Smashing Pumpkins have been a promise Billy Corgan just can’t keep. MACHINA/The Machines of God had about 20 minutes of outstanding music, 20 minutes of dreadful music, and 20 that fell somewhere in between—all of it at odds with Corgan’s “return to rock” claims for an album that had more synthesizers and chiaroscuro coloring than Adore. Meanwhile, Zeitgeist and Oceania each attempted to signify a workmanlike, “back to basics” approach for a band who never did workmanlike or basic. The whine was there, the riffs too, but that was about it. Corgan had been trying to trigger nostalgia for a version of his band that didn’t exist, so Monuments to an Elegy turns out to be his first savvy artistic move in nearly 15 years: a Smashing Pumpkins album that has no precedent whatsoever in his catalog.
For one thing, it is 33 minutes long. We're not talking about a mid-album triptych named after Greek goddesses or a bonus compilation available only if you preordered Monuments on iTunes—like, the whole thing is barely more than a half hour. And it’s split almost equally amongst nine songs of concise, gleaming alt-rock that leaves the album title as the only remnant of Corgan’s excessive tastes. Just a few months ago, it wasn’t particularly clear why Corgan would serve as an executive producer for sync-core opportunists Ex Cops. In retrospect, it may have been method acting, or at least a fact-finding mission to determine how the Pumpkins could sound modern without being desperate for relevancy.
As a result, Corgan isn’t chasing dead formats or trying to fit into playlists at radio stations that consider “Today” to be classic rock. He simply does what most de facto “alt-rock” bands do in 2014—he tries to blend in, making Smashing Pumpkins songs that aren’t exactly aiming for spins in Target, H&M, or car commercials but wouldn’t be out of place if those did come to pass.
But Corgan has always had a latent allergy to anything associated with “indie rock” and now that it’s basically synonymous with “alt-rock,” he still has to prove himself out of step by showing allegiance to his Stratocaster. There are synthesizers and drum machines all over Monuments, but they’re fringe: it’s a still a guitar album. However, he uses guitar as a tool rather than an instrument of expression as what were once riffs are now power chords, solos are whittled down to mere leads. As a result, the songs on Monument are SP concentrate, engineered for instant impact, vestigial songwriting parts around an uplifting chorus that could really be about anything. The lyrics are stupefyingly vague, but the songs about new love sound like they could just as easily be about lost love and vice versa, while the ones about staying true to yourself could be either.
Monuments is the easiest Smashing Pumpkins album, even though it’s the first where Billy Corgan is willing to share a studio with someone more famous and egomaniacal than himself. Drummer Mike Byrne has been replaced by someone nearly 30 years his senior in Tommy Lee, best known as the frontman for the rap-metal latecomers Methods of Mayhem and skinsman for a popular hair metal concern. Corgan surely relishes the opportunity to once again rep for the most uncool iterations of metal, but the partnership is more likely a result of the weird friendships aging rock stars can form with other aging rock stars, i.e., the only people they can relate to. Lee’s excessive tastes are even more downplayed than Corgan’s here, as his impact is most Crüe-like on the funk-metal stomp “Anaïse!” It is also the worst song on the album.
But while I can’t run the numbers as to how many new fans were earned due to Zeitgeist and Oceania, it’s best to assume that Monuments will be no one’s introduction to Smashing Pumpkins—so it’s not worth pretending Billy Corgan can ever truly blend in. The album manages to neutralize the indelible vocals by evoking Corgan's lesser-known guises of the past—the mash-note writer from Adore, the PMA mouthpiece from Zwan, and the facile pop-rocker that was mostly relegated to the B-sides during the Pumpkins’ commercial heyday. The end result is what might have been a state-of-the-art record in 2005 that would’ve done wonders for his reputation had it replaced TheFutureEmbrace.
For now, Corgan catches up with a decade in which his muse basically went missing. Opener “Tiberius” thumps at saturated power chords in waltz time while throwing things just off course with some extra time signature switches and sober piano. So now you’ve heard Smashing Pumpkins as a version of Weezer that fully embraced its late-2000s prog yen. Dear lord, is the title of “Being Beige” asking for it, especially when its crisp electro-acoustic layering and breathy vocals establish an unthinkable connection between Transtlanticism and Adore. It’s also the best thing Corgan’s written since “Honestly”, mirroring its choral surge and stilted, romantic wording. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Monuments to an Elegy was a promising debut from a band that hasn’t found its focus yet and would sound just fine opening up for the Silversun Pickups.
But it’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier—whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins. Once the bubbly “Anti-Hero” pops, there’s a relief in hearing the record end with Corgan having not fucked up for his longest stretch of time in two decades. But it’s ultimately nowhere near as rewarding as his best work because it took no risks. Surely, Corgan has an emotional investment in this, but he seems stuck with some of the best music in years and absolutely nothing to say about it. It’s probably too much to ask for him to go Mark Kozelek and also start writing narrative songs about his cats, his interest in combat sports, and his beef with media figures. But a glance at the titles foreshadows the songs of Monuments as empty vessels, whether it’s phrases repeated in the hopes of giving them heft and meaning (“Run2me”, “One and All”) or placeholder names of people that Billy Corgan probably hasn’t met yet (“Anaïse!”, “Dorian”). As for sweet nothings like, “I’ve never been kissed by a girl like you before” or “cherry blossom, this is goodbye,” well, you can’t pretend it’s someone other than a 47-year old Billy Corgan singing them to you.
As with Oceania, “not bad” doesn’t translate to “great” and the easiest and perhaps only way to have an emotional investment in these songs is to consider what they mean to the Smashing Pumpkins brand. Which is why “Drum and Fife” is the most resonant thing here. As with “Cherub Rock” and “The Everlasting Gaze”, it’s a strident rock song about Being Billy and Being OK With That. This is proudly anti-cool, with a Tommy Lee fill punctuating the line, “I will bang this drum to my dying day,” before an actual fife solo. He knows the hipsters never had his back anyway and in 2014, they are certainly not going to align for the big fight to rock, of all things. And he’s not trying to convince the doubters he’s not dead. When he sings, “you’re gonna listen now to me,” he’s only addressing those who have been following his beat the whole time. | 2014-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | BMG | December 8, 2014 | 6 | 42d41e5b-2381-4ec0-9a0c-f736b7d43318 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Urgent even at its sludgiest tempos, the Fredericksburg, Virginia band’s second album draws on a bleak palette to create illusions of infinite depth and vastness. | Urgent even at its sludgiest tempos, the Fredericksburg, Virginia band’s second album draws on a bleak palette to create illusions of infinite depth and vastness. | Infant Island: Beneath | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/infant-island-beneath/ | Beneath | Infant Island could pass for post-hardcore, metal, or even post-rock, but the first time anyone called them “screamo,” they took on a potentially paralyzing geographical legacy. Barely out of college, the quartet are already the most notable band to emerge from Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour away from Richmond, sometimes called “the screamo capital of North America.” Virginia gave rise to pg. 99, City of Caterpillar, Malady, and Majority Rule, bands whose unstable lineups, obscure discographies, and sudden implosions set the standards for emo’s most chaotic offshoot. Recorded and mixed at the studio of Majority Rule’s Matt Michel, Infant Island’s second full-length Beneath is a brazen monument in a subgenre that typically has little use for canon and longevity.
The band’s 2018 self-titled debut arrived during an international boom period for screamo. While peers like Portrayal of Guilt, .gif from god, and Respire were pushing the genre towards new frontiers of malevolence and orchestral opulence, Infant Island stood out for their versatility, equally suited for a future in the shadow of Sunbather or as melodic firebrands. But their recording budget was in no way commensurate with their ambitions: It was easier to find the celestette, upright piano, and bowed glockenspiel in Infant Island’s credits than in the mix.
In light of Beneath’s sterling production values, Infant Island feels like watching a 3D movie without the glasses. The band sound more daring and confident, and it’s now possible to fully appreciate the intention behind each textural clash. “Here We Are” finds an unexpected nexus between surf-rock and doom metal in its foreboding introduction before burying Daniel Kost’s howls in blue-black tide. “The Garden” and “Death Portrait” are equally locked into militaristic rigidity and spasmodic skramz, visceral and cosmic imprisonment, haunted by bodies buried in the earth and hovering over trees. “Content” plays on the double meaning of its title, tracing a life of complacent cultural consumption before being consumed back in the dirt, bookended by tingling feedback and somber strings.
Beneath takes its cover artwork from John Martin, the English Romantic painter of works like The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, who once boasted that his work “shall make more noise than any picture ever did before.” Like Martin, Infant Island’s bleak palette creates illusions of infinite depth and vastness within relatively compact frameworks. Screamo tends to work in punishing brevity or pulverizing length, but the nine tracks of Beneath are sensibly paced and separated, each movement given enough space to make its point and no more. The album dedicates a significant portion of its runtime to outright ambience, its three evocatively titled instrumentals (“Signed in Blood,” “Colossal Air,” “Someplace Else”) an apocalyptic Neapolitan of infinite darkness, blinding light, and pink mist.
Infant Island clearly intend Beneath as a full-length experience, urgent even at its sludgiest tempos. But it’s no slight to describe the album’s first 20 minutes as being in service of “Stare Spells,” a unification of nearly every variant of heavy music within earshot of mainstream acceptance. Connoisseurs could draw comparisons with any number of legends in the way elegiac acoustic chords and glistening reverb commingle with devastating, downtuned sludge and tinny cymbal crashes: some Neurosis here, a little Touché Amoré there, lots of Envy. Kost’s voice falters just the slightest bit upon entry, a split second stuck between a clean melody and a blackened howl; it’s a presumptive error that needed to stay in, proof of the degree to which the band is pushing itself.
Ordinarily, Beneath would be heralded as the realization of Infant Island’s potential, but it might not even be their strongest release of the past month. Sepulcher, a four-track EP that’s only six minutes shorter than the album, was recorded after Beneath’s completion but released three weeks prior. It takes the band’s ambitions to extremes: “Burrow” is their most propulsive and dynamic slab of pure screamo, “Ghost Whines” their most defiant commitment to paranormal experimentation. It’s capped off by “Awoken,” the kind of stunning, 10-minute scorched-earth aerial view that every screamo band tries to make when they’re completely feeling themselves. Separating the two recordings is understandable—they were produced at different times, under different sets of pressures. Together, they’d be an instantaneous landmark of the genre; separately, Sepulcher and Beneath are superlative documents of a great band that still has their heroes’ propensity for confoundment in them. | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Dog Knights | May 19, 2020 | 7.9 | 42d42801-aa20-4c32-b51a-c6f243691b27 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The unmistakably dramatic pop singer seeks the divine feminine, embracing a bold yet soft aesthetic that’s more effective than some of her lyrics. | The unmistakably dramatic pop singer seeks the divine feminine, embracing a bold yet soft aesthetic that’s more effective than some of her lyrics. | MARINA: Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marina-ancient-dreams-in-a-modern-land/ | Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land | Twelve years into her career, it’s hard to imagine that Marina Diamandis was once a MySpace artist marketed as a quirky Britpop-ish act. Her whole career is so thoroughly of these times. She was fan-forward from the beginning; her original stage name, Marina and the Diamonds, made her fans part of her persona as the eponymous gems, and they rewarded her with devotion. She made just-outside-the-mainstream pop before such music was the Spotify-playlist default; she studded her lyrics with light social commentary when that was still somewhat rare on the Top 40 charts.
Through it all, Marina’s musical persona has remained unmistakable: dramatic, theatrical, her heart worn not just on her sleeve but in a shiny, spangled, and wide-open frame. Her voice spans throaty lows to fluting highs; her lyrics are forthright and low-irony, for better and worse. As an acting coach might say, she’d rather be big and wrong than tiny and right. (From an acting coach, this is a compliment.) But her music has morphed over time, thanks to a series of fast-replaced collaborators: pre-disgrace Dr. Luke and his unsubtle sound on Electra Heart; relative unknown Faultline producing more muted work on Froot; a veritable songwriters’ camp on Love + Fear; several Clean Bandit features during a short-lived EDM phase. Marina has expressed unease about the shifts—Electra Heart made her feel “kind of ashamed, like this isn’t really who I am,” she told The New York Times, while the lower-key Froot made her fear she wasn’t ambitious enough. Her unease is understandable: She is thoroughly herself, in front of so many green screens.
Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is Marina’s boldest music yet. She wants you to know it from the first seconds of the title track: a glam schaffel beat that Marina turns into her own personal pulpit. She swoons and evangelizes and delivers rapidfire hooks—the big one shares a melody with “Womanizer,” but as hooky pop hits go, you could nick far worse. “Venus Fly Trap” might not much say much that Marina hasn’t already said on 2010’s “Hollywood,” but the song is far more brash—it sounds carnivorous—and Marina casts herself not as an outsider gawking at the town, but a star victorious over it: “Why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus fly trap?” She sought out female producers for the album, most prominently Jennifer Decilveo (Bat for Lashes, Beth Ditto)—which shouldn’t be noteworthy, except they’re so rare in the pop industry that in 12 years, Marina has only worked with a handful. Chalk it up to creative synergy, but there’s a muscle to Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land that she’d missed for quite some time.
Marina would probably chalk it up to more than synergy. Recruiting women collaborators ties into the album’s theme: The “ancient dreams” are largely divine-sacred-feminine stuff, and she’s eager to talk about them. “New America” has a decently spooky arrangement—frantic pizzicato strings, vocals arranged like ominous choirs, faint poltergeist SFX in the background. Like Halsey’s “New Americana,” Rihanna’s “American Oxygen,” and JoJo’s “American Mood” before it—and that’s just the past few years—its social commentary isn’t wrong, just a little more overt than pop songs usually get (“Who gave you jazz, hip-hop, rock’n’roll and the blues?”), but ultimately feels like box-ticking. “Purge the Poison” doesn’t get more specific so much as it gets more, period. The track is full-to-bulging with tense handclaps, dramatic vocal swoops, and motormouth delivery of keywords. It wants to be a curative for every societal ill in the zeitgeist: COVID-19, racism, capitalism, misogyny, “every single war,” Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, the collective societal whoops-my-bad over 2000s-era Britney Spears coverage (written, Marina says, before the buzzy Framing Britney Spears documentary, though she admits it was tangential.) The remix, with Russian feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot, adds even more.
Marina doesn’t have space to say much besides “these things exist, and they’re bad.” She does have punchlines—about the sultan of Brunei, whose anti-gay policies led to boycotts of his real estate investments, she quips: “I guess that’s why he bought the campest hotel in L.A.!” But her delivery muffles the punch, rushing to get to the next point, and those points muffle the message. As she sings in “Purge the Poison,” women hold only about one-quarter of government positions. But women contain multitudes: Currently among that quarter are women whose supposed divine femininity didn’t stop them from mocking a colleague’s transgender child or calling the LGBTQ-rights Equality Act “dangerous” and “disgusting.” The narrow focus muddies the album’s politics. To her credit, Marina has welcomed critique, addressing similar comments from fans by saying, “I like seeing [these] comments…it does make me think about my own place.” Some more thought, and a rewrite, might have aimed her lyrics more true.
Besides, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land makes its point through its aesthetic. There are a lot of ballads here; the sheer quantity of them, their lacy ornamentation and quiet maximalism, evoke a soft-focus femininity. The music in “Man’s World” is something between a lament and a swoon, with long curlicues of melisma, distant strings, a lyrical collage of François Boucher cherubs, Marilyn Monroe’s Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, and Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace. “Highly Emotional People” is a ballad in the Sarah McLachlan tradition, made of light piano, floaty soprano, and enough reverb to fill an ancient shrine. “Pandora’s Box” returns antique dramatics to the modern ballad—rolling cello, Old Hollywood strings, all in a flowing arrangement. Everything is delicate, but nothing is muted. This aesthetic certainly isn’t for everybody, but after her ambivalent pop experiments, Marina no longer needs her albums to be. It’s a beacon out for the highly emotional people of the world, of whom she clearly is one; it’s for her.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Neon Gold | June 17, 2021 | 6.6 | 42dbcd52-ee53-48ee-850a-948f6ebd7fc0 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Where her last album explored grief, the R&B singer’s latest is more grounded, exploring the ups and downs of a failed relationship. | Where her last album explored grief, the R&B singer’s latest is more grounded, exploring the ups and downs of a failed relationship. | Jhené Aiko: CHILOMBO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jhene-aiko-chilombo/ | CHILOMBO | Jhené Aiko has a knack for smooth melodies that waft over wispy production like air kisses, lithe and sensual yet frictionless. Her calling card is clear-eyed storytelling that, like the wise best friend in a rom-com, pinpoints precisely why a romance failed or succeeded. Her best songs accent that clarity with narrative or vocal contrasts (often provided by guests, but sometimes Aiko herself), but on Chilombo the formula is pushed to its limit. Despite confident, freeform performances, Aiko’s music too often lacks a pulse.
Compared to the multimedia odyssey of Trip, which was accompanied by a poetry book and short film, Chilombo is leaner and more grounded. Instead of heady explorations of grief, Aiko focuses on the standard peaks and valleys of life post-breakup. The record is loosely about a woman enduring heartbreak and emerging stronger, and the opening suite of songs wears that framework lightly. On “Triggered (Freestyle),” Aiko fumes over reminders of the old relationship: “Trying to let the time kill/All our memories/All you meant to me/All that history/All that’s history,” she croons, each riff on “all” cutting deeper. On “B.S.” she glows with self-satisfaction over a ticking hi-hat: “Flexin on my exes in my Model X/Pretty little skinny little bitty/Body Model X.” By the end of the song she’s so charged up that seeing her replacement “boosts her self-esteem.”
This suite ends with “P*$$Y Fairy (OTW),” which opens with a yearning, bass-boosted intro then blossoms into a twinkling ode to Aiko’s sexual prowess. “I know you love fucking me,” she declares, turning a passive construction into a boast. The song is full of similarly odd flips in perspective (“That dick make me so proud”), blurring who is giving and receiving pleasure like a titillating funhouse mirror.
Unfortunately, everything that makes that opening run charismatic and personable is abandoned as Chilombo stretches on. The jarring “Happiness over Everything (H.O.E.)” is a retread of “Hoe,” from her debut mixtape Sailing Souls. The verses are improved from the hokey original, but it’s weird to hear the self-proclaimed “pussy fairy” turn coy and inert. “Just don’t get the wrong impression,” Aiko pleads, her charm suddenly depleted like Cinderella at midnight. On “10k Hours,” Aiko and Nas turn Malcolm Gladwell’s magic number into a dry index of personal history. “Ten thousand hours turned to ten thousand bridal flowers,” Nas raps flatly about his marriage to Kelis, sounding bored of his own story. Against her feathery melodies, there’s no traction, no dynamism.
The production plays a huge role in that inertia. Produced almost entirely by Lejkeys and the duo Fisticuffs, the album is soft and hushed, dulled percussion and starry keys drifting in a vacuum. Aiko is clearly a student of Quiet Storm, a format that gives the voice space to contract and expand in carnal waves. And her voice certainly has that power; the vocal runs on “Surrender” are variously controlled and indulgent, evaporating into the cloudy synths and condensing beneath them as a breathy purr. But the tempo never rises above a resting heart rate, the acoustic flourishes never dictate the shapes of songs, and Aiko’s performances aren’t consistently magnetic.
There’s an audience and a market for Aiko’s atmospheric take on R&B, but the most interesting aspects of her music have always been rooted in her malleability. Like Jeremih, Ty Dolla $ign, and other R&B artists who straddle genres, she’s got the fluency to provide more than a big hook or play foil to another star. Whether she’s cooing, humming, or rapping, she brings an easygoing grace and playfulness that tends to open up songs. Chilombo gestures at this larger skill set, but settles for good vibes. It’s very chill, and nothing else.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | March 12, 2020 | 6.3 | 42e73f78-d50e-4352-9124-2ef40aa1af35 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Peeling back the lo-fi veil of his previous work, the 23-year-old Bristol producer channels classic club sounds and Y2K video-game aesthetics into breathtaking new hybrids. | Peeling back the lo-fi veil of his previous work, the 23-year-old Bristol producer channels classic club sounds and Y2K video-game aesthetics into breathtaking new hybrids. | Naked Flames: Miracle in Transit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naked-flames-miracle-in-transit/ | Miracle in Transit | If you were a child in the 1990s, your first exposure to house and techno probably wasn’t in a club full of sweaty bodies. For listeners too young to make it into an actual rave, you’d be much more likely to hear dance music blaring from your television set during late-night gaming sessions. The drum’n’bass loops of Bomberman Hero, the jungle rhythms of Parasite Eve, the thumping trance of Need For Speed—the rise of home consoles hit right when dance music was bursting into the mainstream, and the composers of many of the most popular game soundtracks of the era channeled these addictive, looping new electronic sounds into their work; some were even DJs themselves. Stripped of their original contexts, these styles left a different impression, and as the Y2K generation has aged into adulthood—bringing a nostalgia for rave culture with it—a new crop of producers has begun to present alternate-reality takes on what club music can be.
One of those is Naked Flames: In the past two and a half years, the 23-year-old Bristol producer (known only as Anton) has published a steady stream of digital releases and YouTube mixes, all as hyperactive as an illegal rave on Rainbow Road. On last year's Binc Rinse Repeat and 247 365, Naked Flames coated his sped-up trance and house in a lo-fi VHS haze, adding a soft, sweet texture to serene melodies and supercharged funk basslines. His music is as breathlessly joyous as it is aggressively hypnotic, its low-bitrate pulse extending endlessly as each song sucks the listener into a cotton-candy vortex of dance bliss. But on Miracle in Transit, his latest release for chronically online net label Dismiss Yourself, he attempts a sharper, sleeker approach. Dropping the smeared production for a clean, shimmering sound, Miracle in Transit shows off Naked Flames’ ear for jubilant house music that can stand on its own two feet, with gleaming synth lines and phased flutes circling around each other in a dazzling race to the finish line. Naked Flames is still learning how to sustain his sugar highs over his tracks’ extended runtimes, but Miracle in Transit proves that the producer’s past internet cult hits weren't an accident. His productions reconfigure the dancefloor from an exhilarating new vantage point.
Part of what made Naked Flames’ previous releases so entrancing lay in how the crudely lo-fi production seemed to fill in the blank spaces around the edges of his tracks. An avowed Basic Channel acolyte who refers to his own style as “dub rave,” Naked Flames brings an almost hypnagogic element to his music; the dreamlike veil of distortion can feel like glimpsing the perfect party through a tiny keyhole. Without the lo-fi shroud, Miracle in Transit occasionally reveals the limits of his loops’ repetitive nature. “Pan Matsuri” opens the album on a glimmeringly pretty note, with swinging hi-hats and glowing chords breezier than anything we’ve heard from Naked Flames before. But as the track swells with sighing, J-poppy vocals and ethereal washes of synth, it feels like it’s building to some climax that never fully arrives. “Carrot Car” fares much better: From the moment its bouncy acid bassline kicks into gear, the track launches into a heavenly stomp as multi-colored and kinetic as a secret Sonic the Hedgehog zone. As the song pushes itself higher and higher, making way for gloriously chintzy karaoke horns toward the end, it captures Naked Flames at his euphoric best. With the lo-fi production cleared up, the track’s glee is all the more potent.
There’s a careful balance between steady patience and uninhibited release at play throughout Miracle in Transit, and the album’s best tracks reward the extended time it can take to reach their peaks. On “Miles of Conkers,” Naked Flames hovers over a misty, hurried beat for a full five minutes, working on an almost ambient level until a Crystal Waters-like organ enters the picture. The bass begins to rush, the hi-hats start getting jukey, and soon Naked Flames is ecstatically layering sparkling synth lines. Where the track is slow to get going, by the nine-minute mark, it’s over too soon. The dreamy “Under Every Tree in England” similarly shapeshifts as a noodling guitar sample gives way to a playfully mysterious marimba hook, gliding over its relaxed seven minutes with a confident stride. Miracle in Transit’s best moments are like marathons that induce delirious trance states so absorbing, it’s hard to imagine raving any other way. | 2022-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dismiss Yourself | August 2, 2022 | 7.1 | 42ee152c-ef49-468e-963f-9e484ce5090b | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The New York rapper reconnects with the Los Angeles producer for a masterful road-trip album. Humor and dread, weed and food, technique and style—billy woods is in full command of it all. | The New York rapper reconnects with the Los Angeles producer for a masterful road-trip album. Humor and dread, weed and food, technique and style—billy woods is in full command of it all. | billy woods / Kenny Segal: Maps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-woods-kenny-segal-maps/ | Maps | In billy woods’ music, personal history is global history. There’s a recurring figure in his songs: the Average Joe thrust onto the world stage and forced to select from a menu of bad choices. “It ain’t no compromise, I’m Ho Chi Minh, ruthless, MC Ren/Small caliber, close range, General Nguyen,” he rapped on 2012’s “The Foreigner,” likening a petty street beef to the Vietnam War. Alone and as one half of Armand Hammer, he’s turned such juxtapositions into a mad and beautiful science. His unorthodox rhymes hit like jet lag, scrambling the body’s sense of time and space.
Fittingly, woods’ second team-up with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal is a travelog. Maps, a concept album about the highs and lows of touring, decisively enters the pair into the ranks of rap’s great stylists and storytellers. Reposed and taut, elegant and menacing, woods’ dispatches wind around Segal’s kooky boom-bap like a boa on a branch. The pair are road warriors attuned to the horrors and wonders of the world, trading the cramped dread of 2019’s Hiding Places for the horizonless totality of a desert. The road leads everywhere and nowhere at once.
As a Jamaican and Zimbabwean New Yorker who grew up on two continents, Woods regularly incorporates distant locales, global cuisines, and snatches of other languages into his writing. But in recent years, his voice has become as worldly as his pen. Across Haram, Aethiopes, and Church, he’s honed a range of sighs, cadences, and artful pauses that add flavor to his oration. He’s no impressionist, but his masterful storytelling brings people and places to life with quick, visceral strokes. “Delivery fee is ooof,” he exhales on “Rapper Weed,” shaving two words from the apocryphal Hemingway short story challenge.
The one-liners, punches, and vignettes on Maps are legendary, packed with detail and delivered with impeccable timing. woods’ itinerant flow will always be an acquired taste, but his command of it is undeniable. His voice slashes through the air like a gavel strike, commanding and weighted. He can pack a saga into a couplet. “Learned the hard way, motherfuckers will run in shooting/After we spent months tryna strategize,” he raps on “Blue Smoke,” his annoyed tone filling in the story. His sardonic deadpan is so effective that even simple bars like “You can’t fix stupid” and “The earth is a sphere” become gut-busters.
On “Waiting Around,” a flirtation in Belgium doubles as a slick waltz through Cam’ron’s discography: “Jaundiced moon, she had perfect teeth/Purple haze had ya boy like come home with me/She kissed my cheek/Diplomacy.” The album is packed with such wordplay, all of it brisk and tactile. Instead of emphasizing immersion in distant places and sounds like M.I.A.’s Kala, Yasiin Bey’s The Ecstatic, and Mach-Hommy’s Pray for Haiti, Maps foregrounds transit. woods’ perspective-hopping writing leans into the flux of experiencing the world in fragments: hazy conversations and bad sleep shadow him as he shuffles between time zones. It feels like he’s a fugitive rather than a tourist.
Kenny Segal matches that motion with kaleidoscopic production that shifts like tides. He brings out all the stops for this record, supplying free-jazz freakouts (“Blue Smoke”), dreary loops (“Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams”), and jackknife beat switches (“Babylon by Bus”). Some songs, like the bluesy “Houdini” and wistful “FaceTime,” are filigreed with instruments that embellish the settings and moods of woods’ tales.
Others, like “Year Zero,” which features a stunning Danny Brown verse, are spartan voids of creaky percussion and eerie synths that play up woods’ wry prophesizing. The globetrotting beats of Maps might initially scan as more conservative than the abrasive and experimental soundscape of Hiding Places, but the variety is forward-thinking. Segal understands that woods, who has gained a reputation as a doomsayer, is at his core an explorer. His beats push woods into new sonic and narrative spaces.
woods still drops doom bombs (see: “Sooner or later gonna be two unrelated active shooters/Same place, same time, great minds, Tesla and Edison”), but throughout Maps he also follows the slivers of light peeking through the crawl spaces he normally calls home. “I crack a smile at what you say is the truth/I be dead serious laughin’ in the stu,” he says on “Hangman,” finding bemused comfort in conversations with idiots. “I will not be at soundcheck,” he repeats with defiance on the puckish “Soundcheck” as he absconds to chow on some Szechuan food. Despite its myriad miseries and inconveniences—especially crappy and/or overpriced weed, a nuisance woods brings up with charming frequency—the road still offers detours and escape routes.
Adjusting the temperature to livable also allows woods to showcase his cinematic eye. The record is exquisitely sensory: a housecat greets the returning traveler with purrs, conch fritters crisp in the skillet, weed smells like turpentine and tastes of “Jamaican oranges” that look like limes. These tiny delights often give way to unguarded relief. “For a brief, sweet moment, it was nothing in the thought bubble/From up here the lakes is puddles, the land unfold/Brown and green, it’s a quiet puzzle,” woods reflects on “Soft Landing,” which interpolates the pop standard “Feeling Good.” The line revisits a point of view from last year’s tetchy “Paraquat”—“Clouds cleared, I’m looking at the city like jihadis in a cockpit”—but there’s no grim irony, just awe.
woods returns to several themes and ideas from previous records with fresh eyes—most notably home, the subtext of all road epics. “NYC Tapwater” tenderly catalogs the unique pleasures of life in New York City then ends by clarifying it’s a cruel place. It’s not a twist; it’s a warning from someone who has settled into the mirage. On the dreamy “Agriculture,” which is splashed with warm hums and twinkly keys, a pastoral refuge fails to cure the protagonist’s anguish: “Stooped in the coop, gathering eggs/Traded some to the neighbors for fresh bread/I say I’m at peace, but it’s still that same dread.” Letting light into songs gives the darkness more weight.
According to woods, Maps is a “post-pandemic” album because it emerged from his hectic tour schedule following quarantine, but that description also fits its apprehensive mood. It navigates a future that is indistinguishable from the past, turning history’s queasy loops into a dazzling torque. The pair’s songwriting is so inventive and electric that even the depths of the late capitalist abyss begin to offer pathways to freedom. “I already knew the options was lose-lose/Baby, that’s nothing new,” woods raps with devilish charm on “The Layover,” “That just make it easier to choose.” There’s no better way to fly. | 2023-05-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | May 5, 2023 | 8.9 | 42f1b979-c6b9-479d-a3eb-54ed0e10587c | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Foreign Exchange's fourth studio collection is a happy album about coming to terms with a stable relationship in the wake of a more tumultuous one. It’s more musically ambitious than anything the R&B duo has attempted before, incorporating live instrumentation throughout and dabbling in funk, soul, disco, soft rock, and house. | The Foreign Exchange's fourth studio collection is a happy album about coming to terms with a stable relationship in the wake of a more tumultuous one. It’s more musically ambitious than anything the R&B duo has attempted before, incorporating live instrumentation throughout and dabbling in funk, soul, disco, soft rock, and house. | The Foreign Exchange: Love In Flying Colors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18531-the-foreign-exchange-love-in-flying-colors/ | Love In Flying Colors | The Foreign Exchange introduced their latest album, Love in Flying Colors, with a pair of trailer videos called “Her” and “Him,” which showed the title characters listening to each Foreign Exchange album in succession at different stages in their lives. Accompanied by the slogan “life is all about keeping a beat” the message that this is music to grow with may have been a little too on-the-nose, but this process of changing and maturing has been the underlying theme for the duo’s music since 2008’s Leave It All Behind. Coming out after the dissolution of singer Phonte’s rap group Little Brother, that album’s embrace of R&B felt like as much of a fulfillment of the title as its narratives of relationships in turmoil did. Phonte has generally positioned his move away from rap and into R&B—and, more specifically, R&B that explores the mundane intricacies of everyday relationships—as a maturation befitting someone his age (he’s now 34). Promoting Authenticity in 2010, he suggested that there was a void to fill for R&B “about getting married, having kids, slowing down.”
Love In Flying Colors is shooting for that goal: Broadly, it’s a happy, settled album that seems to be about coming to terms with a new, stable relationship in the wake of a more tumultuous one. To achieve that tone, it’s more musically ambitious than anything the Foreign Exchange have attempted before, incorporating live instrumentation throughout and dabbling in a comfy palette of funk, soul, disco, soft rock, and touches of house. It’s crisp, familiar and accessible, but taking this approach also holds the group to a higher standard and plays against its strengths. Previous Foreign Exchange projects could lean a little bit on novelty: 2004’s Connected proved that engaging, soulful hip-hop could be created by a Dutch producer and a North Carolina rapper collaborating over the internet; Leave It All Behind showed that Phonte had a better singing voice than anyone expected; Authenticity was a moody, drifting work full of minimal, electronic production that presaged the wave of bedroom R&B acts that would start sweeping blogs a year or two later. In contrast, Love In Flying Colors isn’t just holding itself up against historical precedent, it’s had the unfortunate luck of falling in the middle of a disco revival zeitgeist without the on-hand studio resources of, say, Daft Punk or Pharrell.
Phonte and Nicolay are great at building an atmosphere in which lyrical phrases are allowed to slowly unwind and Phonte’s voice is used to fill out tracks rather than punctuate them. The clean funk of Love In Flying Colors demands sharper songwriting and stronger vocals, though. If Phonte’s voice was a pleasant surprise when the group was creating understated neo-soul, it’s a bit of a liability when they’re gunning for full-on Kool & the Gang thrills—a fact the duo seems to implicitly recognize by bringing in plenty of guest talent to handle some of the more ambitious melodies (one of the most fun things about the entire Foreign Exchange project is the way it’s grown from an email exchange into a fully fleshed-out musical community). Songs like “Better” and “On A Day Like Today” are missing the punch that would make them the fully realized celebrations they’re trying to be. In general, the album’s meandering middle section blends together, sitting in the same grooves for too long and offering little in the way of the memorable outbursts that this type of funk demands.
There may be a reason, too, why mature subjects like settling down, working through fights and getting married don’t yield much in the way of popular R&B: a meaty phrase like “tell me you’ll stay by my side for all time/ Not just a moment” doesn’t exactly go down smoothly as the climax of a song like “The Moment”, which otherwise is a limber, pitch-perfect dancefloor exercise that shows the direct lineage between disco and early house. And that’s far from the cheesiest lyric on the album, which is heavy on oversimplifications like “sometimes it all feels so enormous/ I wonder why we even try.” Where the album does reign things in lyrically and the mood breaks away from muted satisfaction or confusion into actual excited joy, it’s clear what Love In Flying Colors could be. Opener “If I Knew Then” is triumphant in its breezy declaration that “love’s flying high,” and “Dreams Are Made For Two”, a duet with frequent Phonte collaborator Carlitta Durand, is inviting with its climbing synths and pillowy bass line, even if its couples getaway fantasy verges on wild over-sentimentality. Is there a reason that the songs tend to work better the more unreservedly happy they are? Getting to that self-assured, carefree place in which this type of music works best isn’t easy, and, unlike in the past, the Foreign Exchange aren’t letting themselves hide confusion behind studio tricks. This is all-out openness and clarity, which, for better or for worse, is just a little more grown-up. | 2013-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Foreign Exchange | October 2, 2013 | 6.5 | 42f63b3a-9fb8-4978-9451-62be8573e981 | Kyle Kramer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-kramer/ | null |
Spider Bags' latest album is their first for Merge and their highest-fi release to date, but here the North Carolina country-punk band's taken on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases. | Spider Bags' latest album is their first for Merge and their highest-fi release to date, but here the North Carolina country-punk band's taken on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases. | Spider Bags: Frozen Letter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19633-spider-bags-frozen-letter/ | Frozen Letter | Life is tiring, and Spider Bags have always provided a party for the increasingly fatigued. Frontman Dan McGee’s words have had a whiskey-slouch to them ever since the band's 2007 debut, A Celebration of Hunger. It could spring from his North Carolina clime, but there’s a Southern gothic bent to Spider Bags that separates them from a lot of American garage fare. McGee gives a leery eye to all there is to love; he whips dry vitriol and broken-hearted balladry into roadhouse punk songs that sound like they’re barely hanging together. This is part of the fun of listening to any Spider Bags song, as they cause you to ask to yourself, “Might this whole thing crumble into a pile of dirt and rust?”
Over the years, things congealed more and more, which culminated in their most cohesive work to date, the 2012 album Shake My Head. That album was crammed with life, skipping around from shit-kicker fuzz to psych freak guitar solos while keeping the twangy energy up the whole way through. It follows that Frozen Letter is a bit of a comedown, drunk on its own sound; McGee, aged and with two kids under his roof, sounds utterly windburned by life. It’s their first record for Merge, which means Frozen Letter is easily their most hi-fi record yet—but the band takes on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases.
The band split Frozen Letter into two divergent sections, as the first four tracks kick-up all this dirt only to have it idly settle as the album winds on. It has the shape and feel of a sturdy ‘70s classic rock record, swirling with the Kinks' charm and the strutter of early AC/DC. The guitars, the vocals, and the lyrics are flayed and bony, more exposed than ever before, which works both for and against the band. Frozen Letter is at its best when McGee plays sweet and direct as on “Back With You Again In The World”, an ode to a love as simple as the fired-up Dixie shuffle they take up. When he taps into the morose, self-pitying spirit of Hank Williams on the ballad in the back half of the album, “Walking Bubble”, his words tumble out with ease, turning out a beautiful phrase like ”There aren't enough words in a day for a man like me” with the ease of flipping a blade of wheat grass from one side of the mouth to the other.
The record is filled with little moments that pop—the guitars that scream at the end of “We Got Problems” and their cover of Texas rocker/drifter John Wesley Coleman’s “Summer of ’79” are two big highlights—but in between are long, vexing stretches of inertia. Spider Bags used to play through the bitterness and the malaise, but on Frozen Letter it sometimes sounds like they're surrendering to them instead. The album title itself comes from "Coffin Car”, where McGee imagines a frozen letter jutting out of the ground, then strolls about for five minutes detailing oblique visions of grey horses, curtained rooms, and shiny smokestacks. This, like much of the record, doesn’t build a song so much as it does a series of Rorschach splotches. Everything finally comes together at the end with a big glam blowout, as McGee screams, “I’m tired over your love.” What should be a hollering celebration, though, does little more than force a smile.
As the record closes with the too-fried psych “Eyes Of Death”, it's clear that Frozen Letter exudes ambition without having accomplished much. Spider Bags all but perfected lolling alt-country on Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, but Frozen Letter's sallow, raw feel doesn’t sync up with its songwriting. There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be. So what Spider Bags do here isn't as thrilling as their previous efforts, which left listeners on the edge of your seat, wondering if everything would fall apart. Regardless, it's easy to commiserate with Frozen Letter, as there's empathy to be found in hearing Spider Bags tirelessly trying to put these songs back together. | 2014-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 5, 2014 | 6.2 | 42faaeed-0fb3-49a9-a3b3-4da3bc84d31f | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Sia’s shiny Christmas album feels inconsistent and underwritten, like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags. | Sia’s shiny Christmas album feels inconsistent and underwritten, like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags. | Sia: Everyday Is Christmas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sia-everyday-is-christmas/ | Everyday Is Christmas | Ever since Sia transitioned from “Six Feet Under” coffeeshop songwriter to Top 40 fixture, her career has contained the tension between the writer she’s trained as and the pop star she’s become. Specifically, she has a habit of giving smart, bluntly candid interviews in songwriter mode that are, in pop mode, the exact wrong thing to say. A Billboard interview where she mentioned the “victim to victory” songwriting template of tracks like “Titanium” was thrown back at her, in the headline of a New York Times pan of This Is Acting and countless other reviews. So what was it like writing her first Christmas album? “[There’s a] shortage of good Christmas music… It's not like you have to have an original idea to begin with,” Sia told Zane Lowe. “It's like, Christmas, mistletoe, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus, Christmas list, elves.” This is technically accurate, in the way that a professional elf might accurately describe Christmas gift-giving as “like, hammer, nails, molds, wrapping paper.” But it also kind of grinches up the business.
Of course, there’s no shortage of existing Christmas songs—virtually every musician records them as a quick stocking-stuffer for music blogs and streaming sites—but most of them are strictly for diehard fans. As far as canonical Christmas songs, the past few decades have produced basically only two. There’s the “All I Want for Christmas Is You” school: festive (or “Extra Festive” or “SuperFestive!”, as Mariah Carey dubbed the re-recordings of her hit) and infectious, in both senses of the word. Then there’s the “Last Christmas” school, where Christmas is an incidental setting for smaller human dramas. There’s plenty of room for variation here, from the downright morose original versions of “White Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to the acid-dipped tinsel of Dragonette’s “Merry Xmas (Says Your Text Message),” to the sumptuous femme-fatale drama of Saint Etienne’s “No Cure for the Common Christmas,” to the infinite takes on Wham!’s original.
The latter’s also closest to Sia’s non-holiday music, where big pop songs like “Chandelier” are infused with an underlying darkness. It’s a strange choice, then, that Everyday Is Christmas is mostly played straight. Like Kelly Clarkson’s Wrapped in Red, the album was produced by Greg Kurstin, and his trademark shiny production becomes DEFCON 1 festive. “Candy Cane Lane” is colorful and lightweight. “Santa’s Coming for You” has an ironic title, but the only threat is being smothered by Christmas cheer. There are some lovely ballads, such as the lilting, “Unchained Melody”-esque “Snowman” and its sister light-jazz track “Snowflake” (only kind of ruined by the news of 2017 discoursing the word into oblivion), which linger on the season’s impermanence. But they’re the same metaphor, so the effect is muted by sequencing them right next to each other—or anywhere close to “Puppies Are Forever,” the sonic equivalent of having the Christmas stuffing squeezed out of you by a rictus-grinned Elmyra Duff.
There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting. “Underneath the Mistletoe” flirts with being candid about an obsessive holiday crush—“it’s Christmas time, so run for your life”—but abandons the idea almost immediately. Half of “Ho Ho Ho” wants to be a Christmas misfits’ anthem; the other half wants to be a Christmas version of “Chandelier,” with lots of booze, nothing to lose. The production, vaguely festive and vaguely pop-skanky, doesn’t commit to either. Sia’s got a self-own for this, too: “It was easy and fun. We did it in two weeks.” Of course, plenty of great albums were secretly written in two weeks, just like plenty of fine presents were secretly purchased on the eve of December 24. But it’s still like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags. | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | December 5, 2017 | 5.8 | 42fef80d-63fb-4427-b2ef-f3e28455267d | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Given Robert Pollard's pedigree and prolificacy, it should surprise no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record. But what is surprising is quite how good it is, his best and most focused in some time. Pollard burrows deeper into his beloved classic rock, and somehow discovers new modes of expression. | Given Robert Pollard's pedigree and prolificacy, it should surprise no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record. But what is surprising is quite how good it is, his best and most focused in some time. Pollard burrows deeper into his beloved classic rock, and somehow discovers new modes of expression. | Robert Pollard: Honey Locust Honky Tonk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18249-robert-pollard-honey-locust-honky-tonk/ | Honey Locust Honky Tonk | “Prolific” has long been the dominant adjective to describe Robert Pollard, and even then it sounds like an understatement. Deep into his fifties, he hasn’t lost a beat or slowed down a bit, but instead churns out album after album after EP after one-off solo thing after album. Already in 2013 he has released a new Guided by Voices album, a full-length under his Teenage Guitar pseudonym, a singles box set, and a 12”, with who knows what all else planned for the next six months. It’s been this way for decades now, such that Pollard’s chief trait as an artist is the frequency of his output. Consequently, it’s all too easy to forget that he’s not just a prolific songwriter, but a good songwriter, too. Indie rock’s own Joyce Carol Oates possesses an insanely deep vocabulary of classic-rock tropes, a facility with killer hooks, and an idiosyncratic lyrical style that has matured to reveal new depths of wisdom, humor, and harrumphing crotchetiness.
It should surprise exactly no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record: Even at his most unedited and undigested, Pollard’s music still displays a joy in its own resourcefulness, a contentment in its own faith in the power of rock and roll to define a life. In other words, every release is worth spinning at least once. But it should surprise everyone that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a very good record, his best and most focused in quite some time. One byproduct of his prolific nature is a constant flattening out of his catalog, so that everything, especially at this end of his career, begins to blur together; the highs never seem quite so exciting anymore, the lows no longer quite so embarrassing, and very little stands out as essential. That any particular release stands out at all is by now a small miracle.
Pollard’s dedication to the form has always been impressive, and he has remained largely untouched-- or unperturbed, or uncompelled-- by outside forces or trends in rock and roll. Instead, he has burrowed deeper and deeper into his beloved classic rock and has somehow managed to find new modes of expression in this tiny realm of music. “Circus Green Machine” builds on great bursts of acoustic guitar power chords that sound like Pete Townshend is about to spin a yarn, while “Strange and Pretty Day”, the album’s lowest-fi recording, nods to Skip Spence or maybe Roky Erickson with its insistent one-note piano theme. By this point, Pollard has even become his own reference point: Scuff up the sound a bit and “Airs” or “Igloo Hearts” wouldn’t be out of place on Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.
Even if it’s not hard to imagine a 30-something Pollard penning these new tunes, Honey Locust Honky Tonk nevertheless sounds like the work of a man with some years and experience behind him. There’s some polish on the melodies, a new forthrightness in the lyrics. And by forthright, I mean how he repeats the pretzel-logic line, “We may never not know,” ad infinitum on “It Disappears in the Least Likely Hands (We May Never Not Know)” and still makes it sound somehow poignant. There’s always been an odd melancholy to Pollard’s music, but there’s a peculiar gravity to the psych-rockin’ “Her Eyes Play Tricks on the Camera” and the country-rockin’ “I Killed a Man Who Looks Like You”. A desperate gregariousness pervades the 44-second toast “I Have to Drink” and surely informs the camp-choir sing-along that ends “Real Fun Is No One’s Monopoly”.
The guitars on Honey Locust Honky Tonk can be sluggish at times, especially during the more cumbersome anthems, and the tracklist could stand some pruning. But these are perennial complaints, excusable for being bound up among his many eccentricities, and Pollard compensates with what seems like a greater sense of mission. Mortality looms over Honey Locust Honky Tonk, explicitly defining songs like “Who Buries the Undertaker” while implicitly informing fragments like “Shielding Whatever Needs You”. Rather than dour, however, the album sounds concerned, perhaps even worried, which illuminates even some of its weaker or seemingly extraneous tracks. It focuses Pollard, who sounds like a man who has said so much already but still has so much left to say. | 2013-07-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. / Fire | July 9, 2013 | 7.4 | 430382f6-2c7a-4559-87a8-b3378c3bb1de | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The North Carolina rap group (minus producer 9th Wonder) reunite for a warm, breezy LP that recalls the best of their original work. | The North Carolina rap group (minus producer 9th Wonder) reunite for a warm, breezy LP that recalls the best of their original work. | Little Brother: May the Lord Watch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-brother-may-the-lord-watch/ | May the Lord Watch | The prospect of a Little Brother reunion seemed so unlikely that both Day One fans and this guy expressed excitement and disbelief when it happened. For the past decade, the North Carolina trio—consisting of producer 9th Wonder and rappers Phonte and Big Pooh—were in different places, creatively and personally. They arrived with fanfare in 2003 via Okayplayer’s message boards and a big cosign from the site’s founder ?uestlove. This wasn’t Southern rap the way we were used to hearing it: Between 9th’s airy, soul-sampling beats and the rappers’ complex flows, Little Brother drew comparisons to East Coast stalwarts like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and EPMD.
Two years after the critically lauded debut The Listening, Little Brother signed to Atlantic Records and released its second—and maybe its best—studio album, The Minstrel Show, a conceptual LP that spoofed the WB Television Network and the cartoonish black images it promoted. Then the seams started showing: Little Brother’s deal with Atlantic fell apart, and 9th Wonder—who was in and out of the crew due to his rising fame—left the group. Little Brother’s subsequent albums, 2007’s Getback and 2010’s LeftBack, simply didn’t have the same verve. Phonte and Pooh had been rapping together since college; now they were grown men with separate interests. They were limping to the finish line and needed a break from each other.
So there was genuine shock this past May when Phonte announced on Instagram that he and Big Pooh had reunited Little Brother and that new music was on the way. In interviews, Phonte had been cool on the notion of the group getting back together. “I understand people will always ask for it,” he told Billboard in March 2018. “Personally, it’s not something that I have interest in doing, because I enjoy the peace that’s in my life right now.” His tone changed by September, when he was asked to perform a last-minute set at the annual Art of Cool Festival in Durham. He turned the gig into a Little Brother reunion show, and following it, Phonte and Big Pooh agreed to record a new LB album.
Phonte and Big Pooh sound rejuvenated, and while 9th Wonder isn’t on this record (or part of the group), the beats compiled by Khrysis, Nottz, Zo!, Black Milk, and Devin Morrison have a sophisticated bounce, making this feel like an old Little Brother album without dwelling too much in the past. Thematically, May the Lord Watch picks up where The Minstrel Show left off: Radio host Peter Rosenberg shows up as president of the make-believe UBN Network to announce the death of Percy Miracles (Phonte’s singing alter-ego on LB records), and ?uestlove appears on “Inside the Producer’s Studio” as a fictional James Lipton to interview Roy Lee (Phonte’s beat-making alter-ego who can’t really make beats). On “Niggas Hollering,” sports commentator Jemele Hill debates the all-time greatness of Michael Jordan in a fake First Take. In this way, May the Lord Watch feels like deluxe fan service for the 30 and 40-somethings who remember LB’s early projects.
Like Tribe’s 2016 comeback LP, We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service, May the Lord Watch captures Phonte and Pooh where they are now without sacrificing what made them popular. Beneath the light moments, they reflect on the dark times that brought them here. On “Right on Time,” Big Pooh raps: “Took some odd jobs to put salmon on the plate, contemplating moving dope just to get my pockets straight … doing Uber pickups, they don’t recognize the face.” Meanwhile, Phonte acknowledges his struggles to stay above water as an indie artist: “Yeah I got success and the stress to match, ’cause peace of mind rarely comes with a check attached.” “Sittin Alone” delves into life post-30, when Netflix is more fun than clubhopping, and your scented candles are more exciting than overpriced VIP lounge liquor.
There’s no way to know if Little Brother is back back, or if May the Lord Watch was the group’s way of bringing this chapter to a rightful close. But if it’s truly the end, Phonte and Big Pooh have gone out on a high note. May the Lord Watch is the result of clear-eyed reflection, of getting older and wiser and realizing that petty differences shouldn’t dissolve a true brotherhood. | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Nation / For Members Only / Empire | August 30, 2019 | 7.6 | 431185ec-9115-41d0-98ed-db25eb1b9cd1 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
No longer content to play music tethered to the past, the Virginia guitarist uses field recordings and unsettling ambient experiments to remake his virtuosic folk compositions for the present. | No longer content to play music tethered to the past, the Virginia guitarist uses field recordings and unsettling ambient experiments to remake his virtuosic folk compositions for the present. | Daniel Bachman: The Morning Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-bachman-the-morning-star/ | The Morning Star | Making folk music can require consultation with the dead. In his semi-autobiographical short-story collection, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, from 2000, the late luminary John Fahey ascribed supernatural powers to his six-string, calling it “the road to the unconscious past.” Eighteen years later, these remain insightful words about an American musical tradition brimming with ghost stories. Heeding this wisdom throughout his young career, Daniel Bachman has paid tribute to the rhythmic nuances of American Primitive, ragtime, and folk with virtuosic guitar playing. But now, for the first time, the Virginia musician is approaching American roots music as a living panorama, not as something confined by its own past. On The Morning Star, Bachman expands the spatial dimensions of these genres to create folk for an uncertain present rather than an idealized past.
He has no choice but to begin this task with an exorcism. To banish the assumption that current folk music is fundamentally nostalgic, he expels lingering spirits with the 19-minute “Invocation.” An eerie arrangement of singing bowls gradually conjures metallic screeches from the beyond, before arriving at the calming buzz of a shruti box, then erupting into a fiddle’s feverish squeal. Bachman included drone compositions on his self-titled 2016 record and 2014’s Orange Co. Serenade, but those tracks offered grounding tranquility, while “Invocation” trades in unresolved tension. His longest album to date frames its seven songs as ongoing movements; freed from the burden of neatly pruned concision, each one seems to stretch out to infinity.
With the spell of “Invocation” lifted, Bachman invites us into rural settings evoked by meditative guitar pieces, extended field recordings, and unsettling ambient experiments. While his earlier work valued Leo Kottke-esque feats of fingerpicking, on The Morning Star, Bachman’s guitar moves discreetly, letting bustling fauna set scenes first. The chirp of evening crickets and cicadas on “Sycamore City” goes on for a full minute before Bachman’s guitar arpeggiation kicks in, mimicking their erratic sounds. On “New Moon,” his slide whines like a mosquito following a similar preamble.
On his previous records, Bachman moved swiftly through songs, but in mirroring the natural world, The Morning Star’s version of folk music constantly reconsiders the roles of its smallest and largest details. Though he plays hypnotically throughout the album, Bachman’s prominence on each track fluctuates depending on the size of its overall soundscape. His manic guitar is central to “Scrumpy,” until it settles and falls into the background, behind the sound of a passing train. And sometimes Bachman is altogether absent. “Car,” a menacing organ-drone piece that evokes Southern Gothic imagery of pastoral decay, climaxes with the static of an AM radio tuned a millimeter past an evangelical station. This creepy, serene and impossibly expansive view of the countryside intimates that American roots music, much like our natural surroundings, is so vast as to be unknowable.
Fahey experimented with field recordings and musique concrète, too; his late-’60s output included dog barks, locomotive whistles, sampled rainforest sounds. But if this was his pathway to the “unconscious past” he describes, Bachman is more interested in how these elements can push his music into the present. On “Song for the Setting Sun III” and “IV,” he revisits a series he began on 2015’s River, but this time he dims the major-chord brightness of the first two installments with slower, more melancholy and disjointed arrangements. Bachman’s willingness to fundamentally alter the tone of his compositions feels like a rejection of Americana traditionalism that upholds ancient genre conventions without looking for a bigger picture. A brief but vital moment on “III” illustrates this shift: An ambulance siren fades in and out, its wail less an interruption than a reminder of scale. The theoretical emergency—which might have altered someone’s life—comes and goes, yet the song calmly proceeds. Bachman respectfully plucks on, leaving the listener to appraise the gravity of what’s happening in the background.
That open-endedness is the heart of The Morning Star, and it doesn’t just represent a new style for Bachman; as the record progresses, it also teaches his audience a new way of listening. Closing track “New Moon,” whose title signals the completion of a cycle and rebirth, might have come off as meandering and repetitive at the beginning of the record. But in its final moments, once you’ve adjusted your ears, Bachman’s delicate gestures sound at once extremely private and cosmically vast. | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Three Lobed | July 27, 2018 | 7.6 | 4315ecc5-cda8-45b3-b615-720a8fbebd27 | Matt Grosinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-grosinger/ | |
The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s latest album is somber and searching, filtering personal vulnerability through his familiar delicate melodies and vocal effects. | The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s latest album is somber and searching, filtering personal vulnerability through his familiar delicate melodies and vocal effects. | S. Carey: Break Me Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/s-carey-break-me-open/ | Break Me Open | In his solo career outside of Bon Iver, S. Carey has crafted a tranquil vision of the natural world. The classically trained composer and multi-instrumentalist often takes inspiration from the wilderness of his native Wisconsin—among other places—to create evocative arrangements bent on capturing the resonance of a pristine landscape. Close your eyes and you’ll see towering, snow-covered pines or the summer sun’s radiant reflection on the creek.
But in between 2018’s Hundred Acres and his new LP Break Me Open, Carey contended with monumental loss: His marriage fell apart and his father passed away. The idyll woven into his music didn’t just darken—it fractured. His latest album is somber and searching; at times, it’s flat-out bleak. On the pulsating “Dark,” Carey sings to his children: “If I ever lost you/I’d throw myself into the deepest riverbend.” Though delivered in a near whisper, the line whips the ear like a raw winter wind. A moment later, Carey catches himself with wry self-awareness: “Well, I know that seems dark/But that’s what I might do/If I ever lost you.” It’s meant as a declaration of love and devotion, but the song’s climactic groundswell, pierced by trumpet and saxophone, confesses a yawning pain.
Break Me Open evolves Carey’s early-career instinct for dense arrangements woven from dulcet instrumentation and technological experimentation with overdub and Auto-Tune. Working once again with producers Zach Hanson and Chris Messina, he spent nine days “putting a bow on years of demos and tinkering, building, re-building,” he wrote on Instagram. In true Carey fashion, that meticulous evolution can be heard in the sheer quantity of synths, loops, and vocal effects braided into each track—synthetic textures that heighten his delicate melodies and intrude on the natural landscape so central to his music.
A flurry of synths embody the immobilizing sensation of “Paralyzed,” where Carey contemplates his children growing older and leaving him behind. The song feels suffocating, but he builds to a soaring finish, knowing that to hold something too close is to lose it. Near the end of the brooding, almost claustrophobic “Starless,” a Prismizer effect captures his bewilderment. The blank sky hanging over the song keeps its compass hidden; nature, once a source of respite and gold-tinged verdancy, seems distant and disorienting in the wake of so much personal loss. “The earth is all but dead,” he sings. “Where will you lay your head?”
Carey’s spare writing, with plainspoken lyrics that sit diminutively against the expansive dimensions of his soundscapes, doesn’t express the same emotional complexity he strives for in his music. On Break Me Open, he’s still processing—the shock of divorce reverberates through his lyrics, which reach for understanding but fall short of poignancy. “If you judge, please don’t/Judge me from where I was,” he sings on “Where I Was.” The next line sets up a dramatic contrast that lands without impact: “But if you must, please do/Judge me from where I am.” Alongside “Waking Up,” it’s a modest, quiet song that ends before it fully unfurls.
Though his words reach for darker emotional valences, the album’s most honest moments come across in Carey’s compositions. On “Desolate,” his arrangement reflects the slow decline of a relationship: an opening heartbeat rhythm is surrounded by a flutter of synths, eventually ceding to steadier percussion that finally makes way for soft, meditative piano. His instinct for rose-colored, languorous moments can’t fully depict the heart-rending heft of his personal drama. “A wound gives off its own light,” wrote the poet Anne Carson. Rather than chase down meaning, Break Me Open abides within sensation. | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 25, 2022 | 7 | 43181507-6815-4666-937a-ac14298fb752 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies. Mark Kozelek wants us to know that they all lived, loved, fought, fucked up, and often did the best they could. While Benji is consumed with death, sadness, and tragedy, there's gratitude within this melancholy, and it’s Kozelek’s most life-affirming record. | There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies. Mark Kozelek wants us to know that they all lived, loved, fought, fucked up, and often did the best they could. While Benji is consumed with death, sadness, and tragedy, there's gratitude within this melancholy, and it’s Kozelek’s most life-affirming record. | Sun Kil Moon: Benji | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18860-sun-kil-moon-benji/ | Benji | There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies. And that’s not including the ones where someone’s on the verge of death or seriously headed towards it. Toddlers die, teenagers die, adults die, and the elderly die. They die of natural causes and in freak accidents. People die alone and people die by the dozens—handicapped children, single parents, grandmothers, serial killers. They die out of mercy and die long before they’re due. Rednecks die as respected men and white collar kids die in disgrace. But more importantly, Mark Kozelek wants us to know that they all lived, loved, fought, fucked up, and often did the best they could, before he sets out to “find some poetry to make some sense of this and give some deeper meaning” to their tragedies. Turns out he doesn’t have to dig very far. Here, Kozelek does away with the metaphor and verbal obfuscation often used to distract an audience from their own joy, sadness, crippling failures, and small triumphs. If listeners find themselves unable to make it through Benji in one piece, it’s because Kozelek all but forces us to recognize how the most emotionally moving art can be mapped directly on to our own lives.
This is a culmination of the jarring shift in Kozelek's work that started with 2012’s Among the Leaves, an erratic, occasionally embarrassing, and fascinating tell-all about a life in music. Whereas early songwriting in Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon resulted in elegant, poetic lyrics that demanded a hardbound, 256-page compilation, all of a sudden he was giving us songs about justifying a case of VD to his girlfriend, picking up water from 7-Eleven, and battling his own boredom with songwriting, all wrapped in songs with titles like “The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man". It wasn’t a midlife crisis, exactly; it was more like watching your parents negotiate Facebook for the first time, equally excited and overwhelmed that they can share their daily minutiae but unaware of what to keep to themselves.
Benji steps away from the focus on process in favor of songs that elevate exceedingly personal stories into universal displays of humanity. Presenting himself as no wiser, empathetic, or understanding than any of its subjects or his audience, Kozelek has crafted an album that anyone can feel but also one that, paradoxically, is filled with songs that wouldn't make sense if covered by anybody else. The opening “Carissa” is a portal towards the world Kozelek inhabits throughout Benji, all of it painfully real and subject to nature’s laws even as time seems frozen within it. The first line of Benji lays out the record's confrontational realism: “Carissa, when I first saw you, you were a lovely child/ And the last time I saw you, you were 15 and pregnant and running wild.” We learn a few things about her: she’s Mark Kozelek’s second cousin, and in the 20 years since Kozelek’s seen her, she’s had two kids, settled into a nursing job in a nondescript Ohio town and, in general, gotten her shit together—a rarity in a Mark Kozelek song. And we also know that she dies in a fire after an aerosol can explodes in the trash.
That alone doesn’t make “Carissa” stand out, not in the catalog of one of our most prolific miserablists. But unlike Caroline or Elaine or Katy, Carissa has an effect on Kozelek that feels biological, that she’s a part of Kozelek’s flesh and blood and not just a muse, and he renders her story with detail that would be stunning for a novelist, let alone a songwriter. The chorus is sweetly sung and absolutely crushing: “Carissa was 35/ You don’t just raise two kids and take out your trash and die.” He’s right, that shouldn’t happen. Except the same exact thing happened to his uncle, which is detailed two songs later on “Truck Driver”.
Which leads to an important critical consideration: Do these songs resonate because we understand them to be true stories? We have little reason to doubt Kozelek’s authenticity, as Benji is full of proper nouns and historical facts that check out: Google some of the specificities mentioned during his eviscerating sexual inventory of “Dogs” and you find that there is indeed a Tangier and Red Lobster near the Erie Canal in Akron. When he calls his mom in "Micheline" and learns of his friend Brett’s death in 1999, he mentions booking a movie role—as the bassist from Stillwater in Almost Famous. At one point, he sings that “the Sopranos guy died at 51/ That’s the same age as the guy who’s coming to play drums,” and wouldn’t you know, former Sonic Youth stickman Steve Shelley, who played on the record, turns 52 in June. Kozelek’s reaction to both aerosol can-related deaths in his family are basically, “you can’t make this shit up.” But what if he did make this shit up? If so, Benji arguably becomes an even more impressive record—the debilitating emotional response created by “Carissa” and “Truck Driver” are undeniably real, and if the stories are fiction, the guy did his homework.
Regardless of the real names and real events used throughout, nothing feels exploitative, unnecessary, or cruel the way some of the songs on Among the Leaves could. Nor is Benji subject to the navel-gazing self-importance that usually accompanies an aging musician making their “mortality” album. Despite most of it taking place in rural Ohio, people like Carissa and his uncle (“redneck that he was”) are never used as a stand-in for some salt-of-the-earth Middle American archetype or a cheap way to make some dippy point about us all being interconnected and carpe diem.
Instead, Benji trusts in the complexity and power ingrained in anyone’s life story rather than using them for some grand statement that glorifies Kozelek’s own perspective. Most importantly, his storytelling has sharpened considerably. Befitting someone who watches an absurd amount of boxing, Kozelek’s prose has taken on pugilistic bent, where he can go five minutes or more dancing around, softening the listener with sharp jabs before landing a catastrophic body blow. This is best exhibited on the song “Micheline”, which has three acts linked by nothing but their end result, and the one where his grandmother dies is the least tragic.
This is obviously brutal stuff, its pacing, themes, and structure having more in common with cinema or literature than pop music. But Benji is still a piece of entertainment and it's a pleasure to listen to on that level. For one thing, it's the most musically diverse and sonically direct album he’s made since disbanding Red House Painters. He’ll never return to the turbulent sound of the 1990s, though you get raw, gutbucket blues (“Dogs”, “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes”), swanky, horn-laced yacht-pop (“Ben’s My Friend”), and a tender duet with Will Oldham (“I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”), to name a few. And with its chipper harmonies and a fake Nels Cline solo (not Kozelek’s first joke at his expense), “I Love My Dad” feels like a ribbing at latter-day Wilco, a dad-rock song about his dad.
So Benji can be funny as hell, too: The effervescent narrative “Ben’s My Friend” snaps us back into the present day after the happy ending of “Micheline” and follows Kozelek as he suffers through writer’s block, a distracted lunch in a restaurant filled with “sports bar shit,” and a Postal Service concert where all the drunk kids with their cells appear to be “20 years younger.” He claims he’s too tired for the “backstage hi/bye” with pal Ben Gibbard and he heads back to his hot tub in Tahoe, before revealing the real cause for his meltdown: “I’m content, but there’s a tinge of competitiveness.” “I Love My Dad” finds Kozelek possibly outing himself as a recovering alcoholic (“I’ll have an O’Doul’s and my friend here will have a Guinness”) and a victim of child abuse, but it's otherwise quotably hilarious, detailing a relationship with his father where valuable life lessons are imparted through both Iron Mike-style beatdowns and Edgar Winter records.
Benji sounds more like Kozelek relating events instead of crafting them, which makes the continuity and reflexivity of the record feel both uncanny and the work of protracted genius. “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes” was released months before it ended up as a thematic skeleton key on Benji, and it mentions a flight to Cleveland where he’ll be mourning a relative, which eventually became the inspiration for “Carissa”. “Ben’s My Friend” mentions a visit to Santa Fe that earlier served as the turning point of “I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”. On “I Love My Dad”, his father forces him to watch wrestling matches with a handicapped friend as a means of teaching him patience and the ability to shoot the shit and show respect for those in need. These lessons serves as the entire basis for “Jim Wise”. During that visit, they bring Jim food from Panera Bread and later you find out that Kozelek’s father likes to flirt with the girls there. As standalone pieces, “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love” and “I Love My Dad” are touching, heartfelt odes to his elderly parents and it’s interesting to notice the vast disparity in the tone of each: the latter is an elbow-poking, uncouth tribute to his father raising him to be the man that he is, while the former is a desperate plea for the parent that keeps him alive.
None of these things reveal themselves on the first listen but even after dozens, you never feel like you've exhausted Benji's secrets. The songs are stories, yes, but the kind that are told rather than read, ones you never hear the same way twice. I’ve heard the record compared to Winesburg, Ohio, a life-changing meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, the open-heart emotional surgery of Majical Cloudz’ Impersonator, and Kendrick Lamar’s character-driven opus good kid, m.A.A.d. City, which is indicative of the artistic merits of Benji, but also its ability to reach beyond the hardcore fanbase that has Kozelek has made no secret of his feelings towards as of late. Though Benji has few of the "Behind the Music" set pieces that marked Perils from the Sea, Admiral Fell Promises, and Among the Leaves, and it lacks his stage banter's airing of grievances, this record slowly reveals itself as both a universal meditation on death and, very subtly, a recount of the life events that determined Mark Kozelek’s own artistic journey.
“Dogs” takes its title from a track on Pink Floyd’s Animals. Kozelek’s has consistently acknowledged how the classic rock of his youth has stuck with him, from AC/DC, Yes, Judas Priest to Led Zeppelin, who inspire Benji’s jaw-dropping centerpiece “I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”. Anyone who's seen Led Zeppelin's profoundly dumbfounding medley of concert footage and Hammer of the Gods propaganda knows that the personal circumstances surrounding your viewing of the film is far more important than any of Zep's myth-making. Kozelek admits, "I don't know what happened or what anyone did," and notes how the more pastoral, meditative "The Rain Song", "Bron Yr Aur", and "No Quarter" spoke to him more than the thunder of John Bonham's drumming or Jimmy Page's mahogany double-necked Gibson SG, leading him to conclude, "from my earliest memories, I was a very melancholy kid."
Three decades later, Kozelek cannot shake melancholy, will probably "carry it to hell", and in the meantime, uses "I Watched the Film"'s deeply moving fingerpicking patterns (similar to “Bron Yr Aur”) to understand sadness' pervasive grip on his life. The song ends with Kozelek promising a trip to Santa Fe to find the guy who gave him his first record deal—and yes, 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell really does live in Santa Fe. “Between my travel and his divorce," both have experienced their share of melancholy in the past two decades and have nothing to gain from each other anymore except a genuine connection and a moment to reflect.
That kind of sentiment represents the most profound shift that has occurred since Among the Leaves, when his interviews found him grousing about how his fans are “guys in tennis shoes” and reviews compare him to young, bearded troubadour-types like Jose Gonzalez and Bon Iver. He goes to Santa Fe for no other reason than to tell Watts, thank you. Fine then, someone does get used as a stand-in on Benji, because the record as a whole feels like him thanking not just his fans and supporters, but everyone who he’s come across in his life, by making good on his promise to give their lives poetry and deeper meaning. So while Benji is consumed with death, sadness, mourning, and tragedy, there's gratitude within all this melancholy and it’s actually Kozelek’s least depressing and most life-affirming record: when faced with an album that exposes so much of the beauty, truth, ugliness, humor, and grace inherent in simply existing in this world, the only response is to go out and live. | 2014-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Caldo Verde | February 3, 2014 | 9.2 | 43183a48-1d44-44f4-831d-be7369599fa9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Kentucky songwriter surveys the past, present, and future of country music on a thoughtful new record with deep roots. | The Kentucky songwriter surveys the past, present, and future of country music on a thoughtful new record with deep roots. | Tyler Childers: Rustin’ in the Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-childers-rustin-in-the-rain/ | Rustin’ in the Rain | Tyler Childers knows how the house of country music can be divided against itself. Since his 2011 debut, the Kentucky songwriter has roamed beyond the conventional divisions of the genre, flirting not just with Sturgill Simpson-esque heartland rock and old-time mountain music but synthesizers and even lo-fi beats. As an outspoken progressive who has found success outside the Nashville establishment, it’s tempting to see him as a break from the genre, rather than an artist working within a clear sense of tradition. But at the 2018 Americana Awards, where he accepted an award for Emerging Artist after the host mispronounced his last name, Childers took a hardline stance on his preferred genre: “Everybody always talks about the state of country music and puts down commercial country and says ‘Something’s gotta be done’ and ‘We need to be elevating artists that are doing more traditional country,’ But then we’re not calling those artists country.”
His latest record, Rustin’ in the Rain, is impossible to mistake for anything but country music. From the jaunty opening guitar lick, its songs take the dirty stains on his shirt and the scraggly edges of his sound as a badge of honor: “Blame it on my jeans/Caked in tenant farmin’,” he quips on the title track. Childers has always approached music as hard work, both a virtue earned through sweat and something to do with idle hands, but Rustin’ in the Rain takes work itself as its defining subject matter. On “Percheron Mules,” he fantasizes about rolling around in the mud with a pack of mules, and the animal becomes a recurring motif throughout the album, whether literally on the cover or as a metaphor for the labor of relationships on the stirring ballad “In Your Love.”
The catchy country-pop rhythm of the title track, buoyed by a twangy electric guitar solo, wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place in between Clint Black and Dwight Yoakam on Country Music Television in the 1990s, but Childers frequently channels a vision of the genre that predates the video era. Despite its tale of long-distance technological heartbreak, “Phone Calls and Emails” is a mournful jukebox waltz in the lineage of Willie Nelson standards like “Hello Walls.” The wistful “Luke 2:8-10” — featuring guest vocals from Margo Price, Erin Rae, and S.G. Goodman—is an ironic twist on a Nativity narrative, but the instrumentation is sincerely traditional, as an accordion squeezes away in three-quarter time. There’s gravel in Childers’ voice but a softness too, as he cries and yelps at the moon. The tender, plain-spoken quality of his tenor is what makes it stand out; he never feels strained or affected.
The old-time feeling of Rustin’ in the Rain is most evident in the bluegrass-inflected “Percheron Mules,” a jubilant picking session with the Travelin’ McCourys, the ensemble led by the sons of living mountain music legend Del McCoury. The choice in cover songs also speak to Childers’ heritage within the genre. While his early albums featured entirely original compositions, he has increasingly woven in songs by other artists, building his own canon and using other writers’ words to tell us who he is. Here, he drapes a tender rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” in gentle piano and pedal steel, and it expresses an older model for the kind of outspoken outlaw Childers has become. On the closing track, Childers interprets a more modern selection, “Space and Time” by fellow Kentucky native S.G. Goodman, turning her searing ballad into a sock-hop slow-dance.
While Childers built his audience without support of mainstream country radio, his process for the album wasn’t all that different from the Nashville standard. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he explained that he imagined himself as an old-school songwriter, pitching songs to Elvis Presley. In true Nashville fashion, this album marks the first time that Childers has opened himself to co-writers; he worked with Geno Seale on “In Your Love,” while the song’s video was scripted by the queer Southern poet Silas House. He may often speak up for country music, but Childers acknowledges he does not speak for all of country music.
Released as the album’s first single, “In Your Love” suggested a significant departure, both in its Hornsby-esque sound and its queer themes, made explicit in the music video’s tale of the forbidden longing between two male coal miners. Over a glistening piano and a warm bed of synthesizers, Childers sings not just of love, but self-defense, as the emotional bond between two people helps them endure persecution: “It’s a long hard war/But I can grin and bear it.” By grounding such a radical statement in songs that are still tinged in the patina of tradition, Childers makes clear that this isn’t a break with country music: It is a light cast on its history, a recognition of what it has been and can become. | 2023-10-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Hickman Holler / RCA | October 2, 2023 | 7.6 | 43187928-fb04-43f3-98cc-9f66a80c4465 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Katie Stelmanis’ fourth album swings for big, embodied pop moments without shying from the strangeness and discordance that’s animated the project since the beginning. | Katie Stelmanis’ fourth album swings for big, embodied pop moments without shying from the strangeness and discordance that’s animated the project since the beginning. | Austra: HiRUDiN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/austra-hirudin/ | HiRUDiN | Katie Stelmanis has a voice like a beacon, a sound that can shear through any accompaniment, no matter how drab. She shares this power with ANOHNI and Zola Jesus, singers who enchant their surroundings with the depth and richness of their timbres, who are instantly recognizable in any setting. Her voice comprises the central pillar of her synthpop project Austra, the feature around which her music crystallizes. The Canadian artist’s previous album, 2017’s Future Politics, shifted deeper into the icy trappings of club music, laminating Stelmanis’ voice inside the production styles of deep house and trance. On HiRUDiN, Austra’s fourth LP, the project breaks from that rut, swinging for big, embodied pop moments that let the warmth of Stelmanis’ voice shine through.
The most dynamic of Austra’s albums, HiRUDiN cultivates the raw pleasure of pop hooks without shying from the strangeness and discordance that has lit up the project since its 2011 debut. Live drums bolster songs like “How Did You Know?” and “Messiah” to the heights of Celine Dion’s late ’90s radio hits, a level of urgency that Stelmanis’ voice is readily equipped to handle. But even as she navigates sweeping and sugary choruses, dissonant figures prickle in the background—a stray looping whistle, the glassy shards of a synth arpeggio, the reverb on a piano chord bleeding into abrasive feedback. These bitter notes bring the sweetness of the vocal melodies into focus, making them all the easier to relish.
Stelmanis brought co-producers Rodaidh McDonald and Joseph Shabason into the mix for the first time on HiRUDiN, and worked alongside Cecile Believe—the singer and writer whose presence enlivened SOPHIE’s debut album in 2018—on two of the album’s most striking tracks, the advance singles “Anywayz” and “Mountain Baby.” The latter introduces a children’s choir to the world of Austra, a move that contrasts with Believe’s trip-hoppy guest vocals but whose uncanniness ultimately locks into place. (Who better to sing about the blank innocence of new love than literal children?) These additional players open up the album until it sounds enormous and full, busily populated without losing particulate detail. Mountains serve as a recurring lyrical image, and the scope of the production matches the landscape—HiRUDiN towers, engulfing the listener.
Plenty of pop music about the end of a relationship tends to project personal disaster outward: A couple breaks apart, and so does the whole world. Here, Austra takes a different tack. “Anywayz” dwarfs Stelmanis’ heartbreak, situating it within a planetary scale. “We’ll figure it out/But what if we don’t?/And the world keeps turning anyways,” she sings, her voice lifting into an upbeat hook. There is comfort—even euphoria, release—in the suggestion that her individual tragedy does not matter one bit to the world at large, that it falls away alongside so many other small sufferings as the earth keeps churning itself into the future. Flowers grow no matter how sad you are. For some, that’s an insult, a slight in the face of all-consuming, all-important sadness. For Stelmanis and her new cohorts, it’s a strange relief.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | May 6, 2020 | 7.3 | 4318cb20-f5ea-4da5-9972-42fe9a6bda70 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Tilting his gaze toward the heavens once again, the Detroit electronic icon delivers an ambient-techno concept album exploring the moon’s pull on the human imagination. | Tilting his gaze toward the heavens once again, the Detroit electronic icon delivers an ambient-techno concept album exploring the moon’s pull on the human imagination. | Jeff Mills: Moon: The Area of Influence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-mills-moon-the-area-of-influence/ | Moon: The Area of Influence | Jeff Mills likes outer space. Over the past three decades, the Detroit native and techno legend has amassed an expansive catalog, with many of his releases taking direct inspiration from the cosmos, including records devoted to Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, Orion, and a myriad of (often fantastical) intergalactic journeys. He has even collaborated with NASA.
On his latest LP, Mills is once again looking beyond our atmosphere, albeit toward an object that’s a little closer to home: the moon. It’s not his first time tackling that particular celestial body; back in 2015, he put together a soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s pioneering 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon, and followed that up with a soundtrack for another silent sci-fi classic, George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, from 1902.
While those efforts drew from others’ work (not to mention a completely different era when space travel was pure science fiction), Moon: The Area of Influence is purely the product of his own, modern-day imagination. Its arrival coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an event that captured his imagination (along with the rest of the world’s) when he was just a young boy.
Moon doesn’t really conjure images of rocket ships and astronauts. Although LP opener “Control, Sattva and Rama” does begin with a recording from the NASA control room, the album’s main focus is how the moon affects things right here on Earth. (It’s telling that the moon doesn’t actually appear on the record’s cover, which instead depicts moonlight reflecting off a large body of water.) Mills’ interest in the moon’s influence on terrestrial matters extends from the tides to circadian rhythms (“Sleep-Wake Cycles”) and even people’s moods (“Erratic Human Behavior”).
This being an instrumental electronic album, it’s hard to glean any of these things from the music itself. In fact, Moon doesn’t sound all that different from a bevvy of Mills’ other releases. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the production is precise and minimal, its grooves subtly undulating beneath crystalline melodies. Fans of the insistent techno that usually populates Mills’ DJ sets will likely gravitate toward the hypnotic pulse of “Theia,” the static-laced rhythms of “Erratic Human Behavior,” and the sharp gallop of “180-Degree Repositioning Phase.” “Lunar Power” also sports a steady kick drum, but it’s the track’s analog chirps and swelling strings that stand out.
But Moon offers more meditative moments than club bangers. “Sleep-Wake Cycles” is an eight-minute trek through billowing, almost glassy melodies, while the vivid “Decoding the Lunar Sunrise” wondrously combines trundling basslines, dancing synths, and soaring strings. “The Tides” inspires a similar sense of awe, its gorgeous marriage of plaintive piano and shuffling percussion conjuring a bit of Larry Heard’s gentle magic.
Moon probably isn’t a particularly essential addition to Mills’ discography. While the production is impeccable and the music is undeniably tasteful, it also sounds like, well, just another Jeff Mills record. As such, the ideas behind the record are more intriguing than the music itself, and with this kind of instrumental techno and ambient, there’s only so much conceptual digging to be done.
Mills’ place in the larger electronic sphere is a little like the moon and its relationship to Earth. Much like the heavenly body, he’s a constant presence whose influence is practically immeasurable; it’s no wonder that his work and legacy has given rise to the same sort of wide-eyed devotion that humans throughout history have often felt when they’ve cast their gaze toward the night sky. At the same time, Mills quietly just keeps doing his thing, which makes his outsized influence easy to take for granted. After all, it’s easy to forget just how incredible the moon is if you don’t bother to look up. | 2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Axis | July 24, 2019 | 6.6 | 431c0cde-cbe9-497e-beb0-0885e7faa3b2 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The unpredictable Drool Sucker kicks off a series of EPs from the transcontinental band No Joy in which they attempt to shake off the “shoegaze revival” tag once and for all. | The unpredictable Drool Sucker kicks off a series of EPs from the transcontinental band No Joy in which they attempt to shake off the “shoegaze revival” tag once and for all. | No Joy: Drool Sucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22194-drool-sucker/ | Drool Sucker | Distance doesn’t always heart grow fonder, but you can count on it to summon the muse. Just ask No Joy: before they signed with Mexican Summer or shared stages with Best Coast and Deafheaven, Jasamine White-Gluz, and Laura Lloyd were just two friends on opposite sides of the country (Los Angeles and Montreal, respectively), swapping musical ideas over email. The long-distance musical partnership became official in 2009, when White-Gluz reunited with Lloyd in L.A. Despite closing the geographical distance between them, their sound remained unsettled and unpredictable–honeyed hooks bookended by whooshing static, gauzy fretwork that quickly deteriorates into a Sonic Youth-like roar, even the occasional foray into demented dream-pop.
From a sonic standpoint, White-Gluz and Lloyd have made their desire to escape genre tags—“shoegaze revival,” “noise-pop,” or “indie rock”—from the jump. Regardless of a band’s intentions, most listeners (and critics) are wont to regard full-length albums as aesthetic lines drawn in in the sand. Perhaps that’s why No Joy’s skipping the album cycle brouhaha all together for their latest project: Drool Sucker, the first entry in a trilogy of stylistically distinct EPs ostensibly intended (at least partially) as a refutation of these imposed boundaries.
Like the LP that precedes it, Drool Sucker sees White-Gluz and Lloyd raking their silvery melodies over jagged coals of distortion with purpose and restraint, melting down the 4/4 tempos into a feedback-driven delirium. But where More Faithful swaddles listeners in the din, Drool Sucker represents an effort to suffocate them; on the punishing opener “A Thorn in Garland’s Side,” a stampeding drum fill gives way to caterwauling punk verses which threaten to buckle under the guitars’ leaden heft. “XO (Adam’s Getting Married)” develops their tightly-packed harmonies as a dynamic focal point soon overtaken by the lumbering, doom-y coda.
Viewed in terms of My Bloody Valentine, whose balancing act between ethereal and acrid informs most of No Joy’s output up to this point, the EP stands as the Isn’t Anything to the previous album’s Loveless**: a woozy, raucous effort that tempers their pop with caustic flourishes. Appropriately for their self-defining (or rather, self-redefining) aims, the duo end with a “Theme Song”—and while its swooning grunge doesn’t sound drastically different from what listeners have come to expect, the track belies No Joy’s confidence, as well as their broader determination to transcend genre pigeon-holing as their heroes did. They’re off to a good start. | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | July 30, 2016 | 6.8 | 431df11e-1f1c-4815-98f4-c9fa65a71481 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Glasgow duo’s second record is polished and understated, seeking to offer reassurance in the face of stasis and uncertainty. | The Glasgow duo’s second record is polished and understated, seeking to offer reassurance in the face of stasis and uncertainty. | Cloth: Secret Measure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloth-secret-measure/ | Secret Measure | The twin duo of Rachael and Paul Swinton makes lonely, unassuming music as Cloth. Another word to describe their sound is “muted”—as in “quiet,” but also palm-muted guitar riffs, deadened drums, and whispered vocals about struggling with connection. Muted, but not outright dull; a close listen to their 2019 debut record revealed odd, jittery syncopation and nods to the xx-style electro-pop. It turns out a lot of important figures were tuning in: influential British radio presenters, prestige TV music supervisors, and Mogwai’s label Rock Action Records, who signed Cloth and released the more dramatic, post-rock inspired EP Low Sun in 2022. On the band’s second record, Secret Measure, they work with producer Ali Chant and subtly swerve yet again, streamlining their meandering indie rock into something like the slowcore version of a polished pop crossover.
With Chant at the helm, every choice feels intentional, the embrace of negative space particularly deliberate. The songs sound fragile enough to tip over with a small breeze, but with Chant’s production and Matt Brown’s drums, there’s a sturdy foundation. It’s still intimate, but the patient arrangements make the music feel vast in a way their more lo-fi recordings could not. Songs like “Never Know” and “Lido” pace about until suddenly blossoming midway though with arrangement changes, most notably Jemima Coulter’s trumpet on the latter. The increased focus allows them to filter familiar ideas through their own lens. “Drips” takes a well-worn chord progression and feeds it through a thworping arpeggiator, while “Ladder” is one more nocturnal “I’m on Fire” homage that nonetheless distinguishes itself with a chiming guitar riff. "Money Plant" is the one song that veers too close to 1980s sophisti-pop, complete with electronic percussion straight out of a Roxy Music ballad; it works on its own, but the bass stabs take away from the captivating atmosphere elsewhere.
If the band finds comfort in solitude, Paul Swinton’s lyrics are increasingly restless, seeking reassurance while facing the unknown. A spoken word section on “Secret Measure” describes someone staring off into the distance, unable to speak. “Never Know” pushes through writer’s block, asking, “Why don’t you just spit it out/Pick a note and sing it out?” “Lido” applies the uncertainty to an obsessive interest, just slightly too paranoid to be romantic: “Can I get lost with you/With nothing around?/We’re the same, we’re the same soul.” The recurring themes means the record is in conversation with itself, even responding to itself: The existential concerns in “Ladder” are softened in “Money Plant” (“I’m always looking out, when I know you’re thinking all wrong”).
With a more cohesive sound, some of the rhythmic quirks and time signature hops from their past output are smoothed out. On occasion, the music is so pristine that it’s easy to miss the evocative lyrics buried in the tightly wound grooves. Rachael Swinton rarely raises her voice above a whisper, and on the lusher songs, particularly “Drips,” she threatens to become just one more texture in the mix. That’s a fair enough tradeoff for a record this aesthetically airtight, but by the time they get to the closing “Blue Space,” the duo forecasts a shift ahead: “Everybody’s slowing down/You used to say so/But I don’t know/I’m feeling faster.” They sound ready to evolve again. | 2023-05-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rock Action | May 8, 2023 | 7 | 432769bb-a9ae-4a6d-b80c-ff359ff91102 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Billed as his final album, this 2016 live set by the late songwriter is a thoughtful and intimate survey of his vast catalog. | Billed as his final album, this 2016 live set by the late songwriter is a thoughtful and intimate survey of his vast catalog. | Gordon Lightfoot: At Royal Albert Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gordon-lightfoot-at-royal-albert-hall/ | At Royal Albert Hall | Even before Gordon Lightfoot performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 21, 2016, the legendary songwriter admitted to feeling like he was singing “on borrowed time.” Mortality loomed over much of his work throughout the decade. In 2012, he issued All Live, an album that he candidly admitted was intended as a posthumous release. The subject of age, and the wisdom it brings, suffuses Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s 2019 documentary If You Could Read My Mind. In the film, an aged Lightfoot reflects on his hard-living, hard-drinking early days, the darkness and anger that dogged him and hurt those closest to him, and the way his immersion in nature in the early 1970s via canoe trips into the Canadian wilderness helped to right his spiritual and creative compass. (Plus, you get his off-the-cuff accolades for his nearby neighbor, Drake.)
On At Royal Albert Hall, a live set that the Lightfoot estate has dubbed the late songwriter’s final album, Lightfoot sounds nothing but unburdened. The 26-song album is presented with no overdubs or fixes, only some audience fades. His discography has always made space for thoughtful interplay, and on these recordings, the band delivers. A sympathetic quartet of longtime collaborators round out his signature 12-string acoustic with Mike Heffernan’s soft rock synth pads, Carter Lancaster’s jazzy passages of electric guitar, and commanding rhythms from bassist Rick Haynes and drummer Barry Keane. Small and unexpected touches dot the set, from the flamenco dashes of “Christian Island” to the spiraling synths of “Shadows.”
Lightfoot’s miles-wide voice plays no small role in his classic material, but settled into a light, agreeable lilt, the focus shifts more to the songs: their emotional tone and stark lyricism. Though he’s often thought of in terms of pillowy soft rock, his pared down range reveals the darkness nestled among even his most pastoral narratives and gentle rockers, to say nothing of the outright menacing ballads, like 1974’s Cathy Smith-inspired “Sundown.” This vocal approach reveals more of the humor and sly wordplay, too: Performed here, that song slides along on a more agreeable current. Like his contemporaries Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, who gathered at Lightfoot’s house in 1975, where Mitchell performed a draw-dropping rendition of “Coyote,” Lightfoot’s voice sometimes cracks and falters, adding a ghostly, sly tone to his visions of about sailor’s dreams and the murky distance between winning and losing.
Outside of a few quick asides to the audience—“Here she comes!” or “That was another way of shortening a song,” after an abrupt stop—Lightfoot lets the songs do the talking. The stories they tell are layered. He opens with one of his finest, “The Watchman’s Gone.” Backed by a steady thump that echoes the Band on a stately march, he sings about the forces that kick would-be dreamers out of existence. “I’ve been on the town/Washing the bullshit down,” he sings with uncharacteristic profanity. These sorts of authority figures don’t show up all that often in his songs, and even when Lightfoot presents himself as one, it’s with a gentle shrug: “If you want to know my secret don’t come running after me/For I am just a painter passing through in history,” he sings on the balmy “A Painter Passing Through,” the title track of his 1998 album. Even when he does play the omniscient narrator, like on “Rainy Day People,” which receives a righteous clap of recognition, Lightfoot seems as baffled as anyone: “Rainy day people all know how it hangs on a piece of mind.”
The natural world plays a central theme in many of these songs, from the sunny travelogue of “Christian Island” to the gale force winds of “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” one of the most affecting performances of this set. “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever,” Dylan once said of Lightfoot. “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” goes on for just under seven minutes in this rendition, but it carries an eternal feeling, like it’s always being sung somewhere, by someone. The very best Lightfoot songs have this quality, like he carved them out of solid wood, the sort of object that’s going to stick around long after its creator is gone. | 2023-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Linus | August 4, 2023 | 7 | 4337be17-3584-437d-883e-96e88e0bd763 | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, returns with another outstanding mix. | Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, returns with another outstanding mix. | DJ /rupture: Uproot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12371-uproot/ | Uproot | Jace Clayton (aka DJ/rupture) inspires a special tenor of admiration from music critics because, in addition to crafting literate, reference-rich, and conversational music, he often writes about it just as adeptly. It's not a stretch, if we're honest, to say that he writes about music more skillfully and illuminatingly than the majority of us who have ever done it full-time. He is, to put it bluntly, one of those people who gets it right far more often and in more different ways than your ordinary person really should. Uproot is another one of those instances.
In the broadest, most literal sense, Rupture came to rise as a mashup artist, and there are certainly elements of Uproot-- a mix following on the turrets of 2002's Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and 2005's Low Income Tomorrowland-- that find him flexing those muscles. To give him that tag, though, would be a bit misleading; Rupture uses the form to different ends. Folks like Girl Talk, Diplo, and A-Trak use mashups to make superficial connections, or to make people dance, or to be clever, or, sometimes, to be clever-clever. Rupture, as the name implies, creates fissures. He's less likely to rip four bars or a hooky lyric from something as he is to extract its mood in total; he's less interested in creating fleeting moments than he is in creating large, interweaving tapestries. Because his source material is generally pulled from dubstep, ragga, outré hip-hop, found sounds, and other indigenous musics, those tapestries can often sound political. Clayton has such a global, democratic ear and such a knack for soupy unease that it's difficult not to hear his mixes, at least partly, as commentary pieces. Even when, as is the case with Uproot, his mixes veer on the neatly manicured side, they still ultimately feel combustible out of the box.
While Uproot feels every bit as purposeful as those earlier mixes, it achieves that goal though different means. Musically, it's far more subdued and spacious; the lacerating swathes of digital noise have been subbed out for tracks that favor lonely, clattering rhythms, yawning sub-basslines, and displaced vocals. Like a lot of his contemporaries, Rupture has clearly gravitated towards dubstep over the past few years, and Uproot shows his selection skills in that space are as impeccable as they are elsewhere. From the cavernous glissandos in Frescoe's "Afghanistan" to the twerky, demodulated keys in Filastine's "Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)" to the haunted illbient fog of Moving Ninja's "Uranium", Clayton's selections are generous and far-reaching, and build a pretty compelling case for dubstep as the most creatively robust genre in electronic music right now.
Perhaps surprisingly, Uproot also features moments of genuine, unfettered softness and beauty. Atki2's "Winter Buds" is a dubstep rhythm that rests on an expected rush of warm piano chords, while Dead Leaf's "Save From the Flames All That Yet Remains" chases the looping, pulsing ambient of Professor Shehab + Lloop's "Drunken Monkey (Ambient Remix)" with a gentle swell of strings and pianos. Most notable, though, is the 1-2 punch that provides the mix's stirring midway point; a bittersweet interlude from cellist and Clayton collaborator Jenny Jones provides the segue into a few minutes from the second of Ekkehard Ehlers' terrific two-part ode to filmmaker John Cassavetes, from his 2002 album Plays. Although roundly earmarked as special by the relative few who heard it upon its release, history has arguably done "Plays John Cassavetes" a disservice. Clayton's resurrection of it here, in turn, speaks to another key reason his mixes are special; he's in the rare category of DJs who gives the impression that he is not just wading through music, but correcting it by building his own canon, and constructing an alternate history. It's a place you would want to live. | 2008-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | theAgriculture | October 24, 2008 | 8.8 | 433976dd-1ff1-4a03-bdcf-a0175884809d | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On a bonus album originally hidden inside gatefold copies of his opus Heaven and Earth, the saxophonist explores his mellower side without breaking any significantly new ground. | On a bonus album originally hidden inside gatefold copies of his opus Heaven and Earth, the saxophonist explores his mellower side without breaking any significantly new ground. | Kamasi Washington: The Choice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamasi-washington-the-choice-ep/ | The Choice | Deep in a 2016 New York Times Magazine profile of Kamasi Washington, the saxophonist is at brunch with his girlfriend when some smooth jazz from Najee oozes out of the speakers. But Washington is unperturbed, noting that despite the beige, wallpaper tone, Najee nevertheless has roots in gospel. For a man who’s often billed as jazz’s next big star, it’s a telling moment: For Washington, no musical genre is devoid of value. To which his girlfriend quips: “Kamasi is totally nonjudgmental, in all areas. It makes life a lot less stressful.”
Such openness is a defining characteristic of Washington’s sound and worldview. It makes him an ideal sideman for Chaka Khan and Snoop, the perfect foil for Pulitzer Kenny; He’s even chill with playing the Sexy Sax Man role at the BET Awards. For his recent opus Heaven and Earth, it’s that sense of broadness that gives him the latitude to draw on everything from an early Freddie Hubbard composition to the theme music from Bruce Lee’s 1972 kung-fu joint Fists of Fury, finding Latin flavor in the former and a Blaxploitation strut in the latter. But if you were hoping to glimpse a bit more adventurousness from the saxophonist on the bonus album The Choice (which comes hidden inside the record sleeve and, once it’s cut free, brings the runtime of the entire album past the three-hour mark), the five secret songs here instead show that Washington can also do smooth jazz with the best of them.
Washington’s latest finds the tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader wholly in his own lane. But the sprawl of the massive new album doesn’t lead him outside the parameters he’s already established for his sound; instead, it doubles down on them. So it’s a little disappointing that an additional 40 minutes of music doesn’t reveal any new wrinkles, twists, or paths not taken in the sessions; some curious covers and mild originals merely show that the album could have been an even mellower affair. Pianist Cameron Graves’ gentle chording and Brandon Coleman’s fluttering organ give “The Secret of Jinsinson” a soft edge, and a choir fluffs out the composition’s cloudlike shape. But there’s not enough to differentiate it from Heaven and Earth’s more epic material; it feels more like a leftover.
“Agents of the Multiverse” builds with rattles and struck percussion, Washington’s horn and the rolling tympanum suggesting an oceanic vista for its opening minute. It’s the closest Washington has come to an artist like Pharoah Sanders, with whom he’s frequently compared, but that looseness soon tightens up thanks to the percolating backbeats of guest drummer Chris “Daddy” Dave. His interplay with Washington (whose rhythmic sense on the horn might be his greatest asset) makes for the EP’s highlight, even if the song ultimately just fades away.
The Choice’s most curious moments come in the form of two covers. The first is a nine-minute extrapolation of the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” As noted in Pitchfork’s recent survey of girl groups, this Goffin-King-penned song, a plaint of teenage sexual longing wrapped in lush orchestration, was the first girl-group song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Dilating the piece to three times its length should open it up to vast new emotional terrains, yet Washington and band do little to keep it from slipping into a supper-club standard. This approach leaves the always-dependable vocalist Patrice Quinn, who normally imbues Washington’s vocal songs with inner strength, to verge on the maudlin.
More intriguing is the band’s read on the Five Stairsteps’ 1970 soul masterpiece, “O-o-h Child.” Here, they couch the original’s comfort in the face of adversity in an eerie, psychedelic swampiness, to disorienting effect. For most of its nine minutes, Washington and band immerse themselves in the inherent darkness and unrest that are the flipside of the song’s promise that “Things’ll get brighter.” When Steven Wayne and Matachi Nwosu’s voices harmonize and reach upwards at the chorus, the band embraces that sense of liberation, soaring to new heights right at song’s end. It’s a small musical moment that speaks even louder than many of the album’s big statements. | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Young Turks / Shoto Mas | July 12, 2018 | 6.5 | 433f9cbb-ee3a-4d69-bf30-659d7f686766 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his latest album for Warp, the legendary sonic architect teams with poet Rick Holland for an inconsistent but occasionally brilliant set. | On his latest album for Warp, the legendary sonic architect teams with poet Rick Holland for an inconsistent but occasionally brilliant set. | Brian Eno / Rick Holland: Drums Between the Bells | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15598-drums-between-the-bells/ | Drums Between the Bells | Who's your Brian Eno? The art-pop savant of Here Come the Warm Jets? The ambient theorist of Discreet Music? The prog-jazz dabbler of Nerve Net? Or the film music composer of Small Craft on a Milk Sea? Maybe you think of him mainly as a virtuoso technician, an innovative pop producer, a prodigious collaborator, or a visionary mixed-media artist. His broad range of talents and activities makes getting your head around his catalogue about as plausible as giving him a haircut, and it's natural for us to establish our own versions of what his baseline aesthetic is. Whoever the "real" Eno is to you, he's bound to show up at least once on his second LP for Warp Records, a mercilessly erratic collaboration with the poet Rick Holland.
You could say with only slight hyperbole that Eno's signing to Warp last year was like the Beatles joining Elephant 6. The British label's eclectic roster-- Broadcast's cerebral electronic pop, Autechre's ascetic IDM, Boards of Canada's synthetic naturalism, Aphex Twin's ambient techno-- could reasonably be called the Eno Diaspora. Small Craft, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, was oriented around music composed for (and rejected from) Peter Jackson's film The Lovely Bones, but with its jungle breakbeats, ambient drones, and computer glitches, it sounded like Eno refracting Warp's own history. In other words: Eno making music influenced by Eno.
Drums Between the Bells retains many qualities of Small Craft, including propeller-like live percussion and mildly dated whiffs of trip-hop and downtempo. The big difference is that the music is built around Holland's words, read by a number of different speakers. As it doesn't rely on the ironic voice and language games of modern fashion, Holland's richly imagistic poetry is well-suited to the project. The music around it is scattershot, but not random: Each song is designed to complement the poem at its center. Still, the record has a rather unnerving pace, overpowering and retiring in quick alternation. "Bless this Space" opens things inauspiciously with an electronic jazz fusion setting, which is about the most unsympathetic environment for a poet imaginable. "Glitch" is musically livelier, with a mightily abrasive climax, but the HAL-like vocal treatment flattens Holland's poem into numbingly literal sci-fi boilerplate.
Then, abruptly, a suite of meltingly lovely tracks arrives and does real service to Holland's poetry. The arctic pianos that encircle a crisp female voice on "Dreambirds" recall Eno's prior work with Harold Budd, just as the liquid guitar of "Pour It Out" recalls the lighter side of the Fripp collaborations. Despite its dystopian tendencies, Holland's writing has a plain-hearted tenderness that female voices seem to draw out more subtly than male ones. On these two tracks, as well as "Seedpods" and "The Real", Eno reacts to the female voice with great sensitivity. The result is like a gentler companion to Laurie Anderson's Homeland: no ironclad beats hammering down on the words, but a gossamer web cradling them with all due reverence. The oracular hush fits Holland much better than stentorian force.
Even when Drums dips into sketchy territory-- the reggae-styled "Dow", for example-- it's hard not to be intrigued by Eno's command of sonic texture, weight, and spatial dimensions. Nothing feels vaguely formed. With the ability to realize microscopically precise details and effects, he makes the reconciliation of extremes feel inevitable: A river of industrial slag might flow into saucy jazz horns; funk riffs might level out into a thick krautrock haze. We can count on these kinds of pleasures even from a so-so Eno record, and Drums is better than so-so. The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination. The concrete music of "Fierce Aisles of Light" conjures the feel of being on a train with impeccable accuracy, but it's a pat setting for lyrics where trains feature prominently. When a minute of silence, called "Silence", appears near the end of the record, it's hard not to feel as though you're in the presence of an incredible talent casting about for the next big idea, casually producing minor wonders in the meantime. | 2011-07-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Warp | July 5, 2011 | 6.6 | 4341229a-4e63-49b2-b9c6-15d610149d36 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
For the last decade, T. Hardy Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate. His first solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedate singer-songwriter affair. On Drownin on a Mountaintop the twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses. | For the last decade, T. Hardy Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate. His first solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedate singer-songwriter affair. On Drownin on a Mountaintop the twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses. | T. Hardy Morris: Hardy & the Hardknocks: Drownin on a Mountaintop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20715-hardy-the-hardknocks-drownin-on-a-mountaintop/ | Hardy & the Hardknocks: Drownin on a Mountaintop | Though grunge will always be linked to Seattle, the genre’s image never squared with the suave skyscrapers and cosmopolitan mindset of one of the country’s most cash-flushed cities. Instead, it owed more to the flannelled, blue-collar sensibilities of the small factory towns outside of the city, like Kurt Cobain’s native Aberdeen, which helps account for why it resonated not only with tastemakers but also ordinary, meat-and-potato rock fans. T. Hardy Morris has long been fascinated by grunge's backwoods roots. "It was rural music," the singer/guitarist contended in a recent profile, likening it to the sounds he grew up with in Georgia. "It’s kind of like Southern rock."
For the last decade, Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate, though both styles sometimes took a backseat to that group’s stoner-rock tendencies. Recently, Morris has also been dabbling in side projects a good deal less gloomy than his primary band, recording a couple of LPs with Deer Tick’s Robbie Crowell and Black Lips’ Ian Saint Pé as Diamond Rugs, in addition to a pair of solo albums that play like mirror images of each other. Where Morris’s inaugural solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedated singer-songwriter affair, seeped in the weeping pedal steels and confessional spirit of so many Nashville records, Drownin on a Mountaintop is its temperamental opposite—wild, prickly, and unsentimental. The twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses.
As Morris tells it, fatherhood inspired Mountaintop’s rowdier sound. He rushed to finish the record before the birth of his first daughter, and it beats with the urgency of a man trying to purge some final youthful bad decisions from his system before it’s wholly irresponsible to do so. On song after song, Morris casts himself as a fuck up at best and a menace at worst—a trope he borrows from outlaw country, though unlike a true rebel, Morris can’t stop his thoughts from cycling back to the toll of his actions and the example he’s setting. He presents the album’s booziest, blusteriest song "Likes of Me" as a cautionary tale for his imagined children. "Maybe I can scare you silly not to do the things I’ve done," he seethes maniacally, matching the song’s In Utero-sized stop/start riff with Cobain’s curdled yowl. On Dead Confederate’s first records, Morris was sometimes overeager to play up the echoes of Cobain in his voice, but over time his has developed its own character. Where Cobain’s croak was deliberate and authoritative, Morris’s is rangy and conniving. Even when he’s being earnest, he sounds like a grifter making a hard sell.
Unimpeded by the austere, psychedelic stretches that weigh down Dead Confederate’s albums, Mountaintop gives Morris’s voice ample space to roam, and it’s a thrill to hear him cut loose. That unbridled spirit comes at a cost, though, since Mountaintop’s loosest songs are so lackadaisically written they fall apart. With Audition Tapes, Morris penned considered tributes to the childhood friends he’d left behind, but there’s little of that depth here. Too many lyrics read like they were scribbled during between-take cigarette breaks. On "Starting Gun", he sets up the album’s shittiest pun: "See that clock up on the wall? I wound it up, and it ticked me off." A couple tracks later on "Littleworth" he grabs at the nearest adage, musing "It may sound lazy but the truth hurts," and, as cautioned, it does sound lazy. The thrashing title track offers an even blunter commentary on how thinly written it is. "What the hell is going on," Morris marvels after the chorus, "How can you call this a song?"
There are two types of clumsy lyrics: Ones that pass with limited damage, and ones so invasive they bring entire songs to a halt. It’s those latter ones that Morris steers into again and again, which is unfortunate, since otherwise his crash fusion of grunge and country has never sounded better than it does on Mountaintop. He’s got the attitude down pat, but he doesn’t always have the songs to back it up. | 2015-06-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-06-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | June 24, 2015 | 6 | 434153f9-fd84-40be-b290-1479aac7fa91 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
This live album, which boasts a new song in the form of the title track, draws from all of Antony's studio albums. The renditions of that back catalog are rendered so powerfully by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra that the originals seem almost incomplete by comparison. | This live album, which boasts a new song in the form of the title track, draws from all of Antony's studio albums. The renditions of that back catalog are rendered so powerfully by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra that the originals seem almost incomplete by comparison. | Antony and the Johnsons: Cut the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16902-cut-the-world/ | Cut the World | The second track on Antony's new live album, Cut the World, is a monologue called "Future Feminism." It runs nearly eight minutes. "I've been thinking all day about the moon," Antony begins. "Like, is it an accident that women menstruate once a month and that the moon comes once a month? ...And then what about the fact that we're made of 70% water?" It goes on like this, referencing "patriarchal monotheism," the matter-of-fact revelation that he's a witch who "de-baptized" himself," and ruminations on "the feminization of deities." Behold: Antony stage banter.
Antony's exquisitely earnest "Antony-ness," though, is the rare gift he brings to the world, and in whatever form he chooses to dispense it, it's a joy to soak it in. Running through Antony's gently daft speech are all the elemental themes of his music-- oceans, dying leaves, blood from wombs-- and he delivers it in such a chatty, affectionate, teasing tone that by the end, you are not only disarmed, but lit by a small glow of wonder. And then, of course, he resumes playing and singing.
For a sizable contingent of music listeners, Antony's music is like emotional tincture; powerful, necessary, sometimes a bit too intense taken undiluted. And certainly not for daily consumption. I am one of those listeners: Some innate measuring stick that calculated my desired intake of abject suffering balked at the need for another Antony record after his crossover album, I Am a Bird Now. That record still sits at the center of my listening life, but to add to it, for me, seemed only to chip away from its power, with the result that I found myself appreciating Antony from a distance, and feeling generally grateful for his existence, more than engaging with his music.
If you are one of these listeners, perhaps you will appreciate Cut the World like I did. As a compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music. The song selection here draws smartly from all of his studio albums, touching on his self-titled and culling the most potent material from of The Crying Light and Swanlights. Antony is accompanied by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, performing arrangements by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Antony himself.
If ever an artist's catalogue has demanded orchestral accompaniment, it is Antony's. The emotional surge in his music all but demands the blooming of a string section. His voice dismantles defenses, pours over boundaries, and this quality is mirrored so powerfully in the arrangements that the originals seem incomplete in retrospect. He has performed in front of a full orchestra often over the years, but Cut the World is the first sustained glimpse those of us outside the hall have gotten of the results. "You Are My Sister"'s opening piano figure carries twice the drama brought into pungent, mournful woodwinds. "Cripple and the Starfish" swells magnificently to twice its size in this setting: It feels Mahlerian, overwhelming. The DNCO plays with a simple radiance, as if they've always been a part of this music.
The only song that feels diminished is "Another World"; a low drone tugs at track's harmonic center, muddying its elemental, prayer-like surface. But otherwise, this is a revelatory way to experience Antony's music. The inward-curling pain dissolves, leaving only the aching generosity. The title track, the lone new song, starts with a soft rustle of harmonics akin to those of Arvo Pärt. When the full orchestra enters on the chorus, the bloom of warmth is physically gratifying. Antony's music is like that-- restorative, good to be near. Like the sun, it's something we all need in our lives, even if it feels good to get out of it once in a while. | 2012-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 6, 2012 | 8.1 | 4343566b-1660-4973-ad26-8ec07f893dd7 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the folk-rock duo's darkly holistic 1974 debut, a quixotic blend of the old and the new. | 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 folk-rock duo's darkly holistic 1974 debut, a quixotic blend of the old and the new. | Richard and Linda Thompson: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-and-linda-thompson-i-want-to-see-the-bright-lights-tonight/ | I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight | Four decades after Richard and Linda Thompson released 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, their beautiful and terrifying first album as a duo—after their music failed to attract significant commercial interest; after the conversion to Sufism, the three kids, the arduous years spent living on a religious commune; after he left her for another woman just as mainstream success seemed within their reach; after she clocked him with a Coke bottle and sped off in a stolen car during their disastrous final tour—after everything, Linda was working on a new song about the foolishness of love. It was a lot like the songs Richard used to write for them in the old days: Despairing, but not hopeless, with a melody that seemed to float forward from some forgotten era, and a narrator who can’t see past the walls of his own fatalism. “Whenever I write something like that I think, ‘Oh, who could play the guitar on that?’” she recalled later. “And then I think, ‘Only Richard, really.’”
Can you blame her? Though both Thompsons have made fine albums since the collapse of their romantic and musical relationships in the early 1980s, there is something singular in the blend of her gracefully understated singing and his fiercely expressive playing, a heaven-bound quality that redeems even their heaviest subject matter, which neither can quite reach on their own. As lovers, they could be violently incompatible, but as musicians, they were soul mates. The existence of latter-day collaborations like Linda’s 2013 song “Love’s for Babies and Fools,” one of a handful of recordings they’ve made together since the 2000s, proves the lasting power of a partnership that seemed doomed from the start.
The Thompsons met in 1969, while Richard was working on Liege & Lief, the fourth album by Fairport Convention, the pioneering British band he’d co-founded when he was 18. With his bandmates, he envisioned a new form of English folk music, combining scholarly devotion to centuries-old song forms with the electrified instruments and exploratory spirit of late-’60s rock. The misty and elegiac Liege & Lief was their masterpiece, but it had come at a price. Months earlier, Fairport’s van driver fell asleep at the wheel on a late-night drive home from a gig, and the ensuing crash killed Martin Lamble, their drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Thompson’s girlfriend at the time. According to Thompson, the decision to press on and record Liege & Lief was driven in part by a desire to “distract ourselves from grief and numb the pain of our loss.”
The folk-rock musicians who orbited Fairport in London comprised a hard-drinking scene, where money was usually tight, and revelry and song took precedence over talk about feelings. “They didn’t send you to therapy in those days…we didn’t grieve properly,” Richard Thompson told a podcast interviewer this year. The losses would keep coming. Nick Drake, an ex-boyfriend of Linda’s and occasional collaborator of Richard’s, who struggled to find an audience during his short life, was sliding toward oblivion by the early 1970s. And Sandy Denny, the radiant and mercurial former singer of Fairport, as well as a close friend of both Thompsons, was not far behind him. The fading spirits of fellow travelers like these haunt I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Its songs treat drink, festivity, and even love as fleeting escapes from life’s difficulties, staring through the good times to the black holes that often lie behind them.
Richard lasted for one more album with Fairport, then left the band with hopes of making it as a solo artist. Legend has it that Henry the Human Fly, his 1972 debut, was the worst-selling album in the history of Warner Brothers at the time. He was working steadily as a session and touring musician, but at the ripe old age of 23, he couldn’t help feeling a little washed up. Linda’s career as a folk singer, despite the arresting clarity of her voice, had been only moderately successful, and she was entertaining thoughts of cashing in, going pop. She was only a “weekend hippie,” she has said. And though he was still a few years away from embracing Muslim mysticism, he was already something of a monastic: declining to cash checks for his session work, and following a devotion to modernizing English folk that was so intense it led him to turn down invitations to join several high-profile bands because their styles were too American. Despite their differences in approach to life and career, something clicked. She moved into his Hampstead apartment, and they married in 1972.
Their reason for starting a musical duo was practical, but also sweetly romantic: They wanted to spend more time together. They began touring the UK’s circuit of folk clubs, humble institutions that mixed socialist idealism with commercial enterprise, often operating in the back rooms of local pubs, where Richard and Linda would share stage time with whatever barflies wanted to belt out “Scarborough Fair” or “John Barleycorn” on any given night. Audiences were receptive, but it was a rugged and unglamorous way to make a career, even compared to the modest success Richard had seen with Fairport Convention. After about a year on the circuit, they were ready to graduate to bigger stages, and to make an album.
They recorded I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight quickly and cheaply, working from a cache of songs Richard had been assembling since Henry the Human Fly. The backing band they recruited combined a rock rhythm section with mustier instruments like hammered dulcimer, accordion, and crumhorn, a Renaissance-era woodwind whose nasal buzz makes bagpipes sound mellow. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight approaches its instrumentation with eerie holism, sounding neither like a reverent attempt to resurrect bygone traditions, nor a contemporary singer-songwriter album with period flourishes, but something strange and glowing in between.
It all comes together spectacularly on “When I Get to the Border,” whose lyrics also synthesize the modern with the ancient. The protagonist, voiced by Richard, spends the verses drinking wine by the barrel and fleeing oppressors down a dusty road to a paradise that may not exist. If the allusions to contemporary workaday drudgery and our futile attempts to outrun it were lost on any listeners, the chorus makes them explicit: “Monday morning, Monday morning, closing in on me.” Richard did not always stretch out as a lead guitarist on Fairport Convention albums, and “When I Get to the Border” plays like a coming-out party for the world-class player he had become. He accompanies each verse with delicate spindles, reserving his full might for a series of slash-and-burn licks traded with a rotating procession of traditional instruments in the thrilling coda. Even the crumhorns fucking rock.
Many of Linda’s signature songs are candlelit ballads, but she swaggers through the cascading brass lines of the album’s title track like a sailor on shore leave. On the surface, the song’s message is simple: work’s over, time to party. But in Richard’s writing and Linda’s performance, the urge to go out, get hammered, and press up tight against a stranger is nearly feral in its potency. The nihilism and the pleasure of drunkenness and transactional coupling are inseparable. “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” neither moralizes about its subject matter nor attempts to enshrine it, capturing the charge of a messy night out in all its explosive ambiguity. Musically, it has the feeling of a celebration, one that could have been a massive hit had the Thompsons been willing to sacrifice their quixotic musical aspirations for slicker and more streamlined production.
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight can be bleak, but it never patronizes the destitute characters who populate its songs, framing their anti-social and self-destructive impulses as reasonable responses to an unforgiving world. On “The Little Beggar Girl,” whose old-world melody may present a challenge for listeners unaccustomed to British folk, Linda affects a cockney accent and sneers at the well-meaning condescension of men on the street: “I travel far and wide for the work that I do/’Cause I love taking money off a snob like you.” The narrator, who seems vaguely like a sex worker, isn’t presented as a once-pure, now-fallen angel; she’s a smart, tough person doing what she needs to to get by. “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” is soft and solemn, refusing to judge its cast of misfits for finding solace at the bar. “Withered and Died” might come across as maudlin with less sympathetic performers, but Linda’s delivery lends quiet nobility to its tale of an abandoned woman at the end of her rope. Richard’s guitar solo arrives like pale sunlight through a tall window, offering a ray of hope out somewhere beyond the desolation of the lyrics.
These people are mostly doomed in ordinary ways: cruel bosses, nasty hangovers, empty pockets, absent lovers. But the Thompsons also had an interest in esotericism and spirituality, seeking deeper truths behind the doldrums of life. That attunement, together with their masterful fusion of new and old musical idioms, gives a spectral cast to their tales of everyday strife. It emerges most clearly on “The Calvary Cross,” whose stately three-chord cycle feels like the album’s centerpiece despite being only the second track. After a breathtaking raga-like guitar introduction from Richard, the song unspools as a series of bad omens from a mysterious “pale-faced lady”: a black cat crossing your path, a train that never leaves its station. “The Calvary Cross” is like a shadow that hangs over the rest of the music, suggesting that the characters’ fates are ordained not only by circumstance, but also by forces whose true nature they may never apprehend. The chorus, delivered in the voice of the pale-faced lady, contains the album’s most chilling lines: “Everything you do, you do for me.”
If Richard and Linda Thompson were unusually sympathetic to the hapless, perhaps it’s because they were singing about their own people. “I’m glad I spent a year or two playing in other people’s bands and being for hire on records, because when I became a bandleader I knew the feeling of being employed, and never put myself above those I was employing,” Richard wrote in his recent memoir Beeswing. The feeling of being employed. Maybe that’s what it comes down to for the drunks and outcasts of Bright Lights: the humiliation of lowering yourself for a buck, and how to get out from under it. Maybe the pale-faced lady with her curses and the boss with his orders are one and the same. Everything you do, you do for me.
For a guitarist and singer piecing together a living on the folk circuit, music was a holy vocation, but also a grinding job. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight promoted them from folk clubs to proper venues, but the feeling of success was short-lived. Within a couple of years, according to Richard, “Folk rock was losing ground—not that it had much ground to begin with...we were now playing to an aging audience that consumed less and went out to concerts less.” (It bears repeating that he was in his mid-20s at the time.) Island dropped the Thompsons after Pour Down Like Silver, their third album. They retreated from the music industry and moved into a Sufi commune in London, and then another in rural Norfolk, after having fallen in with a group of worshippers not long after making Bright Lights.
Richard devoted himself to Sufism, and quickly quit drinking, hoping to “fill the void in the pit of my stomach, and not with numbness, but with nourishment.” According to Linda, he donated much of their money to fellow members of the London sect. She had her own interest in Sufism, but her experience on the communes—led by “an Englishman who styled himself a sheik,” as a 1985 Rolling Stone profile put it—was more like an intensification of worldly oppression than an escape from it. She gave birth to the Thompsons’ second child there, which she described as “fucking awful: No doctors, no hot water, nothing.” In her telling, the atmosphere was sexist and repressive, with women made to perform domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning, and to avert their eyes when talking to men.
In the late ’70s, they left the commune, released two albums to little fanfare, and got dropped by another label. Then came 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, their biggest critical and commercial success by a wide margin, which happened to be filled with blistering accounts of dissolving relationships. Richard announced he was in love with another woman soon after its release, but Linda decided to accompany him on tour anyway. You know the rest: Coke bottle, stolen car, divorce.
Were they doomed from the start? Isn’t everyone? That’s the underlying theme of I Want to See the Bright Lights. “The End of the Rainbow,” the album’s almost comically morose penultimate song, takes the form of a warning to a newborn: “Life seems so rosy in the cradle/But I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store/There’s nothing at the end of rainbow/There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” In the 1985 Rolling Stone piece, Linda reflected on their honeymoon in Corsica, taken not long before they started work on Bright Lights. “It rained the whole time,” she said. “I should have known then.”
But there is a happy ending, for the Thompsons at least, who eventually reconciled as friends, began sporadically collaborating again, even recorded an album together with their children. Judging by their public remarks, they get on pretty well these days. We’re all doomed to hurt each other, and to be hurt in return. The least we can do is forgive.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | December 5, 2021 | 8.5 | 434bcd13-54f7-428c-9bca-ba46185459a7 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Interpolating field recordings and birdsong, the Cuban-born jazz pianist's fourth album explores the sounds of his home country with warmth and fervor. | Interpolating field recordings and birdsong, the Cuban-born jazz pianist's fourth album explores the sounds of his home country with warmth and fervor. | Fabian Almazan: This Land Abounds With Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fabian-almazan-this-land-abounds-with-life/ | This Land Abounds With Life | The Cuban-born jazz pianist Fabian Almazan has always been interested in roots. On his 2011 debut Personalities he paid homage to his homeland with renditions of Antonio María Romeu’s danzón “Tres Lindas Cubanas” and Carlos Varela’s “Bola De Nieve,” one of the first songs Almazan says he remembers hearing. On Rhizome, his second album, Almazan explored the idea of interconnectedness, inspired by the underground root system from which the record took its name.
Almazan draws on a similarly naturalist metaphor with his fourth album, This Land Abounds With Life. It is his most fully realized to date. In some ways, the album is a tribute to Cuba’s natural splendor: Almazan, now 35, was just nine when his family left Cuba and settled in Miami by way of Mexico. He returned to his birthplace three years ago and brought back some vivid recordings of bird song, along with the improvised poetry of a local raconteur.
The field recordings, which are featured on “Uncle Tío,” “Songs of the Forgotten” and “The Poets,” cast a spell, especially when juxtaposed against Almazan’s atmospheric piano playing. Almazan’s project here has something in common with that of David Virelles, another young Cuban-born jazz pianist who, for nearly the past decade, has been making a deep and thoughtful study of the disappearing folk traditions of his native country. But Almazan’s new album is both more personal and perhaps more universal in scope.
For the most part, This Land Abounds With Life makes the case for Almazan—who also plays in the trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s band the E-Collective—as a soloist. His previous albums were more form-focused and classically oriented, with heavy string accompaniment. But on this record there is only one track with strings, a reprise—from Personalities—of “Bola De Nieve,” which in Spanish means “snowball,” the nickname of the great Cuban singer and pianist Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernández.
On this record, Almazan gives himself the chance to stretch out, accompanied by his longtime trio mates, drummer Henry Cole and bassist Linda May Han Oh, who play on all of his previous albums. Cole’s funk beats are like water; he creates rhythms that expand and contract. Oh’s bass work, meanwhile, is thick like molasses, keeping everything in place, even when she takes a solo.
Almazan navigates each track with a dexterous touch. On the first tune, “Benjamin,” so named for the donkey in George Orwell’s Animal Farm—one of a few overtly political compositions—Almazan begins with an impressively fleet-fingered introduction. “Jaula,” on the other hand, dedicated to Nelson Mandela, is a solo number, slow and contemplative.
If the album itself has a narrative, it exists first and foremost as a catalog of Almazan’s own diverse and ecumenical interests as a musician. And that makes sense, given that, at root, Almazan’s long-term project, going back at least to Rhizome, seems to be focused on music’s binding power, whether it comes via bird song, poetry or piano. It’s a lovely thought when filtered through his hands, because it is implied rather than stated. The record’s unofficial anthem appears to arrive, quaintly, at its end—a sweet solo rendition of Willie “the Lion” Smith’s understated stride composition “Music on My Mind.” There is, his own playing suggests, no higher pursuit. | 2019-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | self-released | June 15, 2019 | 7.5 | 434d4200-a517-4737-bcc2-66035bd55c07 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
Alicia Bognanno’s snarling alt-rock and sledgehammer choruses are blunted by the muddy production on her fourth album. | Alicia Bognanno’s snarling alt-rock and sledgehammer choruses are blunted by the muddy production on her fourth album. | Bully: Lucky for You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bully-lucky-for-you/ | Lucky for You | Even before reinventing her band as a solo operation in 2020, Alicia Bognanno wrote, composed, produced, and mixed every Bully record herself. That’s on top of singing and shredding. In control behind the microphone and at the boards, Bognanno cultivated a raw alt-rock revivalism. Her stunning, capacious Nashville rasp—the main event—screamed and soared above her crisp, clean instrumentals. Early press for Bully touted her apprenticeship to Steve Albini, suggesting, credibly, that she might be his heir apparent as a producer.
So why, on Lucky for You, Bully’s fourth studio album, does Bognanno cede so much control to Nashville producer JT Daly? Though Bognanno recorded some of her own guitars and vocals for this album, and was involved in its production and mixing, Daly is credited as the album’s sole producer and co-mixer. He’s Grammy-nominated for engineering, but acquits himself poorly here. Tinny drums, flatulent bass, an indistinct slurry of guitars—not one of the instrumentals on this album is up to Bognanno’s peerless snuff. Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.
Lucky for You shifts Bully’s sound into the territory of radio-friendly Y2K pop-rock pastiche lately made wildly popular by artists like Olivia Rodrigo and beabadoobee. It’s not Bognanno’s traditional milieu—which could account for her choice to pass the reins to another producer—but her performances stun nonetheless. The snarling “Hard to Love” is a highlight, recalling the Breeders and featuring an absolute sledgehammer drop of a chorus. “How Will I Know” is a grunge-lite flip of the question made famous by Whitney Houston, focusing, instead of infatuation, on the nearness of death. “If you go before I go, send me a sign,” Bognanno sings, before wondering if she’ll even be capable of receiving it: “How will I know, how will I know, how will I know?”
Bognanno wrote the best track on the album, “Days Move Slow,” while grieving her beloved dog, Mezzi. From the anhedonia of grief, she pulls something kinetic and insistent. She draws out each word of the title—daaaaays move slooooooow—as though pulling on a rubber band, only to let go and sting the listener with the realization that she’s singing about death, with direct references to the afterlife, to belief in God, to bouquets on graves. It may be the best mismatch of tone and content since “Dancing on My Own,” and it marks a new pinnacle for Bognanno.
Not every moment on Lucky for You is this successful. Some, like the pat “Change Your Mind,” dwell too much in cliché: “All I wanted was to feel wanted.” Others, like the bold and novel “A Love Profound,” experiment with vocal stylings new for Bognanno, but are undermined by swampy mixing. “Lose You,” a collaboration with Soccer Mommy, borrows lyrical motifs from Color Theory—“the shades of blue that remind me of you”—and winds up feeling like an outtake from that album.
The final two songs, “Ms. America” and “All This Noise,” make for a fascinating couplet. Both meditate on the state of the union, and each locks into a single emotional register: “Ms. America” is a downbeat grief spiral; “All This Noise” is a screaming punk rager in which Bognanno name-checks polar bears and AR-15s before bellowing “My body is not your choice!” Ultimately, though, “Ms. America” is more convincing, and heartbreaking. Bognanno considers whether or not to have children, and finally, quietly, decides, “I don’t want to teach a kid to fight.” It feels like an honest corrective to blistering protest diatribes, one that grieves for the fallen rather than charging into the next battle.
It’s this kind of lyrical introspection and emotional complexity that drew listeners to Bully’s debut, Feels Like, eight years ago. Bognanno preserves much of what made her earlier records great on Lucky for You, and pushes herself with some novel experimentation. Still, no one can produce her better than she can produce herself. | 2023-06-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 5, 2023 | 6.6 | 434de9bd-a386-45ba-b622-632b7494d77b | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
On his third and final album as SONOIO, Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails combines the brooding intensity of Trent Reznor’s band with arena-rock melodies in the vein of U2 and Depeche Mode. | On his third and final album as SONOIO, Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails combines the brooding intensity of Trent Reznor’s band with arena-rock melodies in the vein of U2 and Depeche Mode. | SONOIO: Fine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonoio-fine/ | Fine | For Alessandro Cortini, naming a solo project SONOIO feels like a conspiratorial wink. “Sonoio” means “it’s me” in his native tongue, Italian, and SONOIO is where he grants free reign to his personality, synthesizing everything that has come before it in his musical career. The tireless Cortini is a veteran of industrial pop giants Nine Inch Nails and New Order-ish emotionalists Modwheelmood, while under his own name he makes opulent ambient records that worship at the altar of the Buchla synthesizer.
Elements of all of these projects appear on Fine, his third and final SONOIO record. But, as might be expected of someone who spends his nights strapped to the NIN touring machine, their influence dominates. The album combines the brooding intensity and coiled aggression of Trent Reznor’s band with grandstanding arena-rock melodies that owe more to U2’s “big music” and Depeche Mode’s stadium-sized angst than to Skinny Puppy’s deviant thrash. By and large, these are the kind of solidly written, satisfyingly thick pop songs that would have Albuquerque row ZZ singing along; it’s easy to imagine Reznor bellowing out “Thanks for Calling” or “Bad Habit” on his latest Enormo-Dome trek.
Cortini, however, possesses neither Reznor’s aggressive authority nor Bono’s buffed-up emotional sincerity. His voice more closely resembles that of Sparks’ Russell Mael or Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe, all quivering intensity and twitchy falsetto. When it works—as on the sunstroke ballad “What’s Before” and the electronic shoegaze track “Left”—this unlikely fusion of music and vocals creates a wonderfully dramatic hybrid that’s somewhat akin to the synth-pop foppery of John Maus’ recent album Screen Memories. At other times, though, the theatrical sheen undermines the songs’ emotional heft. A line like, “Thanks for calling/Thanks for letting me go,” from “Thanks For Calling,” might be a barbarous kiss-off when delivered by Trent Reznor. But Cortini sounds petulant, like a teen whining at parents who wouldn’t let him go to a party.
That the vocals sometimes grate is a shame, considering that the best moments on this album have the instrumental grace of Cortini’s eponymous synth work. “I Don’t Know (Coda)” rests on a subtly burbling TB-303 line—a surprisingly delicate use of an instrument too often employed for its shrieking impact—that trails off into a duet between machine and glockenspiel. “Bad Habit” has a nebulous synth sound that wobbles around like a tired toddler, in a throwback to the dreamy world of Sonno, a 2014 solo album that grew out of lullabies Cortini composed while on tour. This is Fine at its best, though even it could have done without the vocals.
“I Don’t Know (Coda)” provides a fitting end to SONOIO’s charming but underdeveloped run. Whereas NIN regularly leave stages slick with sweat and littered with broken keyboard parts, this agreeably noodling closer suggests that Cortini would return to sweep up any mess he’d made after the house lights came back on. SONOIO turns out to be the Nine Inch Nails you can take home to meet the parents: a pleasant diversion that may leave you craving more illicit excitement. | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dais | July 31, 2018 | 6.1 | 43515e71-aed0-468a-80cd-8bd2a6c2646b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Claire Boucher's cassette-only debut of "post-Internet" DIY bedroom recordings gets an old-fashioned CD/LP release. Following a wave of hype, the re-release is a wisely timed holdover for the months before her next album comes out, but the immersive, enchanting collection is more than a quaint indicator of how far Grimes has come in the past year and a half. | Claire Boucher's cassette-only debut of "post-Internet" DIY bedroom recordings gets an old-fashioned CD/LP release. Following a wave of hype, the re-release is a wisely timed holdover for the months before her next album comes out, but the immersive, enchanting collection is more than a quaint indicator of how far Grimes has come in the past year and a half. | Grimes: Geidi Primes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15751-geidi-primes/ | Geidi Primes | In a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine blog (tagged: "culture;" previous post: "The Novelty Knit"), 23-year-old Claire Boucher proudly described the music she makes under the name Grimes as "post-Internet." "The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything," she said, and this omnivorousness is apparent in her eccentric, dreamy sound, which draws upon everything from dubstep to disco, Eastern music to 1990s R&B.
Even before that interview, it was clear Grimes knew her way around a web browser. She first attracted an audience outside Montreal's DIY art and music scene when she put her earliest recordings online for free, and since then she's cultivated an online presence that makes equal room for her music and haunting visual art. She's even issued preemptive strikes against critics' misguided games of Spot the Influence ("I don't listen to Kate Bush, nor have I ever," she tweeted a few weeks ago-- a delightful bit of sacrilege from an artist who's probably never read an article about herself that didn't contain the word "weirdo"). Whatever she’s doing, it's working: at the beginning of last year she was uploading to her MySpace the DIY bedroom recordings that would comprise her debut album, and now she and her art school haircut are posing in couture for Times online subscribers. (Just ask Salem-- shit doesn't get more post-Internet than that.)
Now that debut album, Geidi Primes, is getting a good old fashioned CD/LP rerelease on the UK-based label No Pain in Pop. (Previously its only physical release was a limited-run cassette on Montreal’s flourishing experimental pop imprint Arbutus.) Coming on the heels of her terrific material on the tantalizingly brief Darkbloom split EP, the Geidi Primes' re-release is a wisely timed holdover for the months before her next LP comes out early next year. But Geidi Primes is much more than a quaint indicator of how far Grimes has come in the past year and a half. Despite its modest production values and relative simplicity, it's a cohesive, enchanting, and surprisingly assured debut.
Even though it clocks in at a slight 30 minutes, Geidi Primes is a wholly immersive listen. The melodies are hooky and sweet, but each track has a throbbing undercurrent of menace that pulls you in like a riptide. It's hard to pinpoint exactly from where this pervading element of darkness springs-- especially since, on paper, most of the lyrics read like valentines. (Pretty much every discernable chorus revolves around the word "heart.") The hypnotic standout "Feyd Rautha Dark Heart" begins with a simple Casio-style beat and an ostensibly sugary hook-- "I won't break your heart in the dark"-- but the track builds into something decidedly eerie: chilly synth hits, zombified vocals, and percussion that sounds like rattling bones. By the end, even the sweet refrain sounds less like an expression of devotion and more like a chant meant to put you under some kind of spell. Which, you come to realize, is Geidi Primes' main objective.
Perhaps Geidi Primes' greatest virtue is its resourcefulness: It excels at crafting evocative moods from deceivingly simple sonic materials and song structures. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the simple, looping bassline of "Rosa", the brightest and most unabashedly straightforward song on the record, and also the one most likely to stay lodged in your head for days. Then there’s the brief, wordless "Gambang" making utter gorgeousness from nothing more than a slightly warped sample and breathy falsetto curlicues.
As a vocalist, Grimes knows how to work her range. Though she's become known for her impressive falsetto (which she pushes to rapturous, Donna Summer-like heights on the Darkbloom single "Vanessa") and she can occasionally pull of a spooky low tone that's faintly reminiscent of Karin Dreijer Andersson, she spends much of Geidi Primes in mid-range, tuneful deadpan, which lends wry humor to the lines she coos to a lover on "Zoal, Face Dancer": "Everybody thinks that I'm boring/ Many people think I've got no clue." Just because she's spacey-- yes, nerds, those are Dune references scattered throughout the track listing-- doesn't mean she's without earthly wit. It takes a pretty good sense of humor to write an utterly gorgeous closer and call it "Beast Infection".
Given her restlessly prolific creativity (she followed up Geidi Primes with another solid 2010 release, Halfaxa) and the bounding artistic strides she's displayed with her recent singles, Grimes could very well be poised for a meteoric rise with the release of her next full length. But Geidi Primes shows that even her earliest recordings displayed a distinct point of view and an oddly mesmerizing quality. There’s something refreshingly "post-Internet" about that too-- a dreamy soundscape that invites an escape from the glitchy universe, a brief provocation to let go and just bliss out. | 2011-09-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-09-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | No Pain in Pop / Arbutus | September 7, 2011 | 7.5 | 4351bec2-3111-44f5-93eb-81e96928e7ce | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
After a string of EPs and some offbeat hits, rapper/singer D.R.A.M. arrives with his first full-length, a record filled with funny asides and sharp details and its fair share of memorable hooks. | After a string of EPs and some offbeat hits, rapper/singer D.R.A.M. arrives with his first full-length, a record filled with funny asides and sharp details and its fair share of memorable hooks. | DRAM: Big Baby D.R.A.M. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22523-big-baby-dram/ | Big Baby D.R.A.M. | Roughly forty percent of the Hampton, Va., singer and rapper D.R.A.M.’s appeal is that he seems like just a really happy guy. His happiness is palpable, indestructible, communicable. His breakout hit was about the cha-cha, for god’s sake, a dance so winningly goofy in name and act that even 6-year-olds know to giggle at it. The chorus was about how he liked to cha-cha, and it was clear from the way he sang it that he meant it, goddamn it.
After Beyoncé Instagrammed herself dancing to it, “Cha Cha” became the viral novelty hit that remained a hit after both the “viral” and the “novelty” wore off. D.R.A.M. quickly proved that he was going to stick around, pumping out a steady stream of joyful, heartfelt, and ever-so-slightly silly songs that treat rap and R&B like a big bubblebath. He has the broad, inspirational corniness of a star camp counselor, the kind of relentless motivational charmer who could coerce a roomful of older kids who should know better to get up and dance the chicken.
Rap in 2016 is having a dizzy moment, in stark contrast with (or perhaps relief to) the sobering and dark times. Gentle positivity is suddenly a virtue, or an armor, and you can see it in music from new kids like Lil Yachty, who floats and gurgles amongst pink puffy clouds of beats like Kirby in his Dream Land, to Fetty Wap belting drunk-uncle love songs on Hot 97, to Chance, counting his blessings and bringing a lifetime’s worth of church services into the booth with him.
D.R.A.M. doesn’t really have new ideas to pitch into this ball pit, but on his full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M., he reminds us that new ideas aren’t the whole game. The key to D.R.A.M. is his generosity, evident in his personality and his voice, a huge barrel-chested warble that lands somewhere in between iLoveMakonnen and Biz Markie. There is something sly in that voice, a sense that he is purposefully singing with just a little less certainty than he needs to, just to keep things relatable and allow you to belt along.
Consider the first chorus of the first song: “I had to tell myself to go and get it myself,” he sings in a burly tone, and his vibrato wobbles a bit, like someone losing control of bike handlebars and steering towards a ditch. But then he comes in behind himself, stacking rich, flawless, three-part harmony, the top line a laser-cut falsetto, and you are gently reminded: He is actually a powerhouse.
His best songs often hinge on concepts that could easily work as lame Lonely Planet-style parodies. Like the silk-sheets, window-steaming, bedroom-ready quiet storm ballad “WiFi,” for example, in which the male suitor gently croons “Do you got wifi? Cause I really wanna show you somethin’/But my phone is fuckin’ up” and the woman responds “Do you like my feng shui in my living room?”
Yes, the song is funny, but it hits all sorts of other notes, too—“Put your phone down, please don't check it” pleads the woman, who just so happens to be Erykah Badu, an artist who made an entire whimsical and philosophical riff out of a mixtape full of songs about phones just last year. The tremble in her voice is not joking, and neither is the music, which is yearning and erotic and frank. D.R.A.M. has indicated that Hot Buttered Soul was a guiding light for him while recording, and Big Baby D.R.A.M. is full of evidence that he has learned real lessons from this study.
He manages the same balancing act on “Cute,” a song that could be insufferably cloying if someone else were pushing it too hard—the chorus is, after all, “I think you’re cute/Oh yes, I do” repeated in a pinched falsetto, and it also features the line “I choose you like a Pokémon.” But specificity rescues it: He admits “one thing ‘bout me, I am a foodie,” and describes the exact moment and location he first saw her Instagram. The song isn’t funny—it’s giddy, and few human emotions are worth treating as seriously.
Great comedians slip the dead-serious stuff into the middle of their routines, and D.R.A.M. sneaks in some confessions amidst all of this crowd-pleasing. He even kinda/maybe/sorta takes a shot at Drake, who jacked the beat of “Cha Cha” and attached it to his world-conquering “Hotline Bling.” “I was hemorrhaging in the red and I could not afford it/N*ggas tried to appropriate me, I could not go for it/I’m taking mine, I’m claiming mine, bitch I go Narco for it,” he bellows on the Young Thug-featuring “Misunderstood,” one of the only minor-key songs on the album. Even on his surprise Top–40 charting hit “Broccoli,” D.R.A.M. makes sure to note that he’s “at the restaurant with that ‘why you gotta stare?’ face,” implying that he’s aware you might have a reason to stare at him, and that he might not like the reason. It’s a barest hint of vulnerability, but it deepens the surrounding joy.
Some of the interludes on Big Baby D.R.A.M. sound like they originated in some distracted shower-singing moment and didn’t evolve from that point—“In a Minute/In House” gently wastes nearly six minutes of your time as he coos in your ear, and “Change My #” is similarly directionless. As an end-to-end album, it can grow tiring; as delightful as, say, “Cash Machine”’s flip of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” is, sometimes you just need a breather.
But D.R.A.M., one eye forever on the shot clock on his 15 minutes, leaves hints that he has yet another act planned; the sultry and low-key “Monticello Ave” retools some classic ’90s R&B grooves while he sits back, rapping in the pocket about the peculiarities and frustrations of his not-quite-star life and pining for someone. “I’m still mad at you for the shit you did, but not that mad, so just come to where I’m is,” he pleads. It’s poignant and small-scale and intimate, and about a million miles away from “Cha Cha.” Maybe one day we will no longer even remember that is where he started. | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / W.A.V.E. Recordings / Empire | October 28, 2016 | 7.8 | 435a53a2-3c56-4ec5-b2c4-07fe55135a18 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The concept behind Golden Tickets, a concept album from Yoni Wolf's WHY?, is generous and sweet. However, these songs represent the nadir of the project. | The concept behind Golden Tickets, a concept album from Yoni Wolf's WHY?, is generous and sweet. However, these songs represent the nadir of the project. | WHY?: Golden Tickets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18492-why-golden-tickets/ | Golden Tickets | The concept behind Golden Tickets is generous and sweet. As Yoni Wolf explained on the Joyful Noise label's website, the EP is a collection of songs for and about specific WHY? fans. "We would write a theme song for one customer who came to the [WHY?] web store and bought something every month... We'd read all about them on Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes even go so far as to contact their significant other to ask them questions. Then I would write the song on piano, and my brother would take the skeleton of lyrics & piano and turn it into a fully realized arrangement."
Those seven songs are collected here, on the Golden Tickets EP, and if I was any of these hardcore fans, I would be struggling with the uncomfortable question of whether my favorite band was personally mocking or belittling me. Part of the issue with these fan-specific valentines is unfair to Wolf but hard to ignore; Wolf's acrid delivery turns everything a little smarmy, which suits him well when he's addressing his favorite subject-- himself and his many faults-- but skews a little queasy when he's paying tribute to people who've done him the favor of repeatedly buying his music.
If I were the fan who Wolf pays tribute to on "Banana Mae", for instance, I would have some serious questions. Wolf opens with the room-clearing line "Follow me, @banana_mae/ If you wanna see what I have to say/ now I'm only less than twenty-tre/ But I'll Twit a tweet to make your hair turn grey" before offering an unflattering imitation of a stereotypical vapid, prattling teenage girl. Banana Mae gets the last laugh, though; the second verse is cobbled together from her own tweets, which ironically contain the only characteristically Yoni Wolfian insights to be found on Golden Tickets: "I'm very impatient for science to figure out/ how I can clone myself and make the clone interact with my friends and family, it's tiring." Or: "I think the reason I don’t have any friends is ‘cause the people that I click with the best/ Also hate to leave their beds." You can hear what she might like in Wolf's best writing.
Speaking of which: For WHY? fans who are not the seven people selected as this EP's subject matter, these songs represent the nadir of the WHY? project. Every song begins with the character baldly introducing themselves: "My name is Hunter Van Brocklin." "Well it's me, Dropjaw." Or "Peta E. Godfrey, I'm a bonafide Aussie." The characterizations are less sketches of human people and more little sock-puppet retellings of the sort of basic biographical info you can glean from scanning a person's Facebook and Twitter: "I was born to teach/ I do humanities/ Strictly public school, I think that should be the rule," he sings on "Peta Godfrey". Wolf's lyrics are bewilderingly lazy throughout: Hunter Van Brocklin is "just a small-town boy in this big city" and a "a simple Southern man trying to find my fate." Van Brocklin has "fingers like a poem when they press the keys." Fingers like a poem?
Wolf has long been a shrewd, incisive writer, and his words have often borne testament to the virtues of mental sweat and finger-cramping rewriting. You could practically see the ghosted revisions hovering over a perfect line like "God put a song on my palm that you can't read/ I'll be embalmed with it long before, you'll see." "I want that sharpened steel of truth in every word," he insisted on "This Blackest Purse." It's been awhile since we've seen that guy. On Golden Tickets, it sounds as if he's simply given up trying. There is one remaining golden ticket, by the way: "The lucky person who receives this golden ticket will have a WHY? song written about him or her," the album page says. "No foolin." In context, it sounds like a threat. | 2013-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Joyful Noise | September 25, 2013 | 3 | 4363eeb2-5374-46bf-8482-d1ee8fc2dc71 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Across five breezy, feel-good songs, the rising Afropop star continues to explore the overlap between the sounds of Ghana and those of his native Nigeria. | Across five breezy, feel-good songs, the rising Afropop star continues to explore the overlap between the sounds of Ghana and those of his native Nigeria. | Mr Eazi: Something Else EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-eazi-something-else-ep/ | Something Else EP | Mr Eazi knows good beats. Whether it’s a 14-song compilation or, in this case, a five-track appetizer, chances are high that he will deliver something listeners will want to blast on speakers during an outdoor summer party in Lagos (now socially distanced, of course). Since his 2013 debut mixtape, About to Blow, Mr Eazi has consistently explored the space between the musical innovations of Ghana and those of his native Nigeria, pulling rhythms that underline the musical kinship between the two West African giants.
Something Else is a fast-moving but intriguing return after a year spent expanding his label/culture center emPawa Africa, an incubator for African artists to develop, discover, and share new ways of creating music. Coming in at just a little over 12 minutes, it is more experimental than previous releases, detailing old truths and new exploits over classical melodies, while still loyal to its banku/Afropop roots. “E Be Mad,” “Love for You,” and “Cherry” are familiar offerings from the artist who gave us the über-chill “Pour Me Water” and the more vocally agile “Skintight.” Mr Eazi doesn’t wander too far from home as he reminds listeners why they’ve continued to show up for Eazi hits. They make you feel good and, for the music history buffs, they reliably present a new understanding of contemporary interpretations of both highlife and banku. On “Cherry,” his voice moves from a saccharine hook to thinly veiled declarations of sexual pleasure. Kenyan-born Xenia Manasseh adds a pleasant R&B flow to the track in the vein of Tinashe or Summer Walker. Their voices bounce easily off each other, and lend balance to the desires of both sexes.
Eazi is at his boldest and most brazen on fiery opener “The Don,” whose sleek, finely tuned beats lean into dancehall. Channeling the work ethic and finesse of Francis Ford Coppola’s first Don, Vito Corleone, Eazi is brash and ambitious, retelling the twists and turns that come with maneuvering through fame’s glare while working to leave a legacy that’s about more than just music. It’s an electric beginning, enough to make you forget the hollow “Saudi Arabia,” which invokes stereotypes of Middle Eastern opulence to explain how he plans to pamper his lover. Beyond its empty invocation of Arabian Nights-type fantasies, the song lands with a discomfiting thud when you think about the insidious and rampant anti-Blackness in Saudi Arabia, where North African immigrant workers suffer in “hellish” conditions. Geopolitical realities are tough to squeeze into a two-minute song, but it’s hard to think of anything else when the song’s central metaphor invokes a place that is unwelcome to so many.
Something Else has room for the past and future. Mr. Eazi is prescient in his mission to innovate local melodies and tones. While Western influences such as R&B and hip-hop continue to dominate global sounds, he continues to advocate for African rhythms as equal conduits of expression with the range to emote, guide, narrate, and build. Refusing to allow banku and highlife to be fossilized, he reimagines them as vehicles for transformative potential: the old ways paving a path to the new age.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Banku Music / emPawa Africa | February 23, 2021 | 6.5 | 436bc150-4ecb-4db9-be2d-0ea6b6f59fb1 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
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 calm before the storm, a long-out-of-print album from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac. | 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 calm before the storm, a long-out-of-print album from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac. | Buckingham Nicks: Buckingham Nicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buckingham-nicks-buckingham-nicks/ | Buckingham Nicks | There they are on the cover, in a black-and-white photograph: young and naked and impossibly beautiful, two people whose early work, in the popular imagination, was viewed almost exclusively through the prism of their mutual desire. We came to know Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks through music that, we were told, cataloged their conflict and heartbreak; here, on this sleeve, they are one, practically a single being.
By the time that Buckingham Nicks came out in September 1973, Lindsey and Stevie had been making music in bands and as a duo for five years, and had known each other for longer. They first sang together in 1966, when they both attended Menlo-Atherton High School in Palo Alto, at a church function for aspiring musicians. He banged out the chords to “California Dreaming” on piano, a current hit by the Mamas and the Papas, and she joined him on harmony. Two years later, Lindsey invited Stevie to join a band called Fritz with two of his boyhood friends. She was fronting the group by the summer of 1968.
Nicks was 19, and her heroes included Janis Joplin and Grace Slick; Buckingham was 18, a Beatles nut who also had an ear for folk music, particularly the Kingston Trio. Fritz was a catch-all of the various styles in the Bay Area at the time—some organ-backed garage rock, a bit of psychedelia that bled into cosmic blues.
You can listen to some of their music online, including a cover of “Born to Be Wild” and a studio session of one of the group’s original songs, “Take Advantage of Me.” Even this early, Nicks has one of the most immediately identifiable voices in rock, low and deep, like it’s bubbling up from her unconscious. She can sound vulnerable but rarely fragile, and when she’s singing something upbeat, as she does here, she sounds commanding.
Fritz scored some big opening gigs—Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana—and they had enough buzz by 1971 that Keith Olsen, a young record producer from Los Angeles who worked out of a dumpy studio called Sound City, flew up to see them. Olsen wasn’t particularly impressed with the band, but he liked Lindsey and Stevie and offered to work with them as a duo. That was the end of Fritz, and the start of Buckingham Nicks.
The pair spent the first few months working on their own, making demos on a four-track reel-to-reel in a spare room at the coffee plant in Daly City owned by Buckingham’s father. Every night, after the workers left, the two would gather with their instruments to write and record. Buckingham became obsessed with the possibilities of recording, experimenting with how sounds were layered and mixed. Nicks had a feel for the shape of melodies and an ear for words that drew from her interest in mysticism but also seemed applicable to everyday life. By the time they made their way down to Los Angeles to work with Olsen in 1972, they had a seven-song demo.
Olsen dubbed the tape and circulated it, but there were no takers, so they continued to hone their material, often at Sound City, where Olsen gave them free studio time. Nicks was the breadwinner—she cleaned Olsen’s house, waited tables at the Copper Penny, and hostessed at Big Boy while Buckingham smoked enormous amounts of hash in their apartment, working through musical ideas. They fought, and Lindsey could be verbally abusive, but they stayed focused. After about a year of this, Olsen finally secured them a deal, and Buckingham Nicks made its way into the world.
James Taylor and Carole King were stars, Joni Mitchell was a critic’s favorite, and Buckingham adored Cat Stevens: This was the context in which Buckingham Nicks operated. Loosely, it was folk-rock, but they brought a primal energy to it that would inform their later work. Listening now, you get the uncanny feeling you’re hearing vintage Fleetwood Mac hits that you just somehow forgot about. Nicks’ “Crying in the Night,” about a woman in a relationship who has a wandering eye, stands alongside her best Fleetwood Mac contributions. Her “Long Distance Winner” is also Mac-like, while Buckingham renders finger-picked guitar as if it were three-chord garage rock.
Buckingham’s finest songs point to his later triumphs. His voice strains in its higher register on the chorus of “Without a Leg to Stand On,” while the tune itself feels effortless, as if built by machine. This tension between methodical craft and drunk-on-music abandon would become his signature. To that end, “Don’t Let Me Down Again” sounds like a dry run of Rumours’ opener “Second Hand News.”
This pair was famous for writing angry music about each other, but Lindsey titled “Stephanie” after Stevie’s birth name, and said everything he wanted to say through his guitar. The delicate piece glimmers like a rose window and offers a microcosm of Buckingham’s painstaking approach to composition. In the last decade, Buckingham has taken to playing it in concert.
The gentle ballad “Crystal,” written by Stevie but sung by Lindsey, would get another life when it was carried over to Fleetwood Mac, and remains a moving example of how their voices blended together. Their harmonies embodied multiplicity: one voice conveying acceptance, the other wondering about what else might be out there. Each could play either role. Lindsey is the steadying force on “Crystal,” outlining the shape of Nicks’ song as she colors outside of it. Christine McVie’s keyboards would give it an extra twist of feeling on the more famous version, but everything the song needs is found here.
There was a lot of competition in the singer-songwriter field in 1973, and Buckingham Nicks wasn’t the best of the lot, but it’s excellent, and it’s still puzzling how swiftly it vanished. It’s packed with top-flight session musicians—Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Jim Keltner on drums—and was recorded by Olsen, a producer with dozens of gold and platinum records ahead of him, but it was a complete failure. Promotion was light, the few reviews were mostly bad, and Polydor dropped the duo a few months after the album came out. After a five-year build-up, the moment was over as quickly as it started.
But Stevie and Lindsey were writing for their next album even before this one was finished. Lindsey had penned “Monday Morning,” and Nicks, inspired by a passage in a book about a Welsh witch, had a stunning new song called “Rhiannon.” There was another ballad called “Landslide.” They weren’t ready to give up on Buckingham Nicks, which made the next decision difficult.
In December 1974, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac received news that his guitarist, Bob Welch, was quitting the band. Line-up changes were nothing new—in their seven-year history, they’d already been through several—but Fleetwood’s band was due back in the studio soon. He’d heard Lindsey play once, and Keith Olsen, with whom he was friendly, mentioned his name. It didn’t take long before he offered Buckingham the job. Lindsey was reticent, afraid of giving up what he and Stevie had built together. He said that Nicks would have to be part of the deal. After having dinner with the members of Fleetwood Mac in January 1975, they both agreed to join.
After this, things would get both easier and harder. Everything about Fleetwood Mac would be soap operatic—grand pianos carted into luxury suites while on tour, a road manager with onstage cocaine at the ready, intra-band couplings and breakups that kept the group on the edge of dissolution, even while they were selling millions of records. But here it was just the two of them, years deep into their dream of a life in music, writing songs that mattered to them and that they dared to hope might matter to someone else. | 2019-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polydor | August 11, 2019 | 8.4 | 436c6ce6-f5fc-4e1c-a747-143fbe1155a8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The expressive voice of Natasha Khan struggles to elevate this Brighton band's dramatic and goth-tinged debut above Ren Faire silliness. | The expressive voice of Natasha Khan struggles to elevate this Brighton band's dramatic and goth-tinged debut above Ren Faire silliness. | Bat for Lashes: Fur & Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9855-fur-gold/ | Fur & Gold | Think "bat" as in both the flirty verb and the gothy noun. Fur & Gold is often a dark and atmospheric record, but it remains playful and self-aware enough to pull back every time it inches towards self-parody. Largely structured around the vocals of the Pakistani-born Brit Natasha Khan, Fur & Gold shows a band quite good at giving their songs room to breathe and evolve, allowing the songs to expand out before snapping back into focus on Khan's expressive voice.
Opener "Horse and I" skirts Renaissance Faire silliness, but proves musically intriguing enough to push past any hokey aesthetic choices. Yes, Khan can come off as a bit dramatic, but her best songs fit the part. "Trophy" is perhaps the album's finest track, plodding along elegantly like a darker and slicker Lavender Diamond. "Tahiti" is the sonic standout, but suffers from some jarringly awkward phrasing in its chorus. "Sad Eyes" never quite fulfills the emotional potential generated by Khan's voice and some sparse piano chords, and it also illustrates a wider point: Uncomplicated and vaguely mystical lyrics generally make sense here, but Khan occasionally sings like she's not really sure what she's saying. An unexpected "Come and spend the night" halfway through "Sad Eyes" might as well be "I'd like a burrito."
Many of the album's biggest disappointments come simply because the band's potential is so palpable, especially during more restrained and focused moments. But as strong as Fur & Gold's individual tracks can be, the record as a whole is frustratingly dilute. While Khan has a real talent for edging towards emotional extremes, she seems to get lost in atmosphere. And ultimately, Fur & Gold sounds a little bit too comfortable for its own good. Khan is a great singer, and her band is undoubtedly competent and capable, but the record sounds like it wants to be more than it is. Khan stops just short of the boldness that can make this kind of record great-- imagine Björk wearing a fur coat rather than a dead swan or Siouxsie Sioux wearing a peasant dress rather than a Nazi uniform. Bat For Lashes dip their feet in some difficult waters, but often seem too preoccupied with their reflection to jump in. | 2007-02-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-02-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Caroline / Echo / She Bear | February 8, 2007 | 6.5 | 436d3594-5ea3-47aa-bd19-aad3f9a4ea3f | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
In the ’80s underground, the Pacific Northwest artist Kerry Leimer never fit into any one category or scene. His soundtrack for the 1982 documentary Land of Look Behind could be called ambient reggae. | In the ’80s underground, the Pacific Northwest artist Kerry Leimer never fit into any one category or scene. His soundtrack for the 1982 documentary Land of Look Behind could be called ambient reggae. | K. Leimer: Land of Look Behind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22790-land-of-look-behind/ | Land of Look Behind | Three years ago, RVNG Intl.’s loving survey of Pacific Northwest musician Kerry Leimer revealed a contemplative player in the American late 70s/early 1980s underground who didn’t quite slot into any one category or scene. He wasn’t really a punk, though he took a decidedly unlearned approach to music-making. And despite delving into synthesizers and ambient soundscapes, Leimer didn’t really turn himself into a new age cottage industry. He even made twitchy, drum-heavy tracks as Savant, but he wouldn’t quite be considered a dance music producer either. In retrospect, Leimer seemed mostly like a one-man iteration of American kosmische music.
A sense of detachment from genres and scenes comes up again on this reissue of Leimer’s long out-of-print soundtrack for Alan Greenberg’s 1982 documentary, Land of Look Behind. Not readily available on streaming sites, the film is one to track down. It remains one of the most fascinating looks at the Rastafarian culture that begat Jamaican music, its eye trained on both the dense, tangled “bad land” of Cockpit Country as well as Kingston in the wake of Bob Marley’s funeral. And while plenty of Jamaican music fills the film, Leimer’s contribution to the score expertly hovers between the island’s ritualistic nyabinghi drumming and futuristic analog synthesizers. It’s a soundtrack for a film that at times seems like a vague remembrance of a film itself, disassociating certain elements from the celluloid and imagining them in strange new ways.
Call it ambient reggae—even if it’s too fidgety to fully settle into either of those sounds. When the nyabinghi drums crop up, they’re often background sounds rather than immediate thunder, adding just a subtle pulse to the sublime shimmer of “The Outpost.” And when the drum circles move to the fore—as on centerpiece “The Cockpit”—Leimer makes the ambient washes more ethereal, recalling some of Steve Roach’s work with percussionists from the ’80s. On “Confusion in Belief,” sunburst synths entwine with tribal drums from the film, mixing with Leimer’s keys and a battery of percussionists: Steve Fisk, Kevin Hodges, David and James Keller. At times, the sound anticipates Boards of Canada, with chunky drums, drifting chords, and voices swirling about, just at the verge intelligibility.
It’s rare to have vocals emerge in Leimer’s work, so his way with looping, tweaking, and layering voices from the film into rhythmic counterpoint fascinates. Chant, casual chatter, an overheard conversation—they all get minced into sound. A location recording of a crowd clamors in the distance on the post-punk landscape of “Gun Court.” Leimer then samples a Jamaican voice discussing the bush and contorts it into all sorts of patterns on “Testimony and Honor.” He chops up that distinct patois and adds an array of handclaps, bird sounds, tapped hi-hats, and rewound tape atop it.
Three bonus tracks are tacked onto this reissue, though Leimer didn’t finish them until many years later. Outside of an extended version of “The Cockpit,” they don’t grapple with the coarse elements of Jamaica; Leimer instead emphasizes the piano and other acoustic sounds in his studio. In a decade that would see numerous artists engage in ethnic music and modern composition, from the likes of Jon Hassell to the Made to Measure series, the eight tracks of the original soundtrack remain unmatched in the decade. By turns raw and elegant, rhythmic and unearthly, Leimer’s music evokes and retains the mystery of Jamaica itself. | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Palace of Lights | February 3, 2017 | 8.2 | 4381563e-34d3-4507-b46e-a8422abe0291 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Berlin-based artist pays tribute to her native Lima, Peru in bittersweet house music that wears its spiritual yearning on its sleeve. | The Berlin-based artist pays tribute to her native Lima, Peru in bittersweet house music that wears its spiritual yearning on its sleeve. | Sofia Kourtesis: Fresia Magdalena EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofia-kourtesis-fresia-magdalena-ep/ | Fresia Magdalena EP | Sometimes, particularly these days, those in search of grace find they must create it themselves. In the Callao district of Lima, Peru, for instance, crowds of outcasts including transgender individuals and people surviving homelessness and poverty gather to worship a DIY saint at a concrete-block shrine. Sarita Colonia was a devout domestic in the 1930s who cared tirelessly for her troubled family and then died at 26, her body tossed in an anonymous mass grave. Since then, Colonia has become a cult figure for people in Lima who deserve the mercy their Catholic church denies them, just as it denies Colonia a sanctioned sainthood. Miracles persist: A drag queen told the L.A. Times that Colonia saved him from murderous homophobes, bending the bullets around him Matrix-style. Over the decades, the shrine has become a party, a kind of rave for the faithful who can’t get past the Catholic church’s velvet ropes.
Colonia has appeared on the cover of each release by Lima-born, Berlin-based Sofia Kourtesis; her visage hovers in the clouds or emerges through thick coats of paint on the producer’s two excellent 2019 EPs for Stockholm’s reliable bliss experts Studio Barnhus, as if 12" sleeves could be Shrouds of Turin for a new kind of savior. Kourtesis titled the first one after herself and the second for the should-be-saint. She’s there on the cover of Kourtesis’s new EP, whose design by Sofia Lucarelli joins illustrations of plants and photos of the Callao cemetery as if to emphasize the nature of life and death. The music within throws its hands in the air as prayers to house deities like Moodymann, whose powers of anticipation and release are echoed in Kourtesis’ extended sighs; DJ Koze, the Loki of post-Balearic tricky disco, whose style is here rendered a bit more low-key and beatific; and fellow bell-ringer evangelicals Pantha du Prince and Four Tet, schooled in the holy trinity of crown, sound bow, and clapper. But Kourtesis has a sound of her own: unfailingly warm, thoughtful in form, risking a certain conservatism for the sake of welcome comfort. Like the shrines to Colonia, Kourtesis’ beats reward belief.
“Fresia Magdalena” expands the pantheon of those Kourtesis finds venerable, including her mother, Fresia, and the people of Magdalena del Mar, the district of Lima where, as a teenager, she surfed the waves and got banished from convent school. Opener “La Perla” puts its faith in ripples of synths and briny percussion, breaking around foamy bits of field recordings and her own vocals; it’s an aching tribute to afternoons spent staring at the sea and trying to make peace with her father’s death. His voice intermingles with samples of disco diva riffing and other, younger voices on “Nicolas,” which takes the pleasure principles of French-touch house à la Roulé and builds a casa de playa beneath an ocean of stars. “By Your Side” is a bit more ooh-la-la, decked out in samples of snazzy horn sections and someone tickling ivories that will tickle the fancy of party people whenever the parties resume.
“Juntos” swings like prime-era Herbert, but its vibe is more morning-after than afterparty, closer to her current Berlin than the Peru of her past. A melancholy violin cuts through the gloom, a crisp beat fidgets, a bit of melody jumps an octave, variously an earworm and alarm. The track embodies doubt but won’t mope; it peers into the vastness of what’s just below sadness and turns away, both clear-eyed and teary. And then arrives “Dakotas,” shimmering and dawn-y, tranced like Octo Octa and Eris Drew have been lately but with shakers and open hi-hats serving as the Amen. Pads, deep and wide in the mix, offer softness. Voices form choruses; some say “hi.” (Or, ahem, “high.”) It’s a modest kind of heartfelt anthem. If you need it, it’s a miracle.
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. | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | March 24, 2021 | 7.5 | 43859508-ae47-4e54-9fe8-15ee13522d97 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The Necks’ 20th album is as laser-focused on repetition as ever. But for the first time, the trio indulges its rock’n’roll instincts, resulting in one of the most powerful albums in the band’s catalog. | The Necks’ 20th album is as laser-focused on repetition as ever. But for the first time, the trio indulges its rock’n’roll instincts, resulting in one of the most powerful albums in the band’s catalog. | The Necks: Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-necks-body/ | Body | Spoiler alerts do not apply to the Necks. For nearly three decades, the instrumental Australian trio has often followed a deceptively simple formula, both in the studio and on stage: Begin in miniature, with discrete thoughts stated patiently with grand piano, upright bass, and spare drums. Over the course of an hour or so, ratchet up the intensity and density of those phrases, expanding and interlocking them until they suggest much more than those primitive elements—perhaps a symphony, sustaining a crescendo as if holding a collective breath, or a large free-jazz ensemble, locked inside an unexpected moment of improvisational communion. There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes they update their palette, adding a guitar here, an organ there; sometimes they invert the mold, so a monolithic sound breaks down rather than building up. But listening to the best of the Necks’ 20 albums can feel like watching a favorite movie for the 10th time; you get the plot and have even memorized some of its tricks, but changes in your own perspective let you see it anew, to discover a new thread inside a pattern you thought you knew.
That said, spoiler alert: Almost halfway into Body, the trio’s engrossing and overwhelming 20th album, the Necks shoot from a slumber of pensive bass and piano into a clanging post-rock eruption, where walloped drums swing hard and heavy beneath pounded keys and shrieking electric guitar that washes everything in vivid neon streaks. The first time you hear it, you may jolt upright with surprise, as if a boogeyman has suddenly appeared from around a corner in that movie you thought you knew so well. But this is not a blip. For a quarter-hour, the Necks grind away at this theme, rending a basic rock’n’roll riff and rhythm into utter dust.
Tony Buck, who tortures his drums and tames the electric guitar here, is the anchor and the aggressor. But it’s Chris Abrahams, ducking behind the cover of Buck and bassist Lloyd Swanton, who dances inside the din with boogie-woogie piano lines. Like funhouse mirrors, his harmonies reflect and reshape foundational rock chords, offering flickers of light from inside the storm. The unexpected stretch matches the delirious heights of the reborn version of Swans, when Michael Gira’s big band would lash out at a melody for half an hour, or the dizzying swirl of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, where one chord played over and over against a swinging beat somehow produces a trance. This is ecstatic music, as engrossing and powerful as anything the Necks have ever made.
The middle of Body is so jarring and thrilling it runs the risk of overshadowing the rest of the album. Divided into four unequal movements, though, these 57 minutes include some of the Necks’ most delicate and considered playing this decade, and especially since their 2013 opus, Open. The first section is a classic Necks incantation—infinite piano glissandi scaling the sides of kinetic percussion and bulbous bass thuds. It conveys a restless and anxious feeling, the equivalent of watching a lab rat scurry inside some booby-trapped labyrinth. At one point, Buck divides the beat by shuffling brushes or perhaps a chain over his snare drum, evoking a snake’s threatening hiss.
In the brief second section, the Necks linger inside a quiet world of organ whirrs, repetitive piano chords and bass tones, and sweeps of acoustic guitar. It is ominously still, setting up the sense that something cataclysmic is going to happen, that something has got to give. The eruption that follows—those 15 minutes when the Necks become a glorious post-rock band—is an escape valve for pressure that has nowhere else to go. It cannot last, either. The Necks allow it to collapse into a reverie of bowed bass, chiming bells, granulated piano, and crackling electronics. The drums occasionally flare up into aftershocks, but the end is mostly about surveying the damage, like waking up after a party or emerging after a tornado and deciding what’s next. As it fades into a distended hum, Body offers no clues or answers—only a little light for you to see what remains.
The Necks’ iterative framework has always allowed for individual interpretation. Decorated only with minimalist art or august landscapes, their records have been like expressionist paintings, meticulously constructed but emotionally conducive to the user’s own narrative and meaning. That applies to Body, sure, but something feels different here—ominous, urgent, melancholy. All this action builds only to fall apart, leaving us in a void of silence. For a trio that has reveled in building its own little worlds for three decades, Body feels newly reflective of our space and time, a stark and jarring statement about the precipice of modern life. This is as high as the Necks have ever taken us and, as such, as low as they’ve ever left us. This time, it’s hard to listen to the Necks and hear anything but our world, sounded back. | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | August 13, 2018 | 8 | 43910f88-b22d-42a8-b9e4-63b57849b475 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The long-awaited debut from the Los Angeles rapper cashes in on its promise. It’s the most gripping record in his catalog. | The long-awaited debut from the Los Angeles rapper cashes in on its promise. It’s the most gripping record in his catalog. | Nipsey Hussle: Victory Lap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nipsey-hussle-victory-lap/ | Victory Lap | It’s taken Los Angeles MC Nipsey Hussle longer than most to create his moment. The seasoned mixtape veteran has been on the indie-rap circuit for almost a decade and was once touted as a future star. When fame didn’t come, he made his own seat at the table, infamously selling copies of his Crenshaw tape for $100 each and getting JAY-Z to endorse him and buy 100 of them. He parlayed his rap successes into local business ventures—including a hair shop and a “smart store” for his clothing line—and became a hometown hero who turned his talent into a small merchandising empire. Victory Lap, his first album on a multi-project deal with Atlantic Records, is more than six years in the making. It is formally his “debut album” but functionally his big cash in. Bridging several generations of West Coast rap, Victory Lap uses his cache of war stories to power the most gripping entry in his catalog, recouping an investment.
His raps are still riddled with flashbacks to gangland survivalism, but he’s focused on his pivot to legitimacy, how he flipped Cripping on Crenshaw into a lucrative indie-rap career and then flipped that into an entrepreneurial enterprise. Black capitalism is foremost on his mind these days; he wants to build up his community and get others to follow, advocating for the grooming of more strong black men. But Nipsey’s ambitions can be more problematic than they seem on the surface: He has used his enthusiasm can to fuel homophobia, denigrating many of the men he claims to want to empower. There are nuggets to take aways from his lectures, but the primary lesson to be learned here is just how ingrained “toughness” is in representations of manhood.
As statements go, Victory Lap is more of a remembrance than a celebration. From digging up $100,000 his brother buried in his mother’s backyard for safekeeping only to discover half the money had molded to fighting off surprise challengers trying to steal jewelry from his entourage in Vegas, the album painstakingly documents the life of a reformed bruiser turned hood economist. Self-taught and self-funded, Nipsey fought to escape the cycle of an existence measured only in summers—time spent as “the man” on the block or serving sentences in the pen. He has been chasing sustainability since he was a teenager, and now that he has it, he’s appreciative, relieved even. He doesn’t just bask in his moment, though, he challenges others to pursue the same goals, as on “Million While You Young,” which equates money with salvation (“I can tell you niggas how I came up/Similar to climbin’ out the grave, huh”).
His flow is effortless, letting off stream-of-consciousness musings on death and loss that carry anxiety and paranoia within: “All my partners steady passin’, tryna wiggle through this madness/Tryna fight this gravity at times and I swear I could feel it pull me backwards/Puttin’ thousands on they caskets, tryna pick the right reactions/I appreciate the process, but I’m so conflicted about the status,” he raps on “Status Symbol 3.” Ghosts of lost friends and loved ones haunt his raps, the echoes of shots fired long ago still ring in his ears, and his verses are full of close calls. There are subtle tensions within even his most gaudy tales, as no win has come without consequence or sacrifice. But his raps aren’t just a mark of persistence, they are a push to improve—both his state of mind and quality of life.
Nipsey’s rhymes are designed to string out little observations until they form a big idea. They aren’t instantly quotable, but they slowly unspool to reveal kernels of fortune-cookie wisdom. “This ain’t entertainment, it’s for niggas on the slave ship/These songs just the spirituals I swam against them waves with,” he raps on “Dedication.” The remarks don’t always connect or make sense in sequence but they can create powerful impressions. He stays on-message almost the entire record, promoting the expansion of black wealth. On “Last Time That I Checc’d,” which is in part an homage to Jeezy, he salutes hustlers in the streets trying to feed their kids and single moms struggling to make ends meet. But he calls for more “black owners” and presents himself as the template.
Debuts are usually albums of firsts, but Victory Lap is full of sequels and standards. When it isn’t heavily indebted to his West Coast forebears Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, and Dj Quik, or literally adding a follow-up in a song series—“Blue Laces 2,” “Keyz 2 the City 2”—it is returning to Nipsey’s well for hard-nosed bully rap. The hour-long album honors all the work he’s put in and looks back at all he’s achieved, but it also looks forward to all he has yet to build and all those he can still inspire. His tactics can be tone-deaf and without nuance, but he knows exactly who he’s speaking to and for. | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | All Money In / Atlantic | February 24, 2018 | 7.8 | 43915730-7042-4b93-835f-eafec3f63b66 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The debut solo album from the Big Thief guitarist has a quiet and mischevious spirit, with a focus put on his nimble playing and Texas twang. | The debut solo album from the Big Thief guitarist has a quiet and mischevious spirit, with a focus put on his nimble playing and Texas twang. | Buck Meek: Buck Meek | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buck-meek-buck-meek/ | Buck Meek | Buck Meek may not be a household name, but as a guitarist for Big Thief, he’s been a chief architect of several dazzling songs. His instrumental skills lie not in writing instant earworms or arena-rattling riffs; rather, his playing galvanizes the emotional impact of Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s words.
On his self-titled solo debut, however, Meek delivers limber, springy songs that prioritize his songwriting and a more laid-back approach to the guitar. Before Big Thief got off the ground, he and Lenker worked together on sparse, guitar-driven tunes that they released under their own names. Meek’s new material hews closer to those proto-Big Thief songs—they share the same loose-limbed affability and a gentle spirit that evades frailty.
But at its core, Buck Meek feels like a country record, and not just because Meek’s native Texan twang stands at the forefront of every tune. The album has a mischievous spirit like the celebrated self-titled LP from cult-hit country star Willis Alan Ramsey. With its lightly teasing chorus and Meek’s goading delivery, “Ruby” in particular feels like the grandchild of Ramsey’s saucy “Northeast Texas Women.” “Joe by the Book” is a straightforward appreciation of an honest mechanic, while closing number “Fool Me” is a woozy whirl that feels tailor-made for last-call, abetted by wobbly honky-tonk piano and touches of pedal steel reverberating in the background. The song reels like a liquor-fueled lament, with Meek singing, “Every time and time again/I’m the loser in the end.” Employing a favored narrative tool of country balladeers, Meek wryly twists the song as it ends: “Fool me with your tears any time,” he sings in its final moments.
Meek’s songs are at their strongest when just amble from beginning to end. His prickly guitar riffs on “Sue” make it sound as though he could barely be bothered to finish bringing them to fruition. But he’s too good of a guitarist for such a move to be actual laziness; rather, these tricks merely bolster the record’s generally easygoing mood. When he occasionally edges into darker areas, he never dwells there for long. “Flight 9525” feels cold and lonely across its two minutes with its refrain of “If I could find a way back home, I’d go.” Later in the record, “Best Friend” outlines an unnamed betrayal that seems to be from the perspective of a dog. Meek sketches out recurring characters and situations, but leaves listeners to their own devices on filling in the blanks. He never tips his hand as to who Suzy is or why Maybelle is sighing wistfully at her costume jewelry, but sometimes these mysteries add unexpected flutters of humor: “It’s hard to know what time the roast went in/’Cause I locked myself outside again” he concludes on “Exit 7 Roses.”
With only two of his ten songs extending past three minutes, Meek leaves little time for a listener to sink into each one. As a result, the album feels like a modest sampler of light refreshments rather than a radical statement of self, and the weightlessness that makes many of the record’s components so charming also prevents them from making a substantial impact. Buck Meek may evaporate quickly, but it sublimates into songs that are hard to leave behind. | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Keeled Scales | May 19, 2018 | 7.2 | 439434e9-f90a-4e97-8ad3-e25910741bb9 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Chicago band that includes members of the Ponys and Boas brings its jagged rock mix from Touch and Go to Kranky. | Chicago band that includes members of the Ponys and Boas brings its jagged rock mix from Touch and Go to Kranky. | Disappears: Lux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14162-lux/ | Lux | Disappears is made up of some Chicago scene veterans-- Brian Case of garage-rock favorites the Ponys as well as several members of the defunct post-rock band Boas. Their music combines elements of both groups, but it nearly became a casualty of the industry's current financial mess. Disappears were the very last act signed to Touch and Go before the label shut down, and as a result, their debut, Lux, was almost lost in the shuffle. Luckily they were eventually scooped up by Kranky, and though their style differs considerably from the experimental and ambient that label is known for, it seems a good fit for Disappears' dense and foreboding sound.
Disappears' sound is a pared-down, drone-heavy mixture of Velvet Underground scuzz, garage-rock energy, and krautrock propulsion. It may not feel like the most unique approach, but, importantly, the band seems aware of that. Part of Disappears' appeal is that they've chosen to work within a set of stylistic and sonic limitations, where vocals and instrumentation are stripped back to their most essential. It's more about minimalism and mastering the basics than making something brand-new.
It works because Disappears keep things tight; even though there's heaviness and repetition in these tracks, usually they're about three minutes long. "Gone Completely" is a killer opener, a rush of fuzz-laden guitars and simple, severe drumming. On this track and throughout the album, frontman Case's vocals are buried in the mix just right-- his delivery is kind of a Britt Daniel-meets-Iggy Pop sing-speak-- and clouded in the feedback his words sound more powerful, like they're trying to escape. The band mostly finds a comfortable zone and rides it, but each track tweaks the formula just so, and the mood stays jet-black dark throughout.
Things do start to feel a bit same-y toward the end of the record. On "Little Ghost" and "New Cross", it sounds like the band is revisiting ideas they touched on earlier. But when a group is working in such tight confines, some overlap is natural. That the goal here is intentionally limited ultimately works for and against Disappears-- they achieve the sound they want, and it does sound good, but it's hard to think of Lux as much more than that, because the components are so familiar. Still, that they're able to make these well-worn rock tropes feel quite so menacing after all this time is an achievement in its own right. | 2010-04-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-04-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Kranky | April 22, 2010 | 6.9 | 43a72e0c-0262-4a64-ac3d-620ae7131e8b | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
This self-released compilation from Yves Tumor is more atmospheric than last year’s excellent Serpent Music. Its 12 sketches account for some of the prettiest songs Tumor has made. | This self-released compilation from Yves Tumor is more atmospheric than last year’s excellent Serpent Music. Its 12 sketches account for some of the prettiest songs Tumor has made. | Yves Tumor: Experiencing the Deposit of Faith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-tumor-experiencing-the-deposit-of-faith/ | null | In his music and performances, Yves Tumor shows equal reverence for light and dark, his best compositions threaded through with shocks of blistering or even ugly sound. His last solo release, 2016’s excellent Serpent Music, was heavy and seductive, but with the self-released compilation Experiencing the Deposit of Faith—whose release coincides with the announcement of his signing to Warp—Tumor gives us a set of off-the-cuff songs that deal in the airier side of things.
The 12 tracks that make up Experiencing the Deposit of Faith seem culled from somewhere in-between. They trade Serpent Music’s definition—both its rounded grooves and harsh décor—for atmospherics and ambivalent loops. I’m reminded of the scratchy anthems Tumor made as Teams in the early 2010s, though here, those pileups of fuzz are dialed back, and we’re more easily able to locate the seams of his constructions. On “E. Eternal,” a tranquil classical guitar phrase is cut with what sounds like a crowd cheering for a sports match and then rich, droning male vocals. And the canned shimmer and dry, clattering percussion of “Paigon Hunting” are bluntly layered such that you’re aware of the tones’ vague mismatching.
One might call this an ambient release, but thinking along the lines of genre does little to open up Tumor’s work—these songs are more like collages or sketches. Something as brief as the two, two-and-a-half-minute “AfricaAshes” or “Anya’s Loop” nonetheless contains multiple surfaces, samples refracting as they reiterate: a soul loop lends dusty warmth and a nod to tradition, while halting structures link more to avant-leaning futurists like Actress. And something like the spark of fireworks against a mournful sax solo at the close of “Prosperity Awareness” is singular, a cinematic take on the field recording. If not in shape, the spirit of these compositions rests in pop music, a desire to give the listener something beautiful to hang onto.
Even with their repetitive structures and rough edges, these are some of the prettiest songs Tumor has made. The nonchalance of the compilation form allows an incidental delicateness to take the center. Where Serpent Music found itself in the more apocalyptic dimensions of the spiritual—with song titles like “Perdition” and “Dajjal,” a term in Islam for a false messiah or antichrist—Experiencing the Deposit of Faith, as its title suggests, evokes relaxed experiences of everyday reflection and transcendence. These revelations are simple: there’s something like morning sunlight in the way gauzy vocal harmonies enter above a William Basinski-like piano loop midway through “Ayxita, Wake Up.”
And such a spirituality wouldn’t carry weight if it weren’t a bit vulnerable, a bit sad. Closer “Love is the Law” moves slowly through a humid woodwind melody grounded by bass, a day’s-end piece of melancholia. It cultivates a quick intimacy, and a sense that one needn’t reach far from one’s surroundings to feel interwoven with something a little bigger. | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 23, 2017 | 7.8 | 43a921dc-cd88-49c4-9087-576ac051853f | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
The adventurous musician and composer takes a step back toward a simpler, sparer sound. | The adventurous musician and composer takes a step back toward a simpler, sparer sound. | Nils Frahm: All Encores | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-all-encores/ | All Encores | The German pianist Nils Frahm likes to think big. He is the founder of Piano Day, an annual holiday dedicated to the instrument, and for a time he was the owner of the world’s largest upright, a Klavins M450i, standing a mammoth 14 feet, nine inches tall. (Since the release earlier this year of the M470i, eight inches taller, his model has, alas, been relegated to proverbial second fiddle.) Stages sag under the weight of his live rig, which can consist of Yamaha grand piano, Fender Rhodes, vintage Mellotron, three Roland Juno-60 synths, at least three drum machines, five Roland RE-501 Chorus Echoes, and racks upon racks of sundry effects, mixers, amps, and still more keyboards; darting from station to station, Frahm concocts a throbbing sort of chamber techno, a many-layered mixture of electronic pulses and acoustic timbres. Still, on record, his music often tends toward the opposite extreme: a kind of contemplative, cloistered intimacy.
Where last year’s All Melody, Frahm’s most ambitious album statement to date, attempted to bring together those two opposing poles—fashioning choir, strings, horns, gongs, pipe organ, and his usual welter of acoustic and electronic elements into a whole at once vast and hushed—All Encores takes a step backward, toward a simpler, sparer sound. In essence, it represents a set of rough drafts, avenues abandoned as All Melody assumed its final form. All 12 tracks here were originally released on a trilogy of EPs, remnants of a proposed triple album that never came to completion, exploring distinct corners of Frahm’s musical practice.
The first four tracks focus on Frahm’s solo piano, with the addition of a brief trumpet soliloquy that opens the second song, “Ringing,” on a particularly mournful note. This is terrain Frahm has explored, in slightly different form, on 2012’s Screws and 2015’s Solo; the pleasure here is in the virtually unplugged proprieties of the recordings—no bells or whistles, just Frahm’s sentimental melodies swimming in the natural ambiance of the Berlin Funkhaus studios, where he recorded. Like All Melody’s unadorned highlights “My Friend the Forest” and “Forever Changeless,” All Encores’ opener, “The Roughest Trade,” is recorded in a way that emphasizes the piano’s mechanics—the clack of the keys as they rise and fall; the soft shuffle of the striking hammers. It amounts to a kind of X-ray of melody in motion, the piano’s wood-and-metal skeleton illuminated beneath Frahm’s pale balladry. None of the other three piano songs have quite the same emotional pull—their melodies are simpler, or simply more forgettable—though the gently swaying “The Dane,” a staple of his live shows, comes close.
After “Harmonium in the Well,” an 11-minute study for reed organ and natural reverb (presumably, given the title, the one he fashioned out of a stone well in Mallorca), All Encores returns to the hybrid textures of All Melody, albeit in scaled-back form. “Sweet Little Lie” sets a drowsy piano lullaby against whispering static; “A Walking Embrace,” for piano and swelling synth pads, verges on the maudlin, as delicate—and as dated—as a collection of glass animals. Only “Spells” attempts the climatic scale of All Melody’s most elaborate pieces—a welcome shot of adrenaline just when the album is in danger of expiring from sheer politeness.
It’s a shame that “Artificially Intelligent” is less than two minutes long, because its hiccuping spray of pipe organ and wordless voice is by far the album’s most original moment, translating Frahm’s acoustic palette into a form somewhere between Morse code, abstract expressionism, and the markings on seismograph scrolls. But the final two songs are worth waiting for: The hypnotic “All Armed” is a sidewinding cross between Shackleton and Jon Hassell, while “Amirador” layers rich, deep, organ-like synthesizer tones into a shifting ambient etude of filmic proportions. It suggests a new direction for Frahm’s music, albeit one that it doesn’t seem like he’s quite figured out yet. Nearly four minutes of the 14-minute piece are virtually silent—as though, finding himself at a crossroads, Frahm were holding his breath, waiting for fresh inspiration to strike.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | October 22, 2019 | 6.5 | 43abb8c4-aa6c-42c7-bcbc-ba2834f2dd8c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprise the broad strokes of Rollie Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style. | Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprise the broad strokes of Rollie Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style. | Cadence Weapon: Afterparty Babies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11242-afterparty-babies/ | Afterparty Babies | On Cadence Weapon's pair of 2005 releases, the mixtape Cadence Weapon Is the Black Hand and the album Breaking Kayfabe, it was thrilling to watch (former Pitchfork writer) Rollie Pemberton assemble his hip-hop bricolage in plain view. The sparse Canadian rap canon afforded him plenty of room to maneuver, and he used it to execute acrobatic feats of self-invention. As the son of Teddy Pemberton, the radio DJ for the seminal Canadian hip-hop program "The Black Experience in Sound", the junior Pemberton must have been acutely aware of his tacit responsibility not just to make hip-hop, but to create a strain of it from the ground up.
Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprised the broad strokes of Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style. But at the time, hedged in by leftfield excursions, they felt tenuous, as if Pemberton were testing a variety of directions before choosing one. Skewed instrumentals like "Those Sliders", hallucinatory mash-ups like "The Anthem (Cadence Weapon National Remix)", and bizarre Reichian beats like the one on "Fathom" made Pemberton's style sound marvelously curious and questing.
If the satisfying Afterparty Babies doesn't have the same thunderclap impact of its predecessors, it's because that element of adventure is subdued. This record has a clearer idea of what it wants to be, with seams neatly tucked away under a monolithic style. Pemberton's knack for massaging startling sounds into hyperkinetic dance tracks flares up periodically: "Do I Miss My Friends?" is built upon a Hanson-baiting a capella "mmm-bop." More often, he sticks to a reliable blend of techno and vintage electro. But if Afterparty Babies solidifies the musical nature of the Cadence Weapon project, Pemberton's identity seems as fluid and unresolved as ever
Pemberton himself is not quite a hipster rapper, although he does have lots to say about Friendster, emoticons, and Heiro-logo tattoos. He's not quite a nerd rapper, although he does drizzle juicy 8-bit blips and molten, neon synths over "Limited Edition of OJ Slammer" while rapping about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. He's not quite an undie messiah, although he takes a few potshots at what he perceives as a vacuous mainstream, especially on the stabby neo-disco track "Real Estate", where "rappers on the radio don't talk about shit" and choruses are fast-food jingles. He's not quite an old-skool preservationist, although Afterparty Babies is awash in scratching and sturdily linear sample beds, and he's not quite a party-and-bullshit MC, although he's fond of house beats and clubland send-ups like "Unsuccessful Club Nights". Instead, Cadence Weapon is a panoramic, everything-but-the-gangster portrait of modern hip-hop offshoots.
"The New Face of Fashion", a nasty electro banger with funk accents, is a screed against trendy couture. On the album's back cover, Pemberton appears in a red hoodie and a peppermint-striped tee with abstract lightning bolt patterns. "Limited Edition OJ Slammer", a diatribe against celebrity-obsession that finds Pemberton "wiping the fame off [his] mouth," seems rather ironic on a record characterized by lyrics like "Say you spray the nina when you're fey like Tina" (on "Your Hair's Not Clothes!", amid fluttering bat-wing synths and deep tone umlauts). At their core, most of the songs here are critiques of the same fast, slick youth culture in which Pemberton is an avid participant, and this paradox is what gives Afterparty Babies its self-contradicting aura. The cover sums it up: In a yearbook-style photo, Pemberton sits on a stool in front of a gallery of standard-issue indie-hipsters (and one Kid Rock clone), included yet apart.
This sort of self-contradiction is really just honesty. Internally consistent points of view are rare, and Pemberton makes no attempt to construct a false one. A thin seam of personal archaeology lends another layer of biographical complexity to the statements and contexts that negate each other. "Do I Miss My Friends?" is dedicated to "all the accidents out there;" the afterparty babies for which the record is titled. A skit at the end of "In Search of the Youth Crew" finds a relative reminiscing about young Rollie's desires to play with dolls. When Pemberton says, "Allegory I label a true story," he's talking about girls again. But he's also talking about Afterparty Babies, which finds him attempting to reconcile his beliefs, lifestyle, and origins, yet finding no place where they neatly align. | 2008-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Epitaph / Anti- | March 4, 2008 | 7 | 43af9e43-4911-4c0f-8135-d75a22faac53 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The second collaboration between M.E.D., Madlib, and Blu is a lighthearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, B**ad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure. | The second collaboration between M.E.D., Madlib, and Blu is a lighthearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, B**ad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure. | Madlib / M.E.D. / Blu: Bad Neighbor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21155-bad-neighbor/ | Bad Neighbor | Madlib’s calling card is his ability to spin obscure funk into woozy rap instrumentals. With the lack of precision and attention to mood, they feel out of time and slightly off-kilter, and they fit perfectly with artists like Erykah Badu and Georgia Anne Muldrow. Recently though, it seems the Cali composer has reined himself in a bit: 2014’s Piñata had all the grit you'd expect from Madlib, but it was crisper and recessive, allowing more space for Freddie Gibbs' menacing, in-the-pocket flows. He further restrains his sound on Bad Neighbor, a collaborative LP with rappers M.E.D. and Blu. This is a light-hearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, B**ad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure.
The producer fits well into this free-flowing group. He also feeds off seemingly random ideas, connecting dots between misplaced vocal clips and Afro-rock samples, and despite his talents he can be easy to take for granted. M.E.D. had a nice showing on 2004’s Madvillainy, the revered outing from MF DOOM and Madlib, but his output has been sparse from there. Blu has been incredibly prolific, but many of his releases are marred with improper mixing and unfocused rhymes, with as many standouts (Below the Heavens, Her Favorite Colo(u)r) as bricks, like Jesus. and the short-lived ucla. On their own, all of these guys are good but sometimes get overlooked.
Bad Neighbor is their second release. In 2013, the trio put out The Burgundy EP, powered by the fluid single "Burgundy Whip". That song re-emerges near the end of Bad Neighbor, but it feels like an afterthought compared with the stronger, more vivid material around it. "Peroxide", featuring Dâm-Funk and DJ Rome, resembles "Planet Rock"-era electro-funk, and the MCs bounce nimbly atop its darting synthetics. "The Stroll" flashes a bright, disorienting synth like a flood light, the beat so full of little noises it's like an event itself.
Anderson .Paak, the grit-voiced singer/rapper who featured prominently on Dr. Dre's Compton and who recently dropped his own noteworthy EP, appears almost out of nowhere on Bad Neighbor track "The Strip", lending his strained voice to the proceedings. There are a few appearances like that, and they feel purposefully casual, allowing everyone to thrive on their own terms. On "Finer Things", Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte Coleman sings the hook and raps about adult romance. MF DOOM shows up on "Knock Knock" to offer his signature disconnected one-liners. Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important. | 2015-10-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | BangYaHead! | October 26, 2015 | 7.2 | 43b94144-4dc3-4598-becb-ae970d296c5c | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The second album from the historically inoffensive singer is another genreless collection of safe choices for a pop star in the making. | The second album from the historically inoffensive singer is another genreless collection of safe choices for a pop star in the making. | Khalid: Free Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khalid-free-spirit/ | Free Spirit | At a middle school dance somewhere in America, hundreds of students are getting rowdy to “Thotiana” while the chaperone tells the DJ to spin something else, something less vulgar, something inoffensive. Something like Khalid. He mainly sings about love, never too deep or personal, like he got inspiration from a Netflix original movie starring Noah Centineo. The 21-year-old is maturing—he can drink now and smokes a little more weed than he did before—and his second album, Free Spirit, comes at a time in which Khalid is both a Billboard Hot 100 mainstay and figuring out if he should be the same teenager that first found success with “Location” or if his music should age with him.
Like so many emerging pop stars trying to be the voice of the next generation (See: Billie Eilish or Dominic Fike), a selling point of Khalid’s music is that it’s genreless. Free Spirit is definitely the first album that can claim both Murda Beatz and Father John Misty in the credits. Khalid’s melodies fit over any instrumental they touch, whether that be an acoustic guitar-heavy ballad like “Saturday Nights” or a Disclosure-produced dance track like “Talk.” Yet, no matter how diverse Free Spirit is in sound and guests, the output is always the same harmless, generic Khalid.
Khalid has no edge, so his attempts at darker songwriting come off like “Riverdale” fanfiction. “Is this heaven or armageddon?/I’ll be gettin’ high with you to watch the ending,” he sings plainly on “Free Spirit.” It’s fitting that one of the top YouTube comments praising his collaboration with country heartthrob Kane Brown on “Saturday Nights (Remix)” is, “No naked scenes, no alcohol, no drugs, no cars around but only soft and smooth voices.” Khalid, unlike an actual teenager, is afraid to cross any line—everything that leaves his mouth is bland. His relationship stories are frustrating, “Can you feel the tension? You’ve got my attention/I know we’re just friends, but I’d rather be together instead,” which he says on the John Mayer-featuring “Outta My Head” that belongs in an Old Navy commercial.
The saving grace of Free Spirit is that none of Khalid’s dull lyrics and euphemisms can take away from the high-budget production showcase. Take “Talk,” where Disclosure gifts Khalid a bubbly dance instrumental. It works, despite Khalid sounding like an R&B singer without the sex and a pop singer without the fun. Hit-Boy recently brought new life to the emo-rap gloom of Juice WRLD and on “Self,” the producer tries that same kick-drum magic with Khalid. That goes well when he opens up about his anxiety, but not when he’s wondering, “Does my raw emotion make me less of a man?” And of course, when record labels need to make a pop singer engaging, they call up folk-trap mainstay Charlie Handsome who uses his talents on “Bluffin’” to squeeze exactly one ounce of soul from Khalid’s monotony.
Khalid is simultaneously a pop star of the past and the future. Like so many pop stars before him, his albums only amplify weaknesses that are difficult to detect when he’s only releasing a single every couple of weeks or months. But Khalid feels perfect for an era where some of the most popular music is popular because it fits onto Spotify playlists meant solely to be used as background noise. Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous. | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Right Hand Music Group / RCA | April 10, 2019 | 4.7 | 43c21741-2490-47be-8af0-1c8817a4ac37 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
For his Jagjaguwar debut, the acclaimed 68-year-old sculptor offers a harrowing portrait of the United States and its systems for suffering. Then, he dances. | For his Jagjaguwar debut, the acclaimed 68-year-old sculptor offers a harrowing portrait of the United States and its systems for suffering. Then, he dances. | Lonnie Holley: MITH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lonnie-holley-mith/ | MITH | Lonnie Holley starts MITH, his third album, with a simple, striking statement: “I’m a suspect in America,” he sings over a prismatic keyboard line, stretching the last syllable until he runs out of breath. As a black man who has lived in the cities of the South for much of his life, Holley has endured that reality for 68 years, watching as white suspicion of black bodies has evolved but never receded. “Here I stand accused/My life has been so misused/Through blood, sweat, and tears/I’m a suspect,” he continues, as overdubbed vocals, synthesizers, and woozy trombone bloom around his words. He ultimately reasons that all of us—yes, even the suspects—become dust specks, anyhow. The song drifts into silence.
Holley’s life has been dotted by death and hardship. But in the late 1970s, he began assembling everyday detritus into found-art sculptures that balance the pedestrian with the surreal, a practice that has earned him high-profile spots at The Met and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He made music all the while, sharing it among friends on cassette, but he didn’t issue his first real record until 2012’s Just Before Music, at the age of 62. That record and its follow-up, 2013’s Keeping a Record of It, felt like gentle trips through outer space, as if it were possible to float the Milky Way. But on MITH, Holley does with music what he’s done with visual art for decades: He collects our ugliest obscured objects and transforms them into singular reflections on our troubled world.
For MITH’s 18-minute centerpiece, “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” Holley methodically imagines the process and pain of enslavement, beginning by watching his own capture from a distance while chains and hand drums rattle behind him. He uses this narrative conceit to trace intertwined histories of labor and oppression—sneaking off one slave ship only to end up on another, with chattel slavery transformed into industrial wage slavery—well into the future, where the cycle will ostensibly continue. Holley sees dripping blood, drowning bodies, and exploding bombs, his voice rising from familiar astral soul into gnarled screams. “I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America” follows, made harrowing by horns that herald end times. People have been waking up in a fucked-up America long before the United States existed, but Holley grounds the feeling in our time with references to “overdatafying,” “arguing, fussing, and fighting,” and “the miscount of voting around the world.” Swooping brass and calamitous percussion swell behind him. “Let me out of this dream,” Holley sings of what is actually a nightmare, requesting relief before a final blast of horns seals his fate.
Animated by expanded instrumentation, this unease ripples throughout MITH. Holley’s supporting cast here includes avant-garde instrumentalists like Dave Nelson and Shahzad Ismaily, plus harmonies from folk duo Anna & Elizabeth. Drums from late producer Richard Swift lend “Copying the Rock” a soft sense of chaos. On “Coming Back (From the Distance Between the Spaces of Time),” cymbal splashes and snare rolls add a sense of looming anxiety; Holley sings about a human returning from outer space, warning of the solidarity it will take for us to survive what is to come.
But MITH isn’t entirely mirthless. Holley again maps the skies on “How Far Is Spaced-Out?” and conjures a jazz-adjacent flow during “There Was Always Water,” which features fellow mystic improviser Laraaji. But the finale, “Sometimes I Wanna Dance,” unfolds with such contrasting gaiety that it almost feels accidental. As Laraaji bounds around an upbeat piano line, Holley urges his listeners to “Shake it around, up or down, in or out,” his vocals crisscrossing like dancers across the floor of a high-school gym. A free activity and an act of freedom, dancing requires no special skills or circumstances; you can dance at home or work, for 15 seconds or until your body falls to the floor. No whiplash ending, this is a survivor’s reminder to look beyond pervasive doom and gloom and summon the spirit needed for another day. If we can’t take the time to express the joy of our own creation and our shared humanity, what’s the point of any of this? | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Jagjaguwar | September 27, 2018 | 7.9 | 43c4b955-db01-4b8f-976a-b5de9e893b3d | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
On their third full-length, Pennsylvania rock band the Districts dives headfirst into the earnest indie rock of the mid-2000s, displaying a new emotional depth. | On their third full-length, Pennsylvania rock band the Districts dives headfirst into the earnest indie rock of the mid-2000s, displaying a new emotional depth. | The Districts: Popular Manipulations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-districts-popular-manipulations/ | Popular Manipulations | The Districts was formed by four childhood friends in 2009, while they were still in high school, and the Lititz, Pa. band has since grown up in the public eye, having signed to Fat Possum in 2013. Their catalog traces the Districts’ evolution from indistinct blues rock to an infatuation with the early 2000s NYC scene. Along the way, they replaced founding guitarist Mark Larson with Pat Cassidy and worked with John Congleton (producer of records by St. Vincent and Cloud Nothings, among others), who recorded their 2015 sophomore LP A Flourish and a Spoil. On their third full-length, Popular Manipulations, the group dive headfirst into the earnest indie rock of the mid-2000s, particularly Spencer Krug’s least esoteric contributions to Wolf Parade. Congleton is back in the booth for four songs, but the band makes a big leap by producing the rest of the collection themselves. Like all of their work, it’s capable and tuneful and reveals a young band of skilled songwriters that put all their faith in their guitars, even if it’s often hard to pinpoint where their own vision begins and their taste ends.
On their 2015 album, the Districts rightfully focused on songwriting over style. Even when singer Rob Grote used his best Casablancas croon to sell his band’s dollar-slice-eating, bar-room appeal, there was never a sense that they were skimping on hooks. If anything, the Districts understood the youthful, carefree appeal of the bands they were aping, and were able to distill the highlights into something palatable. Popular Manipulations finds similar low barometers for successes and failures, but with a new sound that employs studio sheen and a heartfelt vocal delivery. Sure, there are times when Grote drones along zombie-like—the monotonous Liars-sounding opening of “If Before I Wake,” the return of Paul Banks’ robotic vocal influence on “Airplane”—but these outlying moments only highlight Grote’s strength when he bellows with tense desperation across the rest of the album. In fact, “If Before I Wake” juxtaposes the old and new Grote delivery in the same song, displaying an emotional depth never present in the Districts’ previous work.
Lead single “Ordinary Day” is fragile and thin when Grote opens the song by himself, but by the time the band piles on towering guitars, crashing cymbals, and manic vocal layers, its grandeur punctuates the singer’s bland question: “Will it hit you when the feeling’s right?” On “Capable,” Grote’s lyrics sidestep all ambiguity, speaking directly about divorce with both detail and insight, musing on the “mirage of permanence” and an inability to love. More than ever, there’s a sense that the audience is getting to know both Grote and the Districts through their music beyond just a show of influences. It matters less that “If Before I Wake” pulses with the same vocal delivery as Brandon Flowers used in the Hot Fuss-era, but that the song employs the familiar to forge a more rugged path.
Still, Popular Manipulations struggles to reach these heights consistently. “The point is beside the point now,” Grote sings on “Point,” offering the sort of logic that makes most sense through the bottom of a pint glass. There’s a handful of leftfield choices that sour some of the goodwill the record inspires, including the strained falsetto on “Why Would I Wanna Be,” which attempts to distinguish an otherwise innocuous cut. And the record’s closing moments on “Will You Please Be Quiet Please” fall short of a climax through sheer messiness. These stumbles further separate the Districts from their heroes, even if Popular Manipulations resonates more than their previous albums. Channeling and interpreting the appeal of beloved music isn’t an easy task, but for once, the Districts are on the cusp of turning it into something they can call their own. | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | August 12, 2017 | 6.7 | 43c50671-84ff-4379-9ea5-e2a56f9a0885 | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
On her third album, the Queens experimental musician explores the way women’s voices can challenge the norms of taste and decorum and push past the boundaries of accepted musical language. | On her third album, the Queens experimental musician explores the way women’s voices can challenge the norms of taste and decorum and push past the boundaries of accepted musical language. | Eartheater: IRISIRI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eartheater-irisiri/ | IRISIRI | Alexandra Drewchin’s music as Eartheater deals in opposing forces. Her songs interlace acoustic instruments, like guitar and violin, with harsh electronic drums and eerie synthesizer figures; she tends to juxtapose startling beauty with cutting ugliness. Her third album, IRISIRI, exacerbates the contrasts she set up across her first two records. Where her previous albums, Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis (both released in 2015), were often hypnotic and ambient, IRISIRI demands a new kind of attention. It’s the sort of record that lulls listeners into a trance only to snap them out of it with a blast of noise or an incongruous shriek.
From crackling vinyl samples to electric guitar loops, IRISIRI boasts a wide variety of clashing textures. Certain moments, like the stuttering “MTTM,” find kinship with Nicolas Jaar’s searching grooves, while “C.L.I.T.” has enough of a rock edge that it could be an EMA track run through a centrifuge. Drewchin delights in scrambling genre signifiers, but it’s her vocal work on this album that breaks the most rules. She knows that a scream is not in itself an act of defiance, and that there are other sounds a voice can produce—especially a woman’s voice—that jut past the boundaries of accepted musical language.
Drewchin sings throughout IRISIRI, often in ways that prove her technical ability. She can hit high notes and she can evoke the timbre of sacred music, as she does against discordant electronics on “Trespasses.” She also screeches, simpers, and whines throughout the album, all vocal techniques that run the risk of being called “annoying”—a far more dismissive adjective to apply to a woman singing than “abrasive,” “harsh,” or “angry.” But she finds life in that confrontational space. When, on “Inclined,” she cracks her voice on the outer edges of her range, she calls into question why women’s voices are heard the way they are. A violin loops in the background, crowding Drewchin’s delivery with the suggestion of decorum, all while she’s cramping her voice, starving it of oxygen, and rubbing it the “wrong” way. It’s as though a man once told her she sang obnoxiously and, rather than clean up her tone, she decided to double down on all the elements that might irritate the patriarchal ear.
Eartheater hints at the threat femininity poses to the male world order across a number of tracks, most notably “Inhale Baby,” which features vocals from the L.A.-based experimental duo Odwalla1221. “Inhale baby pink/Exhale red,” Chloe Maratta repeats, as if urging her collaborators to alchemize their compulsive docility into fiery rage. Later, an element of body horror appears in the duo’s spoken-word contribution: “There’s so much stuff coming out of my skirt,” says Flannery Silva, stretching out her consonants as if pronouncing a threat. The album’s other feature, by the Philadelphia experimentalist Moor Mother, on the frantic “MMXXX,” complements Drewchin’s vaulting melodies with a steadily defiant verse. As the two vocalists sing and rap over aggressive beats, sirens, and sounds of breaking glass, the contrast between them produces the record’s high point. There is hardly any melody to speak of, yet “MMXXX” ranks among the most addictive song Eartheater has put to tape. It has so much energy it doesn’t need a hook.
“I rejected that culture,” Drewchin wails over raging guitars on “C.L.I.T.,” an advance single whose name stands for “curiosity liberates infinite truth.” The impulse to cast off cultural standards dictating how music should sound dominates IRISIRI, which seems most interested in articulating femininity outside the constraints of patriarchal expectations. In Eartheater’s burgeoning musical world, women don’t need to fold their voices in service of beauty. They are free to make a ruckus, to sound monstrous, to gnash their teeth at anyone who would pen them in. | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | June 13, 2018 | 7.4 | 43ca8146-28eb-4ff1-bd34-f66f29dac4fe | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Following his long-delayed return to rock with last year’s Big Mess—and this year’s much-memed Coachella performance—the Oingo Boingo frontman delivers a characteristically chaotic set of remixes. | Following his long-delayed return to rock with last year’s Big Mess—and this year’s much-memed Coachella performance—the Oingo Boingo frontman delivers a characteristically chaotic set of remixes. | Danny Elfman: Bigger. Messier. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danny-elfman-bigger-messier/ | Bigger. Messier. | Once at the vanguard of the American new-wave scene, Danny Elfman deliberately turned his back on rock music after Boingo, the 1994 farewell by his weirdo Los Angeles collective Oingo Boingo. By that point, Elfman’s work as a film composer had greatly eclipsed his initial new wave fame and while he retained a cult—one big enough to keep Oingo Boingo’s albums in the lower reaches of Billboard’s Top 200 during the heyday of grunge—the soundtrack work was too fulfilling and too lucrative to turn down. Elfman happily busied himself with film, serving as the go-to composer for both Tim Burton and Gus Van Sant and writing notable scores like Silver Linings Playbook and Justice League. Then COVID-19 hit.
Elfman already was plotting a return to rock via an appearance at the 2020 Coachella festival, where he planned to unveil two new songs as part of a live retrospective. Once the pandemic forced organizers to cancel the festival, Elfman simply kept working on new songs, amassing enough for a double album—his first new rock record in nearly 30 years and first solo album since 1984’s So-Lo. Released last summer and knowingly titled Big Mess, the album felt as if it had been conceived and birthed in isolation. Dark and cloistered, superficially industrial, and gothic without being goth, Big Mess is an overheated Grand Guignol of an experience, 70 minutes of detours, jokes, and pointed social commentary: “Serious Ground” contained a sample of President Donald J. Trump, while another song explored “Love in the Time of Covid.”
Big Mess is the kind of record die-hard devotees crave: a dense listen that alienates all but the dedicated. That’s a good strategy for tending an audience but not necessarily for a re-introduction to a rock world that’s largely forgotten your existence. Enter Bigger. Messier., an album of remixes and reinventions from a variety of modern artists chosen to snare curious new listeners. As the title suggests, Bigger. Messier. is indeed unwieldy and unkempt, running a full 21 tracks to Big Mess’s 18, even though only 12 of that album’s songs get the remix treatment. Such details don’t really matter, not when the four variations of “Happy” range from skittish cacophony of the 33EMYBW Remix to the nocturnal new-wave bounce of Boy Harsher’s remix.
All four versions dispense with the tightly controlled melodrama of Elfman’s original, which is par for the course for Bigger. Messier. The original recordings aren’t treated as a blueprint so much as a suggestion, with melodic and lyrical phrases coming into focus and then fading away in a flurry of drum’n’bass and synthetic clatter. Some artists opt to introduce elements of light and shade to their renditions, while additional vocalists add some extra dimensions. Witness “Kick Me,” a barbed and silly satire of celebrity, respectively featuring both Fever 333 and Iggy Pop. Fever 333’s metallic rendition is a bit rote, but Iggy’s hamminess amplifies Elfman’s cartoonishness in an appealing way; he’s playing with the audience, not to it. The flip of these exaggerated gestures is Trent Reznor’s interpretations of “Native Intelligence” and “True,” which both turn the overt dark hysteria of the originals into simmering dioramas of tension.
Such mastery of tone is hardly common on Bigger. Messier. The album winds all over the place, alternating between washes of gilded electronics, glitchy paranoia, and cathartic release, a combination that is simultaneously more incoherent and more inviting than its parent album. Adding more voices to the mix turns the monolithic Big Mess inside out. What was once a foreboding haunted mansion is now a carnivalesque fun house; not a place to linger or live but rather a wild ride that’s worth one spin—but maybe not a second. | 2022-08-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | null | Anti- / Epitaph | August 16, 2022 | 6.2 | 43cc00e5-9529-4baa-b9ab-124e120cc7c3 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Like her 2014 comeback record, the new album from psych-folk artist Linda Perhacs features collaborations with Julia Holter and electronic touches, expanding the borders of her sound. | Like her 2014 comeback record, the new album from psych-folk artist Linda Perhacs features collaborations with Julia Holter and electronic touches, expanding the borders of her sound. | Linda Perhacs: I’m a Harmony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linda-perhacs-im-a-harmony/ | I’m a Harmony | “I’m a harmony/And extra-cellularly/I’m singing this to you/Through your laptop,” Linda Perhacs sings on the title track of I’m a Harmony. After releasing her 1970 debut Parallelograms—which for decades was her only album—Perhacs became a sort of vanished flower child for the folk/psych collector set. I’m a Harmony is her first record in three years, and her third in all, and its title reads like a koan. But it’s also a boast, as Perhacs delivers her meditative folk with typical aplomb. Released from the burden of following up a cult classic, and supported by familiar collaborators, Perhacs is free to stretch out and have a little fun.
Lyrically, I’m a Harmony continues where 2014’s The Soul of All Natural Things left off: plainspoken contemplations of the physical realm, relationships, and the ways in which the two collide. Like Natural Things’ titular first cut, I’m a Harmony’s opener “Winds of the Sky” locates the divine in the meteorological. Perhacs’ stately melody drifts over bass-led downtempo passages; Wilco guitarist Nels Cline closes the song with an awestruck solo reminiscent of Robert Fripp’s work with the Roches. On “Eclipse of All Love,” a waltz-time duet with the Autumn Defense’s Pat Sansone, Perhacs tracks an incoming storm, then connects it to personal matters: “Ain’t it a shame/If we are to blame/For this serious game/On the physical plane.”
Perhacs plots these nexuses of the earthly and emotional all over the album. To devotees of new age music, the approach is familiar. Those hoping for a return to the vibes of her debut may be disappointed, however. Though Parallelograms was produced by Oscar-winning composer Leonard Rosenman and released on an MCA imprint, it’s sometimes categorized as “loner folk,” a catchall genre for idiosyncratic, hermetic records with psychedelic dusting. (It’s also called “acid folk,” though Perhacs was drug-free.) When Perhacs first entered the studio decades ago, she was a dental hygienist—she met Rosenman at work, in fact—with a homemade demo. But while recording she had the good sense to tailor her talent to the skills of the assembled studio vets.
Similarly, I’m a Harmony finds her drawing on the strengths of her current collaborators—several of whom she worked with on The Soul of All Natural Things, or on their own projects—to push her sound outward. Returning player Julia Holter is featured on four cuts, two of which are Perhacs’ longest compositions to date. Holter offers a second lead vocal on “I’m a Harmony,” and her deft keyboard work helps navigate the song from playful airiness to a jammy gallop and back again. The solemn “Visions” opens with Holter and Perhacs intoning wordlessly, coolly looping around each other like contrails; they do the same at the song’s midpoint, adding dubby percussion and slide guitar. In the liner notes, this section is labeled (visual music sculpture).
In a 2014 interview, Perhacs acknowledged how she clashed with her co-producers (Fernando Perdomo and Chris Price, who also worked on Emitt Rhodes’ 2016 comeback Rainbow Ends) over these kinds of non-organic touches. “If you hear a synth [on The Soul of All Natural Things],” she said, “it’s because I put my foot down.” The discussions paid off, and while Perdomo and Price rejoined Perhacs for this new record, her electronic visions carry the day. The contemplative textures and freeform passages lend an existential heft to songs that could otherwise come across as willfully earnest. And the more straightforward compositions—like the tender birthday song “One Full Circle Around the Sun” and the pendulant reverie “Beautiful Play”—benefit from the contrast. On The Soul of All Natural Things, Perhacs joined the distinguished club of artists following up decades-old recordings. With I’m a Harmony, she slips free from the comeback narrative, expanding the borders of her particular cosmology: lovers and friends, bound by the wind, linked by laptops. | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Omnivore | September 22, 2017 | 7 | 43cfd1ef-5e71-43bf-8b59-3edd39185569 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
After the finger-waggling of the divisive The Minstrel Show, Little Brother's third official full-length-- and first without 9th Wonder-- represents an attempt at figuring out just why the duo are rapping, and for whom. | After the finger-waggling of the divisive The Minstrel Show, Little Brother's third official full-length-- and first without 9th Wonder-- represents an attempt at figuring out just why the duo are rapping, and for whom. | Little Brother: Getback | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10855-getback/ | Getback | In 2005, North Carolina-based hip-hop group Little Brother released The Minstrel Show, a record brazen both in title and tenor that sought to castigate the culture of materialistic, anti-intellectual bojangling that had besieged and benumbed the black community in the form of commercial rap music and mainstream TV programming. Unsurprisingly, this played exceptionally well on indie-rap message boards, in coffee shops, and college campuses coast to coast. But outside the Ivy, where people eat, laugh, fuck, and don't spend a hell of a lot of time thinking about whether their culture is eroding, it didn't make a dent.
It's easy for the (over)educated among us to get hip to the underground and then snicker at the poor deluded masses filling their heads and ears with trash, but what happens when we have to step outside our theory-addled cocoons and explain looking down our noses at our neighbors and kin? Confronted with his aging, still-hustling "niggas on the corner," Phonte illuminates this dilemma in a single line-- "they ask me if The Minstrel Show means I'm ashamed of them"-- but in truth the whole of Little Brother's third full-length, Getback, represents a brass-tacks attempt at figuring out just why he and Pooh are rapping, and for whom.
The project's essentialist nature is evident not only in the brevity of its composition (11 songs in under 50 minutes) but also its cast, one man short with the departure of the group's producer and biggest name 9th Wonder (who does make a cameo return to handle "Breakin' My Heart"). That leaves the sonics in the stead of a motley collection of beatmakers, most notably Talib Kweli collaborator Hi-Tek (who helms the languid, gently whirring "Step It Up") and A-lister Nottz (the soulful, celebratory "Two Step Blues"). The man with the most credits (four), however, is relative unknown Illmind, who submits a mixed bag between the too-busy "Sirens" and the smoothly reflective "That Ain't Love", ultimately failing to make anyone forget even the modest legacy of 9th's work with the group.
Still, this is undoubtedly Phonte and Pooh's party, and all the fascination and frustration of Getback lies in listening to two MCs struggle to decide where they belong. Red-herring opener "Sirens" may be politically charged, but the record's real headspace is set with the succeeding track, "Can't Win For Losing", in which Phonte rejects fans, family and scenes as sufficient motivations for enduring the hip-hop grind before embracing friend and mentor Jazzy Jeff's trenchant advice of "fuck 'em, 'Te, do it for you."
Belief in self is great, of course, but as the poignant refrain of one song puts it, "dreams don't keep the lights on," and the remainder of Getback is preoccupied with how to juggle ideals and financial realities, individual dreams and the reciprocity of relationships, even the aesthetic choice between whether to crack jokes or talk tough. The uproarious "Good Clothes" and "Step It Up" attest that the duo (particularly Phonte) is capable of crafting highly clever hip-hop ("a nigga can't attract Cristal with a Boone's Farm mindstate"), but the flashes of quick wit are regrettably few and far between. Instead, untrustworthy friends ("That Ain't Love") and demanding females keep marring Pooh and Phonte's good moods, bringing out grumpily regressive sides of their personalities that don't suit the typically easy charm of either MC (sure, no one gets skeeted on, but "a woman's life is love/ A man's love is life" is a subtly offensive maxim).
It's telling that Little Brother sounds happiest on "Two Step Blues", an ode to the simple joys of shaking off the 9-to-5 and cutting a rug at the VFW with old family and friends. With all the acclaim they've earned and controversy they've courted, however, this unglamorous, down-home utopia might actually be the toughest for Phonte and Pooh to bring to life. | 2007-11-21T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2007-11-21T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rap | ABB | November 21, 2007 | 6.4 | 43da8fd1-3a3f-4d00-aa6c-5799970ed922 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Sumac, Aaron Turner's post-Isis trio, succeed at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling Turner's past work in the slightest. | Sumac, Aaron Turner's post-Isis trio, succeed at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling Turner's past work in the slightest. | Sumac: What One Becomes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21889-what-one-becomes/ | What One Becomes | Sumac, Aaron Turner’s new trio, succeeds at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling his past work in the slightest. Sludgy heaviness and melody meet as before, but they clash instead of meld, and their fraught coexistence is drawn out. Turner attempted this with Split Cranium, a collaboration with Finnish experimental/metal linchpin Jussi Lehtisalo, but the space he affords himself in Sumac goes a long way. What One Becomes, Sumac’s follow-up to their debut The Deal, feels both more whole and more deconstructed, and that it arrived a little over a year after shows how focused they are on adapting as a unit.
They demand more patience of you here, leaning harder on slowness until it starts to feel like claustrophobia. There are fewer faster metal freakouts here than on Deal, which make them all the more jarring when they shatter the peace. Sumac unleash most of their fury on leadoff song “Image on Control,” filled with skronky guitar scrapes, blastbeats and doomy stomps. The closest that One gets to any melodic pleasantries is in “Clutch of Oblivion,” where Turner lets a melody flicker for four minutes, a carrot for those demanding a Panopticon revival, before blasting it into oblivion. He then takes one last stab at the hardcore prevalent in Split Cranium, meditating on a crunchy buildup before unleashing. Even if it’s more recognizable, Turner knows how to ride a riff out, boiling it down to its most base hypnosis.
Throughout One, the sound is so wide-open that it threatens to come apart, but drummer Nick Yacychyn, also of Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, keeps a solid grounding. His playing is the group's secret weapon, and his sensibility makes One sound like Khanate with groove on the brain. (Turner’s guitar tone also approaches the metallic drear that Stephen O’Malley channeled in that group.) His flexibility makes the 17-minute “Blackout” an exercise in indulgence that doesn’t exactly feel like one. His steady tom work carries the piece through plundering depths, ambient segues, and a halfway mark that’s equal parts speed metal and modern classical.
One feels more improvisatory than most of any of the members’ prior works (especially bassist Brian Cook, better known for his work in modern prog-metal heroes Russian Circles), and that makes it alien to most metal. Sumac are pushing metal in a direction so uncomfortable it may cease to be metal, into an openness that isn't about saying “FUCK YOU!” the loudest. The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded. | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | June 13, 2016 | 7.8 | 43dcacdf-dce7-4a99-abe5-27be8fe68e1e | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The resident DJ at the UK-based Freerotation festival releases a dreamy, bucolic ambient LP, full of lush textures and birdsong. | The resident DJ at the UK-based Freerotation festival releases a dreamy, bucolic ambient LP, full of lush textures and birdsong. | Leif: Loom Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leif-loom-dream/ | Loom Dream | Baskerville Hall, a country hotel built in 1839 in the Welsh village of Clyro, is known for a few things. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Hound of the Baskervilles, was a frequent guest at the inn. Paranormal enthusiasts believe the place is haunted. And every summer, it hosts Freerotation, a beloved, members-only affair where the hippie ethos of the 1990s free-party rave scene meets cutting-edge electronic music. Resident Advisor’s Will Lynch called it “600 friends knocking around a weird old hotel for three days—it feels more like a massive sleepover than a festival.” Leif Knowles has been playing Freerotation for years now, and his DJ sets there have become legendary for their range, their risk-taking, and their bucolic scene-setting, providing a fitting counterpart to the rolling green hills and rural idyll. With Loom Dream, he captures that spirit on vinyl.
Leif, as he is known, has been putting out records since the early 2000s, his style gradually evolving from pert minimal house to freaky, futuristic bass music. Loom Dream is his third album, but it is his first ambient full-length—never mind that Whities, the label putting it out, is itself better known for forward-looking bass mutations. Just 34 minutes long, Loom Dream is the kind of mini-LP that is particularly suited to a certain, evocative strain of ambient music: not too short, not too long, but a Goldilocks-like, just-right length for catnapping and coming back up for air.
Loom Dream’s tracklisting comprises six songs, but really the record plays out as a single suite of music, the tracks seamlessly joined by chirping birds, footfalls, and creamy swirls of reverb. Leif’s choice of sounds is faithful to the chill out room aesthetic that artists like Mixmaster Morris and the Orb pioneered in the late 1980s: Synthesizers waft through gentle delay chains while field recordings suggest a sense of place and submerged rhythms generate the subtlest forward motion. The record follows a loose botanical theme—its six tracks take their titles from plants and herbs like yarrow, borago, and myrtle—and between the omnipresent birdsong and lush textures, it’s easy to imagine that Loom Dream would make a lovely soundtrack to a supine half-hour in a sun-warmed glade.
But Loom Dream can also be surprisingly (and impressively) intense. Leif’s pastel atmospheres frequently give way to deep, chest-quaking drums: layer upon layer of thrumming hand percussion, sub-bass rumble, and sampled kit. “Myrtus” is driven by quick, trilling marimba melodies, and in “Rosa,” faintly distorted thumb piano takes the lead. In “Borago,” pummeling floor toms accompany echoing blasts of choral voices, creating a mood that’s both stormy and majestic.
Leif’s rhythmic instincts don’t just keep the music moving, they keep the vibe in constant flux, as time signatures shift and tempos vary. This dynamism helps set Loom Dream apart from its ambient contemporaries. Much like Brian Eno envisioned of ambient music, it is an emotional blank slate—the mood he evokes may be blissful, wistful, or simply serene, depending upon the listener’s headspace—but the constantly shifting grooves keep the record’s limited palette from getting stale. At the record’s end, he switches things up one more time: Over gossamer new-age chords, a steady drumbeat kicks up little clouds of dust that gradually swell into piercing dub-delay feedback; by the end, the sound is a strobing shriek, almost like a car alarm. It’s a suggestion, maybe, that rural idyll can’t last forever. Or maybe it’s just an appearance from one of Baskerville Hall’s ghosts. | 2019-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Whities | June 17, 2019 | 8.3 | 43ddbb17-b330-4ef9-8747-098b1e24799c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A half-century after the release of Bobbie Gentry’s imaginative second album, the art-rock band revisits it as if in a daze but with the help of over a dozen brilliant singers. | A half-century after the release of Bobbie Gentry’s imaginative second album, the art-rock band revisits it as if in a daze but with the help of over a dozen brilliant singers. | Mercury Rev: Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mercury-rev-bobbie-gentrys-the-delta-sweete-revisited/ | Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited | Bobbie Gentry had unqualified freedom to record her second album, and she wasn’t going to waste it. Her 1967 smash, “Ode to Billie Joe,” not only introduced the breakout pop star but also gave listeners one of the era’s enduring mysteries: What exactly had she and Billie Joe McAllister thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge? For her follow-up to that hit and its best-selling album, she envisioned something unique and highly ambitious: an avant-garde country-pop record full of technicolor arrangements, oddball collages, and playful sexual innuendos. Mixing originals with Southern standards made famous by J.D. Loudermilk, Doug Kershaw, and Mose Allison, The Delta Sweete depicts the Deep South as a fantastical place: not how it was in the late 1960s, but how Gentry remembers it from her idyllic Mississippi childhood.
That feeling is one of the few things Mercury Rev get right on their full-album tribute to The Delta Sweete, which features a different singer from various generations and genres on each song. From the first notes of opener “Okolona River Bottom Band,” you get the sense of a place that exists outside of time and space. In this tale about a small town holding tryouts for the local band, the humid shimmer of the droning strings and sequencers, not to mention Norah Jones’ languid vocals, depict Okolona—a very real place in Gentry’s native Chickasaw County—as though it were Brigadoon. Gentry achieved a similar effect with a low, reverberating strum and some insinuating horns. The way Gentry sings those opening la la la’s and the leering male voice at the end give the original a strong sexual undercurrent, but that goes missing here. Without the subtext, Gentry’s wordplay falls flat, the cover becoming like a classified ad that reads “MUSICIANS WANTED.”
Mercury Rev remove these songs from their original settings, taking them out of the South and resituating them who knows where. That’s most apparent on “Reunion,” sung by Rachel Goswell of Slowdive. The original is one of the strangest and most impressive songs in Gentry’s catalog. Against a Bo Diddley guitar strum and some finger snaps, Gentry layered numerous samples into a quilt that captures the freneticism of a family reunion. It’s a remarkable piece of music, especially for 1968, and it’s practically impossible to cover. Mercury Rev seem flummoxed by the endeavor, reconstructing a more conventional tune out of all those voices and highlighting one aside about Billie Joe McAllister as a cheap bit of sensationalism. It’s a dull mess.
What’s more, Mercury Rev blanche these songs of their rhythmic complexities and musical quirks, slowing everything to a crawl and removing almost all of the blues, rockabilly, swamp rock, Southern soul, and country-funk touchstones. Hope Sandoval sings “Big Boss Man” so languorously you might think she’s passing out from heat stroke. Carice Van Houten, from “Game of Thrones,” delivers “Parchman Farm” without Gentry’s knowing wink, without that sense that the narrator is complicit in the crime that sends her man away. Margo Price tries to capture the ecstasy and energy of a lively church service on “Sermon,” but she’s burdened by another blandly lush arrangement. Mercury Rev end not with “Courtyard,” Gentry’s closer covered here by Beth Orton, but with a predictable bonus track. Lucinda Williams singing “Ode to Billie Joe” ought to be an event, but her interpretive strategy is to infuse the song with resentment, as though bitter about having to pass the biscuits please.
At least Chameleonic Norwegian singer/songwriter Susanne Sundfør gives the best and fiercest performance here with “Tobacco Road,” and Mercury Rev return the favor with one of their best re-imaginings. They turn the song into a march toward destruction, full of stomping percussion and menacing pomp. When Sundfør sings about bombing that shabby community of rusty shacks, you can almost hear her lighting the fuses on the stolen dynamite.
Still, Revisited is a noble undertaking. The Delta Sweete was a commercial flop that nearly derailed Gentry’s career, and only recently has she been reconsidered as a singular artist and as an influence on subsequent generations, including Kacey Musgraves, Neko Case, and ostensibly everyone on this tribute. Last year’s excellent box set The Girl from Chickasaw County collected all seven of the albums she recorded from 1967 through 1971, after which she relocated to Las Vegas and eventually excused herself from public life. For those unfamiliar with Gentry and her catalog, that’s a much better point of entry than this affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying. | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union | February 8, 2019 | 4.5 | 43e0f6d6-5282-42c1-9a1e-7dfe7cbfb2c7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
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 Billy Joel’s greatest album, a sublimely crafted breakthrough that finds the meeting ground of the romantic and the mundane. | 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 Billy Joel’s greatest album, a sublimely crafted breakthrough that finds the meeting ground of the romantic and the mundane. | Billy Joel: The Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-joel-the-stranger/ | The Stranger | The Stranger is the reason we know who Billy Joel is. Before the album, his fourth for Columbia and fifth as a solo artist, Joel had two Top 40 songs: “Piano Man,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing bar tunes to a bunch of drunks, and “The Entertainer,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing music for a fickle audience and whose label cut that other song in half just to fit on the radio. Joel was raised in Hicksville, Long Island, classically trained on the piano, and giddily admired the real rock’n’roll of the 1950s. He was something of an anomaly on the label of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, not an impassioned poet, prophet, or star, just a guy with a choir boy’s tenor who loved melody and technique and when songs sounded good. He wasn’t his label’s priority and he wasn’t much of a name, but then he went ahead and made an album filled with classics.
Joel says he didn’t make The Stranger like it was his last shot at success, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Famously, Joel likes to say that he didn’t want to put the biggest song on the album. “That’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard,” Linda Ronstadt apparently told Joel after hearing “Just the Way You Are” in the studio. A lot of people have since agreed with her, including those at the Recording Academy, which gave Joel the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year.
The success of The Stranger did a lot to erase, or at least ameliorate, Billy Joel’s reputation as an aggrieved musician who made a point of despising the dog and pony show of music promotion. He cut his teeth as a young musician, playing on three albums before his 1971 solo debut: The Hassles and Hour of the Wolf, with his bar band the Hassles, and the proto-metal Attila, with his buddy and fellow former Hassle Jon Small. The albums weren’t notable enough even to call them failures. His debut, however, was a failure and objectively fucked up. For some reason, Artie Ripp, who produced the album and signed Joel despite his commercial track record, simply didn’t notice or care that the mixing machine was set incorrectly, leaving Joel’s vocals on Cold Spring Harbor pitched up “like Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Joel smashed his test pressing, and still claims to hate the album.
After Cold Spring Harbor, Joel drove across the country to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Elizabeth Weber and her 5-year-old son Sean. (The hiccup was that Weber was married to Jon Small, who figured his wife and son were kidnapped and went West to locate them and bring them back to Long Island. Weber later married and managed Joel.) In Los Angeles, Joel struck a deal with Columbia and made two albums, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade. While the former had its champions, not many people liked Streetlife Serenade. Stephen Holden, who eventually wrote glowingly about Joel for The New York Times, opened his Rolling Stone review, “Billy Joel’s pop schmaltz occupies a stylistic no man’s land where musical and lyric truisms borrowed from disparate sources are forced together.” Joel returned to New York in 1975 and made Turnstiles, which Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called “more obnoxious.”
The secrets to The Stranger’s success, however, are scattered across Joel’s first four albums, unfortunately buttressed by a lot of unremarkable songs that lack their own punch. Take “James,” from Turnstiles, inspired by Joel’s high school friend and bandmate Jim Bosse. Joel lightly excoriates James for pausing his artistic ambitions to go to college and “living up to expectations.” The melody is not particularly gripping and the chiding doesn’t feel particularly deserved. Now turn to The Stranger, which opens thrillingly with another mild diatribe against middle class professional ambition, “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” As soon as the needle drops, Joel is smashing on his piano and the bass is kicking up the groove, playing with gusto and rhythm.
Also from Turnstiles is “Summer, Highland Falls,” my favorite pre-Stranger Joel song. His piano chords are enchanting, and he coins his greatest phrase from a non-hit: “It’s either sadness or euphoria.” As charming as “Summer, Highland Falls” is, it’s also absurdly wordy: “How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies/Perhaps we don’t fulfill each other’s fantasies.” Again, fast forward to 1977 and “Only the Good Die Young,” Joel’s cleverest Stranger song lyrically: “You didn’t count on me/When you were counting on your rosary,” and, “You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation.” It’s a hoot.
Joel made The Stranger with his road band, largely the same group who played on Turnstiles. The big difference was that Joel produced Turnstiles himself but brought in the well-regarded Phil Ramone for The Stranger, with whom he struck a long-term relationship. Joel claims that he chose to work with Ramone—known for work with Paul Simon and Phoebe Snow and co-producing Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born—instead of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin because Martin wanted the pianist to record his album with session musicians, which Joel attempted to poor results on Streetlife.
Ramone liked Joel’s band—most importantly comprised of bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata—and wanted to bring their live energy to life in the studio, where things had rarely clicked for Joel. One of the most frequent criticisms in his early career was his inability to translate the magnetic personality of his live performances onto his records. An early 1977 concert preview from the Los Angeles Times read: “A common question about the 27-year-old New Yorker is why such a scintillating performer hasn’t become a star.” Later, as if to prove the point, Joel gathered his unheralded songs on the 1981 live compilation Songs in the Attic where the early material absolutely soars and the crowds erupt.
With Ramone behind the boards and the band intact, Joel made an album with a verve and attitude he’d never achieved, sounding like an actual rock star, one who’s sardonic but hopeful. Almost every song on The Stranger has one accusatory line or another, a facet of his lyricism that Joel is quick to attribute to the general unhappiness of a person whose father, a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany, purportedly told him as a little boy, “Life is a cesspool.” I’d be naïve, however, to try to argue that Joel made depressing songs, no matter how depressed he was while he was making them. Joel is a straightforward, often simplistic lyricist, and he composed primarily in the major key. And it’s that tension, the meeting of bombast and the mundane, that makes The Stranger the greatest success in his catalog.
The juxtaposition bursts open on The Stranger’s centerpiece “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” Across seven and a half minutes, Joel tells the superbly ordinary tale of Brenda and Eddie, high school sweethearts turned divorcées reuniting for dinner. The music tells another story, as Joel and his piano are accompanied by a carnivalesque swirl of accordion, saxophone, tuba, and the works, and it’s all for lines of unadulterated chitchat, such as, “Things are OK with me these days/Got a good job, got a good office/Got a new wife, got a new life/And the family is fine.” The music, understandably, is most jubilant when it soundtracks Brenda and Eddie’s good ol’ days, but those yesteryears aren’t exactly exceptional: “Nobody looked any finer/Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner.”
Joel’s not alone as a singer-songwriter championing normal folks and everyday life, but there’s something so unbelievably plain about Brenda and Eddie, and the uncomplicated way Joel concocts and presents them, like when he seems to run out of material near the song’s end and rhymes, “That’s all I heard about Brenda and Eddie/Can’t tell you more than I told you already,” that’s palpably sad when set against his musical scenery. It’s as if Joel is saying all the Brendas and Eddies out there deserve the royal treatment they got back in the day, if only for a night, because we’ve all got some regrets so let’s reminisce and have a drink and a laugh—or maybe he’s not, and the whole thing’s a sendup of two people who really could stand to keep ploughing ahead with their really regular lives because they’re not getting any better. With “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” Joel paints love as too banal even to be romantic, a commonplace emotion that thrills briefly before living continues.
Following the winding epic of dwindling hopes is “Vienna,” a compact tearjerker built on the lilting little piano melody that introduces the tune. Whereas the disenchantment lurks in the subtext of “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” “Vienna” is straightforwardly melancholic, ironically making it The Stranger’s most empathetic and heartwarming song. It’s about growing up and taking things as they come, and Joel and the band move calmly through the song, like they’re demonstrating how to play a ballad for students. Yet Joel can’t help but lecture even when he’s being supportive. While he’s likely singing to himself, there’s ambiguity as to whether he thinks he, his character, or his narrator is somehow right or wrong in his actions or advice. As sweet as it can sound, “Vienna” pairs disappointment with aspiration, with a melody that’s alternately whimsical and maudlin.
Joel also looks to diagnose humanity on “Vienna,” something he does often across The Stranger while still mostly writing about familiar things or people; “Just the Way You Are,” “She’s Always a Woman,” and “The Stranger,” for example, were written for or about Elizabeth Weber. He’s thinking of the bigger picture while his eyes are focused squarely on what’s in front of him, lending an idiosyncratic air to his words, straddled somewhere between profound and puzzling, like an author who purposely contorts a cliché. On the title track, for instance, Joel gets at the common phenomenon of feeling like we change our personalities for different settings—“Well we all have a face/That we hide away forever”—only to get specific about what those faces or masks are: “Some are satin, some are steel/Some are silk, and some are leather.” I can’t think of many people who categorize their moods by fabric. In the end, Joel winds up searching for meaning and is unable to make up his mind; a definitive truth remains elusive. The hit ballads, too, are built on self-doubt and fear, making them Trojan horses of scorn that an aging Frank Sinatra could cover like the singer of the world’s cheapest wedding band, as happened with “Just the Way You Are.”
And, obviously, “Just the Way You Are” and “She’s Always a Woman” don’t sound resentful; they’re absolutely doe-eyed. Because Billy Joel, as he discovered with The Stranger, couldn’t help but make hits, songs that embraced melody at the risk of being labeled schmaltz. “She’s Always a Woman” is balanced and warm like a lullaby, something you could easily think you’d heard before but just can’t place, instantly familiar but fresh and stirring in its own right. “She’s Always a Woman” is the sparest song on The Stranger but the principles of sharp songwriting with understated production remain across the record as Joel constructs monster melodies and choruses with his band. “Those songs—they’re built like the Rock of Gibraltar,” Bruce Springsteen once said of Joel’s work. “Until you play them, you don’t realize how well they play.”
With his compositional gifts and unfussy writing, Joel made a hit record that’s mostly about how life just is, how good things come and good things go and it seems like we’re stuck in the middle of it. Joel, however unwittingly, accentuates The Stranger’s themes with the album’s least interesting songs, the closing “Get It Right the First Time” and “Everybody Has a Dream.” The former, with its boilerplate chipperness, is similar to a Piano Man cut, and it culminates with him trying to make a move and leave a good first impression. And then, on “Everybody Has a Dream,” Joel adopts something like a preacher’s rasp to say that his true dream is for love and a quiet home life, juxtaposing the domesticity with “everybody” else’s silly pipe dreams. What the two songs lack are clear foils, someone for Joel to contest or present as somehow pitiable. There is no God-fearing Virginia, no silk-masked Stranger, no “crazy child,” just Joel alone, trying to make sense of himself or where he is.
There are two props on the cover of The Stranger: the theatre mask, which reflects the words of the title song, and, obscured in shadows, a pair of boxing gloves. Joel boxed briefly as a teenager before a punch to the face broke his nose and ended the fun of the hobby. “The last fight I had, one that was actually in a ring, was with a guy who was a terrible boxer,” he recalled of his final opponent. “That’s when I realized that no matter how ‘bad’ I think I am, there’s always somebody badder.” Suited and barefoot on The Stranger, Joel, 28 years old, kneels on the bed and looks down at the mask on the pillow, representing his album, his songs, a desire to make something of his own, something new and successful. But the gloves dangle like an albatross. He had fought and gotten knocked down; now it was his time to land one.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 27, 2021 | 8.5 | 43e1559a-c6eb-4de6-97fd-8680a56decc3 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Nobody's Smiling is one of Common's most personal records in quite some time, reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with producer No I.D. and meditating on the loss of J Dilla. He also addresses his own conflicted decision to leave the city and people that so greatly shaped some of his best music. | Nobody's Smiling is one of Common's most personal records in quite some time, reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with producer No I.D. and meditating on the loss of J Dilla. He also addresses his own conflicted decision to leave the city and people that so greatly shaped some of his best music. | Common: Nobody's Smiling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19608-common-nobodys-smiling/ | Nobody's Smiling | Common exists in sainted territory in hip-hop: the rare rapper who's appeared on "Oprah", he's earned a default level of respect and can reliably release major label albums every few years, no matter what the industry climate. For many, Common's latest album, Nobody's Smiling, will hold a polarized position in the midst of Chicago's senseless violence, a symbol of all that is right in a genre too often derided for moral depravity and/or artistic bankruptcy. Others will cynically dismiss this latest effort, as Common hasn't lived in Chicago in years but is releasing a record capitalizing on the city's newly gritty national reputation. But Common's not interested in moralizing, nor trendchasing. Although he writes a familiar snapshot of Chicago, its troubles seem a catalyst for his own creativity. The album's most convincing when tackling the push-and-pull conflict between the individual and his hometown, as Common's good intentions are buoyed by memory, generosity, and attentiveness to his craft.
Looming over the album is the specter of Chicago's gun violence and the music which first brought it to our attention; Common's 2011 album The Dreamer/The Believer was released just weeks before Chief Keef hit the national radar. So Nobody's Smiling displays some idealism-drain, its black and white cover art reflecting a stripped down sound. Common and longtime producer No I.D. aren't interested in competing with the street sounds emanating from his hometown. Instead, they go for a complementary feel, with old head-friendly percussive loops and blaxploitation rhythms ("Blak Majik," "Speak My Piece," "Hustle Harder"). Common's delivery has a loose, nimble quality throughout, his words tumbling out with practiced ease. His lyrics are writerly, internal rhymes focused on a history he can recall but which seems distant now: "Have you ever heard of Black Stone around Black Stones?/ And Four CHs, Vice Lords, Stony Island on Aces/ The concrete matrix, street organizations, they gave violations, hood public relations."
Common's approach here is to intertwine his own story with his memories of Chicago in order to forge a connection to the next generation. The use of a Biggie sample on "Speak My Piece" is emblematic; when Common was an emerging artist, the young Christopher Wallace spoke powerfully to the same state of mind Chicago's street rappers wrestle with today. "7 Deadly Sins", a bonus track on Nobody's Smiling, sounds like another way to integrate a mid-'90s street feel, complete with a "Ten Crack Commandments"-esque concept and Wu-Tang-recalling beat. Throughout, Common attempts to speak to everyone, offering bits of wisdom for a new generation while contextualizing for an older, outside audience.
This attempt at generational continuity also explains why Common grants a platform for a phalanx of strong guest stars to shine. Opener "The Neighborhood" features Lil Herb, a young street rapper whose memories of his era are more freshly etched in each bar: "Used to post up on that strip, I look like a street sign/ I been out there three days and I got shot at three times." Meanwhile, West Side rapper Dreezy's verse on "Hustle Harder" argues convincingly that she might be the best bar-for-bar rapper in Chicago right now: "I could be a lady in the streets, but in the booth I pull triggers/ Shots fired, I go harder than a nigga."
Other guest artists, like Def Jam signees Vince Staples and Big Sean, acquit themselves well, providing different points of view on the record's central conflict. Big Sean tones down the usual hamminess, perhaps due to the severity of the subject matter, and catches a slick behind-the-beat flow. But Staples stands out particularly: "Lean and took a puff and then she gave it to my father/ Used to take the bullets out so I could play with the revolver/ Satan serenading ever since I was a toddler." But it's poet Malik Yusef who nearly steals the show, appearing at the end of the album's title track and spitting an evocative piece that captures the album's real central paradoxes: "Now I see how my daddy felt the dark day he discovered that black power didn't keep the lights on." "They drilling on my land but ain't no oil to be found / I might be part of the problem." He hits especially hard while engaging with wordplay in the differences between "shy" and "Chi": "Are these celebrities way too shy to be loyal to the town?"
The album's closer, "Rewind That", is one of Common's most personal records in quite some time, reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with No I.D. and meditating on the loss of J Dilla. He addresses his own conflicted decision to leave the city and people that so greatly shaped some of his best music. Truth is complex, and the popular manichean tensions don't map out so predictably atop "conscious" and "gangster". That's true for street rappers themselves, who have to navigate an ever-increasing divide between their lives and those of the communities who propelled them to fame. And it's true for Common, too, who had to leave his home to continue his career, and for whom—nearly two decades later—finds that the decision still weighs upon him. Nobody's Smiling is driven by the search for this common denominator. | 2014-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-07-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Artium | July 25, 2014 | 7.7 | 43e994d5-709b-4b38-adc4-1c55293a1b2a | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
On his first album in seven years, Ted Leo faces down private and public upheaval, as personal tragedy and political calamity fuel the most expansive, emotionally devastating music of his career. | On his first album in seven years, Ted Leo faces down private and public upheaval, as personal tragedy and political calamity fuel the most expansive, emotionally devastating music of his career. | Ted Leo: The Hanged Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ted-leo-the-hanged-man/ | The Hanged Man | Throughout the 2000s, Ted Leo invited us to rally around his heart of oak. At a time when everything was starting to feel ephemeral and imperiled, Leo’s politically enraged, personally engaged, Lizzy-kissed pick-me-ups offered refuge and reassurance. He was the pillar we could lean on when times got tough, a totem of industriousness and perseverance to which we could all aspire. When the better, kinder world we dreamed of seemed to fade out of view—i.e., right around the time George W. Bush won his second term—Leo simply assured us, “There’s a whole lot of walking to do,” and led the way forward.
But the conditions Leo endured after 2010’s The Brutalist Bricks, in both his personal and professional life, nearly pushed him to the breaking point. As the title of his first proper album in seven years ominously suggests, his proverbial oak has come to represent less a wellspring of life than a convenient place to throw up a noose—not for himself, per se, but for the life he once knew, and for the future he imagined.
The Hanged Man was recorded by Leo primarily at his house in Wakefield, R.I., where the longtime New Yorker recently decamped after waving the white flag on the Big Apple and its astronomical cost of living. The physical upheaval followed a series of emotional ones. As he recounted in a recent, soul-baring Stereogum feature, declining record sales and diminishing crowds forced this DIY lifer to seriously consider packing it in. At that career crossroads, Leo was waylaid by tragedy: In 2011, the baby he and his wife were expecting succumbed to a late-term miscarriage. In the wake of all that, one of indie rock’s most impassioned and outspoken voices all but went silent for a couple of years.
Leo’s low-key, winsome collaboration with Aimee Mann as the Both would reintroduce him to the public realm in 2014—a pleasant diversion that helped restore his confidence. But The Hanged Man is where Leo truly unleashes all the pain, anger, fear, and disappointment he’d been harboring over the past half-decade. For the first time, he’s billing himself without his redoubtable band, the Pharmacists; its drummer, Chris Wilson, backs him up on several tracks, but he’s in service of a dramatically different vision than Leo’s typical ampheta-mod anthems. Here, Leo is less rocker than auteur, crafting the most expansive, experimental, and emotionally devastating music of his career (and mostly on his own, save for a handful of strategically deployed guests).
Like the signature state-of-the-union address he delivered 13 years ago, The Hanged Man arrives at a flash point in U.S. politics, though this isn’t exactly Shake the Sheets II: Electric Trumpaloo—much of the material predates last November’s presidential election. But the outcome adds an extra layer of black-cloud coverage to what was already shaping up to be an intensely introspective album. The opening “Moon Out of Phase” wasn’t just written in the election’s aftermath, it actually depicts the Wednesday morning after, with a dejected Leo summoning the will to “barely make it into clothes” as “the creeping and the menace grows.” In sharp contrast to his usual adrenalized modes, the song is a hulking monolith built on a sludgy, droning, one-chord riff that effectively heralds Leo’s first foray into doom metal. Despite the tantalizing rattle of a tambourine, the drums never kick in to push the song forward, as Leo opts to wallow in the muck of America’s “straight white pigpen.” At the same time, you can sense Leo finding strength in the song’s unrelenting ugliness, like a fallen superhero reconnecting with dormant powers.
The Hanged Man continues to project a bold, subversive spirit even after that introductory blast of static clears. “Used to Believe” is an ebullient jangle-pop aria about losing all hope; when Leo sings, “I used to believe we’d be comfortably settled by now,” the sentimental strings feel almost like an act of cruelty, putting a soft-focus patina on a domestic dream that’s fading out of view. And on “Can’t Go Back,” Leo laments his fading fortunes over a jaunty “Mr. Blue Sky” bounce, while Jean Grae’s cheery, Motown-style backing vocals prod him with a velvet-gloved touch.
Clocking in at over an hour, The Hanged Man isn’t always so willing to mask its disillusioned lyrics in pretty dressing: “The Nazarene” subjects a mournful, McCartney-esque piano serenade to the “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” treatment, building its repeated chords into a queasy, slow-motion cyclone. But even as its musical terrain turns more treacherous (like on the overburdened orchestro-electro elegy “Gray Havens”), Leo includes just enough of his patented windmill-powered rave-ups to keep the momentum rolling—and forcefully exorcise the demons plaguing him. “The Future (Is Learning to Wait Around for Things You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Wait For)” crafts the album’s most rousing chorus out of its wordiest title; Leo’s acquiescence turns to rage in the hammering final minute, as if he can’t bring himself to accept his own song’s sanguine, everything-happens-for-a-reason philosophy. The album hits its frenetic peak with “You’re Like Me,” a bloody-knuckled power-pop confessional that obliquely references recent revelations of the sexual abuse he experienced as a child by assuring fellow survivors that they’re not alone.
The latter track forms the first part of a closing triptych that stands as the most lyrically harrowing music of Leo’s career. It’s completed by two songs that unflinchingly address the loss of the baby girl he never got to welcome into the world. With the solitary electric-folk strummer “Lonsdale Avenue,” he tries to find the light in his darkest hour: “She taught me better love that I might love again,” he admits. By contrast, on The Hanged Man’s crushing piano-ballad finale, “Let’s Stay on the Moon,” Leo’s personal journey orbits back to the despair of the album’s similarly lunar-themed opener. “We had a daughter and she died,” he sings with bleary-eyed resignation, before framing his personal apocalypse in terms of a global one: “Let’s stay on the moon/And watch the earth go down.”
But in the song’s final moments, thanks to a makeshift gospel choir featuring Mann, rapper Open Mike Eagle, and comedian Paul F. Tompkins, the statement transforms from a declaration of fuck-it-all nihilism into a promise of renewal. It’s a testament to Leo’s unyielding generosity that he’s willing to elevate a song about a deeply personal trauma into a vehicle for communal catharsis over the sorry state of our world. On The Hanged Man, he invites us to watch it burn with him—because, at this point, it feels like the only option toward building a better one. | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 11, 2017 | 7.7 | 43ea3737-23db-435c-8710-d8379e8e2eb4 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Unlike the commercial soundtrack music she writes in her day job, the Los Angeles producer’s solo work is an over-the-top onslaught of electronic noise and withering anti-capitalist sarcasm. | Unlike the commercial soundtrack music she writes in her day job, the Los Angeles producer’s solo work is an over-the-top onslaught of electronic noise and withering anti-capitalist sarcasm. | Lauren Bousfield: Salesforce | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lauren-bousfield-salesforce/ | Salesforce | Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are probably a heavy consumer of library music. Any time you watch reality TV, commercials, a YouTube documentary, or anything that requires background music, many of those songs have been sourced from commercial studios tasked with creating music to complement visuals. This niche is how Lauren Bousfield makes a living. The Los Angeles-based producer previously worked under Hans Zimmer helping to sculpt tracks for the likes of Batman v. Superman and Kung Fu Panda 3, and now she spends her days composing library music for television shows and video games. “I have to distill a lot of ideas into something that is passable as music,” she recently told The Wire, wrestling with the dissonance she feels writing tracks intended to have a passive effect. “Society does not work, nothing works, so making music for something that’s like, ‘This totally works!’ makes me feel more sardonic.”
Though she may pay the rent with perfectly unobtrusive songs, Bousfield’s own music is impossible to ignore. Over the last two decades, whether under her own name or as Nero’s Day at Disneyland, Bousfield has raked and scraped synthetic, jagged sounds against one another, crushing her distorted vocals between violent breakcore rhythms with the force of a trash compactor. Hearing her coagulate the horrors of contemporary society into a breakneck rush of sound might be despairingly intense if she didn’t deliver it all with the inflection of a sick joke. Bousfield’s sense of humor is one of her deadliest weapons against disillusionment, and on her latest apocalyptic release, Salesforce, she folds her composerly sensibilities and head-thrashing style of drum’n’bass together to craft one the most aggressive statements of her career.
Bousfield’s work has long felt prescient: Albums like Grievances and Dead Malls and Avalon Vales depicted a rave-soaked landscape where the internet has dissolved the boundaries between genres and genders. Salesforce plays like the evil shadow twin to modern digicore, particularly on the cacophonously melodic “Hazer,” where Bousfield pairs up with Ada Rook of Black Dresses. Rook’s bleating screams make a vicious counterpart to Bousfield’s scorched-earth drum programming, and together the duo builds to a surprisingly hooky chorus, emerging from the harrowing sludge with something actually resembling pop.
Track titles like “Mansions No One Wants to Buy for Any Price” and “Headstone Prices on Credit” offer a helpful frame for Bousfield’s vision of a capitalist wasteland, since her own hissing, heavily processed vocals can be difficult to make out. But the lyrics are worth reading to follow how she dementedly twists corporate signifiers into cartoonish shapes. “I want to reiterate our core values,” she keens over the choral opening passage of “Mansions,” before requesting the listener to “break your demon dick off inside me.” These laugh-out-loud moments come sandwiched between bouts of industrial onslaught. “Sable Wings” makes reference to a “Wingstop surveillance campaign,” while “Debtors Prison Click Here Disney Needs to See This” instructs us to “grind up Goofy’s bones and snort”—this comes after Goofy himself even makes an appearance in the Kingdom Hearts III-quoting intro of “Hazer,” but it doesn’t take long for his gawrsh-ing voice to be swallowed whole by an ocean of terraformed noise. Bousfield exploits this same sense of plasticity in her sound design as well, using chintzy, quantized synth tones to uncanny effect. When the spiraling keys of “Hail Sound” begin to stretch and distort into unnatural shapes, it’s like watching a grand piano bleed out all over the floor.
Bousfield’s approach is so aggressively berserk it makes Fire-Toolz seem radio-friendly by comparison, and the tracks where she exerts more controlled dynamics are the most rewarding. When “Narrow Down Concepts Force Meaning” slowly ramps up its baroque piano intro before exploding into a blitz of chopped-up breaks, it makes for a brain-splittingly cathartic release. Bousfield’s music operates at such a fast clip that it can be too much for the brain to process, yet that overload feels like exactly the point. “Permanently Closed” climaxes with a burst of drum breaks sped up so quickly that they register as a wall of snares, making it hard to do anything but bang your head in an attempt to keep up. At a time where it’s easy to become numb to the hell that corporate greed has wrought, Bousfield’s music is a thrilling reminder of the punishing absurdity that surrounds us. | 2023-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Orange Milk | July 10, 2023 | 7.3 | 43ef8856-aee9-45a9-a1b3-71580fdba290 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Shameless holiday cash-grab recycles old Biggie verses in new songs that feature contributions from Jay-Z, Just Blaze, and, um, Korn. | Shameless holiday cash-grab recycles old Biggie verses in new songs that feature contributions from Jay-Z, Just Blaze, and, um, Korn. | The Notorious B.I.G.: Duets: The Final Chapter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5923-duets-the-final-chapter/ | Duets: The Final Chapter | "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
He's not coming back like some revivified monster. This attempted resuscitation, this half-assed memory-stirrer, is a project of the crassest order. It's graverobbing at its most furtive, orchestrated by a master career-tarnisher. Igor Diddy lurks, hunch-backed, quietly approaching your ear: "Hey there, young consumer, do you like my best friend, the legendary Notorious B.I.G.? Dr. Pha and I, we've breathed new life, created vivacity, and taken creation from God's hands."
It's particularly sad because statement albums were never lost on Biggie. The scope and fearlessness of Ready to Die says as much. The push/pull stories between the then-Sean "Puffy" Combs and his meal ticket are renowned. Ever the capitalist, he constantly sought ways to remix street records into pop hits. But Biggie, a natural songwriter, was always conscious of credibility, name-checking Jeru the Damaja and Nas and Gang Starr. For the most part, he could write hits without pandering, instead leaning on a confusing vulnerability/masculinity complex and that chunky voice. All's to say, he was no saint, nor a pariah of pop. But he had integrity. Duets ignores all this precedent by cashing in blindly, amassing pointless guest spots and fusing old verses over tinny, soulless productions.
Bad Boy has recruited hacks and hit-hounds like Scott Storch, Jazze Pha, and Swizz Beatz to reconfigure songs that needn't be touched, or gotten sound-specific artists like Akon and Mobb Deep to put together Biggie Smalls-Made-Easy cookie-cutters. The first posthumous B.I.G. release, Born Again, had plenty of problems, but at least unheard music saw the light of day. As far as I can tell, this project is a sham. For years we'd been told that Mister Cee, the DJ credited with breaking Biggie, had a stash of unreleased vocals and freestyles. We were told he was waiting to unleash these vocals for a duets project that would blow our wigs back. That's not this project. There are zero unheard verses here.
The list of collaborators ranges from intriguing (Scarface, Nas, T.I.) to groan-inducing (we see you Korn and Nelly), but few of the songs actually leave any impression. The Just Blaze-produced "Living in Pain", jacking Biggie and 2Pac's verses from the latter's "House of Pain", is the only truly effective track. Sampling Lamont Dozier's sweeping, many-times-flipped "Blue Sky and Silver Bird", the song's ululating strings summon an epic sadness, while Mary J. Blige's expertly delivered chorus oozes with conviction.
But elsewhere, only a decent Slim Thug verse saves "Breakin' Old Habits" from utter mediocrity. Not as much can be said for the middling new R. Kelly and Missy Elliott songs featuring tacked-on verses, or the ludicrous Dipset/Lil' Wayne collaboration "I'm Wit Whateva" that doesn't even feature B.I.G.'s vocals. Is this a mistake or are Jim Jones dedications enough to justify inclusion here? Maybe "Whatchu Want", the requisite Jay-Z duet (ludicrously credited to the Commission), is a big deal, but it's stock compared to their earlier thriller "Brooklyn's Finest". Even the songs that make sense, like "Get Your Grind On", with Fat Joe, Big Pun, and Freeway, fall flat.
If anything, this compilation will have youngsters scratching their head over what made the Notorious B.I.G. the subject of hero worship. Everything from the foolishly illustrated album art, featuring a stoned-looking Christopher Wallace with a crown slooping off his head, to the overwrought dedications from his kids, mom, and Lil' Cease (!) flounders in the face of his intimidating if overstated legacy. This record has no rhythm or personality-- and truthfully, no reason to exist. The presence of so many of big names speaks to his importance, vis-à-vis the Rapper=Rock Star revolution. But none of these artists can speak to B.I.G. And if they could, something tells me he wouldn't have much to say back. | 2006-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Bad Boy | January 3, 2006 | 4.2 | 43efdfba-c450-4112-af66-d531a4471022 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
This album of bright, hymn-like drone is mesmerizing but also oddly challenging, with constantly shifting textures that invite steady attention. | This album of bright, hymn-like drone is mesmerizing but also oddly challenging, with constantly shifting textures that invite steady attention. | Nicholas Szczepanik: Please Stop Loving Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15689-please-stop-loving-me/ | Please Stop Loving Me | When I first started listening to Nicholas Szczepanik's latest album, its title felt off by 180 degrees. Its single, 48-minute track is warm, reverent, and emotional. Compared to some recent trends in drone, which tend more toward the dark and cavernous, Please Stop Loving Me's bright organ tones are practically hymn-like. In other words, this is music that sounds like it wants you to love it.
The further I got into the album, though, the more Szczepanik's wry choice of name made sense. Whenever you try to get too comfortable with his drones-- to glide across their surface or ride them like a soft cloud-- he pushes back. His sounds constantly twist, dive, and circle, avoiding complacency and requiring you to do the same. Innumerable shifts in volume, tone, and tempo occur with sneaky unpredictability. Often Szczepanik will lull you into calm waters before tossing you into choppy waves. There is a lot to love here, much of it mesmerizing, even soothing. Just don't turn your brain off, because Szczepanik is more interested in challenging than hypnotizing.
The beauty of Please Stop Loving Me is that he manages to do both consistently. There's really no point along Szczepanik's journey-- which doesn't feel long or short, but more outside of time-- where the music's meditative qualities outstrip its thought-provoking ones or vice versa. In that sense, his material reminds me most of the careful work of Kyle Bobby Dunn. There's an intangible similarity between the ways both musicians turn sounds and patterns into wordless emotional language. But where Dunn is a master at massaging his tones toward quietude, Szczepanik excels at finding subtlety and nuance in immersive volumes. Even at his softest here, he could fill an airplane hangar with his music.
Szczepanik's work conjures lots of images like that one. Whenever I listen, I find myself thinking in pictures and metaphors, giving shapes and colors to his sounds the way I imagine the faces and voices of characters in a book. So it's tempting to concoct a narrative that could accompany this sonic epic, and claim that its arcs and curves are scene changes and plot twists. Maybe they are, but what impresses most about Szczepanik's story is that it could be told only with sound, and only through his particular, engrossing way with it. | 2011-08-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-08-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Streamline | August 1, 2011 | 7.8 | 43f14ba6-1675-45c4-b587-8cd3e90d7655 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
After last year’s more than promising Stranger, it is difficult to regard the Stockholm rapper’s latest mixtape as anything but a step backward. | After last year’s more than promising Stranger, it is difficult to regard the Stockholm rapper’s latest mixtape as anything but a step backward. | Yung Lean: Poison Ivy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-lean-poison-ivy/ | Poison Ivy | He is only 22 years old, but Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad, a.k.a. Yung Lean, has already traced a lifetime’s narrative arc. The Stockholm-born rapper formed a successful underground hip-hop group while still in high school. At 16, he went viral, with videos for songs like “Ginseng Strip 2002,” he sold out clubs across the United States his first time there, and he was profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Tasting stardom, he became addicted to Xanax, lean, and cocaine, was hospitalized, and then ushered to the Swedish countryside to recover. He released his candid, back-to-basics comeback album last November, at the age of 21. “I’m not a temporary artist,” Lean told Fader in 2016, in a nearly 5000-word profile charting his storied rise and fall. Barely past legal drinking age, it feels like he’s been around forever.
Yung Lean was destined to be ephemeral: a short-lived novelty act from the SoundCloud ether who would vanish back into Scandinavian obscurity when our attention drifted to another fleeting trend. But then, as the rapper endured personal hardship, the landscape of hip-hop changed, and in the years since “Ginseng Strip 2002” exactly the style of narcotic, despondent cloud-rap of which Lean was an early practitioner ascended from niche curiosity to the dominant mode of the rap mainstream. It’s kismet: Yung Lean fits in better with the sound of 2018 than he ever has before. He didn’t just outlast his fate as a passing fad—he watched the fad prevail. For an artist who ought to seem outdated, Poison Ivy could hardly arrive at a more opportune time.
And yet it is difficult to regard Poison Ivy as anything but a step backward. Last year’s Stranger was almost universally agreed to represent a step forward for Lean—its production more coherent, its aesthetic more refined, its content more articulate than what had been demonstrated on his previous albums. The expansive, often impressionistic production of Stranger has been scaled back and stifled, exchanged for some of the least-inspired beats he has rapped over since 2014’s inchoate Unknown Memory.
This is a real disappointment. Stranger afforded glimpses of the artist it seemed Lean could be: a defiantly weird, unfashionably bookish white kid from Sweden interested in gothic horror and the supernatural, capable of conjuring cinematic visions both disturbing and evocative. It’s hard to reconcile that artist with some of the feeble images Lean summons up on Poison Ivy. He stumbles right off the bat, on opening track “happy feet”: “I be draped in Burberry/Late nights like the cemetery,” he lazily starts. “Got magic like I’m Harry/Dark magician, you a fairy.” “Yellowman,” the last track on Stranger, was based on the 19th-century short story collection The King in Yellow. That seems a far cry now from gay jokes and references to Harry Potter. Where’s the imaginative fervor of the artist who as recently as last year claimed an affinity with Yukio Mishima and Edgar Allen Poe?
It isn’t merely that Lean seems less serious—Stranger had its kid-like flourishes and pop cultural references less dignified than classic literature, and his music has always spanned a wide range of brows both high and low. But one of the chief creative breakthroughs of that album was its candid specificity. He allowed himself to get confessional, dealing honestly with his struggles with mental health and the nightmares that evidently plagued him. (“When I’m afraid I lose my mind/It’s fine, it happens all the time,” he admitted on album highlight “Agony”.) He cracked something when he learned to be particular. On Poison Ivy he recedes into the general. “Ridin round town/Blowin dough/Money spender,” he drawls on “bender++girlfriend,” a song on which he compares himself to the “Futurama” character. This follows tracks in which he sees himself variously in Sauron, Darth Maul, and “The Sims.”
At eight tracks and 23 minutes, the Poison Ivy mixtape is something of a stopgap in the mind of Lean. It doesn’t align with the arc he has been tracing since the beginning of his career, following through on the creative potential he’s been developing. The apathetic languor of a song like “ropeman” or the astonishingly limp “trashy” are without the glimmers of inspiration and wit that made his most recent releases promising even when not quite successful. It all feels distinctly like stagnation at precisely the point when he seems ready to move forward. | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Year0001 | November 12, 2018 | 4.9 | 43f54ae5-5f8f-4c28-bffe-985c2484a58e | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Fatima Yamaha’s 2004 song “What's a Girl to Do?” made him a cult favorite. Here, on his second release since then, the Dutch producer offers future directions but none as captivating as his start. | Fatima Yamaha’s 2004 song “What's a Girl to Do?” made him a cult favorite. Here, on his second release since then, the Dutch producer offers future directions but none as captivating as his start. | Fatima Yamaha: Araya EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22887-araya-ep/ | Araya EP | Fatima Yamaha’s new Araya EP would not exist without persistent cheerleading from a few impressively dedicated followers. The Dutch producer Bas Bron released a record as Yamaha in 2004 and then appeared done with the name. He continued to put out records under other pseudonyms—Bastian, Seymour Bits—and run his Magnetron label. The results of the Yamaha experiment, a four-track EP titled A Girl Between Two Worlds, seemed like a one-off curio.
But over time, those who heard the EP became smitten. In particular, they swooned over “What's a Girl to Do?,” with its sprightly synthesizers and existential-crisis dialog sampled from Lost In Translation. Two labels, D1 Recordings and Dekmantel, eventually released the song; another devotee, producer Hudson Mohawke, included Yamaha's tune in an Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 in 2009 and used it as the basis for “Resistance,” a new track featuring Jhené Aiko, in 2015.
This put Bron in a strange spot: a Def Jam vocalist with Top 40 cred was singing one of Yamaha’s melodies, but Yamaha barely existed. So Bron pulled the moniker out of mothballs and released the LP Imaginary Lines in 2015. He could have done anything he wanted—he was hardly constrained by precedent—but he decided to stay faithful to his most hardcore fans. Imaginary Lines mostly picked up where A Girl Between Two Worlds left off, maintaining a handsome balance between fluffy and driving. Movie-score atmospheres sit easily next to songs like “Love Invaders,” with its resistance-is-futile grip recalling crackerjack pop songs.
In contrast, the three tracks on Araya represent a swivel away from the accessibility that earned Yamaha ardent admirers. Though “Piayes Beach Bar and Grill” has plenty of dinky electric snap, it avoids any head-rush moments: the synths never achieve peak friskiness, there’s no sample lying in wait to ambush the listener and suddenly transform the song's final quarter. The track ends during the middle of a showy solo, so you get the annoyance of indulgence without the triumphant, ascend-the-scale payoff.
“Romantic Bureaucracy” maintains distance in a different way; it has the exclusive feel of an inside joke. The song plays like a response to “Love's Got Me High,” a ’90s floor-wrecker produced by Detroit stalwart Terrence Parker. As one piano lays out a simple groove similar to the one that carried Parker’s track, Bron adds criss-crossing clusters of keyboard notes—sonic paperwork—on top. A beat never arrives to cut through all the red tape.
Still, Bron can't help but make something hard to shake—that quality, after all, is what kept the Yamaha spark alive for all these years. In that vein, Araya’s title track is crisp and chipper, with a commanding melody ricocheting playfully across a stern, ’80s-pop low-end. It's not much of a leap from here to the work of a more mainstream producer like Eric Prydz. There's a pair of especially pleasing moments around the song’s four-minute mark: a light drum beats out a military rat-a-tat behind the primary melody just as it finishes one strafing run and prepares to begin another pass. This is a great trick for stakes-raising that you can also find in hits like Maxwell’s “Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder).”
Bron needs these overtly gratifying tracks—without them, Yamaha wouldn’t have picked up boosters, and the project would have remained a quirky singularity. But even with “Araya,” this EP makes you wonder about Yamaha’s status. First the persona inspired a minor cult; then it stormed back as a small-scale dancefloor hero. What is Yamaha now? Araya offers a few possibilities, but no answers. | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | February 20, 2017 | 6.8 | 43f755f8-c93d-4369-8bd2-aae6e060cdcb | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
Nailing a transformative take on grime, Gobstopper Records founder and London DJ Mr. Mitch's new full-length is more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before. | Nailing a transformative take on grime, Gobstopper Records founder and London DJ Mr. Mitch's new full-length is more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before. | Mr. Mitch: Parallel Memories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20001-parallel-memories/ | Parallel Memories | For a genre built on, and named after, trunk-rattling energy bordering on absolute filth, grime also holds a certain power in its calmest moments. Before last year, Mr. Mitch would have been considered a surprise source for that kind of work. The Gobstopper Records founder and London DJ was a monster out the gate, with a self-titled 2010 debut EP and 2012 beat-battle showstopper "Senior Bass" standing as early-career trophies for the producer; his ability to bump the heavy shit but shun cold-concrete aggression for bright, alcopop-buzzed hyperactivity was what made him exciting. Even when he went a little overcast, he did so playfully—for proof, check out the ODB-looping Grime 2.0 highlight "Viking" and its tipsy, bottom-heavy synthesizer whistle. It's as potent with "Funky Worm" squiggle-synths as classic g-funk was.
That's why Parallel Memories is surprising. Just a year ago, Mitch was bumping trap-drenched, hip-hop-adjacent bass-war artillery like the Suave EP. But he also made a point of countering last year's agressive, grime-producer soundclash "war dubs" free-for-all with his own simmered-down "Peace Edits". Now he's breaking out with a full-length record that's more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before, a metamorphosis from somebody who's had fans growing to expect them on the regular. And he so regularly nails that transformative take on grime that it's tempting to assign the things he does here as a new potential signature sound. At the minimum, it gives him a new tool in his kit.
The wide-open hushed silences and swooning interplay between synth hooks and pared-down beats puts Parallel Memories in the neighborhood of something that could be called "ambient grime" if that weren't a little too pat. But the slow-burning loops, distance-making reverb, and glassy digital melodies are made to envelop, not built to destroy. The first kick on the album doesn't show up until nearly two and a half minutes into opener "Afternoon After", and when it does finally thump its way through warped-Minimoog swells that chirp like the offspring of harps and whistles, it sounds like a bomb being dropped. That's just one bracing use of negative space, and in a track more suited to scene-setting; in the cuts with more of a focus on rhythm—as busy as the plastic clatter of "Intense Faces" or as screwed-down as the deep-snow trudge of "Hot Air"—the sawed-off beats hit harder for the air around them.
But what's remarkable is how many different moods Mitch is able to evoke this way. Take "Don't Leave": it's simple—and staggeringly effective—to draw off the power of a sampled hook like he does with Blackstreet's "Don't Leave Me", pitting virtuoso R&B vocal intensity alongside delicate, wandering, halting digital melodies that create deep tension with two different strains of slow-motion heartache. But the calm that masks tension also sweetens harshness, like the way the subtly martial snap-thump stutter-step beats of "Intense Faces" shed their gloom the moment he brings in its plinky keyboard counterpoint. And even inside those juxtapositions, there are different shades and detours that provoke mood swings through each loop. "The Night" is frayed nerves or lucid relaxation depending on the angle, a recurring indistinct voice repeating the same two syllables that could either be calling somebody's name or waving them goodbye. "Bullion" plays out like a electro banger slowed to a crawl because the gears are gummed up, and draws out an odd, ill-at-ease feel of triumphant queasiness in the process. And "Sweet Boy Code", a Peace Edit of Dark0's "Sweet Boy Pose", maintains the original's fast-forward euphoria even at half-speed, floating through frozen time with a lightheaded clarity. There's plenty of room for interpretation in the margins of this music—but there's even more room to breathe, and to move. | 2014-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | December 9, 2014 | 7.9 | 43fab45d-90f6-4b4f-8c79-3c5c627d18f6 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
In collaboration with singer Xan Tyler, the musician and producer Kramer offers a thoughtful, cavernous-sounding counterweight to a mischievous career. | In collaboration with singer Xan Tyler, the musician and producer Kramer offers a thoughtful, cavernous-sounding counterweight to a mischievous career. | Let It Come Down: Songs We Sang in Our Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/let-it-come-down-songs-we-sang-in-our-dreams/ | Songs We Sang in Our Dreams | Kramer, Let It Come Down’s main songwriter, fosters the sort of mystique you might expect of someone who goes by his last name alone. Born in 1958 and adopted by a Long Island car salesman and his wife, Kramer made a reputation as an independent, staunchly anti-industry figure well before he learned his birth father was a famed PR executive and his biological brother was high up at Interscope. Kramer’s own label, Shimmy-Disc, offered bands verbal agreements instead of written contracts and forged some of the iconic indie sounds of the 1990s: Kramer discovered Ween, produced all three of Galaxie 500’s records, and some of Low and Half Japanese’s most influential work.
Beginning in the late ’80s, Kramer and performance artist Ann Magnuson performed as Bongwater. The band’s four LPs drew their sense of political conviction from the revolutionary 1960s, while tapping into the day’s slacker culture with a loose sound and titles like Double Bummer and The Power of Pussy. After Bongwater split, Kramer went solo, releasing the two-hour-long The Guilt Trip and the comparatively focused The Secret of Comedy. Although he composed beautiful classical pieces like The Greenberg Variations, his own rock efforts were largely overlong and smattered with profundity, like a genius novelist’s first drafts.
Let It Come Down feels like a counterweight to a mischievous career, a project that Kramer—once an avowed improviser—has worked on for years. He weaves the weight of time into its structure, stretching simple lines into blank canvases for emotion. On Songs We Sang in Our Dreams, boyish humor blooms into something mature and feminine, thanks largely to the band’s crystalline vocalist, British singer Xan Tyler. Perhaps more important, the duo’s debut embraces a logic Kramer fled until his seventh decade: It plays to his strengths.
Among them is a knack for picking collaborators, an idiosyncratic musical vernacular, and an unparalleled ability to make music sound “hall-sized,” the term Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham used to describe the producer’s treatments on their classic song “Tugboat.” Songs We Sang in Our Dreams is cavernous with strings, synth-aping Les Paul, and instrumental cameos, whether tanpura drones or cuíca samples. A dream-pop record from one of the genre’s great architects, it jettisons messy rock for delicate arrangements and surprising vocal accompaniments.
Tyler is a perfect foil, and a stark contrast to previous Kramer collaborators like Magnuson and Half Japanese’s madman-in-chief Jad Fair. While those musicians were notable for their archness, Tyler leaves an impression because of her technical skill, delivering precise, roving melodies that play off the structure provided by Kramer’s acoustic guitar and piano chords. The pair’s harmonies may feel reminiscent of Low, particularly since both duos rely on male-female tension. But while Low’s dynamic often feels romantic, Let It Come Down give the impression of two people alone, singing with identical longing from separate isolations.
Kramer’s unique vernacular helps distinguish Let It Come Down from the tradition he helped create. Samba rhythms—a career-long predilection—form the backbone of “Fingers,” a song that clashes wonderfully with the project’s otherwise consistent mood. The recorded speech in “One Moon,” “Three Wishes,” and closer “Four Hands” evokes Bongwater, but instead of forefronting agit-prop messages, the tracks stand out for their meticulousness, the repetition and timbre of human voices building to something ambiguous yet filled with doom.
Like the sand sliding down the neck of Ed Ruscha’s hourglass on the album’s cover, Kramer and Tyler are two people out of time, writing wistful, dread-filled songs for a planet in a similar situation. “I’ve lost interest in music that makes people laugh,” Kramer told Magnet magazine in 2007. “I want people dipping their toes in a pool of tears. In such an ugly world, beauty is the only true protest.” Let It Come Down fulfills the lofty, admirable goal that he set for himself. This won’t sound like protest music, yet Songs We Sang In Our Dreams rises far above the ugliness of the everyday before it sets us down, reflective if not enraged, in a place where everything seems beautiful. | 2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | June 12, 2020 | 7.7 | 44047bd4-c803-4a46-8c4a-68dd24138f0d | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
*Start Your Own Fucking Show Space *is a loving and lovable tribute to the Brooklyn DIY space Death by Audio | *Start Your Own Fucking Show Space *is a loving and lovable tribute to the Brooklyn DIY space Death by Audio | Various Artists: Start Your Own Fucking Show Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22200-start-your-own-fucking-show-space/ | Start Your Own Fucking Show Space | There once was a time when live albums were a crucial step for rock bands. They were a way of defining the band’s legacy (this is what we sound like, these are the songs we play) as well as proving their technical prowess as performing artists. But as YouTube has made live recordings more immediate than ever, and rock bands in general have become less of cultural icons, the live album has, for the most part, gone the way of the Enhanced CD. Start Your Own Fucking Show Space, though, is a different kind of live album: a means of documenting a venue, not a particular act. The triple-LP set is a loving and lovable tribute to Death by Audio, the Brooklyn DIY space and pedal shop that always operated on old-fashioned values, even while standing at the forefront of a very particular trend in underground rock music.
With much of the crowd noise edited out between tracks (likely a way to keep things moving swiftly and to keep the set from spanning six LPs instead of just three), *Show Space *feels like a type of collection just as anachronistic as the live album. For the most part, it plays like a carefully curated mixtape, chronicling the last decade of guitar-centric noise-rock (save for a few synthier moments by the likes of Future Islands and Dan Deacon). Given the immersive, comprehensive feel of the album, it’s impressive that these recordings are all taken from one month, November 2014, DBA’s final one as a venue. As indicated by the extensive liner notes, featuring the lineups for all 1800 shows that took place in the venue’s seven-and-a-half years of operation, there’s a communal, democratic essence to Show Space. Boasting 26 different tracks and running at 95-minutes, Show Space flows with a familiar, comfortable sense of continuity.
Of course, some bands are bigger than others. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists’ “Bottled in Cork” arrives halfway through the set, sounding as close as these songs come to a hit single. Meanwhile, a gripping performance of Thee Oh Sees’ “Turned Out Light,” a highlight from last year’s Mutilator Defeated at Last, is one of the most euphoric moments: a performance by a band that has perfected the noisy, psych-rock ideal that so many DBA acts aspire to. Performing several months before the release of their debut album, Downtown Boys play a furious, lightning-in-a-bottle “Wave of History” rife with excitement and anger. Nots’ “Strange Range,” meanwhile, is propelled by a rhythmic rumble: a tense performance, the sound of a band bracing for impact. By collecting performances by bands at all different stages in their careers, the set, like a good festival lineup, alternates well between moments of veteran competence and nervous, excited energy.
“I feel like I grew up here in a way,” announces Ty Segall, before playing a righteous and intense “Wave Goodbye.” “I played my first New York show here as a young lad,” he explains. The show Segall is referring to is included as a bundle with the 3xLP. Combined with his performance on the compilation, it allows you to hear his growth in a concise before-and-after juxtaposition. Throughout its brief runtime, Segall’s 2008 DBA set sounds anxious and embryonic, just a small window into the electric performer he would become just years later. His performance of “Wave Goodbye” on this compilation, is powerful, confident, and emotional by comparison. The two performances represent exactly the kind of artistic growth DBA nurtured, creating an environment that made artists feel compelled to bring their best to its stage.
It’s a sentiment alluded to by A Place to Bury Strangers’ Oliver Ackermann, founder of Death by Audio, before his band’s performance of “I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadow of Your Heart.” Monolithic and noisy, A Place to Bury Strangers sounds like exactly the kind of band whose frontman would run a guitar pedal shop and music venue; their moody post-punk indebted to more band names than can fill a wardrobe of t-shirts and their void-filling feedback like the sound of a hundred bands soundchecking at once. “Much love to everyone involved. We all knew who was there,” he slurs, before correcting himself. “Maybe you don’t know everybody, but everybody was fucking really great.” It’s a spirit of community, empowerment, and consistency that was essential to DBA, and it’s one that is exemplified in a righteous way by these recordings. | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Famous Class | August 9, 2016 | 7.8 | 4407918f-56d6-49e1-b538-8ce9d6203070 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
On Guided by Voices’ latest, Robert Pollard sounds reenergized by a sobering sense of lucidity. Some of these songs rank among the most intimate and earthbound in the band’s bottomless canon. | On Guided by Voices’ latest, Robert Pollard sounds reenergized by a sobering sense of lucidity. Some of these songs rank among the most intimate and earthbound in the band’s bottomless canon. | Guided by Voices: How Do You Spell Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guided-by-voices-how-do-you-spell-heaven/ | How Do You Spell Heaven | Since reuniting in 2010, Guided by Voices’ trajectory has essentially played out as a LARP-worthy reenactment of their ’90s narrative. After a cavalcade of ramshackle releases from the beloved “classic” line-up, Pollard once again dismantled the group and reformulated it anew. And just as he did about 20 years ago, he’s turned to guitarist Doug Gillard to be his Ronson/Richards-esque right-hand man, and to serve as the steely anchor of a crew that now includes guitarist Bobby Bare Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March. After taking this retooled GBV on tour in 2016, Pollard gave them the ultimate recorded initiation earlier this year with the 32-song double-album opus August by Cake, even granting Gillard, Shue, and March lead turns at the mic to fill the vocal-foil role once occupied by Tobin Sprout.
But despite its generously democratic approach, August by Cake’s crazy-quilt sprawl wasn’t necessarily the best showcase of this rock-solid unit’s road-tested roar. In hindsight, the album served the same transitional function as 1997’s Mag Earwhig!, the record that first built a bridge between GBV’s early lo-fi experimentation and high-definition ambition. Now, with the expedient follow-up, How Do You Spell Heaven, Pollard and Gillard get to pretend they’re on TVT Records all over again, indulging their radio-rock fantasies without having to deal with the major-label paperwork or pressure to become the next Weezer.
Much of GBV’s post-reunion output has necessitated some degree of excavation to separate the premium tipples from the proverbial pile-up of crushed empties. But How Do You Spell Heaven requires no such effort. With Pollard reassuming all lead-vocalist duties, this handsomely crafted record strikes a balance of crystalline jangle, authoritative swagger, and Wire-schooled crunch reminiscent of 2001’s (way underrated) Isolation Drills. The album’s most immediate earworms—“The Birthday Democrats,” “Diver Dan,” “Paper Cutz”—bound about like kids running through a sprinkler on the first warm day of the year, basking in the fresh air and sun-kissed splendor. And even songs that initially seem like off-the-cuff oddities prove to be less typical GBV fragments than seeds that blossom in surprising ways: the bossa-nova sway of “King 007” triggers a wailing proto-metal rave-up; “How to Murder a Man (In 3 Acts)” begins as a simmered-down rumble, but soon tries to whip through enough structural shifts to fill Abbey Road’s second side in less than three minutes. (Appropriately enough, it’s immediately answered by a rare GBV instrumental, “Pearly Gates Smoke Machine,” whose lead-guitar trade-offs and audible bonhomie posit it as a gently chooglin’ cousin to the Beatles’ “The End”).
On top of polishing up the band’s sound, Guided by Voices’ TVT releases also showcased a newfound clarity and emotional candor in Pollard’s often obtuse, fantastical lyrics, and How Do You Spell Heaven gamely follows suit. Even Pollard’s most outré songwriting can occasionally acquire some accidental real-world resonance—not the least of which is releasing a song called “Steppenwolf Mausoleum” the very week a member of Steppenwolf passed away. But How Do You Spell Heaven winds down with a trifecta of songs that rank among the most intimate and earthbound in the band’s bottomless canon: “Just to Show You” is a gently sashaying declaration of devotion, while the self-evident “Low Flying Perfection” is a harmony-gilded, country-dusted ballad from a band that’s often in pursuit of high-flying imperfection.
And then there’s “Nothing Gets You Real,” a slice of shimmering melancholy that could pass for mid-’80s Go-Betweens, contrasting its glistening guitar strums with a brutally honest account of how ennui can lead to self-harm: “Something is revealed, slashing at your arm,” Pollard sings, “something you can feel, sounding the alarm.” He once fancied himself the lost soul who shoots himself with rock’n’roll, and certainly Pollard has injected enough of the stuff over 100-plus releases that you couldn’t fault him for becoming numb to its effects. But even in those moments when How Do You Spell Heaven doesn’t give him an occasion to scissor-kick, he sounds reenergized by a sobering sense of lucidity. | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. | August 11, 2017 | 7.4 | 440a7d64-743b-483e-9dd3-e713abaf6038 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The New Zealand songwriter returns with a sparse and oblique album whose gentle psychedelic folk and beguiling free association proudly resist interpretation. | The New Zealand songwriter returns with a sparse and oblique album whose gentle psychedelic folk and beguiling free association proudly resist interpretation. | Aldous Harding: Warm Chris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aldous-harding-warm-chris/ | Warm Chris | Not everything has to come to a logical conclusion; not everything needs to be about something. In her lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” the writer Garielle Lutz explains her fondness for language where “the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” By that, she means that language, for some, is at its best when it can be isolated, when it takes on a sort of synesthetic, acoustic resonance. You can apply this terminology to the songwriting of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, who, for four albums, has made folk music with a conceptual weight that’s difficult to categorize or assign to any established narrative. Her latest album, Warm Chris, is a record of the portable solitude that Lutz writes about: It is opaque, surreal, and above all, lonely.
At first blush, Warm Chris is almost a discouraging listen. Its soft, slightly psychedelic folk pop is deceptively thorny and dense. You have to learn how to listen to it, kind of like how you have to teach yourself how to read Samuel Beckett or Renata Adler. It is less accessible than 2019’s Designer: Most of the pop hooks and acoustic bass drops are gone. It moves slowly, and the music flourishes where you least expect it. A song like “Ennui” builds in waves, with an arrangement that snakes from strident pianos to squeezes of baritone sax. Harding’s voice sounds plucked from a dream, growing more awake as the song progresses. “No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!” she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.
Harding is a painstaking songwriter, even though her lyrics tend to veer toward disorder. At times, the vantage point can feel almost dissociative. On “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” she subverts a traditional song title into something alien and mournful. Banjos and horns bloom brilliantly as Harding sings about love, and her words are soft and searching, as if she were narrating the view through a train window. On the title track, her voice drops from soprano to alto and she sings about watching paper planes burn. Her delivery almost recalls a lullaby, and the tape hiss in the background is as gentle and constant as the sound of waves heard from within a seaside home.
For all her inscrutable intensity, there are also moments of levity and light. “Lawn” is sneaky and surreal, the kind of song that demands you put on vintage Mary Quant and go boogie—or turn into a human-sized gecko wearing Twiggy eyeliner, which is what happens to Harding in the video. On “Leathery Whip,” her voice bends abruptly from the sound of a long-haired songwriter living in Laurel Canyon circa 1972 to that of the chipmunk outside her window. “Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!” she exclaims, joined by the flat, freaky baritone of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. She draws out her words as she sings, blowing up vowels like twisty balloons. It’s funny yet vaguely threatening, like the last thing you’d hear before Harry Houdini saws you in half.
The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet. Warm Chris asks you to surrender catchiness and legibility and think instead about how a lyric like “sometimes shepherds have it right” (from “Staring at the Henry Moore”) might also be infused with inexplicable melancholy. Or why on “Lawn,” you have to suppress a giggle when Harding rhymes “They don’t mean a thing to me” with “All these lamps are free!” She favors this kind of free association, unconnected turns of phrase that synthesize the strange, lonely resonance of staring at a piece of abstract art or visiting an empty beach in winter. These are concrete images, but Warm Chris isn’t explicit about anything: The feelings you have when you experience these songs are yours alone. | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | 4AD | March 25, 2022 | 8.2 | 440cc24d-a8ce-484b-80e9-790cb10cd644 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Former Japan leader strengthens his ties to modern avant-garde, be it jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, post-glitch electronics, or modern composition. | Former Japan leader strengthens his ties to modern avant-garde, be it jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, post-glitch electronics, or modern composition. | David Sylvian: Manafon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13496-manafon/ | Manafon | David Sylvian's enjoyed a career common to art-rock-leaning, former English pop stars who've doggedly chased their personal obsessions in lieu of giving their old fanbase what they want, again and again. He's not quite as intractable as, say, old peer Mark Hollis (Talk Talk). For one thing, Sylvian's still releasing records. But from the time Japan ditched the crowd-pleasing glam sheen onward, Sylvian's music has forced his cult to reexamine their ongoing relationship with the master's music every few years.
That's not to say each of Sylvian's reinventions has been total, at least on an album-to-album basis. Manafon is of a piece with the music Sylvian has released in the 21st century, especially 2003's small masterpiece, Blemish. Like that quiet, achingly personal record, Manafon reaffirms Sylvian's aughts-forged connections with the modern avant-garde, be it jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, post-glitch electronica, modern composition, or the artists who manage to occupy all four worlds while claiming none of them.
A small army of The Wire-friendly types contribute-- sax colossus Evan Parker; Japanese "onkyo" ascetics Sachiko M. and Toshimaru Nakamura; guitar re-inventors on the level (and varying praxis) of Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, and members of Polwechsel; and many more. So this may be overstating the obvious, but pop music it ain't. Even the unearthly minimalism of Japan's "Ghosts" or Blemish's "Late Night Shopping" are more immediate than anything on Manafon.
If the results aren't as bracingly sour as Sylvian's cross-purpose collaborations with Derek Bailey, they also lack the warmth he gleaned from Fennesz's heat-prickly electronics. His collaborators' small, brittle, seemingly disconnected instrumental gestures slip around the unctuousness of Sylvian's infamously mannered high-romantic vocals. Sylvian's remains a voice whose only peer for unrestrained melodrama is Antony Hegarty, and whose old-school voluptuousness makes Antony's whinnying jazz-isms seem positively astringent. Sylvian's voice doesn't lend itself to the kind of modern scat one associates with "free" singing, nor does he even try.
But what drama this musical/vocal combination, oil and water on paper, creates on disc. Sylvian often sounds as if he's reading verse rather than singing songs. Choruses are scant, or so languidly paced (as on "The Greatest Living Englishman") that they barely register as such. He lets you know just how carefully he's wrought his words, each line left to vibrate with portent before he'll move onto onto the next. Never have the words "don't know his right foot from his left" seemed so flush with private meaning.
At its best, it's shiver-inducing, a sort of inverse of Joanna Newsom's ecstatic prolixity, though with the same deliberate pacing that can alienate listeners used to songs that progress from verse to verse at the usual clip. Sylvian can rival Michael Gira when it comes to taking his own sweet time getting through a lyric. And at least Swans had brutal, repetitive rhythms to help guide listeners along. Sylvian makes no such concessions to rock tradition, however perverted. And it's the music that makes Manafon a marvel, a mixture of free-improvisation's moment-to-moment sonic epiphanies with Sylvian's molasses-slow kinda-sorta torch songs.
Mark Hollis' 1998 solo album is probably the closest comparison to the backing tracks of Manafon. On that underheard record, Hollis asked why couldn't a singer-songwriter album move to the staggered (and staggering) quietude of Morton Feldman's china-fragile chamber music. Sylvian takes it much further out, though. For one thing, while he knows restraint when necessary, you could never describe Sylvian's performance as "hushed," whereas Hollis often seemed to evaporate from his own compositions.
Sylvian is front-and-center on every song, which is good because he provides the only rhythmic and melodic stability, as the instrumentals dart and scratch and feedback around him, whether it's the scouring burst of formless guitar noise that opens miniature "125 Spheres", the random notes pricking the drone of "Snow White in Appalachia", or the splinters of Bernard Herrmann-meets-AMM piano on "Random Acts of Senseless Violence". Nothing makes "sense" by usual capital-s Songwriting standards; it's music with the rhythm and textural illogic of precipitation. And no other singer is making music this bravely untethered to tradition. Though you know he'll some day move on, you want Sylvian to explore this eerie, expectation-subverting world forever. | 2009-09-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Samadhi Sound | September 29, 2009 | 7.4 | 440ceae8-6710-4c94-9070-d335e0eaa1b0 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Malian desert guitar band changes things up with acoustic instrumentation and guest spots from Nels Cline and members of TV on the Radio. The invitation of outsiders into the songs is in one sense a measure of the confidence the band has in the integrity and singularity of its sound, and also a reflection of where they've been recently. | The Malian desert guitar band changes things up with acoustic instrumentation and guest spots from Nels Cline and members of TV on the Radio. The invitation of outsiders into the songs is in one sense a measure of the confidence the band has in the integrity and singularity of its sound, and also a reflection of where they've been recently. | Tinariwen: Tassili | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15767-tassili/ | Tassili | In southeastern Algeria, there is a vast plateau set aside as a national park called Tassili N'Ajjer. It's close to the border with Libya, and years ago, in the 1980s and early 90s, it was a place of relatively safe passage for Kel Tamashek fighters moving between the refugee camps in Libya and the battlefront in northern Mali. To look at it in satellite images, you might think you were looking at he surface of some distant moon, long ago scarred by geologic activity but now barren and strangely beautiful. It wasn't always this way. Thousands of ancient cave and rock paintings dating from 8,000 to around 1,700 years ago depict a place of plenty that slowly dried to become the modern desert. There are lost religions and civilizations out there.
The Tassili N'Ajjer covers some 45,000 square miles. Near the southern rim of the plateau is a town called Djanet, and it's out in the rocky desert near this town that Tinariwen chose to record its fifth album. The group would have preferred to record near its homebase, Tessalit, in northern Mali, but the security situation was too precarious. The re-flaring of a conflict the group hoped was put to bed clouds some of the album they made-- the first couplet on the album, sung in weary Tamashek by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, translates to, "What have you got to say, my friends, about this painful time we're living through?" It's not only about the new conflict, though. From there, the song calls out to people who have given up the nomadic life of the desert, lamenting that they've left but seeming to understand why they have.
These complex emotions run through the album, and the predominant feeling that comes out of them is longing, for home, for peace, for old friends, for a way of life whose place in the modern world is uncertain. Tinariwen have mostly put aside their electric guitars for this album and returned to the acoustics they first played together, backing the rhythmic playing with small hand drums and clapping. They've invited in a few friends as well. Nels Cline contributes a beautiful wash of ambient guitar to opener "Imidiwan ma Tennam", two members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band add rough, sonorous texture to "Ya Messinagh", and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, who traveled out to the desert recording site, are on hand on five songs, adding subtle backing harmonies and even a bit of lead vocal on one song.
The invitation of outsiders into the songs is in one sense a measure of the confidence the band has in the integrity and singularity of its sound, and also a reflection of where they've been recently. Tinariwen has toured the world and will be in North America again this fall. Some of the longing for the desert in these songs undoubtedly stems from the band's travel schedule, and when Alhabib asks others why they left, he may in part be doing it to remind himself that it's worth the challenge of staying. Meanwhile, Tassili is a very different album from any Tinariwen have recorded before, and they're proving to be a band of considerable range as they build a catalog of varied and excellent albums. Only time will tell where they're able to record the next one, but their retreat to the Tassili seems to have left them creatively refreshed. | 2011-08-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-08-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Global | Anti- | August 29, 2011 | 7.8 | 44119bb8-ec67-4787-9f09-b8403352d768 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On her first album for her new label, the subtly devastating singer-songwriter continues her dark exploration of love and loss. | On her first album for her new label, the subtly devastating singer-songwriter continues her dark exploration of love and loss. | Marissa Nadler: Marissa Nadler | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15544-marissa-nadler/ | Marissa Nadler | "Puppet Master", the sixth song on the new album by Marissa Nadler, opens as a lonely country shuffle. Over a muted beat and a quiet circular guitar line, Nadler again pines for a lover who's left, something she's done about as well as any young American songwriter during the last decade. "Cobalt and sea, come back to me," she sings, her loneliness delivered like a ghost's whisper. "I'll never do you wrong." But 90 seconds in, "Puppet Master" takes an unexpected turn, adding vibraphone and transitioning to a near-waltz that suggests the Ronnettes, just slowed and simplified. Nadler's experience sublimates into a puppet's innocence: "Lately, all I want is you," she offers, sweetly and almost cheerily. "Puppet master, see me through."
Nadler volleys between mourning and flirting on "Puppet Master", the centerpiece of her first album for own label, Box of Cedar. It's a telling move, too: Her looks at love have grown increasingly intricate, subtle and-- most importantly-- realistic since her 2004 debut. Her songs are now much too considered to be only elegiac, too complex to be simply sad. That idea translates musically as well. Just like "Puppet Master", the best songs here make slight and unexpected detours. With the help of producer Brian McTear, the songs fit together naturally; whether above synthesizers or acoustic guitar, Nadler never sounds forced. "In Your Lair, Bear", for instance, is an opening masterstroke, a bold six-minute move that patiently rises over its duration. Drums, strings, electric guitars, and harmonies enter and exit in turn; Nadler's two characters use each other, seasonally wearing one another like amulets or accessories. "I took you home, and I crashed you," she sings at the end, subverting her general role as the one demolished by love. She assumes the power just to admit she's abused it.
Nadler's songs are frank, careful examinations of all the ways a relationship can grow cold. Her music sounds as somber as ever here, and her distant air remains one of the most absolutely haunting things you're likely to find anywhere near indie rock. But she's grown past solipsism to become more of a reporter on the battles she's seen. During "Alabaster Queen", she admits giving over to a someone who is nothing but trouble, excusing the "women wistful wanting" with a deliberateness that foretells how badly this will all end. For the emotional minefield "Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning", Nadler's protagonist preemptively asks for forgiveness before she hits the road, where she'll drink to sleep-- most likely, with another lover. She doesn't blame the despair of the gorgeously pained "Wind Up Doll" on the dead husband, and she doesn't badmouth the lover who doesn't reciprocate her eternal, exhausting feelings during "Wedding". She just shares those stories in songs that are as gorgeous as they are elliptical and intriguing.
Nadler's diligently expanded her reach as a writer and arranger during the past decade, culminating so far in the expansive sounds of 2009's Little Hells and the subtly twisting forms of this new eponymous album. But she's part of that caste of American songwriters who don't make music grand enough to be Joanna Newsom or Bon Iver, brazen enough to be Fleet Foxes. Rather, her contemporaries might be considered Richard Buckner, Doug Paisley, Alela Diane, and Bill Callahan-- really good songwriters who can get lost in the current indie climate, or, as Mike Powell wrote about Callahan earlier this year, folks who might "have nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011." These are writers sitting on terrific strings of records, yet remaining relatively unnoticed. Once again, though, Nadler has maintained and etched out yet another album of cold, stony truths about the ways we love, or fail to. | 2011-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Box of Cedar | June 17, 2011 | 8.1 | 44192dce-adca-4de3-82ff-312fd2769685 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Dan Bejar’s intellect is so formidable that it feels like an event in itself, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been the most rewarding intellectual project in indie rock. New album Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of 2011's Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. | Dan Bejar’s intellect is so formidable that it feels like an event in itself, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been the most rewarding intellectual project in indie rock. New album Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of 2011's Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. | Destroyer: Poison Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20706-poison-season/ | Poison Season | Dan Bejar's intellect is so formidable it feels like an event, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been indie rock's most rewarding intellectual project. You listen to Destroyer to hear the smartest person at a party mutter funny and erudite things in your ear. Even by 2006, Bejar had generated a world deep and manifold enough that fans of his made, and passed around, a Dan Bejar lyric generator. His mind, and the music he's made exploring its contours, is a minor zip code in independent rock music.
Kaputt from 2011 exposed that zip code a little bit, briefly subjecting Bejar to the indignities of mid-level festival-touring success. It was the most immediately beautiful record he'd ever made, but it also accidentally coincided with a rising interest in the soft rock of the 1970s and '80s, which meant that Bejar, long the wry bridge troll beneath the zeitgeist, momentarily represented it. The story is important to Bejar's career, but it feels like an ancillary concern to Poison Season, his new album. The point and pleasure of Destroyer's world, after all, is that it motors away on its own juice, irrespective of others. The world is a big place, his records seem to say, and it can be wearying and demanding, but your thoughts are a republic entirely within your control. As he memorably put it on Destroyer's Rubies' "Painter in Your Pocket": "You looked OK with the others, you looked great on your own."
Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string arrangements all over Poison Season, and they are gorgeously recorded: the orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatz—his records aim to stir the feelings that classic recordings arouse in us. Streethawk hearkened back to glam-rock Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of Kaputt was partly that of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of Bryan Ferry. On Poison Season, he visits a different section of his record collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him.
Bejar uses his voice in new ways here, stretching words out generously on the two-part story-song "Bangkok" so that we feel the beauty of the melody but also don't miss the bumps and crags in his throat. There's a basic tenderness that communicates itself beneath the vermouth of his words, and they remain a joy to soak in, a purposeful blurring of sense and sound. Lines like "The writing on the wall/ Wasn't writing at all" or "It sucks when there's nothing but gold in those hills" resist interpretation and invite savoring—the Destroyer-lyric-generator couplet here would probably be "The ass king's made of asses, the ice queen's made of snow," from "Archer on the Beach". But my favorite moment might be Bejar muttering "aw shit, here comes the sun" on "Dream Lover", the Bruce Springsteen-style rocker that, as he told Pitchfork, he didn't even want to make. The juxtaposition—a curmudgeon swearing under his breath as the horns and drums he's arranged around him power the record up to transcendence—is, as he Bejar noted with some self-deprecation in that same interview, "Destroyer 101."
In fact, there are moments on Poison Season where Bejar's formidable mind threatens to drag the proceedings down a bit. The swooning '50s strings sometimes collides awkwardly with the '70s pop gestures—the funk bass line that peppers "Midnight Meet the Rain" mostly serves to underline the sleepiness of the album's last third. "Hell" lurches between ponderous chamber pop and a swinging beat, capturing the album's uncertainty about exactly what kind of dance it's doing. For an album that took an unusual amount of time for Bejar to make—the four years separating Poison Season from Kaputt represents his longest stretch ever—it feels tonally hesitant, jets of cold water and warmth doled out in furtive and uncontrolled doses. He has never made, and will probably never make, a bad album—he's far too accomplished, intuitive, and literate for that. But on Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself. | 2015-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / Dead Oceans | September 3, 2015 | 7.6 | 441d184f-0726-4656-b6a5-68d2c23886ca | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Barcelona musician expands her dizzying art-pop sound with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit. | The Barcelona musician expands her dizzying art-pop sound with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit. | Marina Herlop: Nekkuja | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marina-herlop-nekkuja/ | Nekkuja | The first time you hear one of Marina Herlop’s songs, it might sound almost incomprehensible. Much of her singing comes from a place beyond language; her piercing harmonies, switchbacking rhythms, and sudden modal pivots are just as disorienting. The Barcelona musician’s songs are equally inspired by 20th-century avant-garde composition and centuries-old folk music, but they appear mostly like alien galaxies modeled upon non-euclidean principles. After prolonged exposure, though, a funny thing happens: They come to feel not just familiar but entirely natural, imbued with all the seeming inevitability of pop music, as though each brain-twisting tone cluster were an expression of some universal law. Bewilderment has rarely sounded quite so catchy.
Herlop wrote her new album, Nekkuja, in the interim between recording her breakout, Pripyat, and its long-delayed 2022 release. She has been performing the songs in concert for two years—often enough that if you’ve seen her once or twice, and checked in regularly with her Instagram stories, you’ll have assimilated even their most labyrinthine twists and turns by now. The music is an extension of the jewel-toned art pop she began with Pripyat; the songs are similar in sound and feel, but they are also punchier, with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit. Though shorter than its predecessor by three minutes, the new album feels more ambitious and more daring.
Herlop delights in pulling out the tablecloth from beneath her carefully appointed songs, leaving cutlery and stemware quivering dangerously in place. “Busa” begins placidly enough: Mellotron-like flutes, spiderwebbed harp melodies, the clacking of a typewriter. A peal of elfin laughter from her friend (la Busa, for whom the song is named) ripples across the stereo field. But jagged tritone synths stab crosswise through the arrangement; stacked vocal harmonies (“Pollen! Pollen! Pollen!”) slice like an industrial laser. “Cosset” opens with the woozy chimes of a deranged Christmas carol, but it abruptly shifts in mood and intensity, as thrumming drum’n’bass rhythms and jazz-funk electric bass take over. Singing a one-word chorus in Catalan—“Worms, worms, worms”—Herlop’s multi-tracked voice soars while underneath, the rhythm section shudders like heavy machinery. Angel choirs and earth movers reach an uneasy détente.
“Nekkuja,” it turns out, is a made-up word. Herlop says that she came up with it after a long search for the precise configuration of syllables that might express the nexus of sounds, colors, and textures that she had in her head. Herlop has always been a master fabulist, but these songs reveal what a vivid lyricist and meticulous composer she has become. The album is loosely themed around the idea of gardening—a preoccupation she nurtured in those difficult years awaiting Pripyat’s release, when she felt her creativity withering on the vine, and she turned her thoughts to ideas of nurturing, custodianship, and the necessity of making peace with that which cannot be controlled.
She opens the record with a line—“Damunt de tu només les flors” (“Above you only the flowers”)—borrowed from Frederic Mompou, a Catalan composer beloved for his minimalist piano pieces, that she spins into a magic-realist poem about childbirth and history, with a chorus like an armored-up nursery rhyme. She touches upon complementary images as she goes: slivers of light in her hands; trees that are sick of humans; roots pushing to shatter the sky. Her byzantine world-building comes to a head on “Reina Mora,” where nervous wooden clicks and flickering handclaps are spun into a controlled rhythmic fury that makes me wonder what a Herlop/Jlin collaboration might sound like. A brief interlude connects “Reina Mora” to the album’s final track, “Babel,” an elastic fugue for what might be hammered dulcimer, striking a perilous balance between Arca and Arvo Pärt. Both songs share the same lyrics, and at the end of “Babel” she returns to the line that opened the album, repeated with one final twist: “Damunt de tu només les flors/Damunt de tu només l’esforç” (“Above you only the flowers/Above you only the effort”). Her voice is split, like light through a prism, into stark harmonic bands, and the album’s parable of sowing and reaping becomes clear; incomprehensible toil gives way to the ecstasy of creation. Worms, pollen, roses emerging from wombs: Rarely are the agonies of the creative process brought so enchantingly to life. | 2023-11-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | November 1, 2023 | 8 | 441f7b85-c2d5-407b-acbd-b87b414a9bb8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
1975’s Nasty Gal is another classic from one of the founders of funk. Davis and her band are a little sleazy, a little sultry, and show some surprising range on an album newly reissued on vinyl. | 1975’s Nasty Gal is another classic from one of the founders of funk. Davis and her band are a little sleazy, a little sultry, and show some surprising range on an album newly reissued on vinyl. | Betty Davis: Nasty Gal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/betty-davis-nasty-gal/ | Nasty Gal | A decade ago, Light in the Attic set about reissuing the long dormant, early ’70s funk catalog of Betty Davis, starting with her self-titled 1973 opus. That album featured her standout “Anti Love Song,” a cover photo of the singer wearing a pair of thigh-high silver platform boots that Rick James probably wished he could have borrowed, and a backing band culled from a large swath of the Family Stone. Moving on to albums They Say I’m Different, Nasty Gal, and the previously unreleased Is It Love or Desire and Betty Davis: The Columbia Years 1968–1969, the whole project sought to clue in new audiences to the legacy of a singer formerly footnoted as the second wife of Miles Davis, who is said to have convinced her husband to change his tamer album title to Bitches Brew. Now, her 1976 album Nasty Gal, with its equally unsubtle title, is being released once again, this time as a long player. While the physical gratification of a deluxe vinyl treatment is reason enough for a new edition, it also marks a new occasion for listening, even more deeply and resonantly than its first reissue nine years ago.
What does it mean to be an artist ahead of her time—twice in her lifetime? In 1975, despite label support and heavy touring, Island Records’ release of Nasty Gal failed to take off in the way those behind it had hoped; shortly after, Davis receded from the public eye. Now at 72, she is the subject of a recent documentary (Betty - They Say I’m Different opened in Amsterdam in November) and otherwise leads a very private life in Pittsburgh. “I even turned your head around now,” Davis unleashes in the titular song, with characteristic formidable, seductive delivery, in what sounds now like lyric self-fulfilling prophecy. “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you now.” In 2009, Nasty Gal continued the job of contextualizing Davis, placing her among peers like Parliament and the Isley Brothers; acknowledging her imprint on musicians from Rick James (“She was what funk was,” he has said), Chaka Khan and Lil’ Kim to Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema and, especially, on Prince, who said of Davis to a reporter in 2012: “This is what we aim for.”
To listen the record now—when the album shares a name with both a fashion brand inspired by Davis’ provocative, space-age style and a widely reclaimed slur uttered by the president of the United States—is another thing entirely. Nasty Gal is still as revolutionary and unbending as it was in 1975. In another preternaturally self-aware moment, amid the deep grooves of “F.U.N.K.,” Davis willfully seizes her place in the wider canon of funk, soul, and R&B: “Help me, Barry White!” she calls out and goes on to shout out to “Isaac Hayes, y’all,” Al Green, the O’Jays, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, and Ann Peebles, and ultimately, her good friend Jimi Hendrix (to whom she famously introduced her ex-husband; Miles doesn’t merit a shout-out in this anthem).
The musical roots of Betty Davis, née Betty Mabry, are not widely acknowledged in North Carolina, but she and the band she put together have deep ties to Reidsville, once a town of textile mills and cigarette factories founded on the border of Little Troublesome Creek (Davis also spent a lot of her childhood in Durham, N.C., where she leaned heavily on her grandmother’s record collection): “B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and all those people,” she once said. “I know some English guitarist who would love to get their hands on it.” Around the age of 12, she wrote her first song, “I’m Gonna Bake That Cake of Love.” The Mabrys moved to Homestead, Pa. where her father got a job in steel-boom Pittsburgh, and at 16, Davis took off for New York City. When she spotted her future husband at a club in the Village, she didn’t recognize the jazz trumpeter, but she liked his style; as the story goes, she told a friend she wanted to meet the “dude with the shoes.”
On Nasty Gal, her prowling caterwaul snakes and oozes through the album, over dirty bass and deep grooves. She trades lyrics with keyboardist Fred Mills on the raw, declarative statement of “Nasty Gal” and over a heavy riffing guitar on “Talkin Trash.” Image was central to the music: On the cover of Nasty Gal, Davis sheds her cosmic leotards and short-shorts for lacy lingerie and fishnets. She recruited a backing band from her home state—drummer Nicky Neal and bassist Larry Johnson were first cousins, Fred Mills lived in her hometown, and she added Carlos Morales on guitar. Davis choreographed their stage moves and insisted the band members play shirtless; she lathered the band members in baby oil so their muscles would shine under the lights. She wanted to change their name from Funkhouse to the Sleazes.
Nasty Gal is certainly in service of sleaze and of sex, but first and foremost, to classic, solid dance grooves that pulse under Davis’ snarl on “Shut Off the Light,” her bedroom vocals on “Getting Kicked Off, Havin Fun,” and the saucy, sultry “The Lone Ranger.” Davis has been chastised by some critics for her reliance on that howl; it’s her weapon of seduction and also her line of defense. But on this album, she briefly and astonishingly reveals a wider range. “You and I,” a lover’s lament about the impossibility of reconciliation co-written with Miles and arranged by Gil Evans, features a trumpet solo by him and orchestration by Gil Evans. It’s a gorgeously steamy slow burner of a ballad, the most lyrical song on the album, and feels spilled out of an open window on some city night. It’s Davis at her most vulnerable, as she sings, “I love you I love you I love you/But it’s so hard for me to be me I wish I could give to you/I’d be free I’d be free I’d be free.” And it’s also fleeting, followed immediately by the revved-up “Feelins,” which delivers Davis back to her foundational structure of gritty, fearless seduction over a strutting, percolating rhythm.
It’s tempting to wonder what might have been had Davis chosen or had the support to continue her career and perhaps to forge together some of these two poles of her work—the tough and the tender. Davis rose to fame but not widespread acceptance in an era when black women in this country were allowed to be seen but not heard—and certainly not to exercise artistic control as a musician. In the 1970s, the Rolling Stone Record Guide called Nasty Gal the work of a “black Marlene Dietrich”—a twisted show of admiration. But plenty of black audiences weren’t ready for Davis either—the NAACP urged a boycott of her work on the grounds that it perpetuated negative stereotypes about African Americans. For a woman, and especially a black woman in America in 1975, to openly sing about desire and sex with such ferocious power was most definitely ahead of the times. Even The New York Times, a year before Nasty Gal, acknowledged that Davis’ day would eventually arrive: “Miss Davis is trying to tell us something real and basic about our irrational needs, and Western civilization puts its highest premiums on conformity and rationality and rarely recognizes the Bessies or the Bettys until they’re gone.” May the record stand corrected. | 2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Light in the Attic | January 10, 2018 | 8.4 | 442406d8-125c-4bf8-9f04-45928244dd97 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
Weezer return to basics on their eighth album, and first for Epitaph Records. | Weezer return to basics on their eighth album, and first for Epitaph Records. | Weezer: Hurley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14652-hurley/ | Hurley | Hurley is Weezer's first record for Epitaph, a partnership that makes a ton of sense since that label has long been the province of smart-alecky teens who like skateboarding and jacked-up power-pop. And it's doubly fitting because Weezer are getting back to basics here after a few years recording with Lil Wayne and letting the other band members sing. Indeed, there is something of a noticeable "return to form" about Hurley-- their best album since at least, uh, Maladroit. The first single, "Memories", is actually about older Weezer-- sure, the lyrics are sub-Ben Folds nyuks ("playin' hacky sack back when Audioslave was still Rage") and the X Games-style brass fanfare can be a turnoff, but as with 2008 single "Pork and Beans", the autobiographical framework of it gives it a certain charm.
Nobody is going to confuse this with 1990s Weezer-- there are still plenty of oddball collaborations (Michael Cera, Linda Perry) for one thing-- but the lows aren't as low or as frequent as they were in recent years. This is still a Mk. III Weezer album where songs are constructed more like sitcoms: each has a single premise based on a rigid structure and a comforting predictability, and each can be experienced in virtually any order. The listenability is at its lowest when it sounds like the producer was meant to pipe in a laugh track. "Where's My Sex?" is pretty much D.O.A., and Cuomo doesn't do much to revive it, the "big reveal" being the phonic similarities between "sex" and "socks" ("I can't go out without my sex/ It's cold outside and my toes get wet"). "Smart Girls" is laughably half-assed, which is more than I can say about lyrics that lack so badly for any sort of detail that you could simply replace "Smart" in the title with "Dumb" or any other adjective.
It's a shame Hurley is so dependant on such lyrical hijinks, because the one thing Cuomo's never abandoned is a ruthlessly economical approach to songwriting. When Hurley works, it's because Cuomo is a master of form. Even if you're not going to be the one singing along, it's easy to imagine "Ruling Me" offering some sort of platonic radio-rock pleasure, while "Hang On" positions itself as the one where the kids will be waving their iPhones in the air. But when the two instincts clash on "Trainwrecks", you hear a perfectly anthemic chorus get lost in a confused verse where Cuomo doesn't put in enough effort to indicate whether it's a riff on hipsters or on himself.
Which leads to the question that's accompanied pretty much everything Weezer's done since The Green Album: Is this a bad album on its own terms, a rush job that could have worked better were the band not releasing records at this pace? Or was Weezer always a goofy pop band subjected to indie ideals they never believed in? The answers depend more on the listener than anyone else. You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that. | 2010-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | September 17, 2010 | 5 | 44286687-9597-4c10-b38b-327e8112c2e3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Hayley Kiyoko’s ambitious debut is at its best when it’s barbed and confrontational, but the former Disney star is still trying to hone her budding pop star identity. | Hayley Kiyoko’s ambitious debut is at its best when it’s barbed and confrontational, but the former Disney star is still trying to hone her budding pop star identity. | Hayley Kiyoko: Expectations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayley-kiyoko-expectations/ | Expectations | There’s a lot riding on this. Hayley Kiyoko, the 26-year-old former Disney star, is one of pop’s few openly gay female artists, whose fans have taken to calling her “lesbian Jesus.” It’s tongue in cheek, but speaks to the hunger for representation among marginalized fandoms—the hoards who flocked to Kiyoko’s early music videos, which offered rare representations of relationships and flirtations between women. Kiyoko now has to balance their interests against her own budding pop star identity, plus the demands of the mainstream that she (and label Empire/Atlantic) evidently want her to break into: Expectations seems like a particularly loaded title.
For her part, Kiyoko seems ambitious. The album comes with a kind of conceptual architecture: opening with the “Expectations (Overture),” and containing a pair of two-part song suites, plus an interlude called “xx.” The sound of the sea and distant birds sometimes color the edges of the songs, giving a rough sense of a contained world, but not much more than that. It doesn’t seem like a leap of faith to guess that the elegant storytelling of Melodrama was an inspiration here, though Expectations doesn’t really use its structure for neat narrative or stylistic tricks in the way that Lorde did.
For one thing, it lacks that kind of songwriting consistency. The obsessive “Wanna Be Missed” has the breathy luster of a forgotten cut off the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, although Kiyoko’s ecstatic crescendo lands with a thud on the blankly intoned line, “I’ve never felt nothing like that,” as if waking up from dental anesthesia. “Let It Be,” the song that closes the album, and puts a lid on the tempestuous relationship that courses throughout, is as stompy of feet and jingly of bell as the Lumineers. “Palm Dreams,” a cheap postcard to Los Angeles life, sounds oddly dated and features a refrain (“Party with us”) that sounds swept from Justin Timberlake’s cutting-room floor. It’s the only song here featuring anything close to a blue-chip songwriter, in “Boom Clap” co-writer Fredrik Berger, which may indict the resources and priority levels afforded to this album.
Those are the most disparate parts of a truly enjoyable if rarely remarkable record, one that lacks the budget of high-end pop but aspires to its trappings. Kiyoko isn’t yet a particularly distinctive vocalist, but “confrontational” is a mode that really suits her. Single “Curious” has a similarly choreographed shuffle in its chorus to Dua Lipa’s “New Rules,” and contains a few pin-sharp barbs worthy of Lorde: “Did you take him to the pier in Santa Monica?” Kiyoko taunts at a girl who’s dropped her for a dude. “Forget to bring your jacket/Wrap up in him ‘cause you wanted to?” Plus it has a perfectly turned kiss-off: “I’m just curious,” she sings, with icy mocking: “Is it serious?” (That and a textbook pop pause pre-chorus: one of those brilliant, tiny spaces that feels like taking a breath before a giant leap.)
Similarly barbed is “He’ll Never Love You (HNLY)” which balances Kiyoko’s well-worn weariness with the rigmarole of being a straight girl’s experiment with deservedly bratty, indignant delivery. This is Expectations at its best: Kiyoko trading in specificity rather than generic neediness, representing an experience that rarely finds an outlet in pop (see also: Years & Years’ brilliant “Sanctify”). The writing on “What I Need” might not be of the same standard, but duetting with Kehlani on a certified Bisexual Bop is inspired, and has legs as a genuine hit if the label is prepared to attempt to push a queer love song into the mainstream. Given that Halsey and Lauren Jauregui’s comparable “Strangers” scraped the Billboard 100 at… 100, I wouldn’t hold your breath. Kiyoko’s debut won’t blow past anyone’s expectations, but it contains just enough intrigue and individuality to sustain them for a second shot. | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire / Atlantic | April 2, 2018 | 6 | 442a703a-7762-451d-88e7-54410a7bd5a0 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
A sequel in name only, Yachty’s leaden, rap-heavy album demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be. | A sequel in name only, Yachty’s leaden, rap-heavy album demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be. | Lil Yachty: Lil Boat 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-yachty-lil-boat-2/ | Lil Boat 2 | The reign of the self-proclaimed King of the Teens is over. At 20, Lil Yachty has aged-out of that constituency and there are a host of contenders already eager to replace him. In his quest to conquer the whole yung demo, he discovered teens are fickle and manifold, creatures of varying interests prone to unpredictable changes of heart. After being heralded as the harbinger of a new era in rap, the metrics didn’t bear out his impact. His debut, Teenage Emotions, was streamed considerably less in its first week (24,000) than records by the significantly less hyped a Boogie Wit da Hoodie (54,000), the younger XXXtentacion (67,000), or Yachty’s self-professed rival, Lil Uzi Vert (100,000). He reckoned with the unimpressive showing by saying, “I disconnected with my fans because I tried to do this other stuff,” the other stuff being his straight-faced struggle raps. Based on those comments, it seemed his next release would surely return to his original model of pure, unadulterated song.
At this point, with his royal status in question, Yachty is at a crossroads. His label, Quality Control, is quietly rebranding him as a Migos understudy, a bit player in their streaming rap empire. But Yachty has other ideas, and he plans to soak up as much bandwidth as possible by fanning his own flames. On Lil Boat 2, it’s like he’s daring you not to like him. And so his sophomore album is a sequel in name only, a far cry from the candy-coated, bittersweet melodies that made him a viral sensation on the original. He’s a bruiser now, you see, trading in earworms and weightlessness for gravity and outlandish braggadocio. Maybe it’s a masterful troll that thrives off the misdirection. Maybe the most subversive thing he can do at this point is to dismantle his playhouse entirely, becoming the thing no one said he could be. It certainly is one of modern rap’s more bizarre, and fascinating, heel turns.
After opening with the on-brand crooner “Self-Made,” Lil Boat 2 becomes decidedly bar-heavy and grey. It’s made up of nearly 70 percent tuneless rap flexers with dark, creeping synths; “Boom!” embodies its title, and the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “Count Me In” is all muffled low end. This shift in tone is purposeful, almost forceful. It demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be.
The issue is that an album reliant on Yachty’s ability to rap can’t hold up to scrutiny. He is a rather spiritless writer. He only has a couple of rough song ideas. He is incapable of fitting his outsized personality into his pedestrian bars. But the sheer gall of this gambit is occasionally enough to tickle one’s curiosity: Attempted reinventions can be mesmerizing, even when they fail spectacularly. In this instance, he really goes for it. He does triplet flows. He splits punches. He packs cadences and stacks phonetic sounds. Take that, Funk Flex.
Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly. His big, showy rap boasts are unimaginative, sometimes predictable, often bafflingly plain in their presentation: “Running to the money like I’m Frank Gore/This ring costs more than a Honda Accord.” He knows how to spend but not how to sell.
The central theme of Lil Boat 2 is simply how rich Yachty is and how broke you are by comparison. He is money-obsessed and really quite bratty about it. “These niggas hate ’cause I’m too rich,” he spits on “Mickey,” the implication being no one actually dislikes him or his music; they’re simply jealous. “I was buying diamonds, you was waiting for tax refunds,” he raps on “Flex,” a song that also works as a nominal diss of his longtime radio nemesis. “Tell your baby daddy I’m richer,” he raps on “Baby Daddy.” You can guess what “Whole Lotta Guap” is about. It isn’t even off-putting that he’s constantly haranguing you about the wealth gap; the real insult is that he flaunts his money in the most mundane of ways.
Duets with PnB Rock and Trippie Redd show that Yachty is still capable of flourishing in a more melodic space, but his refusal to lean into that mode is what makes Lil Boat 2 sound so leaden. Songwriting isn’t his strong suit, and while he’s taken great strides in that area, it was a mistake to build an album out of his raps. It can be entertaining to watch the gears turning, though. There aren’t any moments where he’s noticeably outpaced by his more gifted guests, as he holds his own with NBA YoungBoy, Tee Grizzley, 2 Chainz, and Offset. His best rapping gets packed into “FWM,” a free-flowing outlier that’s as natural and fun as the more whimsical songs in his catalog. His grill-bearing, chain-swinging performances on Lil Boat 2 make me a bit wistful for those—and maybe that was the point. We must suffer through the new Yachty to reassess the old one. | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Capitol | March 9, 2018 | 5.8 | 442fb043-a11b-40d4-b703-d85c7fc9471e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Arthur Ashin (aka Autre Ne Veut) has always been lumped in with the "bedroom R&B" of How to Dress Well and others. At his best, his singing feels directed to a shrine rather than the club. The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn. | Arthur Ashin (aka Autre Ne Veut) has always been lumped in with the "bedroom R&B" of How to Dress Well and others. At his best, his singing feels directed to a shrine rather than the club. The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn. | Autre Ne Veut: Age of Transparency | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21044-age-of-transparency/ | Age of Transparency | The opening to Age of Transparency teases us with memories of 2013's "Play By Play", still the greatest song Arthur Ashin (aka Autre Ne Veut) has ever recorded. "Baaaaaaaaaaaabe," he warbles, his voice soulful, strained and knowing, before he slides into a reprisal of "On and On", remaking the upbeat single into an exercise in jazz improvisation and bare-boned composition that goes just long enough before it chokes out into a sputter. A theme for the album is wrapped within; this set of songs extends something beautiful to its limits and then tries to will it beyond its end. Sometimes to a fault.
Ashin's showiness as a singer is part of his grandeur; his voice has always managed to pull a song together. Yes, he's been lumped into the inner mines of "bedroom R&B" or "PBR&B"–the latter of which is an innocuous title for a genre, an easy way of associating the soul of R&B with the electronic embrace of indie–but he has always had his eye somewhere outside the bedroom. His singing feels directed to a shrine rather than the club, and he's able to emote despair and acute yearning through the rawness of his voice, not in spite of it. It can be unsettling to hear that singular spark start to work against him now.
The disconnect could very well come from the fact that he's now surrounded by a proper choir, and on his most sonically incoherent album yet. On "Get Out" he is navigating a track that feels primed for cinematic pop glory, but the song flags as it goes on and his flights of melodic inspiration begin to feel like a parody of a blues singer. On "Over Now", a glitchy sample turns a dreary lullaby to the death of something or other into a vacuous wall of static; what is clearly meant to be a captivating mess of noise becomes literally difficult to listen to. "Switch Hitter" turns a menacing pop framework, with its elastic guitars and looming synths, into something that feels half-baked. Where these songs hit their most visceral moments is where they can feel their most contrived.
Joel Ford (Ford & Lopatin) and Young Ejecta appear on production again, but Ashin has graduated from his former roommate's Software imprint to a bigger label with a bigger budget, and with that his sound has become cleaner, denser, and glossier, barring some of the organic simplicity that he's benefited from in the past. His lyrics remain simple and poignant, but some of what surprised us on Anxiety has lost its newness here. The sudden moments of rapture–the ones that that pushed through layers of electronic ambience–remain, but are less frequent and more predictable.
That said, when it does all come together on this album, it really is quite gorgeous. "Panic Room" is some of his best writing musically and lyrically. The lines "I don't want to feel like you're not here with me/ Even when you say that you are not here with me" are heart wrenching on their own. Lay them on a wave of synths and the flutter of percussive rolls and the track is as enveloping as "Play By Play" or "Counting" were before it. "World War Pt. 2" dabbles with some frantic pop sampling before retreating, underscoring the fevered pull of a line like "heartbreak is not enough." "Age of Transparency" is another highlight. In these moments, where he approaches the brink and opens his arms to it, the messiness of his intense and manic music mirrors the messiness of life.
The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn. But what once felt intimate has started to lean to over-exertion. Here we see what happens after the fireworks have burst, when its casing is left smoldering and you're hoping for more. | 2015-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Downtown | October 5, 2015 | 6 | 4432fd05-355c-4074-ae5f-ae449b9484d2 | Puja Patel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/puja-patel/ | null |
Considering Nas' one-hot-album-every-10-year average, he's due for another great record. The sprawling, two-disc Street's Disciple isn't it, but it's a step in the right direction, as well in a new direction: If the Nas of Illmatic was trying to get out of the ghetto, the Nas of Street's Disciple is trying to get the ghetto out of the ghetto-- and find a decent babysitter. | Considering Nas' one-hot-album-every-10-year average, he's due for another great record. The sprawling, two-disc Street's Disciple isn't it, but it's a step in the right direction, as well in a new direction: If the Nas of Illmatic was trying to get out of the ghetto, the Nas of Street's Disciple is trying to get the ghetto out of the ghetto-- and find a decent babysitter. | Nas: Street's Disciple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5711-streets-disciple/ | Street's Disciple | I'm as big a fan of tableau vivant as the next, but what the fuck is going on with the cover of Street's Disciple? The Last Supper?! Nas is a prophet, check, but the Jesus Christ of hip-hop? Then there's that poor sonuvabitch in the white. Didn't he read The DaVinci Code? Doesn't he know he's standing in for Mary Magdalene, a prostitute? Does he not understand how stupid he looks wearing a crucifix to The Last Supper?! This may be the most unintentionally hilarious "intentionally hilarious" album cover I have ever seen.
Nas practically needed two discs to back this sort of shit up, which is perhaps one reason why Street's Disciple does the dirty double, with the first disc (purportedly) for the street, and the second one (purportedly) for the home. Sounds gimmicky-- and yes, it's "sprawling," "massive," "has lots of filler," "should have been one disc," etc.-- but guess what: It's cocksure and it works. Relatively speaking, Nas is an old guy now. He doesn't rob banks; he has babies and marries Kelis. He doesn't narrate ghetto life in the glorious present; he reminisces and takes stabs at reform. He no longer needs to prove himself; he just has to flow. Throughout Street's Disciple, Nas simply sounds confident, which is the key to pulling off tracks so thematically un-gangsta: When your best-known lyric is "I never sleep 'cause sleep is the cousin of death," it can be tough to sell a line like, "It was my night to watch my little girl."
"This ain't no sucka for love shit/ This ain't no Huxtable kisses and hugs shit/ First night we fuck shit and don't call the next day," says Nas on "Getting Married". In Nas' hands, the institution becomes an avatar of badassness, much like faith becomes-- to faith's chagrin-- a vehicle for bravado on the Barry White-sampling "Nazareth Savage" ("I carried the cross to help you afford that plasma screen"), or as education advocacy oddly becomes the new thug ideal on "War" ("Tell my daughter try her hardest so the best schools'll take her in"). Nas hasn't mellowed on the mic; he just has different priorities-- and impressively, he doesn't eschew the present for the sake of his dated guns-drawn Queensbridge persona.
"Live Now" most powerfully sums up Nas' street-tough-to-hubby transformation. Here, Nas describes his death-- not by bullets and rap romanticism, but by old age: "My daughter at my bedside, respirator in me... Trying to say something/ The whole room'll quiet down just to hear my last words." Yet, in the same song, as if to counterbalance that tenderness, he anxiously rehashes his past: "Admit I did live it a little bit/ Sweet pickle dick, freaks licked on it/ Lips I dripped on it/ Sex I shot pearl necklaces on necks and tits." The rhyme feels forced, but maybe pointedly so. Nas realizes hip-hop doesn't like the sissy, and he's careful to balance such personal affairs with the requisite bravado.
Nas obviously has no trouble here, and for the most part, Chucky Thompson, Salaam Remi, and L.E.S. front the boards hard and hookless, keeping the focus on the lyrics. Check "Nazareth Savage" ("I squeeze nipples like pimples to get the pus, get it?"), the token girls-I-fucked track "Remember the Times" ("Used to run my bubble bath, tons of laughs, sexy chick/ Mad skills, she used to try to eat my excrement"), or the previously released "Thief's Theme" ("Bust a shell at the ground, pellets hit the crowd/ Nobody like a snitch, everybody shut they mouth"). The content is the same as before, but the vantage point is a rocking chair: Nas presents his past as been-there-done-that, an abridged backstory included as a contrast to his present affairs, and perhaps as a concession to some listeners: "I had to make a song, speakin' on my old life/ For the thieves who come out at night."
The streets are paved with rags-to-riches rappers, but few of them keep the dirt on their shoulder after MTV and the first cool mill. If the Nas of Illmatic was fighting to get Nas out of the ghetto, the Nas of Street's Disciple is fighting to get the ghetto out of the ghetto. The Q-Tip-produced "American Way" is politically untimely but fiery, with Nas bemoaning the black vote's impotence, and at one point calling Condoleeza Rice a "coon Uncle Tom fool." On the equally vicious "These Are Our Heroes", Nas sarcastically salutes "the coons on UPN9 and WB/ Who 'Yes, master' on TV," and calls out Tiger Woods, Cuba Gooding Jr., and "Mr. Goody Two-Shoes" Jay-Z for selfishness: "What you doin' for the hood?" The carps aren't novel-- as Nas points out, "It's trendy to be the conscious MC/ But next year, who knows what we'll see?"-- but carry unusual weight from the Queensbridge darling.
Street's Disciple shares in the missteps we can expect from both double-disc sets and Nas albums in general (a fair number of shitty beats, and the occasional bomb like "I'm the disciple of music!"), but there's a compelling record in here somewhere, and that album is easily Nas' best in years. For the past decade, he's tried to prove he can thug with the best; now unconcerned, he's caught a fresh breath. Street's Disciple is flawed, but Nas' second wave of confidence is one of the most exciting things to happen to hip-hop this year. | 2004-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Columbia | December 5, 2004 | 7.2 | 443af6b0-59fd-469f-a1f7-e09b0d3bb3e1 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
A collection of Terre Thaemlitz’s gorgeous and thought-provoking deep-house 12"s turns a critical eye on history, identity, and club culture. | A collection of Terre Thaemlitz’s gorgeous and thought-provoking deep-house 12"s turns a critical eye on history, identity, and club culture. | DJ Sprinkles: Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-sprinkles-gayest-tits-and-greyest-shits-1998-2017-12-inches-and-one-offs/ | Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs | By 2008, when Terre Thaemlitz unveiled her deep-house masterpiece Midtown 120 Blues, he’d been hired and fired as a DJ in some of NYC’s most infamous and beloved trans bars; sold out venues around the world while first relocating to Oakland and then Japan; and released a string of experimental recordings on heady labels like Mille Plateaux. (Thaemlitz, who identifies as transgender and subscribes to a “non-essentialist” notion of gender identity, uses alternating pronouns.)
Midtown 120 Blues, released under Thaemlitz’s DJ Sprinkles alias, was a culmination of all that, a collection of 12"s and associated tracks all bursting with bright ideas. Some were textural: “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” burned off a murky, funky throb with breaks as rosy as the morning sun. Others were textual: “Midtown 120 Intro” displaced traditional house voices—those too-often uncredited, gospel-inspired Black women demanding attention, sweat, and emotions—for her own kind of diva vocals, a furious murmur illuminating his understanding of house as a “very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon” fashioned in “hyper-specific” places: “East Jersey, Loisaida, West Village, Brooklyn.” Midtown 120 Blues was a statement of purpose that expertly synced up form, function, and feeling. Its power came from Thaemlitz’s context—her history underscored his authority to, say, talk shit about Madonna—and came for the colonized oontz-oontz that Europe’s Nightlife Industrial Complex sold back to America and called house music when it was more like music for luxury hotels.
Midtown 120 Blues set up a soapbox under the strobe lights. Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches and One-Offs, 19 languorous house tracks recorded around and after the major statement, looks underneath the dancefloor to the very foundations of society. The Balearic shuffle of “Useless Movement,” a collaboration with cyberfeminist Laurence Rassel, wonders whether the death of the author killed off women’s shot at recognition; it’s Lit Crit for the hips. “Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles’ Dead End)” remixes moments from Thaemlitz’s larger Deproduction project, which explores the destructive power of the nuclear family. The track puts comedian Paul F. Tompkins into a kind of Martha Wash drag, weaving a joke about right-wing discomfort with gay people’s existence in on itself until it becomes a call-and-response chorus that wrestles with the very notion of assimilation—all over crisp percussion. “Names Have Been Changed (Sprinkles’ House Arrest)” sets another Deproduction section, a long series of complex and excruciating depictions of incest, into an almost impossibly beautiful showcase for strings and lush hi-hats. A dub of this could be a heartbreak anthem; an a cappella might tear your soul into shreds. This does both at once. It’s some kind of terrible miracle.
The instrumental tracks on Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits reinforce the fact that Thaemlitz is among the finest producers of her generation. The nimble basslines of “Kissing Costs Extra” stay in the pocket like a pair of welcome fingers; the kicks are buoyant, even erotic in their bounce, if a bit too mid-tempo to achieve full sleaze. Almost 25 minutes spent in versions of “Sloppy 42nds” prove that the strike of a single piano key can hit harder than the most epic of EDM drops. One thing hard to remember about gay clubs, before we all had a phone in our hands for stimulation, was how boring they could be; you could stand somewhere forever, twiddling a swizzle stick to a mix not quite achieving liftoff—and then suddenly a look could catch a spark inside you, or a pattern of hi-hats could tickle your hips into motion. Thaemlitz works this boredom like Moodymann works anticipation, mining the mood for all it’s worth.
These recordings date back to 1998, the year Celeda and Danny Tenaglia began preaching a sacred text of house music: “Music is the answer/To your problems/Keep on movin’/Then you can solve them.” Compiled in 2021, when the clubs are closed and past-due reckonings of predatory DJs and entrenched industry racism and transphobia refuse to be ignored, this house music sounds more like a series of questions. What might it mean for a DJ to counter a crowd’s loved-up chants for “one more tune” with the shouts of “silence equals death” that form the climax of the astonishing “Hush Now (Broken Record Mix)”? After last summer’s BLM protests, how revolutionary, really, is dancing in the streets? Might “killing” the mood also have its uses?
House music, like collage, is a sample-based artform. But like techno, as artists like Speaker Music remind us, it’s built on Black labor. Sprinkles’ Bassline.89 EP, here in all its brutal glory, works over chunks of classic tracks by Black innovators like Farley “Jackmaster” Funk; elsewhere, the churning, humid storms of two long versions of “Masterjakor” suddenly clear into a third, quick flight into the blue skies of one of hip hop’s greatest one-hit wonders. And further complexities are mixed into these minimalist tracks. Thaemlitz insists his work be kept off all streaming sources, in part to “keep ‘queer’ audio and media functioning queerly, contextually, and with smallness.” This keeps Spotify from making money off her work, and fair enough. It also keeps YouTube’s bots from detecting the samples he uses—a practice that bothers her, he says, not for being found out but because YouTube then pulls down the tracks and blames her for their removal, angering fans. Both Spotify and YouTube are terrible, and artists deserve better. But in this smallness, there’s a tinge of gatekeeping. How do artists control who hears them and by what means? To be sure, these tracks will fill the dancefloor; but as with the productions of, like, every white DJ these days, they pay homage to Black musicians without paying them for their work. (The Sample Clearance Industrial Complex, meanwhile, is often little help.) And come to think of it, what did Midtown gain from its presentation as a white person playing the blues?
Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits is far more uncertain than Midtown; its power source is cohesion and nerve. Maybe, for Thaemlitz, music is neither the answer nor the question: It’s the problem itself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Comatonse | May 14, 2021 | 8 | 443c1732-4c25-4daf-b4f0-3519adc4bd50 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
In a pair of electroacoustic radio operas, the American composer addresses the horrors of the Middle Passage and the moral equivocations of the contemporary church. | In a pair of electroacoustic radio operas, the American composer addresses the horrors of the Middle Passage and the moral equivocations of the contemporary church. | Yvette Janine Jackson: Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yvette-janine-jackson-freedom/ | Freedom | Near the end of Joe Biden’s inauguration, on the grounds where just weeks before a band of right-wing radicals and white supremacists had tried to overthrow the government, Garth Brooks began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Unlike Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez, who’d performed with orchestral backing tracks, Brooks felt he could carry the civil-rights anthem alone, a cappella. Well, not alone: Brooks stopped the song to insist that those gathered around him sing, too. “Not just the people here, the people at home, at work,” he demanded, his tone pointed. “As one. United.”
“United” (not to mention “work”) very likely means something different to others in attendance—like, say, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, or Stacey Abrams and the voters she mobilized in Georgia—than it does to a white star enlisting them in his moment of glory. And something again still to the enslaved people the anthem’s author once bought and sold. What might being “as one” with them sound like?
It might sound like “Destination Freedom,” a harrowing composition by Yvette Janine Jackson, a Harvard music professor whose work explores Black traditions in both popular and experimental music. Jackson calls this piece, and another on her album Freedom, “radio operas.” The longform compositions incorporate musique concrète, electroacoustic music, traditional notation, and free improvisation. They are meant to be heard in total darkness. They are not easy listening, nor should they be.
“Destination Freedom” begins in a hold of treated sounds: notated and improvised efforts by Jackson’s chamber ensemble, Invisible People, often twisted in pitch and speed; recordings of the tumultuous Pacific Ocean; wood creaking in agony and voices murmuring, quietly calling for attention but just out of reach. The sound sways across the stereo field, back and forth, nauseous with dread. Halfway through the 22-minute piece, motion blurs into a passage of echoing wails and streaks of brightness. Here, Jackson’s maritime murk might summon the undertow of Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste, or the grand tragic depth of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. Yet it refuses to go under. Instead, like the Detroit techno duo Drexciya’s enslaved infants-turned-aquatic revolutionaries, it escapes just in time. The final six minutes or so is a futuristic baptismal of foamy hiss, off-grid beats, and incantation: “I want to cross over,” a woman chants, ever more the focus of the mix. The sudden clarity is not of this world.
The complexity of moral clarity defines “Invisible People,” the album’s second composition, which is based on samples of President Obama’s eventual endorsement of same-sex unions and condemnations by African American religious authorities. “Invisible People” marries text lifted from sermons, reparative-therapy propaganda, and internet comments with church piano and free jazz. (In a spirited essay accompanying the record, writer and musician Greg Tate lays out the strategy: “Those faux-liturgical Black religious voices become a choir of dissonance and counter-reformation within the work.”)
“Invisible People” presents the hatred straight, so to speak. “Fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will,” a male voice warns. Misogyny defines masculinity: “Males,” someone says with disgust, “coming to males with lust in their hearts as they should to a female.” Obama’s account of the evolution of his heart (or his political calculus) alternates with other men’s refusals, and Jackson doubles and triples their arguments. Composers often utilize repetition to signify or induce transcendence, but here, it underscores the wicked stubbornness of men.
Jackson’s piece is particularly notable for its negative space—not just the moments of silence between drum rolls or slurs but also the voices of those not included in all the back-and-forth: women and femmes and nonbinary people with skin in this game, the undocumented and uninsured for whom marriage was less a mystical transubstantiation of God’s grace into babies and more a matter of where and if they might live. Their silence is audible, as present in Jackson’s work as the doomscapes of enslavers’ ships. Too often, we’re asked to stop all our work and back up men like Garth Brooks as they center themselves in others’ histories. Jackson asks us instead to do the work of empathy—not by demanding unity, but in listening for who gets left out when we gather as one.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Fridman Gallery | January 29, 2021 | 7.6 | 4443fedc-a4ab-41f4-9c14-e545349772c3 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On his third album, Jake Ewald reunites with former Modern Baseball bandmate Ian Farmer to explore pared-down folk-rock. It’s the furthest from MoBo he’s ever sounded. | On his third album, Jake Ewald reunites with former Modern Baseball bandmate Ian Farmer to explore pared-down folk-rock. It’s the furthest from MoBo he’s ever sounded. | Slaughter Beach, Dog: Safe and Also No Fear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slaughter-beach-dog-safe-and-also-no-fear/ | Safe and Also No Fear | In late 2017, 12 days after Modern Baseball performed a weekend of farewell shows for hometown fans in Philly, co-frontman Jake Ewald released his second solo album, Birdie. The consecutive events suggested an amicable closure: Ewald was signing off on the emo/punk band he’d formed in college and relocating full-time to Slaughter Beach, a hypothetical destination created to inspire his songwriting. After two LPs performed entirely by himself, the beach must’ve grown lonely; on Safe and Also No Fear, Ewald’s third album as Slaughter Beach, Dog, he’s joined by a full ensemble that includes Modern Baseball bassist Ian Farmer, his first official reunion with a former bandmate since their indefinite hiatus. Together, they dive into the pared-down folk-rock Ewald had just begun to explore on previous solo releases. It’s the furthest from MoBo he’s ever sounded, and maybe as a result, also the least engaging.
Although its clunky double phrasing betrays some anxiety, a title like Safe and Also No Fear feels reassuring coming from Ewald, who’s grieved the loss of a close family member and supported bandmates through mental health crises in recent years. But the album rarely reflects a corresponding sense of personal triumph. Opener “One Down” leans on a pedestrian acoustic pattern that plods in one ear and out the other. “I dress up nice/I feel all right/I get loaded/And I come home late at night,” Ewald sings, without enough conviction to absolve the cliché. He falls into a half-spoken drawl on “Dogs,” a tender discourse on human friendships (“I know he always understands me/Even when I am being evasive”), but the stream-of-consciousness melody feels as aimless as another night at the neighborhood bar.
“Black Oak” achieves a more affecting result by ditching the vocal melody altogether: “His belly warm with drink/He leaned into the freeway in the night/Investigating exit ramps/Waiting for a sign,” Ewald recounts in an unnerving deadpan. The guitars drop out as the song’s protagonist meets tragedy: “They found him at the black oak/They dug him up last night.” A looping coda evokes the spaced-out lapse of highway hypnosis, as if the band were cruising those darkened roads themselves.
The spare electric guitar solos of “Tangerine” recall the charm of Birdie standout “Bad Beer,” or the sweeping arpeggios of 2016’s “Monsters.” But even with a full crew alongside him, it’s hard not to feel a kind of emptiness, a monotony that dampens Ewald’s personality. Throughout Safe and Also No Fear, there are flashes of his sheepish wit and contagious hooks—the same qualities that elevated quotidian anecdotes like “Tears Over Beers” in Modern Baseball’s discography. He sounds most confident on the harder-rocking “Good Ones,” a retrospective laundry list of letdowns, and “Heart Attack,” about the panic of realizing that the person you’re dating (or are you?) won’t return your calls. “My sunlight hurts my skin/I let the wrong one in,” he sings genially, reaching the album’s crowning achievement in wordplay: “Hand in hand grenade, you make me weak.” The blips of charisma are reminders of better music Ewald’s made prior; this time around, it feels as though he’s fighting against his own indifference.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lame-O | August 2, 2019 | 6.4 | 4445c6af-b831-4039-8fe8-bad542a14fee | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Peter Bjorn and John follow their breakthrough record with an album of palette-cleansing instrumentals, drawing inspiration from downtempo electronica and their homeland's current infatuation with Balearic music. A proper follow-up to Writer's Block is due in 2009. | Peter Bjorn and John follow their breakthrough record with an album of palette-cleansing instrumentals, drawing inspiration from downtempo electronica and their homeland's current infatuation with Balearic music. A proper follow-up to Writer's Block is due in 2009. | Peter Bjorn and John: Seaside Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12190-seaside-rock/ | Seaside Rock | Peter Bjorn and John are known for crafting shimmery, lovelorn pop songs, so the idea of the mild-mannered Swedish rockers recording an instrumental (ish) album isn't really so far-fetched. As evocative as the lyrics often are on 2006's Writer's Block, the bongo drums and whistled hook on "Young Folks" (to name just the group's most well-known track) spoke to listeners around the world in ways words never could. Since then, PB&J's Björn Yttling has produced some very good records in his own right, including Lykke Li's Youth Novels, Shout Out Louds' Our Ill Wills, and Taken By Trees' Open Field. Meanwhile, Peter Morén-- the band's most distinguished lyricist-- fell comparatively flat this year with a solo album.
Still, the best parallel to the limited-edition Seaside Rock comes from not the trio's own Stockholm, but over on the west coast of Sweden. There, in 2006, Gothenburg electropop duo the Tough Alliance followed their Swedish hit debut, The New School, with a limited edition release of a similarly instrumental(-ish) LP called Escaping Your Ambitions-- an ambient voyage through the nature sounds and aquatic sonic imagery that had already become a "thing" in their seaside city's scene. It would give the band an escape from the burdens (self-imposed and otherwise) of the dreaded sophomore album. Likewise, on Seaside Rock, PBJ's Morén, Yttling, and John Eriksson delay the inevitable pressures of following up Writer's Block with an album of dreamy, morning-after beach-party comedowns all their own, to mixed success.
At its best, Seaside Rock-- like Escaping Your Ambitions-- sounds less like a band chasing a trend than having bubbling sounds rise to meet them. As distant as the Air-like bass grooves of the drumless "Favour of the Season" may seem from Writer's Block, the song's details show a sensitivity to pop elegance and eloquence that's altogether different from the nu-disco spaciness of fellow Swedish seafarers such as the Studio. On "Needles and Pills", the staccato guitars of Balearic music swell to an orchestral crescendo akin to Morricone played by school children. Jangling, harmonica-led finale "At the Seaside" sounds almost as good as the Go! Team's near-instrumental "Feelgood by Numbers" if covered by the Chills. And it's not hard to imagine Morén cooing over the ocean sounds and rumbling pianos of "Barcelona".
PB&J take subverting expectations too far, though, with three tracks featuring guest spoken-word monologues in three separate Swedish dialects. It's sort of like the Scandinavian equivalent of the Fiery Furnaces bringing out Grandma for 2005's Rehearsing My Choir. With its sauntering acoustic guitars and harmonics, "Erik's Fishing Trip" (a possible play on the Daydream Nation title) would grace the opening credits of some post-Napoleon Dynamite comedy indie-flick-- if not for the man murmuring over it in Swedish. "Norrlands Riviera" swaps his voice for a woman's, some bird noises, and very little actual music; the darker "Next Stop Bjursele" is where the album's concept of kids just learning to play instruments is most evident, with martial woodwinds squaring off against foghorns at a march-like pace. "Rock me, rock me, rock me, rock me," this track's monologuer concludes (in English).
As beautifully assembled as parts of Seaside Rock are, a couple of genre-specific tracks underscore its stopgap nature. "School of Kraut" is basically what its title implies: a bit of krautrock motorik topped by childishly innocent orchestration. But ultimately, it just leaves a craving for the real thing (teachers, leave those kids alone). And the calypso-flavored "Saying Something (Mukiya)", with its simple, repetitive steeldrum melody, would work almost disturbingly well as the score to a Little Mermaid video game. For all Seaside Rock's stubborn contrariness, there are few signs that PB&J are actually suffering from writer's block quite yet; with luck, they're just biding their time. | 2008-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Almost Gold | September 15, 2008 | 6.3 | 444ad404-1e55-4cd9-9e05-862906803b4e | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Chicago rapper Verbal Kent has a lean, hungry style and a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato delivery. His eighth solo record features appearances from Freddie Gibbs and Torae and production from Apollo Brown. | The Chicago rapper Verbal Kent has a lean, hungry style and a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato delivery. His eighth solo record features appearances from Freddie Gibbs and Torae and production from Apollo Brown. | Verbal Kent: Anesthesia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20932-anesthesia/ | Anesthesia | About two minutes into "Illustrate", Dan Weiss, the Chicago rapper who records as Verbal Kent, raps the following: "Examining the fabric of life, the life scientist/ Put my foot in your ass, it's shitty for podiatrists." The line raises a lot of questions. Given the context, wouldn't it, in fact, be Kent's podiatrist that this was shitty for? Would he go to the podiatrist immediately after administering the ass kicking? Is he going to the podiatrist as a result of the ass kicking? Is he barefoot? Can't he just take a shower?
Yes, this is devoting a little too much thought to a throwaway bar, but it illustrates the most frustrating issue with Anesthesia, Kent's seventh solo record (not counting an excellent 2013 collaboration with Red Pill and Apollo Brown as Ugly Heroes). His rhymes are lean, his delivery is hungry, and he has excellent taste in collaborators—Freddie Gibbs, Torae, and Red Pill all show up here—and producers. He has a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato morse-code delivery that renders every line tense and jagged. But for the most part, Anesthesia is a thicket of non sequiturs, a "Family Guy" pile-up of unrelated images and decontextualized half-puns, free of any organizing structure that might lend them impact or meaning.
Absurdism in hip-hop has its place—in the late '90s, Kool Keith and Ghostface were masters of it, as was Cam'ron circa Purple Haze. The difference is that they were also expert world-builders, so even their stranger asides felt like they were obeying a certain internal logic. Kent's verses just feel like clumsy free-association: In the heavy-lidded "Add Anesthesia", which features sinister music-box production from Kaz 1, Kent says, "One-hitter in the parking lot/ Anne Frank with the discreet smoking/ Hid her in the parking lot." Later in the same song, he offers the even-more-baffling "Huddle up and nurse from the nipple/ Suck on the same tit, so when effects ripple/ It's a simple thing to solve."
Traces of a stronger record turn up throughout Anesthesia, and when Kent manages to follow a train of thought from start to finish, everything suddenly clicks. On the breathless "Suit Case Switch", he trades motor-mouthed verses with Freddie Gibbs, running roughshod over Apollo Brown's beautifully woozy, '70s-soul-quoting production and nicely working a protracted heist metaphor. In the album's latter half, Kent briefly dabbles in autobiography, and the emotional grounding focuses him. In "Notes", he struggles with the news that he's about to become a father and, aside from a nonsensical digression about albacore tuna, it's poignant and striking. And on the soft, soulful "Is This My Life", Kent seems to be alluding to either substance abuse or the 2003 stabbing that almost took his life when he declares, "Recovery's a myth/ Because you don't ever really return/ You just become a new version of the person you were/ And those of us that make it out a little wiser/ Instead of more bitter, get to shine a little brighter."
Those few flashes of earnestness and coherence suggest the album Anesthesia might have been. Its title, along with a few pointed, passing references to self-medication, imply that Kent had some desire to explore the ways people choose to numb themselves. But none of those ideas are ever fleshed out; instead, Kent keeps falling back on stuff like, "Teach and grade my own masters' thesis/ Hot chili pepper temper, Flea pleading with Anthony Kiedis." The line makes a kind of sense, inasmuch as both Flea and Anthony Kiedis are in a band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Otherwise, like so much of Anesthesia, it's about as resonant as a Wikipedia entry. | 2015-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | September 4, 2015 | 6 | 444b7b6d-cdc7-478e-8335-cd9567366eef | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
How do we rate these DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Thugged Out Pissed Off lacks a healthy portion of the fits of stylistic dementedness and infectious exuberance that made his last two releases like Hoop Life and his Chance the Rapper collaboration charming. | How do we rate these DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Thugged Out Pissed Off lacks a healthy portion of the fits of stylistic dementedness and infectious exuberance that made his last two releases like Hoop Life and his Chance the Rapper collaboration charming. | Lil B: Thugged Out Pissed Off | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21392-thugged-out-pissed-off/ | Thugged Out Pissed Off | People who still keep up with rapper and social media mystic Lil B have their own personal rubric for grading his tapes. What tracks I can show to my friends that think Lil B can’t rap? How ridiculous are the style experiments? What funny celebrities does he have "more bitches than," and have "hoes on his dick like"? Is anything on this as good as "Like a Martian"? Is anything on this as good as "I’m God"? At this point, B's set his own parameters such that there’s no way to identify what "going astray" might look like for him. In everything from his capricious tweets to his mixtapes, he’s made a perspective in every direction a perspective in itself.
So how do we rate new DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music, which arrive about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Sometimes it feels like you have to commit to either categorically disdaining the BasedGod brand, or endorsing all of it. When you have a 50-plus track Lil B release, like the recent Thugged Out Pissed Off, there’s a song or 10 to satisfy any of your favorite B song types or subjects. The majority of his tapes since 2012’s God’s Father have been this large-scale: Perhaps there’s no going back when you’ve gotten into the habit of running long and holding yourself to a standard that no one except you remotely understands. How does he decide when a tape is done? With Lil B, you can’t qualify what you’ll never feel like you really processed.
The tape kicks off with the musical equivalent of a slow-motion strut into the boxing ring with the robe hood up: a trap-ified flip of Giorgio Moroder’s funereal Scarface theme. The track sets the mood for the tape pretty well, insofar as we can generalize that of a 63-track-long collection of freestyles: Thugged Out Pissed Off is a little more self-serious, a little more dead-eyed, and a little more disinterested. It lacks the exuberance that made 2014's H**oop Life and last year's Chance the Rapper collaboration charming. You, the listener, will spend a little more of the portion of the collection asking "Why this?"
As with a lot of the music which defines the notorious genre of cloud rap—from Raider Klan affiliates to disciples like Yung Lean—part of the appeal of Lil B (or, at least, the source of his novelty) for his fans is the contradictory perspectives he squirms in and out of. He’s usually playing at some comic book version of a hard-ass, a bathetic mystic, or a confessional "real hip-hop"per. On this tape—as if celebrating of the impending release of *Deadpool—*he’s in full-on noxious mode. He plays the anti-heroic Stanley Kowalski of hustlers with a "dirty dick like Charlie Sheen," and dallies on the subject of "knocking out bitches." It seems as if he's intending to indict roided-up possible form of masculinity through first-person character study, and as always with B, it’s hard to put together any fixed explanation. "I’m a jealous guy so I beat up my bitches/ I’m so insecure, I don’t even trust me," he drawls on "Play the Hood," showing his cards a bit.
Lamentably, there is little in the way of songs fit for crying in pet stores or fun, non sequitur-filled bangers to balance all this out, or make the body of this thing—the middle two hours, perhaps—less boring. If you love the playful WTF moments, they don’t get too much more compelling than flips of "Coco" and "Jumpman" (the choruses, respectively: "I’m in looove with the Based God" and "Based God, Based God, Based God, Based God"). These are exercises which it’s hard to imagine even the most diehard, TYBG-tatted devotee getting excited about.
The best songs on this tape pair oddball versions of party-rap production—a fair amount of Mannie Fresh’s laser-tag bounce and calls of "whodie" here—or slurred, I’m Gay (I’m Happy)-style boom-bap, with lyrics revolving around racial identity. "I Was Born Poor" couples a Hot Boys-ready, cymbal-driven beat with a velour sitar sample, and finds B dreamily murmuring about his ancestry ("Booker T. Washington, still got that honor/ Born into bondage, still became a scholar"). On the purely musical end, there are a handful of unusual gambits that stick with you: the triumphant singing on "With Me" is placed like a R&B break in the middle of an early '00s rap track and comes out sounding like something close to Tiny Tim.
But even the pleasant details are forgotten too quickly. Even more than, say, 2013’s 101-track *05 Fuck Em—*a similarly unwieldy but much more engaging release thanks to a good haul of truly bizarre style experiments—it feels like B is just hitting a deadline and releasing what he has lying around. Sure, that’s probably what he’s always done, but this feels more like a perfunctory archive purge. Thugged Out Pissed Off creates the image of a Lil B who is unsure if he wants to keep up things exactly as he’s been doing them, but doesn’t know exactly what he should do instead. | 2016-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Experimental | self-released | January 12, 2016 | 6.3 | 44573cfd-80f3-4f30-b002-0b6e877758db | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The North Carolina rapper’s third album in 13 months is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects. This time, they’re starting to go stale. | The North Carolina rapper’s third album in 13 months is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects. This time, they’re starting to go stale. | DaBaby: Blame It on Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dababy-blame-it-on-baby/ | Blame It on Baby | On DaBaby’s biggest song, he asked himself to switch the flow. He didn’t. “BOP” hurtled forward like he’d been shot from a cannon. His potent, barraging raps sound like they’re spurting out of him; the joke goes that they’re all different versions of the same song. DaBaby aims to be everywhere at once: on remixes of any Spotify chart-topper, coursing through TikTok, following pop culture wherever it leads. Of course he put out an album in the middle of quarantine—on the cover, he poses in a face mask, declaring his relevance to The Current Moment.
Blame It on Baby reaches for more and resonates less. Half the album is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects, stale the third time around; for the rest, DaBaby follows formulas other than his own. Though he’s known for being a capital-R Rapper, DaBaby clears his throat—literally, before admitting, “My voice kinda fucked up”—and tries to sing, sometimes with grating results. On “Rockstar,” he doesn’t imitate Roddy Ricch as much as adjust his tone to complement the feature. His voice becomes softer, as close as DaBaby gets to tender, as he talks about the physical jolt of PTSD, “waking up in cold sweats like the flu.” On “Find My Way,” he dribbles syllables over languid guitar. He follows A Boogie’s lead on “Drop,” catatonic and crooning. This is the first music he’s released that sounds limp.
Some of that slowness comes from trudging through the murk of non-apologies and fledging repentance. DaBaby apparently slapped a woman at a recent event; in January, he was arrested for allegedly robbing someone and then pouring apple juice on them. Aggression is a key facet of DaBaby’s music, fueling his viciousness and velocity, and it’s often cartoonish; still, the record’s glimpses of violence can become disconcerting, especially when they involve women (“Put my dick down her throat ’til she throw up,” he raps on “Lightskin Shit”). “Can’t Stop,” the album opener, is weighed down by DaBaby’s insistence that he’s not sorry. On “Sad Shit,” he mimics a generic, desolate Drake song, soaking his voice in AutoTune and rasping pleas. It’s all fake, the sentiment and the sound, and after a few crooned apologies, DaBaby shouts, “Fuck that,” and goes back to tallying up the women he’s slept with. It’s not until “Jump,” eight tracks in, that the album turns familiarly propulsive—but it’s not DaBaby, it’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again doing his best DaBaby impression.
If you’ve listened to DaBaby for a while now, you know his bits. He groans about fans asking for photos. He growls that he’s a dog. Even his most creative rhyme patterns become predictable when he’s employed them so many times before. Usually, the repetition is accompanied by rattling bass and blown-out speakers, or raps so fast the flows create a vortex; on these more subdued, slowed-down tracks, every recycled word is noticeable. Most of his past producers have followed the Jetsonmade model of pouncing drums and bass, a concentrated bump of adrenaline, but the production throughout this album slinks and tingles. DaBaby’s charm gets diluted; he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to.
Ever the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral. “Nasty” pairs a gleaming lilt from Ashanti with a fun, dynamic Megan Thee Stallion verse. It doesn’t have the explosive power of “Cash Shit,” Megan and DaBaby’s last collaboration, but the song is still mesmerizing, with DaBaby’s absurd, precise eroticism in full force. The album’s payoff arrives on the title track, a two-minute opus that stitches together four beat switches and contorts DaBaby’s flow over and over. It builds, it thrills, it makes you feel like you can run through a wall—everything a DaBaby song can and should do, when he asks it of himself. | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | South Coast Music Group / Interscope | April 21, 2020 | 6.8 | 44584c6b-9ba6-4fd6-8a16-769ee1b75d13 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
This 5xCD box set from Cherry Red offers a compelling look at shoegaze's prime era. Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality. | This 5xCD box set from Cherry Red offers a compelling look at shoegaze's prime era. Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality. | Various Artists: Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21499-still-in-a-dream-a-story-of-shoegaze-1988-1995/ | Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 | Like band names, genre terms usually lose their literal meaning once they get established. Just as the corny reference of "My Bloody Valentine" was wiped away by the band’s might and majesty, "shoegaze" became a phonetically evocative word—those oozy vowels and soft sibilants—that suited the blurry sound. The literal meaning—and the fact that it was initially intended as a derisive term— disappeared.
The compressed accusation in "shoegaze"—coined by someone at NME, a music paper less supportive of the genre than its rival Melody Maker—is that these were bands too bashful to meet the audience’s eyes. Unlike the attention-seeking egos that typically front British bands, the shoegazers were self-effacing, hiding behind their hair and glancing down at the array of effects pedals at their feet. Shoegazers were insufficiently invested in the performative aspects of rock: the genre was all about sound, not show.
Despite starting as a slur, "shoegaze" fit the genre like a glove and soon supplanted the competing descriptors. "Dreampop," an invention of A.R. Kane’s, enjoyed small and short-lived currency in the U.S. The other contender was The Scene That Celebrates Itself, coined by a Melody Maker editor. A tautology, of course—show me a Scene That Denigrates Itself—but it did convey the incestuous vibe of the early movement. Most of the bands knew each other and fraternized, and they generally hailed from the Thames Valley (London, Reading, Oxford).
Remembering shoegaze’s other name made me think of Brian Eno’s "scenius" concept: the idea that music evolves through collective processes, in an incremental and reactive way, rather than through heroic innovators making giant steps that everyone else follows. A sound emerges and everyone wants in; the style—usually a mixture of new technological possibilities and aesthetic choices—becomes the idiom through which you express what you have to say. Like all languages, the style stipulates and restricts possibilities as much as it creates them.
The first few discs of Still in a Dream, a new 5xCD box from Cherry Red, make a good argument in favor of scenius. Picking almost randomly, one example of the perfectly generic here is Pale Saints' "Sight of You." It is not ur-shoegaze (that would be MBV’s "You Made Me Realise"), but it is echt-shoegaze. The name Pale Saints vaguely gestures at the Pre-Raphaelites and mystic devotion; the song title proposes love as a rapture of the gaze rather than a fever of the flesh; the sound is choirboy-pure vocals and guitar that works as a billowing curtain of texture rather than propulsive riff. Two other absolutely typical, absolutely lovely specimens of shoegaze here are Lush’s "De-Luxe" (like being buffeted by flower petals in a wind-tunnel) and Slowdive’s "Slowdive," where the slightest of chord sequences ripples the silvery guitar wooze. Where the genre’s progenitors My Bloody Valentine—mystifyingly absent from the box despite providing its title—churned with dizzy-making desire, the effect with second-wave shoegaze tends to be more virginal. Slowdive certainly emit none of the dark erotic energy of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song from which they took their name.
Along with "scenius," another Eno thought sprang to mind when listening through the box: Eno hailed MBV’s "Soon" as "the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." That got me musing: why would "vague" be a good thing for music to be? How would you distinguish between the deliberately indistinct and the merely insubstantial? And how does this sonic vagueness relate to life?
Shoegaze’s nebulousness has to do with its slightly "off" relation with both rock and pop. The genre fetishizes the sound of the guitar, but is relatively uninterested in the other things that guitars have traditionally done—riffs, solos, grooving. Shoegaze introduced a new generation of guitar heroes who weren’t dramatic. Rather than the spotlight of a solo, there would be a mid-song caesura of abstract carnage. The heroism took the form of explorations into texture. Kevin Shields was the scene's Hendrix figure, but the contrast between Jimi the showman and Shields the shy man is telling. No guitar-face or swaggering about the stage. The music was designed to overwhelm in the live context, but in a way that was impersonal—as though the band were victims of the sound as much as the audience, or simply conduits for the torrential noise.
What also made shoegaze such an indeterminate proposition as regards proper rock and proper pop was the way it used rhythm and the voice. It’s tempting to say that this is a genre consisting of non-drummers and non-singers. Certainly, re-listening to Ride’s "Drive Blind" was a bit of a shocker: how did a group get so big with such a shaky voice upfront, with a drummer that could barely hold a beat? But mostly the subdued rhythm and buried vocals was a deliberate aesthetic choice rather than a matter of deficiency. Voices were mixed to be half-obscured by the blizzard of sound; the rhythm section just about kept up with the guitar tumult. Shoegaze was as not-quite-pop as it was not-quite-rock. The melodies harked back beguilingly to a hazy, half-remembered '60s, but had little to do with what '80s chart-pop considered "a tune." Shoegaze’s brief stint as the reigning alternative sound in the UK was ended by Britpop, and it’s the emphasis on "pop" there that is significant. Groups like Oasis and Blur mixed the voice upfront and above the instrumentation; songs acquired anthemic choruses; singers got cocky and in-your-face.
Shoegaze, in contrast, made a fetish of the swoon. The sighing vocals, the sickly drooping drones and melodic descents, the wavery timbres—these signature sonic effects induced listener responses like rolling your eyes back in your head or swaying slightly as if about to faint. The feeling transmitted by shoegaze at its most compelling combined surging urgency and heavy-lidded languor. It suggested threshold states: drowsily slipping into a nap in the mid-afternoon, not being able to shake off the dream in the morning. The connective thread with all these sensations is the relinquishing of control, the scary bliss of losing orientation and agency.
I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to imagine that this had some kind of semi-conscious resonance for a generation that felt powerless. It’s quite hard to reconstruct how bleak things seemed in the late '80s and early '90s; in both Britain and America, conservative governments were in third-term ascendance, and mainstream popular culture from hair metal to Hollywood seemed be in sync with the rightward shift. For many—not all, but many—this encouraged resignation, a withdrawal verging on hibernation. That’s why American nu-punks L7 wrote their anti-slacker anthem "Pretend We’re Dead" as a wake-up call from apathy. That’s why Welsh nu-punks Manic Street Preachers declared that they hated Slowdive more than Hitler—for being so dreamily disengaged, advocates for reverie rather than revolution.
This anti-politics of vagueness comes through clearly on one of Still in a Dream’s more unusual and surprising inclusions, a lost classic that I would never have filed under shoegaze: AC Marias’s "One of Our Girls Has Gone Missing." AC is Angela Conway, an associate of Wire (whose Bruce Gilbert was involved in the sculpted-snow sound of "One of Our Girls," which ought to thrill anyone who loves Chairs Missing and 154.) Drawing on the John le Carré genre of ice-hearted espionage fiction and the idea of the agent who goes AWOL, Conway’s lyric imagines a strategy of dissidence through disappearance:"“She has lost her color/ And faded away/ Moved into thin air."
As a frontline journalist covering much of this music at the time, I recall that the '60s allegiances of shoegaze seemed obvious and paramount. They were harking back longingly to the '60s as a refusal of the '80s—the decade of Thatcher and Reagan. But that necessarily meant a return of '60s sounds without any of the hope or confident dynamism of that decade; change would not be coming, change in fact was being reversed. That’s one reason why the word "dream" was so emblematic of the era (Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation being only the most conspicuous example). Rather than turn dreams into reality, now it was more like dreaming your life away, assisted by recorded relics from that lost time. Rather than "we want the world and we want it now" (the Doors) or even "we’re all normal and we want our freedom" (Love), the spirit was crestfallen and crushed: "There’s a place I’d like to be/ There’s a place I’d be happy" (Galaxie 500’s "Tugboat"), or the murmured, barely audible "much rather be" in "All Different Things" by Bark Psychosis.
Listening today, though, the '60s-ness of shoegaze recedes to a surprising degree. Especially on the first disc—which includes shoegaze-spawning but not-really-shoegaze greats like Cocteau Twins, the House of Love, A.R. Kane—I don’t hear the Byrds or Velvets, I hear the glassy textures of John McGeoch, Vini Reilly, or Clive Timperley of the Passions (the glorious glistening echoplexed intro to "I’m in Love With a German Film Star"). Yes, the "ba ba-ba-ba ba" bit in "Christine" by the House of Love harks back to '60s pop of the Turtles type, but Terry Bickers' crystalline cascades are totally modern in their moment.
In other shoegaze groups, a surprisingly large amount of New Order and the Cure is discernible: the processional glide-rhythms, the high-toned droning basslines. Despite being swathed in prismatic guitar-miasma, Kitchens of Distinction sound like Modern English more than anything on "3rd Time We Opened the Capsule." Even with the overtly classicist outfits like Spacemen 3, for all the signposted allusions to the Velvets, Beach Boys, Stooges, and their refusal of '80s tropes (gated drums, Yamaha DX7 synth—i.e. the very things that groups like Haim now deliberately redeploy), a record like "Hypnotized" could only have been made at that particular time. If you placed it alongside records actually made in the '60s, it would jut out jarringly.
Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. The stricture of only one track per artist means that the inessential gets inevitably over-represented and the defining greats get short-changed and effectively demoted. A five-disc box set of shoegaze organized around quality and innovation as criteria would be about 1/3 My Bloody Valentine. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality. After that you get the influenced: the second and third waves, as well as fellow travelers (Cranes), outliers (Mercury Rev), and offshoots (Seefeel). Shrewdly, the compilers cut off in '95, and don’t attempt to corral any of the shoegaze homages or revivalists of the last 20 years.
I had a great time with the first disc (late '80s), a good time with the second and much of the third (lovely to remake the acquaintance of Moose and the muscular Swervedriver, who had a bit of Thin Lizzy in their make-up), but by the fourth, the trip down memory lane took on a purgatorial aspect. "More of the same, only slightly different" is good up to a point, but with any genre you can have too much of a good thing. Although primarily a UK genre—and in some way reflective of British character traits like diffidence—the Americans did join in: sometimes inventively warping the MBV blueprint (the blow-torched beauty of Medicine’s "Aruca") and other times cloning it (Swirlies). You can always quibble about choices (why "Rollercoaster" as opposed to two dozen other Jesus and Mary Chain candidates?!). But overall Still in a Dream is a job well done: an accurate portrait of an era that, while it can’t really be described as a lost golden age for rock, nonetheless provided sorely needed radiance and refuge during a particularly grim period. | 2016-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Cherry Red | February 3, 2016 | 8 | 44621bef-caf0-41e4-b1cc-d3f8e000a6a5 | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | null |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.