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At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile ... | At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile ... | Wilco: A Ghost Is Born | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8680-a-ghost-is-born/ | A Ghost Is Born | At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile away from the home city I share with the band. While the rock-crit throngs lined up to praise the album's experimentalism, screw-the-Record-Company-Man martyrdom and accidental 9/11 relevance, it merely seemed to me like a postcard photograph that perfectly sums up all the things you love about a city, a sonic map of Chicago's every contour. Putting YHF on the stereo was all it took to cue up a mental slideshow of the city's palette: "Reservations" the gray tones of a frozen-over Lake Michigan, "Heavy Metal Drummer" the humid orange of a Grant Park festival, and "Radio Cure" the brown shade of El-track alleys.
It's very possible, then, that the underwhelming feeling projected by A Ghost Is Born is linked to my address being restored to a Chicago zip code, where I have the city's essence accessible right outside my courtyard gate. Early returns on the album veer wildly from rapturous proclamations that this record solidifies the band's genius to cred-snipers who see it as a crippling failure. To me, it sounds like neither extreme, but rather like a band in need of a break, a band that's been reading their press, a band straying too far from their strengths, and a band that's still too good to let any of these things completely obscure their talents.
A lot of those assumptions are based on the simple fact that A Ghost Is Born is a wildly uneven album, fluctuating in both mood and quality over the course of its one hour runtime. Less cohesive than any other Wilco release, Ghost fulfills all the stereotypes of the album-after-the-breakthrough: So you've played the band reinvention card, what next? On some songs, the band take refuge in their past incarnations ("I'm a Wheel", "Hummingbird"), on some they dip their toe in the water of other bands' pools ("Spiders/Kidsmoke"), and on others they take the previous album's achievements to uncomfortable extremes ("Less Than You Think").
But more than anything, Jeff Tweedy confirms the fear I've held since I was exposed to most of this new material last year during Wilco's tour-closing show: He now revels in extended guitar solos. Five of Ghost's first six songs dissolve into noisy fretboard fingerings, and it's no coincidence that this first half of the album is where most of the weaknesses lie. As a Neil Young fan, I'm no anti-soloist, but for an artist as lyrically and vocally gifted as Tweedy to resort to expressing emotions through age-old bombast and pyrotechnics, something must be gumming up the songwriting works.
Three of these shut-up-and-play guitar sections come in songs so sleepy and hazy ("At Least That's What You Said", "Muzzle of Bees", "Hell Is Chrome") that they practically invite idle speculation about Tweedy's prehab pill regimen. Sluggish and flat, they're the opposite of the idea-packed YHF material, with the affected quirks that fill out the arrangements unable to dispel the overall grogginess.
"Spiders/Kidsmoke", on the other hand, dabbles in a marathon Krautrock vamp, spoiling one of Wilco's best new songs with a cyclical arrangement that erases the tension and release of its live arrangement. Where "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" spent its lengthy runtime constantly shapeshifting, "Spiders/Kidsmoke" seems to content to simply spins its wheels for upwards of 10 minutes.
Only "Hummingbird" manages to cut through Side A's gloom, revisiting the Beatles-pop of Summerteeth, albeit without that album's hyperactive keyboards. Many of A Ghost Is Born's brighter spots seem to be spin-offs of Summerteeth"s classic rock obsession rather than blippy YHF explorations-- despite this being Wilco's first release since the departure of canon-worship keyboardist Jay Bennett. Remaining within the safe confines of their more traditional influences, the piano-strut of "Theologians" echoes the white-soul of The Band (Wilco's closest ancestral analogue), while the slapdash "I'm a Wheel" is an encore-ready reminder of the group's early, 'Mats-evoking days.
There are only two songs on A Ghost Is Born that supercede Wilco's influences and arrangement struggles, moments when studio texture and songwriting merge smoothly to represent the album's grey mood in a way that's genuinely moving rather than disappointingly motionless. Whereas the ambient storm that drifts over the entire album can be distracting, on "Wishful Thinking" it creates just the right overcast backdrop, guiding Tweedy's softly cracking voice as he combs through feedback blankets looking for love's tunnel-end light. Grandiose yet mellow, "Company in My Back" makes the best use of Wilco's current keyboard-heavy lineup as piano and Casio verse-color exploding into dulcimer cacophony on the chorus.
Nevertheless, A Ghost Is Born squanders its second-half capital in the final reel, whipping up an impenetrable, unnecessary 10-minute noise squall to conclude the thin-ice beauty of "Less Than You Think". In interviews, Tweedy has explained the segment as a aural replica of the migraines that propelled him towards pharmaceuticals, but even the deepest empathy won't prevent its unrewarding drone from propelling listeners towards the ">>" button. Hit it, and you're treated to the forgettable "Late Greats", rock-by-numbers with lyrics that unfortunately seem to indicate Tweedy's complaisance with the obscurity = good, radio = bad logic of his loudest booster-critics.
In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus. Certain islands of success continue to give me that feeling of purified Chicagoness, even as I spend my days commuting through the actual city. Should my daily premonition of the CTA's silver snake surging off its elevated track come true, I can't think of a more fitting score for my mass transit demise than "Company in My Back". But it pains me to see Wilco celebrate this album by getting right back on the tour bus, outfitted with a new guitar-army lineup, and spending yet more time away from the city from whence they derive their power. Won't you come home (and stay home), Jeff Tweedy? | 2004-06-21T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-06-21T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | June 21, 2004 | 6.6 | 4465310a-5014-4dcf-823b-0abfb9f3e57e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Dream Music is a reissue of two self-released records from the early ’80s by an obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. His work, weird and entrancing, sounds remarkably fresh in 2016. | Dream Music is a reissue of two self-released records from the early ’80s by an obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. His work, weird and entrancing, sounds remarkably fresh in 2016. | SunPath: Dream Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22082-dream-music/ | Dream Music | Given the hazy, post-genre melange of Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid’s own releases, it makes a certain kind of sense that he’d be interested in signing artists who represent his diverse tastes. The Leaving Records roster represents an almost baffling mix of post-house experimentalists (Seiho), hyper live-samplers (Deantoni Parks), American primitivists (Guy Blakeslee), world music pioneers (Laraaji) and straight up New Agers (Matthewdavid himself under the “Mindflight” moniker). Throw in some “Where did *this *come from?” reissues and you’ve got a label almost like no other. Leaving’s latest release, SunPath’s Dream Music, is in some ways its most obscurantist yet, but shows the label definitely has an ear for the uncommon and special.
Following last year’s triple cassette reissue of works by Laraaji (known most for his work with Brian Eno on the Ambient 3 album), Dream Music is a reissue compilation of two self-released records from the early ’80s by a beyond-obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. The Laraaji release seemed to trigger a growing interest by the label in New Age, as it was followed by Matthewdavid’s own Trust the Guide and Glide under the Mindflight moniker. Trust the Guide channels the genre’s most familiar (and cloying) tropes, playing like a love letter to sounds many already struggle to take seriously. Dream Music, however, is something else entirely: an entrancing and truly weird blend of New Age, ambient music and outside art that still sounds remarkably fresh 30 years later.
It appears that Berry’s career of music-making was entirely limited to these two records, Yasimin & The Snowflake Dragon (1980) and SunPath 2 (1984), each of which consists of two 30-minute pieces of music and both of which were made during time Berry spent living in Northern New Mexico, which he described in an interview to Aquarium Drunkard as inspirational because “[It was] fresh. Unspoiled... The place oozed magic.” It’s easy to read this quote today and roll your eyes, but the quest for spiritual meaning and the hope it could be expressed through sound is core to the identity of not just New Age, but much experimental and ambient music as well.
In going after these visions, Berry’s goal with each of the four compositions on Dream Music was to evoke images, which lead to him spending a considerable amount time searching for specific sounds and/or inventing ways to manufacture or capture them. Beyond the driving moans and whirs of his Prophet synthesizer—which dominated ambient, New Age and synthesizer music in the late ’70s and early ’80s, as the first polyphonic synthesizer—and a handful of flutes, the instrumentation on Dream Music is conjured by a variety of homemade instruments and field recordings by Berry himself. The list of sound-makers he provides is lengthy but highlights include “Peyote ceremony water drum; self-built & chromatically cut glass; Mexican dove ocarina; field recordings of two Colorado streams: one outdoors & one inside a cave”; and “a field recording of a raging snowstorm captured under a full moon outside of the cabin window.” The latter two of course read like back-patting “Oh, of course you dids,” but to Berry’s credit, you can actually hear and identify these sounds within the recordings, and understand how they contribute depth and fullness to the compositions.
You can feel the infusion of these found sounds most acutely on the two tracks that make up the second cassette, the SunPath 2 album, specifically on second track “Stream and Crystal,” which begins with the stream recordings. Here, he leads with the stream recordings that run from beginning to end, giving off the sense that the synths are there to embellish the running water and not the other way around. Additionally, “Stream and Crystal” is the only cut of the four featuring vocals, with a two-minute spoken word recording of Berry’s own gentle incantations. “I awakened in a cave holding one of the crystals in my hand, becoming aware of my heartbeat, becoming aware of my breath...” he says, and continuing onward as the musical parts float in and out. After twenty or so minutes, the ornamentations drop off and only the sound of echoing, flowing water remains, bubbling and drip-dropping for another nine minutes as you feel yourself drift internally, before the water sounds build slowly and loudly into an unexpected crashing thunder that makes you realize Berry has literally lead you inside the cave to the base of a rushing waterfall. As cheesy as it might sound, the full experience of listening for thirty minutes to just running water with a careful dashes of synth and flute on top actually imparts the precise feeling Berry described—an awareness of your heartbeat and your breath.
“Gá Te,” the other track from SunPath 2, is the darkest and most emotive of the four. Beginning with the aforementioned “raging snowstorm” recording, “Gá Te” delivers a dark-of-winter tone of lonely menace that makes it easy to imagine yourself alone in a car or on a hill trudging toward a remote destination alone. As the snowstorm fades away, apocalyptic '80s television soundtrack synths emerge, setting the mood, before stark, quiet Prophet chords arrive to ring and hum ominously in a way that might recall for modern ears the sounds of “Vletrmx” or “Garbagemx” from Autechre’s *Garbage *EP. Both tracks from the first cassette Yasimin and the Snowflake Dragon have their moments as well, though neither touches the majesty of these two.
What is so impressive about Berry’s approach and technique—let alone the fact he made all of it in a pre-computer age—is that he manages to create these beautiful canvases while feeling neither contrived nor cheesy. His work is less redolent of George Winston, Enya, or Yanni than of Eno’s Apollo, Tim Hecker, or Oneohtrix Point Never. And impressively, Dream Music is *actually *“meditative” in a way that things described as being “meditative” rarely are, and despite the possible goofiness inherent in talk of “crystals,” “magic,” and “other dimensions,” it exudes a kind of naive authenticity of a spiritual experience that is just breathtaking.
Apparently Berry felt that the magic of New Mexico ran out in 1985, which led him to head for Wyoming, where he still lives today, no longer making (or at least, sharing) music of any kind. But thanks to Matthewdavid and Leaving Records, we now have Dream Music, which joins other notable recent reissues in making a quietly compelling case for New Age music as a respectable form of art. | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Leaving | July 2, 2016 | 7.6 | 44676080-3002-4f4c-bfca-3c22d179afae | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The Oakland trio’s understanding of the art of death metal continues to deepen and spiral off into unexpected territory. | The Oakland trio’s understanding of the art of death metal continues to deepen and spiral off into unexpected territory. | Ulthar: Providence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ulthar-providence/ | Providence | The work of H.P. Lovecraft looms large within the extreme-metal imagination, and the Oakland trio Ulthar—who take their name from one of the author’s short stories—is far from the first band to fall under its spell. The band’s sophomore LP, Providence, which is named for Lovecraft’s hometown, features album art studded with skulls and plague buboes, resembling one of those cursed Victorian mourning wreaths woven from human hair. Those surface-level clues immediately alert the listener that they’re in for an unsettling ride (and is, artistically, par for the course for Ulthar). There is a certain ghastly air to the proceedings, as though the trio had discovered a nest of eldritch tentacles in the cellar while recording and decided to keep on playing. With Lovecraft himself, the true horror was what a racist, anti-Semitic shitbag he was, but here, that wyrd atmosphere is conjured in good faith, and conducted with blackened grandiosity.
The people involved have decades of experience between them in the study and execution of extremity, from drummer Justin Ennis’s tenure in NYC black metallers Mutilation Rites and current project Void Omnia to vocalist and guitarist Shelby Lermo’s experience with Bay Area death cult Vastum and bassist and vocalist Steve Peacock’s time in off-kilter blasphemers Pale Chalice and Mastery. It is unsurprising that Ulthar is a good band, but Providence is not just a good record, it is a great one, and the reasons for that go far beyond its creators’ resumes.
They couch their devotion to old-school death metal orthodoxy within a modern context; there's no mud, or murk, or self-conscious efforts to sound lo-fi, and the technical aspects are presented plainly, without apology or artifice. Providence allows no time for niceties on its short, brutish opening track, “Churn,” from which “Undying Spear” offers a brief respite before the rippling melody is torn to shreds by an imperious blast. Ulthar’s sound mingles black metal, death metal, doom, and thrash, and they skitter between genres in the leaps of a scale. But Providence owes a particular debt to Finish masters like Demigod, Convulsed, and Demilich, an earlier cohort who innately understood the importance of tempering technical flights with grounded riffs and headbanging tempos.
There is a certain sameness to a few of the album's eight tracks, so those that take the time to experiment invariably stand out. “Through Downward Dynasties” creeps in with an eerie ambient intro, flush with whooshing synthesizer effects and ominous undertones. It soon explodes into a flurry of blastbeats, precise scales, and icy, controlled chaos. Album closer “Humanoid Knot” revels in its own strangeness, from Lermo’s unhinged cackling to its slow, juddering riffs.
Recorded by Bay Area mainstay Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios and mastered by Adam Tucker at Signaturetone Recording, the album just sounds good, always listenable despite its undeniable brutality. They started strong on their 2016 demo and hit their stride with 2018’s monstrous Cosmovore, but with Providence, Ulthar has raised the bar on themselves yet again. With each release, their understanding of the art of death metal continues to deepen and spiral off into unexpected territory. | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | June 18, 2020 | 7.5 | 44692ef6-3ccb-439e-a862-9db757ca77b3 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
The sixth proper album from Calgary-based multimedia auteur Chad VanGaalen is one of his finer efforts, demonstrating his uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft. | The sixth proper album from Calgary-based multimedia auteur Chad VanGaalen is one of his finer efforts, demonstrating his uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft. | Chad VanGaalen: Light Information | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chad-vangaalen-light-information/ | Light Information | Chad VanGaalen has been consistent about his favorite track on Light Information, the sixth proper album from the prolific Calgary-based multimedia auteur and one of his finer efforts yet. Invariably, his pick is “Prep Piano and 770,” the one instrumental. As the title hints, it’s based on prepared piano and a Korg 770 monosynth. All of its contemplative chimes and retrofuturist squiggles are inspired by a floating bell that can be heard and, apparently, seen from the outhouse near a rustic cabin where the VanGaalen family goes (and, um, goes) on summer vacation. And no, before you ask, it’s actually track number three.
Since Sub Pop picked up VanGaalen’s bedroom-recording collection Infiniheart a dozen years ago, the warbling-voiced singer and impressively wide-ranging songwriter has kept tinkering with his warped noise-pop sensibility, as much mad scientist as one-man band. VanGaalen’s previous solo album, 2014’s invitingly easy-going Shrink Dust, could span pedal-steel plaintiveness and comic-book grotesquerie in a single song. VanGaalen is also an accomplished animator and illustrator. Shrink Dust was partly billed as a soundtrack to what would be his 2015 film Tarboz, and VanGaalen has directed videos for Sub Pop labelmates including Metz and Shabazz Palaces. These days, much of his musical work is in the form of his hallucinatory scores for Adult Swim’s “Dream Corp LLC.” Writing a traditionally structured song, he has said, doesn’t come so easily to him anymore.
Produced and almost entirely performed by VanGaalen, Light Information demonstrates he still has an uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft, while also gently questioning the societal pressures that might lead us to miss the point of creating and appreciating art in the first place. If, as VanGaalen has said, the overarching theme of Light Information is to somehow escape from technology, the end feeling is less “infinite content” than “cultivate your garden.”
The origins of Light Information predate Shrink Dust, and it’s a fittingly murkier-sounding and more riotous work, hewing closer to synth-streaked fist-pumpers like “Replace Me” from 2011’s Diaper Island or “Bare Feet on Wet Griptape” from 2008’s Soft Airplane. But the hooks still strike bloody vein. VanGaalen’s calamitous best here includes the galvanizing apocalyptic opener “Mind Hijacker’s Curse,” with its water-bong sound effects, bah-bah-ing “she’s got nobody” refrain, and what might be the album’s thesis statement on the fickleness of time: “Time just can’t be trusted,” VanGaalen frets. Spacier but no less urgent is “Host Body,” where VanGaalen imagines “parasitic demons” that “eat me from the inside out,” which he has said relates to time “turning you into a different person.” First single “Old Heads” has a chorus so jaunty it could be missed that it’s a sci-fi vision of transhuman cyborgs.
VanGaalen’s melancholy moments, when they come, are as gut-wrenching as ever, no matter how carefully cloaked in sardonic humor. The folksier, comparatively pared-down “You Fool” opens with a “semen-coated television controller thrown into a dirty hotel room corner,” and the unapologetic narrator volunteering to sleep on the floor. But the subtle showstopper is “Broken Bell,” where VanGaalen can offhandedly mention needing to visit a father who’s dying of cancer and then nudge a live audience into warm laughter by musing, “Should I take the advice of the graffiti on the wall telling me to go suck it?” It’s a Sufjan Stevens- or Mount Eerie-level meditation on mortality, despite VanGaalen concluding, “I’m not really good at this.”
One risk with mud-caked home recordings by indie oddballs is they can tend to blur together. “Golden Oceans” gunks up its sing-song melodies enough for early Wavves or Times New Viking. “Faces Lit” girds elliptical tech observations in rickety churn that could fit along a continuum with Built to Spill and Deerhunter. The anxious “Locked in the Phase” brings to mind happily revived Ontario indie heroes Constantines, whose lead singer Bry Webb had the B-side of VanGaalen’s one-off “Primitive Brain” single last year. “Mystery Elementals” is another scuzzy rumination on time’s inscrutability. Each of these is solid but doesn’t quite hold up to the album’s highlights.
A last-minute addition to the album, the fluttery finale “Static Shape” is also one of its sunniest songs—and VanGaalen’s. “Carve a shape into the static, and try to remember all the beautiful magic,” he sings, amid burbling electronic percussion and backing vocals from his two daughters. “Try to remember as much as I can and not to lose faith in my fellow kind.” It’s a gorgeous summation of why VanGaalen, in interviews and press materials, can seem more interested in ambient drone or gardening or architecture or, the nerve, his friends and family than feeding or monitoring the content mills. Like Jonathan Richman, VanGaalen doesn’t have a cellphone. But he has faith that if he follows his weird muse, opens up his mind in a way that a few people who are receptive to it might apprehend, that static will take shape, strike a chord. As usual, it may take a few listens, but he’s right. “Prep Piano and 770” isn’t really the best track, but it best captures that humbly optimistic spirit, like tranquil tones and breathtaking vistas observed from a shitter. | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 20, 2017 | 7.4 | 446a72c8-8485-4e57-b516-849b6bb7795f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Zach Condon's horn and ukelele remain in Brooklyn for the bulk of his sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Instead, he returns to France-- the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar. | Zach Condon's horn and ukelele remain in Brooklyn for the bulk of his sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Instead, he returns to France-- the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar. | Beirut: The Flying Club Cup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10759-the-flying-club-cup/ | The Flying Club Cup | More than three minutes into the Lon Gisland EP's "Elephant Gun", the horns pause, and the song lingers on a few of Zach Condon's syrupy syllables before returning to Beirut's strongest melody. It's the sound of Condon and his band shedding its layers of self-packed cultural baggage. As Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy wrote earlier this year of Lon Gisland: "Condon has shown that, yes, there are songs behind the international flavors, that his work would be interesting even if he kept the trumpet at home."
Surprisingly, Condon's horn remains in Brooklyn for the bulk of his sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Condon himself returns to France-- the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar. It's clearly a place he loves. "Once we got there, we kept trying to go to other places, but we didn't feel like traveling so much as being in Paris," he said when I interviewed him a year ago. It's reflected here, with both Gallic brass and accordion and song titles that reference French cities and locations. Crucially, however, Flying Club Cup would be a triumph even with those layers stripped away; that's not to say that the cultural patina obscures the "real" songs underneath, but its removal allows us to sidestep mind-numbing questions about authenticity and intention.
Flying Club Cup deftly showcases Condon's gifts: "Nantes" sounds exotic without directly referencing a particular era or feeling, and "A Sunday Smile"-- despite being about specific people and places-- evokes universal sensations such as sleepiness and warmth. "Un Dernier Verre (Pour la Route)" and "Guyamas Sonora" show off Condon's increased love of piano-driven pop songcraft-- as well his band's frequent trick of introducing the best part of the song (here, the way the lithe percussion and ukulele contrast with the heavy accordion and his vocal layering) three-quarters of the way through. "In the Mausoleum" begins with some "Come On! Feel the Illinois!"-ish piano (Sufjan Stevens playing the U.S. cultural cannibal to Condon's worldly connoisseur), but what I like best is the violins, arranged by Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett (in conjunction with Beirut's violinist Kristin Ferebee), which are strong throughout the record and provide a perfect, light-as-lashes counter to Condon's thick instrumentation.
Vocal layering is another Beirut gift, but it also weighs heavily on each track, which is appropriate when nearly every song is about feeling weary or old beyond your years. But despite the well-traveled themes, Condon's vocal melodies, as on standout "Cliquot", are still dangerously romantic, veering closely to musical theater. Condon also does well by "Forks and Knives (Le Fête)", where the instruments hold back to give him more room to sing. And here, once you get past this spent-cigarette, empty-hotel story he's selling, it's obvious that what Condon lacks in lyrical ability, he more than makes up for in prosody. He has an impressive flow, a delicate glide that perfectly compliments the oft-commented-upon exoticism that tends to divide Beirut listeners. On The Flying Cup Club, and maybe on all of Beirut's records, this exoticism takes the form not of alienation but of a search for a familiar place within what seems (or sounds) unfamiliar, difficult, or repulsive. It's the process of searching that untethers the record from any limiting sense of place, be it an Arrondissement in Paris or a village in the Balkans. | 2007-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | October 9, 2007 | 8 | 446baf42-02bb-4de1-b3b0-61d1d2e4031f | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
On the South Korean artist’s astounding third album, the past and the present, the real and the fake dissolve seamlessly into surreal, maximalist pop music. | On the South Korean artist’s astounding third album, the past and the present, the real and the fake dissolve seamlessly into surreal, maximalist pop music. | 파란노을 (Parannoul): *After the Magic * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parannoul-after-the-magic/ | After the Magic | At a time when even the most modest indie rock projects are expected to provide a captivating origin story and annotated talking points, the still-anonymous South Korean artist Parannoul stated just the following about their new LP: “This album is not what you expected, but what I always wanted.” What we actually know about Parannoul hasn’t changed all that much since 2021’s To See the Next Part of the Dream: They live in Seoul, are open to collaboration, though intensely protective of their privacy, and express what they truly want out of music through seemingly incompatible forms. In Parannoul’s hermetic world, hyperreal synth presets achieve the same uncanny dissonance as dream-pop’s gauzy guitars; emo shares a language with shoegaze; bedroom pop sounds alternatively like one person on a laptop and the soundtrack at a planetarium laser show. At any given point on their astounding third album, After the Magic, Parannoul can be described as any of these styles, all of them, or maybe even none of them—a seamless synthesis that provides a direct line to its author’s unique worldview even as they reveal nothing else about themselves.
Parannoul’s recent split LPs and singles suggested that the production might slowly recede out of the red into softer, more shimmering tones. Yet none of it served as proper preparation for the optimism revealed in the bracing, crystalline clarity of After the Magic. More so than any guitar-based act, the dramatic tonal shift recalls Oneohtrix Point Never reinventing their timbral vocabulary from his murky masterpiece Replica to the spotless, supernatural R Plus Seven. It’s still “electronic music,” though instead of letting ghosts in the machine warn us about technological entropy, Parannoul’s “fake” and “sterile” instruments create a curious warmth, if only from our memories of associating computers with creative possibility.
The first sound heard on opener “북극성 (Polaris)”—and indeed, quite a few songs on After the Magic—is an acoustic guitar, presumably not one of the MIDI presets used on To See the Next Part of the Dream. Before long, Parannoul fills the space with the most obvious of ersatz sounds: spotless cocktail piano rolls, slap bass, synthesized saxophones, all knowingly used as prompts to remember an older, more innocent era of technology. Yet in its slippery reference points—ambient music of the early home-computing age, shoegaze’s drum’n’bass software update, various phases of J-pop incorporating state-of-the-art electronics—After the Magic collapses the nostalgia wormhole, implying that, someday, 2023 will also be remembered as the good old days.
While Parannoul haven’t completely ditched the super-saturated guitars that made their past work sound like M83 and Smashing Pumpkins, the most unexpected change on After the Magic is how they recall the spirit of those projects at their most buoyant. Whether the miserablism of the past was a defense mechanism or a conscious stylistic choice, what remains in its absence is Parannoul’s belief that any emotion worth experiencing has to sound as overwhelming as it feels. The magic is not in the mundane, but in big elemental feelings—turning 20, falling in love before you know how to describe it, literal and figurative space travel, the resurrection in every sunrise, and the endless possibilities of a summer night. Or, as the lap-pop lullaby that closes After the Magic suggests, just watch the fireworks.
And where Parannoul once rendered depression and self-loathing as imposing monoliths, After the Magic’s panoramic music sprawls towards the horizon in every direction. “북극성 (Polaris)” teases at some conventional structure and the late-’90s merger of alt-rock and electronica—itself another fleeting ideal for guitar-centered music. But halfway through, as Parannoul marvel at the possibility of transmitting a crush from the cosmos, the stereo field is flooded with strobing neon synth effects, as if they were abducted by a toy UFO.
The singular and surreal mood of Parannoul comes from the paradox of the music’s creation: arena-sized anthems made in a small room, the sound of 20 people in a recording studio borne of a computer, the feeling of community made mostly by one person. The enormous suite of “Parade” sounds like an arena anthem cocooned from the outside world. While getting swept up in the incapacitating rave rhythms towards the end of “개화 (Blossom),” Parannoul let out an impassioned howl found nowhere else on the record; even an English translation of the lyrics (“I wish I could not wake up”) can’t confirm whether they’re in agony or ecstasy. The volcanic second half of “도착 (Arrival)” imagines how Billy Corgan would have constructed a Siamese Dream-style guitar symphony in 2023—in complete isolation, their voice at the center of countless tiny overdubs stacked like kindling until the mix combusts.
What are the intentions behind Parannoul’s decision to remove their own ego or personal narrative from After the Magic? Even the elusive Burial eventually got doxxed, so perhaps one day we’ll find out. But the effect of their monastic approach isn’t to keep people out, but to extend the space for inner exploration—to float in a state of half-remembered bliss, or to sit in uncertainty, questioning whether all of this momentary joy can be trusted; to indulge in the most alluring promise of nostalgia, revisiting familiar scenes and sounds and ending up with a different outcome. For all of its stunning sound design and genre alchemy, none of this works without the effect captured in every piano line, every enveloping blanket of guitar fuzz, every pristine K-pop melody delivered in Parannoul’s heavy-lidded sigh. It’s an album that might make one hour of our lives so powerful that we spend the rest of our days trying to remember it. | 2023-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Poclanos / Topshelf | February 2, 2023 | 8.4 | 446e5761-3f43-4dba-b17c-f1f66409075b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Playing more like a label-mandated promotional release for an up-and-coming artist than a thorough retrospective of one of rock's contemporary greats, this best of showcases the arc of Buckley's career in a chronologically scattered and not-particularly-enlightening way. | Playing more like a label-mandated promotional release for an up-and-coming artist than a thorough retrospective of one of rock's contemporary greats, this best of showcases the arc of Buckley's career in a chronologically scattered and not-particularly-enlightening way. | Jeff Buckley: So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10266-so-real-songs-from-jeff-buckley/ | So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley | There's little use in debating whether or not Jeff Buckley's legacy is best served by a seemingly endless stream of posthumous releases. Buckley's music and persona are cemented in the pop music canon even before the repackaging, re-sequencing, or re-mastering. And given that Buckley only released one proper LP in his lifetime, it makes sense that these reissues-- including the latest, So Real-- offer little in the way of either consistency or deeper perspective.
Playing more like a label-mandated promotional release for an up-and-coming artist than a thorough retrospective of one of rock's contemporary greats, So Real showcases the arc of Buckley's career in a chronologically scattered and not-particularly-enlightening way. Buckley's three best-known releases-- the Live at Sin-e EP, Grace, and the unfinished Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk-- each encapsulates a distinct moment in Buckley's career, and together constitute a fairly complete snapshot of his musical goals and aspirations. This compilation, however, demonstrates no such personal depth, showcasing Buckley's talents while omitting his inspired missteps.
There's very little new that can be said about the cuts taken from Grace and Live at Sin-e. The choices are even pretty obvious: "Lover, You Should've Come Over", "Grace", "Last Goodbye", and "Hallelujah" from the former; "Mojo Pin" and "Je n'en Connais Pas La Fin" from the latter. Mediocre outtake "Forget Her" and a sped-up "road version" of "Eternal Life" are culled from the still-freshly-released "Legacy Edition" of Grace. The only at all questionable omission here is that of "Morning Theft", a fan favorite and by far one of the strongest tracks on Sketches.
The three tracks chosen to represent Sketches-- "The Sky Is a Landfill", "Everybody Here Wants You", and "Vancouver"-- all speak to the largely unacknowledged influence of D.C. art-rockers Shudder to Think on Buckley's later work. After the release of Grace, Buckley spent some time playing bass in Shudder guitarist Nathan Larson's underrated Mind Science of the Mind project, and the influence is apparent in Sketches' flashes of inspired, angular weirdness. Listening to "The Sky Is a Landfill", in particular, it's clear that Buckley was beginning to explore a more discordant and subversive approach, even if he hadn't quite figured out how to execute it. One can see why Buckley wished to re-record the songs that were released as Sketches-- while his vocals are in prime form, his band lacks the cohesive, communicative energy that makes Shudder's Pony Express Record so amazing.
You can hear Buckley growing more lyrically adventurous too, with similarly mixed results. The straightforward, lovelorn words of "Last Goodbye" and "Lover, You Should've Come Over" perfectly suit that era of Buckley's material. The more impressionistic lines of "The Sky Is a Landfill" and "Vancouver" are a striking contrast; ambitious, overreaching, and occasionally very awkward and clumsy. No matter how many live albums, B-sides, and covers surface, the unbelievably sad truth remains that the record Sketches hints at-- a more sinister, dissonant and explosive take on Buckley's heart-on-sleeve romanticism-- will never be heard.
The inclusion of a single previously unreleased track (a fairly predictable cover of the Smiths' "I Know It's Over") hints that this compilation is meant for completists as well as newcomers. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much to offer either. Buckley's legacy is necessarily imperfect, inconsistent, frustrating, and exhilarating, and the "best-of" treatment ultimately does nothing to bring out the best in his work. | 2007-05-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | May 29, 2007 | 5 | 44719fc0-7dfc-4dda-b184-11f32b193330 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a folk classic that came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a folk classic that came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins. | Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracy-chapman-tracy-chapman/ | Tracy Chapman | A spotlight comes up on Tracy Chapman as she moves into the a capella song “Behind the Wall.” She sings from the point of view of a neighbor hearing a woman screaming in the apartment next door. Her trembling contralto soars and then, just as quickly, falls into a whisper. Between verses, she lets the air settle into silence before charging into the dark scene once again. The last lines—“The police/Always come late/If they come at all”—ring off into nothing. Chapman wrote the song in 1983, while she was still a student at Tufts University and busking in Boston for distracted passersby. Within five years, she would perform it for a television audience of 600 million in a packed Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday benefit concert.
Alone on that massive stage, guitar in hand, she allowed the echoing mic and screaming crowd to amplify the quiet of the song. And as she sang with that magnetic calm, she built an atmosphere as intimate as each listener’s childhood bedroom. “Behind the Wall” was the second of what was supposed to be a three-song set. But then, as the legend goes, serendipity gave the world another glimpse of this commanding artist. Just before Stevie Wonder was supposed to perform, a piece of his sound equipment went missing, and he refused to go on stage. Chapman agreed to take his place. It was in that surprise second set that she played “Fast Car.”
On her self-titled debut, which had been released on Elektra two months earlier with only modest sales expectations, “Fast Car” is a counterbalance to the weightiness of “Behind the Wall.” The low verses mix bleak recognition with quiet hope before building to a chorus so wistful, so joyfully tender it can transport you to a time in your life when you were younger and maybe a little less scared. Most of the people watching her performance at Wembley did not arrive knowing Chapman’s power, and most likely had never heard of her before. But they experienced in real time her ability to lift hearts into people’s throats. She performed her songs the same way she had on the streets for years: alone and brilliantly exposed.
We’ve witnessed the worst this world can throw our way, Chapman suggests on her debut, at times through her working-class characters. But the album creates a world where no force exists without a counter. The worst of what we’ve endured, she also offers, makes righteous justice inevitable. It’s a worldview that many could tune into. By the end of the summer of 1988, a few months after the Nelson Mandela tribute, Tracy Chapman was a platinum album and the singer was a star.
Some credited her rise to fame to that fateful Wembley appearance. Others speculated audience dissatisfaction with the ever-elaborate status quo of pop music of the time had something to do with the singer’s wild popularity. But however this folk- and blues-heavy singer-songwriter album became a hit in the synth- and glitter-flecked late ’80s, Chapman came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins. The only thing that critics struggled with as much as her unexpected success was uncovering how this plainly dressed, androgynous, Black woman with a voice as warm and woody as a bassoon created one of the best folk albums in a generation.
Chapman was as self-effacing in real life as she was singing from behind the characters in her songs. She hated interviews, almost never bantered on stage, and wasn’t shy about her displeasure at being coded a “protest singer.” And unlike folk artists like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, to whom she is often compared, Chapman’s music wasn’t as explicitly confessional as much as it was a portrait of the environment that first fostered her stark but fiercely optimistic worldview.
Born in 1964, Chapman grew up in Cleveland during a time when economic and social pressures were visibly bursting through. The schools were struggling to become integrated, the demographic makeup of neighborhoods was shifting, white people were fleeing to the suburbs, and the African American residents that remained faced housing discrimination and scarce economic opportunities. Fires frequently dotted the streets, the result of arson and also property owners looking to clear out abandoned buildings, while a series of riots and strikes crippled neighborhoods and school districts. By Chapman’s 12th birthday, Cleveland had earned the nickname Bomb City for the simple reason that people were setting off a lot of them there.
It was in a Black neighborhood in this roiling cityscape that her mother Hazel raised Chapman and her older sister by herself. Together, the family sang along to Top 40 radio and Hazel’s collection of jazz, gospel, and soul records, including Mahalia Jackson, Curtis Mayfield, and Sly Stone. Meanwhile, television exposed a young Chapman to the country music stylings of Buck Owens and Minnie Pearl on the show “Hee Haw.” She was already playing ukulele and started writing songs by age 8, took up guitar at 11, and at 14 wrote her first song looking at the troubles in her city. She called it “Cleveland 78.”
Though Chapman left Cleveland while she was still a teenager, having earned a scholarship to a private, Episcopal boarding school in Connecticut, her debut offers a working-class, undeniably Black perspective. There’s “Across the Lines,” in which Chapman describes, over halting guitar strums and a twinkling dulcimer, a segregated city breaking out in a fatal riot. Sparked by news that a white man assaulted a Black girl, the incident is ultimately blamed on the victim. “Choose sides/Run for your life/Tonight the riots begin/On the back streets of America/They kill the dream of America,” Chapman sings in a stoic murmur. There’s “Mountain O’ Things” where she voices the dubious dreams sold to the American poor. “I won’t die lonely,” she sings against a soft marimba and hand drum beats. “I’ll have it all prearranged/A grave that’s deep and wide enough/For me and all my mountains o’ things.”
Yet, for all the violence and hopelessness Chapman captures in her lyrics, there’s an equal measure of radical and at times naive conviction that a more just world is on its way. “Why?” asks basic questions about widespread injustices—“Why is a woman still not safe/When she’s in her home”—before answering with an insistent assurance that “somebody’s gonna have to answer” for the destruction modern society has wrought. “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution,” the opening song, is arguably the clearest view into Chapman’s political ethos. It’s a simple folk-pop anthem with a fervent, bright-eyed assurance that “Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share.” These brazen statements of faith in a better future emerge as encouragements for the downtrodden to continue on. Only someone who has seen society’s murky underbelly can convince you of its redeemability. She wrote the song when she was 16.
The dreams of social justice running through the entire album offset Tracy Chapman from its top-selling contemporaries. But with the eponymous words of “For You” resonating into the final seconds, love emerges as the underlying motivation for survival. Love is what all the figures she gives voice to ultimately want. And thanks to Chapman’s careful wording—the lover of the “checkout girl” from “Fast Car” is never gendered, while the only gendered part of the downbeat and mysteriously desperate “For My Lover” comes with the line “deep in this love/No man can shake”—it’s a body of work that one can easily read centered on queer desire. Chapman was notoriously private about her own sexuality and romantic life, even as she created love songs that welcomed all listeners to share in its subjectivity.
After its release, critics praised the album for its overtly political focus, hailing it as popular music’s return to authentic artistry. But Tracy Chapman didn’t change the course of a Top 40 ecosystem in tune with the era’s glorification of wealth and greed. Rather, the album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it. In pop music at the time, there was no archetype with which to classify the kind of artist Chapman was. And so, as she shrunk away from the spotlight, so did the gritty environment that contextualized her and her work.
Though the album showcased a descendant of white artists like Baez and Dylan, it also showed one who drew from the spiritual folks stylings of Odetta and the influence of blues singers like Bessie Smith. Nevertheless, once she rose to fame, critics debated the relative Blackness of her music, her audience, and by extension herself. In 1989, Public Enemy’s Chuck D summed up a sentiment some critics touched on regarding the perceived whiteness of her audience frankly for Rolling Stone: “Black people cannot feel Tracy Chapman, if they got beat over the head with it 35,000 times.” The lack of nuance leveled at her music and identity highlighted just how far outside of the mainstream her artistry was rooted, and just how little mainstream outlets understood about Black artists and audiences, even as Tracy Chapman held steady on the Billboard charts.
And while a wave of socially critical singer-songwriters did follow her—like Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, Liz Phair, and Fiona Apple—it would be several more years before another Black woman with an acoustic guitar, Lauryn Hill, caught the world’s sometimes unwanted attention. Chapman exposed a hole in expectations of who could be the voice of a generation, an entry point through which women in popular music entered and beat their own path. As Chapman reached for innovation through her own diverse musical influences, she and her debut album stand as evidence of the futility of boxing Black female artists in.
At times, the footage of her on stage at Wembley reveals an artist trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She looks down and away, stands in one spot, her guitar strap blends into her shirt, which blends into the stage. But through her set, as she weaves chilling silence between ribbons of rapturous melody, it feels like a threat to look away. | 2019-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Elektra | January 20, 2019 | 9.4 | 4478e57f-b1e1-4dac-acdc-c786cacf6875 | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
The Menzingers join the “post-30 punk” club, alongside Beach Slang and Japandroids. The first chorus asks “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?” and the LP proceeds from there. | The Menzingers join the “post-30 punk” club, alongside Beach Slang and Japandroids. The first chorus asks “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?” and the LP proceeds from there. | The Menzingers: After the Party | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22844-after-the-party/ | After the Party | The Menzingers are classic rock bards with expired Warped Tour laminates, as rooted in Social Distortion and ska as they are Springsteen and Kerouac. This is their thing, and five albums in, they have it so down that it threatens to leave nothing to the imagination. Their fiercely beloved and unabashedly nostalgic dirtbag opus On the Impossible Past challenged Celebration Rock for 2012’s most accurately titled album. Its follow-up led off with “I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore,” which emphatically slam-dunked its premise and left the rest of the dispirited Rented World to pick up the shattered backboard. And if there’s any doubt about what After the Party is getting at, the very first chorus rants “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?”
“Post-30 punk” feels like a subgenre of a subgenre at this point: age isn’t a number for Beach Slang, it’s a nullity, whereas Japandroids embraced maturity with the same legendary fire as their younger selves. After the Party works with more typical talking points: the buzz is shorter and the hangovers are longer. Can I hide these tattoos at my day job? Is playing Minor Threat on laptop speakers keeping it real or just lame? Am I too old to be sleeping on floors? Am I too old to be too broke to afford a hotel?
On first glance, single “Lookers” plays too much to stereotype, name-dropping Dean and Sal, “Julie from the Wonder Bar” and a hook of “Jersey girls are always total heartbreakers!” (also, lookers). Maybe it’s the “sha la la la!” in the chorus, but “Lookers” has a self-aware, sarcastic edge, an added pain of looking back on a seemingly rebellious youth and seeing just another kind of conformity. The Menzingers earn the benefit of the doubt when “Thick as Thieves” opens with a sly skewering of the songwriting process (“I held up a liquor store/ Demanding topshelf metaphors”) and “Tellin’ Lies” hits on a point where the difference between 29 and 31 really does feel like an entire decade: “When buying marijuana makes you feel like a criminal / When your new friends take a joke too literal.”
But this is a Menzingers album, so the laughs are momentary and ultimately futile deflections of fear. The narrators in these songs are people racing through their 20s who find themselves trapped in tour vans or, most of the time, relationships they can't convince themselves they deserve. “Midwestern States” provides a gutting account of a codependent and deeply-in-love couple couch-surfing across the country, unsure of when things will ever be different as their options and prospects dwindle with each passing year.
The Menzingers’ way with an anthem never fails them, even when the tough talkin’ boyfriends on “Charlie’s Army” and “Bad Catholics” lack definition beyond their bluster (“To everyone you’re such a sweet church girl/but I know your secret”), or the record’s best melody searches for the rest of a proper song (“House on Fire”). After the Party might actually be too well-designed for jukeboxes, as the relentless, face-to-the-glass production results in the sad cowpoke shuffle of “Black Mass” and the Meatloaf-inspired “The Bars” clocking in at about the same volume as everything else, denying a dynamic range that’s needed on a record that lives up to its title by sticking around one or two songs longer than it probably should.
At least it seems that way until “Livin’ Ain’t Easy.” The preceding title track could’ve easily been an exit ramp for Menzingers, a wizened, hard-earned moment of contentment where a couple looks back on their drunken nights and wake-n-bakes to a new morning, confiding, “after the party, it’s me and you.” But on the very next song, singer Greg Barnett remembers the foreclosure sign in the yard and the empty bank account, and hits I-80 to another show that will surely be the start of someone else’s debauchery. *After the Party, *though? It’s the hotel lobby and, “they’re always out of coffee.” | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epitaph | February 8, 2017 | 6.5 | 447beaca-3405-4f51-9895-260714ae71a0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The debut from the UK collective is a hugely accomplished reflection of the present, a magpie-friendly collage of pop all glued together by the laconic voice of Orono Noguchi. | The debut from the UK collective is a hugely accomplished reflection of the present, a magpie-friendly collage of pop all glued together by the laconic voice of Orono Noguchi. | Superorganism : Superorganism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superorganism-superorganism/ | Superorganism | If the internet had an in-house band it might sound a little like Superorganism, a globally disparate indie pop collective whose expansive cut’n’paste musical MO reflects the utopian possibility of the online dream, minus the tarnished reality of toxic social media and fake news. Superorganism are a refreshingly modern band, one who bonded over Skype and live in a DIY studio / HQ in East London where they produce music via email, passing files back and forth like a manically inspired game of tennis. More importantly, Superorganism’s sound is a hugely accomplished reflection of the present, a magpie-friendly collage of pop that is reminiscent of the Avalanches, the Go! Team or Beck at his most light-hearted, dragged into a world where Instagram Stories have replaced dusty vinyl scratches as cultural currency.
Such a flexible approach to composition could have resulted in a sound that is closer to the smoldering chaos of free jazz than danceable indie pop. But Superorganism’s deliciously listenable debut album balances chaos with cohesion thanks to recurring musical motifs in the form of billowing guitar riffs, big choruses, and detuned synths, adorned by an ever-changing array of noises, samples, and effects. The musical beds of “Everybody Wants to be Famous” and “Something for Your M.I.N.D.” are offset by the noise of a cash register, a wheedling G-funk riff, a Champagne cork popping, vocal hooks from C’hantal’s rave classic “The Realm,” and what sounds like someone chomping down on vegetables.
While such detail is enchanting, Superorganism’s eclectic approach might sound a little too kooky over the course of an album were it not for Orono Noguchi’s fantastically world-weary vocals. The singer has said she listened to Pavement while recording the album and you can hear this in her vocal delivery and the songs’ laconic melodies: the resigned melancholy of “Reflections on the Screen” and the longing of “Nai’s March” are particularly reminiscent of Stephen Malkmus, in an album that swims with his influence. Far from being a simple ’90s throwback, however, Superorganism suggests Pavement filtered through James Blake’s kaleidoscopic musical lens and given a crash course in modern pop production, wrapped up in beats that nod to Daft Punk’s minimal funk. This unlikely fusion reaches its apotheosis on the brilliant “Nobody Cares,” a kind of grunge-pop-EDM fusion that captures 2018’s occasional air of weary stoicism in much the same way that Beck’s “Loser” did for the pointed laziness of the early ’90s.
Noguchi’s taciturn vocal style makes Superorganism’s music sound effortless, as if she dreamed up the songs between scrolling through her phone and waiting for her morning coffee. But this belies the incredible care and attention that has gone into creating this album. Bar the rather lackluster “Night Time,” the songwriting is pin-sharp throughout, matching well-observed lyrical detail like “Awkward kids putting gel into their greasy hair” (on “Nobody Cares”) with hooky and often heart-rending melodies that suggest a firm musical hand on the tiller. The production, meanwhile, is awash with tiny sonic detail, like the way the sound abruptly drops out during the chorus of “Something for Your M.I.N.D.,” leaving the listener hanging for half a beat in delicious expectation, or the CD stutter vocal effect on “It’s All Good.”
Perversely, Superorganism’s attention to detail also results in one of this album’s minor frustrations. Superorganism create fascinating visual worlds in home-made videos for tracks like “It’s All Good” and “Nobody Cares,” while their image-conscious live show sees the eight-strong group operate in matching raincoats. It feels almost a shame, then, to listen to these songs removed from their expanded sensory context. But this is a minor gripe for an album that confirms Superorganism as that rarest and most wonderful of all musical beasts: a guitar band that reflects the age we are living in by embracing the technological anarchy of the modern world, as well as their own glorious peculiarities. | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | March 2, 2018 | 7.8 | 447bf7c0-8eb9-472f-b3af-bbb5b42a7b82 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
UK post-punk revivalists tear up their own rulebook and start from scratch on this ambitious, darkly experimental second album. | UK post-punk revivalists tear up their own rulebook and start from scratch on this ambitious, darkly experimental second album. | These New Puritans: Hidden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13951-hidden/ | Hidden | Bassoons, French horns, Japanese taiko drums, a children's choir, Foley samples, incantations about secret recordings, labyrinths, and knights. And that's just Hidden's first two tracks. Raise your hand if you thought These New Puritans had it in them. Just two years ago, the band from Southend-- a UK borough set where the Thames meets the North Sea-- took a stab at Gang of Four rhythms and Mark E. Smith vitriol. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, made interesting uses of negative space and some of the record's spartan tracks turned up as killer remixes. But if anything, TNP were late to the post-punk revival party and about as likely to author a grandiose and triumphant concept album as Glasvegas.
And yet Hidden is a strikingly inventive and original rock record. Granted, nothing is ever completely new in pop music, but the album freshly synthesizes older ideas (post-rock textures, no-wave skronk, Steve Reich-influenced phasing) and current trends (dubstep's delay, chart pop's stentorian synth lines, global beats). You have to listen really hard to hear any guitars. Similar to contemporaries Sigur Rós, Nico Muhly, and Joanna Newsom, These New Puritans challenge classical and popular value distinctions by fully integrating a 13-piece orchestra. A clutch of melodic motifs and variations weave through Hidden, keeping the song set extremely tight and aesthetically cohesive, so when "Orion"'s rabid beats and gothic choir feed into orchestral palette cleanser "Canticle", the transition is fluid and unpretentious.
That's not to say the record is particularly organic-sounding. TNP frontman/songwriter/arranger Jack Barnett has plotted this work of sonic theater to the smallest detail for the biggest bang. "Attack Music" pits dancehall horns against massive beats and cooing female voices against Barnett's arch sing-speak. If possible, the drums, played mainly by Barnett's brother George, are even more spectacular on M.I.A.-shoutout "Fire-Power"-- a track which simulates the crushing of a human skull with a cracker-wrapped melon. Drums, in fact, are so central to Hidden, that Liars comparisons are unavoidable. Barnett credits Benjamin Britten's 20th century opera Peter Grimes as an influence (it was inspired by the same estuary region TNP call home), and Hidden seems to drive at some sort of human/natural world showdown. Given the fact that we're perched on the precipice of ecological Armageddon, it's probably safe to say the band has appropriately scaled their sound to their subject.
But here's the thing: While Hidden's risktaking and relentless focus are easy to admire, they're harder to love. As Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" famously goes, "There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." Good luck finding Hidden's cracks. Still, the record rewards dedication: Beneath the bombast, the playful piano-driven "Hologram" is human, even vulnerable, and the electro-pop contribution "White Chords", with its Thom Yorke-channeling vocals, is unexpectedly lovely.
Hidden is a statement, but not a manifesto. A band needs considerable imagination and skill, not to mention borderline delusional levels of ambition, to attempt this kind of project and hope to be successful. So we probably won't be hearing a lot about new genres "doombeat" or "woodwindwave" anytime soon. And now that they've shown what they're capable of, we can probably expect TNP to do something totally different, if not genuinely amazing, next time around. | 2010-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | February 22, 2010 | 8.2 | 447d4e64-5f5d-49b3-9dee-6d8b4e3972ac | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
The North Carolina producer's shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album comes off like a mix of Passion Pit and M83. Guests include Amy Millan of Stars. | The North Carolina producer's shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album comes off like a mix of Passion Pit and M83. Guests include Amy Millan of Stars. | Porter Robinson: Worlds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19517-porter-robinson-worlds/ | Worlds | If Porter Robinson didn’t make an album like Worlds in 2014, someone else would have. Never mind that, if one were to squint real hard, the North Carolina producer’s shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album could be seen as an antidote to the aggressive, toxically masculine culture that’s pervaded mainstream American dance culture over the last few years—a culture whose fuck-it sense of hedonism has recently resulted in fatal consequences, even as its corporate benefactors continue to cynically bleed its participants dry. Much more than a corrective gesture, the specific mix of sounds on Worlds—part synthy indie-pop, part twinkling bedroom-beatmaker fare, part festival-ready electro—comes at an excellent time. Finding a middle ground between the synthetic surge of big-tent dance music and the tart melodic tendencies of Passion Pit, Robinson’s debut album drives home the reality that mainstream electronic music carries a certain sensitivity found in chart-topping smashes, zeitgeist-capturing Ultra Fest main-stagers, and sneakily successful soft-beat auteurs alike.
Viewed through this lens, the mess of contradictions that Robinson seemingly embodies—a one-time bassface junkie who loaded his recent BBC Essential Mix with cloying indie fare, a dance superstar who’s expressed disgust regarding his own Las Vegas residency while pooh-poohing “DIY Brooklyn” and “future bass” in the same breath—untangles itself. And anyway, the expansive, wistful grandeur of Worlds is a sound that Robinson’s slowly built towards over the last few years. A practical Skrillex protegé raised, like many internet denizens, on a diet of video games and the nerdier areas of Japanese culture, Robinson’s transformation into a sky-gazing sentimentalist began not with his Beatport-crashing 2011 debut EP Spitfire, but the following year’s “Language”, a swooning single that packed shoegaze’s heady throb, American dubstep’s techy crunch, and the wistfulness of trance into six minutes-plus of bliss that slightly resembled if Tiësto had remixed the Honeydrips’ “Fall From a Height” instead of the Field.
If “Language” toyed with the idea of pushing American dance music trends into a more blissed-out direction, Worlds goes whole-hog, to the point that when buzzsaw synths, chintzy strings, and nasty basslines rear their heads near the album’s end on “Fellow Feeling”, their presence is garish and unwelcome. If we’re being real, it’s hard to justify calling most of Worlds “dance music,” as this is electro-pop plain and simple, with its guest vocalists—Stars’ Amy Millan, Owl City affiliate Breanne Duren, Canadian indie-pop duo Imaginary Cities, Sean Caskey of Australian festival-poppers Last Dinosaurs—embodying that genre’s sensibilities. Most surprisingly, Robinson himself occasionally and quite effectively takes lead vocal duties, especially on “Sad Machine”, which finds his high-range voice dueting with a Vocaloid, a digital audio tool that replicates the human voice, over a mid-tempo beat and starry-eyed melodic structure.
”Sad Machine” is one of a few tracks on Worlds that evoke, unintentionally or not, Passion Pit’s high-wire synth-pop fantasias. But above all else, the equally enduring influence of M83’s emotive electro looms over this album’s highlights. “Sea of Voices” stretches out elided vocals and fizzling ambience to an impossibly gorgeous zenith, before massive drums crash through the foreground in a manner not unlike “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”, from M83’s still-unbeatable 2011 opus Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; on “Hear the Bells”, a similar trick is played to equally ecstatic effect, the processing on Imaginary Cities’ vocals serving as a minor and unnecessary distraction from the rippling electronics and anthemic synth that gives the song a healthy, balanced dose of rocket fuel. Together, “Hear the Bells” and “Sea of Voices” make for two of the most transportive electro-pop singles of this year, a pair of unabashedly huge songs that, when caught in the right light, carry the potential to strike a personal chord for anyone who’s ever felt alive while looking at a city skyline at night.
The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat—after all, Passion Pit’s suffered a legion of imitators in their wake, and “Midnight City” has proved one of the most influential songs of the decade when it comes to guiding the tastes of major-label-signed, small-font-Coachella-poster acts. So no one’s going to refer to Worlds as “innovative”, and the sonic shift Robinson’s made here is as industry-canny as it is surprising. Regardless, the career transition he’s attempting is admirable and extremely promising, even of his peers don’t follow suit—and if they do, they certainly could use the change of pace. | 2014-08-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | August 11, 2014 | 6.9 | 447fc0f6-943d-4966-b36d-7f8226ed2e5f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Karen O and Danger Mouse have concocted a lush, vivid world on their dreamy and poignant collaboration. | Karen O and Danger Mouse have concocted a lush, vivid world on their dreamy and poignant collaboration. | Karen O / Danger Mouse: Lux Prima | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/karen-o-danger-mouse-lux-prima/ | Lux Prima | In the last five years alone, Danger Mouse has worked with everyone from Parquet Courts to Run the Jewels, while Karen O’s recent C.V. includes the soundtrack to kids film Where the Wild Things Are and an industrial cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” in the company of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The two of them have become serial collaborators, and they have done so many different things that it is near-impossible to accurately predict what they might sound like together.
On their new record, Lux Prima, they appear to revel in the possibility of a blank slate. O said of making Lux Prima that “when you create from a blurry place you can go places further than you’ve ever been,” while Danger Mouse talked of “looking for a place rather than a sound.” Listening to the results, I imagine that place to be Paris 1969, Detroit 1964 or Bristol 1995, a blend of Serge Gainsbourg’s orchestral grace, Motown pop hustle, and the packed and dusty sound of ’90s trip hop.
At times, the results are sublime. “Lux Prima,” the opening track, arrives on a swell of drums and synth harmonies then glides out on a wash of beatific chord changes. “Redeemer” carries the theatrical tang of spaghetti Westerns, and “Nox Lumina” closes the album in the fug of soured summer of love vibes. The album’s sound is sparse, allowing the listener to savor the interaction between elements.
It helps that Karen O is in immaculate voice throughout. Album highlight “Woman” features one of her greatest vocals, an astounding mixture of power, control, and agility that reads like a forceful fuck-you to anyone who has ever tried to mess with her. At other times her vocals are variously dramatic (“Ministry”), aquatic (“Drown”), and melancholic (“Nox Lumina”), in what must be one of the most versatile vocal performances to grace a recent pop album.
Lux Prima sounds so lush, in fact, that at times you wish that O and the Mouse had worried less about conventional song structure. The album’s weak spots are its choruses which—“Turn the Light” and “Woman” aside—feel tacked on, as if our heroes suddenly remembered that songs conventionally need choruses and acted accordingly. Karen O can write a killer hook—Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Zero” and “Maps” proved that a long time ago—but the lackluster hooks on “Lux Prima,” “Ministry,” and “Drown” sit like a poorly-drawn mustache on an otherwise-immaculate portrait.
Accordingly, Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine. | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Rap | BMG | March 18, 2019 | 7.3 | 4481298a-4631-46c3-83c2-a8c00f874c78 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Written from her own perspective, Halsey’s third album flips lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. But some of its most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop. | Written from her own perspective, Halsey’s third album flips lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. But some of its most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop. | Halsey: Manic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/halsey-manic/ | Manic | After decades of pop-culture hegemony, the gendered tropes around break-ups have finally been supplanted. Instead of tubs of ice cream and days spent wallowing on a couch, modern heartbreak is mitigated by the promise of a social media glow-up and encouraged by a culture obsessed with both wellness and politicizing the personal. A breakup is not the failure of a relationship, this contemporary approach preaches, but an opportunity for growth, no matter how uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s an expression of heteronormative hostility; men, we learn, are trash. Either way, pain can be a messy, divinely timed intervention from the universe. Manic, the third album by Halsey, is an unlikely, but effective, manifestation of this new convention. I can imagine many listeners finding comfort across its 16 songs, and similarly bridging angst and self-discovery to navigate personal crises of their own.
A handful of Manic’s first six singles, among them the “Cry Me a River”-interpolating Billboard No. 1 “Without Me” and the country-pop manifesto “You Should Be Sad,” are rooted in the exploration of deep pain and what Halsey has described as an interest in “female rage.” That explains the lingering influence of artists once written off as angry women: Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and pre-acrobatics P!nk. (That more than a third of the album’s songs were released in its lead-up points to an altogether different convention: the pop album as a compilation of market-tested singles.) Notably, Halsey describes the album as the first project she has written as herself, New Jersey’s Ashley Frangipane, and not under the protective cover of her alter ego. Unlike 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom and 2015’s BADLANDS, Manic is not structured around an elaborate fictional framework.
For Halsey, autobiography offers opportunity; her ability to translate the arc of her life—schoolyard misfit turned aspiring bohème turned Tumblr microcelebrity turned misunderstood pop star—is among the qualities upon which she has established her career. She does well in framing some of those personal experiences as concepts, on standout songs like the pop-rock drunk-texting anthem “3am” and the melodramatic revenge drama “killing boys,” both of which manage to flip lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. On the former, a song that deserves a bright future as a karaoke classic, she begs: “My insecurities are hurtin’ me/Someone please come and flirt with me.” Who among us hasn’t been there?
Sadly, some of the album’s most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop. There are painfully stretched ballads, overly sanitized rhythms, a hint of indeterminately “tropical” energy, and back-to-back booming hooks à la Sia. (Halsey’s first record company was Astralwerks, the mostly electronic label with whom Sia released an album in 2004.) Alongside guest appearances from Morissette, Dominic Fike, and Suga of BTS, Halsey’s collaborators on Manic include Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco, and Jon Bellion, some of the world’s foremost hitmakers and shapers of the amorphous, chameleonic pop I’ve come to associate with sitting miserably in the backseat of a Lyft. Their presence here is felt a little too acutely.
Though Manic features Halsey’s take on a handful of different genres—broody pop-R&B reminiscent of her early work; alt-rock-lite that is an aesthetic match to her persona; twangy country-pop sure to find a home on certain segments of pop radio—much of it has the same reflective surface and, at some points, the depth of an oil slick. The Morissette collab “Alanis’ Interlude,” which features a reference to John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” is almost too irritating to endure: “Your pussy is a wonderland,” the pair warbles, infinitely more times than necessary. It is a low point for someone who is at times a clever songwriter.
Despite some missteps, Halsey’s appeal is clear: It’s a singularly difficult time to be a young person, and she is warmly attuned to that reality. “I don’t wanna be somebody in America just fighting the hysteria,” she sings on the album opener “Ashley,” framing her personal frustrations within the broader sociopolitical context shaping our collective experiences. What does it mean to be a woman in pain in a country that dismisses you? What is the significance of loneliness in a society that seems to require it? How much compassion does a broken self deserve? On Manic, Halsey proves she isn’t quite the radical she thinks she is. But maybe she doesn’t have to be.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | January 23, 2020 | 6.5 | 448218d7-c436-4240-8e02-faaceb27c4bf | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Perhaps for the first time ever, the Melvins sound unfocused and—worse—like their music is beginning to lack energy. | Perhaps for the first time ever, the Melvins sound unfocused and—worse—like their music is beginning to lack energy. | Melvins: Basses Loaded | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21959-basses-loaded/ | Basses Loaded | It's hard to think of a band that's gotten more artistic mileage out of a consistent sound than the Melvins. Since their debut Gluey Porch Treatments almost three decades ago, the Melvins have barely wavered from the lumbering adamantine groove that made them so hugely influential on countless grunge, sludge, and alt-metal acts. At the same time, the group's nucleus, frontman Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover, have jumped at opportunities to experiment for the better part of their history. Most notably, over the last ten years Osborne and Crover have shaken things up dramatically, leading an ever-shifting array of Melvins lineups as if the band encompasses multiple identities at once.
In some ways, Basses Loaded is the logical culmination of this ongoing musical-chairs policy. Crover and Osborne's preference for lineup fluidity is rooted in the 2005 departure of longtime bassist Kevin Rutmanis (Cows, Tomahawk). So it follows that Basses Loaded features six different people on bass, most of whom have participated in some form of album cycle with the band. (Crover himself plays bass on four tunes, leaving the drum duties on those songs to original Melvins skinsman Mike Dillard, who returned to record and tour behind the 2013 album Tres Cabrones.) But Basses Loaded also signals trouble, with several indications that the band could now benefit from stability as much as it has benefited from freedom in the past.
Perhaps for the first time ever, the Melvins sound unfocused and—worse—like their music is beginning to lack energy. Where you can point to just about any tune in the Melvins catalog and marvel at how Crover, Osborne, and their cohorts convey passion resorting again and again to the band's trademark Sherman-tank rhythms and de-tuned guitars, Basses Loaded mostly just plods. Sure, it's gutsy to start an album off with “The Decay of Lying,” a downtempo skeleton of an arrangement that stretches out to six-plus minutes. But the song is devoid of the textural elements the Melvins normally excel at. It also lacks a climax, which leads you to question whether there's a payoff for the patience it takes to sit through it.
There are lively moments: second track “Choco Plumbing,” for example, with its soaring, '76-era KISS-inspired chorus over an odd-shaped riff. But if anything the song only highlights that we haven't heard enough lately from the Jared Warren/Coady Willis/Big Business incarnation of the band that's been phasing in and out of activity since 2006—especially in contrast to the hodgepodge of contents that makes up the rest of the album.
To say that the cover of the Beatles classic “I Want to Tell You” doesn't shed any new light on the original is an understatement. It's as if the band were vying to give us all the textbook definition of “throwaway cover tune.” Osborne has publicly professed his love of the Beatles, while their influence on guest bassist Steve McDonald's main band Redd Kross is obvious, so clearly they don't mean to be irreverent. But Osborne's snarling vocal can't help but give the song a sophomoric demeanor. Likewise, Osborne and Crover are fairly avid real-life baseball fans, but their rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is so snide you would never guess it. Here, it functions as little more than a novelty item, and barely functions in that capacity.
The real kicker here is that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is preceded earlier on the record by “Shaving Cream,” another old-time novelty song with a similar cadence. The song eventually switches into something resembling an electronic loop, but then devolves into outright half-assery when Osborne just shouts “I'm all fucked up / I'm all fucked up” over and over. “Planet Destructor” features the otherwise extraordinarily inventive Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, Trio-Convulsant), who just absentmindedly plays a mismatched walking bassline over the verse as if he'd been playing along with the wrong tune the whole time. The gag is revealed when the whole band shifts into full-on jazz halfway through the song. By then, it's too late.
Such moves might elicit lukewarm chuckles if they were coming from a band of teenagers for an audience of teenagers, but from seasoned veterans with a dedicated following they reek of being low on ideas. Only the warped psychedelia of “Maybe I Am Amused,” which features Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, legitimately goes down avenues the band hasn't explored before. Novoselic's accordion injects shades of Eastern gypsy folk music and singer/songwriter folk into the Melvins sound, reminding us that the Melvins have remarkable range given how doggedly they've stuck to their guns.
With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years. That's not actually the case, but the album's lack of flow—and in some cases, lack of point—suggests that for this group with its vitality still well intact after 30-plus years, a re-focusing is probably in order after a very fruitful run of creative detours. | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Ipecac | June 6, 2016 | 5.5 | 4487d202-8ea6-4170-bacd-7a2a1ad232d3 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Baton Rouge sludge-metal quartet’s fifth proper full-length marks the latest tsunami in the endless storm of defeaning sound, political fury, and overwhelming prolificness that is Thou. | The Baton Rouge sludge-metal quartet’s fifth proper full-length marks the latest tsunami in the endless storm of defeaning sound, political fury, and overwhelming prolificness that is Thou. | Thou: Magus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thou-magus/ | Magus | In more than a decade as a band, Baton Rouge sludge-metal quintet Thou have released music at a stunning rate. Collaborations with other outré metal acts, like the Body; splits with and covers of extreme brethren of all stripes; LPs and EPs and singles—they just never stop. Their immense catalog could be summed up as, say, post-metal stoner-doom with post-rock and ambient flourishes, but the sheer volume of their output seems more essential to their identity. And throughout all that material, even well before the “Great Awokening” made it trendy, they were pushing, and practicing, progressive politics. Magus, the band’s fifth proper full-length, heralds the latest tsunami in the endless storm of defeaning sound, political fury, and overwhelming prolificness that is Thou. The album surges and undulates with the dread that it’s only a matter of time before the waves—another outrage, another onslaught, another record—crash in again.
Despite the pace at which they work, Thou have always been a precision crew. Across Magus’ 11 tracks, they fold odd meters and splashy drum fills into their thick neon sludge. But they also leave room for plenty of surprises. From the sneak-attack intro of opener “Inward” to vocalist Emily McWilliams’ entrance on “Divine Will,” there’s something around every corner—but you can’t really say that something is lurking. Lurking may, in fact, be the posture Thou assume least often. Their stance is far more conspicuous. There are countless explosive moments and precise edges here, all wrapped in squalls of fuzz.
Less volatile tracks, like closer “Supremacy,” with its portentous crash and drone, recall the early noise-rock output of the band’s new Sacred Bones labelmates the Men. The riffs on “Transcending Dualities” sizzle like the fuse on a cartoon bomb, a toothsome wah-wah effect scratching its way down the frequency spectrum. Some of the compositions are so dynamic, encompassing so many beautiful, epic, emotional moments, I had to check the tracklist to believe Thou had packed them all into the same lengthy song. The end of “Sovereign Self” harnesses the energy of a groove without feeling outright groovy and unleashes a ferocity free of any alienating, acerbic edge. Guitarists Andy Gibbs and Matthew Thudium do much of the heavy lifting on the album, riding catchy rhythms while avoiding the blues clichés to which sludge-metal bands so often default.
The lyrics (if not the recordings themselves, whose roaring vocals are mostly incomprehensible) reveal a sprawling metaphysical parable: Vocalist Bryan Funck journeys to the battered core of the human condition, examining the nature of hate by looking within himself. While the material is not exactly new for Thou, it’s certainly more refined here than it has ever been before. Thou don’t need to recalibrate their point of view with each release, because each release is still bringing them closer to the white-hot core of their Thou-ness. Their moves are geological in timescale; the slightest shift in attitude rings through the eons that follow. By that measure alone, Magus is an essential record in the vast Thou canon.
The earth-shaking revelation here is Funck’s ferocious pronouncement, on “Elimination Rhetoric,” that, “Yes, we have hatred: A searing hatred for prevailing design, a searing hatred for limiting belief, a callous disregard for ignorance.” It’s an exhilarating conclusion, if also one that short-circuits logic: When directed against the structural institutions that allow worse kinds of hate to foster, hate can be not only good, but also productive.
Pair these radical epiphanies with the serpentine imagery of pestilence, offal, and rot common to the interior landscapes Funck conjures, and you’re listening to a fire sermon that is equal parts Bashō, Virgil, and Antifa. What’s transcendent about both the music and the lyrics of Magus is the way it lives in the build-up to a war that is only just beginning. Miles away from the battlefield, Thou have already got the enemy in the crosshairs of their righteous hatred. Funck and his band are perceptive enough to know what is at stake here—what the future could be: a boot stamping on a human face forever. That’s the real fight, and Thou are ready for it. | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sacred Bones | September 8, 2018 | 7.8 | 448946cb-0f76-40d8-8560-360e7aee38e8 | Dale W Eisinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dale-w eisinger/ | |
Legendary singer's first new LP in 12 years is a 2xCD record that illuminating her love for her son, her life, and everything from Elvis to the joy of washing clothes to the digits in pi-- all backed by suitably low-key backdrop of piano, a pastel rhythm section, and her own lush pallet of vocal textures. | Legendary singer's first new LP in 12 years is a 2xCD record that illuminating her love for her son, her life, and everything from Elvis to the joy of washing clothes to the digits in pi-- all backed by suitably low-key backdrop of piano, a pastel rhythm section, and her own lush pallet of vocal textures. | Kate Bush: Aerial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1181-aerial/ | Aerial | Non-shocker: I was disappointed the first few times I listened to Kate Bush's first new record in 12 years. Having spent some time recently wondering if the woman responsible for so much haunted, supernatural music might be producing some beacon of artistic integrity that would shine through layers of anticipation and cynicism, it was difficult to not be let down by the mundane discovery that, in fact, she's merely being herself here, writing more about everyday epiphanies than great cosmic truths. It's a pretty Zen lesson in expectation when I think about it, teaching me a thing or two about the pitfalls of hanging onto anything other than gradual enlightenment and a zero-sum world.
Aerial, a double album separated into chapters of A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey, is Bush's answer to a world outside expecting fireworks. That is, Aerial is no answer at all except to illuminate her love for her son, her life, and various distractions (everything from Elvis, to the joy of washing clothes, to the digits in pi). Musically, this is reflected in a uniformly low-key backdrop of piano, pastel rhythm section, and, of course, her own lush palette of vocal textures. Initially, many of the songs seem muted, passive, dated-- hardly reminiscent of Bush's previous adventures in hi-fi. Digging deeper, while the arrangements are hardly explosive-- a Renaissance string arrangement for "Bertie", birdsong in "Aerial Tal", subtle electronic touches in "Joanni"-- they're not so much dated as understated, as efficiently tied to their creator's idiosyncrasies as any in Bush's canon. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they will leap out and grab unconverted listeners as the best moments on Hounds of Love or The Dreaming did, but then I wonder how many unconverted listeners are still following Bush's sensual trail these days.
Aerial's first disc (A Sea of Honey) begins in nondescript fashion with a torch song to Elvis (!) and a molasses-laden backing of big fat 80s rock drums, wispy synth cluster, electronic gamelan ping, and the driest rhythm guitar skank I've heard in 20 years. Still, there's a mysterious air about the song, especially as Bush cries, "the wind is whistling, the wind is whistling through the house." This song was chosen as a single, for what reasons I can't really imagine, but is a nice setup for the more interesting character study of the man with the "obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers" on "Π". In fact, it's Bush's reading off the digits of the number that most interest me, stretching out some, crowding others into rapidly sung groups, all with some of the most expressive singing on the record. Likewise, on the piano-led ballad "Mrs. Bartoluzzi", she manages to sound fascinating while simply repeating the phrase "washing machine," and backing herself with superficially silly things like "slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy." I can't say I'm as taken with "Bertie" (about Bush's son) or "Joanni" (for Joan of Arc), both of which seem totally sincere, but overrun in pleasant, "tasteful" arrangements that never quite compel me enough to go back for repeated listens.
The second disc (A Sky of Honey) seems a bit more adventurous, which is fitting given that it's a song-cycle on the natural ebb and flow of life and the seasons. Beginning with a "Prelude" and "Prologue", Bush eases into her most subtly symphonic music on record, backing herself with only piano and soft, modulating synth pulse. Her teasing lines, "it's gonna be so good," referring to the passing of summer into fall, are both poetic and playful, and fit perfectly the sense of effortless euphoria throughout the disc. Still, I might have wished for a bit more spark: "An Architect's Dream", "Sunset", and "Nocturn", despite maintaining the narrative of her concept, are a bit too steeped in uber-light adult contemporary sheen for my tastes. By the time of the closing title track, my ears are lightly glazed over, and its frail "rock" section does little justice to lines like "I want to be up on the roof, I feel I gotta get up on the roof!" At one point, Bush trades cackles with a bird's song, suggesting she's quite happy with her simple life as a mother and artist. Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art. | 2005-11-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-11-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | November 9, 2005 | 6.4 | 448f7e4d-fb87-4419-99d2-9b869e3e11e6 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The Fuck Buttons member’s fourth solo album channels the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of his career. | The Fuck Buttons member’s fourth solo album channels the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of his career. | Blanck Mass: Animated Violence Mild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blanck-mass-animated-violence-mild/ | Animated Violence Mild | The title of Scottish producer Benjamin John Power’s fourth album as Blanck Mass, Animated Violence Mild, isn’t merely poetic word salad. If you’ve visited an arcade since the early 1990s, the phrase might be familiar from the American Amusement Machine Association’s rating system. The classification is meant to cover games that feature “violent elements that do not result in bloodshed, serious injury and/or death.” The notion of man-made, non-lethal violence finds new meaning on Powers’ most ambitious album yet. “I believe that many of us have willfully allowed our survival instinct to become engulfed by the snake [of consumerism] we birthed,” he writes in a statement accompanying his new record, identifying a kind of virtual violence against our collective interests, one which has been normalized in part by our own compliance.
This sinister current that flows beneath even our lives’ most routine interactions is thrust to the surface and cast in serrated chrome on Animated Violence Mild. The album’s title could double as a tongue-in-cheek rating for the contents therein: These are easily the most aggressive, full-throated songs Power has yet written in his nine-year solo career. Gone are the languid ambient pieces of his self-titled debut album and the overt pop inclinations of Dumb Flesh. Even the teeth bared on his previous full-length, 2017’s striking World Eater, now seem tame by comparison. Nearly every one of these eight tracks channels head-banging abandon in one form or another, with any lingering melodic sentimentality transformed into blinding chemiluminescence.
From the beginning, it’s obvious Power has no qualms prominently displaying his influences, which serves to highlight his omnivorous appetite. Tuneful industrial music of the 1980s and ’90s courses through the churning onslaught of opener “Death Drop” and rarely fades until monumental closer “Wings of Hate.” With its punchy groove and catchy synth lines, “No Dice” evokes the cadence of Nine Inch Nails’ “Terrible Lie” while entirely circumventing the classic with its opulent, sensuous arrangement. And no doubt Trent Reznor would be both proud and envious to hear how “Love Is a Parasite” repurposes The Downward Spiral’s seething energy and earworm riffs for its own apocalyptic design. Power also taps into black metal through scorched screams and electronic blast beats, nods to trap in his slower grooves, borrows the rapidfire samples of footwork, and wraps it all in ecstatic trance synths. But his stylistic combinations are so distinct and well executed that they effortlessly transcend any recognizable source material.
Two of Animated Violence Mild’s biggest standouts, “Death Drop” and “House vs. House,” kick off the record with the kind of instant momentum often reserved for punk records and hard techno DJs. It’s an overwhelming 15-minute stretch that showcases in brilliant detail all of what Blanck Mass has come to embody: bold experimentation, rhythmic intensity, explosive melody, and artful ferocity. “Hush Money” continues the thread with slightly less satisfying results. Perhaps because the halogen-bright dance tune follows two of Power’s best productions, or because it relies on a more linear and familiar structure, it’s the album’s sole dip in ingenuity. That actually says a lot about the quality of Animated Violence Mild: A track that might seem strong in another context can’t quite reach the high water mark set by everything around it.
Animated Violence Mild’s greatest success goes beyond how it manifests the intangibles of humanity’s self-automated undoing, or how it casts a melting pot of influences into singular shapes. Since Power debuted his Blanck Mass moniker in 2011, each record has been held in contrast to Fuck Buttons, his longtime duo with Andrew Hung, and rightly so. The wide scope and stratospheric heights of that group’s best work leave an indelible impression, and Power’s solo work has by turns subverted or indulged the same tendencies. For this album’s final track he seems to do both. “Wings of Hate” is dragon-sized and full of fire, hurtling towards the sun with a raw fury unmatched by Power’s other music. It’s the last in a spectacular series of definitive salvos. If previous Blanck Mass albums were each a step out from the shadow of Fuck Buttons, Animated Violence Mild shows that he’s outgrown the comparison altogether.
Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | August 22, 2019 | 7.9 | 4492e541-04ec-4861-9dc8-4c39513642b9 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
On her debut as Eartheater, Guardian Alien songwriter Alexandra Drewchin presents a vision of psychedelic music that embraces both conventional folk elements and stranger experimentation. | On her debut as Eartheater, Guardian Alien songwriter Alexandra Drewchin presents a vision of psychedelic music that embraces both conventional folk elements and stranger experimentation. | Eartheater: Metalepsis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20277-metalepsis/ | Metalepsis | Guardian Alien, the ecstatic experimentalists that singer-songwriter Alexandra Drewchin has run with over the last few years, have been described as "psychedelic." But despite that tag—and despite the fact that they had a Rastafarian extraterrestrial on one of their record sleeves—the rapturous emotional peaks and torturous noisemaking that Drewchin contributed to the group always rendered their explorations more ritualistic and earthy than that label suggests. Their interest in psychedelic experience is more ideological than aesthetic, an idea that carries through on Drewchin's first full-length release as Eartheater, Metalepsis.
Drewchin displays an all-consuming interest in blurring boundaries that burrows all the way down to the record's textural details. Leadoff track "Macro EV" dances between delicate reverse-delayed electric guitar plinks and needly loops of her own vocals, teetering on the brink between swooning and sickly. Drewchin plays with these opposing textures over the course of the record, imbuing "Homonyms"—the most tuneful and immediate of her folkier efforts—with lurching and chattering vocal exercises. She's upending the conventions of folk and ambient music—taking little excursions into harsher realms, just for good measure—gracefully crossing stereotypical divides between genres without even really letting you notice that she's done so. It's a sort of sonic jamais vu: All of the ingredients feel familiar, but the whole that they eventually make up remains alien and unattainable.
There are also moments where Drewchin intentionally jars us, delivering seemingly absurd elements (such as the minute-long Eastern European rap sample at the end of "Youniverse"). But even those play seriously in context. In the tradition of most who consider themselves experimenters, the origin of the sounds Drewchin uses become muddled. There are samples from John Frusciante solo experiments and stabbing string sections, and all manners of instrumentation both recorded and synthesized. What's a product of the organic world and what's a product of her array of electronic equipment is suddenly unclear. Her treatment lightly suggests that all of these varying parts should be treated and approached the same way, like a utopian psych-folk that embraces electronic instrumentation.
Drewchin's lyrical concerns, too, center on interstitial spaces: between the natural world and the digital ("The Internet Is Handmade"), between the subjective truth and objective reality ("Infinity"), and between the self and the cosmos ("Youniverse"). Throughout she embraces thematic abstraction and philosophical ambiguities as guiding principles. In other words, Drewchin may not have everything quite figured out, and her insistence on posing questions rather than answers elevates Metalepsis into a compelling document of postmodern (and importantly, post-Internet) confusion. Metalepsis is music that's built to overwhelm and envelop you, and maybe even, as Drewchin's moniker suggests, swallow worlds whole. | 2015-03-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-03-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | March 5, 2015 | 7.5 | 44940556-cfed-4be5-b07b-006680cdf40f | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
There is nothing like the debut of Jay Z, a stroke of genius chronicling the life of a 26-year-old drug kingpin from the Marcy Houses with a love for craft unrivaled elsewhere in his work. | There is nothing like the debut of Jay Z, a stroke of genius chronicling the life of a 26-year-old drug kingpin from the Marcy Houses with a love for craft unrivaled elsewhere in his work. | Jay-Z: Reasonable Doubt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23194-reasonable-doubt/ | Reasonable Doubt | He was only going to make one album. So goes the story of Reasonable Doubt, anyway, a tale Jay Z has regaled us with at every opportunity since its release on a new and unproven independent label called Roc-A-Fella Records. It was the album he made before the world was listening, with only a close crew of friends and associates at the late age of 26. Every contributor was paid in bags of cash, piles so mountainous nobody involved could be mistaken how they were acquired. It was the valedictory statement of a drug kingpin and the commencement of a brand, a lifetime’s worth of private thoughts discharged before the true business of empire-building could begin. Grand opening; grand closing.
Shawn Carter has always been fiercely protective of his first full-length, to the degree that it sometimes feels like it belongs more to him than to us. He keeps yanking it from streaming services, as if the album is a troubled prep-school kid. He’s thrown it a series of lavish birthday parties, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a full-concert performance in 2006 and commissioning a documentary to air only on his TIDAL streaming service for its 20th. He has curated its legacy so assiduously that Reasonable Doubt seems like the one part of his story about which he remains insecure, the piece of his legacy that might blink out if he didn’t take care of it.
Perhaps he’s never forgotten its relatively inauspicious release. “Ain’t No Nigga” was a hit, for sure, and the album was certified Gold on its release; solid, but hardly world-conquering in the dynastic era CD sales. Critics were impressed, but not overly so: Mainstream and non-hip-hop publications noted it was clever at times but mostly a rehash of Scarface and gangster-movie tropes. The Source gave it 4 out of 5 mics—approving, not rapturous. The smaller but more influential world of hardcore rap intelligentsia paid attention to him, but in the shadow of Biggie and Pac, Jay felt like a lesser myth. He announced the album with a statement that he was retiring and henceforth “would only be about the business.” In some alternate universe, that might’ve been it.
In Jay’s mind at least, the album certainly marked the end of an era. At this point, by his own cold-eyed accounting on the song “Politics As Usual,” he had been selling drugs for “10 years.” Along a parallel track, he had been flirting furtively with being a rapper. He linked up with Big Jaz (later Jaz-O), doing a stint as the older man's baby-faced sidekick and kicking the triplet-time “figgity-figgity”-style flows that were sweeping New York at the time. He toured, briefly, with Big Daddy Kane, and spit some freestyles for New York hip-hop radio. He was an impressive local kid, but no one’s idea of a worldwide star.
In that murky time between his puppyish Jaz-O beginnings and his sober and assured reappearance on Reasonable Doubt, he figured some things out. First, nobody wanted to hear Jay Z excited. Composed, assured, jaded, deeply unimpressed—these were emotions he could radiate without even trying, and they were truer to his nature. Gone were the endearing attempts at dancing alongside Jaz, looking like a kid at his own bar mitzvah being coaxed onto the floor. His years selling drugs had presumably hardened him, and by the time he opened his mouth on Reasonable Doubt’s opening track, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” he had mastered an unshakable godfather pose. It is hard to convincingly telegraph “above it all” from the bottom of the food chain, but Shawn Carter had a natural haughtiness that couldn’t be faked. “You ain’t havin’ it? Good, me either/Let’s get together and make this whole world believe us,” he barked.
He also figured out how to best wield his clear, surprisingly boyish voice. The syllable chopping disappeared and his words became musical and mellifluous. Even though his voice never rose above a conversational monotone, his words sailed high and glittering over the music, which sampled butter-soft soul from previous decades, blurred memories of more innocent times. These were the lyrics he’s been painstakingly stacking together in his head for years (the “no pen, no pad” detail is another famous and well-rehearsed bit of Jay mythos), and he rolled them out, one pearly string of words after another, like he was exhaling a breath he’d been holding forever.
Lines like “By the ounce, dough accumulate like snow” were their own kind of song, and he treated each syllable with a reverent love undetectable elsewhere in his work. On “Can I Live,” he matches the “Fs” and “Ls” in the phrase “illin’ for revenues, Rayful Edmond-like” to create an irregular little mountain-peak rhythm that echoes the stuttering “expectation for dips, we stack chips” line from earlier in the same verse. He was thinking on several levels at once—how phonetics color meaning, how multiple meanings can suggest all the stories that aren’t being told. He wanted us to feel the discomfited hum of his unquiet mind, even if we couldn’t immediately follow every stray thread. What Biggie and Pac did for self-mythologizing and hip-hop, Jay undoubtedly did for the art of close reading.
The narrative that emerges from a close reading of Reasonable Doubt remains startlingly grim; seen up close, it is a masterpiece of dissociation, a graveyard of dead emotions. From the outset, Jay Z projected surface glamor: He was the first rapper to book a flight out to St. Thomas and hop on a yacht just to film a video. He was the guy who made the “Big Pimpin’” video, putting up a million dollars for the budget. But the message behind all of this flash was always clear: It was all too late for him, and the money was just cold comfort.
This is never clearer than on “D’Evils,” maybe the bleakest, saddest song ever written about the well-worn theme of the psychic toll of drug dealing. “Shit is wicked on these mean streets” could be a boast, the prelude to some exuberant Eazy-E-style tall tales, but the next line echoes in pure psychological space: “None of my friends speak, we all trying to win.” The song’s most lurid moment of violence, and maybe the most brutal scene in all the Jay discography, occurs off-camera, so to speak, only by implication: To locate a rival, Jay kidnaps the mother of his child and stuffs bills into her mouth, force-feeding her crumpled, filthy money while she weeps as he demands information. It is a gruesome scene, but Jay the writer is uninterested in the visual; he’s drawn to the contusion it leaves on her psyche and his: “Don’t cry, it is to be/In time, I take away your miseries and make it mine,” he tells her flatly. It is a chilling promise to both end her life and carry the act with him until the end of his own.
Much later in his career, further removed from the shock of his time dealing drugs, Jay would root around in the messier, more visceral stuff of his early traumas. On “This Can’t Be Life,” he opened his heart to a former girlfriend who miscarried. On “Still Got Love For You,” from Beanie Sigel’s 2001 album The Reason, he raged at his absent father, even allowing his imperial voice to crack slightly: “I’m a mess, Dad/Still I love you no less, Dad/Hope you didn’t think success would make me less mad.” But at age 26, too old to be a burgeoning rap star and far too young to be as tired as he often appeared onstage, he was still in the blast radius of his former life, and all the wounds it left on him were still open. The wide-brimmed hat concealing his eyes, the white suit and fancy cigar of the album’s cover—they were expensive gauze pads, covering a ravaged body. On “Politics As Usual,” perhaps the silkiest track on the record, he is “Cursing the very god that brought this grief to be.”
This album’s legacy is both magnificent and lonely, an immaculate crystal chandelier gathering dust in an abandoned mansion. Every line gleams, begging you to memorize it but forbidding you from loving it. Its impact was subterranean, subliminal—Kendrick Lamar picked up on the notion of “D’evils of Lucy” as recently as 2015, with To Pimp a Butterfly. Other rappers picked up on his chilly, bored pose, but his rapping was really too byzantine to convincingly imitate. It wasn’t until he slowed down his flow, breaking off glittering bits of mind that people could hold onto, that his influence penetrated and spread. Decades later, everyone flows like Jay Z, but not the Jay Z of Reasonable Doubt. That guy is still alone with his thoughts, learning to live with regrets.
Maybe this is why Shawn Carter the man seems to have such a wistful fondness for the album and the time it represented. It feels doomed in its melancholy that it will be misunderstood. “I hope you fools choose to listen, I drop jewels, bust it,” he rhymed on “Feelin’ It,” and then sneered, “Y’all don’t feel me,” a moment later. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in rhyme, the sound of a guy baring his heart and freezing it in carbonite in the same breath. “Sometimes I hear myself moaning,” he adds later, after he’s let his guard down slightly to take a small hit of weed. It’s a startling moment of depersonalization, the sound of pain whistling like wind through the cracks in a fractured psyche.
One of the only other times Jay admits to smoking weed on record came years later, on The Black Album, a lifetime’s worth of accomplishments later. “I try to smoke weed to give me the fix I need/For what the game did to my pulse with no results,” he rapped ruefully on “Allure.” The Black Album ended his most coherent, compelling, and memorable era; the hustler makes it all the way to the beloved corporate American icon and bows out on top. He had sold out Madison Square Garden, and the entire music industry knelt at his feet. Everyone felt him. But the only place he’s ever truly wanted to get back to was here. | 2017-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella / Priority / Freeze | May 14, 2017 | 9.4 | 4496a584-f7bf-4812-bb94-fbf469c6b669 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
In 2010, Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron*.* Three years later, M83's Anthony Gonzalez has paired with Trapanese to score another sci-fi extravaganza, the Joseph Kosinski-directed Oblivion. | In 2010, Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron*.* Three years later, M83's Anthony Gonzalez has paired with Trapanese to score another sci-fi extravaganza, the Joseph Kosinski-directed Oblivion. | M83: Oblivion OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18022-m83-oblivion-ost/ | Oblivion OST | In 2010, the French electronic music duo Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a flashy but hollow reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron. As fuel for an action flick, it was an efficient piece of work. A full orchestra and expensive synthetic tones provided the requisite sweep and height; the expected bombast and wonder. But it was hardly recognizable as music by Daft Punk, which was odd because their usual aesthetic would have been such a dynamic fit for the movie's neon world. The dance music auteurs all but vanished behind a deluxe sheen, into the idioms of Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Three years later, the scenario is playing out again with eerie accuracy: Ryan Dombal's review of the Tron: Legacy OST would perfectly fit M83's Oblivion OST with the replacement of a couple proper nouns.
Like Tron: Legacy, Oblivion is a sci-fi extravaganza, directed by Joseph Kosinski, where awesome visual spectacles are staged around a wispy emotional core. Once again, an acclaimed French electronic act pairs with Trapanese and forsakes its artistic identity to satisfy the generic musical conventions of summer blockbusters. Trapanese's orchestration and M83's poppy electronic shoegaze blended well on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the breakthrough album that opened the door for Anthony Gonzalez to make literally rather than figuratively "cinematic" music in the mainstream. The tradeoff is that Gonzalez by necessity adapts to Trapanese, the professional here, so thoroughly that it was startling to see M83 in the credits. That churning electronic fingerprint, reportedly deemed "too indie" for a Tom Cruise vehicle, is smeared out to an absurd degree. Why hire Gonzalez at all if you don't want raw indie eagerness?
Gonzalez is a masterful stylist, but an average composer at best, which makes the subtraction of his style rather fatal for the Oblivion OST as a standalone experience. The music is more unmemorable than bad, though occasionally Gonzalez's inexperience, which seems to limit what Trapanese can do as well, shows: "Tech 49" cheats its way from tense pulse to driving resolution with desultory orchestral passages, while "Odyssey Rescue" spatters an erratic path through ambiguously related parts, making us keenly aware of the missing onscreen action that would make sense of it. There are brighter spots: If you took "Waking Up" and changed the pounding timpani to synthetic toms, the string section to keyboards and arpeggiators, then you would have a generic but recognizable M83 song on your hands. And Gonzalez's signature arc, where arrangements seem to accelerate through space and then burst into flames upon atmospheric reentry, is evident in "StarWaves". But you have to listen pretty hard to hear the ghostly remains of his hand in these backdrops for chase scenes and dream sequences.
Gonzalez does get one pure M83 moment on the title track, which is taut and effervescent with heartfelt vocals from Susanne Sundfør. More like it would have made for a better album that clashed terribly with the cold, inhuman film to which it was attached. It would be foolish to conflate one instance of creative compromise with M83 being compromised in principle. Artists needn't be slaves to their own visions all the time, and there's nothing wrong with working a job for pay. The only real problem with the Oblivion OST is that it was released as M83, which isn't a neutral funnel for Gonzalez's musical craftsmanship. It's a very specific set of promises that go badly unfulfilled. Gonzalez knows this, telling Pitchfork that he would have preferred to release it as "Anthony Gonzalez and Joe Trapanese." Universal, more interested in the brand than the man, disagreed. The people who buy action-movie OSTs-- whomever they are-- should be satisfied. But to M83 fans, this will just be a cautionary tale about an indie auteur turning his back on little machines he can control and getting mauled by a huge one-- Hollywood focus groups-- which he can't. | 2013-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Back Lot | April 26, 2013 | 4.5 | 44973029-9d4e-4d79-ba8e-b34ee24da49d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The tenor saxophonist’s beguiling and divisive 1969 album attempted to cross-wire free jazz with rock, funk, and soul. It remains his most misunderstood record. | The tenor saxophonist’s beguiling and divisive 1969 album attempted to cross-wire free jazz with rock, funk, and soul. It remains his most misunderstood record. | Albert Ayler: New Grass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/albert-ayler-new-grass/ | New Grass | No one could have predicted Albert Ayler’s turn to pop. The tenor saxophonist emerged in the mid-’60s as one of the most visceral forces of the free-jazz movement, with raw, chaotic compositions that jumbled expressions of joy and mourning until they were indistinguishable. Ayler’s respected standing in avant-garde circles made the abrupt stylistic shift of his 1969 album New Grass all the more baffling. Instead of the structureless squall he was known for, here was Ayler singing lead on AM-radio pop songs and superimposing his unhinged sax skronk over funk, soul, and rock rhythms. Freshly remastered and reissued by Third Man in its first vinyl pressing in over 40 years, the wildly mismatched colors of New Grass still don’t resemble anything else.
Ayler had signed on with highly visible jazz imprint Impulse! in 1966 at the behest of their star player John Coltrane. New Grass would be his third release with the label and the first without his brother and trumpet player Donald Ayler. Donald’s limited but eruptive playing had been integral in his brother’s music finding its highest form, but the lifestyle of the struggling jazz musician pushed him to his brink. He stopped playing in Ayler’s band shortly before suffering a mental collapse. Around the same time, Ayler had begun a relationship with Mary Parks, a poet and singer who went by the alias Mary Maria. Parks sang on New Grass, and her flower-power poetry provided the lyrics. Some familiar sidemen were on board (Bill Folwell switching from upright bass to electric and keyboardist Call Cobbs reprising the gossamer harpsichord he’d brought to Ayler’s free-floating Love Cry the year before), but the personnel consisted mostly of session musicians. Lockstep drumming, overdubbed horn sections, and back-up singers all nudged the sound towards the kind of schmaltz the music industry was churning out in the late ‘60s. As if to ease listeners in, the album begins with a high-energy saxophone and bass improvisation that leads to a spoken message from Ayler. In a mystical ramble somewhere between a prayer and a warning, he offers the hesitant disclaimer “I hope you will like this record.”
On transcendent concert documents like Bells and In Greenwich Village, Ayler’s free jazz was messy and volatile, with a drive so supernatural it barely seemed possible the music was made by earthly beings. His new songs were messy in a way that was unnervingly human; jittery, flailing, and striking out in several bizarre directions at once. The melodic signatures were the same—simple, friendly lines that evoked New Orleans funeral marches or children’s songs—but Ayler’s vibrating tone hovered in a separate orbit from his band’s standardized grooves. More jarring than the ill-fitting arrangements were Ayler’s prominently featured vocals. Unlike the wordless incantations he’d occasionally included on earlier albums, here he was leading songs with a bellowing, untrained voice that was wavering at its most controlled. The sung introduction to “New Ghosts” (a reworking of “Ghosts,” a tune Ayler recorded multiple variations of) devolves line by line into unintelligible blabbering. Park’s lyrics were mostly vague hippie platitudes, and Ayler delivered them in a manic wail that clashed with their gentle sentiments of peace, love, and progress.
The material was recorded over the course of just two days and the performances are rushed. Raved-up workouts like “New Generation” and “Everybody’s Movin’” whizz by at hyperactive tempos, the players scrambling to keep up. Ayler often stops singing mid-verse to jump into long-winded free solos, squealing euphorically as the band chugs along on autopilot behind him. “Heart Love” is the best example of the disjointed sweetness that carries New Grass, with cooing backing vocals and playful sing-song melodies gelling tenderly before Ayler blasts into a sax freakout that burns on for the majority of the song. This certainly wasn’t jazz of any kind, but was too overstimulated and confused to pass for the Woodstock-generation rock’n’roll it was trying to emulate. What was this?
The harshest reviews decimated the record, calling out the new direction as a blatant appeal to white, mainstream audiences. But if this was an attempt at selling out, it was poorly conceived. Ayler’s new sound ignored the smooth, danceable soul The Isley Brothers and Marvin Gaye were topping the charts with at the time and looked more towards the jumpy gospel and R&B of the early ‘50s and the electric blues styles he’d played while touring with Little Walter in his younger days.Compared to the riotous funk of Sly and the Family Stone or the sleek, boundary-testing fusion Miles Davis was beginning to explore around the same time, New Grass seemed uptight and a little old-fashioned. Factoring in warbly singing and discordant sax solos, it’s hard to imagine even the most out-there record exec hearing commercial potential in this strange little record.
The album’s fragile balance of excitement and anxiety speaks to the unstable place Ayler was in during the last few years of his life. Riddled with guilt about pulling his brother into a world that broke him and exhausted from years of grinding in poverty and obscurity, he grew increasingly erratic and isolated. Some friends reported calls with Ayler in which he deliriously explained visions he’d had while staring into the sun. The rest of his recorded output would consist of unfocused experiments that reflected a troubled inner world, and in late 1970 he would be found dead at age 34, in mysterious circumstances presumed by many to be suicide. New Grass signaled the beginning of a descent into darkness for Ayler, one that saw him grasping at ideals of redemption and healing all the way down.
Ayler’s 1964 debut My Name Is Albert Ayler also begins with a spoken message, one that wanders for a while before ending with the soft declaration “One day everything will be as it should be.” He would spend the rest of his life expanding on that thesis, with every phase of his music returning to themes of suffering and confusion ultimately giving way to peace. Ayler’s spiritual message didn’t change on New Grass, but grew weirder and more intimate as he struggled to deliver it in a way that could be universally understood. Similar to Arthur Russell’s hermetic dance tracks or Muddy Waters’ surreal stabs at psychedelic rock on Electric Mud, Ayler’s notion of popular music was so distanced from reality that it became its own self-contained universe.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Third Man | June 30, 2020 | 8.7 | 4497cb09-3d54-43ed-bdbd-110148297d54 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
On their sophomore album, the combustible rock band Savages return with an examination of love as a dark, powerful messy thing. While it doesn't always hit the peaks of their 2012 anthem "Husbands," they find new highs to explore. | On their sophomore album, the combustible rock band Savages return with an examination of love as a dark, powerful messy thing. While it doesn't always hit the peaks of their 2012 anthem "Husbands," they find new highs to explore. | Savages: Adore Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21428-adore-life/ | Adore Life | When Savages emerged in 2012 with the excellent song "Husbands," a lot of talk of the London band revolved around their frenetic live shows, and that they wanted you to turn your cell phones off at those shows. The second part, not an unfair request, invariably led to discussions of their manifestos and politics, which weren’t always easy to parse. Which is a positive.
Savages' music was austere, their apparent influences easy to name (Siouxsie, Wire, Gang of Four, Joy Division), but what frontwoman Jehnny Beth was singing about was more complex. She might be standing up for polyamory or breaking down the patriarchy (or both). One song, "Hit Me," which some people thought was about domestic abuse, was about rough consensual sex (as discussed by the porn star Belladonna). When you added these and other themes to their well-oiled live performances and specific visual presentation—the band in black, Beth dancing like Ian Curtis—it was difficult not to get excited about the group. But, as compelling a prospect as they were, I often found myself more interested in watching them live than listening to them at home on my stereo.
Silence Yourself is a strong record, but in hindsight, it also benefited from much of the above—the backstory, the buzz, the complementary material. So, in that sense, it’s especially interesting returning to the band two years later, after the initial adrenaline rush has passed. On the second collection, Adore Life, they’re still exciting, but the tone has shifted considerably. Not all of the songs work—a couple float by with power and grit but no real hook—but the best moments here are incredible.
Adore Life is a collection of love songs, but Beth refers to it as "a disease," among other things, and told Pitchfork that when they recorded the album, they set out to "write the loudest songs ever." It was produced by Beth's boyfriend, Johnny Hostile, which brings another sort of real-life energy to the proceedings. And, outside of a couple ballads and torch songs, they’re still amped up—maybe even moreso than before. (Check out the sweaty live clip for the excellent anthem "The Answer," which finds the audience losing their shit and their shirts.)
On Adore Life, Savages don’t always scale the heights of their signature anthem "Husbands," but they find different highs. There's the slow-release, PJ Harvey-esque ballad, "Adore," the mid-tempo but somehow manic "Slowing Down the World" (which is reminiscent of Nick Cave), the rumbling death rock of "I Need Something New." You can certainly hear Swans on these songs, too. Savages played some shows with Swans, and Gira has talked about how much he likes the band—the mutual camaraderie makes sense. The connection is there in the brutal repetitions: Note the combustible ending of "I Need Something New" or the feedback implosion at the start of "T.I.W.Y.G." It’s also there in the subject matter: Michael Gira writes violent love songs, too (his classic "God Damn the Sun," which involves addiction, threats of suicide, and general dissolution, is still one of the most romantic songs ever).
So, no, these are not "love" songs in the popular sense. Here, you’ll get a different side of flirting ("I’m not gonna hurt you/ 'Cause I'm flirting with you/ I'm not gonna hurt myself"), the messiness of love ("This is what you get when you mess with love"), lust ("Sleep with me/ And we'd still be friends/ Or I know/ I’ll go insane"), sexual fluidity ("When I take a man/ Or a woman/ They're both the same/ They're both human"), sexual discovery ("When I'm with you/ I want to do/ All the things that/ I’ve never done”), sexual power ("When I take a man/ At my command/ My love will stand/ The test of time"), jealousy/threats ("If you don't love me/ You don't love anybody"). But at its core, the album’s positive. On "Adore," where she repeats "I adore life," Beth sings, in part, about realizing the importance of life in the face of death, and deciding to just live—that kind of knowledge brings with it a kind of freedom and a sense of control.
In many ways, Adore Life feels more alive than *Silence Yourself—*in part because it feels more human, in part because it's telling you to be as loud as possible. People often talk about how serious the band is, which seems like an underhanded way of telling them to lighten up. But it’s their intensity, and the way they look at something like love as a dark and powerful thing, that makes them interesting. Plus, nobody's ever told Swans to smile. | 2016-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 18, 2016 | 8 | 449d84be-0ccb-44b3-8188-fc5836f69b50 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The four volumes of William Basinski's ambient masterpiece have been gathered into a gorgeous and impressive 9xLP, 5xCD box set, including two previously unreleased live performances. | The four volumes of William Basinski's ambient masterpiece have been gathered into a gorgeous and impressive 9xLP, 5xCD box set, including two previously unreleased live performances. | William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17064-the-disintegration-loops/ | The Disintegration Loops | In the early part of the last decade, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops was the sort of music you passed around. Once you heard it, you wanted to tell somebody about it. There was obviously the sound itself, so hypnotic that it was immediately understood as a classic of ambient music. But there was more to it.
The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.
Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD. The video is included with the four volumes of the music and two new live pieces in this lavish and impressive box set.
The beauty of the music is not easy to explain. There are plenty of pieces that work in a similar way-- the beat-less drone pieces of Gas, a few of Gavin Bryars' most heartrending works, the experiments in memory by the Caretaker-- but it's hard to quantify this music's special pull. Each of the nine pieces on the original four volumes has its own character, yet all are related and function like variations on a theme. "Dlp 1.1", marked by a plaintive horn sound, has the air of a dejected fanfare, a meditation on death and loss (it was this loop that was paired with the 9/11 video). "Dlp 2.1" is more of a metallic drone, filled with anxiety and encroaching dread. The source material on "Dlp 4" sounds like a soundtrack to an educational film, not terribly far from the warble of an early Boards of Canada interlude, but the chaotic ripples of distortion make it seem even more uneasy. "Dlp 3" feels like a snippet from an impossibly lush and shimmering Debussy piece stretched to infinity and then lowered into an acid bath. The moods and textures of these pieces are all different but they become more powerful in relation to one another.
There's an irony to the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops appearing here on vinyl for the first time, since the defiantly analog origin of the music is central to its appeal. Even 10 years later, the internet is generally a poor space for contemplating the end; there are few digital metaphors for the process of dying. With Basinski's pieces, the metaphor couldn't be more simple. This music reminds us of how everything eventually falls apart and returns to dust. We're listening to music as it disappears in front of us. Hearing the music on vinyl, with its inherent imperfections, and imagining the records changing over time, lends another layer of poignancy.
Given the central idea behind the project, the length of the individual tracks is important. The first, "Dlp 1.1", is just over an hour long, and its source only lasts a few seconds. To listen to the entire piece is to hear that segment many hundreds of times, and the progression from "music" to silence happens incrementally with each play. But the loops don't fade linearly. It often takes a few minutes for the obvious cracks to appear, and then the tumble toward the void speeds up at the end, presumably because the cumulative runs against the tape head had loosened even the bits of tape that were still hanging on. The process is so gradual it focuses attention in unique way; I find myself examining each new cycle to discover what is left and what has vanished.
It's possible to use this music in the quintessential ambient sense, allowing it to play in the background while doing something else. The sound is uniform and drone-like, so you can adjust the volume and not worry about it intruding. But there is something uncanny about the emotion embedded in this music. It never feels neutral, so it's hard for me to just have it playing in the background. Part of that is what I know of how it was made, and part of that is the nature of the loops themselves. Basinski has a rare feel for mood and texture. The sounds on their own are haunting, and Basinski has a wonderful ear for how a loop can work, how to capture these bits of incidental music in a place where there's just a hint of tension that is never released.
One unexpected twist in The Disintegration Loops story is that some of the work was later performed. New music ensembles have charted the progression and decay of the pieces and scored them for a live setting, and recordings from two shows are included in this box set. (One of the performances is by the ensemble Alter Ego, who partnered with Gavin Bryars and Philip Jeck in 2007 to record a new version of Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic". The presence of Alter Ego reinforces the thematic and emotional connection between the two pieces.)
I was skeptical of these live versions at first, but over time they made more sense. They bring a different quality to the experience and offer a subtle twist. The key to live recordings lies in the rests. Little by little, the players have to insert a bit more silence into the piece and hold that silence as they cycle through the same phrase. And there's something especially tense and uneasy about hearing this happen in a moment with live performers. It also makes it difficult for the audience to know exactly when the piece has ended, and when it finally does, they explode with applause and, presumably, relief.
I've owned many box sets and this is possibly the most gorgeous and substantial one I've ever seen. There are CD and vinyl versions of all the music; the vinyl is heavy, and the pressings are very well done. There's a book that has liner notes from Antony Hegarty, David Tibet, Basinski himself, and others. But most of the book consists of blown-up frames from the video piece. It's almost like a flip book, as each new shot brings us a little closer to darkness. For me, it functions like a more tolerable version of the video piece, which, even after all this time, I still have trouble watching. I respect it and understand that it might work very differently for someone who was there, but it's still difficult for me to watch footage of burning Manhattan in an "art" context.
It's been said that box sets are tombstones, but this one feels like a living and breathing thing. And there's an irony in that too. The obvious observation about The Disintegration Loops is that it's about death, but of course, life gives death meaning. A couple of days ago I was listening to "Dlp 4" while riding the subway to work. For the track's early half, I was gripped by the sublime beauty of the repeating music and I was lost in my own world completely. But then as it started to break apart and silence took over I started to become aware of what was around me. I could hear the engines, the rattle of the tracks, and the voices of people in the subway car. The music had me thinking about the biggest questions-- why we are here and how we exist and what it all means. And then as the last crackle faded and the music was no more, I took in my surroundings and looked around at the faces and I was right there with everybody and we were alive. | 2012-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | November 19, 2012 | 10 | 449fe0c2-1d9b-4e8c-8021-dc53221565f8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On this collaborative album, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick teams with twin-brother jazz duo the Mattson 2. The trio swings between lucidity and lunacy and back again. | On this collaborative album, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick teams with twin-brother jazz duo the Mattson 2. The trio swings between lucidity and lunacy and back again. | Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2: Star Stuff | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23037-chaz-bundick-meets-the-mattson-2-star-stuff/ | Star Stuff | The first words we hear Chaz Bundick sing on his latest release are: “I think I’ve gone and lost my mind.” But they don’t so much set the tone for the record as reaffirm what’s been made obvious. We’re no less than three songs and 13 minutes in before we hear Bundick utter that introductory address—and all the psych-jazz jamming that preceded it already proved we’re dealing with a wandering mind that does not want to be found.
As Toro Y Moi, Bundick has always possessed the sort of voice that sounds like it could float off and dissolve into the ether at any moment. But his production has kept it contained. Whether it’s the hazy hip-hop beats of 2010’s Causers of This, the rubbery funk of 2011’s Underneath the Pine, or the space-age power pop of 2015’s What For?, Bundick prefers to do his tripping in controlled environments. Even his recent concert album—normally a forum where artists let loose—exhibited all the formality of a science-lab experiment. Last year’s Live From Trona should have been Toro Y Moi’s Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii move, a performance recorded in the middle of the California desert for an audience of none. Instead, the isolated setting sun-baked the aqueous qualities of his music into a dry precision
But there was one great exception: The hands-down highlight of the Trona performance was a new song called “JBS” that saw Bundick backed by the Mattson 2, a twin-brother jazz duo he had met by chance in 2014. Framed by a beautiful fading sunset of a guitar riff, “JBS” initially unfurls like an early ’70s reverie from the Shuggie Otis playbook. But when Bundick’s sad-sack narrator says, “I think I’ll stay inside,” it’s an invitation for the trio to go further out, triggering an extended guitar odyssey that channels all the tension and anxiety underpinning Bundick’s plainspoken lyrical laments.
Where it represented a detour on Trona, “JBS” now grounds Bundick’s album-length collaboration with the Mattsons, recorded just before their desert dalliance. And the song’s opening rumination on psychosis proves highly symbolic of an album that swings between lucidity and lunacy and back again. After a minute of tranquil, Feels-esque ambiance, “Sonmoi” is violently overturned by Bundick’s intruding guitar solo, which sets the trio off on an acid-rock excursion. The track brings to mind Hendrix’s final frontiers, or Santana circa Caravanserai, but Bundick isn’t one to put on a shredding clinic—he plays a more reactive role to the Mattsons, tastefully layering his lines or unleashing percussive pricks to bolster their grooves.
In moments like these, Star Stuff provides a snapshot of players still getting to know each other, and in some cases, rushing to hash out ideas in their limited recording windows. The downtempo psych-soul strut “A Search” is embellished by Bundick’s wordless, one-man-Beach Boys harmonies, but when he starts humming over his phased-out guitar line, it’s like he’s laying down a guide vocal for as-yet unwritten lyrics. And on “Steve Pink,” the trio flirt with fusion, pitting a wah-wahed refrain against a stuttering rhythm—but the track manages to come off as overly busy yet too restrained at the same time.
Star Stuff’s best stuff follows the example set by “JBS,” when the trio approximate the sound of a radio dial in 1973 that’s shifting at random between AM pop stations and freeform FM frequencies. The title track is the album’s most focussed statement, with Bundick’s uncharacteristically dramatic vocal fending off string swirls over a bongo-powered backbeat. The instrumental “Cascade” syncs up fret-work contortions to a tropical funk thrust like a Brazilian answer to Yes. And the eight-minute epic “Don’t Blame Yourself” is effectively a late-album sequel to “JBS,” answering that song’s self-pity with self-help. “Everybody goes through it, too,” Bundick sings with sage-like calm, “Don’t just think it’s only for you/Upset over what has been done/Don’t you blame yourself.” To honor that therapeutic mission statement, the song’s celestial prog-jazz sway starts to fade in and out, as if submerging itself repeatedly in an isolation tank.
Of course, as “Don’t Blame Yourself” illustrates in its dying minutes, Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2 wouldn’t be a proper improv side-project without at least one baptism by drum solo. But even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking. | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Company | March 28, 2017 | 6.9 | 44a618de-5a70-4ce6-99ec-010310247eb6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Frank Ocean collaborator lays his hard drive bare, pulling back the curtain to reveal the scattered pieces of recorded music littering his cutting-room floor. | The Frank Ocean collaborator lays his hard drive bare, pulling back the curtain to reveal the scattered pieces of recorded music littering his cutting-room floor. | Vegyn: Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vegyn-text-while-driving-if-you-want-to-meet-god/ | Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God | Never one to pass up an opportunity to self-aggrandize, Kanye West famously immortalized his work ethic on his debut album. “You can't fathom my love, dude,” he declared. “Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers… I deserve to do these numbers.” It’s an axiom that’s motivated countless would-be artists in the decade and a half since: You want to be as good as Kanye? Put your nose to the grindstone and eventually you’ll get there. Even if the stuff you make is middling, nobody will hear it but you. Unless you want them to.
Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God!, a 71-track collection of bits and beats from Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn, lays his hard drive bare. It’s a showcase of interesting drafts; an honest recording of the London multi-hyphenate’s musical trials since the relatively concise (but similarly cheeky) All Bad Things Have Ended—Your Lunch Included in 2014. Only a handful of songs reach the two-minute mark, and their nonsensical, diaristic titles suggest a busy artist tapping in the first phrase that comes to mind.
Throughout the largely instrumental Text, the artist born Joe Thornalley toys with ambient, hip-hop, and dramatically sound-stretched electronica. Vegyn also explores emotive ’80s synths and electric pianos, an affinity he shares with countless other producers looking to tap into that classic Vangelis magic. He writes crystalline arpeggios, invoking Nobuo Uematsu and other great video game composers, while his drums, if they’re present at all, rarely impose. The lack of structure makes Text even more of a mood record, something to put on in the background of a low-key gathering that won’t distract from conversation.
There are moments of brilliance, like the woozy twinkles on “Try and Do a Cd After That (132 Bpm),” the electric piano melancholia of “Sadly Does It (123 Bpm),” or the interplay of guitar and drums on “Save Yall Ready Know What It Is 003 (138 Bpm),” which evokes one of Vegyn’s best Endless contributions, “Slide on Me.” While the music is hardly uninspired, the abundance of micro-exercises highlights just how prosaic even the most beautiful chords can be when, given no purpose within the context of a song, they’re teased out and left to dry.
There isn’t much polish to be found here, either. Mastering levels can vary dramatically from track to track, forcing the listener to continuously reach for the volume, and the alphabetical sorting—an inherent result of the album’s framing as a track dump—makes sequencing moot. That’s sort of the point. This is raw Vegyn: an artist pulling back the curtain to reveal the scattered pieces of recorded music littering his cutting-room floor. Like the recent Radiohead OK Computer leaks, Text reveals genre-spanning influences and methodologies. Vegyn is clearly a gifted producer and an inventive arranger. What remains to be seen is whether he can focus those promising creative energies to deliver songs that are less fleeting. | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PLZ Make It Ruins | June 26, 2019 | 6.6 | 44a7b865-997d-442c-a205-ed1e667836ac | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Sorority Noise know brutal honesty can be uncomfortable, but they employ it so well on their latest album, a rafter-reaching emo record about the raw stages of grief and loneliness. | Sorority Noise know brutal honesty can be uncomfortable, but they employ it so well on their latest album, a rafter-reaching emo record about the raw stages of grief and loneliness. | Sorority Noise: You're Not As _____ As You Think | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sorority-noise-youre-not-as-as-you-think/ | You're Not As _____ As You Think | Numerous oft-quoted studies have equated a sleepless night with being legally drunk: you get the lowered inhibitions, impaired decision making, and depressed functionality, all without any of the buzz. And so Cameron Boucher’s first lyric on Sorority Noise’s third LP explains a lot of what’s to come: “This last week/I’ve slept eight hours total.” From that point forward, You’re Not As _____ As You Think tries to rouse itself from that despondency the best way Sorority Noise knows how: towering twin guitar leads, blinding bursts of distortion, instantly quotable lyrics where the vocals jump up an octave. It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.
The title of Sorority Noise’s 2015 breakthrough Joy, Departed now carries unfortunate foreshadowing. In its wake, “a lot” of Boucher’s friends took their own lives by way of heroin or suicide and they were memorialized on 2016’s It Kindly Stopped for Me EP. Sounding like he’d slept eight hours in the past six months, Boucher’s register rarely left a conversational baritone, with offhand lyrics and monologues laid over incidental guitar and piano, almost avant-garde in its unguarded immediacy. Later that year, Boucher’s pre-Sorority Noise outfit Old Gray reformed for the blood-chilling Slow Burn: its scalding, minute-long screamo outbursts were the polar opposite of It Kindly Stopped for Me, but it had the same white-knuckled edge to confronting death and addiction, too emotionally drained to be anything less than direct.
You’re Not As opener “No Halo” finds the exact midpoint between these two projects and points Sorority Noise in a bold new direction. Boucher has never been more in command of melody while in his lower register or while inhabiting his hardcore roots. But even as the band makes one last surge towards catharsis before collapsing in an exhausted heap, there’s no relief: An organ drone fades out and the next song begins with Boucher muttering, “I’ve been feeling suicidal.” Similar to Modern Baseball and Julien Baker—quoted in succession on “A Better Sun”—Sorority Noise’s rise in stature has coincided with an increased candor about depression and advocacy for mental health treatment, confronting the sadboy caricature that still threatens to define this scene from the outside. The songs are in part Boucher's attempt to eliminate the distance between himself and the listeners and show they’re all in this together.
Similar to Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost, You’re Not As rushes headlong through the outside hype and internal strife, streamlining their sound rather than expanding upon it. Joy, Departed was rife with orchestral swells, florid poetry, and obtuse song titles—the sort of things that pop-punk bands typically adopt to tell fans and the world at large know they’re trying to be taken seriously. But those didn’t play to their strengths, and it was only in a live setting that Sorority Noise discovered their best selves: windmilling on Gibson Explorers, letting the crowd take over during the climactic lyrics of “Using,” creating something close to group therapy.
The bulk of You’re Not As is designed for that exact purpose. Boucher nicks lyrics from his friends on “A Better Sun” and flatly states, “This is the part where I did cocaine to impress every one of my mouth-breathing friends.” And then comes a goddamn pick slide. Out of context, it’s a throwback to any number of post-Weezer ironists flooding the Buzz Bin, but it’s borne of the introspection that reveals how abject misery can become as routine as an office job. A pick slide as a rote gesture. Meanwhile, the midsection of “Disappeared,” “Car,” and “Where Are You?” eliminate any melody that wouldn't qualify as a hook. They rush as quickly as possible to the part that might give someone a sense of comfort in tragedy, or at least the understanding of what it might feel like to start losing friends in your early 20s. Boucher repeatedly chooses urgency over artifice: “You say there’s a god/You say you’ve got proof/Well I’ve lost friends to heroin/So what’s your god trying to prove?” It’s a lyric he might’ve been tempted to obscure or reword on Joy, Departed, and while the blunt immediacy of You’re Not As can occasionally come off as awkward, the discomfort of honesty is easier to handle than forced poetry.
In the same way that Joy, Departed tried to remove both the stigma and seduction surrounding depression, death isn’t glamorized in either direction here. All the albums about death from Sorority Noise’s peer group (Sprained Ankle, Home, Like NoPlace Is There, Stage Four) tend to be really fucking serious. Sorority Noise have that capability; producer Mike Sapone’s impact emerges during the slower numbers, as “First Letter From St. Sean” and “Leave the Fan On” recreate the desolate spaces of Brand New’s “Jesus” in miniature. The song structures become more compact, the concerns more corporeal.
You’re Not As might be something closer to emo’s Tonight’s the Night, a matter-of-fact, insomniac wake for those who died too young by their own hand. “I’ve got friends who’ve died, but everything’s going to be be alright,” Boucher sings on “Where Are You?” and if he doesn’t actually believe it in the moment, the show must still go on. During another restless night in the van on “Car,” Boucher muses, “It’s not ideal, but I’ve never felt more alive” and the glimmer of hope in those words feels earned. Hearing these lyrics yelled back at him as a show of solidarity might finally allow him to rest easy. | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | March 23, 2017 | 8 | 44aa8705-c973-4f24-bc23-b011204cab0d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The West L.A. rapper attempts to broaden his sound on his latest album, a breezy collection of songs that combines low-key anecdotes with hard-won wisdom. | The West L.A. rapper attempts to broaden his sound on his latest album, a breezy collection of songs that combines low-key anecdotes with hard-won wisdom. | Big Sad 1900: I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-sad-1900-i-dont-tap-in-or-tap-out/ | I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out | Big Sad 1900 raps about neighborhood tensions and everyday escapades with the hindsight of a character having a flashback at the beginning of a movie. His stories take place in and around West L.A.’s La Cienega Heights, and if you listen to him enough you can map out bits and pieces of the area without ever going there. On his breakout singles (2019’s “Therapy” and 2020’s “La Cienega Heights”), he reflects on brawls outside of Joe’s Market where he used to mob out in front of, paranoid trips to East L.A., lost loved ones, and recurrent jail stints. But the point of his writing is less about the action of these anecdotes and more about the hard lessons he has learned from them. It gives his music a wistful tone that has made him stand out in a crowded L.A. rap scene.
For a while now, Big Sad has laid down tales full of life and memories on tight collaborative mixtapes with a single producer. In the last two years, he’s had projects entirely produced by G-funk inspired beatmakers like Uce Lee, Cypress Moreno, 420Tiesto, and Steelz. They consistently give his tapes a cohesive and low stakes feel, and he attempts to shake this sound up on his latest album I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out. It’s more intentional, for better and for worse.
I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out isn’t a major label rap debut, but it does have the shape of one. Scattered throughout the 13 tracks are attempts to broaden his sound. It is a goal that could be read as ambitious but I think it’s cliché. On “Chapter 16,” we get the obligatory R&B hook by guest vocalist Yvbaby, whose bad singing is made worse by AutoTune. On “Ghetto Barbie,” Big Sad takes a swing at a love song, which seems unnecessary; he’s always been capable of weaving realistic-sounding Baby Boy-lite relationship details into his lyrics. (Here, he tells generic tales about Netflix and chilling and Dr. Miami visits.) But given the condensed structure of the record, these misses feel more like one-offs.
Despite the darkness of Big Sad’s stories, the producers here share a chill-sounding West Coast feel that gives the tape a breezy atmosphere. One of the best is the Uce Lee-produced “Let’s Get It Poppin,” where Big Sad raps about finding music with a sigh of relief (“Niggas mad I bossed up and got it poppin’/And be rappin’ about my life and make a profit”) over an old-school groove. 420Tiesto smoothly chops up a vocal sample on “Big Dogs,” and it’s the perfect backdrop for Big Sad and P4k, the star of L.A.’s red-hot Baby Stone Gorillas crew, to talk tough. On the bouncy “So What,” Big Sad is a little more upbeat, recounting melancholy club nights over bright percussion.
Big Sad still has plenty of room to grow. “Therapy 2,” combines his best traits (the ultra-specific details and deep introspection) with his worst (the song could use a switch up in flow and lyrics that go beyond his clear-eyed monologue). Once he figures out his strengths, he’ll be more than a great storyteller, he’ll be a really good rapper, too. | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1900 / Empire | June 9, 2022 | 6.8 | 44ac5361-d3ef-4128-864d-05920d0b8523 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Three rarities collections by the pioneering English band offer a small survey of their evolution from a conventional pop outfit to psych visionaries. | Three rarities collections by the pioneering English band offer a small survey of their evolution from a conventional pop outfit to psych visionaries. | Broadcast: Maida Vale Sessions / Microtonics / Mother Is the Milky Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broadcast-maida-vale-sessions-microtonics-mother-is-the-milky-way/ | Maida Vale Sessions / Microtonics / Mother Is the Milky Way | Trish Keenan was a woman out of time and between frequencies. In promotional and live concert photos, the Broadcast singer’s likeness was abstracted, fragmented, and awash in projection, shot through with an arsenal of visual effects that channeled the experimental art of Brion Gysin, Dora Maar, and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. With her severe black fringe and starch white tunic, Keenan could even resemble a photo negative version of Nico. But where Nico came to resent her beauty and actively sought to subvert it, Keenan courted iconicity. By diffusing and distorting her image, Keenan became a Dale Cooper-figure for the band: an astral explorer capable of navigating and illuminating the alternate states their music sought to conjure.
Since Keenan’s passing from pneumonia in 2011, the limitless horizons that Broadcast proposed have been darkened by their singer’s absence. Any appreciation of the band, whether written in tribute or spoken among fans, is immediately asterisked by a sense of tragedy. Because so much of their music explored the spectral qualities of sound and memory, even listening to Keenan’s reverb-laden voice can take on the quality of EVP, skirting the line between haunting and haunted. Yet for a group whose best-known album is a masterpiece of death-obsession, the enduring theme of the band’s work is a rejection of finality. In a Broadcast song, new dimensions are always within reach, suggesting that sound manipulated could result in time transcended. The reissue of three collections of rarities—the new BBC Maida Vale Sessions, and two tour-only albums, Microtronics (2003) and Mother Is the Milky Way (2009)—provides a small survey of the band’s evolution from a conventional pop outfit to psych visionaries.
Like many British artists of their generation, founding members James Cargill and Trish Keenan were radicalized by what the critic Mark Fisher called “popular modernism,” the diffusion of challenging, surreal art through mass media. Part of the poignancy of the Maida Vale Sessions comes from hearing the band prove themselves on their heroes’ turf. The facilities at Maida Vale not only hosted the radio show of John Peel, from which these recordings are sourced, but the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which introduced the British public to electronic music on a mass scale, a history that prompted Keenan to describe the performances as an “initiation.” Maida Vale makes abundantly clear that the band passed with flying colors.
Encompassing material from 1997’s Work and NonWork compilation through 2003’s Haha Sound, the album charts their path from studious, ’60s songcraft toward their own singular sound. Had they stalled out creatively on songs like “The Note [Message From Home]” or “Come On Let’s Go,” Broadcast would have endured as some of the finest interpreters of swooning chanson and psych rock of the 1990s, a decade that wasn’t hurting for revivalists of either stripe. What distinguished them from well-observed pastiche, and what these live recordings highlight, is the dissonance and distortion that lurked at the edge of their sound, as they progressively fused psychedelic fuzz with aggressive electronic effects. The ominous piano chords that launch “Long Was the Year” land on a bed of flickering guitar feedback, while “Echo’s Answer” features a gorgeous extended outro where Keenan’s vocals recede and electric guitars duel over cinematic, ultra-processed strings. The shift from clarity to obscurity was also reflected in the band’s songwriting, as their bookish character studies were phased out in favor of nonsense poems, automatic writing, and cut-up lyrics. No one knows the answer to the questions posed by “Where Youth and Laughter Go,” but in its mesh of music box keyboards, starry-eyed lyrics, and ribbons of corroded and crystalline guitar, the band dares you to imagine.
Cold, clarion, and remote in its beauty, Keenan’s contralto is a singular instrument, an echo that never stops reverberating. One of Maida Vale’s greatest virtues is how it showcases her evolution between records. On tracks like “The Book Lovers” and “World Backwards,” Keenan belts, straining the limits of her range, an affectation that she would dial back by limiting herself to a glassy deadpan. She presents this technique most effectively on “Minim,” where her cascading sighs soar over unfurling synths, snares, and guitar, becoming elemental in the process.
Microtronics is a collection of instrumentals initially released on tour for 2003’s Haha Sound, and it expands upon that album’s interstitials and outros. Enamored with stock “library music,” the band aimed to make generic tunes in a singular way, diverse in sound but immediately recognizable as Broadcast. Tracks like “Microtronics 01” and “Microtronics 09” feature the crisp jazz you could imagine sound-tracking a David Lynch netherworld, while the comet strike synths of “Microtronics 06” and the buoyant jingle of “Microtronics 04” hold their own against Warp labelmates Autechre and early electronic composer Raymond Scott, respectively.
The acoustic fretwork and swelling strings of “Microtronics 11” point the way to the uncanny soundscapes of 2009’s Mother Is the Milky Way. By now whittled down from a five-person outfit to the duo of Cargill and Keenan, Mother plays like the band’s version of a mixtape, an audio collage that swerves wildly between the pastoral and occult. The record draws from both British folk music and British folk horror, contemplating the slippery delineation that separates prim and proper England from its pagan past. “In Here the World Begins” cuts through a squall of children’s recorder to offer a hypnotic, elliptical dirge about accessing a “dream within a dream,” while “I’m Just a Person in This Roomy Verse” features one of the band’s loveliest melodies, intruded by deranged babbling and demonic whispers. Having largely forsaken sampling in favor of recreating the sounds of the past on their own, Mother points to a thrilling, largely unexplored direction for the band: a universe where Vashti Bunyan meets Nurse With Wound, of dappled sunshine and bottomless darkness.
In late 2011, after Keenan’s passing, Cargill confirmed there was enough recorded material in the vault to fashion a new Broadcast album. As of now, it has yet to be released. Cargill has since made an excellent tribute to his creative and romantic partner with former bandmates as Children of Alice, and unreleased tracks and demos have trickled out over the years, often on Keenan’s birthday. Taken together, these three reissues make up one of the most substantial reminders of the band’s power, even in moments of relatively low-stakes creativity. They offer a rejoinder not to regard Keenan as a ghost who haunts the work but as an enduring presence who activates it with every listen. | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | April 4, 2022 | 8.6 | 44ad4329-a4cd-4302-a5d9-c181e3d2f56a | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Taking inspiration from the performance artist Marina Abramović, the UK bass musician’s second album uses chamber instruments and spoken-word fragments to get at the messy business of human intimacy. | Taking inspiration from the performance artist Marina Abramović, the UK bass musician’s second album uses chamber instruments and spoken-word fragments to get at the messy business of human intimacy. | Djrum: Portrait With Firewood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/djrum-portrait-with-firewood/ | Portrait With Firewood | Whether you were one of the 1,400 people to participate in a soul-searching staring contest with Marina Abramović or you simply watched others sit before her during the 700-plus hours of her 2010 performance piece The Artist Is Present, it was one of the most intense and emotional experiences to be had in the atrium of the MoMA. And while watching JAY-Z rap “Picasso Baby” at Abramović was a teeth-gnashing train wreck of music and performance art, producer Felix Manuel is unabashed about admitting Abramović’s influence on his recent productions. As Djrum, Manuel has been at the cutting edge of UK bass for the past eight years, plowing through the barriers between dubstep, downtempo, techno, and drum’n’bass. When he set about working to follow up his debut album from five years ago, Manuel continually returned to video clips of Abramović, moved to tears by what he called her “incredibly deep understanding of the human condition.” The title of Portrait With Firewood, in fact, is a reference to one of Abramović’s own pieces.
Just how Abramović informed Djrum’s gorgeous, questing new work isn’t apparent on the surface. For the first third of the album, one might just assume the art-world influence means no foundation-quaking bass or steady beat, as Manuel instead foregrounds his own piano playing, arrangements, and collaborations with cellist Zosia Jagodzinska and vocalist Lola Empire. While classically trained on the instrument, Manuel says he was reluctant to let fans of his dance productions hear him on piano, a fear that seems unfounded considering the ruminative runs that open the album and set a contemplative mood throughout. “Unblocked” and “Waters Rising” elicit comparisons to Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane, but thankfully, Manuel soon pushes beyond those influences. In “Waters Rising,” rippling overtones mix with nervous wood clops as Empire’s voice surfaces and then sinks back down into the mix.
A duet between Manuel’s piano and Jagodzinska’s quivering cello on “Creature Pt.1” is so evocative that it could be mistaken for an Erased Tapes release. But as dubstep bass detonates across the second part of the track, it shatters the crystalline patterns of the first half, leaving instead jagged shards. The shrieking cello, clipped vocal samples, and knee-capping bass turn the contemplative first half into something menacing and quaking. Only at the end of the track’s second part does Djrum allow in a bit of light, although the vocal sample—“It’s not my mind, it’s not my body, it’s just my heart”—lands with more weight than just about any sound that came before it.
It’s on the latter half of the album that the emotional resonance of Portrait With Firewood is laid bare. A track called “Sex” is dark, turbulent, and knotty, as if the title wasn’t referring to the physical act so much as all the conflicting emotions that boil up around it. Yes, there are samples of heavy breathing—even a shout for emphasis—but as the piece drills deeper, Djrum sounds less interested in the peak of orgasm than the idea of falling into the dark chasms of another person. Amid the tricky rhythms and emotionally poignant strings of “Blue Violet,” Manuel drops in a plaintive female voice saying, “I never felt anything like this before, something I didn’t count on.” That sense of nakedness and exchange returns again at the album’s quietest moment, “Sparrows,” in which dreamy chimes and brushed cymbals twine together like lovers’ fingers. If only it weren’t reduced to the pat rhyme scheme: “I’ll show you my scars/You’ll show me the stars.”
Djrum’s attempt to bridge the gap between acoustic instrumentation and programming doesn’t always work, just as some of Portrait’s spoken word-bits come off as hokey rather than profound. The album’s most ambitious track doubles as its messiest: The nine-minute whirlwind “Showreel Pt.3” toggles between woozy ambience and furious breakbeat techno, with throttling kicks reminiscent of gabber. Atop it all, another disembodied voice laments, “I feel so divorced from the world.” When Manuel pulls it all together, the results are audacious as anything in electronic music right now, restless and in search of emotional connection—a rare instance of a producer holed up in his studio seeking to be present. | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | August 22, 2018 | 7.4 | 44b8f8b0-8619-42bf-90d7-693de64b1135 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
This tribute album is scattershot, as all such albums are, but the best moments find a new generation reckoning with what Smith's catalog means to them now. | This tribute album is scattershot, as all such albums are, but the best moments find a new generation reckoning with what Smith's catalog means to them now. | Various Artists: Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22541-say-yes-a-tribute-to-elliott-smith/ | Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith | Julien Baker was eight years old when Elliott Smith died. She’s not old enough to have experienced him as an active musician or even as a living person, which isn’t a knock against her. On Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith, she shows how a new generation of singer-songwriters are learning from his example. She renders “Ballad of Big Nothing” even breathier and more precarious than the original, a performance held together by tensile guitar licks and a grim determination. Her vocals are more expressive than Smith’s precise deadpan, a bit more conventionally soulful when she twirls her notes or adds some soft whooo’s toward the end. When he sang the chorus—“You can do what you want to whenever you want to”—it sounded like an accusation. When Baker sings those words, they sound more like a consolation, revealing the existential horror in such freedom.
Baker, at 21, is the youngest artist on Say Yes!; the oldest, J Mascis, is 51. That range of ages is one of the more intriguing aspects of this otherwise by-the-numbers tribute album, which is just as scattershot and inconsistent as any other tribute album. It does, however, suggest a legacy that is still evolving and developing from one generation to the next. Smith’s contemporaries tend toward more faithful renditions, with mixed results. Tanya Donelly can’t find anything new to do with “Between the Bars,” but it’s not quite as redundant as Adam Franklin’s “Oh Well, Okay.” For many listeners, “Needle in the Hay” may always soundtrack Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt, but Juliana Hatfield takes the song outside the house and into the city. She adds a low-key drum loop and a harmonium that evokes heavy traffic and dense, pressing crowds, which lets a bit of air into the song without alleviating its dire anxieties.
We know what Smith meant to his contemporaries, but what does he mean to younger musicians who discovered him only after he took his life, after his legacy had cemented, after his albums had been elevated to the status of classics? Some of the most compelling interpretations on Say Yes! come from the younger artists, who have the benefit of some distance on the subject. The Nashville duo Escondido reinvent “Waltz #1” as a shoegaze pop anthem, drenching it in hazy reverb broken only by Jessica Maros’ surface-to-air vocals. It’s refreshingly over the top—a maximalist rendering of a minimalist song. Taking a different tack, Waxahatchee slows “Angeles” down to an even slower crawl, her only accompaniment a heartbeat drum and a guitar that would be hypnotic if it weren’t so discordant and unsettling. More than the music, it’s the vocals that lend the cover its sense of dread. Katie Crutchfield sings with a subtle sneer in her voice, twisting her vowels into a grimace that amplifies the grim, gray humor at the song’s core.
Elliott Smith is, ultimately, not especially easy to cover. His precise melodies make a deep and immediate impression, as do his fatalistic lyrics, but they’re never simply gloomy. His best songs possess some grain of humor—a dark, wincing humor that often bubbles to the surface in sarcastic asides. Walking the fine line between so many gradations of emotion can be tricky, and there are more missed opportunities on Say Yes! than revealing interpretations.
So it’s surprising that one of the standouts comes from one of the unlikeliest sources: Amanda Palmer has not exactly endeared herself to the music world, which makes her choice of songs so ideal. She turns “Pictures of Me” into a meditation on celebrity and a vertiginous rift between a woman’s public and private selves. “I’m so sick and tired of all these pictures of me, completely wrong, totally wrong,” she sings, her voice low but tense, as though barely suppressing her rage. She grits her teeth and pounds her piano violently, turning the song into a great fuck-you to the entire Internet. It doesn’t make her more sympathetic, but that’s not the point. In Smith she finds something like a kindred spirit, and in “Pictures” she finds a song that speaks for her. That’s why we all listen in the first place, right? | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | American Laundromat | October 22, 2016 | 6 | 44c31d8f-67dd-4cbc-9348-39e14ce00d21 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
After a brilliant run of EPs, James Blake returns with an album that tilts toward traditional songwriting while refining his unique approach to production. | After a brilliant run of EPs, James Blake returns with an album that tilts toward traditional songwriting while refining his unique approach to production. | James Blake: James Blake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15081-james-blake/ | James Blake | In January, Portishead founder Geoff Barrow took to Twitter to snip at James Blake. "Will this decade be remembered as the Dubstep meets pub singer years?" he asked, not naming the 22-year-old producer who, only that morning, was highlighted in the BBC's Sound of 2011 poll. When dubstep boomed and shuddered from Croydon at the dawn of the last decade, Blake wasn't yet a teenager. Barrow, on the other hand, was almost 40 and already on hiatus from one of the previous decade's most influential bands. He'd heard the rise of dubstep-- its cavernous bass, quick-click rhythms, bent vocal hooks-- and the tall, plaid-wearing kid from Enfield must have sounded a lot like its populist fall.
Barrow's dismissal of Blake is, presumably, a defense of dubstep-- the gesture suggests a purist, an elitist, or both. Reconsidered from the other artistic end, however, the implication is that maybe this is the decade where singer-songwriters-- longtime wastrels of pianos and six-strings with three chords-- finally get interesting, manipulating their pretty little voices and best love songs for something more than plain ballads and pleas. In that case, Barrow is right about Blake's full-length debut. Composed of tender torch songs, elegiac drifters, and soulful melodies, Blake's first puts him in the rare company of fellow singers-- Thom Yorke, Karin Dreijer, Antony Hegarty, Justin Vernon, Dan Bejar-- who've recently bent their own lavish voices, not samples, to make interesting pop music shaped with electronics. These songs are bigger than the defense of any microgenre, and, chances are, they'll soon make Blake a star. He deserves it.
Dubstep producer Untold released "Air and Lack Thereof", Blake's first single, on his Hemlock label in 2009; it was solid, slightly spooky dubstep, with drums darting around a sample that kept eroding. Since that debut, though, Blake has slowly focused on crafting songs-- bona fide, three-to-four minute builders-- around hooks. Last year's "CMYK", for instance, spliced Blake's voice with cuts from American R&B to place an indelible hook inside a number that actually progressed through its four minutes. Blake's more recent Klavierwerke EP draped its dance floor intentions around his own sweetly sung voice. And now, he moves still further from abstraction, to verses and even an occasional chorus.
While the songs are the magnetic center here, Blake's musicianship and sonics are equally striking. A "dubstep" producer with a gentle piano touch and an ear for granular synthesis so sharp it will make fleets of laptop toters envious, his toolkit is seamless. The two-part "Why Don't You Call Me" / "I Mind", for instance, opens with only voice and piano, played with the studied delicacy of a classical student. But Blake cuts it short 30 seconds in by splicing and resampling the piano line. He then bends his own voice and sings the lone verse twice, editing and re-shaping it into a new form that bears only the faintest resemblence to its opening source material. In the suite's second half, the vocals become spinning smears that fall into the background. It's the only time on the album where the drum clicks, static bursts, and piano splashes become the essential motion. It's the type of track you might have heard on one of his recent EPs-- the kind Blake purists lament this album's supposed lack of.
With this new LP-- released on a major label on both sides of the Atlantic, no less-- odds are, a lot of people are going to listen, and I don't mean in the tail-eating, blog-bite-blog sort of way. "Lindisfarne II" takes what Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago did best and turns it into a simple, poignant mantra; if it doesn't score the season's end of some prime-time drama, a music director should be fired. The same goes for the album-ending "Measurements", which somehow pulls the sound of a Southern black gospel choir from Blake's laptop and white-boy coo. Feist cover "Limit to Your Love" works in just enough of dubstep's bass flutter and snare snap. If Blake really does cross over and become the pretty white male who introduces a broader audience to dubstep, with its foundations in Jamaican music and black musicians in South East London, he'll receive the tired, requisite backlash. But these 11 songs-- gorgeous, indelible tunes that are as generous in content as they are restrained in delivery-- will last a lot longer. | 2011-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | A&M / ATLAS | February 9, 2011 | 9 | 44c5ba98-4eff-43bc-b1b1-c157be87b214 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | 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 Diva, an album that captures Ivy Queen’s legacy as an ardent lyricist and vocalist, a forceful defender of women, and a torchbearer for reggaetón’s subversive—and commercial—promise. | 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 Diva, an album that captures Ivy Queen’s legacy as an ardent lyricist and vocalist, a forceful defender of women, and a torchbearer for reggaetón’s subversive—and commercial—promise. | Ivy Queen: Diva | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ivy-queen-diva/ | Diva | Long before she’d earned the honorifics of La Diva, La Caballota, or La Potra, Puerto Rican rapper Ivy Queen was a pigtailed newcomer whose panties rose above her baggy pants. This was Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodríguez’s look when she infamously auditioned for The Noise, the Puerto Rican collective and nightclub that became pivotal to the evolution of reggaetón in the ’90s. Back then, Ivy Queen was a shy girl from around the way, a young emcee and songwriter from the small town of Añasco eager to cut her teeth in an emerging movement. She’d arrived at the home of now-legendary DJ Negro, ready to drop a verse for some buzzy rappers (and soon-to-be pioneers) who had assembled that day. She was so overwhelmed by nerves that she grabbed the mic and turned her back to DJ Negro during the performance. “Muchos Quieren Tumbarme,” a vicious and self-assured proclamation of femme autonomy, flowed out of her, securing her spot in the crew.
Ivy Queen’s audition was a bellwether for the gender expectations she would navigate—and challenge—throughout her career: the fine lines between assertiveness and confrontation, confidence and arrogance, weakness and vulnerability. In an industry often driven by the objectification of women and the reinforcement of male control over our pleasure, Ivy Queen was tasked with destabilizing the dominance of male desire in reggaetón, while also pushing against monolithic critiques of the genre as inherently misogynistic. She was responsible for making space for all those who are marginalized in the movement—a role too often demanded of women in music, and even more so when they are heralded as the queen, the sole figure carrying the weight of liberation for others. And as deferential as it is, the title “Queen of Reggaetón,” as she’s commonly referred to, isn’t enough to capture all of Ivy’s complexities, to reveal everything she has to offer us.
No project embodies this better than Diva, Ivy Queen’s third studio album. Ivy Queen teamed with independent label Real Music in 2003 for the release; in 2004, the project was licensed and distributed as Diva: Platinum Edition under Universal Music, now with a handful of bonus tracks and remixes. The album is a snapshot of reggaetón in a crucial moment of transition; the genre was in the midst of commercial ascent and sonic transformation for the masses, and although others like La Sista and Glory made their mark, Ivy Queen remained the most visible woman in a boys’ club. With its deep dancehall and reggae en español influences, along with its themes of revenge, sexual freedom, and the politics of the dancefloor, Diva evinced the elasticity of reggaetón—its intrinsic capacity to soundtrack the carnal and the political.
Ivy Queen’s arrival did not come without obstacles. Pesante Rodríguez attended high school in New York, but dropped out in the late ’80s and eventually moved to Puerto Rico. She fell in love with hip-hop en español while watching Vico C on television, mesmerized by his ability to blend incisive raps with sticky dancehall riddims. But she was equally enamored of the salsas and boleros of powerhouse vocalists like Celia Cruz and La Lupe; she started writing her own music after watching the former during a 1974 Fania All-Stars concert on TV.
After a stint in The Noise, Ivy Queen went solo, releasing her first two albums, En Mi Imperio and The Original Rude Girl in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Sony Music signed her for the latter album, which featured a highly publicized collaboration with Wyclef Jean, an early sign of the commercial maneuvers reggaetón would embrace in the new millennium. The Original Rude Girl unfortunately never reached its anticipated commercial heights, and Ivy Queen was dropped from Sony. La Caballota issued singles on compilation albums and mixtapes like The Majestic and Kilates, before releasing Diva on the independent Miami-based label Real Music Group in 2003.
At the time Diva was released, Ivy Queen was as reverent of her roots as she was focused on imagining an artistic future for reggaetón. The album firmly honors Ivy’s love of lyricism and movement, but it also tells stories of sexual liberation for and by women. The year before Diva’s release, sexual and racial anxieties about reggaetón exploded in Puerto Rico. Senator Velda González launched an “Anti-Pornography Campaign” calling for the removal of all “pornographic” material from reggaetón music videos and lyrics, which she claimed degraded women, were vulgar and sexually indecent, and presented an affront to family values (read: white, middle-class norms). The campaign reflected deep-seated racist fears about hypersexuality and respectability in Caribbean music. Of course, there are plenty of examples of women’s bodies being exploited in reggaetón. But predictably, much of the discourse was facile, failing to make sense of the ways the entertainment industry commodifies women, only to later punish them for expressing their own sexuality.
Diva disrupted many of these simplistic narratives. Rather than relegating women to spaces of spectatorship or sexual service, the album explores the freedom of independence, the euphoria of dance, and the satisfaction of revenge. It allows us to enjoy a perreo sucio and remind men that we can be the masters of our own desire. Ivy Queen discards any sense of genre determinism, and instead creates moments of joy and authority—even if they remain within the boundaries of fantasy and commerce.
Diva begins with Ivy Queen laying it all on the floor. Using the language of a boxing match, she recounts her years of rap battles in The Noise, the obstacles she has faced, and the poet and prophet she’s become in spite of an uneven playing field. Many of the tracks signal Ivy’s profound love of dancehall, rap en español, and her eminence in the movement before it was dubbed reggaetón. “Papi Te Quiero” employs the “Buy Out” riddim made most famous by Notch’s “Nuttin’ Nuh Go So,” while “Money Making” enlists legendary Panamanian rapper Japanese, who lends his deep baritone and old-school flow to the production alongside a verse from Ivy’s now ex-husband Gran Omar. Meanwhile, “Sangre” and “Tú No Puedes” are reminders that Ivy Queen is first and foremost a rapper; both revel in hypnotic, early ’00s bombast, and you can almost feel Ivy Queen’s ornate, acrylic talons gripping the mic as she smugly announces her arrival: “Llegó la perra” (“The bitch has arrived”).
But it’s when the album heads to the dancefloor that Diva excels; this is where La Potra most convincingly asserts her power, where she invites us to lay siege to hypermasculine posturing, to revel in sex and refuse the conquest of our bodies. With its playground handclaps and blazoning horns, “Alerta” is at once an affirmation of tenacity and an explosive warning for any and all men intent on interrupting your grinding. “Quiero Saber,” which appeared on the platinum edition of Diva, is an invitation to a dancefloor entanglement with plinking synth stabs that sound like they were lifted straight out of a 2003 FruityLoops drum kit. You can practically feel the humidity in the basement perreo air with the song’s “bellaqueo tra-tra-tra-tra” outro. Of course, even the dance tracks on Diva reflect complex cultural prejudices; “Súbelo” invokes the all-too-common racist epithet “pelo malo” (“bad hair”) levied at Black Latinas who style their curls naturally.
It’s “Quiero Bailar” that will live on as Ivy Queen’s most memorable dancefloor anthem, a reprieve from any reggaetón night dominated by cishet men’s voices and sexual cravings. The baroque harpsichord preamble will go down as one of reggaetón’s most unforgettable intros, turning an antiquated flourish into a vehement assertion of consent. Ivy Queen rides the beat, a version of producer Jeremy Harding’s “Liquid” riddim, and reminds her man that expecting sex after a perreo-fueled tryst is just plain dumb. The song affirms that women in reggaetón are more than just nightclub accessories.
The gruff bars of “Quiero Bailar” and many other Ivy Queen songs are a central element of her magnetism. She’s part of a long lineage of throaty women vocalists in Latin America, like the influential Cuban singer La Lupe. Scholar Alexandra Vazquez aptly describes this genealogy as “the kind of hoarseness that sounds like having to constantly speak above things”—especially men. This quality of Ivy’s voice has also long cast a shadow on her work, sparking misogynistic and homophobic insults that characterize it as overly masculine or too butch. La Diva shrugs off these slights; she embraces her vocal style as a “blessing” that allowed her to stand out, perhaps most clearly in her songs of betrayal, like Diva’s “Tuya Soy” and “Venganza.” As scholar Petra Rivera-Rideau writes, when Ivy Queen spits venom about a partner’s infidelity in her signature baritone, she presents herself as a woman who longs to be seen and loved in her suffering, signaling many of the same themes of abandonment, anguish, and humanity La Lupe explored in her work. But Ivy Queen assures us that her agony won’t be in vain; both “Tuya Soy” and “Venganza” threaten violence for all the deception, even promising she’ll force her man to his knees if he tries it.
For those of us who grew up in the midst of reggaetón’s commercial rise, Ivy Queen soundtracked hundreds of preteen parties de marquesina and femme sexual adventures. The rapper has said her career wouldn’t have blossomed without the LGBTQ community, who granted her the nickname “La Diva” in the first place (the term of endearment was first bestowed upon her at the drag shows she attended with her late friend, makeup artist Willy Rosado). She’s won over queer fans for her support on issues like gay marriage, while also challenging homophobic claims that queerness is a “virus” and defending Ricky Martin when he came out in 2010; in 2014, she toured gay clubs in the U.S.
Alongside Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderón, Ivy Queen has been lauded for ushering in reggaetón’s commercial rise—in 2004, Diva: Platinum Edition hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Tropical Albums chart. But once again, Ivy was tasked with representing all those who were marginalized at the peak of the sound’s mainstream surge. Women in reggaetón were mostly known as chorus girls or side chicks; Ivy Queen became the exception to the rule. The whispered hooks and breathless moans of artists like Jenny La Sexy Voz were key to reggaetón, but often went uncredited (a tradition of silencing that continues to this day, as evidenced by the controversy around Puerto Rican singer Nesi’s unnamed appearance on Bad Bunny’s “Yo Perreo Sola” and the few Black Latinas who are currently visible in the genre’s mainstream today). Ivy Queen has described the responsibility of speaking for all women as a “challenge” and a “status that is difficult to maintain,” and in a 2014 Houston Chronicle article, she succinctly recalled the immediacy of her fame: “All of a sudden, I was the voice of many women.”
Ivy Queen indisputably stepped up to the challenge, but she was forced to navigate the contours of a sexist industry. Sometimes, she had to affirm her skills in masculine or binaristic terms; at others, she had to soften herself for fear of appearing too pushy. The examples are endless: In 2008, she dismissed rumors that she was a lesbian in an interview with the Dominican newspaper Hoy, reaffirming her previous heterosexual marriage and current relationship and saying she “raps like a man.” After Diva’s release, she revealed she originally wanted to title the album La potra, but Universal Music Latino considered the title “too threatening” and “would not sign off” on it. Four years later, she told Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día about the ways she was forced to use the rhetoric of masculinity to prove herself in the industry. “For a woman to exist in this genre, no one knows what we have to go through,” she said. “Sometimes you have to show a masculine side for them to pay attention to you. I didn’t earn this spot because of a pair of boobies—it’s because of my voice, my character, and the respect I’ve had that others treat me equally.” Finally, in 2010, she echoed this sentiment, telling the El Paso Times, “In this industry, I have to be one of the guys.”
All of these experiences expose the burden that women musicians face in the confines of the patriarchy. Ivy was not afraid to rap about being a woman who was confident but still plagued by heartache; nor was she afraid to celebrate her sexuality while rocking a pair of baggy pants. A new generation of artists has attempted to follow in Ivy Queen’s footsteps and cited her as an influence—among them Cardi B, Melii, and Melymel, as well as dozens of others who grew up as outsiders to the movement, like Karol G and Rosalía. Ultimately, La Caballota has remained a singular presence in mainstream reggaetón: an ardent lyricist and vocalist, a forceful defender of women and queer communities, and a torchbearer for the genre’s subversive—and commercial—promise.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Real Music | September 6, 2020 | 8 | 44caaf92-f26b-4dd1-9926-62381998e81b | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
For the ravishing Moonlight, Nicholas Britell composed a score that splits the difference between classical and codeine. It’s orchestral music, chopped and screwed. There’s beauty in its glacial pace. | For the ravishing Moonlight, Nicholas Britell composed a score that splits the difference between classical and codeine. It’s orchestral music, chopped and screwed. There’s beauty in its glacial pace. | Nicholas Britell: Moonlight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicholas-britell-moonlight-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Moonlight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Lucrecia Martel, Henry Roy, Carlos Reygadas, Charles Burnett, Edward Yang, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Kahlil Joseph, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wai: Moonlight is a film of many influences, most of them undisguised and unmistakable. Certainly director Barry Jenkins has a personal vision, clear and true—and his lauded Best Picture winner is indeed rich in distinctive, highly original sounds and images, several already impressed upon the popular imagination. But the Miami-born filmmaker’s cardinal talent is for synthesis, plainly. He sops up styles from all over and wrings out something marvelously new.
Moonlight tells the story of Chiron—black, gay, unwaveringly taciturn—as he advances in three tragic acts from viciously bullied adolescent (Alex Hibbert) to briefly self-discovering teen (Ashton Sanders) and, finally, to repressed and reinvented trapper (Trevante Rhodes) with a wounded, yearning soul. Jenkins renders this plaintive coming-of-age drama with help from an arsenal of disparate inspirations: the slow-motion reveries of In the Mood for Love, the brawny homoerotic tension of Beau Travail, the radiant cobalt palette of Viviane Sassen’s beachside portraiture. The combined effect is strikingly eclectic. Jenkins draws from a huge range of traditions, and what he yields is totally, ravishingly, his own.
The film’s visual models, derived mainly from international arthouse cinema and fine-art photography, are perhaps to be expected of a self-confessed cinephile with a very keen eye. More surprising is how Moonlight sounds—and the wildly different music that inspired it. The soundtrack ranges from Aretha Franklin to Goodie Mob to Boris Gardiner and Prez P. The two cuts most pivotal to the action are Jidenna’s “Classic Man” and the “Laudate Dominum” from Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. And the stirring original score—delicate chamber music composed by Nicholas Britell for piano, violin, and cello—has been chopped and screwed in vintage Houston hip-hop fashion. In fact, I propose the influence that looms over Moonlight most profoundly isn’t Wong Kar-wai, as has been suggested. It’s DJ Screw.
Jenkins had chopped and screwed orchestral music in mind before he knew it was possible. Britell had never even heard of the technique. (“Because how’s a guy from New York who went to Harvard gonna know what chopped and screwed music is?” Jenkins joked in an interview with Pitchfork late last year.) Britell’s introduction to the style was swift—and he told Jenkins he thought he could do something with it. They ran Mozart and Beethoven through Final Cut Pro and slowed them to a crawl to hear what it was like. It seemed to work. “You know what?” Jenkins recalls telling Britell. “This shit ain’t too bad.” So Britell set out to write a score that would split the difference between classical and codeine.
The first piece in the film, bubbling up nearly 10 minutes in, is “Little’s Theme”—a gentle, vaguely mournful minute of piano and hushed violin that begins as young Chiron stares into his lap in the booth of a fast-food restaurant, keeping every thought and feeling submerged. When the piece returns in the second act—Chiron now several years older, looking no less deeply inhibited as he sits sullen in his high-school classroom—the key is pitched way down, from D major to B major. Britell did not play the theme in a lower key, as he explained earlier this year to Song Exploder. “Chiron’s Theme” is simply “Little’s Theme” bent downward on a computer: it’s a sort of orchestral remix, or “Little’s Theme” chopped and screwed.
Of course, the piece descends even further—inevitably, satisfyingly—when reprised once more in act three. There’s a great deal of beauty in the glacial pace of Britell’s chopped and screwed compositions: the new tempo brings out the sorrow and the longing concealed in every fragile note. But there’s also something dangerous in the sound, something fraught with impending peril—and the music accords very much with the cinematography in this respect. The way the camera bobs beneath the boiling waves as father-figure Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Chiron to swim makes it seem like both are at risk of drowning: a threat lurking just beneath a moment of splendor, reflected so well by the ominous and exquisite “The Middle of the World.” Like Chiron’s life, the music always seems on the brink of lapsing into tragedy.
“In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things,” Jenkins said of why he felt chopped and screwed was right for the film. “I don’t mean literally miss lyrics, I just think there’s an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down there’s this emotion, this yearning. I think in some ways, in Moonlight, we’re doing the same thing.” Moonlight is all about slowing things down: it’s about how identities are made, how appearances are cultivated, and how if we stop for a moment the difference between who we’re trying to be and who we are becomes obvious. The clash in styles lays bare these themes so compellingly. It’s real life chopped and screwed. | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Lakeshore | June 30, 2017 | 7.7 | 44ccb406-b033-43fa-8786-45d31359f629 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | null |
Seattle veterans make their J Records debut with this eponymous, monolithic return to straightforward rock. | Seattle veterans make their J Records debut with this eponymous, monolithic return to straightforward rock. | Pearl Jam: Pearl Jam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6210-pearl-jam/ | Pearl Jam | No, really-- this album is the return to form that Pearl Jam fans have been waiting for since Ten. Or Vs.. Or Vitalogy. Or whichever album was the last on which Pearl Jam were a fully accredited rock band. This eponymous effort-- the group's eighth studio full-length, and first for J Records-- is the most consistent effort the group's released since its second album. No pump organ-flecked spoken-word jags about insects, no meandering Eastern-tinged meditations on life, no songs about Jeff Ament's dog. Just 13 tracks of thoughtful, middle-aged, post-grunge rock'n'roll for the thoughtful, middle-aged, post-grunge fellow in all of us. But it gets pretty boring pretty damn quick.
Think what you will of the group, but there's no denying their growth. Despite having the wide eyes of Alternative Nation turned toward them-- selling 17 million copies of their first two records-- Pearl Jam decided to take the road less traveled, and that seemed to make all the difference in maintaining the band's creative viability. Of course, this choice is where they broke with the lion's share of their fan base-- millions who bought into Pearl Jam's original MO weren't willing to put up with creative wanderlust. On Pearl Jam, that's what you get from start to finish (barring one accordion cameo in the minute long reprise of "Life Wasted"). While there's no shirt-rending Jesus Christ poses to be had here, this is as close to the righteous bombast of their heyday as they're likely to ever get again, for better or worse.
One thing that has returned, unfortunately: An emphasis on Eddie Vedder's voice, an acquired taste's acquired taste. That his mushmouthed mewling and moaning became the template for a slew of copycat chest-thumpers is the stuff that keeps vocal coaches up at night. The "weird" Pearl Jam albums found Vedder's singing improving ever so slightly, to the point that he was actually singing without any odd affectations-- the uh-huhs, the oooh-yeahs, the arghs. On this album, though, he's back to the multi-line mulching, growling for all he's worth through its more aggressive tracks. He often sounds best on the low-tempo songs, where the mood better complements his voice's strength-- Eddie's a crooner, not a wailer. But here, he even wails through the slower songs, killing "Parachutes" with his over-emoting and vamping unsuccessfully over the bluesy saunter of "Come Back".
Granted, Pearl Jam haven't lost the perspective they've gained through age-- good luck trying to get their young selves to pen a Springsteenian working-class portrait like "Unemployable". Instead of trying to rage against the machine, they're appealing to its intellectual nature. Unfortunately, this nuance is steamrolled by the group's need for fan-friendly riffage. After years of trying to live up to one of their early statements-- "there ain't gonna be any middle anymore"-- it's disappointing to find them steering the ship back toward the center. | 2006-05-02T02:00:40.000-04:00 | 2006-05-02T02:00:40.000-04:00 | Rock | J | May 2, 2006 | 5.5 | 44d04420-62c3-432f-b821-12a150c723c8 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
Some Other Time is a newly unearthed Bill Evans studio album, initially recorded in 1968 in Germany but not released until this month. It still sounds fresh and alive almost 50 years later. | Some Other Time is a newly unearthed Bill Evans studio album, initially recorded in 1968 in Germany but not released until this month. It still sounds fresh and alive almost 50 years later. | Bill Evans: Some Other Time: the Lost Session from the Black Forest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21799-some-other-time-the-lost-session-from-the-black-forest/ | Some Other Time: the Lost Session from the Black Forest | Casual jazz fans know Bill Evans through his association with Miles Davis. Kind of Blue, the one jazz album you own if you only own one, features Evans on piano on four of the five tracks, and his brief liner notes sketch out the group's approach to improvisation in poetic and accessible terms. When you learn a bit more about Kind of Blue, you learn that Davis actually envisioned the record with Evans in mind. And though for years Davis was listed as the album's sole composer, Evans wrote "Blue in Green" (he eventually received credit.)
Another Kind of Blue piece, "Flamenco Sketches," was partly based on Evans' arrangement of "Some Other Time," the Leonard Bernstein standard. (Evans had earlier used the slow opening vamp as a building block to his breathtaking solo piano composition "Peace Piece"). So though he may not be an especially famous jazz musician, Bill Evans played an integral role in shaping the most famous jazz recording of all time, and the arc of his discography is a rewarding one for those branching off from classic Miles. "Some Other Time" continued to be a touchstone piece for Evans for the rest of his life, appearing regularly on his albums (notably on his duet record with Tony Bennett). And now it's become the title track to a newly unearthed studio album, one recorded in 1968 in Germany but not released until this month.
Jazz in general overflows with archival material. It's a live medium, and recordings of shows have been common since the early part of the last century. Studio LPs could typically be cut in a couple of days, which generally meant a wealth of unused songs and outtakes. But it's somewhat rare to have a true unreleased album—a collection of songs recorded together at a session with the thought of a specific release that never saw the light of day.
Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest is one of these. It was recorded when Evans was on tour in Europe with a trio that included Eddie Gomez on bass and, on drums, a young Jack DeJohnette, who would go on to much greater fame with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and as a leader himself. It was cut between stops on a European tour by German producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the idea that the rights and a release plan would be figured out later. This particular group had only been documented on record just once, on At the Montreux Jazz Festival, recorded five days prior to this date. So the existence of an unheard studio album by the trio is a significant addition to the Evans story.
The piano/bass/drums trio setting is where Evans did his most important and lasting work. He thrived on both the limitations and the possibilities of the set-up, and returned to it constantly over the course of his quarter-century recording career. He generally favored truly collaborative improvising in the setup; the bassist in his trio was expected to contribute melodically and harmonically, in addition to rhythmically, and he could often be heard soloing alongside the pianist. Eddie Gomez, heard on this album, was a steady partner of Evans' for a decade, and the level of empathy between the two players is something to behold. On "What Kind of Fool Am I?," Gomez's dancing lines darts between Evans' bass notes, almost serving as a third hand on the piano. On the immortal title track, Gomez seems like half a conversation, accenting and commenting on Evans' melodic flourishes. For his part, DeJohnette offers tasteful and low-key accompaniment, heavy on the brushwork and soft textures on cymbals—he was more of a role-player at this point in his career. But the three together feel like a true unit.
The tracklist on Some Other Time is heavy on standards, with a few Evans original sprinkled in. To love the American songbook is to be in love with harmony, and Evans never stopped discovering new possibilities in old and frequently played songs. He had a way of phrasing chord progressions for maximum impact, and he used space as virtually another instrument. Evans recorded "My Funny Valentine" many times in a number of different arrangements, often uptempo, but here he drags it out into an achingly poignant ballad that picks up speed as it goes. In his autobiography, Miles Davis famously described Evans' tone as sounding like "like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall," and the tumble of notes on the faster sections of "My Funny Valentine" evince that crystalline loveliness. In addition to the material planned for the original LP, there's a second LP of outtakes and alternate versions that feels very much on par with the first disc.
Evans' art has endured in part because he has a brilliant combination of formal sophistication and accessibility; critics and his fellow musicians heard the genius in his approach to chords, his lightness of touch, and his open-eared support of others in his band, while listeners could put on his records and simply bask in their beauty, how Evans' continual foregrounding of emotion made the sad songs extra wrenching and the happy ones extra buoyant. He was sometimes criticized for an approach that could sound like "cocktail piano," meaning that it wasn't terribly heavy on dynamics and tended to be lower key and generally pretty, but this turned out to be another strength. If you wanted jazz in the background while engaging in another activity, Evans was your man, and if you wanted to listen closely and hear a standard like "Some Other Time" pushed to the limits of expression by his ear for space, he was there for that too.
Evans was one of those jazz artists who changed relatively little over the course of their career. His style developed and his sound had subtle shifts in emphasis over time, but his general approach to music was remarkably consistent, and he remained apart from most of the fashionable trends that wound through the jazz of his era. His first studio date as a leader, in 1956, was just a year after Charlie Parker's death, with bebop very much still au courant; his last, in 1979, the year before his death, was the year Chuck Mangione was nominated for a Grammy for the discofied light jazz funk of "Feels So Good." In both of those years, Evans recorded small-group acoustic jazz albums featuring his standard trio, playing a mix of standards and a few originals. About midway between those two bookends came this set, recorded in a small studio in Germany and left on the shelf, and it still sounds fresh and alive almost 50 years later. | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Resonance | April 23, 2016 | 8.4 | 44d17cf3-b912-408b-8ff9-0dbede09e613 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After tentative vocal experiments on 2016’s R M H Q, the New Zealand guitarist crafts an entire album around guest singers, all women, in which he progressively blurs the traces of his own handiwork. | After tentative vocal experiments on 2016’s R M H Q, the New Zealand guitarist crafts an entire album around guest singers, all women, in which he progressively blurs the traces of his own handiwork. | Roy Montgomery: Suffuse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roy-montgomery-suffuse/ | Suffuse | In 2016, veteran experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery fully shook off a decade-long musical hibernation with the four-LP set R M H Q: Headquarters. Three of the albums were entirely instrumental. Only the first, R: Tropic of Anodyne, featured the New Zealand musician’s voice: a world-weary baritone that dipped in and out of shadowy curtains of guitars. An artist whose most evocative music has historically been instrumental, Montgomery seemed wary of the prospect of singing even as he committed to it. “Where’s the value in cadence?/What makes lyrics sublime?” he wondered out loud on R: Tropic of Anodyne’s title track. The voice may be the most immediately human component to any piece of music, but vocalizing is an inherently vulnerable endeavor. It originates in the body and travels to another body with no intermediary.
For his new album, Suffuse, Montgomery took his discomfort with his own voice as an opportunity to open his music up to a roster of full-time singers. Built on R: Tropic of Anodyne’s outtakes, Suffuse boasts a different guest vocalist for each track. All are women, and Montgomery tailored each song’s instrumentals to each woman’s particular vocal style. Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr opens the album with her formidable contralto, flooding a composition that doesn’t fall far from R: Tropic of Anodyne’s severity. Grouper’s Liz Harris closes it, her voice barely audible amid a wash of distorted guitars.
Male songwriters often compose for and with female pop singers, but such an arrangement is rarer in experimental music, where the idea of fixed individual artistry holds greater sway. Throughout Suffuse, Montgomery seems to try to shake that pretense. He dissolves his creative control as the album unfolds; while opener “Apparition” sounds like an R M H Q B-side with a slightly different vocalist, Julianna Barwick floods “Sigma Octantis” with her signature vocal layers, and the closing track with Harris could have been cut from a Grouper album. Montgomery’s creative thumbprint fades under his collaborators’. Throughout Suffuse, he tries with increasing fervor to lose himself.
Montgomery wrote the lyrics to the first three songs on the album, but let the guest vocalists hold the pen on the latter half, and you can hear his language slip at the midway point. Side A writhes with desire: specifically, the forthright hunger that tends to be associated with masculinity. “Have you something for me?” quakes Fohr on “Apparition,” while Katie Von Schleicher takes point on the frayed sexual longing of “Outsider Love Ballad No. 1.” “Hear me dying in the dark for something that smells of you/Here’s me lying on a bed that could have been stained with you," she snarls. Her voice snags along a trio of repeating melodic peaks like she’s clawing her way up a gravelly mountainside. The smell and the stain in Montgomery’s lyrics recall the tactile, violent hunger of Pixies’ “Cactus,” and so does the grain of Von Schleicher’s delivery, which ranks among the album’s most compelling. Montgomery wrote the song’s spare chord progression to suit her voice, and she pulled her voice threadbare to suit his lyrics: an astonishing exchange of artistry.
By “Mirage,” when the sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon of Purple Pilgrims throw a hush on the music, Montgomery relaxes his grip. He can still be heard in the tone and the pace of the guitars that fall behind the vocals, but he has withdrawn from the foreground. His guest singers sound less and less like him, their voices higher and airier, and he swaddles the guitars in additional reverb to complement the shift. Few albums lay bare the process of their making quite like Suffuse; fewer still evince a desire on the part of the artist to relinquish control, piece by piece, until they have all but handed the reins to someone else. By introducing some of the era’s most compelling women singers to his music, Montgomery uncaps the catharsis that comes when you don’t have to sound like yourself. The rigid boundaries of self and gender fall away the more he unclenches from them, and in the space that’s opened, he finds new ways to let his music speak. | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing / Grapefruit | August 17, 2018 | 7.6 | 44d312c4-11b0-40e5-ab31-3ce95d58754e | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Now a touring member of Broken Social Scene, Land of Talk leader Elizabeth Powell enlists Justin Vernon of Bon Iver for production assistance on the band's first proper full-length, and the result is a mix of the debut EP's wiry rock and affecting acoustic tracks. | Now a touring member of Broken Social Scene, Land of Talk leader Elizabeth Powell enlists Justin Vernon of Bon Iver for production assistance on the band's first proper full-length, and the result is a mix of the debut EP's wiry rock and affecting acoustic tracks. | Land of Talk: Some Are Lakes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12235-some-are-lakes/ | Some Are Lakes | As a newly-minted touring member of sprawling indie behemoth Broken Social Scene, Elizabeth Powell certainly has her work cut out for her. But she's not so green. Land of Talk, the band she fronts, debuted in 2006 with the well-received "super" EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss, on which Powell steered well clear of the hushed pop ruminations of Emily Haines or Feist. She opted instead for steely, tightly-coiled guitar music you can see your breath in.
Produced by man of the moment Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), Some Are Lakes, Land of Talk's proper full-length debut, is a clear-eyed expansion on the post-hardcore bridge Powell began constructing two years ago, the one that stretches between today's Montreal and the Seattle era that birthed Pretty Girls Make Graves. And while just as thorny and gnarled in parts as its bruising predecessor, Some Are Lakes' has more to offer aurally-- its calms are ultimately more haunting and compelling than its many storms.
Opener "Yuppy Flu" arrives on a current of drums and bass before splashing into Powell's icicle guitar gusts, the three locking horns later in a stretch of white-knuckle harmonic interplay that sets the bar high very early. Unfortunately, save for the jounce of "Young Bridge" or poppy crispness of the title track, that stretch is one of the few moments wherein Powell's rocking doesn't feel a bit ho-hum, like territory not worth revisiting. "The Man Who Breaks Things (Dark Shuffle)" is a chain of minor-chord jangle without any release, while "Give Me Back My Heart Attack" is a wiry mess of crushed glass dissonance that hints at Sonic Youth as much as tireless punk maelstrom "Corner Phone" does. All three tracks contain flashes where Powell's pipes-- arguably as knee-buckling as those of her antecedents inside the BSS stratosphere-- feel fenced-in by racket. Because as satisfying as older rockers like "Speak To Me Bones" or even new jam "Got A Call" prove to be, it can feel like you're fighting for affection from these songs.
Which is exactly why the Fleetwood Mac-meets-Afghan Whigs soul-pop of "It's Okay" is worth returning to time and again. Instantly inviting, Powell's nighttime vocals are pushed up front and left to float, weightless. As violent, plaintive, and ultimately conflicted as anything she's already written ("I know how to kill but I hate how it feels."), many of Powell's lyrical sketches are of the blood red, open-heart-surgery variety, a word set her producer knows well. You could in fact argue that Vernon played a hand in sanding down Land of Talk's edges, mostly to the album's betterment. As on, for instance, the closer "Troubled", an acoustic heartbreaker sung partly in French that was actually recorded at the same hunting cabin Vernon recorded his deep woods opus For Emma, Forever Ago. It's a song with no desire to keep you at a distance or leave you standing outside. That feels pretty good. | 2008-10-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2008-10-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | October 1, 2008 | 6.9 | 44d381cd-a8c5-466d-8be4-cb43cd7a28c4 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to\n ... | Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to\n ... | Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: Shake the Sheets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4741-shake-the-sheets/ | Shake the Sheets | Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to stop it. Your once-torrid show-going pace has slowed to a crawl, you can no longer stand sitting through opening acts, you start wishing for anti-smoking legislation instead of bumming cigarettes, your back hurts. Older tracks begin to infiltrate your iPod, new albums have a shorter grace period before deletion, sometimes you chose to just read a book. You start to realize that the bands you're listening to are actually younger than you are, for the first time, and this realization finally breaks the dam you've built against constantly playing Spot-the-Influence. Past nostalgia starts to overtake present enjoyment, and no longer are you a first-order listener, frantically casting out nets to be the first one to the next big thing.
You know it's a bad sign when even the old reliables stop delivering, when their new release barely dislodges previous albums from your rotation, when you start pleading for them to play old songs live like your parents at a CSN concert. Want specifics? Let's take, oh, say Ted Leo for your example. You and Ted have crossed figurative paths for five years now, since the night he lent precious indie cred to your college house's basement by performing there accompanied by only a reel-to-reel (even though you feared booking a guy from some scary-sounding band called Chisel). From then on, you never re-met in person, but fan-love bloomed over rush hour singalongs to The Tyranny of Distance. While living in Leo's once-home of D.C., you attended most of his frequent visits, wrote gospel-like reviews about Hearts of Oak for a rambunctious webzine, and generally formed a one-man street team for the man and his Pharmacists.
Your first sign that relations might be fading was when Shake the Streets hit the file-sharing black market, and you were taken by surprise-- you hadn't even updated your wishlist. Now, months later, the usual Ted Leo delayed sink-in has yet to occur, despite frequent commute listening parties. Which begs the question: Is it you that changed, or is it Ted?
Or perhaps, more accurately, has Ted not changed enough? You can't help but notice that Shake the Sheets is the most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition. Gone is the more aggressively percussive approach of Hearts of Oak, the drum-circle assault of "Ballad of the Sin Eater" that took your head off more than once at dark Black Cat performances. The Pharmacists have receded back to a power trio format, a slight expansion from Leo's recent pretending-he's-Billy-Bragg jaunt, not attempting to toy with crooked arrangements or extraneous instruments.
Instead, Leo focuses on making a ruler-straight power-pop album, a facsimile of a late 70s punk-fed singer/songwriter LP with cover art featuring the artist against a solid-color background. You're less entertained by the Thin Lizzy flourishes, here on the other side of The Darkness' full-flung tributes. You're finding it more difficult to make Dexys comparisons, now that you're starting to appreciate how awesome Dexys actually was.
You also find yourself surprised that Ted Leo isn't taking advantage of his political timing-- a release date Michael Moore would kill for-- just as you're surprised to find yourself looking for political music at all. "Ballad of the Sin Eater" was the best description of ugly-American guilt you'd ever heard or read or danced to, so the relatively limp and general "I wanna sweep the walls of arrogance" criticisms of Shake the Sheets can't help but disappoint. Instead, you find Leo mired in unrepresentative cliché-driven lyrical content like, "It's time for getting down," from "Criminal Piece". But no, you shouldn't presume to know what Leo should sing about, you definitely should not presume that.
In a strange turn of events, you find yourself not as into Leo's usual tics: his unhinged vocals and spasmodic guitar. You find yourself strangely aggravated by Leo's characteristic punk-scat; especially unforgivable is a Jacko-like "shebooyah" in "Walking to Do". It doesn't help that most of these vocal detours are placed into songs ("Walking to Do", "Counting Down the Hours") that sound like the wait music for Splash Mountain.
But the question again: Is it you, or is it Ted? Is it silly for you to hold artists to the standard of constant evolution, dismissing all efforts to double-back on formerly fertile territory? Is it unfair to apply the context of your current musical frustration to the innocent victim of Shake the Sheets? Is constant self-awareness and within-review second-guessing drying up as a valid stylistic trick? Is it possible to be too subjective when you're writing opinion pieces? You wonder if the whole second-person device has really defused the self-indulgence of this very review.
Nevertheless, you hope your arbitrary ten-point scale score adequately conveys that, while disappointing, Shake the Sheets remains better than most of its current brethren in indie cryostasis. You feel a pang of guilt at holding Ted Leo to such high, possibly unreasonable standards, a pang of self-disappointment that you no longer have the iron constitution to be breezily dismissive of a review's ripple effects. But the largest pang of all is the stereotypical one of sadness, mourning the lost ability to follow a favorite artist down any path, the willful naivety to cloak any sub-par effort in the forgiving deafness of fandom. And then having to write about it. | 2004-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Lookout! | October 21, 2004 | 7 | 44d72b9c-997a-4b9e-ab1e-3ec5d74e9f43 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Nearly five years after their debut, the UK indie rockers return with a cinematic new sound and a determination to turn old hurt into healing catharsis. | Nearly five years after their debut, the UK indie rockers return with a cinematic new sound and a determination to turn old hurt into healing catharsis. | Dama Scout: gen wo lai (come with me) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dama-scout-gen-wo-lai-come-with-me/ | gen wo lai (come with me) | Performed willingly or not, cultural assimilation is a nerve-wracking high-wire act, particularly from the vantage point of a child. Memorizing social scripts designed to erase you for the slightest deviation, but still at the mercy of familial expectations, there’s an added layer of anxiety: It can feel as if you’re never more than a classmate’s comment on the unfamiliar textures of your homemade lunch away from a painful fall from grace. Retroactively labeling these fears as purely symptomatic of self-hatred does little to smooth over the scars they’ve left behind.
It’s a process of self-discovery that Dama Scout vocalist Eva Liu—whose family immigrated from Hong Kong to the UK—knows well. She documents it obliquely across gen wo lai (come with me), exploring and exploiting the tense atmosphere of these diasporic blues. The band caught a small wave of buzz in 2017 from a self-titled EP that, for the most part, blended into the indie-rock landscape of the day: a mixture of tough but buoyant drums, jangling guitar hooks, and spaced-out, low-key vocals that might be best compared to psych-rock outfit Crumb just before their detour into hazy bedroom pop. Returning for a full-length nearly five years later, the London-based trio has instead lurched into a trajectory positioning it as a UK analogue to America’s reigning bad-trip therapists Spirit of the Beehive, weaving cryptic meditations on existential dread into a cinematic new sound. gen wo lai (come with me)’s unruly vignettes illuminate flashbulb memories of alienation to light the way on a healing journey through the past.
Rather than agonize over the bleeding, Dama Scout’s strategy in nursing these wounds is to peel off the bandage and let the cut breathe. The opening title track exemplifies this approach, meditating on the memory of Liu’s grandmother eating chicken feet over the seasick churn of bassy synthesizers; guitars and basslines slide in and out of phase before swallowing each other in a brief but satisfying cacophony that washes the creeping anxiety away. It’s here that Liu’s fragmented lyrical approach is at its most potent. Elsewhere, particularly on the sauntering “lonely udon,” the results are less rewarding: When the white-noise rush of studio flourishes appears to lift the track into catharsis, the sensation is one of meandering chaos, a premature rush to experimentation without narrative consequence.
These moments are mercifully few. For a band only now stretching beyond the limitations of an EP, Dama Scout reveal surprisingly assured production instincts, with an ambitious attention to detail. When they twist the EQ knobs into oblivion halfway through “dan dan bub”’s second chorus, pushing the entire song behind a wall of ambience, the effect pricks up your ears, building anticipation for the melody’s return as its chord progression sails out of reach. “emails from suzanne” goes even further. The slashing rhythm surges and decays in fits and starts, mirroring the pain of a mind that “Divides in places/Divides in spaces” by veering sharply between silence and explosive, stoner-metal fuzz. gen wo lai (come with me) deals in uncertainty, suspicion, and doubt, but Dama Scout fold these discomforts into one another with lush, thoughtful orchestration, building pathways between emotional roadblocks and transforming them into interdependent points of self-discovery.
Dama Scout settle for one final false climax to close out the album. The sullen piano dirge of “bubble bee” encapsulates the record’s purest moment of despair, complete with a chorus calculated to raise and then dash hopes, with high notes furiously gasping for air before disappearing beneath the waves of a rising drone. This eerie collapse feels curiously welcome, a chance to recover after covering so much ground at a breakneck pace, but Dama Scout have never sounded more energized; there’s a sense that they could come leaping back at you through the feedback at a moment’s notice. Healing, and second-act transformations like gen wo lai (come with me), can sometimes mean making a home within the discord, harnessing the power of a storm instead of waiting for its eye to pass overhead. | 2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | May 2, 2022 | 7.6 | 44db9bca-6133-4e2f-8a62-a47b032654a3 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Largely centered on the piano, the songwriter’s first solo album in eight years is wistful, heady, and mesmerizing. | Largely centered on the piano, the songwriter’s first solo album in eight years is wistful, heady, and mesmerizing. | Meg Baird: Furling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meg-baird-furling/ | Furling | Meg Baird has made a name as a masterful guitarist, but it’s a piano that ties together her songs on Furling. In a recent interview with Aquarium Drunkard, she spoke about how working at the piano grounded her in a sense of home. Notes fall in aqueous clusters in the starkly beautiful “Wreathing Days,” and a mellow timbre undergirds the melodies of “Ship Captains” and “Ashes, Ashes.” The instrument’s felt-padded hammers land with the ease of falling back into a beloved armchair.
Baird’s willowy voice, along with the acoustic focus of her earlier records, have sometimes earned her the “folk” label, a misnomer that fails to account for her range. With her 2000s group Espers, she pressed forward on hypnotic, far-out psychedelia-tinged abstractions; at the trap kit for Watery Love and Heron Oblivion, she lands each beat like she’s trying to pound through the earth’s crust. With Furling, Baird both expands her palette and distills her multitudes into some of her richest work. She co-produced and recorded the LP with Charlie Saufley, her partner and her bandmate in Heron Oblivion. (The pair completed much of the recording process before March 2020, crediting its belated release to production delays.)
In contrast to her alternately thunderous and delicate work, Furling smolders like an incense cone as Baird works her way through serpentine arrangements. A wistful mood reigns. Splitting the difference between weariness and a restful exhale, Baird contemplates loss and savors fleeting comforts on “Twelve Saints,” leaning into a languorous atmosphere. Her romantic reassurances fold into the soft mandolin sweep of “Star Hill Song.” “I love you even when we can’t deal,” she sings, drifting alongside a wandering guitar line and loose percussion.
In a solo catalog full of satisfyingly sparse compositions, the gentle touches Baird brings to Furling stand apart. One such adornment arrives at the hands of harpist Mary Lattimore, with whom Baird released a 2018 duo LP, Ghost Forests. She adds a shimmery flourish to Baird’s melody on “The Saddest Verses,” where acoustic guitar strums float over a pliant electric guitar line. Baird tempers her softer material with moodier streaks in the overcast roll of “Unnamed Drives” and “Will You Follow Me Home?,” which drifts along with the ease of a purposefully purposeless stroll. “I’d like to know you’re hazy/I’d like to try and catch you maybe,” Baird sings. The songs’ winding instrumental threads lend each one a unique sheen, accumulating into a heady and mesmerizing whole.
Furling is not quite a departure for Baird: For every ominous turn like the instrumental opener “Ashes, Ashes,” there is a return to the warmth of her more characteristic solo material, like the rolling fingerpicking of “Cross Bay.” As a whole, these songs collect the charms of her past work and expand upon them. While her previous solo album, Don’t Weigh Down the Light, arrived in 2015, she’s been relatively easy to find since—lending her guitar and voice to friends like Steve Gunn and Will Oldham. It speaks to Baird’s ever-expanding ethos that, after 20 years of eager, in-depth collaboration, she’s managed to sound more like herself than ever. | 2023-02-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | February 1, 2023 | 7.5 | 44e35158-65c5-4f0d-9d01-cb8852263b00 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Cornelius's Fantasma was a high point of the mid-'90s Shibuya-kei scene, an eclectic crate-diggers' subgenre that celebrated old sounds. Its vinyl reissue shows it still sounds fresh in 2016. | Cornelius's Fantasma was a high point of the mid-'90s Shibuya-kei scene, an eclectic crate-diggers' subgenre that celebrated old sounds. Its vinyl reissue shows it still sounds fresh in 2016. | Cornelius: Fantasma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21980-fantasma/ | Fantasma | By the mid-‘90s, Japanese pop culture had peaked in global coolness. Anime and video games enthralled kids all over the globe, and author Haruki Murakami was starting to gain traction in the English-language world. And although it might not have been quite as universal as Pokemon, Shibuya-kei music was winning praise from Western listeners. The genre’s mish-mash of sonic references and samples spanning the entire 20th century caught the ears of non-Japanese labels, leading to the ‘60s-swooning of Pizzicato Five and lounge-tronica of Fantastic Plastic Machine seeing widespread release. Nothing captured as much critical attention, however, as Keigo Oyamada’s Cornelius project, whose 1997 album Fantasma came out Stateside one year later via Matador Records. Soon after, the Shibuya-kei movement became oversaturated and its biggest names drifted to new sounds.
Fantasma marked the high point for the movement, and has since been celebrated as the style’s ultimate triumph. The Japanese music media isn’t big on “all-time” lists, but when the mood strikes, Cornelius’ third proper album always winds up in the top ten. All this canonization has the side effect of making Fantasma feel like an artifact, a musical museum devoted to a scene that could never exist outside of ‘90s Tokyo. Portland-based imprint Lefse’s new vinyl reissue—featuring four enjoyable bonus tracks, albeit songs that aren’t on the album for a reason —reminds that what makes this set of songs special hasn’t aged. Like Endtroducing… or Discovery, Fantasma took the (often literal) sounds of the past to create something new and exciting, while also ending up a celebration of the process of finding, listening and creating music.
It’s fitting Shibuya-kei’s finest statement came courtesy of one of the people most central to its emergence. Coming of age during Japan’s economically booming Bubble years, Oyamada had time to play in bands and spend hours exploring Tokyo’s well-stocked record stores. Alongside Kenji Ozawa in the group Flipper’s Guitar, he crafted songs drawing inspiration from all sorts of eclectic sources—the Scottish post-punk of Orange Juice, Madchester, bossa nova, the Monkees’ movie debut Head. Despite a tendency to swipe melodies wholesale, they pushed a slew of new sounds into the Japanese music conscience.
Alongside Pizzicato Five and a few other groups introducing unfamiliar styles, Flipper’s Guitar’s CDs sold extremely well at Shibuya music stores—well enough that they snuck into the nation’s album charts. The media, smelling a trend, called it Shibuya-kei (literally, Shibuya style). From there, new artists emerged, not united by a specific sound but rather an ethos that writer W. David Marx pins as “pastiche and bricolage,” offering an alternative to mainstream J-pop. Oyamada launched a label, Trattoria, sharing music from names such as Kahimi Karie and Hideki Kaji, and started his solo career as Cornelius, releasing two albums that found him caught between singer-songwriter and musical curator. He also starred in a Shibuya-kei-tinged hair mousse ad.
Fantasma, though, promised something different and more daring. Whereas previous Cornelius albums launched right into sunny horn fanfare, “Mic Check” begins with a faint click and a lot of space. Someone puffs a cigarette, a can cracks open, and somebody whistles a portion of Beethoven’s 5th. Early copies of Fantasma came packaged with earphones, and “Mic Check” quickly establishes why—it’s a producer’s album, one where every sound is labored over and plays a role in the greater journey. Oyamada wants the listener to be adequately ready for this—“can you hear me?” he asks in Japanese—so that they don’t miss any detail, before letting a semi-song bloom around them.
From there, Oyamada treats listener to a smörgåsbord of musical thrills. His songs here frequently jump between headphone channels—the dizzying Speak & Spell rock of “Count Five or Six” being a great example of this technique—while going one step further by playing around with the idea of recording music. Side two of the record starts with “Chapter 8 (Seashore and Horizon),” which opens with Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney of the Apples in Stereo performing a very Apples-in-Stereo-sounding song. But before a minute can pass, someone hits the stop button on a cassette player, and Oyamada jumps in with his own interpretation of sweetly sung indie-pop, the sort of number that could easily slide into the Elephant 6 catalog. Then the player clicks again, the tape rewinds, and the Apples come back in frame.
“Fantasma is a kind of album that only has one entrance and one exit. That is, you can’t listen to if from the middle,” Oyamada told a magazine around the album’s release. As the defining Shibuya-kei full-length, it’s loaded up with references to obscure older music spliced with styles that were, in 1997, fresh—drum ‘n’ bass drills through tropicália on album centerpiece “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” while “Monkey” jams samples sourced from R&B and an old record starring Mr. Magoo to create a playful romp that’s the most stereotypically Shibuya-kei-sounding thing here—but Oyamada wasn’t simply flexing his deep record collection. Sounds reappear frequently across Fantasma, songs referencing one another in subtle ways—early English-language reviews tended to knock Cornelius for having too much going on, but Oyamada knew exactly what he was doing with the rush of noises. Everything ends up in its right place, making for a more cohesive and intimate listen.
And that’s fitting, as Fantasma celebrates the process of discovery and falling in love with music. Shibuya-kei was built on crate-digging discoveries, but oftentimes could come off as simplistic (or, at worst, trying to be too cool with nothing but some obscure records). But only Fantasma peers into the actual act of listening. Half of the songs here feature no coherent lyrics, but when words do come through, they capture the feeling of being at a concert (“Clash”) or shutting out the world via headphones (“New Music Machine”). Sudden shifts in style even make sense within Fantasma’s walls—the twinkling, childhood collage of “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” gives way to the feedback-soaked, adolescent thrash of “New Music Machine.”
Nearly every song title on Fantasma references an existing musical group, obscure or world famous, but it feels like an act of grateful tribute rather than a hip name-check. With Flipper’s Guitar, Oyamada straight-up sampled chunks of the Beach Boys “God Only Knows,” but on his own “God Only Knows” he spends the track’s seven-minute-plus run time weaving an intricate pop production inspired by (but never directly taking from) Brian Wilson (and quoting another Oyamada favorite, the Jesus And Mary Chain). He reveals his intention with the penultimate number, “Thank You For the Music,” which acknowledges all of his musical heroes, along with the listeners who came along for the Fantasma ride, all over a folksy backing track that makes way for a rapid-fire collage of sounds heard over the course of the album...a reminder of the last 50-some minutes.
A lot of Shibuya-kei in 2016 sounds extremely dated, and it’s not totally the fault of the music for this. A big draw of the style was how the artist themselves served as a curator for the audience, funneling the forgotten sounds of yesteryear to a new audience. But the internet has completely changed the concept of curation—anyone can become an expert on niche styles with some focused Wikipedia digging, while the idea of finding a new perspective to old sounds has been replaced with “make me a playlist that sounds best while I’m in the bath.” Not to say there aren’t perks to a digital reality—I downloaded Fantasma off Soulseek in 2005, and it’s easier to find Shibuya-kei deep cuts on YouTube now rather than go to the actual Shibuya neighborhood.
But Fantasma distills the spirit and process of Shibuya-kei down to its purest essence and still sound warm and celebratory today. He imagined musical utopia, where genre lines fade easily and where geographic borders can vanish (in 2016, Japanese artists construct their own imagined versions of albums because of streaming exclusivity). In the ‘90s, Cornelius caught attention for a cool sound that earned him comparisons to Beck, but it’s the sense of sheer joy and excitement running through Fantasma that still makes it an exhilarating listen today. | 2016-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lefse | June 11, 2016 | 8.8 | 44e5e02f-fd0f-4c63-a87a-525bf70a77f4 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
Featuring collaborations with Sia, Dev Hynes, Charli XCX and more, Blondie’s 11th album is a bit uneven but remains a showcase for Debbie Harry’s versatile, supremely grounded voice and style. | Featuring collaborations with Sia, Dev Hynes, Charli XCX and more, Blondie’s 11th album is a bit uneven but remains a showcase for Debbie Harry’s versatile, supremely grounded voice and style. | Blondie: Pollinator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23211-pollinator/ | Pollinator | For decades, Blondie’s weapon has been their talent for synthesis. While tracks like “One Way or Another” and “Hanging on the Telephone” front-loaded themselves with spiky riffs and Debbie Harry’s petulant yet wondrous vocals, other entrants in the New York New Wavers’ catalog got their power—and staying power—from places removed from what was then considered “rock.” “Heart of Glass” added disco’s bounce to the band’s guitar crunch; their cover of the rocksteady classic “The Tide is High” made plain the Caribbean influences that were infiltrating rock in the late ’70s and early ’80s; “Dreaming” was an urban-cowboy sigh reclining on a cloud of glitter; and Harry’s downtown-blasé, Fab 5 Freddy-saluting bridge on “Rapture” led to it becoming the first rap video to appear on the white-breadiest, earliest iteration of MTV.
From the title on down, Blondie makes it clear that Pollinator, their 11th album, is full of outside ideas—only two of its 11 songs were co-written by Harry and Blondie’s longtime guitarist/Harry’s songwriting foil Chris Stein. Collaborators include of-the-moment gurus like Dev Hynes and Dave Sitek as well as pop workhorses like Sia and Charli XCX; keyboardist Matthew Katz-Bohen, who joined the band in 2008, also co-wrote a pair of tracks, while John Congleton (St. Vincent, Goldfrapp) handled production.
Although it has its moments, the end result is predictably uneven. Blondie’s commitment to tense and jumpy pop remains, even though Harry’s voice is more grounded some four decades after the band’s debut. Pollinator opens with the Harry/Stein rocker “Doom or Destiny,” which chugs along on a simple, brain-Velcro riff and is full of winking wordplay; Congleton gives Harry’s lower-register vocals a metallic sheen that makes the rapid-fire internal rhymes sound playfully robotic. “Long Time,” which Harry co-wrote with Hynes, is a downshifted “Heart of Glass” with seen-it-all lyrics; the blooming keyboards buried in the mix provide a counterweight to Harry’s heavily processed vocals.
Fellow New Wave lifer Johnny Marr penned the muscular, urgent “My Monster,” one of the album’s highlights. Harry’s voice gets to peek out from the digital-processing curtain as guitars and keyboards zip around her. Charli XCX—one of the better 21st-century pop artists operating in Harry’s spirited yet serious style—wrote “Gravity,” a spaced-out synthpop romp that allows Harry to vamp and pout. The album nears dudsville with the Sia Furler/Nick Valensi co-write “Best Day Ever” because even though its synths sparkle, Furler’s lyrics-by-numbers are far too 101 for Harry’s wise persona. (Perhaps a verse en Français would have helped.)
Two of the album’s more unexpected collaborations wind up being its high points. The other Harry/Stein co-write, “Love Level,” opens as a swaggering pop-reggae hybrid then amps up the intensity as John Roberts (the comedian best-known as Linda on “Bob’s Burgers”) enters the fray, which quickly crests into a dancefloor cacophony. “Fragments,” meanwhile, is a seven-minute, blown-out cover of a 2010 piano ballad by the Vancouver musician (and movie blogger) Adam Johnston. In its original form it’s a slow-burn romantic broadside with knotty lyrics (“egocentricity,” “reality,” and “disparity” all fit into a verse that also contains the phrase “overwhelming rejection”); Blondie’s version surrounds Harry with guitar fuzz and breakneck drumming, allowing her to fully lean into a torchy vocal performance that culminates in her showing off her weathered, still-intact higher register as she laments that she doesn’t even remember. It’s part “Is That All There Is,” part defiant wave goodbye—and it’s a fitting close to an album that shows one of the most crucial American rock bands searching for footing in a chaotic, collapsible pop landscape. | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | May 11, 2017 | 6.7 | 44ec787f-b28f-48da-bcc9-64d9ad5401ed | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | null |
Ian William Craig's Centres is a swirling and alchemical blend of drone, keyboards, and manipulated vocals. The more time you spend with it, the further you will want to get lost in it. | Ian William Craig's Centres is a swirling and alchemical blend of drone, keyboards, and manipulated vocals. The more time you spend with it, the further you will want to get lost in it. | Ian William Craig: Centres | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22120-ian-william-craig-centres/ | Centres | Who is Ian William Craig? Nothing about the man, with his easily forgettable name, gently nerdy MFA-student look, and bio notes reading “operatically trained” and “Canadian,” hint at the vast ocean of beauty within his music. In a way, the banality of its presentation deepens the impact of his new album *Centres, *which might be one of the most beautiful, most strange, and most unique things you hear all year.
*Centres was *released this month with minor fanfare, as part of the re-launch of FatCat’s largely post-classical imprint label 130701. The magic of it boils largely down to a swirling, alchemic blend of three elements: majestic, manipulated vocals; gentle, well-constructed keyboard melodies; and a wash of noise, drone, and digital and analog decay. At times, t feels almost as if you could reduce Craig’s music to the still-complementary formula “Fennesz / Tim Hecker + Vocals.” But Craig takes these elements through their paces in ways that feel satisfyingly unpredictable and impossible to peg with shorthand description.
The first highlight of Centres is its opening statement “Contain (Astoria Version),” which begins with heavily treated, angelic vocals. On much of the album, Craig’s voice is presented largely untreated and untouched, but the fact that he chooses to begin “Contain” with his vocals in their most AutoTuned form feels like a gentle nudge to listeners to let go of expectations. “I will not contain you,” he sings, and in the context of this expansive album it rings like a promise.
Centres also edges a tad closer to the world of pop than on its two predecessors (2014’s A Turn Of Breath and last year’s Cradle For The Wanting, both on the tinier Recital label), which mostly means more texture, focus and listenability. The cathartic “A Single Hope” is the apex of this shift--the most direct, melodic track on the album (and one of the few featuring percussion); a throbbing, slow-burn hymnal that would even feel at home as one of the choice cuts on Cherry Red’s comprehensive shoegaze comp earlier this year.
Though as great as “A Single Hope” is, its pop-ish touch points feel a tiny bit quaint and limited next to some of Centres’ grander highlights. The aforementioned “Contain” and “A Circle Without Having to Curve” each run 10 minutes and embrace all three of Craig’s three ingredients while providing drastic shifts in tone and feel, not unlike watching a raging snowstorm. “The Nearness” begins with a beautifully played accordion and Craig’s (near) naked voice—which comes across here as an earnest and better-trained Thom Yorke—before the song descends first under the envelopment of murky fog and then is consumed whole by a rippling field of distortion.
Much of the rest of Centres carries in a similar vein, but at times, Craig’s voice resurfaces to carry the listener back home. “Set to Lapse” lays his vocals on top of a bed flickering noise and wind. The organ-driven “Arrive, Arrive” plays like a Drowned God sea shanty. And winning album closer “Contain (Cedar Version)” is essentially the solo acoustic demo version of the album’s opener. The tone of his voice and the recording here surprisingly recalls Jason Molina’s on his acoustic demos of the tracks from Magnolia Electric Co., and as with those demos, “(Cedar Version)” provides a great closing counterpoint to the opening track.
They also serve as a gentle reminder of how beautiful Craig’s songwriting is, and that his talent is not in just manipulating waves of sound. Running at an overflowing seventy-three minutes, Centres initially seems like a near-formless sea of sound and voice. But over time, it reveals patterns inside the swirl, and the more time you spend in it, the further you will to get lost in its wondrous confines. | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 130701 | July 20, 2016 | 8.2 | 44f22eea-e42a-4381-a46a-71de5e633e1e | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
On a brightly colored pair of EPs, the UK musician builds upon the fantasy world he introduced on 2017’s Neō Wax Bloom: a cartoon universe characterized by digital overload. | On a brightly colored pair of EPs, the UK musician builds upon the fantasy world he introduced on 2017’s Neō Wax Bloom: a cartoon universe characterized by digital overload. | Iglooghost: Clear Tamei EP / Steel Mogu EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iglooghost-clear-tamei-ep-steel-mogu-ep/ | Clear Tamei EP / Steel Mogu EP | As Iglooghost, the British producer Seamus Malliagh has invented an entire fantasy world in which his music is the soundtrack to epic conflict among hypercolor cartoon characters. It's not an entirely novel idea—Gorillaz have played with a similar approach, though to radically different ends: Malliagh seems determined to throw the listener off balance, leaving it unclear how exactly one should meaningfully listen or dance to the music, or even how to engage with its fantastical narrative underpinnings. The tracks themselves are hyperactive, maximalist, and alien in a sharp and craggly kind of way, effervescent and menacing at the same time. Malliagh’s sound palette is both wacky and steely, poppy and industrial. But the most difficult thing to follow in Iglooghost’s music is the abrupt pacing, the unexpected and seemingly illogical buildups and drops, the aggressive rhythms that morph and jolt. Both in sound and composition Malliagh operates in exhausting, extended flurries.
A little less than a year removed from a debut album that introduced Iglooghost’s mythos and aesthetic, Malliagh has returned with a pair of EPs, Clear Tamei and Steel Mogu. On both he’s building upon the same world he introduced on Neō Wax Bloom, one that is fully fleshed out and occupied by fairy gods wearing cone-like hats and sentient bugs that zip across the landscape. The debut “was all based around the fact that the eyes of the god of Mamu had fallen out,” Malliagh recently explained to Fader. “Tamei is him when he’s a baby and training to be a god.”
The video for “Clear Tamei” is the first time Malliagh has been able to throw a bunch of money at the renderings and animations that interlock with his music. Besides the weird folklore, the visual aspect of Iglooghost’s output has always had appealing synesthetic qualities, the zany, ultragloss texture of his designs reflecting the frantic digital excess of his music. If you watch the video after listening to the song, which features Malliagh chant rapping in a mumbled gibberish over a shimmering landscape of pristine synths, the music kind of clicks, shifting the curiosity away from the sound and onto the absurdist world he’s invented.
With five songs each, Clear Tamei and Steel Mogu are bundled but opposing. As the hero’s soundtrack, Clear Tamei is showered in light and delicate electronic sounds that cut through the overwhelming density of Iglooghost’s music. Steel Mogu is dark, oppressive, and unrelenting. The blunt antagonism of the industrial sounds and breakcore rhythms on Steel Mogu, the anti-hero’s EP, are hardly a departure for Iglooghost, but the split release does segment the mood. The operatic trip-hop on Clear Tamei’s “New Vectors” is brimming with synths that creak, thwack, and shoot across the stage like laser beams, but there are also elements that sound like a soaring vocal or lush string section, or maybe the cry of an infant whose vocal chords have been transplanted with a MIDI pad. Steel Mogu doesn’t hint at any such comforts: “Mei Mode” thrashes around with weaponized 808s while “Niteracer” sounds like a whirling glitch. Listening to such dense and unpredictable music can feel both like a productivity-inducing adrenaline rush or a complete diversion.
Increasingly I’m convinced that Malliagh makes the type of music that happens to you, that turns your mind into a passive receptor and resists explication. Still, to listen to Iglooghost’s music is to marvel at and withstand its technical complexity, to be punched by it until you learn how to lean into the blow. At a recent basement show in West Philly, Malliagh’s headlining Iglooghost set was well received, but it also felt out of place on the dancefloor. His change-ups and breakdowns are too unpredictable and audacious to climb into and ride along with rhythmically, and his music is a sensory overload best confronted in headphones. A few days later, at the end of the short tour, he tweeted, “YO SO...I AM BORED OF JUST PRESSIN BUTTONS WHEN I PLAY LIVE” and announced plans to introduce props and giant costumes into his set. It seems like Malliagh has stumbled on something so weird and abrasive musically that he’s trying not just to extend the spectacle but also to interrogate its effects. He is asking of himself the same question he forces on his listeners: What am I supposed to do with this? It’s an exciting problem. | 2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | August 21, 2018 | 7.2 | 44f4ff32-f737-48a2-93c1-8002eefa9bbe | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The women on Half Free are indeed half free: They're prisoners to bad choices and duplicitous men, but they're starting to take control of their situation. The sound further fortifies the common ground between Meghan Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges, and the album sounds like your favorite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency. | The women on Half Free are indeed half free: They're prisoners to bad choices and duplicitous men, but they're starting to take control of their situation. The sound further fortifies the common ground between Meghan Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges, and the album sounds like your favorite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency. | U.S. Girls: Half Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20978-half-free/ | Half Free | Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child. But the really weird thing about it was—as Remy notes with a combination of embarrassment and pride—"I was kinda hot stuff. I mean, I don't know, I looked good—so it was kind of confusing." What follows is a brief conversation about the peculiar relationship dynamic between fathers and daughters compared to moms and sons—Remy's friend concludes that if she had been born a boy, she'd be "one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator," while Remy retorts, "instead of just another woman with no self-esteem." Her sardonic punchline is punctuated by a burst of canned sitcom laughter—and, much like that infamous Rodney Dangerfield scene in Natural Born Killers, the device elicits more squirms than chuckles.
But on Half Free, that bizarre exchange counts as comic relief. And even though this interlude—titled "Telephone Play No. 1"—appears just six minutes into the record, it's still a necessary respite. By that point, we've already heard from the unhappily married wife of a man who had previously bedded her two sisters ("Sororal Feelings"), and a widow grieving her soldier husband's death over a riotous reggae groove ("Damn That Valley"). And there are several more tales of women with no self-esteem to come—unflinching portraits of ladies reeling from inattentive, cheating, or absentee lovers. So the seemingly random appearance of "Telephone Play No. 1" actually makes more sense as the album plays out. It's simply a verbal manifestation of what Remy's proper songs do musically: take us into the spaces that are supposed to provide us with solace—home, family, relationships—and make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. (As the dejected narrator of "Sororal Feelings" declares through a deceptively sunny harmony: "Now I'm going to hang myself/ Hang myself from my family tree.")
Likewise, Remy's music has always thrived on the conflict between the familiar and foreign. On previous U.S. Girls releases, her pop and experimental sensibilities—part Shangri-Las, part Sun Ra—were often at war with one another. (Take 2011's U.S. Girls on KRAAK, where the Ronettes-style romp "State House (It's a Man's World)" gets rudely elbowed into the free-form subterranean skronk of "Sinkhole", as if two opposing spirits were fighting for control of Remy's soul.) But, by building upon the grotto-bound R&B introduced on 2013's Free Advice Column EP (whose hip-hop-schooled producer, Onakabazien, returns here), Half Free further fortifies the common ground between Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges. The album sounds like your favourite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency, seamlessly fusing '60s-vintage girl-group serenades and smooth '70s disco into dubby panoramas and horror-movie atmospherics.
But even as its backdrop mutates from deep-house throbs to psych-rock guitar solos, Half Free always focuses your attention to where it should be: on Remy's radiant voice and vivid storytelling. She's the sort of songwriter who can set a 3D scene in a single line that simmers with suggestion—the first words we hear on the record are "Well there were a four of us in a real small space/ Sharing more than just a family name," and you can immediately feel all the humidity and unease hanging in the room. The cinematically scaled production on Half Free only intensifies the domestic dramas playing out within her lyrics: the steady, string-swept build of disco reverie "Window Shades" mirrors the emotional breakthrough of its protagonist, a woman scorned who finally summons the courage to confront her philandering partner; the drizzling, slow-percolating beat of "Red Comes in Many Shades" provides the gray-skied ambience for Remy's tale of a doomed affair with an older paramour, all while her "tears fall like rain." And though "Sed Knife"—an upbeat power-pop revision of a 2012 B-side—may seem like an outlier here, its images of kitchen-table tensions fit right into the album's theme.
The women at the center of these songs are indeed half free: they're prisoners to bad choices, cruel circumstances, and duplicitous men—but they're starting to take control of their situation. And with the epic closer "Woman's Work", Remy leaves them with a neon-tinted, mirror-ball-twirling anthem to herald their impending liberation. "You arrived in your mother's arms/ But you will leave riding in a black limousine," Remy seethes at a departing ex who's off to live the high life—or the afterlife—without her, but the defiance in her voice suggests she's richer for it. "A woman's work is never done/ She doesn't sleep 'til the morning comes," chimes the Greek chorus behind her—and when applied to a creatively restless, audacious voice like Remy, it sounds less like a complaint than a promise. | 2015-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | September 23, 2015 | 8 | 44fb83c9-a821-4cdd-ba8f-c48b2cc294f9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Kurt Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. The album moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. | Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Kurt Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. The album moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. | Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17851-kurt-vile-wakin-on-a-pretty-daze/ | Wakin on a Pretty Daze | The concept of samsara, one of the Buddha's four noble truths, holds that all beings are trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Fueled by internal struggle, we turn along an endless wheel of suffering, passing through untold lives in our never-ending quest for enlightenment. Some meditate upon this truth for years; Kurt Vile, on "Life's a Beach", nailed it for us in two mumbled words: "Life's awhile."
Vile's music has exuded this unique stoner-Yoda wisdom from the very beginning, even if you weren't searching for it. His sound-- warm, unhurried, and spacious-- doesn't demand close focus, but one of the joys of being pulled into Vile's lonely, contented universe is in discovering that he is muttering sharply self-aware things to himself. It adds another layer to Vile's appeal; seduced by the soothing, watery-blue glimmer of that sound, which promised to make you feel like the only human in the universe, you slowly realized there's actually one other guy here, and he's kind of a wiseass.
Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. It opens, literally, with a stretch and a yawn: On the (almost) title track "Wakin on a Pretty Day", a wah'ed guitar rubs the grit out of its eyes while Vile beholds his furiously ringing phone with clinical detachment: "Phone ringing off the shelf/ I guess somebody has something they really wanna prove to us today," he notes. Unperturbed, he moves along, concerned with something far more pressing: "I gotta figure out what kind of wisecrack I'm gonna drop along the way -- today." The music quickens for a beat or two at this prospect, but settles back down. In Vile's universe, there is time enough for everything.
Accordingly, Wakin on a Pretty Daze moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. Songs unfurl for six, or seven, or eight minutes without peaking dynamically or changing; the tangle of finger-picked guitars on "Was All Talk" queue up like synth presets that Vile just lets roll. On most songs, four or five chords cycle for minutes on end, echoing upward into the record's warm room tone. "Pure Pain" shifts between stomping, hard acoustic chording and two wide-open billowing finger-picked chords that simply hang while Vile muses: "Every time I look out my window/ All my emotions they are speeding/ Zip through the highways in my head." It can be occasionally frustrating to interact with a piece of music so fundamentally unconcerned with interaction, but like anything worth truly loving, Wakin on a Pretty Daze opens up slowly. The music, and the act of loving it, are exercises in patience. Or, as Vile puts it sagely on "Too Hard": "Take your time, so they say, and that's probably the best way to be."
Vile's releases are small variations on each other, and discerning the differences between them comes down to intangibles, things that are difficult to point to: The fact that he only yelps his little "Woo!" twice on "Shame Chamber" the first time around, for instance, indicating his bone-deep understanding that two "woos," for now, are plenty. Or the way the silvery guitar leads snake through the album without ever assuming the foreground, murmuring things that reward attention in the same way Vile's lyrics do. The way the drums nudge gently into the title refrain on "Girl Called Alex", and how Vile's "I wanna-" is abruptly cut off by a stinging guitar; these details, small by themselves, offer accumulated testimony to Vile's mastery of his world. Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.
"Sometimes when I get in my zone, you'd think I was stoned, but I never as they say 'touch that stuff,' " Vile sings, with a hint of mockery, on Wakin's closer "Goldtone." The song is stunning, a desert island of Kurt Viledom. Ever since Vile signed to Matador, his music has grown warmer and more expansive as he receded further into the privacy of his own mind: On Smoke Ring for My Halo's "Ghost Town," he crooned gently, "I think I'm never gonna leave my couch again/ Cuz when I'm out, I'm only in my mind." "Goldtone," and all of Wakin on a Pretty Daze, feels like the culmination of Vile's quest to get away from people, noises, civilization and find somewhere to sit and whistle his own tune. If Kurt Vile could paint a storybook Heaven, it would look like "Goldtone", and he signs it with his most poetic, self-aware koan ever: "I might be adrift but I'm still alert/ Concentrate my hurt into a gold tone." A guitar pushes a wispy cirrus cloud across the sky, sea-blue chimes glitter, and Vile mumbles his way into the sunset. | 2013-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 10, 2013 | 8.5 | 44fda51e-30db-45bb-a8cc-0912b01e5220 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
On LCD's third LP, James Murphy applies his knowledge of post-punk and studio craft to remake 70s art-rock in his own hyper-modern, self-aware image. | On LCD's third LP, James Murphy applies his knowledge of post-punk and studio craft to remake 70s art-rock in his own hyper-modern, self-aware image. | LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14257-this-is-happening/ | This Is Happening | While discussing the burden of influence in 2005, James Murphy told us, "The Strokes are swimming up some incredibly serious stuff: Velvet Underground. Television. It's kinda soul-crushing in a way to listen to 'Perfect Day' and say, 'I'm gonna go write a song like that,' and it'll be fucking horrible by comparison." At that point, the Strokes had yet to squander their leather-clad, LES cool, and LCD Soundsystem were still, mostly, a Williamsburg blip. But over the past five years, things changed. Drastically. In 2010, early aughts trendsetters like Interpol and the Strokes are NYC relics, outpaced by a gang of stridently preppy, chart-topping Columbia grads and a 40-year-old Brian Eno obsessive. On This Is Happening, Murphy once again shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of all things post-punk and zip-tight. But he's also swimming up some serious stuff himself, including Eno and David Bowie's sacrosanct Berlin trilogy. And against his own prediction, it's far from horrible; it's actually pretty perfect.
"I spent my whole life wanting to be cool... but I've come to realize that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed," said Murphy in a recent Guardian feature. This realization probably has something to do with his rising cultural cache. After all, Murphy has done what all other music fiends only dream about-- he's flipped the system and become the embodiment of coolness. This is a phenomenal coup. And he's quick to rationalize his current status to the New Yorker: "I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool I can't control that."
It's somewhat ironic, then, that Murphy's reign as New York's ambassador of post-hip-everything finds him nearly losing his cool on This Is Happening. His early singles and first album were him joking to himself, Sound of Silver was a collective rush of us vs. them, and now it's about him and her. This is also by far the bloodiest LCD Soundsystem album-- a series of bare, lacerating manifestos about distance between people, set to the fizzing art/dance-rock greatest hits inside Murphy's skull. "Love is a murderer," he sings on "I Can Change". He's not kidding.
On the hypnotic dirge "Somebody's Calling Me", the vocal chameleon tries on narcotic whispers while taking Iggy Pop's sleazy, empty-eyed "Nightclubbing" out of the club and into the bedroom. And though "All I Want" borrows that sliding Bowie guitar and kraut-y beat, Murphy makes it singe with his own tour-born regret, loss, and fatigue: "You learn in your bed you've been gone for too long/ So you put in the time, but it's too late to make it strong." Even considering his bold-name touchstones for This Is Happening, it would be shortsighted to cry rip-off; Murphy is remaking essential 70s art-rock in his own hyper-modern, self-aware image.
This fearlessness burrows its way into the rest of the album, making it more of a self-help guide to relationship hangovers than a woe-is-me fest. Opener "Dance Yrself Clean" starts quiet and stuffed with circular paranoia: "Talking like a jerk except you are an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean," Murphy mumbles to himself. "All My Friends" this is not. But then a massive, meaty synth expands the speakers, lifts the singer up, and plops him down smack in the middle of the dancefloor. LCD Soundsystem has always excelled at making sounds for moving bodies, but now that motion is more entangled with other, less exuberant emotions. Potentially misguided frat anthem "Drunk Girls" is a punchline-laden lark that ends with, "Be honest with me, honestly/ Unless it hurts my feelings." On earlier records, Murphy could sound like he didn't really mean it while hollering on the fly, but This Is Happening confirms him as a top-tier vocalist and lyricist capable of mixing heavy and light, lyrical and self-deprecating, sometimes in the same line: "Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry... and this is coming from me."
Murphy's vast perspective and all-knowing mien are invaluable assets to his success. Recorded in L.A. instead of his hometown, This Is Happening finds the unlikely rock star zooming out even further in search of the realness and truth mentioned on the album's "music about writing music" track "You Wanted a Hit". And on the virtuoso rambler "Pow Pow", he seems to locate a perch where he can "relax" and "see the whole place" and understand "advantages to both" sides of any argument. Sounds nice. But by the end of the song, he's beset by confusion, numbness, and a false sense of security. "What you want from now is someone to feel you," he croons. At first, Murphy showed how to let loose without losing your cool; now he's figuring out how to break down without cracking up. | 2010-05-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin / Parlophone / DFA | May 17, 2010 | 9.2 | 44fed221-ffde-4df9-b070-7a695427af6a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Awful Records kingpin Father exploded onto the Atlanta scene with last year's effortless, maddeningly catchy single "Look at Wrist", and on his new surprise album, he offers party music about girls and drugs and fights that is deeper than it initially lets on. | Awful Records kingpin Father exploded onto the Atlanta scene with last year's effortless, maddeningly catchy single "Look at Wrist", and on his new surprise album, he offers party music about girls and drugs and fights that is deeper than it initially lets on. | Father: Who's Gonna Get Fucked First? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20413-whos-gonna-get-fucked-first/ | Who's Gonna Get Fucked First? | "New Atlanta," a concept propagated mostly by blogs to organize the riches of rap's constantly evolving, intimidatingly prolific capital city, entails a yearly changing of the guard. In just the last handful of years, we’ve seen Future take the mantle and inspire a school of hoarse, melody-driven imitators, only to be phased out by adlib-happy hit machines like Migos, yawping innovators like Young Thug, and precocious party-starters Rae Sremmurd. There’s a loose formula: Get acquainted with local hit-making producers like Zaytoven, Metro Boomin, the 808 Mafia crew; get a hit on the strip club circuit and local airwaves; collaborate extensively and pump out free projects hosted by the mixtape DJ of favor; maybe sign a 360 deal. The formula works, and has pumped out a lot of great, occasionally cutting-edge rap music.
But it’s not the only way to find success in Atlanta, as Awful Records’ kingpin Father has proved. His effortless-sounding, maddeningly catchy single "Look at Wrist" exploded on to the scene last summer, turning dancefloors into cooking dance mosh pits nationwide without so much as a DJ Holiday drop. Along with peers iLoveMakonnen and Key! (conveniently, the single’s two featured artists), he’s part of the latest iteration of "New Atlanta," broadly characterized for their DIY ethos and rough-around-the-edges minimalism. And while Makonnen quickly became the scene’s most visible constituent, Father’s been proving himself as its most consistent member. Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?, a 12-song blast that dropped unannounced last week, is his strongest project yet, and a flag planted firmly in the soil of rap’s current epicenter. He reminds us that with good ideas and confidence in your own vision, you don’t need to play by any rules but your own.
"Look at Wrist", the song that put Awful on the map, came with a hilarious subtext that almost didn’t register because of its hypnotizing repetition. "Never had to whip a brick, but I get the gist" felt like meta-commentary on middle American rap fans’ investment in trap lingo with a total remove from the lifestyle. Father wasn’t moralizing—we’re all just trying to have fun here—but this wry, knowing wink consistently informs his work, even in the midst of the turn-up. This is music that’s deceptively simple, that’s deeper than it lets on.
The SoundCloud description of Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First? states its intent plainly: "32-mins of pure, unfiltered debauchery." This is party music about girls and drugs and fights, over efficient beats with lots of empty space. The unprintable title might give some initial pause, but it fits. Even more than partying, this is an album about sex—weird, freaky, intoxicated, potentially group sex—but also, consensual, mutually pleasurable, and age-appropriate. Father handles the topic with a maturity and egalitarianism that feels revelatory, resulting in the most sex-positive rap release of the year. On "Vamp", in the midst of frothing come-ons, Father reminds his paramour, "You have a right to all your choices." "Morena", featuring Awful members Stalin Majesty and Abra, riffs on Big Pun and Joe in an adoring homage to women of color. (Elsewhere, Abra—one of Awful’s two female members—steals the show on bratty, hater-baiting flex "Gurl".) And on album highlight "BET Uncut", Richposlim delivers a strong candidate for best guest verse of 2015, clowning slut-shaming men into submission: "I say she’s sexually liberated! You call her ass a ho." It’s one of many sharp insights hidden in plain sight amid the Henny-guzzling and pill-popping.
Where so much Atlanta rap of the last half decade has been indebted to crunk, Father seems more inspired by snap music, the subgenre that tore up mid-2000s parties with ringtone-friendly 808s, finger-snaps, and raucous dance instructionals. The sound requires a rare sort of magnetism, one that can command a room without seeming to try, a quality Father has in spades. Jermaine Dupri’s label So So Def also looms over the project, and Father even references So So Def one-hit wonder J Kwon on bow-throwing, drink-sloshing two-minute cut "Everybody in the Club Gettin Shot".
But Father’s primary influence isn’t from Atlanta (or, arguably, from this plane of existence) at all: He has always shown a clear debt to Lil B, less in sound than in based spirit. He nods to him directly on grimy cut "Read Her Lips", one of three KeithCharles Spacebar-produced tracks here, with the hook: "First I go on tour, then I fuck my bitch." But the album’s basedness—its oddly memorable turns of phrase, sincere devotion to the absurd and mundane, and purposefully sketchy, homemade quality—feels like a logical extension of a brain raised on bugged-out cartoons, anime, and the infinite rabbit hole of the Internet. Father was a visual artist before coming around to rap, and has cited a childhood fascination with "Rocko's Modern Life" and other '90s cartoons informed by acid trips and dirty jokes—stuff with a visceral appeal for children, but a snarky, debauched subtext for adults. It’s the same ethos that turns even the most seemingly straightforward Father tracks slightly askew.
With the exception of the KeithCharles Spacebar contributions, Father handles the production of the album himself. His style is aggressively minimal, leaving him room to experiment with rhythm and timing to better effect. It’s the ideal canvas for lines that embed themselves into your subconscious for days, the stuff you catch yourself mumbling into the mirror while brushing the Henny aftertaste off your teeth. And Father’s wry, casual lyricism is sharp and often loaded with insights, capable of doing a lot with a little. On the excellent "Back in the "A" Freestyle/On It", Father sets a hilarious scene with just three simple lines: "Run up on me, leave you looking like Eddie Winslow/ In that episode when he got his ass beat/ Take my niggas, then cash out at the Zaxby’s." He then insists on buying lunch for the whole squad. Friends, fights, and fast food: It might not be what you’ve come to expect from the hallowed grounds of "New Atlanta," but Father’s never played by those rules anyway. | 2015-03-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Awful | March 25, 2015 | 7.7 | 4508e3a5-2091-435b-9e42-6c80d9211add | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Like his scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, the Radiohead guitarist’s soundtrack to Jane Campion’s new film invokes the 20th-century avant-garde, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy. | Like his scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, the Radiohead guitarist’s soundtrack to Jane Campion’s new film invokes the 20th-century avant-garde, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy. | Jonny Greenwood: The Power of the Dog (Music From the Netflix Film) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonny-greenwood-the-power-of-the-dog-music-from-the-netflix-film/ | The Power of the Dog (Music From the Netflix Film) | If you don’t know what Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog is about, here’s a fun experiment: Try to guess its genre based on the music by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the chief classical aficionado in the world’s most respected rock band. Made using a chamber ensemble of piano, strings, winds, brass, and more, the soundtrack is quite grand, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy, all in a sternly beautiful modernist mode. These 16 brief yet substantial themes run over darkly lustrous slopes and ominous plains, with each landscape seeming to spill into the other. Their uneasy but graceful unity even accommodates the occasional starchy old avant-garde outburst. It’s all very 20th century and fine and European. Now, raise your hand if you guessed the film’s a Western. No one?
The clever thing is that once you know, you can hear it everywhere in Greenwood’s score: in the cantering acoustic guitar trail laid through sharp-peaked strings on “25 Years,” in the brass that evokes a harmonica’s call and fall on “Requiem for Phil,” and even in the chromatic enfilades of “Detuned Mechanical Piano,” which suddenly seems less like Conlon Nancarrow and more like a player piano running amok in a saloon. Throughout, Greenwood uses the steeliest points of the classical canon to carve canyons and buttes into the hard, treacherous shape of a psychological metaphor.
Of course, this is not his first rodeo, in several senses. Greenwood has scored many films, particularly for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like the latter’s There Will Be Blood, Campion’s movie is also set in the American West at the moment when its physical frontiers began blurring into legend. That score superficially resembles Greenwood’s music for The Power of the Dog, though it was more busily cinematic, grandiose—and, yes, stereotypically masculine.
The Power of the Dog marks Campion’s return to cinema after 12 years and a stint in prestige TV with Top of the Lake, a chilly crime drama set in her native New Zealand. Though her filmography is merrily idiosyncratic, she’s especially known for reviving the romance of Old Hollywood period dramas with incisive contemporary characterization, and with the perspectival benefits of not being some cigar-chomping man. She also seems drawn to the pungent tidepools of humanity that form on the borderlands of the social and the wild.
In The Piano, Campion’s 1993 breakthrough, a woman with a daughter marries a landowner in a remote part of mid-19th-century New Zealand. In The Power of the Dog, a woman with a son marries a rancher in a remote part of early-20th-century Montana, unleashing the havoc of feeling into the manful, stunted world he inhabits with his brother. Throughout, Greenwood’s music mirrors the counterintuitive sensuousness and sophistication of Campion’s casting (extra credit if you guessed Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead cowboy); he cultivates a consistent sense of disturbed introversion through the plosive box step of “Prelude,” the reaching brass tendrils of “The Ravine,” and other tinctures of wonder and dread.
In a way, Radiohead have always been a postmodern prog-rock band, with sleeker taste and different tech than their ’70s forebears, but with a similar interest in smuggling Stravinsky and Messiaen into popular music. Greenwood must be the only artist who has both headlined Coachella and collaborated with Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose turbulent tone clusters he often evokes in The Power of the Dog. When those shivers course through the strings, it might be the cry of night-veiled coyotes or a wail at the edge where one world ends and another begins. That double image perfectly exemplifies Greenwood’s own synthesis of pulp-Western brawn and refined symphonic emotion.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Lakeshore | November 27, 2021 | 6.8 | 450d99ef-c5e0-4c4f-9cd7-f80ff286135d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
D.C. rapper's "What the..?" concept-- an album-length riff on Seinfeld that incorporates snippets of dialogue from famous episodes and an endearingly goofy "drop" by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss -- surprisingly leads to a solid record filled with wit and ideas. | D.C. rapper's "What the..?" concept-- an album-length riff on Seinfeld that incorporates snippets of dialogue from famous episodes and an endearingly goofy "drop" by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss -- surprisingly leads to a solid record filled with wit and ideas. | Wale: The Mixtape About Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11963-the-mixtape-about-nothing/ | The Mixtape About Nothing | "The underground just spun around and did a 360!" When Eminem spit this rhyme in 2000 on The Marshall Mathers LP, he was, as usual, talking about himself, but I imagine the line must sound depressingly prophetic to circa-2008 underground rappers surveying the last eight years. In a strikingly short time, all of the mutually understood rules of independent rap's mid-to-late-90s golden age have been overturned, rendered obsolete by a combination of shifting critical opinion and the democratizing bulldozer of the internet, and indie-rappers have been struggling to gain footing in their bewildering new landscape ever since. Criticizing mainstream hip-hop's misogyny, violence, and materialism, for instance, once meant approving, pat-on-the-head reviews from mainstream rock publications like Rolling Stone and SPIN. These days, it is the quickest route to being derided as a self-righteous "backpack rapper," a term that has soured into a reflexive sneer.
In short, things just ain't the same for (non)gangstas, and any rapper who finds himself uncomfortable inventing a storied criminal past has learned to step carefully. D.C. rapper Wale (pronounced Wah-LAY, as he carefully points out early on) is all too aware of these potential pitfalls, and on his expertly crafted, exuberantly witty, and endlessly surprising new Mixtape About Nothing, he makes an art out of high-stepping lightly through a minefield. "An iPod mind to you Walkman guys," he calls himself at one point, and the adeptness of the rhyme matches the neatness of the distinction. Throughout the tape, Wale displays an almost Road Runner-like ability to evade classification. "I ain't a street nigga, but my niggas is some," he rhymes on "The End Credits", adding later, "I'm not a Muslim; my grandmomma was one." He likens stylistic comparisons to Lil Wayne and Lupe Fiasco to being "locked in a box," lamenting, "We apples and oranges, but everybody pair us." The endless self-positioning might seem obsessive, but Wale instinctively understands that categorization means the death of a three-dimensional personality, and he is determined not to be easily dismissed.
He has succeeded. On The Mixtape About Nothing, Wale emerges fully-formed as a rapper and as a thinker, a lightning-witted, irreverent guy blessed with both an infectious swagger and a sound moral compass-- twin gifts that enable him to accomplish some of the mixtape's most audacious feats. The central conceit, for example, might read on paper like nothing more than white-boy bait: as the title suggests, it's an album-length riff on Seinfeld that incorporates snippets of dialogue from famous episodes and features an endearingly goofy "drop" by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ("Don't you think my kids are gonna think I'm so cool that I'm on this mixtape?? Mothafucka!!") But Wale's genuine love for the show rescues the venture from drowning in cheap irony. On the disarmingly earnest love song "The Grown Up", after Wale confesses, "I gotta be a man before I can become a father," the voices of George Constanza and Jerry weigh in like some Manhattanite take on the Greek chorus: "We're like children! We're not men! We find all these stupid little reasons to break up with these women!" The slyly perceptive joke-- that men of all classes and races shrink equally fearfully from the demands of adulthood-- only hints at the sort of unexpected emotional resonance Wale manages to mine from his unlikely setup.
Indeed, by effortlessly flipping this source material, Wale proves that there is almost no topic he can't handle. Rapping in a blaring voice oddly reminiscent of Rich Boy, he comes across equally funny and engaging complaining about Soundscan, illegal downloads, and "ringtone rappers" as he does while gleefully comparing his bank account to "brunch at a synagogue." When he tackles trickier issues-- mainstream hip-hop's prevailing misogyny and violence, for instance-- he demonstrates an uncanny knack for seeing all sides of the argument without losing his footing.
On the masterful "The Manipulation", he flips with frightening and instructive ease between unctuous, Common-style lover-man and the vilest Pimp C-style misogynist. "The Kramer", meanwhile, builds from the still-sickening audio of Michael Richards screaming racial epithets at nightclub patrons into the most thoughtful examination of the insoluble problem of the prevalence of the word "nigga" in rap music in years. "A nigga write 'nigga' in his lyric/ Expects a white boy to omit it/ The white boy spit it like he spit it/ Recite it to his friends-- who by the way, ain't niggas." The white friends "incorporate the lyric into their everyday living," until a black friend eventually overhears them. He lets it slide-- "it's so insignificant and little"-- and soon: "The things they say went a little too far/ He couldn't tell the difference between 'a' or '-er'/ So they just kept saying 'nigga' to his face/ There's nothing he can do/ He let it get away/ It came to the point he couldn't look them in the face."
No matter Wale's tone-- sternly critical or goofy, reflective or boastful-- the coursing music maintains a joyful momentum. Most of the original beats on the tape come from the D.C. production collective Best Kept Secret, who punctuate straightforward throwback-rap tracks with rattling bongos and woodblocks borrowed from D.C.'s go-go scene. But, just to show us he can, Wale also runs circles around the Roots' "Star" beat, the "Roc Boys" instrumental, and Shawty Redd-style synthesizers alongside Lil Wayne on "The Cliché Lil Wayne Feature". Wale is fully aware of his potential-- "Hip hop heads see a new day, and I is one," he proclaims near the end of the tape-- but he also squirms away from coronation as the next great hope, a label as constricting as any other. "You see, kings get killed, or at least overthrown," he notes on "The Vacation From Ourselves". His "mixtape about nothing" is really a mixtape about almost everything, and with it Wale has produced one of the year's most improbable and inspiring successes. | 2008-07-29T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-07-29T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 29, 2008 | 8.4 | 450f2be9-f0a9-4695-894c-89f6acb73eaa | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Recorded at home on his mother’s laptop, Barely March’s debut album is a scrappy, tuneful album of post-breakup self-deprecation that recognizes the absurdity of wallowing in your own bullshit. | Recorded at home on his mother’s laptop, Barely March’s debut album is a scrappy, tuneful album of post-breakup self-deprecation that recognizes the absurdity of wallowing in your own bullshit. | Barely March: Marely Barch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/barely-march-marely-barch/ | Marely Barch | Publicly available information on Barely March’s debut album is scant, and all of it points to a creation myth of profound tragicomedy. If we take his lyrics at face value, Chris Keough got dumped in December and spent the rest of the winter writing songs about feeling like a total fucking loser and recording them on his mother’s laptop. The album’s rescue from the #pop-punk and #emo voids of Bandcamp is no more glamorous: Marely Barch was remastered on cassette by Telethon, who released a tuneful and stupefyingly ambitious five-act “powerpoppoppunk” opera in 2017 that was almost completely ignored by critics; they had found Barely March on a Facebook group for a Jeff Rosenstock covers compilation. This wildly dorky origin story suits Marely Barch: It’s an album of teenage self-deprecation that simultaneously recognizes the absurdity of wallowing in your own bullshit. It’s also an impeccably written Brief History of Long Island Punk, a genre that happens to be one of the best possible musical vehicles to express these exact emotions.
But Keough can’t help using the immediate tactics of a shitposter: the spoonerized album title; the three thinking-face emojis tacked onto a song called “thinking emoji”; the album cover. Clearly he was going to use “Mambo No. 6” and “Live Fast, Cy Young” as titles regardless of their content. At the very least, they’re of a piece with the truth-in-advertising of “My Life, in Shambles” and “Nervous as I’ll Ever Be.” “Surf Wax Antarctica” is the most tidy summation of Keough’s m.o., nodding to both a very obvious influence and another, less obvious one. “The voice on the TV reminds me that I am just so cowardly,” he yelps before quoting the most Know Your Meme moment from the relatively obscure Cartoon Network show “Courage the Cowardly Dog”: “Return the slab.”
The latter song is also a tidy summation of Marely Barch’s musical charms: Guitar Center glam metal on a Craiglist budget, falsetto whoops, and hyper-referential lyrics relating an emotional death march on Long Island’s Porcelain Beach. This is a record made in complete obscurity in a style whose gender dynamics are under more scrutiny than ever, and he’s mighty generous with this kind of emo melodrama. But getting dumped is totally fucking awful and Marely Barch is a tribute to those times when adult shit like perspective and forgiveness just aren’t gonna cut it. More importantly, it proves one can ingloriously self-immolate without taking anyone else down in the flames. Like the breakup albums that extend beyond their blast radius, the emotions are raw and real enough for the narrator to be relatable, while leaving open the likely possibility that you’ll end up taking the other party’s side. “I’m so stack overflow, the definition of insanity,” he admits, quick with a joke and clearly in touch with his emotions yet also unable to remove himself from his lifeless phone, his apartment, and, during “My Life, in Shambles,” even his shower.
Keough is too demoralized to demand you respect the confidence and craft of a genre that can barely look itself in the mirror, so he just earns it instead. “Magnolia, where have all the good times gone?” he yells in “Thinking Emoji,” honoring the lineage of emo bands attaching proper nouns to their longing with one of many hooks explicitly designed for raising a Schlitz before a tear falls in it. “Wrote a song in 6/8 time/Like that B side that you said you liked,” he sings in “As Nervous as I’ll Ever Be,” even as he’s dealing with grand, finely structured melodic gestures that recall “Killer Queen” as much as Weezer’s A game. As far as pop-punk and emo go, he kids because he loves: “Mambo No. 6” follows a model of dramatic introductory tracks and disarms it with a run of finger-tapping. Listen to a Hopeless or Fearless band and the drums sound like synth presets anyway, so Keough takes advantage of his recording limitations, using the rigidity of drum machines to give his music house-like propulsion or textural shifts, turning the percussive fills of “Thinking Emoji” into blasts of streaming static before it drops out into a coda of chopped and screwed channel surfing.
The most carefully chosen moment of Marely Barch ends up being the one that got it discovered in the first place. “Bonus Oceans” is a Jeff Rosenstock cover taken from I Look Like Shit, a collection of home recordings from 2010-2012, when Bomb the Music Industry! was winding down. Maybe Rosenstock’s comprehensive State of the Union albums are more depressing, but “Bonus Oceans” is his most desperate song: Shamed by a shitty restaurant job, exhausted by the futility of “Remember when?,” he wonders if he’d be better off getting cancer or shot so he could revert back to a childlike state of having other people care for him. It’s a testament to both Keough’s hooky songwriting and his cratered emotional state that the chorus could pass for his own: “If you don’t die young, you’re gonna live too long.” A tremendously affecting song, “Bonus Oceans” is a footnote in Rosenstock’s catalog, but it’s exactly where Keough is at right now: He might be ready to take on the world, if he can just leave his apartment first. | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Halloween | May 12, 2018 | 7.5 | 451098ea-162c-45ba-b277-dc186370b816 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Scrapped in 1977, the original Chrome Dreams is one of rock's great lost records; 30 years later, Neil Young has decided that his new album is a sequel to that career enigma, referencing a chapter only his most dedicated fans would know about. | Scrapped in 1977, the original Chrome Dreams is one of rock's great lost records; 30 years later, Neil Young has decided that his new album is a sequel to that career enigma, referencing a chapter only his most dedicated fans would know about. | Neil Young: Chrome Dreams II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10792-chrome-dreams-ii/ | Chrome Dreams II | The original Chrome Dreams contained some of Neil Young's most enduring electric blowouts and most somber, stirring folk-rock. That is, it would have, had it ever come out. Scrapped in 1977, Chrome Dreams has earned a place alongside Smile and Lifehouse in the Pantheon of Lost Albums, a puzzle for obsessive fans and bootleggers to try and reconstruct. Fortunately, the record was thoroughly stripped for parts, and among its 12 songs, classics "Like a Hurricane" and "Pocahontas" popped up on other Young albums.
So now, 30 years later, Young has decided his new album is a sequel to that career enigma, referencing a chapter only his most dedicated fans would know about. Why? The fuck if I know. Part of Young's charm and continued credibility is that he's grown more inscrutable as his hair has grayed, the opposite trajectory of most of his Rock Hall of Fame peers. After his brush with death in 2005, one might have expected the singer-songwriter to slow down, or at least write a bunch of grim songs about mortality-- this is, after all, the guy who was singing about getting old when he was 24. But instead, Young has sped up his work rate and zagged at every opportunity, quick-fire releasing the ambitious Nashville throwback Prairie Wind and the hurried, furious Living With War.
Chrome Dreams II is less conceptually consistent than those two records; the family resemblance to its predecessor may simply be a matter of their shared scattershot approach. Indulging a grab-bag of styles and dusting off some long-shelved unreleased tracks, the record veers from Hallmark-card country to lite-soul throwbacks to Rust Never Sleeps-like garage rock. This variety might be distracting, were Young not so firmly loyal to the overarching production sound and band collaborators he's kept over the last ten years, with only his recent fondness for choral backing vocals doing much to distinguish it from his earlier work.
Strange then that the album's centerpiece, the 18-minute novella "Ordinary People", was actually recorded during Young's notorious 1980s identity disorder; it's a holdover from his 1988 r&b dalliance This Note's for You. Obviously, a song with a runtime that impressive necessitates the use of terms like "sprawling" and "epic," and it is pretty impressive, its 20 verses providing a stack of snapshots of life for drug dealers, assembly line workers, and the homeless between zealous horn and guitar solos. It aims to be the Band's "The Weight", and while it doesn't quite reach those lofty heights, it's a solid working-class anthem, despite the staleness of references to Lee Iacocca and boxing as an important cultural event.
In the shadow of "Ordinary People", the rest of Chrome Dreams II sounds a bit wispy-- particularly the surprisingly adult-contempo, over-sentimental "Beautiful Bluebird" and "Shining Light". The faux Motown of "The Believer" is a little bit better, but somewhat reminiscent of 2002's Are You Passionate?, an uncomfortable lowlight of late-period Neil. Matched up against the raw, solemn acoustic classics-- "Will to Love", "Star of Bethlehem"-- of the original Chrome, it's telling how far Neil's ability to sculpt his quieter material into something haunting rather than hokey has faded with age.
But the electric numbers, both the compact "Spirit Road" and the extended knee-bend workout of "No Hidden Path", still ripple with vitality, even though they feature only one-third of Crazy Horse. Neither match the furious beauty of "Like a Hurricane", and "Dirty Old Man" might be a pale imitation of the raucous "Sedan Delivery," but it's still thrilling to hear Young getting his aggression out, letting the undiminished fury of his guitar tone saw off the shackles of age.
Whether the album title is Young seriously trying to reconnect to a specific moment of his past or perhaps simply making an inside joke, it's an apt demonstration that he can still shapeshift with the best of them. But while Neil Young's self-fractionation abilities are intact, the low hit to miss ratio of Chrome Dreams II is proof that not all of those personae are still quite as functional as they once were, around the time of Chapter One. Though having one good trick in the bag keeps him from becoming a mere oldies jukebox like so many other 40-year rock vets, the sampler platter of Chrome Dreams II suggests his renowned versatility, by comparison to its cult-classic ancestor, ain't what it used to be. | 2007-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | October 17, 2007 | 5.6 | 45130135-10b9-4b82-8ec1-373c9449fb6e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Aimée Collet Argote's ever-shifting project releases an engaging, incisive album of compelling contradictions and frictions. | Aimée Collet Argote's ever-shifting project releases an engaging, incisive album of compelling contradictions and frictions. | Various Artists: Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15418-dont-rock-the-boat-sink-the-fucker/ | Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker | Des Ark started as a queercore duo 10 years ago, releasing their first LP, Loose Lips Sink Ships, in 2005. Since its inception, the band has remained in a state of flux, with members coming and going almost on a show-by-show basis. The mainstay has been Aimée Collet Argote, a guitar player and songwriter currently based in Philadelphia. She spent nearly four years recording her second full-length, and one would imagine that would give her plenty of time to think up a better album title than Don't Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker.
There is a curious incongruity between the presentation of the music and the music itself on Fucker. Scribbled across a radiant photo of Argote, that title suggests a bumper sticker more than an album, and "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)" and "Bonne Chance, Asshole" don't sound like songs called "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)" and "Bonne Chance, Asshole". Anyone expecting agitprop mallpunk or ironic cowpunk covers may be surprised by the shimmery pop sound of Fucker, which creates a dynamic, often dense sound out of a minimum of instruments.
This is an album of compelling contradictions and frictions. Argote is an especially forthcoming songwriter, penning incisive and cutting lyrics about female relationships that range from self-destructive ("I was fucking every girl who looked my way") to accusatory ("when you find a lover that you want to keep, I think you'll talk to her first, before you tell her you don't love her"). She bares her soul on the lyrics sheet, yet sings and mixes her vocals as if to obscure her words, often bending her syllables or burying them in the mix. Rather than alienating, however, the tactic proves engaging, as she makes the listener lean into the music and work to decipher it.
Most of the time it's well worth the effort, as Argote and her collaborators-- including guitar player Noah Howard and drummer Ashley Arnwine-- capture a loud sort of quiet, emphasizing the softer passages to give the abrasive moments more weight. It's most effective on "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)", which begins with a gentle acoustic theme that repeats throughout the song. By the end, it has changed completely simply by juxtaposition to other melodies and motifs, and all the elements come together for an unexpectedly poignant finale. "Howard's Hour of Shower" is so spare that you can hear the speaker buzz behind her chiming guitars and vocals. On the other hand, "It's Only a Bargain If You Want It" churns stridently as the instruments grind against each other and Argote sings, "You will always be my girl." It's both reassuring and menacing-- a promise and a threat.
Listening to Fucker, it's difficult to discern Argote's intentions regarding that disconnect between the packaging and the music-- or if she even intended such a disconnect. The effect, however, is often intriguing, suggesting a sleight of hand that slyly upends listener expectations about the sound and politics of gender, sexuality, lust, love, and indie rock. To her credit, she never comes across as strictly political or academic, although surely she doesn't really buy into that title. Sinking the fucker is much too blunt; Des Ark rock with more nuance than that. | 2011-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Lovitt | May 13, 2011 | 7.4 | 4515d613-1b4e-4481-a48b-c9ccacad39c3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Island University Story: Selected Works is a condensed version of a three-cassette series that acts as a shadow narrative of Helado Negro's catalog, offering a gratifying variety of sounds and styles. | Island University Story: Selected Works is a condensed version of a three-cassette series that acts as a shadow narrative of Helado Negro's catalog, offering a gratifying variety of sounds and styles. | Helado Negro: Island Universe Story: Selected Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21783-island-universe-story-selected-works/ | Island Universe Story: Selected Works | When Roberto Lange performs as Helado Negro, there's not a lot to watch. He's an engaging singer and performer, but aside from the occasional knob tweak, his backing tracks stream from his laptop and assorted electronic gizmos with little intervention. Where another electronic musician might overcompensate with garish videos, Lange has come up with a curious, low-key solution that is a perfect fit for his curious, low-key music: He's flanked onstage by three figures who don't do much more than sway back and forth, ever so gently, dressed head to toe in tinsel. When your eye wanders from Lange's person, they're there to catch your gaze, reflecting the light like disco balls run through a shredder.
Those mute, cryptic figures make an appearance on Island Universe Story*: Selected Works*: Bits of their tinsel are mixed right into the clear vinyl on which the records are pressed. I like to think of the sparkly strands a little like religious relics, imbued with the aura of each show and each wearer. The unusual presentation suits the album, a condensed edition of Helado Negro's three-volume Island Universe Story cassette series, released between 2012 and 2014. The series is itself unusual. Lange has described its songs, which encompass a variety of experiments and one-off techniques, as a kind of shadow narrative within his catalog—not "outtakes or afterthoughts or byproducts or B-sides," but something "like the dark side of the moon: always present but… just out of sight."
Invisibility has always been of special interest to Lange, who was born in Florida to Ecuadorian immigrants and often sings, in Spanish and English, of slipping between worlds. His 2013 album was titled Invisible Life, and there's a song called "Invisible Heartbeat" on 2014's Double Youth**. On "We Will You," the first song on the new collection, he sings, "There's a future that doesn't see me." It's an immediate highlight of the record, with a deep-diving vocoder melody that recalls Basic Channel's underwater dub. "Enfocando" ("Focusing"), which follows, is another standout, with an odd collection of sounds—harpsichord-like synth melody, reggae-inspired guitar backbeat, jaunty whistling—that he rolls around like a palmful of jewel-toned baubles. "Enfocando," he sings, over and over, in his throaty almost-whisper, allowing each contrapuntal strand to zoom briefly into focus.
One of the stumbling blocks on Helado Negro's last two albums has been their relatively uniform palettes, so it's gratifying to hear him trying out so many different sounds and styles and moods here. Richmond, Virginia's Trey Pollard, a collaborator of Matthew E. White and Natalie Prass, lends watery pedal steel to "Mitad de Tu Mundo," a sort of ambient dub lullaby. "Stop Living Dead," which features Pollard's arrangements for string octet, has something of the dissonant, plastic feel of Arca's Mutant, as the acoustic source material is stretched into strange, synthetic shapes. "Enters," the album's most atypical cut, pairs major-key vocoder with 160-BPM electro rhythms, like a fuzzy Drexciyan daydream. And while most of the album is dominated by Lange's cool voice, which lingers over koan-like statements in a drowsy sing-song cadence, one of the album's most affecting tracks, "Detroit," is a slow-motion electro-funk instrumental where Lange's vocals are limited to background breaths and coos.
Yet Island Universe Story also coheres surprisingly well, given its scattered provenance. As a front to back listen, it may be more satisfying than any of his "real" albums. In a text accompanying the first cassette, Lange wrote of using the tapes to explore "subconscious whisperings, [a] deep labyrinth of dot-connecting"—a prescient approach, given the way that playlists, in the streaming era, have supposedly supplanted albums as the primary mode of long form listening. In putting together this Island Universe Story collection, Lange has made his own playlist of his subconscious whisperings, and it's the tinsel that serves as the connective tissue between them all. | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | May 9, 2016 | 7.8 | 45172544-4252-425c-affa-45f55364d331 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | 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 TLC’s classic second album, whose unapologetic femininity and low-key swagger made it a landmark of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. | 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 TLC’s classic second album, whose unapologetic femininity and low-key swagger made it a landmark of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. | TLC: CrazySexyCool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tlc-crazysexycool/ | CrazySexyCool | The original concept for CrazySexyCool was simple: Women contain multitudes. The title, an amalgamation of their personalities, was a way to subvert the public’s perception of each member: Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins as the “cool” one, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas as the “sexy” seducer, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes herself supposedly “crazy.” She figured, rightfully, that each of them was all of those things at once. Straightforward enough—and yet some of the album’s male producers initially missed the point about the self as a many-layered construct. “They’d do a crazy song for me, a sexy song for Chilli, and a cool song for Tionne,” Left Eye told Vibe in 1994. “We had to explain that CrazySexyCool doesn’t just describe us individually. It describes all the parts of every woman.”
Each member of the Atlanta R&B trio had a distinct role, but the point was how they all came together. T-Boz was raspy and matter-of-fact, her jazz-like vocal style centering tone and swagger over power and clarity. Chilli was the closest to traditional R&B, imbuing their songs with quiet-storm sultriness. Left Eye was the rebellious poet who rapped, sang, and came up with many of their musical and visual concepts.
It was Left Eye who suggested the group pin condoms to their clothing and tape them over her own eyeglasses to promote safe sex, a laudable fashion statement that came to define their anything-goes credo as artists. As with their predecessors Salt-N-Pepa, none of TLC’s messaging in their songs, visuals, or outfits seemed scripted or telegraphed. Unlike in the typical girl group, no one member was ever elevated over another. Their individual styles merged seamlessly because they played off each other’s strengths, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Their 1992 debut album, Ooooooohhh... on the TLC Tip, presented the trio as sexual and independent twentysomething women who allowed themselves to be goofy, improper, and a little bit messy on their own terms. The critical success and triple-platinum sales of that album positioned TLC as role models for younger listeners and pop industry anarchists who pushed the fundamental truth that women have basic physical needs. In the video for “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” they fired water guns and sang about sexual autonomy while sporting bright, baggy jumpsuits and kooky Digital Underground-style puffy hats, making the case for sexual expression without suppression.
CrazySexyCool was slicker and more scandalous, smoothing out TLC’s approach without losing the tongue-in-cheek wit of the debut. Its songs emphasize not just sex but pleasure in all its many forms. It’s a liberating, multifaceted view that suggests sexy doesn’t have to be raunchy or explicit alone: It can manifest itself in the movement of a serpentine sax, or the way T-Boz whispers, simply, “Yes, it’s me again” at the beginning of “Creep” like it’s foreplay.
Released in November 1994, CrazySexyCool earned TLC two No. 1 hits, “Creep” and “Waterfalls,” and secured their current status as the highest-selling girl group of all time, having gone diamond with 10 million units sold in the U.S. by June 1996. TLC’s singular appeal wasn’t only from catchy hooks and savvy visuals: It was their organic way of touching on universal subjects like sex, self-love, and freedom with a certain ease and affability that made their music both exemplary and inviting.
While their more vocal-centric peers of the ’90s—SWV, En Vogue, Xscape—prioritized neatly stacked gospel harmonies and flat-out singing, TLC’s collective advantage was making real music in a pop space that more often presented girl groups as flawless, demure, coordinated confections. With its funky energy and mixture of singing and rapping, CrazySexyCool fit squarely between the year’s star-making R&B debuts by Brandy, Usher, and Aaliyah and the major first statements in hip-hop from the likes of Notorious B.I.G., Nas, and OutKast. Their signing to Babyface and Antonio L.A. Reid’s LaFace records had catapulted them to the forefront of Atlanta’s hip-hop and R&B scenes, and their crossover success carved space for labelmates like OutKast and Goodie Mob to be as weird and expansive as they wanted, and still make it pop.
Left Eye’s deftness as a rapper, and T-Boz’s talk-sing style, which flirted with rap cadences, provided all sorts of possibilities for producers like Jermaine Dupri and Sean “Puffy” Combs, two prominent officiants in the marriage between hip-hop and R&B. Rap bookends the album: Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest sets the tone on CrazySexyCool’s intro, kicking a cool 16 like a hype man warming up the crowd at a house party; and well before many listeners outside of Atlanta knew his name, TLC’s hometown peer André 3000 appears on the gloomy closing track “Sumthin’ Wicked This Way Comes.”
The lead single “Creep” was the first sign that TLC had discovered a more muted palette compared to the hyperactive sound of their debut. The song slinks in with a sample of Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World” as T-Boz presents the best and simplest solution to being cheated on: “So I creep/Yeah.” Her low, conversational register makes it sound like she’s got her feet kicked up in the recording booth and a cool mint in her mouth. She adds a slight vocal fry on the Babyface-produced “Diggin’ on You,” a subtly jazzy and easygoing love story about surrendering to the rizz. Left Eye blocks it instead on upbeat “Kick Your Game,” taking comedic turns as both the pursued and the pursuer over Jermaine Dupri’s signature bells-and-bounce production. Knowing that Left Eye once said she met her ex-boyfriend, NFL star Andre Rison, after he followed her in the club one night trying to holler, it’s hard not to hear the shade when she mentions a pickup line about making love on the 50-yard line.
T-Boz’s morning voice is supremely suited for the album’s overtly sexy songs, especially “Red Light Special,” a drawn-out tease over a spiraling string instrumental from Babyface, with sax notes snaking like they’re doing slow body rolls. She has a laid-back style of seduction, while Chilli sounds like she’s at the edge of ecstasy, a dynamic they also play with on “Let’s Do It Again.” What’s sexy is cool is silly and vice versa, even in passing moments, like the interlude where Chilli initiates a game of phone sex, only to end the call with a juvenile joke and a toilet flush. The only point seems to be that it thrills her, and that’s enough.
TLC’s go-to producer Dallas Austin said he wanted to “bring out the Prince side” of the group on the album, an influence felt in the slithering melodies and pure craving for sex. “Red Light Special” sounds like a straight-shooting sister to Prince’s tickling, moaning “International Lover,” with a similar crawling chord progression. Babyface produced the actual Prince cover: a rework of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” that T-Boz manipulates with a sly wink and a higher-than-usual vocal range. (Prince, who once called TLC his favorite group, granted his rare approval for the cover.) Prince’s original pines for the singer’s imagined intimacy between platonic female friends; TLC uses the more traditional meaning of girlfriend, twisting the original without losing its subversive spirits. “Case of the Fake People” is a similar whirlpool of funk, interpolating the O’Jays’ sweeping “Backstabbers” with boom-bap production from Austin and T-Boz and Chili’s voices swirling in and out of overlapping melodies.
T-Boz loved pointing out that Clive Davis, founder and then-president of LaFace’s parent label, Arista Records, initially hated the concept of “Waterfalls.” In fairness, it was an odd choice for a single: a cautionary tale about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and drug abuse that’s weighty in subject matter but weightless in execution, using lakes and waterfalls as a metaphor for slipping over the edge. The airy, warped production from OutKast producers Organized Noize sounds like actual carbonated water bubbles bursting on the track. It’s a wonder that the song worked, let alone topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks straight. But “Waterfalls” is a beauty, one that gets deep without drowning itself.
By the time T-Boz and Chilli started recording CrazySexyCool in the summer of 1994, Left Eye was spending time in court-ordered rehab after being indicted on a felony arson charge for setting fire to the home she shared with Rison, meaning she wasn’t as present for the sessions as on other TLC albums. She wrote and recorded her verse for “Waterfalls” during a two-hour break from the rehab center. Admiring the world around her in the car, she felt optimistic: “My life is 10 shades of gray/I pray all 10 fade away.” Left Eye, among hip-hop’s most agile lyricists, once said she never really distinguished between a rap and a poem. She rhymes from an almost childlike perspective here: innocent, curious, cocky, and mischievous. “Waterfalls” is as much Left Eye’s poetic opus as it is TLC’s career-defining record. In her limited appearances, she provides the album with many such small but potent pleasures, whether trading preacher-esque yelps with Busta Rhymes on “Can I Get a Witness (Interlude)” or rapping abstractly about whatever she wants to and somehow tying it back to the topic at hand on “Switch.”
Through TLC’s willingness to be anything—but themselves most of all—CrazySexyCool demonstrates that authenticity can be the driving force of a great pop record. That point still resonates nearly 30 years later in the work of artists inspired by TLC, including Kehlani, K-pop powerhouses BLACKPINK, and Cardi B, who referenced Left Eye’s arson charge on her debut album: “Smash your TV from Best Buy/You gon’ turn me into Left Eye.”
A year after the infamous fire, in a 1995 interview with the British weekly Melody Maker, Left Eye lamented that she felt like she’d earned a label as the “jealous, crazy bitch” while her ex came off clean. She rarely addressed the fire in interviews, and only spoke about it at length in the 2007 VH1 documentary The Last Days of Left Eye, released five years after she died in a car crash in Honduras, and assembled from video diaries recorded during her trip. As she explains in the doc: She came home late from a night of partying, she and Rison argued, and it got violent. After waking up to her bruised face in the mirror, she grabbed a stack of his Nike sneaker boxes and lit them on fire in their bathtub, unaware that the flames would spread and consume the home. It didn’t seem to matter to the public that Left Eye had previously filed an assault charge against Rison or that she later described him as jealous and controlling. All most people likely remember is that Left Eye burned down her NFL boyfriend’s property.
The record that may best encapsulate Left Eye’s fury and her vision for CrazySexyCool is a B-side that also appeared on a limited-edition bonus disc. “My Secret Enemy” is many things at once: dark, funny, fly, seductive, blunt, eerie, soft, bluesy. She raps with high-pitched vivacity about the weight of her past, telling her life story through poetry, examining her internal darkness, and slyly alluding to the fire: “Now as I look at myself, I’m seeing someone familiar/Staring back at me through every deep crack that’s in my mirror/And as I think to myself/I’m hearing somebody else scream at me.” The song ends with the voice of a newscaster who points out the hypocrisy of Left Eye’s ridicule in the media while Rison, with his history of alleged abuse, was still “regarded as America’s sports hero.” Then there’s T-Boz, in her low and scratchy cigarette drag of a voice, chiming in with background harmonies. She doesn’t overshadow Left Eye, just complements and supports her, finding and filling the rhythmic gaps in her bandmate’s slippery flow. As always, even when their approaches were divergent, TLC’s members worked together as one.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2024-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LaFace / Arista | April 7, 2024 | 9.3 | 451d664b-1698-4237-b3d8-2734b4defef7 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
The debut album from Caracara—co-produced by former Modern Baseball frontman Jacob Ewald—is dynamic and diffuse, drawing on slowcore, gothic folk, post-hardcore, and more. | The debut album from Caracara—co-produced by former Modern Baseball frontman Jacob Ewald—is dynamic and diffuse, drawing on slowcore, gothic folk, post-hardcore, and more. | Caracara: Summer Megalith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caracara-summer-megalith/ | Summer Megalith | Early into the debut album from Caracara, frontman William Lindsay lands on a phrase that says a lot about Summer Megalith is a whole: “We felt the lack long after.” Catch that reference and it’s clear that post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth is canon for Caracara—especially their beautifully battle-scarred early phase. But that concept of “the lack long after,” that emotional phantom limb syndrome, connects Caracara’s self-described “distorted emotional music” with the numerous other bands Summer Megalith evokes. They might call Wolf Parade, the Antlers, or the Twilight Sad—bands who in retrospect can be heard as emo covert ops—with grandiose, heart-rending, throat-shredding ambition, relentless and implacable in their yearning.
As such, they are not a band that has mastered a single, fully formed aesthetic. Summer Megalith is dynamic and diffuse: Bookended by acidic slowcore and lustrous, gothic folk, it deviates into D.C. post-hardcore and “The O.C.” soft-rock. If it comes off like a survey of every contemporary variant of modern emo, most of it emanates from Lindsay’s voice alone. Early dispatch “Crystalline” took on a whip-smart, nasal tone similar to former Modern Baseball frontman and Summer Megalith co-producer/mixer Jacob Ewald. Together, they slather the album in crackling midrange, making “Burn Me I’m Made of Matches” the most evocatively and accurately named track here. Their earlier single “Glacier” found Lindsay at his most agitated, choking out melodies like Cameron Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman who is releasing this record on his Flower Girl label.
While stylistically shapeshifting on a track-by-track basis, Summer Megalith keeps a steady emotional center. “If this is being civil, I want to be evil, I want to destroy it all,” Lindsay sighs, his despondent melody doubled by moaning cello. He wants to be evil, but it’s just that—a want that he can’t afford. “At least I got to say that you were mine,” Lindsay mutters as his train leaves the U-Bahn station during “Prenzlauerberg,” doomed to watch a lover’s face endlessly fade out in a dim haze of dissipating memories, drugs, and streetlamps at 4 a.m. Meanwhile, when the guitars drop out on the chorus of “Pontchartrain,” his confessions break through the fog like a blast of cold water: “There’s no point in feeling pain/If you learn nothing.”
Given this unbearable weight of regret, it’s appropriate that the first half of Summer Megalith is filled by crescendos with no climax. “Evil” immolates for five minutes, leaving smoking husk; “Glacier” drops verse-chorus structure for an endlessly upward bridge, an impassioned smear of Mineral and M83. While Caracara’s desire to yearn in the most flamboyant and grand-scale manner stands out amid the Philadelphia house show circuit from which they were born, the production can occasionally feel mismatched. But those concerns are moot during the second half of Summer Megalith, where Caracara and Ewald prove capable of shaping some of the most immediately cathartic indie rock of recent times. “Oh Brother” initially feels like the centerpiece, rejuvenating 2010-era stylistic tics (clacking percussion, galloping folk rhythms, off-mic hollers) to comfort a disillusioned friend before a saxophone solo emerges from a sweltering post-rock coda. Either one would’ve been the most thrilling peak to that point.
Summer Megalith reaches its height on a song called, fittingly, “Apotheosis.” Over a lone guitar, the lyrics speak of broken homes, holy ghosts, a visit to a clinic during the “18th week of pregnancy,” and Lindsay makes a solemn promise to outlast the trauma: “When the world turns the rafters into splinters in our feet/You know that I'll stand by you the way that you stood by me.” The stakes are too high and the ambience too raw and cavernous for “Apotheosis” to stay this quiet for too long. When the guitars, drums, and horns finally do try to bring the house down, Lindsay holds his ground: “We’re created, we’re destroyed/Desperate and overjoyed/I don’t feel this way for anything.” When the time does come for Caracara to feel this way, they feel it all. | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Flower Girl | November 17, 2017 | 7.7 | 4527746d-cfce-4a0d-bf5a-009f902c7053 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Because Dornik makes sumptuously arty R&B, he gets compared to Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and Miguel, none of whom he is anything like. The debut album from Jessie Ware's touring drummer and labelmate ably conjures substance out of sheer gorgeous style. | Because Dornik makes sumptuously arty R&B, he gets compared to Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and Miguel, none of whom he is anything like. The debut album from Jessie Ware's touring drummer and labelmate ably conjures substance out of sheer gorgeous style. | Dornik: Dornik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20967-dornik/ | Dornik | Jessie Ware might seem an unlikely tastemaker: an artist who exemplifies hushed, unshowy restraint, unassuming craft over buzz. So it only makes sense that the colleagues she has attracted work in a similarly low key. Her labelmates on PMR Records include producer Julio Bashmore, who’s quietly become an innovator in a genre full of professional Xeroxers; Jai Paul, who’s known for compelling music that’s barely released; and Dornik Leigh, Ware’s tour drummer, who’s since embarked on a solo career as languidly paced as his music. Lead single "Something About You" came out in 2013 and already sounded timeless, or more precisely out of time: lovelorn neo-soul that shimmers like a late-summer mirage. Subsequent singles "Drive" and "Stand in Your Line" were much the same, and two years later, Leigh’s proper debut *Dornik—*named for his parents, Dorothy and Nick—already sounds lived-in.
It’s hard to hear about Dornik without soon after hearing about his resemblance to Michael Jackson. The comparison is fair—Dornik, like many, idolizes the King of Pop, and does resemble Michael vocally, albeit a less hysteric, more quavery version. (And hey, Dornik is a more compelling idea of Michael x 2015 than Xscape was.) Because Dornik makes sumptuously arty R&B, he also gets the Big Three R&B Comparisons almost every time: Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and Miguel, none of whom he is anything like. Better comparisons might be Maxwell circa BLACKsummer’s night, or Dev Hynes, or mid-'90s Sade and Everything But the Girl, or for that matter Ware herself. Often, Dornik evokes the brooding side of early-'90s R&B: the cascading-waterfall SFX, reverbed woodwinds, and fuzzy guitar that appear throughout, the haze of synth pads that hangs over most of the album, Dornik’s preference for retrofuturist sounds over modern.
All this moodiness is in service of something specific: Dornik rivals E•MO•TION for the year’s most crushed-out album; it’s as if Ware’s "Imagine It Was Us" was an entire album of longing bliss. "Blush" is full of little synth twinkles and dazed guitar tumbles that sound like smiles creeping upon a lover’s face. "Mountain" is an uncannily accurate reproduction of the feeling of lying side-by-side with someone in a meadow by a quarry. "Stand in Your Line" might have been an insufferable friend-zone lament from another artist ("I joke and call you my girl, then you smile and you laugh and you call me your boyfriend—oh, if this were true"), but Dornik offers a vocal earnest enough and an arrangement luxuriant enough to hush any complaints. Even the more combative tracks sound as if an hour or kind word would sweep him right back into a swoon. The lyrics rarely transcend pillow talk, but it hardly matters; Dornik leaves the poetry to the arrangements.
All this makes Dornik easy to get lost in—and also, to lose track of. Extending "Imagine It Was Us" to album length is an amazing idea in theory, but in practice hypnotic becomes narcotic. The sequencing is curious: singles toward the end, midtempo mood pieces toward the front; it makes otherwise sumptuous tracks sound samey, and when Dornik tries to inject levity (the singsong "Chain Smoke"), it makes for a jolting, unwelcome distraction. In a way, though, even this fits: the album’s like a fog one can drift in and out of for however many exquisite minutes. There are points in summer and in love when nothing else will do. | 2015-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PMR | August 31, 2015 | 7.1 | 45343e40-9e54-4217-ac86-344d92433b5c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The deep cauldron of metal, prog, and doom influences have so far been a key to Pallbearer's greatness, but their third record fails to piece it all together. They have run up against their limits. | The deep cauldron of metal, prog, and doom influences have so far been a key to Pallbearer's greatness, but their third record fails to piece it all together. They have run up against their limits. | Pallbearer: Heartless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23012-heartless/ | Heartless | Rising metal stars Pallbearer have an unlikely fusion of influences: melancholic doom, prog that’s more ’80s slick than ’70s technical, and a touch of Boston’s hyper-produced hard rock. One couldn’t have predicted they would go from cult metal festivals like Rites of Darkness to Bonnaroo in a few years. Pallbearer should be commended for making it this far with their sound, but Heartless, their third record, shows that they have run up against their limits.
Album opener “I Saw the End” is similar to Foundations of Burden’s “The Ghost I Used to Be,” Pallbearer’s first realization that they could take their heavy sound and mold it into something catchy. Those often opposite attributes are sharpened and condensed, especially when guitarist Devin Holt rips into his solo at the end. They covered Type O Negative’s “Love You to Death” on last year’s Fear and Fury EP, and in “The End” they’ve mastered Kenny Hickey’s layered, warm goth-metal soloing. Combined with their Pallbearer’s love of Pink Floyd, they’ve reaffirmed prog’s role into metal, especially Rush’s cerebral rocking.
Heartless could use more of that inspiration. They’ve become their own worst enemy by writing meandering tracks that betray their prog loftiness and their innate need to crush. “Thorns” attempts to light the same fire as “The End” and exhausts itself as it goes on. “Lie of Survival” and “Dancing in Madness” are worse offenders, as both build towards nothing and use doom as a crutch, rather than as a starting point. In the past, weighty sorrow poured out; here, it’s strained, slow for the sake of slow. Background synths don’t add anything to these songs, and they also don’t get across bassist Joseph Rowland’s infatuation with krautrock. The beginning of “Dancing” is ripe for more active electronics, some series of Tangerine Dream-like arpeggios, something to break up the monotony that was once so rich. Pallbearer are not shredders or speed demons; any slight dip in momentum is fatal, and those two tracks shoot Heartless down. It hasn’t worked against them before, as they were adapting doom into prog’s confines, but this record doesn’t move that concept forward.
“Cruel Road” awakens Heartless from its stupor by taking a lumbering approach to theatrical metal. “Road” moves like a King Diamond song in its succession: a brooding intro, rising hysterics, a dip into neoclassical melodies, then another climatic spike to close the song. Overt dramatics are something Pallbearer hasn’t worked with before, and it feels a lot fresher than most of the record. The common line between “I Saw the End” and “Cruel Road” is Pallbearer falter less when they break out from their gloomy template. “A Plea For Understanding” is the longest and most somber track on Heartless, and perhaps its best, with a lighter take on doom. Holt and Campbell’s shimmering cleans really carry that mournful feeling “Dancing” and “Lie” struggle to convey, and Campbell’s vocals have never soared higher. “A Plea” is such a chore to get to, and it’s too bad Heartless is more defined by its bookends.
I recently saw Pallbearer perform in Austin, and Rowland was brimming with energy, acting almost as a hype man, and Holt found a new ecstatic height in his soloing. They brought an arena liveliness to a sound that requires patience. “The End” benefitted from this invigorated band, and there’s good to reason to think it will become a staple of their sets. Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered. | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | March 24, 2017 | 6 | 45345919-e954-45ad-ad0a-08e686a2ef88 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Over the years, director John Carpenter has created classic film scores for films like Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. Lost Themes is his first standalone album and his darkly atmospheric style is intact. | Over the years, director John Carpenter has created classic film scores for films like Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. Lost Themes is his first standalone album and his darkly atmospheric style is intact. | John Carpenter: Lost Themes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20091-john-carpenter-lost-themes/ | Lost Themes | Since his career began in the mid-1970s, John Carpenter has been responsible for an admirable run of well-loved science fiction and horror films. Many of his features had low budgets but a lot of style. They were dark, dystopian, and violent (though seldom gory), with plots that glued together genre conventions drawn from westerns, '50s monster flicks, and exploitation cinema. His best movies—Halloween, Escape From New York, and Assault on Precinct 13, to name a few—have transcended cult-classic status. For the type of people who read Fangoria magazine, these are all-time hall-of-famers and required midnight movie viewing for virtually anybody else.
In addition to writing and directing, Carpenter also composed the scores for a number of his films. Working primarily with synthesizers, he crafted minimalist music that perfectly matched the eerie vibe of his pictures. These scores have proven at least as influential as the films they accompanied. Over the years, they have been studied by countless electronic musicians, dance producers, and general weirdos, who continue to find inspiration in the director’s ability to marry mechanical orchestration and highly emotive melodies.
Released by Sacred Bones, Lost Themes is Carpenter’s first standalone record. It is not a collection of cues, but a set of independent compositions that echo the sinister tones of the director’s film work. Each track is a sort of mini-score unto itself, shuffling a theme through a variety of moods and variations. To call Lost Themes a John Carpenter solo album is a bit misleading, though. The record is a collaborative effort that was casually jammed into existence by the director, his son Cody (of the band Ludrium), and godson Daniel Davies. As a result, if you’re coming to Lost Themes looking for the vintage Carpenter sound, you will have to adjust your expectations a little.
Horror and sci-fi films are where the techniques and sounds of 20th century avant-garde music—electronic composition, tape music, atonal harmonies—found practical use in the mainstream world. Dissonant sounds slot well into these kinds of stories because they effectively convey shock and alienation. And it doesn't hurt that they're easy to generate with minimal resources. All you really needed to start with was one long, sustained, eerie and suspense-generating minor chord.
Carpenter's scores blended experimental ideas with simple but solid melodies. Having limited skills as a musician, the director made innovative use of technology—mainly synthesizers and drum machines—to generate epic sounds on a thin budget. Most importantly, he allowed synthesizers to sound like synthesizers, rather than trying to pass them off as a budget orchestra. These warbly alien squiggles and pulsing bass tones imbued his melodies with a distinctively robotic touch.
Because these machines were time consuming to set up and program, the director had to adopt a spare style, which he often put to brilliant use. Some scores, like Carpenter's collaboration with composer Alan Howarth on Halloween III, were composed on synthesizers as the film was being played back live, which gave them a drifty and improvisatory feel. These instruments played a large role in Carpenter's aesthetic, but he never seemed wedded to vintage gear. As the times changed, so did his instrumentation, and by the '90s, Carpenter's scores had lost a bit of their grit and otherworldliness.
Lost Themes was composed using the computer-based sequencing software Logic Pro, and it sounds quite different from his analog synth-driven works. The keyboards are brighter and more video-gamey. On some songs, this doesn’t matter so much. From its first piano tones, "Vortex" is immediately recognizable as Carpenter’s work. If the director has a defining go-to gesture, it’s the pulsing synthesized bass tone, the beating of a single repeating note that provides a foundation for plaintive chords and hazy keyboard leads. It provides the bedrock for the Assault on Precinct 13 theme and also the soundtrack to Escape From New York. Fittingly, it is the central ingredient on "Vortex", which opens Lost Themes.
Other times, though, the details seem more haphazard. In Lost Themes’ lesser moments—"Obsidian" and "Domain"—it sounds as if the pair are trying to evoke dread and awe using keyboard presets borrowed from Kraftwerk-goes-Christmas holiday electro ensemble, Mannheim Steamroller.
The main thing that’s missing, though, is a movie. Carpenter’s classic scores were filled with silence and space out of necessity. Film cues needed to stay simple and retain a consistent mood so as not to overpower the on-screen imagery, which relieved a lot of the director’s music from the need for formal structure. Unshackled from that restraint, Carpenter and his collaborators have created a set of recordings that are very ornate and dense. They shift moods frequently, segueing between eerie drones and heavy rock. At times, the album is a bit reminiscent of the Italian prog rock band, Goblin, who also composed horror film scores. This doesn’t make it bad, but it does make it a very different kind of listen. And ultimately, it's a less distinctive one. The eerie and empty vibe-outs that made up Carpenter scores like Halloween III and Prince of Darkness left a lot of room for imagination. They imparted scant information—just heavy atmosphere and mood that oozed out of the speakers like, well, the fog from The Fog and ultimately seeded creativity and invention that had little to do with the films they were made to accompany. Lost Themes is plenty dark and heavy but shorter on inspiration. | 2015-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 5, 2015 | 7.6 | 4536bf6f-8781-40a5-b2a6-caab7f958f56 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
This project's generic-sounding alias obscures the fact that it is a collaboration between Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk. Their combined sensibilities yield a sumptuous techno LP. These are not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture. | This project's generic-sounding alias obscures the fact that it is a collaboration between Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk. Their combined sensibilities yield a sumptuous techno LP. These are not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture. | Studio OST: Scenes 2012-2015 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21625-scenes-2012-2015/ | Scenes 2012-2015 | Like a lot of things related to White Material, the vinyl-only New York techno label founded by DJ Richard and Young Male, Studio OST's debut album deliberately keeps a low profile. The unassuming title, Scenes 2012-2015, suggests a hodgepodge; it also suggests that the material inside is old news (and there's nothing worse in electronic music, which is generally thought to evolve at lightning speed). Likewise, the project's generic-sounding alias, with its air of anonymous work-for-hire, sounds less like an artist's name than an obscure bit of metadata, and it leaves out any indication that White Material's Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk are involved, despite the substantial weight that the latter's name carries as one of the most hotly buzzed-about artists in recent underground American dance music.
But Scenes 2012-2015, which the two RISD grads recorded over three years in a handful of home studios around New York, is no hodgepodge. It's a proper album—the kind that conventional wisdom says that dance music is no good at producing. It's got a beginning, a middle, and an end, and its A and B sides tell slightly different stories; it's meant to be listened to in one sitting, all the way through. And while the album's nine tracks are plenty diverse, encompassing ambient sketches, techno and electro patterns pitched at a wide range of tempos, and even a flickering, 144-BPM study in juke's full-throttle skip, they're also unusually cohesive. They make do with a pared-down set of sounds that give the impression of coming from a modest set of gear, and they avoid samples, advanced digital sound design, and intricate computer trickery in favor of long, linear synthesizer and drum machine patterns, loosely and elegantly woven together. The palette is muted but not self-consciously lo-fi, and the mood oscillates between dreamy and melancholy, though not without a playful undercurrent.
Unlike Lustwerk's music, all nine tracks are instrumental, aside from the occasional garbled hint of ring-modulated speech buried deep in the mix, like an intercepted transmission from across the cosmos. The two musicians' respective styles surface in shifting proportions: "Above the Waves," with its squelchy funk bass and almost jazzy Rhodes keys, recalls Lustwerk's solo productions; "ITCZ," a fuzzed-out daydream for wispy chords and a clunky vintage CR-78 drum machine, shares the hazy vibes of Aronson's "Fog City," from last year's City EP. What predominates is their shared appreciation for ’90s electronic music: Much of the album brings to mind the sound of R&S Records and its Apollo sub-label from the mid ’90s, when artists like Ken Ishii and Biosphere were fusing ambient and techno in exciting ways. "Session" has the crisp, sparkling quality of artists like Morgan Geist and Titonton Duvanté; the stunning "Whitesands," which closes the album with a moody swirl of plangent fifths and crunchy percussion, might be a lost Aphex Twin or Autechre demo circa 1994.
The centerpieces of the album are "ITCZ" and "Unnatural City," which spin mechanical clatter, shimmering chords, and deep-diving bass frequencies—in the latter, there's no bassline to speak of, just an 808 kick plunging unfathomably low—into sedate, hypnotic configurations. "ITCZ," rolling out ceaseless son clave rhythms, is plodding and steady, while "Unnatural City" moves at a fleet, rolling clip, but what they share in common is an unusual balance between stasis and dynamism. No single element dominates; every sound has equal weight, from quicksilver pings to chalky snares. They're not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture, and five minutes later, you leave—albeit somewhat reluctantly. But Aronson and Lustwerk are smart enough to know when to hold back, and as a result, they've come up with one of the year's most generously proportioned techno long-players—one far more sumptuous than its modest profile would ever suggest. | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lustwerk Music | March 25, 2016 | 8.1 | 45373c36-ed16-4162-8696-6c9666bfe314 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
With contributions from Hudson Mohawke, Kode9, the Field, Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw, and Eye from the Boredoms, this varied remix set plays up the humorous and party-starting aspect of Battles' personality. | With contributions from Hudson Mohawke, Kode9, the Field, Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw, and Eye from the Boredoms, this varied remix set plays up the humorous and party-starting aspect of Battles' personality. | Battles: Dross Glop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16514-dross-glop/ | Dross Glop | Watching Battles play on a stage over a lake in France at two in the morning last summer, you could see that they had transformed into a full-blown party band. You could see it in the way Ian Williams was moving in between two keyboards, his porn star moustache twitching, in how Dave Konopka playing with hunched intensity. And then there was John Stanier, destroying the drums in a way that said, "I could definitely kill a man with these hands."
Everyone knows by now that Tyondai Braxton left on bad terms in the middle of making what became Battles' second album, Gloss Drop, and that the remaining members were forced to redefine what the group meant for themselves and for their audience. They managed it admirably, with the shaky live shows at the start of the cycle morphing into unequivocally brilliant outings such as the above-- all of which makes it interesting to wonder why a remix album distorting the band's identity 12 different ways seemed the logical next step.
Each member of Battles has said in interviews that there's a version of Gloss Drop that will never see the light of day. It's an album built on possibilities, one that had a number of distinct incarnations prior to the one we know, which in itself possesses at least three outward personalities. In his review of Gloss Drop, Jess Harvell commented on the album's propensity for pitching virtuosity against silliness, and blurring the lines between human and machine sounds, which are relationships explored-- and sometimes to really great effect—on Dross Glop, this intriguing, rewarding remix collection.
It's an obvious point than when stood against a number of minimal techno rejigs of the source material, it's the playful, borderline daft moments that stand out the most, riding the gamut from fun to flipping nuts. At the milder end of the scale, there's Hudson Mohawke's take on "Rolls Bayce", an unexpectedly soft and emotive take from the Glasgow producer. He plays on the prettier, chiming parts of the original, buffering the steel drum warmth with pillows of sustained, complementing pastel synths. Hyperdub's Kode9 turns "Africastle" into a seven-minute, house-focused mini set of sorts, fizzing and grinding ominously before slamming into a kind of chiptune dancehall dance party. Most strikingly fun of all is Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw's reworking of "Ice Cream". In one interview, Ian Williams said that the original reminded him of a Bollywood song before Matias Aguayo's vocals were involved, and here, it's a strutting global magpie, stuttering with rudimentary synths that you might hear at an Omar Souleyman show, dallying with a little dancehall, and ending with Aguayo's sexy grunts looped to lunacy.
While Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundystem) and Dennis McNany's version of the Gary Numan-featuring "My Machines" isn't as nakedly playful as the aforementioned, it's one of a handful of tracks here that amplifies Battles' renowned humorous streak. An itchy stomp at the beginning, by the end it's a distant cousin of Moroder's disco work, where it's not hard to imagine Numan busting out the chorus of "I feeeeeel looooove." Shabazz Palaces turn "White Electric" into a coolly loping presence, repurposing the song's bass into what sounds like a horn section, again blurring that line between organic and synthesized sounds. Even though The Alchemist's interpretation of "Futura" is ominous, hanging heavily around a Dilla-style beat, his inclusion of one of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotations feels knowing and delivered with a raised eyebrow, all things considered: "If a futurist could, by some miracle, predict the future, his prediction would sound so absurd and so far fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn."
In contrast to this collection's more boisterous efforts, it would be easy to overlook some of the subtler, more cerebral moments here, one of the finest examples of which comes with the Field's remix of "Sweetie and Shag". Axel Willner's last album, Looping State Of Mind, was his most varied collection yet, but this redux is disarmingly simple, paring the chiming, furious clank of the original down to something many half-lives removed, recalling the sense of decay that Willner demonstrated on "Then It's White"; Kazu Makino's vocal turn is reduced to a series of gasps in among tight snares. At their finest, these quieter moments touch on the emotive slant of Hudson Mohawke's remix: Qluster's "Dominican Fade" pairs prim horns with beautiful organ glimmers, sounding nothing like the source material but no worse for it. The same can't be said for Kangding Ray's "Toddler", which is four minutes longer than the original, sounds nothing like it, and resembles a steady, dull rave on an active helipad at its most exciting; elsewhere, Gui Boratto's "Wall Street" feels blocky in comparison to the way some of these remixes play with differing tempos, like the anxiously palpitating grind of Silent Servant's "Inchworm".
While a few songs here feel like very distant relations of the originals that inspired them, there's only one remix present that lives up to the full inversion promised by the album's title: unsurprisingly, that comes from Boredoms' Eye, enlisted to remix his own Gloss Drop appearance, "Sundome". Where the original was neatly sparkling and contained in its final bout of explosiveness, Eye's own version is elephantine, blown out, and cacophonous, with his tentacular mind throwing all sense of structure against the wall. It's a thrilling look inside his brain, a microcosmic version of this peep under the hood that Battles have allowed with Dross Glop, showing off the constituent parts that now make their machine a smooth, assured, and always giddily exciting ride. | 2012-04-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | April 17, 2012 | 7.8 | 4539c339-01ed-4a5a-9d34-0da47b48e89b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On his latest album, the Kentucky rapper addresses his demons head-on with startling bluntness and raw desperation. | On his latest album, the Kentucky rapper addresses his demons head-on with startling bluntness and raw desperation. | EST Gee: I Never Felt Nun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/est-gee-i-never-felt-nun/ | I Never Felt Nun | There’s a wink of irony to the title of EST Gee’s latest album, I Never Felt Nun, which forms a loose trilogy with 2020’s I Dont Feel Nun and I Still Dont Feel Nun, in case you missed the point. The latest project from the Kentucky rapper often plays like a headfirst descent into his most despairing emotions and bleakest experiences. Where fellow Louisville native Jack Harlow, whose co-sign introduced Gee to a larger national audience, aspires toward the kind of pop-rap suited to Super Bowl halftime shows, Gee bleeds his heart out, peeling back the skin to reveal a darker reality in his native city. Alongside high-profile features for Future and Megan Thee Stallion, EST Gee has tapped into a larger network as a new recruit to Yo Gotti’s expanded CMG label—Gee’s relentless hustle and unvarnished emotionality makes for a natural fit alongside profound songwriters like Mozzy and ferocious spitters like 42 Dugg, with whom he released this year’s collaborative Last Ones Left.
Like his home state, Gee’s music sits at a stylistic Mason-Dixon Line, situated between the Bible and Rust Belts, deep fried and industrialized in equal measure. He equally channels the ferocious speed of current Michigan rap, the aching lyricism of Chicago drill, and the bluesy refrains of Southern crooners like Kevin Gates and Rod Wave. There’s a slight Southern twang to the production, with Zaytoven-esque organ trills on “Voices in My Head” and triumphant horns on album closer “The Realest,” a throwback to classic mixtape era trap that caps off with a Jeezy feature. The most surprising regional touch is the appearance from Machine Gun Kelly on “Death Around the Corner,” an unexpected reminder that, long before he was a pop star chasing the clout dragon, MGK was a rageful Ohio-bred Yelawolf knockoff who feuded with Eminem. It’s when he gets back to his roots that Kelly is at his most tolerable, with a more genuine energy than his alt-rock cosplay.
Gee’s delivery carries a sense of purposeful desperation, like he’s rapping not to tell a story or offer wisdom, but to keep breathing. On the opening of “Both Arms,” his gravelly flow is drier than jerky, and he frequently trails off and cracks like his voice is on the verge of giving out. The ad-libs underneath EST Gee’s bars are a non-stop current of mumbles and half-formed syllables, an uncanny counterpoint to his most precise raps that mimic a paranoid stream of thoughts. While others might numb the trauma with substances, Gee more often speaks of death and violence themselves as addictions, unable to imagine life without the bloodlust itself.
At times, bars alone can’t encapsulate the hurt, and Gee’s singing reveals a voice desperate to exorcize and express his emotions. The guitar riff on “Come Home” is emo-tinged, but Gee’s full-throated chorus sounds more like it was ghostwritten by bro-country troubadour Sam Hunt. The pain is obvious and the sentiments impassioned, but the central refrain—“When you come home/Just know I miss you/Like you missing me”—is Gee at his most melodic, suggesting a capacity for emotionally driven anthems beyond raw bars.
There’s a loose religiosity to the album’s themes, evident in titles like “Is Heaven for a Gangsta,” “Hell,” and “Bow and Say Grace.” But just like romance, faith can offer more fear and uncertainty than comfort: “Is there heaven for a shooter/Is there heaven for a mover?/Or was I born in hell and all this shit an illusion?” In his most vulnerable moment, on “Voices In My Head,” EST Gee sings to a friend who took his own life, and as he lies awake in bed praying for release, Gee admits to admiring the “bravery” of the act. Though rap has reached vast new emotional depths in the last decade, Gee’s confessionals are still startling in how bluntly they address the demons head-on. EST Gee’s lyricism doesn’t bring the catharsis of a therapy session or the removed vantage point of hindsight; I Never Felt Nun comes straight from the heart, hardened like armor. | 2022-09-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CMG / Warlike / Interscope | September 30, 2022 | 7.3 | 453b3f9b-e85f-446d-9795-8a274e8f03d3 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Taking cues from Miles Davis’ electric period, the Spacebomb Records founder and Alabama sculptor join forces on a mesmerizing album rooted in improvisation, risk-taking, and unlikely musical chemistry. | Taking cues from Miles Davis’ electric period, the Spacebomb Records founder and Alabama sculptor join forces on a mesmerizing album rooted in improvisation, risk-taking, and unlikely musical chemistry. | Matthew E. White / Lonnie Holley: Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matthew-e-white-lonnie-holley-broken-mirror-a-selfie-reflection/ | Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection | Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection invites direct comparison to one of the most inspired purple patches in modern musical history: Miles Davis’ electric period of the 1970s. The album’s genesis is bold to begin with: In 2018, keen to kick old songwriting habits, Matthew E. White went into the studio with his septet to record a series of improvisational sessions in the spirit of the hard-driving fusion that Davis pursued from 1969’s In A Silent Way to 1975’s Agharta. Inviting the Alabama sculptor and experimental musician Lonnie Holley to add his vocals to the mix was another audacious move, throwing further unpredictability into the works with Holley’s freeform melodies and spontaneous delivery.
Broken Mirror chiefly invites comparison to Davis’ towering 1970 double album Bitches Brew, a record frequently cited by musicians outside the jazz community but rarely recreated. And for good reason: Bitches Brew is so dense, complicated, and inspired that mimicking its white-heat aura feels like a fool’s errand. White’s septet cooks up a thick musical soup whose dense percussive tangles, driving guitar, and almost atonal keyboard stabs are clearly descended from Davis’ masterpiece. So is the record’s improvisational spirit, which relies on modes and gestures rather than chord changes and melodies.
Listening to Broken Mirror, much like its inspiration, requires a kind of recalibration of the musical mind. The record is both ultra-musical in its abundance of ideas and strangely unmusical in its rejection of song structure and repetition, producing a kind of spiraling voodoo funk that swings between gritty and astral. Holley’s vocals, both weathered and sweetly innocent, balance life experience with wonder, gravity with levity, and are ripe with the mesmeric power of understatement. He doesn’t so much sing as emote, hitting emotional targets rather than musical cues. Holley recorded his vocals in a series of first takes after White played him edits of the 2018 septet sessions, and it is striking how well they reflect the album’s various moods.
“This Here Jungle of Moderness/Composition 14,” with its anxious percussion and organ drones, feels like walking through a dirty city street in the sticky heat of midsummer, and Holley responds with lyrics that reflect the sensory overload of the modern megacity: “Big, big, big, big, big, big, big city all around me/Humans moving everywhere/To the global degree.” “I’m Not Tripping/Composition 8” starts off lighter in tone, resting on a synth line that burbles like boiling water, growing angrier and more chaotic as the layers pile on. Holley’s vocals reflect this evolution, moving from musings about energy to reflections on the overbearing nature of modern technology: “Computer technology management/To play our brains/You can’t program Her that way.” The only exception to this sympathetic fusion of music and words comes with the title track, whose punning title and rather hectoring lyrics about cellphones feel a little loose against the furious intensity of the title track—all jabbing percussion, unsettling bass drone, and skittish keyboard runs. The music is tough and hypnotic, an exorcism rather than a haunting.
But this is a small stumble in an album of strength, depth, and implausible symmetry. Holley’s vocals knock Broken Mirror half a stride out of Davis’ considerable shadow, the singer’s unique charm forging something genuinely new out of White’s inspired but retrospective musical work. Broken Mirror is a tribute to risk-taking and unlikely musical chemistry, an improbably fruitful fusion of unstable elements.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Spacebomb / Jagjaguwar | April 12, 2021 | 7.4 | 4548b05b-7e13-4034-b194-5d9bd16f5793 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Brooklyn trio follows the polarizing Creature Comforts with a record that's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum. | Brooklyn trio follows the polarizing Creature Comforts with a record that's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum. | Black Dice: Broken Ear Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/752-broken-ear-record/ | Broken Ear Record | This is music for hiking across an alkaloid wasteland, equipped with enough oxygen and dried food to last through several days trek through a nitrogen-saturated atmosphere. There is a metallic taste to the air, and the sun, even at high noon, obscured by layers of sooty gas and overstuffed rain clouds. Black Dice, even when trying to inject a little rhythmic propulsion into their mechanic-industrial commotion, come off brittle and oil-stained futuristic. To a degree, this is dirty music, though more in style than execution; competing pulses from synthesizers, drum machines and the odd, antiquated guitar (via loop or sample, of course) destroy what little firm ground on which there is to step, but the landscape described by the sound is sturdy, if in need of polish. In fact, it's hard to say whether or not the quasi-urbanized clang is actually futuristic, as when drums appear, they're decidedly "tribal". Nevertheless, it's an isolated wilderness put forth on Broken Ear Record: away from city noise, refinement and fellow travelers.
Brooklyn trio Black Dice are the most interesting "noise" band I know. Never content to inhabit one sonic guise for long, their track record for navigating unexplored areas of static, delay, distortion and bizarre, heavenly bits of electronic data is almost unparalleled among would-be contemporaries. They've landed on the spikiest stylistic beachheads in modernist rock, from splatter noise-core, electronic ambience, quasi-electro acoustic improv (EAI), death disco and now to what I would clumsily characterize as post-apocalyptic jungle-core-- and isn't that a mouthful? Consequently, as easy as it is to marvel at their ambition, it's sometimes tough to really settle into one of their records. There's always something a little uncomfortable about Black Dice-- but then they wouldn't be as interesting otherwise. Broken Ear Record, reportedly the result of the band needing more rhythmic material to play live, is no exception: It's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum.
The sounds used should seem familiar to fans of 2004's polarizing Creature Comforts, as many of its synth patches, guitar tones and delay effects are featured on Broken Ear Record. The muffled, horn-like call that opens "Snarly Yow" could easily have been found hidden inside one of Comforts' robotic tone poems, as could the scraped percussion or the bizarre vocal loop that adorns its outer edges. However, here, rather than revel in the chaos of a savage urban jungle, Black Dice quantize the beats and sprinkle kick drums strategically throughout the track. There are moments that pound, but most of the time, the piece is content to merely suggest pulse, using loops and even modest stretches with straightforward melody. Make no mistake, melody doesn't play quite the importance in this world it does even in, say, Boredoms/Vooredoms' music (BD's most obvious predecessors)-- but as with Broken Ear's efficient use of 4/4 drum stomp, a little goes a long way.
"Motorcycle" uses the elements of melody and industrial rhythm to best advantage, at times sounding like a clamorous update on the Indestructible Beat of Soweto. High pitched human barks bounce up from a chorus of thud-drums, and a buoyant guitar line I swear was lifted from Graceland carries the tune into regions previously too naked-faced "accessible" for Black Dice. Yes, there are machine gun hits at the end, and no, the relative upfrontness of the melodies never lulls me into thinking I'm listening to pop music, but I'm hooked nonetheless. Likewise, the single "Smiling Off" features vocal harmonies (!) and another thudding percussion cadence (more rollicking than primal this time), though withholding the payoff for several minutes while bass drone, static and an erratic siren battle for dominance, flailing blindly in a dark room. "Street Dude" allows this kind of battle to reign supreme, as stereophonic synth blare and a drowning chirp overwhelm the short-lived click-track beat.
There are no truly "calm" songs on Broken Ear Record, but there are occasions to catch your breath. "Heavy Manners" uses a looped, queasy guitar figure with muffled vocals similarly to Animal Collective in one of their acid-damaged moments. Even "ABA", at less than a minute, allows me to shake away the haze via anti-gravity synth dips and pops. Still, Black Dice have hardly compromised what sounds like a pure vision. Their insistence on change is the mark of a still vibrantly creative band, and while I could do with even more rhythmic focus, I can't argue their total dedication to Broken Ear's aesthetic. Jagged and ornery, but playful: this is music for treading dangerously. | 2005-09-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Astralwerks / DFA | September 7, 2005 | 8.1 | 454f4d8b-3aa2-4320-a429-d3e8ba4e2378 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
Warp reissues Aphex Twin's the 1995 HAB EP and 12" together as one eight-track package. | Warp reissues Aphex Twin's the 1995 HAB EP and 12" together as one eight-track package. | AFX: Hangable Auto Bulb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/239-hangable-auto-bulb/ | Hangable Auto Bulb | In a recent Mojo feature on Bob Dylan's 100 greatest songs, Frank Black talked about his attraction to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". What Black loves about the song above all are the drum fills at the end of each verse. This is where Black looks for the most powerful emotions on Blonde on Blonde, and he says that those fills can have him close to tears. Black's response popped out for me because the idea of "emotional" drumming resonates and yet you don't see mentioned often. Rare is the music where the percussion does this sort of lifting, but when it happens, the effect is striking.
Richard D. James' single greatest talent may be his ability to program drums that convey feeling. He's always had a gift for melody and texture, obviously, but how these components work against his drums is what I'm always listening for. Which is, perhaps, why I've never much rated Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. To me it sounds like only half the Aphex Twin picture.
In 1995, James' music was climbing along a Moore's Law curve, one release after the next filled with strange and adventurous sound that made the future of electronic music seem terribly exciting. In October, a few months after the release of I Care Because You Do, Warp put out two limited vinyl singles titled "Hangable Auto Bulb". These 12-inches featured James' first experiments in pairing his unusual melodies with stuttering, chopped, jungle-influenced drum programming, which wound up defining his sound in the second half the 1990s. Both releases were limited and have been widely sought by collectors since; 10 years later Warp has released both together on CD.
James was fond of percussion that didn't even pretend to sound like real drums. The spastic taps going through the title track sound like a pair of scissors banging on a metal desk, with no timbral body to speak of. But the failure to reference proper instruments (or even previous digital approximations) gives an extra squeeze of the "alien" quality noted by so many attempting to describe James' style. Then on "Wabby Legs" the drums are constantly sent into a roll so fast they are transformed into another kind of instrument, a highly tactile buzz that seems to breathe. When this sound duets with a real or imaginary thumb piano as the track comes to a close, another aesthetic plateau is reached and the music's place in time becomes fuzzy.
"Custodian Discount" is the only track that makes obvious use of "bass" part of the drum'n'bass equation, with a huge balloon of low-end bouncing between the finely cut beats. In general James was too obsessed with balance to let the bass dominate. The swooning, half-sick synth lines that overlap on "Laughable Butane Bob" hint at the classical sensibility that would be tweaked and brightened on The Richard D. James Album the following year, while "Every Day" brings the tunefulness even further forward with a hypnotic distorted synth "singing" lead. Everything here is memorable and at eight tracks over 34 minutes Hangable Auto Bulb leaves you wanting more.
Compared to how hectic James and others would get with the drill'n'bass template, Hangable Auto Bulb is very restrained-- serene, even-- despite beats that can never stop twitching. The drums throughout seem strangely alive, full of energy but fallible, ready to take off at the slightest provocation. That tension, between the otherworldly yet effortlessly tuneful melodies purring along beneath drums that constantly struggle to frame them, is what the ensuing era of James' music is all about, and Hangable Auto Bulb is a hell of an intro. | 2005-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 2, 2005 | 8.9 | 4551bcd8-411f-496b-82ee-693b8e4e1be6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
MGMT's third album finds them far from the colossal hooks of early smashes like "Kids" and "Time to Pretend", and experimenting in a different way from 2010's Congratuations. With Dave Fridmann at the helm once again, the studio trickery is at an all-time high. | MGMT's third album finds them far from the colossal hooks of early smashes like "Kids" and "Time to Pretend", and experimenting in a different way from 2010's Congratuations. With Dave Fridmann at the helm once again, the studio trickery is at an all-time high. | MGMT: MGMT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18487-mgmt-mgmt/ | MGMT | You’ve probably heard it more times than “Time to Pretend” by now: the story of MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular. The duo’s 2007 debut stands as one of recent history's rare game-changing (read: replicable) pop-rock records and its success caught everyone off guard, most of all MGMT themselves. Paralyzed by songs they had the misfortune of disliking more than anyone else, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser responded in 2010 with Congratulations, a well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary record of big ambitions that were only vaguely defined. It didn’t yield a hit, but Congratulations gave them something more valuable going forward: moral high ground. Of course, to follow them on their new path, you needed to believe that “Time to Pretend”, “Kids” and “Electric Feel” would prove to be MGMT’s “Creep” or “She Don’t Use Jelly”, an unrepresentative, fluke hit that allowed them to become stealth operatives for uncompromising art-rock in the compromised major label system.
The most important part of is this narrative is believing that MGMT are victimized by Oracular’s commercial success, a success they won’t repeat because hardly anyone will. If MGMT achieves only half of Oracular's platinum sales, it'll still be one of the top 30 or so sellers in 2013. But judging from the once again well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary MGMT, they’ll never make a truly weirder album than their debut either. Their original, guileless mishmash of gonzo storytelling, imperious pomp-rock, and day-glo synthesizers was the work of people who had no choice but to stay true to their ideals, as they had no pretensions or even any real clue of how it would stick. That spirit gave way to a self-conscious, scare-quotes “weirdness” indicative of artists trying to micromanage what you think about them.
And as with Congratulations, there are just enough moments of cohesion to counteract the latter impulse. Though it’s impossible to know what MGMT’s goals were, “Alien Days” at least feels like the most successful alignment of their supposedly divergent impulses towards prog’s complexity and pop’s pleasure. At first hearing, “Alien Days” feels unnecessarily fussy in both composition and production: you get actual child (not childlike) vocals, distorted drum breaks, and what sounds like the use of all 12 major chords within the span of thirty seconds. But once you get a sense of the labyrinthine structure, every strange turn ends up being the right one, each melodic resolution a small, substantial and lasting surprise, like continually finding a dollar in your jeans.
But the “Mystery Disease” referenced on the third track might just be MGMT's allergic reaction to anything resembling a straightforward pop song.Like most of the non-singles from Oracular, “Introspection” is derived from the ornate pastoralia of Kinks and Bowie and then handed off to producer Dave Fridmann to turn it all pixellated and paisley. But it plays out as a four-and-a-half-minute distraction, with all kinds of “What’s this button do?” knob-twiddling-- windshield-wiper stereo panning, perpetually increasing distortion that drowns out the chorus, tremolo effects. “Mystery Disease” bears a sleek glam melody that gets slathered in nasal flange effects and set to booming breakbeats; here, MGMT all of a sudden reveals themselves a late-90s connection between kinda proggy UK bands like Mansun and Doves, studio geeks whose rare pop songs are similarly their most beloved moments. At least on “Your Life Is a Lie”, the production serves the purpose of the lyrics, as VanWyngarden takes your perceptions through a hall of mirrors before abruptly stopping at two minutes, leaving you more confused than before.
That all happens during the first half of MGMT and in a likely nod to their vinyl-era heroes, Side B becomes a figurative record flip. With the exception of the shuffling goof "Plenty of Girls in the Sea", the band does away with any semblance of verse-chorus structure after its most accessible moment (“Your Life Is a Lie”), letting you know this is the real MGMT. And in fairness, the second half of MGMT shows you what they’ve been all along: a centrist indie rock band on a major label, only now you have to believe those two circles overlap way less than MGMT are letting on. The “weirdness” is just a matter of relativity at best, and at worst, a clever marketing ploy to curry critical favor to hedge against its commercial prospects. If you still think KROQ is seeking to add deep cuts from MGMT to its playlist, then yes, the likes of “Astro-Mancy” will sound awfully bizarre slotting in between bands like Bastille and Imagine Dragons, two examples of acts whose synth-spiked, genre-straddling electro-pop is somehow nominally “indie” thanks to MGMT.
But for all of their talk of going off the deep end, MGMT ultimately takes on a less flattering image, of a band wading in the indie mainstream. Hermetically sealed echo chamber “A Good Sadness” is a wallflower’s idea of space disco and indistinguishable from most anything on the most recent Bear in Heaven album, except MGMT eliminate any sort of consistent rhythmic locomotion. While Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse upped the ante for bong-rip phaser effects, Trevor Powers uses them to support and accent luminous and legible mediations on cosmic circumstances; closer “An Orphan of Fortune” wilfully sinks into impenetrable goo. All of this gassy, overproduced stuff should make “Plenty of Girls in the Sea” sound revelatory, but it’s nothing but context, i.e., “see, we could totally write simple pop songs if we wanted to.” But if they think a Bee Gees groove in 6/4 time or an origin story about doing blow and marrying models were simple pop songs rather than some of the strangest hits of the past decade, we're dealing with resentments too deep-rooted to be fixed over the span of two albums.
Still, it’s easy to root for MGMT. Their LateNightTales compilation is fun as hell and their deferential, deflective tone suggests that they envy not only the creative freedom of Radiohead and Flaming Lips, but also their ability to serve as guides towards the eccentric influences who never shared their commercial luck. And when you see their Letterman performance of “Your Life Is a Lie”, it feels like the definitive version, as the multimedia format gives MGMT a better ability to convey the mischief and exuberance that their self-titled so badly needs. Because on MGMT, being weird is serious business, their ideas of prog are regressive, their psychedelia draws into its own dark recesses rather than transporting or illuminating, self-indulgence posing as artistic martyrdom. In other words, it’s not MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular; if anything’s holding MGMT back, it’s themselves. | 2013-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 16, 2013 | 6.2 | 45526a54-d95c-4575-bb4f-6e09e5c68ea2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Atlanta singer/rapper Future-- who has scored guest verses from Drake and T.I.-- is currently wearing the city's pop-rap crown. Instead of milking his underground hits dry, his newest mixtape provides a breeding ground for new ones. | Atlanta singer/rapper Future-- who has scored guest verses from Drake and T.I.-- is currently wearing the city's pop-rap crown. Instead of milking his underground hits dry, his newest mixtape provides a breeding ground for new ones. | Future: Streetz Calling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16054-streetz-calling/ | Streetz Calling | As the epicenter of popular rap music, Atlanta is known as the birthplace and the machine for most of this generation's major gangster stars. But in its own way, Atlanta is also something like the L.A. of the black music industry, a place where pure, unadulterated pop and club music grows and mutates, and sometimes interacts with the mainstream, like when T.I.'s derided "Whatever You Like" became his biggest hit ever. For the most part, though, the purest of Atlanta pop-rap is an underground phenomenon followed feverishly by teens, young adults, and adults who wish they were still young adults (as engrossingly chronicled by Michael Schmelling, Kelefa Sanneh, and Will Welch in their book Atlanta) and whose stars burn quick and fast. D4L and Soulja Boy and Shawty Lo and Yung L.A. have all more or less come and gone, but there are always guys ready to fill the space, if only for six or 12 months. Every high school class has its own heroes.
Future, an Atlanta born and bred singer/rapper, is currently wearing the crown, and if he doesn't prove to have a longer shelf life than most, his star will have maybe burned the brightest. You may know his voice from the hook and second verse of "Racks" (on racks on racks), one of the biggest club hits of the early year, or from "Tony Montana", his current underground smash that features him rapping in a ridiculous voice that's a very rough approximation of that of the movie character. But this is often ridiculous and very rough music, and Future pulls it off well; the song is one of the most fun tracks of the year. Peers are now starting to attach themselves to the guy with the hot hand, too: Drake blessed Future with a verse for the "Tony Montana" remix, and with the remix to "Magic" (his other underground smash), Future somehow secured T.I.'s most recent "first verse since being released from jail."
Streetz Calling is his most recent mixtape, and to give you an idea of how quickly these things move, none of the aforementioned songs appears. Instead of milking his hits dry, Future is presumably providing a breeding ground for new ones. He's so far basically come as close as anyone to perfecting this thread of ringtone pop, where singing and rapping are practically the same thing, and conversing 100% through Auto-Tune doesn't mean you still can't talk about how you used to sell drugs. It would almost feel antiquated if Future weren't amassing hits, or if he weren't bringing some subtle new dimensions to the micro-genre. His near-complete integration of singing and rapping comes off as something born out of genuine inspiration, and less like a decision made because he's just not very good at rapping (like Yung L.A.) or seemingly bored by the entire idea of it (paging Soulja Boy). He's smooth enough on "Unconditional Love" to recall the time when Lil Wayne's Auto-Tune experiments were kind of romantic, and gritty enough on "Never Be the Same" to evoke dancehall singers who have used Auto-Tune to accentuate their pain.
There are tracks here that hew closer to rap music, and though some lose his identity in the process, others highlight his ability to move closer to either pole and still make good music. "Power of That P", especially, is the work of someone full of ideas, as Future riffs on the letter, tying in everything from "promethazine" to "petroleum" to "Peru." On "E" he works fine over a muted brassy beat next to Trouble, one of the city's most promising goon rappers, and on "The Way it Go" he sounds right at home over Zaytoven's candy-coated keyboard funk. He's at his best when the amalgamation of rap and pop is more pronounced, but he's good enough when deciding to indulge his gangster impulses.
Future works as prolifically as most artists need to these days, and a number of his tracks, including, say, a third on Streetz Calling, keep it moving without making any sort of impression. It's par for the course for the style of music he's trafficking in and for the way the game is played now, but Future's batting average is notable, and as more of his tracks become hits (however minor), his ability begins to speak for itself. This is pop music before it happens, and Future seems equipped to outlast many of the artists that paved a path for him. | 2011-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 17, 2011 | 6.9 | 45535e53-11e8-4ae2-b302-4e246d0815af | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
On this 4xLP set-- soon to be reissued as a 2xCD-- the British duo continue spelunking through a dank netherworld. More focused than 2010's Tryptych, Elemental conveys a sense of mystery that goes beyond affect. | On this 4xLP set-- soon to be reissued as a 2xCD-- the British duo continue spelunking through a dank netherworld. More focused than 2010's Tryptych, Elemental conveys a sense of mystery that goes beyond affect. | Demdike Stare: Elemental Parts 1 & 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16163-elemental-parts-1-2/ | Elemental Parts 1 & 2 | The British duo Demdike Stare continue grimly spelunking through a dank, anxious netherworld on Elemental, their first new music in over a year. Their sound hasn't changed significantly in the interim: Dark, ambient drones tangle with scraps of post-punk and library music, while strains of dubstep and techno settle like pathogens in the bloodstream. If "dark" was the organizing principle of their last album, as Mike Powell said of Tryptych, then "darker" is their current M.O.-- murkier, more oppressive, and more intense.
Suffused in cavernous reverb and distortion, Demdike Stare's hammered pianos and grinding, stunted rhythms conjure a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape. Samples of exotic drums and unfamiliar string instruments are pitched so low that the waveforms seem to fray about the edges. Whatever doesn't decompose is thrown into shuddering, mechanical motion; I'm left with the image of giant machines tilling toxic soil, spitting up shrapnel from battles long lost and forgotten.
Almost uniformly slow, sooty, and diffuse, the record can be disorienting; the more you listen, the more individual tracks blur together. Barring a few elegiac passages, there are few melodies to latch on to, and the record's structure feels almost labyrinthine. Tracks may meander through several distinct phases with little regard for a conventional narrative arc; some simply hover, digging in like a bad trip, until they break in a burst of chorus. Elements flit in and out of earshot according to inscrutable whim, and scattered lock grooves have the potential to fuck up your whole sense of time: I spent 10 minutes lost in a loop before I realized I needed to pick up the needle.
There are pieces of recognizable musical codes scattered throughout-- twanging strings lifted from dusty Ocora samplers, techno's steady kick drum, the uneasy rumble of Nurse With Wound and SPK. Ragged synthesizers strafe across the spectrum like strobe lights in a British field, ca. 1989. In its more harmonic passages, the record's trapped-in-a-submarine atmosphere sounds directly inspired by Seefeel's great 1995 album Succour. The hand-soldered experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop bubble up in squealing sine waves and erratic oscillations; those analog strokes are some of the freest sounds on the record, suggesting lines of flight up and away from a potter's field strewn with mouldering recordings of yore.
Two songs explicitly engage with current modes of club music: "Mnemosyne" follows Shackleton's experiments in fourth world dubstep, with ululations laid over square-wave bass blurts and cracking snares, while "Ishmael's Intent" taps into the ominous, ethno-techno vibe of William Bennett's Cut Hands project.
There's a lot of this kind of thing around at the moment-- in addition to Cut Hands, this particular field of gloomy, ethno-infected, post-industrial techno includes Demdike Stare's label-mates Andy Stott, G.H., Raime, and the rest of the Blackest Ever Black label, Ancient Methods, Ekoplekz, and the clockwork kalimba meltdowns of Harmonious Thelonious and the Durian Brothers-- and it's legitimate to ask what elevates Elemental above mere mannerism or fashion. (Now that Tiësto's peddling triangle t-shirts, we can probably agree that the isosceles' hipster moment is over, but the current fascination with esoteric, sepulchral music and imagery shows little sign of abating.)
Beyond the pervasive sense of doom, which is only reinforced by titles like "Mephisto's Lament" and "In the Wake of Chronos", the whole album package feels like a tribute to limited-edition fetish products of 1980s industrial music. While a 2xCD reissue featuring an altered tracklisting is due later in the year, the album is currently out as a lavish, quadruple-gatefold, 4xLP set, with the individual discs colored four different shades of purple: chrysanthemum, violet, rose, and iris. (The first two pieces were included with the gatefold cover, now sold out; the second will be available for purchase separately. It's blatant collector bait, but it's hard to deny that it's a stunning piece of work.)
The music itself, though, is plenty compelling all on its own. More focused than Tryptych, Elemental hones in on its mood and conveys a genuine sense of mystery that goes way beyond mere affect. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that you never know quite what you're hearing. Is that a foghorn or a Moog? A chorus of reeds or a bees' nest? Where did those drums come from? Does it matter? The sound lingers in between the representational and the abstract, and that ambiguity-- that impurity-- only increases its expressive dimensions. At several points, Demdike Stare's album sounds uncannily like Chris Watson's recently released El Tren Fantasma, a sound portrait of a Mexican railway in its last month of operation. Blurring the lines between documentary, music, and noise, and between life and technology, Watson's chronicle turned the real phantasmal. Demdike Stare do the opposite, conjuring a vivid fantasy world out of audio salvage and crusty circuitry. | 2012-01-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | January 10, 2012 | 7.9 | 45586f88-fa67-4fc5-a4a6-a5aaa53944c8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Pacific Northwestern punks Naomi Punk's second LP is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. | Pacific Northwestern punks Naomi Punk's second LP is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. | Naomi Punk: Television Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19554-naomi-punk-television-man/ | Television Man | Television Man is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. Its province is the damp basement, the dirty aquarium, dreamy half-places of strange light and no easy egress. No surprise that Naomi Punk are from the Pacific Northwest, a region legendarily devoid of sun but graced with persistent, almost prehistoric lushness—somewhere that feels both forbidding and overgrown at the same time.
This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. Most of Television's songs—and most the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark.
They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock. Even on my fourth and fifth listen, I couldn't see all the way to the end of "Television Man" or "Linoleum Tryst #19", which have the psychedelic quality of a yawn that peels open to yet some improbably bigger yawn, stretching for a resolution always just out of reach.
In that respect, one obvious touchstone is Nirvana, who among other feats wrote noisy, guitar-based rock songs around chord changes so beautiful and labyrinthine that on first listen they somehow seem wrong. (If you haven't listened to "Lithium" in the past year, treat yourself.) At root, this is basic but deceptively simple stuff about the way two chords can sit next to each other like two familiar flavors paired in some revelatory way. The wit is not in the ingredients, per se, but in the contrast between them.
My introduction to Naomi Punk was through Parquet Courts' 2013 mixtape, which has continued to serve as a reliable map of underground bands marrying the simplicity and aggression of punk with the opacity of "art," by which I generally mean "things that aren't obvious." Television isn't an album I listen to all the time—I value a positive outlook on life—but when I do listen to it, I savor it by the minute. Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it. And at bottom, that's what I find so attractive about the album: Despite its dimness and introversion, it always suggests a horizon. | 2014-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 6, 2014 | 7.9 | 4558ec78-5187-4529-a136-b05f1aaed4d8 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Susanna (sans her Magical Orchestra) tackles another slate of cover songs comprising unlikely selections from Tom Petty, Thin Lizzy, ABBA, and more. Will Oldham duets on several tracks, including a version of his Bonnie "Prince" Billy song "Joy and Jubilee". | Susanna (sans her Magical Orchestra) tackles another slate of cover songs comprising unlikely selections from Tom Petty, Thin Lizzy, ABBA, and more. Will Oldham duets on several tracks, including a version of his Bonnie "Prince" Billy song "Joy and Jubilee". | Susanna: Flower of Evil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12557-flower-of-evil/ | Flower of Evil | There's a certain amount of hubris inherent in every covers record. Surely many if not most begin quite innocently, like a fan letter to a favorite act. But the implication is still that the singer or band thinks that they can bring something new to someone else's song or performance. Perhaps they feel that they can even make the song better. The fact that this rarely happens apparently deters no one. "Playing covers... is not the same as, say, recording your favorite songs of all time," elaborated Norwegian singer Susanna Wallumrod when an interviewer from The Guardian asked about her propensity toward re-imagining the songs of others. "That wouldn't be interesting. It is about trying to make good music of your own."
Truth be told, Susanna's strategy to date has largely been about making someone else's good music her own. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's first album, 2004's List of Lights and Buoys, featured a couple of covers, including a morphine-slow take on Dolly Parton's "Jolene". But 2006's Melody Mountain was comprised of nothing but covers, including such ringers as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and the umpteenth recording of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". These less adventurous selections were offered along with more eclectic stabs at the likes of AC/DC, Prince, and, um, KISS. And 1980s KISS, no less (though if you want to pick a song to make better, you couldn't do much better-- which is to say worse-- than "Crazy, Crazy Nights").
In 2007, Wallumrod-- sans former Jaga Jazzist keyboardist Morten Qvenild, aka the Magical Orchestra-- emerged with the album of originals Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos. But she's back to her old tricks with her second solo disc Flower of Evil, another collection of radically rearranged covers. Well, mostly covers. Susanna slips a couple of originals onto this disc, too, but "Goodbye" and "Wild Is the Will" tend to blend right in, so thoroughly does Susanna adapt each chosen song to her particularly despondent milieu of dramatic piano and spare accompaniment by pals Helge Sten and Pål Hausken.
Frankly, it's hard to tell what we're meant to take away from Wallumrod's introductory take on Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak", no matter how heartbreaking she makes it, especially when she's backed by the master of malleable sincerity himself, Mr. Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Will Oldham turns up again later as duet partner on Badfinger's "Without You", and his own "Joy and Jubilee" gets the Susanna treatment, too. It's a great fit, brittle and beautiful in all the right places, getting to the heart of Oldham's song in a way that the elusive songwriter himself sometimes disallows.
A few other tracks prove apt fits as well, particularly Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes", Roy Harper's "Forever", and Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy", songs you'd think couldn't get any more melancholy or morose...until they do. Black Sabbath's ballad "Changes" especially benefits from its new setting, not to mention Susanna's female touch, as does Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More", plucked from its 80s trappings and remade as a funereal hymn. Fresh readings of Prince's forgotten Lovesexy track "Dance On" and ABBA's "Lay All Your Love on Me" highlight the strength of lyrics too often subsumed by each respective original song's ace production, even if in the latter case, the original Eurodisco trumps Susanna's Eurodirge.
Yet whether you're Chan Marshall, Mark Kozelek, or Susanna, when a cover goes beyond mere interpretation to outright reinvention, it does raise a question: If you're going to radically change a song until it's virtually unrecognizable, why not go all the way, write new lyrics, and call it something else? Revisiting Lou Reed's Transformer nugget "Vicious" as a piano ballad or "Can't Shake Loose" (a solo hit for ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog) as chamber gloom unfortunately further amplifies the perils and pointlessness of this kind of novelty.
Sure, recontextualizing songs can sometimes reveal something new about the source material. At least that's what the most gifted interpreters accomplish. But in Susanna's case, more often than not, the literal meaning of the lyrics is left intact after all else has been jettisoned. With every track projected through the same spectrum of depression, sadness, and misery, the song becomes unimportant and we're left only with her affected, ultimately monochromatic approach. As morbidly effective, thoroughly gorgeous, and sometimes wrenching as the results may be, in the end Susanna simply doesn't own these songs. She smothers and snuffs them out like a candle. | 2009-01-27T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2009-01-27T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rune Grammofon | January 27, 2009 | 5.5 | 455a5848-e816-43b1-b82f-9a4aaac38e78 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
This surreal, distortion-heavy power-pop album, reissued on vinyl, stands among the best of the late-’90s Elephant 6 output. | This surreal, distortion-heavy power-pop album, reissued on vinyl, stands among the best of the late-’90s Elephant 6 output. | The Gerbils: Are You Sleepy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-gerbils-are-you-sleepy/ | Are You Sleepy | Scott Spillane has a glorious beard. Just spectacular, this thing. The beard conveys wisdom, mystery; it derails interviews, inspires Wikipedia edit wars. Amidst the coterie of oddballs known to the world as Elephant 6, Spillane has always stood out, even to those who might not know his name. It’s hardly just the facial hair: Spillane is the horn player for Neutral Milk Hotel, and really, for all of Elephant 6, lending his time-distending, stately-yet-sloppy touch and fondness for atypical instrumentation—euphonium, flugelhorn, that sort of thing—to any E6 record that would have him. Like Jeff Mangum’s heart-stopping bleat or Julian Koster’s swooning saw, it’s impossible to imagine the sound of Elephant 6 without him.
But this truncated version of the Spillane story—horn guy, has beard, knows Jeff—leaves out one crucial bullet point: Spillane not only played with some of the best of Elephant 6, for a brief time, he helmed one of the collective’s finest bands. Spillane came up in Ruston, Louisiana, alongside Mangum, Apples in Stereo pixie-stickler Robert Schneider, and merry Olivia Tremor Control prankster Will Cullen Hart. And right at the peak of E6’s powers, Spillane, his NMH compatriot Jeremy Barnes, late guitarist Will Westbrook, and fellow E6 mainstay John D’Azzo released Are You Sleepy?, the first of two LPs as the Gerbils. Where 2001’s The Battle of Electricity is pleasantly anodyne, 1998’s Are You Sleepy? is anything but: It’s a roughed-up, fuzzed-out, in-the-red power-pop album with proggy ambitions and some deep-fried weirdness just beneath the surface. While not a full-bore classic, it stands among the best of the second-tier E6 offerings, a longtime fan favorite recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in 20 years.
The first thing anybody notices about Are You Sleepy? is Spillane’s voice—he may look like a backwoods dope farmer, but he sings like a cartoon bumblebee. Warm and warbly in the Daniel Johnston mold, his falsetto cuts straight through all the gnarled lo-fi static around him. While most Elephant 6 records attempted to transcend their home-taped origins, Are You Sleepy? is a lo-fi record in every sense, every level screaming hot, every seam undisguised.
Compared with the world-building wonder of classics like Aeroplane, Sleepy? can feel a little one-note: catchy but a tad on the sweet side. Listen closer, and you’ll hear Spillane’s not afraid to mix in a little sour: “Sunshine Soul” likens a budding romance to a cup full of spiders, and “Crayon Box” turns a missed ride to a nearby Portastatic gig into a full-on existential crisis. There’s a semi-surreal, Southern gothic vibe to many lyrics, and much of Are You Sleepy? is written on the body: a lot of knees and lips, teeth and tongues. Quite a few songs trace a kind of fly-on-the-wall longing: the feeling of going unnoticed, of fraying connections with your small circle, of departures both temporary and permanent.
Smack in the middle of Sleepy is “Wet Host,” a five-and-a-half-minute ambient noise collage that separates the record into two distinct halves.The second takes a midnight-dark turn on “Walnuts,” where Spillane recalls a sudden reemergence of “childhood dreams and violent screams” as his syrupy voice overruns with bile. You’d be hard pressed to call Sleepy? an angry record, but it’s got more than a few moments like these, where Spillane’s good-natured facade betrays a kind of uncontrolled bitterness.
Sleepy is best when it lets these stranger impulses seep into the songs, and at its worst when self-indulgence starts to crowd out the songs themselves. The choppy “Ted Doesn’t Mind” devolves into a horny street preacher/”Convoy” routine that’s funny approximately once, and as intermissions go, “Wet Host” would be just as effective at half its length. But these flickers of excess are short-lived. Twenty years on, Are You Sleepy? still feels like the razor blade in the apple. | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Elephant Six | August 27, 2019 | 8.1 | 455cbcb0-f28b-47d3-8310-ec9830e8d079 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
Five years after his breakthrough mixtape, the former upstart has become a veteran. On his second album in eight months, the rough edges give way to the assured pleasures of an expert in his zone. | Five years after his breakthrough mixtape, the former upstart has become a veteran. On his second album in eight months, the rough edges give way to the assured pleasures of an expert in his zone. | Galcher Lustwerk: 200% Galcher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galcher-lustwerk-200-galcher/ | 200% Galcher | 100% Galcher was not just a phenomenon; it was the end—and the beginning—of an era. Released five years ago, on a low-key British electronic-music blog called Blowing Up the Workshop, the mixtape made the then-unknown Galcher Lustwerk into an underground house superstar. Without the help of our present-day streaming ecosystem, the Ohio-bred, New York-based producer went quietly viral, as word of his smoky hip-house songs passed between inboxes. He crafted a document that not only captured the shape of deep house to come but enabled him to cross over in a way few artists in his world ever do. His beautiful, scratchy baritone and the scuffed-up beats surrounding every purr were a magical combo that resonated with clubgoers and headphone listeners alike.
In 2018, Galcher is a known commodity—a veteran, even. Whatever sense of mystery he evoked when he emerged has dispersed, and his aesthetic, alluring as it still is, has become well defined. 200% Galcher, his sophomore album, attempts to capture the magic of his very first release, but it feels less like some diamond in the rough and more like just another extremely pleasant release from a very talented producer.
The big picture of Galcher’s music—the dreamy stoner mood; the sonorous, almost lullaby-like party poems of his lyrics—has mostly remained the same, but the details have sharpened quite a bit. After his 2017 debut album, Dark Bliss, it was evident that the roughness of his earlier work was going to be absent going forward: The edges were sanded down, the grime on the camera lens wiped away. If there is a log line for 200% Galcher, it’s that his deep house gets even deeper.
The music on the new album is tailor-made for hotboxed bedrooms and bodies sinking into couch cushions. The mood is set on the opener, “Wristbands,” an unhurried eight-minute track with one hell of an electric bassline strut and extra-crispy drum-machine beats. He’s relegated his somnambulant voice to the background, his whispered sweet nothings just there for atmosphere. From the get-go, the instrumentation is immediately more vivid and defined than in his previous work; it pops in a way that dispels some of the haziness and feels more emotive as a result.
The sashaying basslines, on “Wristbands” and elsewhere, impart a dose of swagger, and the jazziness is much more pronounced throughout. Lustwerk was a saxophone player in his youth, and that instrument plays an important role on some of the best songs here. The strongest track, “Blue Lotus,” is essentially a jam session, with taut drumming, wide and lazy synth lines, bluesy keys, and wandering saxophone solo. There’s little to “Blue Lotus” that feels synthetic, and that more natural, lived-in sound is a path Galcher should pursue further in the future. Still, his voice is still a star—on “Life” his seductive play-by-play (“Go get out the house go and get a spouse/Go and get aroused hit another house/Buy another house”) turns domestic bliss into something sexier.
But even though 200% Galcher hones in on the producer’s almost cartoonishly smooth aesthetic with ease, pockets of the album feel forgettable. Each song hits the same relaxed note, and after a while, listening to 10 variations on the same shuffling, downcast beat can lull anyone into sleepiness. It’s a fine-tuned consistency that wasn’t present on 100% Galcher: The pacing of that mixtape left room for surprises, and its druggy fun was spontaneous and youthful. With 200% Galcher the compositions are tighter and the songwriting stronger, but the panache is replaced with precision. There is a seamless locomotion here, a workman-like craft that one only gets with experience. It’s a mature statement from a maturing artist, but one that doesn’t quite strike the same spark of invention. But perhaps he no longer needs to blast open doors in house music—his legacy as an innovator is set. What 200% Galcher makes clear is that no one does that thing quite as well as Galcher Lustwerk. | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lustwerk Music | June 26, 2018 | 7.7 | 455dd8a8-e2bd-47a1-b5ce-0cdc7b746147 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
John Darnielle explores the humanity of wizards, sports legends, Ozzy Osbourne, and other folk heroes and beacons of hope. | John Darnielle explores the humanity of wizards, sports legends, Ozzy Osbourne, and other folk heroes and beacons of hope. | The Mountain Goats: In League With Dragons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-mountain-goats-in-league-with-dragons/ | In League With Dragons | “Old wizards and old athletes are the same,” John Darnielle said during a Facebook live stream at the headquarters of Wizards of the Coast, the game company that owns Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. He was there to announce the latest record from the Mountain Goats, In League With Dragons, and his rhetoric was appropriately fanciful: “They were once magic,” he offered by way of explanation.
He roughly meant that fallen wizards and washed-up athletes shared the same mythological powers; they once stood in as folk heroes and beacons of hope. Their might came not only from their skills, but their lore, stories that blurred the line between the possible and the absurd. On In League With Dragons, Darnielle gives credence to these fantasies, stepping into the minds of the athletes, rockstars, and wizards who offer escape from reality.
But despite its title and the winged green monster on the record’s album art, In League With Dragons is light on mythical beasts; only four songs here come from the original wizard musical Darnielle was writing. Instead, he fills the record with the subjects of his own escapist fantasies. “Doc Gooden” depicts the former Mets pitcher recounting his glory days: “When my name was everywhere/None of you were there.” On “Passiac 1975,” Darnielle sings from the perspective of his own personal wizard, Ozzy Osbourne. In what is possibly the gentlest song about The Prince of Darkness, we hear about the less glamorous moments in the life of Ozzy: “In a Holiday Inn by a nameless river/Renew the assault on my lungs and my liver.” Over the years, Darnielle has excelled at exploiting fallibility and irony for humor, and that shines through on the chorus, delivered in his best “We Are The World” voice: “Tell the crowd, tell the world/I want everyone to get high.”
The record occasionally delves into the arcane, as Mountain Goats records can. “Younger” cloaks an exploration of middle-aged disillusionment under an extended D&D-battle metaphor. “Possum By Night” is sung through the eyes of the titular marsupial. It plays out as any Mountain Goats song about a possum should: “All you parasites, climb aboard/All you vagabonds, praise the Lord,” Darnielle sings, backed by a quiet piano. I found it hilarious and heartbreaking; casual fans may, understandably, find it strange and skippable.
Balancing out these moments are fan-service Easter Eggs like “Going Invisible 2,” a continuation of Get Lonely B-side “Going Invisible.” It has the same resigned catharsis as their classic material, and you can easily picture a crowd singalong of the refrain: “I'm gonna burn it all down today/And sweep all the ashes away.”
Darnielle has increasingly distanced himself from those scrappy, acoustic recordings, adding in a full band, and, on the Mountain Goats’ last record, ridding himself of the guitar completely. Here, producer Owen Pallett adds orchestral flourishes, wind instruments, and delicate finger-picked guitar, resulting in one of the Mountain Goats’ most wide-ranging records: “Waylon Jennings Live!” is a full-blown country song, complete with moaning electric guitar, washboards, and shakers, while “An Antidote For Strychnine” is scored like a noir film. In Pallett’s hands, Darnielle’s voice contorts into heretofore-unheard shapes: On “Clemency for the Wizard King” he approaches “Scarborough Fair” levels of falsetto. Together, these songs function like the cast recording of a musical—each builds on what came before while also establishing its own world.
The Mountain Goats are in an enviable position. They have the trust of their audience and feel comfortable departing from their core sound. “I finally don’t feel quite so insecure,” Darnielle said in a recent Vanity Fair interview. It’s evident in the conviction in his voice as he sings about a fictional, fantastical kingdom. At some point, about a decade ago, the Mountain Goats stopped making records rooted in workaday reality; but the beauty in a Mountain Goats record is that reality pokes through whatever costumes you put on it. “It's so hard to get revenge/The human element drags you down,” he sings on the title track. Even cloaked in wizard’s garb, Darnielle can’t hide his essential humanity. | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 30, 2019 | 7.4 | 457a5eff-b041-44a5-a4b9-49adef0c1b19 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
A new collection of the Swedish composer’s early experiments on Fender Rhodes, synthesizers, and magnetic tape shines a long overdue spotlight on an unsung electronic pioneer. | A new collection of the Swedish composer’s early experiments on Fender Rhodes, synthesizers, and magnetic tape shines a long overdue spotlight on an unsung electronic pioneer. | Catherine Christer Hennix: Selected Early Keyboard Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/catherine-christer-hennix-selected-early-keyboard-works/ | Selected Early Keyboard Works | Ten years ago, followers of drone, experimental electronic music, and minimalism might have noticed that something was amiss with the canon: Most of the big names there were men, with very few women or people of color represented. But recent reissues have sought to present a broader portrait of late-20th-century minimalism, one that ventures beyond La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and others of their ilk. From a long overdue reappraisal of the gay black composer Julius Eastman to crucial overviews of Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Mary Jane Leach, such reissues have presented a far more diverse set of artists plotting new courses amid the sine waves.
Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix is a composer, philosopher, writer, mathematician, and visual artist who has benefited from such a reassessment. Despite the fact that she has been working since the late 1960s and mingled with Young and Riley, it wasn’t until 2010 that a recorded version of her bewildering 1976 drone work “The Electric Harpsichord” was finally made available. This year alone saw her first solo museum exhibition in over 40 years, Traversée du Fantasme, at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam; a retrospective archival show of her visual work at the Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; as well as two volumes of her writing, capped now by this two-disc set of previously unheard pieces drawn from rehearsal tapes made during the 10-day Dream Music Festival in 1976.
Exploring different corners of Hennix’s soundworld, Selected Early Keyboard Works shows that she wasn’t always just exploring fathoms-deep drones. Far removed from the scale of her just-intonation ensemble, the Deontic Miracle, these works document her work with a Fender Rhodes and sine-wave drone. The first half of the set presents 43 minutes of a piece entitled “Mode nouvelle des modalités” and it finds Hennix far from the world of her friend, colleague, and sometime collaborator La Monte Young and more taken with the quicksilver early electronics of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the hands of most players of that era (think Lonnie Liston Smith, Herbie Hancock, or Stevie Wonder the Fender Rhodes created floating, placid tones, but Hennix quickly breaks them into shards and jags, rupturing the mood often to propel herself into strange new realms. On the second half of the composition, more space appears between Hennix’s gestures so that the sounds seem to float like space debris in zero gravity.
The 13-minute “Equal Temperament Fender Mix” is charming, worthy of comparison to the early electronic keyboard works of Terry Riley, right down to Hennix deploying her own tape-delay system to create multiple layers of bubbling sound. This should come as no surprise: The Swedish were some of the earliest audiences to embrace Riley’s revolutionary approach to improv and composition.
The sparkling and unnerving 18-minute highlight “The Well-Tuned Marimba” is closely related to Hennix’s drone piece from that same year, “The Electric Harpsichord,” and might be the more intriguing composition, folding together Hennix’s Yamaha keyboard, sine-wave generator, and the sheng, a traditional Chinese polyphonic reed instrument, whose wheezing overtones add a preternatural buzz to the skin-prickling electronic layers. While some of the most revered minimalist composers and compositions present a calm exterior, these newly discovered efforts of Hennix show us a disquieting—and welcome—new wrinkle to those serene surfaces. | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Blank Forms / Empty Editions | September 8, 2018 | 7.2 | 458c55f1-2811-432f-ae8b-8c05e1c3ed2a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
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 essential 1986 debut from the vibrant and visceral Rhode Island indie rock band, the first American group signed to 4AD. | 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 essential 1986 debut from the vibrant and visceral Rhode Island indie rock band, the first American group signed to 4AD. | Throwing Muses: Throwing Muses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/throwing-muses-throwing-muses/ | Throwing Muses | “A living song is dirty, a dead one clean.” So goes one of Kristin Hersh’s many theories of music. If this is the theory, then her band’s 1986 debut, Throwing Muses, is the proof. Songs tear themselves apart and reattach at odd angles. Hersh, without warning, will snarl out a line in a guttural roar otherwise reserved for metal singers. Guitarist and vocalist Tanya Donelly will play a line out of step with the rest of the arrangement, sweeten that which you would not expect to be sweetened, or invite in some ghosts with a whispered vocal beneath the track. Bassist Leslie Langston will design lines like labyrinths. David Narcizo’s precision drumming acts as rivets under strain, holding the song together but barely. The songs themselves are precocious yet visceral, about life in all its grime. Love is a battlefield rendered in gory closeups. Sex is likened to a pigeon crushed under a car tire. The music is alive, and it is dirty.
Following the Muses in the early years, the dirt might not have been immediately apparent. Hersh and Donelly were step-sisters who grew up in musical families—each received a guitar from the other’s father. Around age 14, they started a band with two classmates at Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island with bassist Elaine Adamedes and drummer Becca Blumen. (Narcizo and Langston would join later.) The band’s early songs were less rock than lo-fi new wave, running on tinkly Casio and teenage enthusiasm, but they had the bones of Throwing Muses: Hersh and Donelly’s sugary harmonies, the scrappy confidence of a band. Originally named the Muses, the band added the “Throwing” as a reference to a passage Hersh had read by philosopher Martin Heidegger (they’d later distance themselves from it after learning about Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism).
Everything was proceeding rather normally as high-school bands go; a profile in The Cowl, a Providence college paper, quotes Narcizo as looking forward to the summer and “a chance to define ourselves”: a fifth member, a synth, more percussion. But shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old Hersh was hit by a car while biking. Her head was severely injured, and she recalls hallucinating songs ever since: songs made of trauma and teeth, whose voice was the demonic roar Hersh would be known for on record and stage. She wrote most of these in a ramshackle apartment she called the Doghouse, in a frenzy of deteriorating health. “I can’t even remember what it was like to hear a song that didn’t grab my face and shout at it,” she recalled in her 2010 memoir Rat Girl. “Must’ve been soothing. But this is electrifying.”
At the urging of producer Gary Smith, who would later shepherd the Pixies to fame, the band moved to Boston and became regulars in the burgeoning college-rock circuit there. Two interviewers from a Rhode Island School of Design campus magazine introduced the Muses to the Cocteau Twins and suggested they contact their label, the legendary British outfit 4AD. Awestruck with the sound of dream pop—“It was like heaven music,” Donelly recalls—Throwing Muses sent some early demos to co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell. Watts-Russell, reminded of Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party, struck up a cross-pond pas-de-deux with the Muses, talking about anything and everything besides signing them because, as he’d mention ruefully, 4AD didn’t sign American bands. But soon, the pretense was dropped, the Muses were indeed signed, college-rock producer Gil Norton was assigned to work with them, and everything began.
Not that everything went smoothly. Throwing Muses is an idiosyncratic and uncopyable debut, but it’s also the product of internal and external tension. To make the album cohere, Watts-Russell nixed most of the goofier material and Americana tracks from the band’s repertoire. Hellspawn songs don’t always translate to full-band arrangements—Narcizo often found himself simply drumming along to the lead line, Langston wrote basslines that turned the arrangement into a thatch, then Donelly found herself, as Hersh recalls, “fitting parts over the mesh.” The resulting cassette of demos was surprisingly straightforward, but Norton was still tasked to pump the songs up, smooth them over—especially noticeable on the intro to “Vicky’s Box,” jangly and thick with sound compared to its cassette counterpart. This was new to the band—even the studio Watts-Russell rented was plush and disorienting compared to the band’s upbringing in communes and college crash pads.
Hersh, meanwhile, had become pregnant with her first child, Dylan, while still working through severe PTSD from her bicycle crash. She was diagnosed with what at the time was called manic depression. While this didn’t stop the recording sessions—“I think it’s against the law to fire a band just because it’s pregnant,” Hersh recalled Langston saying—she held back during vocal takes, terrified that summoning the songs’ full demonic roar might somehow get through to her unborn child. She stopped taking the lithium she’d been prescribed since the tremors it gave her made it too hard to play guitar. The result was a protracted recording process and a seemingly endless amount of takes. At one point the band was nearly kicked out of the studio to make way for Deep Purple.
A more fundamental tension was Tanya Donelly’s role in the band. She was as prolific a songwriter as Hersh—as late as 1991’s The Real Ramona, she was still working through her teenage backlog of demos—but during the Muses’ early years, she’d only have one to a handful of songs per album. The press tended to see more resentment there than truly existed. Despite Hersh and Donelly’s images of being less and more poppy, respectively, Donelly was actually the more introverted of the two, at least when it came to interviews. She’s said the distribution of songs on the Muses albums was more a matter of logistics than feeling sidelined. Donelly wrote her demos as herself, instead of envisioning them as Throwing Muses tracks (unlike the songs she’d write for her 1993 debut with Belly, which she’d envisioned as the next Breeders album but couldn’t get cut). She has one track on Throwing Muses, “Green,” a tribute to a first love who died young. The song shows early signs of her surreal imagery: one’s memories coalescing into bodice-ripping form (“Then there were candles, and a phoenix burnt my bed”), and the pivotal line, “Kneel in my ashes, kneading them,” an uncannily striking metaphor for one’s first consuming love. The tempo is that of piecing together a morning after: two repetitive tick-tock guitar figures, drumbeats like tiptoes, finding their way to emotion. Langston’s bass plays the other party: loping along beneath the track, in its own cool, unconcerned world.
Dirty alive music gets you a certain sort of reaction. Fans attached to them hard, sometimes with the kind of obsession we’d call parasocial these days. Critics were intrigued and impressed but at a loss as to who to compare the band to—X, early R.E.M., the Raincoats, and the Slits were common reference points. Even while praising them, writers would comment on how “cryptic” the songs were, leaving it there in a self-fulfilling shrug, or remark that the music felt untrained or “unlearned.” Sometimes this aligns accidentally to reality: In most interviews, Hersh insists that she channels songs, or is possessed by them, rather than deliberately writing; when her father tried to teach her guitar, she preferred to make up her own chords.
But Donelly was a more deliberate songwriter, and her songs sound fully formed from the earliest bedroom demos. Narcizo was plucked out of marching band to join the Muses, and you can hear it in how he executes every swerve and about-face with precision. Langston’s famously knotty basslines came from her extensive background in California bands—jazz, funk, reggae, acid rock—and she was especially irked by the suggestion that the band was “untrained.” “You know how hard it is to play this way? Try it sometime!” Hersh’s memoir quotes her. “There aren’t any lessons to teach you how to do this.” To this day Hersh’s work plays up lead bass, perhaps inspired by Langston’s groundwork.
The lyrics, too, confounded listeners who expected straightforward punk polemic or spicy confessionals. (This included Norton; “Please stop listening to the lyrics,” Hersh eventually told him, after he’d prodded at the proper names and homosexuality references in “Vicky’s Box.”) But Hersh is a singular vocalist and writer, and her lyrics are straightforward once you know what they’re about. Much was made by early reviewers of “Hate My Way” and its brash salvo of an intro (“I could be a smack freak and hate society/I could hate God and blame Dad…”). As Hersh wrote in her memoir, the lyrics aren’t hers. They paraphrase a kid on campus who’d handed her a pamphlet and buttonholed her for a lecture: “We as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions. For example, say you’re a smack freak…” Hersh sets this to a guitar riff hammered at the tempo of a toddler’s stomped foot, with periodic pauses after each makes-you-think-huh? chant.
What follows is a gentle elegy—but the gentle part, as usual, is the part Hersh remembers as “a piece of Doghouse evil.” With the shift in tempo comes a shift in perspective, back to Hersh: “I make you into a song/I can’t rise above the church,” she sings, less mocking and more resigned. The track is suffused with wistfulness, with trying to explain just how bad things are and knowing that it isn’t going to work. The lyrics put Hersh in conversation with her bandmates—the line “My pillow screams too, but so does my kitchen, and water and my shoes, and the road” is likely a response to an earlier demo by Donelly, “Raise the Roses” (“I hear my pillow screaming, find him”). Trying to find anyone, anything, whose turmoil matches her own, she lands on James Oliver Huberty, a mass shooter who killed 21 people at a McDonald’s in 1984. While some of Throwing Muses’ subject matter has become less transgressive over the years, this if anything has become more; imagine anyone in 2022, after hundreds more such shooters, writing a song comparing herself to one.
Throwing Muses is full of tracks about this uncrossable distance. “So many people want to talk/They look in the mirror and see themselves,” Hersh and Donelly sing on “Call Me”—the implication being, what if you see someone else? The lyrics are full of Lovecraftian invocations of unspecified approaching doom, and the vocals border on voice-acting: snarling out warnings, punctuating lines with dramatic sighs, wilting at the end. For all the studio soft-focus Norton applied to the songs between cassette and debut, Hersh’s vocal delivery is largely the same, crucially fierce. To take one line: “Peter said, thanks for letting me ho-ho!ld you, calling me moonshine.” So much is said in one line: the snarling of the dude’s name; that ho-ho! in the middle like a crowing cartoon Falstaff; the subtext that this guy, like many men you encounter as a rock band of teenage girls, might not be entirely savory. The outro, a lilting recollection of loneliness, is one of the Muses’ most musically straightforward moments, and all the more so when you realize that when Hersh sings “Call me,” she means this: Call her something, anything that makes sense.
These questions of identity suffuse the album, as you’d expect from a record written by high schoolers. But unlike other teenage coming-of-age stories, there’s no clean resolution. “I’m losing my person,” Hersh sings in “America,” meaning herself. She writes secondary characters as kindred spirits: the young gay man outrunning his looming identities in “Vicky’s Box,” the titular rabbit of “Rabbit’s Dying,” expiring amid the Muses’ sludgiest arrangement. “Fear” is a meta-song: starting in medias res punctuated by car sirens, quoting the intro to “Call Me” and what would later become the guitar loop of The Real Ramona’s “Hook in Her Head.” Once again, as the song gets quiet, it gets mean. Donelly narrates, in sotto voce, the process of Hersh’s Doghouse songs creeping up through the body, “up to your face, up to your cheeks,” like a twisted meditation ritual to obliterate yourself through sound. While Donelly keeps going, unmovable, Hersh’s vocal goes wordless then erupts into a seething roar: the song’s true voice, severed from words.
In spite of, or maybe because of its singularity, Throwing Muses was bound to be somewhat obscure. 4AD labelmates such as Lush’s Miki Berenyi praised the band to no end, but their influence was otherwise indirect, through connections: Donelly would join the Breeders for their debut Pod, and Hersh would record with Michael Stipe and become acquainted with Mary Margaret O’Hara. The Muses got further traction through the Boston rock scene; Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead recalled seeing them in his teens and remarking that Boston “was so much cooler.” But Throwing Muses was never released in the United States until 1998, when Warner’s Rykodisc bundled it and its demo cassette into the two-CD compilation In a Doghouse compilation. Neither the original nor the compilation appear on major streaming services, so while the album isn’t exactly hard to find, it’s cut off from the algorithmic apparatus connecting, among others, future musicians with their future influences. Throwing Muses was always a submerged kind of album anyway: the primordial well from which myths emerge. | 2022-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 1, 2022 | 9.2 | 458dc61d-d8a1-4fe2-ae02-b3e9cfbe2e3e | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
"Headphones on. The mind- altering fungi has turned your brain cells to glowing embers. You lie on your back, looking ... | "Headphones on. The mind- altering fungi has turned your brain cells to glowing embers. You lie on your back, looking ... | David Sylvian: Dead Bees on a Cake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7682-dead-bees-on-a-cake/ | Dead Bees on a Cake | "Headphones on. The mind- altering fungi has turned your brain cells to glowing embers. You lie on your back, looking past a gathering of treetops in the bamboo forest. But the trees aren't really trees; they're actually large wind instruments growing out of the ground. Mother Nature controls the valves and blows a light, steady stream of air up from the earth's core, and through a copse of tree- woodwinds. Now there's a huge multi- layered drone backing up the high notes of harmonizing hummingbirds, while wood- nymphs whistle along. Wolves give digeridoo howls. Woodpeckers tap out their staccato percussion, a chorus of crickets chirp their accompaniment, and a rhythmically- inclined panda bear pounds on hollow tree stumps in the distance. All the sounds are in perfect unison like some vast aboriginal orchestra. But this is no ordinary trip, you're experiencing David Sylvian's organically- grown multiform sound- universe."
--Excerpt from my upcoming novel, "Mushroom Clouds in My Mind, Man"
Alright, nevermind the Kerouac-ian bullshit. But you get the idea. I mean, Dead Bees on a Cake isn't exactly akin to the incidental soundtrack music of some boring nature film made by Gorp- chomping hippie conservationists. There's a certain rare meld of both primal and postmodern compositional sense being applied here. Sylvian blends his different ethnic influences seamlessly, in a manner that shames the trendy world- beat affectations making appearances on so many British and American songwriters' albums. And sure, sometimes Sylvian's only a pan flute coo or zither- pluck away from officially crossing into Windham Hill territory, and joining the lifetime opening- for- Kitaro circuit. But hey.
Having been a member of synth- rock pioneers Japan, I guess it seems only natural that Sylvian would eventually record with someone authentically Japanese. Good thing he decided to work with arranging/ composing genius Ryuichi Sakamoto, and not, say, Yoko Ono or nasty ol' Yamatsuka Eye. Dead Bees on a Cake is nothing less than a continuation of Sylvian's eclectic series of genre- hopping solo albums-- the best of which is probably his first major collaborative effort with Sakamoto, 1984's Brilliant Trees.
When you're like Sylvian-- able to attract the likes of Robert Fripp (who plays on 1993's God's Monkey), Bill Frisell, and Talvin Singh and have them function as your sidemen-- you know you've finally become that semi- obscure but critically- acclaimed rock enigma you've always dreamed of becoming, right? Even Marc Ribot decides to contribute some inimitable guitar work on this latest album, miraculously tearing himself away from his busy schedule playing with every single musician in New York City.
Dead Bees leads off with the spare, soul- drenched "I Surrender," and gives some foreshadowing of what's to come. Ribot's traditional jazz octave- playing shares space with abbreviated flugelhorn parts, flute, and tape- looped guitar ornamentation (the funk- inflected churn of "God Man" suggests Mitchell Froom could have had his busy paws on the mixing board at some point, although there's no documented proof). But in many cases, just a guitar and vocals are apparently enough to satisfy Sylvian. For instance, on "Dobro #1," Bill Frisell handles the dobro duties while Sylvian simply sings. Or you may get an arrangement like the one on "Pollen Path," consisting of slide guitar, samples, drums, and Sakamoto on "insects."
Each track comes together in the sense that no one instrument or effect is ever really featured over another-- and that includes Sylvian's low, breathy vocals. His vocal cadences fit snugly around whatever instrumentation happens to be floating about. The songs also benefit from Sakamoto's arranging expertise, in that he seems to know exactly where and when to add the odd orchestral quirk, appropriate sound snippets, or coordinate a string or brass arrangement.
Sylvian's intrepid, near- subliminal use of samples proves to be an approach far beyond the grasp of most shameless sample- happy "progressive" groups. He extracts bits and pieces from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John Cage, John Lee Hooker and Charles Brown's 1946 Cash Box award- winning single "Driftin' Blues," slowly and subtly interspersing the sampled contents into a song's framework. "Driftin' Blues" and samples of Hooker's "I'm Wanderin'" serve as the ostensible basis for Sylvian's unorthodox interpretation of simple blues on "Midnight Sun." Pretty heady stuff it is, especially compared to the output of millions of musically- illiterate con-men who steal huge chunks of old Motown hits or spy- movie themes and add a trip-hop beat, just before insisting that the result be hailed as serious work of art.
Talvin Singh makes an indispensable contribution, conjuring up some spicy raga rhythms on "Krishna Blue" and "All My Mother's Names." The latter transports you to an ambient never- neverland where Singh's Zen- like tabla beats become one with the throbbing of your eardrums and Ribot's guitar becomes the stuff of personification, as it unleashes primal screams and experiences fits of electronic epilepsy. Other extra- terrestrial sound samples fade in and out, and before long, you find yourself spinning out of control in something resembling the opening credits of "The Twilight Zone." (Wave to the giant E=MC2 figure as it floats by! There it goes!)
Sadly, Dead Bees on a Cake will most likely be received like every other David Sylvian solo project-- that is, with uniform indifference in America and a maybe few eyebrow raisings in Europe. True, for die- hard Japan fans expecting another Gentlemen Take Polaroids, or Adolescent Sex, this may at first sound to you like stuff you'd only listen to during an Oriental massage or a Calgon bath. But don't be fooled. Sylvian's lyrics are poetic and rarely dull, and the album's unmistakably advanced musical vision makes it pretty tough to dismiss as mere new age pap. | 1999-03-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 1999-03-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Virgin | March 30, 1999 | 7.3 | 459775e1-6c2f-4423-adfa-96e9464efb8c | Pitchfork | null |
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In his debut full-length, the UK producer puts his idiosyncratic stamp on a variety of club styles, folding in the voices of his family members to add emotional resonance. | In his debut full-length, the UK producer puts his idiosyncratic stamp on a variety of club styles, folding in the voices of his family members to add emotional resonance. | Joy Orbison: Still Slipping Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joy-orbison-still-slipping-vol-1/ | Still Slipping Vol. 1 | Peter O’Grady’s family has long played an important role in his career as Joy Orbison. His cousin Leighann introduced him to drum’n’bass and UK garage at a young age, while he credits his uncle, jungle legend Ray Keith, with fostering his nascent interest in dance music. On Still Slipping Vol. 1, O’Grady’s first full-length release—arriving more than a decade after his debut 12"—he weaves his family into the fabric of the record. Voice notes from his parents, sister, uncles, cousins, and Aunt Helen transform Still Slipping Vol. 1 into one of the most quietly moving dance music records of the year, while a playful sense of humor keeps O’Grady’s familiar mischievous streak in play.
O’Grady has, in many ways, been here before. His 2019 Slipping EP featured his grandmother on the cover, while his track “w/ Dad” sampled his father reminiscing about a nameless child. Still Slipping Vol. 1 takes this tendency and runs with it over 14 tracks that showcase O’Grady’s cosmopolitan production technique at its very best. O’Grady calls this “a soul record,” and it certainly feels like a lot of heart has gone into it. Stylistically, though, it runs closer to the many tendrils of the UK bass continuum to which O’Grady has put his name. “swag w/ kav” rides a beat with shades of 2-step garage; “better” is a scuba-deep house number, reminiscent of UK veteran Charles Webster; “layer 6” skirts around the airier moments of drum’n’bass, and “runnersz,” with its melodic sub-bass and twinkling synths, is close enough to what used to be known as post-dubstep, back in the days when Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” blew up in UK clubs. It’s the kind of music where you can hear shades of everything but few conclusive traces of any one style, blending four decades of dance music with a lightness of touch that may surprise those more familiar with the corrosive techno bangers of Joy O’s hookups with fellow UK producer Boddika.
In the age of COVID, when many people haven’t seen their extended families in months, lacing a record with domestic chatter might seem like a sentimental cheat code, a shortcut to emotional depth that isn’t necessarily earned. But O’Grady employs a melodic finesse throughout that equals the best tracks in his catalog—amplifying, enhancing, and sometimes undercutting the ambiance of familiar chitchat. “better,” with singer Léa Sen, has a topline of exquisite tenderness, while slo-mo electro number “froth sipping” contains a synth pattern reminiscent of Orbital’s euphoric melancholy, if the latter were sunk beneath gently moving water. Throughout, O’Grady uses deep, melodic bass tones whose embrace is as warm and comforting as a fresh towel after a cold swim.
“froth sipping” also displays the strand of knowing—and often pretty funny—meta-commentary that runs through Still Slipping. The song ends with O’Grady’s mother proclaiming, presumably about his own music, “There’s something in it that you can latch onto, because it’s got… not a melody, but something you can almost hum to”—the sort of vaguely sympathetic evaluation that will be familiar to anyone who has shared their avant-garde musical adventures with well-meaning family members. At the end of “sparko,” meanwhile, an unimpressed voice declares, “The second you just change the language to ‘mixtape,’ nobody cares,” which is pretty droll for a release that is marketed as a mixtape, rather than an album, for no discernible reason. Sadness has a place too, among the world of familiar reminiscence: “in drink” starts with O’Grady’s mother talking about her own parents getting “into drink” before fading away into mournful chords and a distressed house beat.
Not many producers would wait 12 years to release their full-length debut, then have the nerve to filet it with self-deprecating jokes, wry commentary, and family misfortune. But it is precisely these touches that make Still Slipping Vol. 1 such a compelling record. O’Grady’s wonky melodic craft and slyly self-referential humor invite comparisons to Aphex Twin, signaling O’Grady’s continuing journey beyond the limits of merely functional club music. Rarely is electronic music so utterly human as on Still Slipping, its emotional draw as reassuringly complex as a grand family reunion.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | August 16, 2021 | 7.8 | 459cbe80-09c3-49bd-a483-d3c2aac94922 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Arctic Monkeys’ daring sixth album is a left-turn if ever there was one, but the way Alex Turner swaps witty sleaze for absurdist suave makes it a totally bemusing and fascinating listen. | Arctic Monkeys’ daring sixth album is a left-turn if ever there was one, but the way Alex Turner swaps witty sleaze for absurdist suave makes it a totally bemusing and fascinating listen. | Arctic Monkeys: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arctic-monkeys-tranquility-base-hotel-and-casino/ | Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino | Alex Turner wrote Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album in Los Angeles on an upright piano in his spare room. As it took shape, he christened his makeshift studio the Lunar Surface, after the theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing on a soundstage. When Turner assembled his bandmates, they were alarmed to find he’d applied this concept literally: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a song suite documenting a futuristic moon colony and the exodus that spawned it, told by an assortment of unreliable narrators who can sometimes barely string a sentence together. After 2013’s wildly successful AM, Turner is now writing lyrics in an entirely new idiom, swapping witty sleaze for absurdist suave.
Against the odds, the resulting LP finds the former street poet at his most visionary: material only he could write, performed with a charm and bravado that only he could pull off. He veers from croons to falsetto, splicing together hyperrealist satire, sham biography, and interstellar escapism. Glints of social commentary yield to the whims of his narrators—forgetful, distractible oddballs and drunk egomaniacs who have no right to be so captivating.
At a studio in an old Parisian mansion, the band dreamed up an alluring retro-futurist backdrop for Turner’s inventions. Harpsichords, vintage keyboards, and space-age synths are cobwebbed together. The music borrows from that mid-’70s moment when the Walker Brothers resembled an avant-garde funeral band, while Turner sings drolly surreal one-liners and play-acts as a vanquished lounge singer. To round off the lunar alienation, he spliced his studio renditions with the raw, eccentric vocal demos he’d been recording at home.
The results of this experiment will divide, delight, bemuse, and bewilder various factions of their sizable fan base, particularly disciples of its bluesy predecessor. No singles teed up Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and for good reason: Barely anything here invites casual consumption. There is plenty that actively resists it, and that’s probably the point.
Turner, who is 32, has lately immersed himself in a pair of books often cited as shorthand for our modern condition: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Unlike Father John Misty, another acolyte of this pop-philosophical literature, Turner threads their ideas into quiet storms of insinuation rather than didactic frenzies. “Everybody’s on a barge floating down the endless stream of great TV,” he riffs on “Star Treatment,” one of his sassier nods to our current predicament—what Wallace called the “strange objectless unease” of immersion in visual media.
Turner later references Postman’s “information-action ratio,” the idea that our access to endless information has created a harmful international consciousness: In deciding what to care about, we are paralyzed by choice, and so care a little about everything, rather than a lot about what’s important. On “Four Out of Five,” the “Information-Action Ratio” is the name of a rooftop taqueria in Turner’s rapidly gentrifying moon colony. This is one of his pet topics, how consumerism can co-opt a salient critique and use it to sell you new stuff. Whether or not he’d accept the term, he’s descended into a kind of capitalist ennui, borne out in a sharp line crooned on “Batphone”: “I launch my fragrance called Integrity/I sell the fact that I can’t be bought.”
Even Turner’s trademark nostalgia, once fixed on ice-cream vans and “trackie bottoms tucked in socks,” gets a top-down reinvention. On album highlight “Star Treatment,” he glams up like David Bowie descending on a lunar wedding. After recalling a time when he “just wanted to be one of the Strokes,” Turner drifts into a romantic fantasy about an ex and re-emerges in their back seat, a ghost in the rear-view mirror, before taking an elevator down to Earth to resume his “make-believe residency” as a “lounge singer shimmer.” In an age of hyper-communication and rolling-news anxiety, it’s intriguing to hear Turner in this hallucinogenic state, oscillating between abstraction and narrative. His first-person encounters are inscrutable free-association, yet the absurdities ring true. It’s not until you’re lured into his headspace that this dissonant poetry begins to align with our dissonant reality.
That dissonance reappears in Turner’s fixation on worlds-within-worlds, the way one story can collapse into another. It’s a component of his ruptured reality, traceable to any number of preoccupations—fluid truth in the fake-news era, the wonderland of L.A., the distorting effects of celebrity or cocaine. Those same lines between reality and representation are unravelling in his Lunar Surface home-studio analogy, in the songs-within-songs of “Star Treatment,” “Science Fiction,” and “The Ultracheese,” and in the hand-carved model of a hotel-casino on the record’s cover, which Turner likens to the scaled-down replicas that hotels display in their own lobbies. He has the air of a lounge-lizard Borges, a meticulous analyst with the gloriously caddish spirit of Serge Gainsbourg, John Cooper Clarke, and Jarvis Cocker rolled into one.
Perhaps the great mystery of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is not its knotty themes or cryptic lyrics but what’s motivating Turner. With the keys to the most lucrative and well-oiled indie-rock band around, he’s regenerated Arctic Monkeys in service of a delirious and artful satire directed at the foundations of modern society. This is not an act of protest: Implicated in its sprawl are gentrification, consumerism, and media consumption, but rather than address these meaty topics, he strafes around them, admiring their transformation in the laboratory of his word tricks. In the end, his helpless struggle for meaning is what makes him relatable. For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself. | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | May 14, 2018 | 8.1 | 45a1ccab-e3ec-4a69-bf85-b23e043421ba | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
All four members of the Districts are under 21 and they play bar-friendly rock with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot. Replacing classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor, their debut LP, produced by John Congleton, is full of energy and ambition. | All four members of the Districts are under 21 and they play bar-friendly rock with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot. Replacing classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor, their debut LP, produced by John Congleton, is full of energy and ambition. | The Districts: A Flourish and a Spoil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20142-a-flourish-and-a-spoil/ | A Flourish and a Spoil | The Districts’ appeal lies in how you can call them a "rock band" and have a typically vague term mean something specific. Or, maybe, they’re a throwback to the last time "rock band" meant something. All four members are under 21 years old and they play bar-friendly rawk with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot, replacing the classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor. They’re from Lititz, Penn., a town whose closest metro area is Lancaster, but they evoke New York in 2002, which itself evoked New York during a non-specific time in the late-'70s; think "Welcome to New York" with Taylor Swift swapped out for Julian Casablancas and Hamilton Leithauser and Paul Banks, a fantastical guided tour of art-damaged, post-punk, Koch-era NYC minus the clear and present danger. They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.
They're hardly the only ones who fit this description, but the Districts have significant advantages over their contemporaries. For one thing, they leave something to the imagination. It’s rare for the Districts to hit a specific reference point; the chalkdust guitars and laggard tempo of "Chlorine" recall the magisterial mope of early Walkmen, but otherwise, A Flourish and a Spoil is the first half of the past decade in "rock bands," wadded up and spitballed. Rollicking opener "4th & Roebling" in particular establishes itself as the meeting point in a drunken Transatlantic exchange between the loose-lipped pub crawling of the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys and their more tight-jeaned American counterparts. And unlike, say, Drowners or Catfish and the Bottlemen, Rob Grote doesn’t revert to flippant, soft misogyny as the most effective way of conveying "attitude."
Rather, he’s someone just removed from high school and parental supervision, grappling with how to live with one’s self and with another person. Grote’s subject matter is mostly what one might expect from a band of teens in a small town, which is to say, drinking, girls and getting the fuck out of that town. Classicist imagery abounds: in "4th & Roebling", he waits by a train station, wine is drank, used as metaphor and personified; "Suburban Smell" looks towards the high school gridiron as a spiritual void.
In these songs, the Districts’ youthful energy and belief manifests in effort—while the band trudges dutifully behind him, Grote furrows his brow and intently scratches out his thoughts with the intent of giving everyday occurrences some true gravitas. Unfortunately, his logorrhea muddles his perspective, as the transition from feelings to lyrics lessens the impact of his words rather than deepening their resonance. Clichés are jumbled and reconstituted, and in turn sound both banal and strained—"We’d crack mothers’ backs just by walking the street," "There are sixteen homes on every street/ They all of course lie in the neatest rows." It’s a shame that Grote doesn’t trust the impact of observation; "Bold" is one of the few times he lets the situation speak for itself, noting, "My brother’s not home/ He’s learning war in fatigues" as a reflection on the triviality of his worries about the dishes and whether or not he’s capable of loving.
Or, the main issue with the Districts is that they just haven't found a way to channel their energy and ambition into memorable hooks. John Congleton produces and similar to his work on Cloud Nothings’ Here and Nowhere Else, he stays out of the way, capturing a raucous, live-room sound. But whereas Dylan Baldi uses velocity and distortion to counterbalance his facility with songcraft, plodding tempo, wavering melody, and gritted ambience is all the Districts have. The few bits of trickery show a band still unsure of itself in the studio—a wobbly flange effect on Grote’s vocals in "Hounds" and the puttering drum machines on "Bold" emphasize A Flourish and a Spoil's time-stamped experience by touching on Dave Fridmann’s obtrusive production work with the Flaming Lips and Phantom Planet.
All of which makes "Suburban Smell" a purposeful outlier in a number of ways. It’s a brief acoustic number where Grote shows his age; he’s not the road dog or barfly in prior songs, but rather the kid getting stoned in his basement while the rest of his class goes to parties and football games, the sum of which he calls, "the retard dance." It’s easy to call out Grote for lack of sensitivity. But while "Suburban Smell" may stink of piss and vinegar platitude, it’s the rare time when you truly know where Grote’s coming from, where the Districts are a "millennial" band in age and disposition rather than "millennial" in simply sounding like they could’ve scored some MTV2 play at the turn of Y2K. | 2015-02-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-02-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | February 6, 2015 | 5.6 | 45a1f9ff-00ff-4d6d-bbf2-52921fd9460a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This live set captures the former Big Star frontman for a 1999 one-off in Memphis, where he serves up a feast of soul-music staples backed by the city’s legendary Hi Rhythm Section. | This live set captures the former Big Star frontman for a 1999 one-off in Memphis, where he serves up a feast of soul-music staples backed by the city’s legendary Hi Rhythm Section. | Alex Chilton / Hi Rhythm Section: Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-chilton-hi-rhythm-section-boogie-shoes-live-on-beale-street/ | Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street | You could call Boogie Shoes a homecoming of sorts. A native son of Memphis, Alex Chilton adopted New Orleans as his new home in 1982—with typically perverse logic, the Big Star leader headed to the famously decadent city to get sober, a gambit that paid off—but his connection to the birthplace of rock’n’soul remained strong. When Memphis promoter David Less summoned him in the fall of 1999 to play Fredstock, a charity show for the ailing Fred Ford, a Memphis musical fixture who co-founded the Beale Street Music Festival in 1977, Chilton heeded the call, albeit reluctantly.
As Less recounts in the liner notes for Boogie Shoes, an archival release of that October 7, 1999 set at the New Daisy Theatre, Chilton needed some convincing to return to Memphis. He claimed, absurdly, that there were no musicians in town he could play with. That’s when Less played a trump card: Chilton would be backed by the Hi Rhythm Section. The house band of Memphis’ Hi Records—featuring the Hodges brothers, guitarist Mabon “Teenie,” keyboardist Charles, and bassist Leroy; drummer Howard Grimes; and keyboardist Archie “Hubie” Mitchell, aka Archie Turner—had played on era-defining hits by Al Green and Ann Peebles. The opportunity to sing a set of classic soul covers with such an illustrious outfit proved irresistible to Chilton. Twenty-two years later, his joy at sharing the stage with them is apparent on every one of Boogie Shoes’ 10 rousing tracks.
Chilton was no stranger to R&B. He cut his teeth as a teenage soul singer fronting the Box Tops in the 1960s, growling with a rasp that owed no small debt to Ray Charles. He’d leave this affectation behind as he fronted the legendary power-pop outfit Big Star, eventually developing a laconic drawl that served him well whether he was slumming as a solo act in punk clubs or playing fairs with a reunited Box Tops. The Fred Ford charity show gave Chilton a chance to apply his vocal tricks to a set of R&B warhorses, their familiarity helping to draw attention to his eccentricities. Chilton avoids soul clichés. He bends melodies, making sure they’re recognizable while landing slightly off-center. He rolls the lyrics around in his mouth, delivering phrases as if they’re punchlines to in-jokes. He sings with humor but without a trace of irony; throughout Boogie Shoes, he seems as if he’s on the verge of breaking out in a grin or a smirk.
Acting as the bandleader—he never rehearsed with the Hi Rhythm Section, and just called out songs onstage—Chilton sticks to material he and the audience know by heart. Occasionally, he hauls out songs associated with Memphis, chief among them “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.),” a 1966 hit for Wilson Pickett whose subtitle became the nickname for the city’s legendary Stax Records. Chilton’s Boogie Shoes setlist is notable for how many different styles of ’60s R&B he and the Hi Rhythm Section tackle. They salute Motown by covering the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” pay tribute to New Orleans by playing Fats Domino’s rollicking “Hello Josephine,” dabble in rock’n’roll with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” and even reconfigure KC & the Sunshine Band’s disco classic “Boogie Shoes” as Southern-fried soul.
What ties it all together is the Hi Rhythm Section: They play each of these selections as if they emanated from the heart of Memphis, anchoring the oldies with a cool, supple groove that conveys the sound of the city. The Hi Rhythm Section were among the best musicians Memphis ever produced, reason enough for a wayward son like Chilton to come back home for a night. The chemistry between the singer and the band makes Boogie Shoes something more than a good time. No other Alex Chilton record captures the often cantankerous singer sounding so relaxed, or in such high spirits.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Omnivore | May 8, 2021 | 7 | 45a29a39-ef35-4fd0-a7fc-cd1c8a556021 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The Hives ditch their native Sweden to record in Mississippi, working with producers such as Pharrell Williams, Jacknife Lee, and Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello). They expand their thrashing guitar sound to include more bass and songs that clock in over three minutes. | The Hives ditch their native Sweden to record in Mississippi, working with producers such as Pharrell Williams, Jacknife Lee, and Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello). They expand their thrashing guitar sound to include more bass and songs that clock in over three minutes. | The Hives: The Black and White Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10904-the-black-and-white-album/ | The Black and White Album | Roll back to 2001-02: A swarm of vaguely retro-thinking garage bands with plural-noun names (the Hives, the Strokes, the Vines, the White Stripes) were credited with reinvigorating rock'n'roll. The press went all breathless at the sight of slightly disheveled boys in tight pants, and the Hives were promptly slapped on the cover of Spin, extensively profiled in The New Yorker, and repeatedly fawned over by the NME. Alas, the new millennium's culture-cycle is especially vicious, and by 2004, when the Hives released their fourth LP (Tyrannosaurus Hives, the follow-up to their stateside breakthrough, Veni Vidi Vicious), most folks had moved on-- which is too bad, because of all the over-hyped revivalists of the early 00s, the Hives might be the most fun.
Although The Black and White Album features the same ecstatic, semi-ridiculous guitar thrashing that characterizes most of the band's previous work, it also sees the Hives expanding their sound to include more bass and songs that clock in over three minutes. This time, the band ditched its native Fagersta, Sweden to record, mostly, in Oxford, Mississippi, soliciting help from a handful of all-star producers: Pharrell Williams, Jacknife Lee, Dennis Herring (who's worked with Modest Mouse and Elvis Costello), and Thomas Oberg (beloved vocalist for a bunch of Swedish rock bands, including Bergman Rock/bob hund). With all that muscle behind the boards, it's not surprising that this is also the Hives' cleanest record to date-- the Hives were never particularly convincing as a garage band (the impeccably-tailored, color-coordinated suits didn't help), and any delusions-of-grit they may have entertained in the past are wholly eradicated here.
The Black and White Album can feel, at times, thematically spastic, spinning more like a mixtape than a proper LP. Pharrell's two standout tracks-- "Well All Right!" and "T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S"-- are both slinky clap-alongs that play remarkably well to the band's party-anthem tendencies: "Well All Right!" sees frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist shrieking "People see me and they go/ Ahhhhh! Woo woo!" over pittering drums and perfectly-orchestrated backing chants, a jubilant bit of shameless self-promotion that suits Almqvist remarkably well. Regardless of how you feel about his thick, barky pipes, Almqvist is a captivating performer-- both live and in the studio-- strutting back and forth like a cartoon Mick Jagger, lips pouted, hips popped, voice undulating, part-James Brown, part-John Fogerty. Each vocal track on The Black and White Album sounds intense and revelatory; paired with Pharrell's playful production, the Hives soar.
The Hives' three self-produced cuts are just as jubilant-- with the exception of the instrumental "A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors", which is all fart-bass and creepy synthesizers. It's presumably a concept song about life-as-a-Hive, but it's also the band at their most subdued. Jacknife Lee's track ("Hey Little World") is classic Hives, frantic and propulsive, with a few simple riffs and a broad, confrontational chorus ("Whatcha gonna do/ Any one of you?"). The bulk of the record is handled by Herring; on opener (and lead single) "Tick Tick Boom" a wall of guitars is balanced by a wall of vocals, with all five band members worked into a proper frenzy and howling away. At their best, the Hives are frenetic and volatile, jolting, pushing, panting-- it's punk rock at its most polished, with only the barest threat of dissolution. | 2007-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | A&M | November 16, 2007 | 6.2 | 45a33c43-589f-46d3-b2f7-0563d7b1405a | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
At 69, the Japanese singer-songwriter and city-pop icon is still working in pursuit of the perfect pop song. | At 69, the Japanese singer-songwriter and city-pop icon is still working in pursuit of the perfect pop song. | Tatsuro Yamashita: Softly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tatsuro-yamashita-softly/ | Softly | “There are only two ways for a person to live,” Tatsuro Yamashita recently told Brutus magazine. “You either constantly seek to evolve, or you resolve to hold fast to the same path. The worst is being wishy-washy and doing neither of those things.” Born in 1953, the Tokyo-based musician was always the best songwriter, arranger, and vocalist in all of city pop, but his love of music is boundless, his commitment to evolution wholehearted. He released one of the first city-pop singles, “DOWN TOWN,” with his band Sugar Babe in 1975; it’s essentially a loving riff on the Isley Brothers’ “If You Were There.” Since then, his decades-long solo career has highlighted an undying love for the Beach Boys and various strains of funk, soft rock, and soul. Despite having more than 60,000 records in his collection, Yamashita will comfortably admit that he “[doesn’t] have a lot of favorite sounds,” but he is a voracious listener. During the ’70s and ’80s he’d listen to R&B radio, buy 20-odd CDs, and then create 90-minute mixtapes; now he studies the Global Top 50 charts on streaming services. His new album Softly, his first in 11 years, is a testament to his uncompromising desire to push himself; Yamashita may be 69 years old, but he’s still striving for pop perfection.
He achieves it here because he’s really the same wide-eyed boy from 50 years ago. His love for choral groups and doo-wop was obvious on his 1972 debut Add Some Music to Your Day, released when he was still a teenager, and he opens Softly with a one-minute intro featuring little more than vocal harmonies. Titled “フェニックス” (“Phoenix”), it has Yamashita singing of holding back tears and moving into the future. He crystallizes such sentiments on the follow-up track, “Love’s on Fire,” becoming the mythological symbol of rebirth itself as he announces, “Yes, I’m on fire!” He’s obsessed with his lover, and he knows that their bond will keep him going. A synth-pop track with programmed drums, it’s a bit of a curveball compared to the more traditional instrumentation that has characterized his albums, but the switch-up is a sign of his creative restlessness.
Having likened himself to director Yasujiro Ozu, Yamashita is the sort of artist who largely works within stylistic boundaries. “うたのきしゃ” (“Uta no Kisha”), for example, is one of the most classically Yamashita songs on Softly. It’s built on a sturdy foundation of grooving bassline, uplifting vocal harmonies, and resplendent brass, but it’s all about his sparing use of other instruments: a vibraslap here, a train whistle there, an interlude with an unexpected synthesized beat. Towering above everything is his voice, slightly worn but with the same emotional power he’s always had to transform simple words into transcendent mantras. He concludes the song by repeatedly asking people to ride, sing, and dance to “the music train.” Much like on his 1978 single “Let’s Dance Baby,” he repeats the titular line over and over again with so much conviction that it becomes a magical, magnetic invitation.
Yamashita understands that his songs allow him to verbalize emotions he’d be uncomfortable expressing in real life. “You won’t see me actually saying anything you might hear in my songs,” he’s confessed. (In fact, he has admitted that he never romantically proposed to his wife, Mariya Takeuchi, of “Plastic Love” fame. “We both just kind of went, ‘Should we get married…?’”) This reservation is surprising, given how arresting his most loving songs are. On 1979’s “永遠のFull Moon” (“Eternal Full Moon”), there’s excitement brewing as he sings about basking in the moonlight with a lover, while the 1982 piano ballad “Your Eyes” could handily soundtrack the first dance at a wedding. Such tenderness appears on Softly as well, but “コンポジション” (“Composition”) is notably and refreshingly low-key. He sings about love as a song two people make together, and the only English line, “I wanna play for you,” is sung with such transparent vulnerability that it sells the whole premise; a less accomplished vocalist would render the conceit unbearably saccharine.
Yamashita’s voice, as everyone in his sphere knows, is peerless. Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, who played bass on Yamashita’s 1977 classic Spacy, considered him one of only three great singers in their scene. “I was really jealous of him, but also kind of fascinated,” he told Brutus. “I think of Yamashita-kun as being like a rakugo storyteller.” The comparison is apt: the traditional art of one-man, comic storytelling involves entertaining a crowd while seated and with minimal props—the smallest changes in pitch and tone become massively important in conveying different emotions and characters. Sometimes his voice is so overwhelmingly forceful that it floods you with pure feeling (1977’s “Love Space,” 1983’s “悲しみのJody (She Was Crying)”), but the subtler performances are equally immense. Every melodic phrase in “Lehua, My Love,” for instance, is an opportunity for Yamashita to inject drama—sustained notes and stressed syllables capture the serenity of the titular Hawaiian flower, but also the heartbreak and romance defining its accompanying mythology.
Whenever Yamashita writes a song, he wants it to be a “microcosm containing an infinite world.” He’s talked about his admiration for J.S. Bach’s “Partita for Violin No. 2 - Chaconne” and how much is conveyed by a single violin. He aims for the same grandiosity with his voice, especially when making a cappella tracks. “Shining From the Inside” is one of Softly’s odes to the lustrous beauty of close harmonies, and is sung entirely in English. Given how superior his pronunciation is to his contemporaries’, he was once asked how he learned the language, to which he responded, “I just listened to records and memorized stuff. I can sing it, but I can’t actually speak it.” Despite the linguistic disconnect, Yamashita recognizes the specific rhythms and moods inherent to English’s phonology and knows when to employ it over Japanese to heighten a song’s mood.
Yamashita is also an expert arranger. You can hear his attention to detail on “光と君へのレクイエム” (which Light in the Attic translates as “Light and Requiem for You”), whose propulsive drum beat is tempered by soft synth pulses. In the past, similar songs like 1991’s “アトムの子” (“Children of the Atom”) could be overstuffed, but Yamashita lets his voice quietly rise above the surface here, like rays of light peeking through blinds. “ミライのテーマ” (“Mirai’s Theme”) is also appropriately even-keeled, with the occasional glistening synth flourish ushering in a sense of new beginnings as he talks about the joy of a daughter’s birth.
Curiously, one of Yamashita’s lyrical tenets is to avoid writing about real people or being too specific. It’s partially a result of his antipathy for the Japanese folk boom of the 1970s, and specifically its lyrical content. “If you put too much meaning into the words, you run the risk of the sound losing its color,” he once explained. Even when he addresses the state of the world on “Oppression Blues (弾圧のブルース),” he does so without being didactic; as with his 1986 track “The War Song,” he simply mourns and allows space for sadness. This all aligns with his thoughts on his favorite film, Sadao Yamanaka's 1937 Humanity and Paper Balloons. He was blown away when he first watched it, as he’d mostly seen post-war films up to then and felt they were “preachy, pedantic, or about ‘enlightenment’ or something—full of excuses.” Yamanaka’s movie “looked at human beings with a high degree of clarity” and was “without pretension.” Yamashita’s songs are much the same: Everything is rendered in matter-of-fact terms, and his arranging and singing give his generalized language a prismatic quality, providing deeper insight into the scope of humanity in ways that labored-over text couldn’t.
Half a century into his career, Yamashita has multiple lifetimes worth of songs written, including those for legendary artists like Yumi Matsutoya and Eichii Ohtaki. “Culture, you know, it may have 100 or 200 different entrances, but there is only one exit,” he has said. He approaches the craft of pop music with utmost seriousness; recently, he even destroyed all his demos, ensuring that no one would release any of his half-baked ideas posthumously. It’s hard to complain, though, when he’s still releasing songs like “Cheer Up! The Summer,” suffused in the breezy atmospheres and unbridled joy of his best work. “We can fly away,” he sings, as string arrangements and vocal harmonies lift higher. It’s irresistible because it’s irresistible to Yamashita. Really, all his music is like this: a natural overflow of his boundless love for—and belief in—pop music. | 2022-07-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Moon | July 14, 2022 | 7.4 | 45ad833f-0f94-4e12-b649-0e05a4cbf6a0 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Commitment to Complications strikes the ideal balance between the visceral nature of the innovative L.A. hardcore group Youth Code's demo and the polish in their work since then. | Commitment to Complications strikes the ideal balance between the visceral nature of the innovative L.A. hardcore group Youth Code's demo and the polish in their work since then. | Youth Code: Commitment to Complications | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21732-commitment-to-complications/ | Commitment to Complications | In their sophomore full-length Commitment to Complications, Los Angeles' Youth Code have fleshed out the “hardcore industrial” aesthetic that's always been apparent in their live shows, where it's unclear if Ryan George's lead-fisted attack or Sara Taylor's black metal-meets-Converge rasp will do you in first. Their demo oozed with punk rawness, and while they sharpened their industrial instincts on their self-titled album, its production was a bit of a ...And Justice For All situation where the fidelity didn't quite sync up with its death-dance electronics and hardcore spirit. Here, they've amassed all their best qualities on one record, and explore more connections between the two worlds they come from.
The four originals on A Place To Stand suggested a meaner, more confident Youth Code, with more intense percussion and George ceding his vocal duties and letting Taylor, who always had a more dominating presence, take over and give the duo consistency and fury. “Transitions” and Commitment's title track stand up to “Consuming Guilt” and “To Burn Your World” as some of the most furious songs the band has made. Both, especially the title track, mechanize d-beat drumming, merging a natural feel with Godflesh-like coldness. There's swing, but it's much too fast to dance to, and staying idle isn't an option. It'd be hypnotic if it weren't for Taylor getting in your face.
With Rhys Fulber's production and guiding hand, Commitment strikes the ideal balance between the visceral nature of their demo and the polish in their work since then. He's the perfect partner for them—he is best known for his time in Front Line Assembly, a key influence on Youth Code, and with his production work with Fear Factory, he's well versed in finding the common space between industrial and guitar-based heavy music. They sound both more familiar to industrial audiences here and more like themselves. George and Taylor don't make a lot of alterations to their core sound, but Fulber allows the drum programming to strike harder and the electronics to creep longer, to feel more fulfilled even when Taylor is screaming about vulnerability and loss. They're hungrier than ever, and even with Fulber's assistance and a coveted co-sign from tourmates Skinny Puppy, Commitment is as much about “don't fuck with us” as it is “we've made it.”
Where Commitment really sets itself apart is that George and Taylor have embraced the moodier side of EBM, including quite a few tracks where they're not at Negative Approach speed constantly. This direction was hinted at with “For I Am Cursed” from Stand and “Distorted Views” from the self-titled, and with Fulber's touch, the band embraces a melodic sense that was deep within them, but buried before in minimalism. It's a needed counterpart from the abundant intensity, and even so, Taylor rarely lets up. “The Dust of Fallen Rome” is one of the album's best tracks, chiefly for Taylor's performance, where she reaches beyond her hardcore scream and plumps new emotional depths. She sounds like she's both reaching for utopia and trying not to drown in hardcore purgatory. She reaches similar heights with “Doghead,” which has a groovier tempo—its fanciness makes for quite the contrast with Taylor ripping her soul apart. Commitment makes huge strides in its production, but it's Taylor who really pushes it ahead of their past works.
Metal and hardcore have been more spiritual influences on them than sonic. With “Shift of Dismay,” featuring guitar from Nails' Todd Jones, the two sides meet at their most base level. When Taylor yells “Let the car crash” at those moments when Jones peaks, it's hard not to think of the cover of Ministry's 1990 live record In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up. Will Commitment cross over to metalheads and hardcore kids who may normally be averse to electronics? It should. | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Metal | Dais Records | April 13, 2016 | 7.5 | 45b02670-b5f8-468d-aa30-15d77ed3bc94 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
With corroded sounds and anxious, wistful guest features, the London producer’s new four-track EP breaks new ground in four different directions. | With corroded sounds and anxious, wistful guest features, the London producer’s new four-track EP breaks new ground in four different directions. | Loraine James: Nothing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loraine-james-nothing-ep/ | Nothing EP | Loraine James’ music often feels like it’s on the verge of tipping into chaos. Competing rhythms run out of sync, throwing sparks as they scrape. Straight lines bend without warning, and smooth surfaces splinter. Rather than conform to a flawlessly efficient rhythmic grid, the London electronic musician’s beats twitch and hiccup, as though driven by a MIDI clock gone haywire. That’s as true of James’ quiet moments as her noisy ones: Even the most dulcet passages tend to jitter and glitch. A similar sort of unpredictability plays out across the breadth of her catalog. James has been putting out music for a while now; in addition to her debut album, last year’s thrilling For You & I, she has a string of Bandcamp-only releases going back to 2015, comprising brightly colored electronica, contorted club edits, and even ambient-adjacent atmospheres. No two records encompass quite the same style; neither do any two songs. Every track feels like the product of a blank slate. Her music is exhilarating in the fashion of a gamble that pays off against long odds, or a gambit that shouldn’t work yet somehow, miraculously, does.
The four-track Nothing EP breaks new ground in four different directions. It is darker, on the whole, than For You & I; that album’s dreaminess has curdled, and its industrial punch—like the noise-rap beats of “London Ting // Dark as Fuck,” a song so concussive it could send clipping. running for cover—feels further corroded here, one fried circuit away from total breakdown. The most obvious change is the incorporation of vocalists, something James hasn’t done much of in the past. Early in 2020, she made an open call for singers on Twitter, and three of Nothing’s four tracks feature the fruits of those collaborations. Rather than spotlighting her featured vocalists, however, James tends to fold them deeply into the mix, where their voices turn murky, communicating more with texture than language.
In the opening “Nothing,” the Uruguayan singer-producer Lila Tirando a Violeta moans, “I don’t feel nothing,” dolefully and almost indecipherably, her voice clouded by reverb, while rapid-fire arpeggios zigzag between vintage trance, the ice-castle maximalism of Rustie, and the jittery dissonance of early-’80s synth pop. The lurching kick/snare sequence balances the knitting-needle bounce of trap hi-hats with clanking metal and what might be a brief snippet of jackhammer. It makes for a jarring take on numbness—not a deadening blanket of sound, but an anxious, needling feeling, like the tingling of a limb that’s fallen asleep.
She goes darker still on “Marg,” featuring the Iranian-born, Liverpool-based rapper Tardast, who grew up in Tehran and came to the UK in 2014. The title is Farsi for “death”; his lyrics, also rapped in Farsi, address the refugee experience in images of slippery ice and clipped wings. Occasionally, he cuts to the chase, as if no metaphor could contain his abjection: “Life’s getting worse every day.” His voice is mixed low, an unsteady burble of mutters and whispers surrounded by splotchy synths and heavy, distorted drums that crumple on impact. Layers of percussion—handclaps, hi-hats, tambourines, laser zaps—fall in uneven volleys, landing just shy of their mark, like shots clustered around a bullseye. Anxious and unsteady, the song feels like a harbinger of things coming apart, its joylessness an indictment of systemic failure.
The tenor of the EP shifts in the second half. “Don’t You See It?” gets its melancholy tone from stately minor-key piano chords; HTRK’s Jonnine Standish sings wistfully of loss and yearning, with a resigned tone that recalls Bodily Functions-era Dani Siciliano. James’ production contrasts forcefully; the beat sounds like it’s been made from a lossy YouTube rip of crunching metal or breaking glass. Standish’s singing is the clearest on the album, and while her writing seems purposefully vague she lands a few truly memorable lines—“Summer is a traitor, ’cause summer’s moving on.” Even so, her voice serves mainly as the foil to James’ jagged beats, the soft underbelly of a hard-angled exoskeleton. At the song’s finale, following a climax powered by the record’s heaviest bass, James runs Standish’s voice through some kind of granular effect, crumbling her syllables like flakes of mica.
The closing “The Starting Point,” the EP’s only instrumental, offers a stripped-down contrast to what has preceded it. The one-note bassline nags at the midrange; the brittle beat has the spikiness of early instrumental grime, while snapping syncopations flash back to UK garage at its rowdiest. Drawing on vintage IDM, what used to be called “abstract” electronica, and the example set by her Hyperdub labelmates, James’ productions have typically been part of a lineage of experimental dance music that doesn’t necessarily cater to the dancefloor, but “The Starting Point,” lean and muscular, proves James’ club mettle. It’s an exciting capstone to an EP that refuses to play by anyone else’s rules.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 12, 2020 | 7.9 | 45b6fdba-b2d7-4e26-a7e8-872fb0cee1c4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Taking cues from their early records, Bloc Party’s sixth album successfully marries post-punk with dance grooves—and confusingly devotes a lot of its energy to spite. | Taking cues from their early records, Bloc Party’s sixth album successfully marries post-punk with dance grooves—and confusingly devotes a lot of its energy to spite. | Bloc Party: Alpha Games | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bloc-party-alpha-games/ | Bloc Party | Once again, Bloc Party have returned from a lengthy hiatus and followed up a baffling, mixed-bag album with one that harkens back to their glory days. Roughly every half-decade since 2008’s Intimacy knocked the post-punk revivalists off their axis, Bloc Party have produced an album that feels like a direct reaction to the one that preceded it. In 2012, Four attempted to console fans aghast that Intimacy’s queasy electronics had sidelined one of the tightest rhythm sections in indie rock. By 2016’s Hymns, that rhythm section (bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong) had quit the band, leaving frontman Kele Okereke and guitarist Russell Lissack to craft a weird franken-child of gospel, dance, and stadium rock by their lonesomes. Like clockwork, here’s Alpha Games, a record that seems destined to bear a sticker emblazoned with the one “return to form” quote the label can track down.
The band’s sixth album checks all the requisite Silent Alarm and A Weekend in the City boxes, if such musical attributes can be reduced to a dispassionate list. This is a tightly wound collection of tracks led primarily by dueling Telecasters and dance beats. It’s mostly uptempo until the band slows for a few stunningly pretty ballads in the second half. The production is unshowy yet full-bodied enough to emphasize the rhythmically minded low end and precision hi-hats. The “new” rhythm section—bassist Justin Harris (of Menomena) and drummer Louise Bartle—has been playing live with Bloc Party for almost seven years now, and their take on the band’s early sound is accurate but chunky, as it was on the live runthrough of Silent Alarm released in 2019. A devoted fan with a magnifying glass could identify every trick Alpha Games lifts from Silent Alarm in particular—the whirring effect Lissack uses on his “Traps” solos recalls both “Helicopter” and “Banquet”; on “By Any Means Necessary,” like “Positive Tension” before it, Okereke sings of a woman hellbent on getting “it,” whatever that may be—but Alpha Games isn’t all nostalgic replication, at least not thematically.
As a singer, Okereke is usually defined by his wide-eyed wonderment. This is a guy who once made the modest prospect of driving to Brighton on the weekend seem like an opportunity for rebirth. More recently, on last year’s arresting solo album The Waves Pt. 1, he turned a simple nighttime stroll into a reverie about the passage of time. On Alpha Games, his eyes narrow into a winking leer in service of a loose, startlingly embittered arc that, amid constant themes of hedonism and brutal honesty, largely revolves around cutting off “frenemies.” It’s tempting to ask why, at this ostensibly stable point in the 40-year-old’s life and career, he’s chosen to focus on life patterns that usually accompany an initial rise to stardom, but it’s hard to imagine an answer capable of undercutting the album’s garishly pulpy lyrics.
Okereke leans hard into a persona that drives a “matte-black ’Rari,” lives at the club, and suffers no fools. Opener “Day Drinker” introduces us to an alcoholic who greets his brother’s intervention attempt by telling him he has a “conniving tongue” and that “God hates the faint of heart, the weak-willed, and the profligate.” The rest of the album is dominated by a similarly caustic tone, ranging from bratty (“You can’t hang with us”) to brutal (“I will die die die and be born again/Before I fuck with you again”), and usually directed at unnamed hangers-on. “The things you do for blow or a little guest list/Have consequences,” he coos on “Rough Justice,” the first of two occasions when he calls out parasitic +1 seekers. Most biting is “Callum Is a Snake,” in which Okereke “officially” washes his hands of someone whose “eyes are too close together,” telling him, “I thought you came from better stock.”
The bulk of the album’s aforementioned stunningly pretty ballads reveal themselves to be crueler than they initially sound, but on “Of Things Yet to Come,” Okereke steps back and offers a more perceptive view of this proudly messy lifestyle. Here, those friends are “lost,” rather than tossed off, as the narrator casts blame on himself and wonders, “Am I best left in the past?” Regardless of the album’s relationship to truth and fiction, “Of Things Yet to Come” is the only time it offers anything beyond one-dimensional characters. It doesn’t hurt that the song concludes with Lissack launching into his finest tapestry of lush, Edge-like guitar textures in a career filled with them.
The few things that work on Alpha Games have little to do with their similarity to, or departure from, Bloc Party’s most celebrated work. This is by far the band’s most successful attempt at marrying post-punk with actual dance grooves: Bartle manages to channel Matt Tong-style intensity while playing minimalist patterns more akin to the programmed beats that eventually overtook the group’s former drummer. Okereke and Lissack’s best performances might recall certain aspects of the ones from their mid-twenties, though with the added perspective and experience evident on “Of Things Yet to Come.” The album’s best hooks feature Bartle duetting with Okereke, a new trick in Bloc Party’s repertoire. These strengths are even more frustrating because they reveal an alternative path to the binary rut in which this band has been stuck for 10 years. If Bloc Party continue to build on the unique strengths of their new members, and if Okereke takes his songwriting as seriously as he did on his last solo release, there’s still a glimmer of hope for the band that was once seen as the most promising member of a flash-in-the-pan scene. | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infectious / BMG | May 6, 2022 | 5.2 | 45b9e167-08dc-4b6d-b3c4-a314fee2ed88 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
Assisted by frequent collaborators like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Vancouver singer-songwriter’s second album is a gentle testament to resilience in the face of emotional hardship. | Assisted by frequent collaborators like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Vancouver singer-songwriter’s second album is a gentle testament to resilience in the face of emotional hardship. | Ashley Shadow: Only the End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashley-shadow-only-the-end/ | Only the End | Ashley Shadow believes in the graceful power of acceptance. On her sophomore solo album, five years after her self-titled debut, the Vancouver musician overcomes a series of painful experiences, using natural elements from her home in British Columbia as poetic metaphors. Though largely written in solitude, several of these 10 songs feature frequent collaborators including Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Neko Case guitarist Paul Rigby, and Black Mountain’s Joshua Wells once again handling production. Sounding as if barely a moment has passed since her first album, she has a soothing, country-inflected quiver whose understatement is a big part of its charm.
For listeners in Western Canada, Ashley Shadow may be better recognized by her surname, Webber. During her early twenties, she played bass with cult post-punk band the Organ, whose long out-of-print LPs now fetch triple digits. Webber’s name can also be found in the credits of recordings from the New Pornographers, the Cave Singers, and Lightning Dust, the primary project of her twin sister, Amber. Her biggest moment under the spotlight to date was probably her contribution to Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s 2008 album, Lie Down in the Light, recorded in Nashville and rightfully considered a high-water mark for Will Oldham.
Though not entirely a breakup album, Only the End repeatedly returns to the theme of moving on. On “For Love,” she expresses her admiration for people forced to follow their hearts where they might not want to go. Ushered in with a slow waltz of shakers, the drums pick up steam as she sings a simple reminder that these difficult decisions were made for the right reason: “You did it for love/Not just anything.” Lifted by a triumphant guitar solo from Ryan Beattie of Victoria band Himalayan Bear, “I Will Remember” is her personal plea for support: “Come and show me through the darkest of nights,” she sings with an optimistic lilt. Her voice may be soft, but as the album unfolds its tender strength projects a sense of resilience.
On “From You,” Webber comes to grips with the idea that “everyone has their dark sides,” dropping out the drum kit for a sparse backdrop of pedal-steel shimmer. By contrast, “Grey” features one of the album’s most arresting choruses, highlighted by a buoyant bassline. Following a series of references to the wildfire smoke that has caused dread across the West in recent summers, she delivers a timeless romantic couplet: “After the stormy billows roll/I’ll be by your side forever more.” Her skies may be darkened, whether figuratively or literally, but these hopeful songs feel like attempts to batten down the hatches until the sun beams down again.
“Don’t Slow Me Down” is both the album’s thematic centerpoint and its highlight. This sweet and sour duet with Bonnie “Prince” Billy was written in the immediate aftermath of a romantic split. She uses timeless, elemental imagery—of outrunning the darkness, shaking off the cold—but briefly flashes back to the present to wonder whether an ex-lover ever Googles her name. Oldham’s keening croon is the perfect counterpoint for Webber’s melancholy vibrato, offering a gentle reminder that the future will find her “feeling a calm from time going round.” Like Semisonic taught us, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Felte | October 6, 2021 | 7.5 | 45babb5a-c216-4095-99e0-dd35b60682ef | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The British psych-rockers’ third album boasts studied musicianship and strong arrangements—and very little else. | The British psych-rockers’ third album boasts studied musicianship and strong arrangements—and very little else. | Temples: Hot Motion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/temples-hot-motion/ | Hot Motion | Prefab rock’n’roll revivalism never hurt anyone. Especially not Temples, a British three-piece who have built their career crate-digging for the trippiest and most aggressively overstuffed ’70s psych-rock. Their third album, Hot Motion, is crafted more or less in the same vein as their previous two. A showing of studied musicianship and strong arrangements, Hot Motion is fuzzy to the touch and easy enough to imagine hearing in the background. Unfortunately, very little lies beneath the surface.
What makes Hot Motion weird is that it is the illusion of a psych-rock record; the melodies here are plucked right from pop songs, even more so than on past records. It’s Pink Floyd and Revolver in the streets, “Knights of Cydonia” in the sheets. Over time, the album reveals itself to be a subtle pop zombie. Take the spacey “It’s All Coming Out,” which follows the structure of a pop song, but just happens to have some weird, vaguely ’80s synth effects that resemble a scrapped MGMT demo. Lyrically, there’s not much to look at: Temples favor aesthetics and flashy production over memorable lines.
“The Howl,” probably the weakest cut on the record, toggles between sounding trippy and actually being a song by the Black Keys. The focus is on the hard-to-stomach snare sound, while the guitar is a jarring El Camino pastiche that sounds out of place on a record otherwise coated in paisley and velvet. The song attempts to be a rallying cry for an unspecified event, but in reality, it’s something you might tap your foot to in a loud bar. “You’re Either On Something” feigns drug-induced deepness while vintage-sounding synthesizers flicker in the background and guitar parts go the way of the baroque. The song sounds good in theory, but beauty and technique don’t count for much when the music lacks any semblance of individuality.
Temples are clearly skilled technicians; they probably could’ve produced this record in their sleep. What’s frustrating is that the project begins and ends at talent. These songs are hollow; you could listen to Hot Motion half a dozen times and feel nothing. What makes matters worse is that Temples have made three albums whose sound can more or less be distilled to “glamping while on ayahuasca.” Consistency can be admirable, but this is a bore.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 26, 2019 | 5 | 45bb3e42-5d31-493a-928b-6b4990fb9684 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
null | The Brooklyn-based duo High Places are most often compared to Beat Happening, a band cherished for their regression-- into musical primitivism, adolescent sexuality, and any other condition that twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoan the loss of in therapy. High Places' indulgence in nursery rhymes aside, the kinship is mostly an ideological one: Like Beat Happening, they exult in the simple.
*03/07 - 09/07*, a collection of the band's first 7" and stray compilation tracks (released through the mp3 subscription service eMusic), shows a group whose comfort zone isn't the folky imperative, but heady, hippyish imprecision. The songs here are almost all identical: | High Places: 03/07 – 09/07 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11150-0307-0907/ | 03/07 – 09/07 | The Brooklyn-based duo High Places are most often compared to Beat Happening, a band cherished for their regression-- into musical primitivism, adolescent sexuality, and any other condition that twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoan the loss of in therapy. High Places' indulgence in nursery rhymes aside, the kinship is mostly an ideological one: Like Beat Happening, they exult in the simple.
03/07 - 09/07, a collection of the band's first 7" and stray compilation tracks (released through the mp3 subscription service eMusic), shows a group whose comfort zone isn't the folky imperative, but heady, hippyish imprecision. The songs here are almost all identical: polyrhythmic miniatures built by small drums and shakers, clouded by blankets of echo and reverb; deliberately basic structures; short, and in their own way, catchy and pretty. Rhythms suggest provinces a step removed from where other white, arty urbanites tend to dwell: There are flashes of soca, reclined bounces that remind me of Indian music, and though "Sandy Feat"'s swing could be Tom Petty's "American Girl" or David Bowie's "Modern Love", they inflect it they way Brazilian bands like Os Mutantes did (or Paul Simon on Rhythm of the Saints).
High Places' trunk-rattling impulses are juxtaposed with a spacious, almost tranquil atmosphere, with Rob Barber's percussion chiming and floating rather than physically hitting, and Mary Pearson's sweetly flat vocals layered to the point that her lyrics often become indistinguishable. That blur makes High Places' music hypnotic: Pearson chatters away like a light-headed kid on the playground on one song and intones a mantra on the next, and it's only then that you notice how both forms operate on the same principle: repetition induces calm. (Full disclosure: Pearson's sister is a former Pitchfork employee.)
Pearson's vocals and the duo's lyrics are charmingly coquettish: She reduces falling in love to "Oh, you're a pretty boy, a pretty boy" and writes letters to Martians. "Jump In", penned for Pearson's Michigan elementary school, is so full of encouragement that it scans like the transcription of a guidance counselor or junior minister. "Canary" apologizes to animals displaced by ecological warfare-- "we really messed up." The sentiments are frank, but I out them for three reasons: There's nothing wrong with being positive, the band's confident enough to handle it, and they make me happy.
"Universe"'s lyric makes this clear: "It takes a lot of guts to be a little baby in this place." The idea of returning to infancy might resonate as a dippy bohemian nightmare, but in a society where moderate cynicism is considered a higher road to intelligence than acceptance and curiosity, and where sarcasm is considered a social reflex, you'd be hard pressed to argue with them-- it does take guts. | 2008-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | eMusic | February 14, 2008 | 8.3 | 45c4e586-89a6-4192-8858-fe389d32c878 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The fearless work of the late avant-garde pianist is celebrated with a momentous new anthology, showcasing his immense talent and passion. | The fearless work of the late avant-garde pianist is celebrated with a momentous new anthology, showcasing his immense talent and passion. | “Blue” Gene Tyranny: Degrees of Freedom Found | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blue-gene-tyranny-degrees-of-freedom-found/ | Degrees of Freedom Found | When he was in kindergarten, the late avant-garde pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny brought his favorite records to show-and-tell. He made tape recordings of sounds in his backyard, sang in his Lutheran church’s choir, and even attended additional Baptist services to accompany them on piano. At 11, he took composition classes at Trinity University, where his teacher sent him off with Charles Ives and Harry Partch LPs after their first lesson. For one of his early assignments, he unintentionally composed a 12-tone piece. He soon befriended composer Philip Krumm, and the two put on events where Tyranny performed music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Anton Webern, as well as theater pieces from Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young. He was 14 at the time.
Despite his stage name, Tyranny was a kind, funny, and self-effacing person who uplifted others whenever possible. In David Bernabo’s 2020 documentary, Just for the Record: Conversations With and About "Blue" Gene Tyranny, sound engineer Philip Perkins notes that, when playing in live ensemble settings, every musician except Tyranny was generally given a solo: “He’s supporting everyone else… that’s who he is.” Those who knew Tyranny considered him one of the greatest pianists alive. And while such praise didn’t lead to sizable fame, archival releases from the label Unseen Worlds—most notably the reissue of avant-pop masterpiece Out of the Blue and the live album Trust in Rock—have helped bring his music to a larger audience. Degrees of Freedom Found, his first posthumous release through the label, is even more momentous: a six-disc anthology featuring 380 minutes of music recorded between 1963 and 2019, complete with extensive liner notes from Tyranny himself.
Tyranny’s closest brush with fame arrived in the early ’70s when he went on tour with the Stooges as their pianist (he and Iggy Pop first played together in the ’60s blues-rock band the Prime Movers). On stage, Tyranny would appear in tattered clothing, with light-emitting diodes in his hair, his sweat occasionally leading to electric shocks. While he wouldn’t continue down this punk path, his resolute spirit remained. During an early-1980s live performance of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, an opera where Tyranny plays the role of “Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player,” shards of a broken mirror cut up his hands and left his piano splattered with blood.
Such dedication to the craft comes alive on Degrees of Freedom Found. Tyranny’s secret to conjuring deep emotions lies in the tension between structure and spontaneity. While this balancing act isn’t as obvious in his pop works, the solo piano and piano-centric pieces on this collection make his methodology clear. As he navigates the opening piece “A Letter From Home,” taking crooked and diagonal paths along the way, Tyranny maintains a stately, lovely demeanor: an apt reflection of the stream-of-consciousness reminiscing that appears on Out of the Blue’s extended take on the track. Whether at small or grand scales, his compositions were fully-realized.
Revisiting and reworking compositions was a common practice for Tyranny throughout his career. “Tango for Two,” for example, was originally composed in 1984 as a solo piano piece for the International Tango Collection. On the version here, Tyranny is credited with piano along with an “electronic orchestra,” resulting in a barrage of synthesized instrumentation with technicolor flashes and unpredictable evolution. “The 36 Chords from the Driver’s Son,” another mesmerizing highlight, has seamless modulations and a quizzical structure—there’s power in the gentlest keystrokes and grace in the most rambunctious clanging. The music from “36 Chords” draws from “The Driver’s Son,” a sprawling journey whose 80-minute 1999 performance acts as the box set’s centerpiece. With four other performers providing vocals, synthesizer, and percussion, it is a full-fledged epic, well-deserving of Tyranny’s description of it as an “audio storyboard.”
Tyranny loved avant-garde music for its potential to extend “beyond the particular circumstances of both your life and the whole history of music.” As he explained in Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music, “To try as much as possible to circumvent Puritanism in the United States and elsewhere is the task.” His political intent is most prominently showcased on “Harvey Milk (Portrait),” a track from 1979 that features a speech from the openly gay San Francisco politician, soundtracked by Tyranny’s sparse electronic blips. The second half is voiceless—a stark depiction of Milk’s assassination the previous year. This simple change creates an uneasy atmosphere: a meditation on lost hope.
Music provided opportunities for Tyranny to open himself up to unfamiliar terrain, which was the primary goal of his collaborative work. One of the most striking examples appears in “On the Road to Blountstown (A True Story),” a song that was largely improvised when Tyranny and musician Leroy Jenkins had 10 minutes left during a 2001 set and no material left to play. In the introduction, Jenkins shares a story about being stopped by a sheriff and taken to jail. Next, Jenkins vocalizes atop his viola and Tyranny’s piano, both musicians in perfect dialogue. As Tyranny’s piano dances alongside the shrieking strings, he runs through multiple emotions to flesh out the story’s drama.
He could also find inspiration in more lighthearted fare. “How to Swing a Dog,” from 1984, is a boisterous improvisation that features playwright Roger Babb talking at lightning speed from the perspective of a dog; it’s one of the liveliest tracks on Degrees of Freedom Found, and it emanates classic early-’80s art-school humor. On 2019’s “The Forecaster Hopes,” the newest composition, a 1960s electronic analysis of natural, quotidian sounds becomes the source material for generating “quasi-random rhythms” for his string arrangement. The song is at once steady and erratic, defined by a hopeful aura: a musical embodiment of someone moving through life itself. As the final track on Degrees of Freedom Found, it serves as a capstone to this exhaustive overview of Tyranny’s career. It’s the sort of music that leaves you in awe: a reminder that music always did the same for him.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds | June 12, 2021 | 8.4 | 45d036a7-4eb8-4f0c-847d-a1d91431a2dc | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
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 Scott Walker’s 1995 turn to the avant-garde, a dense and operatic work of geopolitical and psychosexual pop music. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Scott Walker’s 1995 turn to the avant-garde, a dense and operatic work of geopolitical and psychosexual pop music. | Scott Walker: Tilt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scott-walker-tilt/ | Tilt | He was supposed to fail upwards. A photogenic genius with a golden voice, a half-gone gaze, a hotness so soft it felt mildly taboo. He had been a child star, and we all know how that goes, but on this occasion, TV and Broadway conspired to let one off unscathed. He flushed rebellion from his system early—joined low-rent gangs and toppled Beverly Hills outhouses, got himself expelled from a school or two—before flying to Europe to beat the Vietnam draft with the Walker Brothers, his pop trio of pretend siblings.
England loved him. He was 22 and allergic to fame, which made him untouchably cool—forever staring off-camera in an existential reverie, dreaming of Playboy bunnies laying wreaths at his tomb. This sort of fame required rebellion of a higher order. He denounced hippies, fled to a monastery, studied Gregorian chant. He ditched his wildly successful band and went solo, covering the Belgian bohemian Jacques Brel and dreaming up originals that would be, he opined, “very Dylan Thomas, very Kafka.” But his records were selling, so nobody minded—and besides, he was doomed to fail upwards. When his first front-to-back masterpiece, Scott 3, slowed sales, the business people gave him a TV show. When Scott 4 flopped, in 1969, they pondered promoting him to Vegas.
But Scott Walker had a superpower, the unique ability to fail again and fail better. Within a half-decade of that late-’60s crossroads, his sales were circling the gutter and credibility had flown the coop. He failed in flummoxing ways—sold out and became less famous—and would, in some corners, be seen to fail until the bitter end. But by 1995, as his last act dawned, the pressure was letting up. Walker was finally free to fail exactly how he wanted.
Tilt premiered at a playback party in London that year. Mojo noted bewildered faces and, eventually, begrudging recognition of a “record to be greatly admired, if not enjoyed.” Was it good? Nobody had a clue. The Telegraph sheepishly pronounced it a “masterpiece” in a review so hedged it felt like its own retraction.
Before its U.S. release through Drag City in 1997, the album received a trial by fire in the UK, where the border between idiosyncrasy and pretension is vigilantly patrolled. Some felt Walker was trespassing. “I hate Tilt, absolutely hate it,” said longtime devotee Marc Almond, one of the few to put his cards on the table.
Despite little consensus on its merits, Tilt became a byword for artistic ambition and integrity. Walker had chased his muse to the bottom of the charts and tunnelled somewhere surreal and strange, to an outré-rock Atlantis. In the peripheral public eye, Tilt catapulted him from pop’s left field into a freaky avant-garde interzone. Amid the confusion, he had slipped out of his lyrics entirely. More than ever, Walker was attuned to mass human despair—to trauma, nationalism, war as a contemporary issue—yet icky about little feelings like his own. His internal battle between political urgency and emotional deflection suspends these sadistically cryptic songs in a dream world. Tilt’s most gasp-inducing swells accompany lines like:
I knew nothing of the horses
Nothing of the thresher
Or:
We had more in or going out
You were responsible for the rolling stock
The house is on fire, but Walker refuses to dial 911; instead, he devises encrypted distress signals.
While the lyrics bide their time before scaring you shitless, the music is less patient: Stretches of near-silent skitters and scrapes portend percussive blasts, which in turn summon infernos of celestial guitar, tremulous strings, and mammoth church pipe organ. Each part springs from a death-black silence—“like a great hands and mouth coming out of the dark at you,” as Walker once said, though at the time he was describing how it felt to have too many fans. His voice is formidable: at once rent with terror and devastatingly vulnerable, with vibrato like a loved one choking up mid-sentence. Listeners need not comprehend “Rosary”’s addled narrator, or spend days decoding his monstrously sexual cri de coeur, to know they should fear for the singer’s soul.
In the ’70s period when Walker really was sliding out of his mind—alcoholically anesthetized, sleepwalking through MOR slosh—he was prolific, effortless, his voice plain gorgeous. He spent the decade undercover in the spotlight, a neurotic heartthrob slicking up for the suits. He smiled at the camera on record covers. Something was horribly… right.
In 1978, he finally pulled himself together, turned his frown its usual way around, and masterminded the Walker Brothers’ swan song. Led by a now-classic suite of Walker originals, Nite Flights debuted the songwriting idiom that Tilt went on to master. Lead single “The Electrician,” he said, describes the intimate relationship between torturer and prisoner, based on stories of C.I.A. agents who would fly to South America, strap suspected rebels to beds, and wire their genitals to electrode-firing hand cranks. It established a chilling Walker archetype: the spiritually corrupt narrator in the throes of excess, deriving sexual frisson from political power.
Nite Flights attracted enough cognoscenti buzz to secure Walker a solo deal with Virgin. Meanwhile, Julian Cope’s 1981 compilation, Fire Escape in the Sky, was helping dispel Walker’s fusty air for a new crowd of post-punk freaks and gourmands. But Walker’s 1984 comeback, with the mutant AOR oddity Climate of Hunter, threatened to alienate the aliens, not to mention his paymasters. He identified himself as music’s “great leper”: a bubonic prophet lurking under the bridge, dooming any A&R who strayed across his path.
As Climate of Hunter made its way from the shelf to the bargain bin, Walker went missing, presumed drunk, lost in another peculiar seclusion. Two and a half years passed before his suffering manager, Ed Bicknell, finally made contact with his client.
“What have you been doing?” Bicknell demanded.
“I’ve been painting,” Walker said.
“Really? Oils or watercolors?”
“No, man,” Walker replied. “Walls.”
He was scoring odd jobs as a painter and decorator.
Virgin put its sacred cow back on the market. Prospective producers included David Bowie, David Sylvian, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Reid brothers, Brian Eno, and Daniel Lanois. Walker shrugged. Eno and Lanois had the most success, ensnaring him long enough to record some master tapes that Walker disowned and reputedly threw in the Thames.
Virgin snapped. Walker went missing (again), then resurfaced to cameo in a soft drink ad. The Sunday People offered rewards for sightings of a man now lost to himself.
“I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry,” he told The Independent. “People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture.” He was exalted but not in the way he envisaged; forever in demand to sing as anyone but himself; a noble outsider teleported into a pop star’s perpetual flop era.
Nine, ten, eleven years passed—not only an eon in industry time but long enough to start a new life, study botany in Veneto, get to know your convolvulus from your crocuses. Or to clean up and get filthy rich in Vegas. But Walker had endeavored to be boring once, and his lost years haunted him. Now, passing 50, he craved a reinvention.
“I’m looking for that Francis Bacon, in-the-face, whoops factor in the sound,” he said of Tilt, speaking to Mojo in 1995. “I’d like people to sit and listen to it,” he added, “get into it through the words.”
Walker had written most of Tilt between ’91 and ’92, in the heyday of capitalist triumphalism. Amping his “Electrician” style with a new modernist extremity, he sketched geopolitical outlines, lashed the canvas with grotesquerie and psychosexual suggestion, and disrupted linear readings with a smear of voices from history and myth. It was serious contemporary art, which he mused had become a matter of “who combines better than who, who combines this way or that way.”
Working alongside Walker, Pete Walsh captured the whoops factor with brutally analog production: no samples, guide tracks, or compression; a cavalcade of clangor and quiet. Though Tilt sounds operatic by pop standards, a song like “Patriot (A Single)” revolts against refinement, colliding Walker’s vintage-velvet baritone with vanguard composers like Messiaen and Penderecki. “The Cockfighter” wants you to cry out in shock, its metal mechanics evoking Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft—a concert-hall transplant of Einstürzende Neubauten industrialism—as Walker splices excerpts from the trials of Queen Caroline and Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann into a wet-nightmare narrative of what he calls “national eroticism.”
However you spin it, Tilt’s bewildering lyric sheet is strewn with unidentified remains. Displaced images, fished from mysterious backwaters of history, hint at a logic just beyond the frame. Some demand scrutiny; others seem happy in suggestive soft focus.
“Patriot (A Single),” named for an American missile, opens and closes with disjointed phrases that, together, form the date that America launched the Gulf War. (“That’s why I call it a single—a single disc,” Walker said of the circularity.) The next line, “See how they run,” playfully alludes to a standard of another circular song form, the “infinite canon.” In the verse, Walker draws each melody eerily off-course:
I brought nylons from New York
Some had butterflies
Some had flecks
The hum of panic in Brian Gascoigne’s string arrangement is no false alarm. As the writer and researcher Robert Nedelkoff explained in Seth Sanders’ zine A Nest of Ninnies, Soviet aircraft bombarding Afghanistan in the Gulf War dropped nylon parachutes carrying Butterfly Mines. The oddly pretty market scene appears to be a smokescreen, Walker’s narrator a fighter pilot.
Sometimes a phrase resists you until, like a crossword clue, it gives in, and an arid verse blooms. “Bolivia ’95” opens with a wink toward the song’s subject, Che Guevara: “Doctorie, give me a C/For this Babaloo.” Guevara, a former physician born Ernesto, is “Doctor E.” The C gives his nom de guerre.
But in those eight words, Walker also conjures a cosmos of suggestion: the Afro-Cuban god Babalú-Ayé, said to heal earth and man, more explicitly referenced later on; the “C” as South American cocaine specter, cemented in the next line’s plea to “opiate me, doc”; the I Love Lucy character Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-born actor Desi Arnaz, whose signature song is the “Babalú”; and, as Nedelkoff has noted, a melody transposed from a ’60s series called Daktari, set in an East African zoo run by white Americans.
Ardent Scott Walker loyalists have despaired at the song’s cryptography, particularly its “Lemon Bloody Cola” chorus. But through that little opening lyric, “Bolivia ’95” cracks open. It encompasses not only Guevara’s C.I.A.-assisted capture and his execution by Bolivian forces, but also imperial America writ large. In this light, the rest of the song may implicate the stealth imperialism of Cocacolonization, U.S. interventions in coca production, and a raft of related hypocrisies and horrors that made headlines as Walker was writing Tilt.
If it all sounds exhaustingly dense, take solace in the occasional Easter egg hidden in plain sight. In Sundog, Walker’s 2017 lyric collection, he adjusts one phrase in Tilt closer “Rosary” to invite a startling read of the next. Here is Walker’s updated transcription:
Cum morning
My beads on a face
We hear the song anew: the orgasmic, caged-animal moans; the promise of “all the trembling vein that you can bear”; the possible, surely-he-wouldn’t “pearl necklace” pun of “Rosary”; and the final, giant aural signpost:
I kiss holes for the bullets
In case of thigh
A perfect Walker gag: On an album condemned to appear hopelessly intellectual, the grand finale is, in some dimension, the confession of an orgasm addict—a howling paean to misbegotten blow jobs and the lustrous drizzling of semen on skin.
Walker’s final lyrics in the Sundog book—all written towards the end of his life, and sadly unrecorded—wade further into filth: one “dildo-smacked cheek,” two erections (one “mighty,” one “vengeful”), a demand to “dump on me for money,” one “nipple-zit” (“sucked”), a “felch” made flesh, and a chorus of “Thrust to shove/Like my love.” You can peg Tilt as the first masterpiece of Walker’s elliptical era, but “Rosary” illuminates a less-documented path: away from the sugared, black-coffee existentialism of Scott 4 and toward an indecorous, Brel’s-eye view of the species.
Even without his Rabelaisian wit, his moral intensity, Walker would remain canonical—a North Star for failures everywhere. Listening to Tilt, letting that great hands and mouth pull me into the void, one thought keeps leaping out: What a relief that you can even do this.
But is it good? Allow me to answer a question with a ques—only joking. Yes, Tilt is good. Scarily, maddeningly good. It is like an old mansion full of haunted arcana: revolving bookcases, secret rooms, a golden pouf to perch on sipping ancient eau de vie. Even the easiest pleasures, like the stained-glass daybreak in “Bouncer See Bouncer,” arise from such obscure surroundings their beauty is always sudden, a second too quick for your defenses.
Then again, Tilt is not so good that you should lock it away in a trophy cabinet. It is an album you can listen to. A gravitational weight, yes, and bad company in crowds, but not all that inhospitable. He welcomes you to go in easy, trusting your imagination. You can internalize the sound cues, the rattling chains, the freighted blackouts and flickers. Or you can hunt for his passionate emotion, hidden but desperate to be found within the lyric sheet. Rummage for psychic flotsam, cross-examine the non sequiturs, reverse the verses, noun the verbs, discard what won’t fit, squint and twist and flip until an inkling—of maternal neglect, American hubris, or some other unutterable thing—shimmers into view, as if through a frosted window.
To intercept Walker’s signals can be brain-mangling work. You can lose an evening to it, head hitting the pillow full of flowcharts with things like “‘tooth fairies’” at the top and “incest?” at the bottom. You might find that work torturous. But I want to suggest it is just like the torture that made “The Electrician” sing: the lethally intimate zap, from the crank to the groin to the heart, that feels, for a second, like love. | 2022-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fontana / Drag City | June 26, 2022 | 8.6 | 45d713aa-5434-4f4b-b68c-70e17e82016c | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
null | Deerhunter toured with Nine Inch Nails this summer, making a stop at Colorado's famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That canyon found the Atlanta noise-rock quintet at a precipice. In the few months prior, Deerhunter had added a new guitarist, Whitney Petty, to replace the departed Colin Mee. Lead singer Bradford Cox had released his debut solo album, *Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel*, under the name Atlas Sound. The band's third album, *Microcastle*, and its would-be surprise bonus disc, *Weird Era Cont.*, had both leaked half a year before they were due in stores. Unimpressed NIN | Deerhunter: Microcastle / Weird Era Cont. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12360-microcastle-weird-era-cont/ | Microcastle / Weird Era Cont. | Deerhunter toured with Nine Inch Nails this summer, making a stop at Colorado's famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That canyon found the Atlanta noise-rock quintet at a precipice. In the few months prior, Deerhunter had added a new guitarist, Whitney Petty, to replace the departed Colin Mee. Lead singer Bradford Cox had released his debut solo album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, under the name Atlas Sound. The band's third album, Microcastle, and its would-be surprise bonus disc, Weird Era Cont., had both leaked half a year before they were due in stores. Unimpressed NIN fans were writing blog posts comparing Cox to Geddy Lee.
Like Trent Reznor, Cox is a classic outcast. But the real question is why Deerhunter aren't opening for Radiohead, as their friends in Liars and Grizzly Bear have done. Admirers and detractors of Deerhunter's 2007 breakout album, Cryptograms, all seemed to agree on one thing: Despite its status as an underground hit, it didn't explore totally new sounds. Radiohead didn't invent krautrock or avant-garde electronic music, either-- let alone UK post-punk, American alt-rock, or the Beatles. Instead, what they've done is use a stunning assortment of shrewd instrumental ideas to express contemporary anxiety and alienation, all in the form of pop songs, on albums conceived to be more than the sum of their parts.
Deerhunter don't sound a lot like Radiohead, but they've absorbed the UK rock icons' outlook as fully as anybody. If Cryptograms holds any "encoded message," I argued in a Pitchfork review, it's this: Deerhunter are a pop band. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. proves me half-right. It sidesteps much of the art-damaged squall of previous Deerhunter records, but it doesn't embrace 1950s and 60s pop as intensely as lead singer Bradford Cox had intimated in early interviews. If Cryptograms brutalized the pop ideal like a guitar-wielding David Lynch, leaving the follow-up Fluorescent Grey EP an exquisite corpse, then Microcastle resurrects it, scar tissue and all. The resulting 2xCD set captures urgent and imaginative songs that reorganize 4AD haze, off-kilter indie pop, crashing garage-punk, forward-leaning krautrock, and hypnotic Kranky ambience into a singular-sounding call-to-arms.
Here, the band comes into their own by applying their own inspiringly distinctive, bleakly appealing sensibility to whatever ideas happen to move them. Fist-pumping first single "Nothing Ever Happened" shares most of a title with a Pavement deluxe-edition bonus track while sounding a lot like Magazine's more straightforward, hard-charging side. Another standout, "Saved by Old Times", pipes in the Black Lips' Cole Alexander for a dual-channel monologue disorientingly reminiscent of the Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery". (If you play it backwards, Cole namedrops Johnny Cash.)
"I take what I can/ I give what I have left," Cox sings softly, as if explaining his musical approach, on "Green Jacket", a piano-based track at the center of the album. It's part of the languid song suite that ends the first side of the album's vinyl edition and breaks the disc up much the way ambient interludes divided Cryptograms. Only this time, the lull lasts just 10 minutes, not 20, and even at its least structured it's always more accessible. "Microcastle" applies the quiet-quiet-loud structure of the Breeders' "No Aloha" to a slack, laconic rumination on starting anew. With treated mbiras, "Activa" turns the dream-pop of Cox's Atlas Sound solo work into a nightmare vision of wasted lives.
Despite an outsized and often compelling persona, Cox is in some ways absent from Microcastle. The first recognizable voice we hear belongs to guitarist Lockett Pundt, on second track "Agoraphobia"; Pundt's gentle, repetitive wordplay-- "Cover me, come for me, comfort me"-- cozies up against sunlit psych-pop (OK, about wanting to be buried alive for someone else's sexual gratification). Bass player Josh Fauver wrote most of "Nothing Ever Happened". The guitars are big, bright, and unusually unfucked-with. There's a finger-tapping guitar solo. All credit to Moses Archuleta for the propulsive drums.
Deerhunter's slight shift toward directness mirrors, to an extent, the move Liars made with their harder-rocking self-titled album. It doesn't mean Microcastle breaks entirely away from album-unifying concepts. On bell-splashed Cox-Pundt collaboration "Little Kids", getting older means getting deader. By Pundt-led "Neither of Us, Certainly", it's a fate devoutly to be wished. Cox's 50s and 60s pop influences play a small but significant role, linking the wordless, Flamingoes-esque opener "Cover Me (Slowly)" to the warped Everly Brothers waltz of finale "Twilight at Carbon Lake". The Beatles' "Please Please Me" claimed that "there's always rain in my heart"; on dynamic single candidate "Never Stops", there's always winter. In the end, "Twilight" says smell ya later to "the frozen shit that was in your heart."
If you thought the bonus disc would just be crappy outtakes, then you don't know Cox. Weird Era Cont. is surprisingly great in its own right, allowing Deerhunter to join Los Campesinos! in the two-good-albums-in-2008 club. This record sparkles right from the ghostly noise-pop of "Backspace Century" and the jerky dance-punk of "Operation". The girl-group bounce of "Vox Humana" puts Cox's underrated lyrical skills on full display, while "Vox Celeste" throws the neo-shoegaze gauntlet down in the face of the reunited My Bloody Valentine. Reverb drenches Pundt's voice on the luminous "Dot Gain". Instrumentals make a fine return, too, ranging from Faust-meets-Animal Collective loops to noise-music drones. "Focus Group" is a sweetly chiming Smashing Pumpkins-esque guitar anthem that nearly rivals "Nothing Ever Happened" for skewed pop immediacy.
The only song that appears on both discs is "Calvary Scars", which recounts a boy's willing, public crucifixion. It's a dual theme Deerhunter also explored on their self-titled first album's scrawly post-punk barb "Adorno", which mashes up crucifixion and suicide. On Microcastle, "Calvary Scars" is an ambient lullaby with mouthlike percussion; Weird Era Cont.'s "Calvary Scars II / Aux." is the track's heavier-sounding apotheosis, with an extended coda that's a bit like the live version of "You Made Me Realise", followed by a meditative electronic hum that's a bit like... the ringing in your ears after the live version of "You Made Me Realise". Or the calm after a cataclysm. There's a clear parallel with Radiohead's "Morning Bell", which appeared, in different versions, on both Kid A and Amnesiac.
From "Agoraphobia" to "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" to "Calvary Scars II / Aux.", sacrifical suicide could be a metaphor for artistic creation. On Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., Cox sacrifices himself-- or at least, his colorful persona-- for the sake of Deerhunter's art. On stage, he really does sacrifice his illness-damaged body. "I take what I can/ I give what I have left." From a band who, unlike their peers No Age, have studiously avoided politics, spreading the idea that salvation can be found, or at least glimpsed, in art-- let alone in stupid pop records! That you probably downloaded for free!-- is a politically potent act. Hope. Change. At the very least, a reason not to slit our throats before President Palin decides to nuke the world in 2017. | 2008-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Kranky / 4AD | October 27, 2008 | 9.2 | 45db6a6c-6138-4c72-9a60-e511d111a157 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
This 20-track collection of music by the prolific Spanish ambient producer feels like submerging into a warm bath for 95 minutes. | This 20-track collection of music by the prolific Spanish ambient producer feels like submerging into a warm bath for 95 minutes. | Warmth: Warmth: Retrospective (2016-2021) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/warmth-warmth-retrospective-2016-2021/ | Retrospective (2016-2021) | There might be ambient musicians better at tugging at the heartstrings or bottling the great sad mystery of the world, but if you want to bliss out until your eyes roll back into your head, you could do a lot worse than listen to Warmth. Under that moniker, Spanish producer Agustín Mena makes some of the most physically pleasurable ambient music imaginable, blurring synths and field recordings into grand, luxurious drones that spread across the stereo field as if wrapping the listener in an embrace. Retrospective (2016-2021) compiles tracks from six albums in as many years, plus “Taiga,” from the odds-and-ends Wildlife Addendum, and “Growth,” from his Archives label’s Heights compilation. It feels like being submerged in a warm bath for 95 minutes.
Though Warmth’s albums since 2016’s Essay sound more or less of a piece, they can be split into a crop of earlier, longer albums (Essay, Home, Parallel) and later, shorter ones (Wildlife and onward). By presenting most of his older tracks in edits of about four or five minutes, Retrospective avoids the stasis of his earlier work even as its sheer length gives the listener more opportunities to luxuriate than ever before. Some may miss the way tracks like “Home” and “Odessa'' were allowed to simmer longer in their original versions, but on Retrospective, divisions between tracks become irrelevant once you’re deep enough in the album that it starts to fade in and out of your consciousness.
Wherever there’s gauzy, dense, drumless ambient, Rafael Anton Irisarri isn’t far away. The Black Knoll Studio engineer worked with Mena on his last two albums, 2020’s Life and last year’s The Darkest Place, and here he gives some of the older tracks a touch-up, pumping blood into the low end and excising a bit of errant hiss. Though Mena is adept at creating textures that sound like no instrument in particular, Irisarri’s remaster breaks the illusion of a wall of sound just slightly, and the moving parts that figure into Mena’s music are more clearly visible. The growling low end of “The Darkest Place” sounds more sinuous than ever, and it’s easier to appreciate how the little sonar pulses that show up often in Warmth’s music act as bassline, melody, and structural reinforcement all at once.
Even considering Mena’s prolificacy, six years and six albums might not seem like enough of a milestone to warrant a retrospective. But Retrospective isn’t about charting the progression of his sound, which has been subtle, to say the least. It’s about capping off a run of good work and offering a new context in which to enjoy it—not to mention an excuse to package it in a spiffy 2xCD jewel case with an awesome new photo from in-house Archives photographer and erstwhile bear researcher Alexander Kopatz. This compilation doesn’t tell us much about Warmth that we don’t already know, nor does it cast Mena’s work in a new light. It just gives us more of his music in one place, and with music this single-mindedly blissful, more is better.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Archives | January 13, 2022 | 7 | 45dd8267-35f6-4e41-8834-6351e9d61fa4 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
In a Fluxus-inspired work for saxophone, drums, and string quartet, the New York-based musician strikes a boisterous balance between composition and free improv. | In a Fluxus-inspired work for saxophone, drums, and string quartet, the New York-based musician strikes a boisterous balance between composition and free improv. | Darius Jones: fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/darius-jones-fluxkit-vancouver-its-suite-but-sacred/ | fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred) | “I always want my music to have that quality where things seem familiar but different,” New York saxophonist Darius Jones said recently. “Like when you remember something somewhat differently than how it has actually occurred.” Jones executes that plan triumphantly on fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred), a four-song suite with drummer Gerald Cleaver and four string players from Vancouver, British Columbia. The music echoes Jones’ past work as well as the avant-garde jazz that has informed his oeuvre. But there is always something new going on; sometimes it seems as if the music had changed since the last time you listened.
fLuXkit Vancouver’s fascinatingly amorphous quality comes in part from Jones’ interest in Fluxus, an art movement from the 1960s and 1970s that emphasized event-based works where the process was as important as the outcome. Sometimes an individual Fluxus piece would include a “fluxkit,” a box containing a score, instructions, and everyday objects, all intended for use in performance. Jones considers the album’s cover art, liner notes, and score, which combines traditional and graphic notation, to be just such a fluxkit. His goal was to mix media into something, as he put it, “where art and music meet.”
You don’t have to have access to his entire fluxkit to appreciate Jones’ vision. The four pieces here equitably combine composition and improvisation, placing the act of conception on the same plane as the act of performance. It’s all there in the opening track, “Fluxus V5T 1S1,” which starts with Jones in a prayerful mode, playing slow, heavy tones over Cleaver’s snare and the reverent sounds of violinists (and brothers) Jesse Zubot and Josh Zubot and cellist Peggy Lee. Soon, Cleaver inserts a beat that’s followed briskly by James Meger’s stair-climbing bass, and the ensemble coalesces around that structure. But Jones doesn’t join them, instead breaking out with a contrasting theme, delivering a multi-layered performance that’s both razor-sharp and unbounded.
An aura of indeterminacy continues throughout fLuXkit Vancouver, but don’t mistake it for indecision. This is a fearless, even boisterous record, with Jones’ penetrative playing matched solidly by everyone on his team, especially Cleaver and Lee. “Zubot” is named for the two violinists, both of whom contribute mightily, but the drummer and cellist steer the ship, slapping and sawing a course for Jones to sail through. Cleaver’s tom-led rolls set the tone for “Rainbow,” an 18-minute journey that includes a strikingly minimalist bass solo from Meger, and a few rushes of all-together crescendo that evoke Charles Mingus’ most assertive ensemble works.
By the time the 17-minute closer “Damon and Pythias” arrives, Jones’ writing and playing reach their apex. Surprises abound: springy violin plucks, violent sax stabs, and, most frequently, rhythmic surges that have the force of massive waves. It’s all part of keeping the process right up front. Jones initially made a grammatical error in the album’s punning title—“its suite” rather than “it’s suite”—but decided to add a strikethrough rather than correct his mistake. That’s the spirit of fLuXkit Vancouver: Jones lets us see it all, making the world feel like a wide-open place. | 2024-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Northern Spy / We Jazz | January 4, 2024 | 7.7 | 45e2e734-8ca3-4ddc-95ef-a9298ceb7f8f | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their approach, and it yielded a hard, precise music that felt unlike previous jazz/metal fusions. Since then, they've only grown more cold and olympic, but on International Blackjazz Society they let a hint of exciting uncertainty creep in. | On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their approach, and it yielded a hard, precise music that felt unlike previous jazz/metal fusions. Since then, they've only grown more cold and olympic, but on International Blackjazz Society they let a hint of exciting uncertainty creep in. | Shining: International Blackjazz Society | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21106-international-blackjazz-society/ | International Blackjazz Society | On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their aesthetic, and it seemed to focus them. On earlier records the band, organized around multi-instrumentalist Jørgen Munkeby, were more elusive, but Blackjazz was an album made entirely of jagged shapes, like the irregular, violent architecture of a cliffside. It feels aggressively assembled, as if its ideas of metal and jazz were less harmonized than magnetized together. The follow-up, 2013’s One One One, reduced them into an atomically unstable industrial rock band. While thrilling, the album could have the remoteness of a formal exercise.
International Blackjazz Society sounds like a compression of these two approaches, but it evolves into something distinct as you listen. Unlike One One One, the songs here don’t simply accelerate until they expire. There’s more space in the arrangements, and the songs expand into the room they’re afforded. Some of this shift can be credited to new drummer Tobias Ørnes Andersen, who plays industrial music with more patience and tension than previous drummer and founding Shining member Torstein Lofthus. "Thousand Eyes" feels like stoner metal, of all things; the riff is a little more drunk than the band usually allows. "House of Warship" is free jazz, which is actually new territory for Shining; even their freest moments on previous records seemed premeditated, a kind of organized collapse. Whenever Munkeby plays saxophone on International Blackjazz Society the songs sound as if they’re sprouting fractals.
Still, even as the band relaxes into new atmospheres there’s an extreme, ascetic discipline on display. The architecture of their music is modernist, a series of inelastic and inorganic shapes colliding with the velocity of a distant level of "Tetris". On International Blackjazz Society’s final track, "Need", you can feel this refined performance begin to rupture. It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment. | 2015-10-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | Spinefarm | October 22, 2015 | 7 | 45e65916-470d-4d4a-86c2-1975aadba843 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
The shiny soul-pop of Lizzo’s major label debut is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end. | The shiny soul-pop of Lizzo’s major label debut is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end. | Lizzo: Cuz I Love You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lizzo-cuz-i-love-you/ | Cuz I Love You | The precise moment of Lizzo’s transformation has been viewed nearly 200,000 times. In 2014, the same year she released her frenzied rap debut Lizzobangers, the rapper-singer-flautist participated in a web series called The What’s Underneath Project. In her episode, Lizzo sits on a stool before a brick wall and speaks warmly about the evolution of her self-image while shedding her clothing one piece at a time. First goes a plaid shirt, then a pair of retro Jordans, and a beanie, until she’s wearing just a bra and panties. Makeup mostly scrubbed and a teeny weeny afro forming a halo around her face, she is finally, fully herself. This literal disrobing, she has said, prompted an unexpected revelation that would go on to shape her life and her art.
That experience inspired her to write “My Skin,” the breakthrough rap-ballad from her 2015 album Big Grrrl Small World. In an accompanying essay, she described the song as “a summoning of bodies: all shapes, sizes, and shades to unite in their pride, and wear their skin like the gift it is.” Since then, she has sharpened that sensibility, becoming a tireless cheerleader for herself and for millions of people she’ll never know. Cuz I Love You, her first full-length on Atlantic, is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end. The rollout for the album, featuring magazine covers and late-night talk show appearances, has been one extremely long yaaaaaaas, centering her welcome approach to body-positivity and self-love as much the soaring mid-chorus notes of the single “Juice” and her uncanny ability to play a flute while twerking.
Lizzo is clearly a talent. On songs like the soul-tinged “Cuz I Love You” and the naming-and-shaming “Jerome,” she bellows from somewhere deep within, her voice so powerful that it’s a surprise to learn she spent much of her life ashamed by it. Her pledge to be “ARETHA FRANKLIN FOR THE 2018 GENERATION” is evident, if not quite actualized; this generation’s Natasha Bedingfield is maybe more accurate. Songs like “Juice” or the equally upbeat “Soulmate” have enough sheen and universality to stand in for Bedingfield’s mid-aughts empowerment anthem “Unwritten” in any given rom-com or yogurt commercial. (Lizzo faced a minor scandal last year when she allowed one of her songs to be used in a campaign for Weight Watchers. Fans were critical of the decision because WW, despite a recent rebrand to health and wellness, reinforces diet culture, putting it fundamentally at odds with interpretations of Lizzo’s fat-positive principles. She eventually apologized.)
Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping. It’s hard to imagine her earning a spot in the pantheon of great, or even good, rappers when the opening lines of “Like A Girl” have the energy of an “SNL” sketch: “Woke up feeling like I just might run for president/Even if there ain’t no precedent/Switching up the messaging/I’m about to add a little estrogen.” Later, alongside perpetually cool labelmate Gucci Mane on “Exactly How I Feel,” echoes of the Black Eyed Peas’ triumphant, if soulless, stadium-pop ring hollow. There are highlights throughout—nearly every song has multiple captivating hooks—but the album’s peak comes at its end, with “Lingerie,” the sexy closer that is essentially orgasm-as-song. It is tongue-in-cheek, but somehow the most sincere Lizzo we hear.
She joins the proposition for genreless music at an interesting time, with artists as varied as Halsey and BTS and Khalid confirming the inevitability of such a future. “I’m the genre. My voice is the genre,” Lizzo said in a recent interview. And that’s technically true; she is what ties together the fun, anti-gravity pop of “Tempo,” featuring an inventive, compelling verse from Missy Elliott, and the pussy-hat optimism of “Better In Color.” But really, much of Cuz I Love You sounds like an improvement on any given major-label writing session. “Soulmate,” for example, plays like it could just as easily, if more cloyingly, be performed by someone like Meghan Trainor. (Lizzo and Trainor share a producer in Ricky Reed.)
In a piercing essay last month about the value of identity politics, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams wrote of recent “demographic and technological changes” that have “[bolstered] demands for inclusion and raising expectations in communities that had long been conditioned to accept a slow pace of change.” She continued: “These changes have encouraged activists and political challengers to make demands with a high level of specificity—to take the identities that dominant groups have used to oppress them and convert them into tools of democratic justice.” Of course, Abrams was focused on the activism galvanized by marginalization.
But the point is universal, even if the stakes are lower outside the realm of electoral politics. A similar phenomenon has clearly manifested in arts and culture, and in music in particular. An artist’s identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album’s merit increasingly layered and complex. In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo’s music performs an important social function. The sound might disappoint, but there will be people moved to transformations of their own thanks to her songs. And that’s important, too. | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Nice Life / Atlantic | April 22, 2019 | 6.5 | 45e7993e-94cd-4de1-86a0-8c077610150c | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
The man behind King Krule returns with a new album, short film, and book. A New Place 2 Drown evokes a septic world filled with flickering halogen bulbs, sticky synth keys, and corroded outputs. Marshall has made tremendous strides as a producer, gorgeously reproducing the gloom and loneliness of early '90s hip-hop and finding a way to integrate it into his own style. | The man behind King Krule returns with a new album, short film, and book. A New Place 2 Drown evokes a septic world filled with flickering halogen bulbs, sticky synth keys, and corroded outputs. Marshall has made tremendous strides as a producer, gorgeously reproducing the gloom and loneliness of early '90s hip-hop and finding a way to integrate it into his own style. | Archy Marshall: A New Place 2 Drown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21326-a-new-place-2-drown/ | A New Place 2 Drown | Since releasing his first single as Zoo Kid in 2010, the Londoner Archy Marshall has treated his creative output like loose change spilled into couch cushions. He's released hip-hop mixtapes, ambient instrumentals, and remixes of other acts' songs; only some of his output has been under the name King Krule, the moniker he settled on for his 2013 debut full-length, meaning it's flown beneath the radar of casual music fans who were stunned by 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. The work of tracking what he does now has fallen to hardcore faithful, which seems like a smart long-term survival strategy and a sensible reaction to early career hype: halve your visibility, double your productivity, and wait for the universe to catch up.
A New Place 2 Drown is a name given to three new projects—there is also a handsome 208-page art book of sketches, photographs, and poetry from Marshall alongside his older brother Jack, and a short film. And then there is this album. All of it surfaced together this week, and the shared title seems to make an offer to fans and clarify a wish to the larger world. Marshall wants to be swallowed by his work, and he's offering you a chance to join him.
Marshall has often seemed eager for disappearance—journalists have dubbed him "press-shy," a euphemism for "loathes journalists"—but on A New Place 2 Drown, he achieves it completely. His voice was the star of 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, a blood-red streak against black, but here he dissolves it into the grey mist of his beats. Mostly he croons or mutters over crackles, drips, and clanks. He is an element in his landscape now, not a spotlit singer-songwriter or an ersatz modern-day blues singer. There isn't a single guitar audible on the album's drifting, dreamlike 37 minutes, and not a single song you could imagine Willow Smith attempting to cover.
What it shares with his older work is the septic world it depicts, full of flickering halogen bulbs, sticky synth keys, and corroded outputs. He's made tremendous strides as a producer, to the point where his touch exceeds Rodaidh McDonald's work on his debut. His sound is more three-dimensional, a series of shrouded corners and murmured conversations. This is wandering, grey-skies music, finding pleasure and even sensuality in solitude.
Like most others in the sentient universe, Marshall is a professed fan of hardcore '90s NYC hip-hop, stuff like Wu-Tang and D.I.T.C. Unlike everyone else, he gorgeously reproduces its gloom and loneliness, and finds a way to integrate it into his own style. He does this mostly with a succession of sounds so obsessively perfect and tactile they seem like whole songs themselves: The hollow, rounded thunk of the drum track on "The Sea Liner MK 1" precisely mimics the sound of colliding pool balls, and hearing it for only a measly four minutes seems like a cheat, somehow: It is a drum knock so perfect you would cross the street to listen to it.
The formal grain of his music bends increasingly towards hip-hop: The sluggish tempo and tar-thick synths of "Dull Boys" and "Thames Water" suggest across-the-pond admiration of Houston's DJ Screw, as does the halting sing-song of "Buffed Sky". His mumbly, string-of-conscious delivery on "Sex With Nobody" conjures early-'00s indie rappers like Serengeti or Atmosphere. He is steadily narrowing the gap between the rap he admires and the music he makes, and A New Place 2 Drown seems like evidence that he should start producing for rappers regularly.
Marshall's own words are haunting but elusive, ripples moving across the surface of his music that dissipate before your ear focuses on their meaning. But you get a peek into a mind state and a mood with every legible phrase: "I'm pretty sure I'm dying as I speak," he offers on "Arise Dear Brother". "She plays me Barry White, all night/ She drift into the light," he sings wistfully on "Ammi Ammi". The most ringing line, clearest in both its setting and its intention, comes from "Buffed Sky": "I'll fly solo," he sings, drawing out the second syllable of the last word for relish and emphasis. It seems like it's working for him. | 2015-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | XL / True Panther | December 11, 2015 | 8.6 | 45ecd76f-b9e7-4b96-899c-71fee2fb98b9 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Accomplished ambient artist expands his sound to include delicate new elements-- soft percussion, his own voice-- creating distant pop songs. | Accomplished ambient artist expands his sound to include delicate new elements-- soft percussion, his own voice-- creating distant pop songs. | Eluvium: Similes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13927-similes/ | Similes | You can't blame Matthew Cooper for wanting to try something different. Since 2003, he's been plugging away at an ambient style that is emotionally broad but conceptually narrow. There's only so much you can do with a palette limited to light classical instrumentation and drifting electronics, and Cooper's done most of it. An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death was a collection of Erik Satie-inspired piano pieces. When I Live By the Garden and the Sea drenched similarly plaintive melodies in radiant streams of noise. Copia, his greatest and most fully realized album, was full of hulking themes for strings and winds, while Miniatures (released under his real name) was tiny and fluttering. Life Through Bombardment, the deluxe vinyl box-set collecting his entire oeuvre up to 2009, was more than a collector's item-- it seemed to put a completed body of work to rest.
Whatever his approach, Cooper always goes hard for the same matrix of emotions-- melancholy, wistfulness, yearning-- and those of us who love his music cherish this predictability. His sound has an emotional intensity that is almost unseemly, evocative of heartbreak. That hasn't changed on Similes, his first post-Bombardment album, although the intensity is muffled to make room for delicate new elements: soft, stitchy percussion and Cooper's own laconic vocals. In a distant way, these are pop songs: Verses and choruses revolve slowly through wafting electronic sheens that glint with naturalistic piano. But his voice is so subdued and intermittent that it doesn't scan as a lead. It's just one slowly beating, spreading element among others.
Cooper's singing is weary and muted, in the neighborhood of Ian Curtis or Matthew Dear. He murmurs, so you catch only snatches of what he's saying, which seems appropriate in Eluvium music, always peacefully fragmented. His voice sits still amid the ruffling synths and pin-drop drums of "The Motion Makes Me Last"; the piano keys do the real singing. Cooper's affecting vulnerability is really pronounced on "Weird Creatures", where he cautiously treads the chords like slippery stones over a river. He was wise to limit the vocals to a few tracks, as they're not dynamic enough to withstand a whole album. Much of Similes is more standard, wordless Eluvium fare: the rumbling piano-based "In Culmination", the slow-burning "Nightmare 5" and "Bending Dream", and most of all the long, flickering closer "Cease to Know".
Whether Similes will truly wind up being the start of a new career phase or a footnote for Eluvium remains to be seen-- Cooper sounds so tentative about his singing that it won't be shocking if he follows it with a more characteristic album of instrumentals. If he continues to strive for pop forms, he may have to figure out how to make his voice do more than color his arrangements in monotonous shades. If not, Similes will retain value as more than a curio for its sheer approachability and its unique take on Cooper's well-established style. It doesn't move mountains like his best work, but it satisfies. | 2010-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Temporary Residence Ltd. | February 24, 2010 | 6.9 | 45f3457a-f337-45e7-a31b-f47f498b6a7e | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The life and music of gospel singer Washington Phillips has been shrouded in mystery for years. His gentle, measured, unearthly music, played on a handmade instrument, is still a world unto itself. | The life and music of gospel singer Washington Phillips has been shrouded in mystery for years. His gentle, measured, unearthly music, played on a handmade instrument, is still a world unto itself. | Washington Phillips: Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22401-washington-phillips-and-his-manzarene-dreams/ | Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams | For a long time, the only thing there was to know about the gospel singer Washington Phillips is that there wasn’t much to know. Born in Texas in 1880, Phillips recorded a total of 18 songs between 1927 and 1929. Two of these songs were lost. The remaining 16—light, dreamy, paranormally gorgeous—were issued two at a time on 78-r.p.m. records, the precursor to the modern LP, then trickled out on vaguely anthropological collections like Negro Religious Music Vol. 2 or Screening the Blues. It wasn’t until 1980 that Phillips’ was given his own dedicated release, and then on a small label run by a high school English teacher in the Netherlands.
Until now—and this is invariably the heart of Phillips’ story, at least as it’s usually told—people couldn’t even agree on what instrument Phillips used to accompany himself. Some said it was a zither, a narrow stringed box about the size of a laptop. Others said it was an obscure keyboard called a dolceola, in part on account of the Columbia Records’ scout (and Phillips’ producer) Frank B. Walker, who referred to it as a “dulceola.” In the early 1980s, a researcher at Tulane University named Lynn Abbott found a picture of Phillips in the Louisiana Weekly holding what looked like two zithers Frankensteined together, confirming only that whatever it was Phillips played, nobody had seen it before or since. In any case, this is what it sounds like: a small music box playing in a large, resonant cave, playful but indistinct, like dandelion fuzz loosed on a spring breeze.
Recent research by the tireless Phillips chronicler Michael Corcoran reveals that Phillips called his instrument the Manzarene, giving rise to the title of a new digitally released collection from the Georgia label Dust-to-Digital called Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. As mentioned, there are only 16 known Phillips recordings in existence. Though remastered here, they have been released a few times before, including on a still-available Yazoo Records compilation called The Key to the Kingdom. (One version of Phillips’ songs, an LP by the Oregon label Mississippi Records, has a cover obstinately depicting Phillips sitting at a dolceola. Some myths are too beautiful to let go.)
What I personally find remarkable about Phillips’ music is how gentle it is. Here is the American servant of a Christian God who never shouts, never growls, never beats his breast or stomps his feet to prove just how strong the spirit is within him. If early rock-and-roll borrowed the hysterics of gospel and turned them into an expression of sex, Phillips’ delivery—measured, conversational, disinterested in the Buddhist sense—is something I hear in ambient and new age music, or in the transcendent reticence of a songwriter like Bill Callahan, who appears to touch God not by reaching out but leaning back. My favorite song here is “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today” because it sounds like he really doesn’t know. My second-favorite is “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There” because it sounds like he has. No other gospel musician has come as close to convincing me that Jesus’ love might not stress me out.
Ninety years on, with decades of exhumations of gospel and blues behind us, Phillips is still an anomaly. The same 1927 trip during which Frank B. Walker first recorded Phillips, he also recorded Blind Willie Johnson, the Dallas String Band, Lillian Glinn and a handful of other artists who sound more or less like musicians playing music in the 1920s. Even Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground),” an unprecedented recording that appears to capture a ghost crying inside a milk bottle, sounds like the Platonic ideal of a style that has become familiar. Phillips’ music remains weirdly without lineage or context, a sound unto itself.
The blues is built on apocrypha and myth. It cannot be conveniently subjected to the demystifying rigor modern standards demand without being somehow denuded. You cannot—and maybe, to some extent, should not—fact-check the blues. And yet being black music made during the era of American slavery, institutional and beyond, it seems right as a matter of moral, even reparational course to read the stories of people like Phillips—a free black man who lived on acreage his father, uncles and grandfather bought after emancipation, and spent his Juneteenths slow-cooking a hog on the nearby church picnic green—as fully and precisely as possible.
Phillips did not, as it had often been reported, die in an insane asylum, but after falling down a flight of stairs in a government building in Teague, Texas. You can see a picture of this staircase in the liner notes for Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. It is narrow and wooden and takes a sharp bend to the left about ten steps down. As ambivalent as I am about the mystery of his instrument being “solved”—and as insistently as I feel that explaining what he made his music with will never bring us any closer to the wonder of how—I am startled by the sight of these stairs: So tactile, so ordinary. The greatest mystery (of course) is that Phillips made this all on Earth. | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Dust-to-Digital | November 16, 2016 | 8.5 | 45fc10fd-1ca9-4630-8a51-0a45d6661b96 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The reissued compilation from the great American folk and gospel singer is a generous introduction to a historically muted view of Black life in the South. | The reissued compilation from the great American folk and gospel singer is a generous introduction to a historically muted view of Black life in the South. | Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers: Get in Union | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bessie-jones-and-the-georgia-sea-island-get-in-union/ | Get in Union | Before her death in 1984, Bessie Jones’ employment included stints as a domestic worker, a cook, and a laundress. Her life’s work, however, was as a teacher whose medium was song. Growing up in the Gullah-Geechee traditions of rural Georgia, she absorbed music through her family. In adulthood, she doted on the children in her community by teaching them the stories, games, and spiritual music she’d inherited—history that was theirs, too. When she met folklorist Alan Lomax on his journey through the American South in 1959, she saw a way to broadcast her lessons to further reaches.
The Gullah-Geechee culture coalesced from the mix of enslaved West African people living in the remote sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, which Lomax first documented in 1935 (Zora Neale Hurston accompanied him). He met Jones when he returned two decades later, recording her several more times throughout the 1960s at her request. In 2014, Tompkins Square issued the compilation Get in Union on CD as a primer on Jones’ work, sourcing the material from the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity. Curator Nathan Salsburg has updated the collection with nine more recordings, making the lot available digitally for the first time on Bandcamp. Now at 60 tracks, Get In Union is a generous introduction to a historically muted view of Black life in the South.
Jones took up with a cohort that in 1963 became known as the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Though their work was as a de facto collective, her assured voice naturally commanded the foreground. Their music was likewise communal, rising from the oral tradition of Black spirituals. (Jones’ direct line to the material was her grandfather, Jet Sampson, who had been enslaved and brought West with his brothers in 1843.) The group’s sense of interpersonal communion translated easily as they sang about Biblical tales and heavenly salvation. Some of the recordings on Get in Union feature fife, drum, and banjo, bringing a friendly pick-up-band mood to songs like “Beulah Land,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” and “O Day.”
One element central to Gullah-Geechee religious practices was the ring shout, a type of percussive devotional music that developed among enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere. Banned from using drums, worshippers clapped, shuffled, and stomped to keep a syncopated rhythm. Get in Union provides sterling examples of the form. “Moses Don’t Get Lost” gallops toward freedom, while “Walk Daniel” and “Adam in the Garden” transmit a similarly pressing charge to keep moving. Jones and her colleagues didn’t have to answer to recording contracts or managers, because the music had always been intended for themselves: to encourage, reassure, entertain, and heal. The songs had already been around for decades—even centuries—before Lomax arrived, and Jones would’ve continued to sing them whether he was around to roll tape or not.
Jones’ unaccompanied singing across Get in Union is intimate and feels almost private, captured by the state-of-the-art recording equipment that Lomax had lugged through the Lowcountry's ultrafine gray silt. She speaks to straight living on “Plumb the Line” and “This Train Is a Clean Train,” kind but clear-eyed reminders to aim for righteousness. “Go Wash in That Beautiful Stream,” on the other hand, feels like a lullaby. Jones’ softer singing brings a staggering weight to the 87-second recording. Her genuine faith can stir even the stiff non-believers, affected through her passionate voice and the music's history as a tool of liberation for enslaved people.
Black women and their work have long been sidelined, written out of their own stories by malice as often as careless neglect. To wit, Jones’ voice endures in the mainstream imagination as a Moby sample: the call-and-response of her song “Sometimes” is the foundation to his “Honey.” The Gullah-Geechee have continued to weather their own storms, protecting their history while battling the avarice of real-estate developers transforming their familial agricultural lands into luxury golf resorts. The mid-’90s Nickelodeon sitcom Gullah Gullah Island and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (which heavily informed the visual aesthetics of Lemonade) have both brought versions of Gullah-Geechee culture to American screens since Jones’ death, but her perspective touches its taproot.
Jones kept singing her whole life because she recognized her testimony as a guard against the erasure of her people and their experiences. She never enjoyed mainstream celebrity, but she leveraged her Lomax connection to broadcast her message at the Poor Peoples’ March on Washington, the Newport Folk Festival, Jimmy Carter’s presidential inauguration, and now into the 21st Century. Her singing catapulted her history lessons beyond her rural enclave to audiences who might have never heard her people’s stories otherwise. Get in Union is as much a map as a music album, pointing those who listen toward a more unified understanding of Black American experiences. | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Alan Lomax Archive | June 18, 2020 | 8.3 | 45fc6ecc-f4a3-43b6-b67e-4a6660f6a417 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ |
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